Dear Readers,
Up to now in the Friday Seminar Series, we've talked about the things that we can use to analyze individual sources, differentiate them from each other, and obtain information from them. These things are important, but they're not the whole story.
At this point in CHRN/AUG 100, I usually move on to talking about generalized societies, but I think that this topic might be a little basic for people like yourselves, who live in such a globalized culture. You know the underlying things that move cultures, the basic building blocks of the enlightened and dark age societies, or the warlike and the peaceful.
Instead I'll move ahead a little. These different types of societies are all created through different currents in the underlying emotions of their people. Emotions are surprisingly basic, and many of them are hardwired. No matter how complicated the situation, some low level emotion can be brought to bear.
Joy, anger, fear, excitement, they are all things that stay pretty constant. Not totally constant, but that topic is a little advanced. And through these emotions, culture is shaped. Some believe that culture is simply a combination of environmental factors and technology, but that does not explain the common threads in many cultures across your history. The Aztecs and the Egyptians, for example, were quite similar in technology and in culture, but not in environment. The missing piece that explains their cultural similarity is their common human thread.
So too with the original Aegeans and the neo-Aegeans, who had (and will have) identical religions and similar dark ages, but very different technological levels. The commonality, again, is human emotion.
Therefore, we can use human emotions to reverse-engineer human beliefs. This statement is vital to the study of Anachronism. Vital!
For now, I'll let this idea resound, as I have many matters to attend to, but I will develop it further as time goes on.
Always,
Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople
fascinating stuff professor, I eagerly await the day you publish a textbook in our time stream.
ReplyDeleteMr. Keene, you've anticipated my plans to publish some of my translations time-normal to you. I hoped, first, to establish a following in your time stream. Any help is welcome, of course.
ReplyDelete