Ray
Ed Goertzen wrote:
==============Ed G said:Ed said; I have to agree with Kazantzakis. In an excellent book by David
Many thanks to Ray for his detailed answer.(snip)
Astle "Babalonian Woe" (Copyright 1975) he traces the causes of conflicts
from the time of Summerian dominance and attributes them to the infectious
anomaly of monetary systems.
I tend to think that it had more to do with literacy. Literacy
freed the
memory and allowed for communication over distances in a general
fashion. This created the first "information of scale" if I may
paraphrase
the economists.
Ed continued:Money as a symbol or substitute for an object or effort was and is tied to
=========The jacket quote is enlightening. "The intellectual faculties
however are not of themselves sufficient to produce external action; they
require the aid of physical force, the direction and combination of which
are wholly at the disp[oasal of money, that mighty spring by which the
total force of human energies is set in motion. [Augustus Boeckh;
Translated: The Public Economy of Athens, P, 7; Book 1, London 1828.
literacy.
I said:
Einstein made the same point, more politely, in his essay. I think youEd replied: I would question the "needs" to which Einstein refers. My contention
could ask what "needs" the Europeans "had" that made them finally use the
printing press, an earlier import that sat
for a good while before Europe broke forth with books for the common man.
You could also remember the problem with the first Millennium being that
the Spanish Catholics didn't understand zero or Al Jabaar until they had
expelled the Moors and the Jews just prior to the 1500s and translated
their books.
continues to be that, while the printing press "sat for a good while" itThat is not my understanding. I believe it was tied to the trauma of the loss of
was only when its use as a means of excercising power over peoples minds,
thereby "moving" them, was realised, that it came into popular usage. (i.e.
it obtained the financial backing that popularised it employment.)
oral information through the plagues and the fragility of the existing libraries
written by hand and subject to fire. Even in the 20th century the Steinway
Piano company used the same logic to build the manual from the information
contained in the minds of their individual craftsmen. Two generations later, the
families of those craftsmen are still pissed off about the theft of their grandfather
secret knowledge. Value went from people to process and the people were
then downgraded to hired hands from irreplaceable experts. The piano has
never been the same since certain information simply is not literary. But the
printing press and later the computer did protect the written information by
dissemination.
Ray continues:
After expelling the above there was ample reason to get these violent and
disruptive folks out of the country and into some safe activity like
murdering the Inca for gold to cover the ballrooms
of Europe. But, I think it is a mistake to mislabel the intent as profit.
No one wanted Cortez or Pizarro around in Spain.Ed answers:I see that as making my point. It is not neccessarily the invention
that is either good or bad for humanity. It is the (profit) purpose to
which the invention (new idea etc.) can be put in terms of geopolitics.
I tend to think that culture and the external world shapes our perceptions
and options but I think we can control those through manipulation of
the
external. I agree that something can be either good
or bad but my examples
were of two very violent and pathological personalities who anti-social
acts
made their own countries glad to have them abroad.
(snip) As I pointed out:The violence behind the ethnic cleansing, that had taken 700 years of
constant warfare, lent itself to conquest and Empire. The bankers were
the economic structure of choice but certainly not the motivation or the
intent for all of that murder and pillage that spread around the world,
including China, by the Hunter/Gatherers from the Europe of the time.
(See the NYReview of Books URL mentioned later.)Ed continues: Without trade we could not have progressed beyond the family
stage into the extended and tribal stage of social organization. (in fact,
even within families trade takes place, albeit without the monetary
accounting practices.) At the time of Summerian acendance "money" as an
intrinsic value for purposes of trade already was well established within
and between city states.
There was trade in the Americas from the tip of Tierra del fuego
to the
arctic but various things were used instead of "money" i.e. cacao
beans,
wampum, quetzal feathers etc. The market in Tenochtitlan
was the
largest in the world at the time. They were also a violent
people but
it had little to do with money, profit or capital in the sense that
we think
of it today. Cortez remarked that they had "thought him
a God" but after
the fought to the last man he said that they had "fought like Gods."
I asked and still am asking:True in Europe, I suppose but seems like it has to be more complicated
"why a
"sedentary China" is considered less advanced than a predatory Europe?
(snip)Ed's reply:I have made the point before, (perhaps generously ignored), that
the international trade that took place between nation states in antiquity
were facillitated with money. The anomaly of monetary systems created a
balance of payments imbalance. That imbalance required the armys of the
creditor nations (and their mercinaries, paid for with money) to collect
the debts.
than that. Almost all professions have a theoretical framework for
the reason the world revolves around their view of it. Why should
economists be any different. I think the point could be made that
entertainment and the coliseum had as much to do with Roman
aggression and conquest as anything else. It quieted the masses,
provided terror for the conquered sacrificed and gave the army a
patron attitude that gave meaning to their cruelty. It also was the
basis for the opera in spite of the Italians claiming a Greek origin,
again an old idea. Everyone thinks the world revolves around them
and that the world would stop without their contribution. It ain't
necessarily so.
(snip)This was more true up until the 1990s. I don't believe that it is as true
Ed. replys = The corollary point I was submitting would be that just as
the importance of maintaining the monetary solvency of the military
industrial complex of the U.S. drives both invention and technology today,
the same drive (money) drove the implimentation of invention in previous ages.
today with the power in the TNCs and crossing national borders.
Ray continues;
As for banking and speculation as motivation, Skedelsky makes the
point in his article: their sense of importance was inflated and lucky for
them that it was, for if they had the responsibility and power that they
claimed the bigots would have had a point. Even the "simple" act of
throwing Wagner in debtor's prison was a catastrophe. As William
Buckley never tires of saying, the rich are really terribly vulnerable,
and what remains unsaid is that it often makes them poor in their
judgement.Ed replys: ==I would hope that I am not a bigot! My thesis is predicated on
the idea that it is the anonaly of the money system. Banking and
speculation are merely engaged in by those whose occupation it is, in the
same way that I use nuclear generated electricity without having a clue as
to how it is generated.
Why Ed are you wealthy?
Ed continues: ===========I'll look it up.
As to why western civilization developed the way it did, there's a lovely
book by Daniel Boorstien titled "The Discoverors, A History of Man's Search
to Know His World and Himself."
Inside the jacket in a personal note to the reader a paragraph asks,Who says they didn't? Who is supposed to have crossed the Bering Straits?"I have asked some unfamiliar questions. Why didn't the Chinese "discover"
Europe or America?
Why didn't the Arabs circumnavigate Africa and theThey did. See Braudel.
world?
Why did it take so long for people to learn that the earth goesIt didn't. There were those who thought it long before Copurnicus just
around the sun?
as the round earth preceded Columbus.
Why did people begin to believe that there are "species"Who are the "people" that Boorstien refers to? Europeans?
of plants and animals?
Because I suspect he has no idea of the way that the Aboriginies
for example, divided the world. We divided it up into nations with
a unique consciousness defining the members of each nation.
Scientists later divided it according to external characteristics
and called consciousness anthropomorphic. We belief in
relationship they belief in objects.
Why were the facts of prehistory and the discoveryI don't know that, I wasn't there. Scientists don't know it
of the progress of civilization so slow in coming?"
either. Most of their work is based upon projection and
little data.
ED: If there's any time after reading E-Mail, highly recommended.
Personal to Ray:
I appreciate you replys. I would equally appeciate being disabused of any
errors to which I have subscribes in my limited search for answers.
"I once read a book and was exhilarated by how much I knew, then I
dicovered a library."
We say that books are meant to stimulate that which you have
buried in your memory.
Stay strong,
Ray
