The War of the World Views - Mankind, Civilization, Sapiens and the Dawn of Everything

Teleological - the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than ofy the cause by which they arise

Throughout my long life, I have been a big fan of the epic - the epic historical narrative, the epic explanation of the way things are, the epic on the small scale and the large scale. One of the first experiences I had with the epic description of human history was probably Will and Ariel Durant's Civilization. Along with reading such books, most fondly The People's History of the United States by one of my life heroes, Howard Zinn, there werre the popular epic historical drama of the cinemascope era, Lawrence of Arabia and Gone With the Wind. Theee were all fabulous introductions to the ideea of different viewpoints. Needless to say, I had my collection of Women's History of the United States, and Women's History (of a number of things - most of the ones we had been traditional left out of).

I am still a big fan of the tv weries old and new and just began to watch again Civilization, narrated by Sir Kenneth Clark and first appearing in 1969. Some of the big views were through the lense of architecture and art, which was my later road into the big history. My second degree is a B.A. in Fine Arts and one of the most difficult, or challenging courses I ever took was History of Art, a full year, two semester course that relied heavily on memorizing, which is something I am not good at! Nevertheless, I loved it and took legal size pads of notes redeced them to index cards, studied and studied and got good grades. We viewed the history of humankind via statues like the Venus of Willendorf and temples like Stonehenge then, of course up through the tried and true Crete, Minoan and Greek, Roman and Midieval periods, through the modern and post modern via paintings and finally film and photography. Sir Kenneth Clark took a similar journey via temples and churches and Roman roads and Aquaducts. The television series I jsut finished watched was a quick and action movie style look at the rie of humanity via mainly wars of conquest and defense. I read some commentary on the International Movie Database and it was mostly critical. My opinion is that all of these journeys are like road trips. If you take the bus, you see one landscape, if you take the train another, and by plane or boat something else entirely, then there is by foot! However that said, my main criticism is as always that Mankind was about MENKind. You'd have to wonder where all the people came from since women weere rarely pictured let alone mentioned, although, as usual, a warrior queen or two were thrown in as a sop to the complainers. ,p/> What is interesting to me in the extreme is when historians take on the whole package of how something is organized and presented which is, of course, what Howrd Zinn did and what an eye opener that was! Instead of focus on Kings and Conquerors like the perrennial favorites Ghengis Khan and Alexander the Great, Zinn took a look at history from the ground up, through the lives of the little people and forever changed my interests in history. While I am on that subject, I have to interject that the view of history from the peope who lived it has always been my most passionate interest and I love the study of first-person sources such as journals and memoir. That said, however, so much of our HUMAN history occurred before any individuals could write about it, the story must be told via the ghostly bones of early cities and the few notable objects of material culture that must then be interpreted. So, take for example the Venus of Willendorf, the small stone idol, found in the thousands over stone age Europe can be a remnant of a Goddess worshipping period, cult, or the symbol of some other kind of worship like fertility. We don't know, we can only buess using our own bias and experience. Here I must bring in Maria Gimbutas. The book of hers that I read was The Civilization of the Goddess. She was a noted archaeologist and anthropolist.

Recently I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari but I was not as impressed as many of the reviewers whose essays I read. I liked him better in interviews, most recently in a Sunday New York Times Magazine interview I think I mentioned in another blog entry. He is challenged by Graeber and Wengrow in a very well written and gripping essay in the November 6, 2021 issue of the New Yorker, by Gedeon Lewis-Kraus, pg. 62. Their new book takes a far more free-form appreach and apparently, takes a view of the power of happenstance rather than design. I recommend you read the esay, it is far more than I could summarize in this blog entry. It is well worth the read. And even though it is so fueled by testosterone fantasy, I recommend Mankind, the Story of Us which I saw on amazon prime, if for no other reason than it gives another side dish to go with the Thanksgiving meal - the history of human beings!

By the way and totally off topic, I will be having Thanksgiving with my sister and brother a couple of days after the traditional Thursday, because my sister is the cook and she has to work. For my own personal at-home Thanksviing, I have a nice pot of sweetpotato/carrot soup, and for the day after, a nice pot of corn chowder. Obviously I am a vegetarian, but at my sister's dinner, I will enjoy the sides as they eat the turkey. Hope you have a lot to be thankful about and that you have the awareness of all the things you have to be thankful for! Happy Trails! Jo Ann