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August 29 - September 15, 2023
There’s a reason why, in English, the words ‘politics’ ‘polite’ and ‘police’ all sound the same – they’re all derived from the Greek word polis, or city, the Latin equivalent of which is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization’.
The word ‘democracy’ might have been invented in Europe (barely, since Greece at the time was much closer culturally to North Africa and the Middle East than it was to, say, England), but it’s almost impossible to find a single European author before the nineteenth century who suggested it would be anything other than a terrible form of government.
Others noted the ‘Indian’s’ reluctance ever to let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution. It was not so much that they feared poverty themselves, but rather that they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery (perhaps much as Oscar Wilde declared he was an advocate of socialism because he didn’t like having to look at poor people or listen to their stories).
Just consider the case of Leibniz: over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European governments gradually came to adopt the idea that every government should properly preside over a population of largely uniform language and culture, run by a bureaucratic officialdom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams. It might seem surprising that they did so, since nothing remotely like that had existed in any previous period of European history. Yet it was almost exactly the system that had existed for centuries in China.
A focus on work is not precisely the same as a focus on property, though if one is trying to understand how control of property first came to be translated into power of command, the world of work would be the obvious place to look.
The underlying system of calculus appears to have been based on the transformational properties of equilateral triangles, figured out with the aid of cords and strings, and then extended to the laying-out of massive earthworks.
it means that someone had to convey knowledge of geometric and mathematical techniques for making accurate spatial measurements, and related forms of labour organization, over very long distances. If this were the case, it seems likely that they also shared other forms of knowledge as well: cosmology, geology, philosophy, medicine, ethics, fauna, flora, ideas about property, social structure, and aesthetics.
some even use Aboriginal California as a model for what the prehistoric inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent – who first began domesticating wheat and barley 10,000 years ago in the Middle East – might have been like.
Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbours.
Mauss found, it extended even to technologies which held obvious adaptive or utilitarian benefits. He was intrigued, for example, by the fact that Athabascans in Alaska steadfastly refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats. Inuit, for their part, refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.
‘Societies’, wrote Mauss, ‘live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.’
It raises the possibility that decisions such as whether or not to adopt agriculture weren’t just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans really are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should properly relate to one another.
Is it possible to see indigenous Californians and peoples of the Northwest Coast as defining themselves against each other, rather in the manner that Californians and New Yorkers do today? If so, then how much of their way of life can we really explain as being motivated by a desire to be unlike other groups of people?
Schismogenesis, you’ll recall, describes how societies in contact with each other end up joined within a common system of differences, even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from one another. Perhaps the classic historical example (in both senses of the term ‘classic’) would be the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, in the fifth century BC.
These accounts suggest that perhaps a quarter of the indigenous Northwest Coast population lived in bondage – which is about equivalent to proportions found in the Roman Empire, or classical Athens, or indeed the cotton plantations of the American South. What’s more, slavery on the Northwest Coast was a hereditary status: if you
were a slave, your children were also fated to be so.
We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live.
Historians agree that the roots of this women’s cult lie in Mesopotamian fertility rites of Dumuzi/Tammuz, the shepherd-god and personification of plant life, mourned on his death each summer. Most likely the worship of Adonis, his ancient Greek incarnation, spread westwards to Greece from Phoenicia in the wake of Assyrian expansion, in the seventh century BC.
(She spent the last years of her life in the home of her devoted son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books – a series of a dozen volumes in which, as many have pointed out, there are queens, good witches and princesses, but not a single legitimate male figure of authority.)
(This he set out to accomplish largely through the use of drugs and polyamorous sexual relationships; Gross’s work is now largely remembered for its influence on Freud’s other favourite student, Carl Jung, who kept the idea of the collective unconscious but rejected Gross’s political conclusions.)
As Çatalhöyük’s art and ritual suggests, wild cattle and boar were highly valued as prey, and probably had been for as long as anyone could remember. In terms of prestige, there was much to be lost, perhaps especially for men, by the prospect of surrounding these dangerous animals with more docile, domestic varieties. Allowing cattle to remain exclusively in their ancient wild form – a big beast, but also lean, fast and highly impressive – also meant keeping intact a certain sort of human society. Accordingly, cattle remained wild and glamorous until around 6000 BC.
It might even be argued that, after the last Ice Age, the ecological frontier between ‘lowland’ and ‘upland’ Fertile Crescent also became a cultural frontier with zones of relative uniformity on either side,
Harvesting by sickle yields straw as well as grain. Today we consider straw a by-product of cereal-farming, the primary purpose being to produce food. But archaeological evidence suggests things started the other way round.
In doing so, they found new uses for the stalks of wild grasses; these included fuel for lighting fires, and the temper that transformed mud and clay from so much friable matter into a vital tectonic resource, used to build houses, ovens, storage bins and other fixed structures. Straw could also be used to make baskets, clothing, matting and thatch. As people intensified the harvesting of wild grasses for straw (either by sickle or simply uprooting), they also produced one of the key conditions for some
of these grasses to lose their natural mechanisms of seed dispersal.
What they show is that, in certain parts of the region such as northern Syria, the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC.35 Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC – that is roughly ten times as long as it need have taken
Communal tenure, ‘open-field’ principles, periodic redistribution of plots and co-operative management of pasture are not particularly exceptional and were often practised for centuries in the same locations.
At that time, a global drop in surface air temperatures occurred – part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ – which natural forces can’t explain. Quite likely, European expansion in the Americas played a role. With perhaps 90 per cent of the indigenous population eliminated by the effects of conquest and infectious disease, forests reclaimed regions in which terraced agriculture and irrigation had been practised for centuries. In Mesoamerica, Amazonia and the Andes, some 50 million hectares of cultivated land may have reverted to wilderness. Carbon uptake from vegetation increased on a scale sufficient to
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For example, human remains of coastal foragers, found on Mesolithic sites in Brittany, show anomalous levels of terrestrial protein in the diet of many young females, contrasting with the general prevalence of marine foods among the rest of the population. It seems that women of inland origin (who until then had been eating largely meat, not fish) were joining coastal groups.
The dark earths owe their fertility to absorption of organic by-products such as food residues, excrement and charcoal from everyday village life (forming terras pretas) and/or earlier episodes of localized burning and cultivation (terras mulatas).46 Soil enrichment in ancient Amazonia was a slow and ongoing process, not an annual task.
Farming, as we can now see, often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground.
Mass society exists in the mind before it becomes physical reality. And crucially, it also exists in the mind after it becomes physical reality.
By 4500 BC, chernozem was widely distributed between the Carpathian and the Ural Mountains, where a mosaic landscape of open prairie and woodland emerged capable of supporting dense human habitation.
The most informative case we know of is that of traditional Basque settlements in the highlands of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques.
Here we have the very beginnings of an aristocratic ethos with a long afterlife and some wide ramifications in the history of Eurasia (something we touched on earlier, when alluding to Herodotus’ account of the Scythians, and Ibn Fadlan’s later observations on the ‘barbarian’ Germanic tribes of the Volga). We are witnessing the first known emergence of what Hector Munro Chadwick famously called ‘heroic societies’ and, moreover, these societies all seem to have emerged just where his analysis tells us to expect them: on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities.
Writing in the 1920s, Chadwick – Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, at much the same time J. R. R. Tolkien held that post at Oxford – was initially concerned with why great traditions of epic poetry (Nordic sagas, the works of Homer, the Ramayana) always seemed to emerge among people in contact with and often employed by the urban civilizations of their day, but who ultimately rejected the values of those same civilizations.
Here, on the banks of the Fen River, we might conceivably be in the presence of evidence for the world’s first documented social revolution, or at least the first in an urban setting.
We know now that the city of Teotihuacan had its heyday eight centuries before the coming of the Mexica, and more than 1,000 years before the arrival of the Spanish. Its foundation dates to around 100 BC, and its decline to around AD 600. We also know that, in the course of those centuries, Teotihuacan became a city of such grandeur and sophistication that it could easily be put on a par with Rome at the height of its imperial power.
In fact, Tlaxcala and its Otomí guerrilla units had been holding the Aztecs successfully at bay for generations. Their resistance was not just military. Tlaxcalteca cultivated a civic ethos that worked against the emergence of ambitious leaders, and hence potential quislings – a counter-example to Aztec principles of governance.
it is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles; and why for much of European history the truly democratic way of filling offices was assumed to be by lottery.
Cortés may have praised Tlaxcala as an agrarian and commercial arcadia but, as Motolinía explains, when its citizens thought about their own political values, they actually saw those values as coming from the desert. Like other Nahuatl speakers, including the Aztecs, Tlaxcalteca liked to claim they were descended from Chichimec. These were considered the original hunter-gatherers who lived ascetic lives in deserts and forests, dwelling in primitive huts, ignorant of village or city life, rejecting corn and cooked food, bereft of clothing or organized religion, and living on wild things alone.
The Spanish friars will no doubt have heard echoes in these tales of Old World tropes for republican virtue – that same atavistic streak running from the biblical prophets through to Ibn Khaldun, not to mention their own ethic of world renunciation.
Perhaps some of the seeds of our own evolutionary story about how it all began with simple, egalitarian hunter-gatherers were sown right there, in the imaginations of city-dwelling Amerindians.
We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power.2 The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral.
In the case of control over violence, this is obvious. Modern states are ‘sovereign’: they hold the power once held by kings, which in practice translates into von Ihering’s monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within their territory.
In modern states, the very same kind of power is multiplied a thousand times because it is combined with the second principle: bureaucracy. As Weber, the great sociologist of bureaucracy, observed long ago, administrative organizations are always based not just on control of information, but also on ‘official secrets’ of one sort or another.
The combination of sovereignty with sophisticated administrative techniques for storing and tabulating information introduces all sorts of threats to individual freedom
Modern states are democratic, or at least it’s generally felt they really should be. Yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers.
If we are seeking an ancient precedent to this aspect of modern democracy, we shouldn’t turn to the assemblies of Athens, Syracuse or Corinth, but instead – paradoxically – to aristocratic contests of ‘heroic ages’, such as those described in the Iliad with its endless agons: races, duels, games, gifts and sacrifices.
Just as access to violence, information and charisma defines the very possibilities of social domination, so the modern state is defined as a combination of sovereignty, bureaucracy and a competitive political field.
