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nancylebov's old buttons: "Bring back the snakes. Ireland was better off Pagan." I mentioned this in passing at alienzen's birthday party, and it sparked an interesting question in my mind: would Ireland really have been better off without St. Patrick, if it had gone the way of, say, Iceland, and never officially converted to Christianity?Con: It is not by any stretch of the imagination fair to blame Christianity, or any religion, for the existence of war in Ireland. Every country that has ever seen Ireland, more or less, has wanted to invade and colonize or conquer it. If you go back to the earliest recorded history of Ireland, the Ballad of Amergin, what do you see? The Milesian Celts invading Ireland, where the Tuatha de Danaan (previous invaders) had just finished fighting an alliance of the Fomorians (the invaders before them) and the Fir Bolg (the people before them). And that's how it's gone ever since: somebody new invades, uniting the previous invaders (who now collectively call themselves "the Irish") against the new invaders. Who, win or lose, then become "as Irish as the Irish." As the famous saying goes, nobody's more Irish than the Donegals, and what does their name mean? "Those foreigners from Denmark." So you can't blame Christianity, or even the English, for Ireland having a war every generation or so.
But on the other hand, none of those wars have lasted as long as the Troubles did! And while the Troubles were never really, on any kind of a grown-up level, about Catholicism versus Protestantism (although your average Brit's ongoing paranoia about Catholicism plays a part), it was really about land? While the whole "defending the church" thing was just cynical manipulation of the young by the old? I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the fact that the warring sides made it be about religion was the real reason why the Trouble lasted six or eight or ten times longer than any other war in Irish history. And in that regard, both the Green and the Orange have unmistakably been bad for Ireland.
Pro: On the other hand, if you haven't yet gotten around to reading Thomas Cahill's 1996 best-seller How the Irish Saved Civilization, you still should, and its premise goes like this. Early in the history of Irish Catholicism, somebody came back with stories of how amazingly spiritual the Egyptian ascetic sects are, and tried to re-invent asceticism inside Ireland. And when they tried to send their ascetics out into the wilderness, they ran into the insurmountable problem that living alone in the wilderness in Ireland isn't really all that unpleasant. So to make it unpleasant, they put themselves to an intentionally boring and difficult and demanding job: hand-copying the few books that survived the fall of the ancient Roman empire. And those copies were the books that filled, or re-filled, every library in Northern Europe, from Spain to Germany.
More, with all of the economy in copied books centering around the makeshift camps of cranky ascetic Christian mystics, there came to be parasitic towns trading with them for the books, and exporting the books. Cahill documents that those towns developed a culture of the book-collectors reading the books, and teaching the books to the newcomers, and organizing themselves into debating societies. And thus founded the modern university, he says, which has clearly been a net benefit to civilization, to put it mildly. It was even a huge benefit to Ireland ... up until the English invaded, shut down all the universities, and for a century or so made it a death penalty offense to teach an Irish child to read. Not to stir up old trouble, or old Troubles, or anything.
So: pro, ended the Dark Ages a century or more early, invented almost all modern scholarship. Con: prolonged an ordinary Irish land war for centuries. Christianity in Ireland, whether Catholic or Protestant: net positive, or net negative? Right this minute, I can't make up my mind.
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I went to a university that was 40% Jewish and almost 0% Irish. This meant we drank on Purim and clacked out a certain dictator's name from existence... even though I was half-Sicilian and mostly atheist. Cuz hey!
The other option: everybody's stoned on Saint Joseph's (March 19th)! Think about it: you've been chosen the cuckold for God's son. Yeah, pass that bong and gimme some pastry.
That said, there were a lot of Irish there anyway.
Oh, and I get to beat my wife if she doesn't make me dinner. So there's that.
I was surprised myself to discover this history, but apparently Britain was quite invadeable between 43 & 1066.
Copper + good arable land
Like all other invasions of Ireland, Patricks's RC Church's invasion of Ireland failed as the Church Ireland became "more Irish than the Irish", and thus caused the afore mentioned British Invasion. If anything, the root of The Troubles can be laid at the feet of the RC Church, for ever since that time, England felt it "owned" Ireland.
Thank the Gods I picked up Peter Berresford Ellis's "Eyewitness to Irish History"!
ttyl
(Kitchenware crash somewhere in the background)
"That's one of the Happy Wars startin' --
HIT 'EM AGAIN, PADDY!"
-- some live-performance casette of Irish music
As for "the troubles," they were mostly about British colonization and the rape of Ireland's resources. The stronger preying upon the weaker. It took far too many years to free the Irish people, and now that my relatives and ancestors are free we're building a new "Silicon Valley" in Ireland - a system based upon computer technology to supply much-needed jobs.
I once received a completely spectacular St. Paddy's Day blowjob from a friend's wife - she was tanked on green beer, and later remembered none of it.
My vote's "net positive."
On top of all this, the Irish wouldn't have cared one whit if the people they had been killing were fellow Catholics. The Catholic Church, numerous important pastors in Ireland, and the Irish state all denounced the IRA's actions-- but still the killings continued. It wasn't about religion, nor loyalty to Ireland. It was about loyalty to an ideal, to the idea of a united Ireland, the consequences be damned (even when the consequences included the damnation of one's own soul).
In conclusion: The English, what a bunch of cunts.
"In conclusion: The English, what a bunch of cunts."
On the contrary; when you are talking about a lot of senseless violence, "pricks" would be more apt than "cunts". It's that old Testosterone Poisoning again....
also, you could just as well have said "humans" as "English".
Judging by the women who have ruled India, Sri Lanka, Russia, and other places around the world, however, I could have said "women" instead of "English."
Given all that, it's not difficult to imagine that the violence of female rulers is substantially a reaction to the environment in which they found themselves: the need to prove themselves, or the abuse they received on the way up, may have made them disproportionately more strong-handed.
That said, it's clearly an error to say that "ALL WOMEN are peaceful" or "ALL MEN are violent" (although I don't think that was quite said) but I think it's equally erroneous to say that there are no cognitive or behavioral differences between men and women as a whole. I agree that women are perfectly capable of violence, but there's plenty of evidence that they are, statistically, far less likely to use it. Ten seconds with google turned up this example. What do we see? Men were ten times more likely to commit murder. (Curiously enough, both men and women were overwhelmingly more likely to murder a man than a woman -- make of that what you will.) Granted, that's homicide, but do you really doubt that I could turn up similar stats for violent crime or even police brutality? (Actually, I did turn up those stats, I'm just too lazy at the moment to track down their primary sources on .gov servers.) And granted, that's just the U.S., but I don't imagine that it's particularly difficult to turn up a lot of similar statistics for elsewhere.
That doesn't make you or I murderers, of course, but you can't really deny that there's a pattern there. Nor does it mean that politicians are violent (at least, in the same kind of immediate way as is captured in those statistics.) I think, though, that violence here may be an indicator of broader aggressive tendencies, and those aggressive tendencies -- at least in the realm of politics and war -- have allowed men to pretty much set the tone for all of recorded history. Again: not all males, not all the time, but it is a pattern. And again: how else do you explain the fact that there is not evidence of a single matriarchal society -- not one -- in the whole of human history, anywhere?
I am quite aware that the majority of people who were doing the fighting and dying in N. Ireland on both sides were male, which is why my original comment mentions two men specifically and no women. As both of those men are on the side of the English, the side which I so disparaged, it can be pretty clearly understood that I am using it in the sense of a general epithet for any gender (compare with the statement "The English are a bunch of niggers," which makes no sense in the context of mentioning two specific white men and a conflict that has been fought largely by white people).
On the larger-scale question, it is not about which is more likely to be involved in violent crime, as again it is a well-known fact that men commit more violent crimes than do women. However, since you have brought up the spectre of race, I'll make my comparison there. It is also a fact that more black Americans commit violent crimes than white Americans. However, it is nothing but racist to conclude that therefore a white American who commits a violent crime is "acting like a black person."
As far as I can tell, your argument goes something like this: Patriarchal societies are violent. There are no matriarchal societies. Therefore, women are less violent than men. It's complete non-sequitor.
You ignore the cultural question in total, and replace it with a biological question. My answer to "why are there no known matriarchal societies" is the same as my answer to "why are more violent crimes committed by men than women--" in short, because of cultural factors. Growing up, men are taught that it is good to be aggressive. Women are taught it is bad. Many societies have placed specific burdens on females to prevent them from rising to power, and we are still fighting those prejudices today-- which is why I am fully behind almost every element of the feminist movement, and would here note my great respect for feminist academia.
Again, I disagree with the assertion that males are more aggressive by nature, and that it has much to do with the power relationship. Again, if we are to suggest that aggression creates power, then America should ruled by its black members, who commit a great deal more of our violent crime. They don't because it is culture and not biology which has determined our societies.
My point is simply that the term is provocative. If you go around bandying it about in a public forum, don't be surprised when it gets a reaction. In this case, someone suggesting that you should be using a male slur.
Moving on, if blacks were wildly disproportionately criminal in every society in which they existed, then your analogy between blacks and males might hold. I'm not aware of this being the case.
As far as I can tell, your argument goes something like this: Patriarchal societies are violent. There are no matriarchal societies. Therefore, women are less violent than men. It's complete non-sequitor.
No, I'm saying that "the evidence indicates that men are, statistically, wildly more likely to commit violence than women. There is also the fact that there are no matriarchal societies. Perhaps there is a correlation between these facts." That seems pretty straightforward to me.
The reason I'm ignoring the cultural question is because patriarchy appears, again, to be the case in every single human society that we know of. There are societies in which lineage passes through women. There are societies in which women are in possession of the family property. Yet there is no society where women, as a rule, hold the political power. Why? It's fine to say "cultural factors," but how would you account for the apparent universality of them?
So, in one sense you can say that this dynamic isn't an especially male phenomenon, it's just that males are best equipped to exploit it. In another sense, though, this dynamic is an emergent property of all individual humans, and thus males (collectively) certainly have some responsibility for the fact that aggressiveness is as valuable a trait as it is. At that point you're sort of dealing with perspectives, and I'm not sure you can point at one and say that it is objectively true, and point at the other and say it's objectively false.
Edited at 2008-03-19 06:55 am (UTC)
To be fair, you can replace "Irish" with any other predominantly-Catholic group, for most wars since the Reformation... Protestant vs. Catholic has always been just an excuse, an easy way to draw the lines.