As they evolved, humans have always found imagined ways to define who they are and how to structure their social relationships. We’ve been through many upheavals and delusions, including some beliefs that created various inquisition in which non-believers were simply murdered. Murder still happens today with apostasy and atheism in countries such as Saudi Arabia.


Here we are in the 21st century, a date defined in most of the Western world by a guy’s death, a fellow who got crucified by the Romans on behalf of a “chosen people” — though humans in other geographical areas, have had a different time-point of reference such as when Confucius spoketh, and we’re still debating the shape of the social cheese — now slowly maturing into a better democratic freedom camembert. 

Some civilisation did not mark passing time such, except through a continuum of survival, in which changes can be noted only now by paying attention to subtle stylistic differences in artistic expression of spirituality and sex over a long time — over 40,000 years. In this respect, the closure (today, 25/10/19) of the climb of Uluru is significant (See: the view from the monthly... in uluru... uluru...). Some civilisations came and went because of their own failures, their people embroiled with various beliefs that led to some nasty rituals, such as the Aztec human sacrifices that did not prevent bad crops — and others, destroyed by the modernity of guns… 

The moires of tribes and people thus has had many ebbs and flows, in which religion, especially the Abrahamic religions, have become as useful as blocks of concrete in our brain. We need flexibility and adaptation to improved knowledge, rather than plod through social constructs that have deluded inane sets of beliefs.

So, rather than go into the near infinite ocean of sociology studies, including the annoying purpose of present despots, we shall concentrate on the smaller pool of human reproductive relationships. 

In many social constructs, old and modern, relationships have had to be stylised to avoid incest and inbreeding that often lead to degeneration within a population. This characteristic would have been noted in early tribes. Inbred individuals are more likely to show physical, mental and health defects.

It seems that new research in Germany has provided a major clue on family constructs during the Bronze Age, where families avoided inbreeding by choosing partners from “other tribes”, afar… 

In the Australian Aboriginal social constructs, such exchange of varied genetic material were seen as essential to maintain the health of the various groups. As well, many Aboriginal groups were “matriarchal” rather than ruled by men.
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Meanwhile, in the stupid Abrahamic religious beliefs, the two sons of Eve and Adam had wives which were their own twin sisters, and each was to marry one of the sons. Inbreeding galore. No wonder that the religious mobs appear to be IQ deficient, despite the singing and dancing. Okay, this is below the belt...

The Midrash — the biblical interpretation by ancient "Judaic authorities” (mostly men, old men) of the Talmud — notes that Abel's promised wife, Aclima, was more beautiful than her sister Awan. Since Cain would not consent to the arrangement, Adam suggested seeking God's blessing by means of a sacrifice. God, the eternal idiotic joker, favoured Abel's sacrifice of goat meat instead of Cain vegan sacrifice of carrots and tomatoes. Cain thus murdered Abel, whereupon God punished Cain to a life of wandering. But Cain found the land of Nod where he built a city and fathered the long line of descendants, us, by default since Abel had carked it. This line started with Enoch, his son. From then on the fiction is a bit broken to explain how most of these come from inbred bastards… All fiction. Bad fiction.

This fictional narrative of the bible never stated Cain's motive for murdering his brother, nor God's reason for rejecting Cain's sacrifice, nor any details on the identity of Cain's wife. With what follows in the Nod tent, it’s most likely that Cain procreated with both his twin sisters. and since Abel was dead, we’re all inbred descendants of this mad guy — Cain, the originator of evil, violence, or greed. All fiction, stupid irrational fiction...

Yep, this story makes as much sense as a red lunatic monkey living with his family of rejects on planet Mars. But the Christians happily swallow the whole capers — as well as many other stupid beliefs that make less sense than a lunatic blue whale living alone on Pluto. 

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So we need to take a major reality check away from this religious shit. 

The evolution of the Human species went through a few ebbs and flows in which Cain, Abel, Eve, Adam and the twins have no place to be. Science has a few tools to inspect relationships — a bit better than this stupid stinking biblical fantasy.

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For example, back to the study of the (Germanic) Bronze Age families:

Four thousand years ago, the Early Bronze Age farmers of southern Germany had no Homer [the Greek raconteur — not the father of Bart Simpson] to chronicle their marriages, travails, and family fortunes. But a detailed picture of their social structure has now emerged from a remarkable new study. By combining evidence from DNA, artifacts, and chemical clues in teeth, an interdisciplinary team unraveled relationships and inheritance patterns in several generations of high-ranking families buried in cemeteries on their farmsteads.

Among the most striking of the findings, was an absence: “We were totally missing adult daughters,” says team member Alissa Mittnik, a postdoc at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Sons, in contrast, put down roots on their parents' land and kept wealth in the family.

“What shocked me was that you have to give away all your daughters at some moment,” says co-author Philipp Stockhammer, an archaeologist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the Science of Human History in Jena, both in Germany. That poignant glimpse into an ancient culture “could not possibly be recovered … through any one of these methodologies” alone, says historian Patrick Geary of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who was not part of the team.

The researchers worked with remains and grave goods excavated more than 20 years ago, when land along the Lech River south of Augsburg was dug up to build a housing development. Radiocarbon dates showed the farmers lived between 4750 years ago and 3300 years ago. Mittnik was working in the lab of Johannes Krause at MPI, and she and her colleagues analyzed DNA across the genomes of 104 people buried on the farmsteads. The team sought clues to the farmers' sex and how they were related to one another. The researchers recalibrated the radiocarbon dates, constraining them to within 200 years in some cases, and identifying four to five generations of ancestors and descendants who lived in that time window.

Some of the early farmers studied were part of the Neolithic Bell Beaker culture, named for the shape of their pots. Later generations of Bronze Age men who retained Bell Beaker DNA were high-ranking, buried with bronze and copper daggers, axes, and chisels. Those men carried a Y chromosome variant that is still common today in Europe. In contrast, low-ranking men without grave goods had different Y chromosomes, showing a different ancestry on their fathers' side, and suggesting that men with Bell Beaker ancestry were richer and had more sons, whose genes persist to the present.

One-third of the women were also buried with great wealth—elaborate copper headdresses, thick bronze leg rings, and decorated copper pins. They were outsiders, however. Their DNA set them apart from others in the burials, and strontium isotopes in their teeth, which reflect minerals in the water they drank, show they were born and lived until adolescence far from the Lech River. Some of their grave goods—perhaps keepsakes from their early lives—link them to the Únětice culture, known for distinctive metal objects, at least 350 kilometers east in what is now eastern Germany and the Czech Republic.

There was no sign of these women's daughters in the burials, suggesting they, too, were sent away for marriage, in a pattern that persisted for 700 years. The only local women were girls from high-status families who died before ages 15 to 17, and poor, unrelated women without grave goods, probably servants, Mittnik says. Strontium levels from three men, in contrast, showed that although they had left the valley as teens, they returned as adults. That “opens a new window into male life cycles,” Geary says.

Bronze Age princely burials have long signaled social inequality. But the organization of these societies remained “rather vague,” Stockhammer says. By combining archaeology with DNA data on family ties, the new study sharpened the picture. The data show, for example, that brothers were buried with equally rich grave goods, indicating that all sons, not just the eldest, inherited wealth. Related men kept wealth in the family for four to five generations.

The burials of poor, unrelated people on the same plot suggested inequality thrived within these households. Such complex social structure in these rather modest farmsteads surprised Stockhammer, who says the archaeological record in Europe first shows servants or enslaved people living under the same roof as higher-ranking people 1500 years later, in classical Greece.

Read more:

Science  11 Oct 2019:
Vol. 366, Issue 6462, pp. 168

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No Christian here… Just a social structure which allowed these humans to stylistically survive better (some better than others). So what about our modern social structures: based on the Abel/Cain myth, or on the evolution of neolithic tribes in central Germany, Italy (Rome), Athens, Saxony and Gaul? Why did the Greek invent gods and goddesses that would bring them fame and fortune, while some of the people enjoyed homosexuality as well as structured social procreating? We also have to know that human tribes (in what we define as Europe now), way before 40,000 years ago also interbred with Neanderthals, a different species of hominid, in some proportion.

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So, Rod Dreher, the uber religious man in foggy glasses, is still looking for the escape hatch that will lead him to the Benedict paradise Hills where his favourite looney-tune characters from the bible have gone to. It’s painful to read… I did not have to mention him here, but considering he represents a very strong defined religious viewpoint, may as well use him as a stupid counterpoint:

If anything, the Ben Op book ought to have been more “head for the hills” than it is. I may have been too optimistic about the ability of Christian families and communities to withstand liquid modernity. The core point, though, is that the power of liquid modernity is such that trying to face it with ordinary Christianity is like going out into a hurricane with an umbrella and expecting to stay dry.


Yes, we're living in a somewhat liquid modernity, the “new” social interaction of the present leading us to the uncertain future, designed to erase the loony gods from our past… and help us construct better secular societies without killing each others.

So what is “liquid Modernity”, the state of modern social interactions that seems to chagrin (or please — so he can push a barrow of religious beliefs against it) Rod Dreher?


Liquid Modernity 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
by Zygmunt Bauman 

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. 

This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life - emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community - and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning.

Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Bauman published a number of books that dealt with the relationship between modernity, bureaucracy, rationality and social exclusion.[14] Bauman, following Freud, came to view European modernity as a trade off: European society, he argued, had agreed to forego a level of freedom to receive the benefits of increased individual security. Bauman argued that modernity, in what he later came to term its 'solid' form, involved removing unknowns and uncertainties. It involved control over nature, hierarchical bureaucracy, rules and regulations, control and categorisation — all of which attempted to remove gradually personal insecurities, making the chaotic aspects of human life appear well-ordered and familiar.
Later in a number of books Bauman began to develop the position that such order-making never manages to achieve the desired results. [Gus: see Denis Diderot].When life becomes organised into familiar and manageable categories, he argued, there are always social groups who cannot be administered, who cannot be separated out and controlled. In his book Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman began to theorise about such indeterminate persons in terms of an allegorical figure he called, 'the stranger.' Drawing upon Georg Simmel's sociology and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Bauman came to write of the stranger as the person who is present yet unfamiliar, society's undecidable. In Modernity and Ambivalence Bauman attempted to give an account of the different approaches modern society adopts toward the stranger. He argued that, on the one hand, in a consumer-oriented economy the strange and the unfamiliar is always enticing; in different styles of food, different fashions and in tourism it is possible to experience the allure of what is unfamiliar. Yet this strange-ness also has a more negative side. The stranger, because he cannot be controlled or ordered, is always the object of fear; he is the potential mugger, the person outside of society's borders who is a constant threat.
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One of the important omissions here so far is that of religious differences which are “unfamiliar" and not compatible with the rest of the social construct. Some leeway can be given to the “strange", but some of the “traditions” in such religious impositions, which we accept reluctantly due to our social open-arm freedoms, are contrary to the secular network performance of freedom, creating a different tier of social behaviour — including forcing young immature girls into marriage, such as in some Islamic applications.
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… Modernity and the Holocaust, is an attempt to give a full account of the dangers of those kinds of fears. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman developed the argument that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he argued, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorisation of different species, and the tendency to view obedience to rules as morally good, all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass. He argued that for this reason modern societies have not fully grasped the lessons of the Holocaust; it tends to be viewed—to use Bauman's metaphor—like a picture hanging on the wall, offering few lessons. 
In Bauman's analysis the Jews became 'strangers' par excellence in Europe.[15] The Final Solution was pictured by him as an extreme example of the attempt made by society to excise the uncomfortable and indeterminate elements that exist within it. Bauman, like the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, contended that the same processes of exclusion that were at work in the Holocaust could, and to an extent do, still come into play today.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, Bauman began to explore postmodernity and consumerism.[16] He posited that a shift had taken place in modern society in the latter half of the 20th century. It had changed from a society of producers into a society of consumers. According to Bauman, this change reversed Freud's "modern" tradeoff—i.e., security was given up in exchange for more freedom, freedom to purchase, consume, and enjoy life. In his books in the 1990s Bauman wrote of this as being a shift from "modernity" to "post-modernity”.
Since the turn of the millennium, his books have tried to avoid the confusion surrounding the term "postmodernity" by using the metaphors of "liquid" and "solid" modernity. In his books on modern consumerism, Bauman still writes of the same uncertainties that he portrayed in his writings on "solid" modernity; but in these books he writes of fears becoming more diffuse and harder to pin down. Indeed, they are, to use the title of one of his books, "liquid fears" – fears about paedophilia, for instance, which are amorphous and have no easily identifiable reference.[17]
Bauman is credited with coining the term allosemitism to encompass both philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic attitudes towards Jews as the other.[18][19] Bauman reportedly predicted the negative political effect that social media have on voter's choice by denouncing them as 'trap' where people only 'see reflections of their own face'.[20]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygmunt_Bauman
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Phew...

Rod Dreher continues:

 

I understand why many conservative Christians don’t want to deal with the claims I make in my book. If I’m right, then the comfortable strategies they’re living by won’t work, and offer false hope. If I’m right, then they will have to change in ways they don’t want to change — including letting go of the bland optimism that says everything is bound to work out fine. So it’s easier to paint The Benedict Option as a neo-Amish tract, so it can be dismissed.

If the floodwaters are coming, you don’t want to drown because the forecast was too upsetting to take seriously. Read Bauman’s book about liquid modernity to understand the essence of our cultural condition: that the flood is already here, and we’re drowning in it. Last week’s polling data news from the Pew center on the collapse of Christianity in America is more evidence. Bauman was neither a Christian nor a conservative. He was a Marxist. But he understood something central to what it means to live in our time. We who are Christians had better take him seriously.

Here is an eight-minute interview Bauman did with The Guardian before his death. Worth watching, even though he’s wrong about the source of our problems being the separation of power from politics. If he’s right about that, then communist China is the answer to our problems...

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As usual, Rod Dreher manipulates his nose as not to see beyond it… He’s made his mind up and wrote about it: Dive under the storm of modernity in a bubble of delusion, hanging on to a useless belief, called the Benedict option — a derivative of Christianity in perdition. 

But… Ye who are Christians should have a deep look at what you believe in, before philosophising about liquid modernity and the future of humanity… 

Liquid modernity is more like a thick sweet trickle, with a massive lot of coloured information, some useful some not. The religious input in modernity is woeful, backwards and inadequate to deal with any new sciences. Whether you like or not here, religion is uselessly deceptive about the present settings of humanity, both genetic and social, still in “evolution”. 

Life and the universe are far too complex, “faulty" and unsettled for an intelligent designer to have thought of all the bits, some of which are wonky mistakes, regressions, erasures, and contrary to the system. Chaos, status of energy and matter in random associations can only define the brackets of conditions for life to occur at a defining level, all accidental. These factors create change and thus liquidity. We do not live like the Romans, nor like the subjects of Henry VIII… We have moved on, even if our system is not perfect as yet — and we understand the natural processes far more than then, even if an old farmer knows best when to plant his seeds.

Social media — "especially where people only 'see reflections of their own face'" — has had an image problem, but social media also has “netizens” as investigators and propagators of information — false or true. Most of the social media is conflicted as an influencer of political intentions or a propagator of knowledge of democratic values, and it will influence fashion and dancing, plus silly-cat grooming. The said social media can also influence the younger generations to protest against our apathy regarding global warming, though. 
Yes, we, the oldies, are the ones who have seen the changes, but we ignore them because we’re proud of our comfortable achievements, including those that punctured a hole in the ozone layer until we had to do something about it. On this score we’re always waiting for the last minute to act and sort out the bleeding mess, though new scientific information tells us daily that we need to get off our arse NOW.... 
In the recent past — as for many centuries, democracy was not even a grain of sand considering we lived under the thumb of a ruthless ruling class, namely kings and nobility, until some revolutions came along. Some people had enough of the divine self-allocated rights and were seeking equity with democratic rights.

Till about 50 year ago, we had to rely on spruikers standing on soap-boxes at street corners, or lying oratories from engaged biased politicians and on dubious slanted newspapers for information. Then the idiot box came in. Not a good selection of sources to make proper value judgements… We were like flies in a jar.

The internet has thus fostered a new possibility of information seeking: a much greater choice that is more direct and to say the least, easier to unpick or reformat in the direction of “modernity”. It does not rely on old patterns, such as religious beliefs that are looking backwards with stupid concepts such as an “original sin", but on the ability to choose between levels of entertainment, pain, medical attention, scientific information and more — information which is improving at a fast rate, in details and complexity of understanding, especially on the biology of life and on the structure of the universe…

We know more, we know better... even if we know "nothing"...

We are thus caught between a flux of galactic forces and the environmental settings of a small planet, with so far no hope of escaping. Individual death is part and terminal parcel of this bracketing of life.

On a social level, the importance of language is often underestimated. Languages carry the history of a group and a society, as well as its own hopes and relative borders. Breaking borders tend to create a mixing flux, a conflicting synergy between old dead thinking and the said modernity fluidity. Some of the languages are also attached to strong cultural parallel such as Islam and the arabic language.

When the Catholic Church decided to abandon Latin because of “modernity”, it eliminated the arcane feeling and replaced the voodoo with what became what should be seen as an obvious silliness. It opened the door to controversies and the vulgar (the spoken language) restructuring of the fanciful narrative into naive fairy tales for kiddies. 
Islam did not fall into this trap and this is why it is still strong. The Koran can only be read in its original language, Arabic. It does not subject itself to modern fluidity in in its thoughts, but will happily adopt the deadly weapons of modernity. This will generate conflicts within a free democratic society in which such freedom allows for fanciful “traditional” restrictions and behaviour — contrary to the spirit of freedom and fluidity of modernism.

We will sort this out, nonetheless...


Gus Leonisky
Used to be a marble-player champion... (Image at top by Gus leonisky)