No civilization exists in a permanent Age of Pericles or in a continuous Disney “ever after.” In fact, not even Athens during the Age of Pericles had a continuous “Age of Pericles” existence. Heck, Disney has not had a continuous Disney existence as numerous disgruntled employees, customers, and shareholders can attest. Oh! The controversies, among the most recent being the “wokeness” that pervades the parks and the movies.
From Ancient Athens to modern Disney, ups and downs have been a pendulum of good times and bad times in every human organization. And whereas good times might not cause bad times, they are always the circumstance from which the bad times emanate; we know both in contrast with the other. When people have few concerns about food, shelter, and safety, they attend to the personal, the entertaining, and the frivolous as matters of importance, as consequential matters.
Fashion is an example. So is pop psych. Matters that seem insignificant in harsher times rise to “matters that matter,” such as the current brouhaha over gender. In the midst of a “down” like war, plague, or natural catastrophe, fashion, gender, pronouns, and athletic events diminish in public discourse. In those harsher times, people focus on food, shelter, and safety, not on events like ComicCon, COP27 and atmospheric carbon, or the Academy Awards. Gender? Survival supercedes identification in the public mind.
Contra
You are free to disagree, of course. Even I can find arguments against what I just wrote. For example, consider that during WWII when more than 50,000,000 people were killed, Hollywood still produced its movies, academics still did research on language and literature, painters still painted, and museum curators still curated. Peruse older newspaper society pages: Fashion designers still designed clothes; VIPs stepping out for a night on the town still drew paparrazi.
The world, as big and populated as it is, always has outliers not associated with harshness. Because it is so populous, the world experiences ups simultaneously with downs. I suppose, given that argument, that focus on real tragedy as opposed to focus on any behavior or state of mind is just a matter of degree. Ancient Athenians and modern New Yorkers live in a constant duality, the best of times always in a tenuous equilibrium with the bad times, lottery winners stubbing their toes on the way to collect their winnings. Fifth Avenue differing from Times Square. People in $5 million apartments as opposed to street vendors, homeless vagrants, and con artists (and now an illegal migrant population).
Shouldn’t we argue with Dickens that these are the “best of times…the worst of times”? Could Pericles have benefitted from reading Dickens to know the very citizens he elevated to the pinnacle of ancient civilization and to a status emulated for more than two millennia in his future, that those citizens would eventually depose him? Was he a model for the life of Winston Churchill, savior during war and then deposed PM.
Matters That Now Matter
It’s in the context of the above musing that I came upon political science research by Joni Lovenduski under the title “Gendering Research in Political Science.” * It is this article that I believe supports my contention that during Disney or Pericles Haydays, those times when physical safety, plentiful food, and ample shelter are not a major concern, civilization turns its attention to otherwise frivolous matters, such as “identity,”both group and individual.
I’ve taken the libery to paraphrase the abstract of Lovenduski’s article: The author writes that there is a transition in “feminist research on political representation, public policy, and political institutions” from two sexes to the “concept of gender.” According to Lovenduski, political scientists write mostly in a context of two sexes, but not from a context of many “genders.” In the concept of gender lies another way to examine political life.
So What?
There’s no denying that what is important to people IS important to them. If you are a hobbyist, you probably at least slightly obsess over the hobby—maybe to the dismay of a spouse who thinks “there are more important things” like carrying out the garbage, painting the bathroom, or keeping the house in pristine condition because “we might get visitors.” Whatever the level of your obsession and disinterest, it is one you choose in times that permit you to choose. In tough times, the hobby lessens in importance; the questions arising over what is optional and required are moot.
Right now in America, there are many who have no concerns more pressing than a special agenda based on matters that were not important when the ground shook, the floodwaters raged, the wind blew hurricane force, or a foreign adversary attacked. But as we all know from history, such bad times are on that pendulum swinging between the Age of Pericles and Disney to the Age of Dire Concerns. Right now, America can obsess over concerns it will dismiss as frivolous sometime in the near future. The pendulum between good times and bad never stops swinging.
Plato
Maybe for Plato political human didn’t mean much more than political “male.” Maybe the Age of Pericles was a patriarchal age. As in many civilizations, patriarchy dominated politics, and even under the rule of queens men usually played more officlal roles than women, especially in Europe. Given that history, political humans have been divided into male and female. With the rise of modern civilization and women’s suffrage, females took on more governmental responsiblity. Add to the work of suffragettes the work of feminists, and one sees a shift, a transition away from a longstanding male polity. And now, we have entered a new phase, one that declares a suffrage for those who wish to identify as a previously undefined “gender,” which could mean anything. The current good times have engendered “realities” based on “opinions” and “feelings.” When women seeking apointments to high office say in answer to the question “ What is a woman?” that they are not “biologists,” we know that little semblance of life under harsher conditions remains. These are the same human beings who for all their lives have peed sitting down, the same who have monthly periods, and the same who have given births. Now, the frivolity of the times, the intellectual fashion, dominates thought and confuses it. Common sense gives way to special interests. If I have a Roman nose, should I declare myself a proboscian gender, an elephantine gender, a tapir-ist? If sexual body parts, reproductive function, and physiological processes and gametes are now inconclusive gender indicators, then what other than personal pronouncements indicates gender, which now seems to be dissociated from sex.
Should “gender” be considered in political life? Sure. Why not? But to what purpose? Is making a “trans” person a political leader simply because of the “trans” status a significant matter? Or is choosing a “trans” as leader significant because that “human being” is best suited to lead the nation? Does gender matter if it is merely an obligatory decision based on passing “correctness” that plays no role when people have to worry about food, shelter, and safety?
Point of Departure
Here’s your springboard; you determine the kind of dive you wish to make and the depth of water you wish to enter. Whatever you decide, however, it should not be the product of political correctness because such a decision is based more on censorship than on free thinking. Is “gender,” which even gender enthusiasts are hard pressed to define, anything that advances a civilization more than a sexual duality that has dominated since Ur and maybe as far back as Gobekli Tepe? Is there anything in the civil polity that currently prevents any human from rising to a position of dominance other than the biases derived from culture? Does culture drive polity or polity, culture? Both? Then where do we currently lie on the arc of that pendulum?
Sorry if the questions are openended. Here are two more: If "gender enthusiasts" demand you accept their vague definition of gender as based on opinion and feeling, shouldn't they be dismissed as hypocritical if they do not accept your definition of gender that is based on physiology, gametes, and body parts that underlies your "opinion"? Why should one opinion in a world where every opinion has equal value be superior to another opinion?
*Lovenduski, Joni. In Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 1:333-356, June 1998. Online at https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.1.1.333
From Ancient Athens to modern Disney, ups and downs have been a pendulum of good times and bad times in every human organization. And whereas good times might not cause bad times, they are always the circumstance from which the bad times emanate; we know both in contrast with the other. When people have few concerns about food, shelter, and safety, they attend to the personal, the entertaining, and the frivolous as matters of importance, as consequential matters.
Fashion is an example. So is pop psych. Matters that seem insignificant in harsher times rise to “matters that matter,” such as the current brouhaha over gender. In the midst of a “down” like war, plague, or natural catastrophe, fashion, gender, pronouns, and athletic events diminish in public discourse. In those harsher times, people focus on food, shelter, and safety, not on events like ComicCon, COP27 and atmospheric carbon, or the Academy Awards. Gender? Survival supercedes identification in the public mind.
Contra
You are free to disagree, of course. Even I can find arguments against what I just wrote. For example, consider that during WWII when more than 50,000,000 people were killed, Hollywood still produced its movies, academics still did research on language and literature, painters still painted, and museum curators still curated. Peruse older newspaper society pages: Fashion designers still designed clothes; VIPs stepping out for a night on the town still drew paparrazi.
The world, as big and populated as it is, always has outliers not associated with harshness. Because it is so populous, the world experiences ups simultaneously with downs. I suppose, given that argument, that focus on real tragedy as opposed to focus on any behavior or state of mind is just a matter of degree. Ancient Athenians and modern New Yorkers live in a constant duality, the best of times always in a tenuous equilibrium with the bad times, lottery winners stubbing their toes on the way to collect their winnings. Fifth Avenue differing from Times Square. People in $5 million apartments as opposed to street vendors, homeless vagrants, and con artists (and now an illegal migrant population).
Shouldn’t we argue with Dickens that these are the “best of times…the worst of times”? Could Pericles have benefitted from reading Dickens to know the very citizens he elevated to the pinnacle of ancient civilization and to a status emulated for more than two millennia in his future, that those citizens would eventually depose him? Was he a model for the life of Winston Churchill, savior during war and then deposed PM.
Matters That Now Matter
It’s in the context of the above musing that I came upon political science research by Joni Lovenduski under the title “Gendering Research in Political Science.” * It is this article that I believe supports my contention that during Disney or Pericles Haydays, those times when physical safety, plentiful food, and ample shelter are not a major concern, civilization turns its attention to otherwise frivolous matters, such as “identity,”both group and individual.
I’ve taken the libery to paraphrase the abstract of Lovenduski’s article: The author writes that there is a transition in “feminist research on political representation, public policy, and political institutions” from two sexes to the “concept of gender.” According to Lovenduski, political scientists write mostly in a context of two sexes, but not from a context of many “genders.” In the concept of gender lies another way to examine political life.
So What?
There’s no denying that what is important to people IS important to them. If you are a hobbyist, you probably at least slightly obsess over the hobby—maybe to the dismay of a spouse who thinks “there are more important things” like carrying out the garbage, painting the bathroom, or keeping the house in pristine condition because “we might get visitors.” Whatever the level of your obsession and disinterest, it is one you choose in times that permit you to choose. In tough times, the hobby lessens in importance; the questions arising over what is optional and required are moot.
Right now in America, there are many who have no concerns more pressing than a special agenda based on matters that were not important when the ground shook, the floodwaters raged, the wind blew hurricane force, or a foreign adversary attacked. But as we all know from history, such bad times are on that pendulum swinging between the Age of Pericles and Disney to the Age of Dire Concerns. Right now, America can obsess over concerns it will dismiss as frivolous sometime in the near future. The pendulum between good times and bad never stops swinging.
Plato
Maybe for Plato political human didn’t mean much more than political “male.” Maybe the Age of Pericles was a patriarchal age. As in many civilizations, patriarchy dominated politics, and even under the rule of queens men usually played more officlal roles than women, especially in Europe. Given that history, political humans have been divided into male and female. With the rise of modern civilization and women’s suffrage, females took on more governmental responsiblity. Add to the work of suffragettes the work of feminists, and one sees a shift, a transition away from a longstanding male polity. And now, we have entered a new phase, one that declares a suffrage for those who wish to identify as a previously undefined “gender,” which could mean anything. The current good times have engendered “realities” based on “opinions” and “feelings.” When women seeking apointments to high office say in answer to the question “ What is a woman?” that they are not “biologists,” we know that little semblance of life under harsher conditions remains. These are the same human beings who for all their lives have peed sitting down, the same who have monthly periods, and the same who have given births. Now, the frivolity of the times, the intellectual fashion, dominates thought and confuses it. Common sense gives way to special interests. If I have a Roman nose, should I declare myself a proboscian gender, an elephantine gender, a tapir-ist? If sexual body parts, reproductive function, and physiological processes and gametes are now inconclusive gender indicators, then what other than personal pronouncements indicates gender, which now seems to be dissociated from sex.
Should “gender” be considered in political life? Sure. Why not? But to what purpose? Is making a “trans” person a political leader simply because of the “trans” status a significant matter? Or is choosing a “trans” as leader significant because that “human being” is best suited to lead the nation? Does gender matter if it is merely an obligatory decision based on passing “correctness” that plays no role when people have to worry about food, shelter, and safety?
Point of Departure
Here’s your springboard; you determine the kind of dive you wish to make and the depth of water you wish to enter. Whatever you decide, however, it should not be the product of political correctness because such a decision is based more on censorship than on free thinking. Is “gender,” which even gender enthusiasts are hard pressed to define, anything that advances a civilization more than a sexual duality that has dominated since Ur and maybe as far back as Gobekli Tepe? Is there anything in the civil polity that currently prevents any human from rising to a position of dominance other than the biases derived from culture? Does culture drive polity or polity, culture? Both? Then where do we currently lie on the arc of that pendulum?
Sorry if the questions are openended. Here are two more: If "gender enthusiasts" demand you accept their vague definition of gender as based on opinion and feeling, shouldn't they be dismissed as hypocritical if they do not accept your definition of gender that is based on physiology, gametes, and body parts that underlies your "opinion"? Why should one opinion in a world where every opinion has equal value be superior to another opinion?
*Lovenduski, Joni. In Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 1:333-356, June 1998. Online at https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.1.1.333
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