I am wondering how many people within range of this have read
Jared Diamond's "Collapse; how civilizations choose to succeed or
fail". There are plenty of examples of how societies chose to
survive. Usually it was by eliminating class structures and going
to a peasant, egalitarian type of society.
The prime example of this is the Maya of around 900 A.D. The
archeological record shows that once all these palaces were smashed
and the human sacrificing priests were thrown off of their step
pyramids, the standard of living for the peasantry improved. They
were much better off for about 600 years until the guys with the
guns and crucifixes showed up from across the sea.
As Marx said, history is written by the ruling classes who do not
like to believe that they might not be essential to society and do
not want the inferior classes to get the idea either. I think the
evidence from archeology to contemporary observations show that
people are best off when you have a society of free holding peasants
with no ruler class.
Alas, most Marxists do not get that idea. They think all land should
be held in common. In many places it is and it works well, but only
if the critical level of government is the village.
Of course we now have industrialism and most people are now living
in cities. That is a problem humanity has never faced before.
The good part of urbanization is that when people move from the
country side into the cities, their birth rate drops drastically. The
bad side is that, first, the environment gets destroyed, and second,
agriculture gets taken over by the urban economy. Both of these cause
food production to drop.
So, I think too that there will be change, but I do not think it will
be all that unpleasant if the class war gets managed right. I am
especially much more optimistic about peasant revolts. When the
peasants are clear about what they are trying to achieve, and do
not let themselves be lead by fanatics and charlatans, they usually
create a great improvement in their lot.
Besides the Maya, another good example is the slave revolt on
Haiti. The slaves took over the plantations, drove off several
French armies sent to re-enslave them, and were a lot better off
than they were before. However, the great powers of the time
persistently boycotted them and over time this wore them down.
After Saint Patrick overcame the druids, the Irish developed a very
peaceful, prosperous and egalitiaran society for about four centuries
until the guys with the horns on their helmet showed up from across
the sea.
Notice a pattern about peaceful agrarian societies? Almost all caste
or class oriented societies, the historians tell us, originated in a
military conquest in which a technically superior or just more
aggressive people found they could use a weaker people for their own
benefit.
The thing is, when societies start to fall apart because of the
greed and idiocy of an elite, it goes one of two ways. Either it
collapses into a dark age, or else the rulers are overcome and you
have an age of peace and freedom.
This is what is going to be decided over the next 50 or so years. It
looks pretty good that the latter will happen, because the underdogs
all over the world are developing pretty good leadership and are
sensible about what they are trying to achieve. This is what
usually leads to success for peasant and slave revolts.
The underdogs fail when they do not know what they want, only that
they are unhappy with what they have. That is why the Jacquerie
failed at first, and why Watt Tyler screwed up his rebellion in 1381,
and why the Hussites failed in Germany.
In about the same time frame the Swiss freemen were spectacularly
successful in defeating the armies of the feudal warlords, Wallace
and Bruce got the English out of Scotland for four centuries, and the
Latvians fought off waves of crusaders to remain a pagan and
classless society.
Another thing happened in France, which was well discussed by
Tuchman, but otherwise not well recorded in history. After the
black death and the failed peasant revolt, and the hundred years war,
most of the nobility of northern France allied with the English to
kept the French peasants down. King Charles the Wise of France did
something amazing for those times; he allied himself with the
peasants against his nobles and the English, to regain control of his
kingdom. His constable, Du Geusclin, organized a very effective
guerilla war, with a small professional army supporting the armed
peasants.
But enough of my ramblings. My aim is to demonstrate that there is
no reason to be pessimistic that the species cannot get through the
present crisis and achieve a better way of life for all the world's
people.
tr
On 27-Apr-08, at 4:52 PM, Ed Weick wrote:
> It is a long time since I read Tuchman. I have her on my shelves
> and should look again. However, in general, the 14th Century
> brought a close to a warm spell that lasted some four centuries and
> in which, in Europe, population grew and agriculture was greatly
> expanded, many great cathedrals were built and the Norse were able
> to settle Greenland. During this period, the Church initially
> encouraged freedom of thought, but when that freedom began to
> threaten its power, the lid was slammed down. The impact of
> Abelard, who was a teacher but not, I believe, a monk and other
> thinkers of the time was so large that the period during which they
> lived, thought and taught, the 11th and 12 Centuries, is referred
> to as the 12th Century Enlightenment.
>
> The period came to an end at the beginning of the 14th Century,
> when a cold spell sometimes referred to as "the little ice age"
> began. Crop failures led to mass famine in about 1315 and many
> times thereafter. The Black Death in which one-third to one-half
> of the population of Europe died occurred in mid-century and
> recurred several times thereafter, eg. London in 1665. Peasant
> rebellions occurred -- eg. the Jacquerie in France in 1358, the
> English Peasants Revolt in 1381, and the German Peasants Revolt in
> 1525 -- but not very much changed because of them. The lot of
> peasants did improve because disease and famine led to shortages of
> labour, but peasantry even as free labour was not an easy life. I
> would argue that, for the common people, there really wasn't much
> of an improvement in living standards until the latter part of the
> 19th Century and it wasn't really until the early part of the 20th
> Century that really big improvements came with democratization and
> unionization.
>
> Where we go from where we are now is difficult to say. I would
> argue that there is already considerable evidence that, with
> excessive population and dwindling resources, we can not go on as
> we are. There will be change and it won't be pleasant.
>
> Ed
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "Ed Weick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "futurework"
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2008 1:34 PM
> Subject: Re: [Futurework] From memes to viruses?
>
>
>> Oh, dear. I got the exact opposite impression about Tuchman's
>> mirror when I read that book. I thought the 1300s were a time
>> of coming out of a stagnant social order into the modern age,
>> with a kick from the black death.
>>
>> What happened with the famines and epidemics was that Europe's
>> peasant population suddenly declined. Yet the lords still
>> expected the same incomes as before. The Great Peasant revolt in
>> France was viciously put down by the knights, but they could not
>> get the peasants back on the estates. The lords had to start
>> offering rented land at reasonable rates to get anybody to work
>> the land.
>>
>> The age of Serfdom ended. It had begun eight centuries
>> previously when the conquering Franks set up a military
>> government after destroying the Gallo-Roman kingdom that existed
>> for a short while after the fall of the western Roman empire.
>> They made the Gallo- Romans serfs.
>>
>> Far from the church developing more authority in this time, its
>> power collapsed. This was the time of the great schism, when
>> there were two, sometimes three popes around, all claiming to be
>> the real pope.
>>
>> I get puzzled about somebody who thinks these medieval monks like
>> Abelard and Anselm were examples of enlightened thinking. The idea
>> of 'reason' has been the biggest problem with western civilization
>> down to the present.
>>
>> In the present, we are also struggling to come out of an outmoded
>> form of social organization and those who benefit from this
>> organization are resisting fiercely. But they are steadily losing
>> authority. Good sense eventually overcomes rationalism, but it
>> usually takes a disaster like the black death, or an
>> environmental collapse.
>>
>> Rationalists are people who can not get it that there is no such
>> thing as 'objectivity'. Everyone's thought is conditioned by
>> experience and what they have been told and believed are 'laws of
>> nature'. Good sense is the innate human ability to get outside
>> of self and preconditioned thinking , and ask what is actually
>> happening. Education is mostly about neutralizing this ability
>> and conditioning people to think in the 'rational' framework
>> hammered into them.
>>
>> When people who have been taught to be 'reasonable' encounter
>> something that contradicts 'reason' they cannot understand it
>> and think some 'forces of darkness' are gathering.
>>
>> Actually, the forces of good sense and peacefulness are
>> gathering. The dark forces that have prevailed are now
>> frantically trying to make everything 'rational' again.
>>
>> tr
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 26-Apr-08, at 3:47 PM, Ed Weick wrote:
>>> I've been looking through stuff I've written during the past few
>>> years and found the following, which seems relevant to the
>>> discussion of memes that has been a dominant feature of the
>>> Dissenters list recently. It may be of interest to some of you.
>>>
>>> Ed
>>>
>>>
>>> A Short Essay on Viruses
>>>
>>> Some recent postings have raised the fascinating topic of the
>>> effect of disease on history. Recurrent pandemics such as
>>> bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and influenza have played an
>>> enormous role in defining the course taken by peoples for
>>> several centuries thereafter. Syphilis has brought dynasties to
>>> ruin. The viruses or bacteria which were at issue affected
>>> physical health. I would suggest that another type of virus, a
>>> intellectual one, has been at least equally potent in shaping
>>> human history. As an entity, we can think of it as something
>>> like a computer virus - as something which does not take the
>>> shape of an organism, but which is transmittable from person to
>>> person nevertheless.
>>>
>>> What does this intellectual virus do? Just as biophysical
>>> viruses sicken the body, it sickens and immobilizes the mind. It
>>> numbs and dulls human potential, and plunges people into states
>>> of pessimism, meanness and despair.
>>>
>>> The impact of this virus varies from civilization to
>>> civilization, and from era to era. The Aztecs have recently been
>>> mentioned on this list. Some years ago I did some reading on the
>>> Aztecs, and one of the things I recall is that, for many years
>>> before the coming of Cortez, the Aztecs were in a state of deep
>>> pessimism. They felt their world to be ending. I believe it had
>>> something to do with their calendar, a human invention which
>>> they invested with cosmic powers. When Cortez finally came
>>> along, they were immobilized to the point of not being able to
>>> do anything about him and his small army. However, the facts of
>>> smallpox and rebellion by peoples the Aztecs had subjugated did
>>> not help.
>>>
>>> Another example of the virus comes from the 11th to 14th Century
>>> Europe. Led by activist thinkers such as Peter Abelard, and fed
>>> by the accessibility of Arabic and Classical material, the 11th
>>> Century witnessed an increasing secularization of the Christian
>>> world, and an explosion of initiatives toward a more rational
>>> theology, which laid the foundations for the development of
>>> science. Heretical liberally-religious groups such as the
>>> Waldensians and Cathers sprang up and found fertile ground among
>>> intellectuals who had been long dominated by oppressive
>>> Catholicism. It was not long, however, before the virus set in.
>>> The very foundations of the Church were threatened. The Church
>>> moved to suppress the liberalizing influences in whatever way
>>> seemed necessary. People such as Abelard were isolated. Heretics
>>> were burned at the stake. Finally, in 1277, the Pope issued a
>>> statement on where the church stood on the matter of faith
>>> versus reason. If you wanted openness and reason, you could not
>>> have it in the Church and the Church was very much in control.
>>>
>>> Now, some will argue that there was no virus at all, that all
>>> that happened was that the dominant power structure, the
>>> Catholic Church, had been challenged and had retaliated. But
>>> that was not all that there was to it. The drama played itself
>>> out over two Centuries, and it would appear that for much of
>>> that time the Church had been tolerant of what was going on, and
>>> even encouraging. Anselm of Canterbury, 1030-1109, who lived at
>>> the beginning of the so-called "Twelfth Century Awakening", was
>>> an early rationalist. Peter Abelard, 1079-1142, was condoned by
>>> the Church for a considerable part of his life as a teacher. But
>>> what gradually happened was something of a slow "gathering of
>>> dark forces", to use a Tolkien-like image.
>>>
>>> The growing virus of the intellect was aided and abetted by
>>> natural disasters and real biophysical viruses which reinforced
>>> the vengeful power of God. Between 1315-1317 Europe was
>>> devastated by a "hideous famine". Adverse trends in climate
>>> which had begun in the 13th Century culminated in appalling
>>> weather conditions which led to an "medieval economic
>>> depression" which continued to have effects to the beginning of
>>> the Renaissance. And, of course, 1347 brought the Black Death.
>>>
>>> What does all this have to do with the world of today? Some
>>> years ago, Barbara Tuchman held the world of the 14th Century up
>>> to us, proposing that in it we would see a distant mirror image
>>> of ourselves. We tend to forget her lesson. The 14th Century saw
>>> the closing down of an earlier two-century period of
>>> enlightenment; the 20th Century may be witnessing the closing
>>> down of the one which has now run for some two centuries,
>>> beginning, I would propose, with the American and French
>>> Revolutions.
>>>
>>> Though it saw war and mass exterminations, this period also
>>> witnessed the growth of democratic institutions, the spread of
>>> "universals" (education, health, social security), the
>>> humanization of capital, the growing power of labour, and rising
>>> standards of living. However, this may have begun to end
>>> sometime during the past fifty years. The past few decades,
>>> since World War II, have been a period of economic florescence
>>> and gradual decline. The 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, were the
>>> perhaps the most prosperous years of human history. It was not
>>> only the advanced world which prospered and grew, but the
>>> underdeveloped world witnessed the Green Revolution and
>>> industrialization which showed every promise of bettering human
>>> life. Since then, productivity has fallen, unemployment has
>>> grown, and poverty has again become part of the accepted
>>> commonplace. The Green Revolution, based on chemical fertilizers
>>> and pesticides, has turned out to be green more in illusion than
>>> in fact, and industrialization in the NICs is raising the
>>> prospect of massive environmental damage.
>>>
>>> So, these are real problems. What do they have to do with my
>>> virus? I would suggest the following: along with the
>>> deterioration of the economy, the falling productivity of capital
>>> (except, it would seem, the productivity of finance capital),
>>> the mounting debts of governments, and growing unemployment, has
>>> come a pessimistic meanness - a gathering, once again, of the
>>> Tolkien-like "dark forces". It is hard to tell how this began,
>>> but someone, some group, somewhere may have started it and it
>>> has since spread to become the dominant thought mode of our
>>> civilization. During the 1950s, we placed our faith in education
>>> and growth, and during the 1960s in flower-power and the
>>> rebuilding of society along more humane lines. Since then, we
>>> have been running for cover, striving, as John Ralston Saul has
>>> so ably pointed out, to hide within corporate groups and exclude
>>> others by speaking specialized languages that are not even
>>> understood by ourselves.
>>>
>>> Whether or not there really is a virus behind all of this does
>>> not matter. My point is that, as in the 14th Century, we have
>>> once again become a society of despair. Like the Aztecs waiting
>>> for, and dreading, the return of Quetzalcoatl, we are
>>> immobilized. Our governments, unable to do anything positive,
>>> are doing every negative thing they can - cutting, hacking and
>>> lacerating all in the name of satisfying our dour lust for
>>> leanness and meanness. A whole culture of consultants, like an
>>> austere medieval priesthood, has grown up around re-engineering
>>> and lean production - squeezing more work out of those lucky
>>> enough to retain their jobs and getting rid of ("terminating")
>>> all others.
>>>
>>> How do we get out of this? Must we again endure two centuries of
>>> purging and self- flagellation before a new renaissance? Or can
>>> we come to recognize that many problems are of our own making
>>> and refuse to become victims of the virus of despair? How, in
>>> place of universal pessimism and lost hope, do we promote the
>>> idea that we can regain control? I believe that the answers
>>> cannot come from society, or, as some appear to believe, from a
>>> technology such as the internet. They must come from ourselves,
>>> each and every one of us. It would seem that the most important
>>> thing is to become skeptical of everything, including popular
>>> scapegoats and remedies.
>>>
>>> Is it really the TNCs, computers and robotics that are shafting
>>> us? If so, what countervailing powers do we have? If not, find
>>> the real causes. Perhaps it is ourselves, burying our heads in
>>> the sand and getting our asses kicked. Is it government? Well,
>>> in democracies, those who govern are accessible, and if they are
>>> not, storm the barriers and make them so. They are our servants,
>>> not our masters.
>>>
>>> But perhaps it really is ourselves. We don't like to think that
>>> it is, so we look around for others to blame for having done
>>> this to us, or perhaps for a virus. Having quoted him once, I
>>> will quote my old friend Pogo Possum again because he may be
>>> right: "We have seen the enemy and he is us."
>>>
>>> Ed Weick
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>
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