After Such Knowledge

The human race is not really a success. Our species became extinct millions of years ago - in nature. It survives today as a living form only because it was extruded from nature into culture. This is a very different context. It means that the ancestor of Homo sapiens who was divergent from the basic stock, and all that creature's descendants down to the point where they became clearly shielded from nature by culture, became extinct in nature because they were failures in nature. The human race survived only because it was able to leave the natural environment and enter a cultural environment that the race made for itself. The main function of the cultural environment was to provide a setting in which the genus Homo could survive as a living form outside nature. In this process culture acted as a buffer between the genus Homo, as an animal, and nature, shielding Homo from nature. In this sense, both the human race and culture are non-natural. Students of human origins persist in fo...

Mohammed's "umma" was accepted...in words, explicit conceptual schemes, and ideology as the right vehicle of loyalty and allegiance. But it didn't become the vehicle of such devotion on the neurological and endocrinological levels. Only the kinship group "deserved" that. Which is why Afghanistan, at one extreme, is the graveyard of empires. In the European dark age (~970) a major part of human relationships were customary, personal, face-to-face, and many of the controls for human activities were internalized within the endocrine and nervous systems. They were not external controls like prices, traffic signals, or legislation). The internal controls were due to socialization in the family and neighborhood, including behavior patterns and religion. There was a subtle component in the divergence between the fates of Rome in the west and Rome in the east. This rested on the ancient difference between Greek rationalism and Latin pragmatism. You can see it in the...