
The real roots of early city states may rip up the textbooks - walterbell
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23631462-700-the-real-roots-of-early-city-states-may-rip-up-the-textbooks/
======
neonnoodle
The forager/garden-farm way of life and the monocrop agriculture way of life
are mutually exclusive. The compulsory city-states that we associate with
"civilization" depends fundamentally on taking over land for monocrops. The
agro-forager way of life depends on managed biodiversity, with many
interdependent species.

Thus throughout history you have the repeated pattern of displacement,
slavery, genocide, "re-education" and oppression of foraging people and garden
farmers by monocrop-powered militarized states. It's been a 10,000 year global
war, and it is close to having been "won" by civilization. The losers, of
course, are all indigenous people worldwide, as well as the basic livability
of our planet and probably 80% of its species.

The irony, of course, is that monocrop agriculture isn't sustainable. It's had
a good run, but we're coming up against some really tough limits soon. The
Green Revolution bought some time, but it's probably going to be a _very_ hard
landing. All that biodiversity took millions of years to radiate, and only a
short time to destroy. Human cultural diversity took 100,000-500,000 years to
develop many different of ways of life, and only a short time to liquidate.

I only hold out hope that enough species, ecosystems and cultures are left to
help guide civilization toward something sustainable. We can do this the easy
way or the hard way.

~~~
nostrademons
Similarly, the pastoralist agriculture way of life wasn't sustainable, and it
fell to mass-production capitalism in the 30s and 40s. The Green Revolution
could be viewed as the final death knell of that societal organization: now,
small family farms worked by hand labor are virtually extinct, and all of the
seeds are owned by Monsanto, which charges monopoly prices for a single
harvest with no possibility of using the seeds from that harvest for the next
(they've been genetically engineered to be sterile), and they require large
fossil-fuel fertilizer inputs to grow anyway.

And it's likely that mass-production capitalism is beginning to die as well,
killed by robotics, computers, the Internet, micro-manufacturing, and the
Information Age. The key developments of _that_ revolution are just in the
labs right now, so it's a bit unclear what form the eventual civilization will
take, but the writing's already on the wall.

Life has never been about sustainability. You could look at each phase of
evolution - from protists to eukaryotes to vertebrates to land-dwellers to
dinosaurs to mammals to humans to hunter-gatherers to agriculture to
industrialization to information - as a phase-change in complexity levels, one
which usually kills off the vast majority of diversity at the lower levels. In
other words, life is a pyramid scheme, and death is a natural part of it.
Death doesn't mean the absence of anything, it means the emergence of
something new and unforeseen.

~~~
visarga
> In other words, life is a pyramid scheme, and death is a natural part of it.
> Death doesn't mean the absence of anything, it means the emergence of
> something new and unforeseen.

Interesting view about the link between life and death.

~~~
pdfernhout
Yes, that is an interesting point about the cycle of life and death -- or
"recycle" of matter and energy into new forms over time. The fossil record
tends to show that -- life emerges into vast diversity and then gets reduced
to a few very successful forms and stays that way until some disaster
(asteroid, volcanoes, atmospheric change, etc.) and then eventually there is a
new radiation of diverse life and then it reduces again...

One might see the same thing happening capitalism (as a stretch). There is a
lot of diversity (like with early microcomputer manufacturers in the 1970s and
1980s) and then only a couple standard forms are left -- until the cycle
repeats with laptops and then smartphones as conditions change (like cheaper
small parts leading to discontinuities in what is possible). And before that,
there was a lot of diversity too with early computers in the 1940s and 1950s
until IBM dominated the computing landscape until the microcomputer came
along.

With trees, there may be lots of seedlings out there getting mostly shaded out
but essentially for a big tree to fall and open up a spot in the canopy where
they can find lots of sunlight to grow into.

That said, the insight only holds -- for a reasonably short timescale -- as
long as there is a vibrant ecosystem or culture surrounding the death to fill
in the hole. Otherwise, it might be a long time before, say, the matter
involved in a supernova becomes anything living again...

Although, as in a comment someone made on heavier matter created by neutron
stars merging, the metal rings we were are a legacy of such events long ago.
So, as I see it, I have a couple recycling bins. The ones for compost or
bottles get recycled on a timescale of months or yeaar. By contrast, the trash
can contents gets recyled on the order of tends of millions of years when the
landfill eventually slides under a continental plate somewhere and down into
the Earth's mantel to be melted down as magma and then become a mountain to
become eroded or mined... Or, in a worst case, the landfill will eventually
get absorbed by the Sun in a few billion years when it becomes a Red Giant.
So, what bin I put something in when I discard it is a question of how quickly
I want it to be recycled. :-)

(Frankly, we'll probably be mining our landfills soon enough with robotics and
nanotech and biotech, but that is a different point...
[http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM5E.html#5e](http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM5E.html#5e)
)

------
radicaldreamer
Life might not be nasty, brutish, and short for some lucky bushmen, but for
most it sure seems to suck: "Bushmen health, in general, is not good though:
50% of children die before the age of 15; 20% die within their first year
(mostly of gastrointestinal infections). Average life expectancy is about
45-50 years"

~~~
msabalau
High childhood mortality, and adult life expectancy until the 40s doesn't
necessarily have to be characterized as nasty or brutish. It was the norm for
most of human existence, until the new stone age (When the undergraduate
simplification "old people live until 70, and life expectancy is really about
child mortality" kicks in.)

Perhaps unexpectedly, anthropologists visiting such societies often perceive
them as remarkably vibrant and healthy, because so much of the population is
in their teens and twenties.

“Were they beautiful? We were all beautiful. We were in our twenties.” ― Steve
Martin

~~~
forapurpose
> High childhood mortality, and adult life expectancy until the 40s doesn't
> necessarily have to be characterized as nasty or brutish.

> It was the norm for most of human existence

The second statement isn't an argument against the first. In fact the original
'nasty, brutish, and short' quote, I think by Winston Churchill, stated that
it was the norm. Slavery and monarchy, not freedom and democracy, was the norm
for most of human history. Epidemics and famine, not the CDC and obesity, used
to be the norm.

~~~
Zuider
The quote is from 17th-century British philosopher, Thomas Hobbes who argued
that in the state of nature, life was a matter of:

“continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

He proposed that the solution was the voluntary creation by means of a 'social
contract' of an absolute state ruled by a monarch who was above the law.

[http://www.historyinanhour.com/2013/04/05/thomas-hobbes-
summ...](http://www.historyinanhour.com/2013/04/05/thomas-hobbes-summary/)

~~~
lsc
True, but that quote is often used by all who oppose the anarchists; all who
believe that in order to have civilization, we have to give up some rights.

I have noticed an uptick in the number of ideological anarchists lately,
though, both right and left, within my social sphere. I do think that is one
of those interesting "horeshoe" situations in politics; the right anarchists
and the left anarchists, in many ways are the extremes of the right and the
left, but they have so much in common; they both believe that people can
function without being forced to give up any of their own rights (though they
deeply disagree as to what rights a person has.)

Most people, I think, agree that that part of Hobbes' argument is not weakened
by the fact that Hobbes wasn't able to see (or that the political realities of
his situation made it difficult to write about[1]) political systems other
than absolute rule.

[1]A contemporary, the incredible poet John Milton, actually wrote a paean to
regicide. "On the tenure of kings and magistrates" or something like that,
which I read as "Please don't kill me, see? I'm on your side" \- existing as
an intellectual during times of revolution can be a tricky thing. I personally
think "Paradise lost" is a better introduction to Milton, but the point
remains.

~~~
uoaei
That horseshoe effect you mention just goes to show how limited the bipolar-
spectrum representation of political stances really is. Anarchism can be
implemented all sorts of ways, and can easily be considered orthogonal to the
conservatism-liberalism axis, in the cosmopolitan as well as the American-
appropriated senses. s/anarchism/{communism, socialism, authoritarianism,
fascism, *ism} and you have an equally valid statement.

~~~
lsc
ok, sure. My point was that right-anarchists and left-anarchists are very
different people with very different views of fundamental rights, but from an
outside perspective, they look very similar in some ways.

I think, from your statement, that you agree with the above, and you say this
is evidence that the right-left axis is not useful. I personally think it
might have to do with anarchism making fundamentally different assumptions
about humanity and human nature, assumptions that are so out of phase with my
understanding of humanity that I... just don't see it in the ways that I can
understand a marxist or a libertarian. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing,
it is like we have had completely different experiences of humanity and
completely different readings of history.

~~~
uoaei
Absolutely, lived experiences shape our expectations about how the world- and
society-at-large treats people, and how they ought to be (re)organized to
maximize benefits.

You point to fundamentally different assumptions, and as a whole I agree with
that too. I think that anarchists put less emphasis on human nature per se
than they do on ethical organization practices--they preach a scheme of purely
voluntary self-organization mostly from an ethical standpoint, and this stance
implies that they view human agency as the most important ethical question,
rather than meeting basic needs (communism) or castrating exploitative
practices in labor (socialism/Marxism). Libertarians seem to be whistling
another tune, more along the lines of anarchism but by also tying capitalist
success to a person's ability to steer their path in life. Anarchists think
that free association will provide for those who need by virtue of a sense of
humanistic camaraderie.

I'm not arguing for or against anything here or anything you've said, and I'm
not sure I'm doing much at all except a fun exercise to clarify the varying
motivations of people in their quest to restructure economies and societies.
But it is interesting to consider and feels good to put to words.

------
unscaled
"Around 12,000 BC, the world’s population stood at between two and four
million; by 2000 BC, it was around 25 million. But the vast majority of people
had no contact with states as late as the end of the 15th century – Europe’s
middle ages."

This seems extremely off to me. In the 15th century CE most people on Earth
were most definitely sedentary farmers or nomadic pastoralists living under
one sort of state or another. That wasn't necessarily a large kingdom (though
tens of millions lived in China, where kingdoms were quite large even when it
was divided), and it's not like farmers knew or cared much about the politics
of their kings, but there was definitely a state, and even when there wasn't
one towns and villages had their own institutions and hierarchies that were
quite different from the egalitarian lifestyle of hunter gatherers.

To put that in another words, in agricultural societies, even in the most
remote and independent villages, women and men were not equal, fathers and
grown-up sons were not equal, brothers were not equal and different families
were not equal.

These societies are generally fiercely patriarchal - in the sense that females
were viewed as property of the male head of the household, not in the sense
the women were not allowed to hunt. This concept would entirely alien in
hunter-gatherer societies and in most of them so is the very concept of
property itself.

~~~
belorn
There is no historical evidence that agricultural societies were patriarchal,
nor that females were viewed as property of the male head of the household. If
we look at survived native cultures, the key observation is culture and
traditional gave women and men separated roles and responsibilities with the
elders of each as guides and authority. The elder women decided, taught and
guide the other women and girls in the group, while the elder men did the same
for the men and boys. Men were not allowed to interfere with the domain of the
elder women, and women were not allowed to interfere within the domain of the
elder men.

In order for it to be a fiercely patriarchal where females were viewed as
property of the male head of the household, it would mean that men had the
power to decide what women should and should not do. This fly in contrast to
when culture and tradition fully dictate how people should live their life.

------
finnh
The New Yorker recently covered the same topics and the bushman book as well:

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-
again...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-against-
civilization)

------
j_m_b
Wouldn't surprise me at all if government was born from coercion of the
individual to the needs of the state.. it is after all the definition of
government.

~~~
chongli
Government was born from the necessity to manage and defend grain stockpiles.
Compared to hunted/foraged food, grain could be stored for long periods of
time and its high energy density made it a prime target for thieves/marauders.

~~~
trgv
That's one theory.

I find myself wondering what exactly differentiates a "government" from a
"family council" or "tribal leadership" or whatever other phrase you want to
use to describe an "authority-wielding-body with a monopoly on force."

I think "governments" are as old as people, and probably older. Many social
animals have leaders who dominate the rest of the herd.

My feeling is that governments have always been here, they've just gotten
bigger and maybe a little more sinister.

~~~
chongli
As with many things, the line is blurry. I think governments really start to
take shape once you get past Dunbar's number [0]. When people no longer know
everybody, they need to rely on rules and designated authority figures to
settle disputes. I don't know of any way around that.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)

~~~
icebraining
The seems suspect; after all, the parliaments and other legislative chambers
of most countries are larger than Dunbar's number.

~~~
chongli
Parliaments operate based on rules with a central authority, usually called
the speaker, who acts to settle disputes. Parliaments do not operate like an
extended family.

~~~
icebraining
The speaker doesn't really settle disputes, only helps the parties do that
between themselves. They're mediators, not arbitrators. And they don't even
set the mediation rules. The disputes are settled by vote.

As a member of a bellicose family, I can assure you that family members (often
older and respected by both sides) acting as mediators are pretty common :)

------
solidsnack9000
An examination of the habits of fishes, insects, &c, will readily show that
being “the fittest” is often an incredibly, tough harsh life.

------
navigator01
>“For at least 4000 years, there were settled communities but no evidence of
state power”

Well that doesn't mean state power isn't necessary for large scale
communities. It just shows that in the thousands of years after the dawn of
agriculture communities were too small to require a state framework to exist.
As community scale increased, states became necessary.

------
jstewartmobile
Apparently the poli sci and anthropology guys aren't mixing with the history
profs very much.

Most history professors I've known refer to the dark ages as the "so-called
dark ages" because that time period served as proof-positive that you can have
civilized society without the state.

~~~
Infernal
Are there any books or papers you could recommend which explore this view of
the dark ages - say that compare/contrast the type of civilized society that
emerges in the presence of a state with one that emerges in its absence?

~~~
unscaled
I think this is yet another misconception that might come out of theoretical
political science (or the ignorant press). The political difference between
the Early Middle Ages (a.k.a the dark ages) and the Roman empire wasn't the
lack of state, but a very different type of state.

The Early Middle Ages in Europe saw a large number of short-lived monarchies
and a few long-lived ones. The Catholic Church rivaled and often surpassed
secular states in its power. Throughout the entire middle ages, for most of
the peasantry, interaction with the state in the broadest sense that we have
today (i.e. with the king) was scarce. Local rulers, dignitaries and
institutions, had large autonomy and more direct influence on the daily lives
of peasants.

Free cities are a good example of completely autonomous sovereignty. If they
were chartered, the local princes had little power over them - but chartered
cities only appear in the very end of the dark ages.

Anyway, I recommend 'Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade'
by Henri Pirenne. It's an old book and there's definitely more up to date
research, but Henri Pirenne is a brilliant historian and writer and he paints
a very vivid picture of what the "so-called dark ages" in Europe were like.

