Michael C. Meyer writes an interesting idea when he explains:
Water helped ancient man learn those first difficult lessons about the rights of others and responsibility to a larger society. Even the most rudimentary irrigation system required organization, discipline, cooperation, and a measure of social cohesion. Mutual need begets mutual aid. Notions of sharing, of equity, of compromise, and of the common good first floated precariously on this liquid foundation to be later cemented in philosophical thought and codified law.
(Quoted from page ix of Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550-1850, by Michael C. Meyer. University of Arizona Press, 1984.)
Michael C. Meyer is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Arizona.
Water helped ancient man learn those first difficult lessons about the rights of others and responsibility to a larger society. Even the most rudimentary irrigation system required organization, discipline, cooperation, and a measure of social cohesion. Mutual need begets mutual aid. Notions of sharing, of equity, of compromise, and of the common good first floated precariously on this liquid foundation to be later cemented in philosophical thought and codified law.
(Quoted from page ix of Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550-1850, by Michael C. Meyer. University of Arizona Press, 1984.)
Michael C. Meyer is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Arizona.
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