Garunar
L’Université Orientale Royale
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Garunar according to Lord Buddha’s high philosophy means compassion that
humanity could learn to nurture, along with Metta, Muditar and Upikkhar, the noble virtues of Buddhist thought culture. Garunar the University, personal and
innovatively tutorial using textual, electronic and virtual technology, is based in
Asia and in international cities around the world.
A monk sips morning tea
it’s quiet,
the chrysanthemum’s flowering.
Matsuo Basho
At the root of its foundation, the University is a liberal, empowering and open-minded royal lyceum on par with Tagore’s or Aristotle’s schools of thought. Founded by passionate royal commissioners, Asian leaders and intellectuals, Garunar is a private university with a progressive mission to lead social, political and economic reform in Southeast Asia and the Orient in general. The University is founded upon classical ideals of both Eastern, American and European higher education, the proper study of wo/mankind, in Sir Isaiah Berlin’s words. Currently the university is affiliated with the Royal Institution, selective blue chip enterprises, business leaders and Asia Link academic institutions.
The University welcomes applications from undergraduates wishing to study in innovative and progressive modern studies in which the faculties offer dynamic degrees, scholarship and research supervision affiliated with the quality of global human lives. Undergraduate and Graduate Studies:
Faculty of Liberal Arts, B.A.
Faculty of Oriental Religions and Western Philosophy, B.Phil.
Academy of Science, B.Sc., B.Res.
Faculty of Business, Economics and Oriental Medicine, B.Sc.,BBA, MBA, M.Phil.
Research Degrees and Consultancy, B.Res., M.Phil.
Equal Opportunity scholarships for international students: Available upon
application
East Asia ASEAN European friends Americas Russia
For academic matters please contact:
garunar.universite@gmail.com
Admissions: High School diploma, TOEFL, IELTS, GCE, GMAT/ GRE transcripts, 3 letters of formal recommendation
* HOT NEW PROGRAMMES:
BA – Scientific Languages, Communication Technology, Universal Art and curating, Intellectual Design, Green Languages, literary discourse, Nature/Energy, Financial Markets, Stagflation in community, Behavioral Finance, Earthquake+Natural Disaster Science, Hyper Informational Systems, Nano Engineering, Cancer Immunology, Kundalini Yoga, Asian Design & Art, Equities & Protectionism, Business Deals, Guanxi Relationships, Business Informatics, Ethics of Business Leadership in Asia, Cool Social Networking, E-Waste in the 3rd World, Ethanol from non-Food, International Conflict Diplomacy, Personal Markets, Shakespeare & Business, Food/ Forestry Science, Prestigious Fashion, Philosophy, Ballet Choreography
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BA/BSc – Love and Passion, Disability, Life Metaphysics, Law Reform, Post-Modern Buddhism, M.Phil. in Emerging Markets/Cultures, Anti-Cancer/Alzheimer, Vipassana Meditation, Spa Lifestyle
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Self-Awareness, EI, Spiritual Healthcare, Football, Orientalism, Kung Fu, Revolution, Statesmanship, Golf, Psychoanalysis, Botany
B.Econ, MBA - India, Singapore, Indonesia, Korea, Myanmar, Japan, Thailand, Laos, Tibet, China, Arabia ;
BSc, MBA – Innovation & Entrepreneurship, American History of Ideas, Sovereign Wealth, Free Trade Negotiation, Finance, Managing Dysfunctional Nations, Children/Youth/Transition Development, Wallstreet, Union-Management Relations, Labour & Energy Research;
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BA, BEngineering, BSc degrees in: Liberal Arts, IT, Asia-Europe Geopolitics, International Relations, Human Rights, Corporate Social Responsibility, Diplomatic, Political, Media Public Service, Personal Art of Politics, Musical Diplomacy
Diamonds, Silk, Saohpa Affairs, Mogul Arts, Pure Sciences, Democracy, Healthcare, Novel writing, Directing film, Human Rights & Environmental Policy;
BSc – Mathematics, Online Games, Physics, Chemical Engineering, Pharmaceutical Alkaloids, Sustainable Environment, Family Institutions, Avant Garde Sciences, Wisdom Economies, Gay, Lesbian Rights, Medical Tourism, Complex Negotiation, Financial Engineering, Senior Citizens, Fiber, Electronics, Virtual Earth, Bio-chemistry, Dengue, Malaria;
M.D. in Oriental Medicine, Scientific Medicine, Spa, Diabetes, TCM, Heart Disease;
BSc - Feminism, Internet Engineering, Journalism, Women’s Governance, Organic Thought and Farming, Alkaloids, Oxygen, Reforestation, Art of War and Peace, Political Turmoil, Breathing, Asian Finance;
BA in Modern Languages, Harp, Ramayana, Renaissance Politics, Fashion/Architecture, Design, High-Yield Assets, Children, High Art, Singing, Managing Genius;
BFA in Oriental Antiques, Dance, Comparative Classics, Inspiring Innovation, H2O, Human Welfare Finance, Modern Governance, Power Business Brokerage, Novels, Divinity, Songwriting;
*** Currently seeking brilliant student intellectuals, writers, professor scientists, artists, pennyless entrepreneurs, curators, creative & design revolutionaries, alternative senior citizens, cheer leaders, worldwide financiers
Equal Opportunity Scholarships and Recession-proof Microfinance worth euro 1800-2700 are available for eligible applicants in developing nations in Asia, EU, Africa, Americas ;
Degree Programme Tuition and fees:
Bachelor’s degree program euro 27900
MBA, MA, MSc euro 38900
MAIEF (Economics, Finance) euro 9950
mini MBA, PGDIP, PGCERT certificate program euro 8900
online BA, MA, BSc, BEngr euro 19600
international BSc, M Res., MSc euro 27900
Executive, Continuing Education & Special Directed studies euro 8500
BEcon in International Politics, trade and governments euro 24000
MPHIL, MD, MSc, DLitt euro 40660
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*** We are pleased to announce the establishment of the Medical Research Institute for Humanity at Garunar L’ Universite Orientale Royale focusing on the Heart, Cancer, HIV/AIDS, Diabetes. Research papers can be submitted to the Faculty of Research and Academic Affairs.
Nobel Prizes and the Immune System
The Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine have rewarded several breakthroughs that revealed the way in which our bodies protect us against microscopic threats of almost any description. Each of these breakthroughs have provided us with a better understanding of how the immune system senses an attack, how it recognizes and deals with intruders without destroying its own cells and tissues, but also how it can malfunction and unleash its destructive forces upon itself. Click on each link to see a Speed Read, a brief summary of the breakthroughs for which each Nobel Prize was awarded.
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Passive Aggressive Treatment Emil von Behring (1901)Von Behring identified factors in blood that neutralize the toxic products from tetanus and diphtheria bacteria, and he showed how these agents could be used to prevent illness and death caused by diphtheria microbes. |
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Multiple Lines of Defence Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov and Paul Ehrlich (1908)The immune system works through more than one mechanism: Mechnikov identified phagocyte cells that engulf and devour intruders, Ehrlich’s side-chain theory proposed how antibodies released in blood tackle invaders. |
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A Shock Response Charles Richet (1913)Richet discovered anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic reaction to toxins, which showed how the immune system can damage its host as well as provide protection against disease. |
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Complementary Forces Jules Bordet (1919)Factors in blood serum work with antibodies to destroy bacteria, and Bordet’s discovery of these complement proteins allowed the creation of tests that could diagnose many dangerous infectious diseases. |
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Blood Relations Karl Landsteiner (1930)Landsteiner’s discovery of human blood groups, and his system for typing blood, allowed blood transfusions to be carried out without the risk of adverse reactions. |
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Raising Self-Awareness Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnet and Peter Medawar (1960)The concept of immunological tolerance showed how the body learns to recognize its own cells and tissues, which prevents the immune system from mounting a response against itself. |
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Anatomy of a Killer Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter (1972)The two scientists independently deciphered the structure of antibodies, which revealed how seemingly identical-looking molecules can target specifically any one of a countless number of invaders for destruction. |
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Seeking Signs of Compatibility Baruj Benacerraf, Jean Dausset and George Snell (1980)Breakthroughs from the three researchers helped to build a picture for how a specific set of proteins found on the surface of cells can regulate the immune response. |
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Creating Supply on Demand Nils Jerne, Georges Kohler and César Milstein (1984)Jerne’s theories provided a clearer image of how the immune system engages antibodies to fight invaders, Köhler and Milstein’s techniques for producing specific antibodies on demand helped to create better diagnostic tests and new treatments against diseases. |
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Assembly Instructions for Antibodies Susumu Tonegawa (1987)By uncovering the genetic mechanism for the construction of antibodies, Tonegawa revealed how the body can generate millions and millions of antibody proteins from a much smaller number of genes. |
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Double-Checking Cells Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel (1996)Doherty and Zinkernagel’s discovery of how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells uncovered the general mechanisms used by the cellular component of the immune system to distinguish foreign agents from its own cells and tissues. Ref: http://nobelprize.org/ |
Benazir Bhutto’s life has been a rollercoaster of high political drama, acute personal loss, early triumph followed by downfall and charges of corruption. Ginny Dougary meets her in exile in Dubai, as she plans her return to power in Pakistan – Times OnlineBenazir Bhutto’s life has been a rollercoaster of high political drama, acute personal loss, early triumph followed by downfall and charges of corruption. Ginny Dougary meets her in exile in Dubai, as she plans her return to power in Pakistan – Times Online
It is very sad and tearful that Bhutto’s opponents have killed her. She stood tall with democracy and stood fearlessly against extremists. She appeared to be listening to criticism, by basing her political manifesto on poverty and education which Pakistan’s uneducated direly need to bring about a stable and civil society.
I believe it is too early for democracy until a larger percentage of the population is educated enough to bring people into power who are not corrupt and nepotist.
However, this is all likely to be swept away as democracy will be pushed through and we may end up with someone that again loots the treasury and pushes the country to bankruptcy like in the 90’s.
Perhaps this will be the lesser of two evils, the other… perhaps the West dare not worth thinking about.
Abid, Shipley, UK
There are three most public parties in pakistan,in which one is Pakistan Peoples Party,headed by Benazir Bhutto,I know Ms Bhutto well as I am the resident of her native province.She ruled Pakistan very democratically .Now a days Pakistan needs a leader like her i think she must to come Pakistan and end her exile period now.on the otherhand corruption is now rooted in the society of Pakistan and no one ruler deny it.The reasons of corruption is a long story which starts from the begning of pakistan .
Aakash Santorai, Hyderabad, Pakistan
Breakthrough in Developing Super-Material Graphene
ScienceDaily (Jan. 19, 2010) — A collaborative research project has brought the world a step closer to producing a new material on which future nanotechnology could be based. Researchers across Europe, including the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL), have demonstrated how an incredible material, graphene, could hold the key to the future of high-speed electronics, such as micro-chips and touchscreen technology.
Graphene has long shown potential, but has previously only been produced on a very small scale, limiting how well it could be measured, understood and developed. A paper published on the 17th January, in Nature Nanotechnology explains how researchers have, for the first time, produced graphene to a size and quality where it can be practically developed, and successfully measured its electrical characteristics. These significant breakthroughs overcome two of the biggest barriers to scaling up the technology.
Graphene is a relatively new form of carbon made up of a single layer of atoms arranged in a honeycomb shaped lattice. Despite being one atom thick and chemically simple, graphene’s is extremely strong and highly conductive, making it ideal for high-speed electronics, photonics and beyond.
Graphene is a strong candidate to replace semiconductor chips. Moore’s Law observes that the density of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years, but silicon and other existing transistor materials are thought to be close to the minimum size where they can remain effective. Graphene transistors can potentially run at faster speeds and cope with higher temperatures. Graphene could be the solution to ensuring computing technology to continue to grow in power whilst shrinking in size, extending the life of Moore’s law by many years.
Large microchip manufacturers such as IBM and Intel have openly expressed interest in the potential of graphene as a material on which future computing could be based.
Graphene also has potential for exciting new innovations such as touchscreen technology, LCD displays and solar cells. Its unparalleled strength and transparency make it perfect for these applications, and its conductivity would offers a dramatic increase in efficiency on existing materials.
Until now graphene of sufficient quality has only been produced in the form of small flakes of tiny fractions of a millimeter, using painstaking methods such as peeling layers off graphite crystals with sticky tape. Producing useable electronics requires much larger areas of material to be grown. This project saw researchers, for the first time, produce and successfully operate a large number of electronic devices from a sizable area of graphene layers (approximately 50 mm2).
The graphene sample, was produced epitaxially — a process of growing one crystal layer on another — on silicon carbide. Having such a significant sample not only proves that it can be done in a practical, scalable way, but also allowed the scientists to better understand important properties.
The second key breakthrough of the project was measuring graphene’s electrical characteristics with unprecedented precision, paving the way for convenient and accurate standards to be established. For products such as transistors in computers to work effectively and be commercially viable, manufacturers must be able to make such measurements with incredible accuracy against an agreed international standard.
The international standard for electrical resistance is provided by the Quantum Hall Effect, a phenomenon whereby electrical properties in 2D materials can be determined based only on fundamental constants of nature.
The effect has, until now, only been demonstrated with sufficient precision in a small number of conventional semiconductors. Furthermore, such measurements need temperatures close to absolute zero, combined with very strong magnetic fields, and only a few specialised laboratories in the world can achieve these conditions.
Graphene was long tipped to provide an even better standard, but samples were inadequate to prove this. By producing samples of sufficient size and quality, and accurately demonstrate Hall resistance, the team proved that graphene has the potential to supersede conventional semiconductors on a mass scale.
Furthermore graphene shows the Quantum Hall Effect at much higher temperatures. This means the graphene resistance standard could be used much more widely as more labs can achieve the conditions required for its use. In addition to its advantages of operating speed and durability, this would also speed the production and reduce costs of future electronics technology based on graphene
Prof Alexander Tzalenchuk from NPL’s Quantum Detection Group and the lead author on the Nature Nanotechnology paper observes: “It is truly sensational that a large area of epitaxial graphene demonstrated not only structural continuity, but also the degree of perfection required for precise electrical measurements on par with conventional semiconductors with a much longer development history.”
The research team isn’t content to leave it there. They are hoping to go on to demonstrate even more precise measurement, as well as accurate measurement at even higher temperatures. They are currently seeking EU funding to drive this forward.
Dr JT Janssen, an NPL Fellow who worked on the project, said: “We’ve laid the groundwork for the future of graphene production, and will strive in our ongoing research to provide greater understanding of this exciting material. The challenge for industry in the coming years will be to scale the material up in a practical way to meet new technology demands. We have taken a huge step forward, and once the manufacturing processes are in place, we hope graphene will offer the world a faster and cheaper alternative to conventional semiconductors.”
The research was a joint project carried by the National Physical Laboratory; Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden; Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Linköping University, Sweden and Lancaster University, UK. Measurement was carried out by the Quantum Detection Group at the UK’s at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, UK.
Technical detail
The sample was grown epitaxially by removing all silicon atoms in a controlled way from a single surface layer of silicon carbide and allowing the remaining carbon to form the nearly ideal graphene monolayer. The next step was to use standard microfabrication techniques, such as the electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching, to produce devices ranging in lateral size from a few micrometers (1 micrometer = 0.001 mm) to hundreds of micrometers and still only one carbon atom thick. All devices measured so far showed the desired electronic characteristics.
Where now?
Measuring resistance
Growing to a usable size while maintaining quality
A technology for the future
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Rabindranath Tagore
The Gardener
When I go alone at night to my love-tryst,
birds do not sing, the wind does not stir,
the houses on both sides pf the street stand silent.
It is my own anklets that grow lous at
every step and I am ashamed.
When I sit on my balcony and listen to his footsteps,
leaves do not rustle on the trees, and the waster
is still in the river like the sword on the
knees of a sentry fallen asleep.
It is my own heart that beats wildly -
I do not know how to quiet it.
When my love comes and sits by my side,
when my body trembles and my eyelids droop,
the night darkens, the winds blow out the lamp,
and the clouds draw veils over the stars.
It is the jewel at my own breast that shines
and gives light. I do not know how to hide it.”
Gitanjali
“When thou commandest me to sing, it seems that my heart would break
with pride; and I look to thy face, and tears come to my eyes.
All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one sweet
harmony- and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird on its flight
across the sea.
I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only as a singer
I come before thy presence.
I touch by the edge of the far-spreading wing of my song thy feet which
I could never aspire to reach.
Drunk with joy of singing I forget myself and call thee friend who art
my Lord”.
“Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This
frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with
fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and
hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in
joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.
Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.”
The Flower School
"When storm-clouds rumble in the sky and June showers come down, The moist east wind comes marching over the heath to blow its bagpipes amongst the bamboos. The crowds of flowers come out of a sudden, from nobody knows where, and dance upon the grass in wild glee. Mother, I really think the flowers go to school underground. They do their lessons with doors shut, and if they want to come out to play before it is time, their master makes them stand in a corner. When the rains come they have their holidays. Branches clash together in the forest, and the leaves rustle in the wild wind, the thunder-clouds clap their giant hands and the flower children rush out i dresses of pink, yellow and white. Do you know, mother, their home is in the sky, where the stars are. Haven't you seen how eager they are to get there? Don't you know why they are in such a hurry? Of course, I can guess to whom they raise their arms, they have their mother as I have my own."
Women, Poverty & Economics
Women bear a disproportionate burden of the world’s poverty. Statistics indicate that women are more likely than men to be poor and at risk of hunger because of the systematic discrimination they face in education, health care, employment and control of assets. Poverty implications are widespread for women, leaving many without even basic rights such as access to clean drinking water, sanitation, medical care and decent employment. Being poor can also mean they have little protection from violence and have no role in decision making.
According to some estimates, women represent 70 percent of the world’s poor. They are often paid less than men for their work, with the average wage gap in 2008 being 17 percent. Women face persistent discrimination when they apply for credit for business or self-employment and are often concentrated in insecure, unsafe and low-wage work. Eight out of ten women workers are considered to be in vulnerable employment in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with global economic changes taking a huge toll on their livelihoods.
The current financial crisis is likely to affect women particularly severely. In many developing countries where women work in export-led factories, or in countries where migrant women workers are the backbone of service industries, women’s jobs have taken the greatest hit. The International Labour Organization estimates that the economic downturn could lead to 22 million more unemployed women in 2009, jeopardizing the gains made in the last few decades in women’s empowerment.
In many countries, however, the impact goes far beyond the loss of formal jobs, as the majority of women tend to work in the informal sector, for example as domestics in cities, and do not show up in official unemployment numbers. Economic policies and institutions still mostly fail to take gender disparities into account, from tax and budget systems to trade regimes. And with too few seats at the tables where economic decisions are made, women themselves have limited opportunity to influence policy.
UN Women’s Approach
Advancing women’s economic security and rights has always been a core UN Women priority. UN Women supports women to reshape conditions at both ends of the economic spectrum — from boosting women’s participation in economic policy-making to supporting efforts to provide women and their communities with practical skills needed for securing sustainable livelihoods.
In more than 40 countries, for example, UN Women supports national and local initiatives to include gender perspectives in budgeting processes, and to collect and use sex-disaggregated data in public policy formulation to ensure that macro-economic policy frameworks address women’s priorities. UN Women also works to strengthen women’s rights to land and inheritance, increase their access to credit and decent work, and empower women migrant workers as well as home-based workers.
Reference: www.unifem.org
Buddhist Economics
by Professor E.F. Schumacher (a friend of Prime Minister U Nu)
“Right Livelihood” is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble
Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as
Buddhist economics.
Buddhist countries have often stated that they wish to remain faithful to
their heritage. So Burma: “The New Burma sees no conflict between religious
values and economic progress. Spiritual health and material well-being are
not enemies: they are natural allies.”[1] Or: “We can blend successfully
the religious and spiritual values of our heritage with the benefits of
modern technology.”[2] Or: “We Burmans have a sacred duty to conform both
our dreams and our acts to our faith. This we shall ever do.”[3]
All the same, such countries invariably assume that they can model their
economic development plans in accordance with modern economics, and they
call upon modern economists from so-called advanced countries to advise
them, to formulate the policies to be pursued, and to construct the grand
design for development, the Five-Year Plan or whatever it may be called. No
one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for Buddhist
economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth
modern economics.
Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind
of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute
and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to
claim that economic laws are as free from “metaphysics” or “values” as the
law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of
methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look
like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist.
There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human
labor. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider “labor” or
work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the
employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a
minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the
point of view of the workman, it is a “disutility”; to work is to make a
sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of
compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of
the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the
point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.
The consequences of these attitudes both in theory and in practice are, of
course, extremely far-reaching. If the ideal with regard to work is to get
rid of it, every method that “reduces the work load” is a good thing.
The most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called “division of
labor” and the classical example is the pin factory eulogized in Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Here it is not a matter of ordinary
specialization, which mankind has practiced from time immemorial, but of
dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that
the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had
to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases,
unskilled movement of his limbs.
The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least
threefold: to give man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to
enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by joining with other people in
a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a
becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are
endless. To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless,
boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short
of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with
people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of
attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally,
to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a
complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence,
namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living
process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the
bliss of leisure.
From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of
mechanization which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a
man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a
mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave.
How to tell the one from the other? “The craftsman himself,” says Ananda
Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the modern West as the
ancient East, “can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction
between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance
for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them
by the craftmen’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its
significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the
essentially human part of the work. “[4] It is clear, therefore, that
Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern
materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a
multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character.
Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work,
properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses
those who do it and equally their products. The Indian philosopher and
economist J. C. Kumarappa sums the matter up as follows:
If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will
stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the
physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to
produce the best he is capable of. It directs his free will along the
proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels.
It furnishes an excellent background for man to display his scale of values
and develop his personality.[5]
If a man has no chance of obtaining work he is in a desperate position, not
simply because he lacks an income but because he lacks this nourishing and
enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing can replace. A modern
economist may engage in highly sophisticated calculations on whether full
employment “pays” or whether it might be more “economic” to run an economy
at less than full employment so as to ensure a greater mobility of labor, a
better stability of wages, and so forth. His fundamental criterion of
success is simply the total quantity of goods produced during a given
period of time. “If the marginal urgency of goods is low,” says Professor
Galbraith in The Affluent Society, “then so is the urgency of employing the
last man or the last million men in the labor force.”[6] And again:
If . . . we can afford some unemployment in the interest of stability–a
proposition, incidentally, of impeccably conservative antecedents–then we
can afford to give those who are unemployed the goods that enable them to
sustain their accustomed standard of living.
From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by
considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more
important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the
worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the subhuman, a
surrender to the forces of evil. The very start of Buddhist economic
planning would be a planning for full employment, and the primary purpose
of this would in fact be employment for everyone who needs an “outside”
job: it would not be the maximization of employment nor the maximization of
production. Women, on the whole, do not need an “outside” job, and the
large-scale employment of women in offices or factories would be considered
a sign of serious economic failure. In particular, to let mothers of young
children work in factories while the children run wild would be as
uneconomic in the eyes of a Buddhist economist as the employment of a
skilled worker as a soldier in the eyes of a modern economist.
While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly
interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in
no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in
the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of
pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist
economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s
point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter
rationality of its pattern– amazingly small means leading to
extraordinarily satisfactory results.
For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used
to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption,
assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a
man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach
excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human
well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the
minimum of consumption. Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain
amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to
attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort, that is, with the
smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that
involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less toil there is, the
more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. It would be highly
uneconomic, for instance, to go in for complicated tailoring, like the
modem West, when a much more beautiful effect can be achieved by the
skillful draping of uncut material. It would be the height of folly to make
material so that it should wear out quickly and the height of barbarity to
make anything ugly, shabby, or mean. What has just been said about clothing
applies equally to all other human requirements. The ownership and the
consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the
systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means.
Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole
end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of
production–land, labor, and capital–as the means. The former, in short,
tries to maximize human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of
consumption, while the latter tries to maximize consumption by the optimal
pattern of productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort needed to
sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of
consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain
a drive for maximum consumption. We need not be surprised, therefore, that
the pressure and strain of living is very much less in, say, Burma than it
is in the United States, in spite of the fact that the amount of
labor-saving machinery used in the former country is only a minute fraction
of the amount used in the latter.
Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal
pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by
means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live
without great pressure and strain and to fulfill the primary injunction of
Buddhist teaching: “Cease to do evil; try to do good.” As physical
resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of
a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s
throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who
live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get
involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on
world-wide systems of trade.
From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from
local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life,
while dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce
for export to unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and
justifiable only in exceptional cases and on a small scale. Just as the
modern economist would admit that a high rate of consumption of transport
services between a man’s home and his place of work signifies a misfortune
and not a high standard of life, so the Buddhist economist would hold that
to satisfy human wants from faraway sources rather than from sources nearby
signifies failure rather than success. The former tends to take statistics
showing an increase in the number of ton/miles per head of the population
carried by a country’s transport system as proof of economic progress,
while to the latter-the Buddhist economist–the same statistics would
indicate a highly undesirable deterioration in the pattern of consumption.
Another striking difference between modern economics and Buddhist economics
arises over the use of natural resources. Bertrand de Jouvenel, the eminent
French political philosopher, has characterized “Western man” in words
which may be taken as a fair description of the modern economist:
He tends to count nothing as an expenditure, other than human effort; he
does not seem to mind how much mineral matter he wastes and, far worse, how
much living matter he destroys. He does not seem to realize at all that
human life is a dependent part of an ecosystem of many different forms of
life. As the world is ruled from towns where men are cut off from any form
of life other than human, the feeling of belonging to an ecosystem is not
revived. This results in a harsh and improvident treatment of things upon
which we ultimately depend, such as water and trees. [7]
The teaching of the Buddha, on the other hand, enjoins a reverent and
non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also, with great
emphasis, to trees. Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree
every few years and look after it until it is safely established, and the
Buddhist economist can demonstrate without difficulty that the universal
observation of this rule would result in a high rate of genuine economic
development independent of any foreign aid. Much of the economic decay of
Southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to
a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.
Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable
materials, as its very method is to equalize and quantify everything by
means of a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal,
oil, wood, or water-power: the only difference between them recognized by
modern economics is relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is
automatically the one to be preferred, as to do otherwise would be
irrational and “uneconomic.” From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this
will not do; the essential difference between non-renewable fuels like coal
and oil on the one hand and renewable fuels like wood and water-power on
the other cannot be simply overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used
only if they are indispensable, and then only with the greatest care and
the most meticulous concern for conservation. To use them heedlessly or
extravagantly is an act of violence, and while complete non-violence may
not be attainable on this earth, there is nonetheless an ineluctable duty
on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all he does.
Just as a modern European economist would not consider it a great economic
achievement if all European art treasures were sold to America at
attractive prices, so the Buddhist economist would insist that a population
basing its economic life on non-renewable fuels is living parasitically, on
capital instead of income. Such a way of life could have no permanence and
could therefore be justified only as a purely temporary expedient. As the
world’s resources of non-renewable fuels–coal, oil and natural gas–are
exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in
quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is
an act of violence against nature which must almost inevitably lead to
violence between men.
This fact alone might give food for thought even to those people in
Buddhist countries who care nothing for the religious and spiritual values
of their heritage and ardently desire to embrace the materialism of modern
economics at the fastest possible speed. Before they dismiss Buddhist
economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, they might wish to
consider whether the path of economic development outlined by modern
economics is likely to lead them to places where they really want to be.
Towards the end of his courageous book The Challenge of Man’s Future,
Professor Harrison Brown of the California Institute of Technology gives
the following appraisal:
Thus we see that, just as industrial society is fundamentally unstable and
subject to reversion to agrarian existence, so within it the conditions
which offer individual freedom are unstable in their ability to avoid the
conditions which impose rigid organization and totalitarian control.
Indeed, when we examine all of the foreseeable difficulties which threaten
the survival of industrial civilization, it is difficult to see how the
achievement of stability and the maintenance of individual liberty can be
made compatible. [8]
Even if this were dismissed as a long-term view there is the immediate
question of whether “modernization,” as currently practiced without regard
to religious and spiritual values, is actually producing agreeable results.
As far as the masses are concerned, the results appear to be disastrous–a
collapse of the rural economy, a rising tide of unemployment in town and
country, and the growth of a city proletariat without nourishment for
either body or soul.
It is in the light of both immediate experience and long-term prospects
that the study of Buddhist economics could be recommended even to those who
believe that economic growth is more important than any spiritual or
religious values. For it is not a question of choosing between “modern
growth” and “traditional stagnation.” It is a question of finding the right
path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and
traditionalist immobility, in short, of finding “Right Livelihood.”
NOTES.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
‘If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better gather that destiny through the words that have shaped the heart’s desire of the world.’ And that’s exactly what William Butler Yeats did: he caught the heart’s desire. He caught it in language which is beautiful and which is dripping in imagery – and, particularly in the early poems – mysticism. The Song of Wandering Aengus, The Stolen Child. Joyce said of him that he had a surrealist imagination few painters could match. He was born in 1865 to John Butler Yeats the son of a rector in the Church of Ireland and to Susan Pollexfen whose shipbuilding family came from Sligo- where Yeats at his request is buried, beneath Ben Bulben’s head. His epitaph? ‘Cast a cold eye/ On life, on death/ Horseman, pass by’. Yeats learned early that art is what matters. His father was a solicitor and he gave up his practice to study painting in London. Indeed Yeats later studied art in Dublin before in one of literature’s luckiest volte – face he decided on poetry. The publication in 1889 when Yeats was twenty-four of The Wanderings of Osian was a seminal moment, not only in Irish literary history, but also its political history. Yeats’s book, based on the Fenian cycle, brought Irish mythology to the Irish people in English -’the language’ as he pointed out ‘in which modern Ireland thinks and does its business’. This was at a time in Ireland when there was a powerful movement to rescue the Gaelic language.
In Irish literature Yeats resembles a tidal wave. And the tide was not only poetical. In 1904 Yeats set up the National Theatre of Ireland – The Abbey Theatre with Lady Gregory and he worked unceasingly as playwright and director in its cause. In his Nobel speech to the Swedish Academy he chose as his subject ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement ‘ I would not be here were I not the symbol of that movement…the nationalism we called up was both romantic and poetical.’ Well, up to a point. Yeats had a genius – a generous genius for discovering genius in others and amongst those he discovered were two of Ireland’s greatest, Synge and O’ Casey .Their plays were poetical certainly – romantic? not necessarily. The Abbey audience, probably the most hyper sensitive in history, rioted – enraged by the portrait of themselves in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and O’ Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. Yeats harangued them from the stage – ‘you have disgraced yourselves again’ – and he persevered. This strength of character and courage in the face of prejudice which was noted by Eliot is fundamental to his astonishing achievements. He once tried to get a ‘bill of divorcement’ through the Irish Senate. He failed. That he tried at all is remarkable. Finally he refused to allow himself to be destroyed by the agony of his unreciprocated, life-long obsession with Maud Gonne, an obsession that would have felled lesser men.
She exploded into his life in 1889 – just after the publication of The Wanderings of Osian. She was young, twenty-two, tall with flaming red hair but it was her passion that ‘began all the trouble of my life’. She took possession of his soul and when the soul is lost, all is lost. He had found the love of his life, she, an ardent republican, had perhaps found a poet for the cause. She was a magnificent creature – brave but dangerous. ‘She lived in storm and strife,/ Her soul had such desire/ For what proud death may bring/ That it could not endure /The common good of life’. And therein lies the pity. Her fanaticism swept away much that was good in her life. His enduring love, expressed in poems of genius, gave us the haunting poetry of the exultant yet broken heart – A Woman Homer Sung, No Second Troy, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, The Folly of Being Comforted and many, many more. She married the revolutionary Sean Mac Bride. The confirmation of their marriage was, Yeats said, ‘like lightning through me’. Yeats, in his fifties, finally married Georgie Hyde-Lees with whom he had two children.
Easter 1916, his greatest political poem, of which he wrote many (Parnell’s Funeral, September 1913, The Ghost of Roger Casement) was inspired by the tragic military failure of the rebellion led by Patrick Pearse who, with other leaders of the rebellion including Sean Mac Bride, was executed. The iconic line ‘A terrible beauty is born’ contains both a warning and a blessing. The rhythms and repetitions in this poem seem to keep pace with the destiny of the men: ‘Hearts to one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem/ Enchanted to a stone/ To trouble the living stream’…Too long a sacrifice /Can make a stone of the heart/O when may it suffice?’ Yeats, uniquely amongst poets, wrote some of his greatest poetry in his sixties and seventies. Eliot wrote of this late work: ‘Maturing as a poet means maturing as a whole man… out of his intense experience he now expressed universal truths. An artist by serving his art with his entire integrity, is at the same time rendering the greatest service he can to his country and to the whole world.’ The late poems include the The Municipal Gallery Revisited, The Statues and The Circus Animals Desertion – a poem in which the thread is pulled taut between life and art ‘Maybe at last being but a broken man/ I must be satisfied with my heart’ and continues, ‘Now that my ladder’s gone/ I must lie down where all ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.’ Where else? Reference: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/poetryperformance/yeats/josephinehart/aboutyeats.html
IMF Concludes Mission to Burma
An International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation concluded a visit to Naypyidaw on Wednesday but has not yet determined whether the Burmese government will accept currency conditions regarding changing its monetary exchange system.
Ms Meral Karasulu, deputy division chief of the IMF Asian Pacific Department, led the mission team which was comprised of representatives of the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. They met the Burmese minister for finance, officials from the Central Bank of Burma, the Union of Myanmar Federation of Chambers of Commerce and private banks during a lengthy visit which began on Oct. 19.
The mission came at the request of the Central Bank of Burma to discuss plans to unify the country’s multiple exchange rates as well as lifting restrictions on international payments and transfers. The hope was that Burma would accept the obligations of Article VIII of the IMF’s Articles of Agreement which deals with international payments and currency exchange rates.
According to a press statement issued by the IMF on Tuesday, the mission gave an initial diagnostic assessment of the legal framework and actual market practices governing the exchange rate system of Burma. This dealt, in particular, with the country’s existing exchange restrictions and multiple currency practices.
The IMF team will continue its work from its Tokyo headquarters in cooperation with the Burmese authorities as they formulate their policies towards accepting the obligations of Article VIII. The mission expects to visit Burma for a follow-up early in 2012, the statement said.
According to the official line of the Burmese government, part of its economic reform agenda involves seeking the technical assistance of the IMF regarding the country’s economic progress, foreign exchange rate, economic and monetary stability plus legal reforms.
The United States, a key player in the IMF, maintains sanctions against Burma that prohibit US support for lending or technical assistance by international financial institutions in Burma.
In 2001, IMF officials repeatedly failed to convince the Burmese government to undertake limited, incremental reform measures that would not require a large financial investment, according to a US diplomatic cable published by Wikileaks.
“The IMF’s suggestions for incremental economic reform fall on deaf ears here… The official line of the Burmese government has long been that no economic reforms will be possible without a large structural adjustment loan,” the cable said.
But now the US has apparently thrown its support behind the IMF giving technical assistance to the Burmese government in response to its recent moves towards political and economic liberalization.
Simultaneously, it has also increased its diplomatic exchanges with the Burmese government with US special envoy to Burma Derek Mitchell arriving in Naypyidaw on Wednesday for his third visit to the country. He will hold talks with the Burmese officials regarding further reforms.
Reference: The Irrawaddy
The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
Introduction
Woman as Other
The Second Sex
FOR a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new. Enough ink has been spilled in quarrelling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: ‘Even in Russia women still are women’; and other erudite persons – sometimes the very same – say with a sigh: ‘Woman is losing her way, woman is lost.’ One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should, what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. ‘What has become of women?’ was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine.
But first we must ask: what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one, ‘woman is a womb’. But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the rest. All agree in recognising the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in the times of St Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy
But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro. Science regards any characteristic as a reaction dependent in part upon a situation. If today femininity no longer exists, then it never existed. But does the word woman, then, have no specific content? This is stoutly affirmed by those who hold to the philosophy of the enlightenment, of rationalism, of nominalism; women, to them, are merely the human beings arbitrarily designated by the word woman. Many American women particularly are prepared to think that there is no longer any place for woman as such; if a backward individual still takes herself for a woman, her friends advise her to be psychoanalysed and thus get rid of this obsession. In regard to a work, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which in other respects has its irritating features, Dorothy Parker has written: ‘I cannot be just to books which treat of woman as woman … My idea is that all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human beings.’ But nominalism is a rather inadequate doctrine, and the antifeminists have had no trouble in showing that women simply are not men. Surely woman is, like man, a human being; but such a declaration is abstract. The fact is that every concrete human being is always a singular, separate individual. To decline to accept such notions as the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that Jews, Negroes, women exist today – this denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather a flight from reality. Some years ago a well-known woman writer refused to permit her portrait to appear in a series of photographs especially devoted to women writers; she wished to be counted among the men. But in order to gain this privilege she made use of her husband’s influence! Women who assert that they are men lay claim none the less to masculine consideration and respect. I recall also a young Trotskyite standing on a platform at a boisterous meeting and getting ready to use her fists, in spite of her evident fragility. She was denying her feminine weakness; but it was for love of a militant male whose equal she wished to be. The attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their femininity. In truth, to go for a walk with one’s eyes open is enough to demonstrate that humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations are manifestly different. Perhaps these differences are superficial, perhaps they are destined to disappear. What is certain is that they do most obviously exist.
If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through ‘the eternal feminine’, and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question “what is a woman”?
To state the question is, to me, to suggest, at once, a preliminary answer. The fact that I ask it is in itself significant. A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that my only defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man’, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam.
Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being …’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself … Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.’
The category of the Other is as primordial as consciousness itself. In the most primitive societies, in the most ancient mythologies, one finds the expression of a duality – that of the Self and the Other. This duality was not originally attached to the division of the sexes; it was not dependent upon any empirical facts. It is revealed in such works as that of Granet on Chinese thought and those of Dumézil on the East Indies and Rome. The feminine element was at first no more involved in such pairs as Varuna-Mitra, Uranus-Zeus, Sun-Moon, and Day-Night than it was in the contrasts between Good and Evil, lucky and unlucky auspices, right and left, God and Lucifer. Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought.
Thus it is that no group ever sets itself up as the One without at once setting up the Other over against itself. If three travellers chance to occupy the same compartment, that is enough to make vaguely hostile ‘others’ out of all the rest of the passengers on the train. In small-town eyes all persons not belonging to the village are ‘strangers’ and suspect; to the native of a country all who inhabit other countries are ‘foreigners’; Jews are ‘different’ for the anti-Semite, Negroes are ‘inferior’ for American racists, aborigines are ‘natives’ for colonists, proletarians are the ‘lower class’ for the privileged.
Lévi-Strauss, at the end of a profound work on the various forms of primitive societies, reaches the following conclusion: ‘Passage from the state of Nature to the state of Culture is marked by man’s ability to view biological relations as a series of contrasts; duality, alternation, opposition, and symmetry, whether under definite or vague forms, constitute not so much phenomena to be explained as fundamental and immediately given data of social reality.’ These phenomena would be incomprehensible if in fact human society were simply a Mitsein or fellowship based on solidarity and friendliness. Things become clear, on the contrary, if, following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself a fundamental hostility towards every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed – he sets himself up as the essential, as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.
But the other consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim. The native travelling abroad is shocked to find himself in turn regarded as a ‘stranger’ by the natives of neighbouring countries. As a matter of fact, wars, festivals, trading, treaties, and contests among tribes, nations, and classes tend to deprive the concept Other of its absolute sense and to make manifest its relativity; willy-nilly, individuals and groups are forced to realize the reciprocity of their relations. How is it, then, that this reciprocity has not been recognised between the sexes, that one of the contrasting terms is set up as the sole essential, denying any relativity in regard to its correlative and defining the latter as pure otherness? Why is it that women do not dispute male sovereignty? No subject will readily volunteer to become the object, the inessential; it is not the Other who, in defining himself as the Other, establishes the One. The Other is posed as such by the One in defining himself as the One. But if the Other is not to regain the status of being the One, he must be submissive enough to accept this alien point of view. Whence comes this submission in the case of woman?
There are, to be sure, other cases in which a certain category has been able to dominate another completely for a time. Very often this privilege depends upon inequality of numbers – the majority imposes its rule upon the minority or persecutes it. But women are not a minority, like the American Negroes or the Jews; there are as many women as men on earth. Again, the two groups concerned have often been originally independent; they may have been formerly unaware of each other’s existence, or perhaps they recognised each other’s autonomy. But a historical event has resulted in the subjugation of the weaker by the stronger. The scattering of the Jews, the introduction of slavery into America, the conquests of imperialism are examples in point. In these cases the oppressed retained at least the memory of former days; they possessed in common a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion or a culture.
The parallel drawn by Bebel between women and the proletariat is valid in that neither ever formed a minority or a separate collective unit of mankind. And instead of a single historical event it is in both cases a historical development that explains their status as a class and accounts for the membership of particular individuals in that class. But proletarians have not always existed, whereas there have always been women. They are women in virtue of their anatomy and physiology. Throughout history they have always been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change – it was not something that occurred. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts. A condition brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time, as the Negroes of Haiti and others have proved: but it might seem that natural condition is beyond the possibility of change. In truth, however, the nature of things is no more immutably given, once for all, than is historical reality. If woman seems to be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is because she herself fails to bring about this change. Proletarians say ‘We’; Negroes also. Regarding themselves as subjects, they transform the bourgeois, the whites, into ‘others’. But women do not say ‘We’, except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say ‘women’, and women use the same word in referring to themselves. They do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. The proletarians have accomplished the revolution in Russia, the Negroes in Haiti, the Indo-Chinese are battling for it in Indo-China; but the women’s effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received.
The reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organising themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. They are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews, the workers of Saint-Denis, or the factory hands of Renault. They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. The bond that unites her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. Male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein, and woman has not broken it. The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted together, and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman: she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another.
One could suppose that this reciprocity might have facilitated the liberation of woman. When Hercules sat at the feet of Omphale and helped with her spinning, his desire for her held him captive; but why did she fail to gain a lasting power? To revenge herself on Jason, Medea killed their children; and this grim legend would seem to suggest that she might have obtained a formidable influence over him through his love for his offspring. In Lysistrata Aristophanes gaily depicts a band of women who joined forces to gain social ends through the sexual needs of their men; but this is only a play. In the legend of the Sabine women, the latter soon abandoned their plan of remaining sterile to punish their ravishers. In truth woman has not been socially emancipated through man’s need – sexual desire and the desire for offspring – which makes the male dependent for satisfaction upon the female.
Master and slave, also, are united by a reciprocal need, in this case economic, which does not liberate the slave. In the relation of master to slave the master does not make a point of the need that he has for the other; he has in his grasp the power of satisfying this need through his own action; whereas the slave, in his dependent condition, his hope and fear, is quite conscious of the need he has for his master. Even if the need is at bottom equally urgent for both, it always works in favour of the oppressor and against the oppressed. That is why the liberation of the working class, for example, has been slow.
Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as man’s, and frequently it is much to her disadvantage. Even when her rights are legally recognised in the abstract, long-standing custom prevents their full expression in the mores. In the economic sphere men and women can almost be said to make up two castes; other things being equal, the former hold the better jobs, get higher wages, and have more opportunity for success than their new competitors. In industry and politics men have a great many more positions and they monopolise the most important posts. In addition to all this, they enjoy a traditional prestige that the education of children tends in every way to support, for the present enshrines the past – and in the past all history has been made by men. At the present time, when women are beginning to take part in the affairs of the world, it is still a world that belongs to men – they have no doubt of it at all and women have scarcely any. To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal – this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste. Man-the-sovereign will provide woman-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and the metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance. Indeed, along with the ethical urge of each individual to affirm his subjective existence, there is also the temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing. This is an inauspicious road, for he who takes it – passive, lost, ruined – becomes henceforth the creature of another’s will, frustrated in his transcendence and deprived of every value. But it is an easy road; on it one avoids the strain involved in undertaking an authentic existence. When man makes of woman the Other, he may, then, expect to manifest deep-seated tendencies towards complicity. Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.
But it will be asked at once: how did all this begin? It is easy to see that the duality of the sexes, like any duality, gives rise to conflict. And doubtless the winner will assume the status of absolute. But why should man have won from the start? It seems possible that women could have won the victory; or that the outcome of the conflict might never have been decided. How is it that this world has always belonged to the men and that things have begun to change only recently? Is this change a good thing? Will it bring about an equal sharing of the world between men and women?
These questions are not new, and they have often been answered. But the very fact that woman is the Other tends to cast suspicion upon all the justifications that men have ever been able to provide for it. These have all too evidently been dictated by men’s interest. A little-known feminist of the seventeenth century, Poulain de la Barre, put it this way: ‘All that has been written about women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge and party to the lawsuit.’ Everywhere, at all times, the males have displayed their satisfaction in feeling that they are the lords of creation. ‘Blessed be God … that He did not make me a woman,’ say the Jews in their morning prayers, while their wives pray on a note of resignation: ‘Blessed be the Lord, who created me according to His will.’ The first among the blessings for which Plato thanked the gods was that he had been created free, not enslaved; the second, a man, not a woman. But the males could not enjoy this privilege fully unless they believed it to be founded on the absolute and the eternal; they sought to make the fact of their supremacy into a right. ‘Being men, those who have made and compiled the laws have favoured their own sex, and jurists have elevated these laws into principles’, to quote Poulain de la Barre once more.
Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth. The religions invented by men reflect this wish for domination. In the legends of Eve and Pandora men have taken up arms against women. They have made use of philosophy and theology, as the quotations from Aristotle and St Thomas have shown. Since ancient times satirists and moralists have delighted in showing up the weaknesses of women. We are familiar with the savage indictments hurled against women throughout French literature. Montherlant, for example, follows the tradition of Jean de Meung, though with less gusto. This hostility may at times be well founded, often it is gratuitous; but in truth it more or less successfully conceals a desire for self-justification. As Montaigne says, ‘It is easier to accuse one sex than to excuse the other’. Sometimes what is going on is clear enough. For instance, the Roman law limiting the rights of woman cited ‘the imbecility, the instability of the sex’ just when the weakening of family ties seemed to threaten the interests of male heirs. And in the effort to keep the married woman under guardianship, appeal was made in the sixteenth century to the authority of St Augustine, who declared that ‘woman is a creature neither decisive nor constant’, at a time when the single woman was thought capable of managing her property. Montaigne understood clearly how arbitrary and unjust was woman’s appointed lot: ‘Women are not in the wrong when they decline to accept the rules laid down for them, since the men make these rules without consulting them. No wonder intrigue and strife abound.’ But he did not go so far as to champion their cause.
It was only later, in the eighteenth century, that genuinely democratic men began to view the matter objectively. Diderot, among others, strove to show that woman is, like man, a human being. Later John Stuart Mill came fervently to her defence. But these philosophers displayed unusual impartiality. In the nineteenth century the feminist quarrel became again a quarrel of partisans. One of the consequences of the industrial revolution was the entrance of women into productive labour, and it was just here that the claims of the feminists emerged from the realm of theory and acquired an economic basis, while their opponents became the more aggressive. Although landed property lost power to some extent, the bourgeoisie clung to the old morality that found the guarantee of private property in the solidity of the family. Woman was ordered back into the home the more harshly as her emancipation became a real menace. Even within the working class the men endeavoured to restrain woman’s liberation, because they began to see the women as dangerous competitors – the more so because they were accustomed to work for lower wages.
In proving woman’s inferiority, the anti-feminists then began to draw not only upon religion, philosophy, and theology, as before, but also upon science – biology, experimental psychology, etc. At most they were willing to grant ‘equality in difference’ to the other sex. That profitable formula is most significant; it is precisely like the ‘equal but separate’ formula of the Jim Crow laws aimed at the North American Negroes. As is well known, this so-called equalitarian segregation has resulted only in the most extreme discrimination. The similarity just noted is in no way due to chance, for whether it is a race, a caste, a class, or a sex that is reduced to a position of inferiority, the methods of justification are the same. ‘The eternal feminine’ corresponds to ‘the black soul’ and to ‘the Jewish character’. True, the Jewish problem is on the whole very different from the other two – to the anti-Semite the Jew is not so much an inferior as he is an enemy for whom there is to be granted no place on earth, for whom annihilation is the fate desired. But there are deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro. Both are being emancipated today from a like paternalism, and the former master class wishes to ‘keep them in their place’ – that is, the place chosen for them. In both cases the former masters lavish more or less sincere eulogies, either on the virtues of ‘the good Negro’ with his dormant, childish, merry soul – the submissive Negro – or on the merits of the woman who is ‘truly feminine’ – that is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsible the submissive woman. In both cases the dominant class bases its argument on a state of affairs that it has itself created. As George Bernard Shaw puts it, in substance, ‘The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.’ This vicious circle is met with in all analogous circumstances; when an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior. But the significance of the verb to be must be rightly understood here; it is in bad faith to give it a static value when it really has the dynamic Hegelian sense of ‘to have become’. Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: should that state of affairs continue?
Many men hope that it will continue; not all have given up the battle. The conservative bourgeoisie still see in the emancipation of women a menace to their morality and their interests. Some men dread feminine competition. Recently a male student wrote in the Hebdo-Latin: ‘Every woman student who goes into medicine or law robs us of a job.’ He never questioned his rights in this world. And economic interests are not the only ones concerned. One of the benefits that oppression confers upon the oppressors is that the most humble among them is made to feel superior; thus, a ‘poor white’ in the South can console himself with the thought that he is not a ‘dirty nigger’ – and the more prosperous whites cleverly exploit this pride.
Similarly, the most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women. It was much easier for M. de Montherlant to think himself a hero when he faced women (and women chosen for his purpose) than when he was obliged to act the man among men – something many women have done better than he, for that matter. And in September 1948, in one of his articles in the Figaro littéraire, Claude Mauriac – whose great originality is admired by all – could write regarding woman: ‘We listen on a tone [sic!] of polite indifference … to the most brilliant among them, well knowing that her wit reflects more or less luminously ideas that come from us.’ Evidently the speaker referred to is not reflecting the ideas of Mauriac himself, for no one knows of his having any. It may be that she reflects ideas originating with men, but then, even among men there are those who have been known to appropriate ideas not their own; and one can well ask whether Claude Mauriac might not find more interesting a conversation reflecting Descartes, Marx, or Gide rather than himself. What is really remarkable is that by using the questionable we he identifies himself with St Paul, Hegel, Lenin, and Nietzsche, and from the lofty eminence of their grandeur looks down disdainfully upon the bevy of women who make bold to converse with him on a footing of equality. In truth, I know of more than one woman who would refuse to suffer with patience Mauriac’s ‘tone of polite indifference’.
I have lingered on this example because the masculine attitude is here displayed with disarming ingenuousness. But men profit in many more subtle ways from the otherness, the alterity of woman. Here is a miraculous balm for those afflicted with an inferiority complex, and indeed no one is more arrogant towards women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility. Those who are not fear-ridden in the presence of their fellow men are much more disposed to recognise a fellow creature in woman; but even to these the myth of Woman, the Other, is precious for many reasons. They cannot be blamed for not cheerfully relinquishing all the benefits they derive from the myth, for they realize what they would lose in relinquishing woman as they fancy her to be, while they fail to realize what they have to gain from the woman of tomorrow. Refusal to pose oneself as the Subject, unique and absolute, requires great self-denial. Furthermore, the vast majority of men make no such claim explicitly. They do not postulate woman as inferior, for today they are too thoroughly imbued with the ideal of democracy not to recognise all human beings as equals.
In the bosom of the family, woman seems in the eyes of childhood and youth to be clothed in the same social dignity as the adult males. Later on, the young man, desiring and loving, experiences the resistance, the independence of the woman desired and loved; in marriage, he respects woman as wife and mother, and in the concrete events of conjugal life she stands there before him as a free being. He can therefore feel that social subordination as between the sexes no longer exists and that on the whole, in spite of differences, woman is an equal. As, however, he observes some points of inferiority – the most important being unfitness for the professions – he attributes these to natural causes. When he is in a co-operative and benevolent relation with woman, his theme is the principle of abstract equality, and he does not base his attitude upon such inequality as may exist. But when he is in conflict with her, the situation is reversed: his theme will be the existing inequality, and he will even take it as justification for denying abstract equality.
So it is that many men will affirm as if in good faith that women are the equals of man and that they have nothing to clamour for, while at the same time they will say that women can never be the equals of man and that their demands are in vain. It is, in point of fact, a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature. The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation. And there is no reason to put much trust in the men when they rush to the defence of privileges whose full extent they can hardly measure. We shall not, then, permit ourselves to be intimidated by the number and violence of the attacks launched against women, nor to be entrapped by the self-seeking eulogies bestowed on the ‘true woman’, nor to profit by the enthusiasm for woman’s destiny manifested by men who would not for the world have any part of it.
We should consider the arguments of the feminists with no less suspicion, however, for very often their controversial aim deprives them of all real value. If the ‘woman question’ seems trivial, it is because masculine arrogance has made of it a ‘quarrel’; and when quarrelling one no longer reasons well. People have tirelessly sought to prove that woman is superior, inferior, or equal to man. Some say that, having been created after Adam, she is evidently a secondary being: others say on the contrary that Adam was only a rough draft and that God succeeded in producing the human being in perfection when He created Eve. Woman’s brain is smaller; yes, but it is relatively larger. Christ was made a man; yes, but perhaps for his greater humility. Each argument at once suggests its opposite, and both are often fallacious. If we are to gain understanding, we must get out of these ruts; we must discard the vague notions of superiority, inferiority, equality which have hitherto corrupted every discussion of the subject and start afresh.
Very well, but just how shall we pose the question? And, to begin with, who are we to propound it at all? Man is at once judge and party to the case; but so is woman. What we need is an angel – neither man nor woman – but where shall we find one? Still, the angel would be poorly qualified to speak, for an angel is ignorant of all the basic facts involved in the problem. With a hermaphrodite we should be no better off, for here the situation is most peculiar; the hermaphrodite is not really the combination of a whole man and a whole woman, but consists of parts of each and thus is neither. It looks to me as if there are, after all, certain women who are best qualified to elucidate the situation of woman. Let us not be misled by the sophism that because Epimenides was a Cretan he was necessarily a liar; it is not a mysterious essence that compels men and women to act in good or in bad faith, it is their situation that inclines them more or less towards the search for truth. Many of today’s women, fortunate in the restoration of all the privileges pertaining to the estate of the human being, can afford the luxury of impartiality – we even recognise its necessity. We are no longer like our partisan elders; by and large we have won the game. In recent debates on the status of women the United Nations has persistently maintained that the equality of the sexes is now becoming a reality, and already some of us have never had to sense in our femininity an inconvenience or an obstacle. Many problems appear to us to be more pressing than those which concern us in particular, and this detachment even allows us to hope that our attitude will be objective. Still, we know the feminine world more intimately than do the men because we have our roots in it, we grasp more immediately than do men what it means to a human being to be feminine; and we are more concerned with such knowledge. I have said that there are more pressing problems, but this does not prevent us from seeing some importance in asking how the fact of being women will affect our lives. What opportunities precisely have been given us and what withheld? What fate awaits our younger sisters, and what directions should they take? It is significant that books by women on women are in general animated in our day less by a wish to demand our rights than by an effort towards clarity and understanding. As we emerge from an era of excessive controversy, this book is offered as one attempt among others to confirm that statement.
But it is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind free from bias. The way in which questions are put, the points of view assumed, presuppose a relativity of interest; all characteristics imply values, and every objective description, so called, implies an ethical background. Rather than attempt to conceal principles more or less definitely implied, it is better to state them openly, at the beginning. This will make it unnecessary to specify on every page in just what sense one uses such words as superior, inferior, better, worse, progress, reaction, and the like. If we survey some of the works on woman, we note that one of the points of view most frequently adopted is that of the public good, the general interest; and one always means by this the benefit of society as one wishes it to be maintained or established. For our part, we hold that the only public good is that which assures the private good of the citizens; we shall pass judgement on institutions according to their effectiveness in giving concrete opportunities to individuals. But we do not confuse the idea of private interest with that of happiness, although that is another common point of view. Are not women of the harem more happy than women voters? Is not the housekeeper happier than the working-woman? It is not too clear just what the word happy really means and still less what true values it may mask. There is no possibility of measuring the happiness of others, and it is always easy to describe as happy the situation in which one wishes to place them.
In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.
Now, what peculiarly signalises the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilise her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and for ever transcended by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego) – who always regards the self as the essential and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfilment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? What circumstances limit woman’s liberty and how can they be overcome? These are the fundamental questions on which I would fain throw some light. This means that I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.
Quite evidently this problem would be without significance if we were to believe that woman’s destiny is inevitably determined by physiological, psychological, or economic forces. Hence I shall discuss first of all the light in which woman is viewed by biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism. Next I shall try to show exactly how the concept of the ‘truly feminine’ has been fashioned – why woman has been defined as the Other – and what have been the consequences from man’s point of view. Then from woman’s point of view I shall describe the world in which women must live; and thus we shall be able to envisage the difficulties in their way as, endeavouring to make their escape from the sphere hitherto assigned them, they aspire to full membership in the human race.
Gao Xingjian 1940-
Playwright, critic, and novelist Gao was a prominent leader of the avant-garde movement in fiction and drama that emerged in the wake of the Cultural Revolution in China from 1966 to 1976. In 2000 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature from the Swedish Academy, the first time the prize had been awarded for a body of writing in the Chinese language. Gao, a self-exiled dissident writer, emigrated from China to France in 1987 in order to escape government persecution for his controversial plays, prose, and essays. His novel La Montagne de l’âme (1995; translated in Chinese as Lingshan, translated in English as Soul Mountain) is considered by many critics to be Gao’s masterpiece, employing an experimental narrative voice to relate the story of a spiritual journey through remote China. His works typically address themes of the individual versus collective will and the search for self-identity. Despite his continual focus on topics and issues that are distinctive to Chinese culture, all of Gao’s writings have been banned in China since 1989.
Biographical Information
Gao Xingjian (pronounced gow shing-jen) was born on January 4, 1940, in Ganzhou, China. During Gao’s childhood, Ganzhou—also known as Republican China—was invaded by Japanese forces. In 1949, due to the revolution led by Mao Zedong, the nation became the People’s Republic of China. Gao grew up in a liberal family environment—his father was a banker and his mother was an amateur actress—and he had access to a sizable family library of Chinese literature as well as many volumes on Western Literature and art. He attended university at Beijing Foreign Languages Institute from 1957 to 1962, where he studied French language and literature. After graduating, Gao began working as a translator and editor of the French edition of China Reconstructs, a monthly magazine produced in all the major languages of the world to tout the successes of socialist reconstruction in China. During this period, Gao began secretly writing plays, stories, and essays, which he had to hide from the authorities due to Mao Zedong’s edict that all literature and arts should solely be used to serve the masses. Gao’s wife eventually denounced him to government officials. As a result, he was sent to rural China for cultural “re-education,” where he worked for six years as a farm laborer and teacher. Although he continued to write during his “re-education,” Gao either burned or buried all of his writings, including unpublished novels, plays, and essays, for fear of being further labelled as a subversive. Gao returned to Beijing in 1975 and began working for the Chinese Writers Association. Following the end of the Cultural Revolution, Gao’s writing began to appear regularly in Chinese publications and in 1981 he was assigned to work as a writer for the Beijing People’s Art Theater. His first play, Juedui xinhao (Absolute Signal), was produced in 1982 and became a popular success. That same year, Gao was diagnosed with terminal cancer, but two weeks later learned that he had been misdiagnosed and did not have cancer. His next play, Chezhan (1983; Bus Stop), was declared subversive by the Chinese government, and Gao decided to leave Beijing in order to escape a possible prison sentence. He spent the next five months on a fifteen thousand kilometer trek through rural China, an experience which later became the basis for his novel Soul Mountain. When the political climate in China changed in 1984, Gao returned to Beijing. His next plays received negative reactions from the Chinese government, causing Gao to emigrate to France in 1987 during a trip to Germany on an artistic fellowship. After the massacre during the student protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, Gao denounced the actions of the Chinese authorities to the media and applied for political asylum in France. In 1992 Gao wrote and produced a play—Taowang (1992; Fleeing)—about the Tiananmen Square massacre, resulting in the Chinese government banning all of Gao’s works in China. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1998 and was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Letters from the French government in 1992.
Major Works
Gao’s first play, Absolute Signal, follows an attempted train robbery that is thwarted when one of the villains decides not to go through with the crime. The play uses a variety of flashbacks and different perspectives to create an unique narrative voice. In Bus Stop, the thoughts and behaviors of seven characters—representing a cross-section of Chinese society—are rendered as they wait and watch buses pass without stopping. Western critics found the play reminiscent of the Theater of the Absurd movement and drew comparisons to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Chinese authorities, however, condemned the play, interpreting it as an analogy for ineffective communist government. Yeren (1985; Wildman) concerns an ecologist and a newspaper reporter who travel into the wilderness of modern China in search of a mythical “wildman,” who is said to be part human, part monkey. The play, defying conventional dramatic techniques, unfolds through a series of episodic scenes, interspersing traditional Chinese song, dance, and music with dialogue between the unnamed characters. In Bi’an (1986; The Other Shore)—the title refers to a term for Buddhist enlightenment—three characters, designated as The Crowd, Man, and Woman, engage in a symbolic struggle over the conflict between the individual and collective will. The Other Shore was the last play that Gao wrote in China before emigrating to France in 1987. His plays written in France include Fleeing, Dialogue-interloquer (1992; Dialogue and Rebuttal), Le Somnambule (1994; Nocturnal Wanderer), and Zhoumo sichongzou (1995; Weekend Quartet). Fleeing, set during the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests, takes place in an abandoned warehouse where two men and a young woman have taken refuge from the military tanks sent in to stop the demonstration. Dialogue and Rebuttal follows two strangers who have spent the night together, examining their inability to communicate and their individual relationships with language. Nocturnal Wanderer is a dream play where a character named Sleepwalker battles to escape his nightmare. The structure of Weekend Quartet is based on the composition of a musical quartet and examines the relationships between four different characters. Gao has also received considerable critical attention for his two novels, Soul Mountain and Le Livre d’un homme seul (2000; One Man’s Bible). Soul Mountain—a Buddhist term for heaven—is based on Gao’s experience of being misdiagnosed with terminal cancer and his fifteen thousand kilometer, five-month long journey to the eastern coast of China. The novel employs an experimental narrative style, which includes alternating narrative points of view, as well as a bifurcation of the main character into both male and female parts. Soul Mountain is divided into eighty-one short, episodic chapters, with each chapter alternating between first- and second-person narration. The plot follows an individual’s search for meaning by way of a spiritual journey. Through his/her encounters with the people and cultures of remote China, the main character explores the tensions between individual and collective identity. One Man’s Bible is a historical novel, set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. As in Soul Mountain, the narrative voice includes second- and third-person narration, but One Man’s Bible purposely excludes the first-person “I” in order to symbolize the suppression of individual identity by Chinese government forces.
FARMERS DIG IN AS RACE FOR LAND HEATS UP – by Ravi Nessman
ROZAJALALPUR, India — The farmers of Rozajalalpur knew what was coming.
They saw others closer to India’s expanding capital city pushed off their land to make way for malls, apartments and offices. They saw billboards rise along nearby potholed roads and tiny sales offices sprout in the grassy medians to hawk homes in Leisure Park, Golf Homes and Dream Valley.
Then, in March, they saw the innocuous-looking announcement in the newspaper. In type so small it was nearly unreadable, the state government declared it was seizing their farms under an 1894 national law enacted by British colonists to acquire land for roads and railways. Their land was being taken for the “public purpose” of “planned development.”
India’s transformation from a largely agrarian nation into a global economic power hinges on a steady supply of land for new factories, call centers, power plants and homes. As cities like New Delhi spill over their seams with ever more people, the government is increasingly seizing the farms around them for private development.
The farmers east of the capital are fighting back ferociously, taking to the streets and to the courts – with some success. And the government is scrambling to appease them and prevent them from threatening India’s development dreams.
“We cannot live without land,” said 23-year-old Vivek Nagar of Rozajalalpur, a ramshackle village of muddy roads and 10,000 people about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from Delhi.
The land protests erupted in violence in May, killing four people, including two police officers, in the nearby village of Battha Parsaul. Similar protests have hit at least 17 of India’s 28 states over the past three years, according to The Times of India newspaper.
In the spring, protesters fought to stall plans to take their land for a nuclear plant in Jaitapur, in southern India; in August three farmers were killed by police along a highway near Mumbai as they protested a water project they feared would lead to land confiscations.
Though Nagar and his neighbors were offered a small fortune by their standards for their land, it was far below market value. The money couldn’t compensate for the loss of the relatively secure, though tiny, source of income and food from their farms.
Many feared they would end up like Subhash Nagar, a 35-year-old one-time farmer who lived off his small plot in a nearby village until the government took it in 2009 for 1.5 million rupees ($30,500) and the promise of a job in the industrial area they said they would build.
He spent the money on his sister’s wedding and a new house. But the “industrial area” turned out to be a residential complex, and he was left scrounging to feed his wife and two young children off loans from relatives and the 3,000 rupees ($60) he makes a month at a tea stall, he said.
So thousands of area farmers took to the streets over the summer to fight the seizures that would turn their villages into the new development of Noida Extension. Rahul Gandhi, the all-but-anointed next leader of the ruling Congress Party, rode out on the back of a motorcycle and joined the protest as a way to embarass the opposition-led government in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
The farmers turned to the courts as well, in a case seen as one of the most formidable challenges to the government land acquisition program. They won a partial victory Oct. 21, when the High Court ruled that residents of three villages should get their land back, and those from 61 others, including Rozajalalpur, should get some more compensation. The farmers said the extra money was negligible and plan to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The farmers say the Uttar Pradesh government barred them from selling directly to the builders on the pretense it would spur an uncontrollable building frenzy. Instead, it paid them 850 rupees a square meter ($1.60 a square foot) for their land and then sold it to builders for as much as 15 times more. Officials involved in the deals also pocketed money on the side, the farmers said, charging that the corruption spurs officials to take more and more land.
“Bribery is happening on a large scale,” said Rupesh Verma, a lawyer for the farmers whose own farm was officially confiscated in 2007, though his family has refused to leave it. “All the players, the government, the politician, the bureaucrat, the builders are all getting some benefit. Only the farmers have been deprived.”
State officials say they are using the profits from the land sale to install roads, sewer and water lines and electricity hookups, justifying the higher price. Five officials from the embattled Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority, which is in charge of the land seizures and development in the area, did not answer or return dozens of phone calls from The Associated Press.
The farmers point to the nearby state of Haryana, where farmers made fortunes selling directly to builders, as proof their land is worth more than they are getting.
Their fight has inspired others. Those who lost their land 35 years ago, when the satellite city of Noida was first developed, are demanding extra compensation. Even those whose land in New Delhi was seized by the British a century ago to build the Parliament, the president’s house and the Supreme Court are suing.
Hoping to head off further conflict, the Congress Party rushed a quickly-drawn bill to Parliament to replace the 117-year-old land law with one that would make it far more difficult to seize land. Under the proposal, farmers would be paid four times the market rate for acquired land, and be given an annuity and a portion of the newly developed land.
The bill is an effort to end India’s long history of land disputes, which have displaced an estimated 50 to 60 million people since independence in 1947, many for public works such as dams. The seizures – and the confrontations – have grown more widespread with the economic liberalization that unleashed private development over the past two decades, said Harsh Mander, a member of the government’s National Advisory Council, which has proposed urgent reforms.
“When government starts acquiring land for private companies, using this colonial law, it’s something even the British never did. Then people got more and more angry,” he said.
Disputes over land seizures forced the relocation of a planned auto factory from West Bengal to the more business-friendly state of Gujarat in 2008. Land protests have also held up South Korean steel giant Posco’s plans to build a $12 billion plant in the eastern state of Orissa, as well as Reliance Power’s efforts to build a 7,500 megawatt power plant outside Delhi.
Indian industry says the current system has needlessly politicized land acquisitions and increased anger at business.
“As far as possible, the private sector should be allowed to directly purchase the land from the owners,” said Chetan Bijesure, an official at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.
The new protests are leaving would-be homeowners like Ravi Garg out in the cold.
The 31-year-old software engineer was lured to the Panscheel Greens 1 residential complex by the promise of a swimming pool, gym and cafe. For 2.4 million rupees ($49,000) he could get a three-bedroom apartment in the Noida Extension development that would cost him 7 million ($142,000) if it were in Noida itself.
He paid a 1 million rupee ($20,000) down payment and then saw his dreams crumble. Construction has stopped.
“Everything was purely approved by all the government agencies,” he said. “Suddenly when construction reached the fourth or fifth floor, we were told that the land does not belong to the government. It belongs to the farmers.”
He doesn’t blame the farmers, and they also sympathize with the homebuyers, whom they see as comrades fighting for a place to call home.
But the farmers bristle at the golf courses and the Formula One racetrack – which hosted India’s first F1 race last month – as a sign the government is more interested in entertaining the super-rich than helping those on the edge.
“We are a poor country. We need some necessities first. After this, all these things can be done,” said Verma, the farmers’ lawyer.
The farmers realize their way of life is ending. Dalchand Sharma’s ancestor was a wealthy man with 50 acres in Rozajalapur in the 1850s. Over the years, the farm has been divided between so many heirs that the 62-year-old Sharma struggles to survive on just three acres.
His two sons, who would split that small plot, have chosen a different path. One is studying for his MBA and the other to become an engineer.
Sharma wants significantly more compensation so he can buy a cheaper plot of land further from New Delhi, as well as pass some money to the next generation.
“If the land is taken away, and my children get enough money to be comfortable and have houses, than it will be all right,” he said. “If not, then I’m happy the way things are.” AP
Excerpt from “Remembrance of Things Past”
by Marcel Proust
 I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony; which I, too, cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call upon the tea for it again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightenment. I put down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.And I begin again to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof of its existence, but only the sense that it was a happy, that it was a real state in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I find again the same state, illumined by no fresh light. I compel my mind to make one further effort, to follow and recapture once again the fleeting sensation. And that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention to the sounds which come from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself before the supreme attempt. And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it. I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too much confused; scarcely can I perceive the colourless reflection in which are blended the uncapturable whirling medley of radiant hues, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate to me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste of cake soaked in tea; cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, of what period in my past life.Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being? I cannot tell. Now that I feel nothing, it has stopped, has perhaps gone down again into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise? Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind.And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea. |
Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat
The Spirit of the Laws
Montesquieu’s aim in The Spirit of the Laws is to explain human laws and social institutions. This might seem like an impossible project: unlike physical laws, which are, according to Montesquieu, instituted and sustained by God, positive laws and social institutions are created by fallible human beings who are “subject … to ignorance and error, [and] hurried away by a thousand impetuous passions” (SL 1.1). One might therefore expect our laws and institutions to be no more comprehensible than any other catalog of human follies, an expectation which the extraordinary diversity of laws adopted by different societies would seem to confirm.
Nonetheless, Montesquieu believes that this apparent chaos is much more comprehensible than one might think. On his view, the key to understanding different laws and social systems is to recognize that they should be adapted to a variety of different factors, and cannot be properly understood unless one considers them in this light. Specifically, laws should be adapted “to the people for whom they are framed…, to the nature and principle of each government, … to the climate of each country, to the quality of its soil, to its situation and extent, to the principal occupation of the natives, whether husbandmen, huntsmen or shepherds: they should have relation to the degree of liberty which the constitution will bear; to the religion of the inhabitants, to their inclinations, riches, numbers, commerce, manners, and customs. In fine, they have relations to each other, as also to their origin, to the intent of the legislator, and to the order of things on which they are established; in all of which different lights they ought to be considered” (SL 1.3). When we consider legal and social systems in relation to these various factors, Montesquieu believes, we will find that many laws and institutions that had seemed puzzling or even perverse are in fact quite comprehensible.
Understanding why we have the laws we do is important in itself. However, it also serves practical purposes. Most importantly, it will discourage misguided attempts at reform. Montesquieu is not a utopian, either by temperament or conviction. He believes that to live under a stable, non-despotic government that leaves its law-abiding citizens more or less free to live their lives is a great good, and that no such government should be lightly tampered with. If we understand our system of government, and the ways in which it is adapted to the conditions of our country and its people, we will see that many of its apparently irrational features actually make sense, and that to ‘reform’ these features would actually weaken it. Thus, for instance, one might think that a monarchical government would be strengthened by weakening the nobility, thereby giving more power to the monarch. On Montesquieu’s view, this is false: to weaken those groups or institutions which check a monarch’s power is to risk transforming monarchy into despotism, a form of government that is both abhorrent and unstable.
Understanding our laws will also help us to see which aspects of them are genuinely in need of reform, and how these reforms might be accomplished. For instance, Montesquieu believes that the laws of many countries can be made be more liberal and more humane, and that they can often be applied less arbitrarily, with less scope for the unpredictable and oppressive use of state power. Likewise, religious persecution and slavery can be abolished, and commerce can be encouraged. These reforms would generally strengthen monarchical governments, since they enhance the freedom and dignity of citizens. If lawmakers understand the relations between laws on the one hand and conditions of their countries and the principles of their governments on the other, they will be in a better position to carry out such reforms without undermining the governments they seek to improve.
4.1 Forms of Government
Montesquieu holds that there are three types of governments: republican governments, which can take either democratic or aristocratic forms; monarchies; and despotisms. Unlike, for instance, Aristotle, Montesquieu does not distinguish forms of government on the basis of the virtue of the sovereign. The distinction between monarchy and despotism, for instance, depends not on the virtue of the monarch, but on whether or not he governs “by fixed and established laws” (SL 2.1). Each form of government has a principle, a set of “human passions which set it in motion” (SL 3.1); and each can be corrupted if its principle is undermined or destroyed.
In a democracy, the people are sovereign. They may govern through ministers, or be advised by a senate, but they must have the power of choosing their ministers and senators for themselves. The principle of democracy is political virtue, by which Montesquieu means “the love of the laws and of our country” (SL 4.5), including its democratic constitution. The form of a democratic government makes the laws governing suffrage and voting fundamental. The need to protect its principle, however, imposes far more extensive requirements. On Montesquieu’s view, the virtue required by a functioning democracy is not natural. It requires “a constant preference of public to private interest” (SL 4.5); it “limits ambition to the sole desire, to the sole happiness, of doing greater services to our country than the rest of our fellow citizens” (SL 5.3); and it “is a self-renunciation, which is ever arduous and painful” (SL 4.5). Montesquieu compares it to monks’ love for their order: “their rule debars them from all those things by which the ordinary passions are fed; there remains therefore only this passion for the very rule that torments them. … the more it curbs their inclinations, the more force it gives to the only passion left them” (SL 5.2). To produce this unnatural self-renunciation, “the whole power of education is required” (SL 4.5). A democracy must educate its citizens to identify their interests with the interests of their country, and should have censors to preserve its mores. It should seek to establish frugality by law, so as to prevent its citizens from being tempted to advance their own private interests at the expense of the public good; for the same reason, the laws by which property is transferred should aim to preserve an equal distribution of property among citizens. Its territory should be small, so that it is easy for citizens to identify with it, and more difficult for extensive private interests to emerge.
Democracies can be corrupted in two ways: by what Montesquieu calls “the spirit of inequality” and “the spirit of extreme equality” (SL 8.2). The spirit of inequality arises when citizens no longer identify their interests with the interests of their country, and therefore seek both to advance their own private interests at the expense of their fellow citizens, and to acquire political power over them. The spirit of extreme equality arises when the people are no longer content to be equal as citizens, but want to be equal in every respect. In a functioning democracy, the people choose magistrates to exercise executive power, and they respect and obey the magistrates they have chosen. If those magistrates forfeit their respect, they replace them. When the spirit of extreme equality takes root, however, the citizens neither respect nor obey any magistrate. They “want to manage everything themselves, to debate for the senate, to execute for the magistrate, and to decide for the judges” (SL 8.2). Eventually the government will cease to function, the last remnants of virtue will disappear, and democracy will be replaced by despotism.
In an aristocracy, one part of the people governs the rest. The principle of an aristocratic government is moderation, the virtue which leads those who govern in an aristocracy to restrain themselves both from oppressing the people and from trying to acquire excessive power over one another. In an aristocracy, the laws should be designed to instill and protect this spirit of moderation. To do so, they must do three things. First, the laws must prevent the nobility from abusing the people. The power of the nobility makes such abuse a standing temptation in an aristocracy; to avoid it, the laws should deny the nobility some powers, like the power to tax, which would make this temptation all but irresistible, and should try to foster responsible and moderate administration. Second, the laws should disguise as much as possible the difference between the nobility and the people, so that the people feel their lack of power as little as possible. Thus the nobility should have modest and simple manners, since if they do not attempt to distinguish themselves from the people “the people are apt to forget their subjection and weakness” (SL 5.8). Finally, the laws should try to ensure equality among the nobles themselves, and among noble families. When they fail to do so, the nobility will lose its spirit of moderation, and the government will be corrupted.
In a monarchy, one person governs “by fixed and established laws” (SL 2.1). According to Montesquieu, these laws “necessarily suppose the intermediate channels through which (the monarch’s) power flows: for if there be only the momentary and capricious will of a single person to govern the state, nothing can be fixed, and, of course, there is no fundamental law” (SL 2.4). These ‘intermediate channels’ are such subordinate institutions as the nobility and an independent judiciary; and the laws of a monarchy should therefore be designed to preserve their power. The principle of monarchical government is honor. Unlike the virtue required by republican governments, the desire to win honor and distinction comes naturally to us. For this reason education has a less difficult task in a monarchy than in a republic: it need only heighten our ambitions and our sense of our own worth, provide us with an ideal of honor worth aspiring to, and cultivate in us the politeness needed to live with others whose sense of their worth matches our own. The chief task of the laws in a monarchy is to protect the subordinate institutions that distinguish monarchy from despotism. To this end, they should make it easy to preserve large estates undivided, protect the rights and privileges of the nobility, and promote the rule of law. They should also encourage the proliferation of distinctions and of rewards for honorable conduct, including luxuries.
A monarchy is corrupted when the monarch either destroys the subordinate institutions that constrain his will, or decides to rule arbitrarily, without regard to the basic laws of his country, or debases the honors at which his citizens might aim, so that “men are capable of being loaded at the very same time with infamy and with dignities” (SL 8.7). The first two forms of corruption destroy the checks on the sovereign’s will that separate monarchy from despotism; the third severs the connection between honorable conduct and its proper rewards. In a functioning monarchy, personal ambition and a sense of honor work together. This is monarchy’s great strength and the source of its extraordinary stability: whether its citizens act from genuine virtue, a sense of their own worth, a desire to serve their king, or personal ambition, they will be led to act in ways that serve their country. A monarch who rules arbitrarily, or who rewards servility and ignoble conduct instead of genuine honor, severs this connection and corrupts his government.
In despotic states “a single person directs everything by his own will and caprice” (SL 2.1). Without laws to check him, and with no need to attend to anyone who does not agree with him, a despot can do whatever he likes, however ill-advised or reprehensible. His subjects are no better than slaves, and he can dispose of them as he sees fit. The principle of despotism is fear. This fear is easily maintained, since the situation of a despot’s subjects is genuinely terrifying. Education is unnecessary in a despotism; if it exists at all, it should be designed to debase the mind and break the spirit. Such ideas as honor and virtue should not occur to a despot’s subjects, since “persons capable of setting a value on themselves would be likely to create disturbances. Fear must therefore depress their spirits, and extinguish even the least sense of ambition” (SL 3.9). Their “portion here, like that of beasts, is instinct, compliance, and punishment” (SL 3.10), and any higher aspirations should be brutally discouraged.
Montesquieu writes that “the principle of despotic government is subject to a continual corruption, because it is even in its nature corrupt” (SL 8.10). This is true in several senses. First, despotic governments undermine themselves. Because property is not secure in a despotic state, commerce will not flourish, and the state will be poor. The people must be kept in a state of fear by the threat of punishment; however, over time the punishments needed to keep them in line will tend to become more and more severe, until further threats lose their force. Most importantly, however, the despot’s character is likely to prevent him from ruling effectively. Since a despot’s every whim is granted, he “has no occasion to deliberate, to doubt, to reason; he has only to will” (SL 4.3). For this reason he is never forced to develop anything like intelligence, character, or resolution. Instead, he is “naturally lazy, voluptuous, and ignorant” (SL 2.5), and has no interest in actually governing his people. He will therefore choose a vizier to govern for him, and retire to his seraglio to pursue pleasure. In his absence, however, intrigues against him will multiply, especially since his rule is necessarily odious to his subjects, and since they have so little to lose if their plots against him fail. He cannot rely on his army to protect him, since the more power they have, the greater the likelihood that his generals will themselves try to seize power. For this reason the ruler in a despotic state has no more security than his people.
Second, monarchical and republican governments involve specific governmental structures, and require that their citizens have specific sorts of motivation. When these structures crumble, or these motivations fail, monarchical and republican governments are corrupted, and the result of their corruption is that they fall into despotism. But when a particular despotic government falls, it is not generally replaced by a monarchy or a republic. The creation of a stable monarchy or republic is extremely difficult: “a masterpiece of legislation, rarely produced by hazard, and seldom attained by prudence” (SL 5.14). It is particularly difficult when those who would have both to frame the laws of such a government and to live by them have previously been brutalized and degraded by despotism. Producing a despotic government, by contrast, is relatively straightforward. A despotism requires no powers to be carefully balanced against one another, no institutions to be created and maintained in existence, no complicated motivations to be fostered, and no restraints on power to be kept in place. One need only terrify one’s fellow citizens enough to allow one to impose one’s will on them; and this, Montesquieu claims, “is what every capacity may reach” (SL 5.14). For these reasons despotism necessarily stands in a different relation to corruption than other forms of government: while they are liable to corruption, despotism is its embodiment.
4.2 Liberty
Montesquieu is among the greatest philosophers of liberalism, but his is what Shklar has called “a liberalism of fear” (Shklar, Montesquieu, p. 89). According to Montesquieu, political liberty is “a tranquillity of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety” (SL 11.6). Liberty is not the freedom to do whatever we want: if we have the freedom to harm others, for instance, others will also have the freedom to harm us, and we will have no confidence in our own safety. Liberty involves living under laws that protect us from harm while leaving us free to do as much as possible, and that enable us to feel the greatest possible confidence that if we obey those laws, the power of the state will not be directed against us.
If it is to provide its citizens with the greatest possible liberty, a government must have certain features. First, since “constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it … it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power” (SL 11.4). This is achieved through the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government. If different persons or bodies exercise these powers, then each can check the others if they try to abuse their powers. But if one person or body holds several or all of these powers, then nothing prevents that person or body from acting tyrannically; and the people will have no confidence in their own security.
Certain arrangements make it easier for the three powers to check one another. Montesquieu argues that the legislative power alone should have the power to tax, since it can then deprive the executive of funding if the latter attempts to impose its will arbitrarily. Likewise, the executive power should have the right to veto acts of the legislature, and the legislature should be composed of two houses, each of which can prevent acts of the other from becoming law. The judiciary should be independent of both the legislature and the executive, and should restrict itself to applying the laws to particular cases in a fixed and consistent manner, so that “the judicial power, so terrible to mankind, … becomes, as it were, invisible”, and people “fear the office, but not the magistrate” (SL 11.6).
Liberty also requires that the laws concern only threats to public order and security, since such laws will protect us from harm while leaving us free to do as many other things as possible. Thus, for instance, the laws should not concern offenses against God, since He does not require their protection. They should not prohibit what they do not need to prohibit: “all punishment which is not derived from necessity is tyrannical. The law is not a mere act of power; things in their own nature indifferent are not within its province” (SL 19.14). The laws should be constructed to make it as easy as possible for citizens to protect themselves from punishment by not committing crimes. They should not be vague, since if they were, we might never be sure whether or not some particular action was a crime. Nor should they prohibit things we might do inadvertently, like bumping into a statue of the emperor, or involuntarily, like doubting the wisdom of one of his decrees; if such actions were crimes, no amount of effort to abide by the laws of our country would justify confidence that we would succeed, and therefore we could never feel safe from criminal prosecution. Finally, the laws should make it as easy as possible for an innocent person to prove his or her innocence. They should concern outward conduct, not (for instance) our thoughts and dreams, since while we can try to prove that we did not perform some action, we cannot prove that we never had some thought. The laws should not criminalize conduct that is inherently hard to prove, like witchcraft; and lawmakers should be cautious when dealing with crimes like sodomy, which are typically not carried out in the presence of several witnesses, lest they “open a very wide door to calumny” (SL 12.6).
Montesquieu’s emphasis on the connection between liberty and the details of the criminal law were unusual among his contemporaries, and inspired such later legal reformers as Cesare Beccaria.
MERRY CHRISTMAS
& A Happy, healthy, auspicious New Year 2012 to you, family and friends
fr us at Garunar L’ Universite Orientale Royale community
…well please drive carefully, drink wisely and be safe (a personal advice fr the Chancellor) Cheers..
NEWS:
On January 9, 2012 AD we are indeed proud to plan the academic action plan to establish the Childrens’ University Programme where most of young, bright minds in rural SE Asia, Americas and EU will have access to multilateral International Development, community engineering and Education studies, friendship and research.
The Director of the programme will be Mr. Palat M. Yommaha.
Opinion
After Egypt’s Revolution, Christians Are Living in Fear …
Coptic Christians, carrying a symbolic coffin with photos of people killed in clashes, marched from the Coptic Cathedral in the Abbasiya section of Cairo earlier this month.
By ANDRÉ ACIMAN
Published: November 19, 2011
THE images streaming from Cairo’s streets last month were not as horrifying as those of the capture and brutal death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, but they were savage all the same. They were a sobering reminder that popular movements in some parts of the world, however euphorically they begin, can take disquieting and ugly turns.
Related in Opinion
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News Analysis: … But There’s a Slim Hope in History (November 20, 2011)
When liberal Muslims joined Coptic Christians as they marched through Cairo’s Maspero area on Oct. 9 to protest the burning of a Coptic church, bands of conservative Muslim hooligans wielding sticks and swords began attacking the protesters. Egyptian security forces who had apparently intervened to break up the violence deliberately rammed their armed vehicles into the Coptic crowd and fired live ammunition indiscriminately.
Egyptian military authorities soon shut down live news coverage of the event, and evidence of chaos was quickly cleared from the scene. But the massacre, in which at least 24 people were killed and more than 300 were wounded, was the worst instance of sectarian violence in Egypt in 60 years.
Confusion and conflicting narratives abound. Some claim to have overheard an announcer on television encourage “honorable Egyptians” to come to the rescue of soldiers under attack by a mob of Copts. Others heard a Muslim shouting that he had killed a Christian.
Unable to explain exactly why events turned violent, Egypt’s interim prime minister, Essam Sharaf, claimed that the wholesale slaughter of civilians was not the product of sectarian violence but proof that there were “hidden hands” involved.
I grew up in an Egypt that was inventing hidden hands wherever you looked. Because of my family’s increasingly precarious status as Jews living in Nasser’s Egypt, my parents forbade me to flash my flashlight several times at night or to write invisible messages with lemon ink in middle school. These were a spymaster’s tricks, and Jews were forever regarded as spies after the 1954 “Lavon Affair,” in which Israeli intelligence recruited Egyptian Jews to bomb targets in Egypt.
Sadly, the phrase “hidden hands” remains a part of Egypt’s political rhetoric more than 50 years later — an invitation for every Egyptian to write in the name of his or her favorite bugaboo. Rather than see things for what they are, Egyptians, from their leaders on down, have always preferred the blame game — and with good reason. Blaming some insidious clandestine villain for anything invariably works in a country where hearsay passes for truth and paranoia for knowledge.
Sometimes those hidden hands are called Langley, or the West, or, all else failing, of course, the Mossad. Sometimes “hidden hands” stands for any number of foreign or local conspiracies carried out by corrupt or disgruntled apparatchiks of one stripe or another who are forever eager to tarnish and discredit the public trust.
The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period. False rumor, which is the opiate of the Egyptian masses and the bread and butter of political discourse in the Arab world, trumps clarity, reason and the will to tolerate a different opinion, let alone a different religion or the spirit of open discourse.
“Hidden hands” stands for Satan. And with Satan you don’t use judgment; you use cunning and paranoia. Cunning, after all, is poor man’s fare, a way of cobbling together a credible enough narrative that is at once easy to digest, to swear by, and pass around. Bugaboos keep you focused. And nothing in the Middle East can keep you as focused (or as unfocused) as the archvillain of them all: Israel.
Say “Israel” and you’ve galvanized everyone. Say Israel and you have a movement, a cause, a purpose. Say “Israel” and all of Islam huddles. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and now Turkey.
What is good about the episode in Maspero is that, in the exhilarating and unusual spirit of the events of last spring in Tahrir Square, Muslims joined the Coptic demonstrators who were eager to exercise the right to build churches — a right that has always been grudgingly granted to Egypt’s Copts.
What is terrible about the episode, however, is the inability of the government to take the blame for the slaughter of the Copts. Similarly, in September, it failed to intervene in good time when a large mob attacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo, broke down its walls and nearly slaughtered those inside.
The friendly army that Copts embraced during the Arab spring has turned its guns on those who embraced it. Your pal today, your killer tomorrow.
There are no rules and there is no trust. The poor man on the street, if he is to think for himself — which is a tall order in a country that has no history of free speech — must either wear warped lenses to see through wholesale agitprop or surrender to blind fanaticism.
COPTS represent approximately 10 percent of Egypt’s population and are the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians. Yet, sensing danger while everyone else in Egypt and in the West was busy celebrating the fall of Mr. Mubarak during the much-heralded Arab Spring, 93,000 Copts have already fled Egypt since March. In light of the events in Maspero, it is thought that another 150,000 Copts may leave their ancestral homeland by the end of 2011.
When Mr. Mubarak was in power, the Copts were frequently the victims of violent attacks and official discrimination — the New Year’s bombing of a Coptic Church in Alexandria that left 21 dead is the most recent instance. Now, with Mr. Mubarak gone, Copts fear that an elected Muslim majority is likely to prove far less tolerant than a military dictatorship.
Conditions were by no means good for the Copts when Mr. Mubarak was at the helm. The most risible instance occurred in 2009 when, in an absurd effort to prevent the spread of swine flu, the government decided to slaughter all pigs in Egypt.
But since neither contact with pigs nor eating pork spreads swine flu, why kill the poor pigs? The answer is very simple. Slaughtering the pigs, as it turns out, was probably meant to inconvenience the Copts who farmed them and ate them. This constituted another of those petty measures intended to harm the Copts financially.
Today, Egypt is doing the same with Israel. Under the pretext of preserving its national agricultural patrimony, it has forbidden the sale of palm fronds to Israel. Palm fronds are used ceremonially by Jews during the holiday of Sukkot, and since Israel doesn’t grow enough palm trees, it imports the fronds from Egypt. Whom did the ban hurt? The Egyptians who grow palm trees. Whom did the slaughter of pigs hurt? None other than the Cairenes themselves, because pigs, which eat tons of organic waste, used to play an important role in clearing trash from the streets of Cairo.
What doesn’t occur to most Egyptians is that the Copts represent a significant business community in Egypt and that their flight may further damage an economy saddled with a ballooning deficit.
But this is nothing new for Egypt. The Egyptians have yet to learn the very hard lesson of the post-1956 departure of its nearly 100,000 Jews, who, at the time, constituted one of the wealthiest Jewish communities in the Mediterranean region.
The Egyptian economy never recovered from this loss. While blaming Zionism and the creation of Israel or turning to Islamic leadership may take many people’s minds off the very real financial debacle confronting Egypt and help assuage feelings of powerlessness, the hard lesson has not been learned yet.
The Arab Spring was a luminous instance of democratic euphoria in a country that had no history of democracy or euphoria. What happened to the Copts this fall cast a dark cloud, which the interim government, whatever its true convictions, would do well to dispel.
Egypt should not lose its Copts. For if that is what autumn brings, then, to paraphrase Shelley, winter may not be far behind.
André Aciman is a professor of comparative literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the author of “Out of Egypt” and “Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere.”
Polluting Burma
Ratchaburi Electricity Generating Holding with Italian-Thai Development , ITD do Dawei deal
The plan is to build a coal-fired power plant in Dawei, Burma. As the project company holds stakes in coal mines in Indonesia and Australia, it is expected that it will import coal and generate power likely for Burma, with possibility of selling back to Thailand.
Burma already has abundant gas which is suitable for clean energy. (But are there welfare, pension, central provident funds for citizens ?)
It is very disturbing to know that Burma’ll have to import coal (a dirty energy source) while selling gas (a clean energy source). On the other hand we remember there were protests in Thailand against coal-fired plant in Mae Moh and against another project in the upper South. (most of the mines in Burma are now owned by whom – of course one wonders?)
In the present case, that company is transferring pollution from Thailand to Burma. I think this project should be scrapped right away.
written by – A CONCERNED BURMESE
Violence grows as Tibetans get angrier
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN Associated Press BEIJING January 28, 2012 (AP)
A young man posts his photo with a leaflet demanding freedom for Tibet and telling Chinese police, come and get me. Protesters rise up to defend him, and demonstrations break out in two other Tibetan areas of western China to support the same cause. Each time, police respond with bullets. The three clashes, all in the past week, killed several Tibetans and injured dozens. They mark an escalation of a protest movement that for months expressed itself mainly through scattered individual self-immolations. It’s the result of growing desperation among Tibetans and a harsh crackdown by security forces that scholars and pro-Tibet activists contend only breeds more rage and despair. That leaves authorities with the stark choice of either cracking down even harder or meeting Tibetan demands for greater freedom and a return of their Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama — something Beijing has shown zero willingness to do. AP FILE – In this file photo taken Wednesday,… View Full Caption FILE – In this file photo taken Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012, Tibetan Buddhist monks hold pictures of Tibetans they claim were allegedly shot by Chinese security forces earlier this week, during a candlelight vigil in Dharamsala, India. Three deadly clashes with Chinese security forces in January mark an escalation of a Tibetan protest movement that had expressed itself through scattered individual self-immolations, reflecting both the growing desperation of Tibetans and the harsh response by police. (AP Photo/Angus McDonald, File) Close”By not responding constructively when it was faced with peaceful one-person protests, the (Communist) party has created the conditions for violent, large-scale protests,” said Robbie Barnett, head of modern Tibetan studies at New York’s Columbia University. This is the region’s most violent period since 2008, when deadly rioting in Tibet’s capital Lhasa spread to Tibetan areas in adjoining provinces. China responded by flooding the area with troops and closing Tibetan regions entirely to foreigners for about a year. Special permission is still required for non-Chinese visitors to Tibet, and the Himalayan region remains closed off entirely for the weeks surrounding the March 14 anniversary of the riots that left 22 people dead. Video smuggled out by activists shows paramilitary troops equipped with assault rifles and armored cars making pre-dawn arrests. Huge convoys of heavily armored troops are seen driving along mountain roads and monks accused of sedition being frog-marched to waiting trucks. For the past year, self-immolations have become a striking form of protest in the region. At least 16 monks, nuns and former clergy set themselves on fire after chanting for Tibetan freedom and the return of the Dalai Lama, who fled to India amid an abortive uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. China, fiercely critical of the Dalai Lama, says Tibet has been under its rule for centuries, but many Tibetans say the region was functionally independent for most of that time. Anger over cultural and religious restrictions is deepened by a sense that Tibetans have been marginalized economically by an influx of migrants from elsewhere in China. In a change from the individual protests, several thousand Tibetans marched to government offices Monday in Ganzi prefecture in Sichuan province. Police opened fire into the crowd, killing up to three people, witnesses and activist groups said. On Tuesday, security forces opened fire on a crowd of protesters in another area of Ganzi, killing two Tibetans and wounding several more, according to the group Free Tibet. On Thursday in southwestern Sichuan province’s Aba prefecture, a youth named Tarpa posted a leaflet saying that self-immolations wouldn’t stop until Tibet is free, the London-based International Campaign for Tibet said. He wrote his name on the leaflet and included a photo of himself, saying that Chinese authorities could come and arrest him if they wished, group spokeswoman Kate Saunders said in an email. Security forces did so about two hours later. Area residents blocked their way, shouting slogans and warning of bigger protests if Tarpa wasn’t released, Saunders said. Police then fired into the crowd, killing a a 20-year-old friend of Tarpa’s, a student named Urgen, and wounding several others. The incident, as with most reported clashes in Tibetan areas, could not be independently verified and exact numbers of casualties were unclear because of the heavy security presence and lack of access. The topic is so sensitive that even government-backed scholars claim ignorance of it and refuse to comment. The government, however, acknowledged Tuesday’s unrest, saying that a “mob” charged a police station and injured 14 officers, forcing police to open fire on them. The official Xinhua News Agency said police killed one rioter and injured another. “The Chinese government will, as always, fight all crimes and be resolute in maintaining social order,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in comments on the incident. In a commentary Sunday, the nationalist tabloid Global Times repeated accusations that the protests were inspired by Tibetan exile groups and their demands were out of step with the desire for economic development. Yet, it also conceded that the Dalai Lama retained considerable religious influence over Tibetans, warning this created a dangerous trend of “melding the political and relgious.” The harsh response points to a deep anxiety about the self-immolations, said Youdon Aukatsang, a New Delhi-based member of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile. “They’re worried that there is an underground movement in Tibet that is coming to the surface,” she said. Tibetan desperation has been fed both by the harsh crackdown — security agents reportedly outnumber monks in some monasteries — along with a deep fear that the Dalai Lama, probably the most potent symbol of Tibet’s separate identity, will never return. The 76-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate handed his political powers to an elected assembly last year. That was intended to ensure the Tibetan cause would live on after him, but was met with considerable anxiety among many Tibetans who saw it as a sign he was giving up his role as leader of their struggle. Dibyesh Anand, a Tibet expert at London’s University of Westminster, said resistance to Chinese rule is likely to grow more fierce. “Protests will get more radicalized since the Tibetans in the region see no concession, no offer of compromise, no flexibility coming from the government,” he said.
