I am reading an amazing book about how we all got “civilized” (Against the Grain). Getting civilized, not surprisingly, has to do with cities. The word’s roots go back to civis (“citizen”) and civitas (“city”), so to be civilized is to be part of a much larger group that lives together. The book points out that the normal “story” of how this happened doesn’t quite fit the time line. The standard narrative is that people were primarily hunter-gathers, but when agriculture was invented, it allowed us to dry harvested grain, store it, and thus create a surplus that allowed us to live better through hard times, and it allowed us to support “elites,” that is people who had functions of organization: soldiers for defense, planners and builders, etc.
The standard narrative makes it sound like we stumbled on this good deal and just couldn’t wait to create cities, city-states, countries, royals, clergy, etc. Here is where the timeline comes in. This “agricultural revolution” came about around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, so how come cities didn’t start popping up until about 7000 years ago. Apparently it is the case that cities did, they just failed over and over and over.
Grain is an important component for forming a civilization. It is one of a very few foods that can be stored in bulk and therefore taxed. The author keeps pointing out that if the staple of the area were a crop like potatoes, the farmer would leave their potatoes in the ground for extended periods of time, until they were needed. If they were harvested and not eaten fairly rapidly they would spoil. And, whereas dried grain can be seen and confiscated by the tax man relatively easily, taxing a potato field would require the tax man digging up all of the potatoes they claimed and then they would have the storage problem the farmer was avoiding by leaving them in the ground.
Ruins of Uruk, one of the earliest cities (5000-6000 BCE) … 3000-5000 years after agriculture was developed in this same region.
While having grain to tax is necessary for city-state formation, it isn’t sufficient. Anthropologists have shown repeatedly that when we made the transition to an agricultural society, people became sicklier, shorter, and lighter. In other words we went downhill in our physical development. The problem with grain-based societies is they concentrate too much sustenance in too few foods, the diet becomes much less varied and hence less nutritious.
So, why didn’t these cities come to stay if their superiority was so obvious? The reasons claimed in the book make excellent sense. Farmers have to work much harder than hunter-gathers, so in order to make people do it, you must coerce them. The work is more tedious and requires more energy to do, so nobody volunteers for it. Basically, if someone came up to you and told you they had this great idea, that you would work harder than ever and the surplus reward of your labor would devolve to the guy with the idea, how enthusiastic would you be? There were obvious other complications, so read the book if this is a topic that interests you.
So, to make a city, people need to be coerced to donate the labor necessary, with no obvious reward for their extra labor. There is an argument that can be made as to why cities came to have walls. It was not so much to keep enemies out, but to keep the laborers in. Gangs of laborers were taken out to work the fields or dig irrigation ditches, and then taken back in at night “for their protection.” (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?) Yeah, they were build to keep the labor force in.
Until the idea of a “surplus” stuck in the minds of the “elites,” greed didn’t play much a role in human behaviors. In cultures without such “governance,” people worked to create a sufficiency and then stopped working. When everyone had “enough” there was no urge to pile up more, more, more! (Growth, growth, growth … the economic mantra of our current age is the philosophy of a cancer cell.) Obviously there were petty squabbles when a delicacy was involved, maybe a beehive was found and people squabbled over distributing a small amount of a really desirable product, but by and large, everybody had something to do and everybody had enough to eat. Only a surplus of food can set the ambitious’ minds whirring. I imagine something like this: the number of fields currently under cultivation results in, say, 100 elites being supported (those not working at producing food). So, the top guys (it had to be guys) are thinking “if we doubled the fields under cultivation … hmmm, we could do so much more.” (It seems math was invented for this purpose, by the way, as was writing.) But there had to be land to cultivate and farmers to do the cultivation, but there was no limit on this kind of thinking. In one’s mind, one could double the size of the harvest, and then double it again, and again. This greed then leads to bringing more “citizens” under control, through using the warrior elites to capture them from nearby localities, or encouraging current farmers to have more children, and to bringing more land under their control.
The author of the book mentioned above is making a good case that cities just didn’t pop into existence and succeed because the idea was such a good one, but they failed repeated, for thousands of years, because ordinary people didn’t want them. Their lives as hunter-gatherers or pastoralists, or even sedentary hunter-gathers (if the local region were rich enough and had many food streams distributed throughout the year), were much easier, healthier, and freer than living as, in effect, a slave to the elites.
Now there were two primary sources of the coercion that made free people into someone else’s farmers: the force of arms (we take your grain to feed our soldiers who force you to grow more grain) and religion (the gods will punish you if you do not obey). Religions are based upon obedience: do this, do that, and if you don’t, there will be hell to pay. Religions threaten individuals and their families. The gullible become “devoted” as a compensation mechanism. Priests and their like do very little labor and must be a supported elite. (I suspect that the only reason medieval monks gardened, made beer and cheese, and raised animals for slaughter is that the local populations, ravaged by religion wars and disease, couldn’t support as many religious elites as the religions desired.)
If you look at the history of Christianity as a pillar of “western civilization” you can clearly see that it was shaped through power struggles waged by the elites. After Christianity got adopted as the state religion of the Roman empire, in the fourth century, as Rome declined as a “state” the religious factions in Christianity became more and more political. The Christian elites took over roles the Roman state left vacant, and adopted attitudes and mannerisms of Roman emperors. They took to maintaining their own class of warrior elites and began making war on one another. The subsequent religious wars in Europe killed a sizable fraction of the entire continent’s population and weakened Christianity enough to allow for the Enlightenment and eventually modern science. If those wars had instead been rapidly won by a ruthless dominant faction, we might all still be speaking Greek or Latin, and getting healthcare from demonologists.
So, fast forward to today. Greed has become a marker of “success” and “superiority” at least in the elite segments of society. Ordinary people equate being rich to being very competent, even when those involved inherited their money. Businessmen brag about how well they have done. They believe this reflects upon their qualities and has nothing to do with the qualities of the “farmers” (now diversified) who work their fields. They believe that since they are superior, they should shape our society, not just of the segment of elites but everyone else’s, too. They want to transform our schools to make better “farmers” (the purpose of an education used to be to make good citizens, now it is to get a good “job” … as a “farmer”). They want to transform our politics so they make all of the decisions. They want to transform our economies so they make all of the money and then can control to whom they dribble it out to (or is that trickle it down to). They want to control our health, so they can control who stays healthy and who dies young.
Our “civilization” is built upon greed.
The only response to the greedy elites is the one shown to us by history. We need to resist their enticements and their enforcements and break their power. In the early days we did it by sneaking out of the city walls at night and setting up on our own nearby. We did it by walking off of the job, essentially. We don’t have those options anymore as a suspect few of us have retained the ability to live off of the land. Now we must oppose them by creating institutions to oppose theirs. We need to create our own political parties, because the two we have in this country have been captured and corrupted by the greedy. We need to recognize that labor unions have been subjected to elite propaganda campaigns and political undermining because they oppose the high-handed, greedy actions of the elites. We need to recreate unions and strengthen the ones that abide. Before the courts are completely corrupted, e.g. the recent capture of the U.S. Supreme Court through blatant disregard for the law, we must use the law to constrain the corrupt at every opportunity. We must oppose religions that promise rewards when we are dead for obedience now.
Five thousand years ago, we were fighting tooth and nail to keep a greedy elite from making us their slaves. We need to do it again (still?) and be more effective this time. Other countries have shown that citizen-friendly states are possible (Costa Rica, the Scandinavian states, etc.) but as long as this country worships greed and greed-supporting gods, we are on the path to becoming slaves. (Do realize that it is already the case that “if you want to eat (or need medicine, or …) you need to work for the greedy elite.”) I am not being hyperbolic in invoking slave status as the end game for ordinary citizens in this country. We already refer to ourselves as “wage slaves” and we claim we are living from “paycheck to paycheck” (I am.). Think about it.
Uncommon Sense 