On Jun 22, 2010, at 4:01 AM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
> Andy writes:
>
> "Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what
> has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each
> individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very
> standing and being as a rational agentowes nothing to other
> individuals or institutions. "
>
> Any shrinks on this list? When did social inter-dependence become such a deep object of shame?
Also not a shrink, but have been shrunk a bit. (And it's good to be small.)
Isn't this the point where patriarchy has to be brought into the discussion? Isn't the flight from dependency significantly a recurring moment in the subject's self-constitution under patriarchy - much of the specificity in form of which is determined by the prevailing historical circumstances in which each subject comes to be, but which as a recurring phenomenon also falls into some roughly patterned configurations based on the underlying regularities of (highly variable but not random) phenotypic expression?
And patriarchies have arisen in different contexts. Yes, these seem to be at least partially recursive, self-reinforcing social processes, with more competitive social contexts tending[1] to favour the reproductive success of competitively more successful individuals. But that doesn't explain the multiple geneses. One of the most unexpectedly thought-provoking books I've ever read was Leonard Shlain's _The Alphabet vs. the Goddess_. He documents pretty thoroughly, from around the world and through many historical periods - overwhelmingly persuasively, to my mind - that there is a strong correlation between the rise in literacy and the rise in patriarchal social relations (and suppression of goddess worship, among other things). He hypothesises (from his experience as a neurosurgeon) that this may be mainly due simply to the (possibly entirely accidental) fact that the brain centres primarily involved in aggression and literacy are physically adjacent, so that stimulation of the one (from increasing use of writing) promotes increased activity of the other (creating greater propensity to aggressive behaviours and social interactions based on competition and dominance).
[1] But only tending; this point is often lost completely on people without a sense for stats.