Stages Of Civilization
Stages Of Civilization
Problems:
#3 and #4 are inverted. Shamans develop before traders, not after.
Sometimes. So what?
No, not "sometimes", always.
If you like. Who cares? So what? Looking at the cycle above, you're arguing about the chicken and the egg. Which came first? The argument is over! The victor has solved it by decree: the chicken!
Except you've placed them both in sequence with something else, collapse. If you talk about eggs, chicks, and chickens all together, then egg-chicken-chick is simply wrong. Besides, you'd have to work hard to find a collapse which religion and trade didn't survive, so their rebirth in the cycle is simply a mistake to begin with.
Priests arose before traders. People whose sole function it was to organize religion rituals arose long before people whose sole function it was to trade economic goods. The point of this is that it is false that priests and other powerful people were a decadent corruption of some pre-existing system. Rather, priests (and religious activity) were genuinely considered more important by primitives than economic activity. This is an important difference between the primitive and modern mindsets.
They still are. Difference? "Modern" mindsets? The Shaman is always with us, mask or not. Different rattles, different incense. Sometimes robes, sometimes a lab coat.
And with that kind of attitude, you should have no problem understanding psychoanalysis. It appears you have the opposite problem of most people.
I wonder what "most people" have as a problem ... ?
Most people don't understand how certain patterns formed during infancy (eg, oral, anal, sexual) can form the basis of adult behaviour. They also reject that symbols for the umbilical cord (anything "phallic"), the placenta (tree, hydra, maze/labyrinth), and fetus (a baby, but generally anything with big eyes like the Greys) regulate adult emotional life.
Most people don't question the fact that our language uses body parts to refer to motivation (eg, "gut-feeling") and other similarly abstract concepts; colours and sounds don't use body language. And in fact, any "vivid" or "emotive" language is essentially a gruesome collection of body parts (eg. "Bloody hell, we pulled our ass out of that one by the skin of our teeth!"). (Systematically removing all psychoanalytic symbols from your own language is a very instructive exercise. It's very much doable.)
Most people don't question how the Christian deity is literally a giant father figure. Or why power hierarchies and subservience should be allowed to exist either in business, religion, education or the family.
Most people explain things which they recognize as completely screwed up in other cultures in terms of other things which are just as screwed up. Like how you must "show respect" to judges, cops and politicians, or how the scientific community is organized around cult-figures, or how everyone mysteriously falls silent during a presentation (as if they've fallen into some kind of trance, which is usually ritualistically broken by clapping of the hands), or how everyone accepts the impersonal nature of bureaucracy ("just following orders"). There's another example on TheSecretOfPower explained by KrisJohnson.
Most people don't question why certain childhood activities should be centered around the infliction of pain or humiliation, or why adults should dismiss sadomasochistic rituals as "kids being kids". Or that parents should engage in BDSM with their kids (spanking, whipping) with otherwise sane adults never raising an eyebrow.
I'm not sure what the "opposite" of that would be.
Thinking that that is all there is to human beings, that people are slaves to their upbringing and irrational desires, that all humans are similarly irrational, that the human psyche hasn't fundamentally changed in the past few millennia.
Ahhh. That's an interesting conclusion. The data has changed. The environment has changed. The context and expression of hubris has changed, but it has not diminished. The context and methods - and scale - of war have changed, but war is very much still with us. The methods used to obtain knowledge have changed, but there has been no apparent increase in wisdom in the last epoch. And witch doctors still pose as medicine men.
It may be that there is some subtle thing that renders modern man superior to his ancestors. After all, we're thoroughly modern now. We are just so smart. We have imposing edifices of higher learning, imposing edifices of government, and a man on the moon. And Science still doesn't know what a "psyche" is.
Is there some compelling piece of evidence that will show clearly that the "human psyche" has advanced in any significant way?
But of course. Some people don't fit the pattern outlined above. They don't automatically respect authority figures, they consider only themselves the ultimate authority, they do reject hierarchy, they don't enter trance states, they do take responsibility for themselves, they don't beat their children, et cetera. You mention that war is still with us, but Chomsky points out that the US-Iraq war was the first war where protests started before the war even began! We are psychologically superior to our ancestors, and our superior technology is only a comparatively insignificant by-product of that superiority.
I see. This would not seem to say that the majority of people are superior to their ancestors, but rather that some are more enlightened. I think we can agree that most of the population cannot be said to be enlightened.
Inasmuch as there have always the enlightened among us (and always a small proportion of the populace), I don't see that this is compelling. You may see life more clearly than everyone else you know, but I don't see that such individual clarity speaks for all (or most) of Mankind.
The enlightenment of Siddhartha, sadly, did not hail the corresponding enlightement of Mankind - millennia later we have Schickelgruber - and I think we can agree that was not a step forward.
I don't see where the advancement of the "human psyche," broadly applied, is the actual condition. It seems only the trappings have changed.
You claim that "there have always been a small number of enlightened people among us" but this is false. Plato was a pedophile, proud of the Greek tradition of pederasty. When looking upon the past, you are only seeing the trappings of enlightenment; people who claimed at one time or another to have been "enlightened" but certainly meant something very different from what we mean here.
As for the majority of humankind being unenlightened, well that could hardly be otherwise. People in the third-world haven't changed all that much in the past few centuries, when the major psychological changes were occurring in Europe. Even Japan still had an extremely primitive culture until the USA deliberately forced some changes. It's still very primitive psychologically. This will probably change with the newest generation, which is becoming Americanized (this is a GoodThing).
Meanwhile, the USA consists of a few islands of enlightened people in a sea of semi-enlightened and unenlightened people. But 1) even a miniscule fraction of enlightened people is sufficient to alter socio-politics and technology, and 2) the large number of semi-enlightened people is more than enough to fundamentally change society. The USA couldn't be able to exist as it does today without being at least semi-enlightened; it would have blown itself up long ago if it were otherwise.
Western Europe I don't know about, but I suspect it's also semi-enlightened. Northern Europe is different. That's where you can expect to find vast numbers of enlightened people. Spanking is illegal in Finland.
(Do you think we could extract this conversation to another page? I'd like to but I'm not sure since we've already moved to two different subjects.)
Both priests and traders neither sow nor reap, but sell. If there were priests, but no traders, traders would develop. If there were traders but no priests, priests would develop. What difference does it make? What's your point?
Wrong, it is simply false that traders could develop before priests in a primitive society or that priests would develop from traders in an advanced society. That's my point.
MicroSoft have made an incredibly successful religion out of their product. MCSEs are nothing but priests. Try employing an MCSE, you'll soon see. IBM did it before MS, and the same goes for Oracle and DBAs. ClarkesLaw makes this kind of CargoCult inevitable.
Going in the other direction, we need only observe the church's medieval trade in indulgences. These were get-out-of-hell free cards - buy one and go to the orgy or commit the murder without a qualm. The church did a roaring trade in these - they were one of the main reasons MartinLuther split. But if you think that's just history check into your local branch of scientology. Step right up.
An MCSE is not a trader and never was. You've just shown that traders (MS sales force) can retain priests to bless their product. Which isn't what you need to prove, and doesn't come as a surprise.
MS as a whole is the trader in this example. Their sales and engineering forces are carefully integrated elements of a single corporate strategy, and there's no necessary reason to consider them in isolation.
If that argument were valid then there would be no reason to distinguish between any parts of the economy, and we would be forced to look at the entire global economy as a single monobloc. Ludicrous. And by your argument, MSCEs still aren't traders, only MS as a whole is a trader. But that contradicts the definition of 'trader' since a trader is someone who profits from the buying and selling of goods, without adding any value to them other than warehousing and transportation. Engineers acting as engineers by definition cannot be traders.
Also, indulgences remained religious paraphernalia, with no significance except to people who directly acknowledged the spiritual authority of the pope. That's very different from a church developing a trade in lumber or silk. That sort of thing has happened, mind, this is just a bad example.
Products that aren't made from primary resources are somehow not products? How is that?
Because indulgences weren't goods at all. They were a service. One hint to that fact is they were non-transferable.
Priests do not sell, they make it possible for other people to sow and reap. Literally. Priests organize people's hallucinations, delusions, and psychotic desires so they aren't incapacitated by them. Priests are the primitive version of psychologists and psychiatrists, doing psychotherapy (rituals), dealing with multiple personalities (exorcisms) and even prescribing psychoactive drugs when necessary!
MPD is a psychosis - a physical disorder caused by neurotransmitter imbalances. Exorcism does not cure psychosis. As to ergot and mescalin, the only psychotropics generally associated with priests, those things cause psychosis - they don't cure it. If you have the slightest evidence to the contrary, make a page called ReligionCuresPsychosis? and let's see the evidence there. Otherwise, what the heck are you talking about?
The goal of modern therapy with regard to MPD is to fuse the different personalities. The goal of exorcism, is to completely suppress some non-functional personality, leaving one of the better personalities in charge. It's still therapy, it's still treatment, it still affects the patient's ability to function in and cope with the world. It just has a slightly different method.
Incidentally, I've never heard of any cures for psychosis. Treatments, yes but cures, no.
What's the effect of giving mescalin to an already highly psychotic patient?
The idea of priests as hucksters and religion as simply a fairy tale is just a cheap way of avoiding any understanding of its vital function in primitive societies.
Well, on that scale, you may as well point out that civilization isn't cyclic. Loss of priests and traders altogether is a rare thing indeed.
I don't believe civilization is cyclic.
Okay, present a single instance of civilization failing to cycle. The thing either gets up again elsewhere as described above, or it dies out completely, a la RapaNui?.
The point is that, even after a civilization collapses, conditions are still changed from before it developed. How about Greece? Sure, its culture is very different from what it was thousands of years ago, and it has been subjected to various other powers in the mean time, but it would be interesting to hear when it underwent a collapse of the sort you are describing.
The Greek empire benefited from its situation in the Mediterranean to provide considerable independence from farming as a primary source of food. Its colonies in northern Africa, however, were not so fortunate.
Agreed. But I didn't ask about Cyrenaica, I asked about Greece proper. Does it conform to the description above, having undergone a collapse and cycle, or is it a counter-example, or what?
Historically, trading was invented by priests. Priests, whose job it was to organize people's minds, also organized everything else in society. Traders could arise from the priesthood because almost anything can be turned into a religious ritual (the reverse is not true).
Well then here's some more religious rituals turned commercial:
Never mind that, the cult had other doctrines, and nobody has followed it for thousands of years.
So on 3 attempts, you've managed to come up with 1 (one) example of a religious ritual which has turned commercial. Bravo, now you just have the other 999 religious rituals left. Care to show how they have gone commercial in the last millennia? In case you don't understand (and the response I deleted proves you do not) the original claim is that any arbitrary activity can be turned into a ritual. The reverse (by which is meant the converse) of that is that any religious ritual can be turned into a secular activity, which is not true.
But trading in this sense was by no means "selling". Three millennia ago, silver was just a decorative metal frequently used for barter, and not "money" in the modern sense of the word. The trader, an agent of the god-king, exchanged certain goods for other goods according to divinely-mandated exchange rates. The concept of 'profit' would have been beyond them.
How about the ancient Chinese Jue vessel - a healthy capitalist implement, instrumental in the construction of gold brocade, and frequently traded in exchange for power? Or how about Homer, whose gods and heroes are forever striking bargains in exchange for one military product or another? Profit is as natural to mankind as greed and stupidity. Never forget: none of us are terribly bright, and all of us want just one more piece of pie.
Acquiring mystical power, the ability to summon demons, eternal youth, or the power to slaughter thousands at a blow, has nothing to do with profit in any meaningful sense. Power and money are only indirectly related and to many of the right-wing economists who defend capitalism, they are not at all related.
What is profit in a sense meaningful to you? Without your distinction it's impossible to know whether I agree with you or not.
I mean profit in the modern economic sense. That is, as relating to money and wealth. And I said that the concept of profit would have been beyond the ancient priests.
A curious thing I found out today: the first loans to accrue interest didn't appear until nearly the middle of the first millennium BC.
I agree with RK entirely, but step 8 implies the opposite - going back to step 1 would mean the development of priests and traders would have to be repeated. If you're going to take issues with the list, then, that would be the one to take, since it's what the whole concept is based on.
Well, step 8 has actually occurred a number of times, though it was mere hundreds of years instead of hundreds of thousands. It's just that even when it occurs, this cycle isn't the whole picture since the mentality of the people involved is retained past its last step. I also don't think it's that important in the overall scheme of things. But I don't object to the list itself, just its details.
And which watershed came back only hundreds of years after its despoilation by human farming? Name it.
If you count Rome, then you have to admit Europe as something back on its feet within a few hundred years. If you don't, then you have a strange example of a civilization which collapsed according to rules totally different than the above.
There has been considerable desertification of Spain and Portugal, but insufficient time has passed since the clearing of the great European forests last millennium to see any significant exhaustion of arable land in Italy or the rest of Europe. Europe is in many ways similar today to the condition of the Indian sub-continent a millennium ago. Had Europe not industrialized, there seems no reason to doubt it would have followed the cycle described above. Now that Europe is part of a global economy, it will boom and bust along with the rest of us this century.
So the collapse of Rome had nothing to do with agricultural exhaustion. Ok, fine, but in that sense the above stages don't really apply to it, do they? Just what sort of civilizations are you attempting to describe here?
And wars occur because of a priest-king, not until there is one. Before the invention of hierarchical organization, there are only slaughters; not organized slaughters. Organization is what makes organized slaughter possible, the reverse is simply absurd.
War, slaughter, what's the difference? Princes and popes are the inevitable result of TheSecretOfPower. Even if you could somehow avoid one, it would make no difference to the process.
If you don't think there's a difference then you won't mind using the proper word to make everyone else happy, will you? But you'll have difficulty finding a place to put it since slaughter has always existed among humans.
Sure. So what?
Because if you can see war as the natural, but unintentional, by-product of the combination of newly-emerged organization with pre-existing slaughter, then it becomes possible to see war as a good thing. Or at least, as a symptom of a good thing.
And there's a world of difference between a prince and a pope.
Machiavelli, a man who knew a couple of them personally, and also many princes, said of popes:
If you only care about one tiny little aspect of the human experience, say power, then you can make anything look like anything else.
You say Machiavelli, the progenitor of all political science, had a narrow point of view? Never read his Discourses, I suppose?
No, I say that you have a narrow point of view if you think that power is the defining criterion of anything and everything.
See also HowTheMindWorks
That reminds me of Kardashev's "Type I civilization" ... a quick Google leads me to:
Nikolai Kardashev in 1964:
The 4x definition of the stages of civilization:
The large-scale exploration is mostly done, now it is more about filling in the details and finding ways to profit from what's already there than finding new things and expanding the maps.
Expansion of territory would mean taking from another civilization. This used to be glorious, but now it's frowned upon. Instead we seek to expand control internally, influence externally, and wealth in any way possible.
Exploitation of resources hasn't changed much, except that now there are a lot more laws (and protesters) determining what you are and are not allowed to do with your stuff, how you're allowed to do it, and what reports you have to file about it.
As to extermination, it appears that the tempo and scale of destruction is much higher now, but so is the population. If there's a real difference, it probably lies in what happens afterward (and, for that matter, determining when the conflict begins and ends).
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