Archive for the ‘politics’ Category
the history of patriarchy in a small room.
The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.
Toni Morrison
Central Politburo – what if they were all women?
About a month ago I went to a ‘meet-up’ for a group which went under the name ‘philosopher’s corner’. The topic, from memory, was something like ‘Donald Trump and the future of US democracy’. I’ve written a number of posts on and around this topic, so I thought it might be fun, in a perverse way. Unfortunately it wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped. There were about ten attendees, sitting at tables which more or less faced in each other in a squarish formation, something like a Square Round Table, in an out-of-the way little upstairs room. Again from memory, there were seven men to three women, but in the whole two hours’ non-stop conversation, to which I contributed my fair share, I can only recall one brief comment and one question from the female attendees. So, well over 95% of the conversation was male. I was wearing my bonobo t-shirt, featuring a large photo-portrait of said primate, with underneath the line ‘I’d rather be a bonobo’, which is only occasionally true for me, and this might have been one of those occasions. In any case nobody seemed to notice.
Not that there was any violence or even slight rowdiness in evidence, but a couple of those present did seem to sympathise with Trump’s politics (whatever they thought they were) while deploring his personal behaviour. Fortunately (more or less) the conversation drifted to other political hotspots such as Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine, plus a fair slice of local Aussie politics worth pontificating about. Altogether, I don’t recall much that particularly stimulated me, especially from those who most dominated the conversation (the convenor did quite a good job of giving everyone a fair go), but the bloke immediately to my left made two separate comments that, for hopefully obvious reasons, caught my attention. First, he declared that we need a strong, male leader to deal with the world’s trouble-spots in a firm, no-nonsense way. By ‘we’ he appeared to be speaking for the WEIRD world in general. I did try to respond to this, but others jumped in before me, not to disagree with him specifically, but to turn the conversation in another direction, leaving the notion to fester. But shortly afterward, my left-hand compatriot offered another comment, or rather, a question. What’s wrong with the idea of a first nuclear strike, given the current situation? Again, nobody took up the idea, and I admit to being too stunned to offer a response. Presumably he meant on Russia, on Moscow? I took a closer look at the man – middle-aged, neatly dressed, he looked like a clerk, a public servant. The middle-class ‘man in the street’.
We need more female leadership, please please please. Above all we need it in Russia, China, North Korea, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Burma, Indonesia, all the places where we have it least. It’s no good saying, as has been said to me, ‘look at this, that or the other female leader, what difference did they make, some were even worse than the men’. These were all odd women out in a patriarchal world, who had to conform, more or less, to the male stereotype. It needs to be a numbers game, a world turned upside-down, with the kind of group leadership in politics, business, the law, science, even the military, that males enjoy today. And the fact is, it’s happening, if too slowly. The academic world isn’t what it was in Virginia Woolf’s time, and that’s only taken a century. Imagine the human world a thousand years from now. If we survive, and I’m sure we will, things will continue along the painfully slow track of incremental empowerment for the sex that gave birth to us all, that nourished and nurtured us in our early years, the ‘without which not’ of all humanity, and more.
That small community of primates south of the Congo River is putting us to shame. How did they manage it? Obviously it wasn’t a conscious development, and it will need to be more conscious for us. We need our patriarchy to be deflated, little by little, puncture by puncture, for the betterment not just of our own humanity, but for the biosphere that we’ve come to dominate so very disturbingly.
no references this time!
on the French political system, and maybe bonobos
I’ve always had an interest in France, its history and its literature, having done a BA in French language and literature, decades ago, for some reason. Stendhal and Beauvoir are a couple of my heroes. I even stayed in Paris for a week a few years back – bien exotique pour moi. But whenever I read about French politics, I just felt confused. They have a President and a Prime Minister, but which, if any has seniority? Have any of them been female? I knew that, in spite of a prominent female intelligentsia, France has had a reputation as a rather chauvinist nation, but I’ve never made much effort to dig deeper.
So, as I’m just finishing off Cecil Jenkins’ A brief history of France, which, being brief, hasn’t managed to unconfuse me, I’m going to use this post to educate myself a bit more, while keeping bonobos – that’s to say dominant women – in mind, wherever I can find them.
France is currently experiencing its Fifth Republic, constituted in 1958 under then President Charles de Gaulle. The Constitution of 1958 still operates, apparently. From Wikipedia,
The constitution provides for a separation of powers and proclaims France’s “attachment to the Rights of Man [sic] and the principles of National Sovereignty as defined by the Declaration of 1789”.
Whenever I think of the ‘Rights of Man’ and 1789 I think of honorary bonobo, Olympe de Gouges, playwright, political activist, humanist and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, whose moderate opposition to Robespierre and the radicals led to her execution during the Reign of Terror.
The first thing I should say about the current French political system is that it seems brain-befuddlingly complex to me. Cutting to the chase, the President has, these days, a considerably more powerful position than the Prime Minister, whom he’s responsible for appointing. There has of course never been a female President, hardly surprising for a nation that didn’t even allow women to vote until after the Second World War. At least there have been a couple of female Prime Ministers, Edith Cresson (1991-2) and Elisabeth Borne (2023-Jan 2024), neither of whom managed to last a year.
French state politics seems based on a key, controversial concept – dirigisme. Often associated with de Gaulle’s post-war government, and the ‘Trente Glorieuses’, a thirty-year period of largely state-managed growth following WW2, dirigisme is an odd amalgam of authoritarianism and something like socialism, which has seen France benefit from some of the most generous health and welfare benefits in the world. I can well remember my shock when riots broke out last year because of a proposed raising of the pensionable age by the Macron/Borne government, from 62 to 64 (the original plan was to raise it to 65). I found it hard to believe that any wealthy, healthy nation could maintain such a low pension age. In Australia, the age is now 67, and rising. It should also be noted that, according to the New York Times:
Macron sought to gradually raise the legal age when workers can start collecting a pension by three months every year until it reaches 64 in 2030 (!).
Such generosity seems scarcely credible to other WEIRD world countries, surely, remembering that increased longevity means many pension payouts for upwards of 30 years. They do have some kind of pay-as-you-earn scheme, but it doesn’t seem to be as comprehensive as Australia’s superannuation system.
So, Presidential elections are held every five years (reduced from seven in 2000!), and Emmanuel Macron won the last election in 2022, defeating the less than bonoboesque Marine Le Pen in a run-off second vote. So Macron will have been Prez for ten years at the end of his term, which seems a bit much.
So the run-off system clicks in when no candidate gets a majority – 50%+ – in the first round, which will be commonplace when there’s a large field and a diversity of public views/ideologies out there. My own personal view is that the two or three candidates with the most votes should get together and form a collaborative governmental team, but that’s no doubt way too idealistic. However, bonobos come close to managing it, according to Wikipedia:
At the top of the hierarchy is a coalition of high-ranking females and males typically headed by an old, experienced matriarch who acts as the decision-maker and leader of the group.
Ah, if we could only achieve the emotional maturity of bonobos, what a wonderful world it would be.
So the Presidential elections in France don’t involve anything so pesky as an Electoral College, and they don’t pit one I-alone-can-fix-it guy against another, instead they have any number of I-alone-can-fix-it guys, but someone has to get that 50%. And then there’s the legislative election, the last of which was held in June 2022, shortly after the Presidential election, and that’s the way it has been since 2000 – in other words they’re also held every five years, and candidates are elected as députés to the National Assembly, the Parliament’s lower house. There are no less than 577 of them, including eleven who represent, surely rather vaguely, the ‘French overseas’. This presumably multi-party crowd makes for interesting decision-making, or not. And finally there’s the upper house, the Senate (at least it’s not the House of Lords, which should’ve been killed off by now – how many female lords are there?), which consists of 377 six-year term senators. I would say ‘don’t ask’, but I suppose these long terms at least reduce the cost of more regular elections. I just wonder how this rabble of almost a thousand politicians ever gets things done. Then again I’m in favour of more collaborative government, with lots of involvement, so I should be careful what I ask for…
So who/what are the main French parties? Australia has the Liberals (actually conservatives), the Nationals (rather more conservative, and in coalition, sometimes fractious, with the Libs), the Labor party (generally centre-left, and currently in government), the Greens (further left), and a semi-connected group of independents, with a large proportion of women. Currently, 44.5% of Australian federal parliamentarians are women. In France, the percentage as at 2017 – I can’t find more recent figures – was 38.8%.
The French parties are a little more numerous – on the more or less extreme right is Marine le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National), then there’s the more centre-right Les Republicains, and in the centre is Macron’s party, Renaissance (formerly La Republique en Marche!). On the centre left is the Parti Socialist, with La France Insoumise (rebellious France) on the radical and greener side. In the last elections, the ‘old guard’ leftist and rightist parties, i.e the Republicans and the Socialists, performed very poorly,
Pretty straightforward, but I’m trying to work out how it all comes together, particularly relating to the President (currently Macron), the Prime Minister (Gabriel Attal) and the president of the National Assembly (Yaël Braun-Pivet, the first woman to hold the position) and their respective powers. In Australia, there’s no President, and the Prime Minister leads the lower house as the head of government, though there’s a Speaker, chosen from among the governing party MPs, who keeps order in the house (and maybe that’s the role of the National Assembly prez). Anyway, the role of the French PM is nothing like that of our PM, in that he (Gabriel is male) is appointed by the President and ‘is the person who controls the government of France day-to-day’ (Wikipedia), presumably leaving the President to hob-nob with other world leaders and promote the country overseas.
So it sounds like the French President, like the US President, doesn’t have to lower himself by sitting in the parliament, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous opposition members and back-benchers. And he gets to dump his PM, it seems, whereas our PM can only be dumped by a full party vote.
Anyway, that’s enough of this sujet for now – I’m sure I haven’t fully worked it out but it’s been fun trying… and I’ve note an occasional ‘first female’ along the way. Vive les bonobos en humaine – it may take a thousand years, but it will happen.
References
Cecil Jenkins, A brief history of France, 2011
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympe_de_Gouges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_French_presidential_election
On the strange world of US politics, jingoism, superheroes and the rise of social media
the mind’s new minefield
The main problem with the US Federal political system, it seems to me, is that far too many United Staters, including the nation’s political pundits, think there’s nothing much wrong with their political system. Jingoism doesn’t tend to foster a reformist agenda.
Here’s a simple example. On MSNBC, during a discussion of the two failed impeachment proceedings against then President Trump, Chuck Rosenberg, a lawyer and NBC pundit, referred to the resignation of Britain’s former PM Boris Johnson. ‘Removing a President should be hard’, he said with much gravitas, ‘we certainly don’t want to be able to dump our political leaders the way they do in Britain’. I felt a very strong urge to scream at the screen “YES YOU DO!” It should be policies and effective governance that counts, not pumped-up individuals.
It has since become clear that even a clear-cut federal election loss isn’t enough to convince some that their time of leadership has come to an end. This isn’t particularly surprising in the case of Trump, who ‘always wins’ in spite of losing the 2016 election to Hilary Clinton by almost 3 million votes. But of course he ‘won’ that year by virtue of a bizarre system known as the Electoral College. In fact he was the fifth candidate in US history to win only by virtue of this system after losing the popular vote. Even so, we have to ask how such a profoundly ignorant, lazy, corrupt, habitually duplicitous buffoon could have managed to score anything like enough votes to take over the running of the wealthiest, most heavily armed and internationally dominant country on the planet.
Well, needless to say, the problem lies with the USA’s socio-political system, not with Trump, who likely hasn’t added a single neuron to his pre-frontal cortex since the age of seven.
Firstly, that impeachment issue, and the concept of Presidential immunity. Impeachment, which either doesn’t exist or is never used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK or Ireland (and I think that’s all of the other majority-English speaking democracies), is an overly politicised weapon, best abandoned. If a President has broken a law – and he (it’s aways been a he) or she should be subject to all the laws that other citizens are subject to – then they should be tried by the courts, not by any political body. And it goes without saying that court justices and magistrates should not be appointed by political bodies but by independent authorities, insofar as this is possible.
Secondly, on immunity. The British monarch is immune from prosecution, a hangover from the days of Divine Rights. Fortunately, these monarchs today have no political power, and I’m not opposed to vestigial monarchies, such as exist in Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium, as a link to the past, an anchoring national symbol and a tourist drawcard, though I do think they should all be as subject to the nation’s laws as all other citizens. US Presidential immunity, however, is far more disturbing, as Trump’s attempts to utilise it reveals. So, in some respects, Trump is an asset, in that he’s exposed the gaping holes in the US Presidential system. Will United Staters unite to fix their system? I very much doubt it. Recall that their nation’s Attorney-General, or chief law enforcement officer, is chosen by the President himself, and recall that William Barr, realising full well that Trump was looking for a potential A-G that would protect him from the consequences of his own crimes, wrote an ‘unsolicited memo’, which some lawyers (non-Republicans of course), criticised for
its sweeping views of the president’s constitutional role and prerogatives, including the notion that the president has “absolute” and “all-encompassing” constitutional authority over actions by executive branch officers in carrying out law enforcement powers given to them by Congress, including decisions about criminal investigation and prosecution.
and so forth (this from the ACLU) . Barr went on to become Attorney-General and to suppress any action based on the Mueller report’s damning findings. Since then, Presidential immunity has been argued with immense tediousness by people who should know better. Of course there should be no immunity for politicians of any kind. Their actions can have huge effects, so it stands to reason that a whole suite of laws should regulate their behaviour, above and beyond the behaviour of others. And the greater the politician’s power, the more it should be constrained by law. But of course, much better not to give your political leader so much power in the first place. These people are public servants after all.
This brings me to the USA’s attitude to their Presidents, which strikes me as quasi-religious. They even, rather bizarrely, remember them by number.
Here’s a bit of my view on this. The USA is the land of the super-hero. Make no mistake, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Wonderwoman, The Justice League of America, all these I alone can fix it guys are US-born aliens. And not only do they defeat all the bad guys, they clean up or go over the heads of all the corrupt or incompetent local officials. It’s a childish fantasy but it seems the USA’s great unwashed are full of these childish fantasists
In the USA, the President gets to choose many powerful figures apart from the A-G and the Vice President, who have never been elected by the people. Unlike in the Westminster system, none of these powerful figures have to show up in Parliament/Congress, to face opposition or questioning of their actions. They seem more like Presidential courtiers than government ministers. Here’s a quote from the White House website:
The President also appoints the heads of more than 50 independent federal commissions, such as the Federal Reserve Board or the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as federal judges, ambassadors, and other federal offices.
Of course, in Australia and other Westminster-based nations, the Prime Minister (primus inter pares) gets to select and reshuffle her cabinet, but all are elected officials who must work within the parliament and within spitting distance of the opposition. I’ve written elsewhere about my – discomfort, shall we say – with adversarial systems, and I would like to see more of a multi-party system in all of the countries of the WEIRD world. The USA has become more of an Us v Them system than most, to its detriment, I think. After all, governments usually ‘get in’ by relatively slender margins and will be ousted by slender margins in their turn, and yet we constantly see the incoming government overturning the best work of the previous government, and then having their changes overturned in their turn. Surely we can do better than this.
Under Trump, of course, the partisanship has become more extreme, and the Republican Party itself has become bewitched, bothered and bewildered by their nation’s laziest and most corrupt and deceitful leader. And surely, to understand this you have to understand his appeal, for the non-cognoscenti in particular.
Voting isn’t compulsory in the Land of Freedom, so it’s not surprising that millions don’t give a damn about their government, but many of those people must be feeling the squeeze. The USA has the largest per capita imprisonment rate in the WEIRD world (3.5 times higher than here in Australia), as well as the death penalty in many states (Australia abandoned the death penalty nationwide nearly 60 years ago). It has the lowest federal minimum wage, and a rich-poor divide much larger than ours (Australia has the highest minimum wage, federally, outside of Luxembourg). It also fares poorly in terms of basic healthcare and education, and its high levels of Christian religiosity – only about 5% of United Staters identify themselves as atheists – helps explain the current disastrous situation regarding women’s control of their bodies. And with the USA’s more or less never-ending ‘war on drugs’, the country’s poor would be ill-advised to find relief in that area.
And yet. Even with all these problems and disaffections, I find it hard to credit the public gullibility vis-a-vis Trump. Reading history helps, sort of. Hitler had millions of admirers, both inside and outside of Germany, before his downfall, and the same could be said for countless dictators of nations large and small – they’re not called populist leaders for nothing. How do we explain this? – by looking at the situation, and most notably the economic situation, of the dictator’s followers, learning about their grievances, their fears, their group dynamics, sharpened nowadays by social media….
Here’s another anecdote. A few years ago, shortly after the 2020 Presidential election, in an attempt to get out of the house and meet real people I decided to go to a meet-up (here in South Australia) with the impressive name ‘Deep Thinkers’, with decidedly mixed results. After a couple of pleasant chats I moved on to buttonhole a bloke sitting at the bar. As he looked Middle-Eastern, I asked him where he was from (I didn’t say he looked Middle-Eastern). ‘Port Pirie’, he said, naming a small industrial town about 250 kilometres north of Adelaide. I felt as if I’d made a blunder, but we went on to talk about infotech, his field of work, and computer literacy. Then, during a lull, apropos of nothing, he said, ‘I think Trump is one of the greatest Presidents the USA has ever had’. Well, needless to say, things went downhill fast after that (though on the whole, relations remained amicable), but on later reflection, I felt the effects of trepverter, a Yiddish word, supposedly meaning ‘a witty comeback you think of too late’, but which I think of more broadly, as a response I only come up with when I’m alone and my head is clear (I seem to live most of my life in this broadly defined trepverter world). So instead of rabbiting on about Trump’s ignorance and incompetence, I’d have done better to inquire how my interlocutor had arrived at this conclusion. Was he perchance a historian of the US Presidency? Would he be able to name any of the other great US Presidents? Provide me with a top ten, along with a bottom ten? The point being that it was obvious that he was not an authority on US politics, which was confirmed by other remarks he subsequently made, that he was a ‘conservative Christian’, and that he ‘never listens to the mainstream’ (a particularly telling remark). His ‘opinion’ of Trump was purely a parroting of a social media meme, and I rests my case.
This social media phenomenon is quite powerful, and it’s relatively new, and certainly has disturbing elements. To be explored in future posts.
on US jingoism and nationalist dishonesty – plus ça change…
should be billions more people in this pic
It doesn’t seem to me that there’s any nation, at least in the WEIRD world, that’s as jingoistic as the USA. Now whether nationalism is a good thing is always arguable. I take the view that, while nobody gets to choose the nation of their birth, so that it’s a matter neither of shame nor of pride, it’s more than reasonable to be interested in that nation above others (assuming that you still live in your birth nation), because you want it to be as good as can be, for yourself and your peers. Whether you call that nationalism or patriotism or whatever is of no great interest to me. And if you espouse humanist values you will be concerned also about the quality of life in other nations, any of which you could’ve been born and brought up in. But clearly we have more opportunity to improve things in our own nation than in others.
And here’s the obvious thing. Every nation can be improved, in terms of its governance, its laws, its quality of life, its fairness, its health and welfare and so on. And considering that social evolution is a never-ending story, we need our social structures and our governance systems to keep up, to evolve, if not in tandem with, at least not far behind the tides of change.
So, back to the USA. I’ve spent too much time in the past few years, really since the advent of Trump and the meaningless MAGA slogan, listening to US pundits, mostly liberal, bemoaning the fate of their country. But the fact is, I very very rarely hear talk of reform. nor do I hear much in the way of reflection as to why someone so utterly incapable of governance of any kind could have won the favour of so many United Staters, even if they’ve always been in a minority, albeit a vociferous one (and thus seeming to be more numerous than they are).
I was born in Scotland and have lived in Australia since the age of five. Scotland has long had a testy relationship with the country south of the border, with which it is united, sort of, under the UK, but it has its own government headed by a First Minister, as opposed to England’s Prime Minister. What’s the difference between a First Minister and a Prime Minister, you ask? Good question, for which I have no answer, but they’re both based on the principle of primus inter pares, as the leader of the governing party. That party has been elected by the voters, and it has decided upon its leadership by an internal vote of its elected representatives. The party can replace its leader at any time via a vote of no-confidence by those same elected representatives.
This system, which, mutatis mutandis, also pertains in Australia, bears little comparison with the US Presidential system, in which one individual, almost always male, is pitted against other, in a kind of ‘I alone can fix it’ contest of patriotic manliness. The USA, to its detriment, doesn’t have a multi-party system, so its two sole parties tend to duke it out man-o-man-like, in a profoundly adversarial way, which appears to get more block-headed over time. It’s also the case that anyone can run for President, whether or not they’ve had any political experience, or any but the most basic level of education, or know anything of their nation’s history. It certainly helps, though, to have lots and lots of money, or to know how to get it, because campaigning for President, and getting the ‘right’ backing by the ‘right’ people, is hugely about finance. And it’s highly relevant to the politics of the USA that the gap between the rich and the poor there is far greater than what we find in Australia, which of course makes it more plutocratic than it is ever likely to admit.
It’s clear that the US political system has become much more adversarial in recent times, and the advent of social media ‘bubbles’ is at least partly to blame. This has become a problem more generally in the WEIRD world and I’m not sure how to address it, though I’m sure that it needs to be addressed. The problem is greater in the USA, however, due to a number of factors. One is its sub-standard basic public education system, which, together with its comparative lack of a social welfare safety net, its abysmal minimum wage rates and inadequate healthcare provision, leaves millions feeling disenfranchised and ‘left behind’. How else can we explain the religious-style hero worship of an ignorant narcissist who did virtually nothing while holding the office of national President (an office which he ‘won’ in spite of losing the popular vote by almost 3 million).
But the original aim of this essay wasn’t to criticise its system – though while I’m at it I’ll mention that the USA has one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, and the longest prison sentences, as well as huge rates of firearm deaths, as Wikipedia relates:
More people are typically killed with guns in the U.S. in a day (about 85) than in the U.K. in a year, if suicides are included.
My aim was to criticise the USA’s image of itself as some kind of model to the world. Of course, nations tend to lie about their own history, so it’s up to other nations to confront them with those lies. Just recently, I heard yet again a US political commentator claiming, in passing, that the War of Independence and the subsequent drawing up of the US Constitution were all about ‘the people’ rising up against a ‘tyrant king’. This reference to George III – a constitutional monarch who was more or less non compos mentis during this time, is risible. The colonists of that part of the ‘New World’ were rising up against a bullying and exploiting nation. Many of those colonists had recently fled that nation, for various reasons, but often related to their ‘puritan’ values. Powerful nations have bullied and exploited smaller nations, subject nations and their neighbours for thousands of years, and as the USA has become a powerful nation, it has bullied Pacific peoples in the Philippines and elsewhere, as well as the peoples of Indo-China, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has also engaged in the bullying of allied nations, which again shows that there’s nothing exceptional about the USA.
Of course, the ‘New World’ wasn’t new at all, in terms of population. It was for some time understood that the Clovis culture had migrated to the Americas between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, but recent discoveries have pushed human habitation back another several thousand years. The War of Independence and the subsequent US Constitution and the election of Washington as the colony’s first President, hailed today by United Staters as marking the beginning of modern democracy, was but one of many baby steps, albeit an important one, towards full democracy anywhere in the modern world. Less than 1.8% of the population voted, and eligibility, based on property ownership, varied widely between states. So it was hardly any better than the British system of the time, upon which it was largely based. Of course women couldn’t vote, nor of course could slaves, who formed the backbone of the colony’s economy. As for the First Nation peoples, the following decades brought nothing but dispossession and devastation, and, as in Australia, they’ve received little in the way of compensation since.
So, ‘the world’s greatest democracy’ and ‘the leader of the free world’ are still terms I hear gushing from the lips of US pundits, often accompanied by those glazed expressions suggestive of having learnt a kindergarten mantra. Better to try just a bit harder to accept that there’s no ‘greatest’ and no ‘leader’, just a lot of more or less flawed nations with more or less flawed political and social systems that need regular analysis and upgrading and repair. We can all do better, and maybe that’s what we’re here for. Or at least we can imagine that’s the case.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1788–89_United_States_presidential_election
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/whats-the-earliest-evidence-of-humans-in-the-americas
a conversation about dictatorship, intellectuals, bonobos and the strange case of the USA
Francisco Lopez, one of the world’s lesser known dictators – unless you’re Paraguayan (see references)
Canto: So there’s now Putin’s macho invasion of Ukraine, Trump & co’s macho trampling of US democracy, such as it is, Hamas and its macho terrorist attack in southern Israel, and Israel’s massive macho response, Xi’s macho politburo and his assault on female empowerment, and the usual macho claptrap in Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Syria, Yemen, etc etc, etc, so how’s your bonobo world going?
Jacinta: Well, my teensy-tiny part of the world is going okay, and hopefully that tiny-teensy patch south of the Congo River is too, for now. And patches of the WEIRD world are making slow progress, from century to century.
Canto: So you’re taking the long view. How admirable. Seriously, it’s the only way we can maintain any optimism. When the internet suddenly became a big thing in everyone’s life, I was excited – so much useful knowledge at our fingertips without having to visit libraries, subscribe to science magazines, buy books and so on – I didn’t really pay much attention to the social media aspect and its dangers, which have become so overwhelming in the USA, but probably here as well for all I know. I often hear – it’s repeated so often it’s almost as if I comprehend it – that so-and-so has been ‘radicalised by social media’. But what does that really mean?
Jacinta: Well, I think it starts with the fact that people want to be with like-minded people. They like to be part of an ‘in-group’. People who really deserve the ‘intellectual’ title are actually in a tiny minority. They’re generally more independent-minded and suspicious of any in-group thinking.
Canto: And yet, bonobos are real groupies, aren’t they? Isn’t that a problem for you?
Jacinta: I’m not pretending we should be like bonobos in all ways, but, since we’ve been focussing on free will, and the lack thereof, our recognition of this lack should make us more compassionate, from an intellectual perspective. And bonobos are the compassionate, and passionate apes, presumably not coming at it from an intellectual perspective. What they’ve become ‘instinctively’, we need to become from a more knowledge-based, intellectual perspective.
Canto: Way to become more sexy, by just giving it more thought.
Jacinta: It doesn’t require that much thought, just an open-eyed – and certainly more female-centred – view of what macho violence has done and is still doing.
Canto: What about the ‘problem’ of female self-obsession, fashion-consciousness, and general ‘femininity’ – highlighting the decorative over the functional?
Jacinta: Like the ‘problem’ of male dressing tough, or business-like or sporty-casual or whatever, these are minor differences which are already changing with greater equality. Visit any Aussie pub. Anyway, looking decorative rather than functional has often to more to do with status than gender. Though there’s still a way to go.
Canto: I’ve noted that human society, at least in the WEIRD world, seems to be divided into right or left wing obsessionalism. What do you make of this?
Jacinta: Taking the long view, it’s a passing phase..
Canto: Well if you take the long view everything’s a passing phase. Nations are a passing phase, and now everyone’s obsessed with borders and the status of immigrants, as if migration hasn’t been a thing since humans came into being and before – ask any bird-dinosaur.
Jacinta: So, such terms as neo-Marxism or neo-fascism seem laughable to me. It’s largely macho stuff. We’re more about wanting to get on with people, recognising our different backgrounds and influences and trying to find common grounds rather than ideological grounds for grievance. And what are those grounds? The desire to be heard, accepted, even loved. Youse men are too interested in besting, in winning. Of course, I’m generalising – there are male-type females and vice versa.
Canto: Well, I can’t disagree. But isn’t that competitive spirit good for capitalism as well as war?
Jacinta: Ah, capitalism. There are info-wars out there about whether capitalism is good or bad. To me, it’s either, or it’s both, because it’s much more than some political ideology. Birds do it, bees do it, even the fungi in the trees do it. It’s more than just human nature.
Canto: So, you mean capitalising?
Jacinta: Yes, and you can do it in a dumb way – say, by basing much of your diet on one or two species, hunting and gathering them to extinction, then heading towards extinction yourself because you can’t change your culinary ways. Moving to an agricultural lifestyle was a smart but risky thing to do, and was best done gradually, as with any change of diet….
Canto: But this has nothing to do with capitalism as we know it.
Jacinta: Ha, I neither know nor care about the dictionary definition of capitalism. Or the political definition, I should say. I’m thinking it in the broadest sense – capitalising on food and other resources, on our smarts, our technology, our history. And we can be synergistic capitalists, or symbiotic capitalists. Isn’t that what trade is all about? And getting back to bonobos, isn’t their sexual play a kind of synergistic capitalism, especially with the females? They’re building bonds that unite the community, especially the females when the odd too-aggressive male starts to cause trouble. Social capital, they call it. We need more social capital.
Canto: Trade alliances seem to be good for maintaining the peace I suppose, but it’s all beginning to fray…
Jacinta: Idiots like Trump, as far as he has any policies, think that closing the borders and shitting on your allies will MAGA, as if isolationism has ever benefitted any nation that wants to progress. How are the Andaman Islanders going?
Canto: Trump just intuits that the idea will resonate with his base, insofar as he thinks at all.
Jacinta: Yes, being born into wealth, but without intellect, by which I mean intellectual curiosity, the kind of mind that tries to ‘rise above the self and grasp the world’, to quote our blog’s motto, he’s purely interested in self-promotion, and his instincts tell him it’s not the curious and the questioning that’ll follow him, but those impressed by his wealth and his bluster. Look at any dictator – they all project this air of extreme self-importance, it’s the first and last, the ‘must-have’ quality.
Canto: And the fact that there are always so so so many dupes for these guys, that’s what astonishes me most. Why is it so?
Jacinta: I think conditions have to be right. There has to be a substantial proportion of the population that are under-educated, but above all suffering, feeling deprived, abandoned, desperate. Smart, successful and well-heeled people seek out their own, and easily slip into the fantasy that most people are like them. They’re not, especially in places like the USA, with its rich-poor gap, its tattered social safety net, its pathetic minimum wage, its massive incarceration rate, its group-think holy rollers and the like. And surely no nation is more deluded about its own superiority than the USA, so vague but persistent appeals to patriotism, which are the sine qua non for dictators (Hitler being the prime example of that) will always play exceptionally well there.
Canto: Hmmm, quite an indictment, but the USA, to be fair, is very diverse, almost like a few countries rolled into one. New York State and the north-east coast seem to be no-go areas for Trump, and California too… that’s my uneducated guess. It’s like the civil war never ended, it’s so divided. United States indeed!
Jacinta: Haha, we should get off this obsession with the US, but indeed, I’ve often thought they’d be better off dividing the place into two, or even three. Or rather, I just wish they’d do it for our entertainment’s sake.
Canto: Okay, so we’ve covered a lot of macho ground – though it often feels like the female Trumpets blow the hardest. But they can’t help it – no free will after all, right?
Jacinta: Well, yes, but that’s not a cause for despair – determinism isn’t pre-determinism. It means working towards a world in which the determining factors are as positive as they can be. But that’s for another time…
References
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/trump-approval-rating-by-state
how can we learn from bonobos?
Today I’ve decided to change my blog title, and to drop the conversational form of writing, though all my writing is a kind of internal conversation (channelling Adam Smith), informed by various external media.
I really want to get into this patriarchy thing more, because, in spite of all the changes that have occurred since the days of the suffragettes – and it has to be admitted that that was only a little over a century ago, in a human history that goes back 300,000 years, and a few thousand years in terms of states and ‘civilisation’ – it’s still very much a man’s world, with massive male dominance in terms of political leadership and wealth. The exceptions only tend to prove the rule.
Outside of the so-called WEIRD world, and on the fringes of it, we have Xi and his Chinese Testosterone Party, the Putinland thugocracy, little Donny Trumpet and his band of (mostly) male white mice, molto-macho politics in Burma, Tanzania, Latin America, New Guinea, Cuba, the Middle East, much of eastern Europe, and so on. Australia might like to see itself as an island of gender-equal WEIRD sanity, but it’s worth noting where the wealth lies, because there has always lain power. It’s true that Australia’s richest person is a woman, Gina Rinehart (at one time the richest woman in the world), but she began with wealth inherited from her father Lang Hancock, a fact that, unsurprisingly, she’s extremely sensitive about. Hancock was an ebullient and very racist operator, much beloved by his daughter (Hancock produced no sons), who was clearly much influenced by his style and politics. We need of course to recognise that, male or female, we’re hugely influenced by our background, and much of our character is set by our earliest years, as the Dunedin longitudinal development study has shown. Of course, that study, particularly the ‘personality’ aspects of it, is very WEIRD. In non-WEIRD cultures, most of which are highly patriarchal, female power is essentially covert, and even today, in the WEIRD world, Rinehart’s situation is highly unusual.
Outside of Rinehart and family, the top 20 richest Australians include only one woman (Fiona Geminder, daughter of the late billionaire Richard Pratt), at number 19. And as is to be expected, those at the top of these rich lists are exponentially wealthier than those at the bottom.
Of course, not all of the super-rich are interested in political power and influence in the manner of Murdoch, Trump et al, and many women, in particular, who inherit wealth through family or marital connections, have an interest in using it benefit the health and welfare of others. A Forbes article from 2018 claimed that, statistically, ‘women give almost twice as much of their wealth away as men (3.5% vs. 1.8%)’. It’s a most bonoboesque trait, as is their tendency to ‘be more co-operative in work teams’ (also from Forbes).
Developing more co-operative political environments is becoming more essential than many realise. Generally speaking, the Covid-19 pandemic would surely have been more devastating without the global co-operation managed in terms of accurate messaging and fast-paced biochemical development. And would’ve been less devastating if we’d had more of it. I recall some years ago reading about wealthy philanthropists providing interest-free loans to women in ‘third-world’ countries, because they were seen as better money managers, and less selfish in that management, than males. A quick internet search shows that this approach is still in play, though some of the sites advocating and supporting micro-loans seem out of date, and there’s a worry that this may just have been a passing trend. In any case it’s a far cry from women having their hands on the global purse-strings.
I think the WEIRD world needs to set the example here, as it is less constrained by patrilineal kin affiliations and patriarchal religio-spiritual beliefs, and has been motivated in recent decades by a lot of female empowerment rhetoric. My expectation for the future, however distant, is that female dominance will come from large-scale female-female bonoboesque bonding (with or without the sex).
Which takes me back to the bonobo world. How did their female-dominated culture come to be? How did the chimp-bonobo common ancestors live, communally? I’ve been wondering about this for some time, but all the experts I’ve read on bonobos, including Frans De Waals, confine themselves to description, as well as pointing out how their society overturns ideas of inevitable human patriarchy. We need to work out the evolution of their society, if we can, in order to effectively take advantage of it for our own sakes, for if ever there has been a time for female leadership in the human world, it’s now.
One key is to promote the kind of female-female bonding we know bonobos engage in, and we know women are capable of, given half the chance. Angela Saini, author of Inferor, an examination of patriarchy and the scientific treatment of women, provides echoing sentiments from Amy Parish, a leading expert on bonobos:
“Certainly I think when we only had chimps in the model, it seemed like patriarchy was cemented in our evolutionary heritage for the last five to six million years,” Parish says. “Now that we have an equally close living relative with a different pattern, it opens up the possibilities for imagining that in our ancestry that females could bond in the absence of kinship, that matriarchies can exist, that females can have the upper hand, that societies can be more peacefully run.”
And observing bonobos can offer inspiration to those who want to carve out a different future. “For me as a feminist,” says Parish, “it’s really interesting. Because the goal of the feminist movement is to behave with other females as though they are your sisters”.
I note that, among younger generations of women, going out in more or less large groups ‘for fun’ has become more common. This has been exploited in the sex video world with the ‘party hardcore’ set of videos, in which a disco/hotel room full of drinking and dancing women get to ‘take advantage’ of a handful of male strippers distributed around the space, for sexual purposes. Female-female sex is also featured, but, rather revealingly (so to speak), no male-male stuff. That’s apparently a step too far for us benighted humans.
The sexual side of all this is always going to be a touchy topic however. We’re the only animal to wear clothes, and to use complex language, with which we tell our kids that we have naughty private bits, and our adults that public nakedness is indecent. We create religions that tell us that sex outside of ceremonially anointed relationships is forbidden, and that reference to the sexual act and the body parts related to that act should be spoken of as rarely as humanly possible. And of course how could we engage together in scientific research, business conferencing, artistic projects or goat-herding with all our dangly stuff showing?
We don’t need to go that far, though, at least not in the short term. After all, it’s already clear that women are more touchy-feely than men. How often have we been at gatherings of friends, at the end of which the women have parted with hugs and the men with handshakes? In this we’re more like bonobos than we know. And as in bonobos this kind of sensual closeness leads to food-sharing and other forms of co-operation, and a reduction of aggression in general, it would seem to me that female leadership, and the encouragement of the female side of male humanity, is what is most needed for a human future that no longer relies on brute strength, or purely physical skills, but more and more on working together, finding common solutions, helping and caring – and not just for our fellow humans.
In the WEIRD world we have largely left behind patriarchal tribal values and the veiled, secreted women that greatly predate Islamic societies. Of course our societies are more blended than ever before (though DNA and historic research assisted by genetics has made us aware that we moved and mixed in the past more than we’d ever thought possible), and this may hinder the inevitable transition to female supremacy, but in the long run it will happen, as needs must. I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime, and I’m not talking about some ‘hidden hand’ theory, I just feel that for us to survive, and with us as much of the biosphere that can be saved, female supremacy, or feminisation of the human population, will be essential, and a good.
References
https://www.forbes.com.au/lists/people/forbes-billionaires-2023-australias-50-richest-revealed/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/25/the-miners-daughter
https://qz.com/1033621/scientists-assumed-that-patriarchy-was-only-natural-bonobos-proved-them-wrong
a world turned upside down – how’s it going?
Jacinta: So we’ve always been aware that a world turned upside-down – that’s to say, a world in which the majority of wealth, power and influence is in the hands of women, to more or less the same degree that it’s now in the hands of men – will not be seen in our lifetime, if ever. But that won’t stop us from being trying.
Canto: Yes, of course, in the WEIRD world, women are more educated than ever before, and more likely to become doctors, lawyers, scientists and (to a lesser extent) business leaders than ever before, but that’s not really saying much. And outside that WEIRD world, or on its outskirts, we have Putinland, the Chinese Testosterone Party, and the various theocratic states, all of them profoundly patriarchal.
Jacinta: But will it still be this bad in 2123? Think back to 1923, when we were a bit younger. Remember those days, when women were achieving their first graduations, in electrical engineering rather than nursing and librarianship?
Canto: When a male nurse was worse than just a contradiction in terms, yes. Baby steps. The Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church still has five levels of male hierarchy towering over the lowly female parishioner, though there have been some feisty Nuns, dog bless em.
Jacinta: I don’t see too many green shoots at the moment. Last year the Chinese Testosterone Party made its Politburo all-male for the first time in 25 years, and of course the Standing Committee, the select group that does all the ruling, under the watchful eye of Dear Leader Xi, has never had a female member in its 70-year history. It’s truly mind-boggling.
Canto: He needs to be assininated.
Jacinta: No chance. He couldn’t be more asinine than he already is. And recently we’ve lost Jacinda Adern as the New Zealand leader, Sanna Marin as the Finland leader, and Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland. Adern and Sturgeon resigned because of the pressures of the job, but were too diplomatic to mention sexism, We remember the abuse and vitriol Julia Gillard, Australia’s only female PM, suffered at the hands of right-wing media people here. That’s why we need a world turned upside-down. If bonobos can do it, and have fun in the process, why can’t we?
Canto: The UN Women website presents some sobering facts and reflections:
At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.
There are only 13 countries in which women hold 50 percent or more of the positions of Cabinet Ministers leading policy areas.
The five most commonly held portfolios by women Cabinet Ministers are Women and gender equality, followed by Family and children affairs [sic], Social inclusion and development, Social protection and social security, and Indigenous and minority affairs
Jacinta: Yeah, I get the drift. I think we just need to fight harder, as women are trying to do in China, and in Burma/Myanmar. Remember that two and a half years ago I wrote a piece on feminism and the 30% rule in Burma, which I discovered to be one of the worst countries in Asia re the treatment of women – and that was before the macho military coup. A much more recent article, ‘The Revolution is Female: Myanmar’s Women Fighting Against Min Aung Hlaing’s Junta’, posted on the website of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, reports both an increase in female activism in Burma and neighbouring countries, and an increase in suppression of such activism:
Southeast Asia has been facing a significant authoritarian turn in the past decade. This political trend puts women activists at risk for the simple reason that autocrats fear women and have traditionally taken extreme measures to eliminate feminist challenges to authoritarian power. Those who want to help turn the tide against authoritarianism within the region must start by amplifying the voices of women activists in Myanmar and Southeast Asia.
Canto: It’s easy to get discouraged isn’t it. We’re in a part of the world where women have more power than just about anywhere else, and it’s still nowhere near equality. Then you look at Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, most of Africa and South-East Asia, China, Japan, North Korea and so on – it’s just exhausting to even contemplate the scene.
Jacinta: Mmmm. We can say the situation is improving creepingly in the WEIRD world, but elsewhere, not much sign. Men certainly don’t want to give up power, it’s the most addictive drug on the planet. And most women haven’t even heard of bonobos. Even in the WEIRD world, few women know much about them.
Canto: Well I suppose you can’t blame humans for being obsessed with their own species, but you’d think that our closest living relatives would be a species worth considering, for our own sakes.
Jacinta: It seems we’re too full of ourselves, and some men are too full of themselves to take much note of the other gender. I’ve just been gifted a book by one Vaclav Smil, entitled, with due modesty, How the world really works – another expert guide to ‘our past, present and future’. He’s an emeritus professor, naturellement. I glanced through the index to check for any mention of feminism, women or even individual female ‘fellow-experts’, but nothing. Plenty of males of course.
Canto: Sins of omission – worse than commission?
Jacinta: Who knows. I’ll still give Smil’s book a try. Alway the chance of learning something – but I’m guessing I’ll learn more from further bonobo study…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/22/where-are-the-women-at-the-top-of-chinese-politics
What the Ardern, Sturgeon resignations show about the ‘tightrope’ women walk in politics
https://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/leadership-and-political-participation/facts-and-figures#_edn
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
US democracy: another problem
Please Be Sensible, and fund public broadcasting properly
Jacinta: So we’ve long been wondering why things are so bad in the USA, why so many people believe such rubbish, and even act on it, to the detriment, it seems, of their democratic system. We’ve talked about their jingoism and their religiosity, but there’s so much more to it. For example, there’s a movement of the religious Right, the supposedly Christian Right, which seems to have nothing whatever to do with the supposed teachings of Jesus…
Canto: Or his example, since he clearly wasn’t much of a family man. Actually much of Jesus’s behaviour and speakings were contradictory, certainly nothing you could build a coherent moral framework from.
Jacinta: Yes the Christian Right is all about ‘old-fashioned family values’, men who are men, women who know their place, the corruption that is homosexuality, feminism and the pro-abortion crowd. And this stuff is prevalent in Australia too, but with nowhere near the force and noise. And the same goes for the conspiracy theories, the misinformation, the libertarian, anti-government breast-beating and so forth. In the USA it has threatened, very seriously, to bring down their democracy, which is clearly still under serious threat. But something I heard today on the SGU podcast (The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe episode 875) has helped me understand why so many United Staters are so loopy. Their public media outlets – as opposed to private media – have nothing like the presence that Australia’s ABC and Britain’s BBC have. Kara Santamaria, the SGU’s resident (but not token) female, presented research on this. Government-funded media (not of the Putinland or CCP kind of course) can be seen as ‘funding democracy’. The research comes from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, presented in a paper called ‘Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries’. It’s behind a paywall, but the link is below, for anyone who ever reads this, haha. I’m basing my comments on an article about the research, published on the Annenberg website – and on Santamaria’s commentary.
Canto: My turn. From the abstract of the research article we get this conclusion:
Correlations and cluster analyses show that high levels of secure funding for public media systems and strong structural protections for the political and economic independence of those systems are consistently and positively correlated with healthy democracies.
In terms of its public media funding, [the USA] is almost literally off the chart for how little it allocates towards its public media compared to other democracies around the planet. It comes out to .002 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At $465 million dollars, 2020 federal funding of U.S. public media amounted to just $1.40 per capita. Meanwhile, countries such as the UK, Norway, and Sweden spend close to $100 or more per capita toward their public media.
Since the market is no longer supporting the level of news media — especially local journalism — that democracy requires, there is arguably now an even stronger case to make that public media needs to step into the vacuum to address the widening news gaps as the commercial newspaper industry continues to wither away. News deserts are expanding across the country and around the world. This should be public media’s moment – an opportunity to revisit its core purpose and assess how it should operate within a democratic society and within an increasingly digital media system. Ideally, we would both restructure and democratize our public media system as we expand this critical infrastructure.
References
https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/public-media-can-improve-our-flawed-democracy
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/19401612211060255
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
more on macho thuggery and a world turned upside-down
WPL – female political leaders past and present
Jacinta: So here’s the thing – after the horrible cannon-fodder event of 1914-18 that became known as the Great War, and subsequently WW1, the League of Nations came into being, to try to ensure that no futher war of such magnitude, such destruction, would occur. It would be a forum for the negotiation of grievances, a move towards a more civilised behaviour between nations.
Canto: Yes there must’ve been a sense of urgency as the death toll and the suffering came to light. But then it all happened again – so it failed?
Jacinta: Well of course I’m talking about this as the world watches a piece of obvious butchery in Ukraine, over a hundred years after that ‘war to end all wars’. The League of Nations, the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, these institutions have been, IMHO, vitally important 20th century developments, but they haven’t effectively prevented wars and invasions in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on. And war is hell, especially for those who’ve made the mistake of being born in those fought-over lands.
Canto: Yes, the ICC is massively hamstrung by the fact that the most militarily powerful countries, the USA, Russia and China, won’t join it, for the obvious reason that they don’t want to be held accountable. What’s the point of being massively powerful if you don’t get to throw your weight around with impunity?
Jacinta: Yes, and to be bonoboesque about it, none of those countries have come close to having female leadership in recent times. Okay, the USA has at last celebrated it first Vice-President, but it’s not really an elected position. There have been 45 male US Presidents, and zero female Presidents so far. Not bad for a group that represents just under half the population. China hasn’t had a woman on top since the much under-rated Empress Dowager Cixi died in 1908. The CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee, a kind of divinely elected inner Cabinet, which has been operational, more or less, since the 1950s, has had fifty-four members, of which zero have been women.
Canto: Wow – not even a female impersonator? But then, during the one child policy, something miraculous happened. Almost all the kids born turned out to be male. You can hardly blame the CCP for that.
Jacinta: And as for Putinland’s mighty ruler, he’s an unabashed misogynist and he plans to rule his namesake for the next 200 years or so, so the chances of any of those countries allowing themselves to be accountable to the rest of humanity are close to zero for the foreseeable.
Canto: Yes, and it’s funny how the nations most likely to be naughty to the tunes of their national anthems are the ones least willing to defend themselves in open court. I’ve found that there are some other interesting countries that aren’t interested in the ICC – Israel, Libya, Iraq – nations with a very spotty recent history.
Jacinta: And nothing much in the way of female leadership. Israel did have Golda Meir, described in Encyclopedia Brittanica as the country’s first female Prime Minister, as if there were others.
Canto: And then there are nations where women are barely allowed to hold down a job never mind boss others around. So what is to be done?
Jacinta: Well, all we can do is try to lay down foundations. And there’s a groundswell of interest in women’s empowerment, it’s been happening for decades. When we compare women’s wages with those of men, and grumble about a gap that never seems to narrow, we need to remember that it wasn’t so long ago, in the long arc of human history, that women weren’t considered a part of the paid work-force at all. Now they own businesses, run science labs and occasionally help to govern nations. And I should mention that here in little old South Australia – where we’ve never had a female Premier, our newly elected Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas celebrated his victory with a press chit-chat flanked by five new female MPs as well as Deputy Premier Susan Close. A sixth new female Labor candidate looks set to win her seat.
Canto: So how do we promote the empowerment of women in Australia, before taking over the world?
Jacinta: Well the government occasionally brings out policy documents, such as the ‘Gender equality and women’s empowerment strategy’, published by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in early 2016. It recognises that ‘nowhere in the world have women and men achieved equality’, and points out, in its global analysis, that GDPs would rise everywhere if such equality could be realised, or approached. It points out the obvious benefits of female education, for women, their children and the community, and the greater stability and peace that comes with female empowerment (no mention of bonobos however). As was pointed out in the military document I read some months ago, a greater female presence in the military leads to better peace-keeping. This DFAT document repeats the point:
Greater gender equality contributes to stability and peace. Women are often instrumental in brokering ceasefires in conflict situations, and peacekeeping operations involving women as soldiers, police and civilian personnel are more effective. Greater equality can prevent disputes escalating to armed conflict.
Canto: That must be why Putin and his Patriarch aren’t into gender equality so much. And just to change the subject, I’ve heard that, since their invasion isn’t going so well – possibly because the billions spent on the military have been largely siphoned off by the luxury yacht-loving kleptocrats in his inner circle – they’re now trying to pretend that they’ve been largely successful in their main aim, which is to gain complete control of the Donbas and Crimean regions, and this is really all they wanted in the first place, etc etc.
Jacinta: Well, I’ll believe that when I hear something from Putin himself, but that’s highly unlikely. They’re basically fucked, though Putin will never admit it. Hoist by his own macho petard, I’d say. Anyway, this document from six years ago talks the talk convincingly enough, and with a likely change of Federal government in the next few months, the talk will continue. It promotes a three-pronged approach to its aid, trade and foreign relations programs – 1) Enhancing women’s voice in decision-making, leadership and peace-building. 2) Promoting women’s economic empowerment. 3) Ending violence against women and girls. Which all sounds great, though all this needs to start at home. Also the document argues that ‘at least 80 per cent of investments [presumably by DFAT], regardless of their objectives, should effectively address gender equality issues in their implementation’. What about the other 20 per cent? Where did the 80 per cent come from?
Canto: Well, 80%, 90%, 60%, it’s all just talk, who’s going to be doing the measurements? Surely the important thing is that they’re pushing for a much better situation than pertains at the moment. And meanwhile on the world stage there’s an organisation, probably quite informal, called Women Political Leaders (WPL), consisting of former and some current national Prime Ministers and such, as well as heads of the European Commission, high-ups at the UN and so forth, all promoting the benefits of female leadership, benefits we’ve outlined so many times. They held a major forum last July, which seems to have garnered little attention.
Jacinta: I’m hoping that the machismo antics of Putin, Xi Jinping and others, which of course are garnering plenty of attention, might have more effect on our appreciation of female leadership than these forums, which of course are a pointer to the future. Unfortunately, our attention will always be more drawn to the thuggery of these types than to the speeches and achievements of intelligent women. Violence, destruction and suffering are riveting because they bring to mind our own vulnerability, and often our own sheer good luck at not finding ourselves in the thick of it. And I sometimes wonder whether, if we ever achieve something like a bonobo world, many lifetimes into the future, our victory over the male hellholes of the world will render us complacent and soft…
Canto: Haha, little likelihood of that – after all, even the bonobos males have to be kept in check by what Bjork calls ‘an army of me’. So I suspect bonobos aren’t as complacent as they might look.
Jacinta: Yes, happy loving relations often need a lot of work. Hostile relations tend to come naturally – at least so it seems from within our patriarchal culture. So, nothing for it but to keep working for a world turned upside-down.