Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumHow did this happen? The journey of discovery continues.
Since my discovery of the "Saharasia" theory and what it implies about cultural responses to extreme environmental stress, I've been rapidly discarding my previous bias toward genetic determinism, whether driven by thermodynamics or anything else. The reason I always saw modern techno-industrial value systems as inevitable and deterministic is simply because that's my home culture. I was the proverbial fish that didn't know it was wet.
Thanks to James DeMeo's work I can now see that there was, broadly speaking, a bifurcation of culture ~5500 years ago. Cultural values split into two broad arcs in an event that is strongly reminiscent of biological speciation. One cultural species branched off to become patristic techno-industrial civilization. The previous main trunk of culture continued to form the basis of matristic aboriginal societies around the world.
If we understand human beings to be a composite of physical and cultural traits, then the appearance of a new and radically different culture implies that the humans who were colonized by it became in some sense a brand new species. Unfortunately, thanks to its newly developed culture the new species was far more aggressive than the original. The fate of the aboriginal societies that encountered its aggression was well described by Andrew Schmookler in "The Parable of the Tribes".
“The parable of the tribes” describes schematically how one aggressive tribe (or cultural species) among an otherwise peaceful group can force the spread of the “ways of power” throughout the system: power becomes a cultural contaminant that, once introduced, becomes universal within the society, abetted and magnified through innovations in organization and technology.
When the spreading, aggressive species encounters a a society still embedded in the original peaceful culture there are four possibilities for the threatened society:
1. Destruction.
2. Absorption and enslavement.
3. Withdrawal to a less desirable place.
4. Imitation of the aggressive behavior. They self-colonize with the aggressor's values (become like the aggressor) for self-protection.
All four of these outcomes are visible in various situations over the last 5,500 years, as the new Eurasian cultural species spread out around the world.
Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" is a reasonable description of the operation of this patristic branch of culture. The new culture happened to arise on a continent that had all the right raw materials for conquest - horses for fast transportation, wood for energy and metals for implements of war. Once the necessary lessons of technology had been learned, no pastoral society could stand against the cultural tsunami.
This does not mean that all humans are inherently aggressive and competitive, or naturally peaceful and cooperative. It means that humans are enormously flexible in terms of their value systems and behaviour, and are extremely adaptive to the physical and cultural environment in which they find themselves. These adaptations show up in all aspects our our being - from architecture and social institutions to our value systems and morality. The universe makes available an almost infinite range of possibilities. The ones we choose to actualize depend entirely on the nature of the situation to which we are having to adapt.
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Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)The important point is that, when the aggressive culture comes into contact with the peaceful one, there will cease to be a peaceful culture at that place. This will occur regardless of which of the four possibilities you list turns out to be the actual outcome for the threatened society:
2. Absorption and enslavement.
3. Withdrawal to a less desirable place.
4. Imitation of the aggressive behavior. They self-colonize with the aggressor's values (become like the aggressor) for self-protection.
The result would be, over time, a selection for militaristic cultures.
From a quick look at DeMeo's work, however, I form the impression that much of his embellishment of this concept is simply indefensible. He conflates "militaristic" with "patriarchal" and points to desertification as the origin of patriarchal society, without good evidence. This essay -- "Controversy Over DeMeo’s Saharasia hypothesis" -- appeared to make powerful criticisms, although I admit that I haven't gone deeply enough into DeMeo's work to know how he would answer.
If the basic point you take away is to downplay the role of genetic determinism, then I agree, although I would not eliminate that factor completely, particularly in the development of sex roles.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Is that not precisely what has happened? Every nation on the planet today has some kind of military force. I suspect that the reason many societies are less overtly militaristic in character is that the world has run out of appetite for expansion after WWI and WWII, and (with notable exceptions) have tried living within borders according to laws for the last 70 years.
The United States, China, Russia, Germany, France, Israel, Norway, the United Kingdom Saudi Arabia - all the world's economic "big men" - are all strongly militaristic.
No matriarchal societies have ever been militaristic to any degree at all, while all patriarchal societies have been militarized to some degree.
This excerpt is from the update (PDF) to "Saharasia":
Simple villages were shown in the reconstructed scenes, along with agriculture and animal domestication, some early types of pottery, fabrics and copper implements formed into decorative shapes. Settlements slowly grew in size, naturalistic artwork developed along with what I call “mother-dolls” (clay figures of women, what some have interpreted — wrongly I believe — as a “mothergoddess”). Artifacts of simple clay, stone, ceramic, copper, and even woven fabrics appeared, along with simple, yet elegant architecture, and the technology associated with agriculture, animal herding and hunting progressively improved in sophistication. All in all, it basically recorded an ordinary, though certainly vital and exciting existence of hunting, farming, dancing, and peaceful human relationships.
When the collection arrived at the middle of the fourth millennium BC (c.3500 BCE, or Before the Current Era) a broad white stripe, interrupting the path, had been painted on the walls and floor of the Museum gallery, bearing bold dark letters “CIVILIZATION BEGINS”.
Upon walking over that line, the display very dramatically included all kinds of war-weapons, battle axes, shields and helmets. Artifacts related to horseriding warriors appeared, as did crowns, coins and tombs for kings and other big-man leaders. Fortifications, palaces and temples then appeared, with all the evidence for war-making, despotic, and murderous "Homo normalis", as discussed in Wilhelm Reich’s monumental clinical discovery of human armoring, the biophysical source of neurotic behavior and impulses towards sadism and brutality, and the wellspring for virtually every authoritarian social structure which exists, or which has ever existed.
Genetics, geography, climate, resource base, history and even the Second Law of Thermodynamics all play a role in human cultural evolution. What I've been looking for is some idea of why there are apparently two arcs of culture in the world - broadly speaking the Eurasian and the indigenous - and why the very recent Eurasian arc has trampled both indigenous cultures and the planet itself, while the indigenous cultures did not. I think this hypothesis is an important element of that explanation.
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)From what little I've read, it's his emphasis on desertification as a cause of patriarchy that's shaky.
You write:
I don't know enough anthropology to be sure, but I think that this is a general tendency rather than an absolute division. Weren't the Iroquois both matriarchal and aggressive?
Anyway, regardless of how it came about, and regardless of what role gender plays, the result is a kind of race to the bottom. A society that acts unjustly seems thereby to last longer.
SubjectiveLife78
(67 posts)All but wrote the rules which govern the world for the last 70 years. Not sure the appetite ran out, as much as the US has been ok with being the world's policeman, while countries in Europe have been ok spending the money, that would go toward the military, into their social policies. Everyone comes out the winner then. Nobody can tell the US no, and Europe is looked at as utopia.
What I've been looking for is some idea of why there are apparently two arcs of culture in the world - broadly speaking the Eurasian and the indigenous - and why the very recent Eurasian arc has trampled both indigenous cultures and the planet itself, while the indigenous cultures did not.
From the Parable of the Tribes article you're talking about:
With the rise of civilization, the limits fall away. The natural self-interest and pursuit of survival remain, but they are no longer governed by any order. The new civilized forms of society, with more complex social and political structures, created the new possibility of indefinite social expansion: more and more people organized over more and more territory. All other forms of life had always found inevitable limits placed upon their growth by scarcity and consequent death. But civilized society was developing the unprecedented capacity for unlimited growth as an entity. (The limitlessness of this possibility does not emerge fully at the outset, but rather becomes progressively more realized over the course of history as people invent methods of transportation, communication, and governance which extend the range within which coherence and order can be maintained.) Out of the living order there emerged a living entity with no defined place.
In a finite world, societies all seeking to escape death- dealing scarcity through expansion will inevitably come to confront each other. Civilized societies, therefore, though lacking inherent limitations to their growth, do encounter new external limits – in the form of one another. Because human beings (like other living creatures) have "excess reproductive capacity," meaning that human numbers tend to increase indefinitely unless a high proportion of the population dies prematurely, each civilized society faces an unpleasant choice. If an expanding society willingly stops where its growth would infringe upon neighboring societies, it allows death to catch up and overtake its population. If it goes beyond those limits, it commits aggression. With no natural order or overarching power to prevent it, some will surely choose to take what belongs to their neighbors rather than to accept the limits that are compulsory for every other form of life.
In such circumstances, a Hobbesian struggle for power among societies becomes inevitable. We see that what is freedom from the point of view of each single unit is anarchy in an ungoverned system of those units. A freedom unknown in nature is cruelly transmuted into an equally unnatural state of anarchy, with its terrors and its destructive war of all against all.
As people stepped across the threshold into civilization, they inadvertently stumbled into a chaos that had never before existed. The relations among societies were uncontrolled and virtually uncontrollable. Such an ungoverned system imposes unchosen necessities: civilized people were compelled to enter a struggle for power.
Like anything else we know as human, we stumbled into it, had no plan, and tried to make the best of it(depending on your point of view). Only in the last 70 years have we tried to stop it(somewhat at least), but it's not something you stop. A civilization, made up of living things, is like any other living thing; they start out small, grow, mature, and eventually die.
StevieM
(10,500 posts)~snip~
A few years ago in a lab in Panama, Klaus Winter tried to conjure the future. A plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he planted seedlings of 10 tropical tree species in small, geodesic greenhouses. Some he allowed to grow in the kind of environment they were used to out in the forest, around 79 degrees Fahrenheit. Others, he subjected to uncomfortably high temperatures. Still others, unbearably high temperatures—up to a daily average temperature of 95 F and a peak of 102 F. That's about as hot as Earth has ever been.
It's also the kind of environment tropical trees have a good chance of living in by the end of this century, thanks to climate change. Winter wanted to see how they would do.
The answer came as a surprise to those accustomed to dire warnings that climate change will turn the Amazon into a desert. The vast majority of Winter's seedlings didn't die. In fact, most thrived at significantly warmer temperatures than they experience today, growing faster and larger. Just two species succumbed to the heat, and only at the very highest temperatures. The trees' success echoes paleontological data, which hints that warmer temperatures can be a boon for tropical forests. After all, the last time Earth experienced average temperatures of 95 F, there were rainforests in Michigan and palm trees in the Arctic.
That doesn't mean climate change won't affect tropical forests of today. It already is. And it definitely doesn't mean humans needn't worry about global warming. Climate change will be the end of the world as we know it. But it also will be the beginning of another.
Mass extinctions will open ecological niches, and environmental changes will create new ones. New creatures will evolve to fill them, guided by unforeseen selection pressures. What this new world will look like, exactly, is impossible to predict, and humans aren't guaranteed to survive in it. (And that's if civilization somehow manages to survive the climate disasters coming its way in the meantime, from superstorms to sea level rise to agriculture-destroying droughts). Still, experiments like Winter's offer a glimpse.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/09/climate-change-rain-forests-oceans
