For History of Education please click on link.
http://ireadmodule.blogspot.com/2008/09/historical-foundations-of-education.html
Friday, December 17, 2010
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
For your parents
Ten Great Tips For Each Day:
1. Stay out of trouble.
2. Aim for greater heights.
3. Stay focused on your job.
4. Exercise to maintain good health.
5. Practice team work.
6. Rely on your trusted partner to watch your back. Take your time trusting others.
7. Save for rainy days.
8. Rest and relax.
9. Always take time to smile.
AND
10. Realize that nothing is impossible.
This should make you smile:
THE SENILITY PRAYER: Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.
From a forwarded message.
1. Stay out of trouble.
2. Aim for greater heights.
3. Stay focused on your job.
4. Exercise to maintain good health.
5. Practice team work.
6. Rely on your trusted partner to watch your back. Take your time trusting others.
7. Save for rainy days.
8. Rest and relax.
9. Always take time to smile.
AND
10. Realize that nothing is impossible.
This should make you smile:
THE SENILITY PRAYER: Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.
From a forwarded message.
For your parents
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR THOSE OVER FORTY YEARS OLD
1. Focus on enjoying people, not on indulging in or accumulating material things.
2. Plan to spend whatever you have saved.
You deserve to enjoy it and the few healthy years you have left.
Travel if you can afford it.
Don't leave anything for your children or loved ones to quarrel about.
By leaving anything, you may even cause more trouble when you are gone.
3. Live in the here and now, not in the yesterdays and tomorrows.
It is only today that you can handle.
Yesterday is gone, tomorrow may not even happen.
4. Enjoy your grandchildren (if you are blessed with any)
but don't be their full time baby sitter.
You have no moral obligation to take care of them.
Don't have any guilt about refusing to baby sit anyone's kids,
including your own grandkids.
Your parental obligation is to your children.
After you have raised them into responsible adults,
your duties of child-rearing and babysitting are finished.
Let your children raise their own offspring.
5. Accept physical weakness, sickness and other physical pains.
It is a part of the aging process.
Enjoy whatever your health can allow.
6. Enjoy what you are and what you have right now.
Stop working hard for what you do not have.
If you do not have them, it's probably too late.
7. Just enjoy your life with your spouse, children, grandchildren and friends.
People, who truly love you, love you for yourself, not for what you have. Anyone who loves you for what you have will just give you misery.
8. Forgive and accept forgiveness.
Forgive yourself and others.
Enjoy peace of mind and peace of soul.
9. Befriend death.
It's a natural part of the life cycle.
Don't be afraid of it.
Death is the beginning of a new and better life.
So, prepare yourself not for death but for a new life with the Almighty.
10. Be at peace with your Creator.
For... He is all you have after you leave this life.
This is a forwarded message not from the creator of this blog.
1. Focus on enjoying people, not on indulging in or accumulating material things.
2. Plan to spend whatever you have saved.
You deserve to enjoy it and the few healthy years you have left.
Travel if you can afford it.
Don't leave anything for your children or loved ones to quarrel about.
By leaving anything, you may even cause more trouble when you are gone.
3. Live in the here and now, not in the yesterdays and tomorrows.
It is only today that you can handle.
Yesterday is gone, tomorrow may not even happen.
4. Enjoy your grandchildren (if you are blessed with any)
but don't be their full time baby sitter.
You have no moral obligation to take care of them.
Don't have any guilt about refusing to baby sit anyone's kids,
including your own grandkids.
Your parental obligation is to your children.
After you have raised them into responsible adults,
your duties of child-rearing and babysitting are finished.
Let your children raise their own offspring.
5. Accept physical weakness, sickness and other physical pains.
It is a part of the aging process.
Enjoy whatever your health can allow.
6. Enjoy what you are and what you have right now.
Stop working hard for what you do not have.
If you do not have them, it's probably too late.
7. Just enjoy your life with your spouse, children, grandchildren and friends.
People, who truly love you, love you for yourself, not for what you have. Anyone who loves you for what you have will just give you misery.
8. Forgive and accept forgiveness.
Forgive yourself and others.
Enjoy peace of mind and peace of soul.
9. Befriend death.
It's a natural part of the life cycle.
Don't be afraid of it.
Death is the beginning of a new and better life.
So, prepare yourself not for death but for a new life with the Almighty.
10. Be at peace with your Creator.
For... He is all you have after you leave this life.
This is a forwarded message not from the creator of this blog.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Mired in Poverty
PUBLIC LIVES
November 11, 2010
Randy David
Mired in poverty
When families are mired in poverty, it’s the children – in all their innocence – who become the principal victims. Their future is at once compromised. They grow up without proper nourishment, their young bodies battered by disease and parasites against which they have little protection. Their schooling, even if free, becomes a haphazard experience, marked by interruptions beyond their control. Often they’re too hungry to walk to school, or too busy foraging for food that will tide the family over till the next day. Food is always the first priority under these circumstances.
This picture of Philippine poverty, so common in media reports, has become almost a cliché. Endless repetition blunts its urgency. We all learn to move on without being bothered.
It is different when the picture shows people you have known. I know one such family in these dire circumstances. I have become their accidental benefactor, and though I have reluctantly embraced this role, I’m still not certain that I can help change the course of their lives. But it’s worth a try.
Rosalie and Dodoy married even before either one of them had a steady job -- of course. If you’re young and did not finish grade school, you can’t expect to land a stable job in the provinces. And if you’re unemployed, chances are you’ll find yourself starting a family before you’re ready. Theoretically, we can call people to account for the decisions they make in life. But the word “decision” seems inapplicable to people in Rosalie and Dodoy’s circumstances. It is more accurate, I think, to say they’re “thrown” into a way of life they did not exactly choose, living a pre-ordained script they’re likely to pass on to their own children.
They were migrants from Bicol. Bringing with him his young bride, Dodoy moved to Bataan to live with his parents’ family. His father, a caretaker in a small farm owned by my brother, had settled there with his wife and their entire brood of 10 other children. This was about 15 years ago. Rosalie came to work as a house help in my mother’s home in Quezon City, going back to Bataan once a month, while her husband took on odd jobs in construction sites. Before long, she became pregnant with their first baby, and so she had to quit working. I did not see them again after many years later.
The couple, with two kids in tow, approached me one day while I was planting some mango saplings in the 1.5 hectare lot I keep on the slopes of Mt. Malasimbo. I didn’t recognize them until Rosalie introduced herself as my late mother’s former maid. They asked if I had someone to look after the mango farm. I smiled, thinking that the place, with 30 mango saplings, was hardly a farm. Rosalie has always been the confident one; she did most of the talking. She asked if I would let them put up a small shack on the property and use the space between the mangoes and the coconuts to plant seasonal vegetables. Of course, I said without hesitation. In return, they promised to watch over the trees I planted.
That’s how I found myself “thrown” into a relationship of dependence and patronage for which I was neither psychologically nor ideologically prepared. First, they needed a small financial assistance to complete the tiny shack they were building. They asked to “borrow” money, offering to pay it back in kind or in labor. I gave them the money and called it a contribution. Then they needed pesticides, fertilizer, and balls of string for the vegetable patch they cleared. I gave them what they needed and this time I said it was a loan. Harvest time came and what they earned from the sale of their produce was less than half of the money they owed. I accepted a few bunches of the string beans they brought to me in payment, but I didn’t have the heart to take the cash. I advised them to use the money instead to plant corn and mongo.
The kids came one after the other, until there were four additional mouths to feed. The eldest, a boy of 14, is in high school. The two girls in between are in grade school. The youngest, an 18-month-old boy, is still feeding from his mother’s breast. For the last five years, I have been giving Rosalie a monthly allowance of P1000 to help with the food and school needs of the children. In search of regular work, Dodoy left for Manila, but what he earned in the big city as an “extra” tricycle driver was barely enough for his own needs.
One summer, the couple explored the possibility of going back to Bicol and live with Rosalie’s parents. Their visit didn’t last more than a month; they could not endure the hunger and deprivation in her father’s home. It was worse than they suspected.
Last month, Rosalie came to see me. Calmly, this frail woman of about 35 and mother to four young children told me that her husband had left her. She wanted to know if they could continue to stay on the property. I assured her it was no problem with me, but I inquired how she intended to feed her family. She said she earned a little from buying and selling at the nearby market. She just wanted to make sure, she said, that her children’s schooling would not be interrupted, and that her eldest boy at least would finish high school. That was her big dream. I was stunned by her staunch belief in the miracle of education and by her fierce determination to carry on without her husband.
It was then that I began to reconsider my initial skepticism about the government’s conditional cash transfer program. Out there, there are millions of other Filipino children equally mired in poverty who deserve society’s protection, whose future should not be compromised by their elders’ inadequacy, misfortune, or irresponsibility.
public.lives@gmail.com
November 11, 2010
Randy David
Mired in poverty
When families are mired in poverty, it’s the children – in all their innocence – who become the principal victims. Their future is at once compromised. They grow up without proper nourishment, their young bodies battered by disease and parasites against which they have little protection. Their schooling, even if free, becomes a haphazard experience, marked by interruptions beyond their control. Often they’re too hungry to walk to school, or too busy foraging for food that will tide the family over till the next day. Food is always the first priority under these circumstances.
This picture of Philippine poverty, so common in media reports, has become almost a cliché. Endless repetition blunts its urgency. We all learn to move on without being bothered.
It is different when the picture shows people you have known. I know one such family in these dire circumstances. I have become their accidental benefactor, and though I have reluctantly embraced this role, I’m still not certain that I can help change the course of their lives. But it’s worth a try.
Rosalie and Dodoy married even before either one of them had a steady job -- of course. If you’re young and did not finish grade school, you can’t expect to land a stable job in the provinces. And if you’re unemployed, chances are you’ll find yourself starting a family before you’re ready. Theoretically, we can call people to account for the decisions they make in life. But the word “decision” seems inapplicable to people in Rosalie and Dodoy’s circumstances. It is more accurate, I think, to say they’re “thrown” into a way of life they did not exactly choose, living a pre-ordained script they’re likely to pass on to their own children.
They were migrants from Bicol. Bringing with him his young bride, Dodoy moved to Bataan to live with his parents’ family. His father, a caretaker in a small farm owned by my brother, had settled there with his wife and their entire brood of 10 other children. This was about 15 years ago. Rosalie came to work as a house help in my mother’s home in Quezon City, going back to Bataan once a month, while her husband took on odd jobs in construction sites. Before long, she became pregnant with their first baby, and so she had to quit working. I did not see them again after many years later.
The couple, with two kids in tow, approached me one day while I was planting some mango saplings in the 1.5 hectare lot I keep on the slopes of Mt. Malasimbo. I didn’t recognize them until Rosalie introduced herself as my late mother’s former maid. They asked if I had someone to look after the mango farm. I smiled, thinking that the place, with 30 mango saplings, was hardly a farm. Rosalie has always been the confident one; she did most of the talking. She asked if I would let them put up a small shack on the property and use the space between the mangoes and the coconuts to plant seasonal vegetables. Of course, I said without hesitation. In return, they promised to watch over the trees I planted.
That’s how I found myself “thrown” into a relationship of dependence and patronage for which I was neither psychologically nor ideologically prepared. First, they needed a small financial assistance to complete the tiny shack they were building. They asked to “borrow” money, offering to pay it back in kind or in labor. I gave them the money and called it a contribution. Then they needed pesticides, fertilizer, and balls of string for the vegetable patch they cleared. I gave them what they needed and this time I said it was a loan. Harvest time came and what they earned from the sale of their produce was less than half of the money they owed. I accepted a few bunches of the string beans they brought to me in payment, but I didn’t have the heart to take the cash. I advised them to use the money instead to plant corn and mongo.
The kids came one after the other, until there were four additional mouths to feed. The eldest, a boy of 14, is in high school. The two girls in between are in grade school. The youngest, an 18-month-old boy, is still feeding from his mother’s breast. For the last five years, I have been giving Rosalie a monthly allowance of P1000 to help with the food and school needs of the children. In search of regular work, Dodoy left for Manila, but what he earned in the big city as an “extra” tricycle driver was barely enough for his own needs.
One summer, the couple explored the possibility of going back to Bicol and live with Rosalie’s parents. Their visit didn’t last more than a month; they could not endure the hunger and deprivation in her father’s home. It was worse than they suspected.
Last month, Rosalie came to see me. Calmly, this frail woman of about 35 and mother to four young children told me that her husband had left her. She wanted to know if they could continue to stay on the property. I assured her it was no problem with me, but I inquired how she intended to feed her family. She said she earned a little from buying and selling at the nearby market. She just wanted to make sure, she said, that her children’s schooling would not be interrupted, and that her eldest boy at least would finish high school. That was her big dream. I was stunned by her staunch belief in the miracle of education and by her fierce determination to carry on without her husband.
It was then that I began to reconsider my initial skepticism about the government’s conditional cash transfer program. Out there, there are millions of other Filipino children equally mired in poverty who deserve society’s protection, whose future should not be compromised by their elders’ inadequacy, misfortune, or irresponsibility.
public.lives@gmail.com
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Welcome Freshmen of Miriam College
You will be asked to go to this blogspot to give you more information on our subject Introductory course on Sociology. Articles can be found in this blogspot. There is a search box and the tags that are written on its front page.
Welcome again.
Welcome again.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Sunday, September 5, 2010
A story of Genocide, 1994
Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.
Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.
Please click on the link.
Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.
Please click on the link.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Systemic dysfunction of society
PUBLIC LIVES
September 2, 2010
Randy David
Leadership in a transitional society
In our society, when something goes wrong, people ask: who’s to blame? Remedy is instantly sought in the replacement of officials rather than in the review of systems. In other societies, the prior question that is asked is: what went wrong? Only after this is answered do heads roll. The focus on personalities is not something unique to us, nor is it inherent in Filipino culture. It is just what differentiates a traditional from a modern society.
The fact that we are in transition only makes our situation a bit more confusing. We have modern systems in various domains of our national life, but these are easily trumped by the traditional authority of powerful and influential figures. The latter typically claim all the credit for successes. But, when failures and breakdowns occur, they quickly point to their limited responsibility under modern rules.
Take our political system. We tend to highlight the deficiencies of leaders, forgetting that they themselves are creations of the same traditional system in which we all play a role and which we help reproduce in our daily lives. In quest of solutions, we like to cast around for heroic individuals who can redeem the deficiencies of an entire society. As a result, our elections become nothing more than exercises in finding someone we can trust at any given moment, and later blame for all the dysfunctions of our society.
Our politicians not only willingly play this game but indeed they encourage it, for that’s how they win votes. Instead of concrete plans and programs of government, they concentrate on fundamental contrasts in personal virtues and endowments. In all this, the systemic character of persistent social problems – poverty, corruption, social injustice, incompetence, etc. – is effectively concealed. And so when these problems explode in our face, the first thing we do is, again, find someone to blame. Sometimes, sensing that the blame should not be heaped on a few people, we go through episodes of collective breast-beating in atonement for our moral failings.
Yet these problems are largely the outcome of structural failings. Catharsis and atonement alone will not make them go away. The governance of a society like ours has become an incredibly complex business. We have not only greatly multiplied in number. Our people’s experiences, values, and beliefs have also become extremely diverse. Our links to the rest of the world have likewise phenomenally expanded. No longer are we merely responsible for ourselves and to ourselves, we are today also answerable to many other peoples around the world whose lives ours are intertwined with ours.
The old ways of governing, dependent upon the performance of strong, charismatic, or extraordinary leaders at the top, are no longer adequate for managing such complexity. They belong to simple hierarchical societies. Modern problems require differentiated institutional systems and reliable professional response. The era of the heroic individual whose direct personal intervention is demanded in every crisis is long past. Modern impersonal systems are built precisely as a way of reducing complexity. They will not work properly, however, when their operation can, at any point, be overridden by the personal decisions of lone rangers.
In a previous column on the hostage crisis that led to the tragic death of eight Hong Kong tourists, I noted that the bungled effort to rescue the hostages could not be ascribed solely to incompetence or lack of equipment on the part of the police. The entire effort seemed marked by “institutional paralysis.” A system was in place for dealing with hostage situations. But, from what we now know, it appears that the police officers in charge were unable to fully activate this system and confidently assert their authority in the presence of the many big shots that were interfering in the operation. In the end, no one in particular was in charge.
We would be mistaken to think that this systemic problem will go away by simply dismissing people ahead of a full report of what happened. This may appease some people, but it will only hide the larger institutional crisis that is upon us. This crisis did not grow overnight, and it will not be solved overnight. Indeed it was allowed to fester over the years, providing the setting for quick fixes like martial law and people power revolutions. At every turning point, the ensuing change never went deep enough to disturb the basic framework of a patronage-driven hierarchical society. It is this whole system that is today in crisis.
Tragic events like Typhoon Ondoy, the Maguindanao massacre, and the hostage crisis at the Quirino grandstand have one thing in common – they all lay bare the dysfunctionality of our existing social system. They underscore the need to review and strengthen our institutions, or, at the very least, free them from the grip of traditional patrons and authority figures. The structural solutions will increasingly become clear to us in time, if we can resist the tendency to moralize and personalize everything.
Perhaps it is a good thing that despite the uniquely personal circumstances that thrust him to the presidency, President Aquino has kept a very low profile. He speaks plainly and almost diffidently, and, instead of projecting an aura of charismatic confidence, is quick to admit lapses. Given the existing political culture, this may not be the most astute demeanor for a new president to project. But it is the best setting in which to strengthen institutions.
public.lives@gmail.com
September 2, 2010
Randy David
Leadership in a transitional society
In our society, when something goes wrong, people ask: who’s to blame? Remedy is instantly sought in the replacement of officials rather than in the review of systems. In other societies, the prior question that is asked is: what went wrong? Only after this is answered do heads roll. The focus on personalities is not something unique to us, nor is it inherent in Filipino culture. It is just what differentiates a traditional from a modern society.
The fact that we are in transition only makes our situation a bit more confusing. We have modern systems in various domains of our national life, but these are easily trumped by the traditional authority of powerful and influential figures. The latter typically claim all the credit for successes. But, when failures and breakdowns occur, they quickly point to their limited responsibility under modern rules.
Take our political system. We tend to highlight the deficiencies of leaders, forgetting that they themselves are creations of the same traditional system in which we all play a role and which we help reproduce in our daily lives. In quest of solutions, we like to cast around for heroic individuals who can redeem the deficiencies of an entire society. As a result, our elections become nothing more than exercises in finding someone we can trust at any given moment, and later blame for all the dysfunctions of our society.
Our politicians not only willingly play this game but indeed they encourage it, for that’s how they win votes. Instead of concrete plans and programs of government, they concentrate on fundamental contrasts in personal virtues and endowments. In all this, the systemic character of persistent social problems – poverty, corruption, social injustice, incompetence, etc. – is effectively concealed. And so when these problems explode in our face, the first thing we do is, again, find someone to blame. Sometimes, sensing that the blame should not be heaped on a few people, we go through episodes of collective breast-beating in atonement for our moral failings.
Yet these problems are largely the outcome of structural failings. Catharsis and atonement alone will not make them go away. The governance of a society like ours has become an incredibly complex business. We have not only greatly multiplied in number. Our people’s experiences, values, and beliefs have also become extremely diverse. Our links to the rest of the world have likewise phenomenally expanded. No longer are we merely responsible for ourselves and to ourselves, we are today also answerable to many other peoples around the world whose lives ours are intertwined with ours.
The old ways of governing, dependent upon the performance of strong, charismatic, or extraordinary leaders at the top, are no longer adequate for managing such complexity. They belong to simple hierarchical societies. Modern problems require differentiated institutional systems and reliable professional response. The era of the heroic individual whose direct personal intervention is demanded in every crisis is long past. Modern impersonal systems are built precisely as a way of reducing complexity. They will not work properly, however, when their operation can, at any point, be overridden by the personal decisions of lone rangers.
In a previous column on the hostage crisis that led to the tragic death of eight Hong Kong tourists, I noted that the bungled effort to rescue the hostages could not be ascribed solely to incompetence or lack of equipment on the part of the police. The entire effort seemed marked by “institutional paralysis.” A system was in place for dealing with hostage situations. But, from what we now know, it appears that the police officers in charge were unable to fully activate this system and confidently assert their authority in the presence of the many big shots that were interfering in the operation. In the end, no one in particular was in charge.
We would be mistaken to think that this systemic problem will go away by simply dismissing people ahead of a full report of what happened. This may appease some people, but it will only hide the larger institutional crisis that is upon us. This crisis did not grow overnight, and it will not be solved overnight. Indeed it was allowed to fester over the years, providing the setting for quick fixes like martial law and people power revolutions. At every turning point, the ensuing change never went deep enough to disturb the basic framework of a patronage-driven hierarchical society. It is this whole system that is today in crisis.
Tragic events like Typhoon Ondoy, the Maguindanao massacre, and the hostage crisis at the Quirino grandstand have one thing in common – they all lay bare the dysfunctionality of our existing social system. They underscore the need to review and strengthen our institutions, or, at the very least, free them from the grip of traditional patrons and authority figures. The structural solutions will increasingly become clear to us in time, if we can resist the tendency to moralize and personalize everything.
Perhaps it is a good thing that despite the uniquely personal circumstances that thrust him to the presidency, President Aquino has kept a very low profile. He speaks plainly and almost diffidently, and, instead of projecting an aura of charismatic confidence, is quick to admit lapses. Given the existing political culture, this may not be the most astute demeanor for a new president to project. But it is the best setting in which to strengthen institutions.
public.lives@gmail.com
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Language on thoughts - update
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Language matters
PUBLIC LIVES
August 19, 2010
Randy David
Language matters
It is that time of the year when we are prompted to revisit language issues in our society. In what language should we educate our children? What language should the government use to communicate with our people? What language should the courts in our country use? Is the bilingual policy that makes Filipino and English the official media of communication and instruction serving the national purpose? Are we doing enough to develop and enrich Filipino as the national language, as mandated by the Constitution? These issues have remained contentious and unresolved:
Even as languages evolve on their own, nations find themselves having to choose which languages best work for them as they pursue specific goals and purposes. As with persons, language preference ultimately mirrors a nation’s hierarchy of values. In the post-colonial years, especially in those societies marked by cultural diversity, the designation of a national language was thought crucial to the task of nation-building and political integration. Today, nations that have premised their growth on being able to ride the tide of globalization find little need to develop their own languages. They not only turn to English as the language of modernity; they also want to make it the lingua franca of their people.
This brings instant rewards to individuals who seek careers in the modern sector of the economy or in the global labor market. But for the majority who remain in the country, the costs are immense. Education becomes an alienating experience for schoolchildren, who cannot use their own language to create and access knowledge. Social inequalities are exacerbated. As English becomes a marker of class, a mechanism of exclusion, local languages are relegated to the margins of public discourse. Perhaps, most important of all, as we lose the use of our languages, we also break with our own basic orientations as a people. This is especially a problem for the English-speaking Filipino intelligentsia who find that increasingly they can neither understand nor communicate with their own people.
Recent research on the connection between language and ways of seeing and thinking provides new evidence for the thesis that language is not just a carrier but a shaper of thought. These studies, echoing the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, shift the analysis from the nature of the mind to the uses of language.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal (07/23/10), Dr. Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, discusses recent field experiments that show how language structures not just the way we see but the way we solve problems and accumulate knowledge about the world. This is not a new idea at all. But Dr. Boroditsky has come up with new material to prove the point.
Language, she argues, shapes our notions of space, time, and causality. Such notions are not the same in all languages. “About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.” Dr. Boroditsky and another colleague went to Australia to study the Pormpuraaw, an aboriginal group whose languages have no “terms like ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, ‘There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” This astounding precision in the language for depicting space allows people like the Pormpuraaws to “build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions.”
Does the way we talk about space have any bearing on the way we talk about time? To find out, the researchers showed the Pormpuraaws some pictures indicating a progression of events – photos of a person or crocodile at different ages, or a banana being consumed in stages. While seated, the subjects were repeatedly asked to arrange the photos in the correct temporal order, facing in a different direction each time. English speakers arrange time from left to right. Speakers of languages that are written from right to left, like Hebrew, Bororditsky says, arrange time from right to left.
But the Pormpuraaws depict time progression in an east-to-west direction. Facing south, the subjects arranged the time photos from left to right. Facing north, they arranged them right to left. Facing east, they arranged them toward the body. No one needed to tell them where east or west was. In other languages, Boroditsky adds, the past may be represented as above, while the future is below (as in Mandarin). “In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.”
What is true for time and space seems true as well for notions of causality. In some languages, accidents are attributed to no one, whereas in others, the doer who caused the accident is identified, what witnesses saw is important, and blame is assigned.
This reminds me of a story that Michel Foucault tells in an interview. A team of psychologists showed a short film about three characters to a village in Africa, and then asked the viewers to recount the film in their own words. They remembered nothing about the characters; only one thing engaged their attention: “the movement of the light and shadow through the trees.”
Language matters. We are formed by the language we speak. When we lose our language, we lose a part of ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein captured it so well in a crisp aphorism: “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
public.lives@gmail.com
August 19, 2010
Randy David
Language matters
It is that time of the year when we are prompted to revisit language issues in our society. In what language should we educate our children? What language should the government use to communicate with our people? What language should the courts in our country use? Is the bilingual policy that makes Filipino and English the official media of communication and instruction serving the national purpose? Are we doing enough to develop and enrich Filipino as the national language, as mandated by the Constitution? These issues have remained contentious and unresolved:
Even as languages evolve on their own, nations find themselves having to choose which languages best work for them as they pursue specific goals and purposes. As with persons, language preference ultimately mirrors a nation’s hierarchy of values. In the post-colonial years, especially in those societies marked by cultural diversity, the designation of a national language was thought crucial to the task of nation-building and political integration. Today, nations that have premised their growth on being able to ride the tide of globalization find little need to develop their own languages. They not only turn to English as the language of modernity; they also want to make it the lingua franca of their people.
This brings instant rewards to individuals who seek careers in the modern sector of the economy or in the global labor market. But for the majority who remain in the country, the costs are immense. Education becomes an alienating experience for schoolchildren, who cannot use their own language to create and access knowledge. Social inequalities are exacerbated. As English becomes a marker of class, a mechanism of exclusion, local languages are relegated to the margins of public discourse. Perhaps, most important of all, as we lose the use of our languages, we also break with our own basic orientations as a people. This is especially a problem for the English-speaking Filipino intelligentsia who find that increasingly they can neither understand nor communicate with their own people.
Recent research on the connection between language and ways of seeing and thinking provides new evidence for the thesis that language is not just a carrier but a shaper of thought. These studies, echoing the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, shift the analysis from the nature of the mind to the uses of language.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal (07/23/10), Dr. Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, discusses recent field experiments that show how language structures not just the way we see but the way we solve problems and accumulate knowledge about the world. This is not a new idea at all. But Dr. Boroditsky has come up with new material to prove the point.
Language, she argues, shapes our notions of space, time, and causality. Such notions are not the same in all languages. “About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.” Dr. Boroditsky and another colleague went to Australia to study the Pormpuraaw, an aboriginal group whose languages have no “terms like ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, ‘There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” This astounding precision in the language for depicting space allows people like the Pormpuraaws to “build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions.”
Does the way we talk about space have any bearing on the way we talk about time? To find out, the researchers showed the Pormpuraaws some pictures indicating a progression of events – photos of a person or crocodile at different ages, or a banana being consumed in stages. While seated, the subjects were repeatedly asked to arrange the photos in the correct temporal order, facing in a different direction each time. English speakers arrange time from left to right. Speakers of languages that are written from right to left, like Hebrew, Bororditsky says, arrange time from right to left.
But the Pormpuraaws depict time progression in an east-to-west direction. Facing south, the subjects arranged the time photos from left to right. Facing north, they arranged them right to left. Facing east, they arranged them toward the body. No one needed to tell them where east or west was. In other languages, Boroditsky adds, the past may be represented as above, while the future is below (as in Mandarin). “In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.”
What is true for time and space seems true as well for notions of causality. In some languages, accidents are attributed to no one, whereas in others, the doer who caused the accident is identified, what witnesses saw is important, and blame is assigned.
This reminds me of a story that Michel Foucault tells in an interview. A team of psychologists showed a short film about three characters to a village in Africa, and then asked the viewers to recount the film in their own words. They remembered nothing about the characters; only one thing engaged their attention: “the movement of the light and shadow through the trees.”
Language matters. We are formed by the language we speak. When we lose our language, we lose a part of ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein captured it so well in a crisp aphorism: “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
public.lives@gmail.com
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Probe team, Goodbye
Interview with Cheche Lazaro of Probe.
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20100724-282906
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20100724-282906
Monday, July 12, 2010
Chinese romance with English
Times have change indeed. Rewind, Mao Ze Dong's cultural revolution in the 1960's attacked the imperialist English language. Now, many Chinese are going abroad to learn English. Click on the link below.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20100712-280668/Beijing-steps-up-English-language-drive
You can google: China, cultural revolution.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20100712-280668/Beijing-steps-up-English-language-drive
You can google: China, cultural revolution.
Understanding Hacienda Luisita
Hancienda Luisita that huge of piece land will be a focus on the Aquino administration. The Philippines being an agricultural country and most of its presidents have promised agricultural reform.
Fr. Bernas writes on this subject: http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20100712-280589/Focus-on-Hacienda-Luisita
Click on the above link
Fr. Bernas writes on this subject: http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20100712-280589/Focus-on-Hacienda-Luisita
Click on the above link
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Handog ng Pilipino sa Mundo
This video clip show black and white pictures of the events that was the EDSA People Power of 1986. Some clips from Dekada 70 of Lualhati Bautista was also added. For students of sociology and observers of society this is a good historical background on what happened in the past.
The spirit of a man
There have now been 988 service members who have lost limbs in combat since the first of the wars began in 2001, but Specialist Marrocco’s many wounds raised so many questions. Would he crumble mentally? Was his brain intact? How would he ever cope with daily needs like eating, bathing, even simply getting out of bed and putting on clothes?
Click on colored link.
Click on colored link.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
History of Love Part - 02
Source: Anonymous, as forward in email. History of Love parts 1-2.
The Age of Reason
(1700-1800)
· By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted anew approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body.
· The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.
· Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.
· In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable replaced the Christian theology that saw man as besotted and laden with guilt and sin.
· Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.
· Almost any behavior was acceptable as long as emotions were concealed. Even private intimate conversations were stilted with remote and detached words.
· The rationalists scorned the gloom of Christianity. They scrapped the church's concept of women as evil, but they often viewed women as ornaments, toys or unreasonable nitwits and still held women as subservient.
· 1 8th Century love idealized the mythical Don Juan who was impeccably mannered, lustful, haughty, and false. Love was often reduced to malicious sport with the motive to seduce.
· Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (born 1725) was an adventurer who had a brilliant mind. He wrote two dozen books covering math, history, astronomy, and philosophy.
· By mid 18th Century, flirtation and romance were no longer an exclusive part of aristocratic tradition, but were common in the bourgeois or middle class.
· Ben Franklin was a rationalist with guiltless views of sex.
Victorianism
(1800-1900)
· During 19th Century Victorianism, the ideas of nobility and birthright were declining with the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Newly rich entrepreneurs were growing wealthy and tried to copy ways of the upper class with lower class customs. Urbane control of one's emotions was losing popularity to "sensibility". A maudlin "sensitivity" became the ideal. Love now became a mighty force and noble goal. Men grew shy, inhibited and fearful of rebuff as they began backing away from sexuality. They sought not the dazzling flirtatious woman, but the shy, virginal one.
· Victorianism stood for high "moral" standards, close-knit families and glorified views of women. At the same time, prostitution was widespread and the structure of marriage was crumbling as women began revolting against their oppressive "glorified" status.
· Jean Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential forces in forming a new, viciously oppressive political "liberalism" that was combined with slobbering sentimentality. He often displayed sick sentimental tears. He hungered for cruelty and beatings and lived with women vastly inferior to him in order to boost his low confidence and weak self-esteem. He gave away his own children. He wrote with maudlin sentimentality. Europe was deeply under Rousseau's influence.
· Rousseau appealed to the seriousness of the middle class. Laughter and wit went out of style. Emphasis began to focus on female modesty. Open displays of sentimentality, melancholy, and tearfulness became chic. For example, the Irish poet, Tom Moore, got sentimental even for the stones in a road.
· The clinging-vine personality in women developed: women should be modest, virtuous and sweet. They should be weak and anxious to lean on and be dominated by strong men.
· With rising prosperity and development of public school systems made possible by the industrial revolution, children began to move outside of the home, depriving women of many of their functions. The reasonably affluent man no longer needed an all-work woman. He could now concentrate more on a woman's value as a love partner.
· Togetherness concepts developed. With his sweet home-making wife, a new style of home-life patriarch arose. The stay-at-home husband was to spend every available hour with his good wife. (e.g., Corbett's book, Advice To A Young Man , frowns on social activities with others in stating, "If they are not company enough for each other, it is but a sad affair".)
· Women had to be "morally" spotless. This led to excessive prudishness in word and actions. Prudishness then spread from sex to bathroom functions.
· Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1842 stated that the female had no privileges except to barely consent or refuse a man. A woman being courted was permitted to summon up a "timid blush" or the "faintest of smiles" to convey her feelings.
· The Brownings supposedly never saw each other entirely naked.
· Unites States Surgeon General, William Hammond, stated that decent women felt not the slightest pleasure during intercourse. Many doctors considered sexual desire in women to be pathological and warned that female passion could cause sterility. Many thought only prostitutes could enjoy sex.
· The woman's role was glorified and idealized, but this was only a new pretext for their continued subjugation by men. Women literally made themselves helpless through fashion. They immobilized themselves in laces and stays.
· Victorian men were patriarchal and stern, but they played this role at their own sexual expense.
· Out of this Victorian repression arose a great hunger for a fantasy sex life. Flagellation, pornography, and prostitution rose dramatically (e.g., 50,000 prostitutes in London in 1850 and over 300,000 copies of the pornographic book, A Monk's Awful Disclosures, were sold before the Civil War.)
· Nearly all written work about the private lives of Victorians, on the other hand, were "purified" by omitting all references to sex and love.
Decline of Victorianism,
The Rise of Capitalism and
The Emancipation of Women
(1850-1900)
· Emancipation started in 1792 with Mary Wallstonecraft and her attacks on marriage and the subjugation of women. Her work was undermined by her badly misguided condemnation of masturbation and her advocation of government force to stop prostitution. In 1833, Oberlin was the first college to admit women. In 1837, Mt. Holyoke became the first women's college. With the rise of capitalism, women gained economic rights never before enjoyed. Capitalism broke up autocratic church power and the feudal nobility pattern.
· During the 1840s, the new middle class began growing rapidly. Capitalistic economics were accelerating the dissolution of class differences along with ancient social ties and repressive customs.
· The rigid Victorian home was threatened by female suffrage, divorce reforms and free love.
· Victorianism was a desperate delaying action against inevitable changes made by capitalism and the industrial revolution.
· Victorianism and religion tried to fight change and to retain the subjugated position of women by government force and police activities.
Emergence of Twentieth Century
Romantic Love
(1900-1930)
· With the partial emergence of capitalism grew a new age of romantic love. America's increasing divorce rate reflected not the failure of love but the increasing refusal of people to live without love and happiness.
· Love patterns of all modern societies were replaced by America's model because so many people were drawn to the romantic love style that combined sexual outlet, affectionate friendship and family functions, all in a single relationship.
· Romantic attraction not only became desirable, but became the only acceptable basis for choosing a life-long partner.
· Romantic love was made possible by capitalism and the industrial revolution. With romantic love, the sexual desires of both partners could be satisfied within marriage. All the tenderness and excitement of love could coexist with household cares and child rearing. Romantic love was the most difficult and complex human relationship ever attempted... but the most appealing and satisfying.
· Soviets detached individual values from sex (e.g., they promoted the concept that sex was no more than drinking a glass of water).
· The modern Sexual Revolution discarded the 19th Century prudish and patriarchal Victorian-Christian patterns. Sexual liberation made achievement of sexual pleasure increasingly important.
· Children were no longer an economic asset, but a costly luxury valuable only for love. For example, in 1776, Adam Smith estimated an American child was worth [sterling]100 in profit before he left home; by 1910 a city child cost thousands of dollars; by 1944 a child cost about $16 thousand to raise to adulthood; by 1959 a child cost about $25 thousand to raise; by 1975 a child cost about $75 thousand to raise. In 1985, costs for raising a child to adulthood averaged around $150 thousand. Allowing for inflation, future cost will be much higher.
· Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) was a symbol of flaming feminism with her free-love and unwed motherhood stances. She claimed that sexual love should be ecstatic for women. Margaret Sanger staged a heroic fight for birth control claiming that a woman's body belonged to her alone. She published birth control information in 1914 and opened birth control clinics in 1916. Catholic elements had her arrested and jailed. But here work spread. By 1930, over 300 birth control clinics had been established.
· Margaret Sanger separated lovemaking from procreation. This brought the traditional ideal of a monogamous, faithful marriage under attack.
· Complete freedom by each partner was advanced by intellectuals such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Havelock Ellis, Judge Ben Lindsay.
· Havelock Ellis offered ideas in 1900 that were remarkably similar to those advanced in 1973 by the O'Neills in their book, Open Marriage.
· The sexual Revolution also stressed the mechanical aspects of the sex act. In Marie Stopes' book, Married Love (1918), the women's right to orgasm was promoted. Orgasm was described as an end-in-itself. Wilhelm Reich proposed that orgasm failure was the cause of major mental and physical diseases. He even advocated masturbation to combat cancer via flow of sexual energy.
Modern Romantic Love
(1930-Present)
· Free love and open marriage developed in the 20th Century along with progressive polygamy via repeated marriage and divorce. Sexual enjoyment was accepted as a human right.
· The need for reassurance of one's personal self-esteem made this new form of romantic love popular and desired. Themes of love, heart- break, and eventual happiness became popular and dominated the soap operas.
· Dating started in the 1920s as a new way of mate selection made necessary by city life. Shy, passive femininity was being discarded. The crucial feature of dating was freedom from commitment while young people learned and experimented.
· Dating was criticized by many sociologists and social "intellectuals" as a loveless, competitive contest. But dating was a healthy breakthrough and generally a cheerful and happy activity. Dating was an educational process, leading from playful heterosexual behavior to companionship and love.
· Premarital relationships became more open and intimate than relationships of the past. Potential partners were able to know each other much more deeply through intimate dating.
· This new romanticism was at once both idealistically romantic and practical.
· Many conditions were similar to Roman times (economic and legal emancipation of women, well-to-do city life, children being a luxury rather than an asset, and sexual enjoyment deemed a right for all). One profound difference existed. Romans moved away from married life while Americans became more marriage-minded than ever before. And when marriage failed, Americans would divorce and head right back into another marriage.
· Most sociologists have strongly criticized romantic love while praising conjugal love. Their attacks are, however, distorted and out of context. They project romantic love as it was idealized in the medieval period when love could not exist within marriage.
· Romantic feelings are not only for new loves and adolescents, but are also for long-married couples.
· Women have gained the right to be equal to men, but many women are afraid of the demands and challenges of being an equal; other women hold the erroneous fear that equality might cost them the chance for love and marriage.
· Inequality for females is no longer a matter of law. Men and women now have essentially the same educational and economic opportunities, but most American wives still do not strive for high achievement in the major areas of value production, i.e., business, science, medicine.
· To the average man, his job is what he is. To the average woman, a job is only to make money. And the average American housewife suffers from a chronic, low-grade dissatisfaction, diminished self-esteem, and increasing boredom.
· Most women are confused about their "role" and do not really know what they want to be in life. Surveys of two college campuses indicated that 40% of the coeds admitted "playing dumb" with interesting men because many men feel threatened by overtly intelligent women (M. Kamarovsky, Women in the Modern World, Little, Brown & Co., 1953).
· Modern love makes sense and is exercising its immense appeal all over the world.
· Modern romantic love is almost everyone's goal. Today, the value and purpose of romantic love is, above all else, directed toward the fulfillment of major emotional needs and happiness.
· An ominous rise of overt born-again Christianity and fundamentalist religions signal a turn back toward malevolent views of life, love, sex, and women.
The Age of Reason
(1700-1800)
· By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted anew approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body.
· The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.
· Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.
· In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable replaced the Christian theology that saw man as besotted and laden with guilt and sin.
· Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.
· Almost any behavior was acceptable as long as emotions were concealed. Even private intimate conversations were stilted with remote and detached words.
· The rationalists scorned the gloom of Christianity. They scrapped the church's concept of women as evil, but they often viewed women as ornaments, toys or unreasonable nitwits and still held women as subservient.
· 1 8th Century love idealized the mythical Don Juan who was impeccably mannered, lustful, haughty, and false. Love was often reduced to malicious sport with the motive to seduce.
· Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (born 1725) was an adventurer who had a brilliant mind. He wrote two dozen books covering math, history, astronomy, and philosophy.
· By mid 18th Century, flirtation and romance were no longer an exclusive part of aristocratic tradition, but were common in the bourgeois or middle class.
· Ben Franklin was a rationalist with guiltless views of sex.
Victorianism
(1800-1900)
· During 19th Century Victorianism, the ideas of nobility and birthright were declining with the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Newly rich entrepreneurs were growing wealthy and tried to copy ways of the upper class with lower class customs. Urbane control of one's emotions was losing popularity to "sensibility". A maudlin "sensitivity" became the ideal. Love now became a mighty force and noble goal. Men grew shy, inhibited and fearful of rebuff as they began backing away from sexuality. They sought not the dazzling flirtatious woman, but the shy, virginal one.
· Victorianism stood for high "moral" standards, close-knit families and glorified views of women. At the same time, prostitution was widespread and the structure of marriage was crumbling as women began revolting against their oppressive "glorified" status.
· Jean Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential forces in forming a new, viciously oppressive political "liberalism" that was combined with slobbering sentimentality. He often displayed sick sentimental tears. He hungered for cruelty and beatings and lived with women vastly inferior to him in order to boost his low confidence and weak self-esteem. He gave away his own children. He wrote with maudlin sentimentality. Europe was deeply under Rousseau's influence.
· Rousseau appealed to the seriousness of the middle class. Laughter and wit went out of style. Emphasis began to focus on female modesty. Open displays of sentimentality, melancholy, and tearfulness became chic. For example, the Irish poet, Tom Moore, got sentimental even for the stones in a road.
· The clinging-vine personality in women developed: women should be modest, virtuous and sweet. They should be weak and anxious to lean on and be dominated by strong men.
· With rising prosperity and development of public school systems made possible by the industrial revolution, children began to move outside of the home, depriving women of many of their functions. The reasonably affluent man no longer needed an all-work woman. He could now concentrate more on a woman's value as a love partner.
· Togetherness concepts developed. With his sweet home-making wife, a new style of home-life patriarch arose. The stay-at-home husband was to spend every available hour with his good wife. (e.g., Corbett's book, Advice To A Young Man , frowns on social activities with others in stating, "If they are not company enough for each other, it is but a sad affair".)
· Women had to be "morally" spotless. This led to excessive prudishness in word and actions. Prudishness then spread from sex to bathroom functions.
· Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1842 stated that the female had no privileges except to barely consent or refuse a man. A woman being courted was permitted to summon up a "timid blush" or the "faintest of smiles" to convey her feelings.
· The Brownings supposedly never saw each other entirely naked.
· Unites States Surgeon General, William Hammond, stated that decent women felt not the slightest pleasure during intercourse. Many doctors considered sexual desire in women to be pathological and warned that female passion could cause sterility. Many thought only prostitutes could enjoy sex.
· The woman's role was glorified and idealized, but this was only a new pretext for their continued subjugation by men. Women literally made themselves helpless through fashion. They immobilized themselves in laces and stays.
· Victorian men were patriarchal and stern, but they played this role at their own sexual expense.
· Out of this Victorian repression arose a great hunger for a fantasy sex life. Flagellation, pornography, and prostitution rose dramatically (e.g., 50,000 prostitutes in London in 1850 and over 300,000 copies of the pornographic book, A Monk's Awful Disclosures, were sold before the Civil War.)
· Nearly all written work about the private lives of Victorians, on the other hand, were "purified" by omitting all references to sex and love.
Decline of Victorianism,
The Rise of Capitalism and
The Emancipation of Women
(1850-1900)
· Emancipation started in 1792 with Mary Wallstonecraft and her attacks on marriage and the subjugation of women. Her work was undermined by her badly misguided condemnation of masturbation and her advocation of government force to stop prostitution. In 1833, Oberlin was the first college to admit women. In 1837, Mt. Holyoke became the first women's college. With the rise of capitalism, women gained economic rights never before enjoyed. Capitalism broke up autocratic church power and the feudal nobility pattern.
· During the 1840s, the new middle class began growing rapidly. Capitalistic economics were accelerating the dissolution of class differences along with ancient social ties and repressive customs.
· The rigid Victorian home was threatened by female suffrage, divorce reforms and free love.
· Victorianism was a desperate delaying action against inevitable changes made by capitalism and the industrial revolution.
· Victorianism and religion tried to fight change and to retain the subjugated position of women by government force and police activities.
Emergence of Twentieth Century
Romantic Love
(1900-1930)
· With the partial emergence of capitalism grew a new age of romantic love. America's increasing divorce rate reflected not the failure of love but the increasing refusal of people to live without love and happiness.
· Love patterns of all modern societies were replaced by America's model because so many people were drawn to the romantic love style that combined sexual outlet, affectionate friendship and family functions, all in a single relationship.
· Romantic attraction not only became desirable, but became the only acceptable basis for choosing a life-long partner.
· Romantic love was made possible by capitalism and the industrial revolution. With romantic love, the sexual desires of both partners could be satisfied within marriage. All the tenderness and excitement of love could coexist with household cares and child rearing. Romantic love was the most difficult and complex human relationship ever attempted... but the most appealing and satisfying.
· Soviets detached individual values from sex (e.g., they promoted the concept that sex was no more than drinking a glass of water).
· The modern Sexual Revolution discarded the 19th Century prudish and patriarchal Victorian-Christian patterns. Sexual liberation made achievement of sexual pleasure increasingly important.
· Children were no longer an economic asset, but a costly luxury valuable only for love. For example, in 1776, Adam Smith estimated an American child was worth [sterling]100 in profit before he left home; by 1910 a city child cost thousands of dollars; by 1944 a child cost about $16 thousand to raise to adulthood; by 1959 a child cost about $25 thousand to raise; by 1975 a child cost about $75 thousand to raise. In 1985, costs for raising a child to adulthood averaged around $150 thousand. Allowing for inflation, future cost will be much higher.
· Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) was a symbol of flaming feminism with her free-love and unwed motherhood stances. She claimed that sexual love should be ecstatic for women. Margaret Sanger staged a heroic fight for birth control claiming that a woman's body belonged to her alone. She published birth control information in 1914 and opened birth control clinics in 1916. Catholic elements had her arrested and jailed. But here work spread. By 1930, over 300 birth control clinics had been established.
· Margaret Sanger separated lovemaking from procreation. This brought the traditional ideal of a monogamous, faithful marriage under attack.
· Complete freedom by each partner was advanced by intellectuals such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Havelock Ellis, Judge Ben Lindsay.
· Havelock Ellis offered ideas in 1900 that were remarkably similar to those advanced in 1973 by the O'Neills in their book, Open Marriage.
· The sexual Revolution also stressed the mechanical aspects of the sex act. In Marie Stopes' book, Married Love (1918), the women's right to orgasm was promoted. Orgasm was described as an end-in-itself. Wilhelm Reich proposed that orgasm failure was the cause of major mental and physical diseases. He even advocated masturbation to combat cancer via flow of sexual energy.
Modern Romantic Love
(1930-Present)
· Free love and open marriage developed in the 20th Century along with progressive polygamy via repeated marriage and divorce. Sexual enjoyment was accepted as a human right.
· The need for reassurance of one's personal self-esteem made this new form of romantic love popular and desired. Themes of love, heart- break, and eventual happiness became popular and dominated the soap operas.
· Dating started in the 1920s as a new way of mate selection made necessary by city life. Shy, passive femininity was being discarded. The crucial feature of dating was freedom from commitment while young people learned and experimented.
· Dating was criticized by many sociologists and social "intellectuals" as a loveless, competitive contest. But dating was a healthy breakthrough and generally a cheerful and happy activity. Dating was an educational process, leading from playful heterosexual behavior to companionship and love.
· Premarital relationships became more open and intimate than relationships of the past. Potential partners were able to know each other much more deeply through intimate dating.
· This new romanticism was at once both idealistically romantic and practical.
· Many conditions were similar to Roman times (economic and legal emancipation of women, well-to-do city life, children being a luxury rather than an asset, and sexual enjoyment deemed a right for all). One profound difference existed. Romans moved away from married life while Americans became more marriage-minded than ever before. And when marriage failed, Americans would divorce and head right back into another marriage.
· Most sociologists have strongly criticized romantic love while praising conjugal love. Their attacks are, however, distorted and out of context. They project romantic love as it was idealized in the medieval period when love could not exist within marriage.
· Romantic feelings are not only for new loves and adolescents, but are also for long-married couples.
· Women have gained the right to be equal to men, but many women are afraid of the demands and challenges of being an equal; other women hold the erroneous fear that equality might cost them the chance for love and marriage.
· Inequality for females is no longer a matter of law. Men and women now have essentially the same educational and economic opportunities, but most American wives still do not strive for high achievement in the major areas of value production, i.e., business, science, medicine.
· To the average man, his job is what he is. To the average woman, a job is only to make money. And the average American housewife suffers from a chronic, low-grade dissatisfaction, diminished self-esteem, and increasing boredom.
· Most women are confused about their "role" and do not really know what they want to be in life. Surveys of two college campuses indicated that 40% of the coeds admitted "playing dumb" with interesting men because many men feel threatened by overtly intelligent women (M. Kamarovsky, Women in the Modern World, Little, Brown & Co., 1953).
· Modern love makes sense and is exercising its immense appeal all over the world.
· Modern romantic love is almost everyone's goal. Today, the value and purpose of romantic love is, above all else, directed toward the fulfillment of major emotional needs and happiness.
· An ominous rise of overt born-again Christianity and fundamentalist religions signal a turn back toward malevolent views of life, love, sex, and women.
History of Love Part - 01
THE HISTORY OF WESTERN LOVE AND SEX
FROM 1300 B.C. TO THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY
Ancient Greece
(1300 A.C.-450 A.C.)
· Homeric women (1300 B.C.-1 100 B.C.) were relatively free and exercised considerable influence over men, but remained virtuous and on double standards. With the high standard of living in later Greece, women became idle and lost their importance.
Golden Age of Greece
(450 B.C.-27 B.C.)
· Wild bisexual love life of Alcibiades (450 B.C.), a student of Socrates and raised by Pericles.
· High class prostitutes and courtesans were held superior to wives and "virtuous" women.
· Greek men wanted faithful love, but tried to obtain it by gifts and trickery. When Greek men actually did fall in love, they considered themselves as sick.
· The Greeks never connected love with marriage. They found love either an amusement that quickly faded or a god-sent affliction that lasted too long.
Roman Empire
(27 B.C.-385 A.D.)
· Pagan love in Rome was guilt-free, lusty, unfaithful and deceitful.
· Unlike Greeks, the Romans preferred sex without philosophy or significance.
· Abortions and contraception were common. Babies were often discarded as garbage.
· Octavian (Augustus) Caesar sought unsuccessfully to restore family unity and sexual "morality" via government force and the Julian laws...all were failures, even with death penalties.
· Poet Ovid (2 B.C.) wrote a manual for sex and adultery, The Art of Love (Ar Amatoria), a brilliant, modern, fun, deceptive, cheerful and humorous book:
o Modern grooming tips.
o Sanctioned the use of tears by men.
o Sexual positions described that stressed mutual orgasm and satisfaction
· Most "liberated" Roman feminists failed to find emotional satisfaction.
Decline of the Roman Empire
(100 A.D.-385 A.D.)
· Roman empire (100 A.D.-300 A.D.) still appeared vibrant, but was surrendering to a new religion...Christianity. Rome then plunged into an asceticism of joyless and guilt-laden sex.
· Christians linked all Roman evils to sex and pleasure.
· Jovinian in 385 A.D. was excommunicated by the Pope for arguing that marriage was superior to celibacy.
Rise of Christianity and the Dark Ages
(385 A.D.-1000 A.D.)
· Rise of the unwashed hippies in Egypt. They developed and implemented the concepts of Christian sacrifice, self-torture and denial (e.g., St. Simon).
· People became preoccupied with sex as Christians malevolently turned sex into a guilty and sinful activity (e.g., some burning off fingers to resist temptation). Neurotically inflamed eroticism continually increased with increased Christian condemnation of sex.
· St. Augustine (born 354 A.D.) promoted Christian guilt through his books: (1) Confessions -- self-accusations of his personal dissipation during his pagan and lustful youth. He was converted to a Christian in 386 A.D. and turned his hatred against the goodness and pleasures of man. States we are born between feces and urine. (2) The City of God his major work, speculates on how babies might be born from women uncankered by lust and sex. Demonstrates hatred for human life.
· In 585 A.D., the Catholics argued that women did not have a mortal soul and debated if women were even human.
· By the 5th Century, marriage came under clerical domination.
· The dark ages for love and happiness accompanied the rise of Christianity. Collapsing under the Christian stranglehold, 6th Century Rome was repeatedly ravaged and looted. One million population was reduced to fifty thousand. The city lay in rubble and ruins. The senate ceased for lack of qualified men. The hygiene, science, and culture of Rome was abandoned
· Christianity reduced sex to an unromantic, harsh, and ugly act. Penance was cynically performed as often as required. Women became pieces of property.
· Clergy and Popes turned to prostitutes and neurotic sex (e.g., pope of 904 A.D. practiced incest and was a lecher with children).
· By the 9th Century, Christianity dominated. Women were wasteful property. The church sanctioned wife beatings and leveled only relatively light fines for killing women. Noblemen had the "natural right" to ravish any peasant woman on the road and to deflower all brides of their vassals.
· St. Jerome stated that he who too ardently loved his wife was a sinful adulterer.
· Christian marital sex was performed only in one position and never during penance nor on Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, holiday seasons, and then only to conceive a child.
· For the Catholic clergy, sex without values (e.g., prostitute sex, orgy sex, rape, or sadistic sex) was not a serious offense, but sex with value (e.g., loving or valuing a woman) was a high sin with severe penalties.
Pre-Renaissance Rise of Courtly Love
(1000-1300)
· The start of courtly love and the creation of the romantic ideal began in the 11th Century. In Southern France, noblemen developed a completely new set of love concepts from which a unique man/woman relationship arose that was previously unknown to Western civilization.
· April 25, 1227, Ulrich von Lichtenstein started his incredible journey from Venice to Austria dressed as the female goddess Venus. Challenging in a jousting battle every man enroute. He did this in the service of a woman who continually scorned him. Three centuries later this journey served as the basis for the satire, Don Quixote de la Mancha.
· Courtly love or "true love" was a clandestine, bittersweet relationship of endless frustrations. Such a relationship was supposedly spiritually "uplifting", making the knight a better man or warrior. No love existed in marriage, but the pain of frustrated courtly love was considered uplifting, delicious, and exciting.
· The sex act was considered false love, but "true love" was kissing, touching, fondling, and perhaps even naked contact.
· Troubadours believed that unsatisfied passion improved one's character. They could give freely only without the compulsion of necessity (e.g., the compulsion of married people who were duty-bound).
· For the first time, love was combined with character ennoblement (except to some degree with Greeks in their homosexual and courtesan relations).
· Troubadour poets begged their ladies not to grant them sexual favors under any conditions (e.g., Dante's love for Beatrice in Vita Nuova who was a source of spiritual guidance rather than a sexual female).
· In France, William II, Duke of Aquitaine (born 1071 A.D.), was the first of the troubadours. He introduced a new life style, love lyrics, and social manners. His courtly-love concepts swept across Europe and are still with us today.
· In 1122 A.D., William's granddaughter, Eleanor, became Queen of both France and England. She set up cultured courts and established the Court of Love, which codified and promoted courtly love. In Eleanor's court, a cleric named Andre wrote a love manual, Tractatus de Amore et -de Amoris Remedio (Treatise on Love and Its Remedy). His was a serious exposition on courtly love and its rules.
· Poet Chretien, on orders from Eleanor, developed the romantic story of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere.
· Eleanor's gay, happy, and civilized life lasted four years. King Henry II then swept in and ruined the court in 1174.
· Courtly love introduced the elements of emotional relationships between men and women for the first time. This was a revolutionary concept in which love was based on mutual respect and admiration. Courtly love elevated women from a servant and house-keeper to a more equal partner and an inspirer of progress.
The Church vs. the Renaissance
(1300-1500)
· Courtly love mocked religion. Churchmen fought this new, happy love (e.g., St. Thomas stated that to kiss and touch a woman with delight, even without thought of fornication, was a mortal sin).
· Priests and religious fanatics began a 300-year period of flagellation during which they paraded in hordes from town to town praying and whipping themselves and each other into bloody pulps.
· The struggle was between the darkness of religion and the enlightenment of the Renaissance. Also the papal power struggled against the resurgence of pro-man, pro-life Aristotelian ideas.
· The church moved in and a new breed of male factors not known before appeared. They were the inquisitors who were backed by a series of murderous papal pronouncements and bulls.
· By 1450, the official Catholic dogma established that witches existed and could fly by night. All physically desirable women were projected by the church as evil sorceresses. The church was losing its power and this was their means to fight the rising rationalism and happiness brought on by the emerging Renaissance.
· Inquisitors Jacob Sprenger and Henry Kramer, Dominican brothers and professors of sacred theology at the University of Cologne, armed with their influential book, Malleus Maleficarum ("The Witches' Hammer"), and with Pope Innocent VII's infamous Bull of 1484 advocated hanging "evil" women by their thumbs, twisting ropes around their heads, pushing needles under their nails, and pouring boiling oil on their feet in the "devout" hope of forcing confessions of their "wickedness". They burned to death over 30,000 "witches" charged with having sex with the Devil, whom the Church insisted had a brutal penis covered with fish scales.
· Crosscurrents and contradictions raged between the happy and pleasurable love arising from the enlightened Renaissance spirit and the hatred of women (wicked witches) arising from the dark and malevolent spirit of the church.
· Aging Pope Alexander VI had many teenage mistresses.
· In the 16th Century, impotent Duke of Urbino and Elizabetta Gonzaga engaged in a platonic love affair that resulted in a handbook on courtly manners, The Courtier, by Castigliones.
· Queen Marguerite of France was involved in intense but platonic love affairs with twelve men simultaneously. She also wrote a collection of 72 tales titled Heptameron that were bawdy and ribald. These were tales of platonic and "perfect love" mixed with orgies, incestuousness, partner swapping, and sexually insatiable priests.
· Marriage was based on both physical and financial aspects. Love was neither the basis for marriage nor any essential part of it. Marriage was a lifelong financial transaction. Marriage usually took place at 14-16 years old, and sometimes at 2-3 years old and included a dowry plus income and property guarantees.
· Henry VIII was the first major figure to combine love and marriage. He waged a long battle with Bishop Wolsey and Pope Clement VII about his divorce and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn.
· Woman's status was changing. Writers were trying to play both sides of this change (e.g., a book by Pyvve titled, The Praise and Dispraise of Women?. Contrasting approaches appeared later in classical literature (e.g., Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet vs. The Taming of the Shrew) .
· New concepts of joining the mind and the body in love and marriage were developing.
· The middle class was being attracted to the romantic love concepts of nobility.
· Renaissance enlightenment made sex seem not so sinful and disgusting es the church projected. The middle class began to associate sex with love.
· The completely new concept that young marrieds should live alone in a dwelling of their own began developing in the 17th Century.
· While the status of woman as a human being and as a love object was rising, her legal status remained little better than in the Middle Ages. All property belonged to the husband. Wife beating was still legal.
The Puritans
(1500-1700)
· Puritans were not anti-sex. Quite to the contrary, they were value-oriented about love and sex, even romantically sentimental.
· The Reformation combined the enlightened Renaissance (marital sex was held as good and wholesome) with the malevolent Christian position that continued to burn women as witches.
· Dr. Martin Luther (1483-1546) battled against Catholic asceticism in advocating the enjoyment of every pleasure that was not sinful. Luther was lusty and vulgar in the "eat, drink and be merry" style. He claimed to have broken wind in the Devil's face. He fought Rome and claimed that celibacy was invented by the Devil and that priests could marry. He asserted marriage was not a sacrament at all, but a civil matter. In 1532, he held that Christ probably committed adultery with Mary Magdalene and other women so as to fully experience the nature of man. Luther asserted that sexual impulses were both normal and irrepressible. He broke from Rome and married. He cheerfully loved his wife and held sex in marriage as good. Luther's reformation rapidly spread across Northern Europe.
· The Bluenoses -- John Calvin (1509-1564) was the opposite of Martin Luther. Calvin was cheerless and had a viciously malevolent theology based on total human depravity and the wrath of God. An unhappy and unhealthy ascetic, he had ulcers, tuberculosis, and migraine headaches. He considered life of little value and God as a harsh tyrant. Calvin set up a brutal political theocracy in Geneva. No dancing, fancy clothes, or jewelry were allowed. Death penalty for adultery. Even legitimate love was stringently regulated. Solemn weddings with no revelry. The Calvin marriage had two functions: (l) to produce offspring, (2) to eliminate incontinence.
· Most Puritans thoroughly rejected the unhuman joylessness of Calvinism, except for a vocal minority such as John Knox in the United States. His Blue Laws of the 1650's were against Sunday amusements, smoking, drinking, gambling, fancy clothing. He also promoted public whippings, scarlet letters, execution for adulterers, and the Salem "witch" executions (executed 26 women and two dogs in 1692).
· Stern puritan traits were mainly expressions that masked moods of mischief and romance. Church trial records show that much sexual "sinning" existed. But only sex outside of marriage was attacked. Puritans greatly enjoyed sex inside marriage and condemned the "popish" concept of the virtue of virginity. Most Puritans were tenderly romantic and good lovers.
· The image of the sexless and stony heart Puritan is false. Consider the 17th Century Puritan, John Milton (Paradise Lost); he was virtuous, but experienced a healthy view of sex. He displayed idealistic and romantic views about marriage. Milton sent tracts to Parliament urging modern-day, easy divorce ("with one gentle stroke to wipe away 10,000 tears out of the life of man"). Milton's Paradise Lost projects a benevolent view of Adam and Eve in a romantic love context. Milton entirely rejected St. Augustine's malevolent views of women, sex and life.
· 16th Century Puritans tried to combine the ideals of love with the normality of sex in marriage. Woman's status improved under puritanism (e.g., a woman could separate, even divorce, if beaten). Property rights and inheritance laws improved. Marriage became a civil contract.
· 17th Century Puritans were pious and severe, but also strongly sexed and somewhat romantic.
· 18th Century Puritans developed the stifling prudishness of the Victorians.
The Age of Reason
(1700-1800)
· By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted anew approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body.
· The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.
· Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.
· In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable replaced the Christian theology that saw man as besotted and laden with guilt and sin.
· Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.
FROM 1300 B.C. TO THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY
Ancient Greece
(1300 A.C.-450 A.C.)
· Homeric women (1300 B.C.-1 100 B.C.) were relatively free and exercised considerable influence over men, but remained virtuous and on double standards. With the high standard of living in later Greece, women became idle and lost their importance.
Golden Age of Greece
(450 B.C.-27 B.C.)
· Wild bisexual love life of Alcibiades (450 B.C.), a student of Socrates and raised by Pericles.
· High class prostitutes and courtesans were held superior to wives and "virtuous" women.
· Greek men wanted faithful love, but tried to obtain it by gifts and trickery. When Greek men actually did fall in love, they considered themselves as sick.
· The Greeks never connected love with marriage. They found love either an amusement that quickly faded or a god-sent affliction that lasted too long.
Roman Empire
(27 B.C.-385 A.D.)
· Pagan love in Rome was guilt-free, lusty, unfaithful and deceitful.
· Unlike Greeks, the Romans preferred sex without philosophy or significance.
· Abortions and contraception were common. Babies were often discarded as garbage.
· Octavian (Augustus) Caesar sought unsuccessfully to restore family unity and sexual "morality" via government force and the Julian laws...all were failures, even with death penalties.
· Poet Ovid (2 B.C.) wrote a manual for sex and adultery, The Art of Love (Ar Amatoria), a brilliant, modern, fun, deceptive, cheerful and humorous book:
o Modern grooming tips.
o Sanctioned the use of tears by men.
o Sexual positions described that stressed mutual orgasm and satisfaction
· Most "liberated" Roman feminists failed to find emotional satisfaction.
Decline of the Roman Empire
(100 A.D.-385 A.D.)
· Roman empire (100 A.D.-300 A.D.) still appeared vibrant, but was surrendering to a new religion...Christianity. Rome then plunged into an asceticism of joyless and guilt-laden sex.
· Christians linked all Roman evils to sex and pleasure.
· Jovinian in 385 A.D. was excommunicated by the Pope for arguing that marriage was superior to celibacy.
Rise of Christianity and the Dark Ages
(385 A.D.-1000 A.D.)
· Rise of the unwashed hippies in Egypt. They developed and implemented the concepts of Christian sacrifice, self-torture and denial (e.g., St. Simon).
· People became preoccupied with sex as Christians malevolently turned sex into a guilty and sinful activity (e.g., some burning off fingers to resist temptation). Neurotically inflamed eroticism continually increased with increased Christian condemnation of sex.
· St. Augustine (born 354 A.D.) promoted Christian guilt through his books: (1) Confessions -- self-accusations of his personal dissipation during his pagan and lustful youth. He was converted to a Christian in 386 A.D. and turned his hatred against the goodness and pleasures of man. States we are born between feces and urine. (2) The City of God his major work, speculates on how babies might be born from women uncankered by lust and sex. Demonstrates hatred for human life.
· In 585 A.D., the Catholics argued that women did not have a mortal soul and debated if women were even human.
· By the 5th Century, marriage came under clerical domination.
· The dark ages for love and happiness accompanied the rise of Christianity. Collapsing under the Christian stranglehold, 6th Century Rome was repeatedly ravaged and looted. One million population was reduced to fifty thousand. The city lay in rubble and ruins. The senate ceased for lack of qualified men. The hygiene, science, and culture of Rome was abandoned
· Christianity reduced sex to an unromantic, harsh, and ugly act. Penance was cynically performed as often as required. Women became pieces of property.
· Clergy and Popes turned to prostitutes and neurotic sex (e.g., pope of 904 A.D. practiced incest and was a lecher with children).
· By the 9th Century, Christianity dominated. Women were wasteful property. The church sanctioned wife beatings and leveled only relatively light fines for killing women. Noblemen had the "natural right" to ravish any peasant woman on the road and to deflower all brides of their vassals.
· St. Jerome stated that he who too ardently loved his wife was a sinful adulterer.
· Christian marital sex was performed only in one position and never during penance nor on Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, holiday seasons, and then only to conceive a child.
· For the Catholic clergy, sex without values (e.g., prostitute sex, orgy sex, rape, or sadistic sex) was not a serious offense, but sex with value (e.g., loving or valuing a woman) was a high sin with severe penalties.
Pre-Renaissance Rise of Courtly Love
(1000-1300)
· The start of courtly love and the creation of the romantic ideal began in the 11th Century. In Southern France, noblemen developed a completely new set of love concepts from which a unique man/woman relationship arose that was previously unknown to Western civilization.
· April 25, 1227, Ulrich von Lichtenstein started his incredible journey from Venice to Austria dressed as the female goddess Venus. Challenging in a jousting battle every man enroute. He did this in the service of a woman who continually scorned him. Three centuries later this journey served as the basis for the satire, Don Quixote de la Mancha.
· Courtly love or "true love" was a clandestine, bittersweet relationship of endless frustrations. Such a relationship was supposedly spiritually "uplifting", making the knight a better man or warrior. No love existed in marriage, but the pain of frustrated courtly love was considered uplifting, delicious, and exciting.
· The sex act was considered false love, but "true love" was kissing, touching, fondling, and perhaps even naked contact.
· Troubadours believed that unsatisfied passion improved one's character. They could give freely only without the compulsion of necessity (e.g., the compulsion of married people who were duty-bound).
· For the first time, love was combined with character ennoblement (except to some degree with Greeks in their homosexual and courtesan relations).
· Troubadour poets begged their ladies not to grant them sexual favors under any conditions (e.g., Dante's love for Beatrice in Vita Nuova who was a source of spiritual guidance rather than a sexual female).
· In France, William II, Duke of Aquitaine (born 1071 A.D.), was the first of the troubadours. He introduced a new life style, love lyrics, and social manners. His courtly-love concepts swept across Europe and are still with us today.
· In 1122 A.D., William's granddaughter, Eleanor, became Queen of both France and England. She set up cultured courts and established the Court of Love, which codified and promoted courtly love. In Eleanor's court, a cleric named Andre wrote a love manual, Tractatus de Amore et -de Amoris Remedio (Treatise on Love and Its Remedy). His was a serious exposition on courtly love and its rules.
· Poet Chretien, on orders from Eleanor, developed the romantic story of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere.
· Eleanor's gay, happy, and civilized life lasted four years. King Henry II then swept in and ruined the court in 1174.
· Courtly love introduced the elements of emotional relationships between men and women for the first time. This was a revolutionary concept in which love was based on mutual respect and admiration. Courtly love elevated women from a servant and house-keeper to a more equal partner and an inspirer of progress.
The Church vs. the Renaissance
(1300-1500)
· Courtly love mocked religion. Churchmen fought this new, happy love (e.g., St. Thomas stated that to kiss and touch a woman with delight, even without thought of fornication, was a mortal sin).
· Priests and religious fanatics began a 300-year period of flagellation during which they paraded in hordes from town to town praying and whipping themselves and each other into bloody pulps.
· The struggle was between the darkness of religion and the enlightenment of the Renaissance. Also the papal power struggled against the resurgence of pro-man, pro-life Aristotelian ideas.
· The church moved in and a new breed of male factors not known before appeared. They were the inquisitors who were backed by a series of murderous papal pronouncements and bulls.
· By 1450, the official Catholic dogma established that witches existed and could fly by night. All physically desirable women were projected by the church as evil sorceresses. The church was losing its power and this was their means to fight the rising rationalism and happiness brought on by the emerging Renaissance.
· Inquisitors Jacob Sprenger and Henry Kramer, Dominican brothers and professors of sacred theology at the University of Cologne, armed with their influential book, Malleus Maleficarum ("The Witches' Hammer"), and with Pope Innocent VII's infamous Bull of 1484 advocated hanging "evil" women by their thumbs, twisting ropes around their heads, pushing needles under their nails, and pouring boiling oil on their feet in the "devout" hope of forcing confessions of their "wickedness". They burned to death over 30,000 "witches" charged with having sex with the Devil, whom the Church insisted had a brutal penis covered with fish scales.
· Crosscurrents and contradictions raged between the happy and pleasurable love arising from the enlightened Renaissance spirit and the hatred of women (wicked witches) arising from the dark and malevolent spirit of the church.
· Aging Pope Alexander VI had many teenage mistresses.
· In the 16th Century, impotent Duke of Urbino and Elizabetta Gonzaga engaged in a platonic love affair that resulted in a handbook on courtly manners, The Courtier, by Castigliones.
· Queen Marguerite of France was involved in intense but platonic love affairs with twelve men simultaneously. She also wrote a collection of 72 tales titled Heptameron that were bawdy and ribald. These were tales of platonic and "perfect love" mixed with orgies, incestuousness, partner swapping, and sexually insatiable priests.
· Marriage was based on both physical and financial aspects. Love was neither the basis for marriage nor any essential part of it. Marriage was a lifelong financial transaction. Marriage usually took place at 14-16 years old, and sometimes at 2-3 years old and included a dowry plus income and property guarantees.
· Henry VIII was the first major figure to combine love and marriage. He waged a long battle with Bishop Wolsey and Pope Clement VII about his divorce and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn.
· Woman's status was changing. Writers were trying to play both sides of this change (e.g., a book by Pyvve titled, The Praise and Dispraise of Women?. Contrasting approaches appeared later in classical literature (e.g., Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet vs. The Taming of the Shrew) .
· New concepts of joining the mind and the body in love and marriage were developing.
· The middle class was being attracted to the romantic love concepts of nobility.
· Renaissance enlightenment made sex seem not so sinful and disgusting es the church projected. The middle class began to associate sex with love.
· The completely new concept that young marrieds should live alone in a dwelling of their own began developing in the 17th Century.
· While the status of woman as a human being and as a love object was rising, her legal status remained little better than in the Middle Ages. All property belonged to the husband. Wife beating was still legal.
The Puritans
(1500-1700)
· Puritans were not anti-sex. Quite to the contrary, they were value-oriented about love and sex, even romantically sentimental.
· The Reformation combined the enlightened Renaissance (marital sex was held as good and wholesome) with the malevolent Christian position that continued to burn women as witches.
· Dr. Martin Luther (1483-1546) battled against Catholic asceticism in advocating the enjoyment of every pleasure that was not sinful. Luther was lusty and vulgar in the "eat, drink and be merry" style. He claimed to have broken wind in the Devil's face. He fought Rome and claimed that celibacy was invented by the Devil and that priests could marry. He asserted marriage was not a sacrament at all, but a civil matter. In 1532, he held that Christ probably committed adultery with Mary Magdalene and other women so as to fully experience the nature of man. Luther asserted that sexual impulses were both normal and irrepressible. He broke from Rome and married. He cheerfully loved his wife and held sex in marriage as good. Luther's reformation rapidly spread across Northern Europe.
· The Bluenoses -- John Calvin (1509-1564) was the opposite of Martin Luther. Calvin was cheerless and had a viciously malevolent theology based on total human depravity and the wrath of God. An unhappy and unhealthy ascetic, he had ulcers, tuberculosis, and migraine headaches. He considered life of little value and God as a harsh tyrant. Calvin set up a brutal political theocracy in Geneva. No dancing, fancy clothes, or jewelry were allowed. Death penalty for adultery. Even legitimate love was stringently regulated. Solemn weddings with no revelry. The Calvin marriage had two functions: (l) to produce offspring, (2) to eliminate incontinence.
· Most Puritans thoroughly rejected the unhuman joylessness of Calvinism, except for a vocal minority such as John Knox in the United States. His Blue Laws of the 1650's were against Sunday amusements, smoking, drinking, gambling, fancy clothing. He also promoted public whippings, scarlet letters, execution for adulterers, and the Salem "witch" executions (executed 26 women and two dogs in 1692).
· Stern puritan traits were mainly expressions that masked moods of mischief and romance. Church trial records show that much sexual "sinning" existed. But only sex outside of marriage was attacked. Puritans greatly enjoyed sex inside marriage and condemned the "popish" concept of the virtue of virginity. Most Puritans were tenderly romantic and good lovers.
· The image of the sexless and stony heart Puritan is false. Consider the 17th Century Puritan, John Milton (Paradise Lost); he was virtuous, but experienced a healthy view of sex. He displayed idealistic and romantic views about marriage. Milton sent tracts to Parliament urging modern-day, easy divorce ("with one gentle stroke to wipe away 10,000 tears out of the life of man"). Milton's Paradise Lost projects a benevolent view of Adam and Eve in a romantic love context. Milton entirely rejected St. Augustine's malevolent views of women, sex and life.
· 16th Century Puritans tried to combine the ideals of love with the normality of sex in marriage. Woman's status improved under puritanism (e.g., a woman could separate, even divorce, if beaten). Property rights and inheritance laws improved. Marriage became a civil contract.
· 17th Century Puritans were pious and severe, but also strongly sexed and somewhat romantic.
· 18th Century Puritans developed the stifling prudishness of the Victorians.
The Age of Reason
(1700-1800)
· By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted anew approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body.
· The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.
· Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.
· In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable replaced the Christian theology that saw man as besotted and laden with guilt and sin.
· Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.
On Leadership and the common good by Randy David
Please click on the link below:
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/01/leadership-and-common-good.html
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/01/leadership-and-common-good.html
On Language o Ang Ating Wika ni Randy David
I-klick ang link sa ilalim para sa malawakang artikulo.
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/01/wika.html
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/01/wika.html
The Sociology of Love by Randy David
Please click on the link below for the full article.
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/02/sociology-of-love.html
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/02/sociology-of-love.html
Global Political Awakening
The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order - The technological revolution and the future of freedom. Part 1.
Please click the address below:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19873
Please click the address below:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19873
The Will to change by Randy David
The will to change
Posted 10:10pm (Mla time) Mar 26, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the March 27, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
ON HIS way to Calvary, Jesus foretold many events that astonished his followers. He said he would be arrested, that one of his own disciples would betray him, and that Peter himself would deny that he knew him, not once but thrice. He said he would be crucified, and he would die on the cross. He would be buried, but he would rise from the dead. Jesus held these things to be true, and he acted upon them so that God might forgive the sins of men, and thus change the circumstances of their existence. This is the poetry of forgiveness around which the Christian faith revolves. It is a philosophy of action and hope, and Jesus was its strongest poet.
Many of us hold certain beliefs, but all too often we fail to act upon them. As such, they serve us no purpose. They have no meaning, no effect on the way we live our lives. They are books that remain unread, music that is unheard, faith that is unrealized. We remain trapped in old untested beliefs, from which we cannot free ourselves because of fear. We do not develop the courage to experiment, to test our beliefs, to connect them to the practical details of our lives. Consequently, there is a huge gap between the beliefs we profess and the beliefs we actually hold by default, our habits of action. And, indeed, there is an even bigger gap between our habits of action as a people and our social goals.
A friend of mine was complaining recently about corruption in a city government office. He said he needed to secure a hundred and one permits just to remodel an old house. Every precious signature depended on compliance with a set of requirements that kept growing as he produced the necessary documentation. After some months of following up papers, his contractor told him that the message being conveyed was loud and clear: a small amount, the usual S-O-P or "standard operating procedure," would hasten the release of the needed permits.
I advised my friend to go and report the matter to the National Bureau of Investigation so an entrapment operation could be set. He was ready to do so, but he never got around to it. His contractor decided to pay, offering to take the added expense out of his earnings. These people work as a syndicate, he said; you get one of them arrested, and the rest of the gang will make life difficult for you.
The contractor's fear is not unfounded. Everyone who has dealt with such offices assumes a general order of things to which you can only adjust. When you are busy earning a living, you cannot afford to take risks fighting the system. Yet elsewhere in the metropolis, my daughter, who is building a house in Cainta, was pleasantly surprised to be able to get all the building permits she needed in one day without having to pay anybody or secure special favors from anyone. There are such pockets of institutional integrity in our society, and they are steadily multiplying, quietly supplanting the old discredited ways of doing things with straightforward public service.
It is less difficult to reform systems from within than to expect heroic individuals to expose the evils of systems from outside. Corruption thrives on the proliferation of unnecessary and unreasonable requirements. It is the stepchild of inefficiency. A responsible leader in an office usually knows who is on the take. If he is not himself part of the racket, and feels strongly about it, he will find ways of eliminating the opportunity and getting rid of the rotten personnel. To do this, he needs a critical mass of reformers to help him, for the corrupt will do everything to tie his hands, to sabotage his efforts, and to undermine his authority and integrity by capitalizing on his own minor lapses.
It is never easy to initiate change. The will to change has to be anchored on a will to believe that things can be different. Such a belief often cannot be grounded simply on the evidence at hand. Yet if one believes and, on this basis, he acts upon the world, his action may change the situation in ways he himself has not anticipated. In the results, he may find the affirmation of his belief or feeling unjustified in his faith, he may become cynical. Such are what John Dewey called "the risks of faith." The point is that we will never know if our beliefs matter until we act on them, or unless we live them.
In his thought-provoking essay, "Christianity and Democracy," Dewey said: "The one claim that Christianity makes is that God is truth; that as truth He is love and reveals Himself fully to man, keeping back nothing of Himself; that man is so one with the truth thus revealed that it is not so much revealed to him as in him; he is its incarnation." Dewey is not a theologian but a philosopher. But his understanding of the nature of man in Christianity allows one to appreciate better the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels.
Jesus was being prosecuted for supposedly claiming he was the son of God. Yet in fact he always referred to himself as the son of man. He called God his Father only because he believed that all human beings were God's children. His disciples were stunned by the revelations he made, and how they all turned out to be true. But the bigger truth he was teaching them by his own life was the truth that is already in them, waiting to be lived.
People sometimes wonder how a predominantly Christian culture like ours could be the fount of corruption. There is a simple explanation for that: faith, for most of us, is separate from everyday life. We do not draw from it ideals or the will to change.
Happy Easter!
Posted 10:10pm (Mla time) Mar 26, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the March 27, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
ON HIS way to Calvary, Jesus foretold many events that astonished his followers. He said he would be arrested, that one of his own disciples would betray him, and that Peter himself would deny that he knew him, not once but thrice. He said he would be crucified, and he would die on the cross. He would be buried, but he would rise from the dead. Jesus held these things to be true, and he acted upon them so that God might forgive the sins of men, and thus change the circumstances of their existence. This is the poetry of forgiveness around which the Christian faith revolves. It is a philosophy of action and hope, and Jesus was its strongest poet.
Many of us hold certain beliefs, but all too often we fail to act upon them. As such, they serve us no purpose. They have no meaning, no effect on the way we live our lives. They are books that remain unread, music that is unheard, faith that is unrealized. We remain trapped in old untested beliefs, from which we cannot free ourselves because of fear. We do not develop the courage to experiment, to test our beliefs, to connect them to the practical details of our lives. Consequently, there is a huge gap between the beliefs we profess and the beliefs we actually hold by default, our habits of action. And, indeed, there is an even bigger gap between our habits of action as a people and our social goals.
A friend of mine was complaining recently about corruption in a city government office. He said he needed to secure a hundred and one permits just to remodel an old house. Every precious signature depended on compliance with a set of requirements that kept growing as he produced the necessary documentation. After some months of following up papers, his contractor told him that the message being conveyed was loud and clear: a small amount, the usual S-O-P or "standard operating procedure," would hasten the release of the needed permits.
I advised my friend to go and report the matter to the National Bureau of Investigation so an entrapment operation could be set. He was ready to do so, but he never got around to it. His contractor decided to pay, offering to take the added expense out of his earnings. These people work as a syndicate, he said; you get one of them arrested, and the rest of the gang will make life difficult for you.
The contractor's fear is not unfounded. Everyone who has dealt with such offices assumes a general order of things to which you can only adjust. When you are busy earning a living, you cannot afford to take risks fighting the system. Yet elsewhere in the metropolis, my daughter, who is building a house in Cainta, was pleasantly surprised to be able to get all the building permits she needed in one day without having to pay anybody or secure special favors from anyone. There are such pockets of institutional integrity in our society, and they are steadily multiplying, quietly supplanting the old discredited ways of doing things with straightforward public service.
It is less difficult to reform systems from within than to expect heroic individuals to expose the evils of systems from outside. Corruption thrives on the proliferation of unnecessary and unreasonable requirements. It is the stepchild of inefficiency. A responsible leader in an office usually knows who is on the take. If he is not himself part of the racket, and feels strongly about it, he will find ways of eliminating the opportunity and getting rid of the rotten personnel. To do this, he needs a critical mass of reformers to help him, for the corrupt will do everything to tie his hands, to sabotage his efforts, and to undermine his authority and integrity by capitalizing on his own minor lapses.
It is never easy to initiate change. The will to change has to be anchored on a will to believe that things can be different. Such a belief often cannot be grounded simply on the evidence at hand. Yet if one believes and, on this basis, he acts upon the world, his action may change the situation in ways he himself has not anticipated. In the results, he may find the affirmation of his belief or feeling unjustified in his faith, he may become cynical. Such are what John Dewey called "the risks of faith." The point is that we will never know if our beliefs matter until we act on them, or unless we live them.
In his thought-provoking essay, "Christianity and Democracy," Dewey said: "The one claim that Christianity makes is that God is truth; that as truth He is love and reveals Himself fully to man, keeping back nothing of Himself; that man is so one with the truth thus revealed that it is not so much revealed to him as in him; he is its incarnation." Dewey is not a theologian but a philosopher. But his understanding of the nature of man in Christianity allows one to appreciate better the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels.
Jesus was being prosecuted for supposedly claiming he was the son of God. Yet in fact he always referred to himself as the son of man. He called God his Father only because he believed that all human beings were God's children. His disciples were stunned by the revelations he made, and how they all turned out to be true. But the bigger truth he was teaching them by his own life was the truth that is already in them, waiting to be lived.
People sometimes wonder how a predominantly Christian culture like ours could be the fount of corruption. There is a simple explanation for that: faith, for most of us, is separate from everyday life. We do not draw from it ideals or the will to change.
Happy Easter!
Why are Filipinos so Poor? By F. Sionil Jose
In the ’50s and ’60s, the Philippines was the most envied country in Southeast Asia. What happened?
By F. Sionil Jose
What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor – but look at Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and army trucks, the streets flanked by tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur a small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok was criss-crossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city’s skyline. Ricefields all the way from Don Muang airport — then a huddle of galvanized iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument.Visit these cities today and weep — for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia. Remember further that when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114 university graduates compared with the hundreds of Ph.D.’s that were already in our universities. Why then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We did not produce cheaper and better products.
The basic question really is why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed our people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some 15 years ago a survey showed that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they had no money to continue schooling.Thousands of young adults today are therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up all of our economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our poorest eat only once a day.But this physical poverty is really not as serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty of the spirit.
Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, came to the Philippines and wrote about our damaged culture which, he asserted, impeded our development. Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his analysis.This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise on colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and an elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one’s hands is frowned upon and we inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite.
We are poor because we are poor — this is not a tautology. The culture of poverty is self-perpetuating. We are poor because our people are lazy. I pass by a slum area every morning – dozens of adults do nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save. Look at the Japanese and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given them by their banks is so little. They work very hard too.
We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over-coiffed they are, and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their personal jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang – that is what we are, and all that money expended on status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into production.
We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its guise we protect inefficient industries and monopolies. We did not pursue agrarian reform like Japan and Taiwan. It is not so much the development of the rural sector, making it productive and a good market as well. Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who, before the reform, merely waited for the harvest. They become entrepreneurs, the harbingers of change.
Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada opposed agrarian reform, the single most important factor that would have altered the rural areas and lifted the peasant from poverty. Both of them were merely anti-American.
And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings. We condone cronyism and corruption and we don’t ostracize or punish the crooks in our midst. Both cronyism and corruption are wasteful but we allow their practice because our loyalty is to family or friend, not to the larger good.
We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first choice: a nationalist revolution, a continuation of the revolution in 1896. But even before we can use violence to change inequities in our society, we must first have a profound change in our way of thinking, in our culture. My regret about EDSA is that change would have been possible then with a minimum of bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may not be bloody at all if something like EDSA would present itself again. Or a dictator unlike Marcos.
The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex process. The only problem is that it may take so long and by the time conditions have changed, we may be back where we were, caught up with this tremendous population explosion which the Catholic Church exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity.We are faced with a growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communists won, they will rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the barkada, the vaulting egos that sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-53.
To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not internalize new attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to basics and remember those American slogans: A Ford in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do any good it must be spread around.Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are shamed to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed to explain, for instance, why Imelda, her children and the Marcos cronies are back, and in positions of power. Are there redeeming features in our country that we can be proud of? Of course, lots of them. When people say, for instance, that our corruption will never be banished, just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and Ramon Magsaysay as president brought a clean government.We do not have the classical arts that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and archipelagic Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world, showing what we have done with Western art forms, enriched with our own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all over, showing how accomplished a people we are!
Look at our history. We are the first in Asia to rise against Western colonialism, the first to establish a republic. Recall the Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of Gregorio del Pilar and the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from capturing the president of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history is the Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans and their king Leonidas, died to a man, defending the pass against the invading Persians. Rizal — what nation on earth has produced a man like him? At 35, he was a novelist, a poet, an anthropologist, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a teacher and martyr.We are now 80 million and in another two decades we will pass the 100 million mark.
Eighty million — that is a mass market in any language, a mass market that should absorb our increased production in goods and services – a mass market which any entrepreneur can hope to exploit, like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China.
Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the wherewithal to challenge the United States and almost won. It is the same confidence that enabled Japan to flourish from the rubble of defeat in World War II.
I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a real and insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will, to change ourselves.
F. Sionil Jose, whose works have been published in 24 languages, is also a bookseller, editor, publisher and founding president of the the PhilippinesÕ PEN Center. The foregoing is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Mr. Jose in Manila, Philippines.
By F. Sionil Jose
What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor – but look at Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and army trucks, the streets flanked by tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur a small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok was criss-crossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city’s skyline. Ricefields all the way from Don Muang airport — then a huddle of galvanized iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument.Visit these cities today and weep — for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia. Remember further that when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114 university graduates compared with the hundreds of Ph.D.’s that were already in our universities. Why then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We did not produce cheaper and better products.
The basic question really is why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed our people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some 15 years ago a survey showed that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they had no money to continue schooling.Thousands of young adults today are therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up all of our economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our poorest eat only once a day.But this physical poverty is really not as serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty of the spirit.
Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, came to the Philippines and wrote about our damaged culture which, he asserted, impeded our development. Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his analysis.This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise on colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and an elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one’s hands is frowned upon and we inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite.
We are poor because we are poor — this is not a tautology. The culture of poverty is self-perpetuating. We are poor because our people are lazy. I pass by a slum area every morning – dozens of adults do nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save. Look at the Japanese and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given them by their banks is so little. They work very hard too.
We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over-coiffed they are, and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their personal jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang – that is what we are, and all that money expended on status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into production.
We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its guise we protect inefficient industries and monopolies. We did not pursue agrarian reform like Japan and Taiwan. It is not so much the development of the rural sector, making it productive and a good market as well. Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who, before the reform, merely waited for the harvest. They become entrepreneurs, the harbingers of change.
Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada opposed agrarian reform, the single most important factor that would have altered the rural areas and lifted the peasant from poverty. Both of them were merely anti-American.
And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings. We condone cronyism and corruption and we don’t ostracize or punish the crooks in our midst. Both cronyism and corruption are wasteful but we allow their practice because our loyalty is to family or friend, not to the larger good.
We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first choice: a nationalist revolution, a continuation of the revolution in 1896. But even before we can use violence to change inequities in our society, we must first have a profound change in our way of thinking, in our culture. My regret about EDSA is that change would have been possible then with a minimum of bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may not be bloody at all if something like EDSA would present itself again. Or a dictator unlike Marcos.
The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex process. The only problem is that it may take so long and by the time conditions have changed, we may be back where we were, caught up with this tremendous population explosion which the Catholic Church exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity.We are faced with a growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communists won, they will rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the barkada, the vaulting egos that sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-53.
To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not internalize new attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to basics and remember those American slogans: A Ford in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do any good it must be spread around.Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are shamed to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed to explain, for instance, why Imelda, her children and the Marcos cronies are back, and in positions of power. Are there redeeming features in our country that we can be proud of? Of course, lots of them. When people say, for instance, that our corruption will never be banished, just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and Ramon Magsaysay as president brought a clean government.We do not have the classical arts that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and archipelagic Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world, showing what we have done with Western art forms, enriched with our own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all over, showing how accomplished a people we are!
Look at our history. We are the first in Asia to rise against Western colonialism, the first to establish a republic. Recall the Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of Gregorio del Pilar and the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from capturing the president of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history is the Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans and their king Leonidas, died to a man, defending the pass against the invading Persians. Rizal — what nation on earth has produced a man like him? At 35, he was a novelist, a poet, an anthropologist, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a teacher and martyr.We are now 80 million and in another two decades we will pass the 100 million mark.
Eighty million — that is a mass market in any language, a mass market that should absorb our increased production in goods and services – a mass market which any entrepreneur can hope to exploit, like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China.
Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the wherewithal to challenge the United States and almost won. It is the same confidence that enabled Japan to flourish from the rubble of defeat in World War II.
I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a real and insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will, to change ourselves.
F. Sionil Jose, whose works have been published in 24 languages, is also a bookseller, editor, publisher and founding president of the the PhilippinesÕ PEN Center. The foregoing is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Mr. Jose in Manila, Philippines.
Rationalization by Randy David, PDI
Rationalization
Rationalization
Updated 11:44pm (Mla time) Jan 15, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the January 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE WORD has crept in quietly in recent discussions about administrative and fiscal reforms. If taken seriously, it could spell the beginning of political modernity in our country. The vigor with which it is being opposed is an indicator of the staying power of obsolete interests. It shows us that corruption in our society is not a cultural flaw, but a basic ingredient of our political system.
Rationalization simply means altering existing policies and procedures in order to make them more efficient in the attainment of the state's avowed goals. Its most important objective is the elimination of sources of unearned income from the national life. "Rents," as these incomes are sometimes referred to, are of many kinds, but the most prevalent are those that are extracted and dispensed at will by public officials at all levels of the state. The German thinker Max Weber called rents "the economic basis of all aristocracies." In our own time, rents are the social basis of "crony capitalism."
When a friend or ally of a public official is given an accommodation such as a huge loan from a government financial institution, we call that a rent. "Behest loans," as they were once called, did not end with Marcos. Like logging concessions, they continue to be dispensed as part of the spoils of politics. When some favored ally is given exclusive rights to import a certain commodity, that too is rent. When the president orders the government's social security agencies to invest public pension funds in shares of stocks owned by a friend, and then collects commissions, that is rent-seeking.
Money given by gambling lords to authorities so they won't be touched is also rent. When budgetary allocations are released in exchange for favors, that is rent-seeking. When political donors are exempted or given special treatment by revenue laws, rent is also created.
Rent is what we may also call tax breaks or tax incentives that are given to the well-connected, independently of performance, and almost without expiry dates. There are presently more than a hundred existing Philippine laws that grant such duty and tax exemptions to a large assortment of enterprises and individuals. They are very costly in terms of taxes foregone. This is not to say that such special incentives or exemptions are all bad. Indeed, some of them are necessary to encourage investors to develop sectors of the economy that are either very risky or require enormous amounts of capital. The perks are given in exchange for enduring contributions to society's development objectives. But for these incentives not to degenerate into rents, they must be time-bound and linked to performance.
It is ironic, but not unexpected, that the recent legislative deliberations on the bill seeking the rationalization of such special incentives became the occasion for intense lobbying by congressmen on behalf of the particularistic interests they represent. We earlier saw this behavior in the debate on the cigarette and liquor tax. The same kind of lobbying is likely to mark the discussion of the bill seeking to raise the VAT by 2 percent and remove the exemptions from its coverage. Unless the voices of reason prevail-and one doubts this very much given the composition of the congressional majority-these attempts to set things right will eventually succumb to the overwhelming power of rent. The event will thus confirm Thomas McHale's 1959 description of the Philippines as a country where "business is born, and flourishes or fails, not so much in the market place as in the halls of the legislature or in the administrative offices of the government."
"Booty Capitalism," a book published by the Ateneo Press (1998), takes off from this insight. In it, the author, Paul Hutchcroft, identified the basic elements of this phenomenon as it exists in the Philippines: "(1) the high degree of favoritism, as when oligarchs and cronies plunder the state apparatus for particularistic advantage-a feature some have characterized as 'rent-seeking gone wild'; and (2) the capacity of those oligarchs currently holding official position to inflict punishment on their enemies." Hutchcroft provides a useful distinction between bureaucratic capitalism, in which "bureaucratic elite extracts privilege from a weak business class," and booty capitalism, where "a powerful business class extracts privilege from a largely incoherent bureaucracy."
The word "booty" emphasizes both the plunderous ways of Philippine capitalism and the violence that usually marks the scramble for booty. The principal protagonists in this struggle are the family-based oligarchies that have an economic base outside the state but need the resources of the state to accumulate wealth. They are the main sources of political contributions during elections, and in many ways, politicians and public officials are nothing more than their paid agents. As a captive institution, the booty capitalist state can play neither a regulatory nor a developmental role.
Under these conditions, Philippine politics is reduced to a cyclical struggle between the oligarchical "ins" and the oligarchical "outs," with the masses and the middle classes serving as their cannon fodder. Rationalization is the state's desperate attempt to distance itself from the oligarchy, an idea whose time has come, but, without a constituency, is bound to fail.
Rationalization
Updated 11:44pm (Mla time) Jan 15, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the January 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE WORD has crept in quietly in recent discussions about administrative and fiscal reforms. If taken seriously, it could spell the beginning of political modernity in our country. The vigor with which it is being opposed is an indicator of the staying power of obsolete interests. It shows us that corruption in our society is not a cultural flaw, but a basic ingredient of our political system.
Rationalization simply means altering existing policies and procedures in order to make them more efficient in the attainment of the state's avowed goals. Its most important objective is the elimination of sources of unearned income from the national life. "Rents," as these incomes are sometimes referred to, are of many kinds, but the most prevalent are those that are extracted and dispensed at will by public officials at all levels of the state. The German thinker Max Weber called rents "the economic basis of all aristocracies." In our own time, rents are the social basis of "crony capitalism."
When a friend or ally of a public official is given an accommodation such as a huge loan from a government financial institution, we call that a rent. "Behest loans," as they were once called, did not end with Marcos. Like logging concessions, they continue to be dispensed as part of the spoils of politics. When some favored ally is given exclusive rights to import a certain commodity, that too is rent. When the president orders the government's social security agencies to invest public pension funds in shares of stocks owned by a friend, and then collects commissions, that is rent-seeking.
Money given by gambling lords to authorities so they won't be touched is also rent. When budgetary allocations are released in exchange for favors, that is rent-seeking. When political donors are exempted or given special treatment by revenue laws, rent is also created.
Rent is what we may also call tax breaks or tax incentives that are given to the well-connected, independently of performance, and almost without expiry dates. There are presently more than a hundred existing Philippine laws that grant such duty and tax exemptions to a large assortment of enterprises and individuals. They are very costly in terms of taxes foregone. This is not to say that such special incentives or exemptions are all bad. Indeed, some of them are necessary to encourage investors to develop sectors of the economy that are either very risky or require enormous amounts of capital. The perks are given in exchange for enduring contributions to society's development objectives. But for these incentives not to degenerate into rents, they must be time-bound and linked to performance.
It is ironic, but not unexpected, that the recent legislative deliberations on the bill seeking the rationalization of such special incentives became the occasion for intense lobbying by congressmen on behalf of the particularistic interests they represent. We earlier saw this behavior in the debate on the cigarette and liquor tax. The same kind of lobbying is likely to mark the discussion of the bill seeking to raise the VAT by 2 percent and remove the exemptions from its coverage. Unless the voices of reason prevail-and one doubts this very much given the composition of the congressional majority-these attempts to set things right will eventually succumb to the overwhelming power of rent. The event will thus confirm Thomas McHale's 1959 description of the Philippines as a country where "business is born, and flourishes or fails, not so much in the market place as in the halls of the legislature or in the administrative offices of the government."
"Booty Capitalism," a book published by the Ateneo Press (1998), takes off from this insight. In it, the author, Paul Hutchcroft, identified the basic elements of this phenomenon as it exists in the Philippines: "(1) the high degree of favoritism, as when oligarchs and cronies plunder the state apparatus for particularistic advantage-a feature some have characterized as 'rent-seeking gone wild'; and (2) the capacity of those oligarchs currently holding official position to inflict punishment on their enemies." Hutchcroft provides a useful distinction between bureaucratic capitalism, in which "bureaucratic elite extracts privilege from a weak business class," and booty capitalism, where "a powerful business class extracts privilege from a largely incoherent bureaucracy."
The word "booty" emphasizes both the plunderous ways of Philippine capitalism and the violence that usually marks the scramble for booty. The principal protagonists in this struggle are the family-based oligarchies that have an economic base outside the state but need the resources of the state to accumulate wealth. They are the main sources of political contributions during elections, and in many ways, politicians and public officials are nothing more than their paid agents. As a captive institution, the booty capitalist state can play neither a regulatory nor a developmental role.
Under these conditions, Philippine politics is reduced to a cyclical struggle between the oligarchical "ins" and the oligarchical "outs," with the masses and the middle classes serving as their cannon fodder. Rationalization is the state's desperate attempt to distance itself from the oligarchy, an idea whose time has come, but, without a constituency, is bound to fail.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Rich and Poor in the land of P-Noy
Editorial
Rich and poor
Philippine Daily Inquirer
19 June 2010
IF ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WOULD ONLY bother to see how our Asian neighbors are doing, it might be less effusive in touting President Macapagal-Arroyo’s economic achievements or legacy. For example, a recent report published in the New Straits Times said that in 2009 the number of millionaires in Singapore grew by 35 percent, while those in Malaysia grew by 34 percent. The Boston Consulting Group, which conducted the study, said 11.4 percent of Singaporean households owned more than US$1 million in “investible assets,” a measure of wealth that excludes real property and other non-liquid assets like paintings. That comes up to about 93,000 millionaires in a nation of 4.7 million people. The study also found that 60 percent of households in the island nation had bankable assets worth between US$250,000 and $1 million. And what made this all the more astonishing is that it happened during the same year when the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 2.1 percent.
And how did Filipino families fare during the “36 quarters of uninterrupted growth” under the Arroyo administration? There are no comparable figures for the Philippines. But recent computations made by the National Statistical and Coordination Board give us an idea of how we compare with our more progressive neighbor. The computations based on the Family Income and Expenditure Surveys indicate that while the rich may have become richer, their ranks have become thinner. The “rich” here are defined as families with monthly incomes of at least P199,927 or P2,393,126 a year. The average monthly income of families classified as rich today amounts to P235,155, compared to P194,965 in 2006. Romulo Virola, the NSCB secretary general who recently gloated about a “glorious ending” for the Arroyo administration after surprising 7.3 percent in GDP growth during the first quarter, said that in 2006 there were 19,738 rich families (out of an estimated 17.4 million families), less than half the number in 2000 when 51,160 families were classified as rich.
Virola said the decline in the number of rich families “would not have been so bad” if the middle class had expanded at the same time. It did not. As a proportion of all families, those belonging to the middle class (families earning an average of P36,964 monthly today) also declined to 19.1 percent in 2006 from 22.7 percent in 2000. Thus over the same period, i.e., from 2000 to 2006, the proportion of low-income families increased to 80.8 percent from 77 percent. These are families that earn an average of P9,061 a month in 2010.
(Curiously, while the NSCB gives the estimated 2010 incomes for each category—rich, middle class and low-income—it does not have both the absolute number of families in each category or their proportion to the total number of families for the current year.)
If the rich and the not-so-rich have declined in number (or at least as a percentage of the total number of families), where did the fruits of the years of growth go? To the poor obviously, though still not enough to significantly improve their standard of living. The average monthly income of the low-income families has grown to P9,061 in 2010 from P5,766 in 2000, but their monthly expenditures have kept pace, growing to P8,345 from P5,186. While it looks as if some improvement has been made, it is at best marginal. Survey after survey shows more and more people rating themselves poor or complaining of hunger.
At this point it would be futile to even dream of catching up with our more progressive neighbors. But in the end, it matters little how few millionaires we have. What matters most is how many millions of poor we have among us. Cutting their number should be the first priority of government and society.
Rich and poor
Philippine Daily Inquirer
19 June 2010
IF ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS WOULD ONLY bother to see how our Asian neighbors are doing, it might be less effusive in touting President Macapagal-Arroyo’s economic achievements or legacy. For example, a recent report published in the New Straits Times said that in 2009 the number of millionaires in Singapore grew by 35 percent, while those in Malaysia grew by 34 percent. The Boston Consulting Group, which conducted the study, said 11.4 percent of Singaporean households owned more than US$1 million in “investible assets,” a measure of wealth that excludes real property and other non-liquid assets like paintings. That comes up to about 93,000 millionaires in a nation of 4.7 million people. The study also found that 60 percent of households in the island nation had bankable assets worth between US$250,000 and $1 million. And what made this all the more astonishing is that it happened during the same year when the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 2.1 percent.
And how did Filipino families fare during the “36 quarters of uninterrupted growth” under the Arroyo administration? There are no comparable figures for the Philippines. But recent computations made by the National Statistical and Coordination Board give us an idea of how we compare with our more progressive neighbor. The computations based on the Family Income and Expenditure Surveys indicate that while the rich may have become richer, their ranks have become thinner. The “rich” here are defined as families with monthly incomes of at least P199,927 or P2,393,126 a year. The average monthly income of families classified as rich today amounts to P235,155, compared to P194,965 in 2006. Romulo Virola, the NSCB secretary general who recently gloated about a “glorious ending” for the Arroyo administration after surprising 7.3 percent in GDP growth during the first quarter, said that in 2006 there were 19,738 rich families (out of an estimated 17.4 million families), less than half the number in 2000 when 51,160 families were classified as rich.
Virola said the decline in the number of rich families “would not have been so bad” if the middle class had expanded at the same time. It did not. As a proportion of all families, those belonging to the middle class (families earning an average of P36,964 monthly today) also declined to 19.1 percent in 2006 from 22.7 percent in 2000. Thus over the same period, i.e., from 2000 to 2006, the proportion of low-income families increased to 80.8 percent from 77 percent. These are families that earn an average of P9,061 a month in 2010.
(Curiously, while the NSCB gives the estimated 2010 incomes for each category—rich, middle class and low-income—it does not have both the absolute number of families in each category or their proportion to the total number of families for the current year.)
If the rich and the not-so-rich have declined in number (or at least as a percentage of the total number of families), where did the fruits of the years of growth go? To the poor obviously, though still not enough to significantly improve their standard of living. The average monthly income of the low-income families has grown to P9,061 in 2010 from P5,766 in 2000, but their monthly expenditures have kept pace, growing to P8,345 from P5,186. While it looks as if some improvement has been made, it is at best marginal. Survey after survey shows more and more people rating themselves poor or complaining of hunger.
At this point it would be futile to even dream of catching up with our more progressive neighbors. But in the end, it matters little how few millionaires we have. What matters most is how many millions of poor we have among us. Cutting their number should be the first priority of government and society.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Out of Classroom Activity (OCA)
Out of Classroom Activities (OCA) for 23, 24, 25 June 2010.
Instructions:
1. Group yourselves into four members.
2. You are to submit the following papers as group work:
3. Follow the format as instructed to you.
4. Paper 1: Answer the following: 1) What are your varied roles in your family? 2) As a youth in this country, how can you express love of country? (Bulletized form)
5. Paper 2: What is culture ?(definition, always quote your reference). Research over the internet of Other cultural practices. Also give at least 10 YouTube references on different cultural practices, example, the Surma of Ethiopia (visit my blogspot and look for the tag). Example: Surma, Ethiopia, Stick fighting: http:youtube/result/surma
6. Use the Word in submitting your work.
7. Deadline: 29 and 30 June.
Instructions:
1. Group yourselves into four members.
2. You are to submit the following papers as group work:
3. Follow the format as instructed to you.
4. Paper 1: Answer the following: 1) What are your varied roles in your family? 2) As a youth in this country, how can you express love of country? (Bulletized form)
5. Paper 2: What is culture ?(definition, always quote your reference). Research over the internet of Other cultural practices. Also give at least 10 YouTube references on different cultural practices, example, the Surma of Ethiopia (visit my blogspot and look for the tag). Example: Surma, Ethiopia, Stick fighting: http:youtube/result/surma
6. Use the Word in submitting your work.
7. Deadline: 29 and 30 June.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
What in the world is going on?
WHAT IN THE WORLD IS GOING ON?
A GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING FOR CEOs
By HERBERT MEYER
This is a paper presented several weeks ago by Herb Meyer at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland
which was attended by most of the CEOs from all the major international
corporations -- a very good summary of today's key trends and a perspective one seldom sees.
Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the Director of Central
Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. In these positions, he
managed production of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates and other top-secret projections for
the President and his national security advisers. Meyer is widely credited with being the first senior
U.S. Government official to forecast the Soviet Union's collapse, for which he later was awarded the
U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the intelligence community's highest
honor. Formerly an associate editor of FORTUNE, he is also the author of several books.
FOUR MAJOR TRANSFORMATIONS
Currently, there are four major transformations that are shaping political, economic and world
events. These transformations have profound implications for American business leaders and
owners, our culture and on our way of life.
1. The War in Iraq
There are three major monotheistic religions in the world:
Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
In the 16th century, Judaism and Christianity reconciled with the modern world. The rabbis, priests
and scholars found a way to settle up and pave the way forward. Religion remained at the center of
life, church and state became separate. Rule of law, the idea of economic liberty, individual rights,
human rights - all these are defining points of modern Western civilization. These concepts started
with the Greeks but didn't take off until the 15th and 16th century when Judaism and Christianity
found a way to reconcile with the modern world. When that happened, it unleashed the scientific
revolution and the greatest outpouring of art, literature and music the world has ever known.
Islam, which developed in the 7th century, counts millions of Moslems around the world who are
normal people. However, there is a radical streak within Islam. When the radicals are in charge,
Islam attacks Western civilization. Islam first attacked Western civilization in the 7th century, and
later in the 16th and 17th centuries. By 1683, the Moslems (Turks from the Ottoman Empire) were
literally at the gates of Vienna. It was in Vienna that the climatic battle between Islam and Western
civilization took place. The West won and went forward. Islam lost and went backward.
Interestingly, the date of that battle was September 11. Since them, Islam has not found a way
to reconcile with the modern world.
Today, terrorism is the third attack on Western civilization by radical Islam. To deal with terrorism,
the U.S. is doing two things. First, units of our armed forces are in 30 countries around the world
hunting down terrorist groups and dealing with them. This gets very little publicity. Second we are
taking military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
These actions are covered relentlessly by the media. People can argue about whether the war in Iraq
is right or wrong. However, the underlying strategy behind the war is to use our military to remove
the radicals from power and give the moderates a chance. Our hope is that, over time, the moderates
will find a way to bring Islam forward into the 21st century. That's what our involvement in Iraq
and Afghanistan is all about.
The lesson of 9/11 is that we live in a world where a small number of people can kill a large number
of people very quickly. They can use airplanes, bombs, anthrax, chemical weapons or dirty bombs.
Even with a first-rate intelligence service (which the U.S. does not have), you can't stop every attack.
That means our tolerance for political horseplay has dropped to zero. No longer will we play games
with terrorists or weapons of mass destructions.
Most of the instability and horseplay is coming from the Middle East.
That's why we have thought that if we could knock out the radicals and give the moderates a chance
to hold power; they might find a way to reconcile Islam with the modern world. So when looking at
Afghanistan or Iraq, it's important to look for any signs that they are modernizing.
For example: women being brought into the work force and colleges in Afghanistan is good. The
Iraqis stumbling toward a constitution is good.
People can argue about what the U.S. is doing and how we're doing it, but anything that suggests
Islam is finding its way forward is good.
2. The Emergence of China
In the last 20 years, China has moved 250 million people from the farms and villages into the cities.
Their plan is to move another 300 million in the next 20 years. When you put that many people into
the cities, you have to find work for them. That's why China is addicted to manufacturing; they have
to put all the relocated people to work. When we decide to manufacture something in the U.S., it's
based on market needs and the opportunity to make a profit. In China, they make the decision
because they want the jobs, which is a very different calculation.
While China is addicted to manufacturing, Americans are addicted to low prices. As a result, a
unique kind of economic codependency has developed between the two countries. If we ever stop
buying from China, they will explode politically. If China stops selling to us, our economy will take
a huge hit because prices will jump. We are subsidizing their economic development; they are
subsidizing our economic growth.
Because of their huge growth in manufacturing, China is hungry for raw materials, which drives
prices up worldwide. China is also thirsty for oil, which is one reason oil is now at $100 a barrel.
By 2020, China will produce more cars than the U.S. China is also buying its way into the oil
infrastructure around the world. They are doing it in the open market and paying fair market prices,
but millions of barrels of oil that would have gone to the U.S. are now going to China. China's quest
to assure it has the oil it needs to fuel its economy is a major factor in world politics and economics.
We have our Navy fleets protecting the sea lines, specifically the ability to get the tankers through.
It won't be long before the Chinese have an aircraft carrier sitting in the Persian Gulf as well. The
question is, will their aircraft carrier be pointing in the same direction as ours or against us?
3. Shifting Demographics of Western Civilization
Most countries in the Western world have stopped breeding. For a civilization obsessed with sex,
this is remarkable. Maintaining a steady population requires a birth rate of 2.1. In Western Europe,
the birth rate currently stands at 1.5, or 30 percent below replacement. In 30 years there will be 70
to 80 million fewer Europeans than there are today. The current birth rate in Germany is 1.3. Italy
and Spain are even lower at 1.2. At that rate, the working age population declines by 30 percent in
20 years, which has a huge impact on the economy. When you don't have young workers to replace
the older ones, you have to import them.
The European countries are currently importing Moslems. Today, the Moslems comprise 10 percent
of France and Germany, and the percentage is rising rapidly because they have higher birthrates.
However, the Moslem populations are not being integrated into the cultures of their host countries,
which is a political catastrophe. One reason Germany and France don't support the Iraq war is they
fear their Moslem populations will explode on them. By 2020, more than half of all births in the
Netherlands will be non-European.
The huge design flaw in the postmodern secular state is that you need a traditional religious society
birth rate to sustain it. The Europeans simply don't wish to have children, so they are dying. In
Japan, the birthrate is 1.3. As a result, Japan will lose up to 60 million people over the next 30
years. Because Japan has a very different society than Europe, they refuse to import workers.
Instead, they are just shutting down. Japan has already closed 2,000 schools, and is closing them
down at the rate of 300 per year. Japan is also aging very rapidly. By 2020, one out of every five
Japanese will be at least 70 years old. Nobody has any idea about how to run an economy with those
demographics.
Europe and Japan, which comprise two of the world's major economic engines, aren't merely in
recession, they're shutting down. This will have a huge impact on the world economy, and it is
already beginning to happen. Why are the birthrates so low? There is a direct correlation between
abandonment of traditional religious society and a drop in birth rate, and Christianity in Europe is
becoming irrelevant.
The second reason is economic. When the birth rate drops below replacement, the population ages.
With fewer working people to support more retired people, it puts a crushing tax burden on the
smaller group of working age people. As a result, young people delay marriage and having a family.
Once this trend starts, the downward spiral only gets worse. These countries have abandoned all the
traditions they formerly held in regard to having families and raising children.
The U.S. birth rate is 2.0, just below replacement. We have an increase in population because of
immigration. When broken down by ethnicity, the Anglo birth rate is 1.6 (same as France) while the
Hispanic birth rate is 2.7. In the U.S., the baby boomers are starting to retire in massive numbers.
This will push the elder dependency ratio from 19 to 38 over the next 10 to 15 years. This is not as
bad as Europe, but still represents the same kind of trend.
Western civilization seems to have forgotten what every primitive society understands - you need
kids to have a healthy society. Children are huge consumers. Then they grow up to become
taxpayers. That's how a society works, but the postmodern secular state seems to have forgotten
that. If U.S. birth rates of the past 20 to 30 years had been the same as post-World War II, there
would be no Social Security or Medicare problems.
The world's most effective birth control device is money. As society creates a middle class and
women move into the workforce, birth rates drop. Having large families is incompatible with
middle class living.
The quickest way to drop the birth rate is through rapid economic development. After World War II,
the U.S. instituted a $600 tax credit per child. The idea was to enable mom and dad to have four
children without being troubled by taxes. This led to a baby boom of 22 million kids, which was a
huge consumer market. That turned into a huge tax base. However, to match that incentive in
today's dollars would cost $12,000 per child.
China and India do not have declining populations. However, in both countries, there is a preference
for boys over girls, and we now have the technology to know which is which before they are born.
In China and India, families are aborting the girls. As a result, in each of these countries there are 70
million boys growing up who will never find wives. When left alone, nature produces 103 boys for
every 100 girls. In some provinces, however, the ratio is 128 boys to every 100 girls.
The birth rate in Russia is so low that by 2050 their population will be smaller than that of Yemen.
Russia has one-sixth of the earth's land surface and much of its oil. You can't control that much area
with such a small population. Immediately to the south, you have China with 70 million unmarried
men who are a real potential nightmare scenario for Russia.
4. Restructuring of American Business
The fourth major transformation involves a fundamental restructuring of American business.
Today's business environment is very complex and competitive. To succeed, you have to be the
best, which means having the highest quality and lowest cost. Whatever your price point, you must
have the best quality and lowest price. To be the best, you have to concentrate on one thing. You
can't be all things to all people and be the best.
A generation ago, IBM used to make every part of their computer. Now Intel makes the chips,
Microsoft makes the software, and someone else makes the modems, hard drives, monitors, etc.
IBM even out sources their call center. Because IBM has all these companies supplying goods and
services cheaper and better than they could do it themselves, they can make a better computer at a
lower cost. This is called a fracturing of business. When one company can make a better product by
relying on others to perform functions the business it used to do itself, it creates a complex pyramid
of companies that serve and support each other.
This fracturing of American business is now in its second generation.
The companies who supply IBM are now doing the same thing – outsourcing many of their core
services and production process. As a result, they can make cheaper, better products. Over time,
this pyramid continues to get bigger and bigger. Just when you think it can't fracture again, it does.
Even very small businesses can have a large pyramid of corporate entities that perform many of its
important functions. One aspect of this trend is that companies end up with fewer employees and
more independent contractors. This trend has also created two new words in business, integrator and
complementor. At the top of the pyramid, IBM is the integrator. As you go down the pyramid,
Microsoft, Intel and the other companies that support IBM are the complementors. However, each
of the complementors is itself an integrator for the complementors underneath it.
This has several implications, the first of which is that we are now getting false readings on the
economy. People who used to be employees are now independent contractors launching their own
businesses. There are many people working whose work is not listed as a job. As a result, the
economy is perking along better than the numbers are telling us.
Outsourcing also confused the numbers. Suppose a company like General Motors decides to
outsource all its employee cafeteria functions to Marriott (which it did). It lays-off hundreds of
cafeteria workers, who then get hired right back by Marriott. The only thing that has changed is that
these people work for Marriott rather than GM. Yet, the media headlines will scream that America
has lost more manufacturing jobs.
All that really happened is that these workers are now reclassified as service workers. So the old
way of counting jobs contributes to false economic readings. As yet, we haven't figured out how to
make the numbers catch up with the changing realities of the business world.
Another implication of this massive restructuring is that because companies are getting rid of units
and people that used to work for them, the entity is smaller. As the companies get smaller and more
efficient, revenues are going down but profits are going up. As a result, the old notion that revenues
are up and we're doing great isn't always the case anymore. Companies are getting smaller but are
becoming more efficient and profitable in the process.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE FOUR TRANSFORMATIONS
1. The War in Iraq
In some ways, the war is going very well. Afghanistan and Iraq have the beginnings of a modern
government, which is a huge step forward. The Saudis are starting to talk about some good things,
while Egypt and Lebanon are beginning to move in a good direction. A series of revolutions have
taken place in countries like Ukraine and Georgia.
There will be more of these revolutions for an interesting reason. In every revolution, there comes a
point where the dictator turns to the general and says, "Fire into the crowd". If the general fires into
the crowd, it stops the revolution. If the general says "No", the revolution continues. Increasingly,
the generals are saying "No" because their kids are in the crowd.
Thanks to TV and the Internet, the average 18-year old outside the U.S. is very savvy about what is
going on in the world, especially in terms of popular culture. There is a huge global consciousness,
and young people around the world want to be a part of it. It is increasingly apparent to them that
the miserable government where they live is the only thing standing in their way. More and more, it
is the well-educated kids, the children of the generals and the elite, who are leading the revolutions.
At the same time, not all is well with the war. The level of violence in Iraq is much worse and
doesn't appear to be improving. It's possible that we're asking too much of Islam all at one time.
We're trying to jolt them from the 7th century to the 21st century all at once, which may be further
than they can go. They might make it and they might not. Nobody knows for sure. The point is, we
don't know how the war will turn out. Anyone who says they know is just guessing.
The real place to watch is Iran. If they actually obtain nuclear weapons it will be a terrible situation.
There are two ways to deal with it. The first is a military strike, which will be very difficult. The
Iranians have dispersed their nuclear development facilities and put them underground. The U.S.
has nuclear weapons that can go under the earth and take out those facilities, but we don't want to do
that.
The other way is to separate the radical mullahs from the government, which is the most likely
course of action. Seventy percent of the Iranian population is under 30. They are Moslem but not
Arab. They are mostly pro-Western. Many experts think the U.S. should have dealt with Iran before
going to war with Iraq. The problem isn't so much the weapons, it's the people who control them. If
Iran has a moderate government, the weapons become less of a concern.
We don't know if we will win the war in Iraq. We could lose or win. What we're looking for is any
indicator that Islam is moving into the 21st century and stabilizing.
2. China
It may be that pushing 500 million people from farms and villages into cities is too much too soon.
Although it gets almost no publicity, China is experiencing hundreds of demonstrations around the
country, which is unprecedented. These are not students in Tiananmen Square. These are average
citizens who are angry with the government for building chemical plants and polluting the water
they drink and the air they breathe.
The Chinese are a smart and industrious people. They may be able to pull it off and become a very
successful economic and military superpower. If so, we will have to learn to live with it. If they
want to share the responsibility of keeping the world's oil lanes open, that's a good thing. They
currently have eight new nuclear electric power generators under way and 45 on the books to build.
Soon, they will leave the U.S. way behind in their ability to generate nuclear power.
What can go wrong with China? For one, you can't move 550 million people into the cities without
major problems. Two, China really wants Taiwan, not so much for economic reasons, they just want
it. The Chinese know that their system of communism can't survive much longer in the 21st century.
The last thing they want to do before they morph into some sort of more capitalistic government is to
take over Taiwan.
We may wake up one morning and find they have launched an attack on Taiwan. If so, it will be a
mess, both economically and militarily. The U.S. has committed to the military defense of Taiwan.
If China attacks Taiwan, will we really go to war against them? If the Chinese generals believe the
answer is no, they may attack. If we don't defend Taiwan, every treaty the U.S. has will be
worthless. Hopefully, China won't do anything stupid.
3. Demographics
Europe and Japan are dying because their populations are aging and shrinking. These trends can be
reversed if the young people start breeding. However, the birth rates in these areas are so low it will
take two generations to turn things around. No economic model exists that permits 50 years to turn
things around. Some countries are beginning to offer incentives for people to have bigger families.
For example, Italy is offering tax breaks for having children. However, it's a lifestyle issue versus a
tiny amount of money. Europeans aren't willing to give up their comfortable lifestyles in order to
have more children.
In general, everyone in Europe just wants it to last a while longer.
Europeans have a real talent for living. They don't want to work very hard. The average European
worker gets 400 more hours of vacation time per year than Americans. They don't want to work
and they don't want to make any of the changes needed to revive their economies.
The summer after 9/11, France lost 15,000 people in a heat wave. In August, the country basically
shuts down when everyone goes on vacation.
That year, a severe heat wave struck and 15,000 elderly people living in nursing homes and hospitals
died. Their children didn't even leave the beaches to come back and take care of the bodies.
Institutions had to scramble to find enough refrigeration units to hold the bodies until people came to
claim them. This loss of life was five times bigger than 9/11 in America, yet it didn't trigger any
change in French society.
When birth rates are so low, it creates a tremendous tax burden on the young. Under those
circumstances, keeping mom and dad alive is not an attractive option. That's why euthanasia is
becoming so popular in most European countries. The only country that doesn't permit (and even
encourage) euthanasia is Germany, because of all the baggage from World War II.
The European economy is beginning to fracture. Countries like Italy are starting to talk about
pulling out of the European Union because it is killing them. When things get bad economically in
Europe, they tend to get very nasty politically. The canary in the mine is anti- Semitism.
When it goes up, it means trouble is coming. Current levels of anti-Semitism are higher than ever.
Germany won't launch another war, but Europe will likely get shabbier, more dangerous and less
pleasant to live in. Japan has a birth rate of 1.3 and has no intention of bringing in immigrants. By
2020, one out of every five Japanese will be 70 years old. Property values in Japan have dropped
every year for the past 14 years. The country is simply shutting down. In the U.S. we also have an
aging population. Boomers are starting to retire at a massive rate. These retirements will have
several major impacts:
Possible massive sell off of large four-bedroom houses and a movement to condos.
An enormous drain on the treasury. Boomers vote, and they want their benefits, even if it means
putting a crushing tax burden on their kids to get them. Social Security will be a huge problem. As
this generation ages, it will start to drain the system.
We are the only country in the world where
there are no age limits on medical procedures.
- Hide quoted text -
An enormous drain on the health care system. This will also increase the tax burden on the young,
which will cause them to delay marriage and having families, which will drive down the birth rate
even further.
Although scary, these demographics also present enormous opportunities for products and services
tailored to aging populations. There will be tremendous demand for caring for older people,
especially those who don't need nursing homes but need some level of care. Some people will have
a business where they take care of three or four people in their homes. The demand for that type of
service and for products to physically care for aging people will be huge.
Make sure the demographics of your business are attuned to where the action is. For example, you
don't want to be a baby food company in Europe or Japan. Demographics are much underrated as an
indicator of where the opportunities are. Businesses need customers. Go where the customers are.
4. Restructuring of American Business
The restructuring of American business means we are coming to the end of the age of the employer
and employee. With all this fracturing of businesses into different and smaller units, employers can't
guarantee jobs anymore because they don't know what their companies will look like next year.
Everyone is on their way to becoming an independent contractor.
The new workforce contract will be: Show up at my office five days a week and do what I want you
to do, but you handle your own insurance, benefits, health care and everything else. Husbands and
wives are becoming economic units. They take different jobs and work different shifts depending on
where they are in their careers and families. They make tradeoffs to put together a compensation
package to take care of the family.
This used to happen only with highly educated professionals with high incomes. Now it is
happening at the level of the factory floor worker.
Couples at all levels are designing their compensation packages based on their individual needs. The
only way this can work is if everything is portable and flexible, which requires a huge shift in the
American economy.
The U.S is in the process of building the world's first 21st century model economy. The only other
countries doing this are U.K. and Australia. The model is fast, flexible, highly productive and
unstable in that it is always fracturing and re-fracturing. This will increase the economic gap
between the U.S. and everybody else, especially Europe and Japan.
At the same time, the military gap is increasing. Other than China, we are the only country that is
continuing to put money into their military. Plus, we are the only military getting on-the-ground
military experience through our war in Iraq. We know which high-tech weapons are working and
which ones aren't. There is almost no one who can take us on economically or militarily.
There has never been a superpower in this position before. On the one hand, this makes the U.S. a
magnet for bright and ambitious people. It also makes us a target. We are becoming one of the last
holdouts of the traditional Judeo-Christian culture. There is no better place in the world to be in
business and raise children. The U.S. is by far the best place to have an idea, form a business and
put it into the marketplace.
We take it for granted, but it isn't as available in other countries of the world. Ultimately, it's an
issue of culture. The only people who can hurt us are ourselves, by losing our culture. If we give up
our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans.
The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn't another America to pull us out. ###
A GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING FOR CEOs
By HERBERT MEYER
This is a paper presented several weeks ago by Herb Meyer at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland
which was attended by most of the CEOs from all the major international
corporations -- a very good summary of today's key trends and a perspective one seldom sees.
Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the Director of Central
Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. In these positions, he
managed production of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates and other top-secret projections for
the President and his national security advisers. Meyer is widely credited with being the first senior
U.S. Government official to forecast the Soviet Union's collapse, for which he later was awarded the
U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the intelligence community's highest
honor. Formerly an associate editor of FORTUNE, he is also the author of several books.
FOUR MAJOR TRANSFORMATIONS
Currently, there are four major transformations that are shaping political, economic and world
events. These transformations have profound implications for American business leaders and
owners, our culture and on our way of life.
1. The War in Iraq
There are three major monotheistic religions in the world:
Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
In the 16th century, Judaism and Christianity reconciled with the modern world. The rabbis, priests
and scholars found a way to settle up and pave the way forward. Religion remained at the center of
life, church and state became separate. Rule of law, the idea of economic liberty, individual rights,
human rights - all these are defining points of modern Western civilization. These concepts started
with the Greeks but didn't take off until the 15th and 16th century when Judaism and Christianity
found a way to reconcile with the modern world. When that happened, it unleashed the scientific
revolution and the greatest outpouring of art, literature and music the world has ever known.
Islam, which developed in the 7th century, counts millions of Moslems around the world who are
normal people. However, there is a radical streak within Islam. When the radicals are in charge,
Islam attacks Western civilization. Islam first attacked Western civilization in the 7th century, and
later in the 16th and 17th centuries. By 1683, the Moslems (Turks from the Ottoman Empire) were
literally at the gates of Vienna. It was in Vienna that the climatic battle between Islam and Western
civilization took place. The West won and went forward. Islam lost and went backward.
Interestingly, the date of that battle was September 11. Since them, Islam has not found a way
to reconcile with the modern world.
Today, terrorism is the third attack on Western civilization by radical Islam. To deal with terrorism,
the U.S. is doing two things. First, units of our armed forces are in 30 countries around the world
hunting down terrorist groups and dealing with them. This gets very little publicity. Second we are
taking military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
These actions are covered relentlessly by the media. People can argue about whether the war in Iraq
is right or wrong. However, the underlying strategy behind the war is to use our military to remove
the radicals from power and give the moderates a chance. Our hope is that, over time, the moderates
will find a way to bring Islam forward into the 21st century. That's what our involvement in Iraq
and Afghanistan is all about.
The lesson of 9/11 is that we live in a world where a small number of people can kill a large number
of people very quickly. They can use airplanes, bombs, anthrax, chemical weapons or dirty bombs.
Even with a first-rate intelligence service (which the U.S. does not have), you can't stop every attack.
That means our tolerance for political horseplay has dropped to zero. No longer will we play games
with terrorists or weapons of mass destructions.
Most of the instability and horseplay is coming from the Middle East.
That's why we have thought that if we could knock out the radicals and give the moderates a chance
to hold power; they might find a way to reconcile Islam with the modern world. So when looking at
Afghanistan or Iraq, it's important to look for any signs that they are modernizing.
For example: women being brought into the work force and colleges in Afghanistan is good. The
Iraqis stumbling toward a constitution is good.
People can argue about what the U.S. is doing and how we're doing it, but anything that suggests
Islam is finding its way forward is good.
2. The Emergence of China
In the last 20 years, China has moved 250 million people from the farms and villages into the cities.
Their plan is to move another 300 million in the next 20 years. When you put that many people into
the cities, you have to find work for them. That's why China is addicted to manufacturing; they have
to put all the relocated people to work. When we decide to manufacture something in the U.S., it's
based on market needs and the opportunity to make a profit. In China, they make the decision
because they want the jobs, which is a very different calculation.
While China is addicted to manufacturing, Americans are addicted to low prices. As a result, a
unique kind of economic codependency has developed between the two countries. If we ever stop
buying from China, they will explode politically. If China stops selling to us, our economy will take
a huge hit because prices will jump. We are subsidizing their economic development; they are
subsidizing our economic growth.
Because of their huge growth in manufacturing, China is hungry for raw materials, which drives
prices up worldwide. China is also thirsty for oil, which is one reason oil is now at $100 a barrel.
By 2020, China will produce more cars than the U.S. China is also buying its way into the oil
infrastructure around the world. They are doing it in the open market and paying fair market prices,
but millions of barrels of oil that would have gone to the U.S. are now going to China. China's quest
to assure it has the oil it needs to fuel its economy is a major factor in world politics and economics.
We have our Navy fleets protecting the sea lines, specifically the ability to get the tankers through.
It won't be long before the Chinese have an aircraft carrier sitting in the Persian Gulf as well. The
question is, will their aircraft carrier be pointing in the same direction as ours or against us?
3. Shifting Demographics of Western Civilization
Most countries in the Western world have stopped breeding. For a civilization obsessed with sex,
this is remarkable. Maintaining a steady population requires a birth rate of 2.1. In Western Europe,
the birth rate currently stands at 1.5, or 30 percent below replacement. In 30 years there will be 70
to 80 million fewer Europeans than there are today. The current birth rate in Germany is 1.3. Italy
and Spain are even lower at 1.2. At that rate, the working age population declines by 30 percent in
20 years, which has a huge impact on the economy. When you don't have young workers to replace
the older ones, you have to import them.
The European countries are currently importing Moslems. Today, the Moslems comprise 10 percent
of France and Germany, and the percentage is rising rapidly because they have higher birthrates.
However, the Moslem populations are not being integrated into the cultures of their host countries,
which is a political catastrophe. One reason Germany and France don't support the Iraq war is they
fear their Moslem populations will explode on them. By 2020, more than half of all births in the
Netherlands will be non-European.
The huge design flaw in the postmodern secular state is that you need a traditional religious society
birth rate to sustain it. The Europeans simply don't wish to have children, so they are dying. In
Japan, the birthrate is 1.3. As a result, Japan will lose up to 60 million people over the next 30
years. Because Japan has a very different society than Europe, they refuse to import workers.
Instead, they are just shutting down. Japan has already closed 2,000 schools, and is closing them
down at the rate of 300 per year. Japan is also aging very rapidly. By 2020, one out of every five
Japanese will be at least 70 years old. Nobody has any idea about how to run an economy with those
demographics.
Europe and Japan, which comprise two of the world's major economic engines, aren't merely in
recession, they're shutting down. This will have a huge impact on the world economy, and it is
already beginning to happen. Why are the birthrates so low? There is a direct correlation between
abandonment of traditional religious society and a drop in birth rate, and Christianity in Europe is
becoming irrelevant.
The second reason is economic. When the birth rate drops below replacement, the population ages.
With fewer working people to support more retired people, it puts a crushing tax burden on the
smaller group of working age people. As a result, young people delay marriage and having a family.
Once this trend starts, the downward spiral only gets worse. These countries have abandoned all the
traditions they formerly held in regard to having families and raising children.
The U.S. birth rate is 2.0, just below replacement. We have an increase in population because of
immigration. When broken down by ethnicity, the Anglo birth rate is 1.6 (same as France) while the
Hispanic birth rate is 2.7. In the U.S., the baby boomers are starting to retire in massive numbers.
This will push the elder dependency ratio from 19 to 38 over the next 10 to 15 years. This is not as
bad as Europe, but still represents the same kind of trend.
Western civilization seems to have forgotten what every primitive society understands - you need
kids to have a healthy society. Children are huge consumers. Then they grow up to become
taxpayers. That's how a society works, but the postmodern secular state seems to have forgotten
that. If U.S. birth rates of the past 20 to 30 years had been the same as post-World War II, there
would be no Social Security or Medicare problems.
The world's most effective birth control device is money. As society creates a middle class and
women move into the workforce, birth rates drop. Having large families is incompatible with
middle class living.
The quickest way to drop the birth rate is through rapid economic development. After World War II,
the U.S. instituted a $600 tax credit per child. The idea was to enable mom and dad to have four
children without being troubled by taxes. This led to a baby boom of 22 million kids, which was a
huge consumer market. That turned into a huge tax base. However, to match that incentive in
today's dollars would cost $12,000 per child.
China and India do not have declining populations. However, in both countries, there is a preference
for boys over girls, and we now have the technology to know which is which before they are born.
In China and India, families are aborting the girls. As a result, in each of these countries there are 70
million boys growing up who will never find wives. When left alone, nature produces 103 boys for
every 100 girls. In some provinces, however, the ratio is 128 boys to every 100 girls.
The birth rate in Russia is so low that by 2050 their population will be smaller than that of Yemen.
Russia has one-sixth of the earth's land surface and much of its oil. You can't control that much area
with such a small population. Immediately to the south, you have China with 70 million unmarried
men who are a real potential nightmare scenario for Russia.
4. Restructuring of American Business
The fourth major transformation involves a fundamental restructuring of American business.
Today's business environment is very complex and competitive. To succeed, you have to be the
best, which means having the highest quality and lowest cost. Whatever your price point, you must
have the best quality and lowest price. To be the best, you have to concentrate on one thing. You
can't be all things to all people and be the best.
A generation ago, IBM used to make every part of their computer. Now Intel makes the chips,
Microsoft makes the software, and someone else makes the modems, hard drives, monitors, etc.
IBM even out sources their call center. Because IBM has all these companies supplying goods and
services cheaper and better than they could do it themselves, they can make a better computer at a
lower cost. This is called a fracturing of business. When one company can make a better product by
relying on others to perform functions the business it used to do itself, it creates a complex pyramid
of companies that serve and support each other.
This fracturing of American business is now in its second generation.
The companies who supply IBM are now doing the same thing – outsourcing many of their core
services and production process. As a result, they can make cheaper, better products. Over time,
this pyramid continues to get bigger and bigger. Just when you think it can't fracture again, it does.
Even very small businesses can have a large pyramid of corporate entities that perform many of its
important functions. One aspect of this trend is that companies end up with fewer employees and
more independent contractors. This trend has also created two new words in business, integrator and
complementor. At the top of the pyramid, IBM is the integrator. As you go down the pyramid,
Microsoft, Intel and the other companies that support IBM are the complementors. However, each
of the complementors is itself an integrator for the complementors underneath it.
This has several implications, the first of which is that we are now getting false readings on the
economy. People who used to be employees are now independent contractors launching their own
businesses. There are many people working whose work is not listed as a job. As a result, the
economy is perking along better than the numbers are telling us.
Outsourcing also confused the numbers. Suppose a company like General Motors decides to
outsource all its employee cafeteria functions to Marriott (which it did). It lays-off hundreds of
cafeteria workers, who then get hired right back by Marriott. The only thing that has changed is that
these people work for Marriott rather than GM. Yet, the media headlines will scream that America
has lost more manufacturing jobs.
All that really happened is that these workers are now reclassified as service workers. So the old
way of counting jobs contributes to false economic readings. As yet, we haven't figured out how to
make the numbers catch up with the changing realities of the business world.
Another implication of this massive restructuring is that because companies are getting rid of units
and people that used to work for them, the entity is smaller. As the companies get smaller and more
efficient, revenues are going down but profits are going up. As a result, the old notion that revenues
are up and we're doing great isn't always the case anymore. Companies are getting smaller but are
becoming more efficient and profitable in the process.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE FOUR TRANSFORMATIONS
1. The War in Iraq
In some ways, the war is going very well. Afghanistan and Iraq have the beginnings of a modern
government, which is a huge step forward. The Saudis are starting to talk about some good things,
while Egypt and Lebanon are beginning to move in a good direction. A series of revolutions have
taken place in countries like Ukraine and Georgia.
There will be more of these revolutions for an interesting reason. In every revolution, there comes a
point where the dictator turns to the general and says, "Fire into the crowd". If the general fires into
the crowd, it stops the revolution. If the general says "No", the revolution continues. Increasingly,
the generals are saying "No" because their kids are in the crowd.
Thanks to TV and the Internet, the average 18-year old outside the U.S. is very savvy about what is
going on in the world, especially in terms of popular culture. There is a huge global consciousness,
and young people around the world want to be a part of it. It is increasingly apparent to them that
the miserable government where they live is the only thing standing in their way. More and more, it
is the well-educated kids, the children of the generals and the elite, who are leading the revolutions.
At the same time, not all is well with the war. The level of violence in Iraq is much worse and
doesn't appear to be improving. It's possible that we're asking too much of Islam all at one time.
We're trying to jolt them from the 7th century to the 21st century all at once, which may be further
than they can go. They might make it and they might not. Nobody knows for sure. The point is, we
don't know how the war will turn out. Anyone who says they know is just guessing.
The real place to watch is Iran. If they actually obtain nuclear weapons it will be a terrible situation.
There are two ways to deal with it. The first is a military strike, which will be very difficult. The
Iranians have dispersed their nuclear development facilities and put them underground. The U.S.
has nuclear weapons that can go under the earth and take out those facilities, but we don't want to do
that.
The other way is to separate the radical mullahs from the government, which is the most likely
course of action. Seventy percent of the Iranian population is under 30. They are Moslem but not
Arab. They are mostly pro-Western. Many experts think the U.S. should have dealt with Iran before
going to war with Iraq. The problem isn't so much the weapons, it's the people who control them. If
Iran has a moderate government, the weapons become less of a concern.
We don't know if we will win the war in Iraq. We could lose or win. What we're looking for is any
indicator that Islam is moving into the 21st century and stabilizing.
2. China
It may be that pushing 500 million people from farms and villages into cities is too much too soon.
Although it gets almost no publicity, China is experiencing hundreds of demonstrations around the
country, which is unprecedented. These are not students in Tiananmen Square. These are average
citizens who are angry with the government for building chemical plants and polluting the water
they drink and the air they breathe.
The Chinese are a smart and industrious people. They may be able to pull it off and become a very
successful economic and military superpower. If so, we will have to learn to live with it. If they
want to share the responsibility of keeping the world's oil lanes open, that's a good thing. They
currently have eight new nuclear electric power generators under way and 45 on the books to build.
Soon, they will leave the U.S. way behind in their ability to generate nuclear power.
What can go wrong with China? For one, you can't move 550 million people into the cities without
major problems. Two, China really wants Taiwan, not so much for economic reasons, they just want
it. The Chinese know that their system of communism can't survive much longer in the 21st century.
The last thing they want to do before they morph into some sort of more capitalistic government is to
take over Taiwan.
We may wake up one morning and find they have launched an attack on Taiwan. If so, it will be a
mess, both economically and militarily. The U.S. has committed to the military defense of Taiwan.
If China attacks Taiwan, will we really go to war against them? If the Chinese generals believe the
answer is no, they may attack. If we don't defend Taiwan, every treaty the U.S. has will be
worthless. Hopefully, China won't do anything stupid.
3. Demographics
Europe and Japan are dying because their populations are aging and shrinking. These trends can be
reversed if the young people start breeding. However, the birth rates in these areas are so low it will
take two generations to turn things around. No economic model exists that permits 50 years to turn
things around. Some countries are beginning to offer incentives for people to have bigger families.
For example, Italy is offering tax breaks for having children. However, it's a lifestyle issue versus a
tiny amount of money. Europeans aren't willing to give up their comfortable lifestyles in order to
have more children.
In general, everyone in Europe just wants it to last a while longer.
Europeans have a real talent for living. They don't want to work very hard. The average European
worker gets 400 more hours of vacation time per year than Americans. They don't want to work
and they don't want to make any of the changes needed to revive their economies.
The summer after 9/11, France lost 15,000 people in a heat wave. In August, the country basically
shuts down when everyone goes on vacation.
That year, a severe heat wave struck and 15,000 elderly people living in nursing homes and hospitals
died. Their children didn't even leave the beaches to come back and take care of the bodies.
Institutions had to scramble to find enough refrigeration units to hold the bodies until people came to
claim them. This loss of life was five times bigger than 9/11 in America, yet it didn't trigger any
change in French society.
When birth rates are so low, it creates a tremendous tax burden on the young. Under those
circumstances, keeping mom and dad alive is not an attractive option. That's why euthanasia is
becoming so popular in most European countries. The only country that doesn't permit (and even
encourage) euthanasia is Germany, because of all the baggage from World War II.
The European economy is beginning to fracture. Countries like Italy are starting to talk about
pulling out of the European Union because it is killing them. When things get bad economically in
Europe, they tend to get very nasty politically. The canary in the mine is anti- Semitism.
When it goes up, it means trouble is coming. Current levels of anti-Semitism are higher than ever.
Germany won't launch another war, but Europe will likely get shabbier, more dangerous and less
pleasant to live in. Japan has a birth rate of 1.3 and has no intention of bringing in immigrants. By
2020, one out of every five Japanese will be 70 years old. Property values in Japan have dropped
every year for the past 14 years. The country is simply shutting down. In the U.S. we also have an
aging population. Boomers are starting to retire at a massive rate. These retirements will have
several major impacts:
Possible massive sell off of large four-bedroom houses and a movement to condos.
An enormous drain on the treasury. Boomers vote, and they want their benefits, even if it means
putting a crushing tax burden on their kids to get them. Social Security will be a huge problem. As
this generation ages, it will start to drain the system.
We are the only country in the world where
there are no age limits on medical procedures.
- Hide quoted text -
An enormous drain on the health care system. This will also increase the tax burden on the young,
which will cause them to delay marriage and having families, which will drive down the birth rate
even further.
Although scary, these demographics also present enormous opportunities for products and services
tailored to aging populations. There will be tremendous demand for caring for older people,
especially those who don't need nursing homes but need some level of care. Some people will have
a business where they take care of three or four people in their homes. The demand for that type of
service and for products to physically care for aging people will be huge.
Make sure the demographics of your business are attuned to where the action is. For example, you
don't want to be a baby food company in Europe or Japan. Demographics are much underrated as an
indicator of where the opportunities are. Businesses need customers. Go where the customers are.
4. Restructuring of American Business
The restructuring of American business means we are coming to the end of the age of the employer
and employee. With all this fracturing of businesses into different and smaller units, employers can't
guarantee jobs anymore because they don't know what their companies will look like next year.
Everyone is on their way to becoming an independent contractor.
The new workforce contract will be: Show up at my office five days a week and do what I want you
to do, but you handle your own insurance, benefits, health care and everything else. Husbands and
wives are becoming economic units. They take different jobs and work different shifts depending on
where they are in their careers and families. They make tradeoffs to put together a compensation
package to take care of the family.
This used to happen only with highly educated professionals with high incomes. Now it is
happening at the level of the factory floor worker.
Couples at all levels are designing their compensation packages based on their individual needs. The
only way this can work is if everything is portable and flexible, which requires a huge shift in the
American economy.
The U.S is in the process of building the world's first 21st century model economy. The only other
countries doing this are U.K. and Australia. The model is fast, flexible, highly productive and
unstable in that it is always fracturing and re-fracturing. This will increase the economic gap
between the U.S. and everybody else, especially Europe and Japan.
At the same time, the military gap is increasing. Other than China, we are the only country that is
continuing to put money into their military. Plus, we are the only military getting on-the-ground
military experience through our war in Iraq. We know which high-tech weapons are working and
which ones aren't. There is almost no one who can take us on economically or militarily.
There has never been a superpower in this position before. On the one hand, this makes the U.S. a
magnet for bright and ambitious people. It also makes us a target. We are becoming one of the last
holdouts of the traditional Judeo-Christian culture. There is no better place in the world to be in
business and raise children. The U.S. is by far the best place to have an idea, form a business and
put it into the marketplace.
We take it for granted, but it isn't as available in other countries of the world. Ultimately, it's an
issue of culture. The only people who can hurt us are ourselves, by losing our culture. If we give up
our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans.
The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn't another America to pull us out. ###
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