Politics is a Disease!

POSTED BY: HKCavalier
UPDATED: Sunday, June 26, 2005 03:39
VIEWED: 3546
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HKCAVALIER

Monday, June 20, 2005 1:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SergeantX:
HK, have you read any Daniel Quinn? Your comments on agriculture and it's affects on human culture align very closely with his.

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

Hey X, I just went over to Amazon.com and read the first 22 pages of Quinn's Ishmael. Hrm. Can't say I was "enthralled." Kinda made me think of The Celestine Prophecy; clearly, Quinn has some information to impart but he unaccountably feels the need to "sex it up" with the fantasy stuff. Does the writing get any less turgid as he warms to his subject? Is it some other of his books you had in mind? Could you, would you summarize what you got out of Quinn?

HKCavalier

Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

SERGEANTX

Monday, June 20, 2005 2:12 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by HKCavalier:
Hey X, I just went over to Amazon.com and read the first 22 pages of Quinn's Ishmael. Hrm. Can't say I was "enthralled." Kinda made me think of The Celestine Prophecy; clearly, Quinn has some information to impart but he unaccountably feels the need to "sex it up" with the fantasy stuff. Does the writing get any less turgid as he warms to his subject? Is it some other of his books you had in mind? Could you, would you summarize what you got out of Quinn?

LOL, yeah, he can be a bit much to take. A bit silly and fantastical in the beginning, moving on to preachy and pedantic in the latter portions, but I liked his different perspective on civilization.

Basically he seems to see agricultural based civilization, starting approx. 10,000 years ago, as a kind of sickness that has befallen the human race. He shows how great huge swaths of our basic values have been formed around the ever expanding consumption that fuels, and is in turn fueled by, an agrarian food supply.

He claims that the problem with the agricultural lifestyle it requires such organization and cooperation from disparate groups that social structures were build to support it, to keep people laboring in the fields. It also precludes competing modes of living. Tribal or nomadic peoples in particular found agrarians to be very 'difficult neighbors'.

I'm not sure he gets into it in Ishmael, but much of his stuff pokes around the edges of 'new tribalism'. These aren't people looking to live in the jungle as savages, but rather people looking for alternative, perhaps more satisfying, ways of living. I found it particularly interesting because one of the models he describes as 'tribal' is very much like the crew of Serenity.

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

SIGNYM

Monday, June 20, 2005 1:22 PM

Another author who touches on the themes of social organization, politics and culture is Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel and Collpase. I The first book is how civilizations reach ascendency and the other is how they fall apart. G,G&S is a little harder to understand, because the the "rise" of civilization seems to depend on some stochastic factors: abundance of grain types and animals that can be domesticated led to groups of people who became tolerant of each other's (and animal) germs. But one of the things that he talks about is the fact that killing among young males is pretty endemic in small-group foragers because they depend on the landscape and must seriously protect their patch of ground sicne it means survival. The point is that even low population densities do not guarantee peace.

There seem to be some typical trends in human behavior, who seem to be very clever without being very rational. The first is that we generally respond only to overt problems: this year's drought, this season's flu, next year's currency flucutation. Problems that are invisible- dropping water tables, resistant bacteria, economic imbalance- don't get any attention until they become overt.

The other thing is that it seems far easier for us to respond with technology than with conscious social changes. Although behavior changes over two or three generations (birth rate falls as income increases) in response to changin circumstance, memes pretty much stay the same until revolution occurs or (less frequently) people sit down and figure out what to do next.

RUE

Wednesday, June 22, 2005 10:22 AM

I am not used to thinking in these terms.

My sister (the smart one) mentioned an idea she'd been thinking about, which is that humans and human social structures, and, I think, 'memes', might be responding unconsciously to large-scale factors that seem unconnected to human life. A good example would be the 'demographic transition', which works consistently around the globe. I've been chewing on that for the last couple of years (and getting nowhere, I might add), but it was such a unique proposal, and so intuitively attractive, that it stuck in my head. And one way or another, I've been testing most ideas against it ever since.

Quote:
Problems that are invisible- dropping water tables, resistant bacteria, economic imbalance- don't get any attention until they become overt.

This is similar to an idea I got out of a commercial for 'shiftingbaselines.org'. And that is that ppl are geared to respond to things of a certain magnitude, whether it is in space or time. I sometimes wonder if the Early Americans did actually hunt the horse and wooly mammoth to extinction, and rather than repeat the same short-sighted pattern ad infinitum, some tribes adopted the 'seventh generation' concept in response. The other portion I've considered is that when you are young, things tend to seem better. First, they might actually be better - firewood is closer, water is cleaner, game more abundant etc. And then as often happens, one moves from the childhood location. The tribe packs up and leaves, the young go with a different tribe, etc. The young don't actually face the exhaustion and decay of what had been their Eden. And so with childhood stresses forgotten and current problems out of sight, home remains pristine in ppl's minds.

Quote:
The other thing is that it seems far easier for us to respond with technology than with conscious social changes.

Something I've been also wondering about (and also not getting very far with btw) as you see women in veils driven around in a/c cars, and the call to prayer being broadcast over TV. (Not anti-Muslim, it's just easier to see in other cultures, I think - but the anti-evolution 'Christian' radicals in the US also fit as far as I'm concerned. Certianly willing to accept the fruits of science but not the ideas.)
Langauge, the bowl, fire, the blade, the point, agriculture + cities, the alphabet - all were profound changes in human technology that brought new ways of individual survival, that changed social organization, that demanded a changed self-concept. The last great change, though not as profound I think as agriculture, was the rise of capitalism. What type and how profound does a change have to be to spark a basic social response? And, if you see society pretty much hell-bent on the cliff's edge, and not coincidentlaly taking at least big chunks of the rest of the planet along, what kind of response might stop the death march?

RUE

Sunday, June 26, 2005 3:39 AM

I was cruising thtough scientific sites and came across these, which I think belong here:

Source: Vanderbilt University
Date: 2005-04-04
URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050328143813.htm

Understanding Biological Foundation Of Human Behavior Critical To Improving Laws
Laws and public policy will often miss their mark until they incorporate an understanding of why, biologically, humans behave as they do, scholars from Vanderbilt and Yale universities argue in the March issue of Columbia Law Review.

"The legal system tends to assume that either people are purely rational actors or that their brains are blank slates on which culture and only culture is written. The reality is much more complicated and can only be appreciated with a deeper understanding of behavioral biology," said Vanderbilt law professor and biologist Owen Jones. He co-authored the article with Timothy Goldsmith, Yale professor emeritus of molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

All laws at their foundation are designed to influence human behavior, from how we interact with one another, to how we relate to our own property and that of others, to how government agencies interact with each other and with citizens, Jones said.

When developing laws, legislators and legal scholars have traditionally relied heavily on the social sciences, such as economics, psychology and political science, often responding to the popular or political trends of their time. They have rarely looked to incorporate the latest findings from fields such as biology, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, which have grown exponentially in recent years and have shed brand new light on how the human brain is structured and how it influences behavior.

Jones argues that integrating law with behavioral biology, which examines the biological underpinnings of human behavior, could strengthen legal measures in a variety of areas. Such an approach might enhance understanding of why some penalties are more effective than others, how people make choices in areas such as environmental protection and retirement savings, and what the underlying causes of aggression are and how they help explain why young men are sometimes willing – even in the face of the severest penalties – to kill in reaction to threats to their status.

"I hope this paper will spark continuing research in this area and foster a greater synthesis of life science and social science perspectives, ultimately enabling law in many areas of human behavior to achieve its goals more efficiently and effectively," Jones said.

Jones has a joint appointment in the Vanderbilt University Law School and the university's biological sciences department. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050328143813.htm

I do think that behavioral biology is not quite up the the task yet. We look back on Skinner for example as being a primitive level of this kind of study; in 10 years time I think we'll look back on today with the same judgement

Source: University Of California - Los Angeles
Date: 2004-11-30
URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041129111632.htm

UCLA Study Points To Evolutionary Roots Of Altruism, Moral Outrage
If you've ever been tempted to drop a friend who tended to freeload, then you have experienced a key to one of the biggest mysteries facing social scientists, suggests a study by UCLA anthropologists.

"If the help and support of a community significantly affects the well-being of its members, then the threat of withdrawing that support can keep people in line and maintain social order," said Karthik Panchanathan, a UCLA graduate student whose study appears in Nature. "Our study offers an explanation of why people tend to contribute to the public good, like keeping the streets clean. Those who play by the rules and contribute to the public good will be included and outcompete freeloaders."

This finding -- at least in part -- may help explain the evolutionary roots of altruism and human anger in the face of uncooperative behavior, both

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