When you talk about humane possibilities that are discarded in the competitive process, how about providing a couple of examples to illustrate your point? I think this will help persuade readers.
You use the word 'pristine' twice to describe the immediate emergence of a society from its niche. Is it that pure at the beginning?
I very much like your point that our history tells us little about human nature. Well-explained.
Andy Schmookler:
Thank you, April. To respond"
By "pristine" civilization, all I mean to denote is some place where -- according to the archaeologists -- civilization emerged on its own, not transplanted (either as people, or as ideas) from some other pre-existing civilization. (There were, unless the knowledge has changed in the past 40 years, seven such "pristine" civilizations.)
You ask for a couple of examples to illustrate the way more humane possibilities get discarded in the competitive process. The main point is not necessarily that the inhumane possibilities necessarily sweep away the more humane, but that the strong sweep away the week, regardless of which cultural way is more humane.
For example, in the essay above, I cite how Japanese culture felt compelled -- forced -- to change in order to make Japan stronger ("industrialize, or be gobbled up like the rest"), regardless of whether that would make Japanese culture more or less humane.
Another example is what happened to Native American societies over the several centuries following the arrival of the more powerful European settlement in North America.
But to deal more directly with your question about the discarding of humane possibilities"
Perhaps the most dramatic example is the transformation in virtually all of these areas of "pristine" civilization, over the course of several millennia, from a landscape of hunting-gathering societies to a world of empires built from conquest and maintained by slave labor.
And here's another example of such a transformation--and it is one that also illustrates that other crucial point that the rise of full-blown civilization manifested striking parallels in the various places where it arose in "pristine" form. Here are two quotations, cited in the book (P of T).
The first is from Lewis Mumford, describing a change of symbols as Mesopotamian civilization developed:
While the sacral copulation of Babylonian king and priestess in the divine Bedchamber that crowned the ziggurat recalled an earlier fertility cult, dedicated to life, the new myths were mainly expressions of relentless opposition, struggle, aggression, unqualified power.
Note the similarity between that description, and this provided by the anthropologist Robert Adams describing a transformation in the religion of Meso-American Indian civilization at a parallel stage of development:
The priest-representative of older gods personifying natural forces was ultimately replaced in Tula after a period of more or less open struggle by a figure whose identification with a cult of human sacrifice found favor with newly formed groups of warriors bent on predatory expansion.
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