My wife is a beautiful woman. That's the first thing most people notice when they meet her. That was the first thing I noticed when I first met her. What also becomes apparent very quickly is that she's pretty damn smart too.
We were driving somewhere and talking about a vacation we had taken in the recent past. A trip to Italy which concluded with a day in Pompeii. Pompeii for me was spectacular, beat only by Machu Pichu in terms of wow factor. It's a town almost entirely intact, frozen in time, and hauntingly familiar.
While talking about Pompeii and sitting at a traffic light waiting for it to change, my wife made a comment that I immediately rejected but have since reconsidered. She said, and I'm paraphrasing because my memory isn't that good, "It's amazing how little has changed since then". I scoffed immediately. In no way does our life resemble that of the ancient Romans. But I was wrong and she proved it.
The Romans had plumbing, indoor even. They had homes and roads, professions and libraries, They had taxi's and messengers, they took baths, they had fast food (this particular feature of Pompeii surprised me). They worked out, they sent their kids to school, they traveled for holidays. They had an elected Congress, they had a professional military, they had codified laws and they paid taxes. In fact, if you took electricity away from us and legal slavery away from them, we would be the same.
This was my wife's argument and the more I thought about it, the harder it was to dismiss. Is it really possible that we have changed so little over 2000 years of evolution? Sure we do things faster than they did and we have medical advances that they didn't but again, if you take electricity away those differences fade. Who we are as a society, who we are as basic human beings, the things we do and care about, the ways we operate, what we consider normal, is virtually the same.
They might have called it consumption, we call it cancer. Neither of us can cure it. They prayed to multiple gods, we pray to one. Neither has seen him/her/them/it. They fought the "barbarians", we're fighting the "barbarians"; neither of us is winning. It's all eerily the same.
I'm sitting in the cafeteria having lunch today and watching CNN. Or rather reading it since it's too loud in there to hear what the anchor is saying but I can read captions and the scroll bar at the bottom. Apparently the pope is set to meet with someone regarding world poverty and the factoid rolls across the bottom: 85 people control 50% of the worlds wealth. Well shit.
My first thought was "how is this news"? Sure the number might be a little shocking, that's a very small number of people given the world population of almost 7 billion to hold so much of the worlds wealth. But should it really be that shocking? It's always been that way.
The Romans are a notoriously inequitable society. The wealth of the known world, and they conquered much of it, was in the hands of a select few elite. The overwhelming majority of people in the Roman empire were slaves or non-citizens with limited rights. The Asia of today if you will. Actual Roman citizens faired a little better but they weren't necessarily rich. Think of them as today's college graduates. But a small handful of Romans had it all. They could do anything, buy anything, be anything they wanted.
Man hasn't changed much since we as a species first discovered the concept of value. Since then, we've been identifying things of value and working and fighting to acquire more of it than the next guy. Today it's money, 2000 years ago it might have been land. Whatever that value item was, we have been standing on the shoulders of the drowning to get more of it since we first noticed it was there.
Frankly, I have a pretty low opinon of the average person so I'm not overly concerned by this idea. The world is as it presents itself to be. Not as your parents told you it is, not as Hollywood says it is, not how you think it should be. It just is. The people that are surprised and appaled by this dubious statistic CNN flashed on the screen are the same ones that cannot see the world as it is. For whatever the reason, they choose to think of the world differently and so this real world event, that an inequality of such monsterous proportions exists, actually surprises them.
It shouldn't. We have always been this and unless Gene Rodenberry is right and money become obsolete 300 years from now, we will always be this. Take away the fancy cars and the cell phones and we're not much more than we were 2000 years ago.
We were driving somewhere and talking about a vacation we had taken in the recent past. A trip to Italy which concluded with a day in Pompeii. Pompeii for me was spectacular, beat only by Machu Pichu in terms of wow factor. It's a town almost entirely intact, frozen in time, and hauntingly familiar.
While talking about Pompeii and sitting at a traffic light waiting for it to change, my wife made a comment that I immediately rejected but have since reconsidered. She said, and I'm paraphrasing because my memory isn't that good, "It's amazing how little has changed since then". I scoffed immediately. In no way does our life resemble that of the ancient Romans. But I was wrong and she proved it.
The Romans had plumbing, indoor even. They had homes and roads, professions and libraries, They had taxi's and messengers, they took baths, they had fast food (this particular feature of Pompeii surprised me). They worked out, they sent their kids to school, they traveled for holidays. They had an elected Congress, they had a professional military, they had codified laws and they paid taxes. In fact, if you took electricity away from us and legal slavery away from them, we would be the same.
This was my wife's argument and the more I thought about it, the harder it was to dismiss. Is it really possible that we have changed so little over 2000 years of evolution? Sure we do things faster than they did and we have medical advances that they didn't but again, if you take electricity away those differences fade. Who we are as a society, who we are as basic human beings, the things we do and care about, the ways we operate, what we consider normal, is virtually the same.
They might have called it consumption, we call it cancer. Neither of us can cure it. They prayed to multiple gods, we pray to one. Neither has seen him/her/them/it. They fought the "barbarians", we're fighting the "barbarians"; neither of us is winning. It's all eerily the same.
I'm sitting in the cafeteria having lunch today and watching CNN. Or rather reading it since it's too loud in there to hear what the anchor is saying but I can read captions and the scroll bar at the bottom. Apparently the pope is set to meet with someone regarding world poverty and the factoid rolls across the bottom: 85 people control 50% of the worlds wealth. Well shit.
My first thought was "how is this news"? Sure the number might be a little shocking, that's a very small number of people given the world population of almost 7 billion to hold so much of the worlds wealth. But should it really be that shocking? It's always been that way.
The Romans are a notoriously inequitable society. The wealth of the known world, and they conquered much of it, was in the hands of a select few elite. The overwhelming majority of people in the Roman empire were slaves or non-citizens with limited rights. The Asia of today if you will. Actual Roman citizens faired a little better but they weren't necessarily rich. Think of them as today's college graduates. But a small handful of Romans had it all. They could do anything, buy anything, be anything they wanted.
Man hasn't changed much since we as a species first discovered the concept of value. Since then, we've been identifying things of value and working and fighting to acquire more of it than the next guy. Today it's money, 2000 years ago it might have been land. Whatever that value item was, we have been standing on the shoulders of the drowning to get more of it since we first noticed it was there.
Frankly, I have a pretty low opinon of the average person so I'm not overly concerned by this idea. The world is as it presents itself to be. Not as your parents told you it is, not as Hollywood says it is, not how you think it should be. It just is. The people that are surprised and appaled by this dubious statistic CNN flashed on the screen are the same ones that cannot see the world as it is. For whatever the reason, they choose to think of the world differently and so this real world event, that an inequality of such monsterous proportions exists, actually surprises them.
It shouldn't. We have always been this and unless Gene Rodenberry is right and money become obsolete 300 years from now, we will always be this. Take away the fancy cars and the cell phones and we're not much more than we were 2000 years ago.
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