Where Are We Going If Anywhere? A Look at Post-Civilization

Abstract

We are living in what I call the second great change in the state of man. The first great change is the change from pre-civilized to civilized societies. The first 500,000 years or so of man's existence on earth were relatively uneventful. Compared with his present condition he puttered along in an astonishingly stationary state. To judge by his artifacts, at least, generation succeeded generation with the sons exactly like their fathers, and the daughters exactly like their mothers. There may have been changes in language and culture which are not reflected in the artifacts, but if there were these changes are lost to us. The evidence of the artifacts, however, is conclusive. Whatever changes there were, they were almost unbelievably slow. About 10,000 years ago, we begin to perceive an acceleration in the rate of change. This becomes very noticeable 5,000 years ago with the development of the first civilization. The details of this first great change are probably beyond our recovery. However, we do know that it depended on two phenomena: the first was the development of agriculture, and the second was the development of exploitation. These two great inventions seem to have developed about the same time, perhaps independently—although we do not know this—in the Nile valley, in the lower valley of the Euphrates, and in the valley of the Indus. Agriculture, that is the domestication of crops and live-stock and the planting of crops in fields, gave man a secure surplus of food from the food producer. In a hunting and fishing economy it seems to take the food producer all his time to produce enough food for himself and his family. The moment we have agriculture with its superior productivity of this form of employment of human resources means that the food producer can produce more food than he and his family can eat. But this in itself is not enough to produce civilization. In some societies in these happy conditions, the food producer has simply relaxed and indulged himself with leisure. As soon, however, as we get politics, that is exploitation, we begin to get cities and civilization. Civilization, it is clear from the origin of the word, is what happens in cities, and the city is dependent in its early stages at any rate on there being a food surplus from the food producer and on there being some organization which can take it away from him. With this food surplus, the political organization feeds kings, priests, armies, architects, and builders and the city comes into being. Political science in its earliest form is the knowledge of how to take the food surplus away from the food producer without giving him very much in return.