Tag Archives: intolerance

The Ambiguity and Danger of the Concept of Border

Conference paper (multiple non-blind peer review), , , , , , , , , , ,

Some scholarly friends have recently invited me to discuss the theme of the border. The first thing that came to mind was the ambiguity and danger of the concept of border.

Already starting from the definition given by the Italian encyclopaedia Treccani, we realise the duplicity of the concept of border:

The border is the line that separates one state from another. The concept, however, has a different origin and above all has a much wider use: we also need “boundaries” to organise our thoughts. The concept of the border is one of the tools we use to master reality (…) the word end comes from the Latin finis and, as in Italian, it indicates the conclusion of something (in Latin it was used precisely to indicate the border); “Con-finis” means that that conclusion is common, it is the same for both territories or lands. Each of the two territories ends, has an ending point, is limited, and ends up on the same border.

A first observation arises spontaneously for me: the border delimits the self and preserves one’s identity but at the same time it prevents reunification and exchange.

The cognate and synonymous concept of boundaries is, moreover, a common heritage of various branches of knowledge. We have deep traces of it in the myths of the Greek world, but we find the concept of border in the history of philosophy, in the biological sciences, in psychology, but above all, the concept has been widely explored – in the field of study closest to me – in law, both classical and modern, and finally in international law.

The border in the Greek and the Latin worlds separated order from chaos, the known from the unknown, the right from the wrong. You can always go beyond the border, however, as long as you have a good guide with you, a new Virgil.

For Heraclitus, the soul has such remote boundaries that it is not possible to reach them.

Horos in Greek is the border that separates two lands but also the stone that concretely signals their limit. Horos defines both a concept, an experience but also the norm that separates and defines. Horos also has a normative power; it represents a necessity guaranteeing an order. To raise a boundary means to recognise a difference, an otherness, to regulate the relationship with it.

In Hesiod’s Theogony, the boundary is the original delimitation between heaven and earth starting from primordial chaos. The limit is an ordering element through which to get out of chaos. The limit is a barrier to man’s fear of the infinite.

Heracles, during his journey in search of Geryon’s herds, defeats monsters and monstrous creatures, sets a physical boundary between the known world and the world where human beings must not go, placing the border with two columns placed on the two shores of the Strait of Gibraltar. And this limit, if you think about it, resisted until Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the Indies. For Christians for centuries, on the other hand, the edge of the world was Santiago de Compostela on the Portuguese shores of the Atlantic Ocean where the remains of St. James the Great arrived.

But the boundary seems to exist to be crossed, as Dante’s Ulysses teaches, even at the risk of death (see verse 119 of Canto XXVI of the Inferno, known as the “Canto of Ulysses”, which reads: “You were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge”).

It should be noted, however, that Hermes (not surprisingly the protector of travellers, merchants, and thieves), the deity who protects borders but at the same time encourages them to be overcome.

The boundary marks a dividing line that establishes a relationship of inclusion/exclusion. At the border, you can make two choices: either stand at the threshold or cross it.

The border is always defined but at the same time open. It has in itself the idea of limit and difference, of otherness and passage as a link between the inside and the outside, between the known and the unknown. It is not a locked door but a passage to be crossed, possibly with good moral guidance.

 

The concept of boundaries in the natural sciences

In biology – although the statement should be taken with approximation as the writer is not an expert on the subject – the so-called primordial cell has been hypothesized, and subsequently reproduced in the laboratory, a cell with a circumscribed environment, separate but in communication with the outside world and with the potential to increase its complexity; Going beyond the boundary of the cell produces new life; reproduction occurs only by penetrating the other cell, mixing and splitting the DNA of the mother cell so that the daughter cell contains part of the DNA of the two fusing cells.

It is well known that the structure of the cell is formed by the cell membrane, the nucleus and the cytoplasm. For the cell to reproduce, it is necessary to penetrate the cell membrane, reach the nucleus and then allow the DNA to be mixed.

A French psychoanalyst, Didier Anzieu, in his work “The nomadic epidermis and the psychic skin”, borrowed the behaviour of cells, and elaborated the metaphor of the skin, an imaginary metamorphosis of the skin: the skin as a “psychic envelope” that ensures protection against excess stimuli, allows the development of the senses, and acts as a support and containment to the feeling of self.

 

The sphere of law

In Roman law, the “limes” in Roman law marks the boundary between Roman civilisation and the barbarians who cannot be integrated (barbarians are those who stammer, who do not speak Latin, the language of the fathers).

Throughout the Middle Ages, during the Empire and during the Papacy, the border did not represent something essential because all the space belonged to the Emperor thanks to the investiture of the Pope.

It was only with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which put an end to the Thirty Years’ War and effectively created the modern absolute state, that the concept of the border returned and the modern border as it is understood today was born.

In Roman civil law, property, the “dominium ex iure Quiritium”,  was recognised only  to “cives”  and only on Italian soil; defined by the classics as absolute law that extended “usque ad coeleum et ad inferos”, it was protected by robust actions to defend the borders (“actio finium regundorum”). It was often granted as a war prize, but with the disintegration of the Roman Empire small property almost completely disappeared and already with the barbarian invasions, in the Middle Ages, everything had returned to the property of the occupying sovereign.

With the fall of feudalism, private property was reborn as a positive concept for the emerging bourgeoisie (according to the French Civil Code of 1804  “the right of property is that which belongs to every citizen to enjoy and dispose of his goods, his income, the fruit of his work and his industriousness”); already in the Napoleonic Code it is stated that property is recognised within the limits of laws and regulations; and also in the Italian Civil Code of 1942 property is recognised “within the limits and with the observance of the obligations established by the legal system”.

After all, feudalism dies when it is reborn and private property is recognised. The border divides what belongs to the Prince from what belongs to the bourgeoisie. Among private individuals, “u limmitu” (a word from the archaic Sicilian language), acts as a boundary, it is what separates my property from the property of others.

And yet, in modern civil law, the concept of property has always had limits, it must have boundaries and it must be crossable in the general interest. This is stated in art. 832 of the Italian Civil Code of 1942. According to art. 42 paragraph 2 of the Italian Constitution of 1947, the right to property is not a right without limits, it must be based on the principle of solidarity, and it is necessary to impose limits on private property for purposes of social solidarity (the so-called social function of property), these limitations must allow society to grow economically beyond the selfish needs of the individual owner.

 

The border as a place of separation within our society

Be careful, sometimes borders have crept into our own society: what else are prisons and asylums? They are confined places where the inside/outside exchange is difficult, complex, sometimes hindered and marginalised. The best sociology and the most modern psychiatry, however, indicate that the resocialisation of the prisoner passes through the exchange with “the outside”; just as mental distress is cushioned by social inclusion (see the illuminating pages of Franco Basaglia on this point).

Turning to modern international law, it is noted that the ambiguity, and above all the danger, of the concept of the border that delimits the nation is back. That of nation is an idea of romantic derivation: as a unity of language, religion and traditions, but it is an equally dangerous idea because it is at the basis of nationalism and its authoritarian drifts: think of the exaltation of the Aryan race by the Nazis, of the magnificent roots of the Roman Empire exalted by fascism and the examples could unfortunately continue. In the early 1900s, this concept of the nation was opposed, without any success, by the utopia of socialist internationalism, the borderless homeland of workers all over the world, an idea, in turn, sadly exploited by the Bolshevik revolution and Stalinism.

Borders are often drawn for political reasons, as often for economic reasons, and the economic question is often deliberately confused with the religious or historical-political one. Think of the border disputes over international waters for the exploitation of marine resources, or more recently, the war for the conquest of space. On the other hand, we cannot fail to point out how difficult international negotiations are for the protection of the seas and the atmosphere from pollution, where seas and atmosphere cannot but be considered as universal goods, without borders, functional to the very existence of the human race.

For the conquest of the border, wars are fought and deaths are caused, and this is why I am increasingly beginning to distance myself from the concept of border, as is now openly outlined in this article.

 

The open society

I can say without hesitation that the border must be crossable: the border that can be crossed is functional creating of an open, multicultural, multiethnic society.

And yet, despite having taken sides, I cannot ignore that this ambiguous and dual concept of border also has limited positive aspects: it allows the preservation of traditions, cultural heritage, the teachings of the fathers, it is a barrier to the vulgarity of the world and resistant to the so-called liquid society described by Zigmunt Bauman.

According to Zigmunt Bauman, in fact, we Westerners live in a “liquid society”: an environment without definitions, where everything mixes and merges with something other than itself, producing a single media soup. Liquids dilate, mix, have no boundaries.

 After all, respect for other people’s traditions and cultures is respect for the border.

Integration is therefore the solution that is perhaps not definitive and perhaps not a salvation: it represents the virtuous fusion between two cultures without one becoming hegemonic over the other: this is how the United States of America was born and became great, mixing Irish, Italians, Germans and Jews.

But the West is burdened by the sin and the unhealed wound of colonialism that is still at the root of the Third World’s serious backwardness and at the root of continuous and ever dormant disputes and claims. In fact, it is difficult to talk about integration in countries where poverty still reigns and where the economic and cultural disasters of colonialism are still visible.

Recall that for years the American colonialists denied the culture of the American Indians and the Spaniards did the same in South America. More recently, think of the extermination of the Armenians or the Kurds. The systematic eradication of indigenous cultures has sometimes been carried out by genocide. It is difficult for the West to allow us to forget such outrages.

A dominant culture must not only respect minorities but must also be able to tolerate aspects of “other” cultures that are often not easily understood.

There are many examples: think of the problem of the veil of Islamic women resolved in a heterogeneous way within the EU, often banned because it is seen as an intolerable harassment of Islamic women, while in the perspective of the Parisian “banlieues” it represents the affirmation of an identity. In Iran, on the other hand, the imposition of the veil remains an authoritarian act of rejection of Western culture, considered dangerous for religious customs, so a real civil war is being fought in which women are the absolute protagonists. In modern Turkey, until the advent of Erdogan, the state, which wanted to be secular, forbade women to wear the veil at public activities and in universities because there was a desire for modernisation and integration. Today in Turkey, the veil is back in fashion. It is equally difficult in our eyes to accept certain forms of “jus corrigenda” typical of certain patriarchal cultures. Think again of the controversy over the ban on the use of pork in state school cafeterias or the practice of circumcision.

Beyond easy and populist slogans (“immigrants must respect our rules and must adapt to our culture…”), we “dominants” must also have the ability to set limits that are often not always shared by the majority: just to give an example, think of the ban on displaying the crucifix in public offices. Of course, the crucifix identifies a large and millenary community such as the Christian one, but if we want to be truly “open” and affirm the secularity of the state and the equality of all religions before the state, then we need to take a small step back.

However, efforts must be made to understand and the best Western models must be promoted, without imposing them. There is, in fact, a non-negotiable core of Western values, encapsulated in the 1950 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which we must be proud defenders of. And here the border once again takes on a positive value of defending fundamental values that characterises us as a virtuous community that, after the disaster of the two world wars, recognises itself and is founded on those values inscribed in the Convention.

The only boundaries we must preserve are those of the freedom of others, of property, culture and the language of others.

In this sense, applying the principles of the Convention, and of other national and supranational fundamental charters, means attributing to positive law an educational function. The same thing happened in Italy when “reparative marriage” was abolished or the so-called abandonment of the marital roof was decriminalized.

 

The issue of immigration

The concept of border leads us to confront the great, pretended border that perhaps never existed represented by the Mediterranean Sea, which has always been a place of exchange of civilizations: from the Phoenicians, to the Greeks, to the Romans to the Arabs.

Today we want there to be an undrawn border beyond which many peoples fleeing war and famine must not cross. Syrians fleeing a bloody internal war that has already caused more than 430,000 deaths must not pass; Eritreans and Somalis who are weakened by years of wars, famines and dictatorships that in Eritrea impose an endless military conscription on men and women must not pass; sub-Saharans or Pakistanis whose living conditions are miserable must not pass through (just think that the annual per capita income in countries such as Pakistan stands at $1,505, in Ivory Coast at $2,549 or in neighboring Tunisia at $3,800, compared to $35,657 for the annual per capita income in Italy and $43,658 in France); The Bangladeshis in their country of 170,000,000 inhabitants live crammed into a space that is three times smaller than Italy, afflicted by floods, where there are 50,000,000 people living in poverty and where 40 % of the population lives on less than two dollars a day.

But before accusing ourselves of populism and giving ourselves the usual handy lesson, “let’s help them at home”, I want to recall some positive norms only formally signed by almost all the states of the world:

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948: “Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of any State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his own country.”

Art. 14 c. I Dec. Univ.: Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution “.

And what can be said of our Constitution, which not only recognises a broad right of asylum (art. 10 of the Constitution). “a foreigner who is prevented in his country from effectively exercising the democratic freedoms guaranteed by the Italian Constitution has the right to asylum in the territory of the Republic under the conditions established by law”) but recognises the right of our citizens to emigrate (Art. 35 c. III “… recognises the freedom of emigration, subject to the obligations laid down by law in the general interest…).

If, therefore, there is a positive right to emigrate, if you will allow me to provoke you, there are no borders, no frontiers, no barriers, no walls.  And as Pope Francis said on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall: we need bridges, not walls!

And how odious it is the distinction that we Westerners strive to emphasise between those who can be recognized as “asylum seekers” and those who are only “migrants of necessity” who must be rejected.

Of course, this is not to deny the right of each individual state to regulate immigration, but as the Italian Constitutional Court pointed out in its judgment no. 105/2001: “… Although the public interests affecting immigration are manifold and however much they may be perceived as serious problems of security and public order linked to uncontrolled migratory flows, the universal character of personal freedom cannot be affected in the slightest, which, like the other rights that the Constitution proclaims inviolable, cannot be affected in the slightest. It is up to individuals not as participants in a particular political community, but as human beings.”

 

From the border to the ghetto

Allow me now to make one last comment on what I have now revealed to be my negative judgment on the border: how much horror is emanating from the Gaza Strip, which is nothing more than the violent imposition of a border that tightens like a noose around the neck of the Palestinian civilian population and has caused as many as 20,000 deaths to date, including at least 8,000 children.

This is not the place and the time to reflect on the causes of the war between Palestinians and Israelis, but it seems paradoxical to me how Israelis have forgotten the suffering inflicted on them by the Nazis in the Jewish ghettos of half of Europe: today the new ghetto is the Gaza Strip! The extremes connect.

Fortunately, it leaves me with a glimmer of hope, which comes, as always, from culture and dialogue, and I am referring to the so-called Israeli writers of dialogue: Abraham Yehoshua, Amos Oz (who already in 1967 said “even an inevitable occupation is an unjust occupation”); David Grossman, advocate of coexistence between Arabs and Israelis.

Two peoples in two states, it is hoped: at this moment, the impassable border is not the one defended by tanks and barbed wire, but the one erected by religious absolutism and economic selfishness. The certainties of the Jewish religion against the absolutism of Islam; the Western wealth of Israel and the poverty of the Palestinians; the arrogance of the Jewish settlers and the lack of water and arable land of the Palestinians… and we could go on…

But now it is time for me to stop after rambling on too much.

The Human Rights of Privileged Victims. A Marxist Satire on Shouting Matches

Conference proceedings (quintuple non-blind peer review), , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Religious divides have been the source of many a bloody conflict. Even today, across the world, atrocities are committed, among others, by Hindus over Christians, Buddhists over Muslims, Jews over Muslims, Hindus over Muslims, Muslims over Hindus, Muslims over Christians, Christians over Muslims, Sunni Muslims over Shia Muslims and, in a tiny corner of Europe, Protestant Christians over Catholic ones and vice versa.[1] Who benefits from all such division and tragedy? Who gains from the attendant ruthless violation of human rights, sometimes on an egregious scale?*

Assuming here, for sheer argument’s sake, that the traditional Marxist answer to that question is correct, then there is one ‘classic’ class cui bono accrue all such division and tragedy: the bourgeoisie. Who are they? This term is a bit passé today, I must admit. “The 1%”, “the corporate elite”, “the job creators”, or just “the rich” would be more popular expressions in contemporary parlance. Had he been more articulate, even the Dude would have used the old b-word, to Lenin‘s and many classicists‘ plausible surprise.

The concept is not passé, however. The idea that the ruling class preserves its power by keeping the ruled ones internally divided by means of, inter alia, ideological decoys and distracting identities, is as old as Philip II of Macedon (382–336 BC), who lived long before  Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Marxism, and is said by ancient tradition to have uttered the momentous phrase: “διαίρει καὶ βασίλευε” (“divide and rule”). Awareness of social hierarchy, the ensuing concentration of power and the political-cultural techniques for their preservation did not wait for Engels’ and Garibaldi’s century to emerge. Fooling and frying people at will, by pitting them against one another, have been practised for millennia.

In light of today’s levels of skewed market power, de facto regressive taxation, immense wealth disparity reminiscent of the Belle Époque, fantastic unearned incomes by way of financial rent, mass unemployment, workers’ precariousness, widespread de-unionisation, technological replacement of the workforce, growing underemployment of vainly trained young minds, discriminatory substantive inequality before the law, and the concomitant absence of large-scale socio-political dissent, there seems to be no reason to believe that such a well-tested means of social control should not be at work in contemporary societies.

Therein, the class of billionaires and their various corporate manifestations have been thriving unchecked, as proven repeatedly—and at the very least—by a plethora of unpunished financial and fiscal scandals of truly global proportions: Worldcom, Enron, Forex, Libor, Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, etc. Not to mention the credit lifelines and special bail-outs granted to gargantuan banks and their wealthy owners after the self-inflicted international collapse of 2008, while common people were crushed by austerity  packages across continents in order to pay for such generous rescue missions.[2] When money talks, human rights walk… off a cliff. What is more, the very same billionaires have often taken direct control of the political game qua party leaders, government officials, cabinet ministers and populist trailblazers. Not even Marx would have expected the super-rich to become so shameless in their command of political institutions.

At the same time, Marx’s ghost, the ghost of communism per his 1848 Manifesto, not to mention the now-mythical chimeras of internationalism and mass revolution, have all been eerily vacant from the world’s stage, despite Marx’s Capital being picked up from under a shuggly desk by a French data-cruncher and adapted for the 21st century, in which even the most polite and prudent British media acknowledge the resurgent affirmation of nothing less than fascism.

When religion cannot do good enough a job at keeping people internally divided, viable alternatives exist: race, nationality; region-, party-, or even football-based affiliation can be  as effective. The New York City draft riots of 1863, pitting poor Irish immigrants against poor blacks, while well-off Americans could avoid being sent to battle by paying a set fee, are just one historical example among many. (These days, that draft may lead people to the cinemas, rather than to the streets.)

Again and again, poor people that would be better off by joining numbers, forces, and concerted efforts against the tiny minority exploiting them, waste instead their best energies and, at times, their livelihood and life, by fighting among themselves—and against designated ‘others’. Frequently, trouble is taken by the truly troubled in order to suppress the much-maligned “troublemakers”, who are in fact the only ones trying to find a solution to their woes, e.g. ‘anachronistic’ trade unionists and ‘pie-in-the-sky’ left-wing intellectuals. Turkeys do love their Christmas holidays.

About twenty years before The Communist Manifesto, the liberal and Catholic novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) described most vividly the long-lived logic and common practice of divide et impera—Caesar having learnt King Philip’s lesson—in a rustic allegory of his. The novelist depicts Renzo, the poor, rural, male protagonist of Manzoni’s most famous book, I promessi sposi, holding several bickering capons by their legs. That’s the beginning; let me explain.

Renzo is carrying these poor capons as his only means of payment to a well-off city lawyer, whom Renzo intends to hire in the attempt to redress the wrongs that he and his betrothed—the poor, rural, and female Lucia—have been suffering from a local nobleman that, to the young couple’s great misfortune, fancies Lucia well beyond the boundaries of common decency and aristocratic gentlemanship. Manzoni notes that, had the capons been a little more intelligent, they would have started picking the hand that kept them captive, therefore regaining their freedom. Instead, the capons fought among themselves and ended up being delivered with great ease to their recipient. The lawyer enjoyed a few good meals out of these silly animals, but also failed to help Renzo in his human, far-too-human plight.

Rather than Christmas turkeys, Renzo’s capons, or “i capponi di Renzo”, have become a proverbial admonition in Italian culture, though little followed its inherent wisdom may be in the country’s daily habits. Despite Manzoni’s hefty novel being a mandatory reading in the nation’s secondary schools, millions of Italians can still be kept internally divided in all sorts of ways, such as: Northerners versus Southerners, natives versus immigrants, Catholic versus secular, progressive versus conservative, private-sector versus public-sector, and old versus young.

As concerns most contemporary Western nations, gender is being used in the same manner, especially within middle-class environments—even inside academic circles. Men and women spend endless time and effort squabbling about the so-called “male privilege” and an alleged set of attendant disparities, rather than combining their efforts in order to pursue traditional left-wing aims: better wages for all, better working conditions for everyone, sensible monetary and fiscal policies by State authorities, true economic security and autonomy, a life-saving stop to the all-embracing profit-motive that is destroying the planet, and emancipatory self-ownership cum democratic self-stewardship. Such squabbles split regularly the front of the exploited many into two warring fronts: men versus women, women versus men or, in the shouting matches that frequently result thereof, “radicals” versus “right-thinking” persons, or “feminists” versus “male chauvinists” (aka “sexists”, “patriarchs”, “pigs”, etc.), depending on the side one is on.

Sophisticated intellects and fair-minded individuals might plausibly avoid being tossed into these camps or reduced to either of them, but only with great effort and with no hope of broader success. First of all, even well-paid academics can utter absurdities such as “fucking is entirely a male act designed to affirm the reality and power of the phallus, of masculinity”.[3] Secondly, whatever veritable genius the elect may occasionally possess, the same elect have very little effect on the daily shouting matches within public and private bodies. As Socrates, Hypatia and Thomas More knew dangerously well, unmerciful isolation is the price to be paid for uncommon ingenuity.

Shall we mention the now-ubiquitous mass media, where the most vocal and publicised shouting matches occur? There, “male privilege” or, for that matter, “patriarchy”, are not carefully dissected analytical tools, but massive clubs to swing around and smash men’s (and a few allegedly ‘brainwashed’ women’s) heads with, whichever diverse and sophisticated sets of beliefs may be held inside those heads. Having a prick makes you a dick, or vice versa. There is no escape. There is no alternative. It sounds like Maggie Thatcher, but it claims to be ‘progressive’.

Quick and effective communication cannot operate too many distinctions, not even basic ones such as the one separating individuals responsible for certain misdeeds and the gender to which they belong. “Men do this…”, “men are like that”, “men…”; and, if young, “boys”. Black Americans, Southern Italians, German Jews and Hungarian Roma know far too well how systemically hurtful all such fallacious yet very catchy sweeping generalisations can be. Women should do too, as a sad matter of historical fact such as reduction to one big ‘lump’. Even clever individuals may fall into such sweeping prejudices, which social opinion praises already. Everyday parlance welcomes cognitive dissonance.

Under this respect, the mass media’s behaviourally instigated emulation becomes far too easily the social norm, including the ever-present social media, unlike the academically elect’s painstaking theologies, theodicies and theogonies. Snapchat is much more impactful than Spinoza’s Ethics, not even when the latter is simplified. Go to any party meeting, political rally, activist gathering or well-meaning workshop on gender relations, if you don’t believe me. Or listen to the telly, to undergraduate students, to your neighbours and taxi drivers. Or go to the movies, read your old schoolmates’ Twitter pearls of wisdom or the most popular memes on Facebook, and explore the real world of apparent common sense.

Quite simply, oversimplification is overly simple for social-media algorithmic simpletons to sample… As a sage from Savona had once observed, flesh-and-blood people make excellent straw-men, sadly enough. Or straw-women, for that matter. The same people make good harlequins too. Splitting hairy dogma and deep-thinking are the job of few, fastidious, profound Biblicists. Apart from them, most people go by a handful of simple formulas. Dogma is handy. Life gives them little room for little else. Under such far-too-human conditions, erudite subtleties get drowned into the greater sea of common slogans and, eventually, disappear from view.

Out in the open, things are even more straightforward: erudite subtleties do not count. Rhetoric, instead, matters; and it matters more than anything, for rhetoric can truly make and re-make the laws, whether written or unwritten. That is why, inside and around political parties and governments, there are more PR professionals and spin doctors than there are disciplinary experts and concerned academics. The situation is analogous to the superficial but immensely powerful liberal vernacular pervading the economic and business understanding, and decision-making, of contemporary societies at all levels, from the small entrepreneur’s self-perception to the mantras of well-dressed European commissioners. (I use “liberal” in the European sense, not the American one.) Let me explain this one too.

Bookworms and Adam Smith (1723–1790) scholars know perfectly well how critical the founder of modern economics was of corporations, the greed of business-people, their nefarious influence over law-making, or their blindness to the need for banking regulation. Nevertheless, most self-declared liberals today are ready to utter Smith’s name like the revered and wondrous name of a prophet of old, without having read a single page penned by him, and they will defend today’s de facto corporate oligopolies in the name of unfettered “free trade”. All this, it should be noted, while believing with earnest sincerity in the providential blessings of the “invisible hand”. Armed with few, well-tested commonplaces, these unthinking liberals will launch into trite pro-market-versus-pro-State tirades, or right-versus-left political arguments. More often than not, given the acquired matter-of-fact character of the commonplaces at issue, they will win the day… Plus the scary night that follows . One well-written catechism by a committed preacher is more powerful than a million great articles by the most honest scholars. Rhetoric, like love, conquers all.

In the men-versus-women analogue, the chauvinist camp includes even some women that, apparently, don’t realise that they have been duped by patriarchy and are actually not free, though they do think that they are free and act without visible restraint, committing crimes against their gender such as wearing high heels, becoming Catholic nuns, showing a cleavage on a Facebook photograph, or buying copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. (All these  cases being peculiar anecdotes that I can recall from my years in Canada and Iceland.) Even a well-educated and ambitious woman becoming a judge on the US Supreme Court can be so duped, it would seem, were we to listen to certain shouts.

Be as it may that the little sisters consent, the big ones resent; hence the former ought to repent, and nobody is content. The overall meaning is simple. Some women are more equal than others, and the former can tell the latter what is actually good for them to think, do, and be—like older sisters to younger ones, or patriarchs of old. As to those articulate, unrepentant women that complain about this peculiar state of affairs, such as Ellen Willis (1941–2006),  Christina Sommers (b. 1950), Wendy McElroy (b. 1951), Janice Fiamengo (b. 1946) or Camille Paglia (b. 1947) in today’s academia, they risk ending up being reviled as “Nazi”, akin to Rush Limbaugh (b. 1951) and, inexorably, as “patriarchal”. Even Erin Pizzey (b. 1939) can find no refuge today, while Phyllis Chesler (b. 1940) is attacked cruelly by her elder sisters for admitting that women can be just as cruel as men, though in a voice of their own.

Ironically, in the midst of all this “you’re a Nazi” bantering, a duly reworded chapter from Hitler’s Mein Kampf got published in a proudly feminist, peer-reviewed, academic journal. A little later, the leading lesbian activist of the Gallic nation, Alice Coffin, happened to argue that male artists ought to be boycotted because, well… they are male. This is quite an eerie reminder of the hostile discrimination–albeit, luckily, not yet of the swift elimination–experienced by left-wing and Jewish artists, both male and female, in 1940s France. Just think about it. Why boycott anyone who happens to have a penis? Hasn’t discrimination because of crooked noses, skin pigmentation and red flags been enough of a cautionary lesson? Evidently not in today’s France. Alas, it ain’t Switzerland. All the while, Gallic women’s shadow projections are sold as shining progress. Maybe that’s why even noted psychotherapists have been worrying about the seething violence of some older sisters. And the fights go on…

The global lesson to be learnt from all this shouting aloud, and about, is fairly basic, and it is too far from new. Pluralism and free speech are liked by many self-styled “progressives” only insofar as, and for as long as, other people agree with them. (In line with the analogy regarding the economic sphere, try running a country without McDonald’s or no private ownership, and then check whether the ‘liberal’ countries of the world leave you alone or not.) Christianity may be a thing of the past. God Himself (Herself?) dead. Narrow-mindedness and intolerance, though, can still prosper unabated. Dogmas come veritably from all sides, in all colours, shapes, sizes, and flavours. Perhaps, it is a matter of old urges finding new channels and outer shapes to keep expressing themselves. Who knows? (Yet admitting ignorance is precisely one of the rarest attitudes to be found in these fights.)

Not that patriarchs, male prejudice and male privilege may have not existed at some point in history, or may not exist somewhere on Earth today. Saudi Arabia has remained to the very present a hellish place for women, and so do several other oil-rich countries in the Middle East that have glorious business relations with the ‘liberal’ West. (Again, when money talks, human rights walk off a cliff.) Across the globe, there are indeed some nations where women are regularly beaten, have little access to healthcare, are not allowed to pursue any education worthy of note, and cannot walk in the streets without male chaperones for fear of being assaulted. Nasty patriarchs and their stunted children are still around. There is no denying.

If I look at today’s developed world, however, I see no comparably glaring male privilege in, say, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, France, or Canada. (Please note that I do not include here my native country, Italy, where women are still being fired for such an outrageous misdemeanour as getting pregnant.) It is not a matter of there being no inequality at any level. Some inequality does exist but, if we look closely enough, it cuts both ways, not just one way. And the cuts can be sore ones. Let me be very clear on this point.

As it is deployed or implied in daily life, the much-shouted-at “male privilege” is a matter of there being—or not being—blanket better conditions for persons who were born male, similarly to the way in which a person would enjoy blanket better conditions by being born into an aristocratic family in 17th-century France, or in a 1% family today. Anyone who was born in the aristocracy back then, or who is born in plutocratic families today, enjoyed and enjoys better food, longer lives, legal and muscled protection from physical harm, access to enterprising credit, top-level education, conspicuous leisure, better healthcare, and a thousand more life-enabling resources that are regularly denied to others. The well-born person’s benefits, aka “advantages”, over the rest of society are notable and blatant. That’s privilege, in a nutshell. And that is what ordinary men and women take it to be, quite reasonably. Think, for example, of the (in)famous poisoner Marie-Madeleine Marguerite D’Aubray (1630–1676) in the ancien régime, or of the noted businesswoman Ivanka Trump (b. 1981) today. These are neither straw-men nor straw-women: they are, or were, real persons of real substance.

Logic can be of some help here. One of the standard forms of reasoning, identified since ancient times, is the so-called “modus tollens”, according to which if, from a certain condition A follows inescapably another condition B, and condition B is not the case, then it has to be concluded that A is not the case either. Formally, A -> B, –B, ergo –A. If I drink the hemlock like Socrates, then I feel ill and die shortly thereafter; I am alive and well; therefore, I have not drunk the hemlock. This much logic is not phallic. Contradicting it is, however, fallacious. If there is “male privilege”, then there must be conspicuous benefit or blatant advantage for men. If such a conspicuous benefit or blatant advantage does not occur, then “male privilege” doesn’t occur either, even if the phrase keeps being repeated ad nauseam.

In today’s advanced societies, if someone is born male, he is more likely to die younger, to suffer from mental illness leading to suicide, to die in combat, to die on the workplace, to be the victim of violent crime, to be the perpetrator of violent crime, to serve time in prison and, in prison, to suffer rape. (Go and check your national statistics.) Living nastier, brutish and shorter lives is no conspicuous benefit or blatant advantage, whatever creatively postmodern way or cunning ceteris-paribus conditions we may choose to look at it. There could be still some advantages at some level, but they would be neither notable nor blatant, and even less assuredly blanket, insofar as men’s longevity, physical integrity, mental health and law-abidingness signal losses compared to women’s.

Let me be redundant. There may well be benefits that originate from being born a man. They can be small things, such as the likelihood of being allowed to play contact sports when children or swear publicly with impunity. They can be bigger ones, such as increased chances of becoming a top businessperson or politician, smashing the c/g-lass ceiling, and belonging to the 1%—if that can be considered a good thing. (Though certainly a mainstream aspiration, I wonder what Marx would say about it.) Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013), Cristina Kirchner (b. 1953), Carly Fiorina (b. 1954), Theresa May (b. 1956), Christine Lagarde (b. 1956) and, for a while, Rita Crundwell (b. 1953), got up there, though being merely part of a growing minority.

Yet, even if we reached a 50/50 point of equilibrium in the upper echelons, there would be still male benefits as well as female benefits, for being born female would nonetheless increase one’s chances of wearing skirts as well as trousers, or of being addressed politely by strangers as a child—not to mention living the longer, healthier and more law-abiding lives that were just mentioned. Gender roles, as debatable and mutable as we may wish them to be in our societies, imply in concrete reality different gains, not just different losses, for both sexes. As the most important issues are rarely black-and-white matters, so is social advantage far more nuanced than the unrelenting yet simplistic male-versus-female opposition entails. When essential dimensions of human well-being are considered, such as physical, mental and moral integrity, Western women are on the winning side.

There is another way to look at this fact and appreciate its historical roots. We are no more patrician Rome or Puritanical Virginia, nor today’s Afghanistan, by any stretch whatsoever of the imagination. And that is fantastic! In many developed nations, the suffragettes, the witches-that-returned, and the brave activists that fought for women’s health and education in times of actual female segregation have finally won, big time. We should acknowledge and celebrate their achievements, for they occurred against all kinds of odds and enmities. However, their feisty descendants, as well-meaning as they may be today, repeat slogans and employ concepts that are factually anachronistic in wealthy Western nations like, say, Iceland, Holland, Canada or Norway. (How right was Veblen in claiming that today’s common sense is yesterday’s facts!) “Patriarchy”, as far as such blessed countries are concerned, belongs to history’s dustbin, like “Donatism” or the divine right of kings. There may be “vestigial patriarchal elements” that “are being weeded out”, as Laura Kipnis wrote not long ago, but “women have power aplenty”. The war was won!

Meanwhile, the Luddites, Owenites, Marxists, revisionists, Trotskyists and middle-way Swedish social-democrats have seen their battles end up in humiliating defeats, to the point that, in today’s North America, no politician dares to speak of the “working class” in public debates, lest they are accused of nothing less than frightening “socialism”. Only the “middle class” is allowed to exist, verbally, in the country that Donald Trump promised to make great again. In Europe, these dangerous two words are still audible, though a non-working class is actually the chief problem, because Europe’s working class has been emigrating to China since the 1980s, under the banner of “globalisation”. Even among self-declared “left-wing radicals”, when a picture or a video of a corporate board of directors is shown, the rallying cry is no longer “capitalists!”, “bourgeois!”, “fat cats!”,  but “men!”–or, in a seemingly more nuanced yet equally misfiring way, “white men!” That most “men” and “white men” still make up a good chunk of the “proletariat”  has evidently been forgotten. Conveniently, while rage is vented at every and any man or white man, the concentrated elite of actual exploiters still gets away scot free with their exploitation.

Classic concepts can become classified items. Despite its relevance vis-à-vis today’s gross inequality, the very Marxian notion of class has been largely silenced, while “gender” enjoys much more popularity and media attention. Race, nationality and religious creed were very popular too, in previous times. And it is not difficult to understand why, at least for Marx or for the Dude, who would ask, if he had ever read Seneca: cui prodest? Since the cruel, neglectful parents are away skiing on the Alps, or sipping Martinis in the Caribbean, then the understandably upset big sister can kick her younger brothers in the groin to vent her rage. I mean, her wee brothers have a Johnson, just like her dad, who keeps enjoying himself and forgetting about his children. That silly dangling bit of flesh must be really bad… Who do you think benefits from this sorry state of affairs: the brothers?

Though commonplace in shouting matches, most of the enduring Western talk of “male privilege” is, at heart, a remnant of a by-gone past and a misrepresentation of a much more toxic reality, where the one and only true callous and outrageous privilege is that of a few rich family networks directing everyone else’s life in order to maximise these networks’ take to a massive extent, irrespective of gender. If life is a valley of tears, then both men and women are crying aplenty. About the 99% of the entire society, we could say, while occupying Wall Street.

Who, for example, can lead his or her life without spending much, if not most of it, working for someone else, who has the power to hire, fire, disenfranchise and impoverish them?  (Back in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy had no qualms in equating this condition with that of slavery itself). Who, whether a man or a woman, can afford to be indifferent to the boom-bust hot-money cycles that financial moguls and their clients, whether men or women, have been unleashing onto the world’s nations since the end of the Bretton-Woods system? Who, after the crash of 2008, can say in good conscience to have been left untouched and undamaged by the gigantic waves of transnational speculation engulfing the global economy? Who, in constitutionally free and independent countries, has not heard the governments justify their austere, belt-tightening policies by reference to genderless  cruel deities such as “the markets”, “the creditors”, “foreign direct investment”, or “international competition”?

The notion of “male privilege” flies in the face of much theoretical and experimental literature, in which the negative consequences for men of traditional gender roles have been identified, again and again. This is something that ordinary people have no great difficulty to grasp. Stunted emotional development, personal unhappiness, limited self-expression, lack of empathy, karoshi and additional “maladies of the soul”, as Julia Kristeva (b. 1941) would dub them, have been studied and catalogued in the accounts of what exactly standard assumptions and stereotypes about men do to men themselves, from their early childhood to their deathbed, or deathdesk, whether such assumptions and stereotypes are held by women or by other men.[4]

If you have read my satirical piece to this point, then you must have realised that I am a moaning man. Ipso facto, if not ipso dicto, I am not consistent with my gender stereotypes. Real men don’t whine. Only wimps do that. But I don’t care. Quite the opposite, I believe wholeheartedly that standard, if not even archetypal, masculinity can be toxic. Nevertheless, I cannot but reason as well that, if standard gender roles are toxic to men, if not to both sexes, then they cannot be advantageous, at the same time, to men at large. Either option has to be dropped. Self-poisoning precludes self-engrossing privilege, and vice versa.

Rhetorically, speaking of “male privilege” and, for that matter, calling the bourgeois a “patriarch”, obscure, culpably, the fundamental class element at play in our societies. This is the element that is etiologically crucial to understand the suffering pervading our societies. In parallel, the same linguistic-conceptual practices overemphasise the gender element, casting undue suspicion upon men qua men, and therefore splitting the oppressed camp into mutually opposed men and women. In keeping with the business analogue, usages of “patriarchy” as oppressive of both men and women are as rhetorically flawed as the orthodox economists’ insistence on using “goods”, “efficiency” and “optimality” as value-neutral terms. Long ago, Jeremy Bentham argued that both dyslogistic and eulogistic words are springs of action. Pick a different term, please, and reduce equivocation. Rhetoric. as I said, matters a lot in the real world.

Allow me to repeat one thing. Logically, to state the negative character of traditional gender roles for men themselves, and insist at the same time on the existence of “male privilege”, is a contradiction. Worse than fallacious reasoning, however, is the persistence of traditional male gender roles, which are enforced by women too, and the combination  of these roles with the growing hypocrisy and the double standards that the much-desired empowerment of women has made possible. As the ethicist John Kekes (b. 1936) has often remarked in his works, granting more freedom to more people—empowered women included—means granting more opportunity for the evils of cruelty or, as Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) would poetically word them, the evils of ‘‘possession”, “appropriation” and “domination’’.[5] Truly, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

It all starts from an early age, by the way, as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) had rightfully lamented long ago. This time, though, it works in reverse, at least as far as genders are concerned. The list is endless. Let me indulge in it a little. It is somewhat amusing—albeit maybe not for the young men who grow up under such confusing premises, or the older men who get trapped by their paradoxes, especially in the Nordic countries that I have come to know in the last twenty years. Hopefully, my long and strange list will get someone thinking about the sadly neglected male teardrops drenching life’s valley, where they join the well-researched female ones. So, here comes the list, then… Well, no, not right away. First, I must digress a little. (After all, I like very much Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.) Fun must be earned. There is still one serious issue that we have to consider. Specifically, what’s the cure to our boys’ alleged avoidance of crying? Crying?

Boys do cry; but more often than not they do it in hiding, behind doors. Doing so openly would cause them to be derided and dismissed by women—not just by men—as unmanly moaners, in yet another crippling instance of traditional gender roles and expectations, according to which boys don’t cry unless they are sissies. Virility does not parade vulnerability. And yet boys and men are people too. They can be vulnerable. They can be victims. Crying. More crying.

Think of the levels of pain involved: failing at school, unemployed, underemployed, prone to crime or substance abuse, and likely candidates to suicide, these male human beings are losers in the competitive game of society, which is then said to be skewed in their favour. Hence, they are losers twice, for they managed to lose despite being unfairly favoured ab initio. Moreover, these twice-losers may not show openly their pain, for “real men” having any chance of impressing any self-respecting female are expected to be stoical. If men cry, which they do, then they must do it privately, and quietly, so that the rest of society, women in primis, may pretend that men are actually not crying. I mean, really, it is enough for a man to get the flu and complain about it, for this man to be scorned mercilessly, especially by women. And so thrice it goes. Losers, losers, losers.

Again, some sophisticated intellects and fair-minded individuals might avoid being so callous to suffering men. Male tears may not be dismissed indifferently by all members of the ‘fair sex’ as insufferable, privileged people’s whining.  Perhaps, behind those tears and the label “man”, there are actual living persons who genuinely suffer. Thus, occasionally, some deeply intelligent women do realise it and show genuine compassion, including some highly perceptive female sexologists in France. Many other women, who claim to be committed feminists, have openly stated that they would be happy to sip on them instead. Screw the losers! Their suffering is immaterial. What matters is that they are ‘men’. As such, they cannot but be the enemy. Conflicts don’t call for compassion. They call for aggression.

Let us be honest with ourselves. Weakness is not a selling point for men. Compassion kills passion. Every day, around the world, pained men learn this painful truth by way of additional doses of pain. Even frankly smart gals prefer fairly stereotypical guys, if you are brave enough to read the Gul’s numbers on the subject, inter alia. Statistics possess a cold kind of cruelty. Yet, they do nothing but photographing that which is already well known. As amply shown by men’s lived experiences and by mainstream media, weak men make a poor catch and catch poorly themselves. They are not simply rejected, but resented, for such men cannot be ‘relied upon’, as the old gender stereotype prescribes. And that is something that women keep expecting and demanding of their male partners. The grip of the old gender stereotype, on men’s and women’s minds, is as powerful as the ideal ‘man’ that it continues to depict.

But let us look at a longer list; the one that I had promised. Digressions end, eventually. (Even Sterne’s own bizarre novel has an end.) Here it comes:

  • Girls with trousers are normal; boys wearing a skirt are laughed at, told better, or advised a sex change.
  • Tomboys are cool; effeminate boys the butt of the joke.
  • Boisterous girls are future adventurers in the making; boisterous boys an ill-educated nuisance.
  • A girl squad is worth celebrating in pop songs; a group of teenage boys can’t even be allowed into a shopping mall playing Muzak.
  • Man-eating dancing queens and pussycat dolls can tease at will, break hearts with spears, lose them in the game, and do it again; boys are expected to endure it all and be thankful, reminiscent of male mantises and male spiders.
  • Crass humour about women is sexist; crass humour about men is universal.
  • Young girls, often drunk, vomiting innuendos, or worse, at men in the middle of a busy street on a Saturday night, are having a bit of fun; boys doing the same are intolerable pigs.
  • The same goes for hiring male strippers on a hen night versus hiring female strippers on a stag night: stags are actually pigs, and pigs should not pursue such vile objectifications; hens are excused.
  • An intolerable pig is also a man sleeping around, while a woman doing the same is exploring her sexuality or asserting her independence. While the former is routinely attacked as an emblem of ‘patriarchy’, casting doubt on the latter is ‘slut-shaming’.
  • Women making a pass are seen as a glorious sign of liberation; men making a pass as a threatening step towards harassment.
  • Even alone, a man who masturbates is nothing but a variation on the loser theme: a wanker; a woman who masturbates, instead, is a proud feminist challenging “societal taboos“.
  • Not to mention a lonely man with a sex doll, who cannot but come across as a creepy pig that is better avoided; on the contrary, a lonely woman with a dildo is a liberated person who does not need men for her self-realisation.
  • Women who enjoy porn are emancipated, like the heroines of Sex and the City; men who do the same are, again, pigs.
  • Whatever and however heterosexual men look at people or things, the “male gaze” is always taken to be bad. No such negative assumption is made when talking about female looking or the “queer eye”.
  • Something similar applies to genitalia. Whereas “vagina” is to be celebrated, even by means of monologues, the “phallus” is always bad, especially when combined with language or logic.
  • Male masturbation is a standard comic feature in movies, a truly mechanical affair à la Bergson, or even an insult—neither “wanker” nor “tosser” is ever used qua term of endearment. Female masturbation, yet another token of emancipation.
  • A woman constantly putting her hands on a muscular man sitting beside her gets no rebuke. The touched man’s doing the same, as that muscular man has actually observed, would be called “groping”.
  • Women’s menopausal crises deserve warmth and compassion; men’s midlife crises are the fodder for TV comedies.
  • A wilful man taking the initiative stifles female self-expression and reinforces implicitly gender stereotypes; a man waiting to be asked is an ill-mannered arsehole.
  • With luck, the man who takes the initiative may occasionally be thanked as helpful; without luck, he is guilty of “mansplaining”, at the very least.
  • Women can talk freely for both sexes—or more, given the alleged fluidity and plurality of genders of the human race; men, on their part, can never understand what it is like to be a woman, for they are not women.
  • Women’s unwarranted claims are female intuitions, displays of emotional intelligence, oracular truths cast in a different voice, deep insights; men’s unwarranted claims are prejudices.
  • On the job, a man seeking sexual favours in exchange for professional advantages is deemed to be harassing another—’me-too’ thinks that. A woman offering sexual favours in exchange for professional advantages, though, is still deemed to be the victim of harassment, given the enduring “patriarchy” or the “rape culture” of our age, the inherent “vulnerability” of women, and the “predatory” nature of men.
  • An older woman parading a much younger lover is cheered on: “Go Cathrine!”, says the British historian Lucy Worsley (b. 1973) in her TV documentary, The Empire of the Tsars. No TV personality would dare to utter so publicly “Go Donald!” or “Go Silvio!” on the same grounds.
  • On a similar wavelength, young adult women are (rightfully) given the right to vote, join a trade union, launch a ‘disruptive’ start-up, buy an assault rifle (in parts of the US), decide whether to have an abortion, and found a political party. If they happen to have sex with an older and/or well-established man, however, then they become all of a sudden mentally immature persons who cannot make wise choices and can only be the passive victims of seedy sexual intents. Responsible agency has vanished. Young adult men who end up in bed with the emulators (emulatresses?) of Catherine the Great are hardly ever mentioned, and never discussed.
  • Oppression may be unseen, but eyes matter: men can create a “hostile environment” by merely looking at a woman. The older and more ungainly the man is, the easier this feat of perlocutionary gazing becomes.
  • Words matter too: “cunt” and “bitch” are condemned as sexist, while “dork” and “dickhead” are used with liberality and much gusto.
  • Women who work and see to domestic chores suffer from a double burden; men who do the same are emancipated, almost Swedish.
  • Whether in Sweden or elsewhere, many men may be constantly deferring to capable and/or domineering mothers, elder sisters, grandmothers, aunts, girlfriends, fiancées and wives. These men’s bosses may be women, and so may also be their local MPs, ministers of reference, PMs, presidents and mayors. And yet, almost magically,  these men are regularly said to be reaping the benefits of power-hungry “patriarchy”. Could it ever be the case that matriarchs project their appetite?
  • Men telling women what to do are said to enjoy the privilege of command; women telling men what to do are said to experience the “emotional stress” of organisation.
  • A woman slapping a man in public leads to amused or perplexed curiosity; a man slapping a woman in public leads to cops being called onto the scene.
  • A woman working as a childminder is the image of motherly love; a man doing the same is a potential paedophile whose identity and penal record must be triple-checked—these days, many men are quite simply terrified of talking to children.
  • Female bisexuality is experimental and accepted as part of growing up; male bisexuality is unsettling and rejected as screwing up: the sure path to a woman’s rejection. Only female sexuality is truly allowed to be fluid.
  • Genders are said to be many and pliable; yet “men” are spotted with uncanny ease and blamed for the root of all evils: patriarchy.
  • The mysteries and intricacies of the human psyche don’t exist. Forget about Seneca, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky and Jung. The myriad motives of romance and erotic life are nowhere to be seen. Our hearts are open books. And very short ones to boot. ‘Men’ are power-hungry, sex-crazed pigs. ‘Women’ aren’t. That’s all there is to be known. (Only liberal economists have been able to produce an even more inane philosophical anthropology: Homo oeconomicus. And perhaps, quite ironically, only the most adamant patriarchal Puritans or Wahabis have ever shown as remarkable a propensity to stern moralism, judgmental self-righteousness, Manichean inflexibility and unforgiving dogmatism.)
  • A penniless woman hooked on antidepressants calls rightly for universal pity; a penniless man hooked on alcohol calls sinisterly for the epithet of “loser”.
  • A woman who kills a baby is the embodied tragedy of depression; a man who does the same is a monster to be locked away forever, or fried to a crisp.
  • A woman who commits a crime deserves the attention of teams of psychologists and social workers; a man who is found guilty of the same crime can simply be locked away and forgotten—though his prison rapists may notice him.
  • Male-only priesthood in the Roman Church is condemned as sexist by unbelieving feminists, who celebrate the creed of Finland’s SuperShe island for excluding men.
  • Tearooms packed with women are an oasis of independence; bars packed with men  are a gateway to hell. (The Spirits of Prohibition keep nurturing women’s higher ground, even as they occupy traditional male grounds now.)
  • Women who are afraid of men have good reasons; men who are afraid of women have bad problems.
  • Women’s access to the cohort of corporate multi-millionaires is a profound matter of equality to be fought for by all; the plight of poor mine workers, lorry drivers and bin-men is something that is habitually forgotten by the most vocal female activists. Corporate-executive glass ceilings trump common drone-work cellars.

One does not need to be the much-reviled psychologist Jordan Peterson (b. 1962) to abhor these more-and-more commonplace forms of misandry. (Yes, this word can make sense.) It is enough to be an old-fashioned egalitarian, a compassionate human being, or merely a concerned parent of boys.

New ideas are often old ones resurfacing in new schools and  new guises. Evidently, men still await their emancipation from gender roles that, unlike women’s, have changed little, and are now being endorsed by empowered females that keep assuming that they are still the weaker sex. This mixture makes indeed for a toxic potion, which should be cast away. Whether then to err on the side of conservative prudence and uptight censorship, or on that of liberal freedom and loose pluralism, it is not something that I can settle here. The reader is free to err as s/he wills. Who is infallible, after all?

The inequality, however, is settled. Someone is certainly benefitting immensely from the status quo, but it is not men at large, whose human rights get merrily trampled on by the 1% while, at the same time, men keep being loathed in common discourse qua men for their supposed default privilege.

 

Notes

* I thank Dr Lydia Amir, founding member of the International Society for Humor Studies, Dr Natalie Ellen Evans of the University of Guelph, Canada, and Dr Ileana Szymanski, kindred philosopher and Ignatian soul, for their feedback on early drafts of this text. Sadly, Dr Szymanski (1975-2019) did not live to see this piece published. It is therefore to her memory that my satire is dedicated: to the memory of a dear friend, first of all, but also that of a deep-reaching and witty scholar, who was ever in love with Aristotle and her own teaching vocation.

[1] The present text is based on the last chapter of my book, Thinking and Talking (Gatineau: Northwest Passage Books, 2019, pp.281–90), and is part of a set of examples of “talking rhetoric” that are included therein, i.e., “shorter works of mine penned with the aim of edifying, engaging or entertaining the reader, to an extent that is uncommon and/or unneeded in regular academic writing” (x). The chief models for my satirical writings are Carlo Cipolla and, above all, Flavio Baroncelli, to whom a previous issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum is dedicated. Readers looking for standard, stately academic prose, or little prone to tongue-in-cheek reflexive acrobatics, should simply steer clear of the present text, which is unworthy of them and their attention. Part of the rationale for its revision and re-issuing is the transformation of the NSU study circle for which it is intended, since this study circle is going to merge with another and launch a novel NSU study cycle about contemporary elites, or “the 1%”.

[2] The case of 21st-century Greece is particularly telling of these troubling trends and striking contradictions (cf. Yannis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room. My Battle with Europe‘s Deep Establishment, London: Bodley Head, 2017). Also, the readers of Nordicum-Mediterraneum are familiar with the case of Iceland’s 2008 crash, which has been covered in many contributions to the journal.

[3] Andrea Dworkin, “Feminism, Art, and My Mother Sylvia”, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics, New York: Harper & Row, 1976, p.108. In his 1996 book, Il razzismo è una gaffe (Rome: Donzelli, p.37), Flavio Baroncelli offers a charitable interpretation of Dworkin’s denial of the possibility “for a man and a woman to just make love”. He does so by adding an important premise, which Dworkin had failed to state: there are lots of “young men”, both on- and off “campus”, who “act like bullies (that is, they try to come across as ‘normal’ in one another’s eyes) and express precisely that conception of the other half of the human race that Dworkin attributes to men in general.” At the same time, in a humorous “Dialogue between Andrea Dworkin and Nelson Mandela” (Mi manda Platone, Genoa: il melangolo, 2009, pp.136-37; the dialogue is said to replicate in fiction the real exchanges occurred between Baroncelli and Dworkin, who were both notably overweight and aging when they met in the US), the Italian humorist-philosopher depicts the titular characters coming to a secretive agreement on power and inequality. Specifically, in order to “combat their handicap” and keep “appealing to young women”, elderly heterosexual men like Mandela and obese middle-aged lesbians like Dworkin must go on relying upon “myths” such as “the wisdom and experience” of old age, or the outlandish radical theses of controversial academic “books showing that Plato… justified and strengthened male power” (ibid.). As the fictional Dworkin timidly admits in the  fictional dialogue: “I realise that in a truly egalitarian world, without differences in wealth, prestige, intellectual charm, in short, power, beautiful people would go with beautiful people… old people into the dung-heap… the fat ones…” (p.137).

[4] Julia Kristeva, Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme, Paris: Fayard, 1993. Cf. also my review of The Portable Kristeva in Symposium 5(1)/2001: 120–3.

[5] Luce Irigaray, Sharing the World, London: Continuum, 2000, 134–5. Cf. also my reviews of Irigaray’s Key Writings (The European Legacy 13(7)/2008: 879–81) and Sharing the World (The European Legacy 16(5)/2011: 668–9).

The Changing Feelings of Otherness: Surprise, empathy, hostility as evidenced in Frank Westerman’s El negro and me

Conference proceedings (double non-blind peer review), , , , , , , ,

We are in a time of changes. Climate change, population change, social change, political change, identity change (in many countries).

It is very likely that, in the past, people often had the sensation that they were living in a time of change. It is even possible that one of the things that never change in human history is the fact that people have the impression to live in a time of change. The Heraclitean way of looking at things existed and probably prevailed since a very long time. Nothing is new under the sun, including the impression that things are changing.

However, something is different this time because the change does exhibit certain specificities. First, the change is not restricted to a specific area: it is global. It is physical (warming) as well as demographic (population change) and it has diffuse and complex consequences on identities. For these reasons, it is not comparable to previous experiences of change. We are thus not only in a time of change but also in a time of a new kind of change.

And one could ask: Can we adapt to the changes that are going on? Can we absorb the changes that are coming? Or are these changes too massive to be bearable for many of us? If these changes are involving our identities, is the plasticity of human identities sufficiently elevated to render these changes possible? Indeed, the plasticity of identities is at the core of any change and specially of those that involve mixing people of various origins as it has been already noted by thinkers of identity  (see, for instance, Taylor, 1989).

One of the ways to address these questions is to examine, not the change itself, but the feelings associated with that change. Indeed, although this change has new features, it involves also traditional forms of feelings that can be analyzed through many ways.

 

 

El negro and me: a book from Frank Westerman

Among these ways, I chose to take a careful look to a book from Frank Westerman called El negro and me because it describes very vividly a large array of feelings that persons can experience from each other when a change in their vicinity occurs (Westerman, 2004).

Frank Westerman is a Dutch writer and a journalist. He published El Negro and me in 2004. The book tells the story of a stuffed man who was exposed for decades in a museum in Spain. But it is also a reflection on multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, Westerman argues, is not about cultures but about feelings. This idea can also be found in the work of Charles Taylor who published an important book on multiculturalism in 1992 that has, since then, become a classic: Multiculturalism (Taylor, 1992). More precisely: it is about feelings that arise when cultures are coming close to each other.

What are the feelings that are described in El Negro and me? At a first glance, the book seems to be full of political correctness. In other terms, it conveys or, at least, seems to convey, good feelings (an entity that is always suspicious in the debate on multiculturalism, although probably unavoidable) more than rigorous thoughts. When Westerman discovers «El Negro» for the first time, he would confess, he felt ashamed to see that people could have done this. He relates these feelings with his Christian education. But this is only, as one will see, a first impression. Indeed, the analysis of feelings that Westerman would be lead to conduct turned out to be very insightful.

 

 

History of « El Negro »

Let me describe briefly the content of the book. From its opening in 1916 to 2000, in the museum of the city of Banyoles, in the north of Spain (almost in the midst between Barcelona and the Perpignan), a stuffed black man could be seen. The book is the history of what happens to «El Negro», as he was called by the inhabitants of Banyoles.

The man called «El Negro» is a «bechuana» that comes from South Africa and that has been stuffed like an animal after its death, probably around 1830, by a Frenchman named Jules Verreaux, an animal stuffer and the son of an animal stuffer that was, at the time, commercializing many kinds of stuffed animals (lions, crocodiles, elephants, turtles and many species of birds) in Place des Vosges, in the very center of Paris.

Jules Verreaux did «dig out» a freshly buried man from Bechuana (now called Botzwana) in South Africa. He had to proceed very carefully, because this is one of the thing that can lead to a deadly trial if people from Bechuana discovered it. He thus took important risks when he decided to do what he did. And he felt that these risks were giving him some rights on the cadaver.

Jules Verreaux took «El Negro» with him when he went back to France. He expected to have a great success with the exhibition of a specimen of humanity that was quiet unknown in Europe at that time (first part of the XIX th century).

People in France (or later in Spain where he was exhibited, as we will soon see: this point is not clear) probably found that the specimen was not black enough because someone decided to spread shoe polish on its skin in order to give him a brighter tincture. However, the success of the «piece» (as he was called) was not as great as expected and Jules Verreaux finally decided to sell «El Negro». It has been acquired by Francesc Darder, a doctor from Barcelona, presumably directly in Verreaux’s shop in Paris.

The stuffed man was exposed in the anthropological museum created by Francesc Darder that opened in 1916 in Banyoles. At the beginning, the exhibition was not well accepted by the population of the city who found strange to have a black person exposed in a museum. But later, «El Negro» became a sort of attraction and the most remarkable piece of the museum. El Negro was thus «adopted» by the population of Banyoles who finally found that it was part of its identity. This change of feelings of the population of Banyoles regarding his calm and painted guest is very remarkable and is the focal point of the analysis that Westerman will develop on the case. Let me continue the story before turning back to that point.

Meanwhile in 1991 a man from Haïti named Alphonse Arcelin, physician in Cambrils (at about fifty kilometers in the south of Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast), who married a Spanish woman, heard about the presence of « El Negro » in the museum of Banyoles. He was immediately shocked and felt aggressed by the presence of such a piece in the museum. He was even shocked by this term of «piece» used to described the stuffed man. Indeed, the adequate world to describe it is not without rising problems: it is not a thing, it is not a person, it is not a statue, it is not a cadaver either, although it has been prepared from a cadaver. But the term «piece» that contributes to agglutinate El Negro with things like potteries and weapons that were making a large part of the things exposed in the museum was not a correct term, according to Arcelin.

In fact, Arcelin always refused to see «El Negro». He only heard about him. The simple idea of the presence of a man stuffed in a museum was repulsing enough for him. He felt that exposing dead people like animals was a kind of disrespect. Arcelin consequently began a struggle that would last for nine years and that were to result in the «restitution» of El Negro to South Africa where «El Negro» is now buried, invisible for anyone.

 

 

Changing feelings

So let me turn back to the feelings described by Westerman. Very interesting are the changing feelings triggered by «El Negro». I said that Westerman was first ashamed when he saw the «piece». But it turned out that his feelings were much more complex as the inquiry he was conducting did goes on. This is partly due to the fact that Westerman adopts the feelings of the people he describes in his story. As a journalist, he was trying to describe the often-contradictory nature of these feelings.

These feelings involve religious values, as we have seen, but they also involve money and profit, as well as a notion of identity, a notion of national (or local) pride, political commitments, a kind of empathy, sometime, they involve a feeling of distance, sometimes, a kind of hostility, a sense of humanity, and so on.

In other terms, it is not a feeling but rather a bunch of contradictory feelings that Westerman had to describe when he was investigating on El Negro. Westerman shows that the encounter with the otherness involves feelings that cannot be subsumed under a single concept. In such a way that in the course of its inquiry, instead of finding answers, he found emerging questions which prevent him to formulate any definitive conclusion.

But the fact that the author cannot conclude is, in itself, an interesting conclusion. In the description of these feelings, Westerman was thinking to build a kind of multiculturalist theory of being with others. He did not achieve to build such a theory. But because it gives some clues to those who are seeking to do the same thing, it is interesting to look carefully at the points he did mentioned and to address these points as objections to the contemporary theory of multiculturalism.

 

 

«El Negro» integrates into the identity of the inhabitants of Banyoles

Westerman showed that «El Negro» progressively became a part of the identity of the city of Banyoles, in such a way that when Arcelin attempted to make its stuffed body go back to Africa, a large part of the population of the city of Banyoles did demonstrated under the cry of «Queda’t»: «He stays».

Thus, we have a complete inversion of roles: Arcelin who presented himself as the one who was acting for the dignity of «El Negro» finally did contribute to make him disappear, while people from Banyoles were ready to fight for him and were seeing him as a symbol of what they are and of their openness to others. This is showing, at least, how versatile and changing the feelings of identity can be. What can appear as strange and curious at a given time can turn out to be a part of identity a few years later. The history of all populations and of all countries provides many examples of such «changing» identity.

Multiculturalism is sometimes criticized for diluting social cohesion or for creating cultural fragmentation, or even, for destroying national identity and for providing a ground for radicalism, for encouraging a restriction of freedom of expression, amongst other things (Prins and Saharso, 2013).

In a debate that grows since decades «multiculturalism» is opposed to «republican integration», the latter being supposedly a remedy for the bunch of feelings that Westerman has identified: all these feelings are indeed supposed to melt in a common «republican feeling».

The opposition of these two models, the republican model and the multiculturalist model, is the focusing point of a large discussion in which many aspects of the opposition has been evaluated. Canada, partly because of the structure of its population and partly for historical reasons (the country did develop a multiculturalist policy at the end of the 20th century), has been a case in point in the debate. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor did propose a thorough investigation of the notion of multiculturalism and was also appointed by the Canadian government to elaborate propositions for the policy of the country.* Taylor argues that «we define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us» (Taylor, 1994).

 

 

The correct question to be addressed

The feelings generated by the encounter of the other depend, Westerman shows, on the changes of identity that are experienced in the encounter itself. When the changes are occurring rapidly, the feelings of hostility predominate. Examples in contemporary Europe could be found easily. However, identity being itself a highly changeable feeling, it is also very sensitive to time.

In other terms, the otherness of today is the identity of tomorrow but with an important «if»: If time is given for the new identity to be build. Thus, to go back to the initial question, the question is not «can we absorb the new changes that are coming?» but rather «do we have time to absorb the new changes that are coming?»

This is, in fact, a very different way to address the question of identity than the way from where we started. Identities need time to change. Taylor and Bouchard, in their report to Canadian government write: «Identities are thus shifting and assuredly constructed, even occasionally contradictory, but not artificial for all that» (Bouchard-Taylor, 2008). Thus, the question is not are identities changing but how fast does identity change? How long does it take to rebuild identity according to a new situation? And, above all: is the situation changing faster than identity can change or is the opposite true?

These are the questions to which the reading of Westerman can lead. Accordingly, the reading of El negro and meis presumably more helpful to displace questions than to answer questions. But precisely: displacing questions can be more important than answering questions. Therefore, it constitutes an important matter in the debate.

 

 

References

Barrett M. (ed.) (2013), Interculturalism and multiculturalism: similarities and differences, Strasbourg, Council of Europe Publishing.

Bouchard G. and Taylor  C. (2008), Building the future. A time for reconciliation, report to the Gouvernement du Québec, Legal deposit – Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec.

Bouchard G. (2015), Interculturalism, a view from Quebec, Toronto, University of Toronto Press.

Joppke C. (2018), “War of words: interculturalism vs. multiculturalism”, in Comparative Migration Studies, 6 (1): 11.

Kymlicka  W (1995)., Multicultural citizenship, Oxford, Oxford UP, 1995.

Kymlicka W. (2016), “Defending Diversity in an Era of Populism: Multiculturalism and Interculturalism Compared”, in N. Meer, T. Modood, & R. Zapata-Barrero (eds.), in Multiculturalism and Interculturalism: Debating the Dividing Lines, Edinbugh, Edinburgh UP.

Prins B. and Saharso S. (2013),“Multiculturalism and Identity”, inThe Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, ed. by G. Waylen, K. Celis, J. Kantola and S.L. Weldon, Oxford, Oxford UP.

Taylor C. (1989), Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Harvard, Harvard UP.

Taylor C. (1992), Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”, Princeton, Princeton UP.

Taylor C. (1994), “The Politics of Recognition” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, A. Gutmann (ed.), Princeton, Princeton UP.

Westerman F. (2004), El Negro and me, tr. en. by David Colmer, Amsterdam, Atlas.

* As the report states (Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, Building the future, A time for reconciliation, report to the Gouvernement du Québec, Legal deposit – Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, 2008): «On February 8, 2007, Québec Premier Jean Charest announced the establishment of the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences in response to public discontent concerning reasonable accommodation. The Order in Council establishing the Commission stipulated that it had a mandate to: a) take stock of accommodation practices in Québec; b) analyse the attendant issues bearing in mind the experience of other societies; c) conduct an extensive consultation on this topic; and d) formulate recommendations to the government to ensure that accommodation practices conform to Québec’s values as a pluralistic, democratic, egalitarian society». In 2013, Gérard Bouchard published a book partly based on the work he made with Charles Taylor: G. Bouchard, Interculturalism, a view from Quebec, University of Toronto Press, 2015. On the difference between multiculturalism and interculturalism, see: C. Joppke, “War of words: interculturalism vs. multiculturalism”, in Comparative Migration Studies, 6 (1): 11, 2018 ; see also: W. Kymlicka, “Defending Diversity in an Era of Populism: Multiculturalism and Interculturalism Compared”, in N. Meer, T. Modood, & R. Zapata-Barrero (Eds.), Multiculturalism and interculturalism: Debating the dividing lines, (pp. 158–177), Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2016 ; see also: M. Barrett, Interculturalism and multiculturalism: similarities and differences, ed. M. Barrett, Strasbourg, Council of Europe Publishing, 2013: «First, it is important to note that interculturalism shares a number of features with multiculturalism […] However, over and above these similarities, interculturalism places a central emphasis on intercultural dialogue, interaction and exchange».