Dear Tom,
Rev. Pierre Teilhard De Chardin SJ: "Research Is Adoration"
Alan
You are suggesting that "cancel culture" is a form of mobbing and I am not unsympathetic, Al Franken is a good example. What are the male equivalents?t_________________
Tom Magnuson
103 E Tryon St
Hillsborough, NC 27278"No more dynasties, no more celebrities, and no more oligarchs in public office."Dear Tom,I love your analysis, and hope you write many more of these off-the-cuff "takes" on history and current events.As you say, women are more collaborative than men.In my view, such collaboration is an urgently (desperately?) needed antidote to the rugged individualism born of male-dominated culture and protestant Christianity's completely dyadic relationship with God - what fundamentalists-and-evangelicals call their "personal relationship" with God. Although I don't want to undermine my hearty approval of the gender sea change taking place, it is also true that "everything" in life is a mixed bag. (Ivan Illich On "Gender" https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2021/06/ivan- illich-on-gender.html) "Todo tiene sus ventajas y desventajas" as they say in Spanish. ("Everything has its advantages and disadvantages.")Although most of my close friends are women -- and they are many -- my most vocal critics are also women.In recent years I have had a ringside seat to observe married friends divorce; plus my own problematic divorce that is still ongoing.Make no mistake: Sisterhood is powerful.But from my most microscopic view of gender (and perhaps my "sample" is not statistically valid) it seems that women's passion for collaboration has the downside of "sticking together" no matter what so that the phenomenon of "mobbing" (cum "confirmation bias") comes into play quickly - and, often, reflexively. (N.B. When kids are involved in a divorce, it seems that women's solidarity is at its strongest - and not because it's necessarily well-considered, but because "motherhood" is its own pyscho-social-political "genus" and "species.") The fact that these bonding phenomena are understandable does not always make them palatable or "right."This subject would be fun to discuss outside Nash Street Tavern one night.For now, I direct your attention to the following article on "mobbing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing_(animal_ behavior) And this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppy2iiOt6YU Thanks again.Peace with you
AlanPS I would also like to talk with you about my view of "the supernatural" - literally meaning "above nature" - and how I conceive the nascent emergence of women as the dominant sex as a completely topsy-turvy "about-face" in the mechanics-and-thrust of "natural" evolution. A new order is coming into being; what might be called "super nature."Title IX is in the air. My thoughts on it follow.
Title IX, Shapes Much of the Current Moment
[This essay is extemporaneous, without citations, just my speculation on observations made; i.e. it isn’t a scholarly disquisition, it is just my thoughts on one wellspring of current events. ]
Title IX, implemented in 1972, was intended to level the playing field for women, the last major, unprotected community, unprotected, we now know, from White male domination. It provided that schools receiving public monies could no longer discriminate in hiring, admission, or support on the basis of gender. When you think about it, that is a pretty remarkable fact considering that White males provided those protections for males of color years earlier. So, yes it is a gender thing.
The effects were more influential than the authors realized because women, so it seems, are different from men in at least one crucial way. It may be their previous need to cover one another’s backs in a hostile, male world, but women are collaborative more than are men (or that was the case at the time). I don’t know if this is a hormonal thing, a genetic thing, or a sociological thing, but it is a thing.
Until Title IX most graduate programs consisted of guys competing for alpha male status with their committee members. ‘Mine’s bigger than yours’ was all the rage. That has changed. I know from watching horse harems that there is such a thing as an “alpha” female, but even in the harem horses shared one unarguable fact, when the harem master stepped in, they stepped down, no matter what their status. If they didn’t they were bit, kicked and shouldered into line and finally had to submit to stallion demands. That is pretty much how our society worked until Title IX; that change is why it is important.
My evidence for this claim is a witnessed change in my surgeons. As background you should know that, as the result of clumsiness, and adventurousness, I have a long history with surgeons. So I consider myself an authority in the field.
In 2015 the Veterans Administration stupidly destroyed my one good eye, a contract surgeon put a trainee on my good eye’s side of the table without warning me and she trashed my cornea. Realizing their error, VA doctors sent me to Duke Eye Center for treatment. There I learned about “the Title IX Effect.” My surgeons were all women. The department head was a rather old fashioned, arrogant egotist but my surgeons did stuff I’d never seen surgeons do before. For example, when they were perplexed by a test or the result of inspecting my eye, instead of declaring from on high, they’d call a conclave of other surgeons, junior and senior, to chat about what perplexed them. They withheld conclusions until there was a consensus on how to proceed. This is obviously a consensus process, not a dictate.
Next door to me lives a pediatric neurologist andI mentioned my observation to him and he told me about the Title IX Effect. He said that the AMA changed admission requirements to medical schools in response to the new law, and one change was that, for admission purposes, they weighted collaborative experience. Today our medical students are over fifty percent women.
So, that in a nutshell is the phenomenon we’re observing. As a historian I see it in a different light from a medical victim. Over the past thirty years beneficiaries of Title IX have filled our other graduate schools. The main effect has been a wonderful flourishing of studies by women of color and women in general and they, it seems, look at the world entirely differently from the fogies that created the narratives a lot of us learned.
All of a sudden we have books telling American history from the perspective of indigenous folk, Black and Brown folk, Asian folk. Each of whom experienced the blessings of America in ways vastly different from the WASPs that once ruled the roost. Suddenly we have a variety of ways to look at the same events based on the perspective of the non-white, nnon-male, non-straight story tellers and this is rattling the old privileged elites.
This is not to say I agree with all of the output of POC history recovery efforts. The “1619 Project” particularly galls me. The history in that project is just needlessly incomplete and exclusive; before there were African slaves there were indigenous slaves, and after enslavement of Africans became illegal we continued slaving indigenous people for an additional fifteen or twenty years. I’ll not get into the “virtual” slavery of indentures but, suffice to say, The 1619 Project” which claims to be about the foundation of America and the effects of slavery on that foundation is not as rich as it could and should be. There is another limitation of that project which bothers me, and that is the inability or unwillingness of the authorities behind it to identify the origins of our “peculiar institution.
Race-based slavery is almost unique to Anglo-American imperialism. Slavery has existed throughout history but it was generlally based on military failure without reference to skin color. Only the English and the Americans presumed to declare enslaved people to be not just unfortunate but inferior.
England developed the basic rationale during its conquest of Britain. Subordination of Welsh, Irish, and Scots were all rationalized on their inherent inferiority. This was an essential quality of English (later, British) empire. They always subsumed inferior folk. In North America they had a problem with that approach.
Indigenous North Americans proved to be awful slaves. Owing to the fact that they had brethren not more than twenty-five or so miles down the road they were very difficult to keep on task. So, when the Sugar Islands began importing West Africans to work in cane production, England and Anglo-America developed a color coded labor population from which there was virtually no escaping.
Thus for much of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries Anglo-America shipped indegenous folk out of the country to open land and rid the country of unproductive elements. In the seventeenth century three Native Americans could be traded for two Africans in the Sugar Islands. It is said that all North American ports facing the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico shipped, on average, about 10,000 indegenous slaves per year in the seventeenth century until, as noted by John Lawson, there were only one in six Native Americans remaining in Carolina by 1701. It was not just disease that did in the indigenous folk, it was slaving and genocide that did them in; slavers usually killed males above aged 11 or 12 and marcched off women and children capable of work. Old people were left to fend for themselves or were slaughtered out of mercy.
So, the final point of issue I have with The 1619 Project is why didn’t the authorities identify the root cause of our peculiar institution?
_________________
Tom Magnuson
103 E Tryon St
Hillsborough, NC 27278
919-644-0600"No more dynasties, no more celebrities, and no more oligarchs in public office."Dear Randy,I hope you, Rebecca and the kids are all well.Yesterday, I stumbled on The New Yorker Radio Hour while en route to Chapel Hill's "new" Wegman's, a company founded by a Rochester, New York family that has sent generations of its kids to "my" high school, "Aquinas Institute."To the point...G.K. Chesterton observed that "all wars are religious wars."
If we accept "religion" as a synonym for "primary values" I believe Chesterton is right.
The following interview with Reverend Dwight McKissic - a smart, thoughtful, experienced, committed Southern Baptist - "puts it all on the line."What an "unexpected" microcosm for "the whole shebang!"
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