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The nice thing about civilization is that it's built on failure. One of the things that blew my mind recently is that at one point in the distant past, before a
by vinceguidry 7y ago
The nice thing about civilization is that it's built on failure. One of the things that blew my mind recently is that at one point in the distant past, before ancient Greece and even Egypt, there was a global society that all shared very similar ideas regarding religion.
That society fell apart collectively resulting in the sort of gang world that you're describing. Out of those ashes emerged individual city-states, which then aggregated using the tool of conquest into empire, which got big then fell apart forming the current status quo of nation-states, which technology, sophisticated forms of organization, and plain geopolitical luck allowed some nations to leapfrog the rest.
There really does seem to be some kind of collective human wisdom regarding societal organization. If there wasn't, then we'd oscillate back and forth between two kinds of social organization, likely war bands and empire. We'd reach a point at which no innovation could move the needle and that would be the end of progress.
- qnsi 7y agoDo you have anything to read more about this?
- vinceguidry 7y agoI really wish I did. This came from an interaction with a Quora user I highly respect. At some point I'm going to be motivated to research this more. I can say that the context of the discussion was an assertion that I made that the Egypt-Greece-Hebrew civilization is what collectively invented the idea of good and evil. He corrected me saying that it was a major feature of this collective civilization. Just now I tried going through Wikipedia, and I'm fairly certain what he was referring to is generally called Neolithic civilization. It was much more sophisticated than is commonly understood.
- groby_b 7y agoThe idea that there was a uniform neolithic culture is... well... sailing against established knowledge. I'd really like to see a citation or two. Especially since Neolithic civilization spans ~6K years, and appears at very different times in different regions, with cultural artifacts appearing in different order. As for "good and evil", evidence so far says it probably started with Zoroastrianism, which is really at the tail end of the neolithic. Your Quora user either has access to not commonly available research or is misremembering.
- vinceguidry 7y agoI never said it was uniform. Just that it looked the same all over the world. The same sorts of religions, the same kinds of political structures. It shouldn't be that weird to contemplate. All agrarian empires looked roughly the same. This is because humans have roughly the same capabilities, the math is really hard to overcome to produce something different. It takes the collective weight of thousands of years to specialize so that one civ can leapfrog another. RE: good and evil, his specific point was that societies were organized around the broad principles of a grand fight of one set of deities imbued with good traits fighting against another set of deities working against the good ones. Zoroastrianism is notable not because it invented good and evil, but because it was the first stab towards monotheism.
- groby_b 7y ago"there was a global society that all shared very similar ideas regarding religion." That's very different from "over a span of 6K years, there were a bunch of local societies at different times and places that all looked somewhat similar"
- vinceguidry 7y agoA difference in degree, not of kind. The societies probably informed each other through trade. Horses were domesticated around this time and were used as pack animals even if they weren't yet being ridden. Aristocracies would have traded ideas along with goods. Advances in governing might have communicated themselves across the whole globe in a few hundred years, maybe even shorter. This is a blink of an eye on the historical time frame. We really shouldn't underestimate the capabilities of Neolithic peoples.
- dustingetz 7y agoI thought Egypt was the beginning of development, and only then because the seasonal flooding of the Nile forced farmers to cooperate.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoUh, are you unfamiliar with the Fertile Crescent ?
- KineticLensman 7y ago> at one point in the distant past, before ancient Greece and even Egypt, there was a global society that all shared very similar ideas regarding religion Do you mean a single global human culture? We don't even know whether religion came before agriculture or the other way round. Citation really needed here.
- twirlip 7y agoExcavations at Göbekli Tepe indicate that religion may have predated agriculture, perhaps dating back to the end of the Pleistocene. If a neurological basis for religion exists, such structures would hint at an evolutionary selection which made religion advantageous for survival. I don't know anything about a single founding culture, but reading about Indo-European root words fires up one's imagination.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoIf a neurological basis for religion exists, shouldn't religion date at least as far back as modern humans, ~300kY ago ?
- dragonwriter 7y agoNo, among other errors this assumes that anatomically modern humans are equivalent to neurologically modern humans, which is unsupported supposition.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoBut they are, since neurology is part of anatomy ?
- dragonwriter 7y ago“anatomically modern” refers to gross anatomy as evidenced in the fossil record.