I am now renting a room in my house to a young man, a student, from Pakistan (who has also lived and studied in Egypt and Indonesia ). When I ask him questions about Pakistan, he tells me that to understand Pakistan I must first read about the history of India. I am following his advice and am now reading Octavio Paz's In Light of India, where I came across this passage: "In the West since the l8th century change has been overvalued. Traditional India, like old European societies prized immutability....Along with change the modern West glorifies the individual...Change and the individual fulfill each other. With his habitual insight, Tocqueville differentiated between egotism and individiualism. The first "is born from blind instinct..it is a vice as old as the world and is found in all societies." Individualism, in contrast, was born with democracy, and it tends to separate each person and his family from society. In individualistic societies, the private sphere displaces the public. For the Athenian, the greatest honor was citizenship, which gave him the right to take part in public affairs. The modern citizen defends his privacy, his economic interests, his philosophy, his property, what couonts is himself and his small circle, not the general interests of his city or nation. " ...Aristocratic societies were heroic: the fidelity of the vassal for his lord, the soldier for his faith. These attitudes have almost completely disappeared in the modern world. In democratic societies, where change is continual, the ties that bind the individual with his ancestors have vanished, and those that connect him with his fellow citizens have slackened. Indifference and envy are democracy's great defects. Tocqueville concludes: Democracy makes each individual not only forget his ancestors, but also neglect his descendents and separate himself from his contemporaries: he is plunged forever into himself and, in the end, is eternally surrounded by the solitude of his own soul" , A prophecy that has been utterly fulfilled in our time. I find modern societies repellent on two accounts. On the one hand, they have taken the human race--a species in which each individual, according to all the philosophies and religions, is a unique being-- and turned it into a homogeneous mass; modern humans seem to have all come out of a factory, not a womb. On the other hand, they have made every one of those beings a hermit. Capitalist democracies have created uniformity, not equality, and they have replaced fraternity with a perpetual struggle among individuals. It was once believed that, with the growth of the private sphere, the individual would have more leisure time and would devote it to the arts, reading, and self-reflection. We now know that people don't know what to do with their time. They have become slaves of entertainments that are generally idiotic, and the hours that are not devoted to cash are spent in facile hedonism. I do not condemn the cult of pleasure; I lament the general vulgarity. I note the evilsw of contemporary individualism not to defend the caste system, but to mitigate a little the hypocritical horror it provokes among our contemporaries. ....Castes must not disappear so that its victims may turn into the servants of the voracious gods of individualism, but rather that, between us, we may discover a fraternity. Durant wrote: > Yes, the resources are finite, and the only way we can survive > to the point where our population level out without any > war or other means of mass death, > if we use what we have sustainably, which needs global > cooperative employment of the best science we can muster. > It cannot be done with the present profit-centered system. > It can only be done with everybody taking part voluntarily. > > Eva > > > Re: William Rees and his "ecological footprint" . Most people still don't > > "get" it. The Globe and Mail had an editorial yesterday ridiculing him > > and maintaining everyone's right to go to Florida for the winter and to > > drive a van. They see no limits to the size of the pie, as U.S. consumers > > who are now spending more than they earn to keep fueling their economy. > > The Globe's article ridiculed Rees for presuming to know that "happiness" > > does not depend on material wealth. To be rich is glorious. But to be > > happy? > > Melanie > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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