SNIP
>Just how different are we in reality to people of several thousand years ago when it comes to our existence within society? My contention is that we share many common threads and are not as unique as we may have been led to believe.

Tom

I agree, though there is one significant difference that has manifest itself in the last 10 years or so and that promises, I believe, to (eventually) turn society (of the world at large) to a new direction.

That difference is the "media" and specifically its new widespreadedness, with television probably leading the way.

Until the more recent past (I place it at 10 or so years ago but it could be somewhat more) each of our individual societies was somewhat isolated/insulated from each other.
Sure many wealthier people travelled abroad, including to even the poorest or more backward places around. But in such cases they didn't bring their cars or their jewellery or their furs or the other trappings of the 'western' lifestyle. And they don't even today.
So, by and large, the people of the places being visited could see that their visitors were different, but mainly by the visitors' skin and language and clothes and habits, etc. They could see that they were different but they also could assume that the visitors otherwise faced the same kinds of trials and tribulations that they themselves faced in day-to-day life.

A recent PBS series on life in Africa was most surprising to me in two specific regards - in even the smallest of villages, cash money is mandatory to live and television is available, even if it was a communal set.
Money of course brings its own set of problems in these societies but it is television that I want to focus on.

Television now gives virtually all people the full story of how the "western world" really lives! They now see the fancy cars. They now see all of the jewellery. They now see the supermarkets with aisle after aisle full of fancifully wrapped foods. They now see the big fancy houses with their flush toilets and running water and lush green lawns and swimming pools and electric lighting/dodads. They now see the machinery used for plowing fields and sowing crops and distributing water and reaping harvests. Machines, even to milk our cows for God's sake! They now see the skyscrapers and office buildings and fancy busses and fancy trains with cushy seats and the highways and the airports. In the sitcoms they see the "problems" that cause such consternation (we know they're phony plots but they have no ideas of this) and they've gotta say to themselves what crybabys we must be to get so upset at such trivial issues when they haven't eaten for the third day in a row. This all has to make us look fat and greedy beyond any possible reason.

This is just a small bit but I hope it makes the point - they can see for themselves that we have so so much and they have so very little. This has to breed resentment and envy and, particular to this discussion, the younger members of the societies simply have to be pressuring their parents and leaders in ways never before known to get some of these things for themselves! Parents and leader who have no real understanding of ownership (of land or buildings) or of money or of finance or banking or collateral or of all the other things attendant with accumulating such wealth for themselves and so have no hope at all of delivering any of it for their children or their constituents. In such a position I would see no real alternative as a parent or leader but to denounce all that stuff as practising excess to the highest form.
I don't think that at any time in history have we run the risk of having more than half of the world despising another major segment of the world as a whole and this will surely have some impact before too long.

Jim
>
>Tom