Quotes About Premodern

In general, risk-averse behavior has been common among all groups that operated along the margins of survival. The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor.

The sheer challenge of survival in premodern societies always constrained the behavior of the poor.

Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element.

In mechanical terms, humans are quite efficient converters of food into energy, so human slaves were often more valuable than animal slaves, if one could afford them.21 The importance of human beings as a source of energy helps explain why forced labor was so ubiquitous in the premodern world, just as the existence of fossil fuels helps explain why human slavery has largely vanished today.

The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern

Political atheism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. No premodern atheist doubted that social life required belief in, and worship of, God or gods.

German idealism is a return to the premodern on an 'English' and therefore insufficient basis... the German idealistic concept of freedom is a synthesis of the premodern concept of virtue with the Hobbesian-Lockean concept of subjective right as the morally fundamental fact.

The theological contacts between Jews and Christians during much of the premodern period are best characterized as disputations. Even when not engaged in face-to-face argumentation, Jews and Christians spoke about each other in essentially disputational terms.

But in my grandfather's premodern world, how he wanted to live was his choice, and the family's role was to make it possible.

In other words, every effort to do away with liberal democratic capitalism is reactionary, because they all attempt to restore the unity of purpose that defines the premodern or tribal mind. Socialism, nationalism, communism, fascism, and authoritarianisms of every stripe are forms of tribalism.

Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution had developed a strongly centralized state, in which executive power was only weakly constrained by either rule of law or accountable legislatures. The nature of the absolutism that was achieved in pre-Bolshevik Russia was qualitatively different from that of either old regime France or Spain, and much closer to the premodern Chinese or Ottoman variants.

For primitives as for the man of all premodern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and to reality. The polarity sacred – profane is often expressed as an opposition between real The Sacred and the Profane and unreal or pseudoreal. Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.

There is a specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity… in premodern societies the dimension of the uncanny was largely covered (and veiled) by the area of the sacred and untouchable… With the triumph of the Enlightenment, this privileged and excluded (the exclusion that founded society) was no more. That is to say that the uncanny became unplaceable; it became uncanny in the strict sense.

Twenty-first-century American churches have a history and an institutional culture rooted in the modern or premodern periods—the twentieth, nineteenth, or earlier centuries

There is also the fact that premodern lobster was cooked dead and then preserved, usually packed in salt or crude hermetic containers.

Premodern peoples are said to have no creative ability and anti-modern fundamentalists are said to have a profound ability to be destructive. The destruction is taken as proof that they have no appreciation for human life, including their own.