(L) Dark Age Ahead, by Jane Jacobs (C) The Family if Man, a best-selling coffee table book of the 1960s, by Edward Steicehn and Carl Sandburg, a collection of photos from a 1995 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (R) The Decline of Males, by Lionel Tiger
by Mary W Maxwell, LLB
I think you’d be hard put to pin down what a value is. In the life of a primitive animal, a value can be fairly simple — if the creature’s main need is to be near water, it “values” water. You can verify that by noting how it seeks water.
For humans, too, water is a value. We need water. We need the company of other people. We need time to rest. We need stimulation of the brain. We need approval. The word value may also be used for something of higher-order, such a beautiful music or a society’s treasured legacy. “It has great value.”
The following synonyms for value, as a noun, are listed in the Thesaurus: merit, benefit, principles, ethics, morals. Looking at the synonyms for the verb to value, we see: evaluate, rate, appraise, appreciate. Normally, the whole transaction of valuing something is a bit vague; we do it unconsciously. But moments come along when we need to focus on it, such as today when the world seems to be falling apart.
This series of articles on Philip Allott’s book Eutopia is meant to celebrate and elucidate Allott’s main idea, which is that we can make life better for all, if we but try. We’ve got the equipment for it — how else did we get from cave man to modern man?
I’ll start by identifying two things whose value, Allott thinks, needs to be discussed: knowledge and education. Then I will use the writings of others, notably Jane Jacobs, Lionel Tiger, George Crile, and again, Philip Allott.
Philip Allott on the Value of Knowledge and Education
12.65: “Education is our life-long self-creating of a better self.” 12.68: “Every human being is engaged in a unique process of self-educating, responding to their own circumstances and capacities and goals and ambitions, that is to say, their own self-interest. Socially organized education gives effect to the common interest of society.”
7.52 “Shared values … condition behavior in ways that can promote the survival and flourishing of a society — ideas of morality, justice, equity, tolerance, social responsibility, personal entitlement… utility, truth, and others.” 8.36: “Indifference [is] the negation of enthusiasm …. Listless detachment from taking power over one’s circumstances is a reasonable response to the difficulty of daily life…”
12.66 “Yet another miracle of…the human brain-mind, we possess the capacity — to make better human worlds. Education should teach us about the nature of those capacities.”
12.72: “Knowledge determines human behavior…. The Net Mental Wealth (NMW) of a society … determines the quality and potentiality of a society at any given time. It is the function of education to distribute the NMW to succeeding generations….” 12.76: “At the tertiary (college) level of education, all students should be required to devote a year to the intensive study of history and philosophy.”
12.80 To live everyday life is very hard work. Socially organized education is failing us. Education is leaving people in a state of undiscipline, contributing to passivity, cynicism, disillusion, and false fatalism.
11.71: The people cannot rule directly. They must rule through their representatives who should be accountable. That is, the people should be able to pass judgement on them and cause them to behave differently in the future. 8.35: “Education must come to be an education in all virtues, personal and social.”
12.15: “We know immeasurably more about everything than all those who have gone before us … and can access it at the touch of a button.” 12.16: “Yet we do not feel correspondingly cleverer or wiser. Acquiring knowledge is no longer a crucial, and exciting, form of human experience. Knowledge has taken on the character of an inert thing… as an effect of its immensity and its availability.”
What Has Been Going Missing in my Generation?
I am one of the millions of baby boomers (children born after World War II) who are now senior citizens. I grew up in a family that did not own any assets but whose dad brought home the bacon, which sufficed for the family’s comfort and security in a modest neighborhood in Boston. Many things were available in the culture to keep us happy.
As I started to scratch out a list for this article, to suggest items that might be going missing, I was astonished at how many things we-all took for granted. I hereby declare that the following things were readily available and did not cause us to worry about their imminent loss. They were like the flora and the fauna: they were just there:
— the nuclear family and the extended family, easy public transportation, plenty of jobs at all levels, adults interested in mentoring kids such as through Girl Scouts, reasonable tax rates, a good doctor-patient relationship, water in a reservoir (but we only thought of it as water in the taps), community pleasure (usually parish-based), patriotic events, variety of food at local shops, gasoline in endless supply at the pump, coal for home heating, a reliable bank, nursing homes for the elderly, traffic jams only twice a year, civility, female beauty, and male strength.
Each of those is now a cause for concern.
Jane Jacobs and the Dark Age Ahead
Jane Jacobs was famous for her work on city-planning. At age 90, in 2004, she published Dark Age Ahead to warn us that we could lose our culture rapidly and perhaps permanently. Our skills may be lost, even if books record how to do things, as so much of what we know, she says, is gained by example. Some skills have already been lost. (Do you know how to catch a bird for dinner?)
I do not want to be glum in this article, so let’s look at Jane’s recommendations for how to solidify our values. The five things she says we are losing, and need to get on top of, are:
— community and family
— higher education
— the effective practice of science and technology
— taxes and governmental powers directly in touch with needs and possibilities
— self-policing by the learned professions. (p 24)
The loss of family is amazing. Less than 50% of babies in America are now born (in 2022) to a mom and dad who are married to each other. The average length of a marriage, at the time Jacobs wrote her book in 2004, was 13.7 years.
As for higher education, Jacobs refers to it as “credentialing.” Many colleges are simply businesses; they do not even make a pretense of honoring higher learning. It’s not a value.
Science requires — wait for it — honesty. It requires honoring the tradition of measuring evidence carefully and reporting it in a way that reveals the unsuccessful, as well as the successful, results of an experiment or a clinical trial.
Taxes need to be collected from all the proper players, not hidden in a tax haven. Tax money should be spent sensibly not as “pork.”
Doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects, need to have a code of ethics that gets enforced and that the public can depend on. This requires disciplining members rather than closing ranks within a profession.
I would add the family farm to Jane Jacobs’ list of values that we should beef up, and not allow to disappear. No one but small owners can give a farm the care it needs. Oppressive mortgage rules within the farming industry must be cut back and monopolies must be prohibited (as Zephyr Teachout outlines in her book Break ’em Up).
Lionel Tiger and the Value of a Strong Man
Anthropologist Lionel Tiger was cited in Part 3 of this Eutopia series, regarding the question “What is evil?” Much like Allott, he sees evil as “happening” because of a disconnect between moral persons and the products of autonomous systems. Tiger is also a foremost student of the male and masculinity. I will briefly discuss his book The Decline of Males, published in 1999.
“For hundreds of years specifically male virtues — heroism, athleticism, stoicism, clearheadedness, forcefulness, nonemotionality and the like — were supported and celebrated…. A woman’s place was in the home, with the children. She was to be seen, decoratively if possible, and if heard, charmingly and without contention.” (p 84)
The fact that those features of the male are now very downplayed tells us that a new cultural attitude developed. So far, feminism has been around for about 65 years. But the strong-male was around a hundred times longer than that. I presume the traits had their purpose. I mean everything in life is not subject to a change in our attitude about it.
In this section, I won’t delve into women’s rights, gay rights, the significance of the birth control pill, the glass ceiling, gender identity, same sex marriage, or surrogacy. I am talking about values. Society used to value what the man could do based on the aforementioned traits. Without doubt, many a man idealized those traits and performed heroically because he was expected to.
(May I mention Sir Douglas Mawson of Adelaide? In 1909, as a geologist, he went to the South Pole. On a later occasion, he and two other men were on an expedition 100 miles from base camp in 1913. One man fell into a crevice taking most of the food and the sled-dogs with him. Mawson and Xavier Mertz proceeded home, in 50mph winds, but Mertz died. By the time Mawson got to the shore for the ship which would have taken him back to Australia, he was a few hours late, and the ship would not come again for a year!)
The Valuing of Women, per George Crile
George Crile was a surgeon and a general in World War I. My article on war in the Eusociality series quoted Crile as saying: “Lying on the ground for the first time, while waiting for orders to charge is perhaps the most trying ordeal for the soldier, as his instinct urges him to face the on-coming enemy.”
That was from Crile’s book 1915 book, A Mechanistic View of War and Peace, written when the suffragette movement was happening. On page 94-95 of that book, Crile says:
“Woman, the race breeder, the ancient cultivator of the fields, woman the property of hunting, fighting man, has gone to school…. and has begun to assist in the management of the machinery of the new civilization.”
“Perhaps the present feminist agitation will bring a favorable change in human destiny. When we consider that, in evolution, woman developed altruistic traits — traits that are the logical results of her care for her children — it would seem that there must now also be evolved in her a great fundamental reaction against the harshness of man. … Perhaps one of the influences in this further evolution will be woman’s natural reaction against needless violence.” [Crile was referring to war.]
Note that George Crile was not urging us to grab, culturally, the value of women’s peacefulness. He was going to wait a few eons for the male’s evolution to do the necessary.
Philip Allott on Peace and on Women
Philip Allott has much to say about world peace and about the worthiness of all peoples. His position is hinted at, by the Family of Man book photo above. Since his international relations vision is complicated and surprising, I will save it for a later part of this series. Here I will only quote him on the subject of the female human:
12.49 The historical failure to make the fullest use of the capacities and potentialities of half of the human race should be permanent source of shame. By giving a separate and artificial identity to women, it became possible to justify discriminatory treatment of women which then damaged the self-perfecting of the human species. One half of the human race have lived the form of human life allowed to them by the other half.
12.50 Try to imagine how the whole of history would have been if women had been able to bring to it all their capacities and potentialities. One might imagine women being regarded as “the first sex” rather than “the second sex,” given the relatively incidental role of men in procreation.
Conclusion
How helpful it is to concentrate on giving support to foundering values, rather than bid them adieu just because they are in trouble. Let’s end with one of Allott’s many statements of hope, with a warning:
2.66 “The human mind is still capable of reimagining society and law as the foundation of a better human condition. We may have one last chance to think well in order to make a better human future. The human mind is still capable of making the human world into a place of human happiness.”
Darling readers, any chance of keeping the comments on topic today? Or at least sort-of, semi-related to the issue of finding our values? Ta.
Maybe the gumshoe should have a continuous newsfeed type of column where the publisher can just drop topical videos while the headline articles go on uninterrupted. But this would be too much organised freedom for some. How Scandinavian of me.
w3, maybe you should visit Dee in her digs (a shoebox on the M10) to conduct a feasibility study on that.
Oh by the way, readers, please hasten to the Donate button.
I have passed by a couple of times
Merci beaucoup bigtime.
And now for the other nine….
I’ll just throw in the cultural reference if you missed it
Normally politicians are “owned” through their “career”, for example Andrew ROBb was awarded an $880,000 p.a. job in China after stitching up a few trans-national deals as trade minister. So how can every media personality etc be “owned” in a similar way ? They seem to be going nowhere, but like a duck on a pond, the legs are moving. Normally we expect they get kickbacks and end up with a big house, new cars, cocaine etc but what if they are all wise to depop and have been promised if they rise up to a certain rank in the freemasons they will be excluded from injections and depop. Maybe they are on 15th degree and have to get to 25th degree to be guaranteed a nice life beyond 2030. They will be very obedient. So you have a totally hidden heirarchy of slaves, these are the whip-wielders from olden days, they are promoted to whip-wielder and do not want to ever be demoted to common slave. The master mason of course needs all 3 levels to build pyramids and other such edifices. Since the hierarchy seems to stem from here and the Swiss banks, the parliament is almost irrelevant, since it is subject to the people inside who are all working for the secret society.
Well we have to wait for Craig Kelly and Trump / Durham etc and if the stoopids are in majority at that time we will know the system is beyond repair.
Finding our values, what and through higher education, what.
Womans suffrage was used in Australia for the political objective of a mandate for ww1. Then you have the pointing of white feathers.
Senate inquiry of 2004 fails to find Melbourne Universities involvement with child abuse. In 2009 there is a little acknowlogement from UoM but seems after the sorry, to be reaching out to the abusers.
. They teach ethics but never refer to the experiments for Nuremberg code inquiry, they continue from ww2 and still at it. Then the adults and animals. It is ethical because the code of ethics says so. Taxes make it ethical, just need more tax to be more ethical.
Sir Douglas Mawson was a freemason and story teller. I would not turn my back on him. Admiral Byrd and all his stories, no doubt a mason. They are secret keepers by admission. The fact is many public resources have been invested in Antartica and all we have is stories. 12.15: “We know immeasurably more about everything than all those who have gone before us. Really
Plenty of strong men and woman breaking the law with morals today Others hide behind ethics and behave immorally waggling fingers breaking the law. We arrive here with morals and if you can not grasp that, any higher education is dangeous to society.
Two fab points, sir:
Plenty of strong men and woman breaking the law with morals today.
Others hide behind ethics and behave immorally waggling fingers breaking the law.
Thanks, Simon. Re the waggling of fingers, ya goota read Savage Justice, a novel. It has an unforgettable scene in it.
Ron Handberg’s novel ? Has a lot of noise around it.. Do you think “novel” a vehicle for release.
Antonin Scalia comes to mind, lots of unforgettable scenes, the last act though post print, reads like a novel.
As the Pope just said “no explanation” for why God would allow children to suffer,
Wiki, John Marsden, lot of noise around that and the same modus.
Hey Pope, any idea on, who, allows the children to suffer
on topic !!!
https://fightingmonarch.com/2018/07/07/why-we-dont-remember-cias-use-of-scopolamine-hyoscine-burundanga-or-devils-breath/
WHY WE DON’T REMEMBER: CIA’S USE OF SCOPOLAMINE (HYOSCINE), BURUNDANGA, OR DEVIL’S BREATH
MK-ULTRA: THE TARGETING OF JONI MITCHELL, SHAMANIC CONVERSIONS, & MORGELLONS
https://fightingmonarch.com/2022/02/06/the-red-heifer-wormwood-project-blue-beam/
off topic ???
https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/tyranny-is-here-nwo-ottawa/
Tyranny is here. NWO Ottawa
by cathy fox blog on Child Abuse
Tyranny is now knocking on the front door.
Joni Michell, where do you start. Born into a ghost town, diagnosed polio like Neil Young.
Polio and Covid share features like symptomless diag.She plays Fort Bragg.The Queen pays tribute in 2005. The Queens tour of 54, Columbo signoff, has Polio following the tour. Morgelons 2006 has Senators Obama, McCain, Clinton calling for a CDC taskforce. They find nothing and Joni die’s again. Joni and Neil Young join the Rogan circus.
The Queen made a Coronation oath to uphold the Christian faith. When has she ever done that?
Prince Charlie is going to become King. I wonder if he will make the same vow?
Our Politicians pander to anti-Christian values and cause a Babylonian confusion by trying to placate every non Christian religions dogma.
Jeremiah 17:5-10
5 Thus says the Lord:
“Cursed is the man who trusts in man
And makes flesh his strength,
Whose heart departs from the Lord.
A Manson
The Executive Director
Australian Law Reform Commission
Email: info@alrc.gov.au
Dear Executive Director,
Traditional Rights and Freedoms – Encroachments by Commonwealth Laws (ALRC Interim Report 127)Submission with respect to Freedom of Speech and Secrecy Laws
The following notes explain the background information that is necessary to appreciate the points that address Section 16 in relation to Separation of Powers in the abovementioned report.
Background information
I have become increasingly concerned to learn that the ‘Australian Government’ (as it is commonly known) has been operating as an illegitimate government since 1973 when compared to how government should be established in accordance with Australia’s Constitution.
The event that brought about this change occurred when ‘The Royal Style and Titles Act – 1973’ (refer Appendix 1) was established by both Houses of Parliament to remove the Constitutional monarch from the Constitution and replace her with a fictional monarch without any referendum approval being obtained by referendum to do so. This transition meant:
Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom, Australia and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith who was Australia’s natural, living Constitutional monarch then became the fictitious paper entity titled:
Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth.
Read on –
https://www.alrc.gov.au/wp-…
https://www.alrc.gov.au/publication/traditional-rights-and-freedoms-encroachments-by-commonwealth-laws-alrc-interim-report-127/1-the-inquiry-in-context/traditional-rights-freedoms-and-privileges-2/
That link has a very valuable and readable list of rights in Australia. Thank you, CrissCross.
They keep pushing “republicanism” (their version) on their TV channels, all they need is the ALP to run a crooked referendum and bingo, you will own nothing and be happy. Because to communo-fascist Globalists, “words mean what I say they mean”, quote from “through the looking glass” I think.
In fact Victoria did actually have the dictionary re-done.
Of course Malcolm will have a better deal than that, but we will never find out, it will be hosted by Cayman Islands
you will own nothing, I think he is refering to our bodily integrity
and be happy is soma
Crisscrosses link to our rights shows that we have none, except a right to a lawyer. A right that can be forced onto our bodily integrity. A lawyers first responsiblity is to the court, but they won’t tell you that.
We never had any rights to start with, they are popping an illusion.
Liked xx Babylonian confusion. All the information seems like its pandering to everyone. Future scholars when researching the current period, having 99% data and a few books, will conclude mass psychosis.
My expertise in babble has been recognised here
I’m Sorry, So Sorry, Please accept my apologies
I was under the impression that psycopaths were incapable of showing empathy.
LEIGH SALES: What’s empathy training and have you ever had it?
SCOTT MORRISON: No. I haven’t Leigh.
LEIGH SALES: What is it?
SCOTT MORRISON: There are lots of counselling courses that are provided to people and they are largely run out of the private sector. This is something that has become quite common and where these counselling courses are necessary, then I think they can be quite helpful.
https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/scott-morrison-speaks-with-7.30/13341840
…….
Scott Morrison has admitted he simply doesn’t know if the “empathy training” he ordered Liberal MP Andrew Laming to undertake was a “tick a box” online course.
News.com.au revealed on Thursday that the “empathy training” Dr Laming has completed was conducted by a mystery provider on the internet that he will reveal when he returns to Parliament in May.
The Prime Minister was challenged over exactly what “training” had been completed on Friday following fresh complaints from women that Dr Laming had pestered them on planes or online.
https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/scott-morrisons-concession-about-embattled-mp-andrew-laming/news-story/2580c4fea7b78e825b67640a95dce648
Latest video from Academy of Ideas …topical
• Why are Most People Cowards? | Obedience and the Rise of Authoritarianism
https://academyofideas.com/2022/01/why-are-most-people-cowards-obedience-and-the-rise-of-authoritarianism/
took me off to find these …
• Moral Courage | Rushworth M. Kidder
https://au1lib.org/book/830104/f94749
• The Psychology of Good and Evil Why Children, Adults, and Groups Help and Harm Others | Ervin Staub
https://au1lib.org/book/950856/db2e16
Karl Marx’ laid out in his Communist Manifesto what platforms stood as the basis of Communism. As I see it the regime in Canberra called the Australian Parliament abides by every one of them.