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BBP
Super Administrator
Posts: 8056
Registered: 3-10-2005
Location: Eindhoven, Netherlands
Member Is Offline
Mood: Cheerful yet relaxed
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Finished Les Misérables, it was a good book with a happier ending than I'd expected after reading Hunchback. I generally prefer the happy endings but
I prefer Hunchback of the two - although Napoleon's elephant's appearance scored a ton of bonus points!
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elephant_de_la_Bastille_aqua...
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Caputh
Hot Rats Status
Posts: 34
Registered: 29-5-2011
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Agree that Les Miserables is a masterpiece.
Finished reading a very well annotated edition of "Gulliver's Travels" (published by Norton) by Jonathan Swift. The 18th Century Zappa in terms of
satire; he despised almost everyone and everything, particularly groups and is hilarious about how ridiculous life is.
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Plook
Sheik Yerbouti Status
Posts: 439
Registered: 11-7-2022
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How you doing my friend?
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polydigm
King Kong Status
Posts: 2173
Registered: 1-4-2006
Location: Horse Tray Ya
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Mood: Inspired
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I've been looking for support for the idea that human nature is not fundamentally bad. We do have a psychology that, with a combination of wonky genes
and negative nurture, can produce psychopaths of varying types, but those cases are only about five percent of the human population, with none the
less a disproportionately huge potential to bring about all kinds of potentially extinction threatening outcomes.
Easter last year I read Crimes Against Nature, Capitalism and Global Heating by Jeff Sparrow, wherein he takes a much more positive view of human
nature and tries to show how we get trapped in the constructions of a small number of privileged powerful individuals and how the myth that we're all
just basically bad is perpetuated by them in support of their self centred, empire building world views.
I recently obtained a copy of Debt by David Graeber wherein he tries to show how debt has taken a hold of the human psyche and looks at the entire
history of how this came about. I've read a little of that so far, but I'm keen to continue when I finish the following book. He is now sadly
deceased, having fallen fowl of a nasty disease around the age of 39. A huge shame, he was quite the character.
I'm currently reading The Dawn Of Everything, coauthored by David Graeber and David Wengrow wherein they try to show that both ends of the spectrum of
views, the noble savage (Rousseau, precursor of the left wing) and the brute savage (Hobbs, precursor of the right wing), about pre state human
beings, are just wrong. The basic fact is that scientists have shown very clearly that our DNA is not that different at all from human beings who
lived more than sixty thousand years ago. They were just as capable of using their brains to solve food production problems and work out practical
social relations.
For example, Native Americans arrived in America around 25,000 years ago and had plenty of time to work out solutions to their food production and
social organisation problems and a lot of the detailed evidence of their capabilities has been outright lied about in order to dehumanise them at the
time of the arrival of Europeans to justify trying to wipe them out and has continued to be used in that way retrospectively. Native Australians
arrived around 50,000 years ago and showed particular ingenuity in the face of a much more limited environment than in the Americas and had developed
quite complex social relations and methods for managing their environment to maximise food production by the time Europeans arrived. Similar
obfuscations of the true nature of life in Australia before their arrival have been engineered by many academics and leaders through the years.
It's fascinating, I'm really enjoying it, it's quite the eye opener in some ways but also confirming much of how I've come to think of the human race
in recent years and the current predicaments we find ourselves in, based on my own investigation.
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