Duty Now For The Future, 2023 edition (Part I)

Until the last couple of decades or so, the assumption among scholars, historians, and paleontologists held that agriculture led to commerce, and commerce led to government.

It seems self-evident:  Hunter-gather tribes would come back to old campsites in their nomadic travels and see the spot where they spat out seeds the last time they visited now offered a crop of those plants.  Gradually they figured out if they planted seeds before leaving a camp, they faced a good chance of finding food when they returned a year later.  Eventually some of them recognized they stood a better chance of survival if they stayed and tended crops.  This primitive agriculture lead to simple, small communities that traded with the remaining hunter-gather tribes by offering crops in exchange for meat and fish.  As more and more people settled down to take up farming, it became necessary to form some sort of organized community to protect the crops from predators -- animal and human -- and to make sure no one in the community took unfair advantage of others.  This led to the rise of both military and bureaucratic specialists who protect the community, made sure things ran as smoothly as possible, and enforced whatever rules needed to be enforced.

A simple, straight-forward, and easy to understand progression of events.

Too bad it’s utterly wrong.

Thanks to discoveries at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey and other sites in the Middle East, everything we thought we knew turns out to be false.

Hunter / gather tribes were perfectly capable of spending decades -- perhaps centuries -- building elaborate stone structures.

They just never lived in them.

So much of what we perceive as true and factual in history and prehistory needs to be reviewed with our cultural bias lens removed.

The great period of European scholarship occurred parallel to -- and, to be brutally honest, utterly dependent on -- European imperialism around the globe, and the European imperialist desire for a stable society tended to interpret all evidence it came across as either supporting the concept of European imperialism or else being unworthy of consideration.

Money, as David Graeber pointed out, is not a sign of wealth but of debt; it enables a person holding a promissory note -- be it a literal IOU or a dollar bill or a credit card --  the right to demand goods and services from another person because that person owes a debt to the society as a whole that can only be paid by honoring the promissory note presented.

Money evolved from tokens that didn’t mark what the bearer owned but rather what they were owed.

I propose the route of progression is not from agriculture to commerce to a desire for status by ownership of possessions, but rather exactly the opposite:  A desire for status displayed by possessions led to the creation of trade and commerce to acquire those possessions, which in turn led to the establishment of large-scale agriculture and permanent communities and domiciles to fund military and management bureaucracies to protect those possessions.

Graber elsewhere points out in many contemporary tribal / nomadic / hunter-gather cultures, the leaders are often among the poorest in the community, at least in terms of material possessions.

If the chief knows a member of the tribe needs a blanket, the chief gives them one of their own.

As a result, the chief gives away material possessions and comfort but accrues status and importance in the community as a result of selfless leadership.

To want to be like the chief in such circumstances means literally leading a life of sacrifice.

You can’t take anything from the chief to add to your own status; only by giving may you acquire status on your own.

And the chief will not begrudge you imitating them; quite the contrary.

Conversely, among those who value wealth above all else, the desire is to acquire enough possessions for others to envy you, to desire what you have, to want to own the same things you own.

In short, create a status easily threatened by anyone willing to simply take what physical possessions you own.

Or even worse, make it possible for everyone to own the same things you own.

How can you be special if everybody else can acquire the same things you have?

Early hunter-gather tribes faced real limitations:  They could only possess what they could carry.

There’s only so much the biggest, strongest person could lug around.  Even if they had family and friends to help them, bulk limitations on possessions curbed obsession on ownership.

But pack animals increased the amount of property one could possess.  While humans and dogs and cats coexisted for tens of thousands of years, only since 3,500 BCE have humans used pack animals.

And even then, a physical square-cube law that undermined the value of owning animals to schlep your possessions about.  The more stuff you owned, the more pack animals you needed; the more pack animals you owned, the more you needed to feed and care for them.

You needed to make sure they didn’t wander off or get stolen.

Or die.

But a permanent place for your possessions -- a literal keep -- allowed you to keep amassing more and more stuff without worrying about transport.

True, now you faced other ownership problems, but they were simpler and could more easily be translated into status symbols themselves.

You needed local food sources to feed you while you accumulated your possessions; large fields demonstrated your status and bore the advantage of not dying or running off.

At a certain point, commerce and trade entered the scene in order to maintain protection of your stuff.  You couldn’t work your fields all day and acquire possessions and guard those possessions from animal and human predators all by yourself.

First the hoarders pressed their families into service, spouses and children, then siblings and cousins. 

Instead of offering possessions freely and  many tribal chiefs do, the hoarders presented a quid pro quo arrangement:  Help me work my field, and I will give you some of my food.

And while many agrarian communities operate on communal values, freely helping one another because they see it as a debt owed to the community at large, others quickly fall into some form of feudalism:  Work my fields, tend my flocks, give the profits to me, and I will spend some of it protecting you from other rapacious owners and thieves.

This is how things operated for thousands of years.

And then the industrial revolution come along.

© Buzz Dixon