Dear producer,

You wrote 'destructive pagan and religious rituals' referring to hunter gatherer societies.

Considering the Wars of the Reformation, the Inquisition, the Muslim conquests, the Holocaust with a background of centuries of religious hatred, the Crusades, Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim conflict at the breakup of Yugoslavia, Protestant and Catholic hatred in Northern Ireland, murderous Jihad, Israel/Palestine etc. I doubt that the 'destructive pagan and religious rituals' of hunter gatherer societies have come anywhere close to the destructive religious hatreds in post-hunter-gatherer and post-pagan societies. It might be a kinder and more loving world had monotheism not been invented.

Producer, we are hardwired to be acquisitive. Our ancestors survived long ice ages because they had a drive to acquire the means to do so. We have a problem in our society with obesity for the same reason.

Additionally, our species has been pretty low density for all but the last 500 years. We started increasing our population exponentially, but with a small exponent and to settle into permanent communities only about 10000 years ago and kept roughly that same rate of population growth right up until around Columbus's time, when we really started to take off as trade and slavery enabled us to increase our access to resources massively and then accelerated still faster with the discovery of vaccination and industrialisation.

At the core though, we're still a species of chimpanzee with a drive to acquire stuff, whether useful or merely shiny and curious and to make more of us.

It's our nature and so we have to learn how to produce a social arrangement that makes a shrinking population possible while satisfying that inner chimp.

David, all religions and other cultural structures are essentially the same. Only the details vary and they depend on the people/person who is the messiah for the particular example, modified by the environment it exists in.

Lexi, I couldn't agree more. The problems with so much of the work of social constructionalists have derived from both their untested assumptions, which are frequently derived from their moral judgements and from a narrow and simplistic focus on picking winners and losers based on that morality, which often requires such constructions to be forcibly imposed (feminism is a clear example) and conflictual.

I think it is possible to come up with a generic approach that is amoral and is derived from satisfying basic human needs without conflict - in other words, ethical. Of course, that's easy to say...

I'm not sure if there's work being done on that or related topics in any Australian faculties. I'll have to make some enquiries.

Thanks for the kind words, Lexi, I'm feeling pretty humble at the moment, but don't worry, it can't last.

Antiseptic wrote: "David, all religions and other cultural structures are essentially the same. Only the details vary and they depend on the people/person who is the messiah for the particular example, modified by the environment it exists in."

Dear Antiseptic,

In what way are all religions and other cultural structures essentially the same?

All religions do not have either a messiah or a god. Buddhism is an example of one that has neither. Mohammed is regarded as a prophet not a messiah. We tend to see structures that we are unfamiliar with as analogous to structures with which we are familiar. Often they are not.

I went back to university in my sixties and think I learned a bit. I hope you also will.

Dear Antiseptic,

Our societies face many problems, economic imbalances caused
by rapid change, unprecedented shortages of water,
energy, land, living space, and dilemmas of global
interdependence in an overpopulated world where,
despite the affluence of a handful of technologically
advanced societies, billions of people are desperately
poor. We are ultimately dependent on two delicate
systems: the biological life-supports of the planetary
eco-system and the network of international political
and economic co-operation.

In any serious global disruption - caused by either natural
disasters, nuclear war, or economic collapse simple
societies (hunters and gatherers) might be able to continue
to feed themselves and be unaffected. But what would become of
societies where most people are trained to produce neither
food nor goods, nor little else besides the ultimate
inedible knowledge? I'm not implying that all our modern
societies are necessarily doomed. But I do feel that we're
more fragile than we think.

We can't know what form our society will take in the decades
ahead, because the future will be influenced by technological
and other developments that we can't yet forsee.
We inhabit a society that is among other things a sociological
laboratory, a place where experiments are being made that
may shape the human future.

Another question that I have is whether a society like China
which attempts to control infromation can become a successful
and creative society without making major changes in its
political institution?

Dear Lexi,

You wrote: "Another question that I have is whether a society like China which attempts to control infromation can become a successful and creative society without making major changes in its political institution?"

Neither Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia allowed free discussion, democratic forms nor questioning. Both tightly controlled information. However, both were quite successful at creating powerful war machines and impressive technological development.

It took the resources of a great coalition to defeat Germany, but Russia was allowed to implode because Gorbachev refused to reinstate the controls that had kept it together.

Both societies were immensely creative scientifically and technologically. One need not be creative in the humanities or have an open society to be dominant. It's been going on a long while. Greece was culturally superior to the Romans who conquered them, and Rome was culturally superior to those who conquered them. However, China may be both culturally and technologically superior to us while controlling information.

In its long history, as far as I know, China has never been democratic or had an open society. Think of the Britons who were painting themselves blue and worshiping trees two millennia ago.

Think of early China where coinage was introduced in the ninth century BCE, crop rotation was introduced in the sixth century BCE, revolving windows were devised in the fifth century BCE, crossbows with bronze triggers were made in the fourth century BCE, the distinction between arterial and venous blood was noted in the second century BCE, winnowing machines were invented in the first century BCE, astronomical clocks were devised in the first century BCE, nfolding chairs were made in the third century CE – the list goes on and on, ranging far more widely than the ‘gunpowder, magnetic compass and printing’ trilogy usually cited as examples of early Chinese discoveries. They did all that under rigid and undemocratic rule.