Sunday, March 10, 2019
meanings of "patriarchy"
yesterday, Mark made a couple of points in our 11am class about patriarchy. i asked him: "what do you mean by patriarchy?"
the reason is that there's a difference between 1. patriarchy as a social system, in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, etc. most pre-modern and modern systems exhibit a patriarchal model (though there are isolated models of matriarchy though, the amazons in greece, in germania during roman times, in tibet, etc).
and,
2. patriarchy, the ideology, which uses the model above to explain and justify this dominance attributing it to inherent natural differences between men and women.
clearly these are different things. for example, the traditionalist can support 1, and reject 2.
patriarchy in 1. is a social and cultural product, partially a result of differences between the sexes, but also as a result of conventional roles emerging in the theater of culture. patriarchy as social system is resilient in the legal, political, religious, and economic organization of many thriving cultures of today's third world.
it works. we're here.
as per patriarchy as a social system traditionalism is neutral. both patriarchy (and matriarchy as social developments) are fine as long as they prove to be beneficial in the theater of operations of the group.
3. another point touched in the class was this: can traditions change? of course they change!
but they have to change slowly and incrementally BY THEMSELVES, not by force from the top.
example: the religious orthodoxy in the USSR didn't really change with the bolshevik revolution in 1917. that was a sudden imposition from the top under communism! 70 years may seem a lot, but not in tradition/time. today, russia is more religious than it was before communism!
lesson here? traditions don't change by force or decree.
2 comments:
My point was not concerning patriarchy, I merely used it as an example to demonstrate the point I was making. You had categorized moral objectivity and relativism as separate things, but I think the relationship between them is far more complex when we consider the influence time has in our understanding of the world. As concise as possible, my point was that the future is necessarily open and its realization can change our ways of viewing historical facts, thus objectivity and revitalization interact in a kind of dance. I will avoid the example of patriarchy and instead use the one of a famous art piece. You maintained that the Cuernica is an objectively great piece of art. This is of course accepted on the basis of consensus. Now, you also said that in the future this work may be reinterpreted as being terrible at best. Finally, coming to my point, when the latter is accepted, in some distant future, the historical object - Cuernica - is shifted on the hierarchy of great works, its previous objective character is stripped for the place of another. The continuous process of reletivization (i.e. new experiences, conversations about unique problems, the openness and contingency of the future) is what enables us as social beings to establish objective standards through consensus. Again, these objective standards enable us to establish functional relations(i.e. democracy is better than aristocracy)and situate ourselves historically, and keep us away from extreme reletivization (i.e. all actions are equal and permitted). However, it would be foolish to believe that these consensual, objective standards are in essence timeless and static.
Thanks, Mark. You have good points, above. Let's keep the discussion going.
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