The real roots of early city states may rip up the textbooks
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Thus throughout history you have the repeated pattern of displacement, slavery, genocide, "re-education" and oppression of foraging people and garden farmers by monocrop-powered militarized states. It's been a 10,000 year global war, and it is close to having been "won" by civilization. The losers, of course, are all indigenous people worldwide, as well as the basic livability of our planet and probably 80% of its species.
The irony, of course, is that monocrop agriculture isn't sustainable. It's had a good run, but we're coming up against some really tough limits soon. The Green Revolution bought some time, but it's probably going to be a very hard landing. All that biodiversity took millions of years to radiate, and only a short time to destroy. Human cultural diversity took 100,000-500,000 years to develop many different of ways of life, and only a short time to liquidate.
I only hold out hope that enough species, ecosystems and cultures are left to help guide civilization toward something sustainable. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.
As a teenager I read the novels of Daniel Quinn (known best for Ishmael), which is non-scholarly and has its problems. However, it prompted me to pursue a degree in bioanthropology. Most of the enthographic literature is consistent with the hypothesis that people don't willingly join civilization (city-based, hierarchical societies) when given the choice. Civilization has its clear advantages but its externalities have not nearly been solved.
But seriously, the domain of anthropology (cultural as much as biological) is where all relevant scholarship has been done. People make fun of anthropology for not being STEMy enough, but as a field it has a 100+ year history of delivering the goods. There's a classic essay by Marshal Sahlins called "The Original Affluent Society" that has been both influential and controversial. You can also look into the distinction between hoe-based farming and plow-based farming.
Crop rotation has been used for most of the history of sedentary civilizations. Monoculture was used mostly in very early civilizations, and recently in the modern times (since oil-based fertilizers have made crop rotation less important in some ways).
Monocrop agriculture is certainly not meaningful here. Agriculture is, maybe.
Which fertilizers are those? I was under the impression that nitrogen fertilizers were by far the most important. We get the nitrogen from the sea of it that we're swimming in -- no need to dig it out of the ground. The Haber process also uses hydrogen, which probably comes from WGSR, is that what you mean? If so, I strongly suspect that fertilizer production necessary for human survival would easily be economical on electrolytic hydrogen.
The story of, say, Kalimintan or the pre-Columbus United States might be mostly unwritten, but definitely isn't a story of love and harmony for everything around it.
But, and I repeat, these are horticulturalists, not foragers. And so, again, I say, "No, its not "pretty well established" that the sustainability of a foraging lifestyle was maintained by inter-band conflict." In almost every case, the kinds of conflict people mention, are referring to horticulturalists.
Either way, if one is to draw the distinction between city states with monocrop agriculture and the "the forager/garden-farm way of life" the poster I was originally replying to did, the Jivarons and arguably even the Dayak Iban belong more to the latter than the former. And ultimately it was the former intensive agricultural form of social organization which proved more ecologically sustainable in the long term without artificially keeping population densities down, and the latter hunter/forager form of organization that is suspected of wiping out most of the world's large mammals to hasten the transition to agriculture in many parts of the world.
And it's likely that mass-production capitalism is beginning to die as well, killed by robotics, computers, the Internet, micro-manufacturing, and the Information Age. The key developments of that revolution are just in the labs right now, so it's a bit unclear what form the eventual civilization will take, but the writing's already on the wall.
Life has never been about sustainability. You could look at each phase of evolution - from protists to eukaryotes to vertebrates to land-dwellers to dinosaurs to mammals to humans to hunter-gatherers to agriculture to industrialization to information - as a phase-change in complexity levels, one which usually kills off the vast majority of diversity at the lower levels. In other words, life is a pyramid scheme, and death is a natural part of it. Death doesn't mean the absence of anything, it means the emergence of something new and unforeseen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techno...
Lots of commercial seed, GMO or not, is a hybrid that makes good fruit or vegetable and doesn't make great seed.
Interesting view about the link between life and death.
One might see the same thing happening capitalism (as a stretch). There is a lot of diversity (like with early microcomputer manufacturers in the 1970s and 1980s) and then only a couple standard forms are left -- until the cycle repeats with laptops and then smartphones as conditions change (like cheaper small parts leading to discontinuities in what is possible). And before that, there was a lot of diversity too with early computers in the 1940s and 1950s until IBM dominated the computing landscape until the microcomputer came along.
With trees, there may be lots of seedlings out there getting mostly shaded out but essentially for a big tree to fall and open up a spot in the canopy where they can find lots of sunlight to grow into.
That said, the insight only holds -- for a reasonably short timescale -- as long as there is a vibrant ecosystem or culture surrounding the death to fill in the hole. Otherwise, it might be a long time before, say, the matter involved in a supernova becomes anything living again...
Although, as in a comment someone made on heavier matter created by neutron stars merging, the metal rings we were are a legacy of such events long ago. So, as I see it, I have a couple recycling bins. The ones for compost or bottles get recycled on a timescale of months or yeaar. By contrast, the trash can contents gets recyled on the order of tends of millions of years when the landfill eventually slides under a continental plate somewhere and down into the Earth's mantel to be melted down as magma and then become a mountain to become eroded or mined... Or, in a worst case, the landfill will eventually get absorbed by the Sun in a few billion years when it becomes a Red Giant. So, what bin I put something in when I discard it is a question of how quickly I want it to be recycled. :-)
(Frankly, we'll probably be mining our landfills soon enough with robotics and nanotech and biotech, but that is a different point... http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM5E.html#5e )
You can include me out of any such proposals.
The earth has 130 million square km of land. If ~10% makes good farm land that's 1km per person ~(247 acres) which is far to much to farm by hand.
PS: Currently 11% of land is under cultivation, much of that is only viable due to irrigation. But, we also use a lot of land for city's, suburbs, roads, etc that would have been great farm land.
That said, grinding up rocks to make rock dust is a fairly good way of making the Earth fertile again, so collapse is an ideological choice not a certainty: https://remineralize.org/
And nowadays we can make robots to do many dangerous or repetitive tasks instead of requiring human chattel slaves or wage slaves to do them.
The biodiversity issue is not so easily solved. We can potentially recreate biodiversity through genetic engineering and simulated evolution (even as I might prefer the natural kind) -- but no guarantees on that. The ongoing loss of the wild origins of many crops is indeed one of the greatest tragedies of modern times. And such biodiversity is so cheap to preserve relative to the abundance agriculture provides. For an illustrative xkcd on the loss of mammalian biodiversity on land: https://xkcd.com/1338/
The needless loss of cultural diversity is also tragic -- although that is a much more complex topic given various conflicts of cultures. One can see such an ongoing loss almost everywhere in the world with a TV or internet connection -- as mass media drives out much local culture and family traditions by being a "Supernormal Stimuli" crowding out everything else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_Stimuli
Frankly, my biggest concern about a potential collapse is not that is not that we don't have the know-how or technology or resources to make the world work for everyone. We clearly do, even for populations much larger than currently and even without spreading into the ocean or Antarctica or underground or outer space. Bucky Fuller pointed that out decades ago.
The biggest concern is whether nukes and bioweapons and drones (and other fruits of the same advanced technology that could provide abundance for all) get thrown around in final tantrums by a very few people upset that their ideology or personal extreme power and privileges are being challenged. Or that such weapons get unleashed by accident while they are being kept in readiness for elite tantrums over ideology and poltical power (i.e. "War is a Racket" according to Major General Smedley Butler). Unlike previous collapses, nukes and engineered plagues and killer robots make any next collapse potentially very different -- even as the same underlying technologies make so much more possible. Or as I summarize in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Perhaps unexpectedly, anthropologists visiting such societies often perceive them as remarkably vibrant and healthy, because so much of the population is in their teens and twenties.
“Were they beautiful? We were all beautiful. We were in our twenties.” ― Steve Martin
> It was the norm for most of human existence
The second statement isn't an argument against the first. In fact the original 'nasty, brutish, and short' quote, I think by Winston Churchill, stated that it was the norm. Slavery and monarchy, not freedom and democracy, was the norm for most of human history. Epidemics and famine, not the CDC and obesity, used to be the norm.
“continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
He proposed that the solution was the voluntary creation by means of a 'social contract' of an absolute state ruled by a monarch who was above the law.
http://www.historyinanhour.com/2013/04/05/thomas-hobbes-summ...
I have noticed an uptick in the number of ideological anarchists lately, though, both right and left, within my social sphere. I do think that is one of those interesting "horeshoe" situations in politics; the right anarchists and the left anarchists, in many ways are the extremes of the right and the left, but they have so much in common; they both believe that people can function without being forced to give up any of their own rights (though they deeply disagree as to what rights a person has.)
Most people, I think, agree that that part of Hobbes' argument is not weakened by the fact that Hobbes wasn't able to see (or that the political realities of his situation made it difficult to write about[1]) political systems other than absolute rule.
[1]A contemporary, the incredible poet John Milton, actually wrote a paean to regicide. "On the tenure of kings and magistrates" or something like that, which I read as "Please don't kill me, see? I'm on your side" - existing as an intellectual during times of revolution can be a tricky thing. I personally think "Paradise lost" is a better introduction to Milton, but the point remains.
I think, from your statement, that you agree with the above, and you say this is evidence that the right-left axis is not useful. I personally think it might have to do with anarchism making fundamentally different assumptions about humanity and human nature, assumptions that are so out of phase with my understanding of humanity that I... just don't see it in the ways that I can understand a marxist or a libertarian. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing, it is like we have had completely different experiences of humanity and completely different readings of history.
You point to fundamentally different assumptions, and as a whole I agree with that too. I think that anarchists put less emphasis on human nature per se than they do on ethical organization practices--they preach a scheme of purely voluntary self-organization mostly from an ethical standpoint, and this stance implies that they view human agency as the most important ethical question, rather than meeting basic needs (communism) or castrating exploitative practices in labor (socialism/Marxism). Libertarians seem to be whistling another tune, more along the lines of anarchism but by also tying capitalist success to a person's ability to steer their path in life. Anarchists think that free association will provide for those who need by virtue of a sense of humanistic camaraderie.
I'm not arguing for or against anything here or anything you've said, and I'm not sure I'm doing much at all except a fun exercise to clarify the varying motivations of people in their quest to restructure economies and societies. But it is interesting to consider and feels good to put to words.
When historians claim that hunter-gatherers generally had a better life than farmers, they don't have modern urban middle classes typing on their PC in mind as the archetype of hard-up farmers.
It's also worth saying that the Kalahari San probably don't represent a good archetype for hunter-gatherers. They live in a semi-arid savannah, while prehistorical hunter-gatherers generally lived in more abundant areas.
All life expands to fit its ecological niche. For this reason, the only time when life hasn’t been fraught with peril is now; this ephemeral moment in our history when our ability to produce food has exploded at the same time that our fertility rates have collapsed.
This seems extremely off to me. In the 15th century CE most people on Earth were most definitely sedentary farmers or nomadic pastoralists living under one sort of state or another. That wasn't necessarily a large kingdom (though tens of millions lived in China, where kingdoms were quite large even when it was divided), and it's not like farmers knew or cared much about the politics of their kings, but there was definitely a state, and even when there wasn't one towns and villages had their own institutions and hierarchies that were quite different from the egalitarian lifestyle of hunter gatherers.
To put that in another words, in agricultural societies, even in the most remote and independent villages, women and men were not equal, fathers and grown-up sons were not equal, brothers were not equal and different families were not equal.
These societies are generally fiercely patriarchal - in the sense that females were viewed as property of the male head of the household, not in the sense the women were not allowed to hunt. This concept would entirely alien in hunter-gatherer societies and in most of them so is the very concept of property itself.
In order for it to be a fiercely patriarchal where females were viewed as property of the male head of the household, it would mean that men had the power to decide what women should and should not do. This fly in contrast to when culture and tradition fully dictate how people should live their life.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-again...
And it got even better when people could elect and somewhat control the state.
It's necessary for government (more specifically, at least for one context, a definition of sovereignty is a monopoly on violence and justice).
But the definition is much more than that. It's also collective decision-making. I don't follow the law - even ones I disagree with - and pay my taxes because I'm coerced, but because I believe very strongly in the rule of law, I respect the decisions of my fellow citizens - even ones I disagree with, and I'm proud to participate.
I certainly was. My neighbors and I elected someone to represent us on the matter, there was a public debate about the law before it was passed and I told my representative how I wanted them to vote, and our representative's job is up for review in a year.
I find myself wondering what exactly differentiates a "government" from a "family council" or "tribal leadership" or whatever other phrase you want to use to describe an "authority-wielding-body with a monopoly on force."
I think "governments" are as old as people, and probably older. Many social animals have leaders who dominate the rest of the herd.
My feeling is that governments have always been here, they've just gotten bigger and maybe a little more sinister.
As a member of a bellicose family, I can assure you that family members (often older and respected by both sides) acting as mediators are pretty common :)
and from the wikipedia:
"British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size."
that brings us to possible effect of social networks (which either help to overcome brain size limitation of social group size or help that brain function to atrophy - the exact effect on the brain is yet to be determined) on the government.
It is well attested that several North, Meso- and South American cultures were growing maize well before the arrival of the Europeans.
Well that doesn't mean state power isn't necessary for large scale communities. It just shows that in the thousands of years after the dawn of agriculture communities were too small to require a state framework to exist. As community scale increased, states became necessary.
Most history professors I've known refer to the dark ages as the "so-called dark ages" because that time period served as proof-positive that you can have civilized society without the state.
http://www.carrollquigley.net/books.htm
http://www.carrollquigley.net/book-reviews/history_freedom_w...
Oh, and Durant's "The Age of Faith" is also worth a read.
The Early Middle Ages in Europe saw a large number of short-lived monarchies and a few long-lived ones. The Catholic Church rivaled and often surpassed secular states in its power. Throughout the entire middle ages, for most of the peasantry, interaction with the state in the broadest sense that we have today (i.e. with the king) was scarce. Local rulers, dignitaries and institutions, had large autonomy and more direct influence on the daily lives of peasants.
Free cities are a good example of completely autonomous sovereignty. If they were chartered, the local princes had little power over them - but chartered cities only appear in the very end of the dark ages.
Anyway, I recommend 'Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade' by Henri Pirenne. It's an old book and there's definitely more up to date research, but Henri Pirenne is a brilliant historian and writer and he paints a very vivid picture of what the "so-called dark ages" in Europe were like.
As the old structures collapse, a new order invariably claws its way out of the debris. These are periods of tremendous innovation and creativity, here boosted by the prosperous Medieval Warm Period.
The "dark" in "dark ages" reflects more our lack of written documents from these periods (little surviving literature) and a sentimental bias of the early historians toward the lost Roman period. Not a lack of stuff happening -- quite the contrary.
Eh... there was a state, it was just that the economy was way more directly violence-based than states before and after. I mean, all states use violence, sure. But the Romans and most of the world after the renaissance mostly distributed money through mechanisms that weren't directly about violence. Yeah, they used violence to enforce the rules, but if you wanted to get rich, you went into business or something, you didn't go learn to be a better fighter.
In the dark ages? that wasn't the case. Wealth was distributed based on your military service to the person who owned the local land.
If you wanted to rise economically, during the dark ages, your best bet was to go to war, fight well, and force some wealthy guy on the other team to surrender to you. Ransom him back to his family, and you have it made.
Both before and after the dark ages, while soldiering had it's rewards, unless you became a general and took over your society (which still happens from time to time) you really weren't going to get super rich as a soldier. Before and after the dark ages, you were better off going into trade.
Of course there was violence, but since this was not a time known for having the best records, it is anyone's guess as to whether there was more or less of it. In the last 20 years, our imperium has destroyed several sovereign states and killed hundreds of thousands or millions (depending on who you ask) for absolutely no damn reason.
Centralization is typically better at directed goals (such as violence) than decentralization, so your assertion that "the economy was way more directly violence-based" is on shaky ground. Our economy is very violence based, it's just that most of it has been abstracted away from direct contact (see Smedley Butler).
Just shrink the concept down to personal computers. Did you prefer the wild-west of the 70s/80s that gave us Apple IIs, Amigas, Commodores, Ataris, PC-88s, and numerous others, or did you prefer the late 90s when Microsoft seemed to have the whole thing on lock-down?
My point is just that in the dark ages, you accumulated wealth through you yourself or through people who directly worked for you committing acts of violence. Not by simply operating within the rules of society (which are, of course, enforced with violence) as you would do today.
Today? Directly being a, uh, violence technician as it were, or even being higher up in the chain of command in the organizations that handle violence in our society just isn't that remunerative. You've gotta be way up the officer ladder before you make as much money as I did out of high school as a UNIX technician.
I mean, I know I messed up some connotations there; I certainly have nothing against the 'violence technicians' as I put it; I recognize that they are important. I just prefer to live in a world where Truman fires MacArther and not the other way around, if you know what I mean.
There were so many different arrangements, cultures, and value systems in play at that time, and obviously some of those elements came into conflict with each other, but to extrapolate that into a summary of the entire age is a mistake.
I do think I would be a better person if I was better able to understand how the religious people saw the world... but it's just not something I've been able to do. It's very difficult, really, for someone who doesn't believe faith is good in and of itself to understand people who do. I read on the subject; the most sympathetic and relatable portrayal I've found so far is Jeung's "Answer to Job"
But... while it's fair to criticize me for not really understanding spirituality, If you are arguing that the dark ages were not dark for, uh, metaphysical reasons, I think our values are so different that we can't really have a meaningful debate.
The hazy impression I get of that era is a breakdown of the Roman imperium's refined monoculture into a multitude of unrefined variations. On many levels, I like that.
By ceaselessly optimizing, refining, and centralizing without regard to intrinsic human needs, we're really just charging head first into entropy. Think the Italian "slow life" vs NYC...
My own experiences and assumptions all point to 'diminishing marginal value' when it comes to all physical goods - I'll do a lot if it means that me and mine don't starve. I'll do a lot less to move up from a Toyota to a Lexus. (don't get me wrong, If I've gotta drive, I'll take the Lexus... but not if it means I have less reading time.)
Extrapolating backwards from that, my assumption is that everyone in the pre-modern era; everyone from a time where more people suffered from eating not enough than eating too much would be a lot more concerned with obtaining goods (well, food, shelter and the tools to obtain those things in the future) than I am now. So from that point of view, I'd have a distorted view of the dark ages (and, for that matter, Rome and the whole world before the 'green revolution' in the late '60s) simply because I've never experienced anything like real hunger or want. I mean, sure, I've wanted things, but every time you ask me to do something for money? My question is this: Would I rather do that thing you want me to do for the money you are offering? Or would I prefer to stay at home and read classic works from project gutenberg?
For me, a lot of how I've looked at work and the how much time to trade for it has been that view that I really don't have to save that much money to live a pretty comfortable life without working. (Now, I've made some massive mistakes in how to go about doing that, but that's a different discussion. the idea that money in the bank is years I don't have to work to be comfortable is a constant)
What I'm saying is that as modern people, I don't think we can comprehend the privation that pre-modern folks had. The amount of time and effort they needed to put in to gain even the most basic and essential of material goods.
Also, my guess is that when you are in such a tenuous situation, people are going to work a lot harder than your "New York" example. (I like your example because New York is a place I'm considering moving... in part as a way to de-stress my life. Remove transit issues. Live within walking distance of my life.)
From what I've read of ancient Rome, I suspect I would have preferred a short life struggling against nature than a long one tolerating Romans.
But again, value systems.
That, and I'm not entirely sold that acquiring the knowledge of how not to starve or be eaten by animals requires an imperium or a state.
Oh, you don't need the state to deal with animals, or food supply... I mean, the state can deal with those things, but that's not why you agree to live under the power of a state. the primary function of the state is to protect you from warlords or roving bands of warriors (which I personally think are proto-state like entities)
The model I have of peasant life is that okay, you are a farmer. there are good years and bad... you have to deal with crop failures and with wild animals and all that stuff. And as a pre-modern farmer, well, you had better be equipped to deal with those things; nobody else is gonna help you.
In a world where everyone was a farmer, this would be mostly fine. (I mean, one could argue that some sort of mutual system to deal with crop failures would be nice, but that's asking a lot of that time period.) You can mostly deal with it. Even with really primitive technology, if nobody is trying to steal from you, you can make a go at farming.
The problem is that there also exist warriors. Now, in a system with no government, where one band of warriors can expect another band of warriors to later visit the farm they have just looted, where that band of warriors can't reasonably expect to be first to that farm the next year, it is in the best interest of that band of warriors to take everything of value even if that kills the farmer
This, of course, is unpleasant all around. the farmer dies first, sure, but the warriors then end up starving, 'cause they've killed everyone who creates food.
Government is born when one band of warriors establishes themselves in an area, takes an amount of food from the local farmers that usually doesn't kill the farmers, and then mostly chases off any competing bands of warriors. This is better for both the warriors and the farmers than the other way, just because now the warriors have an incentive to keep the farmers alive.
My understanding of feudalism is that it's essentially a complex system designed to ritualize the warfare of the warriors in a way that usually doesn't starve everyone to death. If there's someone sufficiently powerful within your lands, there is a formal system for them to share in the power over the farmers.
The difference, I think, between me and an ideological anarchist is that the ideological anarchist argues that the warriors won't necessarily spring up in numbers that can't be dealt with by the farmers, that humans are basically good and would rather produce than steal.
I... can only assume that people who believe we can live without a state have had better childhoods than I have.
I just think you're overfitting the age into a MMORPG-farmer/warrior/lord-duking-it-out-for-GP model.
Good debate though.
This, I do not understand at all. I mean, sure, it might not be an ideological anarchy, but when you don't have a state, you have anarchy. I guess you could also call it "a hobbesian state of nature" - but to me, and to most people who don't think that humans work the way the ideological anarchists think they do, the two are the same thing.
(That said, I do believe that there were states during the dark ages. They were less stable and well defined than what came before and after, but I don't know of anyone who argues that there was not a layer of government over the lowest level of organization, as you put it. )
The threat to such a tribe isn't anarchy. It is the better-organized foreigner that grinds his subjects into cogs for a well-oiled killing machine. Think Romans on Jews, or Germans on Eastern Europe...
As for states, they certainly existed in various forms at the time. My original point, that I received from Quigley, is that certain stateless groups in the "dark ages" provided a counterexample to those who believe that you can't have civilization without a state. In modern terms, I guess this would be a sort of "localism".
The problem is that figuring out who can take what from whom directly using force ends up with a lot of dead, and it ends up killing a lot of the farmers and artisans that ultimately are producing what you are fighting over.
The argument for federation or centralization is that you formalize the systems of stealing based on measures of force that involve less death and destruction than just having a battle every time your clan thinks it's stronger than the clan down the way.