Re: More on Ecological Economics.

From: JohnAndrew (AJFeeney48_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/04/04 

Date: 4 Jul 2004 14:14:58 -0700

Johnny - This is an interesting post. I especially like the
references to the biological bases for cooperation.

As for your comments about the intelligent getting the supposed
right to eat the unintelligent, and your argument that
Jews have been carrying on some kind of genetics and/or breeding
experiment for thousands of years to produce smarter people --
I'm leary of this kind of reasoning.

I'm part Jewish, part English/Irish/German by ancestry, and
most of my friends and girlfriends have been Jewish, and
the Jewish friends I like the best don't purport to be genetically
superior to other people. They also don't propose to "eat"
other people or be eaten in return, thank you.

I think the
historic accidents that led the ancient priests of Israel
to declare their people "God's chosen people," and the historic
accidents that made a Jewish breakaway sect, Christianity,
central to the development of Europe have led a number of
Jews and many anti-Semites alike to become crazily
obsessed with the notion of Jewishness.

>From what I've read about the life of British prime
minister Benjamin Disraeli, who was born Jewish but converted
to Anglicanism in the early 1800s, Disraeli for reasons
of personal aggrandizement did a lot to invent the concept
of "race."

Disraeli wanted to see himself as a superior man, a
British equivalent to that military and political genius
Napoleon, and he obviously couldn't
do this on the basis of his religious traditions, because
he'd abandoned them. So he came up with the notion that
"pure Jewish blood" was some big deal, some uniquely
qualifying characteristic that would make him a better political
leader than his English rivalries. And, in the view of
Hannah Arendt, author of "On the Origins of Totalitarianism,"
Disraeli in this way helped to popularize a concept of
Judaism and race that has resulted in Jews being persecuted
and killed on a grand scale over the past century.

I'm not a professional geneticist, although
I did study genetics in college, but I think the whole
racial discourse is mostly nonsense, the invention of certain
social and political elites who wanted a good moral excuse
for their priviliged lives and thought they had found one
in the writings of Darwin. Obviously, you may disagree. But
while individual genetic differences exist, I think
one naked ape is a lot like another naked ape, and we
tend to make ourselves crazy and violent when we start
to believe otherwise.

There's also good reason to think that inherited culture
plays a very important role in human behavior; it's not
all DNA.

Historian William MacNeill, formerly of the
University of Chicago, argues in his grand history of
civilization, "The Rise of the West," that when we go
back to the beginnings of the agricultural era in
about 7,000 BC, we find different peoples showing very
different characteristics with respect to violence and
aggression, mostly based on their ways of getting a living.

Thus the early humans who depended on hunting and gathering
for survival had some capacity for violence, MacNeill
reasons; they had to, to be good hunters. However, once
women had discovered how to grow grain from seed, and once
men had taken over some of the hard work of agriculture,
strikingly peaceful cultures evolved among the early
agricultural villages of Europe, especially, in which
most humans were far too busy worrying about the crops and
the weather to engage in any kind of organized violence.

The human groups that domesticated animals and proceeded
to survive as herdsmen and pastoralists, on the other hand,
were regularly subjected to lives of strenuous exercise
and occasional danger; and with the advent of domesticated
horses they turned into the occupational equivalence of
natural cavalry officers. In pretty short order, then,
they evolved into mounted raiders who often sought wealth
by raiding their more peaceful neighbors.

The folk who came down from the mountains to begin irrigated
agriculture on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
on the other hand, quickly became urbanized, because of the
great wealth they could get from the land, and priest and
god-dominated, because the irrigation systems depended on
fairly centralized management and the priests, with a lot of
mumbo-jumbo, basically filled the managerial role. Then as the
cities grew and neighboring temple cities became to compete
for land and water, armed conflict began to break out on
the Mesopotamian plains. Eventually kings took power from the
priests, or tried to, and used the surplus grain produced by the
cities to maintain armies: the beginning of organized warfare.

So from MacNeill's perspective, anyway, the "human nature" of
our distant ancestors in Mesopotamia and Europe could take
the form of pacifistic anarchism, the preferred mode of the
agricultural villages; or a wild, free, and violent life
of pastoral grazing mixed with raiding and pillaging, which was
the preferred mode of the shepherds; or regimented
urban life with a fairly high standard of living but considerable
subordination of the common people to the priests and warrior
kings, which was the basic mode of life in the Sumerian
and Babylonian cities.

So are human beings today peaceful anarchists, or brave
and lawless desperados, or organization men willing to
work and kill and die for kingdom or religion? Judging
from MacNeill's work, we're a bit of all three, or have
the potential for all three. But not primarily because
of our DNA, for our cultural inheritance enormously shapes
how our DNA is expressed.

Johnny Marcos <johnny5@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<Xns951C6C7432A34Johnny5yahoocom@65.32.1.7>...
> AJFeeney48@yahoo.com (JohnAndrew) wrote in
> news:2fcaf67c.0407040528.69c9bc1c@posting.google.com:
>
> > As a species, we are quite capable of producing
> > ruthless conquerors and despots -- Genghis Khan, Tamerlane,
> > Stalin, Hitler, the organizers of the Spanish Inquisition,
> > the organizers of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the organizers
> > of genocide in Rwanda, etc. But as a species, we also
> > have produced Buddha, Jesus, Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi,
> > Thoreau, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a host of other
> > idealists, pacifists and philanthropists.
>
> There can be no good without evil - one requires the other. They are
> human constructs but based in science.
>
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060984031/qid=/sr=/ref=cm
> _lm_asin/104-0001214-8783907?v=glance&s=books
>
> Our genetic propensities toward cooperation, care for no-longer-
> procreative elders, and (in the case of women) outliving reproductive
> capacity set the stage for the evolution of the human brain. Genes may
> be "selfish," but our genes' inclining us toward non-egoistic ways of
> life lie at the foundation of being human at all. This is a crucial
> point, consistent with the ethical views and habits of all civilizations
> other than those that foster "social Darwinism." That our humanity
> depends on the falsity of "social Darwinism" cannot be emphasized too
> greatly. Science supports the kind of other-oriented, community concern
> that all ethics, through all of human history--unlike allegedly
> "enlightened" egoism--codifies. (See also the wonderful anthology, "The
> Evolutionary Origins of Morality," LeonardD. Katz, editor.)
>
> > We are monkeys that have invented incredible instruments
> > of war and torture; we also are monkeys that produce music,
> > art, religion, philosophy, poetry, and a really amazing
> > variety of different recipes for eating virtually everything
> > in the world and making it taste good.
>
> Perhaps the life you eat does not consider that a good thing - aha you
> say - it can't consider this though - the cow or sweet potato we eat
> does not have the mental capacity to appreciate it's own destruction for
> our consumption - so intelligence makes might right. The smartest of us
> - with the highest IQ's deserve all the resources in that world view.
>
> I think the jews started a genetics program 2000 years ago as laid out
> in the old testament with the ultimate effect of that being they have
> the highest collective IQ and intelligence in the world - and when they
> start eating the rest of us it's gonna be OK because recipe's for cows
> and sweet potatos are a good thing. Who said ignorance is bliss? Is
> bliss and happiness the point of your life or is increasing advancement?
> Adam and eve are portrayed as happy people in the garden of eden - she
> didn't even have any malls to go shopping for clothes in - oh the
> HORROR!
>
> > Isn't it just as much "human nature," then, to generate
> > schemes for peace & equality & freedom (however imperfectly
> > they may be realized!) as it is to produce plans for
> > domination and cruelty?
>
> Mises said peace was just a time to allocate and direct resources for
> war - you don't build 10K nukes unless you expect to have to use them at
> some point. At least in the name of efficiency let's reduce thier level
> to only enough to blow the world up a couple times over instead of the
> 10 or 12 times over we can do it now.

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