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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (480307)	9/30/2021 12:51:17 AM
From: abuelita	Respond to of 541201

Koan can.

To: epicure who wrote (480307)	9/30/2021 11:06:47 AM
From: koan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 541201

Yes, our founding fathers were racists and sexists, but they were also the intelligentsia of the day. That shows how primitive human's thinking was back then. What puzzles me, is that you don't see the last 15,000 years of human cultural evolution as just that evolution. We have been evolving culturally for the last 15,000 years. My favorite book of all time:" The Axe makers gift" chronicles that evolution We have been evolving, history is very clear about that. Before 15,000 years ago we were pretty much just very smart nomadic animals, then as we settled down, and started to trade we started to lean. Trade required we learned math, and written languages. When we developed a written language we could pass information down from one generation to the next with both exactness and time frames. As James Burke and Robert Ornstein point out in the above book, the more we learned the more myths were replaced by facts. The early Greeks developed the first functional language, by reworking the Phoenician language which was difficult and that is when knowledge exploded to concepts like Democracy, ethics, science and logic. 10% of Athens was literate. And from there different forms of democracy started to evolve like the Magna Carta. And finally our constitution and democracy, but our collective thinking was still very basic, with few intellectuals. The next big watershed was the world making public education mandatory or available worldwide and that is when we went from concrete thinkers to abstract thinkers, en masse. Don't you find it strange things like ending acceptable racism, sexism and homophobia all happened in a 60 year period or so? That was because we hit a critical mass of abstract thinkers large enough to effect those things, and as James Flynn, pointed out we gained 60 IQ points from about 1900 to 2000, because of public education. As he says, our grandparents were operating at about a 70 IQ and the kids today at about 130 IQ. Can't you see how much more civilized we are today than 100 years ago when women could not vote and we had two world wars and we were just 60 years past slavery? As Steven Pinker said in his book:" the Nature of our Better Angles" this is the most peaceful time in history. And speaking a lot of languages does not mean one is smart, a five year old child could speak 6 languages if one lived in an environment that allowed that. Below is James Flynn lecture on why our IQ's are higher than our grandparents. << LOL- our founding fathers were racists and sexists. So were they idiots? Queen Elizabeth I spoke at least 6 languages and was very familiar with Ancient Greek and Latin- and the thoughts of the ancients. But she had people tortured and killed (quite a lot of people). "Brighter" does not mean nicer or more humane. There were plenty of brilliant Nazis- that's why the US took so many Nazi scientists. The "progress" of civilizations is a complex thing. I don't think anyone's really explained it adequately yet.