“Listen to the cry of a woman
in labor at the hour of giving birth — look at the dying man’s struggle at his
last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus
could be intended for enjoyment.”
- Soren Kirkegaard
When you consider that no matter how refined our thinking can become in terms of building up myriad philosophical, sociological and moral justifications for generalised non-violence; preserving a peaceful orderly society via well thought out equitable laws and maintaining as best we can socialised redistributive tax mechanisms - erasing that is, if not in fact, at least in aspiration, all the imbalances bequeathed us by nature and opportunity, we still are confronted with the ineradicable facts of our 'tooth and claw' evolutionary progress from shrew-like primaeval swamp-dwellers to canny ultra-competitive hominid hunter-gatherers.
Granted, 'the selfish gene' thesis is over-stated when you come to consider man as social animal; how language evolved as a communal enterprise; how primary infant care and a burdensome nine months gestation could only devolve and be supported by a tightly knit co-operative group responsive to reciprocal needs and how intra-group selection oftentimes works heavily in favour of those endowed with high degrees of empathy and the capacity for unconditional regard for their neighbour - yet still, lurking beneath the surface, is the in-wired propensity for savagery, scarcely tamed by a (to a great extent) artificially embossed code of morality (either normative ethics, faith derived or traditional law and order orientated) which is apt to unravel like an unwanted skin, once undue "stress" is imposed on the social fabric.
You need only look at the ready hysteria for blood and revenge which was whipped up during the Great War to see how quickly a formerly (long-lasting) placid condition of the body-politic can be transformed almost overnight into a generalised jingoism and thirst for warfare. We see it here every July at 'marching season' when the Lambeg drums are pounded and perceived territorial space is encroached upon; 'reason' is abandoned en masse via a descent into mutually polarised and atavistic, quasi-tribal "subject-positions" and the whole on each side swept along dutifully by the biggest pair of lungs mouthing the most extreme and intractable effusions imaginable.
Hence the focus should be on this unfailing human capacity to reduce "the Other" to the exact specifications of a ready-made hatred - "ready-made" because its always there even in a completely pacifist society where reductive, stereotypical categories are constantly mobilised and dispersed via media and word of mouth, hanging in the air and waiting to be plucked and used against its target by the first opportunistic ideologue who happens to see before anyone else the first rifts and tears in the social fabric.
This process has occurred in history countless times, where a party interest sweeps to power on the back of a promised ass-kicking to some designated 'enemy other' and human nature being the fickle thing she is always finds it easier to rest in the bosom of a mutually shared dislike - it clears the tables, sweetens the voice, and allows us to carry on the illusion that at base our intentions are good, if only we were allowed a clear object of our wrath.
Secondarily, this is most likely a hormonal (adrenaline and testerone) related phenomenon, which is again ineradicable, and simply an index of "what we are" - the beings that need to expound a due quotient of bile; baseball, soccer, boxing, spectator sports in general, soak up the electricity much like you assume ancient Rome humoured the plebs with exotic animals and gladiators.
Each generation produces its own "wild energy consuming" solutions (Chuck, Sly, Arnie), displacing and re-channelling the barbarism, tapping it and fruitlessly attempting to contain and control it - but its the biological substrate that underlies it, which makes it irredeemably and unalterably "ours" and not something that can be phantomed away by abstract metaphors of God, Justice and Order.
Civilisation at the end of the day rests on a very few key fundamentals; food, water, heat, light and shelter; in half the world, not even that.
Eventually you would think, a generalised pacifism will spread itself out over the human race - perhaps in a thousand years or so - and on foot, in the future, of colossal international co-operative efforts to tame runaway resource stress; freshwater, soil, grain, energy and the wars which deficits of such inevitably produce.
Computer apps providing universal translators should make us all instantly intelligible to one another while robotics research should throw up new-fangled ways to make all our lives easier. A new UN-derived supra-international democratically devolved government with myriad protective checks & balances with a pan-global super-informed citizenry voting instantly via mobile attached PC visors on sundry issues - will represent the logical communist end-point of human political development as the formerly capitalist derived competitiveness of transnational corporates is jettisoned in favour of a 'global commons' ideology.
Individualism will become stronger and more pronounced as hidebound parochial and nationalist ideologies are discarded; the world will melt into one, while ineradicably disagreeable facets of human nature will be properly displaced and re-channelled into suitable alternative diversions - the compunction to make war; the projection of hate into readily bottled stereotypical reductions of the "other"; the cultural misunderstandings which blighted our past and led to mind-numbingly unnecessary conflict, all vanquished with the slow progress of an ever increasing "common sense" fuelled by greater appreciation and empathy for the human condition.
Barriers will dissolve between us, exposing only the raw common humanity we share, while reasons to hate and fear and bang the war drums will disappear into the forgotten mists of time, aided naturally by the as yet unthinkable aforementioned technologies which will have eradicated the world's most basic wants - conflict such as we have known, becoming only a footnote of awe and consternation for our bewildered descendants who wonder how we had ever come to live in such a comparatively violent and savage age.
But this is all a complete pipedream in today's world ... my guess is that we'll have obliterated ourselves ten times over before any of it can get off the ground.
- Soren Kirkegaard
When you consider that no matter how refined our thinking can become in terms of building up myriad philosophical, sociological and moral justifications for generalised non-violence; preserving a peaceful orderly society via well thought out equitable laws and maintaining as best we can socialised redistributive tax mechanisms - erasing that is, if not in fact, at least in aspiration, all the imbalances bequeathed us by nature and opportunity, we still are confronted with the ineradicable facts of our 'tooth and claw' evolutionary progress from shrew-like primaeval swamp-dwellers to canny ultra-competitive hominid hunter-gatherers.
Granted, 'the selfish gene' thesis is over-stated when you come to consider man as social animal; how language evolved as a communal enterprise; how primary infant care and a burdensome nine months gestation could only devolve and be supported by a tightly knit co-operative group responsive to reciprocal needs and how intra-group selection oftentimes works heavily in favour of those endowed with high degrees of empathy and the capacity for unconditional regard for their neighbour - yet still, lurking beneath the surface, is the in-wired propensity for savagery, scarcely tamed by a (to a great extent) artificially embossed code of morality (either normative ethics, faith derived or traditional law and order orientated) which is apt to unravel like an unwanted skin, once undue "stress" is imposed on the social fabric.
You need only look at the ready hysteria for blood and revenge which was whipped up during the Great War to see how quickly a formerly (long-lasting) placid condition of the body-politic can be transformed almost overnight into a generalised jingoism and thirst for warfare. We see it here every July at 'marching season' when the Lambeg drums are pounded and perceived territorial space is encroached upon; 'reason' is abandoned en masse via a descent into mutually polarised and atavistic, quasi-tribal "subject-positions" and the whole on each side swept along dutifully by the biggest pair of lungs mouthing the most extreme and intractable effusions imaginable.
Hence the focus should be on this unfailing human capacity to reduce "the Other" to the exact specifications of a ready-made hatred - "ready-made" because its always there even in a completely pacifist society where reductive, stereotypical categories are constantly mobilised and dispersed via media and word of mouth, hanging in the air and waiting to be plucked and used against its target by the first opportunistic ideologue who happens to see before anyone else the first rifts and tears in the social fabric.
This process has occurred in history countless times, where a party interest sweeps to power on the back of a promised ass-kicking to some designated 'enemy other' and human nature being the fickle thing she is always finds it easier to rest in the bosom of a mutually shared dislike - it clears the tables, sweetens the voice, and allows us to carry on the illusion that at base our intentions are good, if only we were allowed a clear object of our wrath.
Secondarily, this is most likely a hormonal (adrenaline and testerone) related phenomenon, which is again ineradicable, and simply an index of "what we are" - the beings that need to expound a due quotient of bile; baseball, soccer, boxing, spectator sports in general, soak up the electricity much like you assume ancient Rome humoured the plebs with exotic animals and gladiators.
Each generation produces its own "wild energy consuming" solutions (Chuck, Sly, Arnie), displacing and re-channelling the barbarism, tapping it and fruitlessly attempting to contain and control it - but its the biological substrate that underlies it, which makes it irredeemably and unalterably "ours" and not something that can be phantomed away by abstract metaphors of God, Justice and Order.
Civilisation at the end of the day rests on a very few key fundamentals; food, water, heat, light and shelter; in half the world, not even that.
Eventually you would think, a generalised pacifism will spread itself out over the human race - perhaps in a thousand years or so - and on foot, in the future, of colossal international co-operative efforts to tame runaway resource stress; freshwater, soil, grain, energy and the wars which deficits of such inevitably produce.
Computer apps providing universal translators should make us all instantly intelligible to one another while robotics research should throw up new-fangled ways to make all our lives easier. A new UN-derived supra-international democratically devolved government with myriad protective checks & balances with a pan-global super-informed citizenry voting instantly via mobile attached PC visors on sundry issues - will represent the logical communist end-point of human political development as the formerly capitalist derived competitiveness of transnational corporates is jettisoned in favour of a 'global commons' ideology.
Individualism will become stronger and more pronounced as hidebound parochial and nationalist ideologies are discarded; the world will melt into one, while ineradicably disagreeable facets of human nature will be properly displaced and re-channelled into suitable alternative diversions - the compunction to make war; the projection of hate into readily bottled stereotypical reductions of the "other"; the cultural misunderstandings which blighted our past and led to mind-numbingly unnecessary conflict, all vanquished with the slow progress of an ever increasing "common sense" fuelled by greater appreciation and empathy for the human condition.
Barriers will dissolve between us, exposing only the raw common humanity we share, while reasons to hate and fear and bang the war drums will disappear into the forgotten mists of time, aided naturally by the as yet unthinkable aforementioned technologies which will have eradicated the world's most basic wants - conflict such as we have known, becoming only a footnote of awe and consternation for our bewildered descendants who wonder how we had ever come to live in such a comparatively violent and savage age.
But this is all a complete pipedream in today's world ... my guess is that we'll have obliterated ourselves ten times over before any of it can get off the ground.
No comments:
Post a Comment