but we were so totally not in cambodia in 1968......,
2006-12-02 16:17:28
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a taylorist gets his wings...,
2006-12-06 13:36:25
from there to here:
two amusing paragraphs on wikipedia:
the post-Christian usage of "pagan" came to mean rural folk holding to pre-Christian polytheistic beliefs in the face of the new, and predominantly urban, Christianized Roman society. Conversely, it is now the rural peoples of Western culture who are more typically aligned with Christian beliefs (e.g., the bible belt or red state within the U.S.), whereas urban areas are now more secularized.
Neoplatonists in the Early Christian church attempted to Christianize the values of sophisticated Pagans such as Plato and Virgil. This had some influence among the literate class, but did little to counter the more general prejudice expressed in "pagan".
And so it was that new Democrats considered Christianistizing the urbane, largely Christian, secularism so as to make it more palatible to a 50 million strong rural Christianist population.
We would do well to reflect upon this incomplete lesson from history Wikipedia. First, that it didn't work. Second, the generally persued alternative to voluntary conversion:
When the original neoplatonist project of hoodwinkery ultimately failed our predecessors turned to seigneurialism, legally binding the pagan workers to the land as serfs "in return for protection and the right to work":
The period rationale was that a serf "worked for all", while a knight or baron "fought for all" and a churchman "prayed for all." Thus everyone had his place and all was right with God's world.
As for the serf so the modern free man was bound by legal contract, and all those choices not afforded the poor suffering slave. The slave, unlike freer men, was considered nothing more than a machine requiring regular maintenance and the occasional good kicking. Thus was born a more humane division of labor.
This logic of a legally binding "right to work" endured internal country divisions of labor into modernity, and on into international commerce.
The rationale was, in the world of post-enlightenment, that developing nations "worked for all", while Western governments "fought for all" and Western shoppers "consumed for all."
Undeveloping nations, whose inhabitants barely merited the term 'humanity', were quietly enclosed and turned into
strip mines for the rest.
Thus everyone had their place and all was right with God's world.
