> In fact (and I think I may be repeating some of the stuff I have said on silk
> before) - I believe that the organized religions like Christianity and Islam
> were the fisrt attempt at giving large groups of humans a common cause for
> owrking together.
Interesting post, Shiv. This may sound pedantic but it is worth noting that
large groups of people have worked together since the time of the Pyramids.
Formally, Management is a factor of production that can move economic outcomes
closer to the productivity frontier. The economic advantages of creating a
common cause (but really accruing from Management as a factor of production
entailed by the division of labor) were recognized well before organized
religions such as Christianity and Islam came into being.
Anand
________________________________
From: ss <cybers...@gmail.com>
To: silklist@lists.hserus.net
Sent: Fri, January 14, 2011 6:23:26 PM
Subject: Re: [silk] Stochastic Terrorism
On Saturday 15 Jan 2011 2:49:36 am Jon Cox wrote:
> The last part of that poem has been haunting me:
>
> "Pity the nation divided into fragments,
> each fragment deeming itself a nation."
>
> In the early days of the web, it was pretty common
> to assume that "bringing people together in cyberspace"
> somehow implied increasing mutual understanding.
> Clearly, __that__ doesn't happen automatically.
>
>
Ha! Nice couplet.
The word "nation" itself denotes different things. I believe that "nations" in
Europe divided themselves on ethnic and linguistic lines so the borders
between nations were easy to recognize.
But the modern definition of "nation state" demands the presence of borders.
500 years ago my ancestors had no passport, no national anthem, no national
bird, no national sport, no national language. And no specific national border.
Kigndoms and states existed whose rulers were at war with each other, but no
person needed a visa to go from one state to the next.
In fact (and I think I may be repeating some of the stuff I have said on silk
before) - I believe that the organized religions like Christianity and Islam
were the fisrt attempt at giving large groups of humans a common cause for
owrking together.
It was when Christianity failed that secular nation states became a better
alternative. The modern nation state requires all the "new features" that
define a nation other than ethnicity and religion which are pase as defining
features of a nation. The new features are a set of laws (a constitution),
defined borders within which thoose laws are implemented and other bells and
whistles like "national flag", "national anthem" etc.
I once had a discussion with Udhay (maybe a decade or more ago) about whether
or not the web would make the world "borderless". The reason it cannot make
the world borderless is because nation states survive on borders. Wikileaks is
an example of the web trying to break the rules set by nations with very
definite borders. Nations feel threatened when their borders are threatened.
Border are, after all, the very basis for nation states.
Pakistan too is an example of a group of people using Islam to change the
sacrosanct borders of nation states.
shiv
