Blogs: Robert Jensen

Universal patterns within cultural diversity: Patriarchy makes men crazy

Robert Jensen — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:02:09 -0400

Islamabad, Pakistan – Some lessons learned while spending time in a different culture come from paying attention to the wide diversity in how we humans arrange ourselves socially. Equally crucial lessons come from seeing patterns in how people behave similarly in similar situations, even in very different cultural contexts.

This week in Pakistan, as I have been learning more about a very different culture than my own, I was reminded of one of those patterns: Patriarchy makes men crazy.

The setting for this lesson is the International Islamic University in Islamabad, where I am teaching a three-week course on media law and ethics as a visiting fellow of the university’s Iqbal International Institute for Research and Dialogue. Institute Director Mumtaz Ahmad brought in me and my Canadian colleague Justin Podur, who is teaching a course on critical thinking, to bring new perspectives to the students at what is a fairly orthodox university, and the dialogue has indeed been rewarding.

As is the case in my courses at the University of Texas at Austin, no matter what the specific subject of the course -- freedom of expression, democracy, and mass media, in this case -- I often raise questions about how our identities -- race, gender, class, nation -- structure our position in a society and understanding of the world. Given the gender segregation at IIU -- I have male and female students in my class, but they are housed on different campuses and much of the regular instruction is in single-sex settings -- it’s difficult not to circle back frequently to gender.

One day while I was talking about race, I pointed out that while white people in a white-supremacist have distinct advantages, there is one downside: It makes white people crazy. The students’ expressions suggested they weren’t sure how to take that, so I explained: White supremacy leads white people to believe they are superior based on their skin color. That idea is … crazy. Therefore, lots of white people -- those who explicitly support white supremacy or unconsciously accept such a notion -- are crazy.

My students are mostly Pakistani, with a few from other Islamic countries in Asia and Africa; all are brown or black. They tried to be polite but couldn’t help laughing at the obvious truth in the statement, as well as the odd fact that a white guy was saying it.

I then moved to an obvious comparison: We men know about this problem, I said, because of the same problem in patriarchy. In male-supremacist societies, men have distinct advantages, but we often believe that we are superior based on our sex. That idea is ….

This time the women laughed, but the men were silent. They weren’t so sure they agreed with the analysis in this case.

The next week a power outage at the university helped me drive home my point.

When we arrived that morning and found our classroom dark, we looked for a space with natural light that could accommodate the entire class. The most easily accessible place was the carpeted prayer area off the building lobby, and one of the female faculty members helping me with the class led us there. I sat down with the women, and one of the most inquisitive students raised a critical question about one of my assertions from our previous class. We launched into a lively discussion for several minutes, until we were informed that the male students had a problem with the class meeting there. I looked around and, sure enough, the men had yet to join us. They were standing off to the side, refusing to come into the prayer space, which they thought should not be used for a classroom with men and women.

Our host Junaid Ahmad, who puts his considerable organizing skills to good use in the United States and Pakistan, was starting to sort out the issue when the power came back on, and we all headed back to our regular classroom. I put my scheduled lecture on hold to allow for discussion about what had just happened. Could a prayer space be used for other purposes, such as a class? If so, given such that space is used exclusively by men here, is it appropriate to use it for a coeducational classroom?

It’s hardly surprising that students held a variety of opinions about how to resolve those questions consistent with their interpretation of Islamic principles, and a gendered pattern emerged immediately. The women overwhelmingly asserted that there was nothing wrong with us all being in the prayer space, and the men overwhelmingly rejected that conclusion. I made it clear that as an outsider I wasn’t going to weigh in on the theological question, but that I wanted to use our experience to examine how a society could create a system of freedom of expression to explore such issues democratically.

The lesson for me came in how the discussion went forward. The women were not shy in expressing themselves, eager to engage in debate with the men, who were considerably more reserved. After a contentious half hour of discussion, we moved forward to my lecture. During the break, the men huddled to discuss the question of the prayer space. When we reconvened, one of them asked if a representative of the men could speak again on issue. He began by saying that he had hesitated to speak in the previous discussion because he felt it was obvious that the women were wrong and he had not wanted to hurt their feelings or impede their willingness to speak up by pointing out their error immediately.

I suggested we resolve that question first. I turned to the women and asked, “Will your feelings be hurt or will you be you afraid to speak if he is critical of your arguments?” Their response was a resounding no.

I turned back to the man and made the obvious point: We now have clear evidence that that your assumption was wrong. The women are telling you directly that they are not shy about debating, and so you can make your points. When he did -- and when the women disagreed -- they let him know without hesitation. From what I could tell, his argument did not persuade many, if any, of the women that their judgments had been wrong.

What struck me about the exchange was how ill-prepared the men were to defend their position in the face of a challenge from the women. It was clear that the men were not used to facing such challenges, and as they scrambled to formulate rebuttals they did little more than restate claims with which they were comfortable and familiar. That strategy (or lack of a strategy) is hardly unique to Pakistani men.

To modify my previous statement about the negative effects of privilege on the privileged: Patriarchy makes us men not just crazy but stupid. The more our intellectual activity takes place in male-dominant spaces, and the more intensely male-dominant those spaces are, the less likely we are to develop our ability to think critically about gender and power. Sometimes when faced with an incisive challenge, men become aggressive, even violent; sometimes men retreat with an illusory sense of victory; sometimes men sulk until women give up the debate. Individual men will react differently in different times and places; it’s the patterns that are important.

Cultural diversity exists alongside universal patterns. The United States and Pakistan are very different societies, but they are both patriarchal. Patriarchy takes different forms in each society, and the harms to women can be quite different, but my observation holds in both. It doesn’t mean patriarchy doesn’t sometimes also constrain women’s thinking, nor does it mean women are always right in debates with men. To identify patterns is not to make ridiculous totalizing claims.

There’s one more valuable lesson I took away from this episode: I have to be vigilant in challenging my stereotypes about women in Islamic societies. I can be quick to assume that Islamic women always capitulate to the patriarchal ideas and norms that dominate their societies. While I can’t know what each woman in the room was thinking, there was a consensus that they would not accept the conclusion of the men without challenge. In front of me were women with their heads covered (the hijab) and some with the full face veil (the niqab). Others had scarves draped around their shoulders, their heads uncovered. One of the two most forceful women in the debate wore the hijab and the other was uncovered; I couldn’t predict the content or tone of a woman’s response from her dress. No matter how much I know that intellectually, I still catch myself making assumptions about these women based on their choice of head covering. The class discussion reminds me to remember to challenge my own assumptions.

These conclusions are hardly original or revolutionary, but they bear regular restatement:

It is crucial that we remember the reality of cultural diversity and encourage respect of that diversity, while not shying away from critical engagement. That’s especially important for those of us from privileged classes in affluent imperial nations, who often are quick to assume we are superior.

It’s just as crucial to look for patterns across cultures, to help us understand how systems of power shape us in ways that are remarkably consistent and to help us develop better strategies to resist illegitimate authority and transform our diverse societies. That is important for us all who care about justice.

Fear and hope on the runaway train: A review of “Beautiful World"

Robert Jensen — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:05:05 -0400

Before I offer my review of “Beautiful World,” Eliza Gilkyson’s new CD on Red House Records, two disclaimers up front.

First, this really isn’t a music review because I don’t know anything about music. I’m the guy they put in the back row of the choir with instructions to mouth the words as quietly as possible. I learned three guitar chords once; I remember two of them.

Second, while I’m not a big fan of the rules of so-called “objective journalism” in the corporate-commercial news media, this is really a not-objective review -- the singer/songwriter is my partner, in community organizing projects in Austin and in our personal lives.

With those disclaimers, let me say without hesitation that you absolutely can trust me on this one: If you are concerned with the state of U.S. society and the health of the planet, listen to Gilkyson’s new record. I have been writing about similar subjects in journalistic form in recent years, but these songs do what I can’t do in prose -- they help us let down our guard, if only for a few moments, so that we may ponder honestly the cascading crises we face. Gilkyson opens up not only an intellectual but also an emotional space for dealing with reality.

To be at our best politically, we need to be able to stare down that reality without giving in to either sophomoric cynicism or silly sentiment. We need a harsh critique, but one grounded in the recognition of the beauty that remains all around us. Given the serious nature of these crises -- political and social, economic and ecological -- it’s not surprising that people often are reluctant to face these realities. Gilkyson’s invocation of our world’s beauty makes it easier to do.

The core of the record is four songs that address our relationship to the larger ecosystem. “The Party’s Over” reminds us the energy-orgy lifestyle of recent decades is almost finished. “The Great Correction” suggests that a readjustment is coming in the not-too-distant future, a moment when we’ll be forced to recognize our interconnectedness because “we’ll all be burning in the same big sun/when the great correction comes.” “Runaway Train” asks us to think about the reckless nature of First-World affluence, reminding us that whatever our personal position in U.S. society, we are all riding on the same train. And the record’s final cut, “Unsustainable,” argues that we need to go “back to the drawing board/start all over again,” delivers a difficult message in a slow, jazzy style.

OK, that sounds a bit grim, and it would be if Gilkyson left it at that. But as the tragedy of our arrogance plays out all around us, she reminds us that it plays out in a truly beautiful world, “circling infinitely/fragment of sun marbled in blue/turning in time and tuned like a symphony.” That beauty can be found, for example, in Austin in Barton Springs (thinly disguised in the song “Wildewood Springs”), “where the wild birds sing/where the water’s clean” a place where we go when we “long for revival.” If we open ourselves up, that beauty -- and the joy that comes from it -- can be found all around us. And from that comes the strength to continue political struggles. The game isn’t over yet.

Woven in among the more overtly political songs are reminders that in our personal relationships we struggle to find the same beauty within ourselves and each other, sometimes successfully (“Clever Disguise”) and sometimes not (“Rare Bird”). Gilkyson reminds us that even in our failures, there is the hope that “we’ll go on from here unbound/meet again on higher ground/some uncloudy day.” The personal is political is planetary; we live in a web of relationships -- to self, others, and the non-human world. Learning to attend to all of them is at the core of our struggle to be fully human in a mass-mediated/mass-marketed/mass-medicated world.

A number of these songs were first performed at a series of “Last Sunday” community gatherings in Austin in 2006-07, when we invited people to talk about their fears and hopes for the future. The Rev. Jim Rigby, Gilkyson, and I were the primary organizers, but Gilkyson’s music was the emotional center of the events. Rigby and I always knew that more people probably came to hear her music than to listen to us, but that never bothered us. Rigby’s prophetic preaching and my political analysis were important, but we all desperately yearned for the art that can confront and nurture.

“Beautiful World” provides that kind of challenge and comfort, offering not definitive answers but, in Gilkyson’s words, “just a little prayer from me.”

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For more information on “Beautiful World,” released by Red House Records, go to
http://www.elizagilkyson.com/Beautiful_World_Info.htm
or
http://www.redhouserecords.com/212.html

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Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007).
For more information on “Last Sunday,” go to
http://thirdcoastactivist.org/lastsunday.html.
and for the text of Jensen’s talks at those events, go to
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/lastsunday.pdf.
Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.

The selling and shaping of our souls

Robert Jensen — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:12:41 -0400

[This is an edited version of a sermon delivered May 4, 2008, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, TX. http://www.staopen.com/]

The last time I was in this pulpit to deliver a guest sermon, I spoke of the need for each of us to take up the role of prophet, to not be afraid of speaking in the prophetic voice, even when doing so involves risk. http://zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/14743 Today I want to talk about the other kind of profit, the allure of which can so often quiet the prophetic voice within us.

Living in the most powerful and affluent country in the history of the world, this is not mere word play with homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings). Can we resist the seductive nature of the material rewards that come with profit to find within us the spirit of the prophetic? If we cannot, what is the fate of this country? What is the fate of the world that this country seeks to dominate? And my subject today: What is the fate of our souls?

Let’s start with one of the most well-known verses from the gospels, from Mark, where Jesus says: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” [Mark 8:36]

What do we gain when we covet the wealth of the world that can come with accepting the systems and structures of power? When feeling self-righteous, we are tempted to say that we agree with Jesus, that when we place too much value on material rewards we lose something greater. But if we are to be honest, we have to acknowledge that those material rewards in the world can be extremely seductive. If you doubt this, when you leave church go visit a shopping mall. No doubt we all know where to find one nearby. Even when the reward is not “the whole world” but just one little piece of it in a store in the mall, the pull of those rewards can be strong.

That’s perhaps the cruel edge of this truth -- the fact that in this culture when we talk about “selling out” or “selling our souls” we realize the selling price is typically quite low. That’s what Robert Bolt was getting at in his play A Man for All Seasons, in which Sir Thomas More is convicted of treason on the perjured testimony of Richard Rich, who in exchange for his capitulation to King Henry VIII is appointed Attorney-General for Wales. In the play, More asks one final question of Rich after noticing that the Attorney-General is wearing the medallion of his new position. The stage directions call for More to look into Rich’s face, “with pain and amusement,” saying, “For Wales? Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to lose his soul for the whole world. But for Wales?”

I don’t we want to take sides in British regional and class conflicts, but his point is well taken. We can find amusement in the crumbs for which some people will sell their souls, but there is also much pain in recognizing ourselves in the mirror that Thomas More holds up for Richard Rich. For what would I sell my soul? For what have I sold my soul? Do I ever dream of Wales?

At some point in our lives, we have all sacrificed a principle or undermined another person to get what we want, though most of us have never lied under oath and helped send someone to the gallows. But the fact that there’s always a Richard Rich to point to, always someone whose soul-selling is more egregious than ours, is of little comfort. As Rev. Jim Rigby reminds us, week after week in his sermons from this pulpit, the job of theology is not to comfort us in our conceits but to challenge us to go deeper.

That means not only reflecting on our own failures in such moments, but going beyond the idea that our souls are at risk only in a single moment in which we might be tempted to sell out. Just as important is the slower process by which that state of our souls can be eroded. I want to frame that challenge in the words of the writer Wendell Berry, using the first stanza of his poem “We Who Prayed and Wept” :

We who prayed and wept
for liberty from kings
and the yoke of liberty
accept the tyranny of things
we do not need.
In plenitude too free,
we have become adept
beneath the yoke of greed.

Berry trains our attention on the day-to-day reality of the world in which we live, in the most powerful and affluent country in the world, in which many of us hold the freedom to enslave ourselves. So, let’s expand the question beyond the dramatic moments in which we choose whether we will sell our souls at what price and focus on how our souls are shaped by the everyday realities of power and privilege.

My focus today is not on the injustice of this system, not on the suffering that inevitably results in a world structured by empire and capitalism. I’m not going to talk about the cruelty of a world in which half the population lives on less than $2 a day. Of course we should remind ourselves constantly that our affluence is conditioned on that suffering around the world, and that we have obligations to change that. But right now, I’m heading down a different path.

Since we live in a country that seems only to know how to speak in economic language that assumes capitalism is the state of nature, let’s examine this question in the language of profit and loss. If we live in “the land of the bottom line,” to borrow a phrase from the songwriter John Gorka, then let’s talk in those terms. How might we approach a die-hard capitalist who cares only about maximizing self-interest and make an argument that it profits us not to sell our souls for the whole world, let alone for the shopping mall.

I’m using the mall as a stand-in for the readily available pleasures in a consumer-capitalist society that absorbs a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, the pleasures that come with what we might call the cheap toys of empire: big houses, fast cars, abundant food, nonstop spectacle entertainment, and an endless variety of numbing drugs. When we capitulate to the system, most of us get some combination of those things. Maybe there are some among us who have tapped into real wealth and real power, but my guess is that most of us here today are somewhere in the middle and upper-middle classes. We aren’t the ruling class, but we live well, at a level that in previous eras only the elite could expect. But look closer and what do we get? How do we feel when we are alone with ourselves in our big houses; when we park the fast car in the driveway; when we push back from the table after eating too much; when we switch off the television or drive away from the stadium; when the effects of those drugs -- whether legal or illegal, obtained from the pharmacy or on the street -- wear off.

An important note: I don’t want to ignore the fact that to those who have never had much in this world, access to material goods is not a trivial matter. For those who struggle for the basics, this kind of reflection on affluence likely seems self-indulgent. But still we have to ask: When we go so far beyond material security into the level of consumption common in the United States, and when we are through consuming the things that profits can buy, where are we and who are we? Do we like where we are and who we are?

For the moment, put aside empathy and compassion for those suffering with less. We don’t need to be told that the injustice of this system hurts others and that the fate of those others should be our concern. For the moment, ask yourself what have been the consequences for you and your soul of living with the cheap toys of empire.

It’s enticing to want to wiggle out of that one by pointing a finger at those who consume more -- Richard Rich in a Hummer, perhaps -- but that’s at best a temporary diversion. There are always others making choices that are easy to critique. I’m suggesting that instead we ask a more troubling question -- not about our empathy for others in the world who suffer with nothing or our contempt for those wallow in everything -- but about ourselves. How do we feel, deep down in the place where we don’t allow others in, where we often won’t go ourselves?

This country is awash in abundance of most everything except the two things we cannot really live a decent life without -- the meaning we desperately seek in a world of endless mystery, and the sense of real connection to others that we crave so that we can share that meaning.

There are big moral moments in our lives, times in which we must choose between allegiance to our principles and our fear of power, between our obligations to others and our desire for material comfort. In those moments, we should struggle to make sure we don’t sell our souls for the temporary pleasures of the world. But every day we also recognize that our souls -- our sense of what it means to be human beings -- are being shaped day-to-day by the same systems of power and privilege.

Let me be clear one more time: My pitch today is not just that all this matters for the sake of justice, but that it also matters for more selfish reasons. In this system, we lose when we allow systems of empire and capital to shape our souls, day after day in ways sometimes to subtle to see. We lose no matter how many toys we accumulate.

This is one of the main reasons I come to church and look forward to Rev. Rigby’s reminders of how hard it is to be a decent person in this world -- not because I’m so noble but because I’m so weak. I need to be reminded, over and over, that most of the pleasures of the empire are mostly illusion. The irony is that typically we work so hard for money that buys those cheap toys, yet we often are unwilling to do the hard work to get something more. That’s why we need some kind of church, some place to come to support each other in that struggle to be more than the culture expects of us.

That is always a struggle, even for the strongest among us. Wendell Berry has done more than most of us to resist this culture of greed through his efforts not only to theorize about sustainable agriculture and rural community but to live those practices, yet he reminds us that he struggles. I’ll finish with the last lines of Berry’s essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” in which he asks difficult questions about how we are to make these decisions. He ends not with a critique of others but an accounting of his own life. He laments the ways he still is caught up in the system and its machines, one of which is the chainsaw he uses to cut wood because of the speed and efficiency. But he also recognizes that it is “inconvenient, uncomfortable, undependable, ugly, stinky, and scary.” He ends that essay on a difficult, but hopeful, note:

I am not an optimist; I am afraid that I won’t live long enough to escape my bondage to the machines. Nevertheless, on every day left to me I will search my mind and my circumstances for the means of escape. And I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.

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Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org. His latest book is Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007). Jensen is also the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.

The end of Osheroff’s dance: Lessons from a life of resistance and love

Robert Jensen — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:45:28 -0400

As Abe Osheroff’s body slowly began to betray him in his 80s and 90s, one of his favorite lines was, “I have one foot in the grave but the other keeps dancing.”

That dance ended on Sunday, April 6, when the 92-year-old Osheroff died of a heart attack at his Seattle home.

Osheroff is remembered most for his rich life of political activism. From the battlefields of the Spanish Civil War to streets all across the United States, he was a master strategist, energetic organizer, and courageous fighter.

But when I think about a world without Abe, it’s Osheroff-the-philosopher I will miss the most. Conversations with Osheroff typically turned into wide-ranging philosophy seminars -- inquiry into the maddening complexity of being human in an inhuman world, focused on the difficult moral and political questions that he always pursued with intellectual rigor and a demand for accountability expected from himself and others. And at the same time that Osheroff was in this relentless pursuit of more knowledge and a deeper understanding, he squeezed all the joy possible out of this life. He taught and he told stories, he learned and he loved, with incredible passion.

First, the activism: Beginning in his teens, Osheroff organized tenants, the unemployed, and workers. In 1937 he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the U.S. wing of the internationals fighting in Spain. After Pearl Harbor, he re-entered the fight against fascism with the U.S. Army in Europe. While working as a professional carpenter, he also spent part of the 1950s moving around the country semi-underground, avoiding the FBI’s campaign to jail Communist Party members. After leaving the party in 1956, Osheroff moved to California and got involved in community organizing against real estate developers on the Venice canals. In 1964 he went to Mississippi to help build a community center. He worked behind the scenes in the Vietnam antiwar movement in California. In 1985 he went to Nicaragua with the Lincoln Construction Brigade, which he organized to build housing with a workers’ collective. Living in Seattle since 1989, he and his wife, Gunnel Clark, worked in that city’s antiwar movement. Osheroff continued to give talks at universities and high schools until several spinal surgeries made it increasingly difficult for him to travel. Along the way he made two documentary films about Spain and the legacy of the civil war, the award-winning “Dreams and Nightmares” in 1974 and “Art in the Struggle for Freedom” in 2000.

Second, the philosophy: Abe was a doer and talker, but rarely a writer. Perhaps the only disappointment friends have with Osheroff is that he never wrote a book that would have organized for us the lessons he took from his life. That’s why a few years ago I asked him to sit for a long interview, to make sure some of those ideas would be available. A transcript of that interview is online in chapters at:
http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html
with the full interview in a PDF file at
http://thirdcoastactivist.org/abe-osheroff.pdf

I was privileged to know Osheroff for a few years, and there are hundreds of friends and family members who knew him longer and better. I look forward to hearing their stories in the coming years, as we collectively remember not just the things Abe Osheroff did but a spirit that embraced an uncompromising resistance and an endless love for this world. I think it was that balance between a rage against injustice and a love for the beauty of creation that was at the soul of what Osheroff called “radical humanism.”

As we face the difficult times ahead -- dealing with the mounting consequences of human arrogance and greed -- more than ever we will need to find in ourselves the strength Osheroff had to continue fighting and to continue loving. We will need to harness, as Osheroff always did, both our hearts and our minds to the tasks ahead. We will need to remember to celebrate, as Osheroff always celebrated, both the joy and the sorrow of being human.