Jay wrote:
uziq wrote:
i think i'm a little more familiar than you with world history, thanks.
if you think human beings went to war because of 'xenophobia' then i really suggest you read some world history.
start with the recent conflicts of the 20th century, they'll come with pictures if you're lucky and won't tax your poor overheating head.
and wow, amazing evidence for your theory ... people enjoy games, grouping up in teams and competing against other players in games ... the games have guns ... it's white people versus brown arabs ... wow you're really getting at something here. that sure scotches all the pesky science that contradicts your view!
trying to justify hating muslims in the UK, in 2020, because 'it's human evolution and instinct' is pseudo-scientific bollocks of the highest order. it's really that simple. 'i'm sorry, i can't help being rude to strangers and ignorant of their culture, it's in my nature and we've been like this for 20,000 years'. lmao.
He is right to an extent. We are all tribal. It's how we evolved. It's why people join groups outside of their family. To feel. To belong. And it's why people are so easily manipulated once they feel part of a group. It becomes their identity, and identities are nearly impossible to shake once assumed. Ask any addict.
er jay i think drug addicts struggle to stop having the identity of drug addicts because they are ... chemically addicted and dependent ... on a drug. not because they are attached to the ‘tribal belonging’ aspect. what you are describing is the psychological co-dependency of desperate people, or people who’ve been in the gutter so long that they don’t know how to conceive of themselves in straight life. it has nothing to do with tribalism, and absolutely fuck all to do with our tens of thousands of years-long development as a species.
this is exactly my point. people use some vague concept from ‘evolution’ or appeal to our ‘tribal beginnings’ and act as if there’s a sublimated Krang beneath every action we do. it would be laughed at by a psychologist, laughed at by an anthropologist, laughed at by a historian. just in the same way as victorians justified their own behaviour and societal attitudes as being ‘darwinian’ and about the ‘survival of the fittest’, in was in fact an imperial winner-takes-all ideology merely massaging its ideology into a vaguely scientific-sounding shape.
now, yes, obviously we are all group-based and social animals. yes, obviously we all have identities that are important to our senses of self. i’m not denying that xenophobia and fear of the Other have been present, or rather used and deployed, in major conflicts; dehumanising and portraying the guys in the next trench or on the next hill as ‘not us’ is a basic psychological mechanism. and, as you rightly say, leaders and nationalists are quick to weaponise xenophobia and stoke fear of the Other in the papers and press when they need to find young boys to go off and die for their bidding. but to say that xenophobia is a substantial ‘cause’ or that fearing everyone is ‘the default’ because of ‘evolution’, is pseudo-scientific woo.
NYC is a melting pot. ancient cities were melting pots. there were bronze age melting pots. human beings have co-existed side-by-side, inter-marrying and engaging in peaceful trade, for as long as we have gone to war and put up walls. the point is that you can cherrypick any image from 20,000 years of history or the long eons of evolutionary time. it’s lazy and it’s intellectually fraudulent. dilbert is basically appealing to the way early hominids went around bashing each other on the head and hooting at neanderthals to justify his own revulsion of ... Polish people? get a fucking grip!
not only is it terrible science, it’s also pathetically deterministic. insofar as we do have in-built irrationalities and animal instincts, the triumph of modern civilisation has lain in how we have sublimated these things to come together and achieve higher forms of social organization. human beings have evidently been able to put their reptilian brains on ice in order to crawl out of the fucking encircled-wagons phase of society (i would liked to have seen behind closed doors at dilbert's version of los alamos, or the space program). dilbert rallies against religious superstition and ‘irrational’ thought when it doesn’t suit him; we should really move on from silly superstitions, apparently; but oh, it’s okay to be a nationalist and a bigot ‘because it’s our nature’.
it’s fucking bollocks and anyone can see through it.
Last edited by uziq (2020-02-18 01:31:04)
