Mon 2014-04-14 22:29 The history of man is such that yes, we were hunter-gatherer's for much longer than we have been farmers, but obviously there have in the history of the world been many more farmers than hunter-gatherers.
so we tend to see the farming-based cultures like our own as more successful, but really that's only in terms of pure numbers. And I wonder, is it such a good thing to have so many of us on the planet? Have we really been successful or just numerous? Of course it's a purely academic question since we are where we are and there's no going back, but I think that part of the fascination with disaster movies and the idea of a collapse of civilization that pervades so much of late 19th century on literature, film and art is that (perhaps unconscious) suspicion that perhaps we were better off in small bands, as hunter gatherers, since at this point the only path we have to return to such a culture is a disaster scenario.

Tue 2014-04-15 21:37 Really like Epictetus' idea from a mock conversation with Zeus that Zeus, which for Epictetus appears to have been more like a generic conception of nature or life or the world, was hobbled in his ability to create.
That man though was given "a certain portion of ourself, this faculty of choice and refusal of desire and aversion." And that if we can learn to use this he will never feel frustrated or dissatisfied. That's nice, but I especially like the idea of worldview in which the forces creating us, which in our day and age might be more like evolutionary forces or maybe even the microbiology of our guts -- which is perhaps foreign enough, as in literally foreign bacteria, such as to be sketched as a kind of external god-like force -- is inherently flawed, as given us only half the message so to speak and that part of our reason for existence, part of our task in living is perhaps to piece together that missing bit.

I can also see rejecting that notion that we are missing something though. Perhaps we just have half the information and that's all we need. I believe DNA can replicate itself from less than complete strands -- do we need, in this metaphor, all the information of Zeus or can we get by with what we have?