Thursday, March 12, 2009

In defense of the man

Having read Michael Lewis' great article on Iceland, I have to just intercede on the part of what is justly termed 'male capitalism'. Sure, men have really screwed up on a number of occasions, being too over-exuberant, living lives way beyond their means and aggressively going after what it is they want to achieve in life. This always needs to be tempered by reality, and maybe our cataclysmic boom and bust cycles wouldn't be so violent and unfair on the little man if women ruled the world. Slowly and surely would be the way and in a motherly way, women would allow the innovation that could be seen to have a positive effect.
Maybe it's the right way. Aggression needs to be checked, and as in politics, aggression is only useful if the aggressor knows what wants to do with his seeming superior strength. In the way that multilateralism is the only way to achieve your goals in any walk of life (unilateralism concentrates not only your power, but the will of others to diminish it), then maybe it is wrong to be aggressive for the sake of gaining power for its own sake. That seems what by extension is the problem of the banks (and Iceland) at the moment, in that they have so far aggressively leveraged themselves, that their sense of a realistic value is so completely skewed their view of the interconnected reality that they face.
Still, despite the fiasco of the past few years and the great wealth this has wiped out, we must be mindful that this aggression has led us here to the point where we are in our timeline. It is normal of men to want to advance themselves so far that they only want to look back at the end of their lives. Hence, as we grow ever higher in our ascendancy to the gods, we have still not figured out what guiding principals we should do this under. The great progress in technology and the great virtual world we have created in our financial systems, we have not thought hard enough about what it all means for us, which is what, by extension, the calls for a 'female' capitalism mean. Or maybe that is an extension too far, but I would stand by it.
Problem with facing your own past, is that it is difficult, and it is why you need to be depressed to really find out what it is you want out of it all (and then you go ahead and not heed your own advise once the times are good again). This destructive form of intellectual endeavour is maybe wrong, but it is far better than to claim that it is intrinsically wrong. Therefore, if 'women' do want to rule the world, they have to set the boundaries in which the aggressive 'men' of these analyses can live. And that does mean not basing them around theories that were long since proven to be unworkable, and spinning out clichés and trumpeting them up as general truths (yes, claiming yourself to be above all creatures is a hypocrisy, but then so is claiming that you can live below them all in humility).
Hence, for the time being, we have to be pragmatic because these 'men' will move us forward. The day of reckoning will come when the rest of us 'women' actually get together and figure out something which is coherently true, not only of the past, but of the future of our behaviour on this planet.