22 March 2008
Anglo-European parents are shunning state schools which have a high intake of students from other racial backgrounds, according to Laurie Ferguson, a senior Government MP. Mr Ferguson stated that "[These parents] believe there is an over-dominance of some cultures in schools" and they "fear there is a mono-culture in some suburbs".
In response to this innate phenomenon the minister for multicultural, or perhaps rather 'mono'cultural, affairs, has called for the waves of new immigrants to be housed across a wider spread of suburbs.
From our perspective this is an interesting response to an interesting chain of events. For it appears as though genuine 'multiculturalism', genuine in the sense of various racial groups or ethnicities living in groups, or 'enclaves', according to their own values and attending the same schools, is in fact public enemy number one while Social Atomism and outright ethnic standardisation is deemed beneficial. But then isn't this, in fact, mono-culture?
Rather than pronouncing 'right' and 'wrong' on this issue we are simply interested in pointing out the gross confusion and the contraditions surrounding the modern day (politically correct but practically false) notion of multiculturalism. If we want multiple cultures to flourish, really flourish according to their own, then each culture needs to be given geographical space and ideological autonomy rather than be interspersed.
22 March 2008
The ancient and enduring needs of food, shelter and safety have more or less been satisfied in developed countries during modern times with the gradual development of capitalist systems and technology. The main problem with this situation is that many of the emotional needs required by humans have been ignored by this process. The community spirit has also virtually disappeared and secondly many peoples social abilities have gone with it, leaving a vacuous human shell that is unable to properly interact with other humans.
In the developed world people are enjoying a prosperity that is unprecedented in history, technology and mass production have enabled us to produce goods and services with an efficiency that allows us to have anything we want whether it be for shelter, travel, entertainment, gadgets, all sorts of food and disco bars. With all this prosperity there has been a significant change in the value system of many people with an emphasis on what they can consume, not what they can contribute to others and their society. This has had a detrimental impact on community life.
The planning of our cities around economic objectives has created a suburban culture that also encourages consumerism and not much else. The normal interactions based around community life are few and people are isolated in their homes or work places not engaging with those around them outside a consumer context. There are many examples throughout our cities of these socially dysfunctional buildings, the fast food joint with a drive through, the soulless office buildings built with cold stark materials and shopping centres full of bright light and franchised retail stores full of disinterested teenage staff. Furthermore our suburban homes and apartments are now designed to withdraw from the outside world and not integrate with the wider community. These McMansion type homes are centred around television, computers and other gadgetry to entertain the individual and allow him to disengage with those around him including other family members within that home.
People in past traditional societies got most of their fulfilment from spending time with family, friends and acquaintances. It was normal for people of different ages and backgrounds to be communicating and sharing experiences with one another, often these were lifelong interactions. Examples would of been a grandparent taking care of his grandchildren, a housewife talking to the local butcher and a teenager working as an apprentice learning from a middle aged tradesman. Thus in general people were better socialized and not just limited to interactions within their own age group. As we progress in to the 21st century we can see the younger generations are becoming less and less socialised. Examples of what I see in today's youth are indicative of the inability of many young people to interact with other people in a normal way especially with those outside of their own generation. These examples are constant listening to Ipod music, frequent mobile phone chatter and text messaging, rudeness and disrespect to others and in general lack of etiquette. Of course there are many exceptions to this rule and there are many older people with less than desirable behaviour. My objective is not to assign blame to these youth but to analyse the environment that is causing the breakdown in healthy social behaviour.
The solution to our social problems will be very difficult to achieve as consumerism is integrated into our psyche and it is hard for many people to think outside of this reality. Small steps that we can take individually and in small groups are to limit the amount of time we watch television, surf the net and play video games. We can also limit the amount of time that we do nonessential shopping and when we do to go, to visit local shops not oversized shopping malls. What people should be focussing on is spending time with friends/family/neighbours as well as getting involved in community activities such as school fetes, sporting events and other common interest groups. This may not seem very cool to many young people but neither is being obese, social inept and sitting in front of the computer/TV for hours on end.
On a political level we can also change how are cities are designed by promoting local communities and smaller housing and shops that are less about status and economic efficiency and more in line with being part of the neighbourhood. We can also change our school system to teach cultural and moral values as well as academic subjects. I believe achieving these objectives is not impossible it is just a matter of discussing these issues with other mature and intelligent people and then taking action to move forward. This is one of the goals of the Australian Nihilists and we encourage people who may already be thinking about these issues to come along to our meetings, organise their own if in different regions, write articles or just even sign up and participate on our forum.
By Nicaea
15 March 2008
The West champions human reason. Words like logic, rationality, structure, and efficiency are used by leaders of Western culture with an almost divine air about them. Those who are taught, in our many mechanistic schools of business, management, and government, to be 'logical', 'rational', and 'efficient' are the modern elites. Why is this so? What is the historical root of this now unspoken celebration of reason and its component concepts?
It can be traced back to Europe's Age of Reason, or
Age of Enlightenment, as it is variously referred to. During this time, people like Voltaire, Rousseau, Newton, Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith and many more used their own faculties for perceiving structure, for perceiving causes and their effects, and also the universal laws of logic, (in other words their faculties of reason) to explain the workings of the world in a way that reflected truth rather than in the ways in which the then established monoliths of church and absolute monarchy explained the world - for the church and monarchy would inevitably include in their explanations of reality the necessity of the servitude of the people through the use of concepts such as 'original sin' or original and chaotic 'states of nature' among men that can only be managed by a king with the absolute power to ensure we don't continue squabbling but get on with things.
Men, primarily, but also women of the enlightenment aimed to use their powers of reason to construct views of the world which did not falsely elevate one section of society, like kings or members of the clergy, to un-proportionally high positions of power over all other sections of society. They thought that an entire collective based on reason would as a result produce a society based on virtue, or the widespread practice of social goodness. We still think this today. Rationality = virtue, automatically and necessarily so, in the minds of most Westerners. However, while rationality can be used to come to an understanding of 'virtue' in the sense of acting in a extra-individual and holistic culture, it can also be used, as indeed it tends to be nowadays, for other - more self-serving - purposes.
For reason is simply the ability to perceive and manipulate structure, and nothing else. The laws of physics and logic, for example, are the products of reason - and these laws reveal the workings, or structure, of reality. The men and women of the enlightenment used reason to perceive the structure of their society - or more specifically what was being done to it and its people by un-proportionally despotic rulers and institutions - and to identify and overturn the so-called 'facts' that these rulers and institutions advanced to give credibility to their entire positions of power. It was simply lucky, an accident no less, that many of the people of the enlightenment used the human tools of reason and rationality for holistic purposes - i.e. to battle against a false, because increasingly self-serving, regime of power that was stemming from church and monarchy in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds.
Unfortunately for us, this concurrence of reason and virtue, or power to manipulate structure, and virtue, is not taking place in the public sphere nowadays. Our modern elites, the managerial or governmental technocrats with knowledge only of systems and structure and the most effective way of manipulating structure (efficiency), are not instilled with the virtue that must act hand-in-hand with this rationality to produce an admirable society. By modern elites we mean politicians, bureaucrats, managers, economists and other social 'scientists'.
For example, politicians are taught the most effective ways to steer interviews in their direction and to avoid answering certain questions, they are proficient at coming up with statistics, graphs and flowcharts to suit any and every need, and the electoral system has been made more efficient over the years while the involvement the average 'citizen' has in his or her public affairs as dropped dramatically. Social 'scientists' such as economists employ impenetrably rational vocabularies which are so abstract that they cannot be understood by someone without years of training in the specific jargon - and thus an average intelligent person, while not possessing the specific jargon but possibly a sound and intelligent reasoning capacity coupled with some common sense - has to spend so much time wading through abstract concepts to work out that the concepts have been rationalised so much and abstracted from reality so much that they miss the particulars of reality and lead those in the discipline around in wide circles for years on end, often back to the same starting point, while the original problems such concepts were supposed to address go largely un-changed in bare and un-abstracted reality. All the while the rational elites pat themselves on the back.
As our society has become more rational it has also become increasingly fractured into smaller and smaller and increasingly insulated professional groups. This can and has had at least two consequences. Firstly, those in each professional group hide behind their walls of specialisation and expertise, making their recommendations and decrees, without actually doing much good for the society they purport to serve. Many such people scorn a general and broad education as 'unemployable' to keep this culture going. Secondly, but also because of the first consequence, while the rise in professionalism has paralleled the rise of individualism in the modern epoch the result has been, ironically to the dismay of individuals, less autonomy and self-determination. Abstract and 'efficient' answers to real world issues taught by proponents of the same systems of thought dominate the globe and are in the process of standardising it beyond belief.
In summary: the basic point of this article is to highlight the simple, but often unobserved fact, that reason does not necessarily equal virtue, or goodness. We must encourage the cultivation and use of reason/rationality in schools and universities while also encouraging the cultivation and real-world-use of non abstracted thinking (common sense) and, most importantly, holistic values.
By David
hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.