Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? | 150 comments (150 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 6)

oh dear, this exchange seems to be becoming acrimonious.

and I do think M is being a bit slippery as well :-)

having said Please point me to a culture without a parasitical elite and grotesque displays of status. -- when it is common knowledge, surely, that many such cultures have existed and some are still hanging on by their fingernails -- does seem to me to suggest that these cultures are somehow being defined out of the category "culture." otherwise it would be no challenge at all, since any quick survey of ethnography or field anthropology would reveal the wealth of literature (and the longstanding academic and political squabbles) over the world's non-imperialistic (aka indigenous) cultures. not all of which are cultures of abundance, btw. but all are cultures of reciprocity, gift exchange, and other "sharing" mechanisms rather than hoarding and hierarchical control. and the way the challenge is phrased seems to indicate either an unfamiliarity with the literature which I didn't find credible in someone as widely literate as M, or a disinclination to view these people as "real" cultures.

I don't think I ever said that a division of labour would inevitably lead to authoritarian hierarchy, or that skilled craftspersons were the same thing as parasitical elites. we seem to be talking past each other, somehow. I do believe it is possible for the town to be symbiotic with the rural bioregion; but not when it becomes the traditional imperial core, importing negentropy and exporting entropy.

The only way you are going to avoid division of labour and specialisation is by reducing all communities to the size of a family, all economic activity to subsistence, and by suppressing trade certainly seems to me to imply that early (subsistence horticulturalists, nonimperialist, kingroup organised, more generalist than specialised) humans did not engage in trade -- and since this is a common misconception (certainly one that I was taught in school: that first nations people lived in isolated bands with no communication, no long range commerce, and no knowledge of a larger world) I felt compelled to refute it.

It also assumes that I wish to abolish specialisation, which (again) is not a goal I ever intentionally advocated. It also seems prima facie to assume the nuclear family (a recent invention) as the earliest unit of human survival, when the tribe, kingroup, band or village has afaik historic primacy.

There isn't really any contradiction between subsistence farming (meaning that one can subsist, i.e. survive independently by one's own efforts) and trade; surpluses can always be traded -- without losing autonomy. That's been going on for millennia. Some of the Peruvian highland cultures had a whole separate caste of persons whose specialised function was to trade surplus and luxury goods with neighbouring polities; but that trade and its currency were kept strictly and absolutely isolated from the subsistence economy necessary to ensure food security... What kingship/empire/hierarchy/colonialism introduces seems to be labour without food security, with elites controlling not only surpluses but all production; whoever controls the food supply controls our lives, which explains a lot about ADM and Monsanto...

anyway, the day job requires my mental presence so I can't dig as deeply into this wrangle at present as I might like. I note in passing that crosscultural studies are very subversive of established order; every regime has a burning need to naturalise its own features -- be that the regime of male supremacy, white supremacy, the supremacy of city dwellers over peasants, the supremacy of my religion over yours, my empire over your colony... which means that assertions about "human nature" and about history bear very closely on the foundations of our ideologies. the book Threatening Anthropology is very interesting on this topic. what we believe is "natural" conditions and limits what we believe is possible; enlarging our notion of what is possible is directly threatening to elites who (for good reason!) want us to believe that things either have always been just as they are now, or are getting better and better every day.

in fact one of the troubling questions that engage our attention today is somewhat similar to the old election-year rhetoric: "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?"... are we better off than we were 10,000 years ago?

certainly many of us are wondering whether our (putative) grandchildren have any hope of being other than far, far worse off than we ourselves... which again brings us back to a crisis of confidence in the narrative of Progress and Civilisation... are we "progressing" and if so, towards what? did we take a wrong turn some millennia back? are our (mostly male) elites stereotypically unwilling to ask for directions or consult a map?

I have already read (and liked) the major works of Jane Jacobs, -- perhaps the most fluent, passionate, and inspiring defender of cities -- and have a few years invested in the literature of "Livable Cities" and similar optimistic attempts to render the industrial civitas sustainable. perhaps M would do me the reciprocal courtesy of reading Hornborg (Power of the Machine), Bookchin (Ecology of Freedom), or even the recent Declaration from the 2006 conference on Food Sovereignty... for a glimpse of another -- lateral or tangential rather than diametrically oppositional -- PoV on the relation of city and country, farmed and "wild" land, commerce and non-market economies, which I find it hard to represent adequately in brief comment form?

as to finance capitalism being a side effect of imperial growth, I suspect it's both -- an outcome and a rationalisation. certainly people who wax misty-eyed over the "birth of freedom" and entrepreneurial ineguity and capital investment in Euroland tend to glide tactfully over the enormous influx of gold and silver looted by main force and exterminist policy from the New World, and the essential role of slave labour in enabling the profit margins and the resource stripping that fuelled the nascent industrial age.

As Peter Linebaugh points out in a scathing review of the recent movie 'Amazing Grace'

What passes for 'the civilization of the west', to use the traditional but absurd phrase, is the direct result of the unpaid labors of millions of African proletarians, a fact so fundamental that it is the beginning of all modern history as Franz Fanon taught us long ago, and hence of our understanding of the world. The movie reduces this fact to the sugar cube. However, this historical premise of modernity applied to all European wealth and treasure because wealth in one form quickly turned to other forms by the alchemy of trade and money. Thus that sugar and rum, that tobacco and coffee, the staple products of the slave's labor on plantations, was transmuted into the infrastructure - the bricks and mortar, the bridges and roads, the ports and factories of the industrial revolution, and these in turn were represented by stocks and bonds, by paper and debentures, and the chits of the gambling table.
The movie shows us the young William Wilberforce gambling against the Duke of Clarence, a royal pipsqueak, who runs out of cash and must play by the rules of the club which say that, even if at a loss for money, he may wager any other possession he might have with him. "Bring me my nigger," he commands. The illusion of the entire social system shatters at this point as the Afro-British coachman enters to be traded at the gaming table of White's (one of the exclusive clubs of Pall Mall). Wilberforce in shocked naiveté concedes his hand and withdraws in a huff. Where did he think money came from? The trees?

I suppose our squabble here could be reduced to a cartoon version:

D: show me a city and a 'civilised' lifeway that is/was not founded on slavery, immiseration, and theft.

M: slavery, immiseration, and theft we have always with us: we may as well get the benefits of urban culture out of them!

as an unregenerate Leftist (and one semi-literate in the outer layers anthro and paleo and ethno cross-cultural studies) I reject the naturalisation of hiearchy, elite accumulation, etc. I'm not sure where this leaves us... though if we accept that dominance/hierarchy cultures are an automatic response to scarcity (not supported by the literature, but let's entertain the idea), the future looks grim: the imperial model embodied in capitalism exhausts resources at an accelerating pace, thus creating artificial scarcity and intensifying the preconditions for imperial/hierarchical strategy. sounds like a positive feedback loop to me :-(

I think this whole wrangle is connected to the topic that Nomad and I touched on weeks ago and meant to get back to one day -- how much of our present "industrial civilisation" can we hope to preserve, if we accept the goal of living within our planetary means as a worthier one than exterminating (whether by MIHOP or LIHOP) bios of people so that we can keep up the Growth Myth a while longer? I think I'm coming around to the idea that we can't afford cities -- by which I mean large imperial energy-sink cities with monumental architecture, etc. at the heart of Jacobs' and Bookchin's (and many other people's) inquiry right now are questions of scale and limits. what "civilised" lifestyle is possible without (a) cheap fossil fuel and (b) slavery, expropriation, genocide, etc.?

Some people point to the fact that there are more human beings alive today than ever before, and this means Success, and should be credited to Civilisation, Progress, and Capitalism. OTOH in terms of absolute numbers, more human beings than ever before are living with fear, hunger, thirst, lack of shelter, fear of arbitrary violence, etc. -- and those who are not, are largely enjoying that privilege at the direct expense of those who are. And even those in the affluent West don't seem to be particularly happy, if we use antidepressant sales, murder and suicide rates, and self-reporting in response to public surveys as rough indicators. Capitalism understands Growth as in Quantity, but is curiously mute on Quality... and now I've worked my way back to Pirsig (!) and it's time to stop this and get some "real [meaningless technocratic] work" done...

I am sorry to quarrel with Migeru; no personal animus is intended in my ramblings. I'm coming into contact with new ideas, or deeper readings of ideas I've met before, and struggling myself with these questions -- becoming very urgent in our time -- of whether my own urbanised/industrial lifeway can be rationalised (I fear it cannot) and what I can do about that. and where we are going and why we are in this handbasket :-(

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 05:11:07 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 4)

the supremacy of city dwellers over peasants

I happen to prefer city dwelling to rural dwelling. Some people prefer the reverse. But the problem with your analysis is that you are hosting up rural dwelling food producers as somehow superior to everybody else. Even more, you posit a pre modern agrarian lifestyle as a 'natural one'. That makes no more sense than calling my home a 'natural' society. Your understanding of 'nature' and 'natural' are just a variant on old Enlightenment constructs, no more, and no less, than the concept of 'Progress' that you deride.

But all societies are a question of values and technology - they are human creations. That's true of the Native American hunter gatherers, that's true of Native American small scale agricultural communities, and that's true of the serf and nobiligy society of eighteenth century Poland, the industrial urban one of the turn of the century Ruhr, and the service one of modern day NYC.

The technology imposes constraints - a society where you need one hundred people to produce enough food for one hundred and twenty has less options available than the one where that same hundred can feed one thousand.

Those choices can be good or bad, and what is good and bad is a question of values as well - i.e. not natural, but a social construct. We can build pyramids to our rulers, have more leisure, construct cathedrals and temples to the glory of our gods, mass armies, provide health care, build McMansions, provide education and running water, fashionable clothing, research history, produce sitcoms - all choices.

Within your commentary you amalgate the question of one important constraint - energy in a future without large scale use of fossil fuels, and that of what constitute good choices within those constraints. But they are two completely different matters.

by MarekNYC on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 05:54:14 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 2)

I happen to prefer city dwelling to rural dwelling. Some people prefer the reverse. But the problem with your analysis is that you are hosting up rural dwelling food producers as somehow superior to everybody else. Even more, you posit a pre modern agrarian lifestyle as a 'natural one'. That makes no more sense than calling my home a 'natural' society. Your understanding of 'nature' and 'natural' are just a variant on old Enlightenment constructs, no more, and no less, than the concept of 'Progress' that you deride.

De Anander's comments in this thread actually reminded me of a the literary genre "contempt of court and praise of village" [Spanish: "menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea"] which was very popular among the courtier elite in the late Renaissance, and which involved looking back on the mythical Arcadia and romanticising rural life (sometimes they even dressed up as peasants and went to frolic in the fields while the real peasants toiled).

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 06:14:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 3)

ah, the good ol' "latte liberal" meme?

my family goes back on both sides to peasant and yeoman farmers and fishers, sorry, no courtiers (at least not with paternity acknowledged). the closest we get to aristocracy is a Thane, a kind or rural Big Man or squire, way way back on the paternal side. the other side is "peasants all the way down." I suppose family history (oral and written) may explain some of my political thought processes and sympathies.

somehow the experiments I've done in sustainable living -- like using a manual composting loo for 18 months, living without a car, conserving water and heating gas, vegetable gardening, eating local food in season etc -- don't strike me as quite equivalent to dressing up in shepherd costume and frolicking at the Petit Trianon or the Spanish equivalent :-) but ymmv.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 07:48:21 PM EST
[ Parent ]

ah, the good ol' "latte liberal" meme? (none / 0)

said one latte liberal to another latte liberal.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 04:27:02 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 3)

I just grepped carefully through my posts on this thread and find that I never used the words nature or natural except when criticising the attempts of elites to naturalise their privileges. (sigh) I wish folks would argue with what I actually typed, but that is a common complaint :-) and according to Migeru I am not always arguing with what he actually types either...

FTR I make no claims of more or less "natural" standing for human cultures. [we can play semantic games with the word "natural" until it's perfectly "natural" to destroy the temperate climatic balance or to wage nuclear war -- so fuhgeddaboudit.] my questions are about more or less happiness, more or less freedom, more and less egalitarian sharing of resources, more or less potential longevity for human social organisations, more or less violence, slavery, authoritarianism, control, torture, etc.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 07:54:49 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 2)

I just grepped carefully through my posts on this thread and find that I never used the words nature or natural except when criticising the attempts of elites to naturalise their privileges.[...]my questions are about more or less happiness, more or less freedom, more and less egalitarian sharing of resources, more or less potential longevity for human social organisations, more or less violence, slavery, authoritarianism, control, torture, etc.

for the historical dynamic of "civilisation". i.e. a new pseudorational ideology that justifies/perpetuates the regime of accumulation and the core/periphery dynamic needed to support a parasitical and idle elite, monumental construction, massive resource hoarding and concentration, grotesque displays of status and the other markers which we recognise as indicating "high" culture.

Some of the Peruvian highland cultures had a whole separate caste of persons whose specialised function was to trade surplus and luxury goods with neighbouring polities; but that trade and its currency were kept strictly and absolutely isolated from the subsistence economy necessary to ensure food security... What kingship/empire/hierarchy/colonialism introduces seems to be labour without food security, with elites controlling not only surpluses but all production; whoever controls the food supply controls our lives, which explains a lot about ADM and Monsanto...

btw, can we observe a distinction of terminology between agriculture, the tradition of the ploughed field and the (varying degrees of) monocrop, vs horticulture or permaculture, both of which were practised with high sophistication by many non-imperial type people?

There are value judgements throughout that imply the 'noble savage' vision of the world. No, you wouldn't put in those words, vocabularies change, but that's what it amounts to. For you the society where people have to work in the capitalistic economy or starve equals slavery - even those with redistribution that actually makes the choices less stark. On the other hand where you have to work as a food producer in a non-capitalistic agrarian economy - that's a laudable society. City dwellers providing goods and services are 'parasitical' upon the resource producing 'periphery'. The agriculture of the 'ploughed field' is imperialist and bad, 'horticulture' and 'permaculture' practiced by 'non imperialist' cultures, good. Small kinship based communities good, large political units bad. Non-indigenous 'imperialist' cultures vs. non-imperialist indigenous ones.

If it weren't for those type of value judgements I could read you as just an extreme pessimist, but they are there.

by MarekNYC on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:49:44 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 3)

first off, I don't refer to indigenous people as "savages," and secondly, I don't regard gift economies or similar reciprocal networks as "noble" (implying some kind of moral superiority or conscious, righteous refraining from the temptations of bad behaviour). the question is, are they practical and what problems do they solve? what I ask myself is how long those cultures endured in their biomes, how healthy the people were, how much or little coercion and control they experienced in daily life; and some of these answers are accessible from field anthropology, journals of first contact, or living memory. those answers do not support a Hobbesian view of preindustrial life.

being "made to work as a food producer in a non-capitalistic agrarian economy" is not, in fact, anyone's idea of a good time -- nor did I ever suggest it was. monocropping and field agriculture do seem to be correlated historically with corvee labour (for both irrigation and monocrop cultivation), taxation, tribute, and control of [usually hard wheat] grain stores by a kind of evolving priest/king caste. this type of field labour is not an "alternative" to city life -- it's the original basis of city life. I don't see what is unreasonable about preferring the type of agriculture practised by some N Am indigenes, i.e. "food forest" tending and dense polyculture. it's a lot less backbreaking labour and it doesn't impoverish the soil, and provides a more varied diet. it's also quite adequate (modern experiments confirm the extremely high productivity per acre of intensive polyculture) to feed a fairly large population, unlike gatherer-hunter methods which require more hectares per person than we have left.

and yes, the ploughed field is a "bad" form of agriculture in many ways -- "bad" meaning inefficient or spendthrift -- in that it reverses carbon sequestration, and over time impoverishes the soil ecosystems on which all our lives depend. in combination with industrial equipment, neurotoxins (pesticides) and artificial and longhaul overkill "amendments," it's agricultural suicide. "bad" and "good" here have everything to do with our long term survival prospects. our culture will live longer if we don't kill the soil. that seems to me a working definition of "good".

so the question still remains for me, in what ways have non-imperial, indigenous cultures been more successful in staying power or sustainability than imperial cultures which tend to crash-n-burn regularly (not to mention in personal liberty or democratic decision making traditions) and why? and what lessons in adaptive behaviour could we learn from them now that the borders of imperial aggression have pretty much run up against each other, i.e. every square mile of the planet's surface is claimed by an imperial core?

is imperialistic behaviour adaptive? or maladaptive?

"nobility" (or "glory" for that matter) have nowt to do with it. it's a soft landing I'm hoping for, nothing more.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 10:33:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 2)

"made to work as a food producer in a non-capitalistic agrarian economy" is not, in fact, anyone's idea of a good time -- nor did I ever suggest it was. monocropping and field agriculture do seem to be correlated historically with corvee labour (for both irrigation and monocrop cultivation), taxation, tribute, and control of [usually hard wheat] grain stores by a kind of evolving priest/king caste.

That's the social organization. How about minus corvee labour, taxation, tribute and control by a priest/king caste? It's still not anyone's idea of a good time - or is it?

it's also quite adequate (modern experiments confirm the extremely high productivity per acre of intensive polyculture)

Productivity per acre, how about productivity per hour of manual labour? And how practical is it when you add in the much larger amount of infrastructure you'd want - running water, electricity, schools, hospitals, telecommunication networks, decent housing, libraries, transport infrastructure - plus the industrial, administrative and service economy infrastructure necessary for such things for the six plus billion people in this world?

by MarekNYC on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 11:35:11 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 4)

You do realise that importing negentropy and exporting entropy is the definition of a living organism.

in fact one of the troubling questions that engage our attention today is somewhat similar to the old election-year rhetoric: "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?"... are we better off than we were 10,000 years ago?

Maybe, maybe not. But it appears that 10,000 years ago we invented agriculture because to avoid the fate of most other large mammals in Eurasia, namely extinction. For some reason I find it really hard to accept the narrative that agriculture is the root of all evil. If anything, it's the root of food security. Our problems stem from elsewhere.

as to finance capitalism being a side effect of imperial growth

There you go again. I never said that but to you "growth" is necessarily imperial, and you have not understood what I've said about finance capitalism in this and other threads. To be very brief, the growth I am talking about is the radiation phase after the 14th century collapse. Maybe a mention of the Lotka-Volterra equation wouldn't be out of place either, imagine that the red line in the chart is humanity and the black line its renewable resource base. Growth in this context has nothing to do with the cultural mode that we call imperialism, or with core-periphery, but maybe it does have a connection with (neg)entropy.

I suppose our squabble here could be reduced to a cartoon version:
D: show me a city and a 'civilised' lifeway that is/was not founded on slavery, immiseration, and theft.
M: slavery, immiseration, and theft we have always with us: we may as well get the benefits of urban culture out of them!

Cartoon indeed. I don't know, maybe the Mayans had a 'civilised' way of life that was not based on slavery, immiseration and theft (given your positive reference to the Peruvian Highland Cultures).

I reject the naturalisation of hiearchy, elite accumulation, etc. I'm not sure where this leaves us... though if we accept that dominance/hierarchy cultures are an automatic response to scarcity (not supported by the literature, but let's entertain the idea), the future looks grim: the imperial model embodied in capitalism exhausts resources at an accelerating pace, thus creating artificial scarcity and intensifying the preconditions for imperial/hierarchical strategy. sounds like a positive feedback loop to me :-(

You see, in The Ape and the Sushi Master, while completely demolishing the "human exceptionalist" view of culture, etologist Frns de Waal also makes some points about hierarchical structures being nearly inevitable, and not only among humans, which are quite shocking from an egalitarian leftist point of view [one of his best quotes is "put a bunch of left-leaning professors with an egalitarian ethos in the same room and watch a hierarchy develop: it's automatic"]. As you point out, in some cultures the "big man" position changes with context, and indeed there are two ways to look at our own culture. One is to say that it has only one hierarchy and that that comes from somehow, by institutionalising the natural hierarchy of status arising in one situation, extrapolating it to all realms of community life; the other would be to recognise that we, too, are active in multiple realms in our community life and that the status system in each of them is different. One of the features of blogs like this [and of the entire open-content/creative commons movement] is that the status system is a gift culture: the more you give to the community the higher the status. And you and I have enough experience in academia to see an entire parallel status [and hierarchy] system separate from the "main" societal one.

The reason for my frustration with this exchange ("acrimony") is that there are a number of assumptions in what you write (growth = imperialism = city = parasitism) which 1) I want [you] to make explicit; and 2) seem to me unnecessary (though maybe true historically, that I can't argue with absolute certainty) and, most of all, unhelpful, because we're not in 9500 BC, deciding whether to invent agriculture and what social organisation is going to work best for our first permanent settlement in the very long term, but we're in 2000 CE and we have to think about how to get to where from here. I wonder whether you saw my exchange with Nomad on the issue you mention of how much of the current civilisation can be made sustainable, where I pointed out that you have to take into account and utilise the modern knowledge base, and moreover that there are certain advanced technologies that one would like to deploy for a sustainable, prosperous lifestyle and that are impossible without certain economies of scale and a modern industrial base (like, for instance, how are you going to manufacture the advanced materials you need for solar panels, or wind mills? Certainly not in a smithy.) Cue in technopolitical's constant quip that we're so wasteful because we're just very bad at making things.

So, yes, I suppose I have to say that we might as well get the benefits of urban culture [literacy, vaccines, antibiotics, industrial capacity] while we have them and put them to good use, all the more so if one believes that a Lotka-Volterra-like collapse like in the chart above is likely in the coming century. Once the tipping point for a die-off is exceeded it doesn't matter whether the reason was lemming-lie behaviour or an "exterministic" culture (to use Stan Goff's term). And, really, considering I was born after the 1970's oil shocks, I really feel like I am not responsible for exceeding the tipping point, and that at some level it is irrelevant whether exterminism was the cause, or just a narrative more palatable to leftists than just plain human stupidity. What I am responsible for is for what I do about the consequences of living after the tipping point.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 06:09:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 3)

You see, in The Ape and the Sushi Master, while completely demolishing the "human exceptionalist" view of culture, etologist Frns de Waal also makes some points about hierarchical structures being nearly inevitable, and not only among humans, which are quite shocking from an egalitarian leftist point of view [one of his best quotes is "put a bunch of left-leaning professors with an egalitarian ethos in the same room and watch a hierarchy develop: it's automatic"]. As you point out, in some cultures the "big man" position changes with context, and indeed there are two ways to look at our own culture. One is to say that it has only one hierarchy and that that comes from somehow, by institutionalising the natural hierarchy of status arising in one situation, extrapolating it to all realms of community life; the other would be to recognise that we, too, are active in multiple realms in our community life and that the status system in each of them is different.

I'm going to finish one more book before I do a diary on the final death of my leftist idealism over the past few years stemming from acceptance of evolutionary theory and evolutionary psychology. I think that is all that is standing between your views and deanander's.

In my (newish) universe, the cultures humans are able to create can be used to either amplify or retard the base "desires" innate to our pesky brain stems. I have no other starting point now that I reject the "blank slate" concept.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 07:08:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (4.00 / 3)

I think you might warm up (as I have been reluctantly) to Bookchin in this realm. He's a fairly doctrinaire human exceptionalist, but with some interesting twists that almost undermine the position.

I always thought the "evolutionary psychology" crowd tended to undervalue and underreport symbiotic and cooperative, mimetic and reciprocal organisations in evolving biotic systems; at least when I dipped into the lit a while back it struck me as being over-enamoured of "Nature red in tooth and claw" and rather grimly determined to see all mammalian hardwiring as base and selfish (reading mammals as reptilian, you might say). But this doesn't jibe well with many decades of field observation of mammal social behaviours, in which kingroup selection is at least as important as individual survivalism, and deep reciprocal bonds are observed between individuals and between individual and pack or kingroup...

What are they up to lately, the evo psych gang?

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 08:03:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (none / 0)

I already put the Bookchin book into my queue. I've been reading mostly pop science books on the topic, I haven't dove into the "state of the art" in the field. Dawkins' explanation for his view that altruism and cooperative behavior is a form of selfishness makes sense to me, as does his explanation for how various behavioral traits (for any variable from total violence to complete non-violence) get selected for and in what proportions in a given population. Nothing I've come across yet reads as "nature is 100% violence all the time" which, again just referencing Dawkins writings all the way back in the 70's, is a very poor reproductive strategy for an entire population.

Even with that I'm not very optimistic for a couple of reasons. The first can be summed up as "locking horns with nuclear weapons is not a stable survival strategy" and the second relates to the burden of consciousness and the very delicate (and thus difficult to achieve) balance needed to make and keep humans happy.

I'll rant further some other time.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 11:22:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (none / 0)

might want to look up the debates between Dawkins and Gould. excellent reading :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 08:48:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (none / 0)

Does it boil down to this?

However, as Sterelny says, these disagreements are not adequate to explain the antagonism and in Chapter 12 (p. 123) he gets down to the more philosophical ones. "Dawkins is an old-fashioned science worshiper" he states (and lines up with him), while "Gould's take on the status of science is much more ambiguous. ... In Gould's view, science is irrelevant to moral claims. Science and religion are concerned with independent domains."

That might be enough to explain Gould's issues with sociobiology, which I will look into more this evening.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Thu Mar 8th, 2007 at 05:03:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (none / 1)

One of the features of blogs like this [and of the entire open-content/creative commons movement] is that the status system is a gift culture: the more you give to the community the higher the status. And you and I have enough experience in academia to see an entire parallel status [and hierarchy] system separate from the "main" societal one.

That brings up a really interesting and key issue: What kinds of hierarchy are "alright" (and even necessary), and what kinds are noxious. (See ATinNM's comment below that There is nothing necessary wrong with "Heirarchy." )

Maybe a key distinction is that between "power-created/enforced hierarchies" and "gift-generated hierarchies"?

I wonder whether you saw my exchange with Nomad on the issue you mention of how much of the current civilisation can be made sustainable, where I pointed out that you have to take into account and utilise the modern knowledge base, and moreover that there are certain advanced technologies that one would like to deploy for a sustainable, prosperous lifestyle and that are impossible without certain economies of scale and a modern industrial base (like, for instance, how are you going to manufacture the advanced materials you need for solar panels, or wind mills? Certainly not in a smithy.)

Could you indicate what diary that exchange was in?

For what it's worth, I am finding this acrimonious exchange extremely informative, challenging and stimulating. I'm glad I got ring-side tickets! ;-)

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

by marco on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:01:17 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (none / 1)

What kinds of hierarchy are "alright" (and even necessary), and what kinds are noxious.

I'd say that given that a status system is unavoidable, it's the hierarchies that are out of context that are noxious. Like, for instance, listening to Stephen Hawking's ideas as if he were an authority on the future of mankind because of his groundbreaking work in Cosmology.

Could you indicate what diary that exchange was in?

This one in Jerome's Fossil Fools story.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 04:23:50 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (none / 0)

maybe the Mayans

Er... Incas.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 04:40:16 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Abandon bad models (none / 1)

You are deceived by modern biology, specifically evolution theory, which correctly notes that species evolve, but which, by focussing on too narrow an aspect of the process and using a model borrowed from 19th century English capitalism, completely misses the truth about how biology, in the large, actually works.

How long do you have to wander outside the lab to realize that biology has been studied completely upside down? Indeed, competition DOES happen, but it is only possible because MOST biological activity is co-operative.

Do not trust energy transformation theories beyond their limits. Even where it is true, it may not be telling you what is important. It may tell you what is possible (or not possible) but not what is desirable, or even what living systems seek.

And that co-operative activity is what most biologists never look at, with the result that their theories are fine for creating frankenfoods, but are no use to us at all. We have to start THINKING.

Any economic model based on counting trade markers will just get us killed. This is not how sustainable people think, and it is not how ecologies function either.

We have to open our discourse WAY beyond the boundaries of imperialist/unsustainable patterns.

And, really, considering I was born after the 1970's oil shocks, I really feel like I am not responsible for exceeding the tipping point, and that at some level it is irrelevant whether exterminism was the cause, or just a narrative more palatable to leftists than just plain human stupidity. What I am responsible for is for what I do about the consequences of living after the tipping point.

Guilt is not the issue. No guilt! Exterminism vs. stupidity: For whatever reason we have chosen death, not all peoples have done so. Can we unchoose it? What would it take to even WANT to unchoose it?

Some humans are likely to survive. What would we WANT to be carried into the future?

The Fates are kind.

by Gaianne on Tue Mar 20th, 2007 at 11:13:02 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (none / 1)

I don't think I ever said that a division of labour would inevitably lead to authoritarian hierarchy, or that skilled craftspersons were the same thing as parasitical elites. we seem to be talking past each other, somehow. I do believe it is possible for the town to be symbiotic with the rural bioregion; but not when it becomes the traditional imperial core, importing negentropy and exporting entropy.

You have equated city with empire with parasitism and apparently archaeologists studying early setltements seem to reserve the name city for towns where there is evidence of division of labour.

Anyway, the town also imports negentropy and exports entropy from its surrounding bioregion. To claim otherwise is to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The question is whether the situation is sustainable once one takes into account the Sun's negentropy input into the bioregion.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 06:53:08 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? (none / 1)

the way the challenge is phrased seems to indicate either an unfamiliarity with the literature which I didn't find credible in someone as widely literate as M, or a disinclination to view these people as "real" cultures.

In other words, you misunderestimate me because you misoverestimate me.

dominance/hierarchy cultures are an automatic response to scarcity (not supported by the literature, but let's entertain the idea)

I did not say anything about automatic, I said adapted.

people who wax misty-eyed over the "birth of freedom" and entrepreneurial ineguity and capital investment in Euroland tend to glide tactfully over the enormous influx of gold and silver looted by main force and exterminist policy from the New World

Again, I invite you to dig in the ET archives for my comments on that particular bit of Spanish history...

I think I'm coming around to the idea that we can't afford cities -- by which I mean large imperial energy-sink cities with monumental architecture, etc.

I have long wanted to write a diary about "glory", motivated by some remarks by a friend of mine about "the glory of mankind".

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 07:12:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 3)

... the world's non-imperialistic (aka indigenous) cultures. not all of which are cultures of abundance, btw. but all are cultures of reciprocity, gift exchange, and other "sharing" mechanisms rather than hoarding and hierarchical control.

The vast majority of humans who ever lived did so in "non-imperialistic (aka indigenous) cultures", so if you are right, then that sentence is one of the most hopeful things I have read in a while. Because it implies that human society can once again be organized in such a way that does not posit self-interest and greed -- Homo economicus = Homo avarus -- but rather generosity and cooperation -- Homo economicus as Homo benignus -- as the prime incentives/motivations that drive human co-existence.

In other words, a civilization in which people get up and go to work not to make money to obtain things and a "better standard of living", but in which people get up and go to work to contribute, to be creative, and to give to others, knowing that their needs will be taken care of because everyone else is doing the same.

I've dreamed about this, but wrote it off as irresponsible idealism. But what you are saying, it seems, is that this was actually the norm and the default for tens of thousands of years. Is that right?

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

by marco on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 07:31:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 1)

But what you are saying, it seems, is that this was actually the norm and the default for tens of thousands of years. Is that right?

I feel like being a devil's advocate here because, as much as I'd like to believe that, there is no historical record of it. And the reason is not that history is written by the imperialistic winners of wars, but that history is written by literate people [hence civilised, hence city-dwelling].

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 07:36:21 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 2)

Good point: Writing is a product of civilization.

And yet

any quick survey of ethnography or field anthropology would reveal the wealth of literature (and the longstanding academic and political squabbles) over the world's non-imperialistic (aka indigenous) cultures

all of which, DeAnander continues,

are cultures of reciprocity, gift exchange, and other "sharing" mechanisms rather than hoarding and hierarchical control.

What this says to me is that we are at a point in history where we recognize and treasure the fruits and benefits of civilization (e.g. writing, science, surfing, etc.), while at the same time have evidence that what drove that civilization until now -- "hoarding and hierarchical control" -- is not what drove human (pre-civilizational) society until very recently. And what drove most of human society before -- "reciprocity, gift exchange, and other 'sharing' mechanisms", if what DeAnander says is true, or at least the impulses of generosity that underly them -- could be harnessesed to move civilization to a next level -- a post- acquisitive-economy -based civilization.

Thesis: non-hierarchical, sharing/giving-based pre-civilization

Antithesis: hierarchical, hoarding/controlling/appropriating-based civilization

Synthesis: less-hierarchical, sharing/giving-based civilization

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

by marco on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 08:23:12 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 3)

Society 1.0

Decentralised but disconnected. Anarchy?

Society 2.0 (now)

Centralised, but connected. Hierarchy?

Society 3.0

Decentralised but connected. Synarchy?

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

by ChrisCook (cojockathotmaildotcom) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 08:34:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 4)

it's just a phase we are going through?

nice thought.

on a lighter note

I've often said that if intellectual property lawyers had been dominant in our late prehistory, we'd never have got past the stone knife stage...

The debate over who was here first started about the same time that Columbus was first arriving in the New World. In 1590, a Spanish Monk named Friar Joseph de Acosta reasoned, after much examination and comparison, that most of what was in the New World simply walked over from the Old World. He postulated a land connection between northeast Asia and northwest North America, even though that area was completely uncharted in his day. In the post-Revolutionary War United States, the scientific community was discouraged from looking into the issue so that they wouldn't inadvertently give any kind of legitimacy to the Native Americans or to their claims to the land the Europeans were stealing. [emphasis mine: politicising science is nothing new!]
By the early 1900's, the archeological community had been looking and was generally in agreement that Native Americans had been in the country no more than 4,000 years. Then, in 1908, George McJunkin, the son of former slave parents, found the first Folsom Point. At the time, he was working as foreman on the Crowfoot Ranch near Folsom in northeastern New Mexico. He was also an amateur fossil collector, arrowhead hunter and naturalist. One day after a flash flood he came across some strange looking bones sticking out of the side of Wild Horse Arroyo. They were a local curiosity item until Carl Schwachheim came over from Raton and took a look at "McJunkin's site." He got in touch with Jesse Figgins, director of the Colorado Museum of Natural History. Figgins visited the site in 1926 and organized a full excavation for 1927. That's when the actual Folsom Point was found. Radiocarbon dating places these artifacts at 10-to-11,000 years old.

pop history web site

was chatting with a colleague today who said the archaeology/paleo-ethnography world is buzzing with the new notion that the chronological spread of Folsom Point technique may not have indicated the movements of "Folsom Point People" (as it has been interpreted for quite some time by academics raised in a culture of ownership, patents, etc -- plus in some cases lingering infection with racial/genetic superiority memes) but the free dissemination of a new idea/technology via visiting, trading, ceremonial warfare and the usual intertribal contacts. "hey that's a cool idea, let's try it!" is mostly how we refined and invented and improved our techne. monkey see, monkey copy, monkey improve :-) same goes for small farmers sharing and improving and further specialising seeds.

what this means about the current state of intelprop Enclosure and monopoly control I shudder to think. good thing there were no C&D letters when we were working on stuff like pottery glazing :-)

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:04:23 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 3)

the chronological spread of Folsom Point technique may not have indicated the movements of "Folsom Point People"

D'UH'oooooo, ya THINK?

It's called: Trade Networks.

(Now if Egyptologists would figure-out graffiti is not a reliable dating methodology .... )

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 10:08:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 4)

it's just a phase we are going through?

nice thought.

Come on, you yourself encouraged this renascent optimism in me with your comment that

what we believe is "natural" conditions and limits what we believe is possible; enlarging our notion of what is possible is directly threatening to elites who (for good reason!) want us to believe that things either have always been just as they are now, or are getting better and better every day.

We all agree it is our responsibiltiy to make things get better in fact, and not just in the rhetoric and ideology of those you call the "elites" (I prefer "entrenched interests" myself, because in my book you and I are both members of the "elites", but whatever: I think we are both referring to the same forces of inertia and reaction). And to do that, we have to enlarge our notion of what is possible, as you say, and for me my notion of "the possible" has not really included the idea of a "giving/sharing-based industrial economy": I took self-interest, hierarchy and "hoarding" as you say, as unalterable givens of human nature in any society, however it may be organized. While I note (and must look further into) Miguel's reference to the The Ape and the Sushi Master and Millman's mention of evolutionary psychology's descriptions of humans' inevitable "base 'desires'", I remain hopeful, and optimistic, that humans -- with courage, imagination, and perseverance -- will prove creative and resourceful enough to overcome the entrenched interests (including whatever destructive tendencies and instincts we are genetically programmed with) to keep the baby of civilization while throwing out the bathwater of imperialism and the rest of it.

Nice connection of the new Folsom Point technique "monkey see, monkey copy, monkey improve, monkey disseminate" hypothesis to Intellectual Property, Enclosure and Monopoly issues. More evidence that pre-civilizational humanity can teach contemporary imperial-civilizational humanity how to achieve a non-imperial civilizational humanity.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

by marco on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 10:24:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

And yet
any quick survey of ethnography or field anthropology would reveal the wealth of literature (and the longstanding academic and political squabbles) over the world's non-imperialistic (aka indigenous) cultures

And yet, you said tens of thousands of years, which is outside the realm of ethnography.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 04:46:39 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 1)

Of course it is possible. All you need is to heavily tax wealth and redistribute the proceeds to stamp out material deprivation.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 07:40:37 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 2)

ah, but wealth that comes from where? the whole point of the Linebaugh review was that the wealth of the affluent British anti-slavery philanthropist was generated by the very system of slavery and expropriation that he deplored.

as long as wealth comes from accumulation by force, i.e. by forcing the market/finance economy into the indigenous and subsistence economy, it is achieved by scarcity and precarity creation. I don't see how "redistributing wealth" solves the problem -- it becomes ouroborean very fast, like "waging war for peace."

redistributing land maybe -- now we're talking. but that would vitiate the most essential operating requirement of the wealth-accumulating system: the utter dependence on the money economy of all persons below the elite, so that their labour and obedience can be commanded.

btw, can we observe a distinction of terminology between agriculture, the tradition of the ploughed field and the (varying degrees of) monocrop, vs horticulture or permaculture, both of which were practised with high sophistication by many non-imperial type people? it would make discourse a bit easier if we could separate these two practises which have very different impacts on surrounding biomes.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 08:19:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 1)

redistributing land maybe

Thanks for pointing out the obvious, that land ownership is wealth.

I'd venture that more blood has been spilled over land reform than over anything else since the invention of agriculture.

the whole point of the Linebaugh review was that the wealth of the affluent British anti-slavery philanthropist was generated by the very system of slavery and expropriation that he deplored

Guess who wrote this, and in what year:

The principle of private property has never yet had a fair trial in any country; and less so, perhaps, in this country than in some others. The social arrangements of modern Europe commenced from a distribution of property which was the result, not of just partition, or acquisition by industry, but of conquest and violence: and notwithstanding what industry has been doing for many centuries to modify the work of force, the system still retains many and large traces of its origin. The laws of property have never yet conformed to the principles on which the justification of private property rests. They have made property of things which never ought to be property, and absolute property where only a qualified property ought to exist. They have not held the balance fairly between human beings, but have heaped impediments upon some, to give advantage to others; they have purposely fostered inequalities, and prevented all from starting fair in the race.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 04:39:55 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 2)

Land ownership used to be wealth. I don't think the ties are as strict as they used to be.

I know someone whose father (now brother) owns a very impressive country estate in Norfolk. His family, ancestral pile and thousands of acres and all, are as worried about paying repair bills as anyone else is.

Some slight exaggeration there, for sure, but the pile and land aren't quite the meal ticket they used to be. And don't forget most of these piles were built using slave money, based on the remote ownership not just of plantations but of people to work them.

The same is true today, where wealth is created by corporate quasi-slavery. Owning a corporate tower block means nothing unless you can rent it out, or - better - fill it with productive workers who will do your accumulation for you, in return for wage payments that can be as nominal as you can make them.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 07:27:45 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

That must be because the Norfolk estate is idle, surely? If owning the estate loses money, why don't they sell it to someone who will figure out how to make monay out of it? And if it can't pay for its own maintenance, well, it's going to decay.

But if you don't own the corporate tower block you can't enslave the productive workers... And the productive workers are only productive when enslaved, presumably?

What, then, are sources of wealth?

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 07:36:31 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

What, then, are sources of wealth?

Power.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 07:41:31 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

And the sources of power?

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 07:43:57 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

Wealth.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 07:46:45 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

Let's not forget violence.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 07:49:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

Circular reasoning?

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 11:45:50 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 4)

Feedback loop.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 11:46:54 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 3)

The Norfolk estate always was idle. Ornamental lakes and manicured lawns cost money to maintain.

But that was my point. Owning huge swathes of land does not produce income automatically.

In fact the source of income of most landowners wasn't land - it was the exploitation of physical and intellectual labour.

The idea that land ownership is inherently productive is a feudal throwback, when ownership really meant a right to tithes from the productive work performed on the land.

Now we've moved on to symbolic feudalism, where being a CEO or a shareholder means that tithes are paid symbolically, in the form of credits which can be bartered, rather than in terms of cattle that can be slaughtered and roasted and wheat that can be turned into bread.

Effectively, symbolic capital has replaced land as the primary form marker of social dominance. But the model is very similar - 'growth' and 'profit' are what happens when you add labour to capital, just as much as when you add them to land.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 07:52:08 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 1)

But surely the value of land is based upon what individuals are prepared to pay for exclusive rights of use.

Agreed that the estate has ceased to be used productively with a tangible "usufruct" but lots of people are prepared to pay NOW very large sums of money for the permanent rights of exclusive use of the estate for whatever use they wish (subject to planning permisissio! ;-))

So to the extent that someone is prepared to pay a large rental value in exchange for use this land REMAINS "productive".

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

by ChrisCook (cojockathotmaildotcom) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 09:12:17 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

You're confusing access rights with an income stream.

The access rights are a cost, paid for with a one-off payment in fee simple and supported with continuing maintenance outgoings.

It's true that exclusive access has some market value, which possibly increases over time, but unless that value is realised (with the disbenefit of losing somewhere to live) it remains a cost, not a benefit.

Even with rocketing real-estate prices, the inherent profitability of an ancient pile with landscaped gardens is much lower than other kinds of real estate investment.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 11:16:57 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

If they're really losing money on it they could give it to me for free. Or even pay me to take it.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 11:18:19 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (4.00 / 2)

I'd suggest reading Alan Clark's diaries.

I'd suggest reading them anyway, because they're entertaining. But there's one memorable scene where he's looking at a wall of water coming down one of his interior walls during a storm and thinking 'I really can't afford to fix this.'

It's true that it's hard to be sympathetic when people are - by most people's standards - really very rich.

But the original argument was that land is inherently a source of power. And while there's some legacy traditional value associated with it, my point is that if you have £x million to spend and want to make a good return on it, buying a big country house may possibly not be the best way to do it.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 11:27:40 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 1)

Well, I would say that is because a big country house is a way of spending money luxuriously. Is and I would say has always been. Having a lot of land and not using it in a productive manner is showing of your wealth, like having a gold-plated SUV. Or lighting cigarettes with money.

If people insist in keeping the symbols of wealth when the sources of wealth has passed, they might find it hard to do. If reformed from symbols of wealth to productively used assets, the former symbols (land, gold, money) can be very productive, but that includes giving up the status of the symbol.

Land is not inherently a source of power, it has to be used as well.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

by A swedish kind of death on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 07:15:17 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

But you can convert the valuable access rights into a sizeable revenue stream. If you have a stately home that you can't pay the maintenance bills for but you can sell to the likes of Madonna for a few million pounds, and oget yourself a nice house that you can afford to maintain and a nice revenue stream from the rest of the cash.

Or you can sell the house to a hotel developer, or for a conference centre, or to someone who will turn the manicured gardens into an organic farm. In any case, if the house and land are wealth they can be turned into economic power. If they can't, they're not wealth to begin with.

Or if the house really has sentimental value for you and you want to die in it you can take a reverse mortgage on the damn thing.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Mar 8th, 2007 at 04:30:04 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

Or rather than take out a reverse mortgage, you agree with an investor that your house is worth £500k and that you will pay him 10% of an agreed market rental for as long as you use the £50k he invested.

And use an LLC or LLP wrapper to do so.

Then when the time comes to go into sheltered accommodation, you still have a (100-x)% share of the ownership and of the market rental, and have the option of selling the property conventionally, or bringing in another "Occupier" into the property and selling some or part of your share of the rentals he pays over time.

Or to minimise your Inheritance Tax liability when you die in the house you love, you can pass over some of your Equity Shares over time to your kids and pay them a rental in cash or even in more equity shares instead of cash.

Infinitely configurable, (and you don't need a Will cos the LLP agreement says what happens when you die). You won't read much about it because simple models like this don't appeal to professional advisers paid by the hour, rather than by the outcome.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

by ChrisCook (cojockathotmaildotcom) on Thu Mar 8th, 2007 at 10:53:11 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 0)

agree with an investor that your house is worth £500k and that you will pay him 10% of an agreed market rental for as long as you use the £50k he invested.

Sorry, I can't think on a full stomach. Why does the investor give you the money, what is the "agreed market rental" and who lives in the house?

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Mar 8th, 2007 at 11:01:53 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Is a generosity-based civilization possible? (none / 1)

can we observe a distinction of terminology between agriculture, the tradition of the ploughed field and the (varying degrees of) monocrop, vs horticulture or permaculture

Sure, now you need to give one-line definitions of horticulture and permaculture and since you've decided to call monoculture "agriculture", you need to give a new name to the three together.

"It's the statue, man, The Statue."

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Mar 7th, 2007 at 04:42:45 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Not just surplus allocation, but surplus creation (4.00 / 2)

All you need is to heavily tax wealth and redistribute the proceeds to stamp out material deprivation.

I am talking about something more radical.

You are talking about what to do with the surplus output of economic activity, economic activity that currently is driven primarily by an assumption of scarcity and a conditioned impulsion to acquire and accumulate -- in a word, a primarily self-interest based economy.

What I am talking about is changing the pimary basis/motive power of the economic activity itself from self-interest to giving/sharing. In other words, one will not work primarily to gain wealth or status or power for oneself, or even for one's kin, but rather primarily for the benefit of others in general, with the understanding that others will help the individual achieve their own physical, psychological, intellectual, social and even spiritual needs.

I guess this is a sort of blown up extrapolation of some recent psych findings that have given a lot of press in the media that people obtain a lot of "happiness" through giving to others. (Though it's always dangerous to build castles in their based on pop-media interpretations of feel good psychology!)

There is a dark side to such a model: The crushing of the individual and individualism for the sake of the group. See communism, see certain aspects of Japanese culture.

But I think a healthy balance can be achieved. I think social democracy (as far as I understand it) is a huge step in that direction. But I want to find out if it is possible to go further and deeper.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

by marco on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 08:41:23 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Not just surplus allocation (none / 0)

I believe that the "Open Corporate" - of which the UK LLP is the first example - ia based upon a unique synthesis of the collective (joint) responsibility of partnership but without that form's individual (several) responsibility.

In this participative model the individual may remain individual while still benefiting from the "common bond" to which he has - consensually (not by imposed government fiat) - agreed.

Moreover this is not a RE-distributive model but a PRE-distributive model.

Within an "Open Corporate" there is no Profit and no Loss: and it is in members' interests to cooperate, rather than to compete.

It opens up the possibility of a model neither Private nor Public but both/ and - where investment may be obtained for developing public assets by selling not the assets themselves, but merely a proportional "Equity Share" of their production (or the revenues from the sale of production).

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

by ChrisCook (cojockathotmaildotcom) on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 08:54:28 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Not just surplus allocation (none / 1)

Yes, actually, I was thinking specifically about the potential of cooperatives (and your Open Corporate) as a candidate for bringing "civilization" to the next level, wherein a cooperative giving/sharing culture and social organization enables "civilization" and "progress" ("the benefits of urban culture [literacy, vaccines, antibiotics, industrial capacity]") to thrive without the undesired elements that DeAnander has described (e.g. "theft, murder, slavery and warfare").

But the more I know about cooperatives, the more I know I don't know about them, so would like to impose a moratorium on myself for mentioning them until I do some more homework.

Actually, that goes for a lot of subjects discussed here!

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

by marco on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 09:10:18 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Hierarchy (Slightly O/T) (4.00 / 3)

There is nothing necessary wrong with "Heirarchy." If you're hunting big game with pointy sticks having a hierarchy wherein everyone knows their job, sticks to it, and does it is a really good idea. ;-)

Just as using "Network" is a really good idea if your band is in Gather mode.

(In an attempt to forestall the almost inevitable ... PLEASE note I did not assign sex or gender to either the Hunters or the Gatherers.)

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

by ATinNM on Tue Mar 6th, 2007 at 08:31:43 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Is Civilisation A Pyramid Scheme? | 150 comments (150 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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