Like the blood oath, the patriarchal family constituted a highly cohesive moral obstacle to political authority — not because it opposed authority as such (as was the case with organic society) but rather because it formed the nexus for the authority of the father. Ironically, patriarchy represented, in its kinship claims, the most warped traits of organic https://www.loveexamined.net/ society in an already distorted and changing social world.[37] Here, to put it simply, gerontocracy is writ large. It answers not to the needs of the organic society’s principle of sharing and solidarity but to the needs of the oldest among the elders. No system of age hierarchy has a more overbearing content, a more repressive mode of operation.
The enormous potentialities latent in these developments should not be underestimated. Challenges beyond the imagination of the preliterate community they surely are; for a parochial folk to even conceive of itself as part of humanity involved shattering the bones of deeply embedded customs, traditions, and a sense of biological exceptionalism. The myth of the “chosen people,” as I have already noted, is not unique to Judaism; almost every folk, to one degree or another, has this image of itself. To include ethical standards of a shared humanitas, of a human community, involved a sweeping change in the process of conceptualizing social relations. A free-flowing realm of ethics, as distinguished from a world of hardened customs (however admirable these may be), is a creative realm in which the growth of mind and spirit is possible on a scale that has no precedent in the world of traditional mores. Ethics, values, and with them, social relationships, technics, and self-cultivation can now become self-forming, guided by intellect, sympathy, and love.
What to do if you’re in an unhappy marriage
When this history is instead viewed from its origins, mentality and its continuity with nature acquires a decisively different aspect. An authentic epistemology is the physical anthropology of the mind, of the human brain, not the cultural clutter of history that obstructs our view of the brain’s genesis in nature and its evolution in society conceived as a unique elaboration of natural phenomena. One can take issue with the emphasis Bloch gives to human sovereignty in the interaction with nature and the structural phraseology that infiltrates his brilliant grasp of the organic nature of that interaction. Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope) was written in the early 1940s, a grim and embattled period, when such a conceptual framework was totally alien to the antinaturalistic, indeed, militaristic spirit of the times. His insight beggars our hindsight, redolent with its “pop” ecological terminology and its queasy mysticism.
You’re Ready to Get Married. Your Partner Isn’t. Here’s Exactly What to Do.
Knowledge, or gnosis-to know and transcend our primal act of self-transgression-is the first step toward curing our social pathology of rule, just as self-knowledge in psychoanalytic practice is the first step toward curing a personal pathology of repression. But the thought without the act, the theory without the practice, would be an abdication of all social responsibility. What is obviously at issue is not whether a council has been delegated, chosen by sortition, or formed in an ad hoc manner, but whether or not it can formulate policy. It would matter very little-given a reasonable amount of prudence, public supervision, and the right of the assembly to recall and rotate councilors-if councils were limited to strictly administrative responsibilities. It would not be difficult to determine whether these limits, once clearly defined, have been overstepped and the council has engaged in functions that impinge on the assembly’s policy-making powers. Nor would it be difficult to determine when certain functions have been discharged and needless administrative bodies can be disbanded.
No longer would we have need of a Cartesian-and more recently, a neo-Kantian-dualism that leaves nature mute and mind isolated from the larger world of phenomena around it. No less than this ethically rooted legitimation would be at stake-all its grim ecological consequences aside-if we fail to achieve an ecological society and articulate an ecological ethics. Can we, then, integrate the archaic customs of usufruct, complementarity, and the equality of unequals into a modern vision of freedom? What newer sensibilities, technics, and ethics can we develop, and what newer social institutions can we hope to form?
It is libertarian — indeed, deliciously libertine — because nature is no longer the product of a stern, demanding Creator; it is instead an emancipated nature that goes hand in hand with an emancipated humanity and an emancipation of human fantasy. As theory and an explicit ideal, freedom again rises to the surface of consciousness with Christianity. When Augustine places the wayfaring “Heavenly City” into the world as a force for social change, he also locates it in a meaningful, purposeful historical drama that leads to humanity’s redemption. Hence humankind is removed from the meaningless recurring cycles of ancient social thought.
Cohn describes a sketch written about 1330 in the chief stronghold of the heresey, Cologne, [in which] the Catholic mystic Suso evokes with admirable terseness those qualities in the Free Spirit which made it essentially anarchic. He describes how on a bright Sunday, as we were sitting lost in meditation, an incorporeal image appeared to his spirit. But a radical ethical doctrine — or an “amoral” one in the gnostic sense — there surely was. “A man [and certainly a woman] can perform a sinful act without being in sin, and as long as he acts with the intention of following the will of the Spirit, his action is good.”
In contrast, marriage in the upper class has held relatively steady, dropping from 82 percent to 80 percent. This paper represents one of the first attempts that we know of to measure marriage rates among the middle class defined by income. Although the media we consume might make us feel otherwise at times, the truth is that you can be happy and fulfilled, regardless of your relationship status. So as long as you’re comfortable with who you are and where you are in life, you should feel free to date — or not date — to your heart’s content. Above all else, if you just simply don’t want to date — whatever the reason — that’s the only excuse you need to take some time off from dating to focus on yourself.
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In the writings of such people as Herman Kahn, Buckminster Fuller, Alvin Toffler, John O’Neill, and the various seers in Stanford University’s “think-tanks,” futurism is essentially an extrapolation of the present into the century ahead, of “prophecy” denatured to mere projection. It does not challenge existing social relationships and institutions, but seeks to adapt them to seemingly new technological imperatives and possibilitiesthereby redeeming rather than critiquing them. The present does not disappear; it persists and acquires eternality at the expense of the future.
Accordingly, they did not hesitate to violently disrupt Church services and angrily orate against the sovereignty of the Papacy. The new code that edged its way into those preceding it picked up the principle of an exact, quantifiable equivalence from advanced forms of reciprocity, but without absorbing their sense of service and solidarity. Might was brought to the support of fair-dealings and contract, not merely to violent acquisition and plunder. The cosmic nature of equivalence could be validated by the most dramatic features of life. “Heaven and hell . . . hang together,” declare Horkheimer and Adorno — and not merely in the commerce of the Olympian gods with the chtonic deities, of good with evil, of salvation with disaster, of subject with object. Indeed, equivalence is as ancient as the very notions of heaven and hell, and is to have its own involuted dialectic as the substitution of Dike for Tyche and Justitia for Fortuna.
From the eleventh century onward, technics bolted forward with an energy that had not been seen since the Neolithic Revolution. We know quite well that ores do not reproduce themselves in exhausted mines, that ivory does not conceal an animate being, and that animals do not obligingly respond to hunting ceremonies. But these fancies may serve to inculcate a human respect for nature and cause people to cherish its bounty as more than exploitable “natural resources.” Ceremony and myth may enhance that respect and foster a rich sensitivity for the artistic and functional integrity of a crafted object. Group ceremonies, in fact, deepen group solidarity and make a community more effective in the pursuit of its ends. But the modern mind is unlikely to believe that mythopoeic notions of hunting and crafting are solidly rooted in natural phenomena. And however effective mythopoeic functions may be in achieving certain practical, often aesthetic ends, their success does not validate their claims to intrinsic truth.
Operatives worked a six-day week, approximately twelve hours a day, and bells tolled them awake and to their jobs (lateness was severely punished), to and from meals, curfew, and bed. Leaving this muddled logic aside, there is no “cruelty” in nature, only the predation (and mutualism) around which natural history has evolved its structures for sustaining life and ecological balance. There is no “suffering” in nature, only the unavoidable physical pain that comes with injury. There is no “scarcity” and “want” in nature, only needs that must be satisfied if life itself is to be maintained.