The bas reliefs of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later the writings of Plato and Aristotle, leave no doubt that the precondition for the emergence of tribal « big men » involved not only material sufficiency but cultural inferiority. Power, personality, and social immortality are entangled completely with powerlessness, depersonalization, and often genocide. « Big » and « small » have never been differences in size, socially speaking, but differences in contrast, just like « needs » and « luxuries » or « scarcity » and « security. » Even to a mind as perceptive as Aristotle’s, the greatness of the Hellenes was nature’s compensation for the deficiencies of the barbarians.

In i ts organized operations there is no longer room for human impulses, indeed, the gift is necessarily accompanied by humiliation through its distribution, its just allocation, in short, through treatment of the recipient as an object. Suppose we were to discover that the ratio of carbon 14 to carve intended in the atmosphere was significantly smaller 10,000 years ago that it was today. How will this affect the changes we have assigned to objects on the basis of carbon 14 meeting in particular. But the true age of an object be greater than or less than the age we have previously assigned to it and explain. But, with a half-life of 5730 ± 40 years, only about 3% of the original carbon-14 remains in a sample after 30,000 years.

Carbon 14 Dating

The ancient words are all there, but like the many changes in emphasis that placed the imprint of domination on traditional values and sensibilities, they undergo a seemingly minor shift. Apparently, these dynastic quarrels, assassinations, and usurpations were not of special concern to the « masses, » who lived an unchronicled inner life in their obscure communities. They simply went about their own business, working their own parcels of land or the « best land » explicitly owned by the nobles. They herded the nobles’ « considerable flocks. » As a class apart, theirs was also an interest apart. Nowhere in the Homeric narratives do they seem to have intervened in the conflicts of the heroes.

3 Half Life and Radiometric Dating

The warrior societies, for their part, reinforced their military power with economic power by claiming the lands of conquered peoples, not of their own folk, as private booty. Extratribal conquest, in effect, was to lead to the war chieftain’s aggrandizement with large private estates, often worked by their aboriginal inhabitants as serfs. As for the warrior societies that clustered around the chieftains, the most permanent spoils of battle and victory were the lands they carved out as their own demesnes — estates, in effect — which they then elaborated into an internal manorial hierarchy of villeins, tenants, serfs, and slaves. Judging from Mesoamerican data, the manorial economy eventually began to outweigh the capulli economy in sheer acreage and produce. But the blood oath, with its highly variegated customs and rituals, became more symbolic than real. Class society had supplanted hierarchical society, just as hierarchical society had supplanted the egalitarian features of organic society.

Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. In this Norse cosmography, there seems to be more than the old theme of « eternal recurrence, » of a time-sense that spins around perpetual cycles of birth, maturation, death, and rebirth. Rather, one is aware of prophecy infused with historical trauma; the legend belongs to a little-explored area of mythology that might be called « myths of disintegration. » Although the Ragnarok legend is known to be quite old, we know very little about when it appeared in the evolution of the Norse sagas. We do know that Christianity, with its bargain of eternal reward, came later to the Norsemen than to any other large ethnic group in western Europe, and its roots were shallow for generations afterward. During the Viking raids on Europe, the sacred places of the north had become polluted by gold, and the pursuit of riches was dividing kinsman from kinsman. Hierarchies erected by valor were being eroded by systems of privilege based on wealth.

Accordingly, everyone must be equal before Justitia; her blindfold prevents her from drawing any distinctions between her supplicants. But persons are very different indeed, as the primordial equality of unequals had recognized. Justitia’s rule https://onlinedatingcritic.com/ of equality — of equivalence — thus completely reverses the old principle. Inasmuch as all are theoretically « equal » in her unseeing eyes, although often grossly unequal in fact, she turns the equality of unequals into the inequality of equals.

Plow agriculture, grains, and the elaboration of crafts may have provided the necessary condition for the emergence of cities, classes, and exploitation in many areas of the world, but they never provided sufficient conditions. How easily we can slip into a conventional historical stance can be seen from recent fervent controversies around the meaning given to the concept of scarcity. It has become rather fashionable to describe scarcity simply as a function of needs so that the fewer our needs and the smaller our tool-kit, the more « abundant, » even « affluent, » nature becomes. Actually, by emphasizing material affluence per se in terms of needs and resources, this functional approach to scarcity subtly capitulates to the very economistic stance it is meant to correct. It merely recreates from a hunter-gatherer viewpoint a calculus of resources and wants that a bourgeois viewpoint imparted to social theory during the last century.

The Maximum Date for Carbon 14

We may rightly fault this democracy for denying power to slaves, women, and resident aliens, who formed the great majority of the population. But these traits were not unique to Athens; they existed throughout the Mediterranean world in the fifth century B.C. What was uniquely Athenian were the institutional forms it developed for a minority of its population — forms that more traditional « civilizations » rendered into the privilege of only a very small ruling class. Until these transformations occur, however, it is important to know the raw materials from which hierarchical society will raise its moral and social edifice.

This far-reaching, avowedly revolutionary position was drawn not from the Christian father Augustine, but from the republican theorist Cicero. Its medievalistic references to « princes » and « kings » aside, it had a distinctly republican ring. Aristotle, an alien resident of Athens, does not equivocate on the superiority of the Hellenes over all other peoples. In citing the failure of the highly spirited « barbarians » of the north to organize into poleis that could « rule their neighbors, » he reveals the extent to which he, together with Plato, identified the polis with social domination.

What is obviously at issue is not whether a council has been delegated, chosen by sortition, or formed in an ad hoc manner, but whether or not it can formulate policy. It would matter very little-given a reasonable amount of prudence, public supervision, and the right of the assembly to recall and rotate councilors-if councils were limited to strictly administrative responsibilities. It would not be difficult to determine whether these limits, once clearly defined, have been overstepped and the council has engaged in functions that impinge on the assembly’s policy-making powers. Nor would it be difficult to determine when certain functions have been discharged and needless administrative bodies can be disbanded.

This outlook stands in marked contrast to both gnostic and Christian dualism and, in fact, leads to Spinoza’s later, more Judaic concept of a unifying, « godly » substance. By the thirteenth century, mystics such as David of Dinant and Amaury claimed that matter and mind were identical with God — indeed, that everything could be unified as God. The spread of these pantheistic ideas to the ordinary people of Paris and Strasbourg produced a number of sects such as the New Spirit, the sisterhood of the Beguines and the brotherhood of the Beghards, and most notoriously, the Brethren of the Free Spirit. To these sects, humanity was composed of the same divine substance as God, hence it could enter into direct communion with the deity. Such a view not only challenged the need for ecclesiastical intervention between humanity and God, but also gave its acolytes an exhilarating sense of personal freedom that could easily justify the removal of all worldly restrictions on human behavior and open the way to unrestrained moral license. The memory of later uprisings (which are probably very similar in nature to the one we already have explored) was so completely appropriated by the ruling classes that the historical record is sketchy at best and venal in the accounts it does contain.