29 Comments

Sharing time, goods, a field or garden is a way to build an economy of sharing, a living community our society ils lacking desperately. A nice example of decentralized government is the Subak irrigation system at Bali. Our common goods and services are commercialized and raped by multinationals.

Expand full comment

The latest Republican moral panic over teaching school kids that the past existed has made this nearly-60-year-old song of Tom Paxton's very relevant again: What Did You Learn in School Today?

https://youtu.be/0iSisz9uLiI

Expand full comment

Thank You for this quality information

Expand full comment

You comments also brought to my mind the book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill. It highlights an important segment of our human history.

Expand full comment

Everytime I read about or someone seeks to explain the "Pyramid" structure of all societies, it is always the ones at the top of the pyramid who tell this fable; never the ones in the middle or on the bottom. Societies look and are experienced very differenlty depedning where you are sitting or standing.

Expand full comment

I am a retired educator. It never crossed my mind to consider how the learners might integrate the history of these ancient hierarchical societies into their cognitive structures. But now I am thinking that we need to investigate the organization of the First Nations, their ancient political organization and find out if they have lessons to teach us of a different social organization, one less hierarchical and just. Thank you for raising this issue.

Expand full comment

As noted immediately below, it is paradoxical that people claiming to emphasize America’s origins as being Christian, would choose Egypt as a cultural and organizational frame. The “Ur” story of Christianity is shared with Judaism: the Exodus, the throwing off of slavery and subjugation. That such slavery was of a people formerly the cooperating rescuers of both societies should only emphasize the point of this column. What are we missing here? Only the simplification required for authoritarians to succeed.

Pamela, and Rev. Terence Dougherty

Expand full comment

When I read this piece, Diana, a song kept coming to mind from South Pacific.. “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade. You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to taught before it’s too late, before you are 6 or 7 or 8,to hate all the folk your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve GOT to be carefully TAUGHT!” South Pacific was recorded in 1958! And now another song comes to mind....”When will we ever learn?”From Where Have all the Flowers Gone.

Expand full comment

Thanks for this, Diana. Your thoughts about pyramid structures are very much to the point. I wish schools would teach kids that, for most of human history, societies have been organized as "Domination Systems", in which a small elite extracts wealth and well-being from the vast majority, i.e. those who do the work. As Dom and Marcus have written, these systems are oppressive, exploitative and religiously legitimated. They are the source and cause of a great deal of human misery and suffering. They guarantee that working people have little or no control over their own lives. And Joerg Rieger reminds us that the same is true today in the US. "Economists have estimated that approximately two thirds of the working population in the United States can be considered ... as having little or no power over their work and having little agency at work.". (Theology in the Capitalocene, Fortress, 2022, p 106)

Expand full comment

Brilliant. Well said, Diana.

Children's minds are fully capable and desire imagining a goodness beyond normal. Give them truth and they will respond in greater truth. I experience this regularly with children. So did Jesus.

Expand full comment

Give me your child till he (yup, he) is seven and he will be mine forever.....I do remember reading that someplace bibilicly (how DO you spell that word...sigh) connected.

Also, as a former history teacher (masters-level...my thesis was on how "elders" were REALLY treated in Colonial and Pre-Revolutionary Am) your piece rang all my bells and sent shivvvvvvvvvers up my spine.

And finally, don't forget that/how/what the tightly-scripted, insidiously white-guy/Western Civ, bible-based education systems (both at church and schools) of the 50s and 60s led to for Boomers. I kind of see the same thing happening with Gens Y, Z and Alpha.

And really finally, DBB, I sooooo love the fact that you love history!!!

Expand full comment

Thank you for your perspective.

Expand full comment

The link between Egypt and plantation culture is telling. Like you say, it tells a story that normalizes and affirms the hierarchies. My western civ courses always took pains to trace a line from Egypt through Greece, Rome, every empire of Europe to the US: inheritants of the best and of power.

Another example. There’s a obelisk in my Texas hometown in honor of three white supremacists who died during a vigilante attack that brought down the multiracial political coalition of our county during Reconstruction. Their violence led to 70 years of apartheid. The obelisk tradition of honoring power goes straight back to Egypt.

Expand full comment

Wow! These ideas are so refreshing to me! I never thought about the Egyptian social structures and all the other social structures as being our models. "Without an alternative historical story, imagining a different social structure is difficult, if not nearly impossible.

It's so sobering to me how this can happen in our curriculums and we aren't even aware of it.

I am going to think on this wording of yours today as I go about my day. " A people can't work towards what they can't imagine". I want my grandkids to have a wide imagination of what is possible even when I feel sometimes that the odds are stacked against us to have a time when the pyramid shaped power doesn't exist. We sure need our storytellers to highlight alternatives and as you write, give us a new 'story-Universe". Thank you Diana!

Expand full comment

Further evidence of the original “world system” indoctrinating the next generations.

Expand full comment

Thank you for taking the time to articulate the Virginia standards so well.

Perhaps everyone involved would benefit from watching the most recent episode of Abbott Elementary.

Trying to teach 8th grade concepts to 2nd graders causes unintended consequences. Just ask Ralph, Jr. :)

Expand full comment
Error