Relationships

Allen Page Fiske asks: 'how do people co-ordinate their relationships?' and answers his own question:


The answer, surprisingly, is that people use just four fundamental models for organizing most aspects of sociality most of the time in all cultures (Fiske 1991a, 1992). These models are Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. Communal Sharing (CS) is a relationship in which people treat some dyad or group as equivalent and undifferentiated with respect to the social domain in question. Examples are people using a commons (CS with respect to utilization of the particular resource), people intensely in love (CS with respect to their social selves), people who "ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee" (CS with respect to shared suffering and common well-being), or people who kill any member of an enemy group indiscriminately in retaliation for an attack (CS with respect to collective responsibility). In Authority Ranking (AR) people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates. Examples are military hierarchies (AR in decisions, control, and many other matters), ancestor worship (AR in offerings of filial piety and expectations of protection and enforcement of norms), monotheistic religious moralities (AR for the definition of right and wrong by commandments or will of God), social status systems such as class or ethnic rankings (AR with respect to social value of identities), and rankings such as sports team standings (AR with respect to prestige). AR relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative (although they may involve power or cause harm). In Equality Matching relationships people keep track of the balance or difference among participants and know what would be required to restore balance. Common manifestations are turn-taking, one-person one-vote elections, equal share distributions, and vengeance based on an-eye-for-an-eye, a-tooth-for-a-tooth. Examples include sports and games (EM with respect to the rules, procedures, equipment and terrain), baby-sitting coops (EM with respect to the exchange of child care), and restitution in-kind (EM with respect to righting a wrong). Market Pricing relationships are oriented to socially meaningful ratios or rates such as prices, wages, interest, rents, tithes, or cost-benefit analyses. Money need not be the medium, and MP relationships need not be selfish, competitive, maximizing, or materialistic—any of the four models may exhibit any of these features. MP relationships are not necessarily individualistic; a family may be the CS or AR unit running a business that operates in an MP mode with respect to other enterprises. Examples are property that can be bought, sold, or treated as investment capital (land or objects as MP), marriages organized contractually or implicitly in terms of costs and benefits to the partners, prostitution (sex as MP), bureaucratic cost-effectiveness standards (resource allocation as MP), utilitarian judgments about the greatest good for the greatest number, or standards of equity in judging entitlements in proportion to contributions (two forms of morality as MP), considerations of "spending time" efficiently, and estimates of expected kill ratios (aggression as MP).

It's a fascinating matrix of points of analysis; but its emphasis on parsing vertical and horizontal social perceptions of self/other it ignores, or has no place for, some key ways in which relationships are formualted. The most obvious missing element is the aesthetic: the connection we feel, or to which we aspire, grounded on beauty.

Trinity hunting

The closer you examine the New Testament, the more types of the trinity you find. Take the name Jesus: a common enough cognomen in the area at the time. It is applied to precisely three figures in the NT. In his Epistle to Colossians St Paul identifies one of his co-workers as 'Jesus, who is called Justus' [Col. 4:11]; and Acts 13:6 reads: 'and when they had gone through the isle unto Paphos they found a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew, whose name was Bar-jesus' --which is to say, 'the son of Jesus'. So the NT contains three Jesuses, one of them the messiah, one of them the son, and one 'Justus' ('Lawful'). A Jesus who embodies the Law, a Jesus identified as the son, and a Jesus who transcends materiality.

Hughes's Pike

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching. [1960; pp.85-6]

That 'deep as England' is the key: this fish is the grotesque pre-ichthus that lurks beneath Christian England. That sense of this country as a place where the sleep of trees produces monsters (owls hushing the floating woods). Don't stir up the ancestral waters; you won't like what you rouse.

There's context, too: Hughes's 1960 'three-inch long' pike has a 'silhouette/Of submarine selicacy and horror./A hundred feet long in their world'. HMS Dreadnought, Britain's first nuclear-powered submarine was 265 feet long, and was launched by the Queen on Trafalgar day in 1960. What secret business was it about? Hush those floating woods ... don't tell them, Pike.

Holocene

Holocene means 'wholly new'; an ironic description, since of all the geological epochs it is the only not to show new faunal stages or geological transformation. But it is that epoch that includes the rise of us, homo sapiens sapiens ... how could that not be radically new?

Monotheism

Monotheism is a very rare phenonemon in human affairs; most monotheists are actually henotheists.

Potted Imperial History

Losing the American colonies in the eighteenth-century freed Britain up to develop the largest empire the world has ever seen in the nineteenth. Losing the Indian colonies in the twentieth-century inaugurated the terminal decline not only of the British Empire but of Britain itself. Why might this be?

Psychotherapy

The whole discipline of psychotherapy (whatever our doubts about the solidity of its scientific ground) is based on one rather counter-intuitive truth about human beings: it is easier to tells the truth about ourselves to other people than to ourselves. That's a strange thing, when you come to think about it.