Multiculturalism and gender

I enjoyed this article from Asia Times. The author is a Japanese person, Tawada Yoko, living in Germany. Inter alia, the following passage reminded me of the French riots.

Even right-wing radicals don't need [the term 'German']. They refer to the "whites", an inappropriate term because they often attack ethnic German immigrants from Russia, although they never talk badly of African-American pop stars. They woul love to be racists, but in reality they violently attack those they accuse of being poor.

This reminded me of the French riots because of an article, also written by a person (Alice Schwarzer) living in Germany. It brought to mind not only the question of poverty and powerlessness, but the similarities currently existing between left and right wing politics in advanced industrialized economies (after reading Tawada's article, I am can't bring myself to use the term 'Western'). Multiculturalism which, in a variety of manifestations, is an ideology used to enable minority groups to preserve their own cultures within the society to which they have migrated, seems now to be an out-dated and conservative ideology in a world in which we are faced with the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism. What multiculturalism now achieves is to permit powerful patriarchs to present us with a 'tradtion' to which, under the rules of multiculturalism, we must genuflect. In this particular case, the so-called 'tradition' is one of patriarchy. It's not that patriarchy hasn't been an important element of all such 'traditions', including our own, just that we haven't been confronted by it on such a scale in recent decades. Since the feminist wave of the 1970s, patriarchy has been something that women have had to fight in private. Yes, we have a lot more social support systems than we used to have, but the general climate is that equality has been achieved already - even overachieved and could do with some rolling back. Meanwhile multiculturalism allows patriarchs in communities that haven't been through the 70s feminist wave, or any other for that matter, to assert their own version of 'tradition' with impunity.

As Tawada points out, traditions are fictive. They are created in retrospect, by selecting material from a diverse past to suit the needs of the present. This is a point also made in various writings on the development of nationalism by Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Ben Anderson, among others. It is who controls these 'traditions' that is important and how successfully they can be made to appeal to people who are attracted to the 'imagined community' they create.

In the case of the French riots, the constituents of this imagined community were young, mainly French-born, males of North African descent. Multiculturalism attributes their protest to high levels of unemployment. But as Schwarzer pointed out, the unemployment rates, though high by French standards, are twice as high among women of this 'community' compared to men (25% for males and 50% for females). So if it's a question of unemployment, why were the women not present at the riots in large numbers (as they were in the 1968 events in Paris). The answer that Schwarzer gave was that if the women go out of the house dressed, as the men were, in 'French' gear as opposed to 'traditional' gear, they are liable to be viciously attacked by members of their own 'community'. Jeans and T-shirts are, of course, part of 'traditional' Islamic dress for men, while French women have died for daring to suggest the same applies to their own sex.

If you look at it this way, then Sarkozy's response to the riots and other French responses to multiculturalism, such as the recent ban on hijab in public schools, cannot in any way be seen as worse than the response of the left. Multiculturalism has become just another way of putting women back in their place. The fact that many women cooperate with this revival of patriarchy doesn't make it any better. Women in hijab are making a statement of the fact that, by adhering to religion, they are accepting the 'natural order' of patriarchy. I don't want to digress onto my favourite punching bag of religion here, so let me just say that hijab is not prescribed in the Koran. Hijab is a 'tradition' created by modern proponents of Islam to oppress women - specifically, to encourage them to deny their sexuality.

If the 'imagined community' of Saint-Denis is poor and powerless relative to mainstream French society, the women of Saint-Denis are doubly so. Where, in all the chatter of the multiculturalist left do we find any discussion of the brutality of these 'poor and oppressed' men towards the women they live with?

PS: You have to read Tawada's article to get the reference to Montana.

Poverty in Vietnam and China

According to today's Financial Times, the 'eradication' of poverty in China has actually been going in the other direction since China joined WTO in 2001. Three quarters of rural households are expected to suffer a cut in real incomes between 2001 and 2007.

ICFTU says that membership of the WTO has boosted the incomes of those already benefiting from China's economic reforms: private enterprise capitalist and white collar workers. The losers have been blue collar workers, farmers and unskilled office workers, "whose income has remained stagnant for the last 10 years".

About 250m people still earn less than $1 a day, the official measure of poverty, and 700m, 47 per cent of the population, live on less than $2 a day. As a result, "the people who provide everything from T-shirts to DVD players to the world's consumers often have 60-70 hour working weeks, live in dormitories with eight to 16 people in each room, earn less than the minimum wages that go as low as $44 per month, and have unemployment as the only prospect if they should get injured in the
factories", says the ICFTU.

It warns that China will need to create 300m new jobs over the next decade to compensate for job losses in agriculture and at former state-owned enterprises - which is "much higher than China's current job creation capacity".

Unemployment and inequality therefore would continue to rise "if the Chinese government's strategy for further growth, employment creation and poverty eradication is based only on securing a larger share of global trade".

Since 1995, the number of companies under state control has halved, shedding 59m jobs, while emerging private enterprises have created only 16m jobs, according to the International Labour Organisation.

Guy Ryder, ICFTU general-secretary, said: "Most people seem to have been too blinded by China's economic results to see the dark side. Domestic concerns, such as their own trade deficits and the jobs they might lose from cheap Chinese imports, have overshadowed any doubts the international community may have about exactly how Chinese companies are able to produce DVD players that sell for less than $50."

All of this is reflected in growing discontent. The number of so-called 'mass incidents' (sit-ins, riots, strikes and demonstrations) each year has grown 7-fold since 1994 and the number of participants by 5-fold. In 2004 there were 74,000 such incidents with about 3.7m people. The number of petitions to the central government has also reached a record high.

Luckily for Beijing, brewing social unrest has not precipitated a nationwide crisis, and participants in these incidents, localised and poorly organised, have yet to form an anti-government movement with mass appeal. Most incidents are triggered by specific grievances (unpaid wages, high taxes and arbitrary land seizures). The government occasionally appeases protesters by punishing local officials or redressing these grievances. If that fails, the authorities can always call on well-equipped anti-riot police. (FT 6/11/05)

This sounded somewhat like Vietnam to me, although in that case the number of incidents does not seem to be rising, the main reason for them has always been land rather than unpaid wages or taxes, and while the armed forces have been used to restore order, the more frequent response is to send in the Prime Minister or Party Secretary to solve the problem. Maybe the difference lies in the paragraph below from the same article.

At a more fundamental level, China’s investment-driven growth strategy, which powers economic growth with excessive physical capital but short-changes practically everything else, is generating crushing social strains: environmental degradation, a collapsing public health system and neglect of the poor. The resulting social discontent is further amplified by an unresponsive authoritarian political system with few pressure valves. Ordinary Chinese citizens have little recourse for redressing grievances. The official petition system, which ostensibly enables aggrieved individuals to seek intervention by higher officials, has broken down. Only two in 1,000 petitions actually lead to some kind of resolution. Chinese courts offer little judicial relief. They accept only about 90,000 lawsuits against local authorities each year and rule against the government in less than 25 per cent of the cases. On rare occasions, Chinese media may publicise a particularly egregious case of official abuse of power, and subsequent public outrage forces the central government to act.

The first sentence seems to correspond closely to the Vietnamese case, but I think the responsiveness of the Vietnamese authorities is greater (except in the case of certain ethnic minorities who continue to suffer from government paranoia deriving from earlier associations with US-supported separatist movements). Nevertheless, given the similar underlying causes of continued poverty and unrest, it will be interesting to watch whether and how far the two states diverge in their management of the problem in future.

Must do something about this!

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Today, while motoring towards the office, I heard a BBC program about water in the Middle East. The Jordanians have put up a white tent in the desert of the Jordan valley where various dignitaries are gathered to discuss the water crisis - the pollution of the river (which has been dammed upstream where it falls wholly within Israel) and the rapidly falling level of the Dead Sea. They interviewed a female Jordanian farmer who pointed out that her children would have to find jobs elsewhere, simply because the aridity of her farm is now so great that she can barely eke a living. Prince Hassan of Jordan pointed across the river to the West Bank (which was actually under Jordanian rule before 1967) where 80% of the underground aquifer is taken out by Israel.

The reporter crossed the river and interviewed Palestinian villagers who rely on a spring, but up on the hill above is an illegal Israeli settlement. The settlers regularly destroy the pipeline to the village, have tried to blow up the concrete bastion the Palestinians have built around their spring and shoot at Palestinians who try to go near it. The result is that the villagers are lucky to have water for an hour a day.

The reporter interviewed an Israeli spokesperson who said that Palestinians could not be trusted to control water properly. You only have to look at Gaza, he said, where they have dug illegal wells from which they draw water in a profligate fashion. (I have not put this in quotation marks, but it is a fairly precise quotation and the italicised word was definitely used).

Israel's per capita GDP is 10 times that of the West Bank and Gaza. A lot of this income relies on irrigation. A lot of settlements in the West Bank have swimming pools. They have water 24/7. Where are the swimming pools in Gaza's refugee camps? I mean, who the fuck is being 'profligate' with water?

The Israeli "solution" to the water crisis is to build desalination plants in Israel that will pipe water to the Palestinian territories and the Palestinians will not only have to pay, but can easily have their water cut off if they don't behave. As for the poor farmers on the east bank of the Jordan valley...

The reporter reached the gloomy conclusion that Palestinians will go on hating Israel with a passion that is unlikely to produce peace, even in the (unlikely) event that they can get their own state.

Here's an interesting link from Anne Summers' blog on the Australian abortion 'debate'. I'm sure that the conclusions can be applied to the political strategies of other right-wing politicians in the US and elsewhere.

"We are still all on the death list..."

I heard this broadcast and the interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the radio this morning.

Inter alia, she pointed out that the Social Democratic mayor of Amsterdam has not opened his mouth to criticize the oppression of women under Islam. Nor has he said anything critical of the Islamic community in general. But he is still on the death list!

Larry Summers on women

The latest thing I'm reading on some US/Canadian blogs is the view of Larry Summers (Clinton's Treasury Secretary) on women in science and engineering. Summers is President of Harvard, which one blogger mistakenly referred to as a 'PC' place. I mention the last point because I'm coming round to the view that we are going to have to fight all of the battles of the 1960s and '70s again - not just some of them.

Harvard's Economics Department was the scene of a massive battle at that time over whether such topics as 'poverty in America' or 'the economic consequences of the Vietnam War' were a legitimate subject of academic discourse. For the past 30 years we have come to take for granted that which we are now losing again.

Back to Summers. I believe that people who suggest that the relatively poor performance of women in maths and science may be due to biological differences are skating on extremely thin ice.

When you think about it, men and women are separated by a single chromosome. That's all. But let's accept, for the sake of argument, the assumption that this single chromosome programs our bodies in such a way that science and maths are male attributes and women are inferior at them. On the other hand, verbalization and what?... nurturing? are female attributes and men are inferior at them. It is certainly true that the huge majority of scientific and mathematical discoveries to date have been the product of the brains of males.

These male scientists and mathematicians consider that they have made discoveries about the universe. All of us can understand our world better as a result of the male ability in maths and science.

What if, I dare to suggest, these are not discoveries at all, but mere outputs of a brain structured in a particular way? All science is nothing more than the reflection of a set of neuronal impulses. (Structured, no doubt, in a random fashion through evolution or perhaps designed by a male god - depending on your "opinion").

If maths and science are no more than the outputs of a male brain, there is nothing at all available to validate them apart from the sheer prejudice that the male brain is superior to the female one.

Larry, tell me my female logic is f***ed!

(Personally, as an economist who is daily faced with the products of the male brain, I feel that a lot of so-called 'science' could well do with chucking out the window!)

Second, it occurred to President Larry that married women with children are unwilling to put in the 80-hour weeks that men in science and engineering are expected to put in.

Since I am an unmarried person, I can vouch for the fact that, were I to put in an 80-hour week on a regular basis I would need a wife or mother (though a servant would do just as well). Physical subsistence would become impossible otherwise.

Oh, but I forgot something. The female brain might be shown to be 'different'. Therefore, women who don't advance through the lack of wanting to work 80 hours in addition to looking after the kids, are merely demonstrating their "comparative advantage" in housework!

Come to my house Larry and see my comparative advantage in housework! (This is why I love economics, it has so much explanatory power!)