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Chivalry in a thousand years or less, part 4 of 4
So here's the thing. If I decide that traditional American chivalry is a good thing, and I want to always open doors for you ladies, hold your chairs for your, stand when you enter the room or come to the table, watch my language in front of you, defend you against anyone who tries to take advantage of you in any way, etc, etc, etc, what are the consequences of my deciding to live that way? What are the messages I send to other men, to women, even to myself, about women, about men, and about me? Can I behave this way without putting women on a pedestal? Why would I choose to behave so differently around women than I do around other men? Is there a way I can be chivalrous in some fashion that respects and honors both men and women in meaningful, practical ways that is empowering to women, to men, and to me?
So I open doors for everybody. I hold chairs for nobody. I kiss my girlfriend's hand, but nobody else's, as a rule, simply because I don't want to get punched out for doing it to a guy who has no sense of humor. I let people know that I care and am available to be supportive and helpful in need, and trust them to let me know when that need arises. Otherwise, I will not insult or patronize them by assuming that couldn't handle their problems without me, much less make such a presumption based on somebody's gender. Oh, and I don't mind offering to help someone on with their coat, but this decision has nothing at all to do with what they may or may not have between their legs.
Wow! What a huge topic!
Thanks, Dwyn! (And Arnaud and Puti, of course!)
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
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Chivalry in a thousand years or less, part 3 of 4
Essentially, chivalry—and perhaps I should say traditional chivalry, which I would like to distinguish from a post-modern feminist chivarly—places women on pedestals, which might seem to be a profoundly respectful and loving thing to do, but turns out to marginalize women in a very sick, patronizing way. There's a ton of material that's been written on this, and if you're interested, you might look up Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's essay, "The Mad Woman in the Attic," which may be the most seminal and influential of them all.
But essentially, the complaint, which I think is perfectly valid, is by casting women as icons of purity and angelic goodness, we box you up into an image that is impossible to maintain. You will necessarily fail to live up to our expectations, and you "fall off" of your pedestals. The result of this is that we tend to heap upon such women (that is, all of you) as much hatred and disdain has we had previously been our praises and hymns. This process is what Freud describes as the madonna/whore complex, the idea that we (all of us, men and women alike) go around classifying women as either being saints or "sluts" (a word I'm willing to refer to, but would never apply to a humana being). We forget that there is this very small space in between the two extremes that contains only about—well, the entire human female population. Well, maybe Mother Theresa fit in one of the other two categories, but I tend to doubt even that. But even if she did, I'm certain she wasn't born that way.
See Chivalry in a thousand years or less, part 4 of 4
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
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Chivalry in a thousand years or less, part 1 of 4
Wow, I've been missing some really neat stuff. I remember Dwyn starting this thread and really wanting to reply, but being too busy to stop for it.
I never saw Arnaud's very intriguing answer before tracing Puti's response to try to figure out what on earth I had missed!
Arnaud, it is possible that you have missed a sense of the word Chivalry that es common in English. By analogy, we often refer to certain modern rules of courtesy—mostly courtesies that men traditionally extend to women, such as holding a chair as she sits or opening a door for her—as chivalry. Of course, this all dates back, as you say, to the traditional medieval orders of knighthood—a fact much more obvious in a language such as French, where a knight is called a chevalier.
But chivalry, as we understand it in modern American terms has become a very controvercial issue, and really can mean a wide variety of different things. From Dwyn's last message, I'm guessing that she may have meant it in a much broader sense than I usally think of—just the simple willingness to put somebody else's welfare ahead of my own. something that even in itself is also a very important and a very complex proposition, as Puti so wisely (as always!) points out.
This is a huge topic. There are so many directions we can go with this. I don't know. If anybody responds to anything further, maybe that will help me decide what direction (s) might be interesting for us all to explore.
I do have something interesting to add to Arnaud's very helpful history. He makes reference to the struggles for power between the Church and the various state powers, the tensions of the reformation, and the changing status fo the orders of knights during the medieval period. Recently I was reading Andreas Capellanus' "The Art of Courtly Love", which I understand is considered to be the seminal work on what Chivalry was all about –particularly the part where knights devoted themselves to a lady for whom they dedicated all of their deeds of heroism. (By the way, I have to disagree with what you said about knights dedicating themselves to wives and daughters. I've never heard that, and in fact Capellanus says that knights generally committed themselves to some lady they would never dream of marrying—and this is quite consistent with all I've ever read on the subject. Perhaps that was true at some place or time, but I don't think it was ever a dominant practice. The knight's lady was to be to him a queen on a pedestal for whom he would always strive to be worthy, knowing that he could never have her for his own. This was supposed to be a chaste love affair, one that was pursued passionately, but never consummated. The relationship between Lancelot and Guenevere was a perfect example of this at first, until—well, you all know how that turned out.)
See Chivalry in a thousand years or less, part 2 of 4
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
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Chivalry in a thousand years or less, part 2 of 4
Anyway, I digress. I wanted to share what I got from reading Capellanus (or the introduction to my copy of Capelllanus, which was edited by John Jay Parry. He points out that the evolution of chivalry is heavily influenced by friction between the church and other social forces of the times. For example, when goddess worship was being condemned by the church, the practice became transformed into a practice of worshiping the Virgin Mary, which came to be conflated with a knightly practice of choosing a lady to act as an avatar of the Virgin Mary. So the knight's service to his lady was a religious observance in that sense.
Later, the concept of courtly love evolved out of this as a challenge of Church domination of social institutions, particularly marriage. Under church doctrine, marriage was a political affair (no pun intended), and it was a way of splicing and arranging families, of wielding political alliances, and of carefully molding the social structure of the world. Well, the church, as well as policitical interests. Courtly love became a challenge to all of this. This concept of marrying for love, all but unheard of during the early medeival period was an appalling and outragious affront to the poltical and spiritual structures of the times. What it brought out was a challenge between the supremacy of the community (The king must marry for political purposes, because his life belongs to the state, and the state depends on him to get an heir of noble blood who will be accepted by all as a rightful successor to the throne), and that of the individual (But mother, I don't WANT to marry her! She has buck teeth and a whiny voice, and I'd rather die than spend the rest of my life with her!)
This is quite a paradox, really, when we think of how chivalry has come to represent a singular form of selflessness and heroism. I wonder if that, there, might not be an interesting direction to pursue.
One other comment I want to make, and then I should be able to get myself to shut up. The big challenge with traditional modern American chivalry is that feminism kind of killed it. I want to be very careful how I express that, because I consider myself to be a devoted feminist (feminism being, as I love seeing it put in one of my favorite bumper stickers: "the radical notion that women are people.") On the other hand, there is something in chivalry that I deeply respect at the same time that it has at its foundation a host of presumptions that are insidiously sexist.
See Chivalry in a thousand years or less, part 3 of 4
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
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Re:A friend of dwyns
Welcome, old boy!
If Dwyn likes you, I figure you can't be all bad.
Let is know if there's anything we can do to help you find your way around the place.
Cheers!
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA, USA
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Language pair: English; English
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Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: June 12, 2007
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Post Election
Hi Arnaud,
I hear you had your election out there and disappointed poor Mssr. Chirac.
I was interested to know what you and Quentin thought of it all and if you were interested in sharing how you had finally decided to vote.
By the way, I thought I heard your name on the radio the other day. It seems there's a Christiane Malarde in France who's evidently quite the news man. Do you know of him? I don't suppose you're related.
Mark
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Language pair: English; All
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Mark S.
June 2, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Re:Re:Chivalry(part II)
> For example, would you take a bullet
> for a stranger, or dive off a bridge,
> to save a dog?
People are not necessarily the sole
owners of their bodies and lives. For
example, a married person should think
about his (her) family before sacrificing
his life. Sometimes, depending on the
situation, the person might still
sacrifice or seriously endanger his life,
with a full confidence that his family
accepts the choice, however painful
it may be to all of them.
Puti
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Language pair: French; English
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Juha-Petri T.
June 2, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
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What is an identity, exactly? (2 of 2)
(continuing the previous article...)
> and we often hear that the human body
> completely rebuilds itself cell-by-cell,
> about every thirty days (This isn't
> exactly true, but it is fun to think
> about.) Anyway, inking our identity to
> our physical body is problematic, even
> though it's awfully convenient.
There are science fiction writers who
have done thought experiments with these
topics.
If a human being can be duplicated by,
say, perfectly synchronized cell
divisions, which copy is the original?
Can one of them be destroyed without
killing the individual? If the being feels
himself continuous even when he is copied
into two beings, can the copying be
similarly done over a vast distance? Or
over a vast period of time?
Are the copies of a being part of the
same being, or new beings, even if they
feel to grow from the same origin? Can
the copies merge together again?
Can a human being be copied into
a machine imitating him with high
fidelity? Can the sense of time of the
machine-human be bound to the internal
states of the machine, and can these
states be run backwards, or in a shuffled
order with no harm to the machine-human?
Could the machine-human life and
thoughts be run on paper and pencils
instead of computers? Do the calculations
really need to be done, or can the being
exist and live in our thoughts, or in the
world of mathematics without our aid? Do
we need substance to exist?
To me a dualistic (or at least
supermaterial) model of humanity feels
much more harmonious, especially if the
human being does not perish at death, as
that seems to me the only way to
give and get love that does not expire.
Our sense of morality and responsibility
are also built on the assumption that we
have a (more or less) free will, even
though our science cannot show this
freedom to us.
Puti
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Language pair: Finnish; Thai
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Juha-Petri T.
June 1, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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What is an identity, exactly? (1 of 2)
Hi again, Mark, and Dwyn, too!
> [...] it really fascinates me how much
> we seem to think we know about this and
> how little we actually do.
My favourite stuff. :-)
> "I," for Descartes, is the person who
> experiences thought. That is where our
> identity lies.
To me the sense of self is a little bit
of mystery. The fact that to me there is
only one "I", and all the others are
"them" makes me unique, but the other
people sense this same uniquity from their
own viewpoints. We are equal, and yet we
are not.
> If my mind, my soul, or whatever magical
> force/substance/isness that makes me a
> self-aware thinking being is the core of
> my identity, it must be in some way
> connected with my physical being, with
> my body. If that is so, there must
> somewhere be some identifiable
> connection whereby we can see how it is
> that the content of my will gets
> transformed somehow into the dynamic
> phenomenon of my action.
The concept of free will is even a
greater mystery than the concept of ego.
If we take the materialistic viewpoint,
the human ego is caused by the physical
functions of the brain, and only by it.
This really seems to be the easiest
approach, but it is also the most
dreadful one. If there is no latitude in
the tight chain of cause and effect, the
whole universe (and we within it) is just
running through the determined program
like a spring-driven toy. In that model
the human beings are neither human nor
beings, but just parts of the phenomenon
called Universe. Our thinking, moral, and
our whole existence would be fraudulent,
meaningless illusions.
If, on the other hand, we are beings and
have even some sovereignty over our brains
and bodies, we become physical miracles.
What is our invisible spirit guiding our
thoughts? Why does it stop functioning
together with our brains when somebody
hits us unconscious? Are the out-of-body
experiences real?
(To be continued...)
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Language pair: Finnish; Thai
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Juha-Petri T.
June 1, 2005
# Msgs: 1
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Re:What is an identity, exactly? Part 3 of 2
More on identity,
After I sent that last email, I began to realize how slipper this whole concept of identity really is. Really, it's a word we use many different ways. Sometimes our identity IS simply a matter of a name or a social security number. That really is all that matters on payday, or when I want to get a driver's license.
But when I read Dwyn's question, it really struck me as more of a question of, "how do I define, in a meaningful sense (meaningful in terms of how I can make choices on a day-to-day basis within the context of my life, in such a way that I will be able to embody some concept of integrity) what it is (in terms of values, likes, dislikes, personality, virtues, vices, etc) I'm talking about when I make reference to this phenomenon I best know as "me"?
I suspect that may be somewhere in the ballpark of what Dwyn was talking about and what her friend was struggling with, and perhaps, what we all struggle with all the time. I think it is what Arnaud spoke to far more eloquently than I did.
So I';ve been studying an interesting edition of Sir Philip Sidney's "The Defence of Poesie," (Also known as, "An apology for Poetry."). The Editor, Richard Bear (his edition of the essay is easily available on the Internet), points out that during the Renaissance, when Sidney rights, there was a notion of "fashioning the self."that was widely held at the time that identity was a created phenomenon, and not something we were born with or grew into or had thrust upon us. The more I thought about the contrast between these ideas of the nature of identity interms of how it comes into being, the more I realized that that might be an important way to look at what it is exactly that we are talking about when we talk about identity.
What do you think? Is identity who we are? What we were born with? Is it something created by our experiences of growing up in a particular society? Something we construct ourselves, consciously or unconsciously? something we grow into? Is it constant? Does it change over time? Can it have different forms at once? Is it possible that some combination of all of these descriptions fits best?
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA USA
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Language pair: English; German
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Mark S.
May 30, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: May 30, 2005
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