I think  co-operation and competition could both be "innate" but I offer no evidence other than everyday observation!

I have no objection to the idea of a collective or co-operative element in rearing children, but it would need to be a grass roots up trend for the most part. I'd  be very wary of a class of people who would presume to arrange this without being accountable/democratic.


 I don't think being green need mean getting back to nature PW. I think there are some who affect Green attitudes who don't really think it all through. Driving miles to an organic farm shop for example. What we need are local shops selling local goods (within reason). I agree with your comments absolutely. Older stlyes of society, pre the corporate capitalism of today, still contained the idea of a vocation,  the last penny wasn't rung from every sitiuation, this seems to have dissapeared.

I think a lot of people (myself included) would be delighted not to have to own a car.  However, if you live and work outside the M25, or are self-employed (I can hold my hand up to both), using public transport is just not an option.  And it is politically impossible to make the investment in the transport infrastructure that would make not owing a vehicle a viable and realistic option.

They already do, when you send them to school.

edit:- I did say an" element" Milly

Well there is a collective responsibility of sorts in the rearing of children already, not all parents are very good at it. There aren't any easy answers to these things IMO. Social services are criticised for not interfering as often as when they do. The reasons I said should be a grass roots movement was mainly in the sense I think it should be voluntary. It's not that I think the state should have extra rights over parents and children.

 I think your views re world Gov't are right . Gov't needs to much neare the people, not further away, a kind of loose democratic confedration might be possible in the distant future. Likewise with European democracy  - it would be a good idea ! At the moment we seem to have an strong executive with a toothless parliament.


Swan Knight

 I agree it's impossible for many to use public transport, I personally would never criticise anyone in your position, but much more could be done within cities.  Villages could be put back on bus routes, at least to get people into the local market town. The local trend is the opposite, buses are being withdrawn.

With the government systematically unempowering teachers, I would think that very little 'upbringing' goes on in today's schools.

The ultimate failure of capitalism is before our very eyes: the system has no way to respond to pollution of the environment, scarcity of resources, or the human toll of labor*. If everything was plentiful and readily available and perfectly clean, capitalism would work like a charm.

*Besides appealing to an innate sense of duty in the consumer. I'm not holding my breath about that one.

On the other hand, the only way of making things plentiful and available and clean would be to abandon capitalism, which keeps areas like the EU in massive overproduction of food at the same time as starving large parts of the world.

Returning to human nature: I think what PW was saying was that using this as a catchall for why things can't be changed in the direction of more equality is indeed an "ideological construct". As I said, human society wouldn't exist at all if people were "innately selfish". Those interested in archaeology will also know that excavations at various Neolithic sites (Çatalhöyük in Turkey being the best known) have thrown up evidence of complex social interrelations among town populations measuring in thousands, but no conclusive evidence of any class-like social stratification (eg. no house being significantly larger than any other). I'm not saying we should return to the Stone Age (although it isn't impossible that this may be forced on us by cicrumstances of our own making), just that early urban societies, also in Mesopotamia, appear basically to have been "egalitarian" ones, and lasted in this form for many centuries, even millennia, so while we may not be able to escape our genetic inheritance as a species we shouldn't jump to conclusions as to what that inheritance might consist of without pursuing it a bit further back in time than the kind of societies we (think we) know from geography, recent history and literature.