on secular religions ....

[dissent]

In the Katrina thread in the Cafe Diedel wrote -

Btw, whatever German minister Trittin said about Katrina, global warming and the role of the U.S. in international climate politics - don't blame Germany for it. This man is an a-hole of sorts. Nobody except some fanatic and self-righteous environmentalists here like him. In fact his political actions are simply hiding a personal agenda and a totalitarian spirit believing it is alright to press things that (he believes) are true on everybody - them willing or not.

brings to mind the ideas of what secularists use for the human "religion" drive, for which the following two linky's have something to say -

http://www.crichton-official.com/speech ... ote05.html

http://www.crichton-official.com/fear/index.html

seems to me that there are some valid comparisons here. So as humans do we have to have something beyond ourselves to believe in? or not?

[roid]

truly interesting,
but i think he's going a little overboard.

yes, i can see his point in environmentalism being an almost religious movement.

but some particular things i can't let slide:

he seems to think that environmentalists are all nieve to the dangerous nature of uh... nature.
*shrug* i don't know, maybe his exposure to environmentalim has been a strange one. because i, an environmentalist, think quite different to how he expects me to think:
Nature deserves RESPECT. It's not a friendly beast, it can be ★■◆●ing dangerous. The trick is in understanding, mimiking and harnessing it's inherent power. It's like the difference between studying a bull's behaviour then harnessing that bull to plough your fields. or confronting and then killing the bull, eating it's meat, and telling everyone how great you are coz you killed such a dangerous and powerful beast.

The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true

an interesting backstep from respect, mutual integration and cultural tollerance he's pushing here. if only he backed it up, then maybe it'd be worth looking into.
too bad he didn't.
perhaps he just has a different concept of "noblility", and therefore it's purely semantical.

but as it stands, as the definition i hold, the noble savage is not a fantasy.
the historically religiously motivated labeling of other cultures as SAVAGE/PAGAN/HEATHEN and therefore INHUMAN and worthy of genocide is the real wrongdoing.

[dissent]

truly interesting,
but i think he's going a little overboard...

but as it stands, as the definition i hold, the noble savage is not a fantasy.
the historically religiously motivated labeling of other cultures as SAVAGE/PAGAN/HEATHEN and therefore INHUMAN and worthy of genocide is the real wrongdoing.

Where did Crichton say 'worthy of genocide'? That's also going a little overboard. I also wouldn't pin all of the historically motivated labeling of other cultures on religion. I think economics as well as other areas also have their share of motivation in this regard.

[roid]

He didn't, that whole last paragraph was my view.
It is what i think is the greater issue and in THAT i disagree with Michael.
(my point was that accusations of "savagery" are generally followed up with justifications to genocide, so given this link - i think labels of savagery and "the worth of human beings and cultures relative to one another" should be approached VERY CAREFULLY)

the whole concept of the noble savage was created to COUNTER the colonial/religious based stigmatisation of other cultures as being inherently and absolutely WRONG ("savage/etc/etc"). So what Michael seems to be suggesting is that we revisit this - go momentarily backwards. since i consider secular libertarianism to be making great inroads into society, and i consider this a good thing, you can understand why i am hesitant to suggestions to change direction.

it may not itself be a bad idea, he'll just have to justify it. he may be a study of anthropology, but a study of human spirituality he is not.

the study of what is and isn't "nobility", if you ask me, is NOT an anthropologist's sole place to measure.
it's the place for philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and metaphysicians.

of course Michael could well have an interest beyond anthropology, but he hasn't put this forward in either of those links. this lack of interest in the metaphysical is what i refer to when i talk about justification and backing things up.

i suppose he may have touched the subject of spirituality briefly when he talked about environmentalism being inherently religious.

you know what... i think i'm still rather defensive from my pro-mystic defences against Mobius; it could be effecting my judgement of these articles.

[WarAdvocat]

The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true

an interesting backstep from respect, mutual integration and cultural tollerance he's pushing here. if only he backed it up, then maybe it'd be worth looking into.
too bad he didn't.
perhaps he just has a different concept of "noblility", and therefore it's purely semantical.

First off, that statement pretty much a cliche, due to it's essential truth and the frequency with which it has been repeated. I'm very surprised you haven't run across it before, but perhaps that has to do with the varying idological slants of our reading.

Specifically what that phrase means is that the so-called "Noble Savage" is a highly romanticized fiction created by upper-class Euro-centric cultures about aboriginal, indigenous & etc. people in a LITERARY movement, not to counter some stigma. It occurred after these peoples had been safely suppressed as well. It carries with it the pre-supposition that these peoples are somehow better than the so-called civilized nations, living in some sort of "state of grace". In modern times, the paradigm of the Noble Savage has come to encompass some sort of freedom from the "Original Sin" of activity which is detrimental to their environment.

Whichever way you slice it... The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. Humans are humans, whether the context is a highly mechanized and/or developed culture or a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. We are all direct descendants of these people in one form or another, and that includes our sins against each other and the environment.

And that, dear roid, is the context behind the statement you understood so poorly. There is no "backstep from tolerance" is really an insistence on realistic, unromanticized facts.

[roid]

hmm. so you are saying that the concept of the Noble Savage is being mentioned here solely in it's relation to environmentalism?
ok that makes sense, and it makes all of what you said make sense in that regard - if the concept of the Noble Savage was SOLELY relative to environmentalism then i agree that new facts are increasingly suggesting that they wern't that great in that regard:

i have heard the recent backlash against aboriginal people in this regard - locally in australia i'm hearing a gradually louder voice saying "the aboriginals whiped out countless species over their history in australia" and also bringing attention to the fact that they too immigrated here themselves - just a hell of a long time ago.

however my concept of the Noble Savage isn't limited to environmentalism, it's strongly linked with religion. and this is where i believe the real power behind the Noble Savage concept comes from.

Specifically what that phrase means is that the so-called "Noble Savage" is a highly romanticized fiction created by upper-class Euro-centric cultures about aboriginal, indigenous & etc. people in a LITERARY movement, not to counter some stigma...

i believe that the literary concept of the Noble Savage mirrored the change in contemporary thinking at the time - that foreign cultural concepts of spirituality were being introduced into the contemporary culture and actually being recognised for their worth, overcomming the previous religious stigma that wrote all tribal religion off as "the religion of lesser humans". So i DO think it was created to counter the previous stigma.
Contemporary literature of the time mirrors paradigm changes. In much the same way as there has been such an influx of homosexual themes in mainstream contemporary film within the last few decades - it mirrors paradigm changes in the culture and DOES counter previous stigma as it encourages all to adopt the new paradigm.

...It carries with it the pre-supposition that these peoples are somehow better than the so-called civilized nations, living in some sort of "state of grace". In modern times, the paradigm of the Noble Savage has come to encompass some sort of freedom from the "Original Sin" of activity which is detrimental to their environment.

On an environmental standpoint i see your point. But on a spiritual standpoint i think dismissal of the Noble Savage concept is arrogent, spiritually nieve, and culturally elitist.

it'd depend on your values. i value metaphysics, spirituality, psychology and the links between them. and i take exception to the ignorance of these concepts when discussing the Noble Savage.

[WarAdvocat]

I was addressing, specifically, the concept of environmentalism, yes.

However, even in a spiritual-religious moral/ethical context, I think it's silly to believe that the so-called "savages" were any more (or less) noble than we are today, just by sheer virtue of their savagery. In my opinion, people are people, whether in a primitive or modern culture. The myth is that these people were somehow qualitatively different from us today, I think. In most cases, for every "noble" feature, I'm sure an anthropologist could show you some less admirable trait to balance it.

[dissent]

And I think that the issues Chrichton raises are with relation to how people today in some parts of secular environmentalism criticize their opponents with their lack of the "obvious noble savage" ethic that they seem to lack, and that merely correcting this deficiency would usher in some new utopia of human freedom, etc blah blah blah. The point is that the noble savage was a bit more in tune with his environment, and that that wasn't necessarily the way he wanted it because it was often uncomfortable and also dangerous.

[Sirius]

Yeah, one has to remember there is a reason for the rise of civilisations.

[Mobius]

I'll say right now that I like Michael Crichton. I have a personalised, autographed copy of his non-fictional work "Travels" which he signed for me when he visited NZ about 7 years ago. (My sister is a book-rep for Pan McMillan and organised it for me.)

MC is a very sharp cookie - no denying it. Smart, educated and an original thinker too - a very rare species indeed. If you don't know his history, he qualified M.D. at Harvard Medical school but never practiced. He was whisked directly to Hollywood and at age 28 he was a multimillionaire, had a mansion in Beverly Hills and 2 posrche's in his garage.

He then spent a couple of years investigating the nature of the world - and "Travels" is his documentation of those journeys, both physical and mental. It's a fascinating read, I thoroughly recommend it.

I read the piece you pointed out, and believe he has made one very bad mistake. His idea was to refute environmentalism by making it a religion. This however is a bad mistake.

This because religious people will despise the idea (There's no God - big "g") involved, and non-religious people will equally despise it as they will be convinced environmentalism is the proverbial "good science".

The crux of the address by MC is this: "You don't know the truth. Go out and find it."

He is correct that a large portion of environmentalism is pure crap - and this is because no one will actually look at the facts about global warming. There are precious few facts to support the idea that humans are causing global warming.

I know, for example, that the C02 output by humanity accounts for 0.04% of greenhouse gasses on planet Earth. Clouds account for 60%. This simple fact tells you something - but environmentalists reject this fact, because it does not fit their funding applications.

You see scientists are just normal people, prone to the same sort of mistakes as anyone else. But if your entire funding for the next five years rests on showing some damning statistics about global warming caused by humans, then you better believe the "facts" produced by that research group are going to be seriously flawed. (No one in their right mind finds the real truth, discovers it goes against their beliefs and hence produces a report to say the subject is moot, and request their funding to be cut to zero.)

Here's the kicker - the "facts" produced by these very same groups, have entered popular culture, where they are idiotically believed by 99% of people.

Why? Well, many reasons. Laziness. Ignorance. Those are the main ones. Most people like to have things spoon fed to them, and even if it tastes like crap, if you keep spoon feeding the same crap to them long enough, they'll get used to it.

The other reaosn is that people today are very uncritical about things which REALLY matter. For example, the question of whether it is in humanity's best interests to spend vast amounts of money (i.e. a decent percentage of the global product) to try to prevent global warming?

You might say "of course".

However, if we spend a dollar trying to reduce greehouse gasses, what's the payoff at the other end? And when is the payoff? The environment is no different to a business, if it's not profitable to spend money, then it should not be spent.

I for one, maintain that it is far better to spend a dollar and protecting people from the effects of global warming, rather than vainly trying to prevent it. (I believe we can't prevent it, BTW.)

Tandem to this whole issue is MC's assertion that we have grave difficulties identifying truth. He is entirely correct here, and I recommend every person here to read the (very small!) book "Crimes against Logic" by Jamie Whyte. It'll change your life.

Since reading the book, I have come to realise that most of the "information" I gather (and I gather a LOT) is simply false. Often finding true information is very hard indeed - and that's why people tend to simply believe things told them repeatedly. It's much easier to go with the flow than fight against it.

Developing you own personal ability to discern the truth in what you read, see and hear is a very important thing. I have ony just begun to develop my own personal "bullshiz detector" - but it seems to be working already!

[dissent]

I read the piece you pointed out, and believe he has made one very bad mistake. His idea was to refute environmentalism by making it a religion. This however is a bad mistake.

apparently it is a VERY BAD mistake

This because religious people will despise the idea (There's no God - big "g") involved, and non-religious people will equally despise it as they will be convinced environmentalism is the proverbial "good science".

As I read Crichton's piece, it sounds to me that what he is saying is that people will accept the "teachings of environmentalism" with the same uncritical eye that is given to religious canon. His point is that OTHER PEOPLE are making it their religion by accepting its dogma uncriticly.