Month: March 2014

I Work for the PHS

~ Roger JG Albert

Read this without being ‘touched’ and all I can say is that you must be a sociopath.

Struggle On

Yes, I work for the Portland Hotel Society. Yes, I work at Insite, the only legally sanctioned supervised injection site in North America. And yes,  injection drug use, most frequently with illegal substances, occurs there. In fact, many hundred times per day. Yes, I’ve also heard the news about us, and have read our accusations.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. What a place. Make no mistake, this is a community of unique historical importance, no moment so great as now. This apparent gem of a city, ocean, mountains, and this ghetto, not too long ago, known as Canada’s poorest postal code zone. All representing for me and many the collision of all the big questions and big solutions of our culture. The beauty of the mountains and the despair of poverty sharing the same horizon line, obscured only by the division of concrete, glass, and the cranes used to create more, bigger…

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Of life and death

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

This quote from Luc Ferry seems appropriate today for some reason.  Having attended a memorial service yesterday and knowing that there will be another one tomorrow in Kelowna for the son of a dear friend of ours, I offer you this.  It deals with Greek myths which often involve struggles between gods and mortals.  The lesson is difficult for us mortals…it’s hard not to be angry with the gods.

Luc Ferry:

With Orpheus and Demeter, properly speaking, we are no longer dealing with stories of hubris.  Nevertheless, I will speak of them here because their extraordinary adventures are in one essential respect related to the theme touched on in the myths of Sisyphus and Asclepius: in effect, the question of escaping death – or at least that of returning from the underworld to the light of day.  As we shall see, this journey, impossible for mortals (there is as far as I know only one exception in the whole of Greek mythology), is not easy even for those gods who, albeit immortal, find themselves imprisoned in the kingdom of the dead. And this theme of resurrection bears upon the nature of cosmic order within which gods and mortals cohabit, for it is in the nature of things that men die, from which none can escape without provoking a disorder that, in the end, would overturn the course of the universe.  We must therefore accept death, in whose shadow we must nonetheless seek the good life. [my italics]

From: Luc Ferry, Wisdom of the Myths, Kindle Edition, 2014, page 228.

Business-Managed Democracy

~ Roger JG Albert

I was just about to embark on a lengthly rant about how we treat the poor when I ran across this blog and decided to share it with you.  This is Sharon Beder’s website and I’m letting her do the ranting for today.   She would definitely pass as a rebel and a dangerous radical in Stephen Harper’s world so that’s why I kind of like her work.  I’m not saying I agree with everything on this website, but she has some interesting insights into why we treat the poor the way we do and why we blame them for everything they are and aren’t.  Click on the link below to see what I mean.  Then we can talk.

Just saying, though, that if money equals mobility and life, then poverty must equal immobility and death.  Zombies are such a good metaphor for the homeless, aren’t they?

 

Business-Managed Democracy – Site Map.

The Greeks, the Christians and Women: We are a tragic species.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

In Greek myth, humankind started out as exclusively male.  The gods created men, mortal beings, but in the age of gold, their mortality was scarcely given any thought because men always died peacefully, in their sleep, with no pain and suffering and it didn’t end there for them.  After death they became pure spirit ‘daemons’ who are essentially given the task of ‘dispensing wealth to men according to individual merit.’ (Ferry 2014, 146)  That’s not a bad gig, really, not unlike how classical economists see the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.  These were invisible daemons doing the same job.

Pandora is the first woman.  She is Zeus’ creation and is given something by every god.  Of course, she’s drop-dead gorgeous but she also comes with a lot of, let us say, unsavory characteristics.  Without going into detail, Prometheus, the creator of men (males only at this point) has pissed off Zeus because he’s been trying to help his creation with getting on with the job of creating civilization. (What really pissed Zeus off was that Prometheus had stolen fire from Olympus and given it to man so that he could now cook his food…a very civilized thing indeed).  Up to this point, still in the golden age, men are living a pretty cool, decent life.  But because of the internecine pissing contests between the gods, things start going sideways for humans.  It comes to pass that Pandora seduces Epimetheus, Prometheus’ hapless brother at which point all hell breaks loose (which is what Zeus wanted in the first place).  Mankind is cast from the golden age into the age of iron, forced to feed himself, etc., and because of the nasty contents of Pandora’s box (pain, fear, old age, death) doomed to lead a miserable life with nothing but hope for succor. (Hope being the only thing not to escape from Pandora’s box.)

So, the point of all of this is that it’s at this stage in the development of the cosmos that men are now born from sexual intercourse between men and women.  Pandora gives birth to other women and that’s it for man.  Sex is where it’s at now.  We come to be born, as it were, between shit and piss and the rest is history.

What I find interesting here as much as anything is the similarity of this account of the origins of people on this planet with the one offered by Christianity.  The details are obviously very different, but the principles are the same and so are the results. As the story goes, God creates man who is pure and spiritual, living in the Garden of Eden, the golden age.  Almost as an afterthought, God creates woman and she seduces the pretty dumb male and is punished for his stupidity by having to work for a living and by having to put up with woman who is never satisfied and reminds him of death every day.

Because this is the whole point and the tragedy of the relations between the sexes since forever.  Woman is associated with the body, temptation and death.  Men are associated with purity, spirit and life.  Women successfully seduced the stupid men and now we all pay the price of mortality.  How’s that for blaming half the world’s population for what came out of Pandora’s box.  Unfortunately, our world is still driven by these old stupid ideas.   Are we ever going to get over this crap and actually start real human history?  Of course, it’s much more complicated than this, but this is an important dimension of the issue especially when laid next to our incessant warlike behaviour and our drive for puffing ourselves up and smiting our ‘enemies.’  Dumb species we are.  Just plain dumb.  This is not to say that every man is a stupid mysogenist.  The fact is that our cultures are fundamentally mysogenistic.  Individuals can be better than that, but our lives are governed to a great extent by mysogenistic principles and practices. Hard to escape. I know some men and women who have.  For me, that’s grounds for optimism and for what little there is left in Pandora’s Box.  More later (of course).

Women as weak and unclean!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Barbarian Status of Women, Part 2:  Women as Weak and Unclean.

 

To start, I include here a sample of Thorstein Veblen’s writing to give you a sense of what it would be like to read a more substantial piece of his work, like his book The Place of Science in Modern Civilization.  Of course, this long quote is relevant to what I want to pursue in this post, that is, the general cultural institutional perception of women as weak and unclean, associated with the earth, dirt, blood, the night and death.  After all, Gaia, the first of the gods in Greek mythology was female, she was the earth. [She wasn’t personified as later Greek gods were, but she is a god helping to bring order into a chaotic universe.]   Veblen doesn’t go in all of these directions, but others do, including the Freudians.  We’ll have a little visit with them today too.  Now for Veblen:

In such a community [of barbarians] the standards of merit and propriety rest on an invidious distinction between those who are capable fighters and those who are not. Infirmity, that is to say incapacity for exploit, is looked down upon. One of the early consequences of this deprecation of infirmity is a tabu on women and on women’s employments. In the apprehension of the archaic, animistic barbarian, infirmity is infectious. The infection may work its mischievous effect both by sympathetic influence and by transfusion. Therefore it is well for the able-bodied man who is mindful of his virility to shun all undue contact and conversation with the weaker sex and to avoid all contamination with the employments that are characteristic of the sex. Even the habitual food of women should not be eaten by men, lest their force be thereby impaired. The injunction against womanly employments and foods and against intercourse with women applies with especial rigor during the season of preparation for any work of manly exploit, such as a great hunt or a warlike raid, or induction into some manly dignity or society or mystery. Illustrations of this seasonal tabu abound in the early history of all peoples that have had a warlike or barbarian past. The women, their occupations, their food and clothing, their habitual place in the house or village, and in extreme cases even their speech, become ceremonially unclean to the men. This imputation of ceremonial uncleanness on the ground of their infirmity has lasted on in the later culture as a sense of the unworthiness or Levitical inadequacy of women ; so that even now we feel the impropriety of women taking rank with men, or representing the community in any relation that calls for dignity and ritual competency ; as for instance, in priestly or diplomatic offices, or even in representative civil offices, and likewise, and for a like reason, in such offices of domestic and body servants as are of a seriously ceremonial character ‚ footmen, butlers, etc.

Veblen, then, in his odd style, explains that women are considered lesser than men because they can’t fight.  What they do around the house is fine, but the really important stuff, like hunting and protecting the group, is the purview of men and that type of activity becomes entrenched as the value standard by which to judge all action.  So, men, powerful men, manly men, become the standard by which to judge all of humankind.

Veblen’s explanation, then, remains at the level of performance.  The tabu on women is a result of their ‘infirmity’, their inability to pursue the hunt and to fight.  Because this ‘infirmity’ is infectious, men must avoid women, especially at certain times of the year and when women’s infirmity is most obvious during their time of her ‘customary impurity’ otherwise they risk losing their prowess.  There have been obvious residual instances of this proscription when it’s been made clear to professional athletes by coaches and others interested in winning.  So I googled: Is it ok to have sex before a high level athletic competition?  There were enough ‘hits’ to suggest that its still on people’s minds, mindless though that is.  After all when the French refer to orgasm as ‘la petite mort’ what they are referring to is the overwhelming bodily release of tension and semi-immobilization that comes with it.  One dies a little upon ejaculation.  At least that’s my interpretation and I’m sticking by it.  Others have suggested that ejaculation and orgasm give up a little of a man’s ‘life’ every time it happens.  I don’t think so, but it does bring up the notion that bodily functions in general, especially those that involve orifices, ejaculates, evacuations and such are subtle little reminders of our mortality.  Why else do Catholic priests and others vow to be chaste?  Why else would people (men, that is) in certain societies wear butt plugs?  Well, both practices deny the body and its downright nasty habit of getting ill, diseased and eventually dead.  Men can delude themselves into thinking that if they just abstain from bodily stuff and stick to the symbolic, spiritual side of life then they can live eternally.  Yeah, right.

Next class, we visit the Freudians via Norman O. Brown and Ernest Becker.  It might be fun later to look at Greek philosophy and myths to get a sense of how they see this stuff.

The Barbarian Status of Women

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 9 Comments

http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/veblen/women

Click on the above link to read an article published in Volume 4 of the American Journal of Sociology in 1898/9 by Thorstein Veblen who at the time was teaching at the University of Chicago where the Journal was created by Albion Small who was the first scholar to actually hold a chair in sociology in the US.  The article is entitled The Barbarian Status of Women.  It’s written in a typical ‘Veblenian’ style which for people now makes it almost unreadable.  Still the message is sharp and clear if you can decipher it.  if you read it you might want a dictionary handy.  Now, into the fray. 

So, in this day and age, we’re used to hearing about patriarchy, the oppression of women, feminism, the glass ceiling, the double ghetto, etc.  In other words we’re acquainted with the notion that women are not the equals of men.  Of course we know what the data say about women’s inferior rates of pay, high poverty rates, etc.  Well, when Veblen was writing this article probably 120 years ago, there were the beginnings of an organized women’s movement in the US expressed partly in the suffragette movement.  Women were yet to be ‘allowed’ to vote.  The suffragette’s demanded it. In a real way, I think that Veblen tacitly associated himself with this movement. I’m not going to go on about this here;  what I want to deal with here briefly is Veblen’s use of the term Barbarian Status of Women.  

For Veblen, the status of women in his day could easily be traced back to primitive times when men were hunters, developed hunting and exploitative skills whereby they got their status in the group.  Because women could not develop those skills being burdened down with pregnancy and domestic activities, etc., they were denigrated and considered ‘infirm.’  Soon enough that way of seeing things got pretty well entrenched in culture.  Marx had earlier suggested that there was a state in primitive society when there was equality between the sexes.  Men were in charge of the hunt, women were in charge of the home and nobody argued about it (too much).  Veblen didn’t buy that argument.  He found no evidence for it.  He saw the relations between the sexes as essentially predatory.  In fact he concludes that women were not only treated as inferior because they could not compete in the hunt, they were often the ‘prize’ gotten in raids on other groups.  Women ‘gotten’ in this way became the property of men and only the toughest, meanest men in the Valley actually had wives, many if they could sustain them.  This arrangement, Veblen argues came down in history and was the norm still in his day in his culture which he describes as predatory.  Eventually he argues, men had a harder and harder time finding women in their pillaging trips and so had to settle for incorporating predatory institutions in marriage with their ‘own’ women, women in their own tribe.  It wasn’t that long ago – actually it still happens everywhere – in marriage ceremonies and their aftermath that the groom was required to carry the bride to the bridal bedroom.  His property, his prize.  Marriage in our culture is still pretty much a patriarchal affair.  Men are still the ones expected to seek out a bride.  Men, to prove their manliness, must somehow control access to sex either through marriage or by buying it.  Prostitution is not about women selling their bodies for the pleasure of men.  It’s much more about men buying sex, going out and getting it, not unlike in earlier predatory times when ‘buying’ meant capturing in a raid.  Money is a symbol of power in our culture.  If a man has enough of it to buy women, then he can consider himself manly; he can consider himself successful in the raid.

That explains how women became the property of men and still are to a large extent in cultural terms, but it doesn’t really explain how women have come to be plagued with so many negative associations even today.  Veblen had something to say about this too and I’ll address his views on this in my next post but for now, you can think about all the things women are associated with and the things men are. Women are culturally associated with the body, men with the spirit.  Women with the moon, men with the sun.  Men with the right, women with the left. A woman who has sex is promiscuous, a ‘dirty’ whore.  A man who is promiscuous is a stud.  How did those associations come about?  That’s the subject of my next post.