Noah Ryan The Etiquette of Freedom

In the The Etiquette of Freedom, Snyder touches on the idea that language and social order didn't just appear one day, but instead that they co evolved with our changing biology. He goes further into the impact that this has on the nature of human language, but only briefly into what that implies about human social order. I believe that we can learn a lot about government and social order if we investigate it in the context of this slow evolution. For example, our current understanding of government is a system of codes and practices that generally have philosophical bases. In this sense Capitalism and Communism, and just about anything one could call a government, are very similar. They are recent (they came after the agricultural revolution), their implementations are decided upon, and they intend to provide a way of life for the people that follow them. But what is most relevant and important here is that the social order of tribal people is not so external. It is rather part of their way of life, and so integrated into their consciousness that is can hardly be called a government. This way of life in its infinite diversity of cultures evolved and changed over time to fit the needs of the people that lived it. These ways of life seem to me exactly what Snyder was talking about when he describes on page 20 those that understand the world as eat and be eaten, and see the sacred in that. They live (because they do still exist, as distant as our culture has made ourselves from them) in this give-and-take community of life just as we do, but they realize their place in it, and they embody all the important things involved in living with and in the wild. Their minds often seem completely different from ours, their mindset diverse and incomprehensible, as on page 4 when cultural extinction was not as important as values and dignity, or the last paragraph of page 22, but from this we can see how limited our perspective is and how little we really know about the human condition. From them we may relearn our place in the world and understand the sacred around us. We may create such a way of life life that Snyder describes on pages 4 and 5. To not cause unnecessary harm not only because it will inevitably cause harm to you, but because you do not want to cause harm. This is not some idealistic utopia that I want to express. I know that "there will be enough pain in the world as there is" (4). It is just the same, or a similar, sustainable and meaningful way of life that has been practiced by humans for over a hundred thousand years. It attempts to work with our nature and not against it, it tends towards diversity of culture and ways of life just as the community of life tends towards complexity and diversity. My interest in understanding this way of life is part of the reason that I'm taking this class.

Kip Redick introduction

Make sure the title is your name and the subject of your journal entry.