Only “civilization” was to put the figure of Justitia on a pedestal and place its purely quantitative weights on her scale. Her blindfold may have very well been a token of her shame rather than her indifference to the realities of inequality. By contrast, a radical social ecology not only raises traditional issues, such as the reunion of agriculture with industry, but also questions the very structure of industry itself. It questions the factory conceived as the all-enduring basis for mechanization-and even clover co mechanization conceived as a substitute for the exquisite biotic “machinery” that we call food chains and food webs. Today, when the assembly line visibly risks the prospect of collapsing under the mass neuroses of its “operatives,” the issue of disbanding the factory-indeed, of restoring manufacture in its literal sense as a manual art rather than a muscular “megamachine”-has become a priority of enormous social importance. Taxing as our metaphors may be, nature is a biotic “industry” in its own right.
Thus it seemed to Pausanias
the historian, that the wide-grown wickedness of the world
had brought it to pass that times were no longer as of old,
when Lykaon was turned into a wolf, and Niobe into a
stone, when men still sat as guests at table with the gods,
or were raised like Herakles to become gods themselves. Up to modern times, the hypothesis of a changed world has
more or less availed to remove the difficulty of belief in
ancient wonder-tales. Yet though always holding firmly a
partial ground, its application was soon limited for these
obvious reasons, that it justified falsehood and truth alike
with even-handed favour, and utterly broke down that
barrier of probability which in some measure has always
separated fact from fancy.
Cost and time
Even slavery, so basic to Roman economic life, had been placed at odds with the Hellenic notion of the slave’s inborn inferiority. Although Roman society never ceased to view the slave as more than a “talking instrument,” its legal machinery for dealing with slaves was to belie this degradation by the restrictions imposed in late imperial times on the appallingly inhuman practices of the republican period. The subversion of organic society drastically undermined this principle of authentic freedom. Compensation was restructured into rewards, just as gifts were replaced by commodities. Cuneiform writing, the basis of our alphabetic script, had its origins in the meticulous records the temple clerks kept of products received and products dispersed, in short, the precise accounting of goods, possibly even when the land was “communally owned” and worked in Mesopotamia. Only afterwards were these ticks on clay tablets to become narrative forms of script.
If the individual bear is merely an epiphenomenon of an animal spirit, it is now possible to objectify nature by. Completely subsuming the particular by the general and denying the uniqueness of the specific and concrete. The emphasis of the animistic outlook thereby shifts from accommodation and communication to domination and coercion. The old can also perform many functions that relieve young adults of certain responsibilities.
What method of rock dating is using stratigraphy method?
The gnostic experience, if such it can be called, is not locked into episodic rituals and ceremonies; it is an ongoing, unrelieved calling. Gnosis is expected to transfigure every detail of one’s encounter with reality — to create a transmundane reality of “goodness” that is close to a communion with the true God. To use the language of Surrealism, it places a “halo” over the ordinary things and events that normally drift by us unperceived. The very spontaneity it fosters in the self is the correlate of a permanent state of desire rather than mere need, of a passionate perception of the world rather than one deadened by custom, routine, and predictability.
D is more sensitive, but also seems to be measuring something different than the U-score and dp. If we look at Figure 9, we see a better correlation for the more dispersed words, but ever larger discrepancies with the U-score as words get more concentrated. Both versions of dp are very close to the U-score, which is unexpected, seeing that dp does not take into account the shape of the distribution graph, but merely compares to a fully unbiased distribution. It would seem that the way in which the shape varies per word is restricted, so that the two measurements tend to lead to a similar ranking.
Radio astronomers have detected cyanogen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, formic acid, methanol, acetaldehyde, and methyl formate in interstellar space. In short, the classical image of space as a void is giving way to the image of space as a restlessly active chemogenetic ground for an astonishing sequence of increasingly complex organic compounds. It is no longer a “New Age” cliche to insist that, wherever possible, we must “unplug” our “inputs” from a depersonalized, mindless system that threatens to absorb us into its circuitry. In little more than a decade, we have been victimized by our electronic and cybernetic society more than the most outspoken critics of everyday life could have anticipated in the sixties. Loss of individuality and personal uniqueness, with its ultimate result in the “liquidation” of personality itself, begins with the loss of our ability to contrast a more human-scaled world that once was; another world, approximating complete totalitarianization, that now is; and finally a third one, human-scaled, ecological, and rational, that should be. Once that sense of contrast disappears, the tension between these worlds also passes away; it is this tension that motivates us to rear up in resistance against our complete defilement.
B. Discerning What’s Constitutional
Existing phyla of multicellular aerobic life forms thus had their origins in a symbiotic process that integrated a variety of microorganisms into what can reasonably be called a colonial organism, the eukaryotic cell. Mutualism, not predation, seems to have been the guiding principle for the evolution of the highly complex aerobic life forms that are common today. Nor is there so great a lack of data, by comparison with the conventional attributes of “matter,” as to render the new properties implausible.
It was now reduced to a discipline for bringing external nature under social control and human nature under industrial control. Even the apparent chaos that market society introduced into the guild, village, and family structure that formed the bases of the preindustrial world was seen as the surface effects of a hidden lawfulness in which individual self-interest, by seeking its own ends, served the common good. This “liberal” ideology persisted into the latter part of the twentieth century, where it is celebrated not merely within the confines of church and academy, but by the most sophisticated devices of the mass media. What is more important than Hobbes’ notion of the State is the extent to which he divests nature of all ethical content. Even more unerringly than Kepler, who marvelled at the mathematical symmetry of the universe, Hobbes is the mechanical materialist par excellence.
Elders still enjoyed considerable social prestige even after their political standing had diminished, and kinship ties were still fairly strong, if not decisive, in defining many strategic human relationships. Communal labor formed a conspicuous part of village enterprise, particularly in agriculture, where it was cemented by the need to share tools and cattle, to pool resources in periods of difficulty, and to foster a technical reciprocity without which many communities could not have survived major crises. Bureaucracy, conceived as an institutionalized technics in its own right, may well have its origins in the primordial world. I refer not merely to the internal dialectic of hierarchy that yields a legacy of domination in the forms of gerontocracies, priestly corporations, patriarchy, and warrior chieftains. I am equally concerned with the civil sphere of the male, who produces rationalized ceremonial and military systems as compensatory mechanisms for his own ambivalent status in organic society. He is necessarily less fulfilled in a domestic society, where woman forms the core of authentic social activity, than in a civil society — but one that he must elaborate into a fully articulated and structured sphere of life.
Until we become what we should be in the constellation of life, we would do well to live with a fear of what we can be. Even Marx, who first articulated the abstract character of labor, tends to mystify it as a precondition for “freedom” rather than submission — ironically, by tinting labor with humanistic metaphors that it no longer possesses. Capital has a famous comparison between the unconscious activity of the animal and the conscious activity of human beings. Here Marx opposes the worker to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. Accordingly, adepts of the Free Spirit gave up all penitential and ascetic behavior for a life of pure pleasure, not merely one of happiness.
Even at low levels of culture,
men addicted to speculative philosophy have been led to
account for the resemblance between apes and themselves by
solutions satisfactory to their own minds, but which we must
class as philosophic myths. Among these, stories which
embody the thought of an upward change from ape to man,
more or less approaching the last-century theory of development,
are to be found side by side with others which in the
converse way account for apes as degenerate from a previous
human state. Be bold, go and visit your great
ancestress, who flashes so fiercely there where the edge of
the horizon meets the sky.’ Then the birds came to Maui
to be his companions in the enterprise, and it was evening
when they went with him, and they came to the dwelling of
Hine-nui-te-po, and found her fast asleep. Maui charged
336the birds not to laugh when they saw him creep into the old
chieftainess, but when he had got altogether inside her, and
was coming out of her mouth, then they might laugh long
and loud.
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