| | Progress and Free Society | ... Those societies in which the direction of economic activity is, to the greatest degree, in the hands of those who actually carry on society's work are the ones that advance most swiftly. By contrast, those societies in which work is furthest separated from thought and social planning are the most stagnant. Without doubt, the period of the most rapid human development relative to population size was the period of Neolithic revolution and the immediately following urban revolution; this period saw the invention of the technologies basic to civilization — agriculture, animal husbandry, writing, mathematics, spinning, potting, weaving, and metallurgy. They emerged from a society that had not yet ossified into separate classes, where communal agriculturists were free to develop new techniques of immediate benefit to their community and themselves. Next was the brief Ionian period, when small craftsmen and merchants developed new ways of writing and thinking, before the rise of chattel slavery. Two millennia later came the late Renaissance, from 1550 to 1650, when the small population of Europe gave rise to genius after genius; Digges's "mechanics," artisans, small manufacturers, reading of the latest in scientific developments, gave birth to an explosion of new technology before the resurgence of aristocratic power. Finally, there was the nineteenth century, when inventors, entrepreneurs, skilled workers, and scientists — the Edisons, Marconis, Maxwells, and Faradays — combined to transform the world while Beethoven and Brahms composed, Monet and van Gogh painted, Tolstoy, Dickens, and Conrad wrote. Each of these periods gave rise to a greater or lesser degree of political democracy, but all were characterized by a close link between hand and mind, by a democratization of at least major sectors of the economy. By contrast, the periods of slowest development were in the later Bronze Age, the slave societies of 300 B.C. to A.D. 700, and to a lesser extent the feudal society of the Middle Ages. These societies squandered the minds of the population, reducing them to mere tools of a small ruling class. From the standpoint of the underlying theory of evolution it's reasonable that this relationship should hold. The freest societies are those that most directly allow the individual to make changes in the mode of production and thus in the society as a whole, that most readily encourage innovation. In Ilya Prigogine's terms these are the most "unstable" and therefore the fastest-evolving. Today the economic democracy essential to progress has almost disappeared, and progress cannot resume unless those who do the work decide what work is to be done and how it is to be done. Neither a few thousand immensely wealthy capitalists nor a few thousand party bureaucrats have the wisdom to run the vast and complex world economy. That task can be accomplished only by those who work, by the people themselves. | —Eric J Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened - A Startling Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe (1992), Chapter 10, Cosmos and Society | Indexes/04 |
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These associations in the minds of the population spending, reduce their tool is only a small ruling class.
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