Haters Gonna Hate Hate Hate...

I was glancing at the work of a blogger I had once respected - not you, Lumo, I always knew you were as nuts as you are brilliant - and saw that it was frothing with racist and cultural hatred. It started me thinking about what makes a seemingly intelligent and reasonable person go off the rails. There are lots of reasons, I suppose - recent terrorist incidents point to a mix of mental illness and fanatical ideology.

One potent source of the latter is the cultural disruption caused by cultural globalization. The long history of civilization is strewn with the wreckage of cultures - most of them now lost to history - digested and absorbed by conquest or assimilation. The economic globalization which has transformed the world in the last few decades has a cultural counterpart as the internet, television, and video instantly transmits fashion and attitude to every part of the world.

There is a common thread that connects the nut jobs of the American religious right with the Mosque bombers of Nigeria and all their more or less outraged counterparts around the world. All see their culture under attack by the potent digestive juices of the global cultural annihilator.

The encroaching other is a natural target for every sort of disappointment and a convenient scapegoat for every catastrophe. It's interesting to me that women's rights has been a key focus of anger almost everywhere. Women have been a disadvantaged and often disenfranchised group in much or most of the world throughout much of history, and changing that has been profoundly disruptive. Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini was first provoked to speak out publicly when the proposal was made for women to be allowed to vote in the Iranian parliament.

Cultures usually fiercely resist digestion. Sometimes the rage that provokes takes its most destructive form in the immigrant who transported himself into an alien environment purely in search of economic opportunity. The stress of growing older in a culture that can't be accepted, especially if combined with other failures, can trigger descent into fanaticism, and, sometimes, terrorism.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more