Thursday 24 May 2012

The Future Is Private Not Public






An intriguing combination of items came up in today’s rattling around the web.  The more things change the more they remain the same.  Both are quite short but in terms of time between very long, one being the Neolithic, the other current nonsense,

The first attempts to explain what will happen in East London once the circus has ended and the caravans departed from the Olympics “village”.  It seems that there is to be a major property development which will amount to a private new town.

It will not operate under any of our present arrangements for local government or other similar inconveniences which raises the question of who it is for and who will be the financial operators.  Guess what?  There are no clear answers and nobody appears to be in charge.


The second is that recent research suggests that the causewayed enclosures that were constructed during the Neolithic period did not take hundreds or thousands of years to be built.  Indeed, it is argued that it took only 75 years or so for them to spread across the Atlantic Isles.


What is a source of wonder is when you calculate how much work had to be done and what was involved then just what was the size of the population then and who were these people?

This is a Europe we know little or nothing about, notably who the people were, what or who they worshipped, how they communicated or what their social organisation was. 

But to build on this scale and with this rapidity, organise food supplies to maintain the population and to know the heavens as they seem to have done suggests a very able, intelligent population connected with others over a wide area.

What happened to them?  Perhaps, in the future when the diggers find the remains of a 21st Century transformation of the Atlantic Isles from one form of political organisation to a collection of privately owned fiefdoms into which a servile population had been herded they might wonder why.

We may know the answers to that but those in the future may not.


1 comment:

  1. Truly necessary safety for the group - defences against invaders. Ability to move on fairly quickly. What about the even older peoples, who created in e.g. Malta, much much older more isolated stone places of safety, and this continued in similar ways across the Mediterranean islands, in Brittany, up the west coast of Ireland, Lewis, Orkney, and the fabulous Shetland Islands. Things don't look too bright.

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