TheRockSays's Blog

Egyptology, the underappreciated social science

I think Egyptology should enjoy more interest in the west than it does. I can understand why it's like that: there's not a great deal of archaeology on it. Sometimes entire reigns are apocryphal and controversial. But ancient Egypt had a very rich and facinating culture.

Relevance

A little self-indulgent digression

I always had a latent interest in Egyptology, but it was graduated to active around the time official recognition of gay marriage got underway in Canada. I couldn't understand why my country would do this. Why would they challenge our humanity this way, and take an institution based on a biological principle ubiquitious among our species and even much of the animal kingdom? So I became interested in anthropology. Dehumanization is always administered by humans, after all, so dehumanization must be a natural human trait. And I looked at my country through an anthropological microscope.

The Egyptian connection

Ancient Egyptian culture had the following traits:

• Vast sums of weath
• They wore a lot of makeup, so it would seem they considered their biology to be a little less important, and culture a little more important
• Superpower military
• A pagan religion that could only be sustained with great wealth, and collapsed without it

Sound familiar? For those don't quite get it yet, this describes what I see as some of the worst elements of white/western society.

I'd like to be able to include that they were pretty arrogant, and assumed their civilization was the standard, and would last forever (I mean, 3000 years must seem pretty close to forever) but I just haven't seen any evidence of this. Such a subtly could easily be lost in the sands of Africa, especially if they weren't even objectively aware of their attitude. On the other hand, in any history lesson I've ever had, I've never noticed any indication of historical figures doing any forward-looking since before the 19th century. So, thinking you will live forever, when forever is the next couple of years isn't so arrogant I guess.

Butcha gotta love it

So sounds like I should be pretty disgusted with ancient Egypt and western civilization, right? Well, I do live here--this is my home, and I am a middle class, white, western candy ass. And we didn't get so arrogant by having nothing to brag about. Besides, I can appreciate a very complex and culturally sophisticated extinct civilization, in the same way that future civilizations will be able to admire us for Beethoven's 9th Symphony and The Maltese Falcon.

03/9/2007

And something else that links our civilization to the ancient Egyptians: our moral structure.  I've read that they had moral principles, which had permeated their entire society, and I seem to remember reading something to the effect of this being the glue that held their civilization together. I've yet to get a grasp of these moral principles, but since more than one Egyptologist has expressed this idea, I take it for granted. Now I hear you saying what are you trying to tell us, TheRockSays, that our society is a moral one? Well, our current society might be in a state of decay--I too find it disheartening to see 11-year-old girls all skanked out like they think they are going to be the next Pussycat Doll. And you'll get no argument from me, if you try to say our civilization isn't even the most moral one available today. But our civilization does have a moral history, and rightly or wrongly, we are still a very moral people, even if that morality is in decay, and even if you think thing some of our moral principles are in fact immoral.

It is not difficult to imagine that this moral structure was set by Judeo-Christian influences. It's also not difficult to see the connection between what's held our civilization together, and what held another civilization together for about twice as long.  (It's commonly accepted that the ancient Egyptian civilization lasted over 3000 years)

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Great mysteries of history

You know what I really don't understand: ancient mineral exploration technology. I mean, how the heck did the Babylonians know to dig all the way into that mountain for iron? By Googling terms such as "mineral exploration", technology, history, iron, copper, romans and so on, all I get is this obscure paper somewhere in Thailand which has an appendix that devotes itself to the history of mineral exploration. I dunno, maybe "mineral exploration" doesn't make for the best keywords on the subject.

The paper was vague on ancient technologies, but it seemed to say the first principle of mineral exploration is determining how minerals are formed, and thereby developing a geological model. So, it started with people discovering useful minerals near the surface, and then infering that such minerals are deposited around similar geological phenomena. Then, once the stuff on the surface was exploited, prospectors would start digging. Still, it sounds like exploration would have been a tedious and risky process. Since it still is today, I would think a pound of copper back then would be worth a ton of uranium now. That goes double when you think about just how sporadic and novel organized science was before the 19th century. Forming these geological models must have been an exceptional discipline in 4000BC. If I just arrived on this planet, and saw how much rock, dirt and water was on the surface, and was then told that the industrial revolution is only 300 years old here, I'd have assumed that before then metal would have been a luxury for the wealthy, and everything else would have been made of (and heated by) rocks and organic materials.

Conclusion

Whatever the answer is, it is probably pretty mundane, since Google turns up so very little. You can find so very much about Anna Nicole Smith's measurements and figures over the last 10 years, but no one seems to think that there's much to the mineral exploration that allowed mankind leave the stone age well before 300 years ago--so I guess there's not much to it.

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Milgram's experiment

Lately I've been reflecting on Milgram's experiment. It was conducted in the 60s, and basically what it proved is that more often than not people were willing to inflict severe pain on others in obedience to authority (they didn't actually do it, but they were proved to be willing).

It didn't take me long to figure out what inspired these experiments. Clearly it was an attempt to understand how the Nazis were able to overcome the extreme administrative difficulty in enlisting people to commit their attrocities. In fact, it was inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Since well before I knew how to multiply, I knew all there was to know from the mainstream about the holocaust, and if I was asked who died more during WWII, Allied soldiers or Jewish civilians, I probably would have said "Jews". I would have been wrong, but I would have been in sync w/mainstream psyche. But Milgram... the first time I heard about his experiment was sometime in the late 90s when I googling for information about a Peter Gabriel song about the experiment. I had a vague idea of what it was about, and never heard of it again until the Abu Ghraib scandle (one in which a bunch of All-American kids were able to perpetrate criminal abuses on Iraqi prisoners) and I was reading a newspaper article on the incident. So only after knowing about the Jewish holocaust for 25 years, including all the mainstream moral ideologies about it, was I to be properly aware of Milgram's experiment.

Denial and holocaust repetition potential

I think everyone who knows about the holocaust should know about Milgram. Clearly there's a great deal of social denial about Milgram. Last week, after Germany was defeated in the World Cup, I heard a commentary on the radio about how, for the first time, Germans feel comfortable about expressing nationalism, waving their flag (the colours of the republic, not Nazism nor the Kaiser). So for the last 60 years, Germans have been too ashamed to wave a flag that didn't even represent Hitler, but another casualty of Hilter. And Germans have dealt with their guilt in very visible ways. Despite being a western democracy, they ban specific political parties (actually just one party: the Nazi party), open up their doors to immigrants, all of which are to atone for the war. So, Germans have learned their lesson, right? Well, one experiment conducted in Munich (I believe in the 70s--a time when Germans should have still been very conscientious about learning their lesson) 85% of participants were found to be "obedient". This figure is way above the two thirds that were typically found to be obedient in other experiments. So 85% of Munichers are all primed and ready to repeat the holocaust, while a measly 66% of the rest of us are prepared to do our part. It would seem that for all the extreme treatments of the symptoms, the cause has been neglected. We tell ourselves that we must "never forget" and "never let this happen again", then hypocrticially close our ears to the fundamental problem, and let it silently incubate in our civilization.

I won't confirm or deny that this willful ignorance is due to a small elite group, but I do lean more towards the idea that people just don't wanna deal with it. One, it suggests that Nazi attrocities are not a phenomenon of a very specific environment and cirumstances, which are largely irrelevant to us and our daily lives, but that the mechanisms that allowed for such attrocities are a fundamental part of human psychology and instincts--we just don't wanna hear that. Also, the possibility of lending mitigating cirumstances to Nazi culpability is probably a bit turn-off.

Call me Eichmann

This is an adjustment on a quote by the wife of a participant in the experiment who was among the more obedient, i.e. had an amorality closer to Adolf Eichmann than we might have expected. I don't know about you, but I couldn't help but fall into questioning myself, and trying to speculate on what my behavior might have been if I was a participant.

The experiment was based on the pretense that there were 2 participants, one of whom would administer increasing electric shocks to the other. In reality, the shockee was an actor subjected to little or no electric shock, and was instructed to make specific protests and expressions of pain at certain "voltages". What was found was that most people were still increasing the voltage, according to their instructions, over the screams and protests of the shockee. All except a very small sadistic few participants (or maybe the few who saw through it all, and decided to have some fun with the data) were less than completely cooperative, and showed great reluctance to continue at higher voltages. However, when such opposition was demonstrated, an authority figure dressed in a white lab coat would hussle the participant forward with utterances such as "please continue", "I will take full responsibility", or "you have no choice", most people responded to the suggestion, and continued to administer what were preceived to be very painful, even potentially lethal, shocks.

All my life I've been able to say to myself this was an evil act perpetrated by a group of people that you do not belong to. Not only that, but your grandfather valiantly fought against this group, and the countries of both your parents were at war with this very regime, so you're in the clear. No, it's no longer that easy. Now I have to say you belong to a group of beings, homo sapiens, who perpetrated this monsterous evil. Your birthright does not disassociate you from it, because your birthright implicates you! I would like to think that at the first protest, where the shockee clearly stated an objection to his further participation, I would end it right there, and tell the authority figure where he can stick his "responsibility"^*, or sarcastically conceding that I had "no choice", but that I just wasn't going to do it anymore. It makes sense, doesn't it? He's a volunteer, just like me, so he should be allowed to pull out anytime he wants, right? Shocking him isn't essential for his health, stopping won't endanger anyone else's safety, so I have no excuse to shock him, right? Hey, it might have gone that way--I have used smart ass remarks to deal w/authority before, but it would be awfully presumptuous to just assume that I would have behaved exactly the same way that Milgram's collegues predicted his test subjects would behave. And, BTW, Milgram's collegues did indeed predict that all but a very few subjects would test negative for obedience. Also, there have been times when I bended to authority, and while it wasn't to contravene any moral principle, I was really pissed at myself for giving my obedience to that asshole--I obeyed and responded to suggestion by authority.

*You can take your responsibility, dust it off, put it sideways, and stick it straight up your candy ass

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