[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) 'The End of Faith' - Bronowski

[Terry W. Colvin]

ì...the predator posing as a hero because he rides the whirlwind. But the
whirlwind is empty. Horse or tank. Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin, it can
only feed on the labors of other men. The nomad in his last historic role as
war maker is still an anachronism, and worse, in a world that has discovered,
in the last twelve thousand years, that civilization is made by settled
people... 

Organized (offensively motivated) war is not a human instinct. It is a highly
planned and co-operative form of theft. And that form of theft began ten
thousand years ago when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus, and the
nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not
provide... 

Ghengis Khan and his Mongol dynasty brought that thieving way of life into our
own millennium. From AD 1200 to 1300 they made one of the last major attempts to
establish the supremacy of the robber who produced nothing and who, in his
feckless way, comes to take from the peasant (who has nowhere to flee)
the surplus that agriculture accumulates. 

ìYet that attempt failed. And it failed because in the end there was nothing for
the Mongols to do, except themselves adopt the way of life of the people that 
they had conquered... They became settlers because theft, offensive war, is not
a permanent state that can be sustained.î 

Jacob Bronowski 
THE ASCENT OF MAN 


Barry Williams


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
     Alternate: < fortean1 at msn.com >
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