The Air I Breathe

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sun, 09 Oct 2011 14:13:20 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - Neil has often referred to "Western Civilization". Here he explains what that means to him.

What is Western Civilization? The undeniable triumph, ten thousand years in the making, of the individual, in a society of self-governing individuals, deeply rooted in a respect for knowledge and tradition, yet continually looking to a new and even better future, a system that cherishes institutions of private property, individual achievement, and equality before the law, whose only operational boundaries are purely ethical ones, and to whom, beyond that, not even the sky is the limit.

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Operational Boundaries

Submitted by White Indian on Sun, 16 Oct 2011 14:29:46 GMT

operational boundaries are purely ethical ones

Only an agricultural city-Statist could apologize for the big-government program of drawing arbitrary demarcations upon the face of Mother Earth to prevent the free movement of the First Families from foraging and hunting, use aggression and the threat thereof to enforce such lines, and call it "ethical."

The agricultural city-State (civilization) and the Non-Aggression principle are contradictory. Civilization requires vast amounts of aggression to work. L. Niel Smith is willing to whitewash that aggression.

"Agriculture creates government." ~Richard Manning, Against the Grain, p. 73

"Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home." ~Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization, first sentence of the book

Officer, am I free to gambol* about forest and plain?

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* Why agriculture? In retrospect, it seems odd that it has taken archaeologists and paleontologists so long to begin answering this essential question of human history. What we are today—civilized, city-bound, overpopulated, literate, organized, wealthy, poor, diseased, conquered, and conquerors—is all rooted in the domestication of plants and animals. The advent of farming re-formed humanity. In fact, the question "Why agriculture?" is so vital, lies so close to the core of our being that it probably cannot be asked or answered with complete honesty. Better to settle for calming explanations of the sort Stephen Jay Gould calls "just-so stories."

In this case, the core of such stories is the assumption that agriculture was better for us. Its surplus of food allowed the leisure and specialization that made civilization. Its bounty settled, refined, and educated us, freed us from the nasty, mean, brutish, and short existence that was the state of nature, freed us from hunting and gathering. Yet when we think about agriculture, and some people have thought intently about it, the pat story glosses over a fundamental point. This just-so story had to have sprung from the imagination of someone who never hoed a row of corn or rose with the sun for a lifetime of milking cows. Gamboling about plain and forest, hunting and living off the land is fun. Farming is not. That's all one needs to know to begin a rethinking of the issue. The fundamental question was properly phrased by Colin Tudge of the London School of Economics: “The real problem, then, is not to explain why some people were slow to adopt agriculture but why anybody took it up at all.”

~Richard Manning
Against the Grain

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