Qui Reponendi Sunt Te Salutant - Part Two

[Part One]

The Industrial Revolution drastically realigned cultures around the world, even in nations that didn’t participate directly.

First off, thanks to the economics of scale, goods of all kinds could be made faster / better / cheaper.

This meant a lot more people could afford a lot more goods.

Second, because human labor is ultimately the sole factor in determining cost, the less one paid workers, the cheaper to finished product…

…but the fewer customers for said product.

Third, while pre-Industrial Revolution artisans could pace themselves and work at a sustainable rate to keep them comfortable, the demands of capitalism on the Industrial Revolution meant each year needed to be more profitable than the previous.

There’s a name for unchecked growth in biology:  Cancer.

People always liked having stuff, but it wasn’t until the Agricultural Revolution circa 10,000BCE that people began settling down and accumulating huge piles of it.

Prior to that, they could never possess more than they and / or their pack animals could carry, and for obvious reasons:  If they couldn’t take it with them, they left it behind.

Status, particularly among nomadic bands, did not originate with wealth.

In many nomadic cultures today, the chief or elders of the band are often among the poorest in terms of possessions.

They view it as their responsibility to see others have enough, and will give from their own possessions to a band member who needs it food or blankets or other necessities.

Somewhere along the line, status shifted from recognition of what one did for others to the acquisition of property and territory.

The question is whether the Agricultural Revolution led to that shift or resulted from it.

Conventional wisdom is that nomadic bands returning yearly to a campsite would notice seeds thrown out during their previous stay sprouted into crops they could harvest.

Eventually they figured it was better to settle down and stay in one place that guaranteed a safe supply of food rather than roam looking for game and grazing grounds.

Once humans began setting up permanent agrarian villages, the surplus food they raised enabled various specialists – artisans / warriors / bureaucrats – to flourish and thus civilizations were born.

Okay, maybe.

The alternate explanation is that nomads who acquired more goods than they could easily schlep around needed to settle down in fortified communities to protect those goods, and out of necessity turned to agriculture to provide a steady source of food.

Personally, I favor the latter hypothesis.

The idea that a few greedy malcontents would contrive a means of coercing others into providing leisure and comfort for them seems a better explanation of contemporary human culture than a more communal and egalitarian origin mutating into something malevolent.

Whatever the origin, what we now accept as traditional hierarchal society very quickly arose and dominated damn near everything:

1. A ruling elite that could command power by ownership of physical property and the enforced labor of others.

2. A managerial class that made sure everything worked the way the ruling elites wanted it to.

3. A working class that actually supplied the labor to make the things that gave the ruling elite their advantage.

4. An enemy -- foreign or domestic -- to justify the existence of the hierarchy and thus the status of the elite

Within these broad groups were smaller hierarchies, and at the fringes of all could be found outliers and overlappers, but this is the way most of humanity around the world views human society.

© Buzz Dixon

[Part Three]
[Part Four]
[Part Five]