The History of the World, Vol. 5

A multi-column series originally published in 2016

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay 

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device 

"The historian is an unsuccessful novelist." -H.L. Mencken

Dear Grandstickies & Great-Grandstickies (& Gentlereaders),

I'm spending the summer in a cabin on a beautiful lake somewhere in the Swiss Alps, working on my memoirs, and trying to decide if this column will resume post-Labor Day. The market has found me wanting; I'm buying most of my own coffee just now. So be it, I remain an unrepentant supporter of capitalism. 

My big brother Eddie is currently my only financial patron so I'm starting to feel like Van Gogh... without the world-class talent, but with both ears. I'm also considering publishing only when the spirit moves me. Cranking out columns week after week, while enjoyable, is hard work — well, intellectually speaking — at least for me. 

{It sure ain't roofing or the like you whiney b...}

In the meantime, I'll be republishing mostly gently (but occasionally heavily) edited columns with updated statistics and fun facts in [brackets].

In the year 1776 after a few hundred thousand years of most H. sapiens just scraping by and often killing each other while simultaneously avoiding being killed by a somewhat bloodthirsty Mother Nature, two really cool things happened. The American experiment was launched and Mr. Smith published a book.

Adam Smith was, and is, a well-regarded absent-minded professor type with a first-rate mind. He gave up his day job, as a popular professor at Glasgow university in 1764, to tutor and travel with a young Scottish nobleman (road trip!). They spent a couple of years touring continental Europe and met several leading thinkers of the day (e.g. Benjamin Franklin) and Mr. Smith was given a life pension by the grateful nobleman that enabled him to spend the next ten years or so working on his magnum opus, “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”

In other words, he set out to discover the best policies a given nation should pursue so that everyone could make a buck.

Warning: do not try to read The Wealth of Nations unless you enjoy the writing style of 18th-century academics (I’m thinking this is a relatively small group of folks) and you’re much smarter and more patient than I am (I’m thinking this is a relatively large group of folks). The commas and semicolons seemingly reproduce themselves as you try and decipher the text. Find a commentator or two that you trust to render Mr. Smith’s ideas into modern English.

In Mr. Smith’s defense, it ain’t easy to be one of the founders of a field of study (modern economics). Also, I must warn any kneejerk anti-capitalists that beating up on Mr. Smith because you think he was just another greed-head will make you look goofy as he’s well known for his belief that accumulating wealth and material goods won’t make you happy.

Before inventing modern economics, his thing was exploring morality and ethics, figuring out how we should treat each other, how we could all get along. He wrote a book titled The Theory of Moral Sentiments that is still highly regarded. Incidentally, both it and The Wealth of Nations were best sellers in their day and literally changed the world.  

He wanted to figure out what the optimal system was for a free people to attain whatever level of economic security they thought was necessary and appropriate to keep the wolf from the door. He also warned the world about crony capitalism and rent-seeking, two of the monsters currently attempting to strangle America to death. And although he was financially quite successful, he quietly and discreetly gave away most of his money and lived simply. I highly recommend P.J. O’Rourke’s, "On The Wealth of Nations.” Mr. O’Rourke is not an economist, which is not necessarily a bad thing. He was, however, very smart, very funny, and lived in the real world. I highly recommend any of his books, essays, and articles.

“Economic progress depends upon a trinity of individual prerogatives: pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade,” says O’Rourke, stating the fundamentals of Smith’s thought. That’s it? That’s all it takes for a country to be prosperous?  Everdamnbody? Yup. Well, more or less. The rule of law is also an essential component if you think that it’s important that everdamnbody should have to play by the same rules and bullies should be spanked.  

Disclaimer: I’m an unrepentant wild-eyed free marketeer and I don’t care for the word capitalist because of the tendency of well-meaning, progressives, socialists, and communists to frequently use it as an epithet. Also, I describe myself as a sorta/kinda or bleeding heart libertarian, primarily because I’m all for the rationally designed safety net I mentioned earlier and many libertarians think that’s wrong-headed or impossible.

Aside: Communism, in spite of its adherent's claim that it would work if ever done properly, is an obvious dead end, often literally. Socialism is a great idea, all we have to do is change human nature first and lock up all the screwballs like me that are obsessed with personal freedom. Progressivism and/or democratic socialism, or how to have your cake and eat it tooism, is the current flavor of the month for the utopianists of the world. Many people want the benefits of a free market combined with a big, juicy welfare state with millions of rules and unionized bureaucrats, but someone else, preferably the evil rich, should pay the bill. Unfortunately, there aren't nearly enough of them. More on the resulting mess later.

Back to Adam Smith. Smith’s work contradicted a widely held belief of his time, mercantilism. This is the belief that a nation’s wealth is determined by how much gold, silver, cash, ginormous TVs, etc. it can accumulate, after all, there’s only so much wealth to go around. Therefore, you should export for the cash and block, or at least penalize, imports. This view of the world, which currently is enjoying a comeback, leads otherwise clear-thinking people to believe in the Boarding House Pie Fallacy.  

Say you're living in a boarding house. It’s dinner time and Mrs. McGillicuddy is serving up her famous caramel apple pie for dessert. Since there’s only so much pie to go around, and fat Frank is at the table, it behooves everyone to employ a strategery that will ensure an equitable portion of pie. Mr. Smith (not to be confused with Mrs. Smith's pies), contends that boarding house wisdom has limited applicability. There’s an easier and more effective way to get what you want that has the added benefit of not having to impose high tariffs (which begat high prices) and over-regulate anyone — the pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade. Skilfully employed these three ensure that everyone can have their own pie.

To be continued next week...

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day

Scroll down to share this column/access oldies. If you enjoy my work, and no advertising, please consider buying me a coffee via _____ card or PayPal.    

Feel free to comment and set me straight on Cranky's Facebook page. I post my latest columns on Saturdays, other things other days. Cranky don't tweet.

 

The History of the World, Vol. 4

A multi-column series originally published in 2016

Image by Ingi Finnsson from Pixabay 

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device 

"History is a vast early warning system." -Norman Cousins

Dear Grandstickies & Great-Grandstickies (& Gentlereaders),

I'm spending the summer in a cabin on a beautiful lake somewhere in the Swiss Alps, working on my memoirs, and trying to decide if this column will resume post-Labor Day. The market has found me wanting; I'm buying most of my own coffee just now. So be it, I remain an unrepentant supporter of capitalism. 

My big brother Eddie is currently my only financial patron so I'm starting to feel like Van Gogh... without the world-class talent, but with both ears. I'm also considering publishing only when the spirit moves me. Cranking out columns week after week, while enjoyable, is hard work — well, intellectually speaking — at least for me. 

{It sure ain't roofing or the like you whiney b...}

In the meantime, I'll be republishing mostly gently (but occasionally heavily) edited columns with updated statistics and fun facts in [brackets].

The invention of the USA: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  

Or...

Self-evidently, although we’re all unique in how we look, how smart we are, and what innate talents we have, nobody is born automatically better than anyone else. We are entitled to live as long as biology and fate permit, we’re free to pursue our own path and discover what it is that will keep getting us out of bed in the morning until we can’t (or won’t) get out of bed in the morning. I maintain that this is obvious (self-evident) to any more or less well-adjusted kid on the playground. I also maintain that this is obvious to any emotionally healthy, clear-thinking grownup. I maintain that any well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) king, cleric, or bully (even politically correct bullies) that maintains otherwise is delusional and needs to be dealt with appropriately.

{Obvious huh?}

Yes, well obvious to those of us that have grown up fortunate enough to take the concept for granted, Dana. The, um, traditional way was/is the way of the alpha male, still in vogue in more than a few places.    

We have two choices. The traditional way - the way of the alpha male, the way of the bully, king, high priest, etc - or the way of the (at least superficially) rational person. Rational people employ reason. Wikipedia: “Reason is the capacity for consciously making sense of things, applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions and beliefs based on new or existing information.”  

And yes, I used the word superficially. Rationality is a buggy, crash-prone app still in beta testing. For the dead (mostly) white males that invented the USA, fortunately for us, reason was a thing, a very big thing. We got lucky. Many were the 1% of their day, but back in their particular day, something that came to be called the Age of Enlightenment was rockin’ the world, a new meme was going around.

If you decided that the traditional way of doing things only worked well for a tiny group of people and you could rewrite the rules, using reason, to set up a new system that benefited everyone equally (at least in theory), what would you do?

What they did, after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, was set up the USA. The wailing and gnashing continued, and continues, as it should in a democratic republic. Fortunately, the new system includes built-in mechanisms to fix and/or change what the people decide needs to be fixed and/or changed. It ain’t easy to change, and it shouldn’t be, considering how thin the veneer of rationality is.            

Emotionally healthy, clear-thinking kids and grownups realize they’re not the only kid on the playground and that just enough rules are necessary to ensure everyone has fun but has to share the equipment and that bullies are not allowed. This is called government and it requires that a few conditions be met in order that the people remain as free as realistically possible. First, we the governed, get to decide what the rules are. Second, the rules should be as few in number as possible so that individuals remain as free as possible. Third, great care must be taken to avoid the potentially huge, honking, downside of democracy, the tyranny of the majority.

If a majority of the kids on the playground get together to ban little Timmy from the premises just because of his unfortunate tendency to publicly pick his nose, even though he’s not breaking any rules, a grownup (the rule of law) must step in to protect not only Timmy’s right to be there but also make sure he isn’t bullied. This is the why and what of the U.S. constitution. America's called the American experiment because no one else in history had managed to pull off anything quite like it and many thought we wouldn’t either. Some still don’t, and there’s no guarantee that it will ultimately end well.

Now, just because we’re lucky enough to have been born into the species that sits at the top of the food chain, in the most prosperous nation the world has seen (so far at least) we still live in a dangerous, hostile world that guarantees nothing but our eventual death. It’s up to us to come up with food, clothing, and shelter and defend ourselves from those that want to kill us for fun and/or profit.

And yes, a nation as well off as America is morally required to install a rationally designed safety net to catch everyone that fate shoves off the trampoline, but not necessarily for those who deliberately jumped off because they thought it would be fun. I once heard a nurse that was the head of some organization or other declaring with passion and conviction that, “Healthcare is a right!” in a radio interview.

No, it’s not.

Life, freedom, and the pursuit of whatever it is that keeps us getting out of bed are the fundamental rights everyone obviously should get. But even these natural, fundamental rights are a reality, not just a potential reality, only for those fortunate enough to be born into a culture that acknowledges and defends them. You may have noticed there’s no shortage of thugs that look at things a bit differently. Everything else you’re entitled to depends on what you and your fellow citizens agree upon and are prepared to work your bums off to pay for - or put on the national credit card because "If tomorrow never comes, everything is free." -J.J. Cale

If you don’t believe this, try performing the following experiment.

Have yourself stranded on a desert island without a crew from a reality television show. Raise your fist to the sky and DEMAND! food, clothing, shelter (and healthcare), then wait and see what happens. Oh, and make sure you don’t let your situational awareness chops get rusty while you’re waiting because mother nature is notoriously oblivious to our rights. Like any good mom, if she has a favorite, she’s keeping it to herself, and she doesn’t seem to lose any sleep when her kids eat each other to stay alive.

Also, please note that you don’t even have to ask nicely for life (however temporary), liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Self-evidently, unless Gilligan and company show up and turn out to be evil, drug-addled crazies (which would explain a lot), you’re about as free as you can be within the physical limitations of life on Earth. And unless one or more of the zany castaways has brought along a trunk full of fentanyl, you could stay as free as possible (all things considered) simply by agreeing to respect each other's unalienable rights. Next, on to the original Mr. Smith.

To be continued...

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day

Scroll down to share this column/access oldies. If you enjoy my work, and no advertising, please consider buying me a coffee via _____ card or PayPal.    

Feel free to comment and set me straight on Cranky's Facebook page. I post my latest columns on Saturdays, other things other days. Cranky don't tweet.

         

The History of the World, Volume Three

A multi-column series originally published in 2016

Image by Ingi Finnsson from Pixabay 

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device 

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." -H.G. Wells

Dear Grandstickies & Great-Grandstickies (& Gentlereaders),

I'm spending the summer in a cabin on a beautiful lake somewhere in the Swiss Alps, working on my memoirs, and trying to decide if this column will resume post-Labor Day. The market has found me wanting; I'm buying most of my own coffee just now. So be it, I remain an unrepentant supporter of capitalism. 

My big brother Eddie is currently my only financial patron so I'm starting to feel like Van Gogh... without the world-class talent, but with both ears. I'm also considering publishing only when the spirit moves me. Cranking out columns week after week, while enjoyable, is hard work — well, intellectually speaking — at least for me. 

{It sure ain't roofing or the like you whiney b...}

In the meantime, I'll be republishing mostly gently (but occasionally heavily) edited columns with updated statistics and fun facts in [brackets].

In our last episode, we covered the history of the world from the Bigus Bangus to the year 1776. In 1776 the world caught a major break.

In some of Great Britain's North American colonies, a bunch of folks got together and invented the United States of America. In Scotland, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, invented modern economics, and taught the world how free markets would eventually lead to the need for a weight loss industry. These two events occurred while the industrial revolution was picking up steam. A trifecta!  

Insert sound of screeching tires in a panic stop here

At this point in our story, I must toss in a few paragraphs from the Reality Checks, Caveats & Premises Department (RCC&P) before proceeding. First, the three events mentioned in the previous paragraph didn’t happen by magic. The Greeks dabbled in democracy, the Romans ran a republic (at least for a while), and the Brits managed to make a Magna Carta.

Mr. Smith wasn’t the first person to consider how economies worked and we had obviously been producing and selling stuff to each other for thousands of years before the industrial revolution came along and we got really, really good at it. But the trifecta ushered in the modern world and made it possible for so many of us to become the spoiled, whiny, overfed ingrates of the developed world and inspire the lean and downtrodden developing world to aspire to someday have their own obesity epidemics.   

Second, in my semi-humble opinion, the American experiment can be defined by quoting the most important passage of the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

If you accept that statement as a fundamental given (whether or not you believe in a creator), perhaps the most fundamental of givens… Well, If you don’t accept that statement, I fear it’s time for us to go our separate ways, you can have the dog but I’m keeping most of the records CDs DVDs records.

And third, I freely acknowledge that the next sentence in the declaration could have been:

“Assuming, of course, that you are caucasian and male.” That was undeniably the way America worked at the time and it was an undeniable flaw. However, it was the local version of how much of the world worked then, a version of reality that lives on in not a few places. Sexism and racism are unfortunately not rare phenomena. However, I maintain that some dramatic progress has been made in the last 250 years or so, particularly when compared to however many gajillions of years it was considered normal for a given Fred or Barney to club a cutie down at the waterhole to clean the cave and keep an eye on Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm while he and boys were partying at the Loyal Order of Water Buffalos lodge.

When my mum and dad got together, roughly 75 years ago (chronologically speaking a drop in the bucket), they believed that a man’s job was to bring home the bacon and a woman’s job was to be a domestic engineer. Period. In light of the way many folks look at things today, including me, they were wrong. I’m inclined to not only forgive them, but to also say thanks. They weren’t evil, and incidentally, they were part of the generation that survived the Great Depression and won World War Two. While they were busy saving the world they didn’t know that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow would be an era of unprecedented prosperity for the USA, the one that lasted from just after WW2 to the late 1970s. Things started getting weird after that, which I’ll get into later.

Finally, let us acknowledge the elephant skulking in the corner of the room. Homo sapiens will be Homo sapiens. While I’m profoundly grateful for the dumb luck of being a product of, and living in, a country that’s a product of Western civilization, I’m slightly smarter than I look.

My gratitude is based on two things. Although I think Western Civilization in general, and the USA in particular, is the best we’ve done so far, both are as flawed and imperfect as the H. sapiens that somehow came up with them. Therefore a - We’re number one! We’re number one! - overheated sports fan attitude can be as tacky as wearing socks with sandals. Let us be quietly smug. The coolest kid doesn’t have to tell people he’s cool, that’s part of his, um, coolness. Also, an economic implosion here, a pandemic there, or an asteroid the size of a bus, "Last stop, Earth!" and the Dark Ages Digest could experience a sudden dramatic increase in circulation.

To be continued...

{Wait just a minute, Sparky! You're gonna stop there? Posit that 1776 marked some sort of global game-changer, insert a handful of qualifications from the RCC&P department, and then close?}

Well, Dana, I've already exceeded my word allocation. Think of it as a cliffhanger. Cliffhangers are cool, right?

{No, they're not, they're annoying. What do you think...}

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day

Scroll down to share this column/access oldies. If you enjoy my work, and no advertising, please consider buying me a coffee via _____ card or PayPal.    

Feel free to comment and set me straight on Cranky's Facebook page. I post my latest columns on Saturdays, other things other days. Cranky don't tweet.

The History of the World Too

A multi-column series originally published in 2016

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay 

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device 

"The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes." -Mark Twain

Dear Grandstickies & Great-Grandstickies (& Gentlereaders),

I'm spending the summer in a cabin on a beautiful lake somewhere in the Swiss Alps, working on my memoirs, and trying to decide if this column will resume post-Labor Day. The market has found me wanting; I'm buying most of my own coffee just now. So be it, I remain an unrepentant supporter of capitalism. 

My big brother Eddie is currently my only financial patron so I'm starting to feel like Van Gogh... without the world-class talent, but with both ears. I'm also considering publishing only when the spirit moves me. Cranking out columns week after week, while enjoyable, is hard work — well, intellectually speaking — at least for me. 

{It sure ain't roofing or the like you whiney b...}

In the meantime, I'll be republishing (relatively) gently edited columns with updated statistics and fun facts in [brackets].

In our last episode, we covered the period of time stretching from the Big Bang (Bigus Bangus) to the invention of agriculture (the Burgeriniumbun Finalae era) to Mesopotamia where history really got cooking.

Next, depending on how you look at it, an awful lot of history happened - or a few things happened over and over again - and once in a great while something really cool/awful happened. Kind of like the life of the modern-day average Joe/Joan/J. Bagadonuts but subject to even more random acts of violence. They attacked us or we attacked them in the name of cash, conquest, revenge, God, the gods, hunger, honor, slaves et cetera.

Fortunately, God was on our side or it would have been even worse. As Hobbes famously pointed out life is “...solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Mr. H. was arguing that this is the natural state of man (he was partially right) and that’s why we need an all-powerful ruler to keep us on the straight and narrow (he was wrong) but we do need some form of government. This is how we keep the bullies on our playground in check and defend it from bullies from other playgrounds.  

Once in a while, peace would break out but Mother Nature provides us with ways to stave off boredom and complacency like natural disasters, manmade person-made disasters, and disease.

For example, say King Bob is sitting in the privy waiting for nature to take its course and his mind starts to wander because the only copy of The Dark Ages Digest is almost a year old. He’s been giving a lot of thought to attacking a kingdom just down the road because he’s got his fair share of bloodthirsty warriors and greedy nobles to keep happy and if he doesn’t keep them busy they may turn on him or each other for entertainment and booty.

He’s been through that before and knows that even if he and his allies triumph lots of innocent serfs, peasants, and slaves will be slaughtered. Collateral damage, sure, but since they're the ones that do all the heavy lifting, and since most of them die before reaching thirty you need to maintain a good inventory to dodge some significant downsides.

He’s still short of virtual slaves, actual slaves, and cash from last season, not one of his better ones, and short of potential solutions as well. Things are so bad he’s considering hiring one of those expensive consultants his buddy King Steve favors. He’s heard good things about a firm called DPD, Diabolical Plots by the Dozen, founded incidentally, by a distant ancestor of Vladimir Putin.

His ruminations are interrupted by a hysterical minion pounding on the door and screaming, “Your majesty, your majesty there are reports of plague (or flood, or fire, or hairy weather, or rapacious insects, or blight, or famine, etcetrine) in the kingdom!” This solves the problem, short term at least. Now, survival becomes everyone's job one. Assuming this isn’t an apocalyptic-level crisis and assuming that King Bob is one of the survivors he can deal with his other problem later.

This is how things rolled most days in most places. Why? Well, it’s either because we’re naked apes living in a dangerous world, or, someone screwed up the paradise we were provided with by God and he/she/they are still mad (details depend on which creation myth you subscribe to). It wasn’t all bad though. Once in a while, Joe or Joan or J. Bagadonuts was fortunate enough to have an actual boring day. Also, as mentioned above, once in a great while, something truly cool happened.

Somebody came up with the wheel, someone perfected bronze, iron came along, the printing press was invented, Mr. and Mrs. Vermeer had a baby - that sort of thing. Being the clever creatures that we are, we even came up with all sorts of ways to use these breakthroughs for things other than killing each other.

H. sapiens are religious by nature, including the ones who claim not to be. Various entities, or his/her/their messenger(s), have regularly stopped by to light the path to paradise. This phenomenon continues apace, right up to this very moment. Nowadays, the entities and/or their messengers may be politicians, pundits, Greenies, Wokies, etceteries. The field has broadened considerably.

"We're the ones we've been waiting for" so let's ""make America great again! I think that...

{Whoa, Sparky, focus dude.}

Thanks, Dana, I've gotten ahead of myself. Where was I? Oh, yeah...

And then, in 1776, the planet Earth finally caught a break.

To be continued...

Poppa loves you,
Have an OK day

Scroll down to share this column/access oldies. If you enjoy my work, and no advertising, please consider buying me a coffee via _____ card or PayPal.    

Feel free to comment and set me straight on Cranky's Facebook page. I post my latest columns on Saturdays, other things other days. Cranky don't tweet.

    

       

The History of the World

A multi-column series originally published in 2016

Part one: Bang!

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay 

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.  

Trigger Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating meltdown.  

About 

Glossary 

Featuring Dana: Hallucination, guest star, and charming literary device 

"Not Again!" -History

Dear Grandstickies & Great-Grandstickies (& Gentlereaders),

I'm spending the summer in a cabin on a beautiful lake somewhere in the Swiss Alps, working on my memoirs, and trying to decide if this column will resume post-Labor Day. The market has found me wanting; I'm buying all of my own coffee. So be it, I remain an unrepentant supporter of capitalism. 

My big brother Eddie is currently my only financial patron so I'm starting to feel like Van Gogh... without the world-class talent, but with both ears. I'm also considering publishing only when the spirit moves me. Cranking out columns week after week, while enjoyable, is hard work — well, intellectually speaking — at least for me. 

{It sure ain't roofing or the like you whiney b...}

In the meantime, I'll be republishing (relatively) gently edited columns with updated statistics and fun facts in [brackets].

The universe we inhabit appeared 13.772 billion years ago on a Tuesday.

A single, unimaginably dense point began rapidly expanding and a lot of complex stuff happened and continues to happen. The most interesting thing that resulted, from an Earthlings perspective, is that 4.543 billion years ago the Earth appeared. The Earth is the result of some of the complex stuff that happened and continues to happen.

Wikipedia says that about 300,000 years ago anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa.

{So we're all Homos and we're all Africans?}

Yours is a, um... unique perspective, Dana, but I like it.

Or… to one degree or another, everything mentioned in the preceding paragraph and what followed happened because God decided when and if it should be so.

The details depend on your personal beliefs. I know some very nice, perfectly normal H. sapiens that believe what I consider to be some very strange things (of course I’m not talking about your beliefs). I freely concede that one of them may turn out to be right and that I may be wrong. I’m wrong with disturbing regularity so I try to keep an open mind. I highly recommend this approach as I’ve found it to be the only effective defense against blind panic when a high-velocity radioactive fact comes crashing through the roof of my thought structure like a blazing meteorite, and lands in the chair I just got out of to answer the phone.

For the record, the meteorite analogy is a paraphrase of a bit of a Marc Cohn song, “Live Out the String.”

Regardless, tools already existed by the time we came along although hardware stores/departments did not appear till much later on. The controlled use of fire for warmth, light, and most importantly in my semi-humble opinion, cooking (I've never cared for cold cuts) also likely preceded us but this is a matter of some dispute. Along the way, the attributes that distinguish us from the other animals on the planet such as language, art, religion, warfare, etc. developed.

Agriculture came along roughly 12,000 years ago and changed everything.

Our ancestors had been hunters/gatherers for eons. Since grocery stores hadn’t been invented yet everyone had the same job — killing something or harvesting something that nature had randomly produced — to avoid starving to death. Now, on a good day, this wasn’t a half-bad way to make a living. If you, or you and the gang (odds are you belonged to some sort of tribe or odds are you would be dead) managed to find something to kill and eat without getting killed and eaten in the process and/or stumbled onto an apple tree full of ripe apples early in the day, why, you could go home early! Assuming you had found enough food you were free for the rest of the day.

Of course, this could be quite boring because there wasn’t much to do since they had neither cable nor computers, not even smartphones. This was why sex was invented. I refer to sex as practiced by homo sapiens, which tends to be a somewhat frequent and obsessive activity as compared to most other animals.

Anyway, various someone's at various locations gradually figured out how to plant and nurture crops as well as domesticate animals. While this required a lot more work than hunting and gathering it was a somewhat more reliable way to keep from starving to death or from becoming some other species' lunch.

Also, there are some scientists, and some evidence, that suggests getting high was a significant motivation as well. Turning grains into beer is easier than turning them into food, and beer was just as popular then as it is now, even without clever commercials — please drink responsibly. Eventually, we got good enough at this agriculture thing to produce more food than was absolutely needed for the gang to just scrape by. This made it possible to settle down instead of wandering all over the place looking for enough calories to keep body and soul together.

Man, by nature and necessity, is a social animal. It takes quite a few years before we reach maturity so we’re dependent on our parents (a mom and a dad if we’re lucky) much longer than the average creature. Also, survival is considerably easier and our lives are potentially much more pleasant when we work together. For example, everyone knows that bringing down a wooly mammoth with the tribes' help is much easier and more efficient than trying to do it yourself. That’s why most people naturally prefer to hang out or at least affiliate with a clique of some sort, it’s a  survival mechanism. Getting along with the inhabitants of the other huts on the block not only promotes regular meals and security, but it also enables you to get your fair share of woolyburgers without having to slay the neighbors.

Social cohesion increased the likelihood, and quality of, survival. Having to share the playground with the other kids is where morality (the rules) comes from. Please see, The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt.

And somebody came up with monogamy. If all the dudes could count on access to, um, companionship, it made the cooperation needed for the hunt less prone to social drama. The dudettes could count on access to, um, companionship, and protection for the kids. This arrangement was/is disproportionately beneficial for dudes. Dudes need their significant dudette to be, among other things, a good mom, a good wife, and often as not, willing and able to work outside the home. This is necessary to counter a given dude's natural tendency to rapidly devolve into a naked ape when left to his own devices.      

   

We figured all this out long before agriculture made villages not only possible but necessary and humans began clawing their way to the top of the food chain (the original corporate ladder). When we reached the point where we could produce more food than we needed it was only natural that folks began to specialize. Most remained farmers, but surplus food made it possible for some people that had abilities that benefited the community to do their thing without having to farm. A relatively reliable supply of food and water (and/or beer) leads to increased populations. If enough people can produce enough food to keep themselves alive and have enough left over to feed specialists such as craftspersons, cops, kings, etc. — before you know it, a village becomes a town becomes a city becomes a civilization. The rest is history.

Civilization began in Mesopotamia, an area that corresponds roughly to greater modern-day Iraq, that fertile crescent thing that gets so much press. Ain’t that ironical? This happened about 3,500 BCE.

To be continued...

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