I'm on with Leila Hartoum in south Lebanon and Steven Sahounie in Latakia, Syria on the Iran attack on Israel

https://odysee.com/@RT:fd/CrossTalk_1704:a

What's the biggest threat humans pose to Nature? War? Mining? Cars/ trucks? Much as they are horrible and threaten Earth with imminent destruction, you're wrong. It's agriculture!! That's Monbiot's latest revelation in Regenesis: feeding the world without destroying the planet (2022), his Long March to a Better World. In our misguided industrial agriculture, we are constantly attacking the thin, delicate membrane that holds the precious substance that allows all living things to … LIVE.

The purpose of Liah Greenfeld's Mind, Madness and Modernity (2013) is to make evident that

*culture is an empirical reality of the first order in human life, what makes us human and defines human experience.

*madness in its new form—the big three of contemporary psychiatry—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression—was brought about by nationalism, the cultural framework of modernity, our secular, egalitarian, essentially humanistic and democratic world, insisting on the dignity and creativity of man and the value of human life. The other side of the coin, proof that benefits have costs.

Peter Turchin, End times: elites, counter-elites, and the path of political disintegration, 2023.

Turchin is one of the founders of the new 'science' of cliodynamics, a discipline which coalesced in the 1990s, statistical juggling 'facts' from the past, stitched together from bare bones (literally) of archeology, climate, geopolitics, crimes, arrests/ executions, wine imports, lots and lots of numbers. There's probably even a case for kitchen sinks. Think: weather forecasting. My favourite historian, Arnold Toynbee, when asked by a critic what the secret of history was, answered: Just one damned thing after another. Well, it seems Turchin has finally trumped the great master.

In Harnessing human nature Part I, we saw how natural selection takes place not only on the individual level, but on the group level. No man is an island. We are who we identify with, we make alliances, good and bad. The high point of any civilization is when its state, warrior groups conquer others, loot and occupy, and build monuments to glorify it all. In rare exception to this, sometimes civilizations just coast along under wise leadership. Andalusia under Muslim rule from the 8th to 15th cc was probably humanity's high point, though it came to a typically nasty end with the reconquista.

But what about the family? What role does it play in civilization, in shaping individuals, before they move on to their adult groups?