More on the word social

Shortly after I responded to Dave's comment on my previous post my aggregator pointed me to this very interesting and different take on use of the word social.

Having just come back from The Czech Republic, where I spent a lot of time thinking about its past under communism, and having just finished the section in Modern Times which deals with the various forms of totalitarianism shaping the world at the start of the second world war, I have been thinking a lot more about the risks of revolutionary and utopian thinking.

The ideologies of the thirties filled the vacuum left by the loss of faith in religions triggered by the thinking of Einstein and Freud and the destabilization of the old order speeded up by the impact of the first world war. I am constantly thinking about the similarily major changes happening now in how we see societies and relate to each other, partly brought about by the impact of the web on our ability to connect with and understand each other, and the risk of slipping into utopianism and our own dogmas. It is so important to me to try to learn the lessons of history as I play my own small part in avoiding some of John Gray's ever decreasing circles.

For me the bottom line is that without the web and blogging, sitting here in rural Buckinghamshire I would not have been able to re-publish Hugh's cartoon which would not have been read by two people in totally different parts of the world who also think hard about things that matter and we would not have been able to engage each other in trying to understand our world and make it a better place each in our own ways.

This is soooo why I love blogging.

Comments

[Antony Mayfield]

Could not agree with you more, Euan - it's to be celebrated again and again... Cheers, sir!

[Nigel]

Sounds about right to me, I've got a bottle of ketchup for you somewhere!

[Euan W Semple]

Hurrah!

[Marko]

RE: "how we see societies and relate to each other"

I find it difficult to relate to political analysis that talks about one country having a relationship with another, in blogs for example, Robin Lustig's at http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldtonight/
I'm not sure the models and generalizations are good enough to describe a far more complicated situation and certainly not good enough to make predictions.

[Euan W Semple]

I agree Marko. The days of such broad brush stuff are hopefully limited as it is that sort of thinking that, IMHO, makes wars more likely than they need to be.