2021-02-21 ------------------------------------------------------------------ meta4 writes: The historian and culture critic Morris Berman once opined, "An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you". While I'm unsure rampant narcissism, hyper-competition and materialism as an end goal comprise an ideology they are seemingly the defining attributes of American "culture" now and anything that isn't an aid towards those ends simply isn't worth a second thought. gopher://sdf.org/0/users/mmeta4/Phlog/phlog-2021-02-21.txt ------------------------------------------------------------------ This got me thinking of Harari's definition of Liberal Humanism as a religion, which seems to reflect similar idea as the one Berman calls ideology. You can read some of my thoughts on this here: gopher://sdf.org/0/users/undo/j045 meta4 speaks about bringing more holistic environmental and larger scale humanism to people who are wedded with this ideology of Liberal Humanism. while there is a part of the green talk these days that seems more authoritarian than I would like, the philosophy as a whole seems to transcend the American cold war style humanism and the Soviet cold war humanism. This brings me hope as it maps so nicely to the idea that you will have to somehow bring opposing views to a unity through dialogue. This sort of unity is not actually that easy to find if you try to force it onto a dialogue. The fact that it is here (if I am right) points to a new time actually starting with environmental context taking a more central position than could be allowed in the Liberal Humanism. ------------------------------------------------------------------