you’ve got me thinking… what if we didn’t think history needed much perspective from one decade or century to the next… when there were long stretches of reproducable events… until spice routes and merchant classes and the world, from ancient china to marriage alliances in europe in the middle ages, created more people and players vying in complex ways for resources, power, and political advantage.
and while we can catalogue events and relate history, even try to interpret it or, as you did, assign cultural milestones… maybe we haven’t begun to grapple with leaving 1000s of years of behaviors to enter a world of mass consensus… relationships too intricate and too large in scope, scale, and implications
maybe we’re still not past napolean or the revolutionary war… definately still an undercurrent of civil war
and in europe, old rivalies still inform cultural attitudes
anyway… just a reaction to your interesting essay, thinking that in the span of time, what’s a few thousand years…
a crisis of global proportions, like disasters of global warming, might provide the common sense of purpose we lack in these large groups.
and maybe it’s not a bad idea to think of breaking the US into smaller federations… and iraq into three separate states…
anyway… just thinking out lout
perhaps this way of thinking addresses how we evolved in small tribal groups.
and how out of whack is the scale we now face. tribal councils blown up to mediate and moderate relationships among large groups of people with competing priorities and then those diverse competing groups to disparate institutional and industrial entities
and we’re talking thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions and then billions… of people. not to mention interacting with other creatures.
it’s not anarchy at all… it is thinking in old, primative terms of how 30 or 300 people in a group would cooperate because it was clear what was at stake and that whatever it was, it was at stake for the entire group.
it’s funny to see this and i just read a short essay by rabid lamb at pff about tribes and scale.
put together with this essay, it makes so much sense.
and why i think we need to consider we may be pushing through to another evolutional model that can address the modern scale of tribes
it’s all about the relationships