Interview with Cheche Lazaro of Probe.
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20100724-282906
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
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.
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