The Art of Not Being Governed

 

James Scott is a political scientist at Yale University, an advocate of anarchy lite — not “smash the state” but “make the state more wise and fair.”  Originally, the ancestors of all humans were wild folks living in sweet freedom on open lands owned by no one.  Then came agriculture, private property, inequality, and the rise of creepy states, in which well-fed rulers exploited mobs of unlucky subjects and slaves.  The Art of Not Being Governed examines the power dramas between free folks and states in Southeast Asia. 

In this region, states first arose in the valleys and lowlands, especially in locations suitable for growing rice in flooded paddies.  Rice produces high yields, but is labor intensive.  Land that is ideal for raising crops only generates wealth when there is an adequate workforce of fairly obedient taxpayers and slaves.  Alas, wading in paddies, in clouds of mosquitoes, baking in the heat, constantly bent over, was not everyone’s idea of a good time.  Persistent misery inspired many non-elites to envision a beautiful alternative — escape!!!  

Most of the landscape surrounding the valley states was mountainous and rugged, unsuited for conventional agriculture, but ideal terrain for state-evading sanctuaries of freedom.  So, the higher elevations were home to small groups of hill people who preferred autonomy to subservience.  They hunted, foraged, and grew food in scattered locations.  Root and tuber foods, like yams, cassava, potatoes, and sweet potatoes, did not ripen at once, or require storage.  They could be left in the ground up to two years, and dug up as needed.  Scattered amidst the natural vegetation, they were not easy for outsiders to discover.

These scattered communities of hill people often had little, if any, contact with outsiders.  Their primary desire was to live in freedom.  All of them were refugees, coming from a diverse mixture of cultural, ethnic, and religious traditions.  Hill folks had no official name, so a scholar invented one.  He called them Zomians, the people of Zomia (highlands).  The numerous remote hill communities that comprised Zomia were widely dispersed across an area the size of Europe.  Zomian groups inhabited a region that spanned across five nations, and four Chinese provinces.  [MAP]

Down in the valleys, the rice producing states were often disrupted by ongoing conflicts and instability.  Scott noted that these states “tended to be remarkably short-lived.”  The lives of subjects and slaves were miserable, which is why they never stopped running off into the hills.  From most rice paddies, the hills of Zomia were always visible.  In a prison without cages or walls, freedom was just a walk away.  Physical flight was the primary check on state power.  It was usually less dangerous than revolt. 

The constant loss of manpower was a serious challenge that required constant efforts to snatch fresh replacements.  Military campaigns brought home prisoners who were forced to begin exciting new careers in slavery.  States often sent slave raiders into the hills of Zomia, in efforts to find free folks and drag them back to the rice paddies.  

Classroom history books focus on stuff like wars, empires, heroes, and progress.  Slavery gets slight mention, if any.  Students will read about classical Greek intellect, art, and architecture; not slavery.  There were times when the population in Athens had five times as many slaves as full citizens.  Around the world, slavery was a standard component of most agriculture-based civilizations, until recently, when mechanization sharply reduced the need for two-legged farm implements.  Your extended family tree likely contains more than a few slaves.  Visit Wikipedia’s article on slavery.  [HERE]

Clive Ponting published an excellent history that focused much attention on how the hungry dirty commoners actually lived, suffered, and died.  He wrote, “Until about the last two centuries in every part of the world nearly everyone lived on the edge of starvation.”  J. R. McNeill noted that in preindustrial times, horses and oxen were often luxuries that were too expensive for poor farmers.  Humans were far more energy efficient than draft animals, and they were capable of performing clever tricks, like digging up spuds, or planting rice.  Having a gang of slaves boosted the net profits for their masters.  Lords adored hoards of gold.

In the hills, Zomians were wizards at utilizing “geographical friction” to make it harder for slave raiders to find them.  Rather than courteously providing their pursuers with smooth well-marked paths, they deliberately preferred to reside in locations that were not highly visible, or easily accessible.  Some locations were perfect for defensive warfare, because they enabled a small number of guardians to block or ambush a larger force of aggressors.  The most secure refuges were places “only accessible to monkeys.”

Geographical friction is an interesting idea.  Our wild ancestors lived in lands where free movement originally had many natural obstacles.  Friction was provided by rugged mountains, swamps, dense jungles, vast deserts, rivers, seas, etc.  Friction hampered the expansion of early states.  It wasn’t quick or easy to suppress a revolt ten miles away.  Friction could be reduced by roads, bridges, boats, beasts of burden, and contraptions with wheels.  Today, far less geographical friction remains.  We have long distance travel via highways, railroads, air travel, and cargo ships.  We can instantly send info anywhere.  Scott refers to these as “distance demolishing technologies.”  With great pride, we have dumped trash on the moon. 

Scott was fascinated by the deep human desire to live in freedom.  Genetically, we are alert and intelligent wild omnivores, not dimwitted feedlot critters, or hive insects.  His discussion of Zomia revealed patterns that parallel a similar downward spiral of trends around the world.  Folks went from nomadic to sedentary, which led to plant and animal domestication, slavery, patriarchy, population growth, perpetual conflict, civilization, industrialization, and our remarkably victorious world war on everything.

For almost the entire human saga, our ancestors enjoyed the freedom of living in small nomadic groups.  Our mental equipment is fine-tuned for this way of life.  The hill people of Zomia focused on equality, autonomy, and mobility.  For them, the concept of “chief” was incomprehensible.  Lads who got too assertive sometimes had to be ethically euthanized, in order to maintain the coherence of the group.  Smooth cooperation worked far better than compulsory obedience to sharp orders from big daddy buttheads. 

Societies took a sharp turn for the worse with the shift toward private property, when the open commons got chopped into chunks of exclusive, inheritable, real estate.  Equality was displaced by hierarchies based on wealth, class, and status.  Social rank was based on wealth.  More was always better.  Strive to climb the social pyramid.  Primary emphasis shifted from “we” to “me.”  It’s like a silly goofy bratty children’s game.

When our wild ancestors evolved in the tropics, food was available year round, nobody owned it, and it was acquired when needed.  Later, when folks colonized temperate regions, food storage was required for winter survival.  This eventually inspired plant and animal domestication, which created food that was owned, and held in concentrated locations — granaries and enslaved herds.  These treasure chests of valuable grain, meat, and muscle power were “appropriable and raidable.”  They provided irresistible temptation to ruthless geeks who were allergic to hard work and honesty.

Indeed, this led to the creation of a new career path.  Stealing food required far less labor than producing it, and raiding was far more adventurous and exciting for adults who had testicles.  At this point, the need to eradicate looters led to the emergence of armed defenders, a military class.  These warriors could also serve as armed aggressors, looting the treasure chests of other communities.  Since then, the military sphere has never stopped growing in size and power. 

With the transition to hierarchy, the old fashioned tradition of mutual support took the back seat to a competition-based, winner take all culture.  When you’re a slave in a rice paddy, and your master is a cruel bastard, and your foreseeable future is perpetual misery, you begin to contemplate the meaning of life.  You can go crazy, you can flee into the hills, or you can float away into magical thinking. 

The hill people were primarily animists.  They enjoyed a life of freedom in places of healthy wild nature.  They developed intimate relationships with the surrounding flora, fauna, and landscape — here and now reality that you could see, touch, and smell.  For them, the living world was spiritually alive.  Directly experiencing this profound coherence did not require imagination or belief.  It was deeply meaningful.

The stressed and oppressed valley people were more inclined to seek solace in salvation religions, primarily Buddhism and Islam.  Christianity arrived more recently.  Slavery was an institution with deep roots in many cultures around the world.  Until recently, salvation religions treated it as normal.  Slaves must be obedient.  What these religions promised was that the sucky life you have today will pass, and your soul will continue its journey forever via reincarnation, or admittance to a beautiful eternal paradise (if you weren’t too naughty).  Religion provided something to hope for, a better future. 

Multinational salvation religions can be practiced anywhere on Earth.  They are highly portable because their focus is on great mysteries.  Worship often takes place inside buildings, shut away from the family of life.  Paradise is somewhere unseen, a faraway realm.  Some preach millenarian visions of a new and enduring era of peace, justice, and prosperity — a miraculous transition that is inevitable, and may arrive soon.  Wickedness will be destroyed, and the righteous will receive their just rewards.

Even though the hill people enjoyed some advantages over the valley slaves, nobody in the realm of Zomia enjoyed a life of bliss.  Hill folks were frequently pursued by hostile outsiders, and valley slaves were frequently abused by their masters.  Many folks passionately dreamed that their painful way of life would somehow someday be completely turned upside down, and then move in a new and better direction. 

Prophets and messiahs often fell out of the sky, describing their divine revelations, fanning the flames of resentment, and triggering thousands of uprisings and rebellions.  Make Zomia great again!  Folks desperate for any possibility of emancipation were vulnerable to the tempting promises of ambitious, slick talking, charismatic blowhards.

Sadly, a better tomorrow missed the bus somewhere down the road.  States got bigger and more powerful, and then they got blindsided by steamroller colonizers from outer space, like the empire-building British, French, and Japanese.  By 1945 it was pretty much bedtime for Zomian freedom.  Variations of this tragic drama took place around much of the world.  Today, virtually all humans are subjects of states.  Fleeing to zones of refuge is nearly impossible.  Tyrants now have fighter jets, helicopters, tanks, missiles, cluster bombs, land mines, drones, satellites.  Good luck with that rebellion. 

Scott laments the outcome.  “The future of our freedom lies in the daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it.”  He says that our best tool for the challenge is representative democracy.  Good luck conjuring virtuous government.  He was writing in 2009, back in the happy days when there were a billion fewer primates on the ark.  More recently, hopping mad, power-hungry, nationalist psychopaths have been popping up in nations all over the place, like mushrooms after an autumn shower. 

Oh wow!  Look!  A pair of 800 pound gorillas has jumped into the brawl — the climate crisis and resource limits — two invincible giants spawned by the unintended consequences of our obsession with idiotic cleverness.  Their plan is to act like bulls in a china shop, and smash up Fantasyland.  This should be interesting.

Scott, James C., The Art of Not Being Governed, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2009.

Wild Free and Happy Sample 52

 

[Note: This is the fifty-second sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you happen to have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.

HUMAN WEBS

The culture we live in is fantastically irrational, burning every bridge it crosses, and then charging forward to rubbish what lies ahead.  Efforts to comprehend reality often result in throbbing headaches.  In the early pages of this book, I mentioned a fundamental question that William Cronon’s father gave him, to help his son navigate the path of life with greater wisdom, “How did things get to be this way?”  Both father and son were history professors.  His question has guided my process of writing this book.

William and John McNeill were another father and son team of historians, and their vision was to write a book that actually answered the question.  William’s 1963 experiment was written in a conventional history textbook style, and was a hefty 829 pages.  John thought a slimmer and slicker book was possible.  He envisioned an unconventional approach, and with a few years of effort the two of them got the job done in 350 pages, The Human Web.

Webs are relationships that link together groups of people that have come into contact with each other.  These meetings encourage exchanges of information.  In ancient times, hunter-gatherers were few in number, and widely dispersed.  Bow and arrow technology somehow spread around the wild and roadless planet, to every continent except Australia.  This was made possible, over the passage of millennia, by the first worldwide web, which remained a loose and informal network.  As wild folks migrated into unknown lands, and encountered new challenges, innovation increased the odds for survival.  Learning the skills used by others could be extremely beneficial.

Then came agriculture.  As farming and herding grew in importance, the human herd also grew.  More and more cities and civilizations mutilated once-healthy ecosystems, filling the land with more and more people.  Strangers from different webs bumped into each other, more and more often.  These random meetings exposed folks to more and more foreign technologies, crops, ideas, goods, and so on.  Over time, regional webs formed, and these often merged with others, forming larger webs.  Webs enabled a wide variety of information to travel to distant lands, where it accumulated, mutated, intermingled, and jumped on the next boat or caravan to elsewhere. 

Eventually, via this process of mergers and acquisitions, the most powerful web of all came into existence around A.D. 200, the Old World Web.  In its early phase, it spanned across North Africa and most of Eurasia.  By 1450, about 75 percent of humans lived within it.  After 1890 it grew explosively.  Today, it has essentially become a single worldwide web that includes most of humankind, from beggars to billionaires.

As professors, the McNeills had a sacred occupational obligation to gush with pride about the wonders of science, technology, progress, and human brilliance.  It’s mandatory that innocent young students be filled with a radicalized blind faith that we’re zooming up the path to a better tomorrow.  At the same time, the McNeills felt a moral obligation to make an embarrassing confession, regarding the dark shadow of brilliance — civilization’s chronic addiction to self-destructive habits.  The amazing consumer wonderland that we live in is only kept on life support by ever-growing complexity made possible by ever-increasing flows of rapidly diminishing non-renewable resources, especially fossil energy — a steep and slippery downhill path to a mangled tomorrow.

More and more, the inflow of strategic resources is getting dodgy.  We are moving at a brisk velocity toward rock solid limits.  Consequently, John regretfully sighed, “the chances of cataclysmic violence seem depressingly good.”  They were writing 20 years ago, back in the happy days when far less was known about methane plumes, melting permafrost, abrupt climate change, and the limits of modern technology to conjure miraculous solutions.

Deep Connection

In prehistoric times, webs were small and simple exchanges between neighboring tribes.  Like all other wild critters, our ancestors were absolutely integrated into the ecosystem around them, to a degree that we can barely imagine today — like your hand is connected to your arm.  The full attention of all their senses was tuned into the sights, sounds, and smells of the surrounding land.  Their world was sacred, spiritually alive, worthy of full respect.

Louis Liebenberg spent lots of time among hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, folks who lived like your ancestors once did.  Today, some experts believe that the ancestors of every living human trace back to their ancient gene pool.  Hunting on the hot, dry Kalahari was challenging.  Some hunters were more skilled than others.  In one group, up to half of the adult men did not kill even one large animal in a year.  Some barely killed any large game during their entire lives.  Reciprocity was the bedrock norm.  Meat was always equally shared with everyone.  Hunters were expected to be humble and gentle.  When a lad had a long lucky streak, he might take some time off — sometimes for weeks or months — to avoid inspiring envy and resentment.

Each band lived within a territory that they considered their hunting grounds.  The boundary lines were not marked, but all the neighboring hunting bands knew where they were, and respected them.  Boundaries reduced the likelihood of friction and conflict.  In drought years, when a hunting ground dried up, the band could shift to the hunting ground of an allied band.  This provided life insurance in a land where precipitation varied from place to place, and year to year.

It’s hard to imagine our ancestors’ extremely intimate connection to place.  Natalie Diaz described this relationship.  In the Mojave culture, there is no separation between me and the place that surrounds me, we are one.  Each person is entirely a living embodiment of the nearby water, air, soil, plants, and animals.  In the Mojave language, the same word is used to express both body and land, because they are the same.  People are buried in the land of their birth, the land of their ancient ancestors, the place where they belong, home sweet home.  Over time, the family of life recycles their corpses, and new beings arise.

You carry yourself much differently when you deeply experience your sacred connection to all that is, and are fully present in a healthy wild ecosystem.  This sense of oneness with life, experienced by our Homo ancestors for more than two million years, has had a substantial influence on the development of what we are as a species.  The mind and body of the amazing critter you see in the mirror was fine-tuned via a very, very long era of successfully living as happy, healthy, brown skinned, curly haired, bare naked, illiterate wild heathens in the tropics. 

We continue to squirt out of the womb with the genes of a Pleistocene tropical primate.  Today’s newborns still expect to open their eyes in a healthy wild world that is filled with abundant life.  They are ready to spend their life’s journey wandering, living in small bands of family and friends, singing under the stars, dining on a generous variety of wild foods.  We only become unstable oddballs when we are born into a dysfunctional society, and have no choice but to learn its ways.

For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to be among small groups of people that we love, respect, and trust.  Cooperation and sharing are what healthy humans naturally do.  We expect to be fondly treated like an equal. 

In modern society, most of us do not spend every day surrounded by an intimate circle of equals.  It is unpleasant being around folks who are self-centered, disrespectful, and exploitive.  We are constantly encouraged by our culture’s thundering jungle drums to live and think like individuals, not sisters and brothers.  The fundamental verb of life is compete.  A primary purpose in life is to climb as high as possible up the pyramid of wealth and power. 

For us, still today, it is comfortable and enjoyable to wander through a forest, gathering mushrooms, berries, and nuts.  It’s healing to watch moonlight rippling on the surface of a wild and isolated lake.  It’s inspiring to feast on the beauty of northern lights in a winter wonderland.

In modern society, eight lane highways filled with speeding motorized wheelchairs seem like horrific glimpses into the rumbling bowels of hell.  Nothing could be more unnatural and traumatizing than living amidst large numbers of strangers, day after day.  We are like zoo inmates surrounded by walls and fences.  John Livingston wrote that lions raised in zoos, under absolute human control, and isolated from wild habitat, go insane.  They are “overfed, graceless, apathetic, almost catatonic.”  No animal was meant to live like this.

Today, our lives are connected to the global economy, industrial civilization, numerous news and entertainment feeds, and necessities produced by perfect strangers in faraway places.  Many of us don’t feel at home in nature.  We live in climate controlled space stations, staring at glowing screens, lonely in a world of billions, clinging to our companion animals.  Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “What can one expect from a man who has spent the last 20 years of his life putting heads on pins?”

Big Fork

John Gowdy put his spotlight on a massive shift in the human saga.  Humans emerged maybe 300,000 years ago, near the end of the Pleistocene epoch.  The Pleistocene was a 2.5 million year era of countless whipsaw climate swings.  Trends could sometimes shift from ice age to tropical in just two centuries.  The pattern changed around 9,700 B.C., with the arrival of the Holocene epoch, a highly unusual and long lasting era of climate stability and warmer temperatures. 

In several regions of the world, this change led to an abundance of wild grain.  For the first time, it became possible for agriculture to be practiced over the span of several thousand years without blast freezer interruptions.  Conditions became suitable for civilization.  Today, as temperature trends swerve toward hothouse, this moderate stable climate is beginning to experience sharp chest pains.  The sun is setting on the Holocene, and shadows are deepening on the future of industrial agriculture, and the billions who depend on it.  Climate change gave birth to our reckless joyride, and climate change will drive an iron stake through its heart.

James Scott focused his research on southern Mesopotamia because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states.  What are states?  They are hierarchical class-based societies, with rulers and tax collectors, built on a foundation of farming and herding.  Taxes were usually paid with grain, which was easier to transport and store than more perishable stuff.  States often had armies, defensive walls, palaces, ritual centers, and slaves.

In Mesopotamia (now Iraq and Kuwait), the transition from wild tribes to states took several thousand years.  By around 12,000 B.C., there is scattered evidence of hunter-gatherers who quit being nomads and settled down in regions having abundant wild foods.  The menu included wild grains and pulses, large herbivores, and wetland wildlife.  Plant and animal domestication began around 9,000 B.C.  Then, it took at least four thousand years (160 generations) before agricultural villages appeared, and then another two thousand years before the first states emerged, around 3,100 B.C. 

States were typically located close to the floodplains of large rivers, places having abundant fertile soil.  They could produce enough grain to feed a pool of laborers.  States had no interest in expanding into less productive lands that couldn’t generate enough wealth to pay the cost of governing them.  Scott noted that as late as A.D. 1600, most humans in the world were still not governed or taxed by any state. 

Over thousands of years, as many groups gradually shifted from wild and free toward a creepy new role as hardworking law-abiding taxpayers, housewives, or slaves, huge social changes took place.  On the other hand, wild humans in the tropics did not have a more-is-better mindset when acquiring plant and animal foods.  They simply took what they immediately needed, always being mindful to avoid overuse of scarce resources.  They lived and thought like a coherent group, not a motley crew of competitive self-centered individuals.  This very long tradition of mutual support strongly influenced the evolution of who we are today.

The important point here is that wild people were free, nobody gave or obeyed orders.  But with the transition to farming and herding, freedom got put on a short leash.  We began living under the firm control of a hierarchy of masters.  Small groups can readily and happily cooperate, but large dense groups tend to generate snarls and sparks.  Crowding overwhelms our Pleistocene minds, generating anxiety, paranoia, rage, depression, and so on.  Naturally, this undermines social tranquility. 

Masters fear disorder, because angry mobs can rip them to pieces.  To prevent this, crowds must be overseen by enforcers.  Rules must be strictly obeyed, and violators punished.  Growing up in civilization, folks have to obey numerous rules decreed by families, schools, religions, businesses, bureaucracies, and so on.  The god words for this way of life include compete, control, and obey.

Most of humankind is now compelled to spend much of their time wandering among mobs of strangers, folks who are not friends or kin.  Some crowded communities are ruled by violent gangs, ideological fanatics, or the chaotic whims of fate.  Others have law and order, tolerable rules, and sufficient enforcement — the preferred option for those who must live in Strangerland.

Livingston wrote that many endure the numbing conformity of Strangerland by choosing the safe and easy path of docility.  Rules are good tools for controlling people, but beliefs are sometimes even better.  When properly programmed by an ideology, our behavior can be largely manipulated by an autopilot of beliefs, like a self-driving robo-car.  Believers passively accept control from their superiors, and leap to their feet and when der Führer calls.

Because we excel at herd-like followership and self-deception, it’s easy to be swept away by trendy fads or bloody gangsters.  Leni Riefenstahl filmed Triumph of the Will, a haunting documentary on the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, which starred 700,000 Nazi supporters.  Scene after scene shows streets jammed with folks in crisp new uniforms, marching in orderly rows.  Today, with the benefit of highly advanced communication systems, charismatic hucksters, sorcerers, and lunatics can entrance large mobs of naive believers in many locations at the same time. 

Carl Jung lived through the whirlwinds of death and destruction during two world wars.  This was an ideal time to become a psychotherapist.  Mobs bring out the worst in us, creating ideal conditions for devastating psychic epidemics.  “The larger the number of people involved in an action, the greater the propensity towards mindlessness and barbarism.”  Huge growing crowds jammed together in big cities encouraged what Jung called the insectification of humankind.  People were at risk of “complete atomization into nothingness, or into meaninglessness.  Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” 

Mesopotamian Web

Sometime before 3,000 B.C., the first state-based civilization emerged in Sumer, located in southern Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers approach the Persian Gulf, and empty into it.  This civilization developed the cultural DNA for the Mesopotamian web, which eventually metastasized into the Old World Web by around A.D. 200.  Today, the Old World Web dominates the whole planet, providing the thundering drumbeat for the global economy and industrial civilization.  Sumer initially lit the fuse. 

Abdullah Öcalan is a Kurdish political scientist (and political prisoner).  He wrote about the history of Mesopotamia, his ancestral homeland.  Sumerian civilization established or advanced many unusual experiments, including agriculture, herding, patriarchy, slavery, irrigation, deforestation, metallurgy, etc.  The ability to produce surplus food enabled some folks to indulge in specialized pursuits — merchants, potters, smiths, miners, leather workers, fishermen, bricklayers, weavers, scribes, and so on. 

Sumer’s inventions include the calendar, writing, mathematics, astrology, and prostitution.  Women took a distant second place in the gender hierarchy.  The traditional animism of wild folks was displaced by new forms of religion, first pantheism (multiple gods and goddesses), and later monotheism (one male god).  Öcalan wrote that today’s mosques, churches, synagogues, and universities have their roots in Mesopotamian ziggurats (temples). 

The McNeills noted that these ziggurats, constructed with millions of mud bricks, were the most conspicuous buildings in cities (like many of our jumbo sized capitol buildings and worship centers).  At the time, they were the biggest manmade structures in the world.  Ziggurats were monuments built to pay honor to deities.  In the good old days, all gods were local, each city had one or more.  Religions were local too.  Gods were twitchy scary rascals who sometimes made believers fat and happy, and other times sent plagues, locusts, famines, floods, fires, and other assorted miseries to slap them down, or rub them out. 

In order to discourage divine fury, cities built super-duper temples to flatter their gods’ fragile egos.  Benefits, if any, were temporary.  The ziggurats are long gone, and their gods abandoned.  In Babylon, the legendary Tower of Babel was built as tall as possible, which oddly pissed off their temperamental god, who saw it as an outrageous act of blasphemy that required strong punishment.  Some think the Babel legend was inspired by the ziggurat of Marduk (Babylon’s god), which certainly existed.

Babel is the Hebrew word for Babylon, a city on the Euphrates in northern Mesopotamia.  Let’s take a quick side trip here.  In maybe 586 B.C., Babylon’s famous ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, captured Jerusalem, destroyed their temple, and led the Jews away to a less than pleasurable exile in Babylon.  The Jews brought with them their scrolls of sacred scriptures, and this sparked a historic event — the creation of the first portable religion.  They were living and worshipping in a place that was far from their holy land.  The portability enabled by written scriptures made multinational religions possible — believers could establish congregations anywhere in the world.

In Babylon, congregations of Jewish men and women gathered for weekly meetings to spend time with a rabbi who discussed the sacred scriptures.  This preserved their cultural identity, and allowed them to remain distinct.  They did not melt into Babylonian society.  Congregational religions were another innovation from this era.  The McNeills wrote that this put Jews on the path to monotheism.  If the deity of Jerusalem could be worshipped in Babylon, then he could also be worshipped in Egypt or Lebanon.  One god fits all… everywhere.

As centuries passed, cities, civilizations, and empires grew.  In them, numerous competing variations of congregational religions provided solace to the huddled masses of Strangerland.  They enabled city dwellers to be among like-minded people with familiar faces, to benefit from friendship and mutual support, and to righteously snort and sneer at local heretics and infidels.  Urban populations lacked the intimate sense of community found in village life, or tribal life.  Congregations provided some pain relief, a sense of meaning and belonging.

Patriarchy

Öcalan presented a different perspective on the birth of monotheism.  Long, long ago, Babylon was home to a minor league god named Marduk.  Eventually, he rose to prominence after mercilessly slaughtering the primordial sea-serpent goddess, Tiamat (the female principle), and creating the world with her body.  Marduk (the male principle) then created humans, to take care of the daily dirty work as servants and slaves, freeing the gods to enjoy a decadent life of leisure and debauchery.

Marduk could be helpful or brutal, depending on his mood.  Over time, he became the supreme deity, and gained the title Bel (Lord).  In Babylon, he was astrologically associated with the jumbo planet we now call Jupiter.  Over time, this Mesopotamian web spread into new regions.  In Greece, the top god Zeus was also associated with Jupiter.  When it eventually got to Rome, their highest god was actually named Jupiter. 

What was happening here was a huge revolutionary transition in the human saga, from the Stone Age to the Neolithic era (the new stone age), when folks shifted from hunting and foraging to farming and herding.  The Neolithic first arose in Mesopotamia.  Then, the highly contagious culture spread to North Africa, India, China, the Danube region, southwest Europe, and elsewhere.  It matured into a culture of civilization, food production, slavery, patriarchy, growth mania, and so on.

In wild webs, bands of hunter-gatherers lived via cooperation.  In the Mesopotamian web, workers, housewives, and slaves were obligated to submit to the control of their assorted masters.  Top level masters (kings, emperors, etc.) were mortal patriarchs who had an expiration date.  Upon death, a new master had to take his place.  Sometimes the transfer of power was smooth, and other times it sparked fury.

Monotheism’s deity, Big Daddy, was immortal, invisible, and divine — the supreme master, who endured the passage of centuries, and the rise and fall of mortal rulers.  His rules were the highest ones.  They were permanent, and disobedience was dangerous and stupid.  God must be feared.  The invisible Big Daddy watches everything you do, and knows your every thought.  We behave differently when someone is watching us, and we experience guilt, shame, and paranoia when our minds are being read.  This submission to multiple layers of masters and rules was the oxygen that kept civilization on life support. 

In his pro-feminist writing, Öcalan wrote, “The 5,000 year history of civilization is essentially the history of the enslavement of women.”  Prior to 2000 B.C., the woman-mother culture strongly influenced Sumerian civilization, and the two sexes were fairly equal (no shaming of women).  Over time, the warrior class encouraged a strongman cult that came to dominate religion.  The creator of heaven and Earth was male (Marduk).  “So radical was this sexual rupture, that it resulted in the most significant change in social life that history has ever seen.”

This led to the “housewifization” of women, a sharp demotion.  Their new role was to sit at home, and faithfully obey their husbands.  Chastity became mandatory, in order to guarantee the genuine paternity of daddy’s children, so that only his true sons would rightfully inherit his wealth.  It was vital that young women remain virgins prior to marrying their master.

[Continued in sample 53]

 

A History of the Swedish People



Vilhelm Moberg was born in 1898, in a remote village where remnants of the peasant way of life persisted.  He wrote A History of the Swedish People, which spanned two volumes: (1) before the Renaissance, and (2) after.  Moberg’s writing has been translated into 20 languages, and Swedes have bought six million copies of his books.  Most histories focus on the big shots, the decision makers, the conquerors, the villains.  His work focuses on the nameless people that historians disregard: the common folks, the salt of the Earth.  I like that.

In this spirit, chapter one is a discussion of slavery, which existed for several thousand years.  Bondsmen (slaves) have been invisible in Swedish history, because textbooks are obligated to focus on the patriotic glories, and step around the embarrassing dreck.  Bondsmen could be bought, sold, given way, or killed.  Throughout his life, Moberg was devoted to the notion of freedom.  He estimated that in the eleventh century, twenty percent of the population was bondsmen.  The rest of the book is devoted to the commoners who were freeborn, the rugged peasantry who worked hard to survive in the forests of Sweden, and were the majority of the population.

In most other European nations, peasants were not free.  They suffered for centuries under the heavy fist of feudalism.  They inhabited lands crisscrossed with roads, which enabled the nobility to snatch the fruits of their toil and keep them under control.  The main exceptions were Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland, where the peasants escaped serfdom.  The Swiss, surrounded by powerful enemies, were protected by the Alps.  The Norse and Swedes were protected by their vast rugged forests.  As long as the forests survived and remained roadless, the people were much safer.

In several European languages, the words for “road” and “raid” evolved from a common root.  Romans built many roads for the expansion and management of their empire.  Later, those same roads made it easier for scruffy outsiders to rubbish their empire and loot their booty.  In Roman times, the wild German tribes were also fiercely warlike, but their goal was not conquest and expansion.  Their goal was to keep outsiders out, homeland security.  Caesar noted, “It is the greatest pride of the Germanic tribes to surround themselves with broad desolate frontier regions.”  Frontier forests were buffer zones that were kept untilled and uninhabited.

In the dense roadless forests of Sweden, invaders soon became perfectly lost.  It was terrifying.  Behind any bush might be a man with a crossbow.  The forest people knew every rock, hill, and cranny in the woods.  They could pick the ideal time and place to strike.  When attack was unwise, they vanished and waited patiently for fresh opportunities.

Over the centuries, Swedes adapted well to forest life.  In addition to fishing, foraging, and hunting, they farmed on a small scale.  Livestock was their primary resource, providing them with meat, milk, butter, cheese, hides, and wool.  The forest was common land owned by no one.  A Swedish proverb declares, “The forest grows as well for the poor as for the rich.”  It was the poor man’s garden.  Forest dwellers often lived in isolation, with few neighbors to rely on.

Moberg devoted an entire chapter to his love for the forest wonderland in which he grew up.  In his strict rural Lutheran village, good and bad were sharply defined.  Where others could see him, little Vilhelm had to behave properly, to avoid criticism.  In the forest, he was free.  He could hide where no one would see him, and behave any way he liked.  He was happier as a child in the forest than in any other place in his life.

In pagan times there were festivals in which stallions, bulls, billy-goats, cocks, and humans were sacrificed to the gods.  One observer recorded details about the annual ceremony at Uppsala.  Next to the temple was a sacred grove, where the corpses of up to 200 sacrificed men and beasts hung from the trees.  The sacrificial humans included criminals, infirm old men, foreigners, bondsmen, and prisoners.

The Vikings were possessed with an insatiable hunger for the valuables belonging to others.  They enjoyed cruising along coasts and rivers and raiding Christian towns and villages — peaceful settlements with which they had no disputes.  Vikings were extraordinarily cruel and inhuman, and they fought with pure fury.  Vikings ravaged Europe from 800 to 1050.

Sweden’s conversion to Christianity was slow and bloody.  The Asa people (pagans) were open minded, and they worshipped many gods and goddesses.  Deities that brought good harvests, weather, and health were honored, and bummer gods were tossed on the compost pile.  When foreign missionaries suggested worshipping a new one, they were willing to give him a try.  The pagans were open minded, but the missionaries were not.  Naturally, the Swedes were not delighted to be told that all their ancient beliefs were wrong and evil.  Commonly, after the missionaries had moved on to convert others, the newly baptized folks returned to the faith of their ancestors.

It took 300 years to convert the small population of Swedes.  In 1122, Småland was last region to be converted.  The chronicle reads: “King Sigurd set his course for a trading city called Kalmar, which he laid waste, and thereafter ravaged Småland, exacting from the Smålanders a tribute of fifteen hundred beasts; and the Smålanders accepted Christianity.”  This slaughter was called the Kalmar Raid.  Sigurd returned to Norway laden with loot.  In some regions, Swedes continued to secretly practice pagan rituals into the seventeenth century.

Later, Christian Swedes decided to teach the Finns about the Prince of Peace.  King Erik offered the Finns peace on condition they let themselves be baptized and adopt the Christian faith, but they turned down his offer.  So the Finns were massacred.  “After the struggle was over the king walked about the battlefield among the masses of the fallen heathen and was so deeply moved by the sight of their corpses that he wept.”

Moberg had deep appreciation for the 5,000-year era of Swedish peasants, which was approaching extinction by 1900, displaced by the hideous rise of industrialism and urbanization.  Ancient farms and villages were being abandoned, returning to forest.  Growing numbers of weird and spooky human-like beings, known as Consumers, were wandering into peasant country from Stockholm, and other insane asylums.

Rural peasants were the last full-blooded individualists; each one was personally unique, warts and all.  They were highly attuned to the ecosystem that had been their ancestors’ home for centuries, and they had little contact with outsiders, or their peculiar ideas.  The Consumers were rootless tumbleweeds who dressed alike, smelled alike, thought alike, and lived alike — the standardized outputs of a mass culture.

Peasants spent a lot of time with each other, gathered around the hearth fire.  Folks did handiwork — spinning, weaving, carving, and so on.  Elders shared stories and memories.  The daily lives of peasants were spent in intimate contact with the magic, mystery, and beauty of wild nature, which is essential for wellbeing.  Consumers would suffer panic attacks if forced to live in a medieval cottage — no lights, TV, radio, internet, books, running water, toilet.  Here’s Moberg’s punch line: “Instead of the things they lacked, medieval people had others, which we have lost.”  They enjoyed good old fashioned community.

The book goes on to discuss many other topics.  It interested me because my mother’s family has Norwegian roots.  The Norse and Swedes are closely related.  I’ve been reluctant to review this book, because it’s not about ecological sustainability.  But it does discuss subjects that are both interesting, and rarely mentioned.  So, I turned to a number of other sources to look for the missing eco-info.

Like the wild Irish, British, and Germanic tribes, Scandinavians shifted from hunting, fishing, and foraging, moving toward small scale pastoralism and farming in forest clearings.  This encouraged conflicts with wild critters, who were thrilled to feast on the delicious offerings of rye, oats, calves, poultry, sheep, and so on.  Nature became an enemy.  The peasant lads fetched their war paint.

By 1870, wild boars, aurochs (wild cattle), and beavers were extinct in Sweden, and red deer and moose were getting close.  By the mid-1900s, the wolf population was zero.  Later, some beavers (from Canada), boars, and wolves were reintroduced, or wandered in from elsewhere.  To this day, the eternal peasant’s war on wolves continues in Sweden, Norway, and Finland — three of the most “eco-progressive” societies in Christendom.

Oddest of all, in Moberg’s celebration of the common folk of Sweden, he made no mention of the Sami people, the wild hunter-gatherers who have been harshly abused and exploited by the civilized racist settlers for several centuries.  New research is discovering that the Sami people inhabited large portions of Scandinavia long before the Nordic (Germanic) pastoralists arrived.  Sami lived as far south as Hadeland in Norway, not far from Oslo, one of my ancestral homelands.

Genetic data has linked the modern Sami to the first humans who wandered into Scandinavia more than 10,000 years ago.  They have been in Sweden much longer than the Swedes.  The Sami homeland is known as Sápmi, and it spans large areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia.  Sami have another name, Lapp, which some do not like.

Moberg, Vilhelm, A History of the Swedish People, Pantheon Books, New York, 1973.

To learn more about Sami and reindeer, four nice essays are [HERE]

Lapps and Labyrinths, an excellent 2010 book on the Sami, by archaeologist Noel Broadbent, can be purchased from Amazon ($$$), or downloaded free [HERE]

 

Germs Seeds and Animals



In history classes, students struggle to memorize and regurgitate the names, dates, and places essential to our glorious myth — the sacred journey that brought us to the miracle of today.  For many, this parade of dusty factoids is the story they will believe for the rest of their days.  What I was taught about Christopher Columbus resembled a kindergarten fairy tale — the courageous hero succeeds.  Hooray!

The last 50+ years have released a flash flood of important new information.  Our planet is being disemboweled by seven-point-something billion humans racing down a hell-bound path for no good reason.  Alfred Crosby was an important pioneer in the field of environmental history.  In his book, Germs, Seeds, and Animals, Crosby described how the Columbus voyage of 1492 detonated a global ecological catastrophe.  It was a monumental event in the human saga, something like an asteroid strike.

When the Pilgrims washed ashore at Plymouth Rock in 1620, they were not immediately exterminated by Wampanoag warriors, because the tribe was nearly extinct.  Smallpox got there first.  Pilgrims found an empty village surrounded by cornfields full of weeds.  During the first winter, half of the colonists died from malnutrition, exhaustion, and exposure.  They knew almost nothing about surviving in a foreign ecosystem.  Pilgrims struggled to survive on shellfish, and on corn (maize) that was bought or stolen from the Indians.  It wasn’t until 1624 that they figured out how to live on their own.

Native Americans were spooked by the freaky aliens.  Everyone around them was dead or dying, while none of the aliens were molested by evil spirits.  Deadly diseases, especially smallpox, spread from tribe to tribe, across vast regions, well in advance of explorers and settlers.  Natives could have easily exterminated the Pilgrims, but they were fearful of their horrific dark powers.  Without smallpox, history could have taken a radically different path.

The Pilgrims came from a densely populated civilization that had transformed its thriving rainforest into fields, pastures, and disease-ridden cities.  In Europe, smallpox had raged for centuries.  Around 1500, the virus mutated into a far more virulent form, killing many children in cities near the Atlantic coast of Europe.  Folks who survived to adulthood were those lucky to have unusually robust immune systems.  It was these folks who carried smallpox to the New World in 1518, where it killed up to half of those infected.  The virus could unintentionally be transported via a trunk of clothing.  Human-to-human contact was not needed.

In an era of long distance sea travel, ships often returned to Europe with new and exciting diseases from every corner of the Old World.  Many deadly diseases originated in domesticated animals, with whom Old World people often lived in close contact.  A number of livestock pathogens were able to transfer to human hosts.  These germs especially loved infecting dense crowds in filthy cities.  Epidemics of assorted diseases bounced from region to region on a regular basis.  Native Americans, who did not enslave herds of animals, had only two indigenous pathogens, Chagas’s disease and Carrion’s disease.

Spaniards documented the die-off in Mesoamerica (Aztecs) and Peru (Incas), where 90 percent of the Native Americans were dead within a century.  In these cooler highland regions, folks died from temperate diseases, primarily smallpox, measles, whooping cough, and pneumonia.  In the hot, wet coastal lowlands, people not only died from temperate diseases, but also tropical diseases, like malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and amoebic dysentery.  Around 1590, an observer estimated that 29 of every 30 lowland natives had perished from disease.  As a special bonus, Europeans also brought chicken pox, typhus, typhoid fever, bubonic plague, cholera, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and influenza.

To this day, Old World diseases continue killing natives who come into contact with outsiders for the first time — missionaries, loggers, miners, etc.  By far, the primary reason Europeans conquered the Americas was disease.  I was surprised to learn that Europeans did not intend to exterminate the natives and replace them with settlers.  Colonists suffered from get rich quick fever, and the fast path to wealth was to control and exploit multitudes of Indians.

Unfortunately, the native workers rapidly died from disease, malnutrition, and abuse.  This labor shortage inspired a rapid expansion of the highly profitable slave trade.  Africans were less vulnerable to the tropical diseases, for which white folks were helpless sitting ducks.  At least ten million slaves arrived alive in America.  Millions more perished before setting foot ashore.  Once here, their death rate was higher than births, which kept the slave industry booming.

Old World livestock thrived in the New World.  The new ecosystem had abundant vegetation, was free from Old World pathogens and parasites, and wild predators were not a serious threat.  Animals grew faster and larger, and had more offspring.  On the pampa of South America, where few humans lived, feral horses and cattle multiplied into huge populations — they had no buffalo to compete with.

Corn (maize) was a super-productive crop.  Sowing a bushel of wheat might yield 12 to 20 bushels at harvest time.  A bushel of corn might yield 200 bushels or more.  Corn could be grown using simple tools and unskilled labor.  It could be grown on marginal soils, required minimal weeding, and could survive several frosts.  It stored well.  Husks discouraged losses to birds.  When mature, ears could be left on the stalk and harvested later, without risk of spoilage.

Settlers in America were far better nourished than the sickly mobs of Europe.  Most lived in rural areas, in low density, which discouraged epidemics.  They bred like crazy, and many of their kiddies survived to adulthood.  Folks had access to abundant land for expansion.  By 1775, the U.S. population was doubling every 25 years.  In 1790, half of Americans were younger than 16 years old.

Meanwhile, Europeans took corn, potatoes, and treasure back to the Old World, where they blindsided almost everything.  Corn became a staple in southern Europe.  For many folks, it was their primary food.  Because it lacks the essential nutrient niacin, many poor folks came down with pellagra.  Around the world, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands died from pellagra.  The simple cure was a slightly better diet.

Potatoes were widely adopted in northern Europe, where they produced far more nutrients per area than traditional grain crops, which were vulnerable to molds, fungus, and cool weather.  A family of five could survive on 5 acres (2 ha) of grain, or just 1.5 acres of potatoes.  Folks remained healthy on a daily diet of 11 pounds (5 kg) of potatoes and some milk (another source said 10 pounds).  Potatoes contained vitamin C, so far fewer died from scurvy during winter months.  Farmers could raise them on marginal soils, using only a spade.  In wartime, invaders could easily steal stored grain, but buried spuds were often too much effort to swipe, so fewer farmers starved.

Gold, silver, and gems were hauled back to Europe.  This provided a flash flood of new wealth, which greatly expanded the global economy.  Manufactured stuff went to the New World, and resources sailed back to Europe.  The wealth surge provided the capital needed to jump start the Industrial Revolution. 

Because potatoes and corn were highly productive, less cropland was needed.  So, many peasants were forced off the land, to make room for sheep, which generated more profit.  Mobs of displaced people migrated into cities, where they provided cheap labor for industry.  After the 1666 epidemic in London, the plague largely went dormant in Europe.  This spurred population growth, which intensified urban filth, and provided ideal conditions for the cholera epidemic that arrived in 1829.

Aided by potatoes and corn, both Europe and America were able to harvest far more food.  People were better nourished, so child mortality dropped.  The population of Europe leaped from 80 million in 1492, to 180 million in 1800, and 390 million in 1900.  Europe was bursting with people, and many migrated to colonies — Australia, New Zealand, southern Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Canada, and the U.S.  Bottom line, world population leaped from 450 million in 1500 to 7.5 billion in 2018.

Crosby concluded that Columbus sparked “the greatest demographic catastrophe in the human record.”  “The encounter may have been the most influential event on this planet since the retreat of the continental glaciers.”  “Calories can make as much history as cannons — more in the long run.” 

Crosby, Alfred W.  Germs, Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History, M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York, 1994.

Other Crosby books I’ve reviewed are Children of the Sun, and Throwing Fire.

Against the Grain



James C. Scott teaches political science and anthropology at Yale.  He’s a smooth writer and a deep thinker.  A while back, he decided to update two lectures on agrarian societies that he had been giving for 20 years.  He began studying recent research and — gasp! — realized that significant portions of traditional textbook history had the strong odor of moldy cultural myths.  So, a quick update project turned into five years, and resulted in a manuscript that I found to be remarkably stimulating, from cover to cover —  Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

While the human saga is several million years old, and Homo sapiens appeared on the stage maybe 200,000 years ago, the origin myth I was taught began just 10,000 years ago, with domestication and civilization.  We were transformed from hungry, dirty, dolts into brilliant philosophers, scientists, and artists, who lived indoors, wore cool clothes, and owned lots of slaves.

As a curious animal interested in ecological sustainability, I’m amazed that every other animal species has, for millions of years, lived on this planet without destabilizing the climate, spurring mass extinctions, poisoning everything, and generally beating the <bleep> out of the planet.  These are the unintended consequences of our reckless joyride in a hotrod of turbocharged progress.  They define the primary aspects of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the era when tropical primates with huge throbbing brains left permanent scars on the planet.

Experts argue about when the Anthropocene began.  Did it start with the sorcery of nuclear fission, or the curse of fossil-powered industry?  Many point to the domestication of plants and animals, and the birth of civilization.  Scott is among the few who say it began with the domestication of fire, which occurred at least 400,000 years ago, sparked by our Homo erectus ancestors.  Every other species continues to survive via the original power source, the sun’s wildfire.  Plants grow green solar panels that produce the nutrients that keep the fauna alive and happy, a perfectly brilliant design.

Imagine waving a magic wand, and eliminating everything in the world made possible by domesticated fire — no metal, no concrete, no plastic, no glowing screens.  Would humans still be around?  Fire historian Stephen Pyne concluded, “Without fire humanity sinks to a status of near helplessness.”  We wouldn’t be able to survive outside the tropics.  The plant and animal species that enabled civilization lived north of the tropics (see THIS).  Without domesticated fire, we’d still be wild and free — and far less crowded.

Scott focused on southern Mesopotamia, because it was the birthplace of the earliest genuine states.  What are states?  They are hierarchical societies, with rulers and tax collectors, rooted in a mix of farming and herding.  The primary food of almost every early state was wheat, barley, or rice.  Taxes were paid with grain, which was easier to harvest, transport, and store than yams or breadfruit.  States often had armies, defensive walls, palaces or ritual centers, slaves, and maybe a king or queen.

The moldy myths imply that domesticated plants and animals, sedentary communities, and fixed-field agriculture emerged in a close sequence.  Wrong!  There is scattered evidence of sedentary hunter-gatherers by 12,000 B.C.  Domestication began around 9000 B.C.  It took at least four thousand years (160 generations!) before agricultural villages appeared, and then another two thousand years before the first states emerged, around 3100 B.C.

Moldy myths assume that the Fertile Crescent has been a desert since humans first arrived.  Wrong!  Southern Mesopotamia used to be wetlands, a cornucopia of wild foods, a paradise for hunters and gatherers.  There was so much to eat that it was possible to quit wandering and live in settled communities.  “Edible plants included club rush, cattails, water lily, and bulrush.  They ate tortoises, fish, mollusks, crustaceans, birds, waterfowl, small mammals, and migrating gazelles.”  In a land of abundance, it would have been absolutely stupid to pursue the backbreaking drudgery of agriculture.

Moldy myths often give us the “backs-to-the-wall” explanation for the shift to agriculture, which was far more work.  Simply, we had run out of new alternatives for feeding a growing mob, while hunting was producing less meat, and wild plants were producing less food.  We had no choice!  But in the Middle East, there appears to be no firm evidence associating early cultivation with the decline of either game animals or forage. 

Cultivation seems to have emerged in regions of abundance, not scarcity.  Every year, floods deposited silt along the riverbanks, moist fertile soil ready for sowing.  So, flood-retreat farming would have required far less toil than tilling fields, while producing useful nutrients.  More nutrients enabled further population growth, which eventually pressed the shift to miserable labor-intensive irrigated agriculture.

The root of “domestication” is “domus” (the household).  In early Mesopotamia, “the domus was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields, seed and grain stores, people, and domestic animals, all coevolving with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen.”  As a result of living on the domus, animals (including humans) were changed, both physically and behaviorally.  In this process, wild species became domesticated.  Over time, some species became “fully domesticated” — genetically altered, entirely dependent on humans for their survival.  Domestication was also about deliberate control over reproduction, which “applied not only to fire, plants, and animals but also to slaves, state subjects, and women in the patriarchal family.”

Domesticated sheep have brains 24 percent smaller than their wild ancestors.  Pig brains are a third smaller.  Protected from predators, regularly fed, with restricted freedom of movement, they became less alert, less anxious, less aggressive — pudgy passive dimwit meatballs.  They reached reproductive age sooner, and produced far more offspring.

“The multispecies resettlement camp was, then, not only a historic assemblage of mammals in numbers and proximity never previously known, but it was also an assembly of all the bacteria, protozoa, helminthes, and viruses that fed on them.”  The domus was a magnet for uninvited guests: fleas, ticks, leeches, mosquitoes, lice, and mites.  Unnatural crowds of animals spent their lives walking around in poop, and drinking dirty water.  It was a devilishly brilliant incubator for infectious diseases.  Humans share a large number of diseases with other domus animals, including poultry (26), rats and mice (32), horses (35), pigs (42), sheep and goats (46), cattle (50), and dogs (65).

Other writers have noted that, prior to contact, Native Americans had no epidemic diseases.  With very few domesticated animals, they lacked state of the art disease incubators.  Scott goes one step further, asserting that prior to the domus, there was little or no epidemic disease in the Old World.  “The importance of sedentism and the crowding it allowed can hardly be overestimated. It means that virtually all the infectious diseases due to microorganisms specifically adapted to Homo sapiens came into existence only in the past ten thousand years, many of them perhaps only in the past five thousand.”  Thus, the humans that first crossed from Siberia to North America 13,000 years ago were free of disease because little or no infectious disease existed anywhere in the world!

Dense monocultures of plants also begged for trouble.  “Crops not only are threatened, as are humans, with bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases, but they face a host of predators large and small — snails, slugs, insects, birds, rodents, and other mammals, as well as a large variety of evolving weeds that compete with the cultivar for nutrition, water, light, and space.”  Once harvested and stored in the granary, grain could be lost to weevils, rodents, and fungi.  The biggest vulnerability of states was that they were almost entirely dependent on a single annual harvest of one or two staple grains.  Crops could be wiped out by drought, flood, pests, storm damage, or crop diseases.

Mesopotamian life was largely human powered.  Workers grew the grain that the tax man hauled away to the plump elites.  More workers meant more wealth and power for the big shots.  In screw-brained hierarchical cultures (including ours), it’s impossible to have too much wealth.  Therefore, peasants and slaves were husbanded like livestock.  The diabolical “more is better” disease was devastating.  Some believe that monumental walls were built as much for defense as to prevent taxpayers and slaves from escaping to freedom.

Early states were vulnerable in many ways, and they frequently collapsed.  Collapse sounds like a tragedy.  But it could simply mean breaking up into smaller components.  Larger was not necessarily better.  A drought might cause a state’s population to disperse.  For the non-elites, life in a Mesopotamian state could be oppressive and miserable.  Sometimes, collapse was a cause for celebration.  Yippee!

Anyway, the book is fascinating.  Readers also learn about the tax game, the vital slave industry, trade networks, deforestation, erosion, soil salinization, irrigation, looting and raiding, mass escapes of workers, the challenges and benefits of being surrounded by large numbers of aggressive nomadic herders, and on and on.  It’s an outstanding book!

WARNING:  The expensive Kindle edition contains numerous charts, maps, and diagrams.  When downloaded to the Kindle for PC application (v 1.20.1), most are unreadably small, even on a 24” monitor.  Clever nerds can tediously capture the images to another application, expand them, and read them.  Strong reading glasses (3.75 lens or higher) also work with a big monitor.

Scott, James C., Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2017. 

Four Domestications is a free PDF download, the 48-page text of a lecture Scott gave at Harvard.  It includes some of the foundation ideas for his new book.

Seeing Like a State is a free PDF download of Scott’s 1998 book, a companion for his new book.