The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  Because settled agriculture allowed for higher population densities, it accelerated technological innovation and created a requirement for more complex forms of organization as the first sizable towns appeared. Because it generated surpluses, it created the possibility for a few to expropriate the surplus for their exclusive personal use.9

  As best we can determine, early humans were relatively undifferentiated by occupation, status, or power. The fortunes of the individual rose and fell with the fortunes of the band or tribe. Generative power, as manifested in the power to reproduce, to heal, to gather food, and to win the favor of the animal spirit for a successful hunt, was at the center of community life. Symbols and rituals that acknowledged and honored the power of Creation in its feminine form were among the earliest expressions of a distinctively human consciousness.

  One of the few specialized roles in the pre-agricultural societies was that of the shaman, either woman or man, who demonstrated the power to heal through communication with the spirit world. This was perhaps the earliest occupational specialization. These times were scarcely free from violence and competition, yet a cultural commitment to the collective potency of band and tribe generally prevailed. The generative power of the Spirit was the foundation of social organization; the cooperative quest for generative power generally prevailed as organizing principle.

  Temples of the Goddess

  As humans formed themselves into larger social units, the functions of the lone shaman became the functions of an organized body of priestesses and priests, and the temple emerged as one of the first centers of institutional power responsible for administrating affairs affecting the whole of the community. The many functions of the temple ranged from allocating land to mediating disputes and divining the most auspicious time for planting.

  Eisler points to the general absence of heavy fortifications and thrusting weapons in the archaeological record of the large pre-Empire agriculture-based Neolithic civilizations as evidence that their people 98were peaceful and relatively egalitarian. There was little sign of damage through warfare. Burial practices and the generally uniform size and design of houses further suggested generally egalitarian societies with little of the differentiation by class, race, and gender that is characteristic of the societies that followed. The varied artworks of these Neolithic civilizations support a similar conclusion. There are no scenes of battles, images of noble warriors and wrathful gods, nor depictions of conquerors dragging captives in chains.

  There is, by contrast, an abundance of female figures and symbols of nature associated with the worship of the Goddess. A central religious image of these early times appears to be a woman giving birth, creating and nurturing life in the manner of Earth. According to Eisler, “those places where the first great breakthroughs in material and social technology were made had one feature in common: the worship of the Goddess.” Similar Goddess symbolism is found in each of the three main centers where agriculture was first developed: Asia Minor and southeastern Europe, Thailand, and Middle America.10

  In When God Was a Woman, artist and art historian Merlin Stone identifies accounts of sun goddesses in the lands of Canaan, Anatolia, Arabia, and Australia and among Eskimos, Japanese, and the Kasis of India. There are accounts from Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Africa, Australia, and China of female deities who brought forth not only the first people but also the entire Earth and the heavens above.11 Eisler, Stone, and others conclude that the cosmology of the earliest religions of both the gatherer-hunter and agricultural societies centered on a Great Mother deity as the source of life and protection from nature’s threatening forces.

  For a period of as much as six thousand years, prior to the emergence of Empire, the emphasis in the Goddess societies was on the development and application of technologies that nurture life.12 Humans were expected to enter into partnership with the productive processes of nature, an activity for which women—the life givers of the human species—were presumed to have special affinity.13

  Eisler argues that evidence the early Goddess-worshipping societies were matrilineal, tracing descent through the woman, does not necessarily mean they were matriarchal in the sense of treating men as subservient. She explains:

  For here both men and women were the children of the 99Goddess, as they were the children of the women who headed the families and clans. And while this certainly gave women a great deal of power, analogizing from our present-day mother-child relationship, it seems to have been a power that was more equated with responsibility and love than with oppression, privilege, and fear.14

  Others, including some feminist historians, have challenged Eisler’s conclusions as too sweeping in suggesting that the Goddess-worshipping societies were all peaceful and egalitarian. Merlin Stone maintains that at least some of the Goddess societies were not only matrilineal, but as well matriarchal and reduced men to an inferior and dependent position. She points to evidence that through their control of the temple the priestesses controlled inheritance, “the urban activities of the craftsmen, the traders and the rural employment of farmers, shepherds, poultry keepers, fishermen and fruit gardeners,”15 and the buying, selling, and renting of land.16

  Stone cites evidence that in some societies, women arranged to take multiple lovers of their choice, often in the context of temple rituals, thereby securing their own sexual freedom, obscuring the paternity of their children, and thus creating a situation in which the line of succession could be traced only through the woman.17 Later stories from the lands of Libya, Anatolia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, and Russia also describe the Goddess as a courageous warrior and leader of armies.18

  Millennia after the shift from partnership to domination, Diodorus Siculus (Diodorus of Sicily) wrote of his travels to northern Africa and the Near East forty-nine years before the birth of Jesus. Among his accounts are reports of women in Ethiopia who carried arms and practiced a form of communal marriage in which children were raised so communally that even the women themselves often became confused as to who was the birth mother of a particular child. He reported on warrior women in Libya who formed armies and invaded neighboring countries.19

  Our concern here is not with whether women-led societies are always more peaceful and egalitarian than male-led societies, but merely to note the evidence of the rich variety of the early human experience, which included peaceful, egalitarian, highly accomplished societies of substantial size in which women had strong leadership roles.

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  TURNING TO EMPIRE: A GENDER PERSPECTIVE

  According to Eisler, divergent paths taken by the nomadic pastoralists and the settled agriculturalists played out in divergent worldviews and social structures. The settled agricultural societies organized around the generative partnership power we think of as feminine, worshipped female goddesses of life, honored female as well as male leaders, and directed their creative energies to the discovery and development of technologies that sustain and enhance life. Some historians believe that the story found in the biblical account of the Garden of Eden, where woman and man lived an idyllic life, is based on a collective memory of these distant times.20

  By contrast, the nomadic pastoralist tribes tended toward venerating the power dominator societies associated with the masculine. Their path led them to worship violent male gods, honor the warrior, treat women as male property, and devote substantial creative energy to producing ever more effective weapons. As Eisler observes, they sought to improve their condition “not by developing technologies of production, but through ever more effective technologies of destruction.” This gave them an advantage in subsequent combat with the more prosperous agriculturalists, whose lands and labor they eventually appropriated through conquest.21

  Rejecting the Feminine

  Ultimately, the early Goddess-worshipping agricultural civilizations fell to invasions by the God-worshipping nomadic pastoralist tribes that began in earnest around 4300 BCE and continued in a succession of waves through 2800 BCE. As the invaders pene
trated the first great agricultural civilizations that inhabited the lakeshores and riverbanks of the fertile heartlands, they killed the men, enslaved the women, and replaced their relatively equitable, life-centered, and partnership-oriented religions, cultures, and institutions with wrathful male gods, warrior cultures, institutions of domination, and technologies of destruction. Earth Goddess gave way to the sky God.

  Thus began what Eisler calls “a bloody five-thousand-year dominator detour.” As the pre-Empire societies honored the power to give life, so later societies honored the power to take life. Kings and emperors bolstered their demands for obedience with claims of personal divinity or divine appointment.22 Angry male gods representing dominator 101power displaced the female and male gods representing generative power. Priestesses were gradually stripped of power and replaced by priests. Wives became the chattel of their husbands. The poor became the servants of the rich. The regenerative power of the Spirit gave way to the dominator power of the sword. Humans came to mistake dominance for potency, domination displaced partnership as the organizing principle of society, and the era of Empire was born.

  According to Eisler, the invasions typically brought periods of cultural regression and stagnation. Towns and villages disintegrated. The magnificent painted pottery, shrines, frescoes, and sculptures of the Goddess civilizations fell into neglect or were destroyed. The primary use of metals for ornamentation and tools gave way to a primary use of metals for weapons.23 Artifacts from this period depicted heavily armed male warrior gods. Graves from the subjugation period might contain an exceptionally tall or large-boned male skeleton and a variety of weapons along with the skeletons of sacrificed women who were the wives, concubines, or slaves of the man who died. As social structures became more authoritarian and hierarchical, it appears that those most likely to rise to the pinnacles of power were the physically strongest and presumably the most ruthless and brutal. Women were reduced culturally and institutionally to “male-controlled technologies of production and reproduction.”24

  With time, the conquered societies entered into a new period of material production and accumulation, but with a striking change in the pattern of distribution. Previously priority had gone to public works and an improved standard of living for all. Now the men at the top appropriated the bulk of the wealth and power. Their subjects had little choice but to make do with the leftovers. Those who achieved their positions of power by destroying and appropriating the wealth of conquered peoples continued their established pattern of appropriation, distributing the spoils among those who faithfully served them—a pattern that remains familiar to this day.25

  Domesticating People

  As the capacity to produce a surplus increased, rulers learned that, much as the pastoralists had learned to domesticate animals, so too they could domesticate other humans. Rather than kill their captives, they consigned them to forced labor tending the flocks and fields, freeing 102themselves for less arduous endeavors. Thus, the institution of slavery was born as a new tool of production that also served to humiliate and punish vanquished foreign enemies. As urban markets for agricultural products grew and became more profitable, the demand for slaves and serfs grew accordingly.

  As rulers came to recognize the benefits of slavery, they began stripping citizenship from criminals in their own cultural group and condemned them to slavery rather than death or imprisonment as the preferred punishment for their crimes. The institution of debt generated its own crop of slaves. The last resort of the desperately poor was to borrow against a pledge of their labor or the labor of their children. A debtor who defaulted became a slave. Some were so desperate in their impoverishment that they “voluntarily” chose slavery over starvation, much as the desperately poor now “voluntarily” present themselves to companies offering sweatshop work under slavelike conditions or sign up for military service. The demand for slaves made trafficking in slaves acquired through kidnapping and piracy one of the earliest and most profitable forms of commerce.26

  TURNING TO EMPIRE: A SCALE PERSPECTIVE

  In contrast to Eisler’s analysis, Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, deals with the transition to Empire as purely a response to the practical need to organize large numbers of unrelated people into peaceful and coherent social units.

  Small Is Equitable

  In the early gatherer-hunter days, the survival of the band typically required that all able-bodied members contribute to gathering food, which largely precluded class-based social stratification. Land and other resources were shared in common. Similarly, in the early permanent agricultural settlements, which involved tribal units of several hundred people, it was necessary for every able-bodied person to share in the physical labor of tilling and harvesting the fields and—when necessary —in the defense of the village. Crafts like weaving baskets and cloth, pottery, carpentry, and simple metalworking were a routine part of life in most every household. The sharing of assets and labor combined 103with a lack of surplus beyond immediate daily needs left little opportunity for any individual to become disproportionately wealthy.

  The social unit of the tribal village was still small enough that most people knew each other by name and relationship, which eased the task of mediating relationships without formal systems of laws and enforcement. Governance mechanisms were characteristically both informal and highly egalitarian, with major decisions normally reached in meetings of all adult members, conducted without an evident leader, in which all information was public and freely shared. There were no specialized occupational functions, everyone shared in the labor, and there were no slaves or specialized menial roles. Visitors to contemporary tribal assemblies are commonly impressed by this practice of the purest form of democracy.

  Beyond Kinship

  Trust and group identity have long been important issues for humans for the very reason that our nature embodies a broad range of possibility, from deadly violence to self-sacrificial love. When contiguous concentrations of population became too large for all members to be related by blood or marriage or to know each other by name, the problem arose of how to assess the intentions of strangers and minimize the potential for violence.

  The solution, according to Diamond, was to establish the formal hereditary office of the chief. The chief was a permanent centralized authority who made all the significant decisions, held a monopoly on the right to use force, controlled important information regarding relationships with neighbors and the promises of the gods regarding future harvests, wore distinctive identifying regalia, and expected obsequious respect from those of lower rank.

  The chief was in turn supported by one or two levels of bureaucracy composed of generalist retainers, who carried out functions such as extracting tribute, managing irrigation, and organizing labor for public works projects—and received a portion of the tribute in return for their services. Commonly, the office of the chief either combined the offices of political and religious leader or provided support for priests who affirmed the divine nature of the chief’s appointment to legitimate the extraction of tribute. Specialized priests received a share of the tribute in return for this service. 104

  Perils of Coercive Power

  The solution of a powerful ruler to maintain order set in play a dilemma that has confounded the human species since the size of the human population exceeded the limits of organization based on kinship. To fulfill his function the ruler must have the right and the means to impose his will and to extract tribute by coercive force. This requires a retinue of loyal warriors and tax collectors. He must also invest in legitimating symbols of authority and in culture workers who keep the populace enthralled with stories of his divine powers and righteousness. Those who perform these functions must be supported out of the surpluses produced by farmers, artisans, traders, and others engaged in actual productive work.

  Rulers had to be skilled in the political arts of maintaining the loyalty of retainers, the acquiescence of the ruled, and a monopoly on coercive power, whi
le fending off internal competitors for the throne and the armies of neighboring states. The larger the state, the greater the cost of maintaining necessary public functions, including security, and the greater the need for extraction to support these functions—which in turn depended on the exercise of coercive power. Yet the greater the coercive power of the ruler and his retainers, the greater the temptation to abuse this power for personal gain.

  As Diamond points out, the distinction between statesmanship and kleptocracy is largely a matter of how the surplus, extracted as taxes or tribute, is divided between serving public purposes and supporting the self-indulgence of the ruling elite. The right to use coercive power to maintain order and extract a surplus creates an almost irresistible temptation to abuse.

  SMALL AND BALANCED

  Diamond and Eisler both offer important insight into the cultural and institutional realities of the human experience. Diamond brings a scale perspective, Eisler a gender perspective. Neither is complete in itself. The scale perspective directs attention to the complexity of the organizational challenge created by increasing population density in an interdependent world, quite apart from gender considerations. The gender perspective points to the profound truth that addressing the organizational challenge 105in ways consistent with the needs of life and the potentials of the species requires balancing the masculine and feminine principles.