--- Mike Ballard <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> If the workers of the world class consciously set
> down tools for a week, the
> Pharaohs of the world would be brought to their
> knees.
Yet oddly enough nobody in the thousands of years of history of Ancient Egypt ever did this. :)
Your larger point is true perhaps, but my point was that we are born into a social context not made by us, and our value systems, including the whole emancipatory humanist project thing, were not made by us either. There were no Marxists in Ancient Egypt, and there are reasons for that. :)
Maybe I'm getting cynical, but sometimes I think the universal humanist project, for all of its stated emlightenment, is actually just narrow provincialism, whereby everybody in the world should subscribe to the worldview of a largely Western intellectual current that has only existed for the historical eyeblink that is the past 300 years or so. It's another version of "the people on the other side of the river who worship false gods should worship our gods instead. That is why their harvests are so bad; they worship the wrong gods."
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