{"id":22013,"date":"2016-10-16T12:29:24","date_gmt":"2016-10-16T17:29:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22013"},"modified":"2016-10-16T12:29:24","modified_gmt":"2016-10-16T17:29:24","slug":"an-afternoon-in-early-autumn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=22013","title":{"rendered":"An Afternoon in Early Autumn"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.ca\/2016\/10\/an-afternoon-in-early-autumn.html\">An Afternoon in Early Autumn<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>I think it was the late science writer Stephen Jay Gould who coined the term \u201cdeep time\u201d for the vast panorama opened up to human eyes by the last three hundred years or so of discoveries in geology and astronomy. It\u2019s a useful label for an even more useful concept. In our lives, we deal with time in days, seasons, years, decades at most; decades, centuries and millennia provide the yardsticks by which the life cycles of human societies\u2014that is to say, history, in the usual sense of that word\u2014are traced.<\/p>\n<p>Both these, the time frame of individual lives and the time frame of societies, are anthropocentric, as indeed they should be; lives and societies are human things and require a human measure. When that old bamboozler Protagoras insisted that \u201cman is the measure of all things,\u201d though, he uttered a subtle truth wrapped in a bald-faced lie.* The subtle truth is that since we are what we are\u2014that is to say, social primates whow have learned a few interesting tricks\u2014our capacity to understand the cosmos is strictly limited by the perceptions that human nervous systems are capable of processing and the notions that human minds are capable of thinking. The bald-faced lie is the claim that everything in the cosmos must fit inside the perceptions human beings can process and the notions they can think.<\/p>\n<p>(*No, none of this has to do with gender politics. The Greek language, unlike modern English, had a common gender-nonspecific noun for \u201chuman being,\u201d\u00a0<em>anthropos<\/em>, which was distinct from\u00a0<em>andros<\/em>, \u201cman,\u201d and\u00a0<em>gyne<\/em>, \u201cwoman.\u201d The word Protagoras used was\u00a0<em>anthropos<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p>It took the birth of modern geology to tear through the veil of human time and reveal the stunningly inhuman scale of time that measures the great cycles of the planet on which we live.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Afternoon in Early Autumn I think it was the late science writer Stephen Jay Gould who coined the term \u201cdeep time\u201d for the vast panorama opened up to human eyes by the last three hundred years or so of discoveries in geology and astronomy. It\u2019s a useful label for an even more useful concept. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3463,14469,1758,2864,14470,1250],"class_list":["post-22013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-archdruid-report","tag-deep-times","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-lies","tag-stephen-jay-gould","tag-truth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22014,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22013\/revisions\/22014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}