Need of the hour: Culture Shaming

Nowadays, most are familiar with body shaming (unkindness towards obese people), status shaming (looking down on people lower down the social scale), contempt for those with a less paying or less powerful job, or even with those having a less expensive car. All these are only symptomatic of a mean, materialistic mind.

What is needed more in our society, is encouraging people to be more civilised,  cultured & interested in things which makes mankind different from animals. If need be, even culture shaming could be pressed into service into making philistines aware of their cultural inadequacies irrespective of their wealth or even academic education or status.

An example is in Agatha Christie's "Lord Edgware Dies". Lady Edgware, for reasons of her own, wants to dispose of his lordship. So she hires a famous impersonator & mimic to impersonate her at a dinner party (& give her an alibi) while she goes & kills her husband. The problem is one of these identical looking ladies is quite cultured & knows her Homer whereas the other is a philistine & knows Paris only as the city of fashion & not a Paris who abducted Helen of Troy in Homer's Iliad, & makes a fool of herself by exhibiting her ignorance of Homer.

This discrepancy leads eventually to solving the murder. So this shows how important it is to have at least a smattering of culture to be considered civilised.

The Antigone Complex - Ethics & the invention of feminine desire by Cecilia Sjoholm

What if psychoanalysis had chosen Antigone rather than Oedipus? 

Freud's notion of the Oedipus complex had proven to be an inadequate model for the understanding of femininity & feminine desire for many of those engaged in that issue from a social or political viewpoint, & Antigone enables us to discuss some of the most pertinent questions from new angles.

George Steiner, who considers Antigone to be the most canonical text of the West, posed the question. This book traces the relation between ethics & desire in important philosophical texts that focus on femininity & use Antigone as their model. It shows that the notion of feminine desire is conditioned by a view of women as being prone to excesses & deficiencies in relation to ethical norms & rules. Sjoholm explains Mary Wollstonecraft's work, as well as readings of Antigone by G.W.F.Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Luce Ingaray, Jacques Lacan & Judith Butler.

Table of contents:

1.⁠ ⁠Morality & the invention of feminine desire

2.⁠ ⁠Sexuality versus Recognition: Feminine Desire in the ethical order

3.⁠ ⁠The Purest Poem.... Heidegger's Antigone

4.⁠ ⁠From Oedipus to Antigone: Revisiting the question of feminine desire

5.⁠ ⁠Family Politics/Family Ethics: Butler, Lacan, & the Thing beyond the Object.

Institutionalising & Glorifying Slavery

The 21st Century phenomenon of accepting & hailing working hours beyond that mandated by International Labour Organisation has reached alarming heights. Work/Life Balance has become a dirty word, not even to be breathed during the hiring process.

In fact this is putting the clock back to the early days of industrial revolution, when 16 hour work days were common, even for children. Enlightened Europe has moved forward to 35-40 hours/week, with stringent penalties for employers who call employees by phone outside work hours.

As for the specious argument that it is all for "nation building", the rise & fall of nations is a cyclic phenomenon. The Romans were great (because of slavery) & later declined & fell as recounted by Gibbon. Of course, all this can be known only by those who have the leisure to read Gibbon. Hitler's 1000 years Third Reich also bit the dust. 

Actually corporate work culture is worse than slavery because it costs money to replace slaves, whereas in a free capitalist market, new labour can be hired for the asking.

From a pragmatic view, work is not a basic necessity like food, clothing & shelter. Employment is sought only to get money. Inherited wealth makes work redundant. Even now one can find modest jobs with decent working conditions.

The bitter irony is that instead of feeling ashamed of being used like slaves, without leisure to lead a civilised, cultured, cultivated life, people are feeling important because of an illusion that they are doing great work, with no time for any thing else, boosting their fragile little egos. Greed may also be a factor as well as the common belief that more money = more happiness.

It may be cogent here to mention that working for a living was considered shameful in the Regency era of Jane Austen's world. In her "Persuasion", Sir Walter Eliott had nothing but contempt for those who had to work for a living. When he had to rent out his house for economic reasons, to an Admiral of the Navy, no less, he was highly distraught. Even surgeons were very low in the social scale. Even during Queen Elizabeth II's reign, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was always referred to by the Royals as "that grocer's daughter."!

The sane thing to understand is that work alone is not the "raison d'etre" of human existence & man does not live by bread alone. A human being has need of active sport & cultural activities to differentiate him from mere animals. The sooner this is understood & man is allowed to regain his humanity, the better.