{"id":31776,"date":"2017-02-16T01:00:35","date_gmt":"2017-02-16T06:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31776"},"modified":"2017-02-06T14:36:55","modified_gmt":"2017-02-06T19:36:55","slug":"qotd-the-imperfectability-of-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/02\/16\/qotd-the-imperfectability-of-man\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The imperfectability of man"},"content":{"rendered":"

And then you get to things like City<\/em> or some of the Heinlein juveniles, where you\u2019re assured that the UN brought rationality to the world, one world government is wonderful and, as superabundance set in, humans shed religion as unneeded, and went forward to be perfect angels.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure what caused this blindness that affected smart men in the fifties and sixties, and still affects academics, idiots and Marxists today, but I read that and I think \u201cOkay, I can see how you thought this was plausible if what you looked at was the intellectual portions of middle America where religion was a social thing, and where the whole \u201cbrotherhood of man\u201d was a believed fable. But can you imagine making Islam just \u201cwither away\u201d without major persecution, war and executions? Oh, heck, even Catholicism in the more traditional regions.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s tribalism. Perhaps the EU has made the Portuguese and the Spanish live in peace with each other (I think they\u2019re biding their time, but that\u2019s something else) what about the myriad little tribes in Africa, or even racial\/tribal minorities in Asia.<\/p>\n

How could they think the nature of man would pass away so completely?<\/p>\n

I attribute it to lack of contact with other lands. I mean, the US is a huge country, and back then the industrial-news complex had absolute primacy. You really only got the other countries filtered through the lens of your colleagues in the media. And you only got even other segments of your own country filtered that way.<\/p>\n

This was not malice, either. I\u2019m here to tell you that understanding another culture \u2014 or even understanding that another culture really exists, and they\u2019re not just sort of playing at it \u2014 is REALLY hard. Humans are very good at absorbing the conditions they\u2019re born into and internalizing them as THE conditions, i.e. the only true ones, and then thinking of everything else as a bizarre variation.<\/p>\n

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Time Zones”, According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2015-06-23.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And then you get to things like City or some of the Heinlein juveniles, where you\u2019re assured that the UN brought rationality to the world, one world government is wonderful and, as superabundance set in, humans shed religion as unneeded, and went forward to be perfect angels. I\u2019m not sure what caused this blindness that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,11],"tags":[360,47,478,691],"class_list":["post-31776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-christianity","tag-islam","tag-robertheinlein","tag-unitednations"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8gw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31777,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31776\/revisions\/31777"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}