Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="darkbard" data-source="post: 7396151" data-attributes="member: 1282">And herein is another reason why I mentioned ideology earlier. You seem to buy in to, unexamined, the myth of progress that our global western society tells itself, seeing this not only as obviously true on a grand, sweeping scale but also at the granular level of the individual.I could point you to a hundred works of cultural anthropology that demonstrate the falsehood of your claim. I could point you to Larding the Lean Earth, wherein Steven Stoll recounts the lost farming techniques (lost, I might add, to a nascent chemical agricultural indistry) of eigtheenth and nineteenth century America that are only now being rediscovered by organic farmers. I could point to Against the Grain, wherein James C. Scott discusses the processes of early state formation, including the reduced brain size and adrenal response of domesticated animals, and the parallel reduced fitness of newly sedentary human societies. I could point you to the work Calvin Luther Martin, and Loren Eisley, and so many others have done in the study of paleolithic peoples. I could even cite Socrates's fear (in the Phaedrus) that writing would lead to a decrease in human brain capacity. But first you would have to be open to recognizing the ideology that shapes our thoughts with which we are all programmed in our culture, and be willing to challenge that.Those trained in cultural anthropology (it's not my field, though it connects, in some ways, with my own research interests) could probably direct you to even more precise sources that contradict your claims about the naive, unlettered &quot;savage.&quot;</blockquote>

[QUOTE="darkbard, post: 7396151, member: 1282"] And herein is another reason why I mentioned ideology earlier. You seem to buy in to, unexamined, the myth of progress that our global western society tells itself, seeing this not only as obviously true on a grand, sweeping scale but also at the granular level of the individual. I could point you to a hundred works of cultural anthropology that demonstrate the falsehood of your claim. I could point you to [I]Larding the Lean Earth[/I], wherein Steven Stoll recounts the lost farming techniques (lost, I might add, to a nascent chemical agricultural indistry) of eigtheenth and nineteenth century America that are only now being rediscovered by organic farmers. I could point to [I]Against the Grain[/I], wherein James C. Scott discusses the processes of early state formation, including the reduced brain size and adrenal response of domesticated animals, and the parallel reduced fitness of newly sedentary human societies. I could point you to the work Calvin Luther Martin, and Loren Eisley, and so many others have done in the study of paleolithic peoples. I could even cite Socrates's fear (in the Phaedrus) that writing would lead to a [I]decrease[/I] in human brain capacity. But first you would have to be open to recognizing the ideology that shapes our thoughts with which we are all programmed in our culture, and be willing to challenge that. Those trained in cultural anthropology (it's not my field, though it connects, in some ways, with my own research interests) could probably direct you to even more precise sources that contradict your claims about the naive, unlettered "savage." [/QUOTE]

Verification