Posted: Nov 25, 2007, 3:11 PM CST
In response to:
The Bible summed it up, but I guess through trial and error, people came to certain conlusions about right and wrong in a "civilized" society. Those lines between right and wrong have been blurred recently, but I think deep down most people agree on a basic moral code.
35,000 BC: Cro-Magnons or modern humans emerge in east Africa; they possess contemporary capacities for thought, emotion, creativity, desire, fantasy, motivation, psychology, spirituality, etc.; the minds, hearts, and souls of these intensely individualistic but also highly social creatures are fully in place; as these sentient beings approach adolescence they quickly learn in depth -- thru experience and education -- the two fundamental universal virtues: (1) planning for the long term personally and (2) cooperating socially
8000 BC: the Agricultural Revolution forces self-discipline and moral sophistication upward; these new farmers -- in order to survive and thrive -- are required to be less irascible, unpredictable, out-of-control, and animal-like in their behavior; and as proto-rancher-farmers domesticate their animal and plant food supplies, they become more 'domesticated' themselves; the new personal moral codes they're forced to adopt make them considerably less like traditional tribalist hunter-gatherers -- who basically lived like wolves and chimpanzees, and didn't need nearly as many moral skills
3500 BC: the stunning, wondrous Governmental Revolution and advent of civilization and sophisticated culture in Mesopotamia and Egypt forces the individual to even more (1) plan for the future and (2) be socially friendly/cooperative; the newly-invented city-state forces people to live together in unprecedented closeness with their fellow man as old-style natural freedom and privacy become both much harder to get and more valuable to have; this vast expansion of socio-economic interactivity puts an unprecedented premium on social ethics; people handle this more or less badly, as was probably inevitable; this inept socialization and social morality is manifested thruout the various emerging cultures and societies; it's particularly seen in their rather tyrannical government and the interwoven freshly-created institution of polytheism; the cities of this period are actually rather rich in friends, money, and high culture -- but generally hard on individualism, originality, and eccentricity, all of which end up getting somewhat squashed; de facto social eugenics and the domestication/taming of man increases radically in the city