The Community
Sat., February 28, 01:17 PM
This is sort of an intellectual exercise, since I'm thinking about a time well before any kind of recorded history. Sometime in the development of humans, they began cooperating in their struggle for survival. You have to understand, this probably was not something they did consciously. The ones who did not cooperate simply did not survive.
As they lived together and it became obvious that certain behaviors did or did not benefit the community, certain universal rules came into effect. One should not murder, or steal, for example. Some version of these principles occurs in most, if not all, cultures.
[As I write, it strikes me that there is no commandment against the use of alcohol; maybe we need an amendment to the Commandments. As we know, as a Constitutional amendment it didn't work too well.]
No community survives unless it has some provision for producing and nurturing children. People were needed for defense and for food, whether the community lived by hunting or gathering. Every person was needed to do the work. In addition, it was vital to replace those who died.
Producing children required a man and a woman. The woman needed extra protection during times when her own defenses were reduced, as during childbirth and nursing. The most viable households included a man and a woman, as well as extended family or similar structure to aid the couple in protecting and nurturing their children. This is the root of “go forth and multiply” as well as “marriage consists of a man and a woman.” It is also the root of “do not waste the seed,” which in turn is part of the prohibition against same-sex relationships. It made sense for its time, but this is a very different time.
In the mid-eighteenth century, an economist named Malthus theorized that, since the population increased faster than the food supply, conditions like famine, plague and war were necessary to stabilize the population. (That is vastly simplified, of course, but you get the idea.) His philosophies are perhaps the earliest warnings we had about the dangers of overpopulation. It was a time of exploration, however, and most people — if they thought about it at all — figured that people could emigrate to a new place if the local resources were insufficient. They could go to the Americas or to Australia, areas where there were, by European standards, enormous amounts of undeveloped land.
How have we changed since Malthus' time? Fewer people die of hunger, because we have developed better methods of producing food. Modern medicine has conquered most of the diseases that caused early death and, indeed, the life expectancy in developed countries is high enough to cause Mr. Greenspan to make his ominous remarks of last week. (Once again, viewing only part of the problem…) We still have war, of course, but stabilizing the population problem isn't Mr. Dubya's aim, and it won't kill enough people anyway. We are stuck in a mindset that was reinforced by the culture of the Fifties, when we continued to praise large families even as we knew there were too many people.
There's more on this subject, but I'm too tired to work on it now. However — whoo! The local newspaper published my latest submission, a slightly altered version of my February 9 entry.
