Читать книгу Muddling Toward Frugality - Warren Johnson - Страница 15

We are familiar with the achievements of the earliest civilizations which emerged after 4000 B.C. When one kingdom succeeded in conquering a number of others in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, vast surpluses could be brought together in one spot. With threatening armies largely destroyed or incorporated under one king, these surpluses could safely be diverted to other purposes, such as architecture, public administration, metallurgy, expanded irrigation systems, trade, as well as the arts and sciences. Success bred more success; each development increased the power and prestige of the ruler; patronage of the intellectual elite paid off as it has ever since. The ruler had all sorts of positive incentives to maintain a bone-crushing level of oppression and to take as much as he could from the farmers and artisans. In some favored areas, the surpluses grew so large that monumental structures such as the Pyramids, the Tower of Babel, and the Great Wall of China could be built.

It was an age of excess not unlike the early Industrial Revolution. Self-centered individualism was the style of the powerful, and the common people had little choice but to get by as well as they could. In both periods, the amount of work accomplished boggles the mind, especially given the primitive tools used. There was no effective restraining force on the powerful, who could coerce the weak into doing whatever was wanted. In both eras, work was turned into a tribulation. It was long and tedious and provided little beyond subsistence. And there was no incentive to share as there had been among hunting peoples.

Following the invention of agriculture and the appearance of the first civilizations, the empires grew one after another as the balance of power shifted: Sumeria, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. And even though the records of the small, peaceful groups of people who were overrun by the conquerors are virtually nonexistent (only the Jews have preserved much of the history of their experiences under the Roman occupation), there can be little doubt that it was a hard time. Slavery was the rule in the capitals of the empires. The main alternative was to become a soldier, which enabled a slave who played the ruler’s game to move upward and improve his status.

There is little doubt that all through the early civilizations there must have been efforts to make life better for the common people, but these efforts were probably not effective enough to overcome the very clear advantages that accrued to rulers who maintained their power by taking as much as possible from the people under their sway. To rationalize their behavior, rulers could point to the unstable balance of power between opposing empires and say that a country’s whole oppressive system was necessary to preserve its subject from other military powers (an analogy with the present). Yet, culture slowly did achieve a basis on which to restrain the exploitation of the common people by rulers, and it probably came through the moderating force of religion.

The sixth century B.C. was a remarkable century in retrospect; it was a period of time that produced a large percentage of the world’s great religious figures: Buddha, Confucius, Laotze, Zoroaster, and the last of the major prophets of Israel. It is this very confluence that suggests that after a long struggle, the tide had finally begun to turn against exploitation. For to restrain rulers, religion not only had to threaten them with the punishment of hell, or something similar, it also had to achieve its effects over large areas at roughly the same time so as to maintain political and military equilibrium.

The military leaders were not likely to be the types to tremble at the thought of a penalty in the afterlife; still, they could not know for sure. Further, if new religious beliefs were being widely accepted and the ruler refused to accept them or tried to repress them, then he had to face the prospect of a populace broadly opposed to him and so risk rebellion. The wiser course of action seemed to be to accept the religion, especially if traditional enemies were becoming less dangerous because of the spread of religion as well, and to try and turn it to advantage. Religion became part of a ruler’s strategy for maintaining political control. At least it allowed into politics the restraining force of religious ethics.

Today, government and business compete for the right to organize society—as pure capitalism or pure socialism; in the past, government and religion competed for ascendency. The best situation seems to be when the two opposing forces are equally powerful, and both have to act with care and discretion in order to maintain public support for what they do. Religion constricted the absolute authority of monarchs and forced them to worry about public opinion; they were no longer free to do only what was in their own best interests. Religion maintained its public base by looking out for the interests of the common people, providing for their well-being and enriching their lives, while trying to stay in the good graces of the ruler. It could be an awkward position, but it did serve to integrate society. For example, during the later Dark Ages the Catholic church conferred on rulers the divine right of kings in return for the king’s acceptance of the moral requirements of the church, a state of affairs that was successful in maintaining a balance of power for centuries until the times of Henry VIII and the Reformation.

As the role of religion in cultural evolution expanded, the nature of the world’s cultures changed too. They not only became richer and more complex, but very diverse as well, as they evolved in different ways in different environments. The Aryan invaders, who conquered India some two thousand years before Christ and set up a caste system to maintain their dominant position, saw India evolve in a distinctly Eastern way. Its resistance to invaders became insignificant, but its culture was powerful enough to absorb conquerors into the ongoing life in India. In China, the system of manners and morals that Confucius established contributed to a culture that maintained its continuity longer than any other country. Europe was a backward region until relatively late, and the Catholic church had to capitalize on a dying Roman Empire and the breakdown into the Dark Ages before it could get a strong foothold. But slowly, the great diversity of European traditional society evolved, both in the heartland of Europe—Italy, France, England, and Germany—and in the peripheries of the continent, from Scandinavia to Spain, Greece, and Eastern Europe.

Out of the youthful excesses of civilization, cultural evolution slowly produced relatively stable, rich cultures. The general disequilibrium caused by the invention of agriculture was greatly reduced, and the lives of the common people were improved.

Agricultural skills also developed, especially in areas where long periods of habitation had permitted the slow accumulation of ecological experience. In parts of China, rice has been cultivated on the same land for four thousand years, and in many other areas human cultivation has actually improved soils by draining them, aerating them, building terraces, and overcoming mineral deficiencies.¹⁰ But this has not been the case everywhere. The first agriculturalists in the Zagros Mountains above the Tigris and Euphrates valleys did not learn fast enough, and today the hills are largely denuded of soil and thinly populated. The irrigation systems of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys were made useless by the sedimentation washed down from the hills, and excessive irrigation and poor drainage led to salination of the soils. The hills of the Mediterranean were cleared of their trees, overgrazed, and allowed to erode. Everywhere in the contemporary world, the pressure of population is leading to the expansion of agriculture in areas that are unsuitable and it is almost certain to be destructive, and thus temporary. There is still a long way to go before ultimate stability is achieved—the kind of stability that is based on long experience in using the land without undermining its productivity. This has been made impossible, at least for the time being, by a vast new kind of instability on a scale never before seen on the earth.