Writing Feedback /
-- Writing from India (essay about holidays and truth) [29]
It appears Western civilization accepted Plato's ideas on state governance but chose to go Aristotle's way in understanding nature.
Um, in spite of the name of Plato's most famous text being
The Republic, Plato absolutely did not believe in democracy in the sense in which it is practiced in the West today. Nor would he have been a great fan of Western capitalism.
Having made a serious study of both the origins and consequences of various belief systems, I have become convinced that what people believe matters -- not for spiritual reasons but because faith so profoundly affects how people treat each other and the earth. So, while I have some sympathy with Indian philosophy (for example) I am also very much aware of its history and of the ways that it has been used to dispossess and depress the original peoples of the Subcontinent in the same way that Christianity later was used to dispossess and depress the original inhabitants of the Americas.
This is interesting, and something that seems to be a very common belief among those who have adopted a more or less atheistic worldview -- the notion that religious and spiritual thought are generally oppressive in nature and intent. It seems to me, though, that religions have been developed by virtually every society because they serve very important social functions. Indeed, we would not expect to see so much convergence in the evolution of a cultural phenomenon, any more than we would in the evolution of an organic one, unless the features that evolved were highly adaptive and beneficial. And in fact we see new religions emerging even now to replace the old ones, as our need, individually and collectively, for the functions religions provide presumably continues to persist. Environmentalism, for instance, is essentially a religion centered on nature worship. The version of nature being worshiped is an idealized one that has nothing to do with nature as it actually is -- disease, aging, disaster, and a brutal, blind competition for survival. Rather, it is some fairy tale version of nature that will provide for all of us if we only "preserve" it, as if it existed as a fixed thing in the first place, which of course it doesn't. Environmentalism also has its irrational rituals, as religions always do. Buying organic, for instance, is a staple of the movement, although organic food is far more environmentally damaging and far less healthy than conventionally produced crops. And, of course, environmentalism has the standard apocalypse scenario, one that is always expected to occur soon, but that never seems to actually arrive. The failure of the world to end on schedule, though, never convinces its adherents that the apocalypse isn't actually imminent. Finally, like many religions, its exercise of temporal power is often detrimental to the world's least fortunate. Malaria, for instance, kills millions each year thanks to the environmental movement, which successfully lobbied for a worldwide ban on DDT -- after DDT had been successfully used to eliminate malaria in the West, of course, so successfully that most people don't even realize that malaria used to exist in North America and Western Europe as an indigenous disease anymore.