10-16-2016, 06:59 AM
(10-15-2016, 11:21 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(10-15-2016, 11:13 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-15-2016, 03:52 PM)Mikebert Wrote: You do know that the onset of agriculture resulting in a decline in stature (and indicator of health). This is strong evidence that the adoption of agriculture led to a large reduction in the well-being of humans. It has been suggested that the Garden of Eden story is a folk memory of this transition from an idealized hunter-gatherer existence to agriculture around four millennia before Abraham.
All possible. But agriculture became necessary for human survival in many places when desiccation turned many places into milieus unsuited for hunter-gatherers. The cultivation of grain coincided with a time of great hunger.
Yes; you can always say that older times were simpler and better. But evolution and history push us into new and more complicated arrangements, new solutions, and ever larger social relationships. Civilization resulted from agriculture, some millennia after it began. But it's a mixed blessing; more division of labor and oppression by authority, but more possibilities for the arts and science and inventions.
True. But "simpler" is not better, and worse, may not be possible or even satisfying. A prime example: The Old Order Amish have no bureaucracy (a cause of much of the oppression and exploitation in America)... but they also limit formal education and as a consequence the acquaintance with the highest achievements of Western culture. Their denial of even radio ensures that one gets no chance to listen to the most cynical expressions of popular music, but also the richness of classical music.
For people who could not live as they do... maybe we need to constrain the worst tendencies in our elites. Maybe we need to make the liberal arts the focus of university education at the undergraduate level again so that our potential leaders can believe in something other than their own indulgence.
The finest technology can make access, if not content, simple.
Quote:Civilization has proceeded from agricultural towns and villages, to stone age civilizations, to the bronze and iron age of war and empire and society as conquered territory (civic hero's favorite age), to the age of faith, to the secularized age of kingdoms and early humanism and science, to the age of revolution, individual liberty movements, electricity and entrepreneurs, to the socialist age of collectivism, mass industrialism, nationalism, and racial and class war, to our current age of the greening of culture and society, globalism, political correctness, diversity and post-modernism, and beyond-- to increasing integral culture and society.
If we are to use the old criterion of material use as defining ages, then we have stone, bronze, and iron... I would now suggest aluminum. Silicon? Plastic?
The most wondrous technology allows us to achieve more with fewer inputs of materials and toil.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.