Something about the spirit of the present age is wrong, wrong, wrong. My suspicion is that there is too much indulgence of people's naturalness these days. Secularism has not been the redeeming factor one might have hoped it would be. A return to nature was never a good idea, because it has led to men treating women as if they were all a gargantuan nurturing body -- his "mummy". And women, I was told tonight, are just as often inclined to treat males like a daddy. Where this happens, "civilisation" is a misnomer, because really nobody is truly civilised. Rather, everybody just falls back into a familiar psychological and social pattern in their relationships with other people. "Civilisation", as such, does not (is not permitted to) intervene.
When this happens, we are all in a very low state, as I feel we are today.
One simply has to have something to compare it to, to know this, however.
When I went back to Zimbabwe, I felt I did not have to justify every little thing I said by trying to show that I had shaken it dry of all emotionalism (i.e. any personally discrediting content). At least in the white culture, there is not this form of social censure. People are just people, and their status does not have anything to do, in principle, with the degree to which they can demonstrate a separation between their mind and body. In black culture, where "civilisation", was externally imposed, women are ascribed as more emotional than men. This is from both the colonial point of view and that of the culture they already have. Therefore we can say that the black cultures are often more genuinely "natural" in that they identify men and women in terms of their familial positioning.
It's not good in my view -- this global "return to nature". We need something else to intervene --some reason, some values imposed from as if from on high, but ideally something people have been led to feel would automatically be creditable.
When this happens, we are all in a very low state, as I feel we are today.
One simply has to have something to compare it to, to know this, however.
When I went back to Zimbabwe, I felt I did not have to justify every little thing I said by trying to show that I had shaken it dry of all emotionalism (i.e. any personally discrediting content). At least in the white culture, there is not this form of social censure. People are just people, and their status does not have anything to do, in principle, with the degree to which they can demonstrate a separation between their mind and body. In black culture, where "civilisation", was externally imposed, women are ascribed as more emotional than men. This is from both the colonial point of view and that of the culture they already have. Therefore we can say that the black cultures are often more genuinely "natural" in that they identify men and women in terms of their familial positioning.
It's not good in my view -- this global "return to nature". We need something else to intervene --some reason, some values imposed from as if from on high, but ideally something people have been led to feel would automatically be creditable.
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