I see your ramble and raise you an ambling ramble. 🙂

If Swarn isn’t my real name, then my parents are keeping secrets from me, because that’s what they told me.  If you like I can call and interrogate them a little more rigorously.  Because you’re right it does sound a bit made up. 😉

I must remind myself to live in the moment.  When you look too hard towards the future you rush to meet it and miss all the other good stuff along the way.  Far too many people live in a world of instant gratification.  If all gratification was instant we wouldn’t need time at all, only space.  Thus those people are often left disappointed and frustrated most of the time and rarely pursue things that have meaning.

I wonder if many of our racist tendencies are related to a lack of acceptance that biological diversity is natural?  The fact that many people don’t know or won’t accept that we are an evolved species?  That all our physical difference are simply slight variations in genetics for which we have no control over?  That it was not planned by anyone, it just is?

A very interesting book to me was Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond who analyzed why certain cultures rose technologically faster than others, and how this too was a simple accident based on environmental factors rather than any one culture  or race being superior intellectually than another.

It principally advances the idea of environmental determinism which is not overly popular especially amongst historians who feel that it simplifies and reduces cultures to sort of the environment in which they developed in, but I am not sure that it isn’t something we should pay a lot more attention to.  I guess my understanding of the natural sciences makes me more inclined to take environmental determinism more seriously.  We had a wonderful speaker come to our university who said that environmental determinism was the splash and all the other historical details are the ripples.   That analogy really connects to me.

Agrajag is starting to become conscious.  As soon as it becomes self-aware is when it usually dies. 🙂

Related articles

• Bill Gates invites us all to read Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday (guardian.co.uk)
• Enlightenment, inequality and bias (written on Feb. 19th, 2013) (cloakunfurled.com)