Israel's Image Issue
By Roger Cohen, Jan. 28 2016 (LINK to article)
The root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is human tribalism, as it is of conflicts and tensions all over the world.
This may SOUND like an unhelpful platitude and statement of the obvious, but it's not.
The reality is that we are dismissive of our inherent and intense tribal nature, trivialising, ridiculing or demonising it, rather than giving it the serious attention and study that it deserves.
Instead of grappling with the problems our tribalism creates, we insult each other with accusations of tribalism, so it is no wonder the problems are so intractable. We are not facing up to and dealing with their underlying cause.
And it is not politicians who are primarily responsible for this state of affairs, but ACADEMICS, because they are the ones we all - including politicians - look to as authorities on just about everything. And it is they who have cultivated this attitude of trivialising, ridiculing and demonising our tribal nature, not least, because of their own professional claim to be above it, when, of course, they are not. They pretend to be, and our politicians have to follow their example, and are thus unable to deal with the problems our inherent tribalism causes.
It is the subjectivity of our tribalism that makes it so difficult to deal with, but we must learn to do so, and the only way is by approaching it from a human-evolutionary perspective: http://unapprovedcomments.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-wests-overreaction-to-nazism.html
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