Dangerously reactionary thoughts about marriage

1 Hindu marriage vows
Apparently the Hindu makes a series of vows during the marriage ceremony: one to work to financially support the family, another to have children and a third to treat each other with respect.

All very traditional. All so very quaint.

To the Hindu, though, there must be a reasonably clear answer to the question: What is it to be a good husband?

Is there an answer for the post-modernist? If not, is there not something lacking? Something important.

2 Igbo initiation into manhood
Among the Igbo of Nigeria manhood must involve marriage and this must involve childrearing. Celestine A Obi tells us that the ambition of becoming a father is so essential it is built into some of the Igbo names. One name: Nwabu-uwa apparently means: a child is all the world to me.

Manhood though is something that boys must be initiated into in the right way. Celestine describes the process like this: "As soon as a boy comes to the age of reason, he undergoes a civic juvenile test by which ho is initiated into the juju cult by iba nammuo (the walk to the spirit land). By this ceremony ho is initiated into the secrets of "egwugwu" and told of ana-be-mmuo'. These are secrets which, he can never reveal to anyone of the female sex nor to the yet uninitiated of his own sex."

There are secrets one must keep from one's wife. Is there not a great deal of wisdom in this? And is the essence not: a certain distance – a certain sense of propriety - must be maintained. One must be a man for one's wife. One must certainly not lose one's sense of self – one's sense of difference. Is there not something terribly flaccid and unwholesome in the desire to merge, to disappear and have no secrets?

Oh the wisdom of the Igbo!

3 Igbo womanhood

Celestine has a lovely passage on young Igbo women:

"The girls of the village take particular pains to attract the attention of eligible young men and do not hesitate to advertise their personal charms. On gala days, every available ornament is brought into requisition. The girls revel in dancing and seize every opportunity of displaying their charms". Some Igbo girls add poise to their erectness by deliberately walking upright and chest-out. Why all this show? One would be inclined to ask. You would not blame them, if you understand the motive. This is the time for silent but vigorous campaign for a good husband. This ambition glows fervently inside every girl and restlessly demands an urgent satisfaction before the teeming full and pointing breasts sag and bow to age."

The Igbo (as they were, doubtless) fuse the sex drive, the desire to marry and the desire to raise children. The most primitive drives are still one with the central social roles.

How odd that seems from the perspective of one for whom marriage felt like an empty formality, like some feudal relic, and the thought of having children only arrived at an age at which most Igbo contemporaries would have become grandparents.

What a tremendous fragmentation of passion and society. Not that there is a lack of social life, of socialising (and the Igbo with their separation of girls and boys were probably not the best at socialising) but a lack of society nevertheless.

Aren't these dangerously reactionary thoughts very Alasdair MacIntyre – very "After Virtue". (Note: Must find out about MacIntyre's Thomism if only to avoid falling into it.)

(Check out Celstine's work at http://codewit.com/igbomarriage.php)

Neo-Conservative Enlightenment

It was interesting to hear Mr GW Bush say in a speech in Thailand just now – a speech referring to China – that a people brought up on the right to trade goods will sooner or later demand the right to trade ideas. Habermas would certainly not agree that the democratic practice of penetrating public debate could be adequately described as a matter of trading ideas.

What is Enlightenment? Going back to Kant

We want to get back to Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment as a refreshing alternative to the stale talk of modernism and postmodernism. First step: Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment?" even though A&H don't seem to give this much weight.

So what is Enlightenment for Kant? Here is the first paragraph:

"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!"- that is the motto of enlightenment."

So:

1 Enlightenment is a form of liberation (no more tutelage).
2 Enlightenment is about a change in the way people think: now they think for themselves instead of just parroting what other (supposedly more authoritative minds/texts have said).
3 This could have happened a lot earlier in history because there was never any lack in the capacity for reason (reason is thinking and everyone can/could think assuming they are over a certain age and not yet in a coma).
4 The problem in the past was a mysterious lack of courage – a lack which suddenly seems to be made good in the eighteenth century.

In the second paragraph Kant is content to attribute the late coming of the Enlightenment to laziness and cowardice. However, in the following paragraph there is an acknowledgment that the "guardians of society … made their domestic cattle dumb and have made sure that these placid creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness of the cart to which they are tethered...," implying that it wasn't just laziness. In an interesting twist he says that the dumbed-down public can become so attached to the thoughtless prejudices once spread by guardians with ulterior motives that they can rise up and insist on them when more Enlightened guardians attempt to make more rational reforms.

However, the most controversial aspect of Kant's essay is his distinction between the social order (which may be free or unfree) and the freedom of thought. Although we might think that liberation is above all about ending things like tyranny and despotism, Kant writes as if these changes in the social order are of little consequence unless there is a liberation (Enlightenment) in the way people think. The revolution that is called for is a revolution in thought, not in society, excepting the need for reforms regarding the freedom of speech, for instance. the key imperative in Kant's version of the Enlightenment is that "the public use of one's reason must always be free". The word "public" here refers to public debate and criticism which goes on separately and without having any (immediate?) impact on the business of society. The freedom of this public use of reason is perfectly compatible, for Kant, with a lack of freedom in the "private" use of one's reason, meaning what people must agree to as part of their obligations to society (his examples include the obligations of a soldier to obey commands or of a citizen to pay taxes that they might want to criticise).

Kant acknowledges that people are not free to do do (and sometimes to say) what they agree with, but this appears not to compromise the freedom of thought that Enlightened individuals can exercise after they have fulfilled their social obligations. The freedom of thought is unlimited, despite those irrational social obligations. And there isn't even a problem with hypocrisy in the case of, for instance, a clergyman who is obliged by his church to preach one thing while publishing scholarly works criticising the doctrines he has been preaching. The freedom of the individual is perfectly compatible with social unfreedom, a key idea which comes out most clearly in the last paragraph where he puts the following words into the mouth of an enlightened monarch (words we are assumed to agree with): "Argue as much as you will and about what you will, only obey!"

Mental Pollution

A lot is said about dumping waste in the environment. Not enough is said about dumping rubbish in the mind.

Seeing a close relative in a coma and dying brought this home to me. You might think that in a coma a person is a complete vegetable. Wrong. There is a coma scale and unless you really are at the absolute bottom there is still activity. You move. Your nose itches, you scratch it. The higher functions of the mind are obviously shot to pieces: no reaction to words and if the eyes are open, no recognition of anything familiar, but the brain is obviously still ticking over. Things are going on in there – just the simplest, most deeply rooted things – the last things to go before THE END.

That was when I had a horrible thought about opal fruits (a square sweet popular – once popular – in the UK). I never liked opal fruits but that didn't stop their advertising jingle getting right into the fibres of my being. "Opal fruits: made to make your mouth water." It's a jingle that not infrequently floats up into my consciousness and then insists on going round and round for too long before sinking back down again.

So my nightmare is that I might be on death's door, about to breathe my last, or at the end of a protracted decline brought on by Alzheimer's and instead of a rousing symphony that might give me a foretaste of the enduring strength of the human soul or a profound thought from one of the great minds of the Western canon, all I hear is: "Opal fruits: made to make your mouth water. Opal fruits: made to make your mouth water. Opal fruits: made to make your mouth water. Opal fruits: made to make your mouth water."

Kylie's New Narcissism

One of Kylie's pop chants is:

"How does it feeeeel in my arrrrrms?

How does it feeeeel in my arrrrrms?

etc"

Isn't there something odd about this question?

It seems to express the desire to feel what it is like to feel her. For most people the feeling of the intoxicating kiss (for instance) is intoxication enough - an intoxicating loss of individuality, of sinking into the purely sensuous - closing one's eyes and becoming a life of pure feeling - pure egoless feeling - a complete renunciation. But for Kylie this is not enough. She wants to know - she wants to feel - what the other feels in her arms. The intoxication of the kiss is not enough. She wants to feel herself intoxicating the other.

Is there not a pathological hardening of the self here? Is there not a loss of a receptivity to the sensuous moment that needs to be recalled?

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice

"Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus" (John Gray) never seemed like a book to be taken seriously. Wasn't it just a dreadful naturalisation of socially conditioned gender differences? But as time has passed the idea of an infinite plasticity in human social roles and identities looks increasingly untenable to me.

A very personal hunch: Someone is out looking for an address in an unknown part of the city and they happen to have a map with them in their bag. They come to a junction and they are not sure which way to turn. On average, is a man in this situation not more likely to delve into his bag, get out the map and try to work out for himself with his systemising mind where the hell the house in question is? And is a woman in this situation not more likely to stop the first passer-by and ask if they know the address?

Is there not such a difference, and if so, is it purely a product of social conditioning?

The story that really brought home the role of nature as a determinant in the last instance was the story of David Rheimer. I only came across it a while ago. It is a shocking story of a Freudian thesis put to the test using a child who went through hell, but then came out of that firey place for a brief and relatively happy period before sinking again and finally committing suicide. It is a particularly shocking story for those of us who once read Freud and just swallowed the idea that gender identity was all in the mind (or assumed that this could be panned out somehow into the idea that it is all a product of social conditioning).

There is lots to be found about this story on the web, but I reprint below my version of the story (which was originally written for a collection of English language teaching materials so it avoids some of the more disturbing details, including the suicide).

The Case of David Rheimer

Of all the attempts that were made to try to disprove the idea of a biological basis for gender identity one case in particular stands out. In 1972 Dr John Money, a psychologist, started to publish research papers in scientific journals about a child called Brenda who had been born a perfectly normal boy but who was being brought up successfully as a girl. The papers were to become hugely influential.The boy had been left with severe anatomical problems after a routine operation had gone horribly wrong. Because the child was still less than a year old Dr Money persuaded the parents that the wisest course of action was immediate plastic surgery to enable him to be brought up as a girl (in 1967 plastic surgery to reconstruct anything resembling a functional male organ of reproduction was impossible). Although Dr Money assured the young and desperate parents that the outcome was bound to be positive, in truth it was merely an experiment conducted in the hope that it would prove once and for all his conviction that at birth a person's gender identity is undifferentiated.

In the published papers Money portrayed the transformation as an unqualified success. The child, he said, had responded perfectly to his parents, who had consistently treated him as a girl and had kept the anatomical alteration completely secret. According to Money the child at the age of 6 had typically feminine character traits and interests: "She was observed to have a clear preference for dresses and frilly blouses over pants and T-shirts. She took pride in her long hair and loved being her daddy's little sweetheart."

The real story was not made public until 1997 when one of the less senior psychiatrists who had been treating the girl finally found the courage to speak out. The ensuing reports included quotations from relatives and friends. The child's twin brother (who knew nothing of the truth at the time) said: "To me she was my kid sister, but she just never acted the part. She'd get a skipping rope for a gift and the only thing we'd use that for was to tie people up or whip people with it. She was always playing with my toys: toy dump trucks, cars and stuff. The sewing machine she got just sat there. And when she was 6 she said that her ambition was to be a garbage man. I thought it was kinda bizarre - my sister a garbage man!" One of her female classmates also recalled the way she reacted sometimes when she was teased at school (as she often was): "What always impressed me about Brenda was that when the boys called her 'Cavewoman' or 'Gorilla' or something like that she might grab one of them by his shirt and punch him. I always wished I could do that."

Despite the concerted efforts of her parents, the psychologists and the doctors the child was never happy with the idea that he was a girl. After obstinately refusing hormone therapy at the age of 14 ("They told me it would fix things so that I could wear a bra - but I didn't wanna wear a bra!" he later recalled) his parents finally told him the truth. Looking back in 1998 he said: "I was so relieved. Suddenly it all made sense, and I finally knew that I wasn't some sort of freak." Shortly afterwards he willingly underwent the medical treatment necessary for his final metamorphosis back from being a girl to a boy, and the person previously known as Brenda settled into a new and more contented life as David.

When David was in his mid-twenties he met and married a woman who had three children from three unsuccessful relationships. She was bowled over by how caring and considerate he was. To one of the few journalists David agreed to speak to he described how proud he was in his role as husband, father and sole breadwinner in the family - a family that he never believed he would be lucky enough to have. "From what I've been taught by my father what makes you a man is: You treat your wife well. You put a roof over your family's head. You're a good father. Things like that add up much more to being a man than just sex. I guess John Money would consider my children's biological fathers to be real men. But they didn't stick around to raise the children. I did. That, to me, is a man."