The Plowboy Interview
(Page 13 of 18)
So stinginess and lack of hospitality were generally
considered the greatest defects of character in the old
ways. And that's an example of the sort of widely held
belief that guarantees cosmopolitanism ...across a mosaic
of small cultures.
RELATED CONTENT
And, of course, in the case of the European Middle Ages,
what guaranteed cosmopolitanism-before they had any
national states-was the Roman Catholic Church.
Then too, for a period, Buddhism had that same function in
East Asia. The Buddhist monks could go across any boundary
from nation to nation and were, you know, always reminding
people that all men were brothers, just in case they
needed to be reminded.
Of course, in our postindustrial planetary future, if such
a pleasant dream does ever come about, the fact is that we
would be in much better condition to be in touch with each
other-in terms of communication and travel-than humankind
ever was in the past. This would make a sort of
cosmopolitanism really feasible.
So-with that history in mind-bioregionalists ask, "Why
not divide America up into eight or nine nations?"
Many people will respond, "Gee, who wants to be a small
nation?" And you have to remind people that the world is
full of small nations. They're perfectly viable. Most of
Europe-and most of the world-is composed of rather small
political entities.
It's the American bias to think that to be a small
political entity is somehow disadvantageous. It's also the
bias of many Americans to want to consolidate other
continents: to form a United States of Europe and maybe a
United States of Africa.
Now, some people feel that the establishment of a United
States of Africa would help reduce the warfare that goes on
between those countries. However, part of the
reason that Africa has such trouble is that the
national-state model was imposed on them, first by
colonialism and imperialism, and then by the way political
boundaries were drawn by World Wars I and II ...ignoring
ethnic or bioregional divisions. If those boundaries had
respected old divisions of culture, then they might at
least have avoided placing hostile ethnic factions within
the same nations.
PLOWBOY: Right.
SNYDER: We're never going to get away from
some amount of warfare. The question is more like how to
keep it on a workable scale, where we aren't actually
capable of blowing the world up ...for starters.
PLOWBOY: Keep it down to a human scale?
SNYDER: Right. So bioregionalism should
not be thought of as overly idealistic or overly
utopian. There are problems. It is problematical
at many points ...but compared to what our experience in
history has already been, it wouldn't likely be any worse.
And it just might be better.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 | 13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
Next >>
