National Geographic presented a docustory about “America before Columbus”. It is an insight and vision of the dynamic between European humanity and nature in which trees are one part, water and population size being another.
There is yet another factor in the human life dialogue from Europe—an access to essential resources beyond their natural organic boundaries. The development of ships, navigation and salted food enabled their armies to reach greater and greater distances. Totally different ecological environments, an exchange of plants and animals from their “home” territory and culture, enabling a continuance of environmental degradation in these new territories in response to overpopulation in their native countries.
Leaders seem to know of the importance of “exploration” and raiding others in war, searching for other places as a means to continue their existence and counteract limitations of their own resources. The “hand of control” reached its limits as far as it could in their “home” territory, leaving the “conquest” dialogue as their only option to their degrading and collapse by pollution, limits of animal life, agricultural limitations of the land and overpopulation reaching the limits of what the environment could withstand in sustaining themselves.
I am thinking that this period in the human invasion of Earth space to be derived from earlier times when the “Silk Road” was just the beginning of travel between areas within the limits of walking, carrying, pack animals and the use of rivers in order to carry food and goods back and forth in ever increasing distances between two, then three and more places, that brought trade and cultural/tribal interaction between different territories with different food, resources, invention and skills.
One projects this experience to be adventurous and mostly friendly. I think it must have been quite difficult and stressful in this bottom line of a daily agenda of survival. The temperament needed to meet the risk, anxiety and fear of those who converted from raiding to trading had to be alert, durable, strong and courageous.
I sense that we generally assume that all this existed in a temperament of “nice guys”. I would suggest the conditions of life in these times were much closer to the edge of survival in starvation, desperation and a reasonable fear about being attacked and robbed. The equation of trust and mutual interest grew out of experience and agreements to protect each other from violence and forceful domination of other marauding tribes or gangs.
I am thinking the “nice guys” or nice tribes of colonial aggression, was much more selfish with a cruel disregard for strangers and primitive others. Their ruthless behavior to indigenous people is epic. Also hunters were not generally empathetic in situations of tribal competition for food. A hunters aggression continues to be at the foundation of power even today. We call it rebellion and war.
The hard, cruel, distance of personal concern of militant and tribal dominance coupled with the consistent struggle for food and control has never been kind, at least in trying circumstances of defense and control. The individual—indentured and assigned to colonial conquest—were forced to comply to power’s ethic of this time in history in order to have food, a place to sleep, and to be able to protect oneself. Europeans were unsympathetic to dehumanized “primitive” strangers and also facing the reality of dominant nobility seeking to force compliance with their values and ethics.
It was hard to trust those your knew, much less hungry, aggressive strangers you didn’t know anything about. This is still true.
There exists some key elements of group aggression in our current local communities that animate hate, suspicion, false judgments and projections derived from those primal instincts of the past, generated in their difficult life circumstances. Such as raiding others for food and territorial competition for food and survival in unprotected living circumstances of altered or broken faith and trust in those around them. I believe this to be a current emotional potion of fear and hate that is growing and starting to overheat on its way to boiling over in an angry blend of rage and projection in a stimulation of survival fears, broken trust, disappointment and no place to go to connect with others and sustain oneself. That kind of loss of the tribal bond in a world of ferrel loss, leaving worry at my doorstep .