Ch. 5: Society and Inequality in Eurasia / N. Africa

So, civil service evolved into a professional system in China.  I remember that France also operates on a heavy civil service type of system, and the same in-theory, in-practice theme also happened in France.  Only the wealthy (or those with connections) need apply.

Well, Wang Mang had a dandy plan, but as I read about his plan to level the landowning playing field, I thought, who in their right mind as a huge landowner would go along with this without a fight?  And of course, like lots of rules and regulations, his plan proved unenforceable.  Good idea, though.

The ‘scholar-gentry’ class still exists in high-society circles today.

The Chinese peasants persecuted by large landowners sounds very much like the slavery system of the past in our own United States.  People were either on the wealth end of the spectrum or at the impoverished end.  This is yet another example of exerting control over more vulnerable people.

It takes an uprising to spark some change, even if the changes are slow to come.

OK, this is interesting that peasants were “honored and celebrated.”  I did not get that drift in the last paragraph.  I do see, though, how merchants can be viewed in a negative light because, frankly, they do make money off of others.  The state tried to keep merchants under control, even forcing them to loan money, but despite efforts, the merchants still became wealthy.  I do believe that the Jewish people followed a similar state of affairs.

I have learned about the Indian caste system in other classes but do not recall the “untouchables.”  Are they not another class altogether under the Sudras, or part of the Sudras?

So instead of being discriminated against due to skin color, like we had in the U.S., these castes were broken down by job duties, and those unfortunate enough to be on the low end have no way out, unless they use their imagination.  Fascinating system to read about, but it makes me feel for the oppressed.

Never thought of this, but it makes total sense:  slavery compared with the domestication of animals.

Slavery was all around.  Slaves who owned slaves who owned slaves.  We are all slaves to something, usually love (Slave to Love by Bryan Ferry).  It all boils down to human trafficking to the nth degree.

With beatings, sexual abuse, and possibly being sold, what would a slave have to lose by murdering his/her master?  Certainly, it would be worth a shot.

Spartacus and Empress Wu are my two new heroes.  “Some of her actions seem deliberately designed to elevate the position of women.”  Of course they were!  She was a concubine, for God’s sake.

 Aristotle: “A woman is an unfertile male.”  He is the one who should have been poisoned.

If I had lived in Sparta, I would have been a Spartan athlete of the highest order.

Notes on Ch. 4: Culture and Religion in Eurasia / N. Africa

Chapter IV Culture and Religion in Eurasia / North Africa

 The new ways of thinking about religion: personal moral or spiritual transformation - the development of compassion.  Profound, and this transformation happened in China, India, the Middle East, and Greece at about the same time.  People must have been experiencing a philosophical vibration throughout the lands.

Aha!  The answer is “tumultuous social changes.”

“What is the purpose of life?”  I wonder about that every day at my desk at work.

Yes, it takes chaos in order for one to even think about how to restore order.

How to be a Legalist:  Rule your kingdom as though everyone (except farmers who grow food and solders who enforce rules) were a moron.

Just think if our fearless leaders of today followed the advice of Confucius:  “This process of improvement involved serious personal reflection and a willingness to strive continuously to perfect his moral character.”

Wow.  Confucian views were “rigidly patriarchal.”  Somehow I am not shocked.

Filial piety – your family is gold.  Good rule to follow, if your family is worthy of respect; not all are.

Oh, here we go:  “Confucius values clearly justified the many inequalities of Chinese society.”  Don’t we all justify everything we do?  Confucius was just better at it.

“Daoism encourages abandonment of education and active efforts at self-improvement.”  Really?  I can buy into the nature theme, but not using one’s mind is sure to lead to the devil’s playground.  I have to take another look at the movie “The Dao of Steve.”

OK, the ship has been righted with a more balanced outlook between the sexes.  Better.

Oh, cool.  One can practice Confucianism by day and Daoism by night.  I like that.

Just like the Catholic Church with its pope – run like a business.  Same with the Brahmins, who required “heavy fees and became mechanical and formal.”  Churches and religions are businesses, and they need money to keep up their image.

 I wonder who might have been part of this group of anonymous thinkers who composed the Upanishads – women perhaps?

Instant karma is going to get you – John Lennon

Oh, this is good: “Women were increasingly seen as “unclean below the navel.”  “It taught that all embryos were basically male and that only weak semen generated female babies.”  I cannot stop laughing.  Did these morons ever think about the fact that it takes both a man and a woman to create a baby, and what would happen if only male babies were born?  For supposedly deep-thinking people, this concept is pretty asinine.

A common thread of releasing oneself from material desires is at the core of these enlightenment religions, a noble quest indeed.

Zoroastrian and free will to choose between good and evil - another great religious invention to lead people down an alternative path.  I think it best that one cherry picks from all of these religions, since each has its own pieces that make sense.

The Jewish people have certainly made an impact on society in a global sense, being that they began as such a small element and endured many episodes of enslavement and conquer.  They do a fantastic job of running Hollywood.

Yes, I recall reading about Yahweh in world religions class about six years ago, in particular that the Jews were “the chosen people.”  What they were chosen for is a mystery yet to be revealed.

Socrates was one hell of a guy!  ‘Question everything’ is a good mantra.  Take religion out of the equation for explanations of the world.

It seems to me that most word roots are steeped in Latin, Greek, and French culture, so it is appropriate that Greek culture is awarded with “celebrating the powers of the human mind.”

I never knew that Buddha was classified as a common criminal by the Jewish and Roman authorities.

Women were responsible for the world’s sins and were a temptation to men, yet men surely loved engaging in sex with women.  Would they ever admit that?

What starts out as a way to unify people and create a sense of peace turns into controversy and battles of control, starting with the illustrious pope.

Religion offers many benefits, but it also was, and still is, a great source of conflict.

Reflections on Ch. 3: State and Empire in Eurasia / North Africa

Part II

Globalization of civilization – let us see how these civilizations die off and renew.  Surely warring is involved.

Evidently, people were in a mood of complacency, or maybe stagnation, since no new “breakthroughs” occurred.

We can certainly count on the circulation of diseases and plagues when people come into contact.

Chapter III

I had never heard of the U.S. being compared to the Roman Empire, but the points made about corruption, political life, military expansion, etc. are tough to argue against.

Why is violence always a usual suspect throughout history?  I believe it was Rodney King who surmised, “Why can’t we all just get along?”  People have been control freaks since the beginning of time.  Thankfully, the author does point out that there were “substantial periods of peace and security.”

I love the word ‘Persian.’  It just flows nicely.

So deforestation and soil erosion are nothing new.  I wonder what the Greeks and Persians would think of fracking.

Gee, all it takes is some friendly, organized competition, like the Olympic Games, for people to simmer down a bit!  I wonder if the ancient folks experienced people like Tonya Harding.  My guess is yes.

Citizenship – something for which most immigrants to the U.S. strive and what many take for granted.

Alexander and his conquests at the age of a mere 24 years – admirable.  How did he die?  How old was he when he died?  I will have to research this information.

Who would have thought that the Romans and Chinese empires would be compared and contrasted?  Not I.

Values of the republic!  Now this I do like.  If only we could all follow these rules every day: rule of the law, rights of citizens, absence of pretension, upright moral behavior, keeping one’s word – particularly, ‘upright moral behavior’ while behind the wheel of a car.

Of course the army built the Roman Empire because people are not just going to give in to a new regime; it requires force.

Wow.  A man’s control swings from absolute control over wife and kids to the extent of killing them if he so desired, to the other end where women had “almost complete liberty”   - quite the turnaround.  Of course, the ‘complete liberty’ pertains to the ‘elite classes.’  Money talks.

‘Empire in disguise’ – what a perfect description for the Roman emperors – just emphasizes the fact that we all wear masks.

The good of Shihuangdi:  standardizations and implementations; the bad:  executions and book burnings; the ugly:  the Great Wall of China.  It was a good idea at the time.

Interesting statement that “many Chinese in modern times are in fact descended from people who at one point or another were not Chinese at all.”  Would that concept not apply to other ethnicities?

Urban sprawl and pollution were matters of concern back then as they are today.

A triangle of civilizations:  Roman – Chinese – Indian; similar in some ways, yet widely contrasting in others.

First Civilizations or Better Yet: Pharaohs and Frauds - Chapter 2 Ways of the World

‘Paradox’ - the perfect word to describe modern society, particularly when the word ‘strange’ is positioned in front of paradox.”

Scribe - another good word.  Where would we be without scribes?

“Both within and beyond these cities, people were organized and controlled by states whose leaders could use force to compel obedience.”  This sentence sums up the way of the world pretty succinctly, I must say, especially using force to compel obedience.  Well, we need law and order in order to be civilized.

If I have identified correctly, the seven ‘First Civilizations’ are:  Sumerian, Egyptian, Norte Chico (Peruvian), Indus Valley (Middle Eastern), Chinese, Central Asian/Oxus, and Olmec (Gulf of Mexico).

Interesting point: “Civilizations had their roots in the Agricultural Revolution.  But not all agricultural societies or chiefdoms developed into civilizations.”

What a great explanation about winners and losers.  The losers had nowhere to flee; thus, they were “absorbed into the winner’s society as a lower class.”  Opposing forces exist in every aspect of life – a way of maintaining some sort of symmetry.

Just as the First Civilizations emerged simultaneously, similarities emerged with their evolutions, even though they were distantly located from each other – kind of like osmosis.

The description provided of the cities of First Civilizations can still be used to describe today’s cities:  political/administrative capitals; cultural centers; marketplaces; impersonal; and degrees of specialization and inequality.

Major turning point:  urbanization magnifies inequalities as earlier cultures are displaced – where all of society’s ills germinated.  “Exploiting landlords” even then!

Something else that has not changed much:  slavery, which still goes on today in more sophisticated ways, such as human trafficking and prostitution rings.

“The human mastery of nature” and its equation with the inferiority-of-women concept was central in my Way of the Earth” class.   Women were viewed as property to be tamed, just like nature, in a male-dominated society – always a battle of control and domination.

“By the second millennium B.C.E. in Mesopotamia, various written laws codified and sought to enforce a patriarchal family life that offered women a measure of paternalistic protection while insisting on submission to the unquestioned authority of men.”  Well, if that does not sound just like how the mafia operates, then I’ll be damned.  This is organized criminal behavior at its finest.

Sources of state authority:  efforts to defend; adjudicate conflicts; problem solve; protect principles of the upper class; extort from farmers (another mafia move); demand work on public projects; use of force and violence.

Now we’re talking: the invention of writing – a desirable ability to possess and something that can raise the status of a commoner, but was also manipulated with propaganda.  Writing developed a life of its own becoming hard to control.  I can see why, since writers could produce works without applying their name.

A common theme with ancient times and current California: rivalry over land and water.

It’s good to be king

And have your own way

Get a feeling of peace

At the end of the day – Tom Petty

That is, until the Nile’s failure to flood, and you are deemed a fraud.

Reflections on Prologue and Chapter 1 in Ways of the World

Notes of interest from the Prologue and Chapter 1 of Ways of the World:

“The emergence of life from the chemical soup of the early planet.”  I often contemplate how each and every soul traversing earth came to be, what we are composed of, how we develop our own characteristics, and how the world changes us from birth to death.

Three Cs:  Change, Comparison, Connection – good points to consider not only while reading history, but also while attempting to write a decent paper.

Civilizations of technologies and inequalities create strange dichotomies.

Eighteen pages in and drug use surfaces.  Even the early humans liked to alter their state of mind.

It is amazing to me that archeologists, scientists, geologists, etc. can piece together information about ancient civilizations from bones, artwork, and relics.

Here is a good word:  kinship.  I learned all about kinship in my “Way of the Earth” class earlier this year, and the World History book is called Ways of the Earth.  Now there is a heading called The Ways We Were, which prompts me to think of the Streisand/Redford movie The Way We Were – makes me want to cry just thinking about Hubbell and Katie.

This is intriguing:  The San people and their “relative equality between the sexes with no-one having the upper hand.”  People are always looking to have the upper hand in today’s world – no matter the circumstance; everything seems to be a competition.

Anther good one:  gathering and hunting people referred to as “the original affluent society.”  How our lives have gotten so complicated, when really, less is more.

So global warming is not a new process; we have just managed to exacerbate it with proliferation of pollution.

Separate cemeteries for dogs.  How cute!  Pets deserve proper burials.  After all, they are members of the family.

So the Chumash of southern California were the seedlings for La La Land!  I bet the Chumash were not nearly as phony as the current populace down there.

“Domestication – the taming, and the changing, of nature for the benefit of mankind.”  Well, we certainly did a nice number on that one because now we are in a self-induced global warming trend that will be impossible to turn around.

Amazing how people think the same things simultaneously, like the Agricultural Revolution happening “separately and independently” the world over.  Just like when people name their baby thinking it is so unique, then the kid goes to school and there are a dozen of them with the same name.  Cracks me up.

Broad-spectrum diet.  Wonder what the ancient folks would think of food ‘cooked’ in microwave ovens.  I am envisioning a Paleolithic kid eating a French fry.

The statues of Ain Ghazal look thoroughly modern.  Love those.

“The Agricultural Revolution led to an increase in human population.”  If people would stop procreating like rabbits, our planet would be in better shape than its current state.  Not only has the population increased in number, but people in general are bigger and taller than ever.  They are massive, and they always end up sitting in front of me in public venues.

Geez, people are control freaks:  “Human selection modified the genetic composition of numerous plants and animals.”  Like one doctor said to me, just enjoy whole milk – we’ve bastardized our food.  Hilarious!

I like this:  “the lineage system performed the functions of government, but without the formal apparatus of government.”  There’s a novel thought.

So the Agricultural Revolution is to blame for inequalities.  Figures.

There is the word ‘kinship’ again - I like the sound of it.

This is a test run

Testing 1, 2, 3  . . . .