I don’t really like commenting on my own blog much… so I figured I’d post this here also for some more discussion:
When a violent storm rips through an ecosystem it has no moral values guiding it. When it up-roots trees and drowns animals, it does not feel bad for them. Well maybe it does, but the nature of the storm remains the same. I believe that culture works in a homologous manner to these forces of nature.
What do yall think?
I’ve been saying this for years ;D
It’s why I don’t have much time for conspiracy theories. The theorists are engaged in a futile search for a human face behind a complex yet unsentient phenomenon (the control mechanisms of civilisation) in exactly the same way as people over the centuries have turned to anthropomorphic deities for answers to natural mysteries.
Amen. That’s why we create anthropomorphic gods; the forces of mass society are so totally beyond human comprehension that we need to put a human face on it. The “gods” are hte personifications of the great cultural storms born of a mass society so far beyond the human scale that it becomes inscrutable, unknowable, and capricious. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” doesn’t he? Take away our gods, and you still haven’t shrunk down our mass society, you haven’t taken away our need for gods. So we invent new gods, mortal gods of incalculable intellect and cunning that smoke big fat cigars in back rooms and plot out the fate of the world. We simply put oureselves in the gods’ place, a new twist on an old myth that reassures us that our great leaders have everything under control. We’d rather believe that they’re evil, than believe that they’re incompetent before the vast cultural forces unleashed as a consequence of our way of life.
Hah! Reminds me of Gaiman’s “American Gods”.