This post began as a comment I'd intended to offer to Anne of Carversville on her post "The Cult of True Womanhood and Female Cardinal Virtues" . As it ran out though the thought got a bit to large for a comment block, and while inspired by her posts on feminism actually ranged a bit far to be an appropriate comment for that environment. So I'll leave the full thought here where she or any others who might have an interest may read the thought in full.
The majority of my focus in such matters is understanding the ongoing evolution and interactions of the collective entities, those social forces so omnipresent that with the aid of modern communication technologies (serving as synaptic connection between the individuals who function as neural nodes of the collective mind) they have for all intents and purposes achieved the status of a self aware sentience in their own right.
The 19th century writings and publications mentioned in Anne's posts would be among the first glimmerings of such consciousnesses awakening, a common thought distributed by technology to be hosted by many individuals as a portion of their self definition. Such individuals loyalty to and dependence on the definition provided becomes the life force of the collective entity, and like all living things a collective entity must, first and foremost, assure its' own survival. From that understanding it isn't so very hard to see how the irrational assertions printed to chastise any woman who ventured beyond the boundaries of the prescribed definition would be evidence of the collective entity using technology to defend its' host base from a competing collective.
Of course ceReligion, the underlying authority cited in the "Cult of True Womanhood" was undoubtedly the first and still among the most powerful of the social constructs to evolve into this new life form. Among the collective entities ceReligion would have to qualify as Mother Eve, the original source setting the template for all who evolved from her lineage. What Anne’s post brought to focus for me was the thought of parentage among the collectives, the linear descendents that in their maturity become allies, or competition, with the original collective for the same group of hosts.
The “Cult of True Womanhood” is an ideal example of such parentage. From the content of Anne’s post it would seem the same demographic of women who at one time were most likely to embrace the cult were in later generations the same women who would form the core of the Feminist movements. The transition from ceReligion's "Cult of True Womanhood" powered by the promise of heaven to ceFeminist's self willed existence powered by the thought of independence from any need for patriarchal justification makes an interesting case study.
At this point ceFeminism is a fully mature and powerful collective, many generations old and well defined. Many women form a major portion of their self definition in structures defined as feminist thought. For significant numbers of women what religion was feminism now is... the primary source of the vocabulary they use to define themselves to themselves. How the women who host ceFeminism as their primary self definition fare as the collective continues to evolve will tell a great deal about the life cycle of a collective entity. It will be interesting to see how ceFeminism responds when her daughters begin to challenge for primary control of the hosts. It will be interesting to see if ceFeminism will follow the example set by her mother ceReligion and attempt to widen her definition to allow her to dominate rather than guide the lives of the men folk, as ceReligion did in the latter half of the twentieth century bartering her influence in the political arena as a means of shoring up a shrinking host base, or if ceFeminist will ally herself with the younger entities her life enabled and accept a position of lesser power but more stable tenure among the hosts. It will tell a great deal about what kind of woman ceFeminist really is.
(This is too weird! I distinctly remember posting something relevant here a couple of days ago, but it's gone now! Maybe Google was hungry...)
ReplyDeleteceReligion has many children. Any time a large enough group of people believes in something enough to make a life out of it, it becomes one of your CEs. Atheism is a religion, maybe a CE; so are Feminism and what I call "Scientism," the faith that "Science" will solve all our problems from the common cold to global warming. (Science, as you know, does nothing; but scientists using the scientific method have learned and done much.) But wouldn't it be nice if all those CEs just sat down and talked? Especially if, as seems increasingly unlikely, they all agreed to leave us single entities free...
Jochanaan, the ce's can no more agree to leave us free than we can agree to set free the cells in our bodies… our lives are linked by the structure of life. What is to hope for is that the ce's will, with time and a bit of decent parenting by individuals both self and self-source aware, actually understand that their fate is linked to ours, that in the event of major destruction their life structure will fail before ours, just as we have realized that if our warfare were to totally depopulate earth of life that in a few thousand years the algae frozen in Antarctica would find it's way to the sea, and restart the cycle one level below us. The ce's are not evil creatures, they're just embryonic at this point being hosted on entities that taken as a whole are essentially still adolescent.
DeleteSo it comes down to humans after all--as it usually does.
Delete