collapse

So, i had some setbacks since last week, and, man, am i ever feeling grumpier and grumpier. It was like this one disappointment, then the next and before you know it there's an avalanche of negativity you allow coming your way. What to do?? One thing is to think about causes, what to do about changing that. Try not to take it out on people you meet, not drink anything, etc, etc. Watch funny movies. Yea, i found my old Robin of Sherwood series from the 80s on youtube, thanks Ravindraa for uploading, the only good appearance of Robin Hood on the screen ever, with the stuff on paganism and the hilarious characters.

But that still leaves a lot of dark thoughts.

So i was doing a lot of thinkng on collapse. That is one good subject for negativity, and something more specific came to mind reading Cristopher Hitchens piece in Slate on the handing of the Swat valley in Pakistan to sort-of Taliban/AQ factions:

http://www.slate.com/id/2213246/

There's a great deal to be negative about here, not only will the thugs impose cruel punishment on men and women who do not follow their 'divine law', there's also the threat that this will spill over to other parts in northern Pakistan and that they will cooperate with the army and secret service to gain control of the country. And the nukes. It's the potential first stone of the domino effect. That, at least, is what hawks will tell you. For others there is this inevitable march towards modernity where such relapses to medievalism (sorry Robin!!) are seen as errors or little accidents along the way, to be resolved, i guess, by history, or more accurately, i think, by magic. So, which narrative is right?

Well, i would think it's about power, the desire of the Taliban/AQ to gain power over people, the desire of some to make their nation 'great' by attacking India. But there's also the desire of some to protect their country against the fanaticism, as large parts of the population are more secular and democratic. For example, the people of Chitral, wedged between Afghanistan and Swat have formed their own units and are protecting their community through force of arms. So, we'll see who wins, but Obama was right that this is a more dangerous thing than Iraq atm.

I was busy thinking about such things because i am writing this paper, based on earlier research, on collapse, specifically the collapse of the Mycenaeans in Greece c. 1200 B.C. Everything disappeared here, cities, writing, government, art (mostly). What happened? Well, people have put forward quite dramatic things, invading barbarians, massive 'earthquacke storms', peasant revolutions, plagues, desastrous inter-city warfare, even comets from outer space. My theory is not quite so dramatic and deals with the basic way the economy worked. This was based fundamentally on getting a surplus of grains to 'finance' other kind of activities. Getting this surplus is quite difficult in labour terms because of some seasonal factors where you have limited times/manpower for ploughing the field and harvesting the crop. To get around this you can either use intensive garden agriculture or scale up and use massive oxen for your ploughing. But the latter makes you quite vulnerable, as computer models have shown. It seems that if plough oxen become unavailable or too few you have no surplus of grains anymore.

Which means your economy is gone. And i don't mean a 5% decrease here. People can go back to their gardens, but they cannot supply the state/market with all the produce to sustain scribes, specialists, government officials and the like. So, there you go. Of course i have to add a lot more scholarly detail to this but the basic logic is there. Was this so bad for the people? Hard to say. If you see the destructions and site abandonments, you think yes. But on the other hand people might quite welcome the return to simpler societies. After all we humans are more adapted to live in smaller societies, which are often more egalitarian as we know from ethnography. Well, despite being grumpy i like my society, more or less, so i think such value judgements don't matter so much.

Grumpy still, well, the cat managed to change back in one day to being really cheerful.