New forms of work were among further consequences of the farming revolution. Work became a ‘curse’. Farming needed heavy labour, while exploitative rulers proved adept in thinking up elaborate justifications for making other people toil. In the era of Stone Age affluence (see here) two or three days’ hunting and foraging every week were enough to feed most communities. Foragers did not, as far as we know, conceptualize their effort as a routine, but rather practised it as ritual, like the ceremonies and games that accompanied it. They had neither motive nor opportunity to separate leisure from work.
Agriculture seems to have changed all that by ‘inventing’ work and compartmentalizing it as a department of life distinct from leisure and pleasure. Many simple agrarian societies still exhibit the legacy of the hunters’ approach. They treat tilling the soil as a collective rite and often as a form of fun.23 Most early farmers, however, could not afford Palaeolithic levels of relaxation. Typically, soils they could work with rudimentary tools were either very dry or very wet. So they needed ditches for irrigation, laboriously dug, or mounds, tediously dredged, for elevation above the water-line. The hours of dedicated effort lengthened. Work became increasingly sensitive to the rhythms of seed time and harvest, and of daily tasks: weeding soil, tending ditches and dykes. By about four thousand years ago, ‘hydraulic societies’24 and ‘agrarian despotisms’ in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus, and China had reversed former ratios of work and leisure by organizing dense populations in unremitting food production, interrupted only, as season succeeded season, by massive public works undertaken to keep peasants and peons too busy to rebel.
An expanded, empowered leisure class arose. For workers, however, the political fallout was dire. Contrary to popular belief, ‘work ethic’ is not a modern invention of Protestantism or industrialization, but a code elites had to enforce when work ceased to be enjoyable. Ancient Chinese and Mesopotamian poets rhapsodized about unstinting effort in the fields. ‘Six days shalt thou labour’ was the curse of expulsees from Eden. Cain’s grim vocation was to be a tiller of the soil.25 Women seem to have been among the biggest losers, at least for a while: in hunting societies, men tend to specialize in relatively dangerous, physically demanding food-getting activities. In early agricultural work, on the other hand, women tended to be at least as good at dibbling and weeding and garnering as men. In consequence, as farming spread, women had to make additional contributions as providers without any relaxation of their inescapable roles in child-rearing and housekeeping. Sedentary life meant that they could breed, feed, and raise more babies than their nomadic forebears. Women probably withdrew from some work in the fields when managing heavy ploughs and recalcitrant draft animals was required, but in some ways, the curse of work has never abated for either sex. A paradox of ‘developed’ societies is that increasing leisure never liberates us. It makes work a chore and multiplies stress.
Civic Life
Agriculture imposed terrible problems but also ignited grand opportunities. The new leisured elites had more time than ever to devote to thinking. If agrarian societies suffered recurrent famines, the background was of routine abundance. Farming made cities possible. It could feed settlements big enough to encompass every form of specialized economic activity, where technologies could be refined and improved. ‘A social instinct’, Aristotle averred, ‘is implanted in all men by Nature and yet he who first founded the city was the greatest of benefactors.’26
The city is the most radical means human minds have ever devised for altering the environment – smothering landscape with a new habitat, thoroughly reimagined, crafted for purposes only humans could devise. Of course, there was never a golden age of ecological innocence. As far as we know, people have always exploited their environment for what they can get. Ice Age hunters seem to have been willing to pursue to extinction the very species on which they depended. Farmers have always exhausted soils and dug dust bowls. Still, built environments represent to an extreme degree the idea of challenging nature – effectively, waging war on other species, reshaping the earth, remodelling the environment, re-crafting the ecosystem to suit human uses and match human imaginations. From as early as the tenth millennium bce brick dwellings in Jericho seem to oppress the Earth with walls two feet thick and deep stone foundations. Early Jericho covered only ten acres. About three millennia later, Çatalhüyük, in what is now Turkey, was more than three times as big: a honeycomb of dwellings linked not by streets as we understand them but by walkways along the flat roofs. The houses were uniform, with standard shapes and sizes for panels, doorways, hearths, ovens, and even bricks of uniform scale and pattern. The painted streetscape of a similar city survives today on one of the walls.
Dwellers in such places may already have esteemed the city as the ideal setting for life. In the third millennium bce, that was certainly the prevailing opinion in Mesopotamia, where received wisdom defined chaos as a time when ‘a brick had not been laid … a city had not been built’.27 Ninety per cent of the population of southern Mesopotamia lived in cities by about 2000 bce. Only now is the rest of the world catching up. It has taken that long for us to get close to overcoming the problems of health, security, and viability that cities unleash on their people. We are becoming a city-dwelling species but we do not know whether we can avoid the disasters that have overcome all city-building civilizations so far and made them one with Nineveh and Tyre.28
Leadership in Emerging States
As well as stimulating the city, agriculture solidified the state. The two effects were connected. To manage labour and police food stocks, communities strengthened rulers. The more food production increased, the more mouths there were to feed and more manpower to manage. Power and nutrition twisted like bindweed in a single upward spiral. Political scientists commonly distinguish ‘chieftaincy’ – the structure of political authority typical of foraging cultures – from ‘the state’, which herding and farming societies favour. In chieftaincies the functions of government are undivided: rulers discharge all of them, making laws, settling disputes, wielding justice, running lives. States, on the other hand, distribute the same functions among specialists. According to Aristotle, the state was a response to growing population: the first society was the family, then the tribe, then the village, then the state. The village represented a crucial phase: transition to sedentary life, the replacement of hunting and gathering by herding and agriculture. The state was the culmination: ‘the union of families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing life’.29 We still rely on this sort of narrative of the unknowably distant past. In sociologists’ and political scientists’ usual model, chieftains ruled roving ‘bands’, but when people settled down, bands became states and chiefdoms became kingdoms.
However that may be, rival ideas of the state are discernible in political imagery from the third and second millennia bce. In ancient Egypt, for instance, the commonest image of the state was as a flock, which the king tended in the role of a herdsman, reflecting, perhaps, a real difference between the political ideas of herders and foragers. Farming increases competition for space and therefore strengthens institutions of rulership, as disputes and wars multiply; in conflicts, elective leaders qualified by prowess or sagacity tend to shift patriarchs and elders out of supreme command. In such circumstances, ‘primitive liberty’, if it ever existed, would yield to a strong executive. Mesopotamian texts of the period enjoin obedience to draconian enforcers: to the vizier in the fields, the father in the household, the king in everything. ‘The king’s word is right’, says a representative text, ‘his word, like a god’s, cannot be changed.’30 The king towers over anyone else depicted in Mesopotamian reliefs, as he takes refreshment; he receives supplicants and tributaries, and hoists bricks to build cities and temples. It was the king’s prerogative to form the first brick from the mud for any public edifice. State kilns stamped bricks with royal names. Royally effected magic transformed mud into civilization. Yet autocracy was there to serve the citizens: to me
diate with the gods; to co-ordinate tillage and irrigation; to warehouse food against hard times and dole it out for the common good.
Even the most benign state tyrannizes somebody, because good citizenship requires adherence – sometimes by assent but always by force – to what political scientists call the social contract: the renunciation to the community of some of the liberties that a solitary individual might expect to enjoy. But no one has yet found a fairer or more practical way of regulating relationships among large numbers of people.31
Cosmologies and Power: Binarism and Monism
To control increasingly populous states, rulers needed new cadres of professional servants, and convincing ways of legitimizing their power. Their starting point was the world-picture farmers inherited from the foragers who preceded them. People in every age seek coherence: the understanding that comes from matching their feelings or perceptions with other information. A search for universal pattern – a meaningful scheme into which to fit all available information about the universe – ripples through the history of thought. The first idea people had for trying to make sense of everything was, as far as we know, to divide the cosmos in two. I call this idea binarism (traditionally called dualism – a name better avoided as, confusingly, it has also been used for a lot of other ideas).
Binarism envisages a universe in two parts, satisfyingly symmetrical and therefore orderly. In most models two conflicting or complementary principles are responsible for everything else. Balance between them regulates the system. Flow or flux makes it mutable. The idea probably arose in either or both of two experiences. First, as soon as you think of anything, you divide it from everything else: you therefore have two complementary and – between them – comprehensive categories. As soon as you conceive x, you imply a second class: call it not-x. As some wit once remarked, ‘There are two classes of people in the world: those who think the world is divided between two classes of people, and those who don’t.’ Second, binarism arises from observation of life – which seems, on superficial examination, all to be either male or female – or the environment, all of which belongs either to earth or to air. The sexes interpenetrate. Sky and earth kiss and clash. The makings of binarism impress observant minds.
Binarism shapes the myths and morals of people who believe in it – and, to judge from anthropologists’ records of common cosmologies, such people have been and are numerous, inhabiting a world envisaged by the remotest ancestors they know of. Among conflicting descriptions of the cosmos, one of the most frequently reported images is of uneasy equipoise or complementarity between dual forces, such as light and darkness or evil and good. A past generation of scholars interpreted the cave paintings of Ice Age Europe as evidence of a mentality in which everything the hunters saw was classified in two categories, according to gender32 (though the phalli and vulvae they detected in the designs seem equally likely to be weapons and hoofprints, or part of some unknown code of symbols). Some of the earliest creation myths we know of represent the world as the result of an act of procreation between earth and sky. A picture of this sort of creative coupling was still influential in classical Athens. A character in a play of Euripides said that he ‘had it from my mother: how heaven and earth were one form and when they were parted from one another, they gave birth to all things, and gave forth light, the trees, flying things, beasts, the nurslings of the salt sea and the human species’.33 Although most of the new systems of thought that have claimed to describe the universe over the last three thousand years have rejected binarism, the exceptions include Taoism, which has had a formative influence on China and has made major contributions to the history of thought wherever Chinese influence has touched. In mainstream Judaism the universe is one, but God began to create it by dividing light from darkness. Christianity formally rejects binarism but has absorbed a lot of influence from it, including the notion or, at least, the imagery of angelic powers of light perpetually committed against satanic forces of darkness.
At an unknown date, a new cosmology challenged binarism: monism, the doctrine that there is really only one thing, which enfolds all the seeming diversity of the cosmos. In the first millennium bce the idea became commonplace. Pre-Socratic sages who said the world was one probably meant it literally: everything is part of everything else. In the mid-sixth century bce Anaximander of Miletus thought that there must be an infinite and ageless reality to ‘encompass all worlds’.34 A generation or two later, Parmenides, whom we shall meet again as an early exponent of pure rationalism, put it like this: ‘There is and will be nothing beside what is … It is all continuous, for what is sticks close to what is.’35 According to this line of thinking, there are no numbers between one and infinity, which are equal to each other and share each other’s boundaries, linking and lapping everything. All the numbers that supposedly intervene are illusory or are mere classificatory devices that we deploy for the sake of convenience. Two is one pair, three one trio, and so on. You can enumerate five flowers, but there is no such thing as ‘five’ independently of the flowers, or whatever else is in question. ‘Fiveness’ does not exist, whereas ‘oneness’ does. A satirist of about 400 bce complained of the monists of his day, ‘They say that whatever exists is one, being at the same time one and all – but they cannot agree what to call it.’36 The monists seem, however, to have been indifferent to satire. Wherever ideas were documented, monism appeared. ‘Identify yourself with non-distinction’, said the legendary Taoist Zhuangzi.37 ‘Indiscriminately care for the myriad things: the universe is one’, was how Hui Shi expressed the same sort of thought in the fourth century bce.38
The monist idea was so prominent during the formative centuries of the history of Eurasian thought that it is tempting to suppose that it must already have been of great antiquity. The earliest evidence is in the Upanishads – documents notoriously difficult to date. The Kenopanishad is one of the earliest of them, enshrining traditions that may go back to the second millennium bce. It tells the story of a cosmic rebellion. The powers of nature rebelled against nature itself. Lesser gods challenged the supremacy of Brahman. But the fire could not burn straw without Brahman. The wind could not blow the straw away without Brahman. On their own, these texts might suggest no more than the doctrine that God is omnipotent or that there is an omnipotent god: teaching similar to that of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In context, however, a more general, mystical conviction seems to be at work: of the oneness of the universe, infinite and eternal – a ‘theory of everything’, of a kind unprecedented in earlier civilizations. ‘Brahman’ is indeed clearly defined as the single reality that encompasses all in later Upanishads.
Perhaps from a birthplace in India, monism spread to Greece and China during the first millennium bce. It became a major – one might even say the defining – doctrine of Hinduism. The oneness of everything and the equation ‘infinity = one’ have gone on exercising their fascination. Monism, in consequence, is one of those ancient ideas that never stopped being modern. Today, practical monism is called holism and consists in the belief that since everything is interconnected, no problem can be tackled in isolation. This is a recipe for never getting round to anything. A weak form of holism, however, has become extremely influential in modern problem-solving: everything is seen as part of a bigger, interconnected system, and every difficulty has to be addressed with reference to the systematic whole.39 Don’t tinker with the tax code, a modern holist might say, without taking the whole economy into account; don’t extend the reach of the criminal code without thinking about the entire justice system; don’t treat physical ailments without bearing psychic effects in mind.
Monism may not immediately have any obvious political, social, or economic consequences. It does, however, prompt other ideas about how the world works, with political consequences. If everything is interconnected, clues to events in one sphere must lie in another. If, for instance, bird flight, stars, weather, and individual fortunes are all linked, the links may be traceable. This is the
thinking behind oracular divination.
Oracles and Kings: New Theories of Power
Intimacy with spirits gives mediums tremendous power. Most societies have therefore developed alternative means of communicating with the gods and the dead, searching for chinks in the wall of illusion, through which shafts of light penetrate from a world that feels more real – closer to truth – than our own. Of the new methods, the first we know of were oracles, legible ‘in the book of Nature’. The Greeks’ most ancient shrine was in a grove at Dodona, where they could hear the gods in the babble of the stream and the rustle of the leaves. Aberrations – departures from natural norms – could also encode messages. The world’s earliest surviving literature, from Mesopotamia in the second millennium bce, is full of allusions to omens: the gods revealed portents in anomalous weather or rare alignments of the celestial bodies. Similar irregularities typify other sources of oracular wisdom. Rare manifestations or mutations in the sky at night might be revelatory. So might swerves in the flight of birds or odd spots on the innards of sacrificed animals: to ancient Mesopotamians, sheep’s livers were ‘tablets of the gods’. Messages from the same divine source might bellow in volcanoes or earthquakes or flame in apparently spontaneous combustion. The behaviour of creatures specially designated for the purpose, such as the sacred geese of ancient Rome or the poisoned chickens of Zande witch-doctors in the Nilotic Sudan, might have prophecies to disclose. The Gypsy’s tea leaves are the dregs of a tradition of libations to the gods.
Out of Our Minds Page 12
