Re: lock step

Paul Dillon (dillonph who-is-at northcoast.com)
Wed, 29 Sep 1999 22:59:11 -0700

Mike,

For what it's worth in one of the bibles of deep ecology, the book Ishmael,
a very direct correspondence is made: "eficient killing devices=efficient
farming devices" and it's of note that in the Bible the deep logic of the
expulsion from the garden (simple non-agricultural societies) leads to the
bifurcation: pastoralist (Abel), agriculturalist (Cain) with the latter
killing the former, and then on to the good old sacrifice of the children
(Abraham/Isaac) and then on into one of the most lock step of all religions
with its theme of killing children at the center of its ritual). As Ivan
Karamazov said of the children, "If they, too, suffer horribly on earth,
they must suffer for their father's sins, they must be punished for their
fathers, who have eaten the apple . . . Children while they are quite
little--up to seven, for instance--are so remote from grown-up people; they
are different creatures, as it were, of a different species." Funny how
the age at which the reversal of synaptic development begins is so codified
in so many places.

So I wonder if it isn't really a question of the ethos, the dominant themes
(a la dramas of Burke) of agricultural civilization (based on the selective
killing of species not merely individuals, unlike horticulture with its
coexistence of species; e.g. Andean, Guarani, examples). This moves into an
entire realm of cultural analysis and interpretation that seems far removed
from the concerns of activity theory however, more into phenomenological
hermeneutics a la Paul Ricoeur. But then maybe that's one of the
directions one needs to look for the answers to the original question you
posed.

Paul H. Dillon