This is my last contribution to FW until you learn not to sound off with empty rhetoric and constant patronisation. You are always overwhelmed with the last book you have read -- which is almost always about your own ancestors. You are right to be proud about them, but they are only a very small part of the world and its past civilisations. What you have written below is very interesting but nothing whatever to do with the point I was making -- that trade leads to openness to new ideas.
I was stupid to start writing to FW again, because I like discussing things in a balanced way with rational people -- of which FW has a sizeable number with whom I feel privileged to exchange ideas. There is no possibility of doing so in your case. You are a prima donna, which is fine for singing but not for sensible discussion about the matters concerned in this list.
KSH
At 18:52 05/09/2003 -0400, you wrote:
You say potaytoe and I say potahtoe. You say tomaytoe and I say Tomahtoe. Lets call the whole thing off.
Sorry I don't have time to do this more than cursorily but there is a good book that I've been reading that begins to take over the intellectual territory that has been claimed unjustly. Its called "American Indian Contributions to the World, 15,000 years of Inventions and Innovations." Its by a couple of wild Lakota scholars who have scoured the literature by the name of Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield. Checkmark books. Amongst other things it has several pages of comparisons between the Iroquois "Great Law" and the American Constitution and descriptions of native roots of 19th century European political theories borrowed from us. Perhaps this cultural ill fit may have something to do with why they don't work there, if your observations are correct. I can't tolerate wheat glutin or lactose either and the doctors tell me the roots are in my blood. Could be that cultural institutions don't travel as easily as ideas.
Keoke and Porterfield have an Encyclopedic discussion of such things as Trade, Asphalt, Asepsis, and all of the games that we now do including football, basketball, women's football (remarkably like soccer which all of the old worlds banned women from playing until recently). Indians invented the hollow rubber balls and brought rubber to the world. They had universal gender equality and much of current psycho-analytic work has its roots in Native American dream techniques and free association. The Gestalt psychologists studied with native practitioners in the 1950s and incorporated much of the group techniques into T groups and therapy groups that have found there way into modern business management as well. And then there was the syringe used for such things as enemas and it almost seems like we must have invented bathing since there was so little of it done in Europe until quite recently. (joke) While the Europeans didn't bother to boil the water to bathe wounds until the last couple of centuries pre-Columbians were bathing wounds with sterile water and using Balsam as an antiseptic I realize Guy de Chauliac proposed such aseptic practices in 1300 but the Europeans couldn't see the sense of it until Joseph Lister "proved" it by writing it down. (not a joke)
There were co-inventions of various other devices used by the Sumerians about the same time such as the use for certain petroleum products. Its an amazing book. Trade? We had it from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic but no draft animals so there was no reason to tear up the ground with wheels. And the lists of foods that we traded? 75% of the staple food stuffs, all listed, freeze dried and moved over great distances as well as the most productive food plant in the world, the sweet potato.
Freedom? its built into the religion from the base up as a part of empathy for the various ceremonials of reconciliation. Trade followed.
What did those European folks trade over the silk road? We traded long fiber cotton and all kinds of exotic paints, rubber products, flint tools, medicines, cocoa and other foods like corn, beans squash, peanuts etc. Our medicines are a cornucopia including primitive surgeries that worked like "drains" for sutured wounds, etc.
The problem has always been the kind of "ignorance of the other cultures" that America has shown in Iraq. American Europeans seem to assume if they don't know about it then it doesn't exist, or if a European can take a vacation there and spend a few weeks then, like the anthropologists, they become authorities. Well, I've spent many years doing European art and culture and I know ours as well. You can't do it in a week, a month or a year. Like Bel Canto voice writings, if you "know" then books can be useful but if you don't know then they are not enough to "know" what the other side is doing. Like trying to learn how to sing from a book. Not possible. You need holistic images to imitate. Culture and the roots of conflicts are the same. You have to experience it if you are to know. There are problems, (as I have said endlessly), with writing and with book learned history.
Today we are beginning to fill in the holes on our own as we get the money to resist the power play from the dominant society. All of this as a result of having casino wealth. Wealth is not freedom in that sense but power and that gives us the power to resist the educational and economic slavery of those who would keep us enslaved. The Pequot's have built a world class museum next to their casino for the education of the children.
The internet is amazing and native scholars are beginning once more to claim our heritage that was taken and claimed as "inventions" for Imperialists. Sort of like making European names the only official names for the mountains of the world. We're taking that back too. Maybe that tendency to claim common knowledge as official only when some scientist has written about it and stuck his name on it could have been a part of the root cause of such non-European anger amongst folks like Islam? Who was Al Jabar?
I guess I couldn't "call the whole thing off." Well this is the last I will write on this thread. If you want you can read the book, its links and references including the roots of what we call "liberal democratic theory." It seems that they document what I have been saying about the roots which go back thousands of years in this place. And what they say is short because it is one volume but it opens up old roots and puts down new ones and flowers mightily.
REH
----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith Hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Ray Evans Harrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, September 05, 2003 3:23 PM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Tragedy in Iran, too
> At 12:51 05/09/2003 -0400, you wrote: > >I think the only problem you have is to assume that trade creates freedom. > > I don't have a problem. I gave some historical evidence that when Islam was > an active trading network in the Mediterranea it was a liberal and > scholarly regime. > > >I would respectfully suggest that is a typical western mistake. The > >reverse is true. Prosperity didn't create freedom for pre-Columbian > >America but prosperity flowed from the necessity for empathy and respect and > >freedom was the result of both. Trade naturally followed. I don't think > >you can make the case anywhere today that trade implies freedom in fact the > >reverse is true in many cases where humans are enslaved to create efficient > >trade. Work doesn't make free. Neither does trade. > > Would you please give some relevant historical evidence as I've done, and > then I might be able to understand you. > > Keith Hudson > > Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England, > <www.evolutionary-economics.org> > >
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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