"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
4 comments:
With which part(s) do you disagree?
The broad historical and sociological/biological claims with no evidence, which constitute the last paragraph.
Also, there's my advisor's favorite question: 'so what?' So what if people have thought of sports this way throughout history? Why should we care about that now? Does this mean my lack of desire to play sports is a sign of defective masculinity? Or have I just chosen to excel at other things?
No, I didn't give any empirical evidence. Not because it's not out there, I just don't have it. And I don't really take myself *that* seriously. I mean, it's a blog.
As for your second question, I think such responses are generally a cop-out. Based on the sites on your blogroll, you should have read plenty about the important of tradition and understanding historical ideas of what it means to be human, of how to order our lives and communities. If you don't, there's no point in us debating. And the last two rhetorical questions you list, no offense, are a bit sophistic.
Nonetheless, critique noted. I'm curious, though, whether you disagree with the content of my argument as well as its form, or just the latter.
I'm enough of a Grotian that I don't think the questions I was asking are a cop-out. History and tradition can be useful guides, perhaps on the whole, to the proper political and social responses to issues as they arise for us. But the choice of traditions and histories can vary (which elements are emphasized and which downplayed). When my advisor asks me "so what?" it's not intended to say that history bears no relevance to our concerns; it's just to say that I should regard the value I want to place on a piece of history as not yet established.
I am also emphatically not in line with a number of conservative readings of gender relations, if not quite in the liberal/feminist camp, either. The point of my last two questions is that gender definitions often become extremely reductive, or emphasize certain elements on the basis of assertion. But there's more to masculinity than fighting war, or sublimating those urges, which, in an ideal world, should be a banal point.
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