Fair point. I got accused of the “noble savage” myth recently in another post and I went the wrong way with it. In trying to be better stewards of the natural world we are looking at vestige civilizations that never lost it, but the fact of the matter is that if you watch history shows, one I’m thinking of was a recreation of feudal life in Tudor England, Western Europeans used to “know” many, many of these things too, but they forgot it all in the Industrial Revolution, then encountered civilizations that hadn’t forgotten, and ground them to dust, instead of remembering.
After hundreds of years of trying to solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them, there’s always a set of people who are asking questions about the trip we are on. There’s a fine line between pastoralism and compromise that we haven’t worked it out yet, and we don’t even always see it when it happens.
There’s a circumstantial chain of evidence out there that David Hume injected Eastern Philosophy into The Enlightenment. If that’s even a little true, this big philosophical Step Forward was really a step “back”, or maybe sideways.
And I think we still don’t know where the Stoics got their ideas from. Themselves, or Buddhism?
