The very thorny set of issues I am about to tackle here is critical to the well-being of both men and women in the 21st century. It dates back to that period of philosophy called 'The Enlightenment' which was associated with at least two revolutions -- The American Revolution (1775-1783) and The French Revolution (1789-1799).
In Canada, our investigation will take us back to The original British North America Act (1867), the Women's Movement in the early 1900s, to the Canada Act and The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and to modern day issues of Canadian Family Law, and for lack of better wording, 'The Battle of the Sexes'.
We would like 'reason' as much as possible to prevail in these matters but as tends to invariably happen in these types of controversial issues, reason will invariably evaporate at least partly into passion and narcissistic bias. I am no different than anyone else in this regard. Abstract principles are often easy to agree about but when these abstract principle start to get interpreted in terms of practical applications involving 'either/or' decisions, then all hell is likely to break out as everyone seeks to protect their own concrete narcissistic interests.
Call this 'humanism' in a more than slightly satirical, cynical Hobbesian sense. (Hobbes believed -- rightfully so in my opinion -- that 'total human freedom' would result in total anarchy and corruption; thus, government must step in to impose serious restrictions on freedom to seriously deter if not stop people from killing each other and stealing each other blind. (Like Schopenhauer, Hobbes had a pretty good understanding of 'unbridled human narcissism' -- at least in the case of many people. See the internet, Wikipedia, Natural Rights, Hobbes)
While I don't agree wholely with Hobbes' philosophy, and the 50 million dollar question becomes: 'Where do you draw the line between too much freedom and not enough freedom?', still, I at least partly agree with his argument, and the older and more jaded I get, the more I tend to agree with the extent of Hobbes' cynicism about man's 'narcissistic impulses and their corruptive, self-serving, anti-civil nature' (particularly in a culture that promotes and trumpets 'unbridled narcissistic impulses, philosophy, and lifestyle', directly and indirectly, overtly and covertly).
To go to the opposite philosophical corner, I love the philosophical idealism of The Enlightenment period. As naive as the philosophy in this period partly was, it was still a great period of philosophy -- a period of remarkable political and economic philosophers from Locke to Adam Smith to Diderot to Voltaire to Tom Paine to Thomas Jefferson...to the partly post-Enlightenment German Idealism of Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
However, with all due respect, John Locke's and later Tom Paine's theory of 'natural rights' which found its way both into the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States -- is unfounded, assumptive, 'pseudo-firepower'. Before I get tarred and feathered here, let me clarify.
There is no such thing as 'natural rights'. The concept is a myth aimed at giving an argument more force -- just like people/preachers/politicians who use the name 'God' or our 'Creator' to rhetorically try to give their argument more 'kick' and 'juice' with the assumption/myth of 'Divine Authority' (as if any of right up to and including the Pope have any contact with this 'Divine Authority').
The same is true with the use of the term 'Nature' and 'Natural Rights'. I am a big fan of 'The American Declaration of Independence', 'The American Constitution', of Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine. Add Locke, Diderot, and Voltaire to the list and these are five of my favorite political philosophers. Add Adam Smith and Karl Marx to the list and we have my 'Super Seven'. Round out the list with arguably my favorite three philosophers of all time: 1. the best German Idealist and Dialectic Philosopher -- Hegel; 2. the best 'Wholistic and Spiritual' Philosopher -- Spinoza; and 3. the most firey and hard-hitting 'Deconstructionist' -- Nietzsche, and you have arguably my 'Top Ten' Philosophers. (This list could change tomorrow but it is a pretty good list of some of my top philosophical influences.) Honourable mention off the top of my head relative to my purposes and influences in 'Hegel's Hotel' go to: Anaxamander, Heraclitus, Confucious, The Han Philosophers, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Freud, Jung, Adler, Korzybski, Hayakawa, Perls, Derrida and Foucault.
The best two arguments against the use of the term 'Natural Rights' I found on the internet yesterday. They come from Jonathan Wallace and Jeremy Bentham...
...............................................................................
From the internet, Wikipedia, 'Natural Rights':
Jonathan Wallace has asserted that there is no basis on which to claim that some rights are natural, and he argued that Hobbes' account of natural rights confuses right with ability (human beings have the ability to seek only their own good and follow their nature in the same way as animals, but this does not imply that they have a right to do so).[2] Wallace advocates a social contract, much like Hobbes and Locke, but does not base it on natural rights:
We are all at a table together, deciding which rules to adopt, free from any vague constraints, half-remembered myths, anonymous patriarchal texts and murky concepts of nature. If I propose something you do not like, tell me why it is not practical, or harms somebody, or is counter to some other useful rule; but don't tell me it offends the universe.
Jeremy Bentham, a utilitarian philosopher, famously stated:
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.
.................................................................................
All human rights are civilly and/or legally bestowed; they don't come from God or Nature. All rights depend on some sort of 'social contract' between the members and government of a particular society or nation and since this social contract will never, ever totally be agreed on without dissension -- i.e., with 'perfect agreement', this 'contract' will always at least partly be in a state of 'flux'. The 'homeostatic balance' may stay steady if it is a good contract, fair to everyone, but inevitably over time, with changing people and a changing world, any social contract, any 'legal template' (legal document or any section or sub-section of it), and its interpretation, is going to come under scrutiny and review again. This is true of The American Declaration of Independence, and The American Constitution. It is also true of The British North America Act, The Canadian Constitution, and The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And it is also true of all the constantly changing 'equal rights' Acts in both Canada and The U.S (as well as in the rest of the world).
Governments may lay out Constitutions or legal templates and these legal templates may then be interpreted by judges and/or juries but there will never, ever be total and perfect agreement on what the exact content of this 'social contract' should be, and how it should be interpreted. It will always be the subject and content of philosophical investigation, editorializing, narcissistic bias, power-mongering, dialectic-democratic disagreement, and everything else that makes us 'human'.
It isn't the 'rights' that make us human; rather it is the disagreement over these rights that make us human. This disagreement is generally the product of 'narcissistic bias' and different types of reasoning processes that usually at least partly are meant to 'prop this narcissitic bias up' to give it a more 'civil tone and justification'.
Still, we all must seek a 'working, homeostatic balance' whether this be between the sexes and/or between different races, religions, cultures...and this is why these social contracts are made and solidified from philosophical and then political documents -- into law.
To get along harmoniously, we all must go back to the bargaining table -- dialectically, democratically and in 'good faith' -- when things start to sour and civil harmony turns to civil strife. We are in such a period now. Partly, indeed largely, suppressed under the name 'political correctness' for some time now, the civil strife I am talking about is a volacano seething underground but capable of 'blowing to the top and over' at any time. It is already blowing over the top in England. I am talking about 'men's rights' issues due to the constantly changing family law ammendments which in turn are largely due to a barrage of constant 'unbalanced laobbying on the part of hundreds of feminist lobbying groups. We are no longer in the 1950s and 60s. Viewing women as a 'minority group', as 'discriminated against', as 'marginalized', as the 'victims of patriarchal laws' and 'narcissistic masculine bias' is, at this point in time, a collosal, anachronistic myth. Indeed, the teeter totter of Canadian justice (I can't speack too much about American justice in this area but can speculate that it is very similar) has swung from 'low to high' in the area of women's family and sexual protection rights' and from 'high to low' in the area of men's family and sexual rights. The scales of family and sexual justice have reversed themselves due to excessive feminist lobbying unbalanced by masculine lobbying -- we still haven't gotten it right -- and it is time to get back to the dialectic-democratic bargaining table again, and get it closer to being 'right'.
In Canada, I will examine the civil destructiveness and misery caused by too much one-sided, unbalanced feminist lobbying and its 'reverse-discrimination' effect on the family and male-female 'assault' laws in Canada, and the unfair misery and silent rage of thousands of men.
Let me be perfectly clear here. I support 'egalitarian feminism'; I do not support 'narcissistic feminism'. Women too, need to decide where they ethically stand on this matter and whether they want to be viewed as an egalitarian feminist or a narcissistic feminist (the latter basically being the femaile equivalent of a 'male chavanist').
Narcissistic (unbalanced, one-sided) feminism has grown out of egalitarian feminism in a way that is no different than any other philosophical, political, legal and/or lifestyle perspective is bound to become 'narcissistically out of control' if it is left 'unchecked' by the opposite perspective (i.e. in this case unchecked by 'egalitarian masculinism' in a dialectic-democratic dialogue, debate, negotiation and integration process that reflects the Hegelian cycle of: thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis).
Without this dialectic-democratic dialogue and debate -- which is why we have a 'left', 'right', and 'central' political philosophy; a 'prosecutor', 'defense', and 'juge/jury' in the legal system; and an 'orthodox' and 'alternative' medicine in the medical field -- the political, legal, and economic outcome is a foregone conclusion: 'Unchecked power ultimately leads to corruption' -- no different with women than with men.
Just as unchecked masculine power has led to unbridled masculine narcissism and corruption in the past -- and still is active in business and some/many cases of law today -- the opposite phenomenon can no longer be ignored, denied, dismissed, or suppressed as 'political incorrectness' and must be properly labeled and identified for what it currently is: feminist power and matriarchal law over-running the family, domestic violence, and sexual transgression courts of Canada.
To be sure, every case is different. Some cases are more moderate than others. Some cases still involve women being taken advantage of by men -- manipulated, abused, victimized, and/or violated.
However it is long past time that a pattern of legal and civil 'counter-abuse' and 'reverse-discrimination' needs to be identified here as definitely not 'equal rights' and definitely not fair to men, particularly separated fathers.
The goal of this section is to explore more fully the concrete nature of this present civil strife, how unfair one-sided, feminist lobbying has had much to do with the current pattern of discrimination and marginalization against men and particularly separated fathers in the family courts, and what we can do about this situation to bring our family and domestic violence laws back to a 'better working homeostatic balance and centre' that is fair and protective to both sexes; not just women, mothers, and children.
dgb, October 13th-15th, 2007.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment