Kristen

Ok– that’s as much as I have time for now. I may be able to get to the next points later this evening, or it may have to wait a few days or a week. I will end with this statement of Mark’s, because my answer to it is very short:
If we lost the wealth that modern society can produce and went back to the kind of society where it is big grind to produce enough food to feed people and there is little discretionary capacity in society for people not to be involved in food production (and so not much of a police force or bureacracy, let alone any social welfare or universal education) then I think we’d return to more authoratarian society strucutres fairly quickly, even with a view of universal human dignity. I think we have little grasp how much what we take for granted is actually the conditions of a society where everyone is rich. Even our poor people have a kind of wealth unimaginable in earlier eras.

Is Mark a sociologist? Because I simply don’t see what his reasoning is behind this. I’m not a sociologist either– but I don’t see how authoritarian social structures spring of necessity from subsistence farming. I think they do spring of necessity from the tendency of humans to seize power whenever there isn’t anyone to stop them– but simply from needing to work hard just to survive, no.