The Garden of Eden

10000 years ago we were hunter gatherers. We were closely integrated with the processes of the planet that evolved us. Its bounty was free. We were both of it and from it. We knew and understood that we lived within the same frame of time as most of what sustained us.

We ate what we found meat, fruit, vegetables and grains. Their form depended on where we lived and the seasons. Most of these our bodies cannot convert to fat and store. Most natural food cannot be stored. It goes “bad” (for us) quickly. It putrefies. Some natural foodstuffs, carbohydrates, grain, sugars, etc. are storable. They do not putrefy. Our bodies can convert them to fat. Thus our bodies can store their energy. Because it does not go bad it also can be stocked in grain stores etc.

Our modern, only recently understood view of nutrition, tells us that a diet so composed is healthy. It has great variety. This made us very flexible creatures in terms of our food needs. We did not occupy a food niche that could be vulnerable. We did not need to compete directly with others for our food. If we found another creature occupying a particular niche we could comfortable avoid competing with it and use another sources of food.

Many of the foods we ate contained anti-oxidants These, we now believe, protect us from diseases such as cancer that result from the internal cellular damage that can occur as a result of oxidation. The variety utilised meant we acquired a need for many trace elements. The hunter gatherers varied diet provided these. It was a very difficult diet to become obese on. Very little of what we ate could be converted and stored as fat by our bodies. Carbohydrates are relatively rare in nature.

To survive we therefore had to eat regularly during the day because we could not store energy easily from our diet. However many of our foods were highly nutritious and available in large quantity so this was not a problem. Unlike other creatures we did not have to spend the whole day foraging and eating. We had time for art thought and enterprise. Much of this time was spent teaching our young and learning as young. Humans do not reach sexual maturity till after more than ten years of life and intellectual maturity till our late teens or early twenties

Our diet then based as it was on fruit and vegetables thus helped avoid the diseases attributable to cellular age such as cancer and made obesity a rare pathological event. A diet of protein, fat and fruit and very little starchy food convertible into fat ensures this. We were slim and destined to remain so. To keep up our energy level we eat regularly throughout the day. Obesity was a rarity.

Some of our food could be stored but such food was not produced naturally in a form or quantity sufficient to sustain our survival. It needs to be cultivated to be used thus. Enough was available to store a small amount as body fat. We could thus use this small store for energy when other food was scarce. Hunter gatherers did find enough of this to create stores of energy both within and without their bodies. The Garden of Eden's bounty thus had a sufficiency that could sustain us even when other sustenance was scarce.

We did use some of our planet's plenty created within a very different frame of reference to our own, timber and stone for example. The former is renewed on a time scale of many hundreds of years and the latter on time scales of millions. However given the small number of humans that could survive as hunter gatherers the exploitation rate of such forms was so low as compared to the processes creating them that they were being replaced faster than they were being used up.

In such a world the concept of property had little meaning. Everything was a free gift of nature. In the Garden of Eden nothing exists in a sensible form except fleetingly. Each was a short term by-product of the process of being whither they were animals, trees or rocks. All that found sufficient to exist did so for its allotted time and was then passed on as feedstock to the other processes of which they were but a part of what is one whole.

Without storable property communal investment in protective security was not needed. There are no stocks of food worth acquiring that could sustain one beyond a few days. There is no incentive to try to acquire an unknown foraging area. It is of doubtful use without the local knowledge and understanding its indigenous peoples required to exploit it. This is generally peculiar to those humans who have adapted through learning to exploit the place they are born into. In this man evolved in a manner unusual in the evolution of the Way. We evolved to understand our environment. This enables us peculiarly to adapt either ourselves or alternatively our environment to survive within it. However before modern technology this knowledge and understanding took some time, perhaps several generations, for a group in a territory to acquire.

Without modern technology could any of us, other than Eskimos and Bushmen, live in the Arctic or the Kalahari Desert? The understanding “know how”, required to survive as a hunter gatherer in such a context is in the communal experience of the people of that place, a place of which they are an integral inclusive part.

It should be noted also that survival in such contexts is a communal not an individual affair. Local humanity is then clearly the unity not the individual people or lifetimes of which it is composed. Eskimo men could probably learn to make their own clothes and rear children. Eskimo women could probably learn to find food animals and hunt. However the cost of acquiring such “know how” in the extremis they face as a community is the difference between life and death. In hunter gatherer societies the community with its local knowledge of its environment is clearly the viable entity not the individuals composing it. In extreme circumstances, such as that of the Artic or Kalahari Desert individuals are very clearly organelles not organisms.

Unique local understanding, “know how” and knowledge learned and stored in the community is the community’s intellectual property. Possible usurpers simply do not have access to it. In such a context acquisitively inspired violence, war, has little purpose. It is to be observed that generally other living things do not do war. Modern man did. A main issue in this work will be to explore why this might be.

In hunter gather group's, internal security, policing of property physical or intellectual is unnecessary. Viability is an attribute of the community not an individual characteristic. Those with the physical strength or intellectual guile could take what they want by force or subterfuge but to do so is to seed their own destruction. If they did so act and were discovered they could be excluded from the nurture, support and security the group offers. In the harsh environment in which they live, without the support and protection of others, death is then certain. A hunter on his own who cannot hunt through injury and all are injured at sometime, will starve to death. In this socio-economic context individuals are not viable without the group except for very short periods of time. What individuals have is not heritable what the community has is.

In such a context to be injured or ill, and on your own, is synonymous with death, i.e. exclusion from the process of being. Even now when symbolically excluded from his group by having a bone pointed at them Australian aboriginal simply die. For such people exclusion is far more of a fear than physical violence. The emotional violence wrought by withdrawing support, the withdrawal of love, is what is feared above all else. To this day the fear of rejection is so very very powerful that is is still a deep rooted characteristic of all humanity. It is an extremely powerful, much feared, tool in the hands of those who effect to use it.

With this tool, in environments of the type described, men and women are truly equal. Brutish violent behaviour as a means to an end, including indulgence in perverted procreative urges such as rape, are simply not viable strategies. Those using them can very easily be excluded from the succour of the community and so find themselves consigned to death.

All this suggests an idyll. A time in which the universe, nature and human groups were all in perfect balance one with another. This is a false perception.

It ignores the Universe's, nature's Way, as an ever changing unfolding evolutionary process. Humanities uniqueness is in its capacity to gain a perspective from which to understand the flows, this process stimulates. These are always distinct from the forms momentarily created by them we sense and know. We have the ability to understand what creates what we sense and thus have the potential to access the Way of the universe in a manner different from that available to other manifestations of its processes.

In considering our understanding of the “Way” every moment should be seen in proportion to its cosmic context. On this our planet' existence is a fleeting event. The form we call life upon it is of even less significance. Within that a distinct human life form is barely noticeable. Within humanity's ambience modern civilization is a trivially short un-noteworthy experience. Yet here we are choosing to comment upon it.

This is written by a Britain from Reading, a city 40 miles West of London who now lives in Suzhou a Chinese city, 40 miles West of Shanghai. London could claim a history of nearly 2000 years Reading perhaps 1000. In human terms these two cities have been of socio-economic significance for only 500 and 200 years respectively. Suzhou is referred to by Confucius 2500 years ago as the capital of the Kingdom of Wu. It remains socially and economically significant today.

Americans are overwhelmed by European historical perspectives. They will be blown by China's when its 2500 year old history bursts into global focus during the 2008 Olympiad. This event has origin in a European civilisation with roots are as old as China's. Unlike China the civilisation they supported no longer exists except as ruins but its ideas are stored to permeate our lives.

Like Reading Suzhou is close to a great modern metropolis, Shanghai.was an insignificant fishing village when the British created it 200 years ago. It is now a globally significant city. From a Chinese perspective it is a recent Western intrusion of short term significance to their way of being..

In planetary terms these historical perspectives distort reality. Global warming could drown three of these cities this century. In cosmic terms this is not worth comment. To see things from these three points of view, human, planetary and cosmic, matters. Understanding the significance to humanity of our capacity to learn how to store actively can only be seen in its true depth when viewed simultaneously from all three. Our capacity consciously to plan to store the surpluses thrown up by the “Way” is highly relevant to our species perception of its integration with it.

Humans noted that seeds carelessly scattered when gathering a natural crop gave a renewed resource a year on. From this we grew to understand we had the capacity to nurture such occurrences through the process of cultivation,. Cultivating, farming, storable carbohydrates, freed us from a day to day perspective based on seasonal local availability. Crops grow on an annual, solar, cycle. Our perspective became, solar and celestial rather than lunar and seasonal..

The Evolution of War and Violence

The Evolution of War and Violence

In considering our understanding of the “Way” every moment should be seen in proportion to its cosmic context. On this our planet' existence is a fleeting event. The form we call life upon it is of even less significance. Within that a distinct human life form is barely noticeable. Within humanity's ambience modern civilization is a trivially short un-noteworthy experience. Yet here we are choosing to comment upon it.

This is written by a Britain from Reading, a city 40 miles West of London who now lives in Suzhou a Chinese city, 40 miles West of Shanghai. London could claim a history of nearly 2000 years Reading perhaps 1000. In human terms these two cities have been of socio-economic significance for only 500 and 200 years respectively. Suzhou is referred to by Confucius 2500 years ago as the capital of the Kingdom of Wu. It remains socially and economically significant today.

Americans are overwhelmed by European historical perspectives. They will be blown by China's when its 2500 year old history bursts into global focus during the 2008 Olympiad. This event has origin in a European civilisation with roots are as old as China's. Unlike China the civilisation they supported no longer exists except as ruins but its ideas are stored to permeate our lives.

Like Reading Suzhou is close to a great modern metropolis, Shanghai.was an insignificant fishing village when the British created it 200 years ago. It is now a globally significant city. From a Chinese perspective it is a recent Western intrusion of short term significance to their way of being..

In planetary terms these historical perspectives distort reality. Global warming could drown three of these cities this century. In cosmic terms this is not worth comment. To see things from these three points of view, human, planetary and cosmic, matters. Understanding the significance to humanity of our capacity to learn how to store actively can only be seen in its true depth when viewed simultaneously from all three. Our capacity consciously to plan to store the surpluses thrown up by the “Way” is highly relevant to our species perception of its integration with it.

Humans noted that seeds carelessly scattered when gathering a natural crop gave a renewed resource a year on. From this we grew to understand we had the capacity to nurture such occurrences through the process of cultivation,. Cultivating, farming, storable carbohydrates, freed us from a day to day perspective based on seasonal local availability. Crops grow on an annual, solar, cycle. Our perspective became, solar and celestial rather than lunar and seasonal.

Crops can be grown in quantity and stored. Long, now extinct civilisations, depended on this. Moses demonstrated its truths to the Egyptians in the story of the seven years of plenty followed by the seven lean years. The Assyrian's accounting tablets and the Incas knot records testify to the social significance of such know how. Recording and accounting were created to assist storing it and then became means of wider communication. Only one civilisation based on this form has lasted hardly touched and intact into the present time, China.

This approach to being requires sustainable propriety in land. This demands social institution to evolve to protect it and its produce. Wealth invested in farming, irrigation, seed grain, fertilizer, and storing its products grain silos etc. need protecting from nature and people

The wealth created and stored does violence to natural order. It exclude people and nature from its bounty. Uncultivated plants become weeds. Creatures feeding on cultivated plants, crops, become pests. People inside society seeking to acquire them other than through a market become criminals, those from outside enemies to be eliminated with the weeds and vermin.

A state with access to significant lethal force is required to protect such investment in stock and other stored accumulated value, wealth. Access by others other than those granted the privilege is thus prevented. Plants, animals and people seeking “unauthorised” access need to be ruthlessly neutered or eliminated for such a system to be successful. Authority and associated power over others is thus institutionalised. Plants become weeds, animals vermin and other peoples enemies to be eliminated ruthlessly in the survival interest of this vegetarian civilisation. So much for the pacific ideal of the arable farmer. The one thing that is simply not true is that vegetarianism and its associated activity of farming is in its substance pacific. It is instead in its essence aggressively martial. Agrarian societies do violence to the natural order and are only sustainable by doing continuous violence to the rest of nature including their own species. Cultivators both create enemies and are enemies to be feared

Societies based on cultivation differ hugely from hunter gatherer and modern societies inthis. They are based on propriety and the power over nature’s provision it seemingly provides. Violent exclusion is the means to their ends. Violence has to be practiced to sustain them.

Propriety excludes other humans from access to stored value in developed land and stores of crops. Violent acquisition is then a viable strategy. It leaves a usurper in possession of immediately usable wealth. Knowledge (intellectual property) on farming is publicly available. The written or recorded language such societies acquire for accounting purposes ensures this knowledge is stored. Such knowledge is not exclusive to those with particular local knowledge. The usurper of an agricultural developed community acquires immediately usable stored sustenance and a resource, developed land that can be exploited to future benefit.

In this system socially organised violence is thus necessary to protect what one has. For similar reasons socially managed violence, war, is a viable means of obtaining sustenance and procreating new societies based upon one’s own. The basic social entity has changed from globally diverse locally cohesive communal groups to societies, states. These are based on the use of violent ruthless exclusion. This is required to protect what they have from the understandably self righteous violence of the disposed or similarly acquisitive. There is thus a direct correlation between vegetarianism and violence. Farmers may not be violent to other humans but the institutions they require to operate are just ask the few American Plains Indians that are left about the non-violence of farmers.

In such a world war is the tool societies naturally use to penetrate others to procreate their way of being and develop new sustainable approach to wealth creation and accumulation. In such a world women move from being equal partners in power to being property to be possessed or taken.

To be sustainable such societies needed to be larger than other similar ones so they can overwhelm potential usurpers by force of arms. To be large requires an exceedingly stable and effective system of administration sustainable over time.

The West failed to discovered such a system and as a consequence was plagued by wars, rape and pillage. China found the Confucian and Taoist “Way” of providing a sustainable social stable base supporting effective agricultural. This extolled family stability and obedience. This was to be echoed in and modelled in the impartial behaviour of state officials appointed on the basis of merit not influence. It worked. China became and remained for centuries the sole continuing success story of the agricultural system. Family stability and its associated imperial administrative system dissipated disruptive social behaviour and provided a stable foundation of institutionalised authority in which agricultural could flourish to generate the wealth to support the institutional power required to sustain it.

The Way and Human At-one-ment :

Islam's Pivotal Role in its potential Attainment

religion and philosophy

global warming

A blog was published the other day

Steve Gardiner's AnthroBlog - http://slgardiner.com/blogs/anthroblog

on the blogsite titled Sinology. This was a response to a book by Marks on the evolution of the modern world. I can no longer access either of these or for that matter even see this blog. I wrote this response to Gardiner. I publish it so other's elsewhere may see it. Here it is. I hope Steve Gardiner also publishes it so it can be visible on his site as well. This version takes the arguments a little further than the one i posted to his site.

My own book "The Global Silk Road" takes account the issues Steve Gardner's comments on Robert Marks book raises but with an interpretation that does not rely on accident but human hubris and design. I have spent the last five years working through the arguments he and marks raise.

Accident is not, I believe, a good way to describe social evolutionary changes of the kind described in the above blog. Islam was far more vital to the story than merely being a stop to land based trade between the East and West. The continual defeat of Islam by Christian, Catholic and Orthodox forces forced a fundamentalist re-think within Islam. Muslims believe that the Prophet was given the direct and final word of God in a far more extensive and meaningful manner, the Koran, than Moses had been given the 10 Commandments. They tried hard to faithfully follow God's and the Prophet's expressed wish to unite mankind under the one true God, by following his Koranic direction. They felt they were clearly not succeeding so they acted in a manner such that it is possible God's will, as expressed to them, may now indeed possibly be achieved. By working hard to be true to God they have assisted his purpose in manner they did not foresee.

In the Koran God requires true believers to provide others a genuinely humble example to follow totally devoid of hubris and free of any Koranically (God) forbidden prozletising. They had done so but schism rife Christianity was expanding not Islam. To many therefore Islam was clearly failing to do God's will. Fundamentalism was thus born.

Up till around 1400 each individual in Islam was able to liberally interpret through his own direct communion with God what actions he should take in his daily life when not given an explicit direction by the Koran or by the saying of the Prophet. This is the principal of "ishtehad".

In this cultural context Islam nurtured the scholarship that in the end was to create the Western "Enlightenment". Howver many in Islam felt that its lack of progress against the schisms in God's world between the Jews, the Catholics, the Orthodox and the Muslims, the people the Koran calls, “the people of the book”, must mean that something was wrong in Islamic practice. So while for many centuries Islam provided the free-est most tolerant societies on the planet the Caliphates in the late 14th and early 15th Century started closing down on such freedoms - "the closing of the gates of Ishtehad".

The closing of this gate to freedom of thought did not just close the route to the East it did so in a manner that effectively passed the ball of social evolutionary change to the West in clear preference to the East. Chinese Confucian communal culture was designed to produce the social stability required for agricultural production to be at its most effective. To do this it relegated intellectual ability to the personal service of the Emperor and made trade and business the lowest form of social life. The reverse had been true in Islam. The Prophet himself was a trader. There was no place in China for free thinking independent Islamic scholars, artists business men and thinkers. Thereby China committed, as you and Mark's observe, short term socio-economic suicide.

Islamic scholars sought their freedom to be in the West. They found it in the autonomous city states of Italy. They brought with them a Renaissance of Greek culture. Very few original or often even copies of Greek texts had survived the burning of the Greek library at Alexandria in Egypt. Fortunately Arab scholars had translated them into Arabic. This included original or very early texts of many of the gospels. This knowledge had until then been denied to independent Christian scholarship only a privileged few with access to the material in places like the Vatican library could do so. It was the re-translation of these works into Latin together with the addition of five or six centuries of Islamic scholarship on top that gave us this European re-birth, then the enlightenment, then the reformation, then the industrial revolution and then the social turmoil that led to Western migration. The latter re-enforced the discovery of America forced as you observe by the fundamentalist closure of the West's former land route to the East.

The reformation is particularly interesting. Its roots were in part new access to the original Greek texts of the gospels but it was also in part to a new way of thinking about man's relationship with God, Islam. This puts each individual in a direct relationship with God. There is no intervening priesthood let alone a church hierarchy. Their is no priesthood in Islam. Their is no central organizing authority. Nothing stands between a believer and his God. In a very real sense the protestant churches came into being epitomising this aspect of God's will as set out in the Koran.

What bears even more thinking about is that the American Constitution very firmly and explicitly places "ishtehad" at the top of its agenda in providing the framework for the achievement of the American Dream. Freedom of thought and deed subject to fellow feeling and respect for the integrity of others were basic to Islam well before they became enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America.

In a very real sense the USA exists and is powerful today because those with power in Islam 7 centuries ago, in the interest of political stability and religious fundamentalism, thrust these ideas out from within their own purview. They gave them and their socio-economic consequences thereby as a gift to the West.

As we know from there they have eventually spread to the planet as a whole. This is in a manner that through modern communications has put within our grasp the unity of mankind, the at-one-ment (atonement) sought for by God in the Koran and fervently believed in as is clear from the words of the Prophet.

God, the Universe, the Way works in mysterious ways it seems for by putting into being their fundamentalist views of God's wishes and closing the gates of Ishtehad Islam as it exists today has played a huge part in putting mankind in a position to unite as one just as God desires in the Koran. Our increasing global consciousness of the common dangers we now face if we continue to destroy our planetary environment are such as to make it inevitable that we face our maker with our own destruction in prospect or come together in atonement to seek the resolution of the dilemma we and our planet now faces.

As is rightly observed in the blog that stimulated this blog China has in the end been forced to acknowledge the realities brought about by the socio-economic forces of modernism. China in consequence will return to its traditional position of economic power and authority in the first half of this century and so inevitably must have a big say in how the dilemmas facing us are overcome. This could be for good or ill. However given China's traditional predilection for adaptive communally cooperative responses to social dilemmas one would surmise this can not be anything but for the good. Especially when one realises that most of China's growing wealth and much of its huge population live along its very low lying Eastern seaboard and so China has a huge amount to lose and much to gain in working with the rest of the world to resolve the danger our planet now faces.

Mankind needs to keep his hubris at bay if we are to adopt the right globally conscious attitude to what we now face. It is very important never to downgrade the processes of "The Way" (The Dao in China, God in the West) to mere accident. I try to keep what I think in an appropriate perspective by observing that my own hubris can be put aside very easily by noting that I have only been in the systemic thinking movement for 25years while Shanghai near where I live encapsulates all the above as a Chinese-European city adaptively conceived in the face of force majeur by the Chinese emperor and built 250 years ago first by British and later many other European nationalities. On the other hand Suzhou where I live has been a powerful Chinese city of some significance for some 2500years. Note both could be destroyed by global warming in the next 50 years. Organized existentially communicating humanity has however existed for about 25000 years and could perhaps survive global warming. Humanity itself however has only existed for about 2.5million years while the dinosaurs hacked 250million years before being almost totally destroyed by the Way. All this is of course nothing as compared to the planet's rocks which have done at least 2500million years. The solar system maybe has exceeded 25000million and the galaxy a lot more than that and the universe???????? Our view back out into that ancient universe makes it clear that stars, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies are fairly frequently destroyed on the Way of the cosmic evolution of which we are an almost unobservable small part of minute duration.

Who am I in this?