Absolute Values

I am not proud of being a nerd. I know that finding humor in politics and cultural conflict is really nerdy, but it's like a fucking laugh parade! They never stop!

While wandering around for all those holiday-season goodies on Gawker, I linked to this bit on why women aren't funny (and actually, that's not really the point of this totally over-written puff piece by Christopher Hitchens - he even references Kipling). It was so funny! Not only was this not at all a provocative article highlighting the latest in a centuries-long effort to prove, empirically, that women are indeed inferior to men in some biophysical way, it didn't even conclusively prove that women aren't funny.

What Hitchens seemed to be pointing out, though, was that women have a keener, more selective sense of humor in general, but they seem to find men funny.

If you're female, nothing about that needs to be explained. Men are funny.

So, when you get a bunch of men together, all of whom have invested themselves intensely in this power game - whose lives and ability to acquire pussy depend on it - everything they say and do could be considered funny.

This is an empty sort of humor, because it's really a defense against caring so much.

I was criticized once for being a relativist. As if my unwillingness to condemn the values of other people was a lack of conviction. Huh?
What he was trying to say was that I didn't believe in the absolute right of an idea, or one set of ideas over absolute wrong - which, based on what he said must have been anything other than the right idea(s).

I fundamentally disagree. I am absolutely uncompromising about some things, but when it comes to political ideology, what's the point? There is no right or wrong.

Gasp!

I really mean that. Politics is a system of communication and organization, so no matter what 'values' one system or another espouses and develops into a set of cultural norms used for the control of large populations, who am I to say that one is absolutely right and another wrong?

Do I think freedom is right, oppression is wrong? Yes, of course, but what does this freedom look like, and what, or rather, whom is being oppressed?

I think that the absolutist value structure of the West is just as fanatical and uncompromising (and potentially as unhealthy) as those we criticize so arrogantly. Especially since the forms of those cultures have survived for thousands of years longer than ours.

This is not to say that I support hierarchy, totalitarianism, or feudalism. Communism or theocracy. But those are just words. What is important is what the word means, and until we can mean what we preach about democracy, freedom, openness, liberalism, innovation, equality, opportunity, then all those are just words, too.