Fear?

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

This weeks episode is about fear. More particularly, it's about the use and abuse of fear as a political tool. We want to explore the ways in which politicians stoke our fears in order to mobilize us to action, stifle dissent, and justify all sorts of repressive policies. We by no means mean to suggest, though, that all political uses of fear are illegitimate. Some things are worth fearing. And fear sometimes leads us to do the right thing. For example, when we fear the consequences of global warming and try, as a consequence, to prevent it from happening, our fear has motivated us to do something good.

It could even be said that society itself is founded on fear. That's at any rate what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes - one of the founding fathers of the social contract tradition - seemed to think. He claimed that in the state of nature human life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short” because everyone is at war with everyone else. And he argues that to end this war, we enter into civil society and surrender all power -- all power to invoke fear – to the state. So fear is a good thing because it is the glue that binds people together.

Now Hobbes thought that all power should be concentrated into the hands of the state so that we no longer have to fear each other. But one could reasonably wonder about the state itself? Shouldn’t we now fear it? Hobbes's answer is that of course we should. That's the point, in a way. Instead of a thousand little cockroaches constantly nipping at each other, by entering into civil society we all surrender power to the big kahuna of the state. We charge it with the responsibility of keeping order amongst us. And we give it enough power to enforce that responsibility. Cross up the state and you’re really in trouble.

To contemporary ears, the Hobbesian state is bound to sound a shade too tyrannical -- despite the fact that its legitimacy rests on voluntary submission to the will of the sovereign. Surely, there needs to be some limit on the state’s ability to use the instruments of fear to impress its will upon us. Otherwise, the state will just run amok. The tyrants of the 20^thCentury – Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and their many, many imitators -- taught us that. A state with the exclusive power to incite mass fear would be an ugly sight. On the other hand, a state with no power to cause fear would be, well, a wimp of a state. What would the law be without the backing of force? What would a state’s inherent right of self-defense amount to without a kick-butt army to back up that right.

But despite the fact that a state that could not invoke fear in friend and foe would hardly deserve to be called a state, it's hard to deny the downside cost of the constant use of fear as an instrument of politics. It’s because of overblown fear-mongering, one suspects, that we in California are blessed with things like three-strikes and you’re out – which, as far as we can see is helping to bankrupt our state, without doing a great deal to diminish crime. When social problems are framed in ways that are intended to maximize our fear, we’re liable to take actions that are not at all proportional to the problem. Think of the entire war on drugs. It’s turned us into the world’s biggest prison house, without doing much to solve our drug problem.

So maybe Frank Herbert had it right. Maybe fear really is the mind killer. A mind seized with fear makes us do all sorts of crazy things, often way out of proportion to the danger posed by the object of our fear. Which leads us to the question, just what role should fear play in our political discourse? How do we distinguish legitimate from illegitimate appeals to fear? Could there be a politics base more on hope than on fear?

I'd love to know your thoughts.

What is Wife.!?

What is a Wife?

Hey all i was just thinking over this and would like to share some of my thoughts regarding what exactly is going one?

Our today is "What is a wife?" Now we know that that may sound like a sexist question, at least at first. Why focus just on wives? What about husbands? And what about homosexual marriages? Why not be gender-neutral and politically correct? Why not ask: what is a spouse?

 


Beside the fact that it doesn’t have the same ring, our main answer is that neither the category "husband" nor the category "spouse" is as historically, culturally, or philosophically interesting as the category "wife." In one form or another, the institution of marriage has been around for thousands of years. But but until very recently what was there really to say about husbands? You could sum it up in a few sentences. Husbands were the dominant partners in marriage, the masters, the breadwinners, the ones who could own property – including their wives. 

 



By contrast, there are all manner of things to say about wives.
 Wives used to be little more than property – material property and sexual property. In some cultures, wives were confined to the home, had little choice as to whom they would marry and could even be legally put to death for cheating on their husbands.

 

That doesn't, of course, sound much like a contemporary wife. A contemporary wife is her husband’s equal -- sexually, financially, educationally. A growing number are better educated, earn more money, and work longer hours outside the home than their husbands.

Wives have changed tremendously over the centuries -- so much so that the contemporary wife can sound more like the husband of old than the wife of old. Of course, contemporary wives don’t dominate their husbands like the husbands of old used to dominate their wives. It’s just that the needs and desires of the contemporary wife play at least as big a role as the needs and desires of the contemporary husband in deciding fundamental matters in the family.



At least that's the ideal -- even if the facts on the ground always live up to that ideal.

 But the bare fact that our ideal of marriage has evolved in this way represents progress. Marriage used to be explicitly conceived of as a theater of inequality between men and woman. Being a wife was a way of being oppressed. True, the oppression was often dressed up with poetry and roses, and was justified by philosophical and theological doctrines designed to make the oppression more palatable to women. But it was oppression all the same. To be sure, for many women, in many cultures, including certain subcultures right here in the good old USA, marriage still functions as a theater of inequality and oppression. And there are still people of both genders who think that’s the way it ought to stay.

We think that there is lots of insight to be gained not just about wives, but about husbands and also about larger social trends by thinking about what exactly a wife is and should be.

 
We want to use the very idea of a wife as a window onto the larger social world.

 



It might not do the entire trick. That's because there are marriages that may stress the very idea of the wife or the husband to a breaking point. We're thinking of gay marriage, of course. Whether one is pro or con -- gay marriage is at least a little puzzling in the context of of thinking about the concept of a wife. When two people of the same gender get married, does it still make sense to think of marriage as a relationship between a husband and a wife? Or can there be a marriage with two husbands or two wives?

 
Do ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ have to be tied to gender and sex roles at all? Maybe we’re entering a brave new world in which roles in marriage are cut entirely free from traditional sex and gender roles.



 Clearly, there's a lot to think about But tune in and judge for yourself.