The Great Forgetting
Posted: Tue Sep 01, 2015 5:15 pm
http://www.davidsheen.com/b/b1.htm
The destruction of Palmyra is very interesting in that it illustrates with a contemporary example the nature of totalitarian ideology and the imperative to forget. The Isis ideologues want to force people to forget what came before them in order to achieve a more pure Islamist order. This has been a common act throughout history. The slaughter of the Welsh Bards disconnected people from their oral history. Empire has supplanted history with new ideology, the story of the gospel chronicles this act by the Romans against the Jews. And later the Christian destruction of the Library at Alexandria does the same. It could be argued that atheists who try to shame those who take the bible seriously at all is a softer attempt at the same.
Deep Ecology Primitivists are on this tip of 'The Great Forgetting', the basic gist is that there were thousands of cultures totally forgotten because they predated the dawn of agriculture. That history goes back millions of years prior to agriculture and its written record.It was paleontology that exposed the Great Forgetting. It did so by making it unarguably clear that humans had been around long, long before any conceivable date for the planting of the first crop and the beginning of civilization.
Paleontology made untenable the idea that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time. History and archaeology had put it beyond doubt that agriculture and civilization were just a few thousand years old, but paleontology put it beyond doubt that humanity was millions of years old. Paleontology made it impossible to believe that Man had been born an agriculturist and a civilization-builder. Paleontology forced us to conclude that Man had been born something else entirely -- a forager and a homeless nomad -- and this is what had been forgotten in the Great Forgetting.
The destruction of Palmyra is very interesting in that it illustrates with a contemporary example the nature of totalitarian ideology and the imperative to forget. The Isis ideologues want to force people to forget what came before them in order to achieve a more pure Islamist order. This has been a common act throughout history. The slaughter of the Welsh Bards disconnected people from their oral history. Empire has supplanted history with new ideology, the story of the gospel chronicles this act by the Romans against the Jews. And later the Christian destruction of the Library at Alexandria does the same. It could be argued that atheists who try to shame those who take the bible seriously at all is a softer attempt at the same.