The bright side of slavery

At long last, my answer to the following question posed by Discreet:



much to my discomfort and reluctance, i now agree with this, which is to say, i share this opinion. however, this is not to say "anything goes." there's no known culture that has no rules of behavior. cultures that did not survive long enough to be studied, nor created artifacts that can be studied, may have had no rules whatsoever, but i'm basing my opinion on empirical data. it also seems highly likely to me that any culture that even lacked rules to guarantee its own survival would vanish without a trace.

while it's true that all known cultures have rules, it's not known what rules are universally shared among them. but murder, in the sense of unjustified homicide, is probably universally prohibited. note that killing itself has been allowed in many different circumstances, such as war, punishment, self-defense, and even religious ritual, but killing another member of one's society for no good reason is disallowed. the prohibition of incest is almost universal, except for ancient Egypt, where Pharoahs did wed their sisters, but the extent to which incest occured in the general population is in dispute.

in general, any action that so disrupts society as to threaten its existence, such as murder and incest, will be culturally prohibited, because any culture that fails to do so will not endure for long. finally, as a practical matter, some form of the golden rule is probably observed in every culture, but i do not know if it's always explicitly stated or codified, because common sense suffices to realize that if you keep screwing everyone else, you will become an outcast.

i wish i had more time to research this question. to cover it adequately requires at least a term paper, if not a monograph, but i've devoted to it all the time i have at the moment. i want to reiterate that i'm only expressing an opinion; being agnostic, i cannot rule out the possibility that God's word is the source of an absolute code of morality, and i'm hopeful that other agnostics or atheists will point out errors in my reasoning, and refute my acquiescence to relativism.

Reading an interesting (occasionally crackpot, but interesting) book* right now addressing this stuff. Lots of talk of "conformity enforcers" and "diversity generators" in dynamic systems, from bacterial colonies to human society. Problem with the conformity enforcers, seems to me, is that they aren't founded on rational decisions. So you've got those folks -- most of society, in fact -- who insure that nothing deviates too far from the norm. Problem is, this doesn't just apply to murderous behavior, but to just about everything. It'd be nice to cut through stuff that is verboten/required simply because of societal inertia, and that which is verboten/required for a durn good reason.



* Conformity, Diversity, and the Global Brain: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century


(tempted to delete this post for lack of real content. i apologize that i am not doing so...)

It'd be great.

Since I think one of those social inertia things that are in the process of finally being cut is blanket opposition to homosexuality, I find Discreet's positions on these two threads to be... contradictory.

Patiodoggie, the durn good reason for cultural (societal) codes of behavior usually, at its most fundamental level, is the survival of the culture (society). Remove too many cultural restrictions and a society changes and becomes a different entity altogether. Loss of language is the most obvious determinant (when a group adopts the language of another group into which it is absorbed, it ceases to exist as a separate group), but there are others.

Today there are still Aztecs and Maya in Mexico, i.e. the genetic pattern, the DNA, has been passed on. But they now speak mostly Spanish (some exceptions with the Maya), have become Christians and no longer offer human sacrifices. Eergo, they no longer exist as a culture, a separate society.

The maintenance of ancient customs, meaningless to today's practicioners of those customs, is a self-defense mechanism for preserving the society as a distinct culture.

A-yup, couldn't agree more. It's an interesting time to watch these opposing forces in action, though -- as information, technology, and goods flow with increasing rapidity between cultures, which have, as you note, evolved precisely to withstand such external influence.

Historically, it's been very difficult for cultures to pick and choose what they adopt from the outside. As the plow and the horse and cereal grains (not necessarily in that order) spread across the Eurasian latitudinal axis, language and culture spread with it. This used to be interpreted as the rapid spread of conquering peoples. Genetic analysis, though, has shown that this was not the case. Culture spread faster and farther than did genes. It's hard to imagine that people said, "Hey! What a great language! What a great religion!" and made the switch. More likely, the changes were part and parcel with trading with and adopting the technologies of other cultures.


(I'm talking out my arse here, but it beats researching biomass energy, I kin tell ya that...)

(I'm talking out my arse here, but it beats researching biomass energy, I kin tell ya that...)

Most anything does.

Religious rights everywhere understand all of this very well, I think -- that you can't really pick and choose what to accept from the outside.

Saw a case study of this a couple of years ago. A Christian Scientist who worked with my wife very nearly died -- and lost a year of work and wages -- from an easily treatable tooth abcess. (The great irony was that she worked at a dental school...) Now, when Christian Science was founded, there was some reason to be leery of doctors. Things have changed a bit since then, though, and now a trip to a medical professional is more likely to help than hurt you. Her refusal to be treated was not for her own benefit, but for the benefit of her creed -- which is threatened every time some aspect of its authority is challenged.

just what i need right now, another book to read.

sozobe: vis-a-vis homosexuality, in agrarian societies, large families are the norm, because children assist in farm work, and even in industrial societies, children were put to work. but in post-industrial society, like the US, the premium is on knowledge, which children lack. hence, women tend to stay in the workforce and postpone childbirth, because society now values their contribution as workers as much as, or more than, as homemakers. and with less emphasis, or even disapproval of large families--mainland China is just the most extreme example of this--it stands to reason that homosexual lifestyles become more tolerated, especially since it seems to be associated with artistic temperaments. if anyone thinks that's farfetched, consider that mass entertainment, i.e. movies, books, and music, is one of the US's biggest exports.

I ain't recommending the book. I find that things that interest me bore most people to tears -- and vice versa.

there's one important question i haven't addressed yet, because it complicates things. what happens when 2 cultures come into contact? i see 3 possibilities: they co-exist, separate but equal; they merge, perhaps through negotiated exchanges of values; or one suppresses the other. it's the third case that troubles me, a cultural survival-of-the-fittest scenario, because i value cultural diversity, but at least it's not the same as social-darwinism, which tries to explain class differences within a society on a racial basis, not domination of one culture over another.

EDIT: another complicating factor is that moral codes are only universal within a culture, and thus not necessarily applied across cultures. for example, while the US practiced slavery, it was limited to people of African origin, ie. people of another culture. until there is an universally accepted enumeration of human rights, cross-cultural conflict seems inevitable to me.

One thing that resulted from the selection process of salvery was only the strongest survived and the best of the race has thrived to be a collection of formidable atheletes.There music and style of dress have slowly been accepted into main stream culture and the brotherhood of the people has roots to ancient working models of clan community.

I would like to note that some cultures were very adaptive, and this was their salvation. Others were rigidly bound to a self-image, and this stifled their spread. The most obvious, glaring really, example would be to compare the Roman Empire to the Chinese Empire. When the early Romans could not effectively deal with Tuscan cavalry, they created their own mounted forces, not very extensive, and largely used for scouting--but they required their hegemonic tribal allies, the Hernicans and the Latins, to provide substantial mounted forces. When their outward expansion brought them into collision with the Cartheginians, and they were humiliated at sea, they created a navy, and they got the best naval advice available from the Greek colonists of southern Italy and in Scicily. Whenever they encountered any novel military method in an enemy, and the enemy was once defeated, they incorporated it into their military system through the careful and targeted use of auxiliaries. When large Keltic or Germanic tribes migrated into areas claimed by the Republic, they co-opted them by federating them. The Goths had migrated to central Asia, and adopted the use of the horse. They learned this from horse archers, but they used the horse as heavy cavalry, using their customary heavy spears while mounted. Confronted by the Goths, the Romans co-opted them with federation, and then adopted heavy cavalry into their military.

The empire in the east survived for more than a thousand years after Rome was sacked by Alaric because it was adaptive in an even greater degree. The very competent Roman application of rote system was married to the Greeks couriosity, investigative obsession and attention to detail to create a very flexible society and polity which could survive major disasters. The Bulgars under their "King" Krum defeated the Byzantine Army, and killed the Emperor Nikephoros I. The imperial bureaucracy, staffed with well-educated Greeks, continued to function, and daily life went unchanged for the vast majority of citizens, while Staurakios attempted to seize the empire in a coup, and was then driven off his shakey throne by Michael I Rhangabé.

Flavius Justinianus, known to history as Justinian the Great, gave the empire a legal code, built around Roman practices of jurisprudence which had developed over a millenium, and wedded to the local codes of the Greeks, of Anatolia and Armenia--that code spawned the legal codes of so many nations, a great many of which had never considered the establishment of a legal code before encountering the empire.

By contrast, China's Imperial dynasties, largely through the influence of the Mandarins (lots of stuff i won't go into about the Chinese having Mandarins, but no priesthood--one might allege that bureaucracy became the state religion), settled into a pattern repeated again and again. The founders of a dynasty would be militarily competent and active, and when faced with the horse barbarians of the Gansu Corridor and of the Ordos Desert, they would negotiate, trade and make alliances. But gradually, the precedential prescripts of the Mandarins would gain the upper hand, and the members of the dynastic clan would become increasingly sinicized, and begin more and more to resemble whatever corrupt clan they had replaced. Trade with the "barbarians" would be reduced to a ritualize annual exchange of tribute. Eventually, the Mandarins would suceed in gaining complete control over policy, all contact with the barbarians would be curtailed, and walls would be built to thwart the invasion which would inevitably come when the tribes of the steppes could no longer acquire the productions of China for which they had previously traded.

The Chinese military, although excellent in many regards, never adopted outside techniques and equipment. The Chinese invented the crossbow nearly three thousand years ago, but they never advanced beyond perfecting that weapon. The brief Yuan dynasty of the Mongols was effective because, like all new dynasties, their military methods were superior to the Chinese, and when the two combined, their forces were often irresistable.

But China was "the middle kingdom," which is not a geographical statement, but rather an allegation that China existed between heaven (a rather vaguely conceived place) and the earth, an outer howling darkness of base savagery, beneath the contempt and even the notice of the Empire. Occassional bursts of inventiveness and exploration were exceptions which proved the rule; after each instance, further exploration, further industrial development, further overseas trade were prohibited. The Chinese invented gun powder, and used it for fireworks displays or rockets to frighten ignorant tribesmen--the Europeans used it to create firearms and artillery. The Chinese invented a reliable clock (huge and water powered) and it sat in a corner of the Forbidden City, unused, un-maintained and forgotten--the Europeans used clocks to organize their lives, to create the concept of an appointment, and at the pinacle, to improve navigation into an exact science. The Chinese invented moveable type, and made no effort to create a literate populations--the Europeans got their hands on moveable type and the communications age was born; with Gutenburgs bible in print, the comfortable middle classes of Germany could create their own theology, and following Luther's lead, create a host of sects which spread outwards into the world to labor and create their "shining cities on the hill" in the wildernesses of theretofore unknown continents. Each great inovation of the Chinese was forgotten by them, or even prohibited, unless the usefulness of something were too obvious to ignore, and then their characters were frozen in time forever--their magnificent bronzes, their delicate pottery, their beautiful paintings--these cultural expressions remained unchanged, saw no development, no ramification, for millenia.

I believe that the Romans unknowingly bequeathed a legacy of adaptability to the Europeans, and that this alone explains how they used marginal advantages to virtually conquer the planet. China, on the other hand, turned inward, and denied the greater world around it.

Early cities in the Middle East/Mediterranean (like Catal Hyuk, in what is now Turkey) and more recent cities in Subsaharan Africa have had some success in the "separate-but-equal" arena. (Dunno about elsewhere.) Different economic specializations were often tied up with different subcultures within the city -- subcultures that had their own customs, manners of dress, and possibly even their own dialects. It's not at all dissimilar to the presence of guilds in Medieval cities or the (in)famous caste system in India. Naturally, some groups wielded more power than others, though the balance of power may have shifted, depending on the particular needs of the group at the time; the group more able to deal with a particular crisis rose in esteem and power. An obvious exception to this was the clerical aristocracy, which apparently lived quite well in Catal Hyuk while leaving no traces of having produced any sort of tangible good.

Of course, in the context of this thread, they would have been the guardians of culture, which may have had some real benefit in protecting the values of the resident Anatolians against outsiders.





Random side note: much of the art in Catal Hyuk is obsessed with female genitalia and the power of the bull -- lots of spread legs and bull's horns juxtaposed. Over in what is now Crete, the Minoans shared a lot of cultural links over time and space with the same folks who built Catal Hyuk. The were also obsessed with the bull. There was virtually no portrayal of female genitalia in Minoan art, however. They covered up the lower half of the woman and made prominent displays of the breast. Where fetishized female figures in Catal Hyuk were supine and receptive (at least when bulls were around), the ideal Minoan woman sat or stood upright, her loins covered, and her breasts sticking out. Perhaps just one way in which the Minoans distinguished their culture from that of the Anatolian plains...

Setanta's info is jibing very well with my recent toilet-reading...



Thales (about whom I know very little) comes to mind...



Central premise in this odd li'l book is the centrality of trade to survival -- of individuals, of families, of clans, and of entire societies. (And of bacterial colonies, for what it's worth.) The contention is that cultural constructs that don't encourage lots of trading -- even apparently pointless ritualistic trading, like the knick-knacks passed around by Trobriand islanders -- are selected against.



An "error" repeated in the 15th century, when a Chinese fleet eminently capable of reaching the Americas turned back as they sailed down the east African coast because of a renewed interest in matters at home (read: isolationist policies). Huge historical implications there...



Lemme know if these posts endanger the thread....

Screw the thread, i'm takin' over . . .

You could get a cozy berth as Preator of this thread, doggie, if you play your cards right.

An excellent book is Lynn Pan's Sons of the Yellow Emperor, about the Chinese diaspora. The yellow emperor refers to Huang Ti (don't bust my spelling, i'm clueless about how to romanize Chinese names), who founded the first real Chinese Empire in 221 BCE.

you're entirely welcome to my portion of the thread, whatever that may be. i'd be relieved to go back to trivialities like metaphysics and neverending word games.

but a farewell comment, b4 i leave. the desired outcome of culture clashes, to me, is syncretism--ironic that the RC Church thrived on it for centuries, only to undergo an apparent hardliner backlash at the present time. the least desirable--to me--outcome goes by the name of cultural imperialism. the US is stereotypically portrayed as culturally imperialist in many places around the world, i believe, and it's unfortunate because it ignores the melting-pot/salad-bowl pluralism of US society. of course, if the religious right has its way, the rest of the world will find out what real cultural imperialism is like.

Discreet,
I respect your curious nature, and your nerve in asking the question. You simply are lacking in knowledge, and perception of what occured. As are many poeple, black and white.
There is no good side to slavery. We made our situation better by comming out from under a a completly evil, and reprehensable system, with the help of many white allies.

Booman!? Welcome back after your brief absence of what, two years, or thereabouts

I read a good article on EVOLUTIONARY PYSCH


Check it out:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB111472626574220079-IhjgYNglaB4nJ2obX2Ib66Fm4,00.html