Should we fear postmodernity?

Peter van der Werff: Should we fear postmodernity?: The spread of 'postmodernity' in the world brings fear in many of us. That fear is partly justified because some basic certainties ...

Should we fear postmodernity?

Although the word 'postmodernity' is not commonly known, the process it describes is increasingly encountered and installs fear in many of us.

That fear is partly justified because some basic certainties are dissolving. We can, however, reduce our fear if we better understand what is going on and act accordingly.

WHAT IS IT?

Postmodernity, then, means the undermining of stable family settings, regular media, permanently settled companies, permanent predictable markets, including sales offers by companies, reliable banks, the unrestrained provision of social welfare and health care arrangements, and the permanency of universities, trade unions, religious organizations, political parties and elections. Social structures become disposable toys at the hands of the powerful.

Other postmodern processes, you may recognize them, are deregulation, economic privatization, economic liberalization, flexibilization of labor, mergers, alienated buying and selling of companies, belief in once-and-for-all technological solutions and infrastructures, fragmentation of social structures, lose integration into new structures, rapid change, here-and-nowism, the belief in unpredictability, chaos theory, secularization and the rise of spirituality.

Countries lose their clear demarcation with the growth of cross-border economic production lines, financial transactions, information, entertainment, migrants, tourists and business people.

National armies, identifiable by their generals and uniforms, transform into disguised guerrilla bands, drone technology units, hired private armies, combat units of secret services and commercial bodyguard companies.

The video clip, with its fragmentation and rapid change of images, exemplifies postmodernity.

Contributors to postmodernity are found in business and finance but also among IT pioneers, governments and armies trying to escape from exposure, children escaping from family control and migrants escaping from village control or moving to richer countries.

All such changes do not occur in isolation. They are mutually influencing sub-trends, together constituting the overall trend that is called postmodernity.

THE DISQUIET

The disquiet and fear in many of us follows from quite realistic observations: the growth of prosperity comes to a halt or the gap between rich and poor increases. And, on balance, the physical environment is losing out.

The material stagnation or deterioration is in contrast with rising expectations, also generated by to postmodernity, about more income and technological improvements. The disappointments or frustrations are not always easy to swallow.

Moreover, in most parts of the world there is a loss of stable social structures, while larger-scale connections get beyond our routine understanding let alone our control. A deep sense of insecurity or trust is the result.

In addition, the public exposure of hitherto vague suspicions about tendentious operations by advertisers, politicians, bankers, secret services, armies, regular media, construction companies and lobbyists around governments brings the sharp awareness that betrayal is rampant.

But is the world only caught in a downward, lawless spiral? No, no. Look at some other facts. Diseases are more prevented than ever. Less babies die. Old people live longer. Less people get killed in warfare or other violence. Prosperity grows for most people and the percentage of people below the poverty line gets lower.

And public exposure of hitherto tendentious operations does not mean such operations are new. No, they have existed all along and the publicity in itself does not make those practices worse than they were.

NEGATIVE REACTIONS

Not only the contributors to change but also the people reacting to the change can be seen as part of postmodernity.

Among them, feelings of a nearing catastrophe are on the rise. Feelings of bewilderment surface.

For many people dealing with an abstract idea such as a trend is beyond reach. Planning to resist immensely powerful companies, governments and armies is also felt to be pointless.

One way out for the fearful is the building of imaginary walls against the outside world. Retreat in small-scale life and diving into family histories or the local past can be negative if fostering unrealistic beliefs about connections with the wider world or future scenarios.

Another way out is to identify less powerful people and turn them into scapegoats, including immigrants.

A truly dangerous reaction to postmodern uncertainties is the following of ultra-rightwing politicians. These leaders further inflate xenophobic fear and antagonism between communities with tribal, religious or territorial loyalties. Rather than redressing the effects, they exploit the effects of postmodernity for personal gain, be it in India, the US, West Asia or Europe.

Leftist leaders largely fail in organizing communities on the basis of class loyalty. This is all the more remarkable in the face of stagnating or declining incomes, with the rise of prices, and the growing gap between rich and poor. For the moment, postmodernity is just too pervasive to allow mass uprisings in whatever new forms.

The physical environment is losing out.

POSITIVE REACTIONS

Financers have developed the practice of ‘impact investment’, supporting initiatives that not only aim at financial profit but also at positive impacts on society or the physical environment.

In going against some effects of postmodernity, Alternative lifestyles are practiced or advertised.

Realistic local, small-scale and bottom-up initiatives abound, including to become more conscious consumers.

The Internet not only reveals scandals but also provides solutions for better physical and emotional health, and opportunities for improving social life and the physical environment.

Social networks in neighborhoods arise. Single issue organizations replace outdated political parties. Spiritual movements and organizations compensate for secularization.

LEARN FLYING

Many of us learn, willy-nilly or not, to adjust to rapid change, acquire flexibility, develop short spans of attention, shield ourselves off from an overdose of information and trust ourselves and personal networks. Some learn more easily than others. But school education may prepare all children for living in the postmodern world.

Learning to handle freedom, anyway, becomes paramount. Learn to enjoy it. Learn to grow in it. Learn how to swim in deep water. Breathe in and out and be happy with the new life.

Get used to parachute jumping without landing. Take a course in skydiving. Learn two speak another language as if it is your native tongue. Learn to use the other hand than your usual one. Learn to learn. 

Learn to depend less on outer certainties. Learn to reinforce inner life so that you can better deal with outer uncertainties. 

Relieve yourself of being self-convinced. Your survival needs you to loosen your restricted senses.

Learn to be alert. The old jungle genes are patiently waiting to be re-mobilized into situational awareness again.

Teach your children and grandchildren to survive in a postmodern world.

PLAN TO RESIST?

You plan to resist the worldwide upcoming trend? You will chain yourself to a large rock? The rock will explode or disappear in the abyss.

You will plant your boots solidly on the ground? A storm will rise from the earth and blow you high up in the sky. What, then, is the use of boots?

Will you cling to the biggest oak tree in order to survive the tsunami? Forget it. The oak tree will evaporate or lift itself up in the air and open a parachute only for itself. 

Are you organizing a new social group to live on an island? The tsunami will make you all swim in the ocean.

BOOKS

Toulmin, S. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990

Harvey, D. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989

The forest road to gains and losses

Longtime uphill villagers have used nearby forests in sustainable ways. If not, they would not have survived. Therefore, the mere fact that they live there for so long indicates their local wisdom.

They collect dead wood for cooking fires. They find additional plant food and medicinal herbs. They go for hunting to enrich their diets.

They prevent over-exploitation, not by building physical fences around the nearby forests, but by ‘social fencing’, by checking on each other. Whatever anyone brings home is noticed and discussed in the village.

And social fencing is reinforced by inner fencing. Children already learn what to use of the natural habitat and what not. The customs are internalized and more or less applied automatically.

But social and inner fencing are powerless in the face of what arrives on the new government road. The villagers fear for it the ecological destruction by timber logging and plantations companies.

But many villagers see benefits of the road. It opens the way to benefits of the modern world: commuting for work and wages, going to doctors and hospitals, visiting hospitalized relatives, shopping in the nearest town or finding entertainment to break away from the monotony of isolated village life.

The smart students are more fascinated by computer science than by farms or jungles. And the small entrepreneurs desire the road to ease their import and export of goods.

The families of commuters and entrepreneurs, with their externally gained incomes, lose a vital interest in the sustainable dynamic of vegetation, slope soils and water. And they can afford to ignore pressures of social fencing by co-villagers and grab from nearby woods what they want.

The road, and all it brings and takes, corrupts the traditional culture that included inner fencing. External integration is the winner, local ecology the loser.

Neither only blame governments and large companies, nor only the uphill villagers. Most of them, for better or worse, want the benefits of modernity.

Anthropology to help science on the road to realism

Peter van der Werff: Science on the road to realism: Want to be an anthropologist? Be scientific. Read theory, do quantifying fieldwork and improve that theory with your findings. But be wis...

Anthropology to help science on the road to realism

Want to be an anthropologist? Be scientific. Read theory, do quantifying fieldwork and improve that theory with your findings.

But be wise and also imagine what happens beyond your eyes and ears, behind front doors and closed curtains, under covers and tables, up on roofs and tree branches, in the darkness of nights and shadows of the sun, at backs of minds and with subtle energies.

That makes your observations deeper and more sensitive. You will talk in better voices. And your body language attunes to subtle energies that scientific measurements are still to discover.

Then try to express your refinements and integrate them with quantifying theory, perhaps the biggest challenge of all for a true anthropologist.

You will not only improve anthropology but open the minds of mechanistic thinkers. You will be part, dear friend, of science on the road to realism.

Postmodernity: Social Structures As Disposable Toys

Stable social structures become disposable toys at the hands of the powerful.

Dangerous Trend of Shared Space. The Case of Kattenlaan

Once again I got involved in e-mail discussions about the unregulated frightening traffic in my Amsterdam neigborhood Kattenlaan.

The responsible civil servants remain lethargic and now even embrace the upcoming trend of so-called 'shared space' which is quite convenient if you dislike any effort to relieve citizens.

Below is my piece on shared space that I have circulated. The translation of the title is ‘Shared Space: Enemy of Kattenlaan’. Dutch elaborations are in the last two parts.

It is a serious warning for foolish policy.

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At a shared space traffic streams mix without regulation. The related expectation is that safety grows because people will pay more attention. But nowhere it is proven that chaos in the traffic creates safety. It is a fallacy.

Shared space needs planners who do not joining a trend out of compliance or laziness, but have spatial-dynamic understanding, knowledge of human behaviors, realistic precision, ability to deal with complexity and self-reflextion.

Qualified planners know very well that it brings no improvement to remove separate bike-lanes, edges in the pavement and lines at the pavement. Nor does it makes sense to have cars from opposite sites mix freely. By far most of the existing regulations are applied for good reasons and demand our respect.

Shared space belongs to the wider trend of deregulation. As such it is part of growing postmodernity, to be clearly distinguished from artistic and filosophical postmodernism.

Other postmodern trends are mergers, alienated buying and selling of companies just for the money, privatisation, liberalisation, flexibilisation of labor, fragmentation, over-exposure to information and faster rates of change. Stable social structures become disposable toys in the hands of the powerful.

We can notice how these postmodern trends suit power-hungry top managers, opportunistic politicians, lethargic civil cervants and profit seeking employers. On the other hand, many in the world see their purchasing power decline and have a growing sense of insecurity, confusion and fear.

Deregulation in the traffic runs the risk to be a trend that, as unavoidable as disastrous, fits in the general pattern of postmodernity.

Laweiplein-Kattenlaan

In 2003 is in het Friese Drachten een kruispunt gedereguleerd. En, ja, verdraaid: minder ongelukken. Maar het regende klachten over de onoverzichtelijkheid en die klachten gingen ook na een paar jaar niet over. Daarom heeft de gemeente er later een rotonde aangelegd, een regulering van heb-ik-jou-daar.

Als je niettemin gelooft in shared space en het zelfs beschouwt als goed voor de Kattenlaan, kijk dan eerst even goed naar dit filmpje en vergelijk het Laweiplein met de Kattenlaan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUAhEQnaE-4

Verschillen Laweiplein-Kattenlaan punt voor punt:

•           Op het Laweiplein zijn er weldegelijk aparte banen voor auto’s, fietsers en voetgangers. Kijk eens naar alle belijningen, haaietanden, stoepranden, een ronde rand in het midden en verschillende kleuren asfalt. Dat ontbreekt allemaal in de Kattenlaan maar zou prima aangebracht kunnen worden.

•           Op het Laweiplein gaat het om een kruispunt. De Kattenlaan is niet een kruispunt. Het is een weg, kort als ie mag zijn, met doorgaand verkeer. Op een kruispunt weten mensen dat ze moeten vertragen en heel goed moeten opletten. In de Kattenlaan heb je voetgangers die minder opletten, of zelfs niet willen opletten en kinderen die in principe overal mogen spelen. Daar moeten fietsers doorheen laveren. Daarmee heb je op de Kattenlaan in Amsterdam heel andere verkeerssituaties en verkeersgedragingen dan op het Laweiplein in Drachten.

•           Er is op het Laweiplein van alle kanten goed zicht voor de verkeersdeelnemers. Dat goede zicht ontbreekt in Kattenlaan door blinde hoeken bij de Overtoom, het dwarslaantje en de smalle doorgang naar het park waar de meesten doorheen gaan.

•           Er is voor de verkeersdeelnemers op het Laweiplein veel ruimte beschikbaar. In de Kattenlaan heb je voetgangers en fietsers die elkaar in twee richtingen op centimeters van elkaar passeren. Je hoeft als voetganger maar per ongeluk een stap opzij te doen en een achteropkomende fietser rijdt tegen je aan, tot schrik overigens van beiden.

•           In de Kattenlaan heb je dat voetgangers en fietsers in een smalle ruimte elkaar in twee richtingen tegenkomen. Dat is niet zo op het Laweiplein.

•           Op het Laweiplein zie ik nauwelijks ouders die niet weten wat ze kindertjes aan verkeersgedrag moeten leren of bejaarden die hun orientatie kwijt zijn. In de Kattenlaan zie ik daar juist narigheid door ontstaan.

•           De shared space op het Laweiplein betekent niet dat iedereen maar doet wat ie wil. Bedenk bijvoorbeeld hoeveel doen en laten van de mensen gebaseerd is op bekend verkeeersgedrag. Het is door de ongewone situatie in de Kattenlaan dat fietsers en voetgangers per situatie niet weten wat ze moeten doen.

•           Het Laweiplein heet ongereguleerd te zijn maar in vergelijking met de huidige Kattenlaan bulkt van de reguleringen, en zelfs in Drachten zijn de kachten over de onoverzichtelijkheid.

Centraal Station-Kattenlaan

Dan het verkeer achter het Centraal Station. Zie foto’s. Daar ontbreken de auto’s dus de vergelijking met de Kattenlaan is wat zuiverder.

Ik begrijp dat onderzoek daar heeft uitgewezen dat fietsers zich verantwoordelijker gedragen wanneer de verkeersstromen tussen voetganger en fietser niet helder gedefineerd zijn. Je zou dan verwachten dat een onderzoek naar fietsersgedrag tijdens een paar decennia shared space in de Kattenlaan wel heel veel verantwoordelijkheidsgevoel bij fietsers zal vaststellen, hetgeen de problemen grotendeels opgelost zou moeten hebben. Maar is dat zo? Welnee. Dat weet toch iedereen die in de Kattenlaan woont of komt. De onderzoekers en planners zijn van harte in de Kattenlaan uitgenodigd.

Voor de zorgvuldigheid een vergelijking CS-Kattenlaan. Er is overeenkomst en verschil met de vergelijking Laweiplein-Kattenlaan:

•           Gemeentelijk deskundige Aluvihare stelde vast ‘dat gewenning de grote vijand is van shared space. Hij stelt naar aanleiding van de twee incidenten dat de gemeente het gebied achter CS zeer serieus moet volgen. "Na een tijdje kan er een mentale luiheid ontstaan, bijvoorbeeld bij scooterrijders die maand in, maand uit elke dag over het gebied rijden." ‘ https://www.parool.nl/amsterdam/is-de-shared-space-bij-cs-nog-veilig~a4488569/

Die gewenning kennen we van fietsers door de Kattenlaan. Het zijn vaak dezelfde mensen die van en naar hun werk of school door de Kattenlaan komen. Maar of zij het grote probleem zijn, zou ik niet weten. Ze blijven aan de oostelijke kant van het laantje en het is in de spitsuren. Het is voorspelbaar in tijd en ruimte. Je weet je als voetganger waar je aan toe bent. Veel chaotischer is het in de tussenliggende uren en in weekends. Daar is verstandige regulering voor nodig.

•           Achter CS zijn er, in de aanloop naar twee stukjes zonder belijning, aparte banen voor fietsers en voetgangers, inclusief met verschillende kleuren asfalt, stoepranden en belijningen, waardoor ook op de onbelijnde stukjes er veel voorspelbaar gedrag is. Dat ontbreekt in de Kattenlaan. Daar mag iedereen doen wat ie wil.

•           Achter CS gaat het om kruispuntjes. De Kattenlaan is niet een kruispunt. Het is een weg, kort als ie mag zijn, met doorgaand verkeer. Op een kruispunt weten mensen dat ze moeten vertragen en heel goed moeten opletten. In de Kattenlaan heb je voetgangers die minder opletten, of zelfs niet willen opletten en kinderen die in principe overal mogen spelen. Daar moeten fietsers doorheen laveren. Het geeft heel andere situaties en gedragingen dan achter CS.

•           Er is achter CS van alle kanten goed zicht voor de verkeersdeelnemers. Dat goede zicht ontbreekt in Kattenlaan door blinde hoeken bij de Overtoom, het dwarslaantje en de smalle doorgang naar het park waar de meesten doorheen gaan.

•           Er is achter CS veel ruimte beschikbaar. In de Kattenlaan passeren voetgangers en fietsers elkaar op ongewone manieren en soms op een paar centimeters van elkaar. Je hoeft als voetganger maar per ongeluk een stap opzij te doen en een achteropkomende fietser rijdt tegen je aan, tot schrik overigens van beiden.

•           Achter CS zie ik nauwelijks ouders die niet weten wat ze kindertjes moeten leren of een bejaard echtpaar die de doodschrik krijgen omdat een jonge fietser vlak achter hen omscheert. In de Kattenlaan zie ik die narigheid wel.

•           De shared space achter CS betekent niet dat iedereen maar doet wat ie wil. Bedenk bijvoorbeeld hoeveel doen en laten van de verkeersdeelnemers gebaseerd is op al bekende gedragsregels. Het is door de ongewone situatie in de Kattenlaan dat fietsers en voetgangers per situatie niet weten wat ze moeten doen.

•           Wat achter CS moet wennen, is hoe bromfietsers soms diagonaal over het plein naar de Kiss-and-ridestrook rijden, om daar dwars over de stoeprand en de gemarkeerde taxistandplaats heen de rijweg op te gaan. Maar achter het station mogen ze op het fietspad rijden, en aan de westkant van het plein moeten ze de rijweg op. Dat doen ze ook, over de stoeprand heen en zonder mankeren. In de Kattenlaan zijn helemaal geen stoepranden. En dat staat ook niet genoemd in mijn voorstel van augustus jl.

Op grond van nuchter verstand en de vergelijkingen Laweiplein-Kattenlaan en CS-Kattenlaan is de conclusie over shared space in de Kattenlaan: Niet doen! Don’t even think about it.

Firearms discipline and my grandfather

Let me explain my comments on the use of arms and the ban on that use. I believe strongly in restrictive legislation on the possession and the use of arms. I was raised with those restrictions and still deeply respect the restrictions.

I hail from a family of hunters, gamekeepers and forest guards who maintained strict discipline about handling guns when out in the field and locking them securely away at home. My grandfather had three guns: a Ferd. Reuss double-barreled shotgun caliber 12, a Mauser rifle caliber 22 and a FN rifle caliber 22. He had official licenses for all three of them since the Dutch gunlaw was installed in 1917.

He always took one of those arms with him during rounds of inspection in the park woods or winderness. Poachers could become dangerous. Back home her took his keys for pocket, opened the gun cabinet, put the gun back, locked the cabinet and put the keys back in his pocket. Fixed ritual. This behavior was paet and parcel of the society he lived in.

At the picture, you see my grandfather as first left. Notice the safe directions of two guns:

Of course, installing proper legislation, against the will of a minority or majority in society, may reduce the number of accidents. But a force symptomatic for the American society, the strongly lobbying by the National Rifle Association (NRA), resists calls to install good legislation for long already.

I remember how those calls came up after the release of the dramatic movie ‘Joe’ back then in 1970. Sadly enough, they did bring new legislation.

So, what is in the American culture that makes, for instance, the NRA so powerful? By thinking deeper about this culture we go beyond the fighting of symptoms and touch on forces that may be causing many other problems in people and social life as well.

Joe, 1970: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYQUnA-q26M

Genes leading to the demise of humanity

Will our genetic makeup lead to the demise of humanity?

I propose to consider three tendencies that seem to be inborn and endanger our survival: greed in all members of the group, male inter-group strife for territory, and male power struggles within the group accepted by females.

Of course, genes that counter-balance fatal inclinations are to explored also.

Probably, greed has been in us already before we took to farming. We can see this greed in chimpanzee behaviors already. But for chimps and early humans there are hardly opportunities to store what is gathered beyond what can be consumed immediately.

With the rise farming, though, humans developed the technical and social means to store surplus food and in due course the products of crafts and arts as well. This inclination has derailed into an ongoing drive for more consumption although it leads to over-exploitation on of the planet.

The male inclination to fight neighbors for territory, to the intended benefit of all within the group, is perhaps too strong in humans to arrive at reasonable agreements between countries and companies in order to save the planet. Have you seen this video with an inter-group chimp fight about territory? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7XuXi3mqYM

As Nicole Bea Pastoukoff wrote me on Facebook, human males have an inborn tendency to fight one another as rivals in getting access to women. This gives women the strongest offspring possible within the group and contributes to the survival of the group.

But the males may get obsessed with gaining ever more power. These power struggles may make them ignore sometimes necessary adaptations to available resources, let alone consider future needs.

Palestine-Lebanon Corridor: Tragic Till Today

PALESTINE-LEBANON CORRIDOR: TRAGIC TILL TODAY

Did you know that east of the Mediterranean Sea there’s only a narrow strip of fertile land before the mountains rise up? No?

Well, quite likely you have heard a lot about this area in the media, without realizing it is just a narrow strip of land with lots of people living there.

Here are the present-day names: Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Syria. And you may say: ‘Hey, it’s that area where rage and suffering never ends. The people have fought one another since biblical times and it still goes on.’

That’s right. The violence is structural and old.

See, the fertile strip of land was part of the Fertile Crescent, where humans took to the cultivation of food grains 12,000 years ago and populations grew rapidly.

But in the narrow corridor they had much less space for expansion than in other parts of the Crescent, such as in Egypt or Iraq. So, in the Corridor the population grew beyond what the fertile land could provide for. People resorted to life in the mountains which brings small communities existing fairly isolated from each other or fighting each other.

Second, while communities in and near the Corridor remained weak by their small size and mutual fights, other societies in the Crescent expanded and built large armies. They moved over long distances and often came through the Corridor.

Next to scarcity and mutual fighting, the Corridor communities faced a long series of terrorizing occupations, oppressions, exploitations and deportations by the empires of Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans and, in the end, also West Europeans.

So it came that the formation of stable political structures in and around the Corridor remained disrupted. Fragmentation reigned and mutual fighting between small communities went on. This became so deeply ingrained in the unconscious of people that we see the pattern still continued.

Corridor king David killed 22,000 Syrians after they had surrendered and been taken captive. That immense cruelty happened around 1,000 BC. The Israelite Old Testament tells us about it in Chronicles.

Around three hundred years later, this Corridor kingdom found its demise in confrontations with big empires of the time. An Assyrian army marched up, defeated the Israelite army and carried away thousands of Israelites. They resettled them in other parts of the Fertile Crescent as forced laborers in large projects such as irrigation systems, temples, palaces, massive fortifications and roads.

Once upon a time, there was a people living in the Corridor, between River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea that I’ll tell you about. They were called Palestinians, after their land Palestine.

Then, in 1947-1949 more than 700,000 of them, around 80% of the population, were forced from their homes and lands by a penetrating Israeli army. Recognize the pattern? This period is called Nakba. You can find the ruins of villages just by searching for old trees planted for their shadow by the erstwhile villagers.

When the perplexed and defenseless Palestinians finally came to organize resistance they were called terrorists. But the real terror was inflicted by the Israeli army during the Nakba. The terror has been going on since then. Violent liberation actions are pinpricks compared to the mass murder and cruel oppression by the occupying forces.

Humanity derailing beyond survival needs

To coordinate larger-scale works and get labor done for the common good, central leadership evolved. This generated social hierarchies that could enforce, in a top-down way, the labor efforts that to workers did not seem to satisfy their immediate needs.

Central leadership also arose in order to store and distribute harvests for an entire year and keep a minimum of grains as seeds in the next season. Men, with their physical superiority, were the ones using chances to rise in the hierarchy. Women were easier to subjugate and force to work for the common good.

In due course, social hierarchies solidified and started to derail into unnecessary violent discipline. From there, forced labor and slavery were introduced.

With low seasons giving time to specialize in crafts and arts, and storage of harvests getting larger, it became attractive to assault neighboring villages and loot their cereals, along with products of crafts and art.

It made humans learn the taste of blood. Before, conflicts between neighboring groups usually boiled down to limited skirmishes for territory. But now that there was free time in the low seasons and popular food seemingly easily accessible, people’s genes proved able to make us murderously greedy.

This new type of inter-community thrive further contributed to inequality between the sexes as male warrior bands, after having killed the inimical men, raped the women and brought them home for slave work.

Something else influenced neighbor conflicts. The emerging type of warfare also grew in scale. Permanent farming allowed for large populations and in the low season men could be recruited in huge numbers for the armies. Moreover, because of population growth, the survival of communities got less in danger with losses of many lives in warfare. Armies of 50,000 to 100,000 soldiers were seen marching against enemies near and far in West Asia.

Yet another force reshaped patterns of conflict between neighbors. It had to do with men having grown used to top-down enforced labor discipline in the organization of farm work. This familiarity facilitated the organization of large armies in similar ways. It made many a soldier more afraid of the commander than of the enemy and fight nearly mechanically. Once a field battle was won, the lid of discipline was taken off and all hell broke loose for the surviving male and female enemies.

The Assyrians, in the valley down from the Zagros Mountains were farming started, got especially known for their highly skilled warfare. And once they had conquered another community, they used extreme cruelty to destroy the enemy’s sense of identity and any hope of rebellion. Their ferocity went so far as to skin prisoners alive, cut off body parts, including tongues, and displayed collections of human skulls.

And so, Fertile Crescent humanity set of for a future of oppression, exploitation, limitless cruelty, wild greediness and mass murder, all beyond what a community needs for survival.

Unlikely matriarchs

The idea of a matriarchal era in our evolution has been proposed since the 19th century and adopted as proof that women are well able to rule the world or that humans have a deep tendency to be ruled by women.

But quite likely, women never ruled the world. Yes, there have been matriarchal societies but they constituted a tiny part of all societies. At present six matriarchal societies exist that attract attention of anthropologists, feminists and tourists.

Some argue that a range of tribal societies, from about 25,000 years ago, made small, voluptuous female figurines that would represent matriarchy or female dominance.

Although there’s much evidence found for the existence of these figurines, this interpretation is contested. The so-called Venus figurines are rather seen as representing nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction or the bounty of the earth. Others believe these figurines were made by men to express their sexual longing for women.

Reasonable as this may sound, more convincing is that in tribal societies women and men tend to have a complementary division of labor, with women mostly collecting plant food and men mostly collecting animal food, which remains unrelated to dominance by either sex. This pattern seems to have existed all over the planet and for 6-7 million years of human evolution.

Agrarian societies, from over the last 10,000 years, also made female figurines whereas these societies are patriarchal or male dominated. Male dominance arose with agriculture with men gradually leaving the domain of hunting and pushing women out of control in the domain of plant food, although women kept working a lot in agriculture.

Democracy was not invented

Democracy was not invented in the modern West. Neither was it not invented in other parts of the world and earlier times. Democracy has been present throughout the human evolution.

Small human groups have organized themselves fairly democratically for millions of years. It was and is what some simply call ‘tribal’ life, ignoring the many stages of ‘tribal’ organization, from the smallest groups to extensive kingdoms.

Women of the small groups jointly enter the jungle near camps to collect plant food, babies on their back, children around, while casually chatting, deliberating about pros and cons of a plant, or warning one another for dangers. Women with proven knowledge and wisdom may be more listened to than other women. Often they are the elder ones, but not always so. Don’t forget that staying alive is a daily concern. Listening to proven wisdom contributes to survival of the group. But all women chat.

Their men go out in hunting parties to shoot or catch prey animals. For strategic reasons they operate silently but signal to one another about a nearby prey animal or to warn for a predator or other dangers. Men with proven knowledge and wisdom may be more listened to than other men. They may be the elder ones, but not always so. Also here, survival is a deep concern and listening to proven wisdom a necessity.

Before and after the hunt men also deliberate. And in the camp a lot of talking goes on. The wiser members, female and male, may listen to all and express opinions when they feel it needed. Women and men with proven knowledge and wisdom may be more listened to than others, be they the eldest ones or not. Those habits lead to joint decisions for the good of the group.

If the group does not tap in on joint knowledge and wisdom it risks to perish and mistakes die out. If joint decisions are effective, the group survives and transfers apt thinking, feeling and acting to next generations.

But there was another force that endangered the original democracy. That came in the form of larger-scale communities with hierarchies that installed oppression and exploitation by force.

Lucky are the communities and societies that grew to large-scale size and could maintain parts of small-scale democracy. The Netherlands are an example.

Female farming paved the way for patriarchy

Once the breeding of cereal grasses such as barley, einkorn and emmer appeared to worthwhile, more and more groups of people decided to settle and build fenced villages and gardens. They did not plant one variety in straight lines as their Babylonian and Assyrian offspring would do in the plains and industrial farmers do today. No, they did it in casual, haphazard ways. Tribals in Karnataka, India, name this style ‘mandika tanam’.

Men were needed to protect plots against attacking neighbors and wild aninals while, in turn took to raiding other villages and loot the popular cereal produce. Men also came in to help growing the popular cereals. With long sticks they would poke holes in the soil to allow women put seeds in the holes. Women pulled the weeds. But for heavy work in the processing of harvested grains men got involved again. In short, they penetrated the plant domain of women.

Population growth made groups to leave the foothills and settle in the plains where they cleared the wild shrubs and trees in order to grow, along with soft foods, the new cereals. As this cereal production grew in size and workload, men contributed more time and attention to it.

It took thousands of years to learn breeding better cereal varieties, planting in straight lines to make weeding and harvesting easier, bringing water to dry places, using hand plows and finally go for deep plowing with draught animals. With those developments men got increasingly involved in the farming, the organization and building of larger-scale irrigation works and the overall leadership of agrarian affairs.

Unintentionally yet, if you want, tragically, the women who started farming facilitated the men taking control over most of the food supply. As a consequence, men came to control family life and wider social life as well, on the road to patriarchy that has poisoned interactions between women and men till the present day.

Women started the agricultural revolution

Women were the first farmers. Yes, I know, when you hear the word ‘farmers’ you think of men. But, no, not men were the first farmers. Women started the agricultural revolution, a crucial turn in the course of our evolution.

How can it be? Let me ask you this: remember that, next to hunting by men, women were the ones collecting edible plants as the large part of food supply to the group? They had the knowledge and skills to find and gather soft foods such as fruits and vegetables that could be eaten as they were.

And women brought grains, nuts, seeds, roots and pulses home to be crushed with stone tools, as you can see some animals do. Later those hard foods were roasted in camp fires. In due course, humans also learned to pound, to pulverize, those hard foods. They took all that trouble because hard foods, like meat, provided proteins, whereas hunting for meat was more tedious and dangerous.

These food habits came up and still occur all over in the world.

Now, we’re narrowing things down. Women, as close watchers of vegetative life, noticed how plants reproduced themselves. For the purpose of future food supply they studied and respected such processes. While being familiar with the process of reproduction within themselves, they could identify with the creation of new life in the world of vegetation around them.

Their identification with reproductive processes may have made them trying to cultivate the plants. Their concern with food supply made them grow the plants they liked as food. In this way, they came to settle at one place for a while and cultivate plant varieties in gardens and nearby. This pattern we see at quite some places in the world.

For the breeding of popular cereal grasses climate and soil conditions were often not favorable, as humans found out with regret. But around 12,000 years ago climate change in West Asia made cereal grasses grow abundantly. This spurred women to use their experience with the cultivation of other plants to collect cereal seeds, plant them and harvest the fruits.

Women in the Zagros Mountains of Iran were the first ones to do this. It was not in the western part of Fertile Crescent, as many think, but at the eastern side. They started what’s perhaps the biggest revolution of humanity.

That’s what paleontological excavators believe at present. Tomorrow they may surprise us with new findings.

http://hppr.org/post/farming-got-hip-iran-some-12000-years-ago-ancient-seeds-reveal

Bans and prohibitions are carts before horses

If part of the Americans want to get an arms ban accepted in a society that largely prefer a free possession of arms, they’ll have to change this society first. That’s not a flight of fancy but a sober acknowledgment of societal logic.

But mind you, even installed bans and prohibitions don’t remove aggressive or addictive tendencies stored in people. With each new ban or prohibition those tendencies will seek other ways to surface. It is better to try and create supportive, caring social environments that diminish aggressive or addictive tendencies.

So, these are two reasons for the organization of thorough thinking about the creation of wider changes in society, be these changes very hard to achieve and take a very long period of time. But carts before horses don’t ride at all.

Humanity's road to the glory of control

At the junction of Africa, Asia and Europe, some 12,000 years ago, intensified control of plants and animals was on the brink of birth.

What future was this control going to create for humanity and the planet? What features of later humans were shaped by this birth of intense control and could perhaps, albeit difficulty, ever be unlearned again. And what genetic makeup existed already for seven million year and would be nearly impossible to adjust.

In order to facilitate better plant growth, the people learned to build irrigation systems. Their rise of construction capacities generated permanent houses in village clusters and cities, with store houses, market places, palaces, temples and tombs within or outside the stone fences.

They developed script to record quantities in their collective farming and distribution of harvests between people and over the year, and keep track of seasons and celestial bodies that influence plant growth.

To coordinate labor in the large projects, they created social hierarchies that gradually solidified into organized discipline, forced labor, slavery and derailing cruelties.

Labor specialization depending on the positions in a hierarchy grew further. Low seasons gave time to specialize in a range of crafts and arts, and engage in peaceful trade relations with neighboring villages or cities.

The low season brought yet another thing. Now that early tribal life based on what nature gave during the one day gave way to annual cycles of farming and storage of harvests, people came to attack other villages and cities and loot such storage. It meant a shift from territorial fights with neighbor communities to fights for both territory and food. In later stages the looting involved valuables produced by craftsmen as well.

Next to looting and large numbers of men, yet another force entered violent conflict between neighbors. That was the maintaining of social hierarchy as learned in the organization of farm labor. Most men got used to operating in hierarchical settings, be disciplined or discipline others. These experiences facilitated the organization of large armies both before and during battles in the field.

But something else also changed neighbor conflicts, something large. The new type of war grew in scale. Permanent farming allowed for huge populations and in the low season men could be recruited in large numbers for the armies. Moreover, the survival of large populations got less in danger with losses of lives such as in warfare. So, don't underestimate the enormous size of those armies. They could count 100,000 soldiers or more.

Thus humanity took off on the road to inequality, exploitation, oppression, cruelty, looting and mass warfare.

And there’s one more, highly important feature that emerged in the Fertile Crescent waiting to be brought on the stage. That is the shifting division of labor between women and men. It comes in my next post.

Key words: human evolution, Fertile Crescent, early farming, warfare, exploitation, oppression, cruelty, genetic makeup.

Key :-)

The Corridor: Never ending fights in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Syria

Did you know that east of the Mediterranean Sea there’s only a narrow strip of fertile land before the mountains rise up? No?

Well, quite likely you have heard a lot about this area in the media, without realizing it is just a narrow strip of land with lots of people living there.

Here are the present-day names: Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Syria. And you may say: ‘Hey, it’s that area where rage and suffering never ends. The people have fought one another since biblical times and it still goes on.’

That's right. The violence is structural and age-old.

See, the fertile strip of land was part of the Fertile Crescent, where humans took to the cultivation of food grains 12,000 years ago and populations grew rapidly.

But in the narrow corridor they had much less space for expansion than in other parts of the Crescent, such as in Egypt or Iraq. So, in the Corridor the population grew beyond what the fertile land could provide for. People resorted to life in the mountains which brings small communities existing fairly isolated from each other or fighting each other.

Second, while communities in and near the Corridor remained weak by their small size and mutual fights, other societies in the Crescent expanded and built large armies. They moved over long distances and often came through the Corridor.

Next to scarcity and mutual fighting, the Corridor communities faced a long series of terrorizing occupations, oppressions, exploitations and deportations by the empires of Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans and, in the end, also West Europeans.

So it came that the formation of stable political structures in and around the Corridor remained disrupted. Fragmentation reigned and mutual fighting between small communities went on.

This became so deeply ingrained in the unconscious of people that we still see the pattern continued.

https://www.google.co.th/search?q=fertile+lebanon+landscape+photo&tbm=isch&imgil=re-8UmeEJzxQBM%253A%253BC95RwhvOxtyGDM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.alamy.com%25252Fstock-photo-grapevines-growing-in-the-fertile-bekaa-beqaa-valley-of-lebanon-67085020.html&source=iu&pf=m&fir=re-8UmeEJzxQBM%253A%252CC95RwhvOxtyGDM%252C_&usg=__tN300UOR1ywCndXZpIgawcGbKNw%3D&biw=853&bih=393&ved=0ahUKEwjhtPHxm8zWAhUIo48KHfw5A9EQyjcIPg&ei=DTHPWaH6HojGvgT884yIDQ#imgdii=Yv1TD7R-1zNTvM:&imgrc=re-8UmeEJzxQBM:

The distinction between content and social dynamic of culture

CONTENT AND DYNAMIC OF CULTURE

How can I so coldly deny that religion and spirituality influence culture, although I have spiritual orientations myself?

That is because, as both a social scientist and a policy advisor, I give priority to looking at generally occurring dynamics or mechanisms in how humans interact, irrespective of the content they produce.

One such general dynamic creates what many call culture. But often we only look at the content of a specific culture or compare the content of different cultures. We then either ignore the dynamic that produces such cultures or mix content and social dynamic.

As a policy advisor, I acknowledge the attention that we pay to culture can be generated by our concern about a specific culture or a need we feel to change that culture.

Now, in order to achieve anything here, it is important to clearly understand the working of the social dynamic in itself, irrespective cultural content.

This cultural dynamic, as I have come to see it, consists of learning, internalizing, expressing and transferring commonalities in behaviors, that is, in feeling, thinking and acting, in a social entity such as a society or organization.

Like it is important to understand how the dynamic of the internal combustion engine makes cars run, for policy reasons it is helpful to clearly see the social dynamic that creates culture.

If we would want to change, say, certain behaviors, we will hopelessly fail if we focus on the surface and only see cultural content. We will be fight symptoms. We need to study how the learning, internalizing, expressing and transferring takes place and find ways to modify those processes.

This underlying social dynamic itself is distinct from religious, spiritual, rationalist, artistic, medical or any orientation that can fill the content of a culture. Of course, it is possible that I see or experience the underlying dynamic in a religious, spiritual, rationalist, artistic, medical or any other way, but then we are back at content again.

In other words, religion cannot exist without the social dynamic of learning, internalizing, expressing and transferring of common behaviors. But this social dynamic can very well exist without religion.