hamarplazt said:
Confucius, I respect your views and ideas, but there's no thinking that is not conditioned by civilization, and you're a dictionary definition, PRIME example of that.
you might be right on some level....
but my thinking has drastically changed and shifted recently, after reading these anarcho-primitivist / anti-civilization books out of Columbia Uni press.
guys like John Zerzan may be extreme and some might say one-sided in their stance, but their views are indeed based on recent archaeological findings -- findings which disprove many commonly accepted notions and fundamental beliefs about ourselves -- foundational beliefs which shape human society as we know it. and these new findings and their shaking of the foundations of our ideological constructs have radical implications on all levels of life and what we need as a species at this point is a drastic revision of everything we take for granted and have not questioned up to now.
one of the most important things this research and data does is put things into perspective in the bigger picture: civilization (language, agriculture, heirarchy, power) has been around 5,000 years while humans (Homo-Sapien AND Homo-Erectus, which we now know has the same brain capacity as Sapien) have been on earth for more than 4 million years. so civilzation is like a new hat we are trying on for a day to see if we like it.
and about life before civilization, sure there is a lot of conjecture, and even the scientific validity of carbon dating itself has been called into question recently, but there are still many things which archaeologists world wide has come to agree on.
just a few that I can remember and off the top:
organized hunting did not appear until AFTER agriculture. and pre-civilized diet consisted of 99 per cent plants and the occasional found carcass of an animal. thus the phrase "Hunter Gatherer" should be revised to read "Gatherer Hunter". (an example of the subtle yet powerful ways our thinking is twisted around and controled)
transmitable and otherwise major diseases such as Cancer or Diabetes did not appear until Agriculture, when our diet changed from being comprised of thousands of kinds of raw plants to a handful of kinds of cooked plants and animal protein.
we think of our ancestors as these brutish, violent half apes (opening scene of 2001 comes to mind), but this image is completely out-dated and disproven by recent study (1970s - present).
and this next one is the most significan: the fact that humans lived for 4 MILLION years with the same upper-cranial development, which is to say, intellegence, yet there was ZERO advancement in technology. for those 4 million years, there were no weapons such as arrow-heads invented, no plows or shovels to do work, and no written language. And the reasons for this leads to fascinating conjecture and theories.
although it might require more of a leap of the imagination than some would prefer, but it is not difficult to follow this logical train of thought to an image of a very egalitarian, peaceful, non-heirarchical society, one in which people spent most of their time relaxing and playing games, enjoying unimaginable perfect health (some have even made the conjecture that their life-span was much much longer than ours - maybe 300 years or more), with no division of labor, no leaders, no borders and boundaries (certainly no either/or thinking).
a garden of Eden type scenario I suppose. and in all creation myths of all cultures, India, China, African, Egyptian, Greek, Hawaii, Aztec, Mayan, Australia, etc, etc., there are very very similar accounts of a "dream time" or "garden" which predates the fall from grace (civilization).
and ofcourse there are many conjectures about what caused "the fall" (other than the account of Mark E Smith having gone to see the Pistols play in Manchester
) -- some involve population rise and the dwindling of natural resources, some involve environmental changes, etc, etc.
so this is a very brief account of the story of humanity that I have grown more and more fond of, and makes more and more sense the more research I do and the more I think about it, in direct opposition of everything I have been taught before.
whether you believe this stuff or not, I think these ideas should be taken into account, with how ever many grains of salt you feel necessary.