The isolated, seemingly autonomous ego that bourgeois society celebrated as the highest achievement of “modernity” turns out to be the mere husk of a once fairly rounded individual whose very completeness as an ego was possible because he or she was rooted in a fairly rounded and complete community. The State’s capacity to absorb social functions provides it not only with an ideological rationale for its existence; it physically and psychologically rearranges social life so that it seems indispensable as an organizing principle for human consociation. In other words, the State has an epistemology of its own, a political one that is imprinted upon the psyche and mind.
How Having High Standards Affects Relationships (And What That Even Means)
When he is showing you who he is and his actions and behavior don’t meet your needs, you have the power to choose whether you will accept it or walk away from it, because you know in the long run it won’t make you happy. High-value men have evolved beyond their teenage/man-child behavior with regard to romance and sex. So, he doesn’t rely on low-quality, adolescent tactics and manipulation to connect with women. When necessary work, personal events take over, he calls and re-schedule or is upfront. He invests time with people because he cares and genuinely wants to, not because they are going to gain something in return.
I have turned to this remarkable passage because Hegel does not mean it to be merely metaphoric. His biological example and his social subject matter converge in ways that transcend both, notably, as similar aspects of a larger process. Life itself, as distinguished from the nonliving, emerges from the inorganic latent with all the particularities it has immanently produced from the logic of its most nascent forms of self-organization. So do society as distinguished from biology, humanity as distinguished from animality, and individuality as distinguished from humanity.
In this connexion brief notice may be taken of the doctrine
of miracles in its special bearing on mythology. Exceptio probat
regulam; to acknowledge anything as an exception is to
imply the rule it departs from; but the savage recognizes
neither rule nor exception. Yet a European hearer, brought
up to use a different canon of evidence, will calmly reject
this savage’s most revered ancestral traditions, simply on
the ground that they relate events which are impossible. The ordinary standards of possibility, as applied to the
credibility of tradition, have indeed changed vastly in the
course of culture through its savage, barbaric, and civilized
stages.
Thus, the problem of nature’s knowingness has traditionally been seen from the knowing end of a long social history rather than from its beginnings. When this history is instead viewed from its origins, mentality and its continuity with nature acquires a decisively different aspect. An authentic epistemology is the physical anthropology of the mind, of the human brain, not the cultural clutter of history that obstructs our view of the brain’s genesis in nature and its evolution in society conceived as a unique elaboration of natural phenomena. Within this highly complex context of ideas we must now try to transpose the nonhierarchical character of natural ecosystems to society. What renders social ecology so important is that it offers no case whatsoever for hierarchy in nature and society; it decisively challenges the very function of hierarchy as a stabilizing or ordering principle in both realms. And this association is ruptured without rupturing the association of nature with society — as sociology, in its well-meaning opposition to sociobiology, has been wont to do.
The Ecology of Freedom
In a series of laboratory studies beginning with the famous Miller-Urey “spark-gap” experiment, simple amino acids were formed by passing electrical discharges through a flask containing gases that presumably composed the earth’s early atmosphere. By changing the gases in accordance with later theories of the primal atmosphere, other researchers have been able to produce long-chain amino acids, ribose and glucose sugars, and nucleoside phosphates-the precursors of DNA. Even simple mechanical processes that involve physical movement-for instance, air masses circulated by pumps-have their nonmechanical analogue in the convection of air by solar heat.
Nearly all the basic tasks of the community, from planting to food preparation, were done cooperatively. At every age level, the individual was charged with a sense of responsibility for the community. So all-pervasive were these group attitudes that Hopi children, placed in schools administered by whites, could be persuaded only with the greatest difficulty to keep score in competitive games. The absence of coercive and domineering values in organic cultures is perhaps best illustrated by the syntax of the Wintu Indians, a people that Lee studied very closely.
Its existence
among them is vouched for by representations in the
mythological pictures, by its Mexican name ‘atlatl,’ and
by a beautifully artistic specimen of the thing itself in
the Christy Museum; but we do not hear of it as in
practical use after the Spanish Conquest. In fact the
history of the instrument seems in absolute opposition to
the degradation-theory, representing as it does an invention
belonging to the lower civilization, and scarcely able to
survive beyond. Nearly the same may be said of the blow-tube,
which as a serious weapon scarcely ranges above rude
tribes of the East Indies and South America, though kept
up in sport at higher levels.
The trillions of dollars that the nations of the world have spent since the Second World War on means of subjugation and destruction-its “defense budgets” for an utterly terrifying weaponry-are only the most recent evidence of a centuries-long craze for domination that has now reached manic proportions. Compared to this stupendous mobilization of materials, of wealth, of human intellect, and of human labor for the single goal of domination, all other recent human achievements pale to almost trivial significance. Our art, science, medicine, literature, music, and “charitable” acts seem like mere droppings from a table on which gory feasts on the spoils of conquest have engaged the attention of a system whose appetite for rule is utterly unrestrained.
But we can still choose the former body of possibilities over the latter “realities.” Our choices will keep alive the contrast and tension that technocratic and bureaucratic homogeneity threaten to efface, together with personality itself. If accounts of the “poisoning of America” are even modestly accurate, utopian thinking today requires no apologies. Rarely has it been so crucial to stir the imagination into creating radically new alternatives to every aspect of daily life. Now, when imagination itself is becoming atrophied or is being absorbed by the mass media, the concreteness of utopian thinking may well be its most rejuvenating tonic. Whether as drama, novel, science fiction, poetry, or an evocation of tradition, experience and fantasy must return in all their fullness to stimulate as well as to suggest.
Lastly, there is our own legend of Vortigern, who could not
finish his tower till the foundation-stone was wetted with
the blood of a child born of a mother without a father. As
is usual in the history of sacrifice, we hear of substitutes for
such victims; empty coffins walled up in Germany, a lamb
walled in under the altar in Denmark to make the church
stand fast, and the churchyard in like manner handselled by
burying a live horse first. In modern Greece an evident
106relic https://hookupsranked.com/ of the idea survives in the superstition that the first
passer-by after a foundation-stone is laid will die within the
year, wherefore the masons will compromise the debt by
killing a lamb or a black cock on the stone. If now we look to less cultured countries,
we shall find the rite carried on in our own day with a
distinctly religious purpose, either to propitiate the earth-spirits
with a victim, or to convert the soul of the victim
himself into a protecting demon.
Why some people state on their profile that they prefer taller men
In the parlance of many radical theorists, a “rational society” often means little more than a highly rationalized society, and “freedom” often means little more than the effective coordination of humanity in the achievement of economic ends. The centrality of the city in achieving this transformation can hardly be overemphasized. For it was the city that provided the territory for territorialism, the civic institutions for citizenship, the marketplace for elaborate forms of exchange, the exclusivity of quarters and neighborhoods for classes, and monumental structures for the State. Its timbers, stones, bricks, and mortar gave enduring tangibility to social, cultural, institutional, and even moral changes that might have otherwise retained the fugitive quality of mere episodes in humanity’s convoluted history or simply been absorbed back into nature, like an abandoned field reclaimed by forest. By virtue of its endurance and growth, the city crystallized the claims of society over biology, of craft over nature, of politics over community.
Both groups enter into alliances with an emerging warrior caste of young men, finally to form the beginnings of a quasi-political community and an incipient State. Their privileges and powers only then become generalized into institutions that try to exercise command over society as a whole. At other times, however, hierarchical growth may become arrested and even “regress” to a greater parity between age and sex groups.
For a European perspective, I must thank my dear friend, Karl-Ludwig Schibel, who, in reading the opening chapters, brought to them the sophisticated queries of his students at the University of Frankfurt and obliged me to examine issues that I would have ordinarily ignored. Richard Merrill, like Michael Riordan, was an endless source of articles and data from which the scientific material in the Epilogue is derived. To have so able and absorbing a biologist at hand is more than a privilege; it is an intellectual delicacy.