Despite promoting solitude in Viveka-Zandtao, zandtao promotes the value of community working together. In Ch8 zandtao discussed maintaining love in the family within the adversarial patriarchy, that did not mean family against community but family recognising the love at its foundation and recognising the destruction of this love as an attribute of patriarchy - not community.
It is clearly the case that patriarchy promotes the nuclear family, and bell suggests that this is because the nuclear family by its very structure is dysfunctional. “Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin. Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic unit helped increase alienation and made abuses of power more possible. It gave absolute rule to the father, and secondary rule over children to the mother. By encouraging the segregation of nuclear families from the extended family, women were forced to become more dependent on an individual man, and children more dependent on an individual woman. It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power” [bell's Love Ref 13.6]
After reading this quote, bill examined the role of the nuclear family played in his own upbringing. At the age of 5 we moved from a Liverpool suburb where my father’s extended family lived, to a suburb of Manchester where our family became isolated and nuclear. Prior to that my mother had been isolated from her own family because her parents had moved to Belfast with her father's job transfer. These movements were patriarchal – job-related. In the Manchester suburb bill learned the middle-class conformity that on one level was so restricting and yet because of his limited investment led to upheaval and the beginning of the path.
But remember the term middle-class conformity hides much that is personal, and it was this nuclearisation of the family that led to bill's many character weaknesses before upheaval. bill was intensely shy with women, his male peer relationships were not solid or lasting, and he attributes this lack of interpersonal skills to his upbringing. Contributing significantly to this weakness in upbringing was the nuclear family, the lack of extended family, and the Manchester-suburban middle-class community who lived in little boxes. To be fair to these people they had grown up during the war, and bill very much associates these little boxes as arising from the fear that war brought. There were many children on his street but we didn’t play together that much. The suburban community as a whole was not free and easy but that is middle-class for you. It was the totality of conditioning that created the combination of personal dynamics within his family and the nuclear infrastructure of middle-class conformity together leading to the weaknesses. But let zandtao also be very clear it was this combination that led to his upheaval, so at 23 not only did he have significant paper qualifications he had also started on the path – few can have been so lucky; from the outside that is parental job well done. Let zandtao also be clear, he doesn’t regret or blame his upbringing, his parents or the people in the community of his childhood. What matters is that zandtao is now following the path, that is fortune enough for anyone.
But without being personal, analysis can lead to better understanding. Whilst there was love in his birth personal factors began to affect his upbringing. If his mother had not been isolated from her family she would have had people to rely on when things got difficult. A continuation of extended family would have helped – extended on both sides. Late in her life bill's mother found support within the community – through neighbours, yoga and Grannie trips. But because of the isolated nature of nuclear family and because it was post-war Britain, there was limited support within the avenue of little boxes.
So what does this mean for family standing together against patriarchy? In Ch 8 zandtao first spoke of maintaining love within family he was thinking of his own family – a nuclear family, but is the nuclear family the best structure for maintaining love within patriarchy? What he did begin with is mother-love:-
But patriarchy does not begin with mother-love. The patriarchy begins with the needs of the man emphasising romantic love and the man’s home. This is not natural, deep-down women know the home is for the upbringing of children. In that same natural depth, for women courtship is concerned with finding the “best father”, romantic love is a “perk” before starting the natural purpose – the home for the mother, the home for mother-love and the upbringing of children. For many men there is however father-love where during the child’s birth process some of the romantic love becomes father-love.
In the patriarchy the male ego is conditioned and romantic love is prioritised, then the home becomes the respite from the world of work that the patriarchy prioritises in capitalism - imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. Whilst the romantic love and homely respite are prioritised, upbringing suffers – nature suffers. If the father goes with the natural loving process for the man, if the father accepts that some romantic love will be supplanted by father-love, this can help maintain love in the home. Extended family can help redirect that ego if the father begins to reject this natural change, both when it happens and as part of education and upbringing beforehand. Again this clashes with patriarchy where the priority of the home is as a nuclear economic consumer unit. The extended family also has their own nuclear units, but building extended family can denuclearise, and help place emphasis back towards upbringing that begins with mother-love.
Currently the community within patriarchy does not interfere with the nuclear family accepting it as “sacrosanct”, this is as patriarchy wants. But community can just be seen as an extension of the extended family, or perhaps even community could be established as being a community of extended families with the express purpose of overcoming the adversary of patriarchy. The core of love is mother-love but this can be maintained by extending through family to community with the common purpose of extending love and coping with the common adversary of patriarchy. The emphasis of home and community becomes that of upbringing through maintaining love in family, and this goes against the patriarchal priority of the profit-making that is at the basis of imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.
Ideally education and work will develop from this notion of home – the priority of the upbringing of children. Education could build and support the home as could society rather than at present where education is preparation for the world of work – preparing for a role within the corporate paradigm (Matriellez). Society needs people to work for each other ie making products and working in trades to provide social functioning, but this working for each other can be carried out within the context of prioritising and supporting upbringing – as opposed to what work currently is - creating profits for the 1% at the expense of people and therefore children. The prioritising of home and bringing up children is inherently natural, but our conditioning has replaced what is clearly natural by work that creates profits for the few. What we all know deep-down as a natural priority – the upbringing of children – has been replaced by profits for the wealthy with all the conditioning that backs that up.
In the presence of babies people especially women know the priority but how do they withstand patriarchy? That is no easy question, and inroads can only be made gradually. People within society can begin to stand up for mother-love and promote the notion of this as our building block for the betterment of society. This betterment can be carried out through the extended family and community supporting mother-love hopefully ensuring that father-love becomes an integral component of the family. This initially can be achieved by breaking through the western patriarchy’s view that the nuclear family is ideal, and help provide support for a family to be extended, and further extending into the community where mother-love and the home for upbringing are linchpins. Maybe this is an ideal rather than fact, but indigenous communities focus on mother-love building the home for upbringing supported by extended family and the wider community. Equally the wider indigenous community sets as its communal building block mother-love in the home and offers support through its social structure – aligning their societies with nature and not profits.
Essential to this building of community support for mother-love and the home is extending the notion of love beyond that of prioritising romantic love – the priority of patriarchal love. The patriarchal distortion is that there is romantic love and that love builds the home. Central to this is the love between man and woman, a love that has no other priority, of which the nuclear family is then a consequence. From this romantic love a nuclear family is built, but this love self-evidently can be seen to wane, often leaving the family to stay together in dysfunction - staying together for the kids. The priority is not the maintaining of love that begins with mother-love.
In the extended family of the existing patriarchy, there is love for grandparents but beyond that love is not the basis of relationship. Going beyond extended family, community duty is chastised, parents criticise other adults who ask of good behaviour from their children. Police duties have become concerned with the law rather than good community, traditional policing might have controlled the behaviour of children in society – now they cannot interfere unless laws have been broken. Of course police have become organs of the white supremacy so such traditional community is divided with that racism.
Extending love beyond the nuclear family is considered misdirected. Do we love our friends? Do teachers love their students? Do care-givers love those cared for? As soon as such questions are asked thoughts of paedophilia and other perversions arise by patriarchal intention; through such conditioned fears love is focussed on nuclear family, even though abuse frequently occurs within such units. Extended family and community involvement would soon end that as children would not just be connecting with nuclear parents. What if the teacher could be accepted as teacher-love? Children being abused would feel free to go to the teacher; now any form of intimacy with teachers is considered perverse, and in the current climate professional codes of conduct quite rightly instruct teachers to avoid anything other than professional relationship. This again isolates children into the nuclear family that most often is dysfunctional.
Different forms of love – other than nuclear family love – would begin to create a society of compassion. In bell’s ch8 on community she speaks of expanding loving relationships beyond that of the nuclear family. The essence of Sharon’s book, Sharon’s 4 Brahma-Vihara meditations, is to spread the love of loving kindness throughout society. This is all concerned with changing what we value to love rather than the profits patriarchy insists on. Love and patriarchy does not co-exist as patriarchy requires a high value on materialism and concomitant consumerism, maintaining extended love from family to community is the way we can begin to live in adverse awareness but not in confrontation with the prevailing patriarchy.
At one point in the chapter bell suggested that research claimed that the nuclear family was dysfunctional. It is worth considering why such a family might be so. First and foremost if prajna is there the structure of family does not matter, wise love can deal with it all. But such is not likely because the parents will be young adults. What is likely (at best?) are a young couple in romantic love. When the baby comes the mother-love will be primary but less certain will be how the father loves; will the father be able to cope with transferring his romantic love to child-love? Will the father be mature enough? This is fundamental to maintaining love within the family.
Now there are two external factors that will determine this. First will be the extended family, and whether they can guide the father into his duty if nature’s love has not done so. The second factor is strength of the patriarchal conditioning. How strong is the father’s ego in holding to romantic love and how strong does his ego hold to the notion that “his home is his castle”? These are both factors that work against mother-love, the maintaining of love and the recognition that home is for the upbringing of children.
Mother-love is the rock, the hub of the family, the core from which the family grows. Is zandtao being too idealistic in expecting that this mother-love will always be present? Given the pressures of patriarchy he would have to say yes. Nature does provide cover for this with the support of the extended family to help the mother with the establishment of the home – and any egoic deficiencies in mother-love. zandtao assesses that the biggest obstacle to the establishment of the home is father-love depending on whether the extended family can cope and depending on the strength of the patriarchal conditioning on him.
What is not subject to the whims of ego are the fundamental building blocks of our society. Currently this is the nuclear family. The family starts with mother-love, hopefully romantic love can change with the help of extended family to establish the home as a place for the upbringing of children. All of this happens within a society dominated by patriarchal conditioning. Will the pressures of the patriarchy so affect the upbringing dynamic that the egoic conditioning will change that dynamic to the home being dominated by the father’s interest?
Maintaining love has different dynamics. Within family there is always love present but it often goes little beyond duty. Not only within our nuclear families but also in the extended family we must maintain the love that the nuclear family was born with through the support of a loving extended family. Unlike with family there is no duty when it comes to community, we must continue to work to maintain that love in community. Love that is friendship can quickly end, love that starts in a workplace community can end when the job changes, love can end when we move into different communities eg retiring. Whatever happens in family there will always be duty that binds – even if people avoid their duty, in community we need to recognise that work is required to maintain communal connection. But of course duty is not love and we need to work at love in family. Working together knowing that patriarchy wants to exploit us all can help families maintain love, unilaterally defending compromises forced on the family by the patriarchy can cause division that eats into love. Unite in love against patriarchy.
Extending family love into the community is the starting point for activism, and once the community sees that activism comes from love they will respond favourably – despite the patriarchy’s media conditioning. At present activism starts with a theory, but activists take that theory to the community and ask the community to fit into the theory. bill noticed this most starkly when he was on the poll tax march through Kennington – at the time an area in South London that was black majority. He thought then that the activists were fighting for these black people yet the people themselves had little identity with the activists. As bill got more and more into activism he understood that these activists were intellectuals, they were not fighting for the interests of these black people they wanted these black people to be pawns in the activists' game of political theory. It is no wonder the people of Kennington did not want to identify with the activists.
It is this type of organising error that is at the basis of pathtivism – path activism – organise to get more people to follow the path and the conscious activism of love will then follow. If this had any possibility of working, it would be the best strategy. Whilst the natural potential for all people to follow their paths is there, in practice the conditioning is too strong for that to happen. Communities don’t want to be seen as pawns in a global chess game, they are people and want the activists to be interested in who they are as people. In the terms of this z-quest, they are looking for activism that loves their community.
See the love in the activism of workers in the caring professions. They are not the enemy of the community because they are earning money for their caring, given the power of the patriarchy they are simply fortunate. Judge them not on whether they are earning money but whether their work is genuine caring – love. Undoubtedly people within the community would be the best carers but the patriarchy will not employ them - part of their strategy of division; it is not the carers themselves who decide. Do they love? is a sufficient question. Recognise that we are all together in adversity, unite through love if these caring workers genuinely do care. The more the measure of our working together is caring – love - rather than intellectual theory the more chance we have of affecting the patriarchy.
Many activists have learned that activism begins in the grassroots community, but they have learnt this as a strategy. So intellectuals go to work within communities trying to mobilise for their intellectual struggle – again this has met the resistance of alienation. All of this is so frustrating because everybody – the 99% - do have the same interests. If these intellectuals managed to release the intellectual egos that cling them to their books and theories, they could see with aware eyes that what is needed is love in these communities. Begin your activism by living and loving in these communities if they will let you.
If activism begins to love community, then there will be connection and mobilisation. But there could also be conflict between communities – strategies of the divide-and-rule of the patriarchy. At this point is where the theory comes in, the basis of the activism is loving community it is not really sound theory but the extension of practise. There is only one global economy that works in the interests of all the capitalist corporations. That economy will divide the product of one community against the product of another community, there is no future in the struggle if these communities see each other as the enemy. This can also be said of identity. We attach to our identities but the enemy of our identity is not another identity but the patriarchy that exploits identity. Of course the theory says this now, but the communities of these identities do not trust the intellectuals espousing this theory because the intellectual involvement with identity and community is not based in love.
By maintaining love in the family not by isolating as a nuclear family and then by reaching out through the extended family and extending that love to community, we begin to eat into the control of the patriarchy because the patriarchy can only try to control love it cannot defeat it. Through love starting from love in the extended family and community, love that is more than duty, we can make inroads into the patriarchy and the conditioning they use to control us.
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