Showing posts with label social identifiers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social identifiers. Show all posts

Monday 2 November 2020

Picture Post #59 Proscenium



'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Martin Cohen

      

To me, this image has a theatrical quality, almost a grotesque aspect. Look at the man's hand, on his leg, like a dead thing… the awkward tilt of his head. And how thin and sickly the whole body, in this seedy room with the dirty backdrop. 

Yet, at the time, this was modernity, and sophistication. This image represented new technology: think 'Steve Jobs' and iPhones.

The photo was taken exactly 127 years ago, that man could be my great great grandfather, which is to say not so incredibly a remote relation. Yet something has changed, and a certain innocence has been lost even in our celebration of sophistication.

Oh, and why did I call this post ‘Proscenium’? I came across the term reading about the new, trendy visual presentations. It's a term describing the part of a theatre stage in front of the curtain.  The two figures are thus playing out a very ancient routine - that also points to a very different future.



Monday 14 January 2019

Taking the ‘Mono’ Out of Monogamy

Posted by Emile Sorensen

The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch, circa 1500
Monogamy has failed -- by all reasonable metrics -– and we have been unwilling to ask monogamy the hard questions. The divorce rate amongst Baby Boomers is pushing upward of 50% and if one includes the more than 30% of married men and women who will succumb to secret dalliance at some point, the rate is way worse than that.

If 50% of an investment fund turned belly up or half the airplanes that took off each day crashed and burned, we would consider them intrinsically flawed and publicly unsafe. According to Psychology Today, ‘... in the U.S. 50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second, and 73% of third marriages end in divorce. It is now becoming unusual to find two people who remain married to each other for their entire lives.

The word monogamy itself has changed. Just a few decades ago it described the practice of marrying only once during a lifetime. Now it is also used to describes the practice of having only one sexual partner at any given time (as per the definition in the Oxford Dictionary). Anyway, the title ‘monogamous’ is often simply a veneer hiding a complex compromise of temptation, emotional affairs, suppressed regret and hidden unfaithfulness.

Young people are often misled into thinking that marriage can provide them with a lifetime of sexual fulfillment and emotional security – and invariably hit a wall of rude awakening when reality falls short of their expectations and temptation redefines their truth. Even when we verbally advocate monogamy, in reality we tend to deviate from it. And so traditional family structures are being challenged on many fronts. Where relationships were historically based on a sense of religious or social obligation, they are now more apt to be an expression of self-authentication. And the ‘thou shalt not’ from the pulpit has failed to stem this social shift from a ‘theocentric’ or family-centric worldview to one that is egocentric.

As the deception and pain in cheating are still recognised as distasteful and immoral (in the US military adultery is still criminal), social creativity has sought ethical alternatives to infidelity -- and consequently, there has been a commensurate rise in non-traditional relationships. We are seeing a social and cultural evolution taking place regarding the kinds of relationships men and women seek, and what they find fulfilling. It is not uncommon to meet people who have been married two or three times, or more.

As the deception and pain in cheating is still recognised as distasteful and immoral (in the US military adultery is still criminal), social creativity has sought ethical alternatives to infidelity – and consequently, there has been a commensurate rise in non-traditional relationships. We are seeing a social and cultural evolution taking place regarding the kinds of relationships men and women seek, and what they find fulfilling.

Homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexual, polyamory, polyfidelity, polysensual, open relationships, monogamish (mostly monogamous) relationships, swinging, kinky, the lifestyle, serial monogamy and consensual non-monogamy and many others have all become terms we must navigate as we talk intelligently about healthy consensual adult relationships. While most of these relational constructs are still invisible legally, they are undeniably here to stay socially. For example, one Canadian based ‘kink’ websites boasts over seven million members.

Should we abandon monogamy as a great idea whose season has come and gone? What is the new normal? Is there even such a thing as normal any more? We must individually explore where we fit into (or do not fit into) these new social constructs. Ought polyamory, serial monogamy or consensual non-monogamy be recognised as an ‘orientation’ in the same way that homosexuality or lesbianism are?

Ann Tweedy, of Hamline University School of Law recently explained why we may speak of orientation. ‘Sexual orientation,’ she says, ‘is defined as attraction to either the same sex, the opposite sex or both sexes – but it could be broadened to include other sexual preferences that are entwined with identity.’ These alternatives must be addressed as we forge the social pathway forwards. And possible even deeper, we must understand why traditional monogamy is unravelling, what to do with this antiquated system that was the ‘gold standard’ of society, and how to engage the new norms as we live in the real world.

What then has caused the ‘gold standard’ to topple? What has caused this shift, and how should we respond? What is bringing monogamy to its knees? An in depth look at the cause reaches beyond the limitations of this post -- but here are considerations to start the discussion.

Fundamental to understanding our change in behavior surely must be a dialogue about our shifting roles. The marketplace has now been enriched by equality – and with that, sexual temptations and opportunities proliferate for both sexes. Women have come of age and emerged as equal vyers for their share of the economic pie. We work more and travel more – and are connected to and are communicating with others more. On top of that the media bombard our sensual appetites consistently – stimulation overload. And exhaustion!

Online pornography and internet dating have not served traditional structures well. Ashley Maddison, a ‘married dating site’, boasts almost eight million members with about sixteen thousand sign-ups every day – half of whom are women.
It is said that modern technology has fostered an immediate gratification mindset – and if sexual appetite and opportunity is out there – why not? Social conservatism – as espoused by the religious front – is losing traction, even amongst the faithful, as society embraces a more open mindset. And it seems we are not having affairs as much because we are looking for someone else as much as we are looking to authenticate ourselves.

Yet interestingly, the one thing that has not changed -- that threads itself consistently through every style, type and description of relationship -- is the destructive power of deception and the fundamental need for trust. It seems no matter what your preference of relationship structure is – monogamy or otherwise – deception is still the killer and cheating is still cheating. Yes, the structure and context of relationships may be changing. How we understand our needs and the creative ways we give expression to our sexuality may be shifting, but fundamentally – we are still the same. We still look for relationships we can trust, and people we can enjoy the richness of mutual connection and exploration with. We still find satisfaction in the consistency of respect. Monogamy may have fallen on hard days – but faithfulness has not.

Monday 1 January 2018

Picture Post #32 The Family Snapshot









'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen


Archive image: Stalin with his children


Ah, what could be more innocent than a fond family portrait of a parent seated, relaxing with their children.

Indeed, we all have such snaps and maybe there is a little bit of a story lurking untold behind the smiles. But here, with Josef Stalin, ‘Uncle Joe’ to a nation, there is rather too much of a story. Should Stalin be denied the right to be considered a fond parent? And his children: what role do they play in this picture? Are they participating in a fraud, or are they wholly innocent particpants caught up in a story they never asked for nor could influence?

According to the author, Jay Nordinger, conservative commentator and author of a book on the sons and daughters of dictators, Stalin had one daughter and two sons, Yakov and Vasily, one from each of his wives. The young woman in the image is Svetlana, who died compratively recently, in 2011, aged 85. And she died not in Russia, but in the United States.

The story of Svanidze’s mother is rather tragic. She was, or so Mr. Nordinger tells us, Stalin’s great love. They wed in 1906 and had been married only 16 months when she died of typhus – while her son was still only nine months old. Her death greatly affected the future dictator. Revolutionary comrades, worried for his sanity, took away his revolver for fear he might put the gun to his temple. At her funeral, a grief-stricken Stalin told a friend, ‘This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity’.

Colley notes that, deprived of his father’s affections and upset by a failed romance, Yakov once tried to shoot himself, and that even as he lay bleeding, his father scathingly remarked, ‘He can’t even shoot straight’.

Dzhugashvili, by the way, was Stalin’s real name. ‘Stalin’ was his revolutionary non de plume, meaning ‘Man of Steel’.

Yakov fought in the Red Army in the Second Wolrd War, but was captured by the Germans, which Stalin considered (like the Japanese) to be a disgrace. Indeed, under Stalin the families of captured prisoners where shamed. ‘There are no prisoners of war,’ he once said, ‘only traitors to their homeland’. When Stalin was offered his son’s release in return for a senior German officer, he refused the swap saying ‘I will not trade a Marshal for a Lieutenant’.

Yakov had married a Jewish woman, called Julia, and she was arrested, and sent to the gulag. She was perhaps allowed the small privilege of release two years later.

But it is Vasily who is in the picture. He was the son of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda, who bore  his daughter five years later.  In November 1932, Nadezhda, suffering from depression, shot herself.

Vasily seems to have been shallow and vain. He continually used his father’sname to further his career, to obtain perks and seduce women - much to Stalin’s anger. He had no sense of responsibility and Stalin once had to intervene by sacking his colonel son for ‘debauchery and corrupting the regiment’. Despite all this, Vasily rose to the lofty heights of Major-General in 1946, a rank far beyond his ability but his drinking and temper made him both unpopular.

Rarely have facts so coloured an image...  and yet there is a certain family intimacy there, or should we say, a shared complicity.










Monday 15 May 2017

The Philosophy of Jokes

I say, I say, I say...
Posted by Martin Cohen
Ludwig Wittgenstein, that splendidly dour 20th century philosopher, usually admired for trying to make language more logical, once remarked, in his earnest Eastern European way, that a very serious work, or zery serieuse, verk in philosophy could consist entirely of jokes. 
Now Wittgenstein probably meant to shock his audience which consisted of his American friend, Norman Malcolm (who he also once, advised to avoid an academic career and to work instead on a farm) but he was also in deadly earnest. Because, humour is, as he also is on record as saying, ‘not a mood, but a way of looking at the world’. Understanding jokes, just like understanding the world, hinges on having first adopted the right kind of perspective.

So here's one to test his idea out on.
‘A traveler is staying at a monastery, where the Order has a vow of silence and can only speak at the evening meal. On his first night as they are eating, one of the monks stands up and shouts ‘Twenty two!’. Immediately the rest of the monks break out into raucous laughter. Then they return to new silence. A little while later, another shouts out ‘One hundred and ten’, to even more uproarious mirth. This goes on for two more nights with no real conversation, just different numbers being shouted out, followed by ribald laughing and much downing of ale. At last, no longer able to contain his curiosity the traveler asks the Abbot what it is all about. The Abbot explains that the monastery has only one non-religious book in it, which consists of a series of jokes each headed with its own number. Since all the monks know them by heart, instead of telling the jokes they just call out the number. 
Hearing this, the traveler decides to have a look at the book for himself. He goes to the library and carefully makes a note of the numbers of the funniest jokes. Then, that evening he stands up and calls out the number of his favourite joke – which is ‘seventy six’. But nobody laughs, instead there is an embarrassed silence. The next night he tries again, ‘One hundred and thirteen!’, he exclaims loudly into the silence - but still no response. 
After the meal he asks the Abbott if the jokes he picked were not considered funny by the monks? ‘Ooh no’, says the Abbott. ‘The jokes are funny – it’s just that some people just don't know how to tell them!’
I like that one! And incredibly, it is one of the oldest jokes around. This, we might say, is a joke with a pedigree. A version of it appears in the Philogelos, or Laughter Lover, which is a collection of some 265 jokes, written in Greek and compiled some 1,600 odd years ago. So it’s old. Nevertheless, despite its antiquity, the style of this and at least some of the other jokes is very familiar.

Clearly, humour is something that transcends communities and periods in history. It seems to draw on something common to all peoples. Yet jokes are also clearly things rooted in their times and places. At the time of this joke, monks and secret books were serious business. But the first philosophical observation to make and principle to note is that both these jokes involved one of those ‘ah-ha!’ moments.

Humour often involves a sudden, unexpected shift in perspective forcing a rapid reassessment of assumptions. Philosophy, at its best, does much the same thing.

Monday 27 March 2017

Poetry: On Thinking

Posted by Chengde Chen*


It is said that man is the animal that thinks
I don’t know whether animals think or not
but the crowd often doesn’t

From the unifying roar of the Third Reich saluting the Führer
to the wave of the ‘red ocean’ rolling towards the Red Sun
from rock stars’ pretended madness surging into real madness
to Manchester United’s football directing the eyes of the world
the crowd is so simple and so easy to manipulate
Whether it is past or present, east or west
whether it is about religion, war, rock stars or football stars
different fanaticisms are not different!

Why don’t people who can think think? Because
trends are greater than thought
traditions are heavier than thought
faiths are stronger than thought
power is more powerful than thought
A madman’s hysteria can become a nation’s reason
a dead dogma can become a social movement, because
a head without thinking can be filled with anything!

What is thinking? Thinking is not memory
nor reciting hundreds of classical poems
Thinking is not longing, nor lingering under the moonlight
Thinking is not calculation, nor differentiation or integration
Thinking is not fantasy, nor a dream in the daylight
Thinking is the deity’s atheistic advancement –
with reason cutting through the magnetic field of concepts
generating the omnipresent electricity of criticism

For a trend, it is a cold reef
For tradition, it is a rude drunkard
For religion, it is a self-appointed God
For power, it is the blind who see nothing
It is the will of water, and the breath of fire
Logic is its iron hooves, galloping through the universe
It may not be difficult to subdue a thinker
but a thought cannot be conquered
much as no force can make one equal two!


To think is not man’s instinct or necessary function
Without Copernicus, the Earth would still rotate
Without Darwin, apes would still have evolved into man
Yet thoughts make the difference between men
greater than that between man and a deity

Kant, who never travelled beyond his Königsberg
invited God into his heart to discuss ‘Practical Reason’
Einstein, being a junior clerk of a patent office
caught up with light to gain eternal life in four dimensional space
Some people have never thought throughout their lives
so life owes them a world
While some who have, have created new worlds!

Today we are proud of our digital capability
But machines carrying out man’s instructions
is man executing machines’ orders
Hence the Matthew Effect:
those who think, think more; those who don’t, even less
The net may have caught everybody
the high-performance screen can be more desolate

It is said that “when man thinks, God laughs”
But if man doesn’t, God would be bored
He likes the fun of thinking but not the hard work
so He created man to do the job for Him
How should the creature deserve the creation?
This oldest of Greek issues about thinking
is still the first thing that needs to be thought



* Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde@sipgroup.com

Monday 20 February 2017

How Does Identity Politics Infuse Political Discourse?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Chameleon – Image acknowledgement: National Geographic
The great English political philosopher, John Locke, observed:
“We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the colour of our moral character, from those who are around us.”
Locke’s insight into human tendencies and the effects of relationships applies as much to identity politics — and the behaviours, aspirations, and goals of group affiliation — as to society as a whole.

Identity politics has been making increasingly recurrent global appearances, announced with bold headlines: In the United States, legal and constitutional grappling over a ban on incoming travelers from select countries; in the United Kingdom, a vote to leave the European Union, at least in part inspired by unrest over borders and immigration; in the Netherlands, calls heard for those who do not ‘agree with us’ to leave. The examples are plenty; the social and political lines are clearly and often-fervidly drawn.

This brand of politics typically pulls in groups whose allied members self-identify on the basis of assorted social identifiers and causes — race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, social background, disability, religion, economic class, generational cohort, education, indigenous provenance, language, and others. Identity politics also pulls in policymakers disposed sympathetically to reach out to, understand, and advocate on behalf of these groups’ interests — as well as policymakers who, rooted in their own conviction, don’t and won’t. The glue that binds members of self-identified alliances is wariness over the specter of coercion and disapproval, as seen to be normalised by the dominant demographic of society.

‘Identity politics’ is a loaded term, fraught with powerful emotions and symbols. Members of these subgroups, apprehensive of diminished power in their personal and public lives, share the belief that clear-cut identifiers set them up for potential distrust and discrimination. Those reactions by ‘outsiders’, whose judgement may at times be tinged with nativism, fuel a sense of marginalisation and disenfranchisement. The distinctive ‘otherness’ of these self-identified subgroups may prove a handicap not just to acceptance by the mainstream, but to opportunities to fully partake of the benefits that society routinely offers to the majority—or, perhaps more often, that the majority offers to itself.

Group constituents feel deprived of opportunities to determine — at their own discretion, undiminished by reactionary elements — even the larger, existential contours of their lives: their role, their purpose, their future. Through group consciousness and identity, the groups’ struggle has a cosmopolitan ring: communities with shared values, sometimes philosophically disagreeing with one another as ideas churn and contradictions slowly get untangled through a healthy dialectic, often subsequently guided by a written or at least implied platform. Moreover, collaboration across groups may be seen as a viable strategy to amplify their individual voices. Good ideas, after all, are not a zero-sum currency, so aggregating ideas across groups is to their collective advantage.

Perhaps it’s too easy to shoehorn people into social categories with their own demographic markers, but that seems the reality — with the potential for wedge issues to spur spirited differences of opinion about leadership, principles, and methods. The latter being a beneficial dynamic, however. Identity politics serves as a force multiplier in burnishing the groups’ philosophy and ideology, and in the process taking it public. This includes their grievances, their claim to rights and redress, and their petitions to political representatives for systemic, institutional change. Like-minded political representatives may act as the advance guard, taking to the bully pulpit, as well as legislating to replace discriminatory policy with positive policy — practical, actionable policy, not just feel-good nostrums.

Collective action and voice are aimed at repudiating and pushing back against recursive incidents of stereotyping and stigmatizing. Such action and voice provide the bedrock for defying what arguably bodes the worst for members of these subgroups: that is, the threat of irrelevance. And they are aimed at harnessing the energy to successfully counter the narratives that deepen the social fissures and attempt not only to carve out a lesser status in society for group members, but also deprive people of undiminished expression of their equality and value in an otherwise often heterogeneous society.

Identify politics is neither a conservative nor a liberal phenomenon; it falls on both sides of that (reductive) divide. Populism, for example, comes in both political flavors — as continues to be seen in countries around the world. One category that fits under either the liberal or conservative rubric is ‘social background’ — where a sense of victimhood is more important to group members than is simple demographic labeling. People resorting to a crude, reflexive branding of groups may wield any ideology on the political continuum, from the far left to the far right. It’s whatever proves handy in the moment, however one may be philosophically predisposed — where actions, not just reimagined theory, matter, serving as an accelerant for change.

Accordingly, those who disapprove of what they see and hear may seize upon both conservative and liberal identifiers as a framework and animating principles for their cause. Social groups that fall into either category must reclaim their history and draft their own narrative, shouldering how they wish to be defined — outside the orbit of cultural hegemony, accepted non-judgementally for who and what they are and for what they want to become. Societies benefit by allowing room for both conservative and liberal identities to thrive, serving as a bulwark for the best of democracy and its organising principles, even as the balance between the two ideologies might shift back and forth in turns.

Whether identity politics — largely unmoored from mainstream politics — is an effective strategy for politicians campaigning and legislating is an ongoing debate. Legislators, strategists, political pundits, academics, and the public have weighed in. Concerns include, at the core, whether the focus on identity politics atomises audiences with very different identities and needs, and in so doing risks diluting broader-based political messaging.

Those opposed to identity politics argue that messaging would be more effective if the targeted audience is only ever all society — hoping to hit the broader themes of greatest concern to the greatest number of people for the greatest return. Preferably as much outside of a partisan framework as possible, notwithstanding policymakers’ predisposition toward political expediency. Yet, an ambitiously inclusive message risks misfiring in the minds of many self-identified groups, whose platforms, expectations, and anxieties need to be spoken to in a tailored way in order to resonate most productively. Ideally, the greatest effectiveness would emerge from a fusion of both identity messaging and mainstream messaging. Coffers and personnel permitting, it doesn’t have to be either-or.

As the contemporary political philosopher, Sonia Kruks, puts it, how today’s identity politics steers a materially different path from earlier forms of the politics of recognition is the “demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied” — race, gender, ethnicity, and so forth.


This key, enabling ‘demand’ goes beyond the mere superficialities of unsatisfying, insufficient protectionism. Rather, it conjures proactivity, self-assuredness, articulateness, and an embrace of the legitimacy of one’s identity through shared experiences. Locke’s enlightened spirit fits this endeavour, valuing everyone (irrespective of ‘social tribe’) as “equal and independent,” free from “harm” — where the restorative powers of human and civil liberties take an ever-firm hold.