The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #157878   Message #4032096
Posted By: GUEST,jag
04-Feb-20 - 04:14 AM
Thread Name: Dave Harker, Fakesong
Subject: RE: Dave Harker, Fakesong
I do think that that first page of Sharp's "Some conclusions", when you would expect an author to focus on something that he thought was important and clear in his mind, covers most of what has been quoted about his views in the recent posts.

Labels are handy amongst those who have the same unerstanding of what they mean. I jumped in above because I didn't think the way his 'racism' was being discussed was much of an aid to understanding.

I haven't looked up 'social Darwinist' but taking it in two halves fits with his introduction. One the one hand, as a socialist he could well have believed that most of what separated him from an English peasant was upbringing, education and opportunity. On the other hand he could have read Darwin's account of speciation in a group of small islands as allowing the folk music of different nearby nations to be be different because of inherent differences in their peoples.

I think he might have anticipated the baby of a French labourer adopted by an English labouring family to have a preference for French folk songs. That may seem absurd, but less so when we remember that some bird species look so similar that they are identfied in the field mainly by their song and that their are still relics of geographic variation in, say, hair colour in western Europe.