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Before the Dawn of Writing
I have been much impressed with Martin Gurri’s story of communications, from the invention of writing, to the invention of the alphabet, of printing, of mass media, of the internet.
And now, of course, AI.
It has inspired me to ponder a little about human communications before the Dawn of Writing. But not much. Obviously, I thought, humans communicated ideas and knowledge by speech. And also epics and fairy tales.
But I read a piece today at Quillette that really deepened my understanding. In “What the Navigators Knew” Patrick Whittle delves into the acquisition and communication of human knowledge and skills before writing.
There is We, the Navigators by David Lewis about the navigation knowledge and skills of Pacific islanders back in the day. All without maps and sextants: imagine! How did they find their way around the Pacific Ocean? Answer,
these master wayfarers could cross vast stretches of open ocean from tiny island to tiny island using an extraordinary range of environmental cues, including stars, ocean swells, currents, cloud formations and bird movements…
[The navigators] were human beings who had inherited and mastered a remarkably sophisticated body of practical knowledge, even if they didn’t always know why or how a particular practice worked.
Then there is The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich. It is perhaps a more general attempt to understand practical knowledge without modern science and communications.
Henrich offers a detailed and wide-ranging account of human cultural evolution, arguing that our species owes its success not simply to individual intelligence, but to the fact that culture allows us to accumulate, preserve and transmit knowledge across generations.
And part of that process is ritual and taboo.
[K]nowledge that is seen as sacred or taboo may be more memorable, more authoritative and less likely to be modified by someone who does not understand its purpose… Sacred rituals can therefore act as a kind of cultural safeguard by making important accumulated knowledge unusually resistant to potentially disastrous alteration.
In other words, don’t think of ritual and taboo as narrow minded and bigoted, but rather “culturally effective means of remembering and transmitting a hard-won practical lesson”.
It all dovetails, as Pinky Jerebohm would say.
What is scary to me is how much we humans have changed since the invention of writing, and how the speed of change has ramped up exponentially. The point about AI, for instance, is that we don’t really have to go to school to learn stuff. What you need in the AI age is the skill to ask questions.
Do you see the point? Back in the day, humans learned ritual and skills — think of childhood play and learning how to ride a bike — and learned what not to touch.
But now…
I suspect that we need to think deeply about how to acquire knowledge and skills — and to practice them — in the new AI Age. In other words, how do we live childhood now?
I don’t believe we have even started to think about all this.
| Tue, 27 Oct 2026 21:41:05 GMT |
The Krazy Klueless Klot Klub
The thing to remember about our liberal friends is that they don’t have a Klue. Here are a couple of examples.
Example One: the whole question of the de-feminisation of Hollywood.
Example Two: Robert Reich thinks Elon Musk’s companies should be nationalized.
On the feminist front, apparently Hollywood is starting to fire all the feminist girlbosses.
Warner Bros. co-CEO Pamela Abdy — fired… Marvel Studios Executive Producer Victoria Alonso — fired… Thunder Roads Partner President Erica Lee — not fired [but downgraded.]
The problem, mourns Vanity Fair, is
that the current mass purging of executives by entertainment companies…disproportionately hits women[.]
Writes Rebecca Ford:
With so few women in greenlight positions already, the loss of three influential leaders is a sting to both Hollywood and audiences alike… The consolidation of power into fewer hands (with most of those being male) is not without consequences.
Oh dear. But the problem, writes Lou Aguilar was and is
bat-dung crazy liberal witches and their beta-male toadies in charge of mainstream culture, most significantly Hollywood.
As you read above, the financial disaster of the feminised movie industry has finally provoked Hollywood into a course correction.
But after only a quarter of the 21st century of destroying what men built over the whole 20th, the real Hollywood witch hunts may have started.
Of course the real tragedy in Hollywood has been the destruction of the Star Wars movie franchise by Kathleen Kennedy and “The Force is female” notion. The only question is what on Earth George Lucas thought he was doing by putting her in charge of Star Wars.
Men and women are as different as chalk and cheese. I like to symbolize this by Nicholas Wade’s description of chimpanzee life in Before the Dawn. The males do nothing except tap the females and defend the border. The females do everything else: bearing and feeding and raising baby chimps. The male contribution is the size of the troop’s food-growing territory.
Down the ages after the Dawn, let us say, things have changed a bit, to a society featuring monogamous marriage where men worked outside the house supporting the mother of their children as she bore and fed and raised them. Notice that things have not changed that much: males are still providing the food to keep the children alive.
But in the modern era, woman’s life is not completely consumed by bearing and feeding children and keeping them alive. In fact woman has ventured outside the home into the wage-working world. But woman is still woman. The idea that she can live and work as a “girlboss” or a female warrior, is a fantasy. It’s in the jeans. In reality, what we have seen in the modern world is that woman in the working world has selected for caring, relating type jobs, not heroic war-fighting jobs.
Now to Example Two: Joseph Campbell in The Hero’s Journey talked about the best male life as a descent into the underworld of the unconscious and fight the demons down there. If he defeats the demons there he may return to the human world, and there die, fighting for humanity on the border between Chaos and Order. Nietzsche, in his notion of the Übermensch, writes about “self-overcoming” or Selbstüberwindung, “the continuous, lifelong process of mastering one’s lower impulses, confronting suffering, and constantly transcending current limitations rather than reaching a static end-state.” I regard this as the conversion of the warrior culture of old into a symbolic world of fighting the demons within to create something to transform the world.
That is why I think that Elon Musk symbolizes the modern man and his journey of “self-overcoming.” His life is a record of achieving things that the experts agreed couldn’t be done?
A workable electric vehicle? Couldn’t be done.
Full self driving software for cars, with accident rate about 80 percent below human drivers? Couldn’t be done.
Reusable rockets? Couldn’t be done.
Low-orbit satellite to Earth communication? Couldn’t be done.
But Robert Reich says that Musk’s companies should be nationalized.
“Democrats ought to [start] laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink & SpaceX... It should be a public corporation.”
The stunning ignorance of this comment is illustrated by the experience of a NASA engineer that went to work for Musk’s SpaceX.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said “if it works, build it. If it doesn’t, change it by Friday.”
The former NASA engineer proposed a change for the Raptor rocket engine.
At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours.
“Big Balls” tells us the problem in his foreword to Jennica Pound’s UNELECTED.
Bureaucrats have no motivation to fix the machine; the only way to get fired in Washington is to take a risk and fail, so they do nothing.
At SpaceX and the entire venture capital / startup culture, the whole point is to take a risk and fail. And then fix it.
I say that the whole culture and belief system of the left is a complete misunderstanding of the nature of human life in the modern age. It wants to make huge experiments in human culture and way of life; but keep the political and economic world completely locked down and resistant to change.
I say the opposite is true. We should be very slow to change human culture and ways of life, but should be reckless in trying economic change.
And if you believe and live like a lefty, then I think you belong to the Krazy Klueless Klot Klub.
Just sayin’.
| Tue, 27 Oct 2026 01:02:29 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Three Religions: The religion of the educated Gentry is creativity; the religion of the responsible Commoners is an Axial Age religion; the religion of the subordinate clients is vengeful gods.
Hitler is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: The Culture of the Ally, that helps Oppressed Peoples, or not.
