As the inorganic replaces the organic in nature, so the inorganic replaces the organic in society and personality. The simplification of the natural world has its uncanny parallel in the simplification of society and subjectivity. The homogenization of ecosystems goes hand in hand with the homogenization of the social environment and the so-called individuals who people it. The intimate association of the domination of human by human with the notion of the domination of nature terminates not only in the notion of domination as such; its most striking feature is the kind of prevailing nature — an inorganic nature — that replaces the organic nature that humans once viewed so reverently.
Intercalibration of the various time-scales back through Mesozoic and Palaeozoic times will probably incorporate all of these methods, with extension of astronomical calibrations to the Palaeozoic probably involving ‘floating’ astronomical time-scales intercalibrated with the continually updated and refined GPTS and GTS. Nature generally imposes such restrictive conditions on human behavior that the social limits encountered by the individual are almost congruent with those created by the natural world. The “superego” and “ego,” to use Freudian categories, formed by the child seem to be (as they so often are in fact) the products of natural limitations transmuted into social relationships.
Despite the morass of slavery into which the classical world descended, only to be followed by feudal forms of servitude, these ethical distinctions did not disappear. A close association between ethics and technics persisted throughout medieval society, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Feudal custom and the Protestant ethic dictated a sense of moral responsibility and theological “calling” toward work and technical change, all other social and doctrinallimitations aside. The medieval guilds were not merely occupational associations; they regulated the quality of goods according to very distinct canons of fairness and justice in which Biblical precept played as much of a role as economic considerations.
Definitions for absolute datingab·so·lute dat·ing
Today, we fervently debate their tenets under very different names, hardly mindful of their pedigree or the extent to which they anticipated our theories and practices. The most well-known of these radical movements reached their apogee in the English Revolution, then drastically narrowed their millenarian scope. They became amiable service organizations, such as the Society of Friends (Quakers), with very little awareness of their own fiery, often violent, chiliastic origins.
The extraordinary extent to which bourgeois society has discredited popular demands for public control of the social process is the result of sweeping structural changes in society itself. Appeals for local autonomy suggest politically naive and atavistic social demands only because domination has become far more than a mere legacy. Indeed, the increasingly vociferous demands for local control may reflect the extent to which community itself, be it a municipality or a neighborhood, is faced with extinction. With the breakdown of the organic community, privilege began to replace parity, and hierarchical or class society began to replace egalitarian relationships.
Shallow structures and evolution of the Ivory Coast and Ghana transform margin
Conscious cultural affinity is ultimately a more creative basis for association than the unthinking demands of kin loyalties. The rudiments of an ecological society will probably be structured around the commune-freely created, human in scale, and intimate in its consciously cultivated relationships-rather than clan or tribal forms that are often fairly sizable and anchored in the imperatives of blood and the notion of a common ancestry. It is not “retribalization” that an ecological society is likely to seek but rather recommunalization with its wealth of creative libertarian traits. We also must recover the terrain necessary for the personification and the formation of a body politic. What began in the late 1970s as a squatters’ movement for more housing in Holland has now turned into a fervent struggle by young people in Switzerland for space free from authority and surveillance. Issues of habitation and logistics have turned into issues of culture, and issues of culture have become issues of politics.
Biology and socialization, in fact, cojoin precisely at the point where maternal care is the most formative factor in childhood acculturation. Biology is obviously important because the neural equipment of human beings to think symbolically and to generalize well beyond the capacity of most primates is a tangible physical endowment. The newborn infant faces a long period of biological dependency, which not only allows for greater mental plasticity in acquiring knowledge but also provides time in which to develop strong social ties with its parents, siblings, and some kind of rudimentary community. No less important is the fo rm of the socialization process itself, which intimately shapes the mentality and sensibility of the young. Republican virtue viewed as a human good had to be depersonalized, generalized, and finally objectified into republican virtue viewed as an institutional good. Where Jefferson had placed the locus of his ethics in a family-worked farm, independent and strong in its commitment to independence, the new merchant-entrepreneurs placed the locus of their ethics in an industrial community worked by hired, robotized hands.
There is an enormous body of science on the age-dating of Apollo samples and Moon-derived asteroids. We have a lot of rock samples and a lot of derived ages, but it’s hard to be certain where a particular chunk of rock picked up by an astronaut originated. The Moon’s surface has been so extensively “gardened” over time by smaller impacts that there was no intact bedrock available to the Apollo astronauts to sample. So we can get incredibly precise dates on the ages of these rocks, but can’t really know for sure what we’re dating. For clarity and precision in international communication, the rock record of Earth’s history is subdivided into a “chronostratigraphic” scale of standardized global stratigraphic units, such as “Devonian”, “Miocene”, “Zigzagiceras zigzag ammonite zone”, or “polarity Chron C25r”. Unlike the continuous ticking clock of the “chronometric” scale (measured in years before the year AD 2000), the chronostratigraphic scale is based on relative time units in which global reference points at boundary stratotypes define the limits of the main formalized units, such as “Permian”.
The Cathari, a gnostic sect that flourished during the Middle Ages, had a program for self-extinction. Their extreme rejection of the “hylic” or material — from reproduction to food — would have guaranteed a retreat from the Demiurge’s cosmos into an utterly ineffable one had the Albigensian “crusade” of the thirteenth century not led to their virtual extermination. Thus, groups that, during the breakdown of the ancient world and the years of early Christianity, might have emphasized a productivist and ascetic outlook sometimes shifted their perspectives during more stable periods to a consumerist and hedonistic interpretation of freedom. Comparatively large popular movements from the late imperial Roman era became highly elitist sects during medieval times and developed a harshly predatory view of their rights and their freedoms.
The notion of nature as a realm of “scarce resources,” which is articulated clearly in Aristotle’s Politics, has yielded to the notion of nature as a realm of plenty and abundance; hence, no need exists for institutions and restrictions of any kind, or for hierarchy and domination. Indeed, Cokaygne is not a society at all but a fecund land, and its human inhabitants may live in it without placing any constraints on their desires. It is libertarian — indeed, deliciously libertine — because nature is no longer the product of a stern, demanding Creator; it is instead an emancipated nature that goes hand in hand with an emancipated humanity and an emancipation of human fantasy. Freedom’s equality of unequals had never totally disappeared as a principle of “compensation,” if only because this principle could be used to provide credibility for privilege as well as equality. Where justice assailed the inequities of class rule or its claims to status as a matter of birth, the notion of “compensation” reinforced these inequities by according to “unequals” a greater “compensatory” increment in power, wealth, and authority. “Compensation” acknowledged the “superiority” of the slave master and feudal lord over their slaves and serfs; it accorded the ruler the authority and means to live according to the norms of rulership.
Nor is it a celestial, omnipresent “energy” that replaces the vast material differentia of which the natural and social realms are composed. To the contrary, wholeness comprises the variegated structures, the articulations, and the mediations that impart to the whole a rich variety of forms and thereby add unique qualitative properties to what a strictly analytic mind often reduces to “innumerable” and “random” details. In view of the enormous dislocations that now confront us, our own era needs a more sweeping and insightful body of knowledge — scientific as well as social — to deal with our problems.
Samples from several localities (Wyoming,
Canada, Greenland, and China) have yielded dates as old as 4–4 Ga (Fig. 12). Individual clastic grains of the mineral zircon have yielded dates of up to 4 Ga, indicating that
by 4 Ga solid crust existed, at least for a while. Radioisotopic dating of Moon rocks yields
dates of up to 4 Ga, and dating of meteorites thought to reflect the most primitive solids of the
Solar System has yielded ages as old as 4 Ga. Geologists consider these meteorites to be
fragments of very early, undifferentiated planetesimals. Meteorites derived from differentiated
planetesimals (ones that had separated into a core and mantle) are about 4 Ga. The main difference between absolute and relative dating is that the absolute dating is a technique to determine the numerical age of a rock or a fossil whereas the relative dating is a technique that determines the relative age.
The formation of the human mind is inseparable from the socialization of human nature at birth and its early period of development. However significant biology may be in shaping the human nervous system and its acuity, it is ultimately the gradual introduction of the newborn infant to culture that gives reason its specifically human character. We must turn to this early formative process to find the germinal conditions CaribbeanCupid for a new, libertarian mode of rationality and the sensibility that will infuse it. Although Lowell was to fade away as a model industrial community, its legacy never disappeared. Such a highly regulated world did not reappear in the United States until the 1950s, albeit in the pastel colors favored by social engineers and reinforced less by brute surveillance than by the subtle arts of industrial psychology.
In either case, we are obliged to understand why one course of development unfolded, not merely how it occurred — and to give it meaning, coherence, and ethical interpretation. In any case the development is real and we cannot suppress our responsibility to interpret it in ethical terms by claiming that it is merely a series of random events. To evoke nature as the source for an objectively grounded ethics, as I propose to do, requires careful qualification.
