Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (Orion Publishing Group Ltd, 2017) p. 101
4 Oct 2018
Primitiveness and civilisation are degrees of the same thing
It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can conceal a dozen fallacies at once. One of the most dangerous is the implication that civilisation, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilisation are degrees of the same thing. If civilisation has an opposite, it is war. Of those two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.
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