Peter Bradwell
Researcher
Peter Bradwell is a researcher at Demos. He is interested in digital identity, technology and the ways that information and knowledge is shared...
at 12:00am
on Friday, 24th March 2006
Imperialism - It's still here and it's more rational than ever'
I picked up yesterday on the verbal fracas between George Monbiot and Jenny Tonge regarding her comments in the House of Lords on Botswanan Bushmen. Today saw Lady Tonge in the Guardian attempting to repudiate the suggestion that her views about these people being in the 'Stone Age' might have been a touch, um, crude.
Her piece included this remark on the 'Stone Age' comparison:
'A more accurate description would have been Mesolithic, middle stone age or hunter gatherer. Why this perfectly acceptable, biological, evolutionary description should cause offence I do not know.'
I nearly fell off my Swedish chair. That warm glimmer of hope that, at the 'highest' level, the resurgent rhetoric of 'development' might mean something more nuanced than a singular and all too familiar dogma of retarded evolution vanished. Progress happened, now we have computers - nice sticks but seriously, get with our programme.
I probably shouldn't extrapolate from Lady Tonge's views on development outwards to British policy generally - but seeing as its Friday, and given the spirit of cultural reductionism, let's stick with it.
Rant over.
Imperialism - It's still here and it's more rational than ever'
I picked up yesterday on the verbal fracas between George Monbiot and Jenny Tonge regarding her comments in the House of Lords on Botswanan Bushmen. Today saw Lady Tonge in the Guardian attempting to repudiate the suggestion that her views about these people being in the 'Stone Age' might have been a touch, um, crude.
Her piece included this remark on the 'Stone Age' comparison:
'A more accurate description would have been Mesolithic, middle stone age or hunter gatherer. Why this perfectly acceptable, biological, evolutionary description should cause offence I do not know.'
I nearly fell off my Swedish chair. That warm glimmer of hope that, at the 'highest' level, the resurgent rhetoric of 'development' might mean something more nuanced than a singular and all too familiar dogma of retarded evolution vanished. Progress happened, now we have computers - nice sticks but seriously, get with our programme.
I probably shouldn't extrapolate from Lady Tonge's views on development outwards to British policy generally - but seeing as its Friday, and given the spirit of cultural reductionism, let's stick with it.
Rant over.
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