When you are a 'big person', residing at the top of the human food chain, totally engaged in the concept of an ever upward Progress, you tend never to look down at the complexity of Life below your feet.
Partially it is your class and ethnic snobbery about all the 'lesser breeds', partly its a popular scientific construction that the smaller and the older simply must be 'less progressive' and hence just ancient history.
None of this is possible when you are a 'small person' , at the bottom of the human food chain, also eternally looking upwards.
Looking upwards isn't a luxury for the small and the weak - they need to see all the warning signs of potentially trouble from their bosses ('betters') as soon as possible, if they are to survive.
And when you are on the bottom, everybody else is your boss and your 'better' --- you can't help but appreciate just how varied and complex the human world actually is.
If Henry Dawson saw the world different than his contemporaries , as vastly more complicated than they saw it, perhaps he had cause ...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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