Societies each have a common glue that binds them, setting the course of a collection of people. We can identify three things that throughout mankind's history have served as objective truths: 1) Nature - common in the ancient world, fragmented and rare today, 10,000+ year legacy 2) God - replaced Nature, common by the Middle Ages, beginning to fragment today, 2000-year legacy 3) Man - the New World Order that seeks to replace God by settings its adherents to war with one another and thereby become the top priority of modern civilization. Man may become the shortest lived legacy. We do not yet know by examining our history if the cycle loops back around with Nature on top once again. What seems true is that the manner in which we prioritize these three in our society determines our direction as different flavors of civilization. The destructive force behind the conflicts between civilizations has always been the priority differential between these ideals among collections of people. Thus, with three conflicting options available to us, we each pull in different directions or do not move at all.
I contest several of your premises and conclusions as follows: 1. The common glue binding societies is not the spiritual backdrop, but the economic mechanism that affords survival. 2. These spiritual backdrops extend back far further than the 12,000 years you suggest. (10,000+ does not address this. 30,000+, 50,000+ or 100,000+ would be much more defensible.) 3. You have provided no evidence whatsoever to justify the your contention that Nature was seen as the first 'objective truth'. 4. There is a huge difference between perceiving the world as controlled by God and the world as controlled by Gods, or even gods. 5. Frankly, your sentence on the New World Order has a semantic content very close to zero, so that I am unable, even, to describe it as nonsense. 6. You offer no evidence, or even formal deduction, to justify your claim that the character of a civilisation is determined by how these three elements mix. In summary, as presented, your ideas are weak, poorly thought out, inadequately described, wholly unjustified, naively based, and completely lacking any robustness or vigour. Other than that, they were OK.
*blatherings 1 and 4 provide justification blather 3 10,000+ includes your alleged "defensible" ranges.
I disagree. Human beings and social organization existed before economic systems. Social organization has mostly been larger in scale than economic systems. Most especially with today's economic system, everyone in a given society is not pulling in the same direction together. The ancient nomadic tribe all pulled together in reaction to immediate natural needs. People were hungry at the beginning of the day. Everyone engaged in activities directly involved with getting food, whether hunting or foraging. When nature's winter snows would begin, everyone would work together toward the task of migration. This is not some complex economic model at work, it is a commonly shared ideal. The Nature ideal was closest to reality. In the Middle Ages, the Crusades or the Muslim invasions give us an example of everyone from a given society coming together for their God in common cause. Economic systems compete, divide and displace as often as unite. Economics is as much solvent as glue within a given society and again, such a system is not quite as old as social organization or man. Today, the global social organizations with the most power in our age put Man at the center of all things. Human rights, equality, dignity and so on are central ideals. The United Nations charter is founded on the principle of Man as central ideal. Little room is given to the Old World's God, which for all practical purposes is fantasy, or for Nature and natural systems, without which, mankind could not possibly have come into being. The Man-as-central ideal is about as defective as the declining God-as-central ideal, because it is another form of reality denial. Hehe, thanks.
I want to respond more fully when I have the time, but briefly I think I am using economic in a broader sense than you. I am not requiring that money be in use as a medium of exchange in order for an economy to exist. The division of labour and sharing of the resources in a primitive tribal environment takes place according to some of the principles of economics. More later. Glad you recognised in my last paragraph, my tongue was in my cheek, not up your ass.
Replace "common glue that binds them" with "ideal like a gravity well that pulls them". That appears to be the source of confusion.
what what? ideal? gravity well? the confusion expands our particular gravity well is the surface of earth quite real hardly idealistic we bind by standing around?
You are almost certainly mistaken. Chimpanzees, who have a social structure with many similarities to the human social structure, spend a great deal of time grooming. This is done both to maintain a healthy fur/skin, but also to develop and sustain relationships. It has been established that they keep a mental tally of who they owe grooming favours to, and who owes them grooming time. Chimps who try to get more than their fair share of grooming are in danger of being cold shouldered. This mental tally is an economic entity, placing value on grooming. Similar arrangements are thought to exist amongst the others apes and monkeys. It is difficult to imagine man would be the only primate who had not followed a similar pattern. Thus economics have been bound up in the development of human culture and social interaction from the beginning.
The mere thought that man is at the centre of all things is enough to make me reach for the cyanide. However one whiff of the evidence provided by nature gives assurance that this, if ever it were true, will be a relatively short lived affair.
Birds engage in this, or similar behaviour as well. This is a survival methodology serving evolution, although you may call it an economic system like one may call the act of walking "transportation". Methods flow toward goals. The flow exists because of an immanent ideal, often memes for human societies, observed behaviour for animals, experience for all higher organisms (those possessing a spine). Our immanent and corrupt ideal right now is Man, meaning Self, or Ego before all other considerations.
