I’ve been watching a bunch of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts’ videos lately, and I especially have been enjoying their animated lectures. There’s one narrated by Jeremy Rifkin that talks about the myths of human nature and the need to achieve an empathic civilization. It raises important issues about human consciousness and how humans have related to each other in the past and how we need to learn to relate if our survival is worth ensuring.
Rifkin, in this video, shows the progression of communal relations by a series of periodic examples tied together by his axiom that “to empathize is to civilize.” The hunter/gatherer saw her community as those immediately around her and those that lived over the next hill as the “Other”, thus empathy only stretched as far as one could yell. With written language and theology this sphere grew to include anyone of the same faith system. When technology erased enough of the distance between people, nation-states became the new borders of empathy and the Others were those that belonged to other nation-states. How then, he leaves open, can we make the next step to a global community? Or is that even the next possible step?
We can make no mistake that the need is there to disregard the fiction of nation-states in order to survive as a species. Sooner or later, if left as is, the horrors of war will destroy us (if our destruction of the natural environment doesn’t do it first). Accepting this, it now becomes an issue of how humanity moves to that next step. In Rifkin’s examples, he always presented an Other that united Us against Them, with the Other always assuming an opposite correlation with our new uniting factor. So, assuming Rifkin’s premise is correct, who or what becomes the new Other? I’ve talked with a couple friends on this and received responses ranging from, “the Other becomes obsolete as an after-effect of globalization”, “Others will be those that negatively define themselves, so as to separate themselves from the community”, “we need to discover life outside of this planet, intelligent or not, to announce the meme that we are not so special and actually exist in fragility, thus our interdependence is paramount.”
So, is any of this correct? Do we need to first unite on a continental level like the European Union? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and let me know if Rifkin is full of shit as I hardly know anything about him other than he made an intriguing lecture in a Youtube video.
This being an election year, we are again subjected to pre-approved candidates that do not represent solutions but wish to distract us with catchy slogans and scare us into voting for them. Bush voters regularly stated the ability for Bush to provide security from terrorism as the reason they chose to vote for him (which is needless to say, hilarious), and voters for Obama could be relied upon to unironically state the need for “hope” and “change” as legit reasons for their own choices. The former being scared into voting for a madman, the later being distracted into voting for the same.
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When one takes the time to read liberal blogs a pattern quickly becomes apparent. When one is so entangled in the system of our government it obscures what one is actually cheering for or raging against. The line, ideologically speaking, becomes so blurred that thankfully one is able to determine which people deserve cheering or choking with a simple initial next to their name proudly proclaiming R or D! A member such as Arlen Specter, once a Republican and embodying everything “wrong” with our society, can change his party affiliation and suddenly this baptism allows for the ignoring of his policy beliefs by the liberal masses.
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Keep in mind while reading the following that this president was elected on a campaign of “change.” That he won his election denigrating the “failed policies of the past.” Reminding oneself of these facts becomes a cruel joke when compared to the very things that he has since done. Anyone still defending Obama has to either be doing so out of refusal to admit to one’s mistakes, or has simply embraced a “team Democrat” philosophy and that as long as Barack Obama has a little “D” next to his name, he could skull-fuck Santa Claus and liberals would find some way to defend it. “It’s not what I would have done,” you can almost hear one say, “but he is the president and so knows a lot more about the situation than we do!” I want to know what third-dimensional chess excuse we get now that reports show that the White House has basically given up closing our concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay and his latest public mockery of those who would call for an end to hostilities in Afghanistan.
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In the race to the bottom of American’s expectations for… well, just about anything we have seen our leaders take every advantage possible of taking more and giving less back to us. Whether it be in the form of rights, money, jobs, security, honesty, transparency, or any of a myriad of things we generally take for granted – we are expected to get less and like it. Rahm Emmanuel’s famous quote, “Never waste a good crisis,” is now an unofficial motto for our government.
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As someone who spends a good deal of both my working and recreational hours on the internet, I’ve grown quite fond of it. It has been the greatest communications device ever created, the ability for humanity to share information on such a scale helps to make the world much smaller for important ideas to travel. However, this freedom is at odds with the society the modern world finds itself in. Free speech, information, and ideas are not congruent to the ever-strengthening police state of Empire. Were people able to freely exchange these things we might actually have an emancipatory world where defenders of the status quo would be unable to continuously divide us amongst ourselves or retain their power. Should it be any surprise that congress is considering a bill to insert a “kill switch”, controlled by the president, to our access of the internet?
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Helen Thomas’ recent comments, however inartful they may have been, are essentially correct. The Zionist government of Israel needs to be dissolved. While the Rachel Corrie and her passengers were not killed like previous attempts to bring aid to Gaza, the aid supplies were again prevented from reaching a people that desperately need them. The crimes against humanity Zionism has been responsible for eliminate any possibility that it can or should be party to any “two-state” solution and like any reactionary, repressive, superstitious, racist ideology – it should be removed from power. That Israel’s modern origins spring from the events of the holocaust, makes the holocaust it imposes on Palestinians all the more disgraceful.
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With the recent unfortunate events of Israel’s storming of a flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip with aid supplies, one hopes (futilely) that the U.S. rethinks its relationship with the apartheid state of Israel. Though even as I am writing this draft, sources are coming out everywhere denying any possibility of this, with even our vice president coming out to defend the Israel’s murderous actions. I admit up-front that my hopes are futile as the actions of one death-state should hardly offend its death-state allies.
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As a summer project for myself I have started reading Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. I picked up the Penguin Classics edition translated by Ben Fowkes. I’ve long been intimidated by the thick text and the reputation of being an incredibly complex read, but since leaving the throes of liberalism these past couple of years and finding clarity in Marxist ideologies I’ve also felt a responsibility to read and understand the book. Recently, I was lucky enough to see David Harvey speak at a leftist forum and during one of the panels he mentioned of his book A Companion To Marx’s Capital and I knew that this could be my opportunity finally conquer Marx’s magnum opus.
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Apparently not. I saw this on Matthew Yglesias’ blog a bit ago and didn’t immediately do anything with it as I was curious whether it would ever be widely reported. Much to my dismay it wasn’t and had it not been for Yglesias’ report on it, I unfortunately would not have seen it at all. What its lack of reporting means to us makes it all the more unfortunate.
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I’ve been watching a bunch of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts’ videos lately, and I especially have been enjoying their animated lectures. There’s one narrated by Jeremy Rifkin that talks about the myths of human nature and the need to achieve an empathic civilization. It raises important issues about human consciousness and how humans have related to each other in the past and how we need to learn to relate if our survival is worth ensuring.
