Consanguinity, Solidarity, and Government

I woke up about 6 a.m. this morning and stayed awake until about 9, thinking about but not actually getting up. For some reason I thought about family more than anything else. I would have to say, if asked who had the most influence on my life, that my parents and three siblings had. Three of them are "gone over," the remaining three of us are all over 80. From there I would have to move to teachers and exemplars, both of the good and the bad life—I've known  both kinds. Could I come up with a list of 6 Very Important Influences to add to my own immediate family? I think so. But won't just now, later maybe.

Impressions gleaned from years of undirected reading about the early days of man (meaning the whole kaboodle, male and female and shades in between): first came the family and simultaneously the extended family. Seems very hard to imagine how a tiny mother-father-child group could have survived on its own in the earliest circumstances, so I think a larger groping had to be there for  a newly formed atomistic family from the start.

What about the start? There had to have been a moment when homo sapiens didn't exist; then came the first of the species. This had to have been a kind of virgin birth, a virtually miraculous thing: if one goes with evolution, the first true "man" must have emerged from a "wedding of God and hominid" (or you might put it in terms of natural religion as the "wedding of Apollo, the Sun, and Gaia, our Mother Earth") such that the result was the aboriginal Adam and Eve. That was evidently a few millions of years ago. And it was, say the "early" experts, in Africa. All follows from that. But before you can say Jack Robinson the new race had spread all over the globe on foot or by crude boats, leaving no traces in the form of permanent architecture until late in the day.

Extended families became tribes, tribes became communities. The first communities appear to have been towns or even cities surrounded by agricultural areas often brilliantly irrigated. Such places had an intense social solidarity. That last word, now in common use, means, according to my Websters's Tenth Collegiate edition: "unity (as of  a group or class) that produces or is based on unity of interests, objectives, and standards." Those earliest Mesopotamian city-states were ruled by kings and Gods (who tended to blend into one another) for the purpose of feeding and organizing the work and welfare of the population. 

Government: An  élite arose, initially and for a long time a priest class, then a more secular ruling aristocracy took over, which has always and everywhere tended to aggrandize more and more wealth and power to itself, at the expense of the general population. If there is anything new under the sun I don't know what it is. Revolutions a plenty, vast dreams of liberation forever entertained, always frustrated by the reemergence of a "controlling aristocracy." We are watching that go on the USA today as small numbers of bankers and media moguls and government bureaucrats, and munitions firm owners (the military-industrial complex) grab the wealth, shift the paying work overseas, and impoverish the hundreds of millions who own little or nothing.

A money thread runs through this whole story. I'll come back to that.