In Our ViewWhere we speak our mind on Humans Being
Human. A bit provocative, even opinionated, we hope to stimulate
interest and feedback. A miscellany of forms and formats. Biggest Disease?
Diana writes: "The biggest disease today is the feeling of being unwanted. People need to be loved, without love, people die." These are the final words in a book on her life, in her own hand-writing. Diana: The Portrait by Rosalind Coward, Andrews-McMeel, 368 pages 
Arundhati Roy, the Booker award winning novelist (The God of Small Things), recorded a series of interviews with David Barsamian between February 16, 2001 and May 26, 2003. South End Press published them recently in this slim volume. The book is a delightful read, conveying Roy’s unique persona in many ways. Her clear voice and memorable turn of phrase are both insightful and enlightening. As just one example, this exchange jumped off the page at me last night: Barsamian: Himanshu Thakker …told me, "You know, it’s remarkable. The women are the leaders in the country [India]. The women are advancing the movements for social justice." Why is that? Roy: I don’t know but it’s absolutely correct. In India, the legacy of the freedom struggle has been a great respect for nonviolent resistance. The pros and cons of violent resistance can be debated, but I don’t think there can be any doubt that violent resistance harms women physically and psychologically in deep and complex ways…" Deep, even profound, understanding of human nature, we sense. The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Interviews by David Barsamian. South End Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2004, 178 pp. 2004-08- 31
Sexing Cultures...? This fascinating book ranks and compares 50 national cultures and 3 regions of the globe on a scale of masculinity à femininity. It is a bold and daring undertaking in our postmodern climate, as its subtitle implies: The Taboo Dimension of National Cultures. The author, Dr. Geert Hofstede, once worked for IBM. From that global perspective, he developed a comprehensive protocol for comparing national cultures. Masculinity-femininity – or ‘tough versus tender’ -- is one of five dimensions he uses. The others are: (unequal versus equal) Mixing and matching, Dr. Hofstede’s results provide interesting clusters of nations with similar characteristics. We note instantly how they ‘play out’ in our ongoing global politics. Here’s a tantalizing summary of Hofstede’s masculinity à femininity dimension:
The 53 nations and areas score from a masculinity high of 95 (Japan) to a low of 5 (Sweden) -- a considerable range. If national cultures are human creations, or imaginings, note the scope we have for changing ours, based solely on models that already exist, right here on Earth. Masculinity and Femininity: The Taboo Dimension of National Cultures by Geert Hofstede and Associates, published by SAGE Publications, Inc., 1998 2004-08-27 Loving Men ‘All
my life I have been interested only in men…’ says
the protagonist of this much-acclaimed-in-France novel. Her tale is brimming, overflowing with her love of man… and
men. Chapter titles
include: Alone
with Him; The Father; The Teacher; The Grandfather; The
Great-Uncle; The Lover; The Publisher; Jesus…
Then,
towards the end, in a Chapter entitled The Stronger Sex,
she enumerates many of the ‘strong’ things men do.
They range from the silly (“… the man who goes out for
a box of matches and is never seen again.”) to the macabre and
the horrific. Unfortunately,
her list leans heavily towards the latter (“There’s the man
who insults, kills, tortures, massacres.”) But
this is not egregious male-bashing.
She is seeking a truth, the truth of the difference: “She
tries to identify what makes them men, she lingers over this
point: they do things no woman would do or else do things
differently from how women would. But, to her regret, she cannot
rise above this cliché: their
violence, the brutal way they live, their desire to dominate;
except perhaps by linking it to what falsely might seem to be its
opposite: the
fragile, retarded, huge children within each of them, which may be
the true crux of their savagery.
And sometimes she feels pleased that she hasn’t had a
son…” And
there is more, much, much more that brings her closer to an
answer, too. Her
final Chapter is The Addressee, and we have – at least --
an ending, if not a definitive conclusion to the search. In
Those Arms by
Camille Laurens, published
by
Bloomsbury,
2003. 2004-01-27 On ForgivenessI have been waiting anxiously for the books from South Africa’s experiences with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Here is one, and in my view, it is not to be missed.
The
sub-title of this modest book is “A South African Story of
Forgiveness.” And
that is one of its more interesting features.
The author, who is also a clinical psychologist, really
does delve into the origins and meaning of forgiveness.
Listen to this quote from the widow of a murdered
policeman: “I
hope that when he sees our tears, he knows that they are not only
tears for our husbands, but tears for him as well…. I would like
to hold him by the hand, and show him that there is a future, and
that he can still change.”
[p.
94] The
‘he’ she is addressing is Eugene de Kock, the head of the
former apartheid state’s death squads.
His knick name was “Prime Evil” and his relationship
with the author of this book is another of its multiple,
inter-woven themes. The
book’s title is A
Human Being Died That Night.
It
speaks to all human beings who must live with and amongst people
of its own species who originated in groups profoundly different
from their own. We
all have much to learn from Pumla
Gobodo-Madikizela,
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's teachings, and this book 2004-01-26 Leadership Gap: Men vs Women Here is an amazing graph showing trends in leadership beliefs of men and women born during the 20th century. It reflects views of people in 'postindustrial' societies, primarily.
Source: Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, 2003. Cultural Barriers to Women's Leadership: A Worldwide Comparison, revised version for the Journal of Democracy, Figure 5. 2004-01-08 Saving
Ourselves? In September
1969, The New York Times magazine did an interview with Walter
Lippmann, the distinguished American commentator and journalist on
the occasion of his 80th birthday.
One memorable quote from Mr. Lippmann, as cogent today as
then, goes like this: “The
prime question before mankind … is how men [sic] will be able to
make themselves willing and able to save themselves.” As quoted by Peter Corning in Nature’s Magic: Synergy in
Evolution and the Fate of Humankind. 2004-01-08 Sharing the
"Yellow Dog": The
Gynocrat -- and Being a Little Crazed All the controversy over Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog got us reading him over the holidays. I can’t say that I ‘enjoyed’ the book. But I did come away fascinated with his reactions to what has been described as his post 9/11 masculinity crisis. It is expressed a couple of times in the book – the inability of the post 9/11 human male to protect and shelter and defend his kin, offspring, future. That ability was stripped from him by the events of 9/11, he seems to believe.
I was
also taken with a couple of quotes that describe quite precisely a
current version, let’s say, of the perennial ‘war between the
sexes.’ Listen: “…
He was a good modern person; was a liberal, a feminist (indeed a
gynocrat: ‘Give the girls a go,’ he’d say.
‘I know it’s asking the earth.
Still, we’re no good.
Give the girls a go.’)”
[p. 10] And
this on “Men in power”
by a male character writing to a female character in the book: “…
Men were in power for five million years.
Now (where we live) they share it with women.
That past has a weight, though we behave as if it
doesn’t. We behave
as if the transition has been seamlessly achieved.
Of course there’s no going back. … Still, we
should acknowledge the weight of it, the past.
Unconsciously, and not for long at a time, men miss women
being tractable, and women miss men being decisive; but we can’t
say that. All I’m suggesting, perhaps, is that there’s
a deficiency of candour… It would be surprising if women
weren’t a little crazed by their gains in power, and if men
weren’t a little crazed by their losses.
We will argue about this, I hope, and you will win and I
won’t mind. No,
strike that out. You
will win, and I will mind, but I’ll probably pretend not to.
What I’m saying is that it will take a century to work off those
five billennia and consolidate the change.
We pretend it is, but the change isn’t yet intact and
entire.” [pp.
306-7] Isn’t
that perceptive? But do
we have a century available to us, to work this through?
Will humanity survive the next century on its present
course? 2004-01-07 Human Sacrifice Visiting Mayan ruins over the holidays got us thinking about the role of human sacrifice in The HS Project. A bit gruesome, I know, but not something we had considered much previously, i.e., on its own apart from its killing and violence components. But the article also said this: “We have to remember that human sacrifice is not just a ritual act designed to appease the gods, divine the future, or bring luck and prosperity to those offering the sacrifice. It covers all situations in which a human life is exchanged for a greater cause. Even religious belief is not a necessary requirement; hunger-strikers are prepared to die for their nationalism, whilst Kamikaze pilots died for their emperor in World War Two. “Some anthropologists interpret the executions of condemned men and women on death row in America as another form of sacrifice, perceived as removing evil and thereby cleansing American society. The suicide bombers of Palestine and the 11 September terrorists are also modern-day human sacrifices. If the idea seems unpalatable, we have to remember that one of the major world religions, Christianity, is constructed in the image of a sacrificed man-god who is said to have died to save humankind.” Does that set off light bulbs in or “Ah-ha” balloons just above your head? Human sacrifice is killing for the hierarchy, to appeal or present or offer to the being (or concept ?!) at its pinnacle. Its significance is so profound for its members that they would give themselves or their own on its behalf. It’s a very small step from there (looking through the social dominance lens of arbitrary set systems of hierarchy) to understanding what’s going on out there, right now. If we really have globalized ourselves – into one over-arching, inter-connected, globally wired hierarchical super-system – then all those folks proclaiming their religion or nation or nationalism or lifestyle or governance style to justify their killings could all be doing the same thing: making (human) sacrifices to the top of our single global hierarchy through the sub-hierarchy they happen to inhabit, right now. They use whatever means they have at hand at the moment. Some have nuclear weapons, others have themselves, their own bodies, and most have a range of means that fall somewhere in-between and are defined by their setting and context. They justify their actions through the language and structures and reward systems of their own sub-hierarchy, but they are playing the same game, by the same rules, with the same objective. “Reach for the Top”! Kill for your belief, your greater cause…whatever its (arbitrary – fill in the blank) name. Kill and be saved… Perhaps we need, finally, as increasingly self-aware human beings, to confront this ‘urge’ to deadly violence. Look past the rationalizations and the groups that ‘make’ us do it, and just confront the fact of this basic ‘need’ itself. Decide if it’s worth it after all, if we really do believe in it after all, if we really do need it after all. I kill, therefore I am… Are They Human Yet?
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It
turns out, according to an excellent article on the BBC online,
that human sacrifice is only known from about 5000 years ago.
The
book is short and accessible, yet profound in spots – in the way
of thoughtful people with a world vision that rolls off
their tongues in concise aphorisms that stop you in your tracks.