“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
–L.P. Hartley
If you enjoy history like I do, it’s hard to miss one glaringly obvious fact: history is violent.
Really, really violent.
Now if you, also like me, were fortunate enough to have experienced both The Odyssey and the Biblical Old Testament as a child, you may have caught glimpses of this.
Homer’s Achaean warriors wouldn’t feel all that out of place in one of the many fascinating accounts of the Biblical patriarchs or the later Israelites during the Conquest of Canaan and even after.
I could see someone like Saul, the Biblical first king of Israel, or David, remembered as the righteous king who succeeded Saul, making a cameo in The Odyssey or The Iliad. For the most part, they wouldn’t feel out of place.
But here’s the thing: even those societies were relative pacifists compared with other, far older societies.
See, it turns out we moderns, with our abhorrence of violence and social practices like slavery and conquest, are the weird ones. And whether you’re a history buff or a fantasy fiction author interested in writing imaginary cultures informed by real ones, it’s worthwhile to take the time to understand this.
With this in mind, I’d like to explore a few historical patterns that I’ve found helpful in making sense of the past and the present. Perhaps you’ll find them helpful as well.
Remember, we’re the weird ones.
1). The Most Primitive Cultures are Some of the Most Violent
Before history, there was prehistory—and so far as paleoanthropologists can tell, the prehistory of Homo sapiens stretches back about 300,000 years at least. And before agriculture (beginning around 9,500 BCE/11,500 years ago in certain parts of the Middle East), all human cultures were hunter-gatherers.
It’s worth noting, too, that the adoption of agriculture was not a one-off sudden transformation, but rather a series of gradual transformations. And we have to remember, too, that agriculture started in different parts of the world at different times, and spread unevenly to other areas.
What were hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists doing for most of that period before the first civilizations with writing? As it turns out, killing each other at shockingly high rates.
As Steven Pinker writes in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, archaeologists can estimate rates of violent death from “…the remains of hunter-gatherers and hunter-horticulturalists from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas” covering a period “from 14,000 BCE to 1770 CE, in every case well before the emergence of state societies or the first sustained contact with them.”
What are those rates? Pinker writes: “The death rates range from 0 to 60 percent, with an average of 15 percent.”
[Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.]
What in the world could these men (being the ones doing most of the fighting) have had to fight about? As it turns out, much the same things men have always had to fight about: access to natural resources, access to women, vengeance, and security.
Here’s Pinker again:
“Foraging peoples can invade to gain territory, such as hunting grounds, watering holes, the banks or mouths of rivers, and sources of valued minerals like flint, obsidian, salt, or ochre. They may raid livestock or caches of stored food.
“And very often they fight over women. Men may raid a neighboring village for the express purpose of kidnapping women, whom they gang-rape and distribute as wives. They may raid for some other reason and take the women as a bonus. Or they may raid to claim women who had been promised to them in marriage but were not delivered at the agreed-upon time. And sometimes young men attack for trophies, coups, and other signs of aggressive prowess, especially in societies where they are a prerequisite to attaining adult status.”
He goes on to describe foragers and hunter-horticulturalists launching preemptive strikes against enemies.
So, small-scale societies not organized into states are some of the most violent cultures in history. What are we to make of state-organized societies?
2). Pre-Modern Civilizations: Less Violence, More Slaves and Peasants
State-organized societies are less violent than the small-scale societies we’ve been discussing.
Whereas the small-scale societies Pinker discussed above averaged a rate of violent death of 15%, evidence from pre-Columbian Mexico suggests a rate of violent death of 5%. The native civilization of this region includes the Olmecs, Maya, Zapotecs and Mixtecs, the people of Teotihuacan, and the later Toltecs and late-comer Mexica (Aztecs), known for their practices of human sacrifice.
Of course, these societies also tolerated inequalities, particularly in the form of practices that shock modern sensibilities. Most people in these cultures were peasant cultivators, distinguished from small-scale hunter-horticulturalists by the fact that they were the subjects of a hierarchical social-political-economic order presided over by political-military elites.
As author Ian Morris writes in his excellent book Forages, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve:
“Even in the most literate ancient societies, such as classical Athens (fifth and fourth centuries BC) and late Republican Italy (first century BC), perhaps one male citizen in ten, and far fewer women, had rudimentary literacy skills. Not until the early second millennium AD did rates creep much above 10 percent, and even then probably only in Western Europe and urban China.”
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: 41 (The University Center for Human Values Series) (p. 49). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Of course, there was also slavery, practiced in a wide variety of geographical and historical contexts, from very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to Persia, the Greek-speaking city-states, the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, post-Roman Europe, the Islamic world of the Maghreb and Mashreq, and many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa.
As Morris explains, farming societies gained a six-fold increase in available calories compared with foraging cultures, but the trade-off was that they had to stay in one place and perform the back-breaking labor of agriculture.
The result was farming societies that were much larger and less mobile than foraging societies—and far more tolerant of social and political hierarchies than the mobile foragers.
There were also interesting consequences for the gendered division of labor. In foraging societies, Morris explains, “women usually did most of the plant gathering and men most of the hunting” (p. 58).
But with the rise of intensive agriculture based on plowing, manuring, and irrigating, men’s upper body strength advantage became more important, and farming increasingly became men’s work.
Additionally, women in these societies had a lot more children, and farming households required a lot more work in any case. As Morris explains:
“Because (1) the foods produced by farmers often required more processing (threshing, sifting, grinding, baking, and so on) than those brought home by foragers; (2) the increasingly permanent homes that farmers built required a lot more upkeep and cleaning than foragers’ temporary shelters; and (3) these activities could be done in the home by women supervising small children, the logic of farming pointed toward a new sexual division of labor and space. The conclusion that farmers all over the world apparently reached was that men should go out to work in the fields while women stayed home to work in the house. So obvious did this decision seem, in fact, that no farming society that moved beyond horticulture ever seems to have decided anything else.”
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: 41 (The University Center for Human Values Series) (p. 59). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Because these societies had the ability to generate agricultural surpluses, they could afford to enslave or simply conquer their enemies instead of wiping them out altogether.
In fact, Morris argues that farming societies had every reason to resort to slavery:
“Forced labor was almost unknown within foraging societies. Horticulturalists often took slaves in raids and wars, but these captives (especially the women) were normally incorporated fairly rapidly into their captors’ kinship structures—unlike the slaves in many of the more developed farming societies, who remained permanent, subjugated outsiders.
“Farming societies seem to have shifted toward forced labor because they had to: neither kinship nor the market could generate the labor needed to build the ships, harbors, roads, temples, and monuments without which their (relatively) huge populations could not have fed themselves or maintained their societies.
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: 41 (The University Center for Human Values Series) (p. 64). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
Modern people find it easy to judge ancient, medieval, and even Early Modern societies for their various offenses against our values. And to be sure, those societies tolerated and took for granted practices that we find anathema.
But by now we’ve established that we’re the weird ones: we have relatively non-violent societies that are not all that comfortable with all those class hierarchies and even the gendered division of labor, to say nothing of slavery.
This awareness can help us make sense of the past on its own terms. But what about ourselves? Can we make sense of our current values in light of our own recent pasts?
3). Our Modern Values are Byproducts of Industrialization & Fossil Fuels
The modern world is the product of many things, a dizzying array of technological, social, economic, political etc. forces. We can simplify this complex picture by pointing out that what all of these things have in common is an incalculable debt to the Industrial Revolution and especially to fossil fuel economies.
At the root of this transformation was the use of coal-fueled steam power. Here’s Morris again:
“Not until the seventeenth century were fossil fuels and steam power put together in a productive way, by northwest European coalminers who realized that they could burn the coal they dug up to power engines that would pump water out of their mineshafts, allowing them to dig deeper to find more coal.
“The earliest steam engines burned so much coal that they were economical only if used right next to the mines that fed them, but in 1776, James Watt and Matthew Boulton managed to build an engine with separate heating and condensing chambers, dramatically cutting its coal consumption. Industrialists quickly figured out how to augment human and animal muscles with steam power in all walks of life. Productivity soared and prices collapsed, but despite this, sales increased so much that profits rose much higher than ever before.”
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: 41 (The University Center for Human Values Series) (pp. 93-94). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
As a result of the advent of steam power and industrialization, there was more of everything: more technology, more and cheaper mass-produced goods, and more calories.
We shouldn’t take too rosy a picture of early industrialization, with its long hours, back-breaking work, massive pollution, and terribly unsafe working conditions… but we also shouldn’t lose sight of the bigger picture, and the bigger picture was more energy and ultimately higher living standards for everyone.
“By 2000, each acre of American farmland absorbed, on average, eighty times as much energy as it had done in 1900, and yielded four times as much food.”
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: 41 (The University Center for Human Values Series) (p. 94). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
And it’s not only the West that has benefited, but the world generally. As Matt Ridley explains in The Rational Optimist:
“Since 1800, the population of the world has multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen more than nine times. Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer.
“She was less likely to die as a result of war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at any given age, to get cancer, heart disease or stroke. She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school.”
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist (P.S.) (p. 14). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
So, what does all this have to do with modern values? Simple: industrialization incentivizes efficiency, and that means breaking down social divisions between classes, castes, racial and ethnic groups, and ultimately even the time-honored gendered division of labor.
To be fair, the dynamics of early industrialization did increase inequality at first—all those factory and mill owners profited considerably more than did their workers—but over time wages rose, inequality diminished, and political and social pressure mounted in favor of abolishing the forced labor of slavery.
Here’s Morris again:
“By making wage labor attractive enough to draw in millions of free workers, higher wages made forced labor less necessary, and because impoverished serfs and slaves—unlike the increasingly prosperous wage laborers—could rarely buy the manufactured goods being churned out by factories, forced labor increasingly struck business interests as an obstacle to growth (especially when it was competitors who were using it).
“The more a society moved toward fossil fuels, the more political support swung behind abolition and emancipation. Between the 1780s and 1848, most of continental Europe abolished serfdom, with even Russia following suit in 1861. Britain banned slave trading in its empire in 1807 and banned slaveholding altogether in 1833.”
Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: 41 (The University Center for Human Values Series) (pp. 101-102). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
In less than a century, fossil fuel civilizations did away with legal chattel slavery in the West. Today slavery survives only as an illegal and criminal practice, albeit one that is tolerated to a much greater degree in certain non-Western societies, notably various parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
Industrialization also made men’s advantage in upper body strength less and less important, since machines could do more and more of the heavy lifting and since women were perfectly capable of participating in the increasingly service-oriented modern economies.
At the same time, the collapse of infant mortality meant women did not need to have as many children, and in any case, there was no longer any need for children as a labor force.
Conclusion
So there you have it, the present is a strange country. Our values are weird—really, really weird.
For me, it’s difficult to escape a sense of gratitude when I consider the past. Our lives are so much easier with labor-saving devices and massive calorie surpluses.
And for all that we’ve watched the world come undone over the tragic Covid-19 epidemic, the fact remains that our ancestors routinely dealt with far higher rates of death from all manner of disease.
Inequality? We have plenty of that, all right—but not like past societies did.
More than anything, I think what this perspective gives me is a sense of humility. The talking points and conflicts of the present age are everywhere, and people are as convinced as ever of the rightness of various causes. It’s a little humbling to consider all of that against a backdrop of thousands of years, even tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
Conflict seems to be an important part of the human condition, no doubt reflecting our evolved impulses to always seek more for ourselves and the groups we identify with.
Still, it’s interesting and enjoyable and yes, humbling to get some perspective.
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