The art of The Listen

I was originally intending to point out that Westerners presume I was brought up with all sorts of advantages, and to look down on others, whereas my actual situation differed very much from what they presume to have been the case.

As for WHY my situation differed, or indeed, who was to blame for that, these are themselves very Western preoccupations, and that is not a way in which I was brought up to think. I mean, if we find out why something happened, that does not immediately solve the problem, or make it better in any way.

What would be of benefit to me is if Westerners themselves were capable of listening to the stories of those whites who happen to have come from Africa, instead of hatin’ on them.

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MINUS THE MORNING: Women’s putative "emotionality" and how that serves in their oppression

The common-sense of Western culture is that women are “emotional”. In white, Zimbabwean culture, “common sense” states somewhat differently, that they are more oriented towards feelings than are men. In neither case do my experiences of women in either culture lead me to draw such point blank conclusions as those shot forth into the world by “common sense”.

My viewpoint is far more philosophically informed than common sense is. I consider that, far from being “emotional” themselves, women are tasked with processing the emotions of those around them. The emotional burden they carry is that of others, not of themselves. This is why it can be so difficult for women to express themselves, for before they can express what is in them, they must first be able to offload all the baggage that is not their own at all, but belongs to someone else.

Women, for instance, learn early that they are to be held accountable for other people’s feelings. They understand that their language is not valued for its denotative meanings, but only in terms of what it seems to connote. And no connotation is pure enough to lack potential for offending someone, somewhere. This understanding is the basis on which a woman learns to practice self-censure to the point that she barely speaks at all. She may have strong enough views, but she is not permitted to denote them, primarily because any denotative language will nonetheless be read primarily as if it were connoting something – something which she has almost certainly not meant to imply, at all.

This was certainly my problem writing MINUS THE MORNING. How does one denote the misogynistic hostility of a father, without seeming to connote something about “fathers” in general, that people do not want to hear? How does one denote the loss of country and home, without “connoting” that other people are to blame, for not having taken better care?

One needs to denote these things, but all that happens is one ends up “connoting” something else instead. This was the constant shock I received during the process of editing the book to take into account others’ critiques.

The nature of this interpretive dynamic points to the fact that women are viewed primarily as emotional care-givers, rather than as those who can point out facets of their environment to others, objectively. The idea that what one is saying is actually true does not, as a rule, enter people’s heads. Rather, most people are much more accustomed to taking you to task for being a bad care-giver.

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Morality in Western culture

I think the problem with the Western mode of moralising is that it is inherently capitalistic. I have found this to be true in general, that unless somebody has some really substantial intellectual training (and sometimes even then), they will tend to take the moral position that will enable them to capitalise. That means they want to shine at very little cost to themselves — or at a cost to you rather than to them. Ask them to do something difficult in life in order to claim their ostensibly superior morality, and they will not even have a clue what you are getting at. “Take a difficult position in order to be genuinely moral, rather than seem to be moral at little cost?” That doesn’t make sense!

When it comes to Westerners and what they take to be “morality” one has to lower one’s expectations to the lowest level possible. They are brought up to compete — to look for any moment that advantages them over you, and to capitalise. It is very hard for them to mitigate this competitive tendency with anything that is truly solid. So, one must lower one’s expectations absolutely to the breaking point.

And then lower them again.

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A way of eating ice-cream

Richard Chinheya writes as follows:

There was a long held view by white citizens in Zimbabwe to conclude that it was pointless to pay a black man much money as ‘he would spend it on beer’.

Whereas whites had a solid foundation where they would plan for their children so that by the time they were of age they had a car, and/or house and a job they thought the blacks did not have these owing to their laziness and stupidity. These circumstances justified a superiority complex and perpetuated an impression that blacks were stupid, dull or unintelligent.

Perhaps the domestic employees were the basis for these perceptions but these were important to make whites feel intelligent and the blacks dull. sadly even now both blacks and whites are victims of these syndromes.

Certainly, what you write is true, especially of past Rhodesia, although it is less true of present day Zimbabwe, but still the racial divide persists along these lines, to some degree.

I want to suggest the presence of an alternative reality, however, even in the midst of all of this unfairness. The logical assumption that all whites cared for their children by setting them up with the material benefits of life could prove to be occasionally mistaken. Injustice is only perpetuated when it is assumed that one been given all the positive things in life, which will set one up in good stead for a middle class existence. Some parents — even in Rhodesia — might find that scenario to be all too easy. Their own children might not necessarily be favoured in this way.

So it was with my father, who didn’t necessarily want to transfer benefits to me automatically. The common sensical assumption that he would, or did, has always followed me like a bad smell.

His failure to do so, however, was a fact, albeit one not likely to be believed.

In KG1, for instance (I was five), me, my schoolfriend Nicky, and my father took an afterschool walk in Ballantyne Park. “I’ll buy an ice-cream cup for anyone who can walk along those bricks without falling off!” This was my father’s challenge to me and Nicky.

So we stepped onto the line of bricks that formed the exit to the park, and walked along them, one foot in front of the other, wobbling. After a few seconds, I fell off, but Nicky kept on going for a few more seconds.

“Nicky wins!” proclaimed my father. “I will buy her an ice-cream.”

“What about me?” I wanted to know.

“No, I only have enough money for one ice-cream, so I will buy one for Nicky.”

That’s what happened — and Nicky ate her ice-cream in front of me.

I don’t hold a grudge against my father for whatever he thought he was demonstrating on that day. He taught me quite directly that I couldn’t depend on him too much, and that his judgements were unlikely to count in my favour.

The problem is I have been punished for having been given all sorts of unfair advantages in life — those that pertained to being born white in Rhodesia.

The fact is that most of those advantages I am assumed to have had did not really exist.

It has taken me a long time to realise that in the eyes of Westerners, my father’s  was pretty abnormal behaviour.

But then again, it is also the reason why Westerners themselves have always seemed to irrational to me. I mean, in the sense that they have treated me like I’ve had unfair advantages by being brought up in a colonial society, when to my mind it is the Westerners who have lived in the lap of material luxury. They would be insisting on a very crazy interpretation of life if they think that somehow I have been set up very well for success in life, and need to face “reality” by being brought down a level or two.

Darwinism and adaptation

What is strong and what is weak is not necessarily as easily observable or even “objective” as we take it to be. Rather, the context of the environment and culture determines what is or isn’t strong and weak. Put most U.S. citizens into an African culture or environment, and watch them flail. One doesn’t even wish them to admit their “moral failings” as there is no meaning or point in it. Their success or failure has nothing to do with morality, but simply with their competency in meeting the circumstances as they actually are. If such an American admits that he is not all-seeing and all-conquering by virtue of his innate nature, then this might better facilitate an adaptation of sorts, but it still doesn’t mean that there is any intrinsic virtue in his proclamation of his weaknesses. It just means that he is reducing his arrogance level in such a way that maximizes his chances for adaptation. Whether or not he succeeds in adaptation, even after this adjustment, still has nothing to do with morality, but with social and environmental features.

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patriarchal thought processes

To understand the psychology of the patriarchal mind one must delve deeply into patriarchal logic.

The first matter that comes to our attention is that the patriarch wishes to avoid being “influenced” by factors in life that he defines as “feminine”. If you are female, that means YOU.

By that biological fact alone you represent a threat to him, such that he will do anything — and I mean anything at all — to avoid an appearance of being influenced by you.

This explains the second feature of our patriarch: He isn’t really listening.

To understand the reason for this, go back to Matter One. To listen to you implies that he is making himself vulnerable to be influenced by you. That is the whole outcome that has to be avoided at all costs.

Thirdly, and because of his embrace of these two preceding predilections, the patriarchal mind has no idea of what you are talking about.

What you say literally doesn’t make any sense to him at all.

This is because he has taken care to shield himself from your ideas on the basis that they might be seen to “influence” him. Not understanding you at all puts him into an extremely vulnerable position with regard to you. He is quite jittery when you are around. He avoids direct contact, and tries to stage all public interactions to take place in formal contexts, where the “script” for the interaction is already decided.

The fourth direction in terms of the logic of the patriarch’s psychological development is toward trying to resolve this crisis of confidence he has created.

He concludes that what seems true (that he actually does not know you at all) cannot be so.

After all, it is he who is patriarch — the one defined by intellectual purity, by power and by truth.

Therefore, you must have been hiding your real self from him all along.

Why so? Well, obviously, because you have something nefarious about you that needs to be hidden.

In fact, it now seems that you are not just hiding something, but you are also withholding important information with the express purpose of making the patriarch feel jittery about his position.

(You are, indeed, the living embodiment of all the “influences” that the patriarch has refused to accept. You have become the manifestation of all the negative and disowned parts of his own mind. )

Solving the problem leads to the consolidation of the final term of patriarchal logic: “Either I am good and you are evil; or you are good and I am evil.”

On the basis of his previous choices, who do you think the patriarch will pick in order to represent the “good” over the “evil” forces?

Himself? Or you?

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Midnight #2

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Jennifer F Armstrong

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HAZCHEM!

The real poison of patriarchy that is fed intravenously into all children growing up today is the mystical feeling that patriarchal perspectives are always and inevitably transcendent perspectives. In relation to women, that is, they are “The Perspectives” that offer a birds-eye view on everything.

What that means, in practice, is that whenever there is a patriarchal perspective to be offered, women’s perspectives are automatically wrong. One has to remember that women’s perspectives are by definition NOT patriarchal perspectives, no matter how much the right wing has worked to make it seem like unusual intelligence in a woman will make her see the world in a patriarchal way. The metaphor of transcendence is employed here quite implicitly, but it remains only a concept, without any relation to social and cultural dynamics as they actually are.

Let me explain how the idea that patriarchal perspectives are the transcendent ones actually works. This concept CREATES the social dynamics that relegate women into a position of inferiority — the set of gender relations that it would appear merely to “interpret”. But this is not at all possible without a lot of faith. Therefore, a man must believe in himself and never come to doubt his own perceptions. It is out of this attitude of faith that his “transcendence” pours. (This faith is henceforth known as “self confidence” and/or “virility”).

But let us refer to the attitude that claims transcendence as its own as “faith”, for that it the function that enables all patriarchal perspectives.

The man of faith confronts a world in which there are many opposing perspectives. He notices women’s perspectives are often in opposition to his own, and this puts him into a state of self-doubt. “Maybe my transcendence is not all that it seems to be?” echoes a constantly nagging doubt. At that moment, he calls on faith to help him to resolve the issue of epistemological discrepancy.

“After all, I have the Transcendent View,” he says. “All patriarchal texts affirm so.”

What of women and their points of views — the ones that are genuine and therefore necessarily anti-patriarchal?

“Women are inherently manipulative, and exhaust all their energies in trying to make higher individuals lose their ways,” he affirms to himself. “All patriarchal texts assume so.”

HAZCHEM!

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Intellectual anchors

As per my previous post on the enormous difficulties one necessarily has, in writing within a context of cultural anomie, I’d like to address a related issue.

This second issue concerns intellectual paradigms, and the difficulty one necessarily has in figuring out their presuppositions. For, it is the rarest thing in the world for the writer of a paradigm to announce (that is, self-reflexively) the very presuppositions of their own paradigm. The reason for this is that the premises on which any paradigm is based cannot be taken to be artificial or arbitrarily imposed. Much rather, they need to pass as “common sense”. Otherwise the whole value of the paradigm is in doubt, in terms of its ability to point us to a deeper level of truth.

So it is that one must do a lot of intellectual sleuthing in order to try to find out the hidden premises, (those unstated presuppositions about the world) without which the paradigm would not be effective as a means for interpreting reality.

One way to find these out is to approach the paradigm with one’s own particular version of “common sense”, and then wait to see what produces a sense of dissonance. This dissonance does not imply anything about premises being right or wrong, but rather suggests the presence in the paradigm of presuppositions that one experiences as alien.

Let me demonstrate how this works. Let me consider, for example, the intellectual presuppositions of Freud.

The aspect of Freud’s work that produces dissonance most within my mind is that which seems to be a wholly uncritical positive regard for the status quo. To depart from acquiescence to the status quo, indeed, to become critical of the status quo, marks one in Freudian terms as a “discontent”. This is Freud’s “polite” way of saying that one is stark raving balmy. Yet to accept anything — including and up to the status quo — in an uncritical way is not the mark of an intellectual. So what is going on here?

Mike has clarified the issue for m, yesterday, with his suggestion that the intellectual anchor for Freudianism is actually a particular appropriation of Darwinism. This particular appropriation lends itself to the idea that those who define the status quo are the healthy members of society (and thus, on the basis of this implicitly Darwinist argument) guaranteed to be sane. Conversely, those who do not adopt the standards defined by status quo are those who are less fit to survive. If this is so, then we can say that Freud has high estimations of the value of the status quo on the basis of a certain appropriation of Darwinist theory. (In other words, he is not uncritical of the status quo at all, but rather positively applauds it.)

Once one has discovered what seems to the intellectual anchor — the hidden presupposition — of any particular paradigm, one understands what it is capable of doing, or not doing, as a whole.

Freudianism does not lend itself well to making a radical critique, simply because it is a core part of this paradigm to affirm the value of the status quo.

Some paradigms have inherently different capabilities, and should be able to do some tasks better than other ones can.

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MINUS THE MORNING crunch points

This is what it is like to be trapped in the combined harvester of cultural moralities. …when all you wanted to do was eat your lunch in the hay.

When one is not part of an established culture, the meanings that one utters are as if uttered to the wind. One speaks in any case, but one cannot even hazard a guess as to how what one says will be interpreted. This was the background to my writing my memoir. After experiencing disproportionate treatment and reactions to innocent statements I’ve made, one finally puts the pieces of identity politics logic together.

It becomes apparent that many people feel free they have the right to express open aggression at me, because they thought one such as I must have had it too good in my country of origin.  Or else, they also think that being from Zimbabwe and being white implies you are a racist.

 ”Nothing I’ve expressed has ever been racist. Is it something to do with my accent? Is it related to the way I speak, or something I have not said? Something I’m wearing? Or something that I ought to do? Or not do?”

This earlier sense of confusion, along with twhat to do about it looms overhead like a dark thundercloud, but not the only one, for one’s parent is also extremely enraged. He thinks that whatever step you make in life is the wrong one. Every sign of adaptation to the present erases the meaning of the past. And people died for that past, in order to preserve white, Christian civilization. My father fought for Ian Smith, whether or not he agreed with his policies. A brother died for Smith.

And so an even darker storm gathered; one that was especially threatening for its inexplicable presence. One somehow knows by it that one sins by moving forward in life, but one doesn’t know this through words that anyone has taken time or effort to express. One conjectures it somehow on the basis of which of one’s actions or verbal expressions are punished the most.

A crunch point comes when one is almost resigned to being unable to articulate very much about the nature of the forces that have influenced one’s life. At the point of almost giving up, after many more years of research, careful contemplation and revisions, one is finally able to make sense of the forces that had had the most impact on one’s life.

One has finally understood the meaning of  ”psychological projection”.

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cultural infantilism

The unconscious mind  will always strive to certain ends, depending on your goals and needs. When somebody treats you in such a way that they undermine your self-esteem and make you doubt your own judgement  they are working to create dependency in you to draw from that, even if they do not recognize this themselves.

In terms of finding friends who will listen, I really like Zimbabweans. There is still enough humanism in Zimbabwean culture for Zimbabweans to be able to listen to others, most of the time. In contemporary Western culture, we are going through a post-humanist phrase, where the person doesn’t really matter. It is like Kleinian “object relations” where a person is only important in terms of the function they serve for me. If they nurture me, I will accept that nurturing function, but I will not get to know the person since to do so is a strain and a burden and doesn’t serve my immediate needs.

The post-humanism of Western society is infantile since few people can afford to represent themselves as whole human beings, because they just get cut down.

Patriarchal sexuality and logic

I’m going more along the lines that subjectivity = no legitimisation, whilst objectivity =legitimisation of knowledge. So the point of being a patriarch is to have one’s knowledge legitimised by claiming an objective status for it.

Now I think this is what patriarchy, in modern times, has been trying to do with male sexuality. It has endeavoured to associate it with the objective quest for knowledge, and thus to legitimise it, by making is seem objective.

My view is that patriarchal thinking does not succeed here — that the way the patriarch experiences his sex drive remains subjective, not least because he changes the environment he moves into (he HAS to see women a certain way, in order to legitimise his sex drive). Also, because he does not engage in a genuine dialectic with women, but only seems to do so. Rather, he engages in a very subjective dialectic with his own internalised version of “woman as she has to be, in order for me not to lose my legitimisation”. He is not participating in reality objectively, because the reality that he would have to participate in has been labelled as polluting. So he invents a fantasy and participates in that, instead. A fantasy, however, seems to suffice him in terms of being a compromise between maintaining patriarchal mores and experiencing (albeit in a very safe and mediated way) a certain level of dialectical relationship.

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On academic liberalism

Academic conferences can expose you to a world of left-liberal ideology. I am an alien with respect to that world. It isn’t that I don’t understand the project of liberalism, which is to ameliorate reality. What I do not “understand” so much is how a left-liberal ideal of inclusiveness can be taken for the reality of life. It is as if left-liberals work very hard to promote a notion that there is intellectual and social space for us all to live in harmony together. Having produced this notion (for instance by means of a orchestrating a seminar or a conference), they are done. It now really seems as if nothing has been excluded from the scope of left-liberal hegemony. A notion like that of patriarchal psychology being equivalent to “black holes” in the universe must be dismissed as something irrelevant to the project at hand — the gathering of all into one tent of harmony.

But this tent remains what it is — merely conceptual. And despite the hard work and the good intentions of academics, their pronouncements remain pronouncements. Their sense of achieving inclusiveness is limited to change at a conceptual level. I do not, by writing an academic text, remake the world.

The danger of left-liberal thinking is not in the sense that it does too little whilst estimating that it does much. Instead, the real danger is the development of a left-liberal hegemony within academia. This concerns intellectual blind spots, which form wherever good feelings about living in collective harmony with each other find their natural limits in the lives of those who are belligerent, desperate or struggling, and in any case excluded from a realm where social harmony is even thinkable.

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On the state of play in politics

Jennifer Armstrong:

The mind is separated from the body, especially in Western culture, after Descartes. So “the mind” is very morally pure and politically correct. It is Eloi. Meanwhile the hard toilers can’t identity with intellectual leftist, not least because they live hard lives. The body is Morlock — and so are the manual workers.

Identity politics is also a part of the problem, which prevents us from seeing how society is divided along horizontal lines of hierarchy. Instead we are encouraged to see only vertical lines, and the colours of skin competing against another. So, putatively left wing identity politics merely reinforces the main capitalist sense of reality — that we are all competing against each other. Moreover we all have weapons in the form of moral censure by means of which we can attempt to “compete” by stabbing others in the backs. I know about this because I was stabbed in such a way by some leftists who used my being a white from Africa as the basis for workplace bullying and attempting to rise up the power hierarchy at my expense. The way I see it: Identity politics is pro-capitalist and reactionary.

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Black holes

It has now become obvious to me that puzzle of the patriarchal male –why he is how he is –can be related to a similar phenomenon, to “black holes” in the Universe. As I have said earlier, “patriarchy is institutionalised male narcissism which psychologically obliterates the Other”:

My sense of things is that patriarchy wants a mirror for the male psyche (like Narcissus) in order for masculinity to read, in the Other, the meaning of the male sex drive. This was arguably also Freud’s project all along — to discern the meaning of the male sex drive, to focus on it, and understand its message for patriarchal culture. Logically, in order for the male sex drive to be able to read “objectively”, it needs to be read as a phenomenon in isolation. Therefore, the female sex drive has to be silenced; it has to be rendered passive. And so it was rendered that way by patriarchy, throughout the ages. The outcome of this peculiarly patriarchal logic is why it became technically impossible, from a patriarchal point of view, to find out anything about the female sex drive. That is why Freud’s understanding of female sexuality could only go so far as asking the rhetorical question, “What do women want?” It is logically consistent with the patriarchal psychological construction of reality that Freud should not have been able to produce a substantial answer to this question, despite dedicating his whole life to questions of human sexuality.

However, if one is to understand the very construction of reality in patriarchal terms as designed to feed male narcissism by silencing the Other (that is, women) then a lot more starts to make sense.

Why does one experience, in a relationship with certain males, the sense that the closer they get to you the less you have the ability to make sense? It is as if one were pulled beyond an event horizon, after which point one’s very atoms start to tear apart. Whatever meaning one may have intended to convey is lost for good.

Others cannot even hear one screaming.

That it is in the fundamental nature of patriarchal culture to do this to women is hardly understood. Do we look up into the night sky and notice black holes? Not at all.

Rather, we tend to notice only stars — the givers, rather than the takers of light.

The phenomenon of patriarchal men as “black holes” has been similarly overlooked historically. I consider it necessary to take into account their aggregate effect if one would weigh up the universe in terms of human interpsychological relationships.

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Aggressive narcissism

The patriarchy insists that women should be thoroughly passive, and that it must somehow play witchdoctor, inspecting the entrails of female behaviour, in order to discover their mysterious meanings.

This insistence on women’s passivity by the patriarchy is necessary in order for women to play the role they are required to, under the patriarchy. That is, they are to be mirrors of men’s souls, nothing more and nothing less. So a male looking into a woman is supposed to be able to read his own sex drive, in terms of good or evil, and to make sense of it that way, in relation to other men.

If what he sees in the mirror makes him angry about himself, he may beat or kill the woman, but if what he sees of himself pleases him, he will try to couple with her in a more peaceful manner.

In any case, he is a narcissist who uses women as a means to an end.

My view here is based on thinking about people like Freud, and how they reflect upon masculinity and femininity. The puzzle is why so great an intellect as that of Freud’s was unable to figure out “what women want”. My conclusion is that patriarchy has fixed it so that women’s voices are silenced. But why? What did patriarchy want, when it fixed things this way, for surely it must have had some reason, some incentive? My sense of things is that patriarchy wanted a mirror for the male “soul” as it were (like Narcissus) — but more specifically in order for masculinity and the male as such to discern the meaning of his sex drive. And, looking at it closely, this was really Freud’s intention all along — to discern the meaning of the male sex drive, to focus on it, and understand its message for patriarchal culture.

But, as I have said, in order for the male sex drive to be able to read “objectively”, it needs to be in isolation from all other sex drives. In other words, the female sex drive has to be silenced; has to be rendered passive. And so it was rendered so by patriarchy throughout the ages. And this is precisely why it became technically impossible — by virtue of patriarchy’s own logic and the way it had structured reality — to find out anything about the female sex drive.

In other words, patriarchy is institutionalised male narcissism which obliterates the Other.

UPDATE: Interestingly, THEO DORPAT seems to concur that Freud was culpable in attempting to override some of his clients’ self-expression, in order to impose his own rigid views. See:
http://www.amazon.com/Gaslighting-Interrogation-Methods-Psychotherapy-Analysis/dp/1568218281

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Mike’s kata

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Destitution: Hillsong Christian singing in Zimbabwe

The patriarchal witchdoctor

In regard to a sexy woman, “asking for it” reinforces the idea that:

For women, sex is trouble.

Men have so little control over their actions that a woman’s appearance can provoke them into harassment or worse.

Women have men in mind when they choose what to wear or how to behave.

If a woman dresses or acts in a sexy way in hopes of having sex, then she’s fair game for all men.

Women should not or will not clearly initiate or consent to sex. Men have to look for clues, such as the way a woman dresses, to see if she wants it.

Sex is akin to a bar fight in which women provoke men, and the men react in a way that proves their manhood while putting women in their place.

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This is very intriguing stuff by Suzie, and it is spot on in terms of how patriarchy reasons. The patriarchy insists that women should be thoroughly passive, and that it must somehow play witchdoctor, inspecting the entrails of female behaviour, in order to discover their mysterious meanings.

This insistence on women’s passivity by the patriarchy is necessary in order for women to play the role they are required to, under the patriarchy. That is, they are to be mirrors of men’s souls, nothing more and nothing less. So a male looking into a woman is supposed to be able to read his own sex drive, in terms of good or evil, and to make sense of it that way, in relation to other men.

If what he sees in the mirror makes him angry about himself, he may beat or kill the woman, but if what he sees of himself pleases him, he will try to couple with her in a more peaceful manner.

In any case, the patriarchal man is a narcissist who uses women as a means to an end.

a turnstile to a balanced mode of living

I’m surprised that this factor doesn’t come under scrutiny more — contemporary society is not one designed to facilitate enjoyment, but to facilitate work. Functionality rather than elegance, the bare minimum rather than opulence — all of these serve to tell us: Don’t get too comfortable here; it really isn’t worth your time; keep movin’ along.

Adapation to the condition of being a work-slave is really facilitated by the lack of deep enjoyment offered by other facets of life.

Most contemporary facilities are designed to be enjoyed only superficially.

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On whipping

People are often not consciously aware that they are being oppressive. That does not mean they are not guilty of oppression, only that they are not consciously aware of what they are doing. This leaves the person who is aware of it, indeed the person who is being oppressed, with a problem.

Suppose I am whipping you, only I am not aware that I am doing it.

The first point of action you might try is to ask me to stop.

Maybe you will get the response from me: “Well I’m comfortable acting like this. It is the quintessential me.”

What will you then do?

You can try to grab the whip out of my hand, but I’m not going to let it go that easily. I say, “You are trespassing into my area and trying to take my private property!”

You can then try reasoning with me.

“Please give me that whip. We will both feel better if you are able to stop whipping me, and I will certainly respect you more.”

I consider your request for a moment, and think, well, I don’t really feel like I should stop whipping you to get your respect, when whipping you to get your respect is much more fun.”

So you try to grab the whip from me using physical force.

Immediately, I let out a cry of alarm to all who are like me, who then appear on the scene with their whips, and start whipping you (writers of feminist blogs will understand this analogy.)

I says “See! Justice is on the side of the powerful. I hope you appreciate the efforts I’ve exerted in order to adjust your attitude — for your own good. I don’t want to have to make an example out of you again.”

Having had this experience, you then come to a feminist blog like this one, and you say: “Perpetrators are as much victims and the actual victims are!”

Everybody then gives you three cheers.

why back to nature is not a good thing

There is something about the spirit of the present age that is wrong, wrong, wrong. My suspicion is that there is too much indulgence of people’s naturalness these days. Secularism has not been the redeeming factor one might have hoped it would be. A return to nature was never a good idea, because it has led to men treating women as if they were all a gargantuan nurturing body — his “mummy”. And women, I was told tonight, are just as often inclined to treat males like a daddy. Where this happens, “civilisation” is a misnomer, because really nobody is truly civilised. Rather, everybody just falls back into a familiar psychological and social pattern in their relationships with other people. “Civilisation”, as such, does not (is not permitted to) intervene.

When this happens, we are all in a very low state, as I feel we are today.

One simply has to have something to compare it to, to know this, however.

When I went back to Zimbabwe, I felt I did not have to justify every little thing I said by trying to show that I had shaken it dry of all emotionalism (i.e. any personally discrediting content). At least in the white culture, there is not this form of social censure. People are just people, and their status does not have anything to do, in principle, with the degree to which they can demonstrate a separation between their mind and body. In black culture, where “civilisation” as externally imposed form has not intervened to such a degree (sorry if this sounds racist, but it is true), women are ascribed to be more emotional than men are deemed to be. That is, black culture is more genuinely “natural” in that it recognises men and women in terms of their relationships within the family.

It’s not good — not good at all, this global “return to nature”. Really, something else has to intervene –some reason, some values imposed from on high, something creditable.

gender and civilisation

I have trouble trying to see males, per se, as more rational than I. That doesn’t work for me, and I can’t seem to make this contemporary paradigm make any sense.

Confirmed somewhat from my recent trip to Zimbabwe, I get a sense that the culture there still views women as representing “civilisation” and men as representing the wild man, as part of “nature”. If I am right that this really is how most colonial whites see it, it also confirms that this is probably how I was brought up to see it, too.

If so, this would particularly account for my suspicion about gender roles in Western culture. After all, it would have been an effective switch, for me, to have start to see myself in terms of “nature” (at least at the subconscious level) whilst seeing males as representing the opposite symbolic pole of “civilisation” as such.

I needed to make that switch in my thinking to adapt successfully, to a very different culture, — and I did not.

The more recent (or, in other terms, “urban”) male strategy of dominance — choosing to identify with civilisation and not with nature — seems linked to the world moving away from frontier cultures (wherein men were supposed to guard the peripheries) towards urban cultures. In this latter case, hierarchies, represented by the metaphor of the skyscraper, seem more apt. This is a case of men on top, women on the bottom.

***

… which would explain the nature of my project: a desperate effort to try to inscribe myself into “nature” and into the realm of emotion, to adapt — an effort that ultimately failed, since I have now chosen non-adaptation, not fitting in, as my only realistic recourse. And why I now see a large part of the memoir as representing a project that failed, at least in Western terms although not in African.

Choosing one’s level of participation

I was on ZimNet radio discussing women’s self defence, and so many people rang in to tell me that I couldn’t possibly understand Zimbabwean culture because I was white. They even said I wasn’t Zimbabwean, although I was born there. One woman even rang to say that if a man was going to rape his wife, he should be free to do it, as nobody had the right to intervene.

I suspect that all these callers were trying to make me feel angry or exasperated, but I didn’t feel that way at all. After all, I am not particularly maternal or caring, I just think it is rational that women should do what they can to raise their status. If they do not want to do so, that is no skin off my nose.

They should accept the status that they feel most comfortable to accept.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/

Nietzsche and the good conscience

Nietzsche’s readers almost always fail to observe a central aspect of his thinking. Most probably this is because they have sought out (and thus created in their minds) a kind text that would identify them as “winners”. So, they must have overlooked the precept that one should seek to explore the realm of thinking freely, but without necessarily having the benefit of a good conscience. To live according to a good conscience is in accordance with the spirit of the pharisee and persecutor of free individuals, and is not a way of thinking that pertains to a Nietzschean adventurer.

As it seems to me, a good conscience is precisely what one risks and perhaps sacrifices if one wants to partake of a Nietzschean form of intellectual adventuring. And, not being prepared to risk this holds you back, pins you down, makes you one of the “good and the just”.

O my brethren! With whom lieth the greatest danger to the whole human future? Is it not with the good and just?–

–As those who say and feel in their hearts: “We already know what is good and just, we possess it also; woe to those who still seek thereafter!

And whatever harm the wicked may do, the harm of the good is the harmfulest harm!

And whatever harm the world-maligners may do, the harm of the good is the harmfulest harm!

O my brethren, into the hearts of the good and just looked some one once on a time, who said: “They are the Pharisees.” But people did not understand him.

The good and just themselves were not free to understand him; their spirit was imprisoned in their good conscience. The stupidity of the good is unfathomably wise.

It is the truth, however, that the good MUST be Pharisees–they have no choice!

The good MUST crucify him who deviseth his own virtue! That IS the truth!

A good conscience, an established identity, conservatism, a right wing imperative to maintain the hierarchy as it is (because it suits one very well that way, thank you) — these all cause one to crucify the Nietzschean adventurous spirit (if not immediately in others, then at least and always within oneself).

Also, if one is supportive of the tradition of patriarchy and finds it very natural to be down on women — I’m sorry to say, you are very much among the persecutors of Nietzschean experimentalism and intellectual adventure.

http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/