Thursday, October 8, 2015

Whether its 1917 or 2015, hate comes with frontiers designed to keep new ideas out

Briton (cum Canadian cum American) Anglo Saxon Supremacist Peter Brimelow and Australian (cum British cum Canadian) dog whistle wedge electioneer Lynton Crosby are the past and present intellectual inspirations for Canadian politician Stephen Harper.



As Conservative Prime Minister, Harper is currently leading the meanest, nastiest, most hate-filled election campaign in his country in almost 100 years.

One has to go back to an earlier Conservative Prime Minister led campaign, that of the wartime election of 1917 , to find such bile and naked hatred.

That too was an election campaign based upon racist definitions of just who was or was not a 'real Canadian' and was deliberately designed to set the vast country's religions, ethnicities, regions, classes and genders at each others' throats.

To Prime Minister Borden's government, conservative middle class WASPs could be trusted to be patriotic --- but everyone else were suspect.

Ironically, it took almost seventy years before some sections of Canada began to trust the Conservative Party itself again.

The Canadian who won't receive a Nobel Prize : Aylan Kurdi


There is one fundamental reason why America, a nation about the same size as Canada, has about a million times more intellectual and cultural impact upon the world : its historic attitude to incoming new ideas.

For all its many many faults, America remains much more open to new ideas and that means they must - however reluctantly - also be open to the new people who hold them.

That American attitude now has to go international if humanity is to survive the immense global climate and environmental crisis it has created for itself and Mother Nature.

No, take that back.

What's called for is a far far Bigger Big Tent than that.

We need to look at how microbial HGT, a truly frontier-less approach to (literally !) 'taking up' new ideas has kept the microbes on Earth for almost four billion years.

Surviving almost four billion years worth of truly global disasters on a scale that humanity has thankfully been, so far, unable to imitate.

Perhaps the tiny, stupid, helpless bugs are onto something...

No comments:

Post a Comment

Archive of older posts

Why My Urgency ?

My photo
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...

PEER REVIEW

The best form of 'peer review' is a diversity of comments from around the world - I welcome yours.