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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
April, 2004
1. INTRODUCTION
Last month the newsletter contained some comments on dark age theory by
a reader (referred to as RR), along with a response to them. This
month's newsletter contains another observation/query by the same
reader and a corresponding response. This concerns the question of how
civilisation arose in the first place. Why did the hunter-gatherers
that existed on the earth in prehistoric times suddenly start
developing cities and complex social institutions? Some have suggested
that this can only have happened with the intervention of intelligent
aliens, or some kind of master-race (the 'Watchers' or some such). I
will present the explanation that is offered by dark age theory.
Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address:
http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm
I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the
latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be
interested.
Marc Widdowson
2. POW! THE ORIGINS OF CIVILISATION
A reader (RR) presents the following query/challenge.
"Although I know this has not been a focus of your work, the cyclical
nature of the historical processes you describe and analyze in your
thesis does not account for the rise of civilization per se. That is,
for the vast majority of humanity's existence, there were (as far as we
know) no civilizations, just scattered tribes with almost no political
order, based on a hunter-gatherer economy. What changed? Why did
'civilization' emerge as a phenomenon to begin with? It seems to me
that any cyclical theory of historical patterns of change and
continuity needs to at least touch on the issue of what sort of
exogenous processes got the cycle going to begin with (not least
because this point raises the issue of what sort of exogenous factors
might 'break' the cycle, i.e. lead to a decline and collapse of
civilization on a global scale that is not followed by a rebirth of a
new civilization - see the Easter Island question above [in March 2004
newsletter]). I.e. the predictive value of your thesis depends to some
extent on how it deals with this issue."
MW responds:
I agree. This is of interest and an important issue. Dark age theory
cannot answer it in quite the way you would probably like, i.e.
explaining how one thing led to another. An important concept of dark
age theory is the principle of mutual causality - that in history many
things interact in complex ways, and asking whether A caused B or B
caused A is like asking whether the chicken came before the egg or vice
versa. The way that dark age theory deals with the origin of
civilisation revolves around the idea of ensembles. An ensemble is a
self-consistent set of social institutions. The institutions that make
up an ensemble are logically interdependent. None of them can exist in
isolation. Each relies on the other. (Note: an institution is a set of
ideas and material objects that shape human relationships. A
relationship is something that exists between two parties; there is a
relationship between A and B if A's behaviour influences B's
behaviour.) For example, take an institution like international air
travel. You couldn't just introduce this one concept to, say, a tribe
of Eskimo living a traditional lifestyle in the Canadian arctic,
without making any other changes to their society. How are they going
to pay for the flights? How will they learn to fly the planes? How will
they build the planes? Where will they get the jet fuel from? Put a
Boeing airliner in an Eskimo camp and it would be totally useless
unless you made all sorts of other changes in their society, to
establish maintenance, a supply chain, even reasons for travelling. No
one is going to give them the jet fuel for free, for example. What are
they going to give in exchange? Seal meat? And even if that is
acceptable, they will need to have the concept of money, and a banking
system for clearing international payments. Oh, and if you have a
banking system, then you need to be able to read and write, so that you
need a system of formal schooling. And so on and so on. Try to
introduce international air travel to an Eskimo tribe and you will end
up completely transforming their society, until it won't resemble an
Eskimo tribe at all. This is the ensemble concept. You cannot have
individual institutions piecemeal. You have to have them all together.
They form a logically interdependent collection. According to dark age
theory, there are three basic ensembles, depending on whether your
society is dominated by 'friends', 'acquaintances' or 'strangers'.
These are technical terms within dark age theory, but to put it simply,
friends are people you care about, acquaintances are people you know,
and strangers are people you don't know. Each of these types of society
has its own characteristic ensemble of institutions. The type of
society depends fundamentally on its size (more technically, it depends
on 'scale' = the number of distinct other people any given individual
typically interacts within a given time interval - for those with a
background in sociology, this corresponds to what Durkheim called
'dynamic density'.) It is impossible in practice to have a group of a
million people all of whom genuinely care about each other. Experience
(i.e. anthropological and sociological research) shows that the largest
group that can be dominated by 'friends' (in dark age theory
terminology) is about 10-50. The acquaintance ensemble is most
characteristically found in 'village-size' groups of roughly 1000
individuals. The stranger ensemble is typical of groups of 10,000 plus.
The friend ensemble is found among people like the Eskimo or the
hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari desert (who ceased to exist in the
last few years, because of the policies of the Namibian government, but
that is another matter). Such groups have a philosophy of share and
share alike. They have very simple lifestyles. They have no leaders.
This is because the small size of their groups means they can't live
any other way. Why don't the Kalahari hunter-gatherers have computers?
Is it because they are stupid? Of course not. (If you took someone who
does have a computer, such as you the reader of this newsletter, and
dumped you in the Kalahari desert. How long would you survive? Not very
long. Is that because you are stupid? Again, no. It is not brains that
are the issue here.) The reason the Kalahari people don't have
computers in their tiny band is because there is no way they could have
the expertise to develop and build them in such a tiny group. (Think
how many people it takes to develop Windows and keep bringing out new
editions every year or so, for example.) On the other hand, think about
say downtown New York, which is definitely a stranger-style society
(most people are mutual strangers). Could they live with the same
philosophy as the hunter-gatherers? Definitely not. Imagine if New York
tried to go over to share and share alike. I could walk into any shop
or anybody's home and 'borrow' whatever I wanted. How is that going to
work? How are you going to react when someone comes to borrow your
stereo, or browse in your refrigerator? Of course, you can go and
browse in their refrigerator, or someone else's refrigerator. But it's
not going to work is it? Similarly, if you took away the mayor, the
police, the law courts. You would literally have anarchy. (I know some
idealists out there think that anarchy could work, but the few
experiments to establish truly anarchistic communes with more than a
few dozen individuals have invariably ended in failure.) If there were
no police in New York, and no municipal authority maintaining the
drains and the traffic lights and so on, it would rapidly become an
intolerable place to live. We get back to the Eskimos and aircraft
scenario. To make New York work, you need, for example, plumbers. To
have plumbers you have to have food shops and clothes shops (because
plumbers can't grow their own food and make their own clothes, else
they would have no time for plumbing). To have these shops you need
money. Therefore you need reading and writing and the ability to count.
You need banks. You need a set of laws to stop the banks ripping their
customers off and vice versa. And so on. As soon as you have plumbers,
you have to have a whole lot of other things, and you end up with a
very complex society and a big city (i.e. for all those shops and banks
and schools and things). If you take away the plumbers, the drains are
soon going to get blocked and the toilets will jam and the water pipes
will burst, and quite soon the whole infrastructure will fall apart,
and the city will become an intolerable place to live. People will
leave and spread across the landscape, until they end up like those
hunter-gatherers - small, scattered groups of 'friends', with no
strangers in sight. The principle of mutual causality applies. The big
city needs plumbers. Plumbers need the big city. Don't ask which came
first. It is a chicken and egg situation. They arrive together and
disappear together. You can't have plumbers first and then a little bit
later the big city. Similarly you can't have the big city first and
then a little bit later get yourself some plumbers. They can only exist
in conjunction with each other. Civilisation, obviously, is basically
what I have called the stranger-style society, with its characteristic
institutional ensemble. Some of the basic elements of this
institutional ensemble are political leadership, a government
bureaucracy, writing (or at least some means of recording information),
some kind of currency (for commercial transactions), and other things.
The ensemble concept explains why (1) civilisations arise (and
disappear) fairly rapidly, and (2) all civilisations are much the same
in their basic institutions. So how did civilisation arise? The answer
of dark age theory is that the scale of the relevant societies reached
the level at which strangers predominated and they flopped over into
the stranger-style institutional ensemble. It was a bit like a lump of
nuclear material reaching critical mass. Below the critical mass
everything is fine. But go just a little beyond the critical mass and
POW! Civilisation arose when human societies got to the critical
density of strangers, and POW! So why did they reach this 'critical
mass' or scale? Natural human increase for one thing. It is remarkable
how humans had reached practically every part of the globe thousands of
years ago - even the remotest Pacific islands. This is because humans
didn't easily start living packed together at stranger-style densities.
Rather they tried to get away from each other at first and spread out
across the planet, getting as far away from each other as possible. It
was only when the planet was filled up that scale began to rise on a
local basis. Naturally, scale rose fastest and furthest in the most
desirable areas - e.g. the river valleys, of the Nile, the
Tigris/Euphrates, the Yangtse, which could support higher populations.
That is why civilisation first rose in these places. That is the basic
situation anyway. There are refinements that one can add to this
theory. For example, it is theorised that ten thousand years ago, the
climate was wetter than it is now and the whole area of Egypt was quite
lush. People lived relatively spread out. But then the climate became
drier, and the lands began to turn to desert. People were forced out of
the desert and they crowded into the Nile valley, which was a narrow
strip that was the only still well-watered territory in the whole area.
Scale rose dramatically, and people found themselves in the stranger
ensemble, i.e. civilisation. It was like the separate parts of a
hydrogen bomb being forced together, reaching critical mass and going
POW!. POW! Scale. Ensembles. Friends, Acquaintance and Strangers. These
are the concepts you need to explain the origins of civilisation.
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