I just had a thought, so think of this as an thought experiment
more then my usual ramblings…
modernity…and what separates modernity from what came before…
think of how things were done before technology and science…
most of the world for most of humanity’s history has grown their own
food and/or hunted and/or fished… if you wanted to eat, for most of history
you either grew it or you hunted it… that has been the human way for
since the creation of humans and in fact, that is the way it is for animals…
to eat, you found your food, you killed it, then you ate it…
that has been the way of animals for over a billion years here on planet
earth…
now at time the technology grew from spears to bow and arrows to guns,
but the idea was still the same, the tools used changed…
for American frontier families, they grew their food and then went into
town and traded that food for other goods they needed… but the
meat/fish was found, killed and eaten… you had an immediate
direct relationship with the processes that allowed you to exists…
to grow the food, you needed plows and other tools that farmers
needed to grow their food………
there was no separation between the actions of the human being
and how they lived… if you wanted to eat, you had to find and kill the food
and if you wanted to grow stuff, you had to grow the stuff…… there was no
mediation between human’s actions and how they lived…in other words,
you had direct control over your food and how you got them…
think of the modern world… If I want to eat, I go to the store, I buy
the food and we use appliances to cook the food…
compare that to the way of life for a million years…
If I was hungry, I had to go find the food, kill the food and prepare the food
myself or get a family member to do so…
we were in direct contact with the way we lived, the tools we used were
limited in how they were used…the modern person who is squeamish about
blood or killing animals would have died before 1800 because they had to kill and prepare
food to survive… of course this was before modernity…
now as I said, we go to the store, buy the food and pay money for it…
so clean and neat and without any idea of how that food was prepared…
we simply take it for granted……
or to say this another way, between us and the basics of life, exists
our tools, technology, machines… our means of how we survive
is separate and apart from us by technology and machines…
we exists and someone else who we don’t know and have never
meet, has already taken care of the “modern” needs of survival…
we exists and the basics of life is separate and apart from us……
we have no contact with or are completely separated from a millions
years of existence…out tools and technology and machines have
isolated us from what human life was like for a million years……
we exists and between us and the basics of life exists some sort of
mediation, tools, machines and technology and even money…
of course we feel alienated, remote, an estrangement from
our existence because we are living our lives vastly different
then all life previously, human and animal…….
we humans have had over 15,000 generations of human existence
since the beginning of modern humans, since the beginning of
“modern” times, say the French revolution, we have had 9 generations…
(at roughly 25 years per generation)
9 generations isn’t enough time to adapt or learn to cope with the radical
changes that has happened since the French Revolution…my great grandmother
was born in 1849, thus I am 4 generations away from 1849……
so personally, I am roughly 6 generations from the French Revolution…
not much time………
so how do generations adapt so quickly over so short of a time to
go from living a life that in 1789 would have been familiar to
Julius Caesar, some 2000 years ago, to living a life that would have been completely
unfamiliar to someone like Napoleon in the short span of the 230 years
since the French Revolution………
we have become separated, apart, alienated from the human existence that
had lasted for over 300,000 since the rise of modern humans………
so let us think about history for a moment…
the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans were part of the cycle of human existence
that went from the rise of the city to the Medieval times… The Greeks for
example, felt they were part of a long past that went back into the unknow past…
they felt at home with the long standing tradition that the were part of and had
lasted for a couple of thousand years…that collapse and the new age began…
but this new age had much of the same process that had lasted for a million years…
Human beings lived off the land… thus the political and economic and social
order may have changed, but it didn’t change the fact that human beings still
existed by living off the land… that didn’t change until the start of the industrial
revolution or roughly 1789……….and within a hundred years, the modern world was
not only born but brought into fruition… we can easily see the modern world
by 1900… phones, cars, airplanes came a few years later, but at the French Revolution,
you cannot see the modern world, not yet…the machines and science and technology
wasn’t there yet…the science and machines and technology which has divided us
from the previous 15,000 generations of human beings…
and now the 64,000 dollar question? is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Kropotkin