I'm starting this, and other BLOGS, as an experiment, so please bear with me, if you will, while I try getting it together. Up until now I've used my own homepage and posts (responses to articles, editorials and other people's posts) on the Guardian's Comment is Free (but unfortunately too heavily "moderated") website. My hope is that in this blog I will succeed in giving my ideas more structure and a better sounding board.
I think I have some important things to say about man's Darwinian nature and the civilization (the power structures of state and economy) it has given rise to.
At the moment there are massive taboos in place against taking a general Darwinian view of ourselves and our civilization (partly because of the nasty associations with Social Darwinism and Nazism), but this has to change, if we are to understand ourselves, our situation and the existential problems (social, political, economic and environmental) now threatening us.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You present yourself as a "native, with a strong sense of ethnic and national, as opposed to state"? But surely you must be aware that these two are not in opposition but go closely together. National identity became a feature of nation-state, whilist before it was a religious identity for example. Both are constructs of ethnocentric minds like yours. I wish you were a bit more conscious of these sensitive issues.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment, which suggests that we have very different views on this issue.
ReplyDeleteMy sense of personal and group identity IS ethnocentric, as I think most people's is, or would be, if they were not obliged to suppress it in the face of state ideology, which wants us all to identify with itself, rather than with those we feel a natural and spontaneous affinity towards.
Which doesn't mean that we should behave nastily towards those we do not spontaneously identify with. On the contrary, one should respect them.
But we need to stop pretending, as the state would have us do, that we all belong to the same "British" (French or whatever) tribe. Because we don't. It is a deception, perpetrated by the state, in order to facilitate society's self-exploitation to the advantage of power, wealth and privilege.