MESOPOTAMIA
Which class rule evolved first mesopotamia: Warriors or Priests? (we know the answer)
Which class emerged in control of rule?
Did that class adopt the role of the other (conflate)?
Did that ruling class conflate roles of religion and law?
Now, the little rhetorical problem here is that I made the original statements about the tendencies of CIVILIZATIONS to make use of different TECHNOLOGIES of organization, and the unintended consequences of those rules. I make this argument in order to expand upon the differnces between western, fertile crescent, hrappan/indian, and chinese civilizations, and how our earliest assumptions about the world, man, the good, and the true, originated in the ancient past and still govern us today – with unintended consequences. And I make this argument so that westerners understand why, as poor people, small in number, lacking concentrate capital of the river valleys, developed FASTER (not first, just faster) than other civilizations in the pre-historic, ancient, and modern eras.
Why is that? Well, I think I know, and I think it’s something we CAN know.
Here is another example.
If we read the inscriptions from the Palace Stele from Ur, the Cuneiform of Cyrus and Darius and his Son Darius (starting with the 27th or Persian Dynasty), with the inscriptions of similar periods of the Egyptians (just prior to persian conquest), with the writings of Homer and shortly after of the ‘Athenians’, or any of the greeks, with the writing of the romans, of the german law and myth, of the english law and myth, then what is the difference in the method of narration, explanation and argument?
All civilizations produce some level of occult(experiential), religion, myth, literature, history, law, mathematics, and ‘science'(existential). But we can actually MEASURE that distribution. And we can easily determine the level of conflation or deflation (from occult down to science) that governance relies upon, and we can measure changes in the economies that result from those (a) distributions of use and (b) use in government. So we can MEASURE the consequences of say, how chinese rule changed when the migrated from empirical to moral rule. We can measure the consequences of the use of islam by the aristocracy and it’s use as a method of general rule.
(btw: the fellow in the original thread does not know just how much knowledge I have of the ancient middle east, but I’m pretty sure it’s comparatively non trivial. and it would turn into a pissing match if I took that avenue with him. )
THE WAY WE SPEAK, THE METHODS OF NARRATION, EXPLANATION, ARGUMENT, AND DECIDABILITY profoundly influence us. And if we conduct rule by those different methods they profoundly affect us more. The problem is the means of rule by scientific law is expensive and requires a high trust low context society, and the means of mythological rule is inexpensive but only requires indoctrination in a high context but produces a low trust society.
These are profound questions that explain our evolutionary differences.
Curt
