Archive for the ‘authoritarianism’ Category
a more feminist future…. ?
On the patriarchy matriarchy feminism masculinism front, I watched a while back a video, apparently one of a series, by a young woman who presented, with amusing confidence, an anti-feminist position. I didn’t pay too much attention to her spiel (and thankfully I can’t find the video now to reference it!), but I noted a lot of approving comments, all from males. One even happily highlighted Aristotle’s view that women are naturally inferior, in terms of rationality, to men. Presumably this allowed him to believe that, whatever his own level of ‘rationality’, it was superior to that of the four billion or so females that inhabit the planet. I should mention that Aristotle also believed that slaves were naturally less rational than free Athenian citizens. Presumably female slaves were doubly dumb.
I’ve just finished reading Darwin’s The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, and I found it hard to take in the end, as in the final pages he expatiated on human sexual selection. Basically he was claiming that males select females for their physical appearance while females select males largely for that rationality thing, which explains why men have evolved to be smarter than women. So, I try to make allowances for Darwin, like Aristotle, being a creature of his time and his culture, as I am of mine…
Having read Darwin’s Origin of species a couple of times, and now his Descent of man, I’ve noted the great number of references he has to others in his field of interest – breeders of livestock, pigeon fanciers, ornithologists, zoologists, botanists and so forth, with whom he has corresponded. Not long ago I came across a collection of his correspondence, here in Adelaide’s reference library – a whole shelf of heavy tomes of the stuff. And in my own reading of these references, I’ve never found a single female. That’s Victorian England for you – not so different, perhaps, from ancient Athens, as far as the status of women is concerned.
Things have changed though, in the WEIRD world, in the last 150 years, and Darwin has been proven wrong about the female intellect. And it stands to reason – male dogs and cats aren’t smarter than their female counterparts, and female bonobos aren’t intellectually superior to the males they manage to keep in their place via a powerful sisterhood. Male gorillas may be bigger and tougher than the females but there’s no evidence that they’re smarter.
Having said all that, I’m still holding out for a female-dominant human world, as they have other qualities that we need more than ever in the current climate. Yes there may have been some not so admirable female leaders in recent years (the only period in which female political leadership has been allowed), but none have been as disgusting as Putin or so absurd as Trump, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to assess current female leadership without recognising that they’ve achieved their position within a largely patriarchal framework. That framework, it seems to me, is more competitive (and thus warlike) and less collective than that of matriarchy. Not that the difference is huge – I’m a big fan of women’s soccer, and of course it’s hugely competitive, but you don’t get quite the brutalism and the confrontations with referees that are fairly common in the men’s game. Time may tell a different story, but I doubt it.
But returning to the young woman who’s presenting an anti-feminist series of videos, my guess is that she’s been shaped, as I’ve been, by childhood experiences. My own childhood was shaped by a dominant and largely competent female parent, who was the major breadwinner, as she moved up the scale from a registered nurse to a sister to an assistant matron of a hospital and then, after further training, to a nurse educator, while my father remained an unskilled labourer, often unemployed. My mother also ran the house, getting my siblings and I to do set chores – even assigning sections of the back garden for each of us to tend. The house was filled with books, though she wasn’t a big reader, and my father not at all. The marriage wasn’t a happy one, though they were still together – only just – when I left home at about nineteen.
So, though I had clashes with my mother, and in many ways it wasn’t a happy childhood, it was definitely due to her that I and my siblings are very much on the feminist side, which makes me speculate about the anti-feminist woman on Youtube. It seems highly likely that for her, the father was the dominant parent, and competently so, and the mother, not so much. This is wild speculation of course, but – well, perhaps not so wild.
It’s the free will/determinism thing again. Trump’s grandad was Friedrich Drumpf, but someone was inspired to switch it to something nominatively determining, and the rest is a horrible history. I’ve read a biography of Putin, and I’ve heard much of the early childhood of Trump, all enough to explain what terrible tragedies they are for the rest of the world – but their success in obtaining leadership has also much to do with the psychology, if I can describe it so, of the countries they’ve come to dominate. With Trump’s country it’s libertarianism, ‘the land of the free’, where anyone can apparently become a billionaire if they work hard enough, or are super-smart or super-bold, etc. In Russia – well, its autocratic history is long, and is well described by Orlando Figes in The story of Russia:
The Russian autocratic tradition had many roots but the Mongol legacy did more than most to fix the basic nature of its politics. From the 16th century, the first tsars of Muscovy drew upon the Mongol imperial tradition, adapting it to their own purposes. Beginning with Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) they justified their claim to an imperial status not just on the basis of their spiritual descent from Byzantium but also on the basis of their territorial inheritance from Chingiz Khan.
Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, p51
The tsars maintained this largely bogus tradition to the end, and Putin, after a period of bolshevik turmoil, and the hopes of Gorbachov’s perestroika, has effectively resurrected it:
Here was the fundamental weakness of the Russian aristocracy. The most senior boyar clans – those who were closest through marriage or royal favour to the Moscow court – formed an oligarchic ruling class, which at times, when the grand prince was weak, might direct his government. But their wealth and power came from him. They kept them only for as long as they retained his protection. It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day. Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will.
Ibid, p52
So, Russia and China have never come close to anything resembling democracy, in spite of glasnost and the brutally suppressed Tiananmen Square protests – their long, brutal histories have made such a transformation highly unlikely – but then, the future is long – at least we hope so.
A lot of those hopes, for me, lie in a greater – and greater and greater – role for women in government. First, inevitably, among democracies, so that the ultra-male oligarchies and dictatorships will be shamed and bewildered by the people they’re dealing with, and then…
Well, it’s a pleasant dream…
References
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to sex, 1871, in Darwin: the indelible stamp, ed James Watson, 2005
Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, 2022
vive les bonobos – monitory democracy
I’ve been reading John Keane’s very lively and up-to-date The shortest history of democracy with great pleasure, and especially his final chapter, ‘Monitory Democracy’, which has really spurred my thinking on contemporary politics, and ‘how we are to live’, from a personal as well as a more ‘rise above yourself and grasp the world’ perspective.
First, the personal. I’ve been more or less obsessively anti-authoritarian since my youth. I recall even in primary school staring out the window as the teacher droned on, watching a tiny bird flapping its wings in a blur just above a hibiscus bush, and wondering what law of nature forced me to be cooped up there among strangers, learning stuff which I could just as well learn at home, when the fancy took me. Some of the first of my anti-authoritarian thoughts. I was nevertheless a more or less ‘straight A student’ through primary and the first year or so of high school, and then things went downhill fast, as relations with my authoritarian mother, the head of our household, became extremely frosty, and I became passively resistant to my teachers, who seemed to me either brutes or bores, and sometimes both. My greatest loathing was reserved for the headmaster, nicknamed Batler – a combination of Batman and Hitler – due to to his predilection for haunting the corridors in a flowing black academic gown, hoping to pounce on miscreant victims. He caned me once for not doing my homework. It took another 20 years for caning to be banned in schools, but I could’ve told authorities long before that ‘enlightened’ decision that such beatings had zero correctional effects, certainly in my case.
Talking about my case, everyone was on it, parents and teachers, while I derived a strange naughty pleasure in wagging school and reading my brother’s academic textbooks in the green fields close to our house. It was a house full of books, my saving grace, with a library just down the road. I neglected school-work more or less completely, which exacerbated relations at home. My final day at school was quite dramatic. I was lounging in a corridor study area with a friend when Batler descended upon us, his wings like a shield of steel. He started questioning me on my activities, but I didn’t say much in response, and the fact that I was chewing gum at the time seemed to peeve him somewhat, as he decided in his wisdom to try another corrective, slapping my face with full force, and sending my gum across the corridor space. He then ordered me to see him after school for further punitive measures. This was good, as it allowed my last act at that school to be one of disobedience.
So I left school at fifteen, with a chip on my shoulder which somehow only strengthened my love of literature and knowledge. And it also intensified, to an almost pathological degree, my hatred of authoritarianism of all kinds. Ironically, my mother, who, I knew, felt that my father’s relative weakness vis-a-vis herself had rubbed off on me – ‘you’re just like your father’ was her favourite insult – started putting in my way material about the great careers that could be had in the military. It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
The point of all these unreliable memories is that I tend to look at the world of politics not so much as the battle between left and right, or socialism and capitalism, but between authoritarianism (often but not always associated with the political right) and its opposite, however defined. Which brings me back to monitory democracy. And feminism. And bonobos.
Keane’s book, as mentioned, was a sparkling and inspiring read, which reminded me of Jess Scully’s Glimpses of Utopia, another road map for the future (though of course more utopian). The only slight disappointment was that feminism barely rated a mention. Of course it hardly needed to be said that the forces that disrupted or militated against electoral democracy in Germany, Italy, Japan, China and South America in the first half of the 20th century were overwhelmingly male, but I think more needs to be said about women as victims of the past and makers of the future.
The term ‘monitory democracy’ was new to me, but the idea is plain enough. Electoral democracy is insufficient protection for ‘the people’, it needs to be monitored and scrutinised – and not just government in the narrow sense, but all the institutions and systems that make for an open and civil society – financial systems, the law, the business community, the police, health and welfare organisations, the military, the lot. We need to guard against control of any of those institutions by a walled-in, self-selected and mostly male ‘elite’. And beware of terms like ‘unelected swill’ – there are plenty of individuals who, like myself, have no inclination to take on the responsibilities of government, but are nonetheless deeply concerned about how others use or abuse the power accorded them. Women, in particular, know what it’s like to find themselves in a toxic work environment, and – like sniffer dogs – would be quicker than most to detect its source.
There are plenty of sectors I know of that are insufficiently monitored, to the detriment of the general public. I myself tried to make a complaint about the police over a very serious matter, but got absolutely nowhere, and was told by a prominent lawyer that their internal complaints system was a joke, and the external Office for Public Integrity not much better. Recently there was a Royal Commission into the Australian banking system, which found plenty of wrong-doing, costing more than $100 million to customers, but apart from a couple of resignations at the head of NAB, no consequences ensued. Of course this was nothing compared to the subprime lending and other dodgy practices that led to the 2007-8 worldwide recession. The lack of accountability for that disaster seems almost as shocking as the disaster itself. Only one banker, an executive of Credit Suisse, experienced jail time. Currently, a Royal Commission into the former Liberal government’s disastrous Robodebt scheme is underway. We can only wait and see, but often the wait is far too long – justice delayed is justice denied.
Monitoring organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the IPCC, GlobalSecurity.org and a variety of fair trade organisations and truth and reconciliation-style commissions have cropped up in recent decades, as well as organisations promoting the more promising half of the world’s human population, such as AWID (The Association for Women’s Rights in Development), ActionAid, the Alliance for Feminist Movements, among others, taking issues beyond the somewhat tired left-right ideological divides, and focussing more on fairness and human rights.
In some ways these non-aligned watchdog and promotional organisations have crept up on us, but they’re evidence of our recognition of the complexity of national and international issues of poverty, identity, freedom and rights. And of the global nature of the problems we face – climate change, habitat loss, over-population, cultural differences, the continued threat and reality of warfare, to name a few.
Many of these watchdog organisations are anathema to states, whether democratic or authoritarian. Here in Australia the UNHCR and other organisations have castigated us for our treatment of ‘boat people’ desperate for a new life in a safe place. Successive governments have tended to blow off these criticisms with unseemly arrogance. The United States and many other powerful nations have high-handedly refused to be signatories to the International Criminal Court, though (or because) they’re often the greatest abusers of International law. The US is also bellicose about any other nations joining the ‘nuclear club’, while ceaselessly adding to and rendering more deadly its own nuclear arsenal. The USA’s Pentagon has never passed an audit in its history, but this is symptomatic of highly hierarchical and authoritarian organisations, such as the police and the military, worldwide. They’re also the most male-dominated of course.
In the bonobo world the females are, if only slightly, the smaller sex, but they prove beautifully that size isn’t everything. The size difference between male and female bonobos appears to be reducing, due presumably to social evolution, just as in humans, male testosterone levels are dropping. I see that as a good sign, if it’s not too much of a health hazard (the findings I read about came from one of the Scandinavian countries – I doubt if the same thing is happening in Sudan). Female empowerment has come a little way rather than a long way, but as with monitory democracy, it’s fast given the long timeline of F sapiens. Of course individual timelines – and I’m thinking entirely of myself here – are minuscule in comparison, and time is running out for me. I’m generally an optimist, though sometimes a disappointed one, and I’m optimistic about the human future in spite of all the fuck-ups, the fuckwits, the setbacks and the delusions of grandeur that will inevitably clutter our journey into that unknowable place. Which brings me to another exhilarating book, Gaia Vince’s Adventures in the Anthropocene…
References
John Keane, The shortest history of democracy, 2022
Jess Scully, Glimpses of Utopia, 2020
Gaia Vince, Adventures in the Anthropocene, 2014