I received a rather interesting alert, on a troubling topic, upon my return from the last of my finals, and so, kindly from Spilt Milk, via Anomic Entropy, a friend of mine and sister; the unkindly tale of another man puttering along in the footsteps of Julian Assange. For the delicate of ears, I will avoid going into much detail of this kind of assault, or offense. Suffice to say that Michael Moore is quite willing to forgive the serious crimes of patriarchal arrogance and the narcissistic supremacy personality which Julian Assange possesses, and indeed make light of the entire situation.
In doing this, of course, he slanders some of the most prominent feminists and anti-war activists in Sweden, and for those who may think, "well, they are likely of the extreme left anyway", let us consider the simple old tale, oft-repeated in many cultures, of the boast of great Kings, such as to make their land safe for a woman to walk from end to end naked carrying a bag of gold. The circumstances of the victim of a wrong are irrelevant, and are always irrelevant, and shall always be irrelevant. The corollary to that, after all, is what is a woman doing walking from one end of the country to another nude while carrying such valuables? The answer is that itself is part of the point: No matter what someone does or who they are, the law must be evenly applied. This is the actual rationale of hate crimes legislation, for that matter; all it does is transfer jurisdiction to the federal courts so that the bias of local courts, with narrower values and greater likelihood for personal involvement in a case, can be eliminated from the consideration. All so that the absolute principle of justice be upheld.
As an extension, though, it shows that the male's respect for his female ideological counterparts is virtually nonexistant. Homosexual men despise homosexual women in many cases, and black women had not inconsiderable difficulties in rising to any kind of power in the civil rights movement. This general maxim continues, that even when an ideology espouses gender equality, men are not really interested in adhering to it, and will tend, no matter how notionally enlightened, to see the women around them as their inferiors or toys.
In the case of Michael Moore, a loathesome individual in all respects, his shamelessness in the advance of his ideological cause which is revealed in his documentaries is also present in his misogynist inclinations. As he has no respect for the truth, he has no respect for even his own beliefs. This is rather the point of Julian Assange, however: As I have observed, the man acts out of a desire for fame, a daring joust to write his name on the books of history... He is basically narcissistic, and he enables countless defenders, precisely because those men wish they had the courage to act out their own narcissistic fantasies. And inevitably in the time of man bound up in this "I against the world" mythos, which extends to the left as well as to the notionally more anti-collectivist right, but is found primarily in men (and is why Ayn Rand so viciously hated her own sex, and despised lesbians as natural communists, but more on that another time).
It is, in this case, what leads to the rape defence. The ideal heroic Lone Man reduces women to props in his view of the world, because the entire world is just props in his ideology. This means, of course, that men like Michael Moore who don't have the courage to really break the law or confront the authorities to push their ideological agendas, lust as much over the power of objectification that Assange has gained over the world by resisting punishment for his crimes for so long, as much as they lust over the narcissistic feeling of power and totality of control he has displayed. The possession and control of the women around such a man are naturally part of his self-imagined apotheosis of total objectification, and proceeds accordingly. It therefore suffices to say that Michael Moore has merely made clear that he wishes he had the "courage" and perfect levels of self-absorption which would allow him, too, to rape women and yet be surrounded by defenders. He does not, and all he can do is defend the man who represents his ideal.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The Final Act of Julian Assange.
And, for those who may have doubted my points on the affair, the last act of Julian Assange. Fox is a less than reliable source, but so is all modern media. Let it suffice to say that Assange intends to release uncensored versions of the previously released documents. Wikileaks censored the documents only to protect innocent people from violent retaliation, by their own claims. This means that they are threatening to get innocent people murdered if they are shut down.
The manipulating Alcibiades of the world's latest Utopian movement, indeed; the first recourse in bloodshed to advance such dreams is always the innocent. Just like Marat and Robespierre, Dzerzhinsky and Lenin, it is the fools and the desperate innocents who must be killed first, and Assange intends to create his own butcher's tally, there is no other way to interpret this. His true colours fly, and as usual this Maid feels like a bit of a Cassandra, even faster than usual: It took only a day for the comparison to be proved out by empirical evidence, and only regret can be felt at the fact that this latest utopian cause will begin spelling blood, for all that it was very predictable.
The manipulating Alcibiades of the world's latest Utopian movement, indeed; the first recourse in bloodshed to advance such dreams is always the innocent. Just like Marat and Robespierre, Dzerzhinsky and Lenin, it is the fools and the desperate innocents who must be killed first, and Assange intends to create his own butcher's tally, there is no other way to interpret this. His true colours fly, and as usual this Maid feels like a bit of a Cassandra, even faster than usual: It took only a day for the comparison to be proved out by empirical evidence, and only regret can be felt at the fact that this latest utopian cause will begin spelling blood, for all that it was very predictable.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
As usual when I make assumptions... (A few more thoughts on Mr. Assange)
..I find them liable to be subverted. In this case it is with a small excess of free time, scanning files into the computer for class and not really having to do anything else. Tomorrow the effort resumes--the mental capabilities required of the engineer could be rightfully terrifying to the laywoman--though I am by no means particularly skilled at my field, and not in comparison to men, either. A young friend of mine of Ashkenazi extraction quite exceeds me in intellectual capability for this field of applied science, and more credit to her. Art was doubtless my real calling, but the world proved brutal enough to make me focus on more practical things.
While my prior post on Julian Assange focused on the issue of the legitimacy of rape in patriarchal society (to put it very bluntly), accepted by all but acted out by those with power, there is another issue less connected to feminist matters which needs to be addressed, that of state secrets. I had already implied there was a real threat of damage from what the Wikileaks organisation had released by the comparison to the Ems Telegram, and this was no mistake. Power critiques of the world tend to suggest that power being held in any hands is inherently a bad thing, but of course, this ignores both human nature (and that is the nature of women as well as men) and the nature of social interactions in general. It would generally be considered an absurdity if it were a requirement of law that car companies explain in detail to their customers how the engine of their automobile works.
Diagrams of an idealised air cycle version of the Otto cycle could be provided with relative ease, but these can be barely understood by a woman with knowledge of a year and a half of the calculus and introductory differential equations. To attempt to explain the details to someone of lesser learning and capability would be to confuse them. How is this not the same in the political sphere? Leftists decry with horror the coming of the generation of Sarah Palin, but what is she other than the natural expression of an egalitarian society? What is other than the folksy representative of a people convinced by decades of propaganda that all individuals are created equal? For, in absolute terms, the intelligence of some is greater than the intelligence of others. Some women are born with crippling illnesses which disable them or make them sterile; they are still humans and still women, but they do not have the same capabilities as the mean of the female population. To accept them with compassion is a spiritual duty which stands in proud contrast to the application of Darwinian principles to human society, but to treat them as the equals of their sisters is to dishonour everyone involved with the charade.
A commoner is not a Queen, and a farmer is not a diplomat. People should strive to make the best of their abilities rather than be deluded into thinking that the whole of human achievement is open to them; not merely false, it is also viciously cruel to tell a mentally retarded child that he could become President someday, and yet this is veritably what happens in our system of egalitarianism.
In short, the application of specialized knowledge tends to require specialized people. When the average American cannot place Korea on a map (and why would they need to, so what dishonour is there in that?), why should they know of our secret discussions with the People's Republic of China on matters of the security and future of the Korean peninsula? The answer is that they should not, for attempts to apply the knowledge of their own lives to the situation will lead only to misunderstanding. Sarah Palin cannot even keep track of which of the Koreas is our ally, so what possible use would it be for her to know the details of the State Department cables that Assange leaked? There is none.
Asking average people to make day-to-day strategic policy decisions for states is exquisitely dangerous. The Athenians learned this with the immensely ill-fated Syracuse expedition, and the United States is starting to understand it as well as the opinion poll and folk revolts against establishment political parties brings the responsiveness of politicians to the demagogues of the modern era (Limbaugh, Beck, etc) to the same level as that of the Athenian people to the demagogues of their own era and State. The purpose of the Republican system was to allow the people to choose, through a careful product in which the men (and when the system was formulated it was very much only men) are winnowed down to a few candidates for each office, and the people are asked to select the one who will best represent their interests and serve the common welfare of their nation. In time, however, all the restrictions on their selection have slipped away from the republics, and with them came their decline. We must at least place good people before the voters, and this is no longer happening.
In the same way, Assange represents this populist edge: He is offering people the power to be involved in the secret, day-to-day operations of the state. He represents the internet-based ideology of Wikipedia: That Direct Democracy, "anyone can edit", will allow for the vast expansion of knowledge and the breakdown of traditional government. A sort of libertarian utopia of internet direct democracy will ensue. In doing so, however, he guarantees only that Alcibiades' ghost will find purchase in the American Republic as the man himself did in Athens.
The simple fact is that the average person engages in conservation of intelligence. They avoid seeking to impose upon their minds knowledge in excess of what they believe they need for a comfortable existence. They do not need to know secrets of governments, not because they could be harmed by them or because ignorance is bliss, but due to the bitter fact that if given this knowledge and the attendant power, they will interpret it through the lens of their own conserved intelligence, and accordingly come to simplistic dichotomies of the issue which will lead to the unstable decision-making which brought about the fall of the Athenian Thassalocracy. Mandating that they learn, however, is a distinctly evil state imposition. If they are successful with their present level of knowledge, and happy, they have no motivation to learn, and the lives of people should not forced to further conformity. Rather it should be simply accepted that the business of the common person in government is limited strictly to that involvement required to clearly communicate their basic needs and appeal that they be met.
Assange and his ilk are Utopians who bring a visiion of the world exactly like that of the Utopia of Marx, and potentially to be just as thoroughly drenched in blood. It will be based on the assumption that people inherently crave knowledge, which is inherently false--the desire to continuously learn must be inbred at a very young age--in the same way that the Goodness of humanity when freed of capitalism was the erroneous basis of Marxian doctrine and led to the horrors of Bolshevik Russia. Since people do not, in fact, desire to learn without their personalities being shaped by their parents in such a way, they will respond to this power in the worst possible way, and hand it through their own unconcerned ignorance to those who would do evil with it. This has been and will be the fate of all Utopias, and Assange and Wikileaks are the warning gun that a new Utopian ideology to replace the Marxian doctrines of the 20th century is now upon us, as the endlessly reoccurring ulcer of rationalist society.
While my prior post on Julian Assange focused on the issue of the legitimacy of rape in patriarchal society (to put it very bluntly), accepted by all but acted out by those with power, there is another issue less connected to feminist matters which needs to be addressed, that of state secrets. I had already implied there was a real threat of damage from what the Wikileaks organisation had released by the comparison to the Ems Telegram, and this was no mistake. Power critiques of the world tend to suggest that power being held in any hands is inherently a bad thing, but of course, this ignores both human nature (and that is the nature of women as well as men) and the nature of social interactions in general. It would generally be considered an absurdity if it were a requirement of law that car companies explain in detail to their customers how the engine of their automobile works.
Diagrams of an idealised air cycle version of the Otto cycle could be provided with relative ease, but these can be barely understood by a woman with knowledge of a year and a half of the calculus and introductory differential equations. To attempt to explain the details to someone of lesser learning and capability would be to confuse them. How is this not the same in the political sphere? Leftists decry with horror the coming of the generation of Sarah Palin, but what is she other than the natural expression of an egalitarian society? What is other than the folksy representative of a people convinced by decades of propaganda that all individuals are created equal? For, in absolute terms, the intelligence of some is greater than the intelligence of others. Some women are born with crippling illnesses which disable them or make them sterile; they are still humans and still women, but they do not have the same capabilities as the mean of the female population. To accept them with compassion is a spiritual duty which stands in proud contrast to the application of Darwinian principles to human society, but to treat them as the equals of their sisters is to dishonour everyone involved with the charade.
A commoner is not a Queen, and a farmer is not a diplomat. People should strive to make the best of their abilities rather than be deluded into thinking that the whole of human achievement is open to them; not merely false, it is also viciously cruel to tell a mentally retarded child that he could become President someday, and yet this is veritably what happens in our system of egalitarianism.
In short, the application of specialized knowledge tends to require specialized people. When the average American cannot place Korea on a map (and why would they need to, so what dishonour is there in that?), why should they know of our secret discussions with the People's Republic of China on matters of the security and future of the Korean peninsula? The answer is that they should not, for attempts to apply the knowledge of their own lives to the situation will lead only to misunderstanding. Sarah Palin cannot even keep track of which of the Koreas is our ally, so what possible use would it be for her to know the details of the State Department cables that Assange leaked? There is none.
Asking average people to make day-to-day strategic policy decisions for states is exquisitely dangerous. The Athenians learned this with the immensely ill-fated Syracuse expedition, and the United States is starting to understand it as well as the opinion poll and folk revolts against establishment political parties brings the responsiveness of politicians to the demagogues of the modern era (Limbaugh, Beck, etc) to the same level as that of the Athenian people to the demagogues of their own era and State. The purpose of the Republican system was to allow the people to choose, through a careful product in which the men (and when the system was formulated it was very much only men) are winnowed down to a few candidates for each office, and the people are asked to select the one who will best represent their interests and serve the common welfare of their nation. In time, however, all the restrictions on their selection have slipped away from the republics, and with them came their decline. We must at least place good people before the voters, and this is no longer happening.
In the same way, Assange represents this populist edge: He is offering people the power to be involved in the secret, day-to-day operations of the state. He represents the internet-based ideology of Wikipedia: That Direct Democracy, "anyone can edit", will allow for the vast expansion of knowledge and the breakdown of traditional government. A sort of libertarian utopia of internet direct democracy will ensue. In doing so, however, he guarantees only that Alcibiades' ghost will find purchase in the American Republic as the man himself did in Athens.
The simple fact is that the average person engages in conservation of intelligence. They avoid seeking to impose upon their minds knowledge in excess of what they believe they need for a comfortable existence. They do not need to know secrets of governments, not because they could be harmed by them or because ignorance is bliss, but due to the bitter fact that if given this knowledge and the attendant power, they will interpret it through the lens of their own conserved intelligence, and accordingly come to simplistic dichotomies of the issue which will lead to the unstable decision-making which brought about the fall of the Athenian Thassalocracy. Mandating that they learn, however, is a distinctly evil state imposition. If they are successful with their present level of knowledge, and happy, they have no motivation to learn, and the lives of people should not forced to further conformity. Rather it should be simply accepted that the business of the common person in government is limited strictly to that involvement required to clearly communicate their basic needs and appeal that they be met.
Assange and his ilk are Utopians who bring a visiion of the world exactly like that of the Utopia of Marx, and potentially to be just as thoroughly drenched in blood. It will be based on the assumption that people inherently crave knowledge, which is inherently false--the desire to continuously learn must be inbred at a very young age--in the same way that the Goodness of humanity when freed of capitalism was the erroneous basis of Marxian doctrine and led to the horrors of Bolshevik Russia. Since people do not, in fact, desire to learn without their personalities being shaped by their parents in such a way, they will respond to this power in the worst possible way, and hand it through their own unconcerned ignorance to those who would do evil with it. This has been and will be the fate of all Utopias, and Assange and Wikileaks are the warning gun that a new Utopian ideology to replace the Marxian doctrines of the 20th century is now upon us, as the endlessly reoccurring ulcer of rationalist society.
Friday, December 3, 2010
A few last reflections for the next fortnight.
I started this project needing to write much, having had little time to do so with my studies being so utterly all-consuming of late. I must return to them tomorrow, and seek my sleep now. Still, some important things have been written and I may hope they are read and understood with the meanings which I have desired to impart: Sometimes the understanding of my words seems much less clear to others, which I do so regret.
For the moment, then, the last point I would wish to make is in reference to the title. The Massagetae, the tribe of which Tomyris was Queen, defeated the Persian Army of Cyrus--and killed the Shah of Shahs who founded the Achaemenid Empire--with the open plains tactics which would characterize many of the peoples who had strong women in their numbers in the Central Asian plains. I, too, am of a heritage grown up in that region of the world, though a much later one, best exemplified thus:
And so it is finding myself with very, very few myths and legends of women that we can take pride in, that I find myself with the need to provide some for my daughters. That this accomplishment should be undertaken responsibility will necessarily mean the work of many decades, probably only culminating in my retirement. The subject is already clear--the Thassalocracy of the Minoans in which women appear to have been equal to men, and whose stories we will not know short of the translation of Linear A--but the mental maturity and time to commit to the effort will be a long time coming.
Until then, the stories of brave warrior Queens of old, and especially of Tomyris who dispatched Cyrus honourably for the rather treacherous provision of the Massagetae with strong drink (which t'would have been quite hopeless against these Cossack women!) are the legends in which we must take pride and teach to our daughters, and the myths we must discern from the older stories of the Goddesses, of India, the west, and all the world, before they were shackled by men or swamped under the tide of Christendom. In this little task, I am surely more confident, for the motivation of imparting wisdom in one's young is a mercifully strong one, indeed.
For the moment, then, the last point I would wish to make is in reference to the title. The Massagetae, the tribe of which Tomyris was Queen, defeated the Persian Army of Cyrus--and killed the Shah of Shahs who founded the Achaemenid Empire--with the open plains tactics which would characterize many of the peoples who had strong women in their numbers in the Central Asian plains. I, too, am of a heritage grown up in that region of the world, though a much later one, best exemplified thus:
Until then, the stories of brave warrior Queens of old, and especially of Tomyris who dispatched Cyrus honourably for the rather treacherous provision of the Massagetae with strong drink (which t'would have been quite hopeless against these Cossack women!) are the legends in which we must take pride and teach to our daughters, and the myths we must discern from the older stories of the Goddesses, of India, the west, and all the world, before they were shackled by men or swamped under the tide of Christendom. In this little task, I am surely more confident, for the motivation of imparting wisdom in one's young is a mercifully strong one, indeed.
The Liberation of Being Modest.
Now to consider a delicate, and more explicitly feminist, subject. There are traditionally in feminism two schools, as the professor of the sole Women's Studies class I ever bothered to take kindly and wisely put it: Those who are against the sexual act, and those who are comfortable with it. But from thesis and antithesis comes, ideally, synthesis. Is it possible to find redeeming aspects to a view which straddles both these points?
Well, perhaps. I am personally an intensely modest person, rarely finding it appropriate to venture outside in clothing which does not cover me to the neck, and prefering to actually dress; skirts, long dusters, brocaded blouses with silver buttons and these sorts of things. I do not have the wardrobe I'd prefer to be truly proper, but I do frequently surprise people at school by changing between classes when I drop home for lunch, as something different usually seems appropriate for the afternoon over the morning. I shall leave it to Aristasians to critique the nature of modern public dress which leads me to such preferences and sentiments, though I warn that I do not agree with their opinions on language. We cannot ask soldiers, workers, sailors, and other sorts of professions to behave according to the strictures of high society, which is why we have social classes (or should have them), and class spheres, in which different things are appropriate according to setting, and these rules are enforced to create standards of etiquette appropriate to each circumstance. To use the most extreme circumstance: If one is trying to get an artillery caisson out of the mud whilst under a barrage of shrapnel, four letter words are appropriate.
This is however a slight tangent from the principle point, though modesty certainly involves comportment as well as dress. I have never cringed harder in my life than to hear someone, first berate another for an innocent mistake in a fine Japanese restaurant south of Seattle, and then hear the berated person reply with obscenities out of his embarassment at the error. The criticism was uncalled for in public, and should have been handled after dinner; the language in public was utterly horrifying, especially in a place regularly frequented by the local Japanese community where decorum was at a considerable premium. I rather wished to flee, but that would have also been indecorous, by calling further attention to the altercation, so I had only to wait with my cheeks red until enough time had passed that I could excuse myself to the lady's room and compose myself.
Modesty in dress, however, is something important. It is also something which does not speak on sexuality. That is to say, that the anti-sex aspect of feminism is flawed because it assaults sexuality with a very broad brush. The sacrosanct of the female sexuality should be celebrated; erotica is not inappropriate, as the Greeks and Romans well understood, and the Hindi a thousand times moreso. Your body, as a Maid, is a powerful temple to the Goddess and should not be neglected as such; it is a place of power and in the sacred prostitution of old Mesopotamia and of more modern customs was recognized and, even in the Patriarchy, respected as such to at least some small measure. This power should be celebrated, and exercised according to the directions of the restrictions of your class and circumstance, to bring pleasure and joy and health to your partners, and in consort with men, the creation of new life. In the sexuality of a woman's body is a supreme level of power that she ought be trained in both using and controlling, for liberation implies the power to engage in self-discipline.
The liberated woman certainly ought know control, and one of the foremost reasons for it is the way that the driving forces of the patriarchy will tend to pervert sexuality. Observe, for example, modern business clothes for women--they are whorish, without reservation--and they serve only to objectify working women. One wonders what the point of working is when so objectified, and the Honourable Secretary of State's wearing of a pantsuit was a blessed relief, but only because it is better to wear even a dumpy Mao suit as in cultural revolution China than to be restricted into a skirt which offers neither free movement for practicality nor any kind of modesty, which at once constrains the physical body... And shows it off to the consuming eyes of they who control you.
This does call, therefore, for a certain resumption of modesty, a fight against the idea of the "third wave" feminist that liberation will be had in dressing like men. Casual dress on similar standards to men, does nothing at all in terms of advancing women's liberation when business dressing standards forbid it (and ignoring for the moment the debasement of modern casual dress for both males and females). Therefore, beyond seeking to dress modestly in casual dress, to refudiate the idea that the woman must be obscured into the modern casual clothes of the man, we may also seek to assault the sexual objectification of the woman in the business dress culture.
Here, we may indulge in imagining the dress of a truly proper and liberated businesswoman to be a skirt of length below the knees, either A-frame or with a suitable kick-pleat for free movement, with stockings covering the knees and heels of a half inch or inch at the very most, flat and stable for walking, to reject the idea that women must be limited to areas of business where customary formal business dress makes their presence impracticable. Ideally the business dress of a woman will serve an engineer in the field just as well as a secretary, with a few modifications (boots, for instance). The purse should be long-strapped and worn across the shoulder as this is a practical concession against theft, and it may well be carrying important identification cards in the modern secured workplace. An under-bodice or similar unribbed garment, demi-corset at most, might be well suitable for toning, with a button-up blouse modestly concealing the décollage, obviously, for work should be a professional place, and hair generally pulled back, but some free draping allowed to the sides, or else in a more typical style, and the blouse perhaps covered by a vest as well worked in below the long coat.
These general rules are but an indulgent description of an ideal which is intended to contrast the tight, short pencil-skirt, gauzy nylons, and high heels of the modern woman's business suit, a request for you to imagine the differences. The woman so dressed can run, whereas the modern business suit does not permit it. The woman so dressed conceals her body in the workplace, where she is procuring money for her household.She is thus left with the freedom to choose her own dress on time which is her own, and to bring to work only that which she needs to accomplish her job in a competent fashion. One cannot say that women are liberated in the workplace until it is the norm for them to be able to wear exactly the same amount of concealing clothing as men wear, because they have even more reason for it, while still adhering to standards of beauty and elegance.
Who then could really say that dress codes changing in the past forty years have done anything positive at all for women, when the average Maid is still required to wear objectifying clothing to work? There is certainly power to be had in modesty in the right circumstance, in the same way that the raw power of female sexuality may be channeled into incredibly healthy and productive expressions in its own time as well. Truly of the Christian Bible the truest verse remains: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven". The leftist feminist literati at times seems to have done very little to address the continued sexual exploitation of the professional woman in modern corporate culture, and it is here that a stand against social convention could actually do some good.
Well, perhaps. I am personally an intensely modest person, rarely finding it appropriate to venture outside in clothing which does not cover me to the neck, and prefering to actually dress; skirts, long dusters, brocaded blouses with silver buttons and these sorts of things. I do not have the wardrobe I'd prefer to be truly proper, but I do frequently surprise people at school by changing between classes when I drop home for lunch, as something different usually seems appropriate for the afternoon over the morning. I shall leave it to Aristasians to critique the nature of modern public dress which leads me to such preferences and sentiments, though I warn that I do not agree with their opinions on language. We cannot ask soldiers, workers, sailors, and other sorts of professions to behave according to the strictures of high society, which is why we have social classes (or should have them), and class spheres, in which different things are appropriate according to setting, and these rules are enforced to create standards of etiquette appropriate to each circumstance. To use the most extreme circumstance: If one is trying to get an artillery caisson out of the mud whilst under a barrage of shrapnel, four letter words are appropriate.
This is however a slight tangent from the principle point, though modesty certainly involves comportment as well as dress. I have never cringed harder in my life than to hear someone, first berate another for an innocent mistake in a fine Japanese restaurant south of Seattle, and then hear the berated person reply with obscenities out of his embarassment at the error. The criticism was uncalled for in public, and should have been handled after dinner; the language in public was utterly horrifying, especially in a place regularly frequented by the local Japanese community where decorum was at a considerable premium. I rather wished to flee, but that would have also been indecorous, by calling further attention to the altercation, so I had only to wait with my cheeks red until enough time had passed that I could excuse myself to the lady's room and compose myself.
Modesty in dress, however, is something important. It is also something which does not speak on sexuality. That is to say, that the anti-sex aspect of feminism is flawed because it assaults sexuality with a very broad brush. The sacrosanct of the female sexuality should be celebrated; erotica is not inappropriate, as the Greeks and Romans well understood, and the Hindi a thousand times moreso. Your body, as a Maid, is a powerful temple to the Goddess and should not be neglected as such; it is a place of power and in the sacred prostitution of old Mesopotamia and of more modern customs was recognized and, even in the Patriarchy, respected as such to at least some small measure. This power should be celebrated, and exercised according to the directions of the restrictions of your class and circumstance, to bring pleasure and joy and health to your partners, and in consort with men, the creation of new life. In the sexuality of a woman's body is a supreme level of power that she ought be trained in both using and controlling, for liberation implies the power to engage in self-discipline.
The liberated woman certainly ought know control, and one of the foremost reasons for it is the way that the driving forces of the patriarchy will tend to pervert sexuality. Observe, for example, modern business clothes for women--they are whorish, without reservation--and they serve only to objectify working women. One wonders what the point of working is when so objectified, and the Honourable Secretary of State's wearing of a pantsuit was a blessed relief, but only because it is better to wear even a dumpy Mao suit as in cultural revolution China than to be restricted into a skirt which offers neither free movement for practicality nor any kind of modesty, which at once constrains the physical body... And shows it off to the consuming eyes of they who control you.
This does call, therefore, for a certain resumption of modesty, a fight against the idea of the "third wave" feminist that liberation will be had in dressing like men. Casual dress on similar standards to men, does nothing at all in terms of advancing women's liberation when business dressing standards forbid it (and ignoring for the moment the debasement of modern casual dress for both males and females). Therefore, beyond seeking to dress modestly in casual dress, to refudiate the idea that the woman must be obscured into the modern casual clothes of the man, we may also seek to assault the sexual objectification of the woman in the business dress culture.
Here, we may indulge in imagining the dress of a truly proper and liberated businesswoman to be a skirt of length below the knees, either A-frame or with a suitable kick-pleat for free movement, with stockings covering the knees and heels of a half inch or inch at the very most, flat and stable for walking, to reject the idea that women must be limited to areas of business where customary formal business dress makes their presence impracticable. Ideally the business dress of a woman will serve an engineer in the field just as well as a secretary, with a few modifications (boots, for instance). The purse should be long-strapped and worn across the shoulder as this is a practical concession against theft, and it may well be carrying important identification cards in the modern secured workplace. An under-bodice or similar unribbed garment, demi-corset at most, might be well suitable for toning, with a button-up blouse modestly concealing the décollage, obviously, for work should be a professional place, and hair generally pulled back, but some free draping allowed to the sides, or else in a more typical style, and the blouse perhaps covered by a vest as well worked in below the long coat.
These general rules are but an indulgent description of an ideal which is intended to contrast the tight, short pencil-skirt, gauzy nylons, and high heels of the modern woman's business suit, a request for you to imagine the differences. The woman so dressed can run, whereas the modern business suit does not permit it. The woman so dressed conceals her body in the workplace, where she is procuring money for her household.She is thus left with the freedom to choose her own dress on time which is her own, and to bring to work only that which she needs to accomplish her job in a competent fashion. One cannot say that women are liberated in the workplace until it is the norm for them to be able to wear exactly the same amount of concealing clothing as men wear, because they have even more reason for it, while still adhering to standards of beauty and elegance.
Who then could really say that dress codes changing in the past forty years have done anything positive at all for women, when the average Maid is still required to wear objectifying clothing to work? There is certainly power to be had in modesty in the right circumstance, in the same way that the raw power of female sexuality may be channeled into incredibly healthy and productive expressions in its own time as well. Truly of the Christian Bible the truest verse remains: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven". The leftist feminist literati at times seems to have done very little to address the continued sexual exploitation of the professional woman in modern corporate culture, and it is here that a stand against social convention could actually do some good.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
What use the spirit?
This is one of the greatest problems of modern society--spirituality. I consider myself to be rather deeply spiritual and a bit superstitious, though much less of the later, because spirituality is generally more compatible with philosophy and I try to honour spirits without holding in myself beliefs about various activities which directly contradict science. This sort of detached spirituality is likely related to my profession of engineering. On the other hand, engineers, who I prefer to refer to as applied scientists, are the most religious of the scientific professions. I suspect this is a degree of self-selection; I chose engineering because I want to see my accomplishments before my eyes, because I want to have a constructive feeling most especially of contributing to the world in which my chiildren live, and then of course due to the very practical fact that engineering professionals are the only real people with stable careers in the modern United States. Cascadia is too subject to the whims of the US government--I am a Cascadian nationalist--and therefore cannot institute the worker protections it otherwise might be able to pursue. This means I chose the most stable career constantly because it allows me to protect and nurture children most effectively.
Modern religion, however, is not something very conductive to spirituality. The temple of the Mega-Church has overcome any kind of older traditions, and Vatican II gutted the ritual and ceremony of American Catholicism. I was, personally, raised in Orthodoxy and the Orthodox tradition was an eye-opening exposure to a genuine spirituality which left me deeply at odds with my parents' later meddling in protestantism, for long reasons I shall not relate. I could see the pointlessness of the religion even as a very young child, and my heart ached for the Marine tradition of the Theotokos (God-Bearer, for those increase numbers of disadvantaged to whom the modern schools have denied knowledge of the Greek Tongue), of that little remnant of female spirituality which protestantism crushes entirely which I was fortunate enough to spend the first few years of my thinking life with. My ultimate reaction to that dreadful hollowness of Protestantism was in adulthood a gyration between atheism and paganism which settled down to a comfortable acknowledgement of a distant sort of polytheistic paganism. I will trust that the Goddesses shall forgive me for the lack of passion in my faith, and carry on thusly in life.
Few people in this country are so privileged. Modern American spirituality, and to a large extent that of the British Commonwealth and Europe as well, is a fundamentally bankrupt experience. This is far worse than the moral bankruptcy of the modern Russian Orthodox Church, as a creature of the state security apparatus. This is about the spiritual bankruptcy of western Christendom, because it is possible for a religious organization to be at once morally bankrupt and spiritually redemptive, or a moral voice and spiritually bankrupt. The Catholic Church mostly sustained the later position until the hammer-blows of the priestly paedophilia scandals of late. Protestantism shed any kind of connection with the spiritual almost from its creation. It has been the enabling engine of global capitalism ever since, and with more and more terrifying rapidity it has reached a point where it serves as nothing more than the temple order of a capitalist society.
It is this organisation of Jesus-promotes-wealth (the most contemptible lie ever proclaimed in the entire Universe from here unto Domesday) which is the ultimate purveyor of spiritual bankruptcy. Gone, gone, is the sublime of the Pythia, of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, of even the divine wonder of old gold and jewel encrusted Icons of the Theotokos. Now we have a man, stnading in a room which is often used as a basketball court on other days of the week, preaching a doctrine of adherence to a set of moral principles in which we are supposed to believe... Because God told us to. The redemptive power of spirituality is completely lost. The point of those rules--to enable the rituals of supernatural force which save and ennoble the human spirit--is missing, and thus any kind of validity to the pronounced doctrine has ceased to exist.
It is in this environment that Gentlemen of Letters and Sciences rightfully proclaim that religion is unnecessary, that we have no need for it, that it is a false and harmful doctrine which holds back society. All of this is true about modern western Christendom, and not in a single way false, at least, when applied specifically to that peculiar doctrine. And indeed, where is Domesday? The End Times were never supposed to be something terrifying, and were something that Christendom dwelt extensively on as an escape from a flawed world. It was imperfect, but it was spiritual. Now, however, the doctrine assures that tithing and obeying these moral commandments will result in wealth and prosperity on this earth, which is a service to the modern corporate culture. Once, Christendom promised only torment and death on this Earth, while holding forth the banner of hope, of spiritual power and redemption, in the eternal award of the Initiates to the Faith. Now, the power of the beauty of Iconography, of the sacred mysteries, of the chanting of priests and swinging of censers which was shared with the worship of the Goddess at Ephesus, is no more, and we listen to the pronouncements of the Chief Officer of the Country Club in how a few ancient doctrines, ripped from their spiritual foundings, shall provide for us on Earth and provide some sort of spiritual award reduced to a vague feeling of happiness and watered down from an understanding of the transcendence of the human spirit.
In this sort of world, it is only perfectly fair that atheism prospers, and that I support the propounders of the atheist doctrines, for when this hollow brand of religion which does nothing for its adherents slews away like rotten flesh, we may hope that a more genuine spirituality will take root in its place. This is one which necessarily is, in all the panoply and confusion and grandeur of how such systems operate in practice, nonetheless fully able to communicate spirituality to the people through art. For as Schopenhauer realized in the mysticism of the Buddhist east and customs of India, and expounded as filtered through the philosophical lens, art is the only way for the common person to reach enlightenment. Art was the business of the ancient church, and of the faiths of the mystery cults and the Mother Goddesses. Art was the connection of enlightenment with the common person, and the conduit through which their spirituality could fill the fundamental psychological void of the human existence: That we are both self-aware and mortal.
Until then, we must support the atheists, for they till the sod under, that we might hope that in their wake, seeds of a new and genuine spirituality founded in the old knowledge and comfort of the Mother Goddesses may take root in the West and make good some of the psychological damage caused by the absence of any nurturing promise against this terrible realization of chronologically limited self-awareness. Their interests and mine furthermore may very well not diverge within my lifetime, so my beliefs become a matter for family, and rationalism as something to propound, for the most part, in public. This may thus be the rather complex summary of my feelings on the subject of religion, spirituality, and the modern atheist movement to which so many of my dearest friends and confidantes adhere.
Modern religion, however, is not something very conductive to spirituality. The temple of the Mega-Church has overcome any kind of older traditions, and Vatican II gutted the ritual and ceremony of American Catholicism. I was, personally, raised in Orthodoxy and the Orthodox tradition was an eye-opening exposure to a genuine spirituality which left me deeply at odds with my parents' later meddling in protestantism, for long reasons I shall not relate. I could see the pointlessness of the religion even as a very young child, and my heart ached for the Marine tradition of the Theotokos (God-Bearer, for those increase numbers of disadvantaged to whom the modern schools have denied knowledge of the Greek Tongue), of that little remnant of female spirituality which protestantism crushes entirely which I was fortunate enough to spend the first few years of my thinking life with. My ultimate reaction to that dreadful hollowness of Protestantism was in adulthood a gyration between atheism and paganism which settled down to a comfortable acknowledgement of a distant sort of polytheistic paganism. I will trust that the Goddesses shall forgive me for the lack of passion in my faith, and carry on thusly in life.
Few people in this country are so privileged. Modern American spirituality, and to a large extent that of the British Commonwealth and Europe as well, is a fundamentally bankrupt experience. This is far worse than the moral bankruptcy of the modern Russian Orthodox Church, as a creature of the state security apparatus. This is about the spiritual bankruptcy of western Christendom, because it is possible for a religious organization to be at once morally bankrupt and spiritually redemptive, or a moral voice and spiritually bankrupt. The Catholic Church mostly sustained the later position until the hammer-blows of the priestly paedophilia scandals of late. Protestantism shed any kind of connection with the spiritual almost from its creation. It has been the enabling engine of global capitalism ever since, and with more and more terrifying rapidity it has reached a point where it serves as nothing more than the temple order of a capitalist society.
It is this organisation of Jesus-promotes-wealth (the most contemptible lie ever proclaimed in the entire Universe from here unto Domesday) which is the ultimate purveyor of spiritual bankruptcy. Gone, gone, is the sublime of the Pythia, of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, of even the divine wonder of old gold and jewel encrusted Icons of the Theotokos. Now we have a man, stnading in a room which is often used as a basketball court on other days of the week, preaching a doctrine of adherence to a set of moral principles in which we are supposed to believe... Because God told us to. The redemptive power of spirituality is completely lost. The point of those rules--to enable the rituals of supernatural force which save and ennoble the human spirit--is missing, and thus any kind of validity to the pronounced doctrine has ceased to exist.
It is in this environment that Gentlemen of Letters and Sciences rightfully proclaim that religion is unnecessary, that we have no need for it, that it is a false and harmful doctrine which holds back society. All of this is true about modern western Christendom, and not in a single way false, at least, when applied specifically to that peculiar doctrine. And indeed, where is Domesday? The End Times were never supposed to be something terrifying, and were something that Christendom dwelt extensively on as an escape from a flawed world. It was imperfect, but it was spiritual. Now, however, the doctrine assures that tithing and obeying these moral commandments will result in wealth and prosperity on this earth, which is a service to the modern corporate culture. Once, Christendom promised only torment and death on this Earth, while holding forth the banner of hope, of spiritual power and redemption, in the eternal award of the Initiates to the Faith. Now, the power of the beauty of Iconography, of the sacred mysteries, of the chanting of priests and swinging of censers which was shared with the worship of the Goddess at Ephesus, is no more, and we listen to the pronouncements of the Chief Officer of the Country Club in how a few ancient doctrines, ripped from their spiritual foundings, shall provide for us on Earth and provide some sort of spiritual award reduced to a vague feeling of happiness and watered down from an understanding of the transcendence of the human spirit.
In this sort of world, it is only perfectly fair that atheism prospers, and that I support the propounders of the atheist doctrines, for when this hollow brand of religion which does nothing for its adherents slews away like rotten flesh, we may hope that a more genuine spirituality will take root in its place. This is one which necessarily is, in all the panoply and confusion and grandeur of how such systems operate in practice, nonetheless fully able to communicate spirituality to the people through art. For as Schopenhauer realized in the mysticism of the Buddhist east and customs of India, and expounded as filtered through the philosophical lens, art is the only way for the common person to reach enlightenment. Art was the business of the ancient church, and of the faiths of the mystery cults and the Mother Goddesses. Art was the connection of enlightenment with the common person, and the conduit through which their spirituality could fill the fundamental psychological void of the human existence: That we are both self-aware and mortal.
Until then, we must support the atheists, for they till the sod under, that we might hope that in their wake, seeds of a new and genuine spirituality founded in the old knowledge and comfort of the Mother Goddesses may take root in the West and make good some of the psychological damage caused by the absence of any nurturing promise against this terrible realization of chronologically limited self-awareness. Their interests and mine furthermore may very well not diverge within my lifetime, so my beliefs become a matter for family, and rationalism as something to propound, for the most part, in public. This may thus be the rather complex summary of my feelings on the subject of religion, spirituality, and the modern atheist movement to which so many of my dearest friends and confidantes adhere.
The Kerala System
This, then, will be a brief initial explanation of the subject of the Indian State of Kerala which I intend to return to on repeated occasions if possible. A brief disclaimer: I am slightly biased toward Kerala (but then again, all charming works of literature have a hint of bias in their objective analysis, and I am arrogant enough to try and be charming) because of personal religious fervour, which likes much the worship of the Naga in this variant of Hinduism, as snake-worship is a fundamental part of the pre-Indo-Aryan religions of many parts of Europe. Finding solace in the spirituality of a region is at least somewhat important and does provide me that tint of bias.
Kerala, a state corresponding to the region known until recently as the Malabar Coast of the Deccan. Islam came here by trading and not by conquest as it northern India from the heights of Afghanistan and Persia, and Christianity was introduced in the Roman times, for Kerala contained the great Roman trading ports of India, which have had quarters directly controlled by the Romans, and before them also saw a Hellenistic Greek presence. It is a land of many unusual things. The first of these is an exceptionally favourable GINI coefficient. Kerala is poor, and wealth is extremely evenly distributed. This should not be a particular surprise, as GINI coefficients are most favourable in undeveloped nations and Asian states, for the most part, though this is not completely true.
What is interesting is what has been accomplished with so little wealth. Here is a society of traditional crops, without even genetically modified organisms (of which I shall conduct a defence on a later date), for their introduction has been sporadic and opposed in India. A land of immense rainfall, it is certainly an ideal habitation for humanity, but the same is true of Cascadia, Kamchatka, Chile, or France, a natural breadbasket which would sate any desires of a Physiocrat, and on the Physiocratic school of Economics we shall also return shortly. Kerala's points of interest lay in the accomplishment of the people:
Allow us to consider Kerala's own pride, first.
Literacy rate for women: 87.86%
Number of districts with a favourable (more females than males) sex ratio: 13 out of 14. -- a serious issue in modern India.
Female life expectancy: 74 years.
Number of deliveries under institutional care: +90%
Infant mortality rate: Half the Indian national average.
And an interesting note:
"WORK PARTICIPATION
Though Kerala rank top in women's literacy rate and education, the work participation sex-ratio shows a deviation. There are only 345 female workers per 1000 male workers which is lower than the national average (1991). The work Participation rate for women in 1991 was only 15.85 while that of men was 47.58 which is about three times that of women. This in turn indicate that women's share of earned income" in the state is only 12% . The above fact leaves the note that the higher rate of literacy/education among women is not a sufficient condition for gender equality in work. Along with low work participation, rates of unemployment and gender differentials in the labium market persist across the society."
This is interesting because it references a recently published article on the Netherlands I shall reproduce here to help make a point:
Women in the Netherlands work less and love it. (as a paraphrase of the article title.)
This point, which I shall undertake to develop in a further post based on this article alone, however, shows that workforce participation is not necessarily an aim of women even in a very liberal, open society with plenty of rights for women and opportunities. We shall dare to say that the nature of women favours security over ambition, and if security can be provided at less effort it will be accepted, but this is a brief abstract of a thesis which would require much effort, very tangential to Kerala, to develop, so please understand the limitations of the assertion for now.
In short the position of women in Kerala is much superiour to that in the rest of India, and indeed to that in most of the world. The life expectancy of women in Kerala is a full six years greater than that of women, the educational levels are similar, and workforce participation runs at roughly similar rates to the Netherlands, which is a significant indication of how two very different societies, but both with high female literacy and social participation, will tend to have relatively low involvement of women in the workforce. This coincides with further metrics: End of life care, for example, is better than it many industrialized countries in Kerala. And how we treat our dying and our dead is very, very fundamental to the overall human condition.
People in Kerala have the resources to be as happy as those in the west based on their health metrics, and they lack the stressors of artificial western life which lead to the great unhappiness which plagues frankly most of us, especially intellectuals, and leads to the pandemic of false use of medication for supposed mental ills which would be regarded as a normal range of expression in a non-standardized society, and much less pronounced due to the relative happiness of people in regions like Kerala or Bhutan over the industrial world.
The first and most important part of the data is that Kerala is the closest thing the world has ever seen to a modern Matriarchy. Ruled until Indian independence by long lines of Queens both openly and as effective powers to the throne, the Princely States which made up Kerala were traditionally ruled by the Nairs and Bunts, forward castes which practiced a matrilineal system of inheiritance. Worshipping the snakes of the Earth and organized on matrilineal lines with a history of strong Queens, the land of Kerala comes as close as anyone could ask for in a matriarchal society in modern Earth, and the immense success of women in Kerala relative to the rest of India must be ascribed to this fact. The culture had harmonious and more equal relations between the sexes in which women were actually respected as rulers and the creators of each generation, whose wisdom raised children and whose wombs determined inheiritance. Though imperfect, it is still something to be lauded as how a society can be organized. Maternal morality rate being a source of particular pride (in how low it is relative to the rest of India) continues to reflect the position of women in Kerala as being fundamentally different than in most of the rest of the world.
The British, in perhaps their greatest intellectual crime in India, succeeded in largely destroying the old matrilineal inheiritance systems for the Nairs, though they remain with the Bunts, and then the arrogance of Nehru and his followers finished off the old Royal families, but that does not stop Kerala from being largely a success, and a sustainable success, at that. The legacy of the culture outlives the old customs of ruling, though, in the same way the legacy of traditional patriarchy serves to reinforce modern and less overt patriarchy by subverting women into its structure through force of tradition (the intellectual, activist conservative woman of modern America will often be single, very well educated, and successful. She is liberated. Many of her sisters, however, remain bound into traditional notions of womanhood which serve to enslave women as a system of more traditional patriarchy society. They are the likes of Phyllis Schyfly rather than Michelle Malkin).
Kerala, on one-seventieth (1/70th!) of the income of the United States, has nearly identical health outcomes and education, and more happiness. This is a brilliant rejection of the idea that humanity must suffer a Malthusian collapse through overpopulation. It also disproves the idea that capital is necessary in any great quantity for a happy and prosperous society. This returns us to the ideas of the Physiocrats, those laudable philosophers of economy of the grand era of the Ancien Régime. The Doctrine of the Physiocrats held primarily that working of the land--that actual productive work (i.e., of farms and to a lesser extent mining and fishing) were the only actual forms of wealth to be generated. We may regard this assertion proudly as true, using Kerala as an example of how it is true, for in Kerala the agricultural produce remains still the main source of economic development, and yet all actual needs of the people are successfully met. This suggests in the most strong of terms that development of capital in excession of that found in Kerala is actually unnecessary for the human condition, and is based on speculation and not actual productive wealth.
This, then, is the principle argument for the Kerala model: It is sustainable, and nothing more is necessary, so we should we seek more when it provides us with nothing truly beneficial in any kind of rigorous, scientific analysis of available data metrics which measure the happiness, health, and cultural development of humans? We find there to be a very limited need to press beyond Kerala, and find the idea that much of modern technology could not have been developed in the Kerala system to be rather false.
States with relatively concentrated industrial facilities and capabilities have been considered great powers in the past--Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire, for instance--and were able to sustain that concentrated industry, enough for the business of state with an appropriate level of diffusion through society, despite having essentially agricultural existence for the average person. To combine the technological upper-class veneer required for the functions of an organized State with the human social development of Kerala is to make a nation. This furthermore addresses in and of itself the primary criticism of the Kerala model.
That criticism is that approximately 30% of the people in the state are reliant on some form of cash allowances from outside of Kerala, known as remittances. But the people working for remittances make a true pittance, working usually for on the order of 1.00 USD an hour--or much less, only some of which they can send back to their families. Most importantly, however, Kerala has an extremely poorly developed industry, which is good, as modern multinational corporations would destroy the Keralan model if allowed to take root in Kerala. But it is not good in general, for the industry which, for example, sustained the Army of the Tsars, could be used to good effect in Kerala--to provide the industrial veneer required to more effectively distribute wealth through the families. This is where the loss of the Royal families hurts the most; they are bound to the land, their blood is of it, it is their investment and their glory. They are naturally going to invest their resources into it--and into defending it.
The maintenance of the industrial structure that would have been funded by an active and involved Royal family would have provided the additional GDP that remittances in the global economy are instead forced to provide before the states of Kerala were denied an independent development under their traditional and matriarchalist form of government. And this, then, is why Royal Families are good: They tend to keep the investment, in their traditional expression (the consideration of the debasement of modern royalty in Europe is another matter), within their holdings, their own lands. They are tied by blood, honour, and tradition to their soil of their foremothers, and their wealth is therefore much, much more likely to be effectively reinvested in the provision of those people with jobs and livelihoods than could ever be expected from the shiftless capitalist interested only in accumulating wealth, especially when he is a foreigner. And so, the great flaw of the Kerala model indeed came about only because of the destruction of the Matriarchist-Matrilineal traditional governing structure within Kerala State.
Kerala, a state corresponding to the region known until recently as the Malabar Coast of the Deccan. Islam came here by trading and not by conquest as it northern India from the heights of Afghanistan and Persia, and Christianity was introduced in the Roman times, for Kerala contained the great Roman trading ports of India, which have had quarters directly controlled by the Romans, and before them also saw a Hellenistic Greek presence. It is a land of many unusual things. The first of these is an exceptionally favourable GINI coefficient. Kerala is poor, and wealth is extremely evenly distributed. This should not be a particular surprise, as GINI coefficients are most favourable in undeveloped nations and Asian states, for the most part, though this is not completely true.
What is interesting is what has been accomplished with so little wealth. Here is a society of traditional crops, without even genetically modified organisms (of which I shall conduct a defence on a later date), for their introduction has been sporadic and opposed in India. A land of immense rainfall, it is certainly an ideal habitation for humanity, but the same is true of Cascadia, Kamchatka, Chile, or France, a natural breadbasket which would sate any desires of a Physiocrat, and on the Physiocratic school of Economics we shall also return shortly. Kerala's points of interest lay in the accomplishment of the people:
Allow us to consider Kerala's own pride, first.
Literacy rate for women: 87.86%
Number of districts with a favourable (more females than males) sex ratio: 13 out of 14. -- a serious issue in modern India.
Female life expectancy: 74 years.
Number of deliveries under institutional care: +90%
Infant mortality rate: Half the Indian national average.
And an interesting note:
"WORK PARTICIPATION
Though Kerala rank top in women's literacy rate and education, the work participation sex-ratio shows a deviation. There are only 345 female workers per 1000 male workers which is lower than the national average (1991). The work Participation rate for women in 1991 was only 15.85 while that of men was 47.58 which is about three times that of women. This in turn indicate that women's share of earned income" in the state is only 12% . The above fact leaves the note that the higher rate of literacy/education among women is not a sufficient condition for gender equality in work. Along with low work participation, rates of unemployment and gender differentials in the labium market persist across the society."
This is interesting because it references a recently published article on the Netherlands I shall reproduce here to help make a point:
Women in the Netherlands work less and love it. (as a paraphrase of the article title.)
This point, which I shall undertake to develop in a further post based on this article alone, however, shows that workforce participation is not necessarily an aim of women even in a very liberal, open society with plenty of rights for women and opportunities. We shall dare to say that the nature of women favours security over ambition, and if security can be provided at less effort it will be accepted, but this is a brief abstract of a thesis which would require much effort, very tangential to Kerala, to develop, so please understand the limitations of the assertion for now.
In short the position of women in Kerala is much superiour to that in the rest of India, and indeed to that in most of the world. The life expectancy of women in Kerala is a full six years greater than that of women, the educational levels are similar, and workforce participation runs at roughly similar rates to the Netherlands, which is a significant indication of how two very different societies, but both with high female literacy and social participation, will tend to have relatively low involvement of women in the workforce. This coincides with further metrics: End of life care, for example, is better than it many industrialized countries in Kerala. And how we treat our dying and our dead is very, very fundamental to the overall human condition.
People in Kerala have the resources to be as happy as those in the west based on their health metrics, and they lack the stressors of artificial western life which lead to the great unhappiness which plagues frankly most of us, especially intellectuals, and leads to the pandemic of false use of medication for supposed mental ills which would be regarded as a normal range of expression in a non-standardized society, and much less pronounced due to the relative happiness of people in regions like Kerala or Bhutan over the industrial world.
The first and most important part of the data is that Kerala is the closest thing the world has ever seen to a modern Matriarchy. Ruled until Indian independence by long lines of Queens both openly and as effective powers to the throne, the Princely States which made up Kerala were traditionally ruled by the Nairs and Bunts, forward castes which practiced a matrilineal system of inheiritance. Worshipping the snakes of the Earth and organized on matrilineal lines with a history of strong Queens, the land of Kerala comes as close as anyone could ask for in a matriarchal society in modern Earth, and the immense success of women in Kerala relative to the rest of India must be ascribed to this fact. The culture had harmonious and more equal relations between the sexes in which women were actually respected as rulers and the creators of each generation, whose wisdom raised children and whose wombs determined inheiritance. Though imperfect, it is still something to be lauded as how a society can be organized. Maternal morality rate being a source of particular pride (in how low it is relative to the rest of India) continues to reflect the position of women in Kerala as being fundamentally different than in most of the rest of the world.
The British, in perhaps their greatest intellectual crime in India, succeeded in largely destroying the old matrilineal inheiritance systems for the Nairs, though they remain with the Bunts, and then the arrogance of Nehru and his followers finished off the old Royal families, but that does not stop Kerala from being largely a success, and a sustainable success, at that. The legacy of the culture outlives the old customs of ruling, though, in the same way the legacy of traditional patriarchy serves to reinforce modern and less overt patriarchy by subverting women into its structure through force of tradition (the intellectual, activist conservative woman of modern America will often be single, very well educated, and successful. She is liberated. Many of her sisters, however, remain bound into traditional notions of womanhood which serve to enslave women as a system of more traditional patriarchy society. They are the likes of Phyllis Schyfly rather than Michelle Malkin).
Kerala, on one-seventieth (1/70th!) of the income of the United States, has nearly identical health outcomes and education, and more happiness. This is a brilliant rejection of the idea that humanity must suffer a Malthusian collapse through overpopulation. It also disproves the idea that capital is necessary in any great quantity for a happy and prosperous society. This returns us to the ideas of the Physiocrats, those laudable philosophers of economy of the grand era of the Ancien Régime. The Doctrine of the Physiocrats held primarily that working of the land--that actual productive work (i.e., of farms and to a lesser extent mining and fishing) were the only actual forms of wealth to be generated. We may regard this assertion proudly as true, using Kerala as an example of how it is true, for in Kerala the agricultural produce remains still the main source of economic development, and yet all actual needs of the people are successfully met. This suggests in the most strong of terms that development of capital in excession of that found in Kerala is actually unnecessary for the human condition, and is based on speculation and not actual productive wealth.
This, then, is the principle argument for the Kerala model: It is sustainable, and nothing more is necessary, so we should we seek more when it provides us with nothing truly beneficial in any kind of rigorous, scientific analysis of available data metrics which measure the happiness, health, and cultural development of humans? We find there to be a very limited need to press beyond Kerala, and find the idea that much of modern technology could not have been developed in the Kerala system to be rather false.
States with relatively concentrated industrial facilities and capabilities have been considered great powers in the past--Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire, for instance--and were able to sustain that concentrated industry, enough for the business of state with an appropriate level of diffusion through society, despite having essentially agricultural existence for the average person. To combine the technological upper-class veneer required for the functions of an organized State with the human social development of Kerala is to make a nation. This furthermore addresses in and of itself the primary criticism of the Kerala model.
That criticism is that approximately 30% of the people in the state are reliant on some form of cash allowances from outside of Kerala, known as remittances. But the people working for remittances make a true pittance, working usually for on the order of 1.00 USD an hour--or much less, only some of which they can send back to their families. Most importantly, however, Kerala has an extremely poorly developed industry, which is good, as modern multinational corporations would destroy the Keralan model if allowed to take root in Kerala. But it is not good in general, for the industry which, for example, sustained the Army of the Tsars, could be used to good effect in Kerala--to provide the industrial veneer required to more effectively distribute wealth through the families. This is where the loss of the Royal families hurts the most; they are bound to the land, their blood is of it, it is their investment and their glory. They are naturally going to invest their resources into it--and into defending it.
The maintenance of the industrial structure that would have been funded by an active and involved Royal family would have provided the additional GDP that remittances in the global economy are instead forced to provide before the states of Kerala were denied an independent development under their traditional and matriarchalist form of government. And this, then, is why Royal Families are good: They tend to keep the investment, in their traditional expression (the consideration of the debasement of modern royalty in Europe is another matter), within their holdings, their own lands. They are tied by blood, honour, and tradition to their soil of their foremothers, and their wealth is therefore much, much more likely to be effectively reinvested in the provision of those people with jobs and livelihoods than could ever be expected from the shiftless capitalist interested only in accumulating wealth, especially when he is a foreigner. And so, the great flaw of the Kerala model indeed came about only because of the destruction of the Matriarchist-Matrilineal traditional governing structure within Kerala State.
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