It's the system, sweetie pies.---Episode 2

How In The Hell Did Aristocracies Come Into Existence     ?

   The archaeological guess is that the change in economic forms accounts for the rise of a narrow elite, with control over ALL THE RESOURCES OF THE SOCIETY ( intellectual as well as material, religious as well as political ). Whether this change was in the nature of new forms of production through the use of metal or new forms of agriculture through the use of irrigation resources, the people WHO INITIALLY GOT CONTROL of these revolutionary forms IMMEDIATELY MONOPOLIZED the key economic resource of society.  They could do anything they wanted thereafter, provided that they remained a relatively homogeneous and peaceful group. By and large they remained homogeneous and at peace among themselves. THEY decided how to divide up the power, how to divide up the wealth, who should be king, and which family should become the royal dynasty.  { Much like the oligarchic system of early 21st-century USA. } The instability in these societies usually came NOT from within , but from external invasions by new people --- in the case of Mesopotamia, from the north, and in the case of Egypt, from the sea or the desert --- who at various times pushed into these wealthy river valleys and gained control.  Their control usually collapsed or was overthrown a few generations later by the old native aristocracy or by later invaders. But all the invaders perpetuated the existing social structure, taking over the prerogatives of the old aristocracy.

   The social structure of the ancient near Eastern societies, once established,was perpetuated in the Hellenistic empires that replaced the old Near Eastern dynasties after the conquest of the Near East by Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E. The Hellenistic empires were conquered, in turn, by the Romans in the second and first centuries B.C.E.  By and large, the Romans also perpetuated the Mediterranean social structure they had found. 

                   HERE'S THE POINT, DEAR HEARTS 

     The exploitation of serfs by their lords then, was not an invention of the Middles Ages [ 300-1500 A.C.E.] Medieval people inherited the rule of lords over peasants. They knew no other way of life or alternative organization of rural society. It was natural to them that a few lords should own all the land while the mass of peasants TOILED THEIR LIVES AWAY ---- that was the very nature of society. Medieval people did not give this social structure as second thought ; just as 21st-century westerners, for the most part, take middle-class society for granted, so medieval Europeans took for granted the aristocratic--peasant organization of society. 

   The social system of lord and peasant was not questioned, but medieval men and women had to justify it and to organize it, and they did so in a number of ways. Variations in the social patterns of the ancient Near East and medieval Europe are NOT fundamental changes. They are simply variations of the methods and ideology of organization. The ancient social structure was elaborated or varied in different places at different periods, but mainly it was simply perpetuated for thousands of years. 
   To understand medieval people, one must understand how uneducated and downright stupid the masses were, and how much the minority aristocrats liked it that way. Until the twelfth century, at least, medieval people were not even aware that the oppressed peasants could possibly overthrow the aristocrats. Their way of life had always been there ; to reject it was to disappear into primitivism, into the void of barbarism. Under thses circumstances, it is remarkable that anything ever changed in the middle Ages --- for their heritage was extraordinary. Medieval social theory, at least before the twelfth century, was entirely A JUSTIFICATION OF THE EXISTING SYSTEM, and even in this respect, medieval people inherited a tradition from early mediterranean civilization. { Got that, bucko ?? } 


   SYSTEM JUSTIFICATION WAS A PRODUCT OF RELIGION

   In the ancient world, in Egypt and Mesopotmia, the social structure was justified on religious grounds. It was God's plan for the world ---God's will --- and acceptance of the social forms was a religious duty. [ And, bear in mind, this was before Madison Avenue advertising, TV reality shows, Rush Limbaugh on a.m. radio, Fox News, movies, social media, and even World Wrestling.] Medieval men inherited that attitude and built upon it. They had more difficulty than the Egyptians, in doing so however, because certain strains within Christianity were incompatible with the ancient system. THERE IS AN EGALITARIAN STRAIN IN THE BIBLE [ particularly in the Hebrew prophets and in the New Testament] , for example, that runs counter to the ancient traditions of exploitation and domination. { Some called this "A liberal in the wood pile !" } Medieval people had to relate these two traditions, and they came out heavily (before the late middle ages, almost exclusively) on the side of the ancient, class-dominated, authoritarian society. 
   

It's the system, sweetie pies. ----Episode 1

      And in the Beginning, There Were Aristocrats and Peasants


   Did we humans start living in communities, growing and capturing food, forming governments, making laws, following various religions, killing one another in wars, and blaming and hating those in the other group only a few hundred years ago ? Nope, it started more like 6, 215 years ago [ Okay, that's a tad specific, but it was somewhere around then] in the Mesopotamian Tigris-Euphrates valley and probably a little later in the Egyptian Nile valley. That is the point where civilization began, if we define civilization primarily as structured society, organized government, and specialized economy over a large area. Humans were no longer all gatherers or all hunters.  They became kings, priests, soldiers, farmers, or craftspeople. 

   The earliest civilized communities of the ancient Near East were dominated by a small, self-sustaining aristocracy{No, camel breath, NOT democracy.} as early as 3000 B.C.E. The nobility, or elite, of these Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies controlled nearly all the economic resources of these societies. [ Hmm, sounds familiar.] One of the noble families appeared from somewhere and became the ruling dynasty. From these families and from the ranks of the bureaucrats who served the monarchy were drawn the priests who controlled the temples. Thus the ideology of the ruling religious group sanctioned the prevailing government and social structure. { Hey, pay attention : certain powerful forces determined THE SYSTEM, even way back 6,000 years ago, and THE SYSTEM has been creating the structure of government, law, religion, and society ever since. } 

    In these early societies there were, in essence, only two social groups or classes. One class was the elite : the aristocratic group that that controlled both rural and urban wealth and dominated the religious institutions, the government[ Hey, that's just like the 21st century in the US ], and the bureaucracy. The other class was a mass peasantry, who may or may not have been slaves, , but in any case existed solely to serve the ruling elite class. [ Just a tad more inequality of income and wealth, and we 'mericans will have returned to Square One.] 

   It is said in the Hebrew Bible that the Hebrews were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt.The point here is that almost everybody was a slave (legally or empirically) unto Pharaoh and unto a small elite. It could be said, indeed, that these were one-class societies. Only the aristocracy had any real consciousness of its identity, its rights, or its destiny. The aristocracy held a monopoly of power, learning, and culture, and they alone had a sense of their special and privileged place in the world. [ Well, things are that way now, except business entities called corporations have replaced long-forgotten Pharaoh. ] 

   In the social history of premodern western civilization --- whether the modern era is designated as beginning in 1500 or in the late eighteenth century---a series of elitists have perpetuated control over the resources of society. It is a history in which successive challenges were made on moral and ideological grounds to the aristocratic control of society and its resources. Obviously, there is a substantial pattern of change and development in premodern social history, and these changes are highly significant and deserve close examination. Nevertheless, the factor of continuity --- of the perpetuation down to the modern industrial world of a one-class social structure, or, stated differently, of the domination of a minority aristocracy --- is one of the fundamental facts and continuing conditions of the history of western civilization. 

          How in the Hell Did An Aristocracy Come into Existence 
                                     in the First Place ? 



    This is a toughie. We don't have records to examine and find the answer. Literacy did not begin in Mesopotamia and Egypt until the late part of the fourth millennium B.C.E. , and in the first written records the aristocrats had already emerged and the forms of government and social control had already been established. The frigging SYSTEM was in place before there was a single written record generated.  Archaeological evidence, which is piss poor evidence for determining how aristocracies came into existence, is all tat historians ever found to work with. Archaeologists work with material objects, and the process of prehistorical change has therefore been established according to the materialistic bias. Archaeologists are bound toattribute social changes to alterations in the means of production because their evidence only discloses such alterations.  Artifacts alone, without written records, cannot reveal great changes in human values or ideological unheavals that may have dtermined social change.   Some dumbass historians have speculated a great intellectual  revolution, some tremendous shift in human consciousness, behind the emergence of the first ancient civilizations, but in the absence of written records, this explanation can be no more than a wild guess. 

   

Those who write and those who read---Episode 3

                                              

   

Those who write and those who read---Episode 2

                                             REREADING 

   Curiously enough, one cannot read a book : one can only reread it.  A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. Here's why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work on upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is --- a work of fiction or a work of science(the boundary line between the two is not as clear as it is generally believed) --- a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book. 
   Now, this being so, we should ponder the question how does the mind work when the sullen reader is confronted by the sunny book. First, the sullen mood melts away, and for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game. The effort to begin a book, especially if it is praised by people whom the young reader secretly deems to be too old-fashioned or too serious, this effort is often difficult to make ; but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant. Since the master artist used her/his imagination in creating the book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use her/his imagination too.
   There are at least two varieties of imagination in the reader's case. So it's important to decide which of the two to use in reading a book. First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. (There are various subvarieties here, in this first section of emotional reading.) A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which she/he nostalgically recalls as part of her/his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, she/he identifies herself/himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination scholars like Robert Penn Warren wanted readers to use.

   So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader, according to scholars such as RPW ? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, according to many literary scholars, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader's mind and the author's mind. RPW believed we ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in the aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy--- passionately enjoy with tears and shivers --- the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what is important is that the reader must know when and where to curb her/his imagination and this she/he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at her/his disposal. We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author's people. The color of Fanny Price's eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important. 

Those who write and those who read ---Episode 1

          BEING A SERIOUS READER OF DECENT WRITING

                        Read, Digest, and Think DETAILS 

 In reading, one should notice and massage details. There's nothing wrong with admiring the generalization, once the reader has already collected the details and carefully arranged them. If one begins by looking at the finished collection, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book. Nothing is more boring or unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madam Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. Or, what about reading a novel by Franzen, Foer, DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, or any of the so-called post-post-modern writers, and by page 50, concluding that the author's message is some simple, general theme such as "man's cruelty to man," or "man's cruelty to the environment," or conclude that the book is just a ridiculous collection of abstruse crap, etc., etc. ?  We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.

Another question : Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel ? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from commercial best-sellers that are touted by book clubs and the New York Times Best Seller List under the heading of historical novels ? But what about the masterpieces ? Can we rely on Jane Austen's picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman's parlor ? And Great Expectations, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred, thirty-five years ago ? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels that literate people consider masterpieces.  The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales.  

Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius, not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace : these do not bother about any reinventing of the world ; they merely try to squeeze the best they can of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction. The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise.