[Terrapreta] Pottery Shards

[Jim Joyner]

Gerald Van Koeverden wrote:
> Of course, such communal effort is unthinkable in our present day  
> individualistic and specialized labour age, except in the case of  
> emergencies.  We still have it through the mechanism that a  
> significant percentage of our income goes to taxes to support  
> services like education, research, policing, postal service, sewage,  
> law courts, roads, pensions, medical facilities, etcetera which are  
> then provided back to us as community services.  But before extensive  
> specialization -  when 90% of the population were farmers and before  
> the extensive use of money or the notion of private property (private  
> property was not a popular concept in Amerindian culture) -  citizens  
> provided labour for community projects...
Gerrit,

I don't think we can have it both ways.

If we (the greater "we") want to go back to a subsistence living 
standard, then the problem will probably resolve itself very quickly 
anyway. Economic activity would be reduced, pollution would be reduced 
and due to large die off, populations would probably be reduced radically.

The age of specialization (better and better division of labor: 
individualistic and specialized) is what has brought to the point of 
having (at least in developed countries) a capital surplus, the ability 
to live far beyond our basic needs.

It would seem that our DNA has not prepared us very well for abundance; 
that we do better as a species on less than more. But, I don't know of 
anyone in the whole world who wants to go back to or stay at a 
subsistence level.

There might theoretically be a place in between where we can live and 
let live (so to speak), but we have no political systems on the face of 
the planet that would encourage us to live that way -- all such systems 
are just one form or another of dictatorship -- not known to make for a 
better world. I don't really know, but it seems we are doomed to learn 
the hard way and that means a lot of pain. Of course, there is nothing 
in the big-of-it-all that says the human race has to prosper or even 
survive. The rest of the universe or even the planet is likely to care 
very little.

Jim