| Most Recent Messages of Each Discussion |
Created by |
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!)
|
Language pair: English; All
|
|
Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
|
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
|
Language pair: English; All
|
|
Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
|
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
|
Language pair: English; All
|
|
Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
|
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
|
Language pair: English; All
|
|
Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
|
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
|
Language pair: English; English
|
|
Mark S.
June 3, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: June 12, 2007
|
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
|
Language pair: English; All
|
|
Mark S.
June 2, 2005
# Msgs: 1
|
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
|
Language pair: French; English
|
|
Juha-Petri T.
June 2, 2005
# Msgs: 5
Latest: June 3, 2005
|
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
|
Language pair: English; German
|
|
Mark S.
May 30, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: May 30, 2005
|
Re:What is an identity, exactly? Pt 1 of 2
Identity: Part 2 of 2
At the time the "continental rationalists," of whom Descart was perhaps the most famous were trying to figure out this magical phenomenon of human reason, another really brilliant guy in England was doing the modern thing, trying to spend more time in his body and less in his head. David Hume was a British Empiricist working at the problem of reality from the other end. He studied human beingness from the outside in, rather than from the insite out. He tried to figure out what makes two different people different, and what you could point to, to prove once and for all that that squalling purple hunk of mostly water that comes popping into the world on our original birthday, and the gray, wrinkly quintessense of dust on the deathbead breathing her last are somehow the same person. Physicaly, there's nothing to support the idea at all. They don't look anything alike, 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. It is a handy physical phenomenon, there is a direct one-to-one association between our bodies and our senses of self, so it works very nicely unless you believe in some essence of us that survives beyond the death of our body.
Anyway, Hume tried to take that on and he tried to find any physical evidence that would scientifically prove that we have some human characteristic that we can call identity. He failed. What it boiled down to was this: Here I sit in my room typing at my typewriter keyboard and I have some subset of 41 years worth of human memories in my head. These are the only connection I have (beyond the physical body I live in) to that squawling purple prune I once was. Unfortunately, there is nothing continuous that links all of those memories together. How do I know that I wasn't just born this morning in this forty-one-year-old body with some random sampling of memories that would be just enough to convince me that that guy who did all of those forty years worth of things was really me? It's kind of a ridiculous question to ask in one sense. It's a lot easier to accept that I have been the same guy for forty-one years. Occam's razor, you know: The simplest explanation is most likely to be correct. It certainly makes a lot more sense. However, there is no real scientific law that correct answers are always the simplest, and there is no scientific way to prove that the star of my memories is really the guy writing you this long blathering barrage of balderdash this morning.
So what Hume finally decided was that there is no such thing as identity. We are nebulous aggregations of sense impressions –of experiences and ideas—and our self images of being individuals with cohesive identites are nothing but illusion.
What do you all think of that?
Mark
|
Language pair: English; All
|
|
Mark S.
May 30, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: May 30, 2005
|
Re:What is an identity, exactly? Pt 1 of 2
Dwyn, I've been really chomping at the bit to talk to this one, because it really fascinates me how much we seem to think we know about this and how little we actually do.
I mean, the goverenment things they know all they need to know about our identities, once they get our names on a birth certificate, citizenship paper, social security card, Drivers license, and so on, but how many people are there out there that have identification showing that they are two (or more) different people? Since the government makes so many mistakes, and people are who we are, and life is what it is, there are probably numbers of people who have no idetnification of any kind. Weren't born in a hospital—no birth certificate. Never worked a formal job, no SSAN. Never got a driver's license, no state ID. As far as the government is concerned, they don't exist.
This seems pretty superficial, and it is, but I start here to make a point. Identity within a social/national context is a construction. societies put these together in order to manage the unmanageable. And any conception we have in our heads of what identity is is just as arbitrary and means just as much.
When Rene Descartes rocked the world with his (in)famous conculsion, "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am,") he was making a statement, not only about the nature of human essence, but also on the notion of identity. By defining being as an ability to experience the phenomenon of thought, Descartes was linking our identity to our minds. "I," for Descartes, is the person who experiences thought. That is where our identity lies. That makes a great deal of sense when you think about it, and we kind of want to run up and say, "yeah! That's it!" But there were certain problems with this that Rene never solved, and so far, no has anyone else. 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. I want to lift my finger and move it over to press down the "t" key and—whohoa! There it goes and all of these t's keep popping up all over my computer screen. It's amazing stuff, and nobody can explain it. We all experience the thought, the will, the idea. We all are intimately familiar with the sensation of our fingers flying about the keyboard (or plodding across it, for those of us who never learned to type properly), by the process that transforms thought into action is pure mystery.
See Identity part 2 of 2
|
Language pair: English; All
|
|
Mark S.
May 30, 2005
# Msgs: 3
Latest: May 30, 2005
|
