We don’t even necessarily have to adopt the old ideas verbatim either. We could have (sit down readers) TWO days off a week, we could call it a weekend, and go fishing and hiking and stuff.

Cuba has a great land system, although I don’t recall the name off hand, where the land is given gratis to people as long as they maintain it and farm it. If they let it go to waste they are evicted and another person is given the land. This comes from an old Roman methodology.

I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic in my last comment, I was trying to emphasise that many of the traditions are still around, we just choose, or are paid extra, to ignore them. Doug is right, we shouldn’t sell our souls so cheaply.

The roman thing could go for intellectual property as well, companies could be forced to develop the idea and make it available, or the patent gets passed to someone who will.

Hi Douglas

just one question on the middle ages. Did your research include a look at the climate developments at the time. I think late middle ages was a period of higher temperature while later it cooled again. In this case warming was seen as adding to prosperity. Do I remember that correctly?

I want to say that Cuban program your thinking of was the Zafra, or the 1970 Gran Zafra. It’s a Spanish word for the late summer harvest.

The Cuban’s had a lot of great ideas about reducing bureaucratism and parasitic economic activity, unfortunately those are the symptoms of any centralized institution.

I think Weber had the right idea about socialism. All large institutions will become corrupt and excessively extractive no matter their ideology.

I just stumbled upon a pretty fascinating bit of information.

Have you ever heard of M. King Hubbert? He was a 20th century geophysicist with a similar take on money and it’s place in our society. He had a lot to say concerning the nature of continuous growth and it’s physical and economic dangers.

http://mkinghubbert-technocracy.blogspot.com

Yeah – he was the Hubbert’s Peak guy, who explained how oil production would peak and then change everything. So he had a lot to say about developing sustainable economic models rather than ones that depend on growth.

What if. What if we are living in the future equivalent of the Dark Ages right now? What if the future Renaissance looks back at us and writes us off because of what we are now, then the plague(s) came, whittled the populace down to the Guidestones’ 500 million, what the economy could support, and voila, history repeats. Only we’re history. Mabye, Rushkoff, maybe your wish has already come true.

My wish isn’t for the economy to become more repressive, reduce the available food supply, kill off half the world’s population, and then recast it all as progress.

My wish is for us to revive some of the best person-to-person interactions and commerce of the pre-corporate era in order to develop an alternative that exists right alongside corporatism.

But I don’t think we’re in a high quality, highly distributed late-middle ages scenario right now. I think we’re in the end state of a more centralized schema.

Interesting post. I am with you on wanting to look back for other models of social and economic organisation and then find new, better ways to achieve them in the present.

In terms of the so-called Dark Ages, what many people don’t know is that this coincided with a period of great innovation, progress and diversity in the Muslim world that later became a key factor in the renaissance. From about 600-1600AD, the Muslim world made great leaps in maths, science, healthcare and other areas, plus they revived and re-distributed ancient Greek learning. This was all quite key to the European renaissance, as I understand it.

I agree that the term dark ages was intended to make the Renassiance look like a new beginning, but I think it is also true that we have forgotten the role of what was then the most progressive new-kid-on-the-block of the monotheistic faiths, for which rational (yes: rational) scientific enquiry was seen as a religious duty. See http://www.muslimheritage.com for people who know a lot more about this than I.

I hate to pimp my own sh*t, but you might also find this 5min mini-talk about the C20th interesting: http://www.headshift.com/blog/2009/02/the-twentieth-century-was-wron.php

I will await the book with interest…

thank you very much

greetings from switzerland

Hey Lee,

Great point. Arabic was the lingua franca in the day. Maimonides wrote in Arabic. There have always been individuals and communities preserving and forwarding civilisation. Nobody cares much for the substance or the discourse of civilisation unless, perhaps, it had an empire or lots of movie stars.

sigh

-mason

Interesting, indeed. I’ve been fixated on Renaissance disinfo as a way of discrediting the Middle Ages, but it also served to discredit everything Muslim. The first centralized currencies in France were actually a Crusades innovation, meant to suppress the use of Arabic coins with Arabic gods on them.

Then again, like today, the anti-Arabic sentiment may have itself been a propagandistic way of promoting an economic agenda.

Doug,

You should stick to speaking about the “…ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values.” and not economic history as you obviously do not have the needed information to make a informative observations.

The interaction between inflation of home currency, the Church & sovereign rulers of Europe assisted in creating a perpetuating cycle of conflicting power struggles which was only exacerbated by continual wars at home and abroad. Europe was a den of slow to no intellectual growth compared to Arabic countries & China of the same time. The so-called “Dark Ages” are appropriate to Europe insomuch that relative growth in many intellectual areas paled in comparison to those in the Renaissance. In fact, only after the “Plague” and the advent of more modern monetary policy & the progressive movement of rights was inflation controlled and growth of output propelled forward.

Crack open some history books on: monetary (chronology of money), religion and overall knowledge & invention. Capitalism inherently is more efficient & beneficial than feudalism and the merchantalistic policies of the Middle Ages. If you don’t like centralized banking or monetary policy, I suggest you start working on stockpiling printer paper so you can print out the drivel you peddle so you can buy your groceries when you next advocate the return of a barter economy. Good luck finding someone who will trade anything for it.

Here’s a little tidbit to assist you with your “return to prosperity”:
The two key terms in
the Marxian-Leninist terminology, “feudalism” and
“capitalism,” have sometimes been used independently
for the periodization of European history. Feudalism,
a very specific military and social-political system in
the Carolingian Empire and its successors, had become
by the eighteenth century a rather indistinct term to
denote legal relations between lord and peasant (O.
Brunner). As such it entered into the comparative
vocabulary. Eventually European historians defined the
ninth to the twelfth centuries as characterized by feu-
dalism, sometimes referring to them as “the feudal
age.” The concept of capitalism began its victorious
career with Marx. Sombart’s Der Moderne Kapitalis-
mus (1902) described capitalism as an economic system
which was specifically Western and which, beginning
in the late Middle Ages, reached its climax in the late
nineteenth century. Other historians have distinguished
a period of predominantly commercial capitalism
(fifteenth to eighteenth century) and of industrial capi-
talism which can be equated with the “Machine Age.”

All wrong. Or at least what you say has been considered myth by most historians of the past century or so.

Start with Braudel.

Braudel on Capitalism via Wikipedia(couldn’t have said it better myself):

Braudel in his three-volume Civilisation Matérielle, Economie, et Capitalisme (1979) (Capitalism and Material Life ), a sweeping study of preindustrial capitalism the world over, returned to economic themes that interested the Annales historians of the 1930s but had otherwise been neglected by the school. There is little original research but instead a synthesis of a great deal of work by many scholars, some of it outdated. Braudel prefers descriptive detail rather than theoretical constructs, avoids all economic theory, and uses statistical data as illustration rather than an analytic tool.

Braudel argued that capitalists have typically been monopolists, not, as is usually assumed, entrepreneurs operating in competitive markets. He argued that capitalists did not specialize and did not use free markets. He thus diverged from both liberal (Adam Smith) and Marxian interpretations. In Braudel’s view, under capitalism, the state has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than as the protector of competition usually portrayed. He said capitalists have had power and cunning on their side, and they have been arrayed against the majority of the population. Few historians have followed up this lead.[8]

Seems to me that Braudel was mingling in the same territory you are: using no economic theory or statistical tools to test you hypotheses. Basically, making off-hand casual remarks to give as gospel. It’s one view to be sure, but not the view of the majority. I beg you to look in some academic economic journals for your future economic information and observations.

this is very interesting.

seems to mirror the claims of british catholic writer, hilaire belloc, about the disinformational aspects of “capitalism”.

have this book as a pdf for anyone who would like to read it. send me an email to: mpkinusa {at} yahoo(.)com if you would like this.

belloc claims that modern capitalism began when queen elizabeth confiscated the catholic monasteries, which constituted 35% of english landholdings, and gave them to her friends in the nobility. this allowed the nobility class to gain disproportionate power over the centuries, until we are left with the present distortion of “capitalism” whereby the tiny minority of the population owns almost all the wealth, while everyone else toils as wage slaves.

it seems clear to me that belloc shares your view about the sanguine nature of the late middle ages. he writes exactly what you write about the relative prosperity and economic and political freedom of the “serfs”. you might disagree with his explanation of the decline to our modern situation whereby people work as wage slaves of the capitalist elite, which he traces to elizabeth’s expropriation of the catholic monastic holdings, but until i read an alternative explanation you, i shall consider belloc’s thesis to be eminently plausible.

shalom!

it seems clear to me that belloc shares your view about the sanguine nature of the late middle ages. he writes exactly what you write about the relative prosperity and economic and political freedom of the “serfs”. you might disagree with his explanation of the decline to our modern situation whereby people work as wage slaves of the capitalist elite, which he traces to elizabeth’s expropriation of the catholic monastic holdings, but until i read an alternative explanation you, i shall consider belloc’s thesis to be eminently plausible.

shalom!

Arabic culture had direct influence on Renaissance economics.

Leonardo Fibonacci’s youth in Algeria introduced him to hindu-arabic numeral systems. which he introduced by and large to Europe.

You cant do fractions, and good book keeping with roman numerals.

As we approach the 33rd, i am increasingly interested in the flow and application of knowledge between the learning centers and periods of Jewish, Christian and Muslim-hosted thought.

Woke early this am to read again Norman O. Brown’s “The Apocalypse of Islam” in his co-edited series of essays “Facing Apocalypse.”

Thinking mostly of Khidr & Rebbe Shimon or should i say Mohammed & the Kabbalists. And, Doron, i think Norman would avow Hindu thought too has a mode traveling this vector.

I prefer the colloquial “Mathmaster” to the Joycean.

Jam Rek! -mason

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