I'm all for the advancement of technology, advancement of scientific knowledge and the pursuit of living harmoniously with the world around us both for our own betterment (ie not pumping chemicals toxic to our own health into the atmosphere so that we can go someplace real fast) and for that of the larger whole. Ultimately, no man, and no thing in the universe for that matter, is an island, everything exists within the context of its surroundings.
There are numerous cultures around the planet that understand this concept at a much more fundamental level than we do in "the West." In this context, in the Guugu Yimithirr language, you cannot refer to your right or your left devoid of your surroundings. The individual does not exist independent of its environment. If you were walking on your way with the sun setting on your right, and a mountain on your left, then when you turn around to head home in Guugu Yimithirr you would say that the sun is still setting on your right, and the mountain is still on your left, while in English these conditions would have changed. Two people facing each other will talk about things on their right and their left. It is a communal experience.
But how can we explain control of a system we don't understand? This isn't an isolated chemical reaction found in a sterile lab in Connecticut or Cambridge or CalTech. Ego aside, we don't know smack about the weather. We have no context for global climate change, every time it appears in the fossil record (The earth’s climate, tectonics, atmosphere, oceans, and periodic disasters invoked the primary selective pressures on all organisms, which they either adapted to, or they perished) or an ice cores it happens too quickly in a geologic sense (aka thousands of years) for us to know what could possibly be happening.
That's why this is a very bad thing.
The difference between playing god and fulfilling our potential is taking responsibility for the outcome.
As it is true that one cannot consider the object without considering the environment in which it exists, it is also true that one cannot consider a cultural categorization without considering fundamental values of that culture: In the west, the emphasis on the location of the individual in relation to the world that surrounds him is indicative and influenced by a societal weltanschauung of liberal individualism, which is to say, the reason that we cannot linguistically consider objects in relation to the collective and in relation to the individual is because in this culture, the two exist on opposite ends of the CONTINUUM.
ReplyDeletem?
I know this is forever ago, but I really like your reply.
DeleteMy post was written in a polarized dichotomy, a black-and-white, way of thinking: "Western cultures think way X, but let's think Y instead."
Your image of a continuum is great, and points out my hypocrisy in attempting to breach my linguistic paradigm.
Thanks!