I am not sure if it was humans in general or just the people that got to write books, after a lot of people started living in urban environments away from nature.
Not only there were things like animism that were very popular in many cultures (and there are many myths across the world where the animals speak to/with humans, consult them or help them), but I do not think that you can live in the countryside and not really be convinced that even the smallest of birds are communicating with one another with their chirps and tweets.
Just a few hours earlier a few sparrows gathered on a tree next to my garden, started tweeting furiously at each other and then all left towards the same direction. It is obvious that some sort of message was conveyed in some way. Sure, maybe sparrows do not have a “full language”, but there is definitely meaning in most of those sounds and there are corresponding reactions.
That said, I do not think that speciesism was much of an issue for more people either. Considering how horrible humans can be to one another, they’d hardly need a philosophical platform to pen animals, use them for labour or kill them for food, so I’d say that this idea is also mostly philosophical and “in the books”, than being practiced in the real world by everyday people.
All excellent points! Considering my deep interest in folklore, I’m surprised I didn’t bring up the point about animal folk stories, especially Tricksters and spirit guides.
I don’t believe that racism and speciesism necessarily require a conscious and explicit “philosophical platform”, sounds far too elaborate to me … IMO a plain “gut feeling” … <edit> “mindset”? </edit> … would suffice, as can be trained in family and society, if the individual doesn’t much think for themselves, or out of conformism, social pressure, etc.
Sadly these don’t prevent a speciesist mindset, as can very well be seen in India, where you can observe mistreatment and/or malnourishment of allegedly “holy” cows most everywhere.
And now I am reminded of one of Arthur C. Clarke’s books, “Deep Range”:
Throughout history a herder that has sheep, takes care of them, collects their wool and milk and occassionally butchers some animals to eat and sell the meat. That is one of the most ancient “job descriptions” in human society and there is no real conscious thought going into how or why, by the herder. However, most of them actually caer for and love those animals that they herd.
For example, a few months ago, due to the laws being as they are, this herder lost all his sheep (they had to be put down due to some illness):
… he said that it was like watching someone kill his children and suffered a stroke on the spot (he survived).
However, he himself, in the past, must have had some of those sheep killed as well, because that’s the job description.
Therefore people like that are not speciest. They just are.
Assigning such a “tag/label” to that person is actually detrimental since it invariably applies negative characteristics where in reality none exist.
A similar thing happens with the word racism, which is now unfortunately overused.
It is within our nature, as social/pack animals ourselves, to seek out the company of our own species or our own tribe/family. Nothing wrong with that as an idea, since that’s how the whole species survived and that’s how a lot of animals survive right now. Neither the various herds of Gnu nor the different packs of lions that hunt them are doing anything wrong.
Since we all watched the whale video, within it, Anton mentioned that each “whale tribe” has its own members and borders and quirks and so forth. Indeed it is the equivalent of a human “city-state”. Whale killers (or “killer whales” as most people know them) and a lot of dolphins are also like that and members of one tribe do not intermix much (or at all), with other tribes. Indeed sometimes they wage turf wars. Just like humans did and still do.
Are those animals “racists”? Of course not. Similarly most humans aren’t “racists” either. Here is a practical example:
Even in our civilised time, you might notice that people of village X, “dislike” the people in the next-door village Y for no apparent reason other than the “sin” of having a different “competing” village and they express their “tribal dislike” in the now accepted way of such conflict, sports.
You are German so you probably know that there are endless (big and small) football feuds between almost all teams in your country. Are all those people in the stands “racist” because they prefer their town’s team and they boo the team of the town that’s down the road and is visiting for a “local derby”? Of course not. None of that stuff is conscious, it is part of what makes humans a “social/tribal animal” if you take away the “I like to be around my tribe” basic sentiment, then, by definition, you cannot have a tribe, at all since that is the basis of the tribe.
The overusage of the term “racist” is, once again, applying negative characteristics where in reality none exist.
This is not just an abstract problem though. The unfortunate dillusion of the term can even twist even the most natural ideas into “moral dilemmas” like, for example, something we’ve read in this forum, the idea that somehow you shouldn’t provide your own kids any special advantages because it is somehow unfair towards other kids. Imagine that! The basic instinct of nurturing your own offspring that all the nesting animals share, has been turned by some miracle into a discriminating “racist concept” in today’s society.
This is why I said that some terms are more “in the books”, rather than “in reality”.
I’ll close this with one of my favorite things, an image of a livestream of a stork nest somewhere in the country. I just took the screenshot, it is 21 minutes past midnight and the stork is looking over its offspring:
Interesting that you’re bringing this up … I’ve been saying for a long time already that this “local patriotism” is actually “exercising and training for nationalism” and helps building the “us vs. them” mindset.
IMO football (and other sports) teams should be made up on-the-fly, i.e. every team should consist of players from different clubs, with some short time to train together so they “speak the same language”. And for the next match mix the teams again, so all that hooliganism and “local patriotism” lose their roots.
The question for me would be WHICH people won’t suppress it.
But yeah, I guess that’s part of what’s wrong with this planet: some people playing some sports game (or even Our Game) and earning lots of money, while other people work their asses off and still can’t manage to feed themselves and their families.
And yeah, of course that’s only part of the problem because the much bigger problem is those who earn big money just by having money. Sometimes I’m really glad that my remaining time of being a Homo Sapiens on this planet is very limited.
Sports and games (even board games like Go) are, in a sense, reflecting life in that regard.
Team sports are not only building an “us vs them” mindset (which as I said it is not inherently bad), but they are also building up positive things like teamwork and cooperation, they teach young people how to handle defeat (which is so important and so absent in today’s education, unfortunately ), how to strive to improve and how to get to like and enjoy the idea of doing better ever day.
Those do not spring up naturally and need to be trained, even in the animal kingdom.
In case of team sports the cooperation is in order to overcome a “made up” adversity, like winning a game to get some points to win a trophy. It is not a real contest and unless it is a pro game, there is nothing really of substance on the line, yet you will not easily find a good substitute to teach children all those beneficial things that I mentioned above. Personally I cannot think of any other than online team games which can generate a similar, yet less efficient, result.
And then we have games like Go where we have ranks, competitions, single tournaments, team tournaments and so forth. Indeed the very existence of ranking is a competition which could be said that it trains a “me vs them” mindset and that’s ok.
Games and playing and “mock battles” are a critical component of training for real life, whether you are a human or a dog or a dolphin.
As a personal anecdotal observation, the most ill-behaved, most prone to mental issues and falling to vices like drugs, are children that come from rich families, that are constantly coddled and never face adversity and never even play sports. Lacking real adversity and competition, the human mind will find a way to create imaginary ones and that’s how you usually end up with a lot of “modern problems”.
Sports are the human equivalent of this:
Dogs do similar things and most mammals have similar teaching practices. It is part of their nature.
Weeeeell, I just returned from a game like that and I think that you’d be disappointed.
Ten old people (40+ most of us) gathered to play basketball, the teams were “randomised” and yet there was more passion to win, than if we were “young and hot blooded” and playing for money or a real tournament. Very exciting even though nothing was really on the line (Though my team lost this week again. The fact that I am on the team never helps our chances hahaha).
It would just move out of team sports and to something else.
Even if people just form neighbourhood Go clubs or Origami clubs and just host small tournaments every Sunday, the same “us vs them” mentality would find its way to be practiced.
Some big cities have multiple teams (e.g. Madrid, Milan, London, Athens, etc) and those tend to be the biggest rivalries… so, again, those people are definitely not rivals because they are racist, since they live in the same city and many of those rivalries exist for almost a hundred years.
That’s my main point here. That powerful words should be reserved and used sparingly and accurately, else they fail to describe a situation correctly and they also lose their meaning and power.
In case of football it is actually the opposite. It has so much money because it has a lot of fans. You cannot really “ban” football.
You might find that it is exactly those kinds of people that are more keen to be fanatic sports fans, just like it seems that it is exactly those kinds of people that tend to be more prone to sports gambling.
P.S.
Team sports is one of the most efficient ways to meet up new people from across the country and continent and realise that they are very similar to you, since you all share the same passion. European football cups have done more for cultural exchange in Europe (and elsewhere), than any other institution.
Indeed most of my countrymen learn geography due to football betting. You won’t believe what kind of obscure villages in the UK, Germany or even Finland people are aware of, due to football.
Also a lot of teams have formed “brotherhoods” and they practically promote cultural exchange between countries. For example:
Couldn’t access the video, but I am already familiar with the subject. This is bringing us very close to the dystopian world of L. P. Hartley’s Facial Justice (1960), one of the best little-known science-fiction novels ever. Hartley was even prescient in his use of “justice.”
With the straight of Hormuz being closed already for a while now, and it being unknown how long it will take the orange idiot to TACO on this, I’m going to post this map of EV adoption.
I still drive my red Skoda Superb diesel from 2017, currently having almost 320k km on the odometer, but when its maintenance gets too costly I’m intending to buy an EV.
If you are doing 30000 kilometers per year, I am not sure if an EV is a cost efficient choice long-term, considering that the charging cost at the roadside chargers is significantly more expensive than the baseline powercost.
EVs thrive mostly on an urban environment and for shorter distances, especially when they can be charged at home.
We have a long way to go, until we get some “affordable energy” in Europe, unfortunately:
In the company’s announcement, the big issue of the uncovered loans of “green energy ventures” only gets a couple of lines, but in reality the company owner said a lot more, which were worrisome enough that even the news had to point them out:
You’d have to google translate that one though.
If you want a quick explanation though, the scheme was setup like this:
Step a - the carrot): Promise loans to citizens to install photovoltaic parks in their fields and great prices to go along with them so they could repay those loans and soon get a lot of “passive income”
Step b - the implementation): A lot of people bought into it (and like any good scheme the early adopters got some profits so that the suckers could buy in) and eventually there was an amazing array of normal citizens going through the bureaucratic and actual trouble of converting their fields to 500kW parks with an average cost to setup at 1000 euros per kW. So each part was a 500.000 euros investment, which was heavily leaning on loans on the park and the land itself.
Step c - the hook): All those things were made without a plan to store the energy, at all, and the loans and the subsidies where given for production (since that was the benchmark that the country needed to achieve in order to get more funds ), not storage. However, this means that everyone now produces and sells energy at the same time (Greece has only one timezone), so the energy selling price falls to zero in more and more days each year. … the energy companies (like the one the aforementioned gentleman owns), “buys” that energy for free and sells it back to the citizens at the exorbitant prices shown on the map.
Step d - the final step): This has not happened yet, but it will (that’s what those two links say practically). The banks will call in the loans, the land and the parks will be confiscated, companies like the one above will buy all that infrastructure and the land (that’s very important), for a fraction of the original cost and without actually going through any trouble of building the infrastructure themselves. After that they will either let those parks run “on autopilot” (to milk them for profit for as long as they last) or get into the next “wave of EU subsidies” which will be for battery storage (which, in some cases will be almost totally covered by state/EU funds) and they will, of course, sell the energy back to the citizens (who practically subsidised this fiasco) at a high cost, for profit.
And that’s what we call here “financial growth” ahahaha
Of course not.
), how to strive to improve and how to get to like and enjoy the idea of doing better ever day.
), not storage. However, this means that everyone now produces and sells energy at the same time (Greece has only one timezone), so the energy selling price falls to zero in more and more days each year.