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Do you have anything to read more about this?

by qnsi 7y ago

vinceguidry 7y ago
I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    I 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 ago
        A 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.

Do you have anything to read more about this?

by qnsi 7y ago

Do you have anything to read more about this?

I 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 ago
The 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 ago
  I 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 ago
      A 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.