Farmers have repeatedly met with disastrous results because of the conventional emphasis on single-crop approaches to agriculture or monoculture, to use a widely accepted term for those endless wheat and corn fields that extend to the horizon in many parts of the world. Without the mixed crops that normally provide both the countervailing forces and mutualistic support that come with mixed populations of plants and animals, the entire agricultural situation in an area has been known to collapse. Benign insects become pests because their natural controls, including birds and small mammals, have been removed. The soil, lacking earthworms, nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and green manure in sufficient quantities, is reduced to mere sand — a mineral medium for absorbing enormous quantities of inorganic nitrogen salts, which were originally supplied more cyclically and timed more appropriately for crop growth in the ecosystem.
A vibrant vitalism so completely replaces the despiritized matter of conventional physics that even the idea of planets copulating is not implausible. Life, as we normally conceive it, and society are merely the offspring of a progressive elaboration of the passions. Fourier, to be sure, is not unique in conceiving of the universe in biological terms. But in contrast to most vitalists, he carries his “law of passionate attraction” from the stars into humanity’s innermost psychic recesses.
Humanity was to cling to the primal blood oath with such tenacity that primordial social forms often remained intact even after they had been divested of their content. In many cases, the clans were not immediately destroyed; often they were retained and like the extended family persisted as mere shadows of the past. In fact, they were subtly reworked in certain societies into instrumentalities of the newly emerging State — first, in the service of early priestly corporations, later, in vestigial form, in the service of the military chieftains and kings. In trying to answer these questions, we are again burdened by all the paradoxes created by hindsight. The drama that Victorian thought presents would seem irrefutable if we were to look backward from a history layered by stages in which the last stage imparts functions to the first such that every stage is a logical social descendant of previous ones.
• There are two ways of dating geologic materials:
It also assumes that the strong emphasis on individual autonomy, which our contemporary “modernists” so facilely attribute to the Renaissance, will acquire unsurpassed reality-but without the loss of the strong communal ties enjoyed by organic societies in the past. Hierarchy, in effect, would be replaced by interdependence, and consociation would imply the existence of an organic core that meets the deeply felt biological needs for care, cooperation, security, and love. Freedom would no longer be placed in opposition to nature, individuality to society, choice to necessity, or personality to the needs of social coherence. In this respect we have been our own worst enemies-not only objectively but subjectively as well. Our mental, and later our factual, dissociation of society from nature rests on the barbarous objectification of human beings into means of production and targets of domination-an objectification we have projected upon the entire world of life.
Radiometric dating
To the extent that such a levelling would occur, it was the work his utopia might hope to achieve gradually, in the fullness of time. The notion that equivalence can be the moral coinage of freedom is as alien to freedom itself as is the notion of the State. Indeed, it is not accidental that this kind of language can be found in the constitutions and legal codes of the most unreconstructed bourgeois republics. Traditional anarchist concepts of contract score no greater advance over our system of justice than Marx’s notion of a “proletarian dictatorship” scores any advance over our republican concepts of freedom. But this apparatus is itself the “client” of a vastly complex natural world, which it rarely comprehends in terms that are not strictly technical.
The myth of contractual “trust,” with its sanctimonious seals and archaic language, is built on the persistence of contractual mistrust and social estrangement, which the idea of “contract” continually reinforces. That everything has to be “spelled out” is evidence of the ubiquity of moral predation. Every “agreement” reflects a latent antagonism, and (traditional anarchist rhetoric aside) its “mutualistic” ethics internationalcupid lacks any true understanding of care and complementarity. Denied the message of social ecology, the libertarian ideal tends to sink to the level of ideological sectarianism and, even worse, to the level of the hierarchical syndicalism fostered by industrial society. Actually, the formal structure of dialectical and analytical reason would require very little alteration to accommodate a libertarian rationality.
A comprehensive compilation and summary of Quaternary geochronologic methods and applications is provided by Noller et al. (2000b). The most commonly used methods are also described by McCalpin (1996) and Yeats et al. (1997). Recent developments in cosmogenic surface exposure dating methods are beginning to be widely applied in paleoseismology to determine the age of offset features for slip-rate measurements (e.g., van der Woerd et al., 2006).
By the thirteenth century, mystics such as David of Dinant and Amaury claimed that matter and mind were identical with God — indeed, that everything could be unified as God. The spread of these pantheistic ideas to the ordinary people of Paris and Strasbourg produced a number of sects such as the New Spirit, the sisterhood of the Beguines and the brotherhood of the Beghards, and most notoriously, the Brethren of the Free Spirit. To these sects, humanity was composed of the same divine substance as God, hence it could enter into direct communion with the deity.
For the first time in a written legacy, work — in contrast to valor — appears as an attribute of personal nobility and responsibility. The virtuous man who bends his neck to the yoke of toil occupies the center of the poetic stage and enviously elbows out the aristocrat who lives off his labor. Thus do poor men assemble their virtues as the attributes of toil, renunciation, and husbandry, all the more to affirm their superiority over the privileged who enjoy lives of ease, gratification, and pleasure. Later, the ruling classes will recognize how rich an ideological treasure trove the Hesiods have bestowed upon them. They too will extol the virtues of poverty for the meek, who will find treasure in heaven while the arrogant will pay in hell for their sinful “heaven” on earth.
They were too afraid to cement their view of nature to subjectivity — a commitment they identified with mythic and classical archaisms. The wish to make this commitment haunts their entire work on reason and enlightenment, but it is a wish they were too prudent to satisfy. One of the most vivid accounts of how communal labor traditions and forms linger on into modern times, often transforming grueling toil into festive work, appears in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Levin (Tolstoy’s typical fictional counterpart) observes peasants haying on his sister’s estate. Sitting transfixed on a haycock, he is “fascinated” while teeming peasants in the meadow buoyantly cut the hay, stack it, and pitch it with hayforks on wooden carts.
With the loss of innocence appeared new concepts that were to have a highly equivocal effect on social development, a certain ideological armoring, a growth of intellectual powers, an increasing degree of individuality, personal autonomy, and a sense of a universal humanitas as distinguished from folk parochialism. To be expelled from the Garden of Eden can be regarded, as Hegel was to say, as an important condition for its return — but on a level that is informed with a sophistication that can resolve the paradoxes of paradise. But the very lack of distinction between “freedom” and “domination” leaves organic society unguarded against hierarchy and class rule.
They can tell you how old something is to a near-precise date or within a set range, usually with a slight margin of error. Multiple tests are carried out on a subject material, choosing a range of samples to ensure that such problems are eliminated. Researchers will also send samples to different labs, ensuring that each is unaware of which other labs are carrying out tests. When there is concurrence, we can be quite certain of the date or date range that results from the test. This in turn depends in the approximate expected age of the object because radioactive elements decay at enormously different rates. To understand radiometric dating techniques, you first have to have an understanding of what is being measured, how the measurement is being made and the theoretical as well as practical limitations of the system of measurement being used.
Even a sense of one’s personal destiny disappears into the bureaucrat’s office and filing cabinet. History itself will be read in the microfilm records and computer tapes of the agencies that now form the authentic institutions of society. Psychological categories have indeed “become political categories,” as Marcuse observed in the opening lines of his Eros and Civilization, but in a pedestrian form that exceeds his most doleful visions.