This Morning’s Readings, Viewings and Musings Courtesy of Aeon Journal and YouTube
The points made in this excellent essay are well taken and long overdue. Pre-patriarchal, ‘natural’ or collectivist human society was not ‘red in tooth and claw’ as 19th-century historians would assert. Nor was non-hierarchical collectivist ‘primitive’ life ‘short, nasty and brutal’ as so-called ‘civilized’ patriarchal thought famously asserts.
It was cooperation, not competition — resource-sharing strategies, hospitality values so deep they constituted our earliest ‘laws’ or rules of conduct, kindness to strangers, collective responsibility for the young, matrifocal connectivity, Earth-centred reverence patterns, pantheist/animist sacrality and other deeply felt common values — that got our physically delicate species through the Ice Age. Even inter-species cooperative values were instilled in human societies in the face of environmental challenges and resource scarcity, most advantageously, from the Ice Age and through ensuing ages, with wolves and wolf-dogs.
It is these kinds of indigenous societies that, even today, when permitted to co-exist alongside colonizing hierarchies and dominant ideologies — when preserved from missionizing efforts and other kinds of invasive interference — continue and thrive in balance with the environment for thousands of years, miraculously exempt from the continuous cycle of war, invasion, and attrition that afflicts the dominant paternalistic/warrioristic systems currently holding sway in human societies worldwide. (https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth?fbclid=IwAR0smU6IogFOfSEz2JhwpqPUsjmGlhjIQwAIt6_1lsnYnY7xswcWxh8n-D0)
My second deep dive this morning raised an important aspect of Hierarchical/militaristic ethics and values as opposed to non-authoritarian/collectivist values — Starhawk described ‘gossip’ as the gentlest form of social control by common consensus, whereby the collective may spread the word, and the shame, of, say, “Marge has been beating the kids,” or “Joe’s been hitting the bottle again,” with ostracizing in extreme or resistant cases and exile in cases of persistent violent behaviour, whereas militaristic orders consider the power of these egalitarian methods and ban them, positioning ‘honour’ or ‘reputation’ immunity as tantamount, and justified killings to protect or avenge the same. (https://aeon.co/videos/a-samurai-rulebook-offers-guidance-on-how-to-kill-enemies-and-refrain-from-gossip?fbclid=IwAR1RiCmINXLpLVupSBTwskKW3iXs9_SUPKz0dpI0FJIP28DXVOmU5-k-T5o)
