Our affinities fade with distance.\u00a0 Towards our immediate families, they are very strong; towards our extended families, less so; then outward ever more feebly to the broadest kinships (nation, race) and fictive kinships (religion, ideology, language, civilization).\u00a0 The math must be very complicated — much more so than a simple inverse-square law.\u00a0 I am sure that affinity can “pick up” strength for a while even as distance increases, just as there will be uphill stretches when walking down a mountain\u00a0— that there are, for example, people who care more about their co-religionists than about their extended families.\u00a0 And I’m ready to believe that there are\u00a0some individuals\u00a0who honestly feel the same warm affinity for the remotest strangers as they do for their own kin.\u00a0 You might call those people “saints,” though personally I’d prefer something in the zone “half-crazy misfits.”<\/p>\n
In low radius-of-trust societies affinity barely extends beyond kin.\u00a0\u00a0One can only imagine the difficulty Mussolini’s army recruiters had getting Sicilian peasants to fight for their country.\u00a0\u00a0 Societies that can afford a more expansive view of the world\u00a0typically have affinites that go out further.\u00a0 And of course the individual personality factors in.\u00a0 Joe may feel genuine distress thinking about the poor brutalized Congolese;\u00a0Jane may not give a damn, or\u00a0see why she should; and Joe and Jane might both be stalwart citizens, good spouses & parents, etc., indistinguishable in all the social virtues that matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the broad generality, though,\u00a0 human affinities diminish with perceived distance (I don’t, of course, just mean geographical distance).\u00a0 Most people’s affinities are at effectively zero at some point well short of the Congo, as the Earth’s gravitational field is undetectable\u00a0well before Alpha Centauri.\u00a0<\/p>\n
All this seems as obvious to me as 2+2=4.\u00a0 If there is something obnoxious in saying it aloud, I wish I could understand why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our affinities fade with distance.\u00a0 Towards our immediate families, they are very strong; towards our extended families, less so; then outward ever more feebly to the broadest kinships (nation, race) and fictive kinships (religion, ideology, language, civilization).\u00a0 The math must … Continue reading