Peter Frost, dissident anthropologist, wrote about some issues in the matter I’ve considered in recent blog essays—the formation of complex societies. See Mathematical Models of Human History: Are They Plausible? and A Different Model of the Growth of Centralized States in History.
Frost’s article, The Agricultural Revolution That Wasn’t, looks at the broader issue of how large groups of people of people form from bands of hunter-gatherers. I think it worth the short time it takes to read Frost’s entire article and to start reading his essays and articles published at Ron Unz’s website for the internet writings of solid, dissident thinkers.
Frost has this to say about the general conditions of human life as complex, large-scale human communities (civilizations or proto-civilizations) were developing:
About 10,000 years ago, the pace of human genetic evolution rose a hundred-fold [see original article for reference]. Our ancestors were no longer adapting to slowly changing physical environments. They were adapting to rapidly evolving cultural environments.
What, exactly, caused this speed-up? The usual answer is the shift from hunting and gathering to farming, which in turn caused other changes. People were becoming sedentary and living in ever larger communities: villages, towns, and finally cities. Farming also produced a food surplus to be stored for future use, thereby providing powerful men with the means to bankroll a growing number of servants, soldiers, and other hangers-on. Thus began the formation of early states. And thus ended the primitive equality of hunter-gatherers.
But is that the whole story? Was farming the trigger for this chain of events? Or did something earlier get things going? More and more anthropologists are taking a closer look at what happened just before the advent of farming, a period called the “Broad Spectrum Revolution”[.]
If you haven’t been keeping up with at least the general discoveries in the overlapping fields of genetics and paleontology, you might wish to reread the above quote and think about it, especially the discovery that the older claim that we are stone-age ape-men in civilized drag is only a highly qualified truth. In the above quotation, Frost makes it sound as if natural selection continues to work as it always did but now the selective processes are relative to the ability to survive and reproduce in a complex human community in which individuals are sheltered from predators and some natural disasters. In fact, this is clearly true, but the power of selection seems diluted by the survival beyond the age of reproduction in a civilization of many not adapted to civilized life. Charity, the need for large amounts of labor who might work more effectively if they aren’t `cultured’, and perhaps other factors allow the reproduction of many who simply don’t get this business of civilization.
With my limited knowledge of the workings of genes, I have to believe that keeping so many alive at least long enough to reproduce, diluting the effects of bad luck as well as lack of fit to civilized life, has to increase the variety in the human gene pool.
Frost also tells us:
Farming thus came on the heels of a broader cultural, behavioral, and even psychological revolution. It is this broader change, rather than farming alone, that probably caused many supposedly farming-related events, such as the rapid spread of certain agricultural peoples into territories that formerly belonged to hunter-gatherers.
Frost tells us that some hunter-gatherers were, and are, willing to retreat rather than become part of this new-fangled way of living:
One of my professors, Bernard Arcand, would talk to us about the hunter-gatherers of Upper Amazonia and their indifference to farming. They saw it as something akin to slavery and couldn’t understand why anyone would want to stay put in one place and toil in the fields all day. Attempts to teach them the benefits of farming typically failed. Benefits? What benefits?
There has to be a change in mental makeup before farming becomes possible. People must become willing to exchange short-term pain for long-term gain. They must accept monotony and sedentary living. They must live in larger communities with people who are not necessarily close kin. And they must get used to bland, nutrient-poor food.
Some of those who don’t like civilization live down the street. Some are in our armies or in our more dangerous occupations and may well more than pull their weight, yet, on the whole, we’ve got a real problem in the modern world. This “change in mental makeup” is rather extensive and has to take place deep within us and also in our more superficial aspects before civilization takes and we settle down as men and women capable of behaving properly and amusing ourselves properly—to put it in a grossly oversimplified way. We have to learn how to gain some richness in life by way of active participation in various arts or religious rites or story-telling or… If there are some who have mental makeups not suited to life in a complex civilization, then they might simply be passive creatures who watch the spectacles around them or on their video screens or they might engage in various activities such as crime on one scale or another to gain the goods and at least qualified prestige they can’t gain by making music or art or producing artisan-quality furniture or supervising a complex industrial process or taking proper risks in new business ventures or… People not capable (for whatever reason) of actively amusing themselves, in substantial solitary or communal activities, might be ready for such exciting activities as wars; they might participate in riots—perhaps starting as demonstrations for a good cause; they might engage in sex for excitement (see one of my early essays— Raising the Ante on Passion: Nabokov and Gibson); they might use drugs to escape life in a community unsuited to one’s needs or desires; and so forth. Some of these activities are self-destructive and some do serious damage to individual others or to communities; some may even be parts of sociopathic behavior.
We don’t seem to be a happy people. We flock toward entertainment of a juvenile sort, often enough a perverse and juvenile sort. We glorify those who refuse to grow up and become morally responsible civilized men. We are half-assed citizens of complex states requiring far better than that and then we have the nerve to get upset when our governments fill up with self-serving scoundrels. We Americans and some other men of the West perhaps show our worst sides, at least over the past 60 or 70 years, in the behavior we put up with, and often cheer on, in our leaders in the international realm. We react self-righteously to imagined or wrongly attributed acts against us and then don’t even feel bad about the thousands or hundreds of thousands who are killed, the communities left without fresh water or power systems, and so on. We drink another beer and just remember they “hate us for our freedoms” and feel to be a righteously exceptional people—see Dumber Every Day, With Beer in Hand and War on TV. We common folk send our pennies and dollars over to help Haitians or Indonesians after some natural disaster or to help others to build schools and hospitals and churches even as we remain blind to our politicians’ and bankers’ theft of the wealth of entire countries.
It could be argued, even by those so suspicious of the central-planning mentality as I am, that we need some conscious awareness, if vague, of what is wrong and of where we can head and how we can better form our children and our own selves to take proper advantage of the complex and multi-sided benefits of civilization. In fact, in saying this I speak not of central planning but rather of numerous individuals and communities engaging in well thought-out experiments in living and in making our livings.
I’m going to end with a suggestion I’ll pursue in my next essay, which I’m writing in response to some good analysis and speculation in another essay by Frost, Does Natural Law Exist?, just published on Ron Unz’s website today (2014/09/01). My suggestion is that participation in more complex communities, of which civilization is the most complex we know, actually requires a greater and richer development of the individual, including a richer sort of self-directedness which is tied to higher level thinking skills capable of dealing with messy situations which can’t be handled by simple rules-based thinking. This isn’t a plea for any sort of radical individualism, for sure. I know quite well a lot of human beings can’t do the research and independent thinking necessary to understand the complex problems of modern human life, but those who can’t should have rich enough, complex enough, thoughts to be able to recognize those who have bothered to learn about these issues and can maybe generate some ideas, if they be no more than an interesting creative movie or a piece of folk music that speaks of the experiences of an American soldier or Marine in Afghanistan. By now, a lot of smart men and women who aren’t scholars or creative artists or theologians should realize those in authority in the institutions of our age are not up to the job of dealing with our problems.