If it looks back at all to the history of mind, it does so within a context so overwhelmingly social and from historical levels so far-removed from the biological genesis of mind that it can never make contact with nature. Its very claim to “modernity” has been a systematic unravelling of the interface between nature and mind that Hellenic thought tried to establish. This interface has been replaced by an unbridgeable dualism between mentality and the external world. In Descartes, dualism occurs between soul and body; in Locke, between the perceiving senses and a perceived world; in Kant, between mind and external reality.
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By contrast, organic society contains the conceptual means for functionally distinguishing the differences between society and nature without polarizing them. Implicit in virtually every contemporary image of labor is a unique image of matter — the material on which labor presumably exercises its “fiery” powers to transform the world. To the modern mind, matter essentially constitutes the fundament of an irreducible “being,” whether we choose to make it interchangeable with energy, particles, a mathematical principle, or simply a convenient functional premise.
Compact Time: A Short History of Life on Earth
Carbon-14 content in the atmosphere somehow changed over a period of time due to atmospheric effects. The atmospheric changes include volcanic eruptions and the burning of excessive carbon. The above reaction shows how plants take up the radioactive isotope of carbon (14C).
Dates on Bones
In a paper published to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team led by archaeologist Stuart Manning identified variations in the carbon 14 cycle at certain periods of time throwing off timelines by as much as 20 years. If this is true, then many of our established historical timelines are thrown into question, potentially needing a re-write of the history books. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Isotopes are different forms of the same element that have a different number of neutrons.
Carbon dating
The new, comparatively libertarian “institutional technics” spawned by this fascinating world yielded, in turn, an equally remarkable elaboration of a human-scale, comparatively libertarian instrumental technics. Aside from the watermills already in abundance throughout Europe (William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book https://datingrated.com/ lists some 5,500 in about 3,000 English villages in 1086 A.D.), there were also windmills. Apparently derived from the ritual Tibetan prayerwheels, they had become so numerous by the thirteenth century that the Belgian town of Ypres alone could celebrate the fact that it had reared 120 windmills in its environs.
With the exception of the Paris Commune of 1871, which exploded as an anarchic confederal image of a France administered by a Commune composed of decentralized communes, European socialism had decorated itself with republican trappings at best and dictatorial ones at worst. Despite his slogan of “All Power to the Soviets!” — and even earlier in the summer of the same year, “All Power to the Shop Committees!” (a strictly anarchosyndicalist demand) — Lenin readily dispensed with both forms and replaced them by the Party as a State organ. Radical “amorality” thus turns upon ascetism to encourage unrestrained freedom and the open defiance of the Demiurge’s moral tenets.
So crucial was the coequality of substance with labor, in any understanding of this early technical imagination, that work was distinguished by its capacity to discover the “voice” of substance, not simply to fashion an inert “natural resource” into desired objects. Among the old Anvilik Eskimo, ivory carvers “rarely tried to impose a pattern on nature, or their own personalities on matter,” observes Rene Dubas. Holding the “raw ivory” in his hand, the craftsman turned it gently this way and that way, whispering to it, “Who are you? Who hides in you?” The carver rarely set out consciously to shape a particular form. Instead of compelling the fragment of ivory to become a man, a child, a wolf, a seal, a baby walrus, or some other preconceived object, he tried subconsciously to discover the structural characteristics and patterns inherent in the material itself.
A world so demeaned may well be beyond redemption, at least within the terms of its own institutional and ethical framework. The flames that threaten to engulf our planet may leave it hopelessly hostile to life-a dead witness to cosmic failure. If only because this planet’s history, including its human history, has been so full of promise, hope, and creativity, it deserves a better fate than what seems to confront it in the years ahead. Henri Bergson’s conception of the biosphere as an “entropy reduction” factor, in a cosmos that is supposedly moving toward greater entropy or disorder, would seem to provide life with a cosmic rationale for existence.
For example, radium and polonium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie, decay faster than uranium. Here we will explore half-life and activity, the quantitative terms for lifetime and rate of decay. In order to date organisms precisely scientists need a reliable historical record of its variation to accurately transform 14C measurements into calendar ages. Using the terrestrial calibration curve, a calendar age of AD 1390–1435 was established for the moa bone sample. The scintillator chemical butyl-PBD picks up each decay event and emits a tiny flash of light that the spectrometer is programmed to detect and count. In addition to the moa sample, control samples are also measured at the same time.
Ultimately, it is in this ecological interplay of social freedom and natural freedom that a true ecology of freedom will be fashioned. If this interpretation of human consociation and its origins is sound, it may provide the basis for a reconstructive approach to an ecological society. Up to now, I have had to define social ecology in largely critical terms-as an anthropology of hierarchy and domination. I have been concerned primarily with authority and the conflict in sensibilities between preliterate societies and the emerging State. I have explored the imposition of rule, acquisitive impulses, and property rights on a recalcitrant archaic world, one that has persistently resisted “civilization”-at times violently, at other times passively.