Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Did you know?
Students of SO 101 are encouraged to view the video Did you know? What could be the impact of technology in future life?
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Supplementary reading on geology
SO 101 students, please see the latest posting on Earth's geological period. Care to read and view the animation.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
2001 Space Odyssey
Ever wonder the vastness of space? Our universe or multi-verse? Listen to this music.
FUTURESTATES : Plastic Bag By Ramin Bahrani
FUTURESTATES : Plastic Bag By Ramin Bahrani
For SO 101 students. Please watch this film. We will discuss this next month.
For SO 101 students. Please watch this film. We will discuss this next month.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
Welcome Freshmen
Welcome Freshmen to a new period of your life.
For starters do visit Carl Sagan's video clips. As a follow-up you can search for the tag "evolution" at the search engine by typing it in.
Carl's Sagan's work may have 12 episodes at YouTube, you can follow it up by viewing them at your free time, which is your choice, and make notes of the questions you have in mind so that we can discuss them in our class.
Sociology as a subject of human study is linked to the origins of humans because we have to answer the question, "Where did we come from?" We have to understand in a scientific way or other tools to understand or origins, our purpose and our destiny as human is this "blue planet" (as seen from outer space).
I encourage you to learn more about this by doing research and by publishing your thoughts about it in your own blogspot.
Enjoy the journey of learning, a life-long learning.
For starters do visit Carl Sagan's video clips. As a follow-up you can search for the tag "evolution" at the search engine by typing it in.
Carl's Sagan's work may have 12 episodes at YouTube, you can follow it up by viewing them at your free time, which is your choice, and make notes of the questions you have in mind so that we can discuss them in our class.
Sociology as a subject of human study is linked to the origins of humans because we have to answer the question, "Where did we come from?" We have to understand in a scientific way or other tools to understand or origins, our purpose and our destiny as human is this "blue planet" (as seen from outer space).
I encourage you to learn more about this by doing research and by publishing your thoughts about it in your own blogspot.
Enjoy the journey of learning, a life-long learning.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Innovation propelled by new technologies
Innovation is driving societies to become more competitive and survive.
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2011/06/04/gps.johnson.innovation.cnn
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2011/06/04/gps.johnson.innovation.cnn
Drive towards new innovation
The move towards innovation propelled by sharp cutting edge technology is being accelerated by societies to make their population competitive and survive.
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2011/06/04/gps.johnson.innovation.cnn
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2011/06/04/gps.johnson.innovation.cnn
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Big Bang, Human Evolution, Simple presentation 4:38 mins
A video presentation on the Big Bang Theory, rise of replicating DNA, early life forms, evolution, human evolution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f7LD1KhddE&feature=fvsr
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f7LD1KhddE&feature=fvsr
Friday, April 29, 2011
Filipino wit
FILIPINO SIGNS OF WIT:
1. The sign in a flower shop in Diliman called "Petal Attraction"
2. A 24-hour restaurant called "Doris Day & Night"
3. Barber shop called "Felix The Cut"
4. A bakery named "Bread Pitt"
5. Fast-food place selling 'maruya' (banana fritters) called "Maruya Carey".
6. Then, there is "Christopher Plumbing"
7. A boutique called "The Way We Wear"
8. A video rental shop called "Leon King Video Rental"
9. A restaurant in Cainta district of Rizal called "Caintacky Fried Chicken"
10. A local burger restaurant called "Mang Donald's" (San Fernando, La Union )
11. A doughnut shop called "MacDonuts"
12. A shop selling 'lumpia' (egg roll) in Makati called "Wrap and Roll"
13. And two butcher shops called " Meating Place and Meatropolis" .
Smart travelers can decipher what may look like baffling signs to unaccustomed foreigners by simply sounding out the 'Taglish' (The Philippine version of English words spelled and pronounced with a heavy Filipino such as:
14. At a restaurant menu in Cebu :
We hab Sopdrink in can an in Batol? [Translation: We have soft drinks in Can and in Bottle].
15. Then, there is a sewing accessories shop called Bids And Pises -
[translation: Beads and Pieces --or-- Bits and Pieces]
There are also many signs with either badly chosen or misspelled words but they are usually so entertaining that it would be a mistake to 'correct' them like.......
16. In a restaurant in Baguio City , the 'Summer Capital' of the Philippines: Wanted: Boy Waitress
17. On a highway in Pampanga: We Make Modern Antique Furniture
18. On the window of a photography shop in Cabanatuan : We Shoot You While You Wait
19. And on the glass front of a cafe in Panay Avenue in Manila : Wanted: Waiter, Cashier, Washier
Some of the notices can even give a wrong impression such as:
20. A shoe store in Pangasinan which has a sign saying:
We Sell Imported Robber Shoes? (These could be the 'sneakiest' sneakers);
21. A rental property sign in Jaro reads:
House for Rent, Fully Furnaced (It must really be hot inside)!
22. Occasionally, one could come across signs that are truly unique - if not altogether odd.
City in southern Philippines which said: Adults: 1 peso; Child: 50 centavos; Cadavers: fare subject to negotiation.
23. European tourists may also be intrigued to discover two competing shops selling Hopia (a Chinese pastry) called Holland Hopia and Poland Hopia - which are owned and operated by two local Chinese entrepreneurs, Mr. Ho and Mr. Po respectively - (believe it or not)!
24. Some folks also 'creatively' redesign English to be more efficient. The creative confusion between language and culture leads to more than just simple unintentional errors in syntax, but in the adoption of new words, says reader Robert Goodfellow who came across a sign.....
House Fersallarend' (house for Sale or Rent). Why use five words when two will do?
25. According to Manila businessman, Tonyboy Ongsiako, there is so much wit in the Philippines. Why? Because we are in a country where a good sense of humor is needed to survive. We have a 24-hour comedy show here called the government and a huge reserve of comedians made up mostly of politicians and bad actors. (Thanks to Mr. George Ma Mon Luk)
1. The sign in a flower shop in Diliman called "Petal Attraction"
2. A 24-hour restaurant called "Doris Day & Night"
3. Barber shop called "Felix The Cut"
4. A bakery named "Bread Pitt"
5. Fast-food place selling 'maruya' (banana fritters) called "Maruya Carey".
6. Then, there is "Christopher Plumbing"
7. A boutique called "The Way We Wear"
8. A video rental shop called "Leon King Video Rental"
9. A restaurant in Cainta district of Rizal called "Caintacky Fried Chicken"
10. A local burger restaurant called "Mang Donald's" (San Fernando, La Union )
11. A doughnut shop called "MacDonuts"
12. A shop selling 'lumpia' (egg roll) in Makati called "Wrap and Roll"
13. And two butcher shops called " Meating Place and Meatropolis" .
Smart travelers can decipher what may look like baffling signs to unaccustomed foreigners by simply sounding out the 'Taglish' (The Philippine version of English words spelled and pronounced with a heavy Filipino such as:
14. At a restaurant menu in Cebu :
We hab Sopdrink in can an in Batol? [Translation: We have soft drinks in Can and in Bottle].
15. Then, there is a sewing accessories shop called Bids And Pises -
[translation: Beads and Pieces --or-- Bits and Pieces]
There are also many signs with either badly chosen or misspelled words but they are usually so entertaining that it would be a mistake to 'correct' them like.......
16. In a restaurant in Baguio City , the 'Summer Capital' of the Philippines: Wanted: Boy Waitress
17. On a highway in Pampanga: We Make Modern Antique Furniture
18. On the window of a photography shop in Cabanatuan : We Shoot You While You Wait
19. And on the glass front of a cafe in Panay Avenue in Manila : Wanted: Waiter, Cashier, Washier
Some of the notices can even give a wrong impression such as:
20. A shoe store in Pangasinan which has a sign saying:
We Sell Imported Robber Shoes? (These could be the 'sneakiest' sneakers);
21. A rental property sign in Jaro reads:
House for Rent, Fully Furnaced (It must really be hot inside)!
22. Occasionally, one could come across signs that are truly unique - if not altogether odd.
City in southern Philippines which said: Adults: 1 peso; Child: 50 centavos; Cadavers: fare subject to negotiation.
23. European tourists may also be intrigued to discover two competing shops selling Hopia (a Chinese pastry) called Holland Hopia and Poland Hopia - which are owned and operated by two local Chinese entrepreneurs, Mr. Ho and Mr. Po respectively - (believe it or not)!
24. Some folks also 'creatively' redesign English to be more efficient. The creative confusion between language and culture leads to more than just simple unintentional errors in syntax, but in the adoption of new words, says reader Robert Goodfellow who came across a sign.....
House Fersallarend' (house for Sale or Rent). Why use five words when two will do?
25. According to Manila businessman, Tonyboy Ongsiako, there is so much wit in the Philippines. Why? Because we are in a country where a good sense of humor is needed to survive. We have a 24-hour comedy show here called the government and a huge reserve of comedians made up mostly of politicians and bad actors. (Thanks to Mr. George Ma Mon Luk)
Monday, February 28, 2011
EDSA 25th Anniversary, Statement by Former Senior Government Officials
25 Years of People Power from EDSA Revolution to Daang Matuwid:
Lessons in Democratic Life for Our Nation’s Future
(A Statement from the Former Senior Government Officials)
We, former senior government officials, join our people in celebrating the silver anniversary of the victory of our democratic revolution.
The Filipino people can rightfully be proud that they took the path of people power revolution, a path taken since by many other nations from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, including the latest from Tunisia and Egypt.
Our own people power revolution banished a dictator, defeated takeover attempts by various military factions, ratified a Constitution that guarantee our rights, rebuilt the institutions essential for our democratic governance, gave power and resources to our local governments, and liberated our media, our economy and our society from the many oppressions of authoritarian rule. Many of our countrymen celebrate just surviving another day; surely our people must celebrate making so much history in the first 25 years of our democracy.
We celebrate our achievements but we must be mindful of the monumental tasks that remain. Thus far, our people power revolution has failed to end corruption at the highest levels of our government, failed to lift millions of our fellow Filipinos from poverty, and failed to bring enduring peace to our countryside, particularly in Mindanao. Our democracy is now a 25-year old young adult. It must rise from the exuberance of the EDSA revolution and embrace the discipline of daang matuwid. It has so much yet to learn and do.
What Have We Learned?
1. Our people like to choose their leaders. They often choose wisely. Sometimes they choose liars, cheats, and thieves but bad leaders do not fool all the people all the time. We must never again compromise the integrity of our elections being the only way for our people to choose their leaders.
2. Our country has many honest, competent and courageous people willing to sacrifice for our democratic institutions to function well. We must get more of our best, most decent and brightest people to become civil servants because their service will save our nation.
3. Our laws speak so clearly: a public office is a public trust. We must keep our leaders, particularly those at the highest levels, and our civil servants, including those at the grassroots, faithful to our laws and worthy of our trust. We must make sure those who violate our trust suffer substantial consequences.
4. The exercise of our freedoms and rights is our best guarantee for a secure and prosperous future. Surrendering our liberties for security and prosperity is a fool’s bargain. The greatness of our leaders will depend on the responsibility borne by our citizens. We revere our dearly departed Corazon Aquino not just because of what she did but even more because of what she was able to inspire our people to do.
What Must We Do?
Now we must join the one-year old presidency of Benigno Simeon Aquino to do what he said in his inaugural he would do: “Ilalaan ko ang aking buhay para siguraduhin na ang ating demokrasya ay kapaki-pakinabang sa bawat isa.”
1. We must first rid our government of the leeches and vampires sucking the blood of our people. We need to restore responsibility and accountability in our public agencies. We must finally take the steps necessary to make the Office of the Ombudsman the “protector of the people” that our Constitution intended it to be, instead of the coddler of the corrupt powerful that it has become. Throughout our government, we must make graft rare not common, corruption unusual not routine, and abuse extraordinary not SOP. Our highest officials must become the leaders in honesty and integrity or serve as prime examples of punishment for violations, when necessary.
2. We must invest in improved health and better education to realize the promise of our nearly hundred million people being the true blessings they were meant to be for their families and our country. Our nation has nearly doubled in numbers since the EDSA revolution 25 years ago. Our society and economy has the means to protect all Filipinos from sickness or disability and to enable all to become literate, skilled and productive in a modern technological world. We need to deploy these means sooner rather than later before the growing numbers of the sick and ignorant overwhelm those who are well and educated.
3. We must expand our economy, not just on the obvious vigor of our cities, but also on the growing prosperity of our farmers, fisherfolks and rural communities. Our economy must grow more by creating jobs at home and less from merely spending the remittances of workers abroad. So many of our economic enterprises survive on the exploitation of our workers that we need to re-discover the powerful virtuous cycles possible when workers are lawfully treated so that they become better consumers. We must give attention to employing our young people who are unable to get jobs because they have no prior job experience. Our government and the private sector should start up internships, apprenticeships, on-the-job options and other modes of providing our young mostly unemployed workers with valuable work experience.
4. We must have a government that serves, not constrains, the individual and collective enterprise, energy and creativity of our people. First of all our government must not insult, scandalize or provoke another outbreak of people power by its failures to retain our trust in its integrity and our respect for its competence. We must use the power of the people, not just to oust dictators or plunderers, but also to educate our children, heal our sick, empower the powerless, and uplift the lives of all. Our government must mobilize our citizens, not just in protest of its mistakes or in the election of its replacements, but also in strategic and sustained participation in governance, enterprise and development.
5. We must build an inclusive and just peace everywhere conflict and insurgency prevails. We should support prudence, perseverance and good faith in the political negotiations between the government and the major insurgencies afflicting our countryside. We should also accelerate the delivery of missing public services, expanded economic opportunities and more knowledge and information to communities long isolated by armed conflict. We urge our political leaders to provide political solutions to our very real problems that continue to kill Filipinos and keep those who survive poor.
Our democracy has the capacity to perform far better than it had done thus far. Whatever imperfections our democracy might have, we can make it work better if we strive daily to strengthen our institutions and if more of our people become responsible citizens. Our most important task is the elimination of the worst miseries of poverty and the lessening of inequities that are the root of all unrest and instability in our beautiful land. Let us dedicate this silver anniversary celebration to our people power revolution’s eventual attainment of this task.
For Reference:
Jesus Estanislao
Former Secretary
Department of Finance
Mobiline: 0918 934 1038
Vicente Paterno
Former Minister
Ministry of Industry
Mobiline: 0917 795 7974
Sixto Roxas
Former Chairman
National Economic Council
Mobiline: 0928 520 3301
Leticia Ramos-Shahani
Former Undersecretary
Deparment of Foreign Affairs
Mobiline: 0915 487 1877
Lessons in Democratic Life for Our Nation’s Future
(A Statement from the Former Senior Government Officials)
We, former senior government officials, join our people in celebrating the silver anniversary of the victory of our democratic revolution.
The Filipino people can rightfully be proud that they took the path of people power revolution, a path taken since by many other nations from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, including the latest from Tunisia and Egypt.
Our own people power revolution banished a dictator, defeated takeover attempts by various military factions, ratified a Constitution that guarantee our rights, rebuilt the institutions essential for our democratic governance, gave power and resources to our local governments, and liberated our media, our economy and our society from the many oppressions of authoritarian rule. Many of our countrymen celebrate just surviving another day; surely our people must celebrate making so much history in the first 25 years of our democracy.
We celebrate our achievements but we must be mindful of the monumental tasks that remain. Thus far, our people power revolution has failed to end corruption at the highest levels of our government, failed to lift millions of our fellow Filipinos from poverty, and failed to bring enduring peace to our countryside, particularly in Mindanao. Our democracy is now a 25-year old young adult. It must rise from the exuberance of the EDSA revolution and embrace the discipline of daang matuwid. It has so much yet to learn and do.
What Have We Learned?
1. Our people like to choose their leaders. They often choose wisely. Sometimes they choose liars, cheats, and thieves but bad leaders do not fool all the people all the time. We must never again compromise the integrity of our elections being the only way for our people to choose their leaders.
2. Our country has many honest, competent and courageous people willing to sacrifice for our democratic institutions to function well. We must get more of our best, most decent and brightest people to become civil servants because their service will save our nation.
3. Our laws speak so clearly: a public office is a public trust. We must keep our leaders, particularly those at the highest levels, and our civil servants, including those at the grassroots, faithful to our laws and worthy of our trust. We must make sure those who violate our trust suffer substantial consequences.
4. The exercise of our freedoms and rights is our best guarantee for a secure and prosperous future. Surrendering our liberties for security and prosperity is a fool’s bargain. The greatness of our leaders will depend on the responsibility borne by our citizens. We revere our dearly departed Corazon Aquino not just because of what she did but even more because of what she was able to inspire our people to do.
What Must We Do?
Now we must join the one-year old presidency of Benigno Simeon Aquino to do what he said in his inaugural he would do: “Ilalaan ko ang aking buhay para siguraduhin na ang ating demokrasya ay kapaki-pakinabang sa bawat isa.”
1. We must first rid our government of the leeches and vampires sucking the blood of our people. We need to restore responsibility and accountability in our public agencies. We must finally take the steps necessary to make the Office of the Ombudsman the “protector of the people” that our Constitution intended it to be, instead of the coddler of the corrupt powerful that it has become. Throughout our government, we must make graft rare not common, corruption unusual not routine, and abuse extraordinary not SOP. Our highest officials must become the leaders in honesty and integrity or serve as prime examples of punishment for violations, when necessary.
2. We must invest in improved health and better education to realize the promise of our nearly hundred million people being the true blessings they were meant to be for their families and our country. Our nation has nearly doubled in numbers since the EDSA revolution 25 years ago. Our society and economy has the means to protect all Filipinos from sickness or disability and to enable all to become literate, skilled and productive in a modern technological world. We need to deploy these means sooner rather than later before the growing numbers of the sick and ignorant overwhelm those who are well and educated.
3. We must expand our economy, not just on the obvious vigor of our cities, but also on the growing prosperity of our farmers, fisherfolks and rural communities. Our economy must grow more by creating jobs at home and less from merely spending the remittances of workers abroad. So many of our economic enterprises survive on the exploitation of our workers that we need to re-discover the powerful virtuous cycles possible when workers are lawfully treated so that they become better consumers. We must give attention to employing our young people who are unable to get jobs because they have no prior job experience. Our government and the private sector should start up internships, apprenticeships, on-the-job options and other modes of providing our young mostly unemployed workers with valuable work experience.
4. We must have a government that serves, not constrains, the individual and collective enterprise, energy and creativity of our people. First of all our government must not insult, scandalize or provoke another outbreak of people power by its failures to retain our trust in its integrity and our respect for its competence. We must use the power of the people, not just to oust dictators or plunderers, but also to educate our children, heal our sick, empower the powerless, and uplift the lives of all. Our government must mobilize our citizens, not just in protest of its mistakes or in the election of its replacements, but also in strategic and sustained participation in governance, enterprise and development.
5. We must build an inclusive and just peace everywhere conflict and insurgency prevails. We should support prudence, perseverance and good faith in the political negotiations between the government and the major insurgencies afflicting our countryside. We should also accelerate the delivery of missing public services, expanded economic opportunities and more knowledge and information to communities long isolated by armed conflict. We urge our political leaders to provide political solutions to our very real problems that continue to kill Filipinos and keep those who survive poor.
Our democracy has the capacity to perform far better than it had done thus far. Whatever imperfections our democracy might have, we can make it work better if we strive daily to strengthen our institutions and if more of our people become responsible citizens. Our most important task is the elimination of the worst miseries of poverty and the lessening of inequities that are the root of all unrest and instability in our beautiful land. Let us dedicate this silver anniversary celebration to our people power revolution’s eventual attainment of this task.
For Reference:
Jesus Estanislao
Former Secretary
Department of Finance
Mobiline: 0918 934 1038
Vicente Paterno
Former Minister
Ministry of Industry
Mobiline: 0917 795 7974
Sixto Roxas
Former Chairman
National Economic Council
Mobiline: 0928 520 3301
Leticia Ramos-Shahani
Former Undersecretary
Deparment of Foreign Affairs
Mobiline: 0915 487 1877
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Have I told you how to get rich?
Want to build some wealth in 2011? Revisit those New Year's resolutions.
You probably haven't thought about your pledges in more than a month. But odds are at least one of them involves getting rid of debt, increasing your income or building some financial security.
http://finance.yahoo.com/retirement/article/112185/9-ways-to-build-wealth-in-2011?mod=retire-planning
You probably haven't thought about your pledges in more than a month. But odds are at least one of them involves getting rid of debt, increasing your income or building some financial security.
http://finance.yahoo.com/retirement/article/112185/9-ways-to-build-wealth-in-2011?mod=retire-planning
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Pia's bill on no age discrimination
MANILA, Philippines—A bill that seeks to eliminate age discrimination in employment by prohibiting and penalizing any employer, labor contractor, and organization that will deny any individual jobs because of age has been filed at the Senate.
In filing Senate Bill 252, Senator Pia Cayetano noted an emerging discrimination against older people especially with a number of fresh graduates joining the labor force.
In filing Senate Bill 252, Senator Pia Cayetano noted an emerging discrimination against older people especially with a number of fresh graduates joining the labor force.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Philippines fails to industrialize, women as drug mules
MANILA--"Maid in the Philippines" was how its top export commodity used to be known, with millions of women from the impoverished country hired abroad as domestic workers.
But as menial jobs vanish in the global recession and opportunities fail to materialize at home, more and more desperate Philippine women are resorting to something far more dangerous -- smuggling drugs as mules.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20110220-321282/Women-drug-mules-pay-as-Philippines-fails-on-jobs
But as menial jobs vanish in the global recession and opportunities fail to materialize at home, more and more desperate Philippine women are resorting to something far more dangerous -- smuggling drugs as mules.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20110220-321282/Women-drug-mules-pay-as-Philippines-fails-on-jobs
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Rural situation, Philippines
About half of the Philippines’ 88 million people live in rural areas. Poverty is most severe and most widespread in these areas and almost 80 per cent of the country’s poor people live there. Agriculture is the primary and often only source of income for poor rural people, most of whom depend on subsistence farming and fishing for their livelihoods. In general, illiteracy, unemployment and the incidence of poverty are higher among indigenous peoples and people living in the upland areas. Overall, more than a third of the people in the Philippines live in poverty.
Click on the link.
http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/web/guest/country/home/tags/philippines
Click on the link.
http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/web/guest/country/home/tags/philippines
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Can sleep heal us faster?
Can sleep heal us faster?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/science/18qna.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=science
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/science/18qna.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=science
Monday, January 3, 2011
Alzheimer's disease affects society.
Margaret Nance was, to put it mildly, a difficult case. Agitated, combative, often reluctant to eat, she would hit staff members and fellow residents at nursing homes, several of which kicked her out. But when Beatitudes nursing home agreed to an urgent plea to accept her, all that changed. - From New York Times
Population decline
In some cities of America, population has been declining. Click on the link and read on the article.
Friday, December 17, 2010
History of Education
For History of Education please click on link.
http://ireadmodule.blogspot.com/2008/09/historical-foundations-of-education.html
http://ireadmodule.blogspot.com/2008/09/historical-foundations-of-education.html
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
For your parents
Ten Great Tips For Each Day:
1. Stay out of trouble.
2. Aim for greater heights.
3. Stay focused on your job.
4. Exercise to maintain good health.
5. Practice team work.
6. Rely on your trusted partner to watch your back. Take your time trusting others.
7. Save for rainy days.
8. Rest and relax.
9. Always take time to smile.
AND
10. Realize that nothing is impossible.
This should make you smile:
THE SENILITY PRAYER: Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.
From a forwarded message.
1. Stay out of trouble.
2. Aim for greater heights.
3. Stay focused on your job.
4. Exercise to maintain good health.
5. Practice team work.
6. Rely on your trusted partner to watch your back. Take your time trusting others.
7. Save for rainy days.
8. Rest and relax.
9. Always take time to smile.
AND
10. Realize that nothing is impossible.
This should make you smile:
THE SENILITY PRAYER: Grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway,
the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.
From a forwarded message.
For your parents
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR THOSE OVER FORTY YEARS OLD
1. Focus on enjoying people, not on indulging in or accumulating material things.
2. Plan to spend whatever you have saved.
You deserve to enjoy it and the few healthy years you have left.
Travel if you can afford it.
Don't leave anything for your children or loved ones to quarrel about.
By leaving anything, you may even cause more trouble when you are gone.
3. Live in the here and now, not in the yesterdays and tomorrows.
It is only today that you can handle.
Yesterday is gone, tomorrow may not even happen.
4. Enjoy your grandchildren (if you are blessed with any)
but don't be their full time baby sitter.
You have no moral obligation to take care of them.
Don't have any guilt about refusing to baby sit anyone's kids,
including your own grandkids.
Your parental obligation is to your children.
After you have raised them into responsible adults,
your duties of child-rearing and babysitting are finished.
Let your children raise their own offspring.
5. Accept physical weakness, sickness and other physical pains.
It is a part of the aging process.
Enjoy whatever your health can allow.
6. Enjoy what you are and what you have right now.
Stop working hard for what you do not have.
If you do not have them, it's probably too late.
7. Just enjoy your life with your spouse, children, grandchildren and friends.
People, who truly love you, love you for yourself, not for what you have. Anyone who loves you for what you have will just give you misery.
8. Forgive and accept forgiveness.
Forgive yourself and others.
Enjoy peace of mind and peace of soul.
9. Befriend death.
It's a natural part of the life cycle.
Don't be afraid of it.
Death is the beginning of a new and better life.
So, prepare yourself not for death but for a new life with the Almighty.
10. Be at peace with your Creator.
For... He is all you have after you leave this life.
This is a forwarded message not from the creator of this blog.
1. Focus on enjoying people, not on indulging in or accumulating material things.
2. Plan to spend whatever you have saved.
You deserve to enjoy it and the few healthy years you have left.
Travel if you can afford it.
Don't leave anything for your children or loved ones to quarrel about.
By leaving anything, you may even cause more trouble when you are gone.
3. Live in the here and now, not in the yesterdays and tomorrows.
It is only today that you can handle.
Yesterday is gone, tomorrow may not even happen.
4. Enjoy your grandchildren (if you are blessed with any)
but don't be their full time baby sitter.
You have no moral obligation to take care of them.
Don't have any guilt about refusing to baby sit anyone's kids,
including your own grandkids.
Your parental obligation is to your children.
After you have raised them into responsible adults,
your duties of child-rearing and babysitting are finished.
Let your children raise their own offspring.
5. Accept physical weakness, sickness and other physical pains.
It is a part of the aging process.
Enjoy whatever your health can allow.
6. Enjoy what you are and what you have right now.
Stop working hard for what you do not have.
If you do not have them, it's probably too late.
7. Just enjoy your life with your spouse, children, grandchildren and friends.
People, who truly love you, love you for yourself, not for what you have. Anyone who loves you for what you have will just give you misery.
8. Forgive and accept forgiveness.
Forgive yourself and others.
Enjoy peace of mind and peace of soul.
9. Befriend death.
It's a natural part of the life cycle.
Don't be afraid of it.
Death is the beginning of a new and better life.
So, prepare yourself not for death but for a new life with the Almighty.
10. Be at peace with your Creator.
For... He is all you have after you leave this life.
This is a forwarded message not from the creator of this blog.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Mired in Poverty
PUBLIC LIVES
November 11, 2010
Randy David
Mired in poverty
When families are mired in poverty, it’s the children – in all their innocence – who become the principal victims. Their future is at once compromised. They grow up without proper nourishment, their young bodies battered by disease and parasites against which they have little protection. Their schooling, even if free, becomes a haphazard experience, marked by interruptions beyond their control. Often they’re too hungry to walk to school, or too busy foraging for food that will tide the family over till the next day. Food is always the first priority under these circumstances.
This picture of Philippine poverty, so common in media reports, has become almost a cliché. Endless repetition blunts its urgency. We all learn to move on without being bothered.
It is different when the picture shows people you have known. I know one such family in these dire circumstances. I have become their accidental benefactor, and though I have reluctantly embraced this role, I’m still not certain that I can help change the course of their lives. But it’s worth a try.
Rosalie and Dodoy married even before either one of them had a steady job -- of course. If you’re young and did not finish grade school, you can’t expect to land a stable job in the provinces. And if you’re unemployed, chances are you’ll find yourself starting a family before you’re ready. Theoretically, we can call people to account for the decisions they make in life. But the word “decision” seems inapplicable to people in Rosalie and Dodoy’s circumstances. It is more accurate, I think, to say they’re “thrown” into a way of life they did not exactly choose, living a pre-ordained script they’re likely to pass on to their own children.
They were migrants from Bicol. Bringing with him his young bride, Dodoy moved to Bataan to live with his parents’ family. His father, a caretaker in a small farm owned by my brother, had settled there with his wife and their entire brood of 10 other children. This was about 15 years ago. Rosalie came to work as a house help in my mother’s home in Quezon City, going back to Bataan once a month, while her husband took on odd jobs in construction sites. Before long, she became pregnant with their first baby, and so she had to quit working. I did not see them again after many years later.
The couple, with two kids in tow, approached me one day while I was planting some mango saplings in the 1.5 hectare lot I keep on the slopes of Mt. Malasimbo. I didn’t recognize them until Rosalie introduced herself as my late mother’s former maid. They asked if I had someone to look after the mango farm. I smiled, thinking that the place, with 30 mango saplings, was hardly a farm. Rosalie has always been the confident one; she did most of the talking. She asked if I would let them put up a small shack on the property and use the space between the mangoes and the coconuts to plant seasonal vegetables. Of course, I said without hesitation. In return, they promised to watch over the trees I planted.
That’s how I found myself “thrown” into a relationship of dependence and patronage for which I was neither psychologically nor ideologically prepared. First, they needed a small financial assistance to complete the tiny shack they were building. They asked to “borrow” money, offering to pay it back in kind or in labor. I gave them the money and called it a contribution. Then they needed pesticides, fertilizer, and balls of string for the vegetable patch they cleared. I gave them what they needed and this time I said it was a loan. Harvest time came and what they earned from the sale of their produce was less than half of the money they owed. I accepted a few bunches of the string beans they brought to me in payment, but I didn’t have the heart to take the cash. I advised them to use the money instead to plant corn and mongo.
The kids came one after the other, until there were four additional mouths to feed. The eldest, a boy of 14, is in high school. The two girls in between are in grade school. The youngest, an 18-month-old boy, is still feeding from his mother’s breast. For the last five years, I have been giving Rosalie a monthly allowance of P1000 to help with the food and school needs of the children. In search of regular work, Dodoy left for Manila, but what he earned in the big city as an “extra” tricycle driver was barely enough for his own needs.
One summer, the couple explored the possibility of going back to Bicol and live with Rosalie’s parents. Their visit didn’t last more than a month; they could not endure the hunger and deprivation in her father’s home. It was worse than they suspected.
Last month, Rosalie came to see me. Calmly, this frail woman of about 35 and mother to four young children told me that her husband had left her. She wanted to know if they could continue to stay on the property. I assured her it was no problem with me, but I inquired how she intended to feed her family. She said she earned a little from buying and selling at the nearby market. She just wanted to make sure, she said, that her children’s schooling would not be interrupted, and that her eldest boy at least would finish high school. That was her big dream. I was stunned by her staunch belief in the miracle of education and by her fierce determination to carry on without her husband.
It was then that I began to reconsider my initial skepticism about the government’s conditional cash transfer program. Out there, there are millions of other Filipino children equally mired in poverty who deserve society’s protection, whose future should not be compromised by their elders’ inadequacy, misfortune, or irresponsibility.
public.lives@gmail.com
November 11, 2010
Randy David
Mired in poverty
When families are mired in poverty, it’s the children – in all their innocence – who become the principal victims. Their future is at once compromised. They grow up without proper nourishment, their young bodies battered by disease and parasites against which they have little protection. Their schooling, even if free, becomes a haphazard experience, marked by interruptions beyond their control. Often they’re too hungry to walk to school, or too busy foraging for food that will tide the family over till the next day. Food is always the first priority under these circumstances.
This picture of Philippine poverty, so common in media reports, has become almost a cliché. Endless repetition blunts its urgency. We all learn to move on without being bothered.
It is different when the picture shows people you have known. I know one such family in these dire circumstances. I have become their accidental benefactor, and though I have reluctantly embraced this role, I’m still not certain that I can help change the course of their lives. But it’s worth a try.
Rosalie and Dodoy married even before either one of them had a steady job -- of course. If you’re young and did not finish grade school, you can’t expect to land a stable job in the provinces. And if you’re unemployed, chances are you’ll find yourself starting a family before you’re ready. Theoretically, we can call people to account for the decisions they make in life. But the word “decision” seems inapplicable to people in Rosalie and Dodoy’s circumstances. It is more accurate, I think, to say they’re “thrown” into a way of life they did not exactly choose, living a pre-ordained script they’re likely to pass on to their own children.
They were migrants from Bicol. Bringing with him his young bride, Dodoy moved to Bataan to live with his parents’ family. His father, a caretaker in a small farm owned by my brother, had settled there with his wife and their entire brood of 10 other children. This was about 15 years ago. Rosalie came to work as a house help in my mother’s home in Quezon City, going back to Bataan once a month, while her husband took on odd jobs in construction sites. Before long, she became pregnant with their first baby, and so she had to quit working. I did not see them again after many years later.
The couple, with two kids in tow, approached me one day while I was planting some mango saplings in the 1.5 hectare lot I keep on the slopes of Mt. Malasimbo. I didn’t recognize them until Rosalie introduced herself as my late mother’s former maid. They asked if I had someone to look after the mango farm. I smiled, thinking that the place, with 30 mango saplings, was hardly a farm. Rosalie has always been the confident one; she did most of the talking. She asked if I would let them put up a small shack on the property and use the space between the mangoes and the coconuts to plant seasonal vegetables. Of course, I said without hesitation. In return, they promised to watch over the trees I planted.
That’s how I found myself “thrown” into a relationship of dependence and patronage for which I was neither psychologically nor ideologically prepared. First, they needed a small financial assistance to complete the tiny shack they were building. They asked to “borrow” money, offering to pay it back in kind or in labor. I gave them the money and called it a contribution. Then they needed pesticides, fertilizer, and balls of string for the vegetable patch they cleared. I gave them what they needed and this time I said it was a loan. Harvest time came and what they earned from the sale of their produce was less than half of the money they owed. I accepted a few bunches of the string beans they brought to me in payment, but I didn’t have the heart to take the cash. I advised them to use the money instead to plant corn and mongo.
The kids came one after the other, until there were four additional mouths to feed. The eldest, a boy of 14, is in high school. The two girls in between are in grade school. The youngest, an 18-month-old boy, is still feeding from his mother’s breast. For the last five years, I have been giving Rosalie a monthly allowance of P1000 to help with the food and school needs of the children. In search of regular work, Dodoy left for Manila, but what he earned in the big city as an “extra” tricycle driver was barely enough for his own needs.
One summer, the couple explored the possibility of going back to Bicol and live with Rosalie’s parents. Their visit didn’t last more than a month; they could not endure the hunger and deprivation in her father’s home. It was worse than they suspected.
Last month, Rosalie came to see me. Calmly, this frail woman of about 35 and mother to four young children told me that her husband had left her. She wanted to know if they could continue to stay on the property. I assured her it was no problem with me, but I inquired how she intended to feed her family. She said she earned a little from buying and selling at the nearby market. She just wanted to make sure, she said, that her children’s schooling would not be interrupted, and that her eldest boy at least would finish high school. That was her big dream. I was stunned by her staunch belief in the miracle of education and by her fierce determination to carry on without her husband.
It was then that I began to reconsider my initial skepticism about the government’s conditional cash transfer program. Out there, there are millions of other Filipino children equally mired in poverty who deserve society’s protection, whose future should not be compromised by their elders’ inadequacy, misfortune, or irresponsibility.
public.lives@gmail.com
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Welcome Freshmen of Miriam College
You will be asked to go to this blogspot to give you more information on our subject Introductory course on Sociology. Articles can be found in this blogspot. There is a search box and the tags that are written on its front page.
Welcome again.
Welcome again.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Sunday, September 5, 2010
A story of Genocide, 1994
Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.
Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.
Please click on the link.
Most of the dead were Tutsis - and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.
Please click on the link.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Systemic dysfunction of society
PUBLIC LIVES
September 2, 2010
Randy David
Leadership in a transitional society
In our society, when something goes wrong, people ask: who’s to blame? Remedy is instantly sought in the replacement of officials rather than in the review of systems. In other societies, the prior question that is asked is: what went wrong? Only after this is answered do heads roll. The focus on personalities is not something unique to us, nor is it inherent in Filipino culture. It is just what differentiates a traditional from a modern society.
The fact that we are in transition only makes our situation a bit more confusing. We have modern systems in various domains of our national life, but these are easily trumped by the traditional authority of powerful and influential figures. The latter typically claim all the credit for successes. But, when failures and breakdowns occur, they quickly point to their limited responsibility under modern rules.
Take our political system. We tend to highlight the deficiencies of leaders, forgetting that they themselves are creations of the same traditional system in which we all play a role and which we help reproduce in our daily lives. In quest of solutions, we like to cast around for heroic individuals who can redeem the deficiencies of an entire society. As a result, our elections become nothing more than exercises in finding someone we can trust at any given moment, and later blame for all the dysfunctions of our society.
Our politicians not only willingly play this game but indeed they encourage it, for that’s how they win votes. Instead of concrete plans and programs of government, they concentrate on fundamental contrasts in personal virtues and endowments. In all this, the systemic character of persistent social problems – poverty, corruption, social injustice, incompetence, etc. – is effectively concealed. And so when these problems explode in our face, the first thing we do is, again, find someone to blame. Sometimes, sensing that the blame should not be heaped on a few people, we go through episodes of collective breast-beating in atonement for our moral failings.
Yet these problems are largely the outcome of structural failings. Catharsis and atonement alone will not make them go away. The governance of a society like ours has become an incredibly complex business. We have not only greatly multiplied in number. Our people’s experiences, values, and beliefs have also become extremely diverse. Our links to the rest of the world have likewise phenomenally expanded. No longer are we merely responsible for ourselves and to ourselves, we are today also answerable to many other peoples around the world whose lives ours are intertwined with ours.
The old ways of governing, dependent upon the performance of strong, charismatic, or extraordinary leaders at the top, are no longer adequate for managing such complexity. They belong to simple hierarchical societies. Modern problems require differentiated institutional systems and reliable professional response. The era of the heroic individual whose direct personal intervention is demanded in every crisis is long past. Modern impersonal systems are built precisely as a way of reducing complexity. They will not work properly, however, when their operation can, at any point, be overridden by the personal decisions of lone rangers.
In a previous column on the hostage crisis that led to the tragic death of eight Hong Kong tourists, I noted that the bungled effort to rescue the hostages could not be ascribed solely to incompetence or lack of equipment on the part of the police. The entire effort seemed marked by “institutional paralysis.” A system was in place for dealing with hostage situations. But, from what we now know, it appears that the police officers in charge were unable to fully activate this system and confidently assert their authority in the presence of the many big shots that were interfering in the operation. In the end, no one in particular was in charge.
We would be mistaken to think that this systemic problem will go away by simply dismissing people ahead of a full report of what happened. This may appease some people, but it will only hide the larger institutional crisis that is upon us. This crisis did not grow overnight, and it will not be solved overnight. Indeed it was allowed to fester over the years, providing the setting for quick fixes like martial law and people power revolutions. At every turning point, the ensuing change never went deep enough to disturb the basic framework of a patronage-driven hierarchical society. It is this whole system that is today in crisis.
Tragic events like Typhoon Ondoy, the Maguindanao massacre, and the hostage crisis at the Quirino grandstand have one thing in common – they all lay bare the dysfunctionality of our existing social system. They underscore the need to review and strengthen our institutions, or, at the very least, free them from the grip of traditional patrons and authority figures. The structural solutions will increasingly become clear to us in time, if we can resist the tendency to moralize and personalize everything.
Perhaps it is a good thing that despite the uniquely personal circumstances that thrust him to the presidency, President Aquino has kept a very low profile. He speaks plainly and almost diffidently, and, instead of projecting an aura of charismatic confidence, is quick to admit lapses. Given the existing political culture, this may not be the most astute demeanor for a new president to project. But it is the best setting in which to strengthen institutions.
public.lives@gmail.com
September 2, 2010
Randy David
Leadership in a transitional society
In our society, when something goes wrong, people ask: who’s to blame? Remedy is instantly sought in the replacement of officials rather than in the review of systems. In other societies, the prior question that is asked is: what went wrong? Only after this is answered do heads roll. The focus on personalities is not something unique to us, nor is it inherent in Filipino culture. It is just what differentiates a traditional from a modern society.
The fact that we are in transition only makes our situation a bit more confusing. We have modern systems in various domains of our national life, but these are easily trumped by the traditional authority of powerful and influential figures. The latter typically claim all the credit for successes. But, when failures and breakdowns occur, they quickly point to their limited responsibility under modern rules.
Take our political system. We tend to highlight the deficiencies of leaders, forgetting that they themselves are creations of the same traditional system in which we all play a role and which we help reproduce in our daily lives. In quest of solutions, we like to cast around for heroic individuals who can redeem the deficiencies of an entire society. As a result, our elections become nothing more than exercises in finding someone we can trust at any given moment, and later blame for all the dysfunctions of our society.
Our politicians not only willingly play this game but indeed they encourage it, for that’s how they win votes. Instead of concrete plans and programs of government, they concentrate on fundamental contrasts in personal virtues and endowments. In all this, the systemic character of persistent social problems – poverty, corruption, social injustice, incompetence, etc. – is effectively concealed. And so when these problems explode in our face, the first thing we do is, again, find someone to blame. Sometimes, sensing that the blame should not be heaped on a few people, we go through episodes of collective breast-beating in atonement for our moral failings.
Yet these problems are largely the outcome of structural failings. Catharsis and atonement alone will not make them go away. The governance of a society like ours has become an incredibly complex business. We have not only greatly multiplied in number. Our people’s experiences, values, and beliefs have also become extremely diverse. Our links to the rest of the world have likewise phenomenally expanded. No longer are we merely responsible for ourselves and to ourselves, we are today also answerable to many other peoples around the world whose lives ours are intertwined with ours.
The old ways of governing, dependent upon the performance of strong, charismatic, or extraordinary leaders at the top, are no longer adequate for managing such complexity. They belong to simple hierarchical societies. Modern problems require differentiated institutional systems and reliable professional response. The era of the heroic individual whose direct personal intervention is demanded in every crisis is long past. Modern impersonal systems are built precisely as a way of reducing complexity. They will not work properly, however, when their operation can, at any point, be overridden by the personal decisions of lone rangers.
In a previous column on the hostage crisis that led to the tragic death of eight Hong Kong tourists, I noted that the bungled effort to rescue the hostages could not be ascribed solely to incompetence or lack of equipment on the part of the police. The entire effort seemed marked by “institutional paralysis.” A system was in place for dealing with hostage situations. But, from what we now know, it appears that the police officers in charge were unable to fully activate this system and confidently assert their authority in the presence of the many big shots that were interfering in the operation. In the end, no one in particular was in charge.
We would be mistaken to think that this systemic problem will go away by simply dismissing people ahead of a full report of what happened. This may appease some people, but it will only hide the larger institutional crisis that is upon us. This crisis did not grow overnight, and it will not be solved overnight. Indeed it was allowed to fester over the years, providing the setting for quick fixes like martial law and people power revolutions. At every turning point, the ensuing change never went deep enough to disturb the basic framework of a patronage-driven hierarchical society. It is this whole system that is today in crisis.
Tragic events like Typhoon Ondoy, the Maguindanao massacre, and the hostage crisis at the Quirino grandstand have one thing in common – they all lay bare the dysfunctionality of our existing social system. They underscore the need to review and strengthen our institutions, or, at the very least, free them from the grip of traditional patrons and authority figures. The structural solutions will increasingly become clear to us in time, if we can resist the tendency to moralize and personalize everything.
Perhaps it is a good thing that despite the uniquely personal circumstances that thrust him to the presidency, President Aquino has kept a very low profile. He speaks plainly and almost diffidently, and, instead of projecting an aura of charismatic confidence, is quick to admit lapses. Given the existing political culture, this may not be the most astute demeanor for a new president to project. But it is the best setting in which to strengthen institutions.
public.lives@gmail.com
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Language on thoughts - update
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Language matters
PUBLIC LIVES
August 19, 2010
Randy David
Language matters
It is that time of the year when we are prompted to revisit language issues in our society. In what language should we educate our children? What language should the government use to communicate with our people? What language should the courts in our country use? Is the bilingual policy that makes Filipino and English the official media of communication and instruction serving the national purpose? Are we doing enough to develop and enrich Filipino as the national language, as mandated by the Constitution? These issues have remained contentious and unresolved:
Even as languages evolve on their own, nations find themselves having to choose which languages best work for them as they pursue specific goals and purposes. As with persons, language preference ultimately mirrors a nation’s hierarchy of values. In the post-colonial years, especially in those societies marked by cultural diversity, the designation of a national language was thought crucial to the task of nation-building and political integration. Today, nations that have premised their growth on being able to ride the tide of globalization find little need to develop their own languages. They not only turn to English as the language of modernity; they also want to make it the lingua franca of their people.
This brings instant rewards to individuals who seek careers in the modern sector of the economy or in the global labor market. But for the majority who remain in the country, the costs are immense. Education becomes an alienating experience for schoolchildren, who cannot use their own language to create and access knowledge. Social inequalities are exacerbated. As English becomes a marker of class, a mechanism of exclusion, local languages are relegated to the margins of public discourse. Perhaps, most important of all, as we lose the use of our languages, we also break with our own basic orientations as a people. This is especially a problem for the English-speaking Filipino intelligentsia who find that increasingly they can neither understand nor communicate with their own people.
Recent research on the connection between language and ways of seeing and thinking provides new evidence for the thesis that language is not just a carrier but a shaper of thought. These studies, echoing the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, shift the analysis from the nature of the mind to the uses of language.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal (07/23/10), Dr. Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, discusses recent field experiments that show how language structures not just the way we see but the way we solve problems and accumulate knowledge about the world. This is not a new idea at all. But Dr. Boroditsky has come up with new material to prove the point.
Language, she argues, shapes our notions of space, time, and causality. Such notions are not the same in all languages. “About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.” Dr. Boroditsky and another colleague went to Australia to study the Pormpuraaw, an aboriginal group whose languages have no “terms like ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, ‘There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” This astounding precision in the language for depicting space allows people like the Pormpuraaws to “build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions.”
Does the way we talk about space have any bearing on the way we talk about time? To find out, the researchers showed the Pormpuraaws some pictures indicating a progression of events – photos of a person or crocodile at different ages, or a banana being consumed in stages. While seated, the subjects were repeatedly asked to arrange the photos in the correct temporal order, facing in a different direction each time. English speakers arrange time from left to right. Speakers of languages that are written from right to left, like Hebrew, Bororditsky says, arrange time from right to left.
But the Pormpuraaws depict time progression in an east-to-west direction. Facing south, the subjects arranged the time photos from left to right. Facing north, they arranged them right to left. Facing east, they arranged them toward the body. No one needed to tell them where east or west was. In other languages, Boroditsky adds, the past may be represented as above, while the future is below (as in Mandarin). “In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.”
What is true for time and space seems true as well for notions of causality. In some languages, accidents are attributed to no one, whereas in others, the doer who caused the accident is identified, what witnesses saw is important, and blame is assigned.
This reminds me of a story that Michel Foucault tells in an interview. A team of psychologists showed a short film about three characters to a village in Africa, and then asked the viewers to recount the film in their own words. They remembered nothing about the characters; only one thing engaged their attention: “the movement of the light and shadow through the trees.”
Language matters. We are formed by the language we speak. When we lose our language, we lose a part of ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein captured it so well in a crisp aphorism: “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
public.lives@gmail.com
August 19, 2010
Randy David
Language matters
It is that time of the year when we are prompted to revisit language issues in our society. In what language should we educate our children? What language should the government use to communicate with our people? What language should the courts in our country use? Is the bilingual policy that makes Filipino and English the official media of communication and instruction serving the national purpose? Are we doing enough to develop and enrich Filipino as the national language, as mandated by the Constitution? These issues have remained contentious and unresolved:
Even as languages evolve on their own, nations find themselves having to choose which languages best work for them as they pursue specific goals and purposes. As with persons, language preference ultimately mirrors a nation’s hierarchy of values. In the post-colonial years, especially in those societies marked by cultural diversity, the designation of a national language was thought crucial to the task of nation-building and political integration. Today, nations that have premised their growth on being able to ride the tide of globalization find little need to develop their own languages. They not only turn to English as the language of modernity; they also want to make it the lingua franca of their people.
This brings instant rewards to individuals who seek careers in the modern sector of the economy or in the global labor market. But for the majority who remain in the country, the costs are immense. Education becomes an alienating experience for schoolchildren, who cannot use their own language to create and access knowledge. Social inequalities are exacerbated. As English becomes a marker of class, a mechanism of exclusion, local languages are relegated to the margins of public discourse. Perhaps, most important of all, as we lose the use of our languages, we also break with our own basic orientations as a people. This is especially a problem for the English-speaking Filipino intelligentsia who find that increasingly they can neither understand nor communicate with their own people.
Recent research on the connection between language and ways of seeing and thinking provides new evidence for the thesis that language is not just a carrier but a shaper of thought. These studies, echoing the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, shift the analysis from the nature of the mind to the uses of language.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal (07/23/10), Dr. Lera Boroditsky, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, discusses recent field experiments that show how language structures not just the way we see but the way we solve problems and accumulate knowledge about the world. This is not a new idea at all. But Dr. Boroditsky has come up with new material to prove the point.
Language, she argues, shapes our notions of space, time, and causality. Such notions are not the same in all languages. “About a third of the world’s languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.” Dr. Boroditsky and another colleague went to Australia to study the Pormpuraaw, an aboriginal group whose languages have no “terms like ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, ‘There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” This astounding precision in the language for depicting space allows people like the Pormpuraaws to “build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions.”
Does the way we talk about space have any bearing on the way we talk about time? To find out, the researchers showed the Pormpuraaws some pictures indicating a progression of events – photos of a person or crocodile at different ages, or a banana being consumed in stages. While seated, the subjects were repeatedly asked to arrange the photos in the correct temporal order, facing in a different direction each time. English speakers arrange time from left to right. Speakers of languages that are written from right to left, like Hebrew, Bororditsky says, arrange time from right to left.
But the Pormpuraaws depict time progression in an east-to-west direction. Facing south, the subjects arranged the time photos from left to right. Facing north, they arranged them right to left. Facing east, they arranged them toward the body. No one needed to tell them where east or west was. In other languages, Boroditsky adds, the past may be represented as above, while the future is below (as in Mandarin). “In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.”
What is true for time and space seems true as well for notions of causality. In some languages, accidents are attributed to no one, whereas in others, the doer who caused the accident is identified, what witnesses saw is important, and blame is assigned.
This reminds me of a story that Michel Foucault tells in an interview. A team of psychologists showed a short film about three characters to a village in Africa, and then asked the viewers to recount the film in their own words. They remembered nothing about the characters; only one thing engaged their attention: “the movement of the light and shadow through the trees.”
Language matters. We are formed by the language we speak. When we lose our language, we lose a part of ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein captured it so well in a crisp aphorism: “The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”
public.lives@gmail.com
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Probe team, Goodbye
Interview with Cheche Lazaro of Probe.
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20100724-282906
http://services.inquirer.net/print/print.php?article_id=20100724-282906
Monday, July 12, 2010
Chinese romance with English
Times have change indeed. Rewind, Mao Ze Dong's cultural revolution in the 1960's attacked the imperialist English language. Now, many Chinese are going abroad to learn English. Click on the link below.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20100712-280668/Beijing-steps-up-English-language-drive
You can google: China, cultural revolution.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20100712-280668/Beijing-steps-up-English-language-drive
You can google: China, cultural revolution.
Understanding Hacienda Luisita
Hancienda Luisita that huge of piece land will be a focus on the Aquino administration. The Philippines being an agricultural country and most of its presidents have promised agricultural reform.
Fr. Bernas writes on this subject: http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20100712-280589/Focus-on-Hacienda-Luisita
Click on the above link
Fr. Bernas writes on this subject: http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20100712-280589/Focus-on-Hacienda-Luisita
Click on the above link
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Handog ng Pilipino sa Mundo
This video clip show black and white pictures of the events that was the EDSA People Power of 1986. Some clips from Dekada 70 of Lualhati Bautista was also added. For students of sociology and observers of society this is a good historical background on what happened in the past.
The spirit of a man
There have now been 988 service members who have lost limbs in combat since the first of the wars began in 2001, but Specialist Marrocco’s many wounds raised so many questions. Would he crumble mentally? Was his brain intact? How would he ever cope with daily needs like eating, bathing, even simply getting out of bed and putting on clothes?
Click on colored link.
Click on colored link.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
History of Love Part - 02
Source: Anonymous, as forward in email. History of Love parts 1-2.
The Age of Reason
(1700-1800)
· By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted anew approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body.
· The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.
· Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.
· In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable replaced the Christian theology that saw man as besotted and laden with guilt and sin.
· Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.
· Almost any behavior was acceptable as long as emotions were concealed. Even private intimate conversations were stilted with remote and detached words.
· The rationalists scorned the gloom of Christianity. They scrapped the church's concept of women as evil, but they often viewed women as ornaments, toys or unreasonable nitwits and still held women as subservient.
· 1 8th Century love idealized the mythical Don Juan who was impeccably mannered, lustful, haughty, and false. Love was often reduced to malicious sport with the motive to seduce.
· Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (born 1725) was an adventurer who had a brilliant mind. He wrote two dozen books covering math, history, astronomy, and philosophy.
· By mid 18th Century, flirtation and romance were no longer an exclusive part of aristocratic tradition, but were common in the bourgeois or middle class.
· Ben Franklin was a rationalist with guiltless views of sex.
Victorianism
(1800-1900)
· During 19th Century Victorianism, the ideas of nobility and birthright were declining with the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Newly rich entrepreneurs were growing wealthy and tried to copy ways of the upper class with lower class customs. Urbane control of one's emotions was losing popularity to "sensibility". A maudlin "sensitivity" became the ideal. Love now became a mighty force and noble goal. Men grew shy, inhibited and fearful of rebuff as they began backing away from sexuality. They sought not the dazzling flirtatious woman, but the shy, virginal one.
· Victorianism stood for high "moral" standards, close-knit families and glorified views of women. At the same time, prostitution was widespread and the structure of marriage was crumbling as women began revolting against their oppressive "glorified" status.
· Jean Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential forces in forming a new, viciously oppressive political "liberalism" that was combined with slobbering sentimentality. He often displayed sick sentimental tears. He hungered for cruelty and beatings and lived with women vastly inferior to him in order to boost his low confidence and weak self-esteem. He gave away his own children. He wrote with maudlin sentimentality. Europe was deeply under Rousseau's influence.
· Rousseau appealed to the seriousness of the middle class. Laughter and wit went out of style. Emphasis began to focus on female modesty. Open displays of sentimentality, melancholy, and tearfulness became chic. For example, the Irish poet, Tom Moore, got sentimental even for the stones in a road.
· The clinging-vine personality in women developed: women should be modest, virtuous and sweet. They should be weak and anxious to lean on and be dominated by strong men.
· With rising prosperity and development of public school systems made possible by the industrial revolution, children began to move outside of the home, depriving women of many of their functions. The reasonably affluent man no longer needed an all-work woman. He could now concentrate more on a woman's value as a love partner.
· Togetherness concepts developed. With his sweet home-making wife, a new style of home-life patriarch arose. The stay-at-home husband was to spend every available hour with his good wife. (e.g., Corbett's book, Advice To A Young Man , frowns on social activities with others in stating, "If they are not company enough for each other, it is but a sad affair".)
· Women had to be "morally" spotless. This led to excessive prudishness in word and actions. Prudishness then spread from sex to bathroom functions.
· Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1842 stated that the female had no privileges except to barely consent or refuse a man. A woman being courted was permitted to summon up a "timid blush" or the "faintest of smiles" to convey her feelings.
· The Brownings supposedly never saw each other entirely naked.
· Unites States Surgeon General, William Hammond, stated that decent women felt not the slightest pleasure during intercourse. Many doctors considered sexual desire in women to be pathological and warned that female passion could cause sterility. Many thought only prostitutes could enjoy sex.
· The woman's role was glorified and idealized, but this was only a new pretext for their continued subjugation by men. Women literally made themselves helpless through fashion. They immobilized themselves in laces and stays.
· Victorian men were patriarchal and stern, but they played this role at their own sexual expense.
· Out of this Victorian repression arose a great hunger for a fantasy sex life. Flagellation, pornography, and prostitution rose dramatically (e.g., 50,000 prostitutes in London in 1850 and over 300,000 copies of the pornographic book, A Monk's Awful Disclosures, were sold before the Civil War.)
· Nearly all written work about the private lives of Victorians, on the other hand, were "purified" by omitting all references to sex and love.
Decline of Victorianism,
The Rise of Capitalism and
The Emancipation of Women
(1850-1900)
· Emancipation started in 1792 with Mary Wallstonecraft and her attacks on marriage and the subjugation of women. Her work was undermined by her badly misguided condemnation of masturbation and her advocation of government force to stop prostitution. In 1833, Oberlin was the first college to admit women. In 1837, Mt. Holyoke became the first women's college. With the rise of capitalism, women gained economic rights never before enjoyed. Capitalism broke up autocratic church power and the feudal nobility pattern.
· During the 1840s, the new middle class began growing rapidly. Capitalistic economics were accelerating the dissolution of class differences along with ancient social ties and repressive customs.
· The rigid Victorian home was threatened by female suffrage, divorce reforms and free love.
· Victorianism was a desperate delaying action against inevitable changes made by capitalism and the industrial revolution.
· Victorianism and religion tried to fight change and to retain the subjugated position of women by government force and police activities.
Emergence of Twentieth Century
Romantic Love
(1900-1930)
· With the partial emergence of capitalism grew a new age of romantic love. America's increasing divorce rate reflected not the failure of love but the increasing refusal of people to live without love and happiness.
· Love patterns of all modern societies were replaced by America's model because so many people were drawn to the romantic love style that combined sexual outlet, affectionate friendship and family functions, all in a single relationship.
· Romantic attraction not only became desirable, but became the only acceptable basis for choosing a life-long partner.
· Romantic love was made possible by capitalism and the industrial revolution. With romantic love, the sexual desires of both partners could be satisfied within marriage. All the tenderness and excitement of love could coexist with household cares and child rearing. Romantic love was the most difficult and complex human relationship ever attempted... but the most appealing and satisfying.
· Soviets detached individual values from sex (e.g., they promoted the concept that sex was no more than drinking a glass of water).
· The modern Sexual Revolution discarded the 19th Century prudish and patriarchal Victorian-Christian patterns. Sexual liberation made achievement of sexual pleasure increasingly important.
· Children were no longer an economic asset, but a costly luxury valuable only for love. For example, in 1776, Adam Smith estimated an American child was worth [sterling]100 in profit before he left home; by 1910 a city child cost thousands of dollars; by 1944 a child cost about $16 thousand to raise to adulthood; by 1959 a child cost about $25 thousand to raise; by 1975 a child cost about $75 thousand to raise. In 1985, costs for raising a child to adulthood averaged around $150 thousand. Allowing for inflation, future cost will be much higher.
· Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) was a symbol of flaming feminism with her free-love and unwed motherhood stances. She claimed that sexual love should be ecstatic for women. Margaret Sanger staged a heroic fight for birth control claiming that a woman's body belonged to her alone. She published birth control information in 1914 and opened birth control clinics in 1916. Catholic elements had her arrested and jailed. But here work spread. By 1930, over 300 birth control clinics had been established.
· Margaret Sanger separated lovemaking from procreation. This brought the traditional ideal of a monogamous, faithful marriage under attack.
· Complete freedom by each partner was advanced by intellectuals such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Havelock Ellis, Judge Ben Lindsay.
· Havelock Ellis offered ideas in 1900 that were remarkably similar to those advanced in 1973 by the O'Neills in their book, Open Marriage.
· The sexual Revolution also stressed the mechanical aspects of the sex act. In Marie Stopes' book, Married Love (1918), the women's right to orgasm was promoted. Orgasm was described as an end-in-itself. Wilhelm Reich proposed that orgasm failure was the cause of major mental and physical diseases. He even advocated masturbation to combat cancer via flow of sexual energy.
Modern Romantic Love
(1930-Present)
· Free love and open marriage developed in the 20th Century along with progressive polygamy via repeated marriage and divorce. Sexual enjoyment was accepted as a human right.
· The need for reassurance of one's personal self-esteem made this new form of romantic love popular and desired. Themes of love, heart- break, and eventual happiness became popular and dominated the soap operas.
· Dating started in the 1920s as a new way of mate selection made necessary by city life. Shy, passive femininity was being discarded. The crucial feature of dating was freedom from commitment while young people learned and experimented.
· Dating was criticized by many sociologists and social "intellectuals" as a loveless, competitive contest. But dating was a healthy breakthrough and generally a cheerful and happy activity. Dating was an educational process, leading from playful heterosexual behavior to companionship and love.
· Premarital relationships became more open and intimate than relationships of the past. Potential partners were able to know each other much more deeply through intimate dating.
· This new romanticism was at once both idealistically romantic and practical.
· Many conditions were similar to Roman times (economic and legal emancipation of women, well-to-do city life, children being a luxury rather than an asset, and sexual enjoyment deemed a right for all). One profound difference existed. Romans moved away from married life while Americans became more marriage-minded than ever before. And when marriage failed, Americans would divorce and head right back into another marriage.
· Most sociologists have strongly criticized romantic love while praising conjugal love. Their attacks are, however, distorted and out of context. They project romantic love as it was idealized in the medieval period when love could not exist within marriage.
· Romantic feelings are not only for new loves and adolescents, but are also for long-married couples.
· Women have gained the right to be equal to men, but many women are afraid of the demands and challenges of being an equal; other women hold the erroneous fear that equality might cost them the chance for love and marriage.
· Inequality for females is no longer a matter of law. Men and women now have essentially the same educational and economic opportunities, but most American wives still do not strive for high achievement in the major areas of value production, i.e., business, science, medicine.
· To the average man, his job is what he is. To the average woman, a job is only to make money. And the average American housewife suffers from a chronic, low-grade dissatisfaction, diminished self-esteem, and increasing boredom.
· Most women are confused about their "role" and do not really know what they want to be in life. Surveys of two college campuses indicated that 40% of the coeds admitted "playing dumb" with interesting men because many men feel threatened by overtly intelligent women (M. Kamarovsky, Women in the Modern World, Little, Brown & Co., 1953).
· Modern love makes sense and is exercising its immense appeal all over the world.
· Modern romantic love is almost everyone's goal. Today, the value and purpose of romantic love is, above all else, directed toward the fulfillment of major emotional needs and happiness.
· An ominous rise of overt born-again Christianity and fundamentalist religions signal a turn back toward malevolent views of life, love, sex, and women.
The Age of Reason
(1700-1800)
· By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted anew approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body.
· The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.
· Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.
· In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable replaced the Christian theology that saw man as besotted and laden with guilt and sin.
· Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.
· Almost any behavior was acceptable as long as emotions were concealed. Even private intimate conversations were stilted with remote and detached words.
· The rationalists scorned the gloom of Christianity. They scrapped the church's concept of women as evil, but they often viewed women as ornaments, toys or unreasonable nitwits and still held women as subservient.
· 1 8th Century love idealized the mythical Don Juan who was impeccably mannered, lustful, haughty, and false. Love was often reduced to malicious sport with the motive to seduce.
· Giovanni Jacopo Casanova (born 1725) was an adventurer who had a brilliant mind. He wrote two dozen books covering math, history, astronomy, and philosophy.
· By mid 18th Century, flirtation and romance were no longer an exclusive part of aristocratic tradition, but were common in the bourgeois or middle class.
· Ben Franklin was a rationalist with guiltless views of sex.
Victorianism
(1800-1900)
· During 19th Century Victorianism, the ideas of nobility and birthright were declining with the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Newly rich entrepreneurs were growing wealthy and tried to copy ways of the upper class with lower class customs. Urbane control of one's emotions was losing popularity to "sensibility". A maudlin "sensitivity" became the ideal. Love now became a mighty force and noble goal. Men grew shy, inhibited and fearful of rebuff as they began backing away from sexuality. They sought not the dazzling flirtatious woman, but the shy, virginal one.
· Victorianism stood for high "moral" standards, close-knit families and glorified views of women. At the same time, prostitution was widespread and the structure of marriage was crumbling as women began revolting against their oppressive "glorified" status.
· Jean Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential forces in forming a new, viciously oppressive political "liberalism" that was combined with slobbering sentimentality. He often displayed sick sentimental tears. He hungered for cruelty and beatings and lived with women vastly inferior to him in order to boost his low confidence and weak self-esteem. He gave away his own children. He wrote with maudlin sentimentality. Europe was deeply under Rousseau's influence.
· Rousseau appealed to the seriousness of the middle class. Laughter and wit went out of style. Emphasis began to focus on female modesty. Open displays of sentimentality, melancholy, and tearfulness became chic. For example, the Irish poet, Tom Moore, got sentimental even for the stones in a road.
· The clinging-vine personality in women developed: women should be modest, virtuous and sweet. They should be weak and anxious to lean on and be dominated by strong men.
· With rising prosperity and development of public school systems made possible by the industrial revolution, children began to move outside of the home, depriving women of many of their functions. The reasonably affluent man no longer needed an all-work woman. He could now concentrate more on a woman's value as a love partner.
· Togetherness concepts developed. With his sweet home-making wife, a new style of home-life patriarch arose. The stay-at-home husband was to spend every available hour with his good wife. (e.g., Corbett's book, Advice To A Young Man , frowns on social activities with others in stating, "If they are not company enough for each other, it is but a sad affair".)
· Women had to be "morally" spotless. This led to excessive prudishness in word and actions. Prudishness then spread from sex to bathroom functions.
· Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1842 stated that the female had no privileges except to barely consent or refuse a man. A woman being courted was permitted to summon up a "timid blush" or the "faintest of smiles" to convey her feelings.
· The Brownings supposedly never saw each other entirely naked.
· Unites States Surgeon General, William Hammond, stated that decent women felt not the slightest pleasure during intercourse. Many doctors considered sexual desire in women to be pathological and warned that female passion could cause sterility. Many thought only prostitutes could enjoy sex.
· The woman's role was glorified and idealized, but this was only a new pretext for their continued subjugation by men. Women literally made themselves helpless through fashion. They immobilized themselves in laces and stays.
· Victorian men were patriarchal and stern, but they played this role at their own sexual expense.
· Out of this Victorian repression arose a great hunger for a fantasy sex life. Flagellation, pornography, and prostitution rose dramatically (e.g., 50,000 prostitutes in London in 1850 and over 300,000 copies of the pornographic book, A Monk's Awful Disclosures, were sold before the Civil War.)
· Nearly all written work about the private lives of Victorians, on the other hand, were "purified" by omitting all references to sex and love.
Decline of Victorianism,
The Rise of Capitalism and
The Emancipation of Women
(1850-1900)
· Emancipation started in 1792 with Mary Wallstonecraft and her attacks on marriage and the subjugation of women. Her work was undermined by her badly misguided condemnation of masturbation and her advocation of government force to stop prostitution. In 1833, Oberlin was the first college to admit women. In 1837, Mt. Holyoke became the first women's college. With the rise of capitalism, women gained economic rights never before enjoyed. Capitalism broke up autocratic church power and the feudal nobility pattern.
· During the 1840s, the new middle class began growing rapidly. Capitalistic economics were accelerating the dissolution of class differences along with ancient social ties and repressive customs.
· The rigid Victorian home was threatened by female suffrage, divorce reforms and free love.
· Victorianism was a desperate delaying action against inevitable changes made by capitalism and the industrial revolution.
· Victorianism and religion tried to fight change and to retain the subjugated position of women by government force and police activities.
Emergence of Twentieth Century
Romantic Love
(1900-1930)
· With the partial emergence of capitalism grew a new age of romantic love. America's increasing divorce rate reflected not the failure of love but the increasing refusal of people to live without love and happiness.
· Love patterns of all modern societies were replaced by America's model because so many people were drawn to the romantic love style that combined sexual outlet, affectionate friendship and family functions, all in a single relationship.
· Romantic attraction not only became desirable, but became the only acceptable basis for choosing a life-long partner.
· Romantic love was made possible by capitalism and the industrial revolution. With romantic love, the sexual desires of both partners could be satisfied within marriage. All the tenderness and excitement of love could coexist with household cares and child rearing. Romantic love was the most difficult and complex human relationship ever attempted... but the most appealing and satisfying.
· Soviets detached individual values from sex (e.g., they promoted the concept that sex was no more than drinking a glass of water).
· The modern Sexual Revolution discarded the 19th Century prudish and patriarchal Victorian-Christian patterns. Sexual liberation made achievement of sexual pleasure increasingly important.
· Children were no longer an economic asset, but a costly luxury valuable only for love. For example, in 1776, Adam Smith estimated an American child was worth [sterling]100 in profit before he left home; by 1910 a city child cost thousands of dollars; by 1944 a child cost about $16 thousand to raise to adulthood; by 1959 a child cost about $25 thousand to raise; by 1975 a child cost about $75 thousand to raise. In 1985, costs for raising a child to adulthood averaged around $150 thousand. Allowing for inflation, future cost will be much higher.
· Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) was a symbol of flaming feminism with her free-love and unwed motherhood stances. She claimed that sexual love should be ecstatic for women. Margaret Sanger staged a heroic fight for birth control claiming that a woman's body belonged to her alone. She published birth control information in 1914 and opened birth control clinics in 1916. Catholic elements had her arrested and jailed. But here work spread. By 1930, over 300 birth control clinics had been established.
· Margaret Sanger separated lovemaking from procreation. This brought the traditional ideal of a monogamous, faithful marriage under attack.
· Complete freedom by each partner was advanced by intellectuals such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Havelock Ellis, Judge Ben Lindsay.
· Havelock Ellis offered ideas in 1900 that were remarkably similar to those advanced in 1973 by the O'Neills in their book, Open Marriage.
· The sexual Revolution also stressed the mechanical aspects of the sex act. In Marie Stopes' book, Married Love (1918), the women's right to orgasm was promoted. Orgasm was described as an end-in-itself. Wilhelm Reich proposed that orgasm failure was the cause of major mental and physical diseases. He even advocated masturbation to combat cancer via flow of sexual energy.
Modern Romantic Love
(1930-Present)
· Free love and open marriage developed in the 20th Century along with progressive polygamy via repeated marriage and divorce. Sexual enjoyment was accepted as a human right.
· The need for reassurance of one's personal self-esteem made this new form of romantic love popular and desired. Themes of love, heart- break, and eventual happiness became popular and dominated the soap operas.
· Dating started in the 1920s as a new way of mate selection made necessary by city life. Shy, passive femininity was being discarded. The crucial feature of dating was freedom from commitment while young people learned and experimented.
· Dating was criticized by many sociologists and social "intellectuals" as a loveless, competitive contest. But dating was a healthy breakthrough and generally a cheerful and happy activity. Dating was an educational process, leading from playful heterosexual behavior to companionship and love.
· Premarital relationships became more open and intimate than relationships of the past. Potential partners were able to know each other much more deeply through intimate dating.
· This new romanticism was at once both idealistically romantic and practical.
· Many conditions were similar to Roman times (economic and legal emancipation of women, well-to-do city life, children being a luxury rather than an asset, and sexual enjoyment deemed a right for all). One profound difference existed. Romans moved away from married life while Americans became more marriage-minded than ever before. And when marriage failed, Americans would divorce and head right back into another marriage.
· Most sociologists have strongly criticized romantic love while praising conjugal love. Their attacks are, however, distorted and out of context. They project romantic love as it was idealized in the medieval period when love could not exist within marriage.
· Romantic feelings are not only for new loves and adolescents, but are also for long-married couples.
· Women have gained the right to be equal to men, but many women are afraid of the demands and challenges of being an equal; other women hold the erroneous fear that equality might cost them the chance for love and marriage.
· Inequality for females is no longer a matter of law. Men and women now have essentially the same educational and economic opportunities, but most American wives still do not strive for high achievement in the major areas of value production, i.e., business, science, medicine.
· To the average man, his job is what he is. To the average woman, a job is only to make money. And the average American housewife suffers from a chronic, low-grade dissatisfaction, diminished self-esteem, and increasing boredom.
· Most women are confused about their "role" and do not really know what they want to be in life. Surveys of two college campuses indicated that 40% of the coeds admitted "playing dumb" with interesting men because many men feel threatened by overtly intelligent women (M. Kamarovsky, Women in the Modern World, Little, Brown & Co., 1953).
· Modern love makes sense and is exercising its immense appeal all over the world.
· Modern romantic love is almost everyone's goal. Today, the value and purpose of romantic love is, above all else, directed toward the fulfillment of major emotional needs and happiness.
· An ominous rise of overt born-again Christianity and fundamentalist religions signal a turn back toward malevolent views of life, love, sex, and women.
History of Love Part - 01
THE HISTORY OF WESTERN LOVE AND SEX
FROM 1300 B.C. TO THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY
Ancient Greece
(1300 A.C.-450 A.C.)
· Homeric women (1300 B.C.-1 100 B.C.) were relatively free and exercised considerable influence over men, but remained virtuous and on double standards. With the high standard of living in later Greece, women became idle and lost their importance.
Golden Age of Greece
(450 B.C.-27 B.C.)
· Wild bisexual love life of Alcibiades (450 B.C.), a student of Socrates and raised by Pericles.
· High class prostitutes and courtesans were held superior to wives and "virtuous" women.
· Greek men wanted faithful love, but tried to obtain it by gifts and trickery. When Greek men actually did fall in love, they considered themselves as sick.
· The Greeks never connected love with marriage. They found love either an amusement that quickly faded or a god-sent affliction that lasted too long.
Roman Empire
(27 B.C.-385 A.D.)
· Pagan love in Rome was guilt-free, lusty, unfaithful and deceitful.
· Unlike Greeks, the Romans preferred sex without philosophy or significance.
· Abortions and contraception were common. Babies were often discarded as garbage.
· Octavian (Augustus) Caesar sought unsuccessfully to restore family unity and sexual "morality" via government force and the Julian laws...all were failures, even with death penalties.
· Poet Ovid (2 B.C.) wrote a manual for sex and adultery, The Art of Love (Ar Amatoria), a brilliant, modern, fun, deceptive, cheerful and humorous book:
o Modern grooming tips.
o Sanctioned the use of tears by men.
o Sexual positions described that stressed mutual orgasm and satisfaction
· Most "liberated" Roman feminists failed to find emotional satisfaction.
Decline of the Roman Empire
(100 A.D.-385 A.D.)
· Roman empire (100 A.D.-300 A.D.) still appeared vibrant, but was surrendering to a new religion...Christianity. Rome then plunged into an asceticism of joyless and guilt-laden sex.
· Christians linked all Roman evils to sex and pleasure.
· Jovinian in 385 A.D. was excommunicated by the Pope for arguing that marriage was superior to celibacy.
Rise of Christianity and the Dark Ages
(385 A.D.-1000 A.D.)
· Rise of the unwashed hippies in Egypt. They developed and implemented the concepts of Christian sacrifice, self-torture and denial (e.g., St. Simon).
· People became preoccupied with sex as Christians malevolently turned sex into a guilty and sinful activity (e.g., some burning off fingers to resist temptation). Neurotically inflamed eroticism continually increased with increased Christian condemnation of sex.
· St. Augustine (born 354 A.D.) promoted Christian guilt through his books: (1) Confessions -- self-accusations of his personal dissipation during his pagan and lustful youth. He was converted to a Christian in 386 A.D. and turned his hatred against the goodness and pleasures of man. States we are born between feces and urine. (2) The City of God his major work, speculates on how babies might be born from women uncankered by lust and sex. Demonstrates hatred for human life.
· In 585 A.D., the Catholics argued that women did not have a mortal soul and debated if women were even human.
· By the 5th Century, marriage came under clerical domination.
· The dark ages for love and happiness accompanied the rise of Christianity. Collapsing under the Christian stranglehold, 6th Century Rome was repeatedly ravaged and looted. One million population was reduced to fifty thousand. The city lay in rubble and ruins. The senate ceased for lack of qualified men. The hygiene, science, and culture of Rome was abandoned
· Christianity reduced sex to an unromantic, harsh, and ugly act. Penance was cynically performed as often as required. Women became pieces of property.
· Clergy and Popes turned to prostitutes and neurotic sex (e.g., pope of 904 A.D. practiced incest and was a lecher with children).
· By the 9th Century, Christianity dominated. Women were wasteful property. The church sanctioned wife beatings and leveled only relatively light fines for killing women. Noblemen had the "natural right" to ravish any peasant woman on the road and to deflower all brides of their vassals.
· St. Jerome stated that he who too ardently loved his wife was a sinful adulterer.
· Christian marital sex was performed only in one position and never during penance nor on Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, holiday seasons, and then only to conceive a child.
· For the Catholic clergy, sex without values (e.g., prostitute sex, orgy sex, rape, or sadistic sex) was not a serious offense, but sex with value (e.g., loving or valuing a woman) was a high sin with severe penalties.
Pre-Renaissance Rise of Courtly Love
(1000-1300)
· The start of courtly love and the creation of the romantic ideal began in the 11th Century. In Southern France, noblemen developed a completely new set of love concepts from which a unique man/woman relationship arose that was previously unknown to Western civilization.
· April 25, 1227, Ulrich von Lichtenstein started his incredible journey from Venice to Austria dressed as the female goddess Venus. Challenging in a jousting battle every man enroute. He did this in the service of a woman who continually scorned him. Three centuries later this journey served as the basis for the satire, Don Quixote de la Mancha.
· Courtly love or "true love" was a clandestine, bittersweet relationship of endless frustrations. Such a relationship was supposedly spiritually "uplifting", making the knight a better man or warrior. No love existed in marriage, but the pain of frustrated courtly love was considered uplifting, delicious, and exciting.
· The sex act was considered false love, but "true love" was kissing, touching, fondling, and perhaps even naked contact.
· Troubadours believed that unsatisfied passion improved one's character. They could give freely only without the compulsion of necessity (e.g., the compulsion of married people who were duty-bound).
· For the first time, love was combined with character ennoblement (except to some degree with Greeks in their homosexual and courtesan relations).
· Troubadour poets begged their ladies not to grant them sexual favors under any conditions (e.g., Dante's love for Beatrice in Vita Nuova who was a source of spiritual guidance rather than a sexual female).
· In France, William II, Duke of Aquitaine (born 1071 A.D.), was the first of the troubadours. He introduced a new life style, love lyrics, and social manners. His courtly-love concepts swept across Europe and are still with us today.
· In 1122 A.D., William's granddaughter, Eleanor, became Queen of both France and England. She set up cultured courts and established the Court of Love, which codified and promoted courtly love. In Eleanor's court, a cleric named Andre wrote a love manual, Tractatus de Amore et -de Amoris Remedio (Treatise on Love and Its Remedy). His was a serious exposition on courtly love and its rules.
· Poet Chretien, on orders from Eleanor, developed the romantic story of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere.
· Eleanor's gay, happy, and civilized life lasted four years. King Henry II then swept in and ruined the court in 1174.
· Courtly love introduced the elements of emotional relationships between men and women for the first time. This was a revolutionary concept in which love was based on mutual respect and admiration. Courtly love elevated women from a servant and house-keeper to a more equal partner and an inspirer of progress.
The Church vs. the Renaissance
(1300-1500)
· Courtly love mocked religion. Churchmen fought this new, happy love (e.g., St. Thomas stated that to kiss and touch a woman with delight, even without thought of fornication, was a mortal sin).
· Priests and religious fanatics began a 300-year period of flagellation during which they paraded in hordes from town to town praying and whipping themselves and each other into bloody pulps.
· The struggle was between the darkness of religion and the enlightenment of the Renaissance. Also the papal power struggled against the resurgence of pro-man, pro-life Aristotelian ideas.
· The church moved in and a new breed of male factors not known before appeared. They were the inquisitors who were backed by a series of murderous papal pronouncements and bulls.
· By 1450, the official Catholic dogma established that witches existed and could fly by night. All physically desirable women were projected by the church as evil sorceresses. The church was losing its power and this was their means to fight the rising rationalism and happiness brought on by the emerging Renaissance.
· Inquisitors Jacob Sprenger and Henry Kramer, Dominican brothers and professors of sacred theology at the University of Cologne, armed with their influential book, Malleus Maleficarum ("The Witches' Hammer"), and with Pope Innocent VII's infamous Bull of 1484 advocated hanging "evil" women by their thumbs, twisting ropes around their heads, pushing needles under their nails, and pouring boiling oil on their feet in the "devout" hope of forcing confessions of their "wickedness". They burned to death over 30,000 "witches" charged with having sex with the Devil, whom the Church insisted had a brutal penis covered with fish scales.
· Crosscurrents and contradictions raged between the happy and pleasurable love arising from the enlightened Renaissance spirit and the hatred of women (wicked witches) arising from the dark and malevolent spirit of the church.
· Aging Pope Alexander VI had many teenage mistresses.
· In the 16th Century, impotent Duke of Urbino and Elizabetta Gonzaga engaged in a platonic love affair that resulted in a handbook on courtly manners, The Courtier, by Castigliones.
· Queen Marguerite of France was involved in intense but platonic love affairs with twelve men simultaneously. She also wrote a collection of 72 tales titled Heptameron that were bawdy and ribald. These were tales of platonic and "perfect love" mixed with orgies, incestuousness, partner swapping, and sexually insatiable priests.
· Marriage was based on both physical and financial aspects. Love was neither the basis for marriage nor any essential part of it. Marriage was a lifelong financial transaction. Marriage usually took place at 14-16 years old, and sometimes at 2-3 years old and included a dowry plus income and property guarantees.
· Henry VIII was the first major figure to combine love and marriage. He waged a long battle with Bishop Wolsey and Pope Clement VII about his divorce and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn.
· Woman's status was changing. Writers were trying to play both sides of this change (e.g., a book by Pyvve titled, The Praise and Dispraise of Women?. Contrasting approaches appeared later in classical literature (e.g., Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet vs. The Taming of the Shrew) .
· New concepts of joining the mind and the body in love and marriage were developing.
· The middle class was being attracted to the romantic love concepts of nobility.
· Renaissance enlightenment made sex seem not so sinful and disgusting es the church projected. The middle class began to associate sex with love.
· The completely new concept that young marrieds should live alone in a dwelling of their own began developing in the 17th Century.
· While the status of woman as a human being and as a love object was rising, her legal status remained little better than in the Middle Ages. All property belonged to the husband. Wife beating was still legal.
The Puritans
(1500-1700)
· Puritans were not anti-sex. Quite to the contrary, they were value-oriented about love and sex, even romantically sentimental.
· The Reformation combined the enlightened Renaissance (marital sex was held as good and wholesome) with the malevolent Christian position that continued to burn women as witches.
· Dr. Martin Luther (1483-1546) battled against Catholic asceticism in advocating the enjoyment of every pleasure that was not sinful. Luther was lusty and vulgar in the "eat, drink and be merry" style. He claimed to have broken wind in the Devil's face. He fought Rome and claimed that celibacy was invented by the Devil and that priests could marry. He asserted marriage was not a sacrament at all, but a civil matter. In 1532, he held that Christ probably committed adultery with Mary Magdalene and other women so as to fully experience the nature of man. Luther asserted that sexual impulses were both normal and irrepressible. He broke from Rome and married. He cheerfully loved his wife and held sex in marriage as good. Luther's reformation rapidly spread across Northern Europe.
· The Bluenoses -- John Calvin (1509-1564) was the opposite of Martin Luther. Calvin was cheerless and had a viciously malevolent theology based on total human depravity and the wrath of God. An unhappy and unhealthy ascetic, he had ulcers, tuberculosis, and migraine headaches. He considered life of little value and God as a harsh tyrant. Calvin set up a brutal political theocracy in Geneva. No dancing, fancy clothes, or jewelry were allowed. Death penalty for adultery. Even legitimate love was stringently regulated. Solemn weddings with no revelry. The Calvin marriage had two functions: (l) to produce offspring, (2) to eliminate incontinence.
· Most Puritans thoroughly rejected the unhuman joylessness of Calvinism, except for a vocal minority such as John Knox in the United States. His Blue Laws of the 1650's were against Sunday amusements, smoking, drinking, gambling, fancy clothing. He also promoted public whippings, scarlet letters, execution for adulterers, and the Salem "witch" executions (executed 26 women and two dogs in 1692).
· Stern puritan traits were mainly expressions that masked moods of mischief and romance. Church trial records show that much sexual "sinning" existed. But only sex outside of marriage was attacked. Puritans greatly enjoyed sex inside marriage and condemned the "popish" concept of the virtue of virginity. Most Puritans were tenderly romantic and good lovers.
· The image of the sexless and stony heart Puritan is false. Consider the 17th Century Puritan, John Milton (Paradise Lost); he was virtuous, but experienced a healthy view of sex. He displayed idealistic and romantic views about marriage. Milton sent tracts to Parliament urging modern-day, easy divorce ("with one gentle stroke to wipe away 10,000 tears out of the life of man"). Milton's Paradise Lost projects a benevolent view of Adam and Eve in a romantic love context. Milton entirely rejected St. Augustine's malevolent views of women, sex and life.
· 16th Century Puritans tried to combine the ideals of love with the normality of sex in marriage. Woman's status improved under puritanism (e.g., a woman could separate, even divorce, if beaten). Property rights and inheritance laws improved. Marriage became a civil contract.
· 17th Century Puritans were pious and severe, but also strongly sexed and somewhat romantic.
· 18th Century Puritans developed the stifling prudishness of the Victorians.
The Age of Reason
(1700-1800)
· By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted anew approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body.
· The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.
· Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.
· In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable replaced the Christian theology that saw man as besotted and laden with guilt and sin.
· Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.
FROM 1300 B.C. TO THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY
Ancient Greece
(1300 A.C.-450 A.C.)
· Homeric women (1300 B.C.-1 100 B.C.) were relatively free and exercised considerable influence over men, but remained virtuous and on double standards. With the high standard of living in later Greece, women became idle and lost their importance.
Golden Age of Greece
(450 B.C.-27 B.C.)
· Wild bisexual love life of Alcibiades (450 B.C.), a student of Socrates and raised by Pericles.
· High class prostitutes and courtesans were held superior to wives and "virtuous" women.
· Greek men wanted faithful love, but tried to obtain it by gifts and trickery. When Greek men actually did fall in love, they considered themselves as sick.
· The Greeks never connected love with marriage. They found love either an amusement that quickly faded or a god-sent affliction that lasted too long.
Roman Empire
(27 B.C.-385 A.D.)
· Pagan love in Rome was guilt-free, lusty, unfaithful and deceitful.
· Unlike Greeks, the Romans preferred sex without philosophy or significance.
· Abortions and contraception were common. Babies were often discarded as garbage.
· Octavian (Augustus) Caesar sought unsuccessfully to restore family unity and sexual "morality" via government force and the Julian laws...all were failures, even with death penalties.
· Poet Ovid (2 B.C.) wrote a manual for sex and adultery, The Art of Love (Ar Amatoria), a brilliant, modern, fun, deceptive, cheerful and humorous book:
o Modern grooming tips.
o Sanctioned the use of tears by men.
o Sexual positions described that stressed mutual orgasm and satisfaction
· Most "liberated" Roman feminists failed to find emotional satisfaction.
Decline of the Roman Empire
(100 A.D.-385 A.D.)
· Roman empire (100 A.D.-300 A.D.) still appeared vibrant, but was surrendering to a new religion...Christianity. Rome then plunged into an asceticism of joyless and guilt-laden sex.
· Christians linked all Roman evils to sex and pleasure.
· Jovinian in 385 A.D. was excommunicated by the Pope for arguing that marriage was superior to celibacy.
Rise of Christianity and the Dark Ages
(385 A.D.-1000 A.D.)
· Rise of the unwashed hippies in Egypt. They developed and implemented the concepts of Christian sacrifice, self-torture and denial (e.g., St. Simon).
· People became preoccupied with sex as Christians malevolently turned sex into a guilty and sinful activity (e.g., some burning off fingers to resist temptation). Neurotically inflamed eroticism continually increased with increased Christian condemnation of sex.
· St. Augustine (born 354 A.D.) promoted Christian guilt through his books: (1) Confessions -- self-accusations of his personal dissipation during his pagan and lustful youth. He was converted to a Christian in 386 A.D. and turned his hatred against the goodness and pleasures of man. States we are born between feces and urine. (2) The City of God his major work, speculates on how babies might be born from women uncankered by lust and sex. Demonstrates hatred for human life.
· In 585 A.D., the Catholics argued that women did not have a mortal soul and debated if women were even human.
· By the 5th Century, marriage came under clerical domination.
· The dark ages for love and happiness accompanied the rise of Christianity. Collapsing under the Christian stranglehold, 6th Century Rome was repeatedly ravaged and looted. One million population was reduced to fifty thousand. The city lay in rubble and ruins. The senate ceased for lack of qualified men. The hygiene, science, and culture of Rome was abandoned
· Christianity reduced sex to an unromantic, harsh, and ugly act. Penance was cynically performed as often as required. Women became pieces of property.
· Clergy and Popes turned to prostitutes and neurotic sex (e.g., pope of 904 A.D. practiced incest and was a lecher with children).
· By the 9th Century, Christianity dominated. Women were wasteful property. The church sanctioned wife beatings and leveled only relatively light fines for killing women. Noblemen had the "natural right" to ravish any peasant woman on the road and to deflower all brides of their vassals.
· St. Jerome stated that he who too ardently loved his wife was a sinful adulterer.
· Christian marital sex was performed only in one position and never during penance nor on Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, holiday seasons, and then only to conceive a child.
· For the Catholic clergy, sex without values (e.g., prostitute sex, orgy sex, rape, or sadistic sex) was not a serious offense, but sex with value (e.g., loving or valuing a woman) was a high sin with severe penalties.
Pre-Renaissance Rise of Courtly Love
(1000-1300)
· The start of courtly love and the creation of the romantic ideal began in the 11th Century. In Southern France, noblemen developed a completely new set of love concepts from which a unique man/woman relationship arose that was previously unknown to Western civilization.
· April 25, 1227, Ulrich von Lichtenstein started his incredible journey from Venice to Austria dressed as the female goddess Venus. Challenging in a jousting battle every man enroute. He did this in the service of a woman who continually scorned him. Three centuries later this journey served as the basis for the satire, Don Quixote de la Mancha.
· Courtly love or "true love" was a clandestine, bittersweet relationship of endless frustrations. Such a relationship was supposedly spiritually "uplifting", making the knight a better man or warrior. No love existed in marriage, but the pain of frustrated courtly love was considered uplifting, delicious, and exciting.
· The sex act was considered false love, but "true love" was kissing, touching, fondling, and perhaps even naked contact.
· Troubadours believed that unsatisfied passion improved one's character. They could give freely only without the compulsion of necessity (e.g., the compulsion of married people who were duty-bound).
· For the first time, love was combined with character ennoblement (except to some degree with Greeks in their homosexual and courtesan relations).
· Troubadour poets begged their ladies not to grant them sexual favors under any conditions (e.g., Dante's love for Beatrice in Vita Nuova who was a source of spiritual guidance rather than a sexual female).
· In France, William II, Duke of Aquitaine (born 1071 A.D.), was the first of the troubadours. He introduced a new life style, love lyrics, and social manners. His courtly-love concepts swept across Europe and are still with us today.
· In 1122 A.D., William's granddaughter, Eleanor, became Queen of both France and England. She set up cultured courts and established the Court of Love, which codified and promoted courtly love. In Eleanor's court, a cleric named Andre wrote a love manual, Tractatus de Amore et -de Amoris Remedio (Treatise on Love and Its Remedy). His was a serious exposition on courtly love and its rules.
· Poet Chretien, on orders from Eleanor, developed the romantic story of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere.
· Eleanor's gay, happy, and civilized life lasted four years. King Henry II then swept in and ruined the court in 1174.
· Courtly love introduced the elements of emotional relationships between men and women for the first time. This was a revolutionary concept in which love was based on mutual respect and admiration. Courtly love elevated women from a servant and house-keeper to a more equal partner and an inspirer of progress.
The Church vs. the Renaissance
(1300-1500)
· Courtly love mocked religion. Churchmen fought this new, happy love (e.g., St. Thomas stated that to kiss and touch a woman with delight, even without thought of fornication, was a mortal sin).
· Priests and religious fanatics began a 300-year period of flagellation during which they paraded in hordes from town to town praying and whipping themselves and each other into bloody pulps.
· The struggle was between the darkness of religion and the enlightenment of the Renaissance. Also the papal power struggled against the resurgence of pro-man, pro-life Aristotelian ideas.
· The church moved in and a new breed of male factors not known before appeared. They were the inquisitors who were backed by a series of murderous papal pronouncements and bulls.
· By 1450, the official Catholic dogma established that witches existed and could fly by night. All physically desirable women were projected by the church as evil sorceresses. The church was losing its power and this was their means to fight the rising rationalism and happiness brought on by the emerging Renaissance.
· Inquisitors Jacob Sprenger and Henry Kramer, Dominican brothers and professors of sacred theology at the University of Cologne, armed with their influential book, Malleus Maleficarum ("The Witches' Hammer"), and with Pope Innocent VII's infamous Bull of 1484 advocated hanging "evil" women by their thumbs, twisting ropes around their heads, pushing needles under their nails, and pouring boiling oil on their feet in the "devout" hope of forcing confessions of their "wickedness". They burned to death over 30,000 "witches" charged with having sex with the Devil, whom the Church insisted had a brutal penis covered with fish scales.
· Crosscurrents and contradictions raged between the happy and pleasurable love arising from the enlightened Renaissance spirit and the hatred of women (wicked witches) arising from the dark and malevolent spirit of the church.
· Aging Pope Alexander VI had many teenage mistresses.
· In the 16th Century, impotent Duke of Urbino and Elizabetta Gonzaga engaged in a platonic love affair that resulted in a handbook on courtly manners, The Courtier, by Castigliones.
· Queen Marguerite of France was involved in intense but platonic love affairs with twelve men simultaneously. She also wrote a collection of 72 tales titled Heptameron that were bawdy and ribald. These were tales of platonic and "perfect love" mixed with orgies, incestuousness, partner swapping, and sexually insatiable priests.
· Marriage was based on both physical and financial aspects. Love was neither the basis for marriage nor any essential part of it. Marriage was a lifelong financial transaction. Marriage usually took place at 14-16 years old, and sometimes at 2-3 years old and included a dowry plus income and property guarantees.
· Henry VIII was the first major figure to combine love and marriage. He waged a long battle with Bishop Wolsey and Pope Clement VII about his divorce and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn.
· Woman's status was changing. Writers were trying to play both sides of this change (e.g., a book by Pyvve titled, The Praise and Dispraise of Women?. Contrasting approaches appeared later in classical literature (e.g., Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet vs. The Taming of the Shrew) .
· New concepts of joining the mind and the body in love and marriage were developing.
· The middle class was being attracted to the romantic love concepts of nobility.
· Renaissance enlightenment made sex seem not so sinful and disgusting es the church projected. The middle class began to associate sex with love.
· The completely new concept that young marrieds should live alone in a dwelling of their own began developing in the 17th Century.
· While the status of woman as a human being and as a love object was rising, her legal status remained little better than in the Middle Ages. All property belonged to the husband. Wife beating was still legal.
The Puritans
(1500-1700)
· Puritans were not anti-sex. Quite to the contrary, they were value-oriented about love and sex, even romantically sentimental.
· The Reformation combined the enlightened Renaissance (marital sex was held as good and wholesome) with the malevolent Christian position that continued to burn women as witches.
· Dr. Martin Luther (1483-1546) battled against Catholic asceticism in advocating the enjoyment of every pleasure that was not sinful. Luther was lusty and vulgar in the "eat, drink and be merry" style. He claimed to have broken wind in the Devil's face. He fought Rome and claimed that celibacy was invented by the Devil and that priests could marry. He asserted marriage was not a sacrament at all, but a civil matter. In 1532, he held that Christ probably committed adultery with Mary Magdalene and other women so as to fully experience the nature of man. Luther asserted that sexual impulses were both normal and irrepressible. He broke from Rome and married. He cheerfully loved his wife and held sex in marriage as good. Luther's reformation rapidly spread across Northern Europe.
· The Bluenoses -- John Calvin (1509-1564) was the opposite of Martin Luther. Calvin was cheerless and had a viciously malevolent theology based on total human depravity and the wrath of God. An unhappy and unhealthy ascetic, he had ulcers, tuberculosis, and migraine headaches. He considered life of little value and God as a harsh tyrant. Calvin set up a brutal political theocracy in Geneva. No dancing, fancy clothes, or jewelry were allowed. Death penalty for adultery. Even legitimate love was stringently regulated. Solemn weddings with no revelry. The Calvin marriage had two functions: (l) to produce offspring, (2) to eliminate incontinence.
· Most Puritans thoroughly rejected the unhuman joylessness of Calvinism, except for a vocal minority such as John Knox in the United States. His Blue Laws of the 1650's were against Sunday amusements, smoking, drinking, gambling, fancy clothing. He also promoted public whippings, scarlet letters, execution for adulterers, and the Salem "witch" executions (executed 26 women and two dogs in 1692).
· Stern puritan traits were mainly expressions that masked moods of mischief and romance. Church trial records show that much sexual "sinning" existed. But only sex outside of marriage was attacked. Puritans greatly enjoyed sex inside marriage and condemned the "popish" concept of the virtue of virginity. Most Puritans were tenderly romantic and good lovers.
· The image of the sexless and stony heart Puritan is false. Consider the 17th Century Puritan, John Milton (Paradise Lost); he was virtuous, but experienced a healthy view of sex. He displayed idealistic and romantic views about marriage. Milton sent tracts to Parliament urging modern-day, easy divorce ("with one gentle stroke to wipe away 10,000 tears out of the life of man"). Milton's Paradise Lost projects a benevolent view of Adam and Eve in a romantic love context. Milton entirely rejected St. Augustine's malevolent views of women, sex and life.
· 16th Century Puritans tried to combine the ideals of love with the normality of sex in marriage. Woman's status improved under puritanism (e.g., a woman could separate, even divorce, if beaten). Property rights and inheritance laws improved. Marriage became a civil contract.
· 17th Century Puritans were pious and severe, but also strongly sexed and somewhat romantic.
· 18th Century Puritans developed the stifling prudishness of the Victorians.
The Age of Reason
(1700-1800)
· By mid-18th Century, emotional love had fallen out of favor among the upper classes and intellectuals (rationalists). They wanted anew approach that would be more stable and productive. They turned from emotion to reason. Theology and metaphysics yielded to mathematics and physics. They scorned enslavement to emotion. Emotionalism became intolerable to men in the Age or Reason. They wanted women of intellect. They separated or dichotomized the mind from the body.
· The epitome of rational gallantry was Louis XIV, the sun king of France. All Europe saw him as the ideal of the aristocracy and a model for all lesser men. He established elaborate rules of etiquette that served to suppress all evidence of emotion.
· Nobility concealed feelings with the aid of detached reason and carefully rehearsed manners.
· In between the gallant rakes and the subdued Puritans arose an upper-middle-class man (as described in Samuel Pepys' diary, 1683). The age of enlightenment had arrived. New scientific and rational outlooks replaced mystical and intuitive ones of the past. A humane and tolerant view of man that saw him as basically good, worthy and admirable replaced the Christian theology that saw man as besotted and laden with guilt and sin.
· Never before had such emphasis been placed on manners. An artificial code of formal behavior was consciously and deliberately applied in order to control one's emotions. The emotional life of humans disappeared behind the facade of elegant manners and icy self-control.
On Leadership and the common good by Randy David
Please click on the link below:
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/01/leadership-and-common-good.html
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/01/leadership-and-common-good.html
On Language o Ang Ating Wika ni Randy David
I-klick ang link sa ilalim para sa malawakang artikulo.
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/01/wika.html
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/01/wika.html
The Sociology of Love by Randy David
Please click on the link below for the full article.
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/02/sociology-of-love.html
http://randydavid.blogspot.com/2005/02/sociology-of-love.html
Global Political Awakening
The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order - The technological revolution and the future of freedom. Part 1.
Please click the address below:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19873
Please click the address below:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19873
The Will to change by Randy David
The will to change
Posted 10:10pm (Mla time) Mar 26, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the March 27, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
ON HIS way to Calvary, Jesus foretold many events that astonished his followers. He said he would be arrested, that one of his own disciples would betray him, and that Peter himself would deny that he knew him, not once but thrice. He said he would be crucified, and he would die on the cross. He would be buried, but he would rise from the dead. Jesus held these things to be true, and he acted upon them so that God might forgive the sins of men, and thus change the circumstances of their existence. This is the poetry of forgiveness around which the Christian faith revolves. It is a philosophy of action and hope, and Jesus was its strongest poet.
Many of us hold certain beliefs, but all too often we fail to act upon them. As such, they serve us no purpose. They have no meaning, no effect on the way we live our lives. They are books that remain unread, music that is unheard, faith that is unrealized. We remain trapped in old untested beliefs, from which we cannot free ourselves because of fear. We do not develop the courage to experiment, to test our beliefs, to connect them to the practical details of our lives. Consequently, there is a huge gap between the beliefs we profess and the beliefs we actually hold by default, our habits of action. And, indeed, there is an even bigger gap between our habits of action as a people and our social goals.
A friend of mine was complaining recently about corruption in a city government office. He said he needed to secure a hundred and one permits just to remodel an old house. Every precious signature depended on compliance with a set of requirements that kept growing as he produced the necessary documentation. After some months of following up papers, his contractor told him that the message being conveyed was loud and clear: a small amount, the usual S-O-P or "standard operating procedure," would hasten the release of the needed permits.
I advised my friend to go and report the matter to the National Bureau of Investigation so an entrapment operation could be set. He was ready to do so, but he never got around to it. His contractor decided to pay, offering to take the added expense out of his earnings. These people work as a syndicate, he said; you get one of them arrested, and the rest of the gang will make life difficult for you.
The contractor's fear is not unfounded. Everyone who has dealt with such offices assumes a general order of things to which you can only adjust. When you are busy earning a living, you cannot afford to take risks fighting the system. Yet elsewhere in the metropolis, my daughter, who is building a house in Cainta, was pleasantly surprised to be able to get all the building permits she needed in one day without having to pay anybody or secure special favors from anyone. There are such pockets of institutional integrity in our society, and they are steadily multiplying, quietly supplanting the old discredited ways of doing things with straightforward public service.
It is less difficult to reform systems from within than to expect heroic individuals to expose the evils of systems from outside. Corruption thrives on the proliferation of unnecessary and unreasonable requirements. It is the stepchild of inefficiency. A responsible leader in an office usually knows who is on the take. If he is not himself part of the racket, and feels strongly about it, he will find ways of eliminating the opportunity and getting rid of the rotten personnel. To do this, he needs a critical mass of reformers to help him, for the corrupt will do everything to tie his hands, to sabotage his efforts, and to undermine his authority and integrity by capitalizing on his own minor lapses.
It is never easy to initiate change. The will to change has to be anchored on a will to believe that things can be different. Such a belief often cannot be grounded simply on the evidence at hand. Yet if one believes and, on this basis, he acts upon the world, his action may change the situation in ways he himself has not anticipated. In the results, he may find the affirmation of his belief or feeling unjustified in his faith, he may become cynical. Such are what John Dewey called "the risks of faith." The point is that we will never know if our beliefs matter until we act on them, or unless we live them.
In his thought-provoking essay, "Christianity and Democracy," Dewey said: "The one claim that Christianity makes is that God is truth; that as truth He is love and reveals Himself fully to man, keeping back nothing of Himself; that man is so one with the truth thus revealed that it is not so much revealed to him as in him; he is its incarnation." Dewey is not a theologian but a philosopher. But his understanding of the nature of man in Christianity allows one to appreciate better the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels.
Jesus was being prosecuted for supposedly claiming he was the son of God. Yet in fact he always referred to himself as the son of man. He called God his Father only because he believed that all human beings were God's children. His disciples were stunned by the revelations he made, and how they all turned out to be true. But the bigger truth he was teaching them by his own life was the truth that is already in them, waiting to be lived.
People sometimes wonder how a predominantly Christian culture like ours could be the fount of corruption. There is a simple explanation for that: faith, for most of us, is separate from everyday life. We do not draw from it ideals or the will to change.
Happy Easter!
Posted 10:10pm (Mla time) Mar 26, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the March 27, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
ON HIS way to Calvary, Jesus foretold many events that astonished his followers. He said he would be arrested, that one of his own disciples would betray him, and that Peter himself would deny that he knew him, not once but thrice. He said he would be crucified, and he would die on the cross. He would be buried, but he would rise from the dead. Jesus held these things to be true, and he acted upon them so that God might forgive the sins of men, and thus change the circumstances of their existence. This is the poetry of forgiveness around which the Christian faith revolves. It is a philosophy of action and hope, and Jesus was its strongest poet.
Many of us hold certain beliefs, but all too often we fail to act upon them. As such, they serve us no purpose. They have no meaning, no effect on the way we live our lives. They are books that remain unread, music that is unheard, faith that is unrealized. We remain trapped in old untested beliefs, from which we cannot free ourselves because of fear. We do not develop the courage to experiment, to test our beliefs, to connect them to the practical details of our lives. Consequently, there is a huge gap between the beliefs we profess and the beliefs we actually hold by default, our habits of action. And, indeed, there is an even bigger gap between our habits of action as a people and our social goals.
A friend of mine was complaining recently about corruption in a city government office. He said he needed to secure a hundred and one permits just to remodel an old house. Every precious signature depended on compliance with a set of requirements that kept growing as he produced the necessary documentation. After some months of following up papers, his contractor told him that the message being conveyed was loud and clear: a small amount, the usual S-O-P or "standard operating procedure," would hasten the release of the needed permits.
I advised my friend to go and report the matter to the National Bureau of Investigation so an entrapment operation could be set. He was ready to do so, but he never got around to it. His contractor decided to pay, offering to take the added expense out of his earnings. These people work as a syndicate, he said; you get one of them arrested, and the rest of the gang will make life difficult for you.
The contractor's fear is not unfounded. Everyone who has dealt with such offices assumes a general order of things to which you can only adjust. When you are busy earning a living, you cannot afford to take risks fighting the system. Yet elsewhere in the metropolis, my daughter, who is building a house in Cainta, was pleasantly surprised to be able to get all the building permits she needed in one day without having to pay anybody or secure special favors from anyone. There are such pockets of institutional integrity in our society, and they are steadily multiplying, quietly supplanting the old discredited ways of doing things with straightforward public service.
It is less difficult to reform systems from within than to expect heroic individuals to expose the evils of systems from outside. Corruption thrives on the proliferation of unnecessary and unreasonable requirements. It is the stepchild of inefficiency. A responsible leader in an office usually knows who is on the take. If he is not himself part of the racket, and feels strongly about it, he will find ways of eliminating the opportunity and getting rid of the rotten personnel. To do this, he needs a critical mass of reformers to help him, for the corrupt will do everything to tie his hands, to sabotage his efforts, and to undermine his authority and integrity by capitalizing on his own minor lapses.
It is never easy to initiate change. The will to change has to be anchored on a will to believe that things can be different. Such a belief often cannot be grounded simply on the evidence at hand. Yet if one believes and, on this basis, he acts upon the world, his action may change the situation in ways he himself has not anticipated. In the results, he may find the affirmation of his belief or feeling unjustified in his faith, he may become cynical. Such are what John Dewey called "the risks of faith." The point is that we will never know if our beliefs matter until we act on them, or unless we live them.
In his thought-provoking essay, "Christianity and Democracy," Dewey said: "The one claim that Christianity makes is that God is truth; that as truth He is love and reveals Himself fully to man, keeping back nothing of Himself; that man is so one with the truth thus revealed that it is not so much revealed to him as in him; he is its incarnation." Dewey is not a theologian but a philosopher. But his understanding of the nature of man in Christianity allows one to appreciate better the portrayal of Jesus in the gospels.
Jesus was being prosecuted for supposedly claiming he was the son of God. Yet in fact he always referred to himself as the son of man. He called God his Father only because he believed that all human beings were God's children. His disciples were stunned by the revelations he made, and how they all turned out to be true. But the bigger truth he was teaching them by his own life was the truth that is already in them, waiting to be lived.
People sometimes wonder how a predominantly Christian culture like ours could be the fount of corruption. There is a simple explanation for that: faith, for most of us, is separate from everyday life. We do not draw from it ideals or the will to change.
Happy Easter!
Why are Filipinos so Poor? By F. Sionil Jose
In the ’50s and ’60s, the Philippines was the most envied country in Southeast Asia. What happened?
By F. Sionil Jose
What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor – but look at Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and army trucks, the streets flanked by tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur a small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok was criss-crossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city’s skyline. Ricefields all the way from Don Muang airport — then a huddle of galvanized iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument.Visit these cities today and weep — for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia. Remember further that when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114 university graduates compared with the hundreds of Ph.D.’s that were already in our universities. Why then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We did not produce cheaper and better products.
The basic question really is why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed our people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some 15 years ago a survey showed that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they had no money to continue schooling.Thousands of young adults today are therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up all of our economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our poorest eat only once a day.But this physical poverty is really not as serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty of the spirit.
Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, came to the Philippines and wrote about our damaged culture which, he asserted, impeded our development. Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his analysis.This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise on colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and an elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one’s hands is frowned upon and we inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite.
We are poor because we are poor — this is not a tautology. The culture of poverty is self-perpetuating. We are poor because our people are lazy. I pass by a slum area every morning – dozens of adults do nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save. Look at the Japanese and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given them by their banks is so little. They work very hard too.
We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over-coiffed they are, and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their personal jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang – that is what we are, and all that money expended on status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into production.
We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its guise we protect inefficient industries and monopolies. We did not pursue agrarian reform like Japan and Taiwan. It is not so much the development of the rural sector, making it productive and a good market as well. Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who, before the reform, merely waited for the harvest. They become entrepreneurs, the harbingers of change.
Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada opposed agrarian reform, the single most important factor that would have altered the rural areas and lifted the peasant from poverty. Both of them were merely anti-American.
And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings. We condone cronyism and corruption and we don’t ostracize or punish the crooks in our midst. Both cronyism and corruption are wasteful but we allow their practice because our loyalty is to family or friend, not to the larger good.
We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first choice: a nationalist revolution, a continuation of the revolution in 1896. But even before we can use violence to change inequities in our society, we must first have a profound change in our way of thinking, in our culture. My regret about EDSA is that change would have been possible then with a minimum of bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may not be bloody at all if something like EDSA would present itself again. Or a dictator unlike Marcos.
The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex process. The only problem is that it may take so long and by the time conditions have changed, we may be back where we were, caught up with this tremendous population explosion which the Catholic Church exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity.We are faced with a growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communists won, they will rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the barkada, the vaulting egos that sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-53.
To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not internalize new attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to basics and remember those American slogans: A Ford in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do any good it must be spread around.Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are shamed to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed to explain, for instance, why Imelda, her children and the Marcos cronies are back, and in positions of power. Are there redeeming features in our country that we can be proud of? Of course, lots of them. When people say, for instance, that our corruption will never be banished, just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and Ramon Magsaysay as president brought a clean government.We do not have the classical arts that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and archipelagic Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world, showing what we have done with Western art forms, enriched with our own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all over, showing how accomplished a people we are!
Look at our history. We are the first in Asia to rise against Western colonialism, the first to establish a republic. Recall the Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of Gregorio del Pilar and the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from capturing the president of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history is the Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans and their king Leonidas, died to a man, defending the pass against the invading Persians. Rizal — what nation on earth has produced a man like him? At 35, he was a novelist, a poet, an anthropologist, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a teacher and martyr.We are now 80 million and in another two decades we will pass the 100 million mark.
Eighty million — that is a mass market in any language, a mass market that should absorb our increased production in goods and services – a mass market which any entrepreneur can hope to exploit, like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China.
Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the wherewithal to challenge the United States and almost won. It is the same confidence that enabled Japan to flourish from the rubble of defeat in World War II.
I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a real and insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will, to change ourselves.
F. Sionil Jose, whose works have been published in 24 languages, is also a bookseller, editor, publisher and founding president of the the PhilippinesÕ PEN Center. The foregoing is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Mr. Jose in Manila, Philippines.
By F. Sionil Jose
What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor – but look at Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and army trucks, the streets flanked by tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur a small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok was criss-crossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city’s skyline. Ricefields all the way from Don Muang airport — then a huddle of galvanized iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument.Visit these cities today and weep — for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia. Remember further that when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114 university graduates compared with the hundreds of Ph.D.’s that were already in our universities. Why then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We did not produce cheaper and better products.
The basic question really is why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed our people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some 15 years ago a survey showed that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they had no money to continue schooling.Thousands of young adults today are therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up all of our economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our poorest eat only once a day.But this physical poverty is really not as serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty of the spirit.
Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, came to the Philippines and wrote about our damaged culture which, he asserted, impeded our development. Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his analysis.This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise on colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and an elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one’s hands is frowned upon and we inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite.
We are poor because we are poor — this is not a tautology. The culture of poverty is self-perpetuating. We are poor because our people are lazy. I pass by a slum area every morning – dozens of adults do nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save. Look at the Japanese and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given them by their banks is so little. They work very hard too.
We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over-coiffed they are, and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their personal jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang – that is what we are, and all that money expended on status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into production.
We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its guise we protect inefficient industries and monopolies. We did not pursue agrarian reform like Japan and Taiwan. It is not so much the development of the rural sector, making it productive and a good market as well. Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who, before the reform, merely waited for the harvest. They become entrepreneurs, the harbingers of change.
Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada opposed agrarian reform, the single most important factor that would have altered the rural areas and lifted the peasant from poverty. Both of them were merely anti-American.
And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings. We condone cronyism and corruption and we don’t ostracize or punish the crooks in our midst. Both cronyism and corruption are wasteful but we allow their practice because our loyalty is to family or friend, not to the larger good.
We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first choice: a nationalist revolution, a continuation of the revolution in 1896. But even before we can use violence to change inequities in our society, we must first have a profound change in our way of thinking, in our culture. My regret about EDSA is that change would have been possible then with a minimum of bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may not be bloody at all if something like EDSA would present itself again. Or a dictator unlike Marcos.
The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex process. The only problem is that it may take so long and by the time conditions have changed, we may be back where we were, caught up with this tremendous population explosion which the Catholic Church exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity.We are faced with a growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communists won, they will rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the barkada, the vaulting egos that sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-53.
To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not internalize new attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to basics and remember those American slogans: A Ford in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do any good it must be spread around.Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are shamed to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed to explain, for instance, why Imelda, her children and the Marcos cronies are back, and in positions of power. Are there redeeming features in our country that we can be proud of? Of course, lots of them. When people say, for instance, that our corruption will never be banished, just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and Ramon Magsaysay as president brought a clean government.We do not have the classical arts that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and archipelagic Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world, showing what we have done with Western art forms, enriched with our own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all over, showing how accomplished a people we are!
Look at our history. We are the first in Asia to rise against Western colonialism, the first to establish a republic. Recall the Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of Gregorio del Pilar and the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from capturing the president of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history is the Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans and their king Leonidas, died to a man, defending the pass against the invading Persians. Rizal — what nation on earth has produced a man like him? At 35, he was a novelist, a poet, an anthropologist, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a teacher and martyr.We are now 80 million and in another two decades we will pass the 100 million mark.
Eighty million — that is a mass market in any language, a mass market that should absorb our increased production in goods and services – a mass market which any entrepreneur can hope to exploit, like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China.
Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the wherewithal to challenge the United States and almost won. It is the same confidence that enabled Japan to flourish from the rubble of defeat in World War II.
I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a real and insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will, to change ourselves.
F. Sionil Jose, whose works have been published in 24 languages, is also a bookseller, editor, publisher and founding president of the the PhilippinesÕ PEN Center. The foregoing is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Mr. Jose in Manila, Philippines.
Rationalization by Randy David, PDI
Rationalization
Rationalization
Updated 11:44pm (Mla time) Jan 15, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the January 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE WORD has crept in quietly in recent discussions about administrative and fiscal reforms. If taken seriously, it could spell the beginning of political modernity in our country. The vigor with which it is being opposed is an indicator of the staying power of obsolete interests. It shows us that corruption in our society is not a cultural flaw, but a basic ingredient of our political system.
Rationalization simply means altering existing policies and procedures in order to make them more efficient in the attainment of the state's avowed goals. Its most important objective is the elimination of sources of unearned income from the national life. "Rents," as these incomes are sometimes referred to, are of many kinds, but the most prevalent are those that are extracted and dispensed at will by public officials at all levels of the state. The German thinker Max Weber called rents "the economic basis of all aristocracies." In our own time, rents are the social basis of "crony capitalism."
When a friend or ally of a public official is given an accommodation such as a huge loan from a government financial institution, we call that a rent. "Behest loans," as they were once called, did not end with Marcos. Like logging concessions, they continue to be dispensed as part of the spoils of politics. When some favored ally is given exclusive rights to import a certain commodity, that too is rent. When the president orders the government's social security agencies to invest public pension funds in shares of stocks owned by a friend, and then collects commissions, that is rent-seeking.
Money given by gambling lords to authorities so they won't be touched is also rent. When budgetary allocations are released in exchange for favors, that is rent-seeking. When political donors are exempted or given special treatment by revenue laws, rent is also created.
Rent is what we may also call tax breaks or tax incentives that are given to the well-connected, independently of performance, and almost without expiry dates. There are presently more than a hundred existing Philippine laws that grant such duty and tax exemptions to a large assortment of enterprises and individuals. They are very costly in terms of taxes foregone. This is not to say that such special incentives or exemptions are all bad. Indeed, some of them are necessary to encourage investors to develop sectors of the economy that are either very risky or require enormous amounts of capital. The perks are given in exchange for enduring contributions to society's development objectives. But for these incentives not to degenerate into rents, they must be time-bound and linked to performance.
It is ironic, but not unexpected, that the recent legislative deliberations on the bill seeking the rationalization of such special incentives became the occasion for intense lobbying by congressmen on behalf of the particularistic interests they represent. We earlier saw this behavior in the debate on the cigarette and liquor tax. The same kind of lobbying is likely to mark the discussion of the bill seeking to raise the VAT by 2 percent and remove the exemptions from its coverage. Unless the voices of reason prevail-and one doubts this very much given the composition of the congressional majority-these attempts to set things right will eventually succumb to the overwhelming power of rent. The event will thus confirm Thomas McHale's 1959 description of the Philippines as a country where "business is born, and flourishes or fails, not so much in the market place as in the halls of the legislature or in the administrative offices of the government."
"Booty Capitalism," a book published by the Ateneo Press (1998), takes off from this insight. In it, the author, Paul Hutchcroft, identified the basic elements of this phenomenon as it exists in the Philippines: "(1) the high degree of favoritism, as when oligarchs and cronies plunder the state apparatus for particularistic advantage-a feature some have characterized as 'rent-seeking gone wild'; and (2) the capacity of those oligarchs currently holding official position to inflict punishment on their enemies." Hutchcroft provides a useful distinction between bureaucratic capitalism, in which "bureaucratic elite extracts privilege from a weak business class," and booty capitalism, where "a powerful business class extracts privilege from a largely incoherent bureaucracy."
The word "booty" emphasizes both the plunderous ways of Philippine capitalism and the violence that usually marks the scramble for booty. The principal protagonists in this struggle are the family-based oligarchies that have an economic base outside the state but need the resources of the state to accumulate wealth. They are the main sources of political contributions during elections, and in many ways, politicians and public officials are nothing more than their paid agents. As a captive institution, the booty capitalist state can play neither a regulatory nor a developmental role.
Under these conditions, Philippine politics is reduced to a cyclical struggle between the oligarchical "ins" and the oligarchical "outs," with the masses and the middle classes serving as their cannon fodder. Rationalization is the state's desperate attempt to distance itself from the oligarchy, an idea whose time has come, but, without a constituency, is bound to fail.
Rationalization
Updated 11:44pm (Mla time) Jan 15, 2005
By Randy David
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A15 of the January 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE WORD has crept in quietly in recent discussions about administrative and fiscal reforms. If taken seriously, it could spell the beginning of political modernity in our country. The vigor with which it is being opposed is an indicator of the staying power of obsolete interests. It shows us that corruption in our society is not a cultural flaw, but a basic ingredient of our political system.
Rationalization simply means altering existing policies and procedures in order to make them more efficient in the attainment of the state's avowed goals. Its most important objective is the elimination of sources of unearned income from the national life. "Rents," as these incomes are sometimes referred to, are of many kinds, but the most prevalent are those that are extracted and dispensed at will by public officials at all levels of the state. The German thinker Max Weber called rents "the economic basis of all aristocracies." In our own time, rents are the social basis of "crony capitalism."
When a friend or ally of a public official is given an accommodation such as a huge loan from a government financial institution, we call that a rent. "Behest loans," as they were once called, did not end with Marcos. Like logging concessions, they continue to be dispensed as part of the spoils of politics. When some favored ally is given exclusive rights to import a certain commodity, that too is rent. When the president orders the government's social security agencies to invest public pension funds in shares of stocks owned by a friend, and then collects commissions, that is rent-seeking.
Money given by gambling lords to authorities so they won't be touched is also rent. When budgetary allocations are released in exchange for favors, that is rent-seeking. When political donors are exempted or given special treatment by revenue laws, rent is also created.
Rent is what we may also call tax breaks or tax incentives that are given to the well-connected, independently of performance, and almost without expiry dates. There are presently more than a hundred existing Philippine laws that grant such duty and tax exemptions to a large assortment of enterprises and individuals. They are very costly in terms of taxes foregone. This is not to say that such special incentives or exemptions are all bad. Indeed, some of them are necessary to encourage investors to develop sectors of the economy that are either very risky or require enormous amounts of capital. The perks are given in exchange for enduring contributions to society's development objectives. But for these incentives not to degenerate into rents, they must be time-bound and linked to performance.
It is ironic, but not unexpected, that the recent legislative deliberations on the bill seeking the rationalization of such special incentives became the occasion for intense lobbying by congressmen on behalf of the particularistic interests they represent. We earlier saw this behavior in the debate on the cigarette and liquor tax. The same kind of lobbying is likely to mark the discussion of the bill seeking to raise the VAT by 2 percent and remove the exemptions from its coverage. Unless the voices of reason prevail-and one doubts this very much given the composition of the congressional majority-these attempts to set things right will eventually succumb to the overwhelming power of rent. The event will thus confirm Thomas McHale's 1959 description of the Philippines as a country where "business is born, and flourishes or fails, not so much in the market place as in the halls of the legislature or in the administrative offices of the government."
"Booty Capitalism," a book published by the Ateneo Press (1998), takes off from this insight. In it, the author, Paul Hutchcroft, identified the basic elements of this phenomenon as it exists in the Philippines: "(1) the high degree of favoritism, as when oligarchs and cronies plunder the state apparatus for particularistic advantage-a feature some have characterized as 'rent-seeking gone wild'; and (2) the capacity of those oligarchs currently holding official position to inflict punishment on their enemies." Hutchcroft provides a useful distinction between bureaucratic capitalism, in which "bureaucratic elite extracts privilege from a weak business class," and booty capitalism, where "a powerful business class extracts privilege from a largely incoherent bureaucracy."
The word "booty" emphasizes both the plunderous ways of Philippine capitalism and the violence that usually marks the scramble for booty. The principal protagonists in this struggle are the family-based oligarchies that have an economic base outside the state but need the resources of the state to accumulate wealth. They are the main sources of political contributions during elections, and in many ways, politicians and public officials are nothing more than their paid agents. As a captive institution, the booty capitalist state can play neither a regulatory nor a developmental role.
Under these conditions, Philippine politics is reduced to a cyclical struggle between the oligarchical "ins" and the oligarchical "outs," with the masses and the middle classes serving as their cannon fodder. Rationalization is the state's desperate attempt to distance itself from the oligarchy, an idea whose time has come, but, without a constituency, is bound to fail.
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