- 13 Jul 2017 11:09
#14823135
Naughty Potemkin, you are inching towards the question of which/whether African societies have the capacity to go through similar processes as some other parts of the world have, which means you are really close to being called a racist! Although the possible lack of such a capacity might not be strictly related to race, it is applied to people of another race, so you can't go there. You have to choose between racism and pretending that the neo-liberal approach will work, those are the only officially cognizable positions.
Potemkin wrote:His willingness to offend the PC brigade is indeed a fine thing. However, his thinking is itself rather moralistic, and puts the causal cart before the horse. European nations aren't prosperous societies because we have fewer children; we have fewer children because we live in prosperous societies. A century or two back, Europeans were popping out the babies like there was no tomorrow. This was a perfectly rational thing to do - most children would be earning a wage by the age of six or seven, and the more children you had the better your chance of being housed and fed in your old age when you could no longer work down a mine or in a mill. And given the rate of infant mortality at the time, only a fool would have only one or two children - it made sense to pop out as many as you could, in the hopes that at least some would survive to adulthood. This ceased to be rational by the early to mid 20th century, with the rise of the welfare state and increasing prosperity of European and North American societies. So people stopped doing it. Notice the direction of cause and effect here. Europeans didn't suddenly become 'virtuous' for no apparent reason in the early 20th century, any more than they had been 'irresponsible' for the previous two millennia. They were behaving rationally in response to their social environment. When that social environment changed, their behaviour changed. Macron is essentially demanding that African people change their behaviour (which is perfectly rational behaviour given their social and economic environment) without there being a preceding and corresponding change in their social environment. In other words, he is calling on them to behave irrationally. This is an obvious example of bourgeois moralism, detached from any objective reality, which is just as risible as the 'political correctness' of the middle-class liberals whose feathers he has ruffled by saying this.
Naughty Potemkin, you are inching towards the question of which/whether African societies have the capacity to go through similar processes as some other parts of the world have, which means you are really close to being called a racist! Although the possible lack of such a capacity might not be strictly related to race, it is applied to people of another race, so you can't go there. You have to choose between racism and pretending that the neo-liberal approach will work, those are the only officially cognizable positions.
Orb Team Re-Assemble!