03-21-2017, 01:14 PM
(03-19-2017, 01:38 PM)Odin Wrote: Fascinating Science article I ran into!
Much of what we think of pre-Columbian America is what the European conquerors report - that the people were barbarous and had perverted religion. Truly-civilized Europeans burned heretics and hanged witches, robbed the First Peoples blind, and established slavery. Of course white people are exempt from barbarity... yeah, sure.
Quote:Collective states may have another tendency that can be spotted archaeologically: They attract people from beyond their borders, who bring artifacts that can be linked to other cultures. "When you have a collective formation that's funded by internal resources, it's in the interest of those in government to bring in more people," says Gary Feinman, an archaeologist at The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, and a co-author on Blanton's 1996 paper. Economic equality and markets may also attract immigrants to collective societies. "People move where they think there's better opportunity—where they can make a living, where their kids are going to do better than they did. That's always a motivation," Feinman says.
People go where the opportunities are. It is often the immigrants who create their own opportunities. Just think of the high-technology businesses. Places with declining opportunity, like Coal Country, are not attracting the immigrants. When coal was booming because steel was booming (much of the coal goes into steel production), coal mines attracted immigrants. That of course is over.
But diversity requires a legitimization of difference.
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.