There is something about the spirit of the present age that 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. Thus both masculinity and femininity are expressed in non-emotional ways. In black culture, where "civilisation" as externally imposed form has not intervened to such a degree (sorry if this sounds racist, but it is true), women are ascribed to be more emotional than men. That is, black culture is more genuinely "natural" in that it recognises men and women in terms of their relationships within the family, not in relation to civilizing mores per se. (It's more complicated than this, since the gender roles are taught through Christian teachings, but it boils down to a model taken from the natural processes of procreation and parenting, rather than from other transcendental ideals.)
It's not good -- not good at all, this global "return to nature". Really, something else has to intervene --some reason, some values imposed from on high, something 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. Thus both masculinity and femininity are expressed in non-emotional ways. In black culture, where "civilisation" as externally imposed form has not intervened to such a degree (sorry if this sounds racist, but it is true), women are ascribed to be more emotional than men. That is, black culture is more genuinely "natural" in that it recognises men and women in terms of their relationships within the family, not in relation to civilizing mores per se. (It's more complicated than this, since the gender roles are taught through Christian teachings, but it boils down to a model taken from the natural processes of procreation and parenting, rather than from other transcendental ideals.)
It's not good -- not good at all, this global "return to nature". Really, something else has to intervene --some reason, some values imposed from on high, something creditable.
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