These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plough his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves.
The advent of settlements and private property had ushered in a new age in the history of humankind. The 1 per cent began oppressing the 99 per cent, and smooth talkers ascended from commanders to generals and from chieftains to kings. The days of liberty, equality and fraternity were over.
4
Reading about these recent archaeological discoveries, my thoughts returned to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Self-proclaimed ‘realistic’ writers have all too often brushed him off as a naive romantic. But it was beginning to look like Rousseau might be the true realist after all.
The French philosopher rejected the notion of the advance of civilisation. He rejected the idea–still taught in schools today–that we started out as grunting cavemen, all bashing each other’s brains in. That it was agriculture and private property that finally brought us peace, safety and prosperity. And that these gifts were eagerly embraced by our ancestors, who were tired of going hungry and fighting all the time.
Nothing could be farther from the truth, Rousseau believed. Only once we settled in one place did things begin to fall apart, he thought, and that’s just what the archaeology now shows. Rousseau saw the invention of farming as one big fiasco, and for this, too, we now have abundant scientific evidence.
For one thing, anthropologists have discovered that hunter-gatherers led a fairly cushy life, with work weeks averaging twenty to thirty hours, tops. And why not? Nature provided everything they needed, leaving plenty of time to relax, hang out and hook up.
Farmers, by contrast, had to toil in the fields and working the soil left little time for leisure. No pain, no grain. Some theologists even suspect that the story of the Fall alludes to the shift to organised agriculture, as starkly characterised by Genesis 3: ‘By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread.’29
Settled life exacted an especially heavy toll on women. The rise of private property and farming brought the age of proto-feminism to an end. Sons stayed on the paternal plot to tend the land and livestock, which meant brides now had to be fetched for the family farm. Over centuries, marriageable daughters were reduced to little more than commodities, to be bartered like cows or sheep.30
In their new families, these brides were viewed with suspicion, and only after presenting them with a son did women gain a measure of acceptance. A legitimate son, that is. It’s no accident that female virginity turned into an obsession. Where in prehistory women had been free to come and go as they pleased, now they were being covered up and tethered down. The patriarchy was born.
And things just kept getting worse. Rousseau was right again when he said that settled farmers were not as healthy as nomadic foragers. As nomads, we got plenty of exercise and enjoyed a varied diet rich in vitamins and fibre, but as farmers we began consuming a monotonous menu of grains for breakfast, lunch and dinner.31
We also began living in closer confines, and near our own waste. We domesticated animals such as cows and goats and started drinking their milk. This turned towns into giant Petri dishes for mutating bacteria and viruses.32 ‘In following the history of civil society,’ Rousseau remarked, ‘we shall be telling also that of human sickness.’33
Infectious diseases like measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, syphilis, malaria, cholera and plague were all unheard of until we traded our nomadic lifestyle for farming. So where did they come from? From our new domesticated pets–or, more specifically, their microbes. We get measles by way of cows, while flu comes from a microscopic ménage à trois between humans, pigs and ducks, with new strains still emerging all the time.
The same with sexually transmitted diseases. Virtually unknown in nomadic times, among pastoralists they began running rampant. Why? The reason is rather embarrassing. When humans began raising livestock, they also invented bestiality. Read: sex with animals. As the world grew increasingly uptight, the odd farmer covertly forced himself on his flock.34
And that’s the second spark for the male obsession with female virginity. Apart from the matter of legitimate offspring, it was also a fear of STDs. Kings and emperors, who had entire harems at their disposal, went to great lengths to ensure their partners were ‘pure’. Hence the idea, still upheld by millions today, that sex before marriage is a sin.
Famines, floods, epidemics–no sooner had humans settled down in one place than we found ourselves battling an endless cycle of disasters. A single failed harvest or deadly virus was enough to wipe out whole populations. For Homo puppy, this must have been a bewildering turn of events. Why was this happening? Who was behind it?
Scholars agree that people have probably always believed in gods and spirits.35 But the deities of our nomadic ancestors were not all that interested in the lives of mere mortals, let alone in punishing their infractions. Nomadic religions would have more closely resembled that described by an American anthropologist who spent years living with the Hadza nomads in Tanzania:
I think one can say the Hadza do have religion, certainly a cosmology anyway, but it bears little resemblance to what most of us in complex societies (with Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) think of as religion. There are no churches, preachers, leaders, or religious guardians, no idols or images of gods, no regular organized meetings, no religious morality, no belief in an afterlife–theirs is nothing like the major religions.36
The emergence of the first large settlements triggered a seismic shift in religious life. Seeking to explain the catastrophes suddenly befalling us, we began to believe in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done.
A whole clerical class was put in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry. Had we eaten something forbidden? Said something wrong? Had an illicit thought?37 For the first time in history, we developed a notion of sin. And we began looking to priests to prescribe how we should do penance. Sometimes it was enough to pray or complete a strict set of rituals, but often we had to sacrifice cherished possessions–food or animals or even people.
We see this with the Aztecs, who established a vast industry for human sacrifice in their capital at Tenochtitlan. When the conquistadors marched into the city in 1519 and entered its largest temple they were stunned to see huge racks and towers piled high with thousands of human skulls. The purpose of these human sacrifices, scholars now believe, was not only to appease the gods. ‘The killing of captives, even in a ritual context,’ one archaeologist has observed, ‘is a strong political statement […] it’s a way to control your own population.’38
Reflecting on all this misery–the famines, the plagues, the oppression–it’s hard not to ask: why? Why did we ever think it would be a good idea to settle in one place? Why did we exchange our nomadic life of leisure and good health for a life of toil and trouble as farmers?
Scholars have been able to piece together a fairly decent picture of what happened. The first settlements were probably just too tempting: finding ourselves in an earthly paradise where the trees hung heavy with fruit and untold gazelle and caribou grazed, it must have seemed crazy not to stay put.
With farming, it was much the same. There was no lightbulb moment when somebody shouted: ‘Eureka! Let’s start planting crops!’ Though our ancestors had been aware for tens of thousands of years that you could
plant things and harvest them, they also knew enough not to go down that road. ‘Why should we plant,’ exclaimed one !Kung tribesman to an anthropologist, ‘when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’39
The most logical explanation is that we fell into a trap. That trap was the fertile floodplain between the Tigris and the Euphrates, where crops grew without much effort. There we could sow in soil enriched by a soft layer of nutrient-rich sediment left behind each year by the receding waters. With nature doing most of the work, even the work-shy Homo puppy was willing to give farming a go.40
What our ancestors couldn’t have foreseen was how humankind would proliferate. As their settlements grew denser, the population of wild animals declined. To compensate, the amount of land under cultivation had to be extended to areas not blessed with fertile soil. Now farming was not nearly so effortless. We had to plough and sow from dawn to dusk. Not being built for this kind of work, our bodies developed all kinds of aches and pains. We had evolved to gather berries and chill out, and now our lives were filled with hard, heavy labour.
So why didn’t we just go back to our freewheeling way of life? Because it was too late. Not only were there too many mouths to feed, but by this time we’d also lost the knack of foraging. And we couldn’t just pack up and head for greener pastures, because we were hemmed in by neighbouring settlements, and they didn’t welcome trespassers. We were trapped.
It didn’t take long before the farmers outnumbered the foragers. Farming settlements could harvest more food per acre, which meant they could also raise larger armies. Nomadic tribes that stuck to their traditional way of life had to fend off invading colonists and their infectious illnesses. In the end, tribes that refused to bow down to a despot were beaten down by force.41
The outbreak of these first clashes signalled the start of the great race that would shape world history. Villages were conquered by towns, towns were annexed by cities and cities were swallowed up by provinces as societies all frantically scaled up to meet the inexorable demands of war. This culminated in the final catastrophic event so lamented by Rousseau.
The birth of the state.
5
Let’s return for a moment to the picture Thomas Hobbes painted of the first humans to walk the earth. He believed that an unfettered life pitted our forebears in a ‘war of all against all’. It only makes sense that we’d rush to embrace the first Leviathans (chieftains and kings) and the security they promised. Says Hobbes.
We now know that our nomadic ancestors were actually fleeing these despots. The first states–think Uruk in Mesopotamia or the Egypt of the pharaohs–were, without exception, slave states.42 People didn’t choose to live crammed together, but were corralled by regimes ever-hungry for new subjects, as their slaves kept dying of pox and plague. (It’s no accident that the Old Testament paint cities in such a negative light. From the failed Tower of Babel to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, God’s judgement of sin-ridden cities is loud and clear.)
It’s ironic at best. The very things we hold up today as ‘milestones of civilization’, such as the invention of money, the development of writing, or the birth of legal institutions, started out as instruments of oppression. Take the first coins: we didn’t begin minting money because we thought it would make life easier, but because rulers wanted an efficient way to levy taxes.43 Or think about the earliest written texts: these weren’t books of romantic poetry, but long lists of outstanding debts.44
And those legal institutions? The legendary Code of Hammurabi, the first code of law, was filled with punishments for helping slaves to escape.45 In ancient Athens, the cradle of western democracy, two-thirds of the population was enslaved. Great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle believed that, without slavery, civilisation could not exist.
Perhaps the best illustration of the true nature of states is the Great Wall of China, a wonder of the world meant to keep dangerous ‘barbarians’ out–but also to lock subjects in. Effectively it made the Chinese empire the largest open-air prison the world has ever known.46
And then there’s that painful taboo in America’s past on which most history textbooks are silent. One of the few willing to acknowledge it was Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’47 He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’.
Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.48 And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her.49 ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?’50
In recent centuries, whole libraries have been written about the rise and fall of civilisations. Think about the overgrown pyramids of the Maya and the abandoned temples of the Greeks.51 Underpinning all these books is the premise that, when civilisations fail, everything gets worse, plunging the world into ‘dark ages’.
Modern scholars suggest it would be more accurate to characterise those dark ages as a reprieve, when the enslaved regained their freedom, infectious disease diminished, diet improved and culture flourished. In his brilliant book Against the Grain (2017), anthropologist James C. Scott points out that masterpieces like the Iliad and the Odyssey originated during the ‘Greek Dark Ages’ (1,110 to 700 BC) immediately following the collapse of Mycenaean civilisation. Not until much later would they be recorded by Homer.52
So why is our perception of ‘barbarians’ so negative? Why do we automatically equate a lack of ‘civilisation’ with dark times? History, as we know, is written by the victors. The earliest texts abound with propaganda for states and sovereigns, put out by oppressors seeking to elevate themselves while looking down on everybody else. The word ‘barbarian’ was itself coined as a catch-all for anyone who didn’t speak ancient Greek.
That’s how our sense of history gets flipped upside down. Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.
6
Thomas Hobbes, the old philosopher, could not have been more off the mark. He characterised the life and times of our ancestors as ‘nasty, brutish and short’, but a truer description would have been friendly, peaceful and healthy.
The irony is that the curse of civilisation dogged Hobbes throughout his life. Take the plague that killed his patron in 1628, and the looming civil war that forced him to flee England for Paris in 1640. The man’s take on humanity was rooted in his own experience with disease and war, calamities which were virtually unknown for the first 95 per cent of human history. Hobbes has somehow gone down in history as the ‘father of realism’, yet his view of human nature is anything but realistic.
But is civilisation all bad? Hasn’t it brought us many good things, too? Aside from war and greed, hasn’t the modern world also given us much to be thankful for?
Of course it has. But it’s easy to forget that genuine progress is a very recent phenomenon. Up until the French Revolution (1789), almost all states everywhere were fuelled by forced labour. Until 1800, at least three-quarters of the global population lived in bondage to a wealthy lord.53 More than 90 per cent of the population worked the land, and more than 80 per cent lived in dire poverty.54 In the words of Rousseau: ‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.’55
For ages civilisation was a disaster. The advent of cities and states, of agriculture and writing, didn’t bring prosperity to most people, but suffering. Only in the last two centuries–the bl
ink of an eye–have things got better so quickly that we’ve forgotten how abysmal life used to be. If you take the history of civilisation and clock it over twenty-four hours, the first twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes would be sheer misery. Only in the final fifteen minutes would civil society start to look like a good idea.
In those final fifteen minutes we’ve stamped out most infectious diseases. Vaccines now save more lives each year than would have been spared if we’d had world peace for the entire twentieth century.56 Second, we’re now richer than ever before. The number of people living in extreme poverty has dropped to under 10 per cent.57 And, third, slavery has been abolished.
In 1842, the British consul general wrote to the Sultan of Morocco to ask what he was doing to prohibit the slave trade. The Sultan was surprised: ‘The traffic in slaves is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam.’58 Little did he know that, 150 years later, slavery would be officially banned around the world.59
Last and best of all, we’ve entered the most peaceful age ever.60 In the Middle Ages as much as 12 per cent of Europe’s and Asia’s populations died violent deaths. But in the last hundred years–including two world wars–this figure has plummeted to 1.3 per cent worldwide.61 (In the US it’s now 0.7 per cent and in the Netherlands, where I live, it’s less than 0.1 per cent.)62
There’s no reason to be fatalistic about civil society. We can choose to organise our cities and states in new ways that benefit everyone. The curse of civilisation can be lifted. Will we manage to do so? Can we survive and thrive in the long term? Nobody knows. There’s no denying the progress of the last decades, but at the same time we’re faced with an ecological crisis on an existential scale. The planet is warming, species are dying out and the pressing question now is: how sustainable is our civilised lifestyle?
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