My brother was murdered in a gruesome robbery attempt. A pregnant 15 year old daughter of a coworker of his was also murdered. They was killed by a group of teenagers. Something this event showed me is that not everything can be figured out and explained. But after the murder I was intensely concerned with trying to make sense of it.
One line of thinking might be lumped into a category of the Devil's spawn as an explanation. I sometimes wince at how ordinary it is to speak of people as predators. Partly it turns me sour because I tend to think of animals like lions and tigers when I think of predators. Speaking of people as "predators" belies the essentially honorable living which lions and tigers make. Another problem I have with this commonly employed the term is how it obscures the very human motivations involved in violence.
Another line of thinking addresses the prevalence of violence in the American South--the murders happened in Dixie--with a culture of honor. I think that the notion of a culture of honor in the southern USA is sometimes over-extended, still the idea of it somehow resonated in me.
I was born in the South, but my parents were both born in New England, so I was the outcast Yankee among my peers. Of course I wanted to fit in, boys want to fit in, but I discovered probably without and explicit understanding of the construct of culture, that fitting in was hard to do. I think--following Canadian Watcher's mention of "The Cult of True Womanhood" that there's a fairly general pattern across regions in the USA where woman have particular authority in the home. There's a fairly explicit sense that mothers are instrumental in propagating the culture through their children. My dilemma as a boy was the culture my mother was intent to cultivate in me and perpetuate was antithetical to the culture of honor the mother's of my peers were keen to.
If culture as a construct has meaning, it's clear that culture is mutable. As people we can aspire to better ways of being people and one happy side effect of such aspirations is that they offer us a view to some of the ways that culture frames our experience and even delimiting our aspirations.
Laurie Penny has a righteous rant up about the princess fantasies popular culture promotes among girls.
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/lauri ... ss-fantasy
Chris Dilley points to Penny's essay and then to one by The Heresiarch. (As an aside I would very much like to learn how to make embedded links here. How can I learn to do it?) Here is Dilley's post
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com ... ation.html and here's The Heresiarch
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com ... ation.html
Heresyarch writes:
Society wants little girls to identify with princesses, not because it expects them to aspire no higher than matrimony, but because the "conformist" qualities belittled by Laurie Penny are the very ones that promote success in life.
Penny's concern is that the problem with princess fantasies is they limit the possible lives of girls as they become adults and conversely The Heresiarch argues that the princess fantasy is helpful towards girls' future success. Dilley argues that their both right.
I rather like it that we here at RI pretend we like one another. Surely on some level most of us really do, but even when pretending it seems a good thing because perhaps that encourages more views to be shared. I don't think the arguments here are essentially rational arguments, few online forums seem well-suited to that. Within bounds we come to argue our positions and that's a good thing. Sometimes it gets dicey here as we seem to be a passionate and sensitive lot and some ideas seem inviolate.
Dilley argues that The Heresiarch is right that the sort of values that princess fantasies are thought to encourage are valuable in the capitalist order. The rub is they are valuable, but only to a point:
First, even in the realm of employment, there’s a downside to being a princess. Conformity might equip you well to do a mid-level job. But it deprives you of the aggressive competitive edge that will drive you to the top of the greasy pole.
Secondly, the personality templates that promote labour market success will chafe against some people more than others. This tension between being a good worker and pursuing one’s own conception of personal flourishing is one origin of Marxian alienation. Thirdly, the characteristics that allow one to do (moderately) well in the labour market are, of course, only a subset of all possible or even desirable human types. In this sense, economic success diminishes diversity - which might be costly even in narrow economic terms.
I doubt that will rub many here the wrong way, but Dilley makes a more controversial observation:
It would be very easy here to tell a purely Marxist story of how capitalism warps our humanity. Except for two things. One is that many of the qualities promoted by a market economy (which must be distinguished from capitalism) - such as trustworthiness - are valuable in pretty much all contexts. And for another thing, it is not obvious whether any alternative socialist mode of production would do any better in overcoming the trade-off between human flourishing and personal economic success.
I can hear chaffing in some quarter of RI.
Keith Hart has an interesting post up
http://thememorybank.co.uk/2011/05/10/t ... -of-money/where he discusses the need for anthropologists to be aware of intellectual history and how that history shapes how we think. A brief snippet in re Marcel Mauss stood out:
Mauss’s chief conclusion was that the attempt to create a free market for private contracts is utopian and just as unrealizable as its antithesis, a collective based solely on altruism. Human institutions everywhere are founded on the unity of individual and society, freedom and obligation, self-interest and concern for others. Modern capitalism and economics rest on an unsustainable attachment to one of these poles and it will take a social revolution to restore a humane balance.
There seems to me a widespread agreement here at RI that a social revolution is needed. There seems far less agreement about the nature of a social revolution that's needed, or what might constitute it.
Some ideas expressed really are beyond the pale, of course there are disagreements about what's tolerable to us in the realm of ideas. There are some general but explicit rules applied across the threads at this forum. Almost always I presume good faith among the posters here; that is I presume that most of the time people are saying something close to what they actually think and believe. Some might apply a standard of good faith which requires another to change their views when presented with enough evidence of error. That seems an unreasonably high standard for most online discussion forums.
)
If you forget how to do this you can hover over the URL box in the toolbar and it shows you an example. If that isn't what you meant let me know)
