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
Re: [Futurework] From memes to viruses?
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
Re: [Futurework] From memes to viruses?
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
