Book Reviews: The dark side of Indian law

http://www.hcn.org/issues/42.19/the-dark-side-of-indian-law

Artist Ethic and Bohemianism

There is a scene in Marin Cotillard's La Vie en Rose in which Edith Piaf's mother, in a jealous rage tells her that she is an artist, not a prostitute, nor a thief, but an artist and therefore an honorable person.

Bohemianism was born around the time of the industrial revolution and it is a by-product of it.  The low brow Bohemian artists, condemned to the life in the factory or the life of the outlaw, lacked everything that the bourgeois high browed had. Artistic activity came as an alternative in the pursuit of a decent life, and if wealth was to be acquired it was only by those means that brought satisfaction in work: artistic and literary practices; together with the pursuit of pleasure as vengeance on the inequalities and hypocrisy of bourgeois culture and society.

Bohemianism ran its course after more than a century and reached its peak in the American and European 1960's communities.

Unfortunately, the former 1960's Bohemians have become old bourgeois and Bohemianism is impossible to practice any longer in the big cities where it used to exist, as a consequence of prohibiting rents.

Nevertheless, Bohemianism is practiced today by moneyed youths who consider themselves artists but without the toll of poverty on their backs. This new "bohemians" are the high hipsters that concentrates (in New York) in areas such as Williamsburg and Park Slope; as opposed to poor young creatives or low hipsters of the so-called Hipsturbia.

Cities who wants to thrive and prosper need a quota of Bohemians and of street cultural life: Our success may hinge on embracing a bohemian philosophy.
 





 

Fukuyama: On Warfare and Military Organization

" Getting rich was obviously a motive for making war in tribal societies (...) But war is not motivated by the acquisitive impulse alone. Although warriors may be greedy for silver and gold, they also display courage in battle not so much for the sake of resources, but for honor. Honor has to do with the willingness to risk one's life for a cause, and for the recognition of other warriors. Consider Tacitus account of the German tribes written in the 1st century A.D., one of the few contemporaneous accounts of these progenitors of modern Europeans.

And so is great rivalry among the retainers to decide who shall have the first place with his chief, and among the chieftains as who shall have the largest and keenest retinue. This means rank and strength, to be surrounded always with a large band pf chosen youths ... when the battlefield is reached is a reproach for a chief to be surpassed in prowess, a reproach for his retinue not to equal the prowess of a chief; but to have left he field and survived one's chief, this means lifelong infamy and shame: to defend and protect him, to devote one's own feats even to his glorification, this the gist of their allegiance: the chief fights for victory, but the retainer for the chief. 

(Check 1:40 min)


A warrior will not trace places with a farmer or a tradesman even if the return to agriculture or trade proves higher, because he is only partly motivated by the desire for wealth. Warriors find the life or a farmer contemptible because does not partake of danger and community.

Should it happen that the community where they are born be drugged with long years of peace and quiet, many of the high-born youth voluntarily seek those tribes which are at the time engaged in some war, for rest is unwelcome to the race, and they distinguish themselves more readily in the midst of uncertainties: besides, you cannot keep a great retinue except by war and violence ... you would not so readily persuade then to plough the land and wait for the year's returns as to challenge the enemy and earn wounds: besides, it seems limps and slack to get with the sweating of your brow what you can gain with the shedding of your blood. 

Tacitus remarks than in the periods between wars, these youthful warriors spend their time in idleness, because engaging in civilian occupations would be demeaning to them. It was only with the rise of bourgeois class in seventeen-and-eighteen-century in Europe that the warrior ethic was replaced by an ethic that placed gain and economic calculation above honor as the mark of the virtuous individual." (Fukuyama 74-75)

Check at 1:43 min: Cruelty of the idle class:

(will cont.)

Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order, From Pre-Human Times to the French Revolution. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. New York.

Snow Gorilla

I DoI Don't Give a Damn Because I Don't Have Anything to Lose.

One thing I admire about people who doesn't have anything to lose because everything was taking from them before they were born and after is their "I don't give a damn attitude" that allows them to be themselves and follow their instincts of survival, managing to have great moments in their life time and even be happy. Life is a short thing and all the glories of the world can fit in a nut case. So live your life while it last and enjoy every single day like is the last one. My own life story (because I do have one) I' ll tell you another day.
So you wanna be a poet. And you study Shakespeare down to the psychopathology of his characters. And you get a Ph.D. in comparative literature with a dissertation of Milton and Dante. But you haven't study this. What do I make with you?

Love