06-10-2020, 06:10 PM
(06-10-2020, 05:48 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: For the most part I could go along with your recent post. There is one bit, however, that I would contest.
(06-10-2020, 04:12 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I tend to think that racist and group-exclusivity power-plays are not inherent in human nature, and that there is no material or physical basis for a view that they are. It is also a spiritual belief. I disagree. The naked ape is a nice guy. I see that spiral and planetary dynamics shows a progression through millennia of human history toward loyalty and connection to ever-larger groups.
Humans do have instincts towards us and them. Among their own, they will be moderately nice. If they convince themselves that you are in another group, you get what Xenakis calls xenophobia. People can easily motivate themselves to treat other group horribly. It is sometimes hard to argue against it, as human history is full of it.
I see this in primarily materialistic terms. At the cusp of the Agricultural and Industrial ages, both agricultural processes and weapon technology changed. Society needed fewer farmers and more soldiers. Muskets were easier to train with than the muscle powered weapons that preceded them. Eventually, the soldiers stood around fondling their muskets and claimed to their lord that they had a right to own and carry these things. The lords looked at the soldiers, the riffles, particularly the muzzles, and agreed. Encouraged, the soldiers asked for the rights of conscience.
That began the long slow climb in democracy, human rights and equality. Look ma. No spiritual influence required. It goes on to this day. The ‘stay as you are’ folk divide the world into people like them and people not like them, and stick it to the other as they can. The progress people say all men are created equal under law, and try to make it so for ever larger groups.
But if we differ on the forces acting on the people, we agree that movement towards progress should occur.
To be expected. I'm glad for the level of agreement. I think I interpret such aspects of human nature as conscience, progress and need as spiritual, or as the spiritual aspect of the physical; the will to live and grow within Nature and Humanity. The process of moving toward more rights and more desirable ways of living is not a mechanistic explanation.
It depends on how people interpret the source of those aspects of humanity. Mechanistic explanations are useful to locate sources of problems and solve them, but ultimately mechanistic explanations put the causes in the past in an infinite regress. There is no other time but the eternal now. We are always now, no matter how much we may preoccupy ourselves with the past, so change and eternity are aspects of one process, and all causes are now and spontaneous, aka spiritual. But not apart from the physical in some heavenly realm; the physical too is spiritual, these are two words used for a common reality of consciousness seen from within and energy seen from without. That is an essential shift from agricultural age spirituality to information age spirituality.
It's an eternal and interesting debate. But I don't need the spiritual explanation to disagree with Mickey that certain aspects of humanity will always be the same. Conditions on the ground indicate otherwise. We come from more primitive conditions, when baser drives were more common, and we can observe this, but within evolution there is the drive to improve and grow, and conditions change, and we observe this as well.