Rachel’s Musings

This must be the year of change… The US President rode into office on a platform promising change (although he seems to be forgetting that). So, in keeping with this change theme, I’ve decided to change my life, or at least my career. To that end, I am going back to school – a rather scary thing to do amongst the California budget crisis since the class schedule, for example, is being revised. Hopefully, the classes I want to take are still being offered when they’re done slashing…

What am I going to study, you ask? I have been accepted into the master’s program of the philosophy department at SF State. The areas of philosophy that I am particularly interested in are feminist and moral philosophy, especially applied ethics. I would like to center my investigation of these areas around the development of an ethical framework that helps us humans create life-affirming and sustainable societies that are just to all individuals no matter what our relationship status.

Musings over our current economic and environmental situation have deepened my interest in addressing these problems more rigorously by switching careers. As the financial crisis deepens, most economists and policy makers suggest that the way out of the crisis is to spend. They call on the government and individuals to increase our spending, ignoring that one of the root causes of the crisis is a mountain of debt. This debt was largely created by a desire for growth – economic growth as well as the idea of “more” on the individual level. We were accumulating stuff in an attempt to attain happiness in life. If only we could get this one more thing, we’d be happy and our life would have meaning. Overconsumption – and the associated debt – is a symptom of an ethical crisis that might lead to the destruction of our life support system. Back in the 1950s, Victor Frankl talked about an existential vacuum. The existential vacuum emerged from a meaning crisis in most of the Western world: As religions were replaced by humanist ideas, no ready-made life meaning was available and humans no longer felt connected to something larger.

Additionally, our connections to other human beings have narrowed with the increasing emphasis on the nuclear family. The community of friends and acquaintances merged into the idea of “The One” – one person who can meet all of our needs. Underneath the façade, though, the needs for connection and meaning remain unfulfilled. Combine this need deficit with an economic system that pushes growth as the only factor that matters and the consumption and debt patterns we are witnessing now result.

In order to create a life-affirming and sustainable society, we need to find an ethical framework that reconnects us with genuine sources of meaning. My task as philosopher is to help develop this kind of framework that provides potential answers – or guidelines on how to find them – to the quest for meaning in life and the desire to be part of something larger. I suggest that there are better ways to fill the existential vacuum: By strengthening our connections to ourselves and to other people, as well as nature. These connections have to be founded on a profound understanding of justice – an affirmation of the individual as connected to a larger world, no matter who that individual is or how these connections are established (i.e., through marriage or friendship or anything in between). In order for us to increase our chances of survival as a species we need to change our priorities. This redefinition, though, requires a vision of a new way that is grounded in a deep understanding of our interconnections but does not need religious concepts.

I have mused here before about the various types of discrimination we face depending on the kind of relationship we are in. I suggested there that

• We fight Relationship Status Discrimination (RSD) by preventing that any relationships carry special benefits.
• We support offering automatic legal protection to relationships when they dissolve whether through break-up or death.

What would a society look like when we’re all done, when we’ve eliminated RSD?

A world without Marital Status Discrimination might look like this:

• Values all couples for their commitment no matter what institution sanctioned them.
• Expands rights/ privileges/benefits to all couples. E.g.:
  • One can get health care through a partner.
  • Tax benefits for couples.
• Coupling is assumed as the highest form of maturity.

To me, this is still very couple-centric, which is something I would like us to move away from. That is why I suggest that we take on Relationship Status Discrimination.

A world without RSD would look something like this:

• Values all people for who they are not who they’re with.
• Either expands all rights/privileges/benefits to all people or eliminates special treatment. E.g.:
  • Health care for all rather than health care for the working and/or coupled.
  • Everyone is taxed equally.
• People are viewed as fully human whether they’re in a relationship or not.

I like this much better because it is striving toward equality for all and really means all, not just married or coupled folks.

It is important to me, though, not to eliminate all protections for people in special alloparents to raise our children collectively. This might be a lofty ideal, which will proof ultimately unrealistic. On the other hand, the trajectory we’re currently on seems to lead to the extinction of at least the human race. So maybe it’s worth trying something else.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? We go like cattle to work every morning not questioning the absurdity of our whole lifestyle – how it is destroying our very ability to exist on this planet. As women, we joyfully participate in a patriarchal ritual designed to pass us from our father to another man ensuring that we never become independent. And even the little things: Why do we let men open doors for us, tuck us into our seat? Sure, it’s nice on some level but it’s also disempowering. The message is clear: We are too weak or delicate to open doors (literally and figuratively) or seat ourselves. Why do we participate in our own disempowerment?

Clearly, fear is at play. There are strong archetypes that entice us to stay on the wide path – for else we’d be beaten, poor, and unloved. As women, we’re told again and again that we need to fear the stranger as rapist and are better off in the safety of a marriage (never mind that a woman is more likely to be abused by her husband than a stranger). If we’d make our own path, we’d surely end up in the poor house and that would be horrible because money is what makes us happy!

Maybe it’s time to rethink all that… To me, though, the most important question is the why: What is keeping us from being upset over living such unsustainable and largely meaningless lives. Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe everybody is perfectly happy and I am just a disgruntled spinster… Somehow I doubt that…

(Here are some similar thoughts from Barbara Ehrenreich who is musing over the unemployeds lack of complaining… Another trance at play: We’re lead to believe that looking for a job is a full-time job therefore we don’t have time to demand, for example, that those who created the current recession be held accountable.)

Jaclyn Geller remarks in her dialog with Bella DePaulo:

Historians argue fiercely about when the transition from pragmatic to “affective” — personal – marriage, took place in Europe. It’s been placed anywhere from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century.

I am not a historian but based on what I have read (for example in Stephanie Coontz’ work), I would argue that romantic marriage didn’t take off until the eighteenth century. It might’ve been around before then but it didn’t turn into the motivating factor for marriage until fairly recently.

The industrial “revolution” happened somewhere between 1760 and 1830 depending on the historian. Coincidence? I think not. Though it would be difficult to prove, these dots can be connected, the two are related. Romantic marriage comes along with the idea of nuclear family, both reduce our connections to the larger community. These connections were in the way of people moving to the industrialized centers, so utilizing the limiting idea of the nuclear family helped industrialization.

Does anybody know of someone (or multiple people) who have studied this (the interaction of the emergence of romantic marriage and industrialization)?

Research on interaction of the emergence of romantic marriage and industrialization
Here are some links to papers/articles that might be promising, though they look at the nuclear family, rather than romantic marriage but I think the two are closely linked:

• How industrialization has led to an increase in the nuclear family structure (No sources cited)

Another puzzle piece fell in place for me today. I was listening to an Aurora Forum conversation between Juliet Schor and David Loy. I’ve known about Juliet Schor’s work on conspicuous consumption and overwork, so I was interested in hearing her ideas for a new system. But it was a comment by David Loy that struck me. Loy argues that consumer capitalism is a religion, in fact the first true global religion. As all religions, consumerism then attempts to fill a fundamental human need: Giving us a sense of meaning, a sense of self. However, consumerism, by definition, cannot give us that since it is built on the notion of more: “consumer capitalism as it’s functioning now [is] constantly persuading us to buy more, and what I would talk about as a sense of lack.” This sense of lack creates what Victor Frankl called an existential vacuum. How? That’s the puzzle piece that fell into place. Loy draws on Buddhism to explain the mechanism but I prefer to use science. As Susan Blackmore summarized research on the self: “every time I seem to exist, this is just a temporary fiction and not the same ‘me’ who seemed to exist a moment before, or last week, or last year.” There is no self. Deep down, we understand that our self is an illusion, this creates an ungroundedness. “We experience this ungroundedness as something as a sense of lack, as a sense that there’s something wrong, something missing.” To counteract this ungroundedness, we construct the self by the stories we tell ourselves. Timothy Wilson calls these stories “self-narratives.” We used to draw these stories from religion: There’s this being out there who knows everything and gives my life meaning and me a sense of self. Loy suggests that this grounding is now provided by consumer capitalism: I am what I do and what I own. In addition, consumer capitalism redirects our sense that there’s something wrong. Instead of filling the vacuum with connections to other people and stories to create a sense of self, consumerism tells us that we’re lacking stuff. And if we only have enough money and stuff, we will have found the key to filling the vacuum.

So, the key link between the existential vacuum and consumerism is that sense of self (or lack thereof). Loy argues that therefore we need to acknowledge the religious dimension of the issue. I don’t think that’s necessary and possibly even dangerous. I do think it is very much important that we need to understand the tremendous importance of the self-narratives. They ground us, they give us meaning and a sense of self. History shows that religion can give us that grounding but unlike Loy, I think that grounding is still inauthentic because it is imposed and thus can be easily commodified, something Loy calls “junk religion.” To develop an alternative, we need to understand how self-narratives develop. According to Wilson, self-narratives are interpretations of our behavior, most of that occurs when we interact with our environment, including other people. Other people reflect back our behavior, so interaction is important. Community is important.

There’s still a puzzle piece missing – or maybe several pieces: I think that our narrowed definition of relationship has also created some detrimental effects. The word “relationship” is now almost exclusively reserved for that “special relationship” we have with one other person who we – so goes the cultural narrative – ultimately marry. The claim that I, as a single woman, am not in a relationship is absurd to me. I have tons of relationships but only if I use a broader, connecting, definition. I sense that this narrowing of the definition has also something to do with our overconsumption and all the other problems but I haven’t quite figured out how yet.

Our current capitalist system, especially the unregulated variety in the US, is built around ideas that are fundamentally not life affirming. The system is built on the idea of growth, which ultimately is unsustainable. The idea of growth drives critical aspects of the system: Growing companies, growing profits, growing monetary wealth, growing markets (including by increasing the population), growing consumption, growing GDP. Without growth, capitalism would collapse. The current financial crisis has made a farce out of growing monetary wealth. The recent stock market increases – possibly most of the growth since the 1980s – has been driven by bubbles, inflated by Credit Default Swaps and other financial inventions that brought the whole world’s economies to their knees. To get out of this crisis, we are told, we just have to grow the economy again. Let’s inflate the next bubble! That’ll fix everything. Millions of people got hurt – not to mention the billions that didn’t benefit from the system to begin with: The world’s poor.

We need a new system. A system that is life-affirming and sustainable. Sustainable means that we’re not creating an environmental disaster, especially when expanding the system to everyone on Earth (as would be the case, for example, if everybody in the world would live at the living standard in the U.S.). Life-affirming means that we’d improve all creatures’ lives as much as we can. I am not quite sure how this system would look like but it certainly would have to do away with our (Western) addiction to growth. There’s just nowhere to grow to anymore! Another essential part of this system (or worldview or way of living) would be a limit to world population. The world population has increased dramatically in the last century and a half. This is a reflection of increased standards of living – less children die and people live longer – and withholding of birth control. There are already guidelines on how to control world population, though they’d probably need updating since we probably need to reduce the population to a sustainable level.

If we don’t shift gears, I am not too optimistic about our future (others are also sounding the alarm). I sense that we’re on a train racing ahead under the banner of growth pretending that the canyon up ahead is not there. Business as usual. Heads firmly in the sand.