Greetings Economists, On Oct 18, 2006, at 9:28 AM, michael a. lebowitz wrote:
A tautology, no? What makes 'women's issues' not 'BIG, GENERAL, IMPORTANT questions'?
Doyle; Your question is to me the big question to clarify. Why aren't women's issues not the Big General Important Questions? I think we can sketch an answer that fits current experience but still have great difficulty with a more in depth reply. Women's work (at home) is about personal virtually one on one emotional connection. That structure has initiated some major big general important responses in economic systems. The question asks what is the General application of these personal relationships? The first efforts were in the major religions to better understand the consequences of emotional relationships and say in general what works and what doesn't work in emotional relationships. This we call morality or textual description of emotion structure. This was useful to large state apparatus as was Rome to generalize the social structure from a chaotic melange of conquered 'tribes'. The State in turn removed religion from direct control by instituting laws to regulate emotion once again by verbal description or textual description of a law of emotional structure. These proved more successful than religious morality in a variety of state venue in Europe and China. The obvious is also true neither system in general granted universal rights to women based on ending the imbalance in family structure. So that voting does not empower women to end the dominance of men by legislating legal restraints upon emotional abuse. The general problem rests upon the distinction between text and verbal information and emotional information. They are not the same and for a variety of neuroscientific reasons our rough and ready evaluation of how we feel is still quite mysterious. We can say to the broad masses when you are mad don't kill and for the most part people obey the law. The state appears to reserve this right to itself. The monopoly of violence covers the failure of such verbal/textual rules, failure to adequately address emotion structure for emotion structure on the large scale say of football stadiums of rabid fans is not subject to legal proscription and only state violence breaks the spontaneous massing of emotional rage fear etc. We know feelings are real time, and the law is a slow behemoth of violence aimed at breaking up some kinds of emotional responses. Women still get beaten in the home, and abuse is not just physical but emotional trauma as well. We see women do the same things as well so this structure in emotions favors men but is universal. We cannot distinguish with the law benign emotional connections like homosexuality from hierarchical capitalist style class divisions of people. Yet when we look at class divisions the most up front element of that is the emotions people adapt to guide their behavior in which class division arises first from emotional evaluation of the connection. Then the state apparatus of law or text description of emotion structure bulwarks present relations. Is it a tautology then to say this? No because while we understand to some degree the production of verbal information the knowledge of producing emotion is lacking. The character of emotion is to connect, the character of words is to share in conversation but that interaction is lost in print format. The sharing process knowledge is the key to ending the tautology. On Oct 18, 2006, at 9:28 AM, michael a. lebowitz wrote: But, we're talking about a left, presumably socialist, movement, no? Doyle; Yes we are. The conceptual basis for the above arises in the sense of how the left sees individualism. Where emotions are seen as private and personal the left sees the community as paramount. It is the generalized character of emotional knowledge that is a mystery because verbal description does not adequately capture emotion structure. One cannot rely upon written law, and police power to disambiguate emotional connection to a universal expression of emotional connection. A universal expression of emotional connection literally tells us that we can 'love' everyone in society. Now how do we realistically understand that? Religions preach love thy neighbor but the preaching has rather large failures throughout history. Precisely because the production of emotional knowledge is poorly done on the General Big Important scale. It's one reason why a simple phrase is potent. A face based method of communication like video conferencing conveys more information than a phone call. And that this generalized increase in real time knowledge production is what a generalized big important emotion structure break down of the tautology points to. thanks, Doyle Saylor
