[P2P-F] What do I Know?

[Michel Bauwens]

Thanks for this reaction Anna,

I agree about agression and nurturing to be polarities in each of us, which
may then be culturally re-inforced and fixated in all kinds of ways by
cultures and societies,

But patriarchy predates EM by thousands of years, and gendering predates
patriarchy by tens of thousands if not more. It is easy to forget that even
in tribal societies, with very strong nurturing, and this could be true
even for matriarchal societies (who engaged in hunt and had to defend
themselves), that male initiation was especially geared towards
de-sensitizing males and habituating them to violence. A meta-study last
year was pretty unequivocal: the amount of human to human violence has
dramatically decreased over time. Civilizational and nation-state based
wars can have a terrible cost, but overall, the percentages are
dramatically lower than in most tribal societies (anthropologists and
others have counted skeletons and how they died, i.e. percentage of signs
of violence vs illnesses etc..)

Ironically, though the balance and positions between males and females have
varied over time, I think only EM derivatives have allowed the flexibility
you describe.

The question is: can this be married with a return to nurturing ? To the
degree that we can enter post-civilisational processes (see A. Chandler for
a definition of civilization that is specifically linked to class based
societies, the need for internal repression, and thus , the need to
de-sensitize and make nurturing more difficult), we can develop renewed
nurturing practices. I see a lot of evidence of this around me, and more
specifically, in EM derived cultures, while where I live hear in East Asia,
maybe because of earlier forms of EM influences, the evolution may go in
the other direction (a lot of east-asian women in the middle classes do not
want to nourish their children directly because of aesthetic reasons for
example, and the men have to work harder and are less at home). The
movement for labor, gender, race and civic rights, to the degree they are
protests against hierarchical and class divisions, are post-civilisational
and create the basis for renewed emphasis on nurturing. (see how maternal
and paternal leave allows parents to spend more time with their children)

Michel



<<Message: 1
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2017 08:41:24 +0100
From: Anna Harris <anna at shsh.co.uk>
To: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>,
        rkanth at fas.harvard.edu
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: What do I Know?
Message-ID: <624F7EB1-C7EF-44A6-A7E6-6F63E0A5B48D at shsh.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Dear Rajani,

 In this long rant there are nuggets of truth which shine, but I have a
quibble with one particular statement which is fundamental to your
approach, - that men are naturally aggressive and violent.

"I also know that men and women are profoundly,  and naturally, dissimilar.
By instinct,  men are aggressive and violent, and  women are nurturing".

Our definition of what is masculine and what is feminine has been defined
for us by our culture which, as you have demonstrated, has been
contaminated with EM values. These definitions are being questioned now by
people who don't fit in to these gender categories, who are demanding at an
increasingly younger age, to be seen as non binary. Those of us who grew up
with these definitions may be becoming more fully aware of our own
discomfort at being thrust into one or other of these gender categories.

Progressives have got so far as to allow that masculine and feminine
energies exist in both men and women. But it seems a bridge too far to
question the very definition of masculine and feminine as culturally
dictated.

While this may seem peripheral to your whole thesis, I view it as a radical
challenge to the foundations of patriarchal culture which rests on the
primary division between male and female. (Unfortunately this has currently
been taken over by big pharma, since it paves the way for drug dependency
from an early age, and has actually created more confusion about having to
decide to be one or the other.)

Nevertheless the basic categories are being questioned and fatally blurred,
so that being yourself is what really matters. This is a really positive
step towards your kin based affective society, where kin is seen as
including all beings.

Anna

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