Damek.

“…collaborative, culturally-informed aid must replace the age-old top-down kind of aid.”

From this anthro blog post on understanding the people you’re trying to help and helping them in ways that are best for them instead of imposing your own assumptions.

Here is what poor Haitians define as elements of a good society:

1. relative economic parity
2. strong political leaders with a sense of service who “care for” and “stand for” the poor
3. respe (respect)
4. religious pluralism to allow room for ancestral and spiritual beliefs
5. cooperative work
6. access of citizens to basic social services
7. personal and collective security

[...] aid organizations have contested the first two of these: the first is seen as counter-productive to economic progress and the second as counter-productive to democratic principles.

[...] [RE: point 5:] Working in groups is part of rural life. It is accompanied by laughter, songs, jokes, games, and sometimes drinking. Collective play and performance “heat up” labor. Aid agencies often look down on what they perceive as rowdy and undisciplined behavior.

These sound like pretty good principles to me. I’d modify #2 a bit, I don’t think people need strong political leaders, but when such people assert themselves, they should definitely carry a sense of service and humility and be aware of power and consent. And the bit about play & cooperation is just priceless.

Came across these posts on feminism and the men who are rejecting negative masculinity, but questioning (and eliciting good discussion) what the alternative is. If you’re against negative masculinity, great, but what’s a replacement concept of positive masculinity?

One of my favorite responses:

This is the same kind of argument I often hear from young women who, despite fully supporting gender equality, don’t want to be “labeled” as a feminist. Which makes me wonder: Do men really lack an alternative to “toxic masculinity”? Or is it just that even these gender-conscious youths still have trouble fully identifying themselves as feminist–balking, like too many women’s rights supporters, from a conception of themselves that should be empowering? Moreover, the concept of a “feminist masculinity” seems unnecessary, and if anything detrimental, to the goal of combating sexism and homophobia in that it continues to present men and their “masculinity” in opposition to women. What if everyone just worked toward being a decent (feminist) person?

This all reminds me of John Stuart Mill’s ideas of liberty, and critiques of them. The idea being that he has important things to say about liberty, but they’re negative philosophies: “Don’t do this, don’t do that,” that define freedom as against what it isn’t. But how do you have a positive idea of freedom as an empowering, enabling force? And again, my favorite answer is basically, true freedom requires each generation to constantly renew its freedom by finding the new limits and removing them. Some would call this progress… But the point is, this means positive freedom is the struggle itself to achieve freedom. And you do this by acting positively to remove limits, which may itself be a negatively-defined thing, but the actions of doing so are positive.

Thus, if you want to be a manly, masculine male man, but reject oppressive masculinity and male hegemony, the answer is: simply be a decent human being. If you need some sort of storybook archetypical role to fit yourself into, and you’re rejecting the ones presented to you, I’d say “simply human” is a pretty good alternative

Or as another person put it, “If all the problems are due to the fact that the sexist masculine stereotype is simply an act, then not acting is actually quite an accomplishment.”

Yup. Yet another part of the constant struggle to be authentic. And I’ll take “human” over “male” any day.

I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about the way people tell stories – about themselves, about each other – to create a sense of identity and self-knowledge, to guide future actions, etc. I’ve been thinking about how these stories are continually revised, updated, reverted, and changed.

So it was with interest that I came across this post about the cultural memory of social morés. It seems David Brooks wrote some column lamenting the loss of romanticism in the “twitter age” or some such nonsense. I’d caught glimpses of Ezra Klein criticizing him, but this seems the best observation to me:

…there’s a rea­son why he called it the “Happy Days” era: the past he’s describ­ing isn’t really the past, but a 70s-era TV ver­sion of the past. Not even the past’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion of itself! For that, you’d have to see On the Water­front or read On the Road or Giovanni’s Room. It’s mem­ory as ide­ol­ogy, cre­ated (whether con­sciously or uncon­sciously) to sur­rep­ti­tiously win argu­ments about the present, espe­cially about social morés and gen­er­a­tional change.

And the Happy Days era — the real one, which was reflected in the TV show like a fun­house mir­ror — was dri­ven by tech­no­log­i­cal and social change, too! Kids had access to cars, tele­phones, TV, records and the radio, and dis­pos­able cash. Cruis­ing, malt shops, high school dances, drive-in movies, every­thing you see in Amer­i­can Graf­fiti — it might feel like part of the time­less social rit­ual now, but then, it was a rev­o­lu­tion, a set of truly rad­i­cal acts. Add the pill, civil rights, and a swelling in the ranks of col­lege stu­dents, and you’ve got fem­i­nism, counter-culture, the sex­ual rev­o­lu­tion. But in some ways, this was a post­script. The most impor­tant changes, the sub­ter­ranean ones, had all hap­pened already.

As someone who has often had an attraction to various depicted eras in theater, books, film, and television, and as someone with a renewed interest in the study of culture in general, it’s a useful insight and reminder that the way societies dream about themselves rarely represents the reality “on the ground,” so to speak. And one of the hallmarks of society since the industrial age, or perhaps slightly before, has been somewhat constant social change, combatted by regressives and curmudgeonly types of all kinds.

Much like language, sexual behaviors and courtship will be what they will be. There’s no right or wrong way. Welcome to humanity, twitter & facebook. Your time is likely short; you’d better enjoy it!

I read the linked-to story about white men not being very progressive over the weekend, but leave it to Melissa at Shakesville to articulate one of those back-of-the-head thoughts a straight white male like me had when I saw it:

I’ll be a pedant, in my usual way, and note there are, in fact, not plenty of white men with progressive views, but plenty of white men with some progressive views, and vanishingly few who regard, with the same fervor they do healthcare reform or protecting social security, the importance of social justice, and the attendant need to challenge institutional marginalization.

Which might not seem like a key tenet of progressivism to a straight white cis man, but is sure as hell does to the rest of us.

This is something important with which I agree, but feel like I took a few years off from caring enough about. Shame on me.

A commenter adds:

I think there are a lot of fauxgressive out there that recognize that progressives do more for them as members of the middle class and aren’t really interested in structural change. And so many of them are just entirely unaccustomed to having their entitlement challenged in any way shape or form. I want to follow along to the male-dominated blogs that focus on political processes- they can be reasonably influential through candidate fundraising, etc, but I’m damn fucking tired of this shit. It’s so incredibly lonely-ifying. And then they will complain about not having enough women around. Um, really?

Incidentally, after six years in the UES, something must have happened recently because I find myself seeing a lot more unselfconscious privilege and entitlement everywhere – including myself, of course. Not just in the sense where so-called self-made people are enmeshed in a web of privilege they were born to, but that’s part of it. People don’t need to do everything for themselves, but no one likes people who take more credit than they deserve, you know? And western society as a whole sometimes (always?) seems spun from a lie that says we don’t stand on the shoulders of the rest of the world, but could exist in a vacuum.

But I’ll shut up now!

Philosopher Richard Rorty believes that there is hope for America, but that today’s Left is not meeting the challenge. He contrasts the cultural, academic Left’s focus on our heritage of shame (which, he admits, has to the extent that it makes hatred intolerable had the positive effect of making America a more civil society) with the politically engaged reformist Left of the early part of this century. “The distinction between the old strategy and the new is important,” he writes. “The choice between them makes the difference between what Todd Gitlin calls common dreams and what Arthur Schlesinger calls disuniting Americans. To take pride in being black or gay is an entirely reasonable response to the sadistic humiliation to which one has been subjected. But insofar as this pride prevents someone from also taking pride in being an American citizen, from thinking of his or her country as capable of reform, or from being able to join with straights or whites in reformist initiatives, it is a political disaster.”

…Rorty claims that the Old Left was stubbornly reformist, whereas the New Left collaborates with and thereby empowers the Right by supplanting real politics with cultural issues. He urges the New Left to understand that our national character has not been settled but is still being formed.

History is not over. (Yea, I know, “duh.”)

This jives a little with something else I’ve been thinking about lately. Part of it has to do with feeling tired of activism and issues and movements. Part of it has to do with the tribalism of every day life (sci-fi geeks, music geeks, food geeks, business geeks) and how I have always felt tribeless, detached from the general culture fray and all its little cultural pockets. (Perhaps why Data was always my favorite Star Trek character and Anthropology was, in the end, truly the best major for me).

I’m tired of it all and starting to feel the best thing for me to do is to embrace my tribelessness and just live my little thread of life. To meet and interact with other people on equal, human terms. To always work to be aware of and whittle away at untempered consumerism, kyriarchy, rape culture, sexism, racism, etc. In my daily life.

I’m tired of ambition and politics and issues. I want to just live, be human, and treat others well. To absorb and share knowledge. Doesn’t anyone else want to do that anymore?

I want to escape culture and start from scratch. Oh well.