In a metaphor, the evolution of civilization is in many ways similar to the evolution of flight. A long story made brief – both required multiple attempts, before they were able to function sustainably. Just as the engineers in the big firms which produce the machines – Airplanes and Helicopters – used for flight, are constantly attempting to improve upon their products, we as members of our respective societies are always looking for better, faster and cheaper ways to sustain ourselves. Civilization requires three main ‘materials’ if you will; Politics – the role of the state and political organization, the spokesperson promoting the idea that might is right, Economics – the production, exchange and economic organization of society. The funds for the might, and Ideologies – the social constructs and prevalent ideas we have within society that we use to justify our uses of political and economic behaviour (actions). As a result of these three main aspects of society, civilization has been able to evolve and progress – typically something viewed as positive – like when hunters learned how to kill 2 mammoths at once. However progress quickly becomes a problem when you have too much of it – such as when hunters learned how to run a heard of mammoth off the side of a cliff (ultimately causing a shortage of food). Human nature is the sphere from which all aspects of society grow. The problem with human nature is that we are still ‘wired’ for survival, even though we have evolved as a civilization to live in societies where we no longer need to worry about survival, so much as substance. Through the evolution of civilizations past to present we have learned new ways to maintain our communities. Human nature is a double-sided sword, it i...
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...es and other people so long as they are comfortable.
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In order to establish whether Lenin did, indeed lay the foundation for Stalinism, two questions need to be answered; what were Lenin’s plans for the future of Russia and what exactly gave rise to Stalinism? Official Soviet historians of the time at which Stalin was in power would have argued that each one answers the other. Similarly, Western historians saw Lenin as an important figure in the establishment of Stalin’s socialist state. This can be partly attributed to the prevailing current of pro-Stalin anti-Hitler sentiments amongst westerners until the outbreak of the cold war.
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Karl Marx noted that society was highly stratified in that most of the individuals in society, those who worked the hardest, were also the ones who received the least from the benefits of their labor. In reaction to this observation, Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto where he described a new society, a more perfect society, a communist society. Marx envisioned a society, in which all property is held in common, that is a society in which one individual did not receive more than another, but in which all individuals shared in the benefits of collective labor (Marx #11, p. 262). In order to accomplish such a task Marx needed to find a relationship between the individual and society that accounted for social change. For Marx such relationship was from the historical mode of production, through the exploits of wage labor, and thus the individual’s relationship to the mode of production (Marx #11, p. 256).
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Karl Marx is among the most important and influential of all modern philosophers who expressed his ideas on humans in nature. According to the University of Dayton, “the human person is part of a larger history of life on this planet. Through technology humans have the power to have an immense effect on that life.”[ii] The people of his time found that the impact of the Industrial Revolution would further man’s success within this world and would ensure his success as a species. Marx was extremely radical in finding that this was a positive impact on humans in nature.
There is no longer any question that our world climate has changed (King, 2004). Over the last 100 years, "temperatures have risen by about 0.6 degrees Celsius and global sea level has risen by about 20cm" (K...
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The earth is a complex system, which continues to evolve and change. Climate change and global warming are currently popular in the political agenda. But what does “climate” really mean? The difference between weather and climate can be conveyed in a single sentence: “Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.” Based on research of the geologic record, we know that climate change has happened throughout Earth's history and at present, ever-increasing evidence points to the roles that humans play in altering Earth systems. The Earth and its atmosphere receive heat energy from the sun; the atmospheric heat budget of the Earth depends on the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing radiation from the planet; which has been constant over the last few thousand years. However present evidence seems to suggest that the recent increase in temperature has been brought about by pollution of the atmosphere, in particular the release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide, mostly through Anthropogenic Forcing (human activity) and other various internal and external factors. I...