Transcript for:
Cognitive Revolution & Human Societies

part one the cognitive Revolution one a human handprint made about 30,000 years ago on the wall of the chv pond dark cave in southern France somebody tried to say I was here one in animal of no significance about 13.5 billion years ago matter energy time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang the story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics about 300,000 years after their appearance matter and energy started to coales into complex structures called atoms which then combined into molecules the story of atoms molecules and their interactions is called chemistry about 3.8 billion years ago on a planet called Earth certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms the story of organisms is called biology about 70,000 years ago organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures the subsequent development of these human cultures is called history three important revolutions shaped the course of history the cognitive revolution kickstarted history about 70,000 years ago the Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago the scientic revolution which got underway only five 500 years ago May well end history and start something completely deant this book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms there were humans long before there was history animals much like modern humans RSD appeared about 2.5 million years ago but for countless Generations they did not stand out from the Myriad other organisms with which they shared their habitats on a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters anxious mothers cuddling their babies and clutches of Carefree children playing in the mud temperamental youths changing against the dictates of society and weary Elders who just wanted to be left in peace chest thumping machos trying to impress the local Beauty and wise old matriarchs who had already seen it all these archaic humans loved played formed close friendships and competed for status and power but so did chimpanze disas baboons and elephants there was nothing special about them nobody least of all humans themselves had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon split the atom fathom the genetic code and write history books the most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas fireflies or jellyfish biologists classify organisms into species animals are said to belong to the same species if they tend to mate with each other giving birth to fertile offspring horses and donkeys have a recent common ancestor and share many physical traits but they show little sexual interest in one another they will made if induced to do so but their offspring called mules are sterile mutations in Donkey DNA can therefore never cross over to horses or vice versa the two types of animals are consequently considered two distinct species moving along separate evolutionary paths by contrast a bulldog in the spanel may look very deant but they are members of the same species sharing the same DNA pool they will happily mate and their puppies will grow up to perrow with other dogs and produce more puppies species that evolve from a common ancestor are bunched together Under The Heading genus plural Genera lions tigers leopards and Jaguars are dear species with in the genus panth biologists label organisms with a two-part Latin name genus followed by species lions for example are called panth Leo the species Leo of the genus panth presumably everyone reading this book is a homo sapiens the species sapiens wise of the genus homo man Genera and their turn our group into families such as the cats lions cheetahs house cats the dog wolves foxes Jackal and the elephants elephants mammoths mastadons all members of a family Trace their lineage back to a founding matriarch or patriarch all cats for example from the smallest house kid to the most ferocious lion share a common feline ancestor who lived about 25 million years ago Homo sapiens two belongs to a family this B now fact used to be one of history's most close L guarded Secrets Homo sapiens Long Preferred to view itself as set apart from animals an orphan bft of family lacking siblings or cousins and most importantly without parents but that's just not the case like it or not we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes our closest living relatives include chimpanzees gorillas and orangutans the chimpanzees are the closest just 6 million years ago a single female ape had two daughters one became the ancestor of all chimpanzees the other is our own grandmother skeletons in the closet Homo sapiens has kept hidden an even more disturbing secret not only do we possess an abundance of uncivilized cousins once upon a time we had quite a few brothers and sisters as well we are used to thinking about ourselves as the only humans because for the last 10,000 years our species has indeed been the only human species around yet the real meaning of the word human is an animal belonging to the genus homo and there used to be many other species of this genus besides Homo sapiens moreover as we shall see in the last chapter of the book in the Noto distant future we might again have to contend with nonan humans to clarify this point I will often use the term sapiens to denote members of the species Homo sapiens while reserving the term human to refer to all exent members of the genus homo humans rstd evolved in East Africa about 2.5 million years ago from an earlier genus of apes called Australopithecus which means Southern ape about 2 million years ago some of these archaic men and women left their Homeland to journey through and settle vast areas of North Africa Europe and Asia since survival in the snowy forests of Northern Europe required deant traits than those needed to stay alive in Indonesia steaming jungles human populations evolved in dear directions the result was several distinct species To Each of which scientists have assigned a pompous Latin name two our siblings according to speculative reconstructions left to right homo rudo fenus East Africa Homo erectus East Asia and homon neanderthalensis Europe and Western Asia all are humans humans in Europe and Western Asia evolved into homo neander alenis man from the neander valley popularly referred to Simply as neanderthals neanderthals bulkier and more muscular than us sapiens were well adapted to the cold climate of Ice Age Western Eurasia the more Eastern regions of Asia were populated by Homo erectus upright man who survived therefore close to 2 million years making it the most durable human species ever this record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species it is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now so 2 million years is really out of our leak on the island of java in Indonesia lived homo soloensis man from the solo Valley who was suited to life in the tropics on another Indonesian Island the small island of Flores archaic humans underwent a process of ding humans rst reached Flores when the sea level was EX exeptionally low and the island was easily accessible from the mainland when the Seas rose again some people were trapped on the island which was poor in resources big people who need a lot of food died rst smaller fellows survived much better over the generations the people of Flores became dwarves this unique species known by scientists as homo oranus reached to maximum height of only 1 meter and weighed no more than 20 V kilg they were nevertheless able to produce stone tools and even managed occasionally to hunt down some of the islands elephants though to be fair the elephants were a dwarf species as well in 2010 another lost sibling was rescued from Oblivion when scientists Excavating the denova cave in Siberia discovered a fossilized ner bone genetic analysis proved that Dinger belonged to a previously unknown human species which was named hom Inova who knows how many lost relatives of ours are waiting to be discovered in other caves on other islands and in other climes while these humans were evolving in Europe and Asia evolution in East Africa did not stop the Cradle of humanity continued to nurture numerous new species such as homo rudol fenus man from Lake Rudolph homor gaster Working Man and eventually our own species which we've modestly named homo sapiens wise man the members of some of these species were massive and others were dwarves some were fearsome hunters and others Meek plant gatherers some lived only on a single Island while many roamed over continents but all of them belonged to the genus homo they were all human beings it's a common fallacy to Envision these species as arranged in a straight line of descent with her gaster begetting erectus erectus begetting the Neanderthals and the neander thals evolving into us this linear model gives the mistaken impression that at any particular moment only one type of human inhabited the Earth and that all earlier species were merely older models of ourselves the truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago the world was home at one and the same time to several human species and why not today there are many species of foxes bears and pigs the Earth of a 100 Millennia ago was walked by at least six dear in species of man it's our current exclusivity not that multi- species past that is peculiar and perhaps incriminating as we will shortly see we sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings the cost of thinking despite their many deces all human species share several dening characteristics most notably humans have extraordinarily large brains compared to other animals mammals weighing 60 kg have an average brain size of 200 cubic cm the earliest men and women 2.5 million years ago had brains of about 600 cubic cm modern sapiens sport a brain averaging 1,200 to 1,400 cubic cm Neanderthal brains were even bigger that Evolutions should select for larger brains may seem to us like well an allb brainer we are are so enamored of our high intelligence that we assume that when it comes to cerebral power more must be better but if that were the case the feline family would also have produced cats who could do calculus why is genus H the only one in the entire Animal Kingdom to have come up with such massive thinking machines the fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body it's not easy to carry around especially when encased inside a massive skull it's even harder to fuel in in Homo sapiens the brain accounts for about 2 to 3% of total body weight but it consumes 25% of the body's energy when the body is at Rest by comparison the brains of other Apes require only 8% of rest time energy archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways fiercely they spent more time in search of food secondly their muscles atrophied like a government diverting money from defense to to education humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons it's hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the Savannah a chimpanzee can't win an argument with a homo sapiens but the ape can rip the Man Apart like a rag doll today our big brains pale nicely because we can produce cars and guns that enable us to move much faster than chimps and shoot them from a safe distance instead of wrestling but cars and guns are a recent phenomenon for more than 2 million years human neural networks kept growing and growing but apart from some in knives and pointed sticks humans had precious little to show for it what then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years frankly we don't know another singular human trait is that we walk upright on two legs standing up it's easier to scan the sent if for game or enemies and arms that are unnecessary for Locomotion are freed for other purposes like throwing stones or signaling the more things these hands could do the more successful their owners were so evolutionary pressure brought about an increasing concentration of nerves and Nelly tuned muscles in the palms and inures as a result humans can perform very intricate tasks with their hands in particular they can produce and use sophisticated tools the rst evidence for Tool production dates from about 2.5 million years ago and the manufacturer and use of tools are the criteria by which archaeologists recognize ancient humans yet walking upright has its downside the skeleton of our primate ancestors developed for millions of years to support a creature that walked on all fours and had a relatively small head adjusting to an upright position was quite a challenge especially when the skiing had to support an extra-large Cranium humankind paid for its lofty vision and industrious hands with back aches and stin necks women paid extra an upright gate required narrower hips constricting the birth canal and this just when baby heads were getting bigger and bigger death and child birth became a major Hazard for human females women who gave birth earlier when the infant's brain and head were still relatively small and supple fared better and lived to have more children natural selection consequently favored earlier births and indeed compared to other animals humans are born prematurely when many of their vinal systems are still under developed a cult can Trot shortly after birth a kid leaves its mother to forge on its own when it is just a few weeks old human babies are helpless dependent for many years on their Elders for sustenance protection and education this fact has contributed greatly both to humankind's extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems lone mothers could hardly Forge enough food for their offspring and themselves with needy children in tow raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbors it takes a tribe to raise a human evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties in addition since humans are born underdeveloped they can be educated and socialized to a far greater extent than any other animal most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed Earth and we emerging from a Kil any attempt at remolding will scratch or break them humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace they can be spun stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of Freedom this is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist capitalist or socialist warlike or peace loving we assume that a large Brain the use of tools Superior learning abilities and complex social social structures are huge advantages it seems self-evident that these have made humankind the most powerful animal on Earth but humans enjoyed all of these advantages for a full 2 million years during which they remained weak and marginal creatures thus humans who lived a million years ago despite their big brains and sharp stone tools dwelt in constant fear of predators rarely hunted large game and subsisted mainly by gathering plants scooping up insects stalking small animals and eating the caring left behind by other more powerful carnivores one of the most common uses of early stone tools was to crack open bones in order to get to the marrow some researchers believe this was our original Niche just as would Beckers specialize in extracting insects from the trunks of trees the rst humans specialized in extracting marrow from Bones why marrow well suppose you observe a pride of lions take down and devour a gye you wait patiently until they're done but it's still not your turn because first the hyenas and jackals and you don't dare interfere with them scavenge The Leftovers only then would you and your band dare approach the carcass look cautiously left and right and dig into the edible tissue that remained this is a key to understanding our history and psychology genus homo's position in the food chain was until quite recently solidly in the middle for millions of years few hum hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could all the while being hunted by larger Predators it was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis and only in the last 100,000 years with the rise of homo sapiens that man jumped to the top of the food chain that spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences other animals at the top of the pyramid such as lions and sharks evolved into that position very gradually over millions of years this enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much Havoc as lions became deadlier so gazel evolved to run faster hyenas to cooperate better and rhinoceros is to be more bad-tempered in contrast humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust moreover humans themselves failed to adjust most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures millions of years of dominion have led them with self-c condense sapiens by contrast is more like a Banana Republic dictator having so recently been one of The Underdogs of the Savannah we are full of fears and anxieties over our position which makes us doubly gruel and dangerous many historical calamities from deadly Wars to ecological catastrophes have resulted from this over hasty jump a race of cooks ofic and step on the way to the top was the domestication of re some human species may have made occasional use of re as early as 800,000 Years Ago by about 300,000 years ago Homo erectus neanderthals and the forefathers of homo sapiens were using re on a daily basis humans now had a Dependable source of light and warmth and a deadly weapon against prowling Lions not long afterwards humans may even have started deliberately to torch their neighborhoods a carefully managed re could turn impassible Barren thickets into Prime grasslands teaming with game in addition once the re died down Stone Age entrepreneurs could walk through the smoking remains and harvest Charco animals nuts and tubers but the best thing red did was cook foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms such as wheat rice and potatoes became Staples of our diet thanks to cooking fire not only changed food's chemistry it changed its biology as well cooking killed germs and parasites that infested food humans also had a far easier time chewing and digesting old favorites such as fruits nuts insects and carrying if they were cooked whereas chimpanzees spend V hours a day chewing raw food a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food the Advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food to devote less time to eating and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines some scholars believe there is a direct link between the Advent of cooking the shortening of the human intestinal tract and the growth of the human brain since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers it's hard to have both by shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and sapiens1 fire also Al open the arm resty cynic and Gulf between man and the other animals the power of almost all animals depends on their bodies the strength of their muscles the size of their teeth the breadth of their wings though they may harness winds and currents they are unable to control these natural forces and are always constrained by their physical design Eagles for example identify thermal colums rising from the ground spread their giant wings and allow the hot air to lift them upward Wards yet Eagles cannot control the location of the columns and their maximum carrying capacity is strictly proportional to their wingspan when humans domesticated re they gained control of an obedient and potentially Limitless Force unlike Eagles humans could choose when and where to ignite aim and they were able to exploit re for any number of tasks most importantly the power of fire was not limited by the form structure or strength of the human body a single woman with an INT or re stick could burn down an entire forest in a matter of hours the domestication of re was a sign of things to come our brothers Keepers despite the benets of re 150,000 years ago humans were still marginal creatures they could now scare away Lions warm themselves during cold nights and burn down the occasional Forest yet counting all species together there were still no more than perhaps a million humans living between the Indonesian archipelago and the Iberian Peninsula a mere blip on the ecological radar our own species Homo sapiens was already present on the world stage but so far it was just minding its own business in a corner of Africa we don't know exactly where and when animals that can be classified as Homo sapiens rst evolved from some earlier type of humans but most scientists agree that by 150,000 years ago East Africa was populated by S apens that looked just like us if one of them turned up in a modern morg the local pathologist would notice nothing peculiar thanks to the blessings of re they had smaller teeth and Jaws than their ancestors whereas they had massive brains equal in size to ours scientists also agree that about 70,000 years ago sapiens from East Africa spread into the Arabian Peninsula and from there they quickly overran the entire Eurasian land mass when homo sapiens landed in Arabia most of Eurasia was already settled by other humans what happened to them there are two connecting theories the INF breeding Theory tells a story of Attraction sex and mingling as the African immigrants spread around the world they bred with other human populations and people today are the outcome of this infra breeding for example when sapiens reached the Middle East and Europe they encountered the Neanderthals these humans were more muscular than sapiens had larger brains and were better adapted to cold climbs they used tools and Dre or good hunters and apparently took care of their sick anatum archaeologists have discovered the bones of Neanderthals who lived for many years with severe physical handicaps evidence that they were cared for by their relatives neanderthals are often depicted in caricatures as the archetypical brutish and stupid cave people but recent evidence has changed changed their image according to the infr breeding Theory when sapiens spread into Neanderthal lands sapiens bred with neanderthals until the two populations merged if this is the case then today's eurasians are not pure sapiens they are a mixture of sapiens and Neanderthals similarly when sapiens reached East Asia they enter bread with the local erectus so the Chinese and Koreans are a mixture of sapiens and erectus the opposing view called the replacement Theory tells a very different story one of incompatibility revulsion and perhaps even genocide according to this Theory sapiens and other humans had deant anatomies and most likely deant mating habits and even body odors they would have had little sexual interest in one another and even if in the enderal Romeo and the sapiens Juliet fell in love they could not produce fertile children because the genetic Gulf separating the two populations was already unbridgeable the two populations remained completely distinct and when the Neanderthals died out or work kildo their genes died with them according to this view sapiens replaced all the previous human populations without merging with them if that is the case the lineages of all contemporary humans can be traced back exclusively to East Africa 70,000 years ago we are all pure sapiens map one Homo sapiens conquers the globe a lot hinges on this debate from an evolutionary perspective 70,000 years is a relatively short interval if the replacement theory is correct all living humans have roughly the same genetic baggage and racial distinctions among them are negligible but if the interbreeding theory is right there might well be genetic differences between Africans Europeans and Asians that go back hundreds of thousands of years this is political Dynamite which could provide material for explosive racial theories in recent decades the replacement theory has been the common wisdom in the ELD it had rumor archaeological backing and was more politically correct scientists had no desire to open up the Pandora's box of racism by claiming cynic and genetic diversity among modern human populations but that ended in 2010 when the result of a 4-year work to map the Neanderthal genome were published geneticists were able to collect enough intact Neanderthal DNA from fossils to make a broad comparison between it and the DNA of contemporary humans the results stunned the scientific Community it turned out that 1 to 4% of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA that's not a huge amount but it's Sant a second shock came several months later when DNA extracted from the fossilized from dinova was mapped the results proved that up to 6% of the unique human DNA of modern melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denis ofen DNA if these results are valid and it's important to keep in mind that further research is underway and may either reinforce or modify these conclusions the INF breeders got at least some things right but that doesn't mean that the replacement theory is completely wrong since neander thalen did the soovin contributed only a small amount of DNA to our present day genome it is impossible to speak of a merger between sapiens and other human species although deces between them were not large enough to completely prevent fertile intercourse they were sufficient to make such contacts very rare how then should we understand the biological relatedness of sapiens neanderthals and denisovans clearly they were not completely de species like horses and donkeys on the other hand they were not just deor populations of the same species like bulldogs and spaniels biological reality is not black and white there are also important gray areas every two species that evolve from a common ancestor such as horses and donkeys were at one time just two populations of the same species like bulldogs and spaniels there must have been a point when the two populations were already quite deant from one another but still capable on rare occasions of having sex and producing fertile offspring then another mutation severed this last connecting thread and they went their separate evolutionary ways it seems that about 50,000 years ago sapiens neanderthals and Denis ens were at that borderline point they were almost but not quite entirely separate species as we shall see in the next chapter sapiens were already very deant from neanderthals and din V not only in their genetic code and physical traits but also in their cognitive and social abilities yet it appears it was still just possible on rare occasions for a sapiens and an yander thought to produce a fertile offspring so the populations did not merge but a few lucky Neanderthal genes did hit a ride on the sapiens Express it is unsettling and perhaps thrilling to think that we sapiens could at one time have sex with an animal from a dear species and produce children together three a speculative reconstruction of a neanderthal child genetic evidence hints that at least some neanderthals may have had fair skin and hair but if the Neanderthals denisovans and other human species didn't merge with sapiens why did they vanish one possibility is that homo sapiens drove them to Extinction imagine a sapien's band reaching a Balan Valley where neanderthals had lived for hundreds of thousands of years the newcomers began to hunt the deer and gather the nuts and berries that were the Neanderthals traditional Staples sapiens were more prent hunters and gatherers thanks to better technology and Superior social skills so they multiplied and spread the less resourceful neanderthals found it increasingly de difficult to feed themselves their population dwindled and they slowly died out except perhaps for one or two members who joined their sabiens neighbors another possibility is that competition for resources aired up into violence and genocide tolerance is not a Sapient trademark in modern times a small deance and skin color dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of sapiens to set about Exterminating another group would ancient sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely deant human species it may well be that when sapiens encountered neanderthals the result was the rst and most significant ethnic cleansing campaign in history whichever way it happened the Neanderthals and the other human species POS one of History's great whiffs imagine how things might have turned out had the Neanderthals or denisovans survived alongside homo apens what kind of cultures societies and political structures would have emerged in a world where several deant human species coexisted how for example would religious faiths have unfolded would the Book of Genesis have declared that neanderthals descend from Adam and Eve would Jesus have died for the sins of the denisovans and would the Quran have reserved seats in heaven for all righteous humans whatever their species would Neanderthals have been able to serve in the Roman Legions or in the sprawling bureaucracy of Imperial China would the American Declaration of Independence hold as a self-evident truth that all members of The Genius homo are created equal would Carl Marx have urged workers of all species to unite over the past 10,000 years Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it's hard for us to conceive of any other possibility our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation and that orasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom when Charles Darwin indicated that homo sapiens was just another kind of animal people were outraged even today many refuse to believe it had the Neanderthals survived would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals they were too familiar to ignore but too different to tolerate whether sapians are to blame or not no sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native population became extinct the last remains of homo solo enses are dated to about 50,000 years ago homo denova disappeared shortly thereafter neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago the last dwarf like humans vanished from flory's Island about 12,000 years ago they left behind some bones stone tools a few jeans in our DNA and a lot of unanswered questions they also left behind us Homo sapiens the last human species what was the Sapient secret of success how did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many dist and ecologically deant habitats how did we push all other human species into Oblivion why couldn't even the strong brainy coldproof neanderthals survive our Onslaught the debate continues to rage the most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language to the tree of knowledge in the previous chapter we saw that although sapiens had already populated East Africa 150,000 years ago they began to overrun the rest of planet Earth and drive the other human species to Extinction only about 70,000 years ago in the intervening Millennia even though these archaic sapiens looked just like us and their brains were as big as ours they did not enjoy any marked advantage over other human species did not produce particularly sophisticated tools and did not accomplish any other special Feats in fact in the rst recorded encounter between sapiens and Neanderthals the Neanderthals one about 100,000 years ago some sapiens groups migrated North to the Levant which was Neanderthal territory but failed to secure or footing it might have been due to nasty natives an inclement climate or unfamiliar local parasites whatever the reason the sapiens eventually retreated leaving then neanderthals as masters of the Middle East this poor record of achievement has led Scholars to speculate that the internal structure of the brains of these sapiens was probably deant from ours they looked like us but their cognitive abilities learning remembering communicating were far more limited teaching such an ancient sapiens English persuading him of the truth of Christian dogma or getting him to understand the theory of evolution would probably have been hopeless undertakings conversely we would have had a very hard time learning his language and understanding his way of thinking but then beginning about 70,000 years ago Homo sapiens started doing very special things around that date sapiens bands left Africa for a second time this time they drove the Neanderthals and all other human species not only from the Middle East but from the face of the Earth within a remarkably short period sapiens reached Europe and East Asia about 45,000 years ago they somehow crossed the Open Sea and landed in Australia a continent hither to Untouched by humans the period from about 70,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago witnessed the invention of boats oil lamps bows and arrows and needles essential for sewing warm clothing the rsty objects that can reliably be called our date from this era see the statal L man on this page as does the rst clear evidence for religion Commerce and social stratification most researchers believe that these unprecedented accomplishments were the product of a revolution in Sapient cognitive abilities they maintained that the people who drove the Neanderthals to Extinction settled Australia and carved the Staton men were as intelligent creative and sensitive as we are if we were to come across the artists of the sto cave we could learn their language and they ours we'd be able to explain to them everything we know from the adventure of Alice in Wonderland to the paradoxes of quantum physics and they could teach us how their people view the world the appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago constitutes the cognitive Revolution what caused it we not sure the most commonly believed Theory argues that accidental genetic mutations change the inner wiring of the brains of sapiens enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to Comm communicate using an altogether new type of language we might call it the tree of knowledge mutation why did it occur in sapiens DNA rather than in that of Neanderthals it was a matter of pure chance as far as we can tell but it's more important to understand the consequences of the tree of knowledge mutation than its causes what was so special about the new Sapient language that it enabled us to conquer the world it was not the rst language every animal has some kind of language even insects such as bees and ants know how to communicate in sophisticated ways informing one another of the whereabouts of food neither was it the rst vocal language many animals including all ape and monkey species have vocal languages for example green monkeys use calls of various kinds to communicate zoologists have identied one call that means careful in Eagle a slightly deant call warns careful a lion when researchers played a recording of the arrest he called to a group of monkeys the monkey stopped what they were doing and looked upwards in fear when the same group heard a recording of the second call the lion warning they quickly scrambled up a tree sapiens can produce many more distinct sounds than green monkeys but whales and elephants have equally impressive abilities a parrot can say anything Albert heinstein could say as well as mimicking the sounds of phones ringing doors slamming and Sirens wailing whatever Advantage Einstein had over a parrot it wasn't vocal what then is so special about our language the most common answer is that our language is amazingly Supple we can connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce an inite number of sentences each with a distinct meaning we can thereby inest store and communicate a prodigious amount of information about the surrounding World a green monkey can yell to its comrades careful a lion but a modern human can tell her friends that this morning near the bend in the river she saw a lion tracking a herd of bison she can then describe the exact location including the deant paths leading to the area with this information the members of her band can put their heads together and discuss whether they ought to approach the river in order to chase away the lion and hunt the Bison a second theory agrees that that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world but the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans not about lions and bison our language evolved as a way of gossiping according to this Theory homos sapiens is primarily a social animal social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction it is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison it's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom who is sleeping with whom who is honest and who is a cheat four an ivory figurine of a lion man or lionist woman from the stle cave in Germany Circa 32,000 years ago the body is human but the head is leonine this is one of the first indisputable examples of Art and probably of religion and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist the amount of information that one must obtain and store in order to track the everchanging relationships of a few dozen individuals is staggering in a band of the individuals there are 1,225 one-on-one relationships and countless more complex social combinations all Apes show a keen interest in such social information but they have trouble gossiping actively neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens probably also had a hard time talking behind each other's backs a much maligned ability which is in fact essential for cooperation in large numbers the new linguistic skills that modern sapiens acquired about 70 Millennia ago enabled them to gossip for hours on end reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands and sapiens could develop Tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation. one the gossip Theory might sound like a joke but numerous studies support report it even today the vast majority of human communication whether in the form of emails phone calls or newspaper columns is Gossip it comes so naturally to us that it seems as if our language evolved for this very purpose do you think that history professors chat about the reasons for World War I when they meet for lunch or that nuclear physicists spend their Coe breaks at scientic conferences talking about quarks sometimes but more often they gossip about the professor who caught her husband cheating or the quarrel between the head of the department and the dean or the rumors that a colleague used his research funds to buy Alexus gossip usually focuses on wrongdoings rumor mongers are the original fourth estate journalists who inform Society about and thus protect it from cheats and freels most likely both the gossip Theory and that there is a lion near the river Theory are valid yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions rather it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all as far as we know only sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen touched or smelled Legends myths gods and religions appeared for the rst time with the cognitive Revolution many animals and human species could previously say careful a lion thanks to the cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say the lion is the guardian Spirit of our tribe this ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of sapiens language it's relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don't really exist and believe six impossible things before breakfast you could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him Limitless bananas after death in Monkey heaven but why is it important after all can be dangerously misleading nor distracting people who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer and if you spend hours praying to non-existing Guardian Spirits aren't you wasting precious time time better spent foraging fighting and fornicating buin has enabled us not merely to imagine things but to do so collectively we can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story The Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians and the Nationalist myths of modern states such myths give sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate exibly in large numbers ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers but they do so in a very rigid Manner and only with close relatives wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more exibly than ants but they can do so only with small numbers of other IND individuals that they know intimately sapiens can cooperate in extremely exible ways with countless numbers of strangers that's why sapiens rule the world whereas anow leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and Research Laboratories the legend of pujo our chimpanzee cousins usually live in small troops of several dozen individuals they form close friendships hunt together and ght shoulder-to-shoulder against baboons cheetah and enemy chimpan disease their social structure tends to be hierarchical the dominant member who is almost always a male is termed the alpha male other males and females exhibit their submission to the alpha male by bowing before him while making grunting sounds not unlike human subjects cow toow before a king the alpha male strives to maintain social harmony within his troop when to individuals ght he will intervene and stop the violence less benevolently he might monopolize particularly coveted foods and prevent lower ranking males from mating with the females when two males are contesting the alpha position they usually do so by forming extensive coalitions of supporters both male and female from within the group ties between Coalition members are based on intimate daily contact hugging touching kissing grooming and mutual favors just as human politicians on Election campaigns go around shaking hands and kissing kissing babies so as pents to the top position in a chimpanzee group spend much time hugging backs slapping and kissing baby chimps the alpha male usually wins his position not because he is physically stronger but because he leads a large and stable Coalition these coalitions play a central part not only during overt struggles for the alpha position but in almost all day-to-day activities members of a coalition spend more time together share food and help one another in times of trouble there are clear limits to the size of groups that can be formed and maintained in such a way in order to function all members of a group must know each other intimately two chimpanzees who have never met never fought and never engaged in mutual grooming will not know whether they can trust one another whether it would be worthwhile to help one another and which of them ranks higher under natural conditions a typical chimpanze troop consists of about 20 to individuals as the number of chimpanzees in a troop increases the social order destabilizes eventually leading to a rupture and the formation of a new troop by some of the animals only in a handful of cases have zoologists observed groups larger than a 100 separate groups seldom cooperate and tend to compete for territory and food researchers have documented prolonged Warfare between groups and even one case of genocidal activity in which one troop system atically slaughtered most members of a neighboring band. two similar patterns probably dominated the social lives of early humans including archaic Homo sapiens humans like chimps have social instincts that enabled our ancestors to form friendships and hierarchies and to hunt or ght together however like the social instincts of chimps those of humans were adapted only for small intimate groups when the group grew too large its social order stabilized in the band split even if a particularly fertile Valley could feed 500 archaic sapiens there was no way that so many strangers could live together how could they agree who should be leader who should hunt where or who should mate with whom in the wake of the cognitive Revolution gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands but even gossip has its limits sociological research has shown that the maximum natural size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals most people can neither intimately know nor gossip actively about more than 150 human beings even today a critical threshold in human organizations Falls somewhere around this magic number below this threshold communities businesses social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance and rumor mongering there is no need for formal ranks titles and law books to keep porter. three a platoon of 30 soldiers or even a company of a 100 soldiers can function well on the basis of intimate relations with a minimum of formal discipline a well-respected sergeant can become king of the company and exercise Authority even over commissioned users a small family business can survive end hourish without a board of directors a CEO or an accounting department but once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed things can no longer work that way you cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon successful family businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more Personnel if they cannot reinvent themselves they go bust how did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and Empires ruling hundreds of millions the secret was probably the appearance of ition large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths any large-scale human cooperation whether a modern State a medieval Church an ancient city or an archaic tribe is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's Collective imagination churches are rooted in common religious Smiths two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on Crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God would was incarnated in human and allowed himself to be cruy to redeem our sins states are rooted in common National myths two serbs who have never met might risk their lives to save one another because both believe in the existence of the Serbian Nation the Serbian Homeland and the Serbian a Judicial Systems are rooted in common legal myths two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine ORS to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws Justice human rights and the money paid out in fees yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another there are no gods in the universe no Nations no money no human rights no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings people easily understand that Primitives cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits and Gathering each full moon to dance together around the camp what we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis take for example the world of business corporations modern business people and lawyers are in fact powerful Sorcerers the principal deance between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger Tales the legend of PUO affords us a good example an icon that somewhat resembles the stat ofine man appears today on cars trucks and motorcycles Les from Paris to Sydney it's the hood ornament that adorns Vehicles made by PUO one of the oldest and largest of Europe's car makers PUO began as a small family business in the village of valentiny just 300 kilm from the sto cave today the company employs about 200,000 people worldwide most of whom are complete strangers to each other these strangers cooperate so actively that in 2008 PUO produced more than 1 5 million automobiles earning revenues of about 55 billion e in what sense can we say that Pua the company's oal name exists there are many pujo vehicles but these are obviously not the company even if every PUO in the world were simultaneously junked and sold for scrap metal puu would not disappear it would continue to manufacture new cars and issue its annuel report the company owns factories machinery and showrooms and employees mechanics accountants and secretaries but all these together do not comprise PUO a disaster might kill every single one of pu's employees and go on to destroy all of its assembly lines and executive AIS even then the company could borrow money hire new employees build new factories and buy new Machinery fugo has managers and shareholders but neither do they constitute the company all the managers could be dismissed and all its shares sold but the company itself would remain intact five the PUO lion it doesn't mean that puos is invulnerable or Immortal if a judge were to mandate the dissolution of the company its factories would remain standing and its workers accountants managers and shareholders would continue to live but puu would immediately vanish in short puos seems to have no essential connection to the physical world does it really exist pujo is aant of our Collective imagination lawyers call this a legal it can't be pointed at it is not a physical object but it exists as a legal entity just like you or me it is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates it can open a bank account and own property it pays taxes and it can be sued and even prosecuted separately from many of the people who own or work for it PUO belongs to a particular genre of legals called limited liability companies the idea behind such companies is among Humanity's most ingenious inventions Homo sapiens lived for Untold Millennia without them during most of recorded history property could be owned only by Ash and blood humans the kind that stood on two legs and had big brains if in 13th century France Jean set up a wagon manufacturing Workshop he himself was the business if a wagon he made broke down a week after purchase the disgruntled buyer would have sued Jean personally if Jean had borrowed 1,000 gold coins to set up his workshop and the business failed he would have had to repay the loan by selling his private property his house his cow his land he might even have had to sell his children into servitude if he couldn't cover the debt he could be thrown in prison by the state or enslaved by his creditors he was fully liable without limit for all obligations incurred by his Workshop if you had lived back then you would probably have thought twice before you opened an Enterprise of your own and indeed This legal situation of discouraged entrepreneurship people were afraid to start new businesses and take economic risks it hardly seemed worth taking the chance that their families could end up utterly destitute this is why people began collectively to imagine the existence of limited liability companies such companies were legally independent of the people who set them up or invested money in them or managed them over the last few centuries such companies have become the main players in the economic Arena and we have grown so used to them that we forget they exist only in our imagination in the US the technical term for a limited liability company is a corporation which is ironic because the term derives from Corpus Bonnie in Latin the one thing these corporations lack despite their having no real bodies the American legal system treats corporations as legal persons as if they were flesh and blood human beings and so did the French legal system back in 1896 when Arman PUO who had inherited from his parents a metal working shop that produced Springs saws and bicycles decided to go into the automobile business to that end he set up a limited liability company he named the company after himself but it was independent of him if one of the cars broke down the buyer could sue PUO but not Armen pujo if the company borrowed millions of Franks and then went bust arm and PUO did not owe its creditors a single Frank the loan after all had been given to PUO the company not to Armen PUO the homo sapiens Armen PUO died in 1915 PUO the company is still alive and well how exactly did Armand PUO The Man created PUO the company in much the same way that priests and Sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history and in which thousands of French cures were still creating Christ's body every Sunday in the parish churches it all revolved around telling stories and convincing people to believe them in the case of the French cures The crucial story was that if Christ's life in death As Told by the Catholic Church according to this story if a Catholic priest dressed in his his sacred garments solemnly said the right words at the right moment mundane Bread and Wine turned into God's zesan blood the priest exclaimed Haka State Corpus mom Latin for this is my body and Hocus Pocus the bread turned into Christ sesh seeing that the priest had properly and assiduously observed all the procedures millions of devout French Catholics behaved as if God really existed in the consecrated Bread and Wine in the case of puos the crucial story was the the French legal code AS written by the French Parliament according to the French legislators if a c lawyer followed all the proper liturgy and rituals wrote all the required spells and Oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper and act his ornate signature to the bottom of the document then Hocus Pocus a new company was incorporated when in 1896 arm and PUO wanted to create his company he paid a lawyer to go through all these sacred procedures once the lawyer had performed all the right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and Oaths millions of upright French citizens behaved as if the PUO company really existed telling active stories is not easy the dec difficulty lies not in telling the story but in convincing everyone else to believe it much of History revolves around this question how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods or nations or limited liability companies yet when it succe EDS it gives sapiens immense power because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals just try to imagine how de difficult it would have been to create States or churches or legal systems if we could speak only about things that really exist such as Rivers trees and Lions over the years people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories within this network CS such as PUO not only exist but also accum to men's power the kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles actions social constructs or imagined realities an imagined reality is not a lie I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there there is nothing special about lies green monkeys and chimpanzees can lie a green monkey for example has been observed calling careful a lion when there was no lion around this alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who had just found a banana leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself unlike lying an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in and as long as this communal belief persists the imagined reality exerts force in the world the sculptor from the stat cave May sincerely have believed in the existence of The Lion Man Guardian Spirit some Sorcerers are Charlotte but most sincerely believe in the existence of gods and demons most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies most human rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of Human Rights no one was lying when in 2011 the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens even though the UN Libya and human rights are all figments of our fertile imagination ever since the cognitive Revolution sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality on the one hand the objective reality of rivers trees and lions and on the other hand the imagined reality of gods Nations and corporations as time went by the imagined reality became ever more powerful so that today the very survival of rivers trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as Gods Nations and corporations bypassing the genome the ability to create an imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively but it also did something more since largescale human cooperation is based on myths the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths by telling dear stories under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly in 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the Divine divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people consequently ever since the cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens has been able to revise Its Behavior rapidly in accordance with changing needs this opened a fast lane of cultural Evolution bypassing the track jams of genetic Evolution speeding down this fast lane Homo sapiens soon far outstripped all other human and animal species in its ability to cooperate the behavior of other social animals is determined to a large extent by their genes DNA is not an autocrat animal behavior is also unnuanced by environmental factors and individual qus nevertheless in a given environment animals of the same species will tend to behave in a similar way signicant changes in social behavior cannot occur in general without genetic mutations for example common chimpanzees have a genetic tendency to live in hierarchical groups headed by an alpha male members of a closely related chimpanzee species bonobos usually live in more egalitarian groups dominated by female alliances female common chimpanzees cannot take lessons from their bonabo relatives and Stage a feminist Revolution male chimps cannot Gather in a constitutional assembly to abolish the oal fale and declare that from here on out all chimps are to be treated as equals such dramatic changes in Behavior would occur only if something changed in the chimpanzees DNA for similar reasons archaic humans did not initiate any revolutions as far as we can tell changes in Social patterns the invention of new technologies and the settlement of alien habitats resulted from genetic mutations and environmental pressures more than from cultural initiatives this is why it took humans hundreds of thousands of years to make these steps 2 million years ago genetic mutations resulted in the appearance of a new human species called Homo erectus its emergence was accompanied by the development of a new stone tool technology now recognized as a dening feature of this species as long as Homo erectus did not undergo further genetic alterations its stone tools remained roughly the same for close to 2 million years in contrast ever since the cognitive Revolution sapiens have been able to change their behavior quickly transmitting new behaviors to Future Generations without any need of genetic or environmental change as a prime example consider the repeated appearance of childless Elites such as the Catholic priesthood Buddhist monastic orders and Chinese unic bureaucracies the existence of such Elite goes against the most fundamental principles of natural selection since these dominant members of society I willingly give up procreation whereas chimpanzee alpha males use their power to have sex with as many females as possible and consequently sire a large proportion of their troops young the Catholic alfha male abstains completely from sexual intercourse and child care this abstinence does not result from unique environmental conditions such as a severe lack of food or want of potential mates nor is it the result of some quirky genetic mutation the Catholic church has survived for centuries not by passing on a celibacy Gene from one Pope to the next but by passing on the stories of the New Testament and of Catholic canon law in other words while the behavior patterns of archaic humans remains for tens of thousands of years sapiens could transform their social structures the nature of their interpersonal relations their economic activities and a host of other behaviors within a decade or two consider a resident of Berlin born in 1900 and living to The Ripe age of 100 she spent her childhood in the hoen zaler Empire of Wilhelm II her adult years the viar Republic the Nazi Third Reich and communist East Germany and she died a citizen of a democratic and reuni Germany she had managed to be a part of V very different sociopolitical systems though her DNA remained exactly the same this was the key to sapen success in a one-on-one brawl a neanderthal would probably have beaten a sapiens but in a conflict of hundreds neanderthals wouldn't stand a chance neanderthals could share share information about the whereabouts of lions but they probably could not tell and revise stories about tribal Spirits without an ability to compostion neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers nor could they adapt their social behavior to rapidly changing challenges while we can't get inside a neanderthal mind to understand how they thought we have indirect evidence of the limits to their cognition compared with their sapiens rivals archaeologists Excavating 30,000 yearold Sapient sites in the European Heartland occasionally Ed their seashells from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts in all likelihood these shells got to the Continental interior through longdistance trade between de and sapiens bands Neanderthal sites lack any evidence of such trade each group manufactured its own tools from Local materials. 4 six the Catholic alfha male abstains from seual intercourse in child care even though there is no genetic or ecological reason for him to do so another example comes from the south passic sapiens bands that lived on the island of New Ireland north of New Guinea used a volcanic glass called obsidian to manufacture particularly strong and Sharp Tools New Ireland however has no natural deposits of obsidian laboratory tests revealed that the obsidian they used was brought from deposits on New Britain an island 400 km away some of the inhabitants of these islands must have been skilled Navigators who traded from Island to Island over long distances do five trade may seem a very pragmatic Activity one that needs notive basis yet the fact is that no animal other than sapiens engages in trade and all the sapiens trade new works about which we have detailed evidence were based ons trade cannot exist without trust and it is very dcult to trust strangers the global trade network of today is based on our trust in suchal entities as the dollar the Federal Reserve Bank and the totemic trademarks of Corporations when two strangers in a tribal Society want to trade they will often establish trust by appealing to a common God mythical ancestor or totem animal if archaic sapiens believing in such Conrad shells and obsidian it stands to reason that they could also have traded information thus creating a much denser and wider knowledge Network than the one that served neanderthals and other archaic humans hunting techniques provide another illustration of these deces neanderthals usually hunted alone or in small groups sapians on the other hand developed techniques that relied on cooperation between many dozens of individuals and perhaps even between de bands one particularly active method was to surround an entire herd of animals such as wild horses then chase them into a narrow Gorge where it was easy to slaughter them on mass if all went according to plan the bands could Harvest tons of meat fat and animal skins in a single afternoon of collective or and either consume these riches in a giant pot latch or dry smoke or in arctic areas freeze them for later usage archaeologists have discovered sites where entire herds were butchered annually in such ways there are even sites where fences and obstacles were erected in order to create artificial traps and slaughtering grounds we may presume that neanderthals were not pleased to see their traditional hunting grounds turned into sapiens controlled slaughter houses however if violence broke out between the two species neanderthals were not much better o than Wild Horses 50 neanderthals cooperating and traditional and static patterns were no match for 500 versatile and Innovative sapiens and even if the sapiens lost the RSD round they could quickly invent new strategems that would enable them to win the next time what happened in the cognitive Revolution new ability wider consequences the ability to transmit larger quantities of information about the world surrounding Homo sapiens planning and carrying out complex actions such as avoiding lions and hunting B and the ability to transmit larger quantities of information about Sapient social relationships large larger and more cohesive groups numbering up to 150 individuals the ability to transmit information about things that do not really exist such as tribal Spirits Nations limited liability companies and human rights a cooperation between very large numbers of strangers be rapid innovation of social behavior history and biology the immense diversity of imagined realities that sapiens invented and the resulting diversity of behavior avor patterns are the main components of what we call cultures once cultures appeared they never ceased to change and develop and these Unstoppable alterations are what we call history the cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology until the cognitive Revolution the doings of all human species belong to the realm of biology or if you so prefer prehistory I tend to avoid the term prehistory because it strongly implies that even before the cognitive Revolution humans were in a category of their own from the cognitive Revolution onwards historical narratives replace biological theories as our primary means of explaining the development of homo sapiens to understand the rise of Christianity or the French Revolution it is not enough to comprehend the interaction of genes hormones and organisms it is necessary to take into account the interaction of ideas images and Fantasies as well well this does not mean that homo sapiens and human culture became exempt from biological laws we are still animals and our physical emotional and cognitive abilities are still shaped by our DNA our societies are built from the same building blocks as Neanderthal or chimpanzee societies and the more we examine these building blocks Sensations emotions Family Ties the larance we end D between us and other Apes it is however a mistake to look for the deces at the level of the individual or the family one onone even 10 on 10 we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees synic deces begin to appear only when we cross the threshold of 150 individuals and when we reach 1,000 to 2,000 individuals the deces are astounding if you tried to Bunch together thousands of chimpanzees into tion andman Square Wall Street Vatican or the headquarters of the United Nations the result would be pandemonium by contrast sapiens regularly Gather By the thousands in such places together they create orderly patterns such as trade networks Mass celebrations and political institutions that they could never have created in isolation the real deance between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals families and groups this glue has made us the masters of creation of course we also needed other skills such as the ability to make and use tools yet to making is of little consequence unless it is coupled with the ability to cooperate with many others how is it that we now have InterContinental missiles with nuclear warheads whereas 30,000 years ago we had only sticks within spearheads physiologically there has been no synic and improvement in our tool making capacity over the last 30,000 years Albert Einstein was far less dextrous with his hands than was an ancient hunter gatherer however our capacity to cooperate with large numbers of strangers has improved dramatically the ancient in spearhead was manufactured in minutes by a single person who relied on the advice and help of a few intimate friends the production of a modern nuclear warhead requires the cooperation of millions of strangers all over the world from the workers who mind the uranium war in the of the earth to theoretical physicists who write long mathematical formulas to describe the interactions of subatomic particles to summarize the relationship between biology and history after the cognitive Revolution a biology sets the basic parameters for the behavior and capacities of homo sapiens the whole of History takes place within the bounds of this biological Arena B however this arena is extraordinarily large allowing sapiens to play an astounding variety of games thanks to their ability to invention sapiens create more and more complex games which each generation develops and elaborates even further C consequently in order to understand how sapiens behave we must describe the historical evolution of their actions referring only to our biological constraints would be like a radio sports caster who attending the World Cup football championships owers his listeners a detailed description of the playing L rather than an account of what the players are doing what games did our Stone Age ancestors play in the arena of history as far as we know the people who carved the stat Aion man some 30,000 years ago had the same physical emotional and intellectual abilities we have what did they do when they woke up in the morning what did they eat for breakfast and lunch what were their societies like did they have monogamous relationships and new nuclear families did they have ceremonies moral codes Sports contests and religious rituals did they ght Wars the next chapter takes a peak behind the curtain of the ages examining what life was like in the Millennia separating the cognitive Revolution from the Agricultural Revolution three a day in the life of Adam and Eve to understand our nature history and psychology we must get inside the heads of our hunter gatherer ancestors for nearly the entire history of our species sapiens lived as foragers the past 200 years during which ever increasing numbers of sapiens have obtained their daily bread as Urban laborers and US workers in the preceding 10,000 years during which most sapiens lived as farmers and herders are the blink of a night compared to the tens of thousands of years during which our ancestors hunted and gathered the ourishing ELD of evolutionary psychology argues that many of our present day social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long pre-agricultural era even today scholars in this old claim our brains and minds are adapted to a life of hunting and Gathering our eaing habits our conflicts and our sexuality are all the result of the way our hunter gatherer Minds interact with our current post-industrial environment with its mega cities airplanes telephones and computers this environment gives us more material resources and longer lives than those enjoyed by any previous generation but it often makes us feel alienated depressed and pressured to understand why evolutionary psychologists argue we need to delve into the hunter gather or world that shaped us the world that we subconsciously still inhabit why for example do people gorge on high calorie food that is doing little good to their bodies today's anend societies are in the throws of a plague of obesity which is rapidly spreading to developing countries it's a puzzle why we been John the sweetest and greasiest food we can end e until we consider the eating habits of our forager for bears in the savanas and forests they inhabited high calorie sweets were extremely rare and food in general was in short supply a typical forager 30,000 years ago had access to only one type of sweet food ripe fruit if a stone AG woman came across a tree groaning with GS the most sensible thing to do was to eat as many of them as she could on the spot before the local baboon band picked the tree bear the instinct to gorge on high calorie food was hardwired into our jeans today we may be living in high-rise apartments with overun refrigerators but our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah that's what makes us spoon down an entire tub of Ben and Jerry's when we end d one in the freezer and wash it down with a jumu Coke this scoring Jean Theory is widely accepted other theories are far more contentious for example some evolutionary psychologists argue that ancient foraging bands were not composed of nuclear families centered on monogamous couples rather foragers lived in communes devoid of private property monogamous relationships and even fatherhood in such a band a woman could have sex and form intimate bonds with several men and women simultaneously and all of the Bands adults Co operated in parenting its children since no man knew denitively which of the children were his men showed equal concern for all youngsters such a social structure is not an Aquarian Utopia it's well documented among animals notably our closest relatives the chimpanzees and babos there are even a number of present-day human cultures in which Collective fatherhood is practiced as for example among the Bari Indians according to the beliefs of such Society a child is not born from the sperm of a single man but from the accumulation of sperm in a woman's womb a good mother will make a point of having sex with several different men especially when she is pregnant so that her child will enjoy the qualities and paternal care not merely of the best hunter but also of the best Storyteller the strongest Warrior and the most considerate lover if this sounds silly bear in mind that before the development of modern embryological studies people had no solid evidence that babies are always sired by a single father rather than by many the proponents of this ancient commune Theory argue that the frequent ulties that characterize modern marriages and the higher rates of divorce not to mention the core neopia of psychological complexes from which both children and adults sewer all result from forcing humans to live in nuclear families in monogamous relationships that are incompatible with our biological software one many scholars vehemently reject this Theory insisting that both monogamy and the forming of nuclear families are core human behaviors though ancient hunter gatherer societies tended to be more communal and egalitarian than modern societies these researchers argue they were nevertheless comprised of separate cells each containing a jealous couple and the children they held in common this is why today monogamous relationships and nuclear families are the norm in the vast majority of cultures why many men and women tend to be very possessive of their partners and children and why even in modern states such as North Korea and Syria political Authority passes from father to son in order to resolve this controversy and understand our sexuality society and politics we need to learn something about the living conditions of our ancestors to examine how sapiens lived between the cognitive revolution of 70,000 years ago and the start of the Agricultural Revolution about 12,000 years ago unfortunately there are few certainties regarding the lives of our forager ancestors the debate between the ancient commune and eternal monogamy schools is based on M evidence we obviously have no written records from the age of forgers and the archaeological evidence consists mainly of fossilized bones and stone tools artifacts made of more perishable materials such as wood bamboo or leather survive only under unique conditions the common impression that pre-agricultural humans lived in an age of stone is a misconception based on this archaeological bias the Stone Age should more accurately be called the wood age because most of the tools used by ancient hunter gatherers were made of wood any reconstruction of the lives of ancient hunter gatherers from the surviving artifacts is extremely problematic one of the most glaring deces between the ancient foragers and their Agricultural and Industrial descendants is that foragers had very few artifacts to begin with and these played a comparatively modest role in their lives over the course of his or her life a typical member of a modern an Society will own several million artifacts from cars and houses to disposable nappies and milk cardens there's hardly an activity a belief or even an emotion that is not mediated by objects of our own devising our eating habits are mediated by a mindboggling collection of such items from spoons and glasses to genetic engineering labs and gigantic oceangoing ships in play we use a plethora of toys from plastic cards to 100,000 Cedar stadiums our romantic and sexual relations are aced bya Rings beds nice clothes sexy underwear condoms fashionable restaurants cheap motels airport lounges wedding halls and catering companies religions bring the sacred into our lives with Gothic churches Muslim mosques Hindu ashrams Doris Scrolls Tibetan prayer Wheels Priestly cix candles incense Christmas trees mats of balls tombstones and icons we hardly notice how ubiquitous our stew is until we have to move it to a new house foragers moved house every month every week and sometimes even every day toing whatever they had on their backs there were no moving companies wagons or even pack animals to share the burden they consequently had to make doe with only the most essential possessions it's reasonable to presume then that the greater part of their mental religious and emotional lives was conducted without the help of artifacts an archaeologist working 100,000 years from now could piece together a reasonable picture of Muslim belief and practice from the Myriad objects he Unearthed an a ruined mosque but we are largely at a loss in trying to comprehend the beliefs and rituals of ancient h win gatherers it's much the same dilemma that a future historian would face if he had to depict the social world of 20 RSD Century teenagers solely on the basis of their surviving snail mail since no records will remain of their phone conversations emails blogs and text messages a Reliance on artifacts will thus bias an account of ancient hunter gatherer life one way to remedy this is to look at modern forager societies these can be studied directly ly by anthropological observation but there are good reasons to be very careful in extrapolating from Modern forger societies to ancient ones fiercely all forager societies that have survived into the modern era have been unnuanced by neighboring Agricultural and industrial societies consequently it's risky to assume that what is true of them was also true tens of thousands of years ago secondly modern forager societies have survived mainly in areas with cold climatic conditions and inhospitable terrain ill suited for agriculture societies that have adapted to the extreme conditions of places such as the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa May well provide a very misleading model for understanding ancient Societies in Fertile areas such as the yanked sea River Valley in particular population density in an area like the Kalahari Desert is far lower than it was around the ancient yank sea and this has far-reaching implications for questions about the size and structure of human bands and the relations between them thirdly the most notable characteristic of hunter gatherer societies is how deant they are one from the other they dear not only from one part of the world to another but even in the same region one good example is the huge variety the first European settlers found among the aborigin peoples of Australia just before the British Conquest between 300,000 and 700,000 h gatherers lived on the continent in 200 to 600 tribes Each of which was further divided into several bands. two each tribe had its own language religion norms and Customs living around what is now Adela in Southern Australia were several patrilineal Clans that reckon descent from The Father's Side these Clans bonded together into tribes on a strictly territorial basis in contrast some tribes in Northern Australia gave more importance to a person's maternal ancestry and a person's tribal identity depended on his or her totem rather than his territory it stands to reason that the ethnic and cultural variety among ancient hunter gatherers was equally impressive and that the 5 million to 8 million foragers who populated the world on the eve of the Agricultural Revolution were divided into thousands of separate tribes with thousands of De languages and cultures do3 this after all was one of the main legacies of the cognitive Revolution thanks to the appearance of chin even people with the same genetic makeup who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very dear and imagined realities which manifested themselves in different norms and values for example there's every reason to believe that a forager band that lived 30,000 years ago on this spot where Oxford University now stands would have spoken a de language from one living where Cambridge is now situated one band might have been belligerent and the other peaceful perhaps the Cambridge band was communal while the one at Oxford was based on nuclear families the cabin might have spent long hours carving wooden statues of their Guardian Spirits whereas the oxonians may have woried through dance the former perhaps believed in reincarnation while the latter thought this was nonsense in one Society homosexual relationships might have been accepted while in the other they were Taboo in other Wards while anthropological observations of modern foragers can help us understand some of the possibilities available to ancient foragers the ancient Horizon of possibilities was much broader and most of it is hidden from our view the heated debates about Homo sapiens natural way of life missed the main point ever since the cognitive Revolution there hasn't been a single natural way of life for sapiens there are only cultural choices from among a bewildering pallet of possibilities the original affluent society what generalizations can we make about life in the pre-agricultural world nevertheless it seems safe to say that the vast majority of people lived in small bands numbering several dozen or at most several hundred individuals and that all these individuals were humans it is important to note this last point because it is far from obvious most members of agricultural and industrial societies are domesticated animals they are not equal to their masters of course but they are members all the same today the society called New Zealand is composed of 4.5 million sapiens and 50 million sheep there was just one exception to this general rule the dog the dog was the RSD animal domesticated by Homo sapiens and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution experts disagree about the exact date but we have incontrovertible evidence of domesticated dogs from from about 15,000 years ago they may have joined the human pack thousands of years earlier dogs were used for hunting ining and as an alarm system against wild beasts and human Intruders with the passing of generations the two species co-evolved to communicate well with each other dogs that were most attentive to the needs and feelings of their human companions got extra care and food and were more likely to survive simultaneously dogs learned to manip at people for their own needs a 15,000 year bond has yielded a much deeper understanding and action between humans and dogs than between humans and any other animal do4 in some cases dead dogs were even buried ceremoniously much like humans members of a band knew each other very intimately and were surrounded throughout their lives by friends and relatives loneliness and privacy were rare neighboring bands probably competed for resources and even fought one another but they also had friendly contacts they exchanged members hunted together traded rare luxuries cemented political alliances and celebrated religious festivals such cooperation was one of the important trademarks of homo sapiens and gave it a crucial Edge over other human species sometimes relations with neighboring bands were tight enough that together they constituted a single tribe sharing a Common Language common myths and common norms and Val values yet we should not overestimate the importance of such external relations even if in times of Crisis neighboring bands Drew closer together and even if they occasionally gathered to hunt or Feast together they still spent the vast majority of their time in complete isolation and Independence trade was mostly limited to prestige items such as shells Ember and pigments there is no evidence that people traded staple Goods like fruits and meat or that the existence of one and depended on the importing of goods from another sociopolitical relations too tended to be sporadic the tribe did not serve as a permanent political framework and even if it had seasonal meeting places there were no permanent towns or institutions the average person lived many months without seeing or hearing a human from outside of her own band and she encountered throughout her life no more than a few hundred humans the sapiens population was thinly spread over over vast territories before the Agricultural Revolution the human population of the entire planet was smaller than that of today's Cairo seven first bet a 12,000-year-old tomb found in Northern Israel it contains the skeleton of a 50-year-old woman next to that of a puppy bottom left corner the puppy was buried close to the woman's head her left hand is resting on the dog in a way that might indicate an emotional connection there are of course other possible explanations perhaps for example the puppy was a gift to the gatekeeper of the next world most sapiens bands lived on the road roaming from place to place in search of food their movements were a nuanced by the changing seasons the annual migrations of animals and the growth cycles of plants they usually traveled back and forth across the same home territory an area of between several dozen and many hundreds of square k occasionally bands wandered outside their Turf and explored new lands whether due to natural calamities violent conics demographic pressures or the initiative of a charismatic leader these wanderings were the engine of human worldwide expansion if a forager band split once every 40 years and its Splinter Group migrated to a new territory 100 km to the east the distance from East Africa to China would have been covered in about 10,000 years in some exceptional cases when food sources were particularly Rich bands settled down in seasonal and even permanent camps techniques for drying smoking and freezing food also made it possible to stay put for longer periods most importantly alongside seasoned Rivers rich in seafood and waterfoul humans set up permanent Shing Villages the rst permanent settlements in history Long PR dating the Agricultural Revolution fishing Village might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian Islands as early as 45,000 years ago these may have been the base from which Homo sapiens launched its rst transoceanic Enterprise the invasion of Australia in most habitats sapiens bands fed themselves in an elastic and opportunistic fashion they sced for termites picked berries dug for roots stalked rabbits and hunted bison and Mammoth not withstanding the popular image of man the Hunter Gathering was sapien's main activity and it provided most of their calories as well as raw materials such as Flint wood and bamboo sapiens did not forage only for food and materials they foraged for knowledge as well to survive they needed a detailed mental map of their territory to maximize the essency of their daily search for food they required information about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal they needed to know which foods were nishen which made you sick and how to use others as cures they needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell they studied every stream every walnut tree every bar cave and every in stone deposit in their vicinity each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife How to Mend a torn cloak how to lay a rabbit trap and how to face Avalanches snake bites or hungry lions Mastery of each of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice the average ancient forager could turn into stone into a spear Point within minutes when we try to imitate this feat we usually fail miserably most of us lack expert knowledge of the aching properties of intin Basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely in other words the average forager had wider deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants today most people in industrial societies don't need to know much about the natural world in order to survive what do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer an insurance agent a history teacher or a factory worker you need to know a lot about your own tiny El of expertise but for the vast majority of life's Necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny ELD of expertise the the human Collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands but at the individual level ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history there is some evidence that the size of the average sapien's brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging 5 survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone when Agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival and new niches for imbeciles were opened up you could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the Next Generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly line worker foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals plants and objects but also the internal world of their own bodies and senses they listened to the slightest movement in the grass to learn whether a snake might be lurking there they carefully observed the foliage of trees in order to discover fruits beehives and bird nests they moved with a minimum of orent noise and knew how to sit Walk and Run in the most haal and eent manner varied and constant use of their bodies made them S as marathon runners they had physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practicing yoga or taii the hunter gatherer way of life deaired signicantly from region to region and from season to season but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of of the peasants Shepherds laborers and Office Clerks who followed in their footsteps while people in today's and societies work an average of 40 to 40v hours a week and people in the developing world work 60 and even 80 hours a week hunter gatherers living today in the most inhospitable of habitats such as the Kalahari Desert work on average for just 30v to 40 V hours a week they hunt only one day out of three and Gathering takes up just 3 to 6 hours daily in normal times this is enough to feed the band it may well be that ancient hunter gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Kalahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials on top of that foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores they had no dishes to wash no carpets to vacuum no floors to polish no nappies to change and no bills to pay the forer economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do today a Chinese Factory hand leaves home around 7 in the morning makes her way through polluted streets to a sweat shop and there operates the same machine in the same way day in day out for 10 long and mind numbing hours returning home around 7 in the evening in order to wash dishes and do the laundry 30,000 years ago a Chinese forager might leave camp with her companions at say 8: in the morning morning they'd roam the nearby forests and Meadows Gathering mushrooms digging up edible roots catching frogs and occasionally running away from tigers by early afternoon they were back at the camp to make lunch that left them plenty of time to gossip tell stories play with the children and just hang out of course the Tigers sometimes caught them or a snake bid them but on the other hand they didn't have to deal with automobile accidents and industrial pollution in most places and at most times foraging provided ideal nutrition that is hardly surprising this had been the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years and the human body was well adapted to it evidence from fossilized skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to sewer from starvation or malnutrition and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants average life expectancy was apparently just 30 to 40 years but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality children who made it through the Peril RSD years had a good chance of reaching the age of 60 and some even made it to their 80s among modern foragers 40v year-old women can expect to live another 20 years and about 5 to 8% of the population is over 60.6 the forager secret of success which protected them from starvation and malnutrition was their very diet Farmers tends to eat a very limited and unbalanced diet especially in premodern times most of the calories feeding an agricultural population came from a single crop such as wheat potatoes or rice that lacks some of the vitamins minerals and other nutritional materials humans need the typical peasant in traditional China ate rice for breakfast rice for lunch and rice for dinner if she were lucky she could expect to eat the same on the following day by contrast ancient foragers regularly ate dozens of deant food The Peasants ancient ancestor the forager may have eaten berries and mushrooms for breakfast fruits snails and turtle for lunch and rabbit steak with wild onions for dinner tomorrow's menu might have been completely deant this variety ensured that the ancient foragers received all the necessary nutrients furthermore by not being dependent on any single kind of food they were less liable to sewer when one particular food source failed agricultural societies are ravaged by famine when drought re or earthquake devastates the annual rice or potato crop forager societies were hardly immune to natural disasters and swer from periods of want and hunger but they were usually able to deal with such calamities more easily if they lost some of their staple food SCE they could gather or hunt other species or move to a less affected area ancient foreigners also sared less from infectious diseases most of the infectious diseases that have plagued Agricultural and industrial societies such as small poox measles and tuberculosis originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution ancient foragers who had domesticated only dogs were free of these scourges moreover most people in Agricultural and industrial societies lived in dents unhy yanic permanent settlements ideal hot beds for disease foragers roamed the land in small bands that could not sustain epidemics the wholesome and varied diet the relatively short workking week and the Rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to Dean pre-agricultural forager societies as the original an societies it would be a mistake however to idealize the lives of these ancients though they lived better lives than most people in agricultural industrial societies their world could still be harsh and unforgiving periods of want and hardship were not uncommon child mortality was high and an accident which would be minor today could easily become a death sentence most people probably enjoyed the close intimacy of the roaming band but those unfortunates who incurred the hostility or mockery of their fellow band members probably swer terribly modern forigners occasionally abandon and even kill old or disabled people who cannot keep up with the band unwanted babies and children may be slain and there are even cases of religiously inspired Human Sacrifice the a people hunter gatherers who lived in the jungles of Paraguay until the 1960s ow a glimpse into the darker sign of forging when a valued band member died the ACH customarily killed a little girl and buried the two together anthropologists who interviewed the a recorded a case in which a band abandoned a middle-aged man who fell sick and was unable to keep up with the others he was left under a tree vultures perched above him expecting a Hardy meal but the man recuperated and walking briskly he managed to rejoin the band his body was covered with the bird's feces so he was henceforth nicknamed vulture droppings when an old dick woman became a bird into the rest of the band one of the younger men would sneak behind her and kill her with an axe Blow To The Head and AK man told the inquisitive Anthropologist stories of his prime years in the jungle I customarily killed old women I used to kill my Ants the women were afraid of me now here with the whites I have become weak babies born without hair who were considered underdeveloped were killed immediately one woman recalled that her RSD baby girl was killed because the men in the band did not want another girl on another occasion a man killed a small boy because he was in in a bad mood and the child was crying another child was buried alive because it was funny looking and the other children laughed at it apostrophe do7 we should be careful though not to judge the ache too quickly anthropologists who lived with them for years report that violence between adults was very rare both women and men were free to change Partners at will they smiled and laughed constantly had no leadership hierarchy and generally shunn domineering people they were EX extremely generous with their few possessions and were not obsessed with success or wealth the things they valued most in life were good social interactions and highquality friendships do8 they viewed the killing of children sick people and the elderly as many people today view abortion and euthanasia it should also be noted that the a were hunted and killed without Mercy by paraguayan Farmers the need to evade their enemies probably caused the a to adopt an exceptionally harsh attitude towards anyone who might might become liability to the band The Truth is that a society like every human society was very complex we should beware of demonizing or idealizing it on the basis of a superial acquaintance the aor neither angels nor ends they were humans so too were the ancient hunter gatherers talking ghosts what can we say about the spiritual and mental life of the ancient hunter gatherers the basics of the fore economy can be constructed with some condensed based on quantiable and objective factors for example we can calculate how many calories per day a person needed in order to survive how many calories were obtained from a kilogram of walnuts and how many walnuts could be gathered from a square kilometer of forest with this data we can make an educated guess about the relative importance of walnuts in their diet but did they consider a walnuts a delicacy or a hum drum stable did they believe that walnut trees were inhabited by Spirits did they Endy Walnut leaves pretty if a forager boy wanted to take a forager girl to a romantic spot did the shade of a walnut treesus the world of thought belief and feeling is by denition far more difficult to decipher most Scholars agree that animistic beliefs were common among ancient foragers animism from Mana Soul or spirit in Latin is the belief that almost every place every animal every plant and every natural phenomenon has awareness and feelings and can communicate directly with humans thus animists May believe that the big rock at the top of the hill has desires and needs the rock might be angry about something that people did and rejoice over some other action The Rock might admonish people or ask for favors humans for their part can address the rock to mify or threaten it not only the rock but also the oak tree at the bottom of the hill is an animated being and so is the stream mowing below the hill the spring and the Forest Clearing the bushes growing around it the path to the clearing and the field mice wolves and crows that drink there in the animist World objects and living things are not the only animated beings there are also immaterial entities the spirits of the dead and friendly and malevolent beings the kind that we today call demons fairies and angels animists believe that there is no barrier between humans and other beings they can all communicate directly through speech song dance and ceremony a hunter May address a herd of deer and ask that one of them Sac itself if the hunt succeeds the hunter may ask the dead animal to forgive him when someone Falls sick a shaman can contact the spirit that caus the sickness and try to pacify it or Scare it away if need be the shaman may ask for help from other spirits what characterizes all these acts of communication is that the entities being addressed are local beings they are not Universal Gods but rather a particular deer a particular tree a particular stream a particular ghost just as there is no barrier between humans and other beings neither is there a strict hierarchy non-human entities do not exist merely to provide for the needs of man nor are they all powerful Gods who run the world as they wish the world world does not revolve around humans or around any other particular group of beings animism is not a speciic religion it is a generic name for thousands of very deer and religions Cults and beliefs what makes all of them animist is this common approach to the world and to man's place in it saying that ancient foreigners were probably animists is like saying that premodern agriculturists were mostly theists theism from Theos God in Greek is the view that the universal is based on a hierarchical relationship between humans and a small group of ethereal entities called Gods it is certainly true to say that premodern agriculturists tended to be theists but it does not teach us much about the particulars the generic rubric theists covers Jewish rabbis from 18th century Poland which burning Puritans from 17th century Massachusetts Aztec priests from 15th century Mexico sum Mystics from 12th century Iran 10th Century Viking warriors 2 Century Roman legionaires and wor Century Chinese bureaucrats each of these viewed the others beliefs and practices as weird and heretical the deces between the beliefs and practices of groups of animistic foreigners were probably just as big their religious experience may have been turbulent and filled with controversies reforms and revolutions but these cautious generalizations are about as far as we can go any attempts to describe the specifics of archaic spirituality is highly speculative as there is next to no evidence to go by and the little evidence we have a handful of artifacts and cave paintings can be interpreted in Myriad ways the theories of Scholars who claim to know what the foreigners felt shed much more light on the prejudices of their authors than on Stone Age religions instead of erecting mountains of theory over a mole hill of Tomb relics cave paintings and Bone statuettes it is better to be frank and admit that we have only the haziest Notions about the religions of ancient foragers we assume that they were animists but that's not very informative we don't know which Spirits they prayed to which festivals they celebrated or which taboos they observed most importantly we don't know what stories they told it's one of the biggest holes in our understanding of human history the sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing as explained above Scholars cannot even agree on the basics such as the existence of private property nuclear families and monogamous relationships it's likely that deant bands had deant structures some may have been as hierarchical tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group While others were as laidback peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of babos eight a painting from Lasco cave Circa 15,000 to 20,000 years ago what exactly do we see and what is the painting's meaning some argue that we see a man with the head of a bird and an erect penis being killed by a bison beneath the man is another bird which might symbolize the soul released from the body at the moment of death if so the picture depicts not a prosaic hunting accident but rather the passage from this world to the next but we have no way of knowing whether any of these speculations are true it's a roar shot test that reveals much about the preconceptions of modern Scholars and little about the beliefs of ancient foragers in sjer Russia archaeologists discovered in 1955 a 30,000 year-old burial site belonging to a mammoth hunting culture in one grave they found the skeleton of a three-year-old man covered with strings of mammoth ivory beads containing about 3,000 beads in total on the dead man's head was a hat decorated with Fox teeth and on his wrists TV Ivory bracelets other Graves from the same site contained far fewer Goods Scholars deduced that the sun germ Amoth Hunters lived in a hierarchical society and that the dead man was perhaps the leader of a band or of an entire tribe comprising several bands it is unlikely that a few dozen members of a single band could have produced so many grave Goods by themselves nine hunter gatherers made these handprints about 9,000 years ago in the hands cave in Argentina it looks as if these long dead hands are reaching towards us from within the rock this is one of the most moving relics of the ancient forager world but nobody knows what it means archaeologists then discovered an even more interesting tomb it contains two skeletons buried Head to Head one belonged to a boy aged about 12 or 13 and the other to a girl of about 9 or 10 the boy was covered with 5,000 Ivory beads he wor a fox tooth hat and a belt with 250 Fox teeth at least 60 foxes had to have their teeth pulled to get that many the girl was adorned with 5,250 Ivory beads both children were surrounded by statuettes and various iory objects a skilled Craftsman or craftswoman probably needed about four T minutes to prepare a single Ivory bead in other words fashioning the 10,000 Ivory beads that covered the two children not to mention the other objects required some 7,500 hours of delicate work well over 3 years of Labor by an experienced Artisan it is highly unlikely that at such a young age the sjer children had proved themselves as Leaders or Mammoth Hunters only cultural beliefs can explain why they received such an extravagant burial one theory is that they owed their rank to their parents perhaps they were the children of the leader in a culture that believed in either family charisma or strict rules of succession according to a second theory the children had been identied at Birth as the incarnations of some long dead Spirits a third Theory argues that the children's burial reacts the way they died rather than their status in life they were ritually sacrist perhaps as part of the burial rights of the leader and then in tuned with palp and Circumstance do9 whatever the correct answer the sjer children are among the best pieces of evidence that 30,000 years ago sapiens could invent sociopolitical codes that went far beyond the dictates of our DNA and the behavior patterns of other human and animal species peace or war finally there's the thorny question of the role of war in forager societies some Scholars imagine ancient hunter gatherer societies as peaceful paradises and argue that war and violence began only with the Agricultural Revolution when people started to accumulate private property other Scholars maintained that the world of the ancient foragers was exceptionally cruel and violent both schools of thought are Castles in the Air connected to the ground by the thin strings of meager archaeological remains and anthropological observations of present day foragers the anthropological evidence is intriguing but very problematic foragers today live mainly in isolated and inhospitable areas such as the Arctic or the Kalahari where population density is very low and opportunities to GH T other people are limited moreover in recent Generations foragers have been increasingly subject to the authority of modern states which prevent the eruption of large-scale conics European scholars have had only two opportunities to observe large and relatively dense populations of independent foragers in Northwestern North America in the 19th century and in Northern Australia during the 19th and early 20th centuries both himmer Indian and Aboriginal Australian cultures witnessed frequent armed conics it is debatable however whether this represents a Timeless condition or the impact of European imperialism the archaeological endings are both scarce and opaque what Telltale Clues might remain of any war that took place tens of thousands of years ago there were no fortifications and walls back then no artillery shells or even swords and shields an ancient spear Point might have been used in war but it could have been used in a as well fossilized human bones are no less hard to interpret a fracture might indicate the roar wound or an accident nor is the absence of fractures and cuts on an ancient skeleton conclusive proof that the person to whom the skeleton belonged did not die a violent death death can be caused by trauma to soft tissues that leaves no marks on bone even more importantly during pre-industrial Warfare more than 90% of War dead were killed by starvation cold golden disease rather than by weapons imagine that 30,000 years ago One Tribe defeated its neighbor and expelled it from coveted foraging grounds in the decisive battle 10 members of the defeated tribe were killed in the following year another 100 members of the losing tribe died from starvation cold and disease archaeologists who come across these no skeletons May too easily conclude that most fell victim to some natural disaster how would we be able to tell that they were all victims of a merciless War duly warned we can now turn to the archaeological endings in Portugal a survey was made of 400 skeletons from the period immediately predating the Agricultural Revolution only two skeletons showed clear marks of violence a similar survey of 400 skeletons from the same period in Israel discovered a single Kraken a single skull that could be attributed to human violence a third survey of 400 skeletons from various pre agricultural sites in the danu valley found evidence of violence on 18 skeletons 18 out of 400 may not sound like a lot but it's actually a very high percentage if all 18 indeed died violently it means that about 4.5% of deaths in the ancient anub Valley were caused by human violence today the global average is only 1.5% taking war and crime together during the 20th century only 5% % of human deaths resulted from human violence and this in a century that saw the bloodiest tours and most massive genocides in history if this Revelation is typical the ancient danu Valley was as violent as the 20th century the depressing NS from the danub valley are supported by a string of equally depressing Innings from other areas at jab sahaba and Sudan a 12 comma year-old Cemetery containing 59 skeletons was discovered arrowheads and spear points were found embedded in or Line near the bones of 24 skeletons 40% of the ND the skeleton of one woman revealed 12 injuries in AET cave in Bavaria archaeologists discovered the remains of 38 forers mainly women and children who had been thrown into two burial pits half the skeletons including those of children and babies bore clear signs of damage by human weapons such as clubs and knives the few skeletons belonging to mature males bore the worst marks of violence in all probability an entire forager band was massacred at AIT which better represents the world of the ancient foragers the peaceful skeletons from Israel and Portugal or the abatar of Ja sahaba and EET the answer is neither just as foragers exhibited a wide array of religions and social structures so too did they probably demonstrate a variety of violence rates why while some areas and some periods of time may have enjoyed peace and Tranquility others were Riven by ferocious conflicts do10 the curtain of Silence if the larger picture of ancient forager life is hard to reconstruct particular events are largely IR retrievable when the sapiens band or S entered a valley inhabited by neanderthals the following years might have witnessed a breathtaking historical drama unfortunately nothing would have survived from such an encounter acccept at best a few fossilized bones and a handful of stone tools that remain mute under the most intense scholarly inquisitions we may extract from them information about human anatomy human technology human diet and perhaps even human social structure but they reveal nothing about the political Alliance forged between neighboring sapiens bands about the spirits of the Dead that bless this Alliance or about the ivory bead secretly given to the local which Dr order to secure the blessing of the spirits this curtain of Silence shrouds tens of thousands of years of History these long Millenium May well have witnessed Wars and revolutions ecstatic religious movements profound philosophical theories incomparable artistic masterpieces the foragers may have had their all conquering napoleons who ruled Empires half the size of Luxembourg gifted beat ovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo youths and charismatic prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a universal Creator God but these are all mere guesses the curtain of silence is so thick that we cannot even be sure such things occurred let alone describe them in detail Scholars tend to ask only those questions that they can reasonably expect to answer without the discovery of as yet unavailable research tools we will probably never know what the ancient foragers believed or what political drama as they experienced yet it is vital to ask questions for which no answers are available otherwise we might be tempted to dismiss 60,000 of 70,000 years of human history with the excuse that the people who lived back then did nothing of importance the truth is that they did a lot of important things in particular they shaped the world around us to a much larger degree than most people realize trekers visiting the Siberian Tundra the deserts of central Australia and the Amazonian rainforest believe that they have entered pristine Landscapes virtually Untouched by human hands but that's an illusion the foragers were there before us and they brought about dramatic changes even in the densest jungles and the most desolate wildernesses the next chapter explains how the foragers completely reshaped the Ecology of our planet long before the RSD agricultural Village was built the wandering bands of Storytelling sapiens were the most important and most most destructive force the animal kingdom had ever produced four the flood prior to the cognitive Revolution humans of all species lived exclusively on the afro Asian land mass true they had settled a few Islands by swimming short stretches of water or crossing them on improvised rafts Flores for example was colonized as far back as 850,000 years ago yet they were unable to venture into the open sea and none reached America Australia or remote Islands such as Madagascar New Zealand and Hawaii the sea barrier prevented not just humans but also many other afro Asian animals and plants from reaching this outer world as a result the organisms of distant lands like Australia and Madagascar evolved in isolation for Millions upon millions of years taking on shapes and Natures very de from those of their distant afrasian relatives planet Earth was separated into several distinct ecosystems each made up of a unique assembly of animals and plants Homo sapiens was about to put an end to this biological exuberance following the cognitive Revolution sapiens acquired the technology the organizational skills and perhaps even the vision necessary to break out of Afro Asia and settle the outer World their rst achievement was the colonization of Australia some 45,000 years ago experts are hardpressed to explain this feat in order to reach Australia humans had to cross a number of sea channels some more than 100 kilm wide and upon arrival they had to adapt nearly overnight to a completely new ecosystem the most reasonable Theory suggests that about 45,000 years ago the sapiens living in the Indonesian archipelago a group of islands separated from Asia and from each other by only narrow Straits developed the r D sea fairing societies they learned how to build and maneuver Oceano vessels and became long disten Traders and explorers this would have brought about an unprecedented transformation in human capabilities and Lifestyles every other mamal that went to sea seals sea cows Dolphins had to evolve for Ian to develop specialized organs and a hydrodynamic body the sapiens in Indonesia descendants of Apes who lived on the African Savannah became passic sea farers without growing burs and without having to wait for their noses to migrate to the top of their heads as whales did instead they built boats and learned how to steer them and these skills enabled them to reach and settle Australia true archaeologists have yet to unearth rafts or or Shing Villages that date back as far as 45,000 years ago they would be de cult to discover because rising sea levels have buried the ancient Indonesian Shoreline under 100 m of ocean nevertheless there is strong circumstantial evidence to support this Theory especially the fact that in the thousands of years following the settlement of Australia sapiens colonized a large number of small and isolated Islands to its North some such as bua and Manus were separated from the closest Land by 200 kilm of Open Water it's hard to believe that anyone could have reached and colonized Manus without sophisticated vessels and sailing skills as mentioned earlier there is also arm evidence for regular sea trade between some of these islands such as New Ireland and New Britain one the Journey of the RS humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history at least as important as Columbus journey to America or the Apollo 11 expedition to the Moon it was the RS time many human had managed to leave the afro Asian ecological system indeed the RS tea time many large terrestrial mammal had managed to cross from afro Asia to Australia of even greater importance was what the human Pioneers did in this new world the moment the RSD hunter gatherer set foot on an Australian Beach was the moment that homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain on a particular land mass and thereafter became the deadliest species in the animals of planet Earth up until then humans had displayed some Innovative adaptations and behaviors but their act on their their environment had been negligible they had demonstrated remarkable success in moving into and adjusting to various habitats but they did so without drastically changing those habitats the settlers of Australia or more accurately its conquerors didn't just adapt they transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition the rst human footprint on a Sandy Australian Beach was immediately washed away by the waves yet when the Invaders Advanced inland they left behind a deant footprint one that would never be expunged as they pushed on they encountered a strange Universe of unknown creatures that included a 200 kg 2 met kangaroo and a marsupio lion as massive as a modern tiger that was the continent's largest Predator koala is far too big to be cuddly and cute rustled in the trees and itless birds twice the size of ostriches sprinted on the plains dragon likee lizards and snakes of V meters long slithered through the undergrowth the giant dip redon a 2 and A2 ton wombat roamed the forests except for the birds and reptiles all these animals were marsupial like kangaroos they gave birth to Tiny helpless fetus like young which they then nurtured with milk and abdominal pouches marsupial mammals were almost unknown in Africa and Asia but in Australia they reigned Supreme within a few thousand years virtually all of these Giants vanished of the 24 Australian animal species weighing kg or more 23 became extinct. two a large number of smaller species also disappeared food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged it was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years was it all the fault of homo sapiens guilty has charged some Scholars try to exonerate our species placing the blame on the vories of the climate the usual scapegoat in such cases yet it is hard to believe that homo sapiens was completely innocent there are three pieces of evidence that weaken the climate Halli and implicate our ancestors in the extinction of the Australian megap fiercely even though Australia's climate changed some 45,000 years ago it wasn't a very remarkable upheaval it's hard to see how the new weather patterns alone could have caused such a massive Extinction it's common today to explain anything and everything as the result of climate change but the truth is that Earth's climate never rests it is in constant Ducks every event in history occurred against the background of some climate change in particular our planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and warming during the last million years there has been an Ice Age on average every 100,000 years the last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 th000 years ago not unusually severe for a nice age it had Twin Peaks the RSD about 70,000 years ago and the second at about 20,000 years ago the giant diadon appeared in Australia more than 1.5 million years ago and successfully wethered at least 10 previous ice ages it also survived the rst peak of the last ice age around 70,000 years ago why then did it disappear 45,000 years years ago of course if diprotodons had been the only large animal to disappear at this time it might have been just a uke but more than 90% of Australia's meapa disappeared along with the deedon the evidence is circumstantial but it's hard to imagine that sapiens just by coincidence arrived in Australia at the precise point that all these animals were dropping dead of the chills do3 secondly when climate change causes mass extinctions sea creatures are used usually hit as hard as land dwellers yet there is no evidence of any cnicin disappearance of oceanic fauna 45,000 years ago human involvement can easily explain why the wave of Extinction obliterated the terrestrial megaphon of Australia while sparing that of the nearby oceans despite its burgy navigational abilities Homo sapiens was still overwhelmingly a terrestrial Menace thirdly mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decim occurred again and again in the ensuing Millennia whenever people settled another part of the outer World in these cases sapiens guilt is irrefutable for example the meapa of New Zealand which had weathered the alleged climate change of Circa 45,000 years ago without a scratch sore devastating blows immediately after the rst humans set foot on the islands the mayores New Zealand's RSD sapiens colonizers reached the islands about 800 years ago go within a couple of centuries the majority of the local megaphon was extinct along with 60% of all bird species a similar fate befell the mammoth population of ranel island in the Arctic Ocean 200 kilm North of the Siberian Coast mammoths had arish for millions of years over most of the northern hemisphere but as Homo sapiens sprad rst over Eurasia and then over North America the mammoths retreated by 10,000 thousand years ago there was not a single Mammoth to be found in the world except on a few remote Arctic Islands most conspicuously Rangel the mammoths of ranel continued to prosper for a few more Millennia then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago just when the rst humans reached the island were the Australian Extinction and isolated event we could Grant humans the benit of a doubt but the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer all the settlers of Australia had at their disposal was Stone Age Technology how could they cause an ecological disaster there are three explanations that mesh quite nicely large animals the primary victims of the Australian Extinction breathe slowly pregnancy is long ospring Pro pregancy are few and there are long breaks between pregnancies consequently if humans cut down even one deedon every few months it would be enough to cause redon deaths to outnumber births within a few thousand years the last Lonesome deedon would pass away and with her the entire species do four in fact for all their size dip radons and Australia's other Giants probably wouldn't have been that hard to hunt because they would have been taken totally by surprise by their two-legged disant various human species had been prowling and evolving in afro Asia for 2 million years they slowly honed their hunting skills and began going after large animals around 400,000 years ago the big beasts of Africa and Asia learned to avoid humans so when the new Mega Predator Homo sapiens appeared on the afro Asian scene the large animals already knew to keep their distance from creatures that looked like it in contrast the Australian Giants had no time to learn to run away humans don't come across as particularly dangerous they don't have long sharp teeth or muscular light bodies so when a dip roted on the largest marsupio ever to walk the earth set highs for the rst time on this frail looking ape he gave it one glance and then went back to chewing leaves these animals had to evolve a fear of humankind but before they could do so they were gone the second explanation is that by the time sapiens reached Australia they had already mastered Dre agriculture faced with an alien and threatening environment they deliber L burned vast areas of impassible thickets and dense forests to create open grasslands which attracted more easily hunted game and were better suited to their needs they thereby completely changed the Ecology of large parts of Australia within a few short Millennia one body of evidence supporting this view is the fossil plant record eucalyptus trees were rare in Australia 45,000 years ago but the arrival of homo sapiens inaugurated a golden age for the species since eucalyptuses are particularly resistant to re they spread far and wide while other trees and shrubs disappeared these changes in vegetation inuenced the animals that ate the plants and the carnivores that ate the vegetarians koalas which subsist exclusively on eucalyptus leaves happily munched their way into new territories most other animals swer greatly many Australian food chains collapsed driving the weakest links into extinction. 5 a3d explanation agrees that hunting and re agriculture played us in a control on the extinction but emphasizes that we can't completely ignore the role of climate the climate changes that beset Australia about 45,000 years ago destabilized the ecosystem and made it particularly vulnerable under normal circumstances the system would probably have recuperated as had happened many times previously however humans appeared on the stage at just this critical juncture and pushed the brittle ecosystem into the abyss the combination of climate change and human hunting is particularly devastating for a large animals since it attacks them from De angles it is hard to ende a good survival strategy that will work simultaneously against multiple threats without further Evidence there's no way of deciding between the three scenarios but there are certainly good reasons to believe that if Homo sapiens had never gone down under it would still be home to marup Lions dip radons and giant kangaroos the end of sloth the extinction of the Australian meapa was probably the RSD synic and Mark Homo sapiens left on our planet it was followed by an even larger ecological disaster this time in America Homo sapiens was the rst and only human species to reach the Western Hemisphere land mass arriving about 16,000 years ago that is in order around 14,000 BC the RSD Americans arrived on foot which they could do because at the time sea levels were low enough that a land bridge connected Northeastern Siberia with Northwestern Alaska not that it was easy the journey was an arduous one perhaps harder than the sea passage to Australia to make the crossing sapiens rst had to learn how to withstand the extreme Arctic conditions of Northern Siberia an area on which the Sun never shines in Winter and where temperatur can drop to -50° C no previous human species had managed to penetrate places like Northern Siberia even the cold adapted neanderthals restricted themselves to relatively warmer regions further south but Homo sapiens whose body was adapted to living in the African Savannah rather than in the lands of snow and ice devised ingenious Solutions when Raman bands of sapiens foragers migrated into colder climates they learned to make snowshoes and active thermal clothing composed of layers of Furs and skins sewn together tightly with the help of needles they developed new weapons and sophisticated hunting techniques that enabled them to track and kill mammoths and the other big game of the far north as their thermal clothing and hunting techniques improved sapiens dared to venture deeper and deeper into the Frozen regions and as they moved North their clothes hunting strategies and other survival skills continued to improve prove but why did they bother why banish oneself to Siberia by choice perhaps some bands were driven North by Wars demographic pressures or natural disasters others might have been lured northwards by more positive reasons such as animal protein the Arctic Lans were full of large juicy animals such as reindeer and mammoths every Mammoth was a source of a vast quantity of meat which given the frosty temperatures could even be frozen for later use tasty fat warm fur and valuable Ivory as theing from sunre testify Mammoth Hunters did not just survive in the Frozen North they thrived as time passed the bands spread far and wide pursuing mammoths mastadons rhinoceroses and reindeer around 14,000 BC the chase took some of them from Northeastern Siberia to Alaska of course they didn't know they were discovering a new world for Mammoth and man alike Alaska was a mere extension of Siberia at rst glaciers blocked the way from Alaska to the rest of America allowing no more than perhaps a few isolated Pioneers to investigate the lands further south however around 12,000 BC global warming melted the ice and opened an easier passage making use of the new Corridor people moved South on mass spreading over the entire continent though originally adapted to hunting large game in the Arctic they soon adjusted to an amazing variety of climates and ecosystems descendants of the Siberian settled the thick forests of the Eastern United States the swamps of the Mississippi Delta the deserts of Mexico and steaming jungles of Central America some made their homes in the river world of the Amazon basin others struck roots and Indian mountain valleys or the open Pampas of Argentina and all this happened in a mere millennium more too by 10,000 BC humans already inhabited the most southern point in America the island of Tierra Delo at the continent's southern tip the human Blitz GG Across America testes to the incomparable Ingenuity and the unsurpassed adaptability of homo sapiens no other animal had ever moved into such a huge variety of radically deant habitats so quickly everywhere using virtually the same genes do 6 the settling of America was hardly bloodless it left behind a long trail of victims American fauna 14,000 years ago was Far richer than it is today when the rstd Americans marched south from Alaska into the plains of Canada and the western United States they encountered mammoths and mastadons rodents the size of bears herds of horses and camels oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today among them fearsome saber-tooth cats and giant ground sloths that weighed up to 8 tons and reached a height of 6 M South America hosted an even more exotic managerie of large mammals reptiles and birds the Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived but no longer within 2,000 years of the sapien's arrival most of these unique species were gone according to current estimates within that short interval North and America lost 34 out of its 47 gener of large mammals South America lost 50 out of 60 the Sabertooth cats after rushing for more than 30 million years disappeared and so did the giant ground sloths the oversized Lions Native American horses Native American camels the giant rodents and the mammoths thousands of species of smaller mammals reptiles birds and even insects and parasites also became extinct when the mammoths died out all species of Mammoth ticks followed them to Oblivion for decades paleontologists and Zoo archaeologists people who search for and study animal remains have been combing the Plains and mountains of the Americas in search of the fossilized bones of ancient camels and the Petri fees of giant ground sloths when they end what they seek the treasures are carefully packed up and sent to Laboratories where every bone and every COA like the technical name for fossilized turds is meticulously studied and dated time and again these analyzes yield the same results the freshest dung balls and the most recent camel bones date to the period when humans areed America that is between approximately 12,000 and 9,000 BC only in one area have scientists discovered younger dung balls on several Caribbean islands in particular Cuba and H pangola they found petriot ground sloth scap dating to about 5,000 BC this is exactly the time when the rst humans managed to cross the Caribbean Sea and settle these two large islands again some Scholars try to exonerate Homo sapiens and blame climate change which requires them to posit that for some mysterious reason the climate in the Caribbean islands remained static for 7,000 years while the rest of the Western Hemisphere warmed but in America the dung ball can not be dodged we are the culprits there is no way around the truth even if climate change abetted us the human contribution was decisive do 7 Noah is Arc if we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America and add the smaller scale extinctions that took place as Homo sapiens spread over afro Asia such as the extinction of all other human species and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote Islands such as cube the inevitable conclusion is that the rst wave of sapiens colonization was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom hardest hit were the large furry creatures at the time of the cognitive Revolution the planet was home to about 200 gener of large terrestrial mammals weighing over 50 kg at the time of the Agricultural Revolution only about a 100 remained Homo sapiens drove to Extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans and vented the wheel riding or iron tools this ecological tragedy was restaged in miniature countless times after the Agricultural Revolution the archaeological record of Island after Island tells the same sad story the tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied population of large animals without any trace of humans in scene two sapiens appear evidenced by a human bone a spear point or perhaps a PCH herd Scene Three Qui L follows in which men and women occupy center stage and most large animals along with many smaller ones are gone the large island of Madagascar about 400 km east of the African Mainland owers a famous example through millions of years of isolation a unique collection of animals evolved there these included the elephant bird a itless creature 3 m tall and weighing almost half a ton the largest bird in the world and the giant Le lemur the globe's largest primates the elephant Birds and the giant lemur along with most of the other large animals of Madagascar suddenly vanished about 1,500 years ago precisely when the rst humans set foot on the island 10 reconstructions of two giant ground sloths megatherium and behind them two giant armadillos gadon now extinct giant armadillos measured over 3 m in length and weighed up to 2 tons whereas giant ground sloths reached Heights of up to 6 M and weighed up to 8 tons in the paic ocean the main wave of Extinction began in about 1500 BC when Polynesian Farmers settled the Soloman Islands Fiji and new calonia they killed though directly or indirectly hundreds of species of birds insects snails and other local inhabitants from there the wave of Extinction moved gradually to the east the South and the north Into the Heart of the paic Ocean obliterating on its way the unique Fauna of Samoa and Tonga 1200 BC the Maris Islands ad1 Easter Island the Cook Islands in Hawaii ad500 and N New Zealand ad1 1200 similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean Indian Ocean Arctic ocean and mediterran Anan sea archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest Islands evidence of the existence of birds insects and snails that lived there for countless Generations only to vanish when the RS human Farmers arrived none but a few extremely remote Islands escaped man's notice until the Modern Age and these islands kept their phone intact the galopagos islands to give one famous example remained uninhabited by humans until the 19th century th preserving their unique managerie including their giant tortoises which like the ancient de radons show no fear of humans the first wave Extinction which accompanied the spread of the foragers was followed by the second wave Extinction which accompanied the spread of the farmers and gives us an important perspective on the third wave Extinction which industrial activity is causing today don't believe Tree Huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature long before the Industrial Revolution Homo sapiens held a record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions we have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the animals of biology perhaps if more people were aware of the first wave and second wave extinctions they'd be less nonchalant about the third wave they are part of if we knew how many species we've already eradicated we might be more motivated to protect those that still Sur survive this is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans unlike their terrestrial counterparts the large sea animals swer relatively little from the cognitive and agricultural revolutions but many of them are on the brink of Extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources if things continue at the present Pace it is likely that whales sharks tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons ground sloths and mammoths to Oblivion among all the world's large creatures the only survivors of the human o will be humans themselves and the farmyard animals that serve as Galley slaves and Noah's Arc part two the Agricultural Revolution five history's biggest fraud for 2.5 million years humans fed themselves by gathering plants and hunting animals that lived and bred without their intervention homo cus H gaster and the Neanderthals plucked wild GS and hunted wild sheep without deciding where G trees would take root in which Meadow a herd of sheep should graze or which billy goat would inseminate which nanny goat Homo sapiens spread from East Africa to the Middle East to Europe and Asia and N to Australia and America but everywhere they went sapiens too continued to live by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals why do anything else when you lifestyle feeds you amply and supports a rich world of social structures religious beliefs and political Dynamics all this changed about 10,000 years ago when sapiens began to devote almost all their time and or to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species from sunrise to sunset humans seed seeds watered plants plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to Prime pastures this work they thought would provide them with more fruit grain and meat it was a revolution in the way humans lived the Agricultural Revolution the transition to agriculture began around 9500 to 8500 BC in the Hill Country of Southeastern turkey Western Iran and the leand it began slowly and in a restricted geographical area wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9,000 BC PE and lals around 8,000 BC olive trees by 5,000 BC horses by 4,000 BC and grape vines in 3500 BC some animals and plants such as camels and cashew nuts were domesticated even later but by 3500 BC the main wave of domestication was over even today with all our Advanced Technologies more than 90% of the calories that feed Humanity come from the handful of plants that our ancestors domesticated between 9,500 and 3500 BC wheat rice maze cold corn in the US potatoes Millet and barley no noteworthy plant or animal has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years if our minds are those of hunter gatherers our Cuisine is that of ancient Farmers Scholars once believed that agriculture spread from a single Middle Eastern point of origin to the four corners of the world today Scholars agree that agriculture sprang up in other parts of the world not by the action of Middle Eastern farmers is exporting their Revolution but entirely independently people in Central America domesticated Maze and beans without knowing anything about wheat and pea cultivation in the Middle East South Americans learned how to raise potatoes and llamas unaware of what was going on in either Mexico or the leand China's RSD revolutionaries domesticated rice militant pigs North America's first gardeners were those who got tired of combing the undergrowth for edible gourds and decided to cultivate pumpkins new guinon tamed sugar cane and bananas while the rst West African Farmers made African milet African rice sorghum and wheat conformed to their needs from these initial focal points agriculture spread far and wide by the RSD century and the vast majority of people throughout most of the world were agriculturists why did agricultural revolutions erupt in the Middle East China and Central America but not in Australia Al Alaska or South Africa the reason is simple most species of plants and animals can't be domesticated sapiens could dig up delicious shws and hunt down woolly mammoths but domesticating either species was out of the question the fungi were far too elusive the giant beasts too ferocious of the thousands of species that our ancestors hunted and gathered only a few were suitable candidates for farming and hering those few species lived in particular places and those are the places where agricultural revolutions occurred Scholars once proclaimed that the Agricultural Revolution was a Great Leap Forward for Humanity they told a tale of progress fueled by human brain power Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people eventually people were so smart that they were able to decipher Nature's Secrets enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat as soon as this happened they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling dangerous and often Spartan life of hunter gatherers settling down to enjoy the pleasant satiated life of farmers map two locations and dates of agricultural revolutions the data is contentious and the map is constantly being redrawn to incorporate the latest archaeological discoveries one the tale is a fantasy there is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the agricultural Revolution since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered rather than heralding the new era of Easy Living the Agricultural Revolution left Farmers with lives generally more dult and less satisfying than those of foragers hunter gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways and were less in danger of starvation and disease the Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more Leisure rather it translated into population explosions and pampered Elites the average farmer worked harder than the average forager and got a worse diet in return the Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. two who was responsible neither Kings nor priests nor Merchants the culprits were a handful of plant species including wheat rice and potatoes the plants domesticated Homo sapiens rather than vice versa think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the Viewpoint of wheat 10,000 years ago wheat was just a wild grass one of many con to a small range in the Middle East suddenly within just a few short Millennia it was growing all over the world according to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction wheat has become one of the most successful plans in the history of the Earth Earth in areas such as the Great Plains of North America where not a single wheat stock grew 10,000 years ago you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers without encountering any other plant worldwide wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilm of the globe's surface almost 10 times the size of Britain how did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous we did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage this ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and Gathering until about 10,000 years ago but then began to invest more and more or in cultivating wheat within a couple of Millennia humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk other than taking care of wheat plants it wasn't easy we demanded a lot of them we didn't like rocks and Pebbles so sapiens broke their backs clearing out we didn't like sharing its space water and nutrients with other plants so men and women labored long days weeding under the scorching Sun wheat got sick so sapiens had to keep a watch out for worms and blight wheat was defenseless against other organisms that liked to eat it from Rabbits to Locust swarms so the farmers had to guard and protect it wheat was thirsty so humans lugged water from Springs and streams to water it its hunger even impelled sapiens to collect animal fees to nourish the ground in which s grew the body of homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks it was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazel not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets human spines knees necks and arches paid the price studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments such as slip discs arthritis and hernas moreover the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat Health this completely changed their way of life we did not domesticate wheat it domesticated us the word domesticate comes from the Latin damus which means house who's the one living in a house not the wheat it's the sapiens how did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence what did it ow in return it did not ow a better diet remember humans are omnivorous Apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods grains made up only a small fraction of the human Diet before the Agricultural Revolution a diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins hard to digest and really bad for your teeth and gums wheat did not give people Economic Security the life of a peasant is less secure than that of a hunter gatherer foragers relied on dozens of species to survive and could therefore weather de cult years even without stocks of preserved food if the availability of one species was reduced they could gather and Hunt more of other species farming societies have until very recently relied for the great bulk of their calorie andt take on a small variety of domesticated plants in many areas they relied on just a single staple such as wheat potatoes or rice if the rains failed or clouds of locusts surved or if a fungus learned how to infect that staple species peasants died by the thousands and millions nor could we tore security against human violence the early farmers were at least as violent as their forager ancestors if not more so farmers had more possessions and needed land for planting the loss of pasture land to raiding neighbors could mean the dear between subsistence and starvation so there was much less room for compromise when a foraging band was hard pressed by a stronger arrival it could usually move on it was dcult and dangerous but it was feasible when a strong enemy threatened an agricultural Village Retreat meant giving up elds houses and granaries in many cases this doomed the refugees to starvation Farmers therefore tended to stay put and fight to The Bitter End 12 tribal Warfare in New Guinea between two farming communities 1960 such scenes were probably widespread in the thousands of years following the Agricultural Revolution many anthropological and archaeological studies indicate that in simple agricultural societies with no political Frameworks Beyond Village and tribe human violence was responsible for about 15% of deaths including 25% of male deaths in contemporary New Guinea violence accounts for 30% of male deaths in one agricultural tribal Society the Don and 35% in another the Ina in Ecuador perhaps 50% of adult warres meet a violent death at the hands of another human exclamation mark 3 in time human violence was brought under control through the development of larger social Frameworks cities kingdoms and States but it took thousands of years to build such huge and defective political structures Village Life certainly brought the RSD farmer some immediate benets so such as better protection against wild animals rain and cold yet for the average person the disadvantage is probably outway the advantages this is hard for people in today's prosperous societies to appreciate since we enjoy ends and security and since our ants and security are built on foundations laid by the Agricultural Revolution we assume that the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful Improvement yet it is wrong to judge thousands of years of History from the perspective of today a much more representative Viewpoint is that of a three-year-old girl dying from malnutrition in RSD Century China because her father's crops have failed would she say I am dying from malnutrition but in 2,000 years people will have plenty to eat and live in big air conditioned houses so my suffering is a worthwhile sacrifice what then did we to agriculturists including that malnourished Chinese girl Ido AED nothing for people as IND individuals yet it did bestow something on Homo sapiens as a species cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially around 13,000 BC when people fed themselves by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals the area around the Oasis of Jericho in Palestine could support at most one roaming band of about a 100 relatively healthy and well-nourished people around 8500 BC when wild plants gave way to weels the Oasis supported a large but cramped Village of 1,000 people who swered far more from disease and malnourishment the currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain but rather copies of DNA helixes just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account not by the happiness of its employees so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA if no more DNA copies Remain the species is extinct just as a company without money is bankrupt if a species boasts many DNA copies it is a success and the species aishes from such a perspective 1,000 copies are always better than 100 copies this is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions yet why should individuals care about this evolutionary calculus why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the homo sapiens genome nobody agreed to this deal the Agricultural Revolution was a trap the luxury trap the rise of farming was a very gradual airs spread over centuries and Millennia a band of homo sapiens Gathering mushrooms and nuts and hunting deer and rabbit did not all of a sudden settle in a permanent Village plowing El so in weed and carrying water from the river the change preceded by stages Each of which involved just a small alteration in daily life Homo sapiens reached the Middle East around 70,000 years ago for the next 50,000 years our ancestors arish there without agriculture the natural resources of the area were enough to support its human population in times of Plenty people had a few more children and in times of need a few less humans like many mammals have hormonal and genetic mechanisms that help control procreation in Good Times females reach puberty earlier and their chances of getting pregnant are a bit higher in bad times puberty is late and fertility decreases to these natural population controls were added cultural mechanisms babies and small children who move slowly and demand much attention were a burden on nomadic forgers people tried to space their children 3 to four years apart women did so by nursing their children around the clock and until a late age Around the Clock suckling significantly decreases the chances of getting pregnant other methods included full or partial sexual abstinence backed perhaps by cultural taboos abortions and occasionally infanticide do for during these long Millennia people occasionally ate wheat grain but this was a marginal part of their diet about 18,000 years ago the last ice age gave way to a period of global warming as temperatures Rose so did rainfall the new climate was ideal for Middle Eastern wheat and other cereals which multiplied and spread people began eating more wheat and in exchange they inadvertently spread its growth since it was impossible to eat wild grains without rst winnowing grinding and cooking them people who gathered these grains carried them back to their temporary campsites for processing wheat grains are small and numerous so some of them inevitably fell on the way to the campsite and were lost over time more and more wheat grew along favored human trails in near campsites when humans burned down forests and thickets this also helped wheat fire cleared away trees and shrubs allowing wheat and other grasses to monopolize the sunlight water and nutrients where wheat became particularly abundant and game and other food sources were also plentiful human bands could gradually give up their nomadic lifestyle and settle down in seasonal and even permanent camps at rst they might have camped for four weeks during the Harvest a generation later as weed plants multiplied and spread the Harvest Camp might have lasted for a few weeks then six and n it became a permanent Village evidence of such settlements has been discovered throughout the Middle East particularly in the lant where the Natan culture Rish from 12 ,500 BC to 9500 BC the nachin were hunter gatherers who subsisted on dozens of wild species but they lived in permanent Villages and devoted much of their time to the Intensive Gathering and processing of wild cereals they built stone houses and granaries they stored grain for times of need they invented new tools such as stone scies for harvesting wild wheat and stone pestles and mortars to grind it in the Years following 500 BC the descendants of the nauan continued to gather and process cereals but they also began to cultivate them in more and more elaborate ways when Gathering Wild Grains they took care to lay aside part of the Harvest to sew the El's next season they discovered that they could achieve much better results by sewing the grains deep in the ground rather than haphazardly scattering them on the surface so they began to hoe and plow gradually they also started to weed the El to guard them against parasites and to water and fertilize them as more or was directed towards serial cultivation there was less time to gather and hunt wild species the foragers became Farmers no single step separated the woman Gathering wild wheat from the woman farming domesticated wheat so it's hard to say exactly when the decisive transition to agriculture took place but by 8500 BC the Middle East was peppered with Perman Villages such as Jericho whose inhabitants spent most of their time cultivating a few domesticated species with the move to permanent Villages and the increase in food supply the population began to grow giving up the nomadic lifestyle enabled women to have a child every year babies were weaned at an earlier age they could be fed on porridge and GRL the extra hands were sorely needed in the elves but the extra Mals quickly wiped out the food surpluses so even more Els had to be planted as people began living in disease written settlements as children fed more on cereals and less on mother's milk and as each child competed for his or her porge with more and more siblings child mortality soared in most agricultural societies at least one out of every three children died before reaching 20.5 yet the increase in birth still outpaced the increase in deaths humans kept having larger numbers of children with time the wheat bargain became more and more burdensome children died in droves and adults ate bread by the sweat of their brows the average person in Jericho of 8,500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC but nobody realized what was happening every generation continued to live like the previous generation making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done paradoxically a series of improvements Each of which was meant to make life easier added up to a millstone around the necks of these Farmers why did people make such a fateful miscalculation for the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated people were unable to Fathom the full consequences of their decisions whenever they decided to do a bit of extra work say to Ho the elds instead of scattering seeds on the surface people thought yes we will will have to work harder but the Harvest will be so Bountiful we won't have to worry anymore about lean years our children will never go to sleep hungry it made sense if you worked harder you would have a better life that was the plan the rst part of the plane went smoothly people indeed worked harder but people did not foresee that the number of children would increase meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children neither did the early f Farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system and that permanent settlements would be hot beds for infectious diseases they did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies compelling them to start building walls and doing guard Duty then why did didn't humans abandon farming when the plan backed partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and by then nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently and partly because population growth burned Humanity's boats if the adoption of plowing increased a Village's population from a hundred to no which 10 people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times there was no going back the Trap SNA shut the pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship and not for the last time it happens to us today how many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered RMS vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are 30v but by the time they reach that age they have large mortgages children to school houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad what are they supposed to do go back to digging up Roots no they double their efforts and keep slaving away one of History's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spoon new obligations once people get used to a certain luxury they take it for granted then they begin to count on it finally they reach a point where they can't live without it let's take another familiar example from our own time over the last few decades we have invented countless time-saving devices that are supposed to make life more relaxed washing machines vacuum cleaners dishwashers telephones mobile phones computers email previously it took a lot of work to write a letter address and stamp an envelope and take it to the mailbox it took days or weeks maybe even months to get a reply nowadays I can Dash or an email send it halfway around the globe and if my address is online receive a reply a minute later I've saved all that trouble and time but do I live a more relaxed life sadly not back in the snail mail era people usually only wrote letters when they had something important to relate rather than writing the rst thing that came into their heads they considered carefully what they wanted to say and how to phrase it they expected to receive a similarly considered answer most people wrote and received no more than a handful of letters a month and seldom felt compelled to reply immediately today I receive dozens of emails each day all from people who expect a prompt reply we thought we were saving time instead we revved up the treadmill of life to 10 times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated here and there a lite holdout refuses to open an email account just as thousands of years ago some human bands refused to take up farming and so escape the luxury trap but the Agricultural Revolution didn't need every band in a given region to join up it only took one once one band settled down and started tilling whether in the Middle East or Central America agriculture was irresistible since farming created the conditions for Swift demographic growth Farmers could usually overcome foragers by sheer weight of numers ERS the foragers could either run away abandoning their hunting grounds to end pasture or take up the plow share themselves either way the old life was doomed the story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson Humanity search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on serial cultivation a series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at leaning a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative Act of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching Sun divine intervention the above scenario explains the Agricultural Revolution as a miscalculation it's very plausible history is full of far more tic miscalculations but there's another possibility maybe it wasn't the search for an easier life that brought about the transformation maybe sapiens had other aspirations and were consciously willing to make their lives harder in order to achieve them scientists usually seek to attribute historical developments to cold economic and demographic factors it sits better with their rational and mathematical methods in the case of modern history Scholars cannot avoid taking into account non-material factors such as ideology and culture the written evidence forces their hand we have enough documents letters and Memoirs to prove that World War II was not caused by food shortages or demographic pressures but we have no documents from the naan culture so when dealing with ancient periods the materialist School Reigns Supreme it is dult to prove that preliterate people were motivated by faith rather than economic necessity yet in some rare cases we are lucky enough to end The Telltale clu in 1995 archaeologists began to excavate a site in southeast turkey called goly in the oldest strum they discovered no signs of a settlement houses or daily activities they did however andd Monumental pillared structures decorated with spectacular Engravings each Stone pillar weighed up to 7 tons and reached a height of v m in a nearby Quarry they found a half chiseled pillar weighing 50 tons altogether they uncovered more than 10 Monumental structures the largest of them nearly 30 m across archaeologists are familiar with such Monumental structures from sites around the world the best known example is Stonehenge in Britain yet as they studied gole te they discovered an amazing fact Stonehenge dates to 2500 BC and was built by a developed Agricultural Society the structures at gole tart dated to about 9500 BC and all available evidence indicates that they were built by by hunter gatherers the archaeological Community initially found it difficult to credit these things but one test after another ConEd both the early date of the structures and the pre-agricultural Society of their Builders the capabilities of ancient foragers and the complexity of their cultures seem to be far more impressive than was previously suspected 13 opposite the remains of a Monumental structure from go right one of the decorated Stone pillars about 5 m High Why would a foring society build such structures they had no obvious utilitarian purpose they were neither Mammoth slaughter houses nor places to shelter from rain or hide from lions that leaves us with the theory that they were built for some mysterious cultural purpose that archaeologists have a hard time deciphering whatever it was the foreigners thought it worth a huge amount of or in time the only way to build gole was for thousands of foragers belonging to deant bands and tribes to cooperate over an extended period of time only a sophisticated religious or ideological system could sustain such efforts go he held another Sensational secret for many years geneticists have been tracing the origins of domesticated wheat recent discoveries indicate that at least one domesticated variant inoran wheat originated in the kosad dag Hills about 30 km from goly te. 6 this can hardly be a coincidence it's likely that the cultural center of go was somehow connected to the initial domestication of Wheat by humankind and of humankind by wheat in order to feed the people who built and used the Monumental structures particularly large quantities of food were required it may well be that foragers switched from Gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation not to increase their normal food supply but rather to support the building and running of a temple in the conventional picture Pioneers rst built a village and when it prospered they set up a temple in the middle but go CL suggests that the temple may have been built rst and that a village later grew up around it victims of the Revolution the fan bargain between humans and Grains was not the only deal our species made another deal was struck concerning the fate of animals such as sheep goats pigs and chickens nomadic bands that stalked wild sheep gradually altered the Constitutions of the herds on which they prayed this process probably began with Selective hunting humans learned that it was to their advantage to hunt only adult Rams and oldo sick sheep they spared fertile females and young Lambs in order to safeguard the long-term Vitality of the local herd the Second Step might have been to actively defend the herd against predators driving away Alliance wolves and rival human bands the band might next have coralled the herd into a narrow gorge in order to better control and defend it finally people began to make a more careful selection among the sheep in order to tailor them to human needs the most aggressive Rams those that showed the greatest resistance to human control were slaughtered rst so were the skinniest and most inquisitive females shepherds are not fond of sheep whose curiosity takes them far from the herd with each passing generation the Sheep became fatter more submissive and less curious voila Mary had a little lamb and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go alternatively Hunters may have caught and adopted a lamb fattening it during the months of Plenty and slaughtering it in the leaner season at some stage they began keeping a greater number of such Lambs some of these reached puberty and began to procreate the most aggressive and unruly Lambs were rst to the slaughter the most submissive most appealing Lambs were allowed to live longer and procreate the result was a herd of domesticated and submissive sheep such domesticated animals sheep chickens donkeys and others supplied food meat milk eggs raw materials skins wool and muscle power Transportation plowing grinding and other tasks hitherto performed by human Sen were increasingly carried out by animals in most farming societies people focused on plant cultivation raising animals was a secondary activity but a new kind of society also appeared in some places based primarily on the exploitation of animals tribes of pastoralist herders as humans spread around the world so did their domesticated animals 10,000 years ago not more than a few million sheep cattle goats bores and chickens lived in restricted afro Asian niches today the world contains about a billion sheep a billion pigs more than a billion cattle and more than 25 billion chickens and they are all over the globe the domesticated chicken is the most widespread foul lever following Homo sapiens domesticated cattle pigs and sheep are the second third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world from a narrow evolutionary perspective which measures success essed by the number of DNA copies the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful Boon for chickens cattle pigs and sheep Unfortunately The evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success it judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction with no regard for individual sewering and happiness domesticated chickens and cattle May well be an evolutionary success story but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived the the domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueler with the passing of the centuries the natural lifespan of wild chickens is about 7 to 12 years and of cattle about 20 to 20 years in the wild most chickens and cattle died long before that but they still had a fair chance of living for a respectable number of years in contrast the vast majority of domesticated chickens and cattle are slaughtered at the age of between a few weeks and a few months because this has always been the optimal slaughtering age from an economic perspective why keep feeding a for 3 years if it has already reached its maximum weight after 3 months egg laying hens dairy cows and draft animals are sometimes allowed to live for many years but the price is subjugation to a way of life completely alien to their urges and desires it's reasonable to assume for example that Bulls prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the company of other bulls and cows rather than pulling carts and plow shares under the Yoke of a whip wielding ape in order to turn Bulls horses donkeys and camels into obedient draft animals their Natural Instincts and social ties had to be broken their aggression and sexuality contained and their freedom of movement curtailed Farmers developed techniques such as locking animals inside pens and cages bridling them in harnesses and and leashes training them with whips and cattle prods and mutilating them the process of taming almost always involves the castration of males this restrains male aggression and enables humans selectively to control the herd's procreation 14 a painting from an Egyptian grave circuit 1200 BC a pair of oxen plowing a field in the wild cattle roamed as they pleased in herds with a complex social structure the cast ated and domesticated docks wasted away his life under the Lash and in a narrow pen laboring alone or in Paris in a way that suited neither its body nor its social and emotional needs when an ox could no longer pull the plow it was slaughtered note the hunched position of the Egyptian farmer who much like the ox spent his life in hard labor oppressive to his body his mind and his social relationships in many new Ganan societies the wealth of a person has traditionally been determined by the number of pigs he or she owns to ensure that the pigs can't run away farmers in Northern New Guinea slice ow a chunk of each Pig's nose this causes severe pain whenever the pig tries to sneak since the pigs cannot Endy food or even end their way around without sne this mutilation makes them completely dependent on their human owners in another area of New Guinea it has been customary to gouge out Pig's eyes so that they cannot even see where they're going down 7 the dairy industry has its own ways of forcing animals to do its will cows goats and sheep produce milk only after giving birth to calfs kids and lambs and only as long as the youngsters are suckling to continue a supply of animal milk a farmer needs to have calves kids or Lambs who are suckling but must prevent them from monopolizing the milk one common method throughout history was to Simply Slaughter the calfs and kids shortly after birth milk the mother for all she was worth and then get her pregnant again this is still a very widespread technique in many modern dairy farms a milk cow usually lives for about V years before being slaughtered during these V years she is almost constantly pregnant and is fertilized within 60 to 120 days after giving birth in order to preserve maximum milk production her Cales are separated from her shortly after birth the females are reared to become the next generation of dairy cows whereas the males are handed over to the care of the meat industry. 8 another method is to keep the calfs and kids near their mothers but prevent them by various strategems from suckling too much milk the simplest way to do that is to allow the kid or calf to start suckling but drive it away once the milk starts sewing this method usually encounters resistance from both kid and mother some Shepherd tribes Used To Kill The Offspring eat its Ash and then stew the skin the the studa spring was then presented to the mother so that its presence would encourage her milk production the newer tribe in the Sudan went so far as to smear stew animals with their mother's urine to give the counterfeit calvs a familiar live scent another newer technique was to tie a ring of thorns around a calf's mouth so that it Pricks the mother and causes her to resist suckling do n wared camel breeders in the sahary used to puncture or cut o parts of the nose and upper lip of young camels in order to make suckling painful thereby discouraging them from consuming too much milk do 10 not all agricultural societies were this cruel to their farm animals the lives of some domesticated animals could be quite good she praised for wool pet dogs and cats war horses and race horses often enjoyed comfortable conditions the Roman Emperor calig allegedly planned to appoint his favorite horse incitatus to the consul ship Shepherds and Farmers throughout history showed action for their animals and have taken great care of them just as many slaveholders felt action and concern for their slaves it was no accident that Kings and Prophets styled themselves as Shepherds and like in the way they and the gods cared for their people to a shepherd's care for his flock 15 a modern calf in an industrial meat farm immediately after birth the calf is separated from its mother-in-law inside a tiny cage not much bigger than the calf's own body they the calf spends its entire life about 4 months on average it never leaves its gauge nor is it allowed to play with other calves or even walk also that its muscles will not grow strong soft muscles mean a soft and juicy steak the first time the calf has a chance to walk stretch its muscles and touch other calfs is on its way to the slaughterhouse in evolutionary terms cattle represent one of the most successful animal species ever to exist at at the same time they are some of the most miserable animals on the planet yet from the Viewpoint of the herd rather than that of the shepherd it's hard to avoid the impression that for the vast majority of domesticated animals the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophy their revolutionary success is meaningless a rare wild rhinoceros on the brink of Extinction is probably more satiz than a calf who spends its short life inside a tiny box fattened to produce Ju Stakes the contented rhinoceros is no less content for being among the last of its kind the numerical success of the calf species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures this discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual sewering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution when we study The Narrative of plants such as wheat and Maze maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense yet in the case of animals such as cattle sheep and sapiens each with a complex world of Sensations and emotions we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience in the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand inand with much individual suffering six building pyramids the Agricultural Revolution is one of the most controversial events in history some partisans Proclaim that it set humankind on the road to prosperity and progress others insist that it led to predition this was the turning point they say where sapiens Casto its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation whichever direction the road LED there was no going back farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that no complex Agricultural Society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to hunting and gathering around 10,000 BC before the transition to agriculture Earth was home to about 5 to8 million nomadic foragers by the RSD Century ad only 1 to2 million foragers remained mainly in Australia America and Africa but their numbers were dwarfed by the world's 250 million Farmers one the vast majority of farmers lived in permanent settlements only a few were nomadic Shepherds settling down caused most people's Turf to shrink dramatically ancient hunter gatherers usually lived in territories covering many dozens and even hundreds of square kilometers home was the entire territory with its Hills streams woods and Open Sky peasants on the other hand spent most of their days working a small leld or Orchard and their domestic lives centered on a cramp structure of wood stone or mud measuring no more than a few dozen meters the house the typical peasant developed a very strong attachment to this structure this was a far-reaching revolution whose impact was psychological as much as architectural henceforth attachment to my house and separation from the neighbors became the psychological Hallmark of a much more self-centered creature the new agricultural territories were not only far smaller than those of ancient foragers but also Farm more artial aside from the use of re hunter gatherers made few deliberate changes to the lands in which they roamed Farmers on the other hand lived in artificial human islands that they laboriously carved out of the surrounding Wilds they cut down forests dug canals cleared outs built houses plowed furrows and planted fruit trees and tidy rals the resulting articial habitat was meant only for humans and their plants and animals and was often fenced to by walls and hedges farmer families did all they could to keep out Wayward weeds and wild animals if such Interlopers made their way in they were driven out if they persisted their human antagonists sought ways to exterminate them particularly strong defenses were erected around the home from the dawn of Agriculture until this very day billions of humans armed with branches swatters shoes and poison sprays have waged Relentless war against the diligent ants furtive roaches Adventure spiders and misguided beetles that constantly infiltrate the human domicile for most of History these menade an Cleaves remained very small surrounded by expanses of Untamed nature the Earth's surface measures about 510 million square kilometers of which 155 million is land as late as ad400 the vast majority of farmers along with their plants and animals clustered together in an area of just 11 million square kilom 2% of the planet's surface dot to everywhere else was too cold too hot too dry too wet or otherwise unsuited for cultivation this minuscule 2% of the Earth's surface constituted the stage on which history unfolded people found it a cult to leave their articial Islands they could not abandon their houses elvs and granaries without grave risk of loss furthermore as time went on they accumulated more and more things objects not easily transportable that tied them down ancient Farmers might seem to us dir poor but a typical family possessed more artifacts than an entire forager tribe the coming of the future while agricultural space shrank agricultural time expanded foragers usually didn't waste much time thinking about next week or next month Farmers sailed in their imagination years and decades into the future foragers discounted the future because they lived from hand to mouth and could only preserve food or accumulate possessions with d difficulty of course they clearly engaged in some Advanced planning the creators of the cave paintings of chalvet Lasco and dalir almost certainly intended them to last for Generations social alliances and political rivalries were long-term heirs it often took years to repay a favor or to avenge a wrong nevertheless in the subsistence economy of hunting and Gathering there was an obvious limit to such long-term planning paradoxically it saved foragers a lot of anxieties there was no sense in worrying about things that they could not influence the Agricultural Revolution made the future Farm more important than it had ever been before Farmers must always keep the future in mind and must work in its service the agricultural economy was based on a seasonal cycle of production comprising long months of cultivation followed by short periods of harvest on the night following the end of a plentiful Harvest The Peasants might celebrate for all they were worth but within a week or so they were again up at dawn for a long day in the El although there was enough food for today next week and even next month they had to worry about next year and the year after that concern about the future was rooted not only in seasonal cycles of production but also in the fundamental uncertainty of Agriculture since most Villages live by cultivating a very limited variety of domesticated plants and animals they were at the mercy of droughts ouds and pestilence peasants were obliged to produce more than they consumed so that they could build up reserves without grain in The Silo jars of olive oil in the cellar cheese in the pantry and sausages hanging from the rafters they would starve in bad years and bad years were bound to come sooner or later a peasant living on the assumption that bad years would not come didn't live long consequently from the very Advent of Agriculture worries about the future became major players in the theater of the human mind where Farmers depended on rains to water their Els the onset of the rainy season meant that each morning the farmers gazed towards the horizon sing the wind and straining their eyes is that a cloud would the rains come on time would there be enough would violent storms wash the seeds from the Els and batter down seedling meanwhile in The Valleys of the Euphrates indis and yellow Rivers other peasants monitored with no less trepidation the height of the water they needed the rivers to rise in order to spread the fertile top soil washed down from the highlands into enable their vast irrigation systems to L with water but ouds that surged too high or came at the wrong time could destroy their elves as much as a drought peasants were worried about the future not just because they had more cause for worry but also because they could do something about it they could clear another ELD dig another irrigation canal so more crops the anxious peasant was as frenetic and hardworking as a harvester and in the summer sweating to plant olive trees whose oil would be pressed by his children and grandchildren putting o until the winter or the following year the eating of the food he craved today the stress of farming had far-reaching consequences it was the foundation of large- scale political and soci social systems sadly the diligent peasants almost never achieved the future Economic Security they so craved through their hard work in the present everywhere rulers and Elites sprang up living over the peasants surplus food and leaving them with only a be subsistence these forfeited food surpluses fueled politics Wars art and philosophy they built palaces forts monuments and temples until the late modern era more than 90% of humans were peasants Who Rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows the extra they produced fed the tiny minority of Elites Kings government oals soldiers priests artists and thinkers who L all the history books history is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets in Imagine order the food surplus is produced by peasants coupled with new transportation technology eventually enabled more and more people to cram together RSD into large villages then into towns and N into cities all of them joined together by new kingdoms and Commercial networks yet in order to take advantage of these new opportunities food surpluses and improved Transportation were not enough the mere fact that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how to divide the land and water how to settle disputes and conics and how to act in times of drought or war and if no agreement can be reached Strife spreads even if the storehouses are bulging it was not food shortages that caused most of History's Wars and revolutions the French Revolution was spearheaded by end lawyers not by famished peasants the Roman Republic reached the height of its power in the rst century BC when treasur rettes from throughout the Mediterranean enriched the Romans Beyond their ancestors Wildest Dreams yet it was at that moment of Maximum that the Roman political order collapsed into a series of deadly Civil Wars Yugoslavia in 1991 had more than enough resources to feed all its inhabitants and still disintegrated into a terrible blood bath the problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals the handful of Millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities kingdoms and Empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for Mass cooperation to evolve despite the lack of such biological instincts during their foraging era hundreds of strangers were able to cooperate thanks to their shared myths however this cooperation was loose and limited every sapiens band continued to run its life independently and to provide for most of its own needs an archaic sociologist living 20,000 years ago who had no knowledge of events following the Agricultural Revolution might well have concluded that mythology had a fairly limited scope stories about ancestral spirits and tribal totems were strong enough to enable 500 people to trade seashells celebrate the odd festival and join forces to wipe out in Neanderthal band but no more than that mythology the ancient sociologist would have thought could not possibly enable millions of Strang ERS to cooperate on a daily basis but that turned out to be wrong myths it transpired are stronger than anyone could have imagined when the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty Empires people invented stories about great Gods motherland and joined stock companies to provide the needed Social Links while human evolution was crawling at its usual snails pace the human imagination was building a taling networks of mass cooperation unlike any other ever seen on Earth around 8500 BC the largest settlements in the world were Villages such as Jericho which contained a few hundred individuals by 7,000 BC the town of St l y can Anatolia numbered between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals it may well have been the world's biggest settlement at the time during the fth and fourth Millennia BC cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants spr crowed in the Fertile Crescent and each of these held sway over many nearby villages in 3100 BC the entire lower n Valley was united into the rst Egyptian Kingdom its pharaohs ruled thousands of square kilometers and hundreds of thousands of people around 2250 BC Sargon the Great forg the rstt Empire the Acadian it boasted over a million subjects and a standing army of 5,400 soldiers between 1,000 BC and 500 BC the rst mega Empires appeared in the Middle East the late Assyrian Empire the Babylonian Empire and the Persian Empire they ruled over many millions of subjects and commanded tens of thousands of soldiers into 21 BC the King Dynasty United China and shortly afterwards Rome United the Mediterranean Basin tax's levied on 40 million kin subjects paid for a standing army of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and a complex bureaucracy that employed more than 100,000 doels the Roman Empire at its Zenith collected taxes from up to 100 million subjects this Revenue nanced a standing army of 250,000 to 500,000 soldiers a road network still in use 1,500 years later and theaters and amphitheaters that host spectacles to this day 16 a stone sta inscribed with the code of hamurabi Circa 177 6 BC impressive no doubt but we mustn't Harbor Rosy Illusions about Mass cooperation networks operating in Pharaoh on a Egypt or the Roman Empire cooperation sounds very altruistic but is not always voluntary and seldom egalitarian most human cooperation networks have been geared towards suppression and exploitation The Peasants paid for the burdening cooperation networks with their precious food surpluses despairing when the tax collector wiped out an entire year of hard labor with a single stroke of his Imperial pen the famed Roman amphitheaters were often built by slaves so that wealthy and Idol Romans could watch other slaves engage in vicious gladiatorial combat even prisons and concentration camps are cooperation networks and can function only because thousands of strangers somehow manage to coordinate their actions all these cooperation networks from the cities of ancient Mesopotamia to the kin and Roman Empire were imagined orders the social norms that sustained them were based neither on ingrained instincts nor on personal acquaintances but rather on belief and shared myths how can myths sustain entire Empires we have already discussed one such example PUO now let's examine two of the best known myths of History the code of ham Ori of circus 1776 BC which served as a cooperation manual for hundreds of thousands of ancient Babylonians and the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 ad which today still serves as a cooperation manual for hundreds of millions of modern Americans in 1776 BC Babylon was the world's biggest city the Babylonian Empire was probably the world's largest with more than a million subjects it ruled most of Mesopotamia including the bulk of modern Iraq and parts of present day Syria and Iran the Babylonian King most famous today was ham morabbi his Fame is due primarily to the text that bears his name the code of hamurabi this was a collection of laws and judicial decisions whose aim was to present hamurabi as a role model of a just King serve as a basis for a more uniform legal system across the Babylonian Empire and teach future Generations what Justice is and how a just King acts future Generations took notice the intellectual and bureaucratic Elite of ancient Mesopotamia canonized the text and Apprentice scribes continued to copy it long after hamurabi died and his Empire lay in Ruins Hammurabi's code is therefore a good source for understanding the ancient Mesopotamians ideal of social order do3 the text Begins by saying that the gods and you and L and maruk the leading deities of the Mesopotamian Pantheon appointed hamurabi to make Justice Prevail in the land to abolish the wicked and the evil to prevent the strong from oppress ing the weak apostrophe Ford then lists about 300 judgments given in the set formula if such and such a thing happens such as the Judgment for example judgments 196 to9 and 209 to4 read 196 if a superior man should blind the eye of another superior man they shall blind his eye 197 if he should break the bone of another superior man they shall break his bone 100 198 if he should blind the eye of a commoner or break the bone of a commoner he shall weigh and deliver 60 shekels of silver 199 if he should blind the eye of a slave of a superior man or break the bone of a slave of a superior man he shall weigh and deliver one half of the slaves value in silver five 209 if a superior man strikes a woman of superior class and thereby causes her to miscarry her fetus he shall weigh and deliver 10 shekels of silver for her fetus 210 if that woman should die they shall kill his daughter 2011 if he should cause a woman of commoner class to miscarry her fetus by the beating he shall weigh and deliver five shekels of silver 212 if that woman should die he shall weigh and deliver 30 shekels of silver 2113 if he strikes a slave woman of a superior man and thereby causes her to miscarry her fetus he shall weigh and deliver two shekels of silver 214 if that slave woman should die he shall weigh and deliver 20 shekels of silver dot six after listing his judgments hamurabi again declares that these are the just decisions which hamurabi the able King has established and thereby has directed the land along the course of truth and the correct way of life I am hamurabi Noble King I have not been careless or negligent toward humankind granted to my Care by the God and will and with whose shepherding the god Marduk charged me7 hamur robi's code asserts that Babylonian social order is rooted in Universal and eternal principles of Justice dictated by the gods the principle of hierarchy is of Paramount importance according to the code people are divided into two genders and three classes Superior people commoners and slaves members of each gender and class have deer values the life of a female commoner is worth 30 silver shekels and that of a slave woman 20 silver shekels whereas the eye of a male commoner is worth 60 silver shekels the code also establishes a strict hierarchy within families According to which children are not independent persons but rather the property of their parents hence if one superior man kills the daughter of another superior man the Killer's daughter is executed in punish punishment to us it may seem strange that the killer remains unharmed whereas his innocent daughter is killed but to hamurabi and the Babylonians this seemed perfectly just Hammurabi's Code was based on the premise that if the king's subjects all accepted their positions in the hierarchy and acted accordingly the Empire's million inhabitants would be able to cooperate actively their society could then produce enough food for its members distribute it tently protect itself against its enemies and expand its territory so as to acquire more wealth and better security about 3,500 years after hamor ob's death the inhabitants of 13 British colonies in North America felt that the king of England was treating them unjustly their representatives gathered in the city of Philadelphia and on July 4th 1776 the colonies declared that their inhabitants were no longer subjects of the British crown their Declaration of Independence proclaimed Universal and Eternal principles of Justice which like those of H orabi were inspired by a divine power however the most important principle dictated by the American God was somewhat de from the principle dictated by the gods of Babylon the American Declaration of Independence asserts that we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness like hamur robi's code the American founding document promises that if humans act according to its sacred principles millions of them would be able to cooperate effectively living safely and peacefully and adjust in prosperous Society like the code of hamurabi the American Declaration of Independence was not just a document of its time and place it was accepted by Future Generations as well for more than 200 years American school children have been copying and learning it by heart the two texts present us with an obvious dilemma both the code of hamurabi and the American Declaration of Independence claimed to outline Universal and eternal principles of justice but according to the Americans all people are equal whereas according to the Babylonians people are decided be unequal the Americans would of course say that they are right and that hamurabi is wrong hamurabi naturally would retort that he is right and that the Americans are wrong in fact they are both wrong hamurabi and the American founding fathers alike imagined a reality governed by Universal and immutable principles of Justice such as equality or hierarchy yet the only place where such Universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of sapiens and in the myths they invent and tell one another these principles have no objective validity it is easy for us to accept that the division of people into superiors and commoners is augment of the imagination yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth in what sense do all humans equal one another is there any objective reality outside the human imagination in which we are truly equal are all humans equal to one another biologically let us try to translate the most famous line of the American Declaration of Independence into biological terms we hold these truths to to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness according to the science of biology people were not created they have evolved and they certainly did not evolve to be equal the idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of Creation The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity which argues that every person has a divinely created soul and that all souls are equal before God however if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God creation and souls what does it mean that all people are equal evolution is based on deance not on equality every person carries a somewhat deant genetic code and is exposed from birth to deant environmental inuences this leads to the development of deant qualities that carry with them de chances of survival created equal should therefore be translated and to evolve differently just as people were never created neither according to the science of biology is there a Creator who endows them with anything there is only a blind evolutionary process devoid of any purpose leading to the birth of individuals endowed by their creator should be translated simply into born equally there are no such things as rights and biology there are only organs abilities and characteristics birds why not because they have a right to why but because they have wings and it's not true that these organs abilities and characteristics are unalienable many of them undergo constant mutations and may well be completely lost over time the ostrich is a bird that lost its ability to fly so unalienable rights should be translated into mutable characteristics and what are the characteristics that evolved in humans life certainly but Liberty there is no such thing in biology just like equality rights and limited liability companies Liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination from a biological Viewpoint it is meaningless to say that humans and Democratic societies are free whereas humans and dictatorships are unfree and what about happiness so far biological research has failed to come up with a clear d of happiness or a way to measure it objectively most biological studies acknowledge only the existence of pleasure which is more easily dend and measured so life liberty and the pursuit of happiness should be translated into life and the pursuit of pleasure so here is that line from the American Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men evolv deerly that they are born with certain mutable characteristics and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this line of reasoning their response is likely to be we know that people are not equal biologically but if we believe that we are all equal in essence it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous Society I have no argument with that this is exactly what I mean by imagined order we believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true true but because believing in it enables us to cooperate actively and Forge a better Society imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages rather they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate actively bear in mind though that hamurabi might have defended his principle of hierarchy using the same logic I know that superiors commoners and slaves are not inherently deant kinds of people but if we believe believe that they are it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous Society True Believers it's likely that more than a few readers squirmed in their chairs while reading the preceding paragraphs most of us today are educated to react in such a way it is easy to accept that hamur obi's code was a myth but we do not want to hear that human rights are also a myth if people realize that human rights exist only in the imagination isn't there a danger that our society will collapse Vol said about God that there is no God but don't tell that to my servant lest he murder me at night ham orabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy and Thomas jerson about human rights Homo sapiens has no natural rights just as spiders hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights but don't tell that to are servants lest they murder us at night such fears are well Justified a natural order is a stable order there is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow even if people stop believing in it in contrast in imagined order is always in danger of collapse because it depends upon myths and myths vanish once people stop believing in them in order to safeguard an imagined order continuous and strenuous sorts are imperative some of these sorts take the shape of violence and coercion armies police forces courts and prisons are ceaselessly at work for forcing people to act in accordance with the imagined order if an ancient Babylonian blinded his neighbor some violence was usually necessary in order to enforce the law of a knife for a eye when in 1860 a majority of American citizens concluded that African slaves are human beings and must therefore enjoy the right of Liberty it took a bloody Civil War to make the southern states acques however an imagined order cannot be sustained by violence alone it requires some True Believers as well prince tarand who began his chameleon likee career under Louis the 16th later served the Revolutionary and Napoleonic regimes and switched loyalties in time to end his days working for the restored monarchy summed up Decades of governmental experience by saying that you can do many things with bayonets but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them a single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers far more sheepy and actively moreover no matter how asent bayonets are somebody must wield them why should the soldiers jailers judges and police maintain an imagined order in which they do not believe of all human Collective activities the one most DEC cult to organize is violence to say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question what maintains the military order it is impossible to organize an army solely by coercion at least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something be it God honor motherland manhood or money an even more interesting question concerns those standing at the top of the social pyramid why should they wish to enforce an imagined order if they themselves don't believe in it it is quite common to argue that the elite may do so out of cynical greed yet a cynic who believes in nothing is unlikely to be greedy it does not take much to provide the objective biological needs of homo sapiens after those needs are met more money can be spent on building pyramids taking holidays around the world nancing election campaigns funding your favorite terrorist organization or investing in the stock market and making yet more money all of which are activities that a true cynic would end utterly meaningless diogenes the Greek philosopher who founded the cynical School lived in a barrel when Alexander the Great once visited diogenes he was relaxing in the Sun and asked if there were anything he might do for him the cynic answered the all powerful conqueror yes there is something you can do for me please move a little to the side you are blocking the sunlight this is why cynic Stone build Empires and why an imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces truly believe in it Christianity would not have lasted 2, years if the majority of Bishops and Priests failed to Believe In Christ American democracy would not have lasted 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights the modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism the Prison Walls How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity democracy or capitalism first you you never admit that the order is imagined you always insist that the order sustaining Society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature people are unequal not because Hami said so but because an l and Marduk decreed it people are equal not because Thomas jerson said so but because God created them that way free markets are the best economic system not because Adam Smith said so but because these are the IMM able laws of nature you also educate people thoroughly from the moment they are born you constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order which are incorporated into anything and everything they are incorporated into fairy tales dramas paintings songs etiquette political propaganda architecture recipes and fashions for example today people believe in equality so it's fashionable for rich kids to wear jeans which were originally working class attire in the Middle Ages people believed in class divisions so no young nobleman would have worn a peasant's SMU back then to be addressed as Sir or Madam was a rare privilege reserved for the nobility and often purchased with blood today all polite correspondents regardless of the recipient begins with Dear Sir or Madam the humanities and social sciences devote most of their energies to explaining exactly how the imagined order is woven into the tapestry of Life in The Limited space at our disposal we can only scratch the Surface three main factors prevent people from realizing that the order organizing their lives exists only in their imagination a the imagined order is embedded in the material world though the imagined order exists only in our minds it can be woven into the material reality around us and even set in stone most westerners today believe in individualism they believe that every human is an individual whose worth does not depend on what other people think of him or her each of us has within ourselves a brilliant ray of light that gives value and meaning to our lives in modern Western schools teachers and parents tell children that if their classmates make fun of them they should ignore it only they themselves not others know their true worth in modern architecture this myth leaps out of the imagination to take shape and stone and mortar the ideal modern house is divided into many small rooms so that each child can have a private space hidden from view providing for maximum autonomy this private room almost invariably has a door and in many households it is accepted practice for the child to close and perhaps lock the door even parents are forbidden to enter without knocking and asking permission the room is decorated as the child ceas te with Rockstar posters on the wall and dirty socks on the or somebody growing up in such such a space cannot help but imagine himself an individual his true worth emanating from within rather than from without medieval nobl men did not believe in individualism someone's worth was determined by their place in the social hierarchy and by what other people said about them being laughed at was a horrible indignity nobleman taught there children to protect their good name whatever the cost like modern individualism the medieval value system left the imagin ation and was manifested in the stone of medieval castles the castle rarely contained private rooms for children or anyone else for that matter the teenage son of a medieval Baron did not have a private room on the castle second or with posters of Richard the lion hard and King Arthur on the walls and a locked door that his parents were not allowed to open he slept alongside many other youths in a large Hall he was always on display and always had to take into account what other saw and said someone growing up in such conditions naturally concluded that a man's true worth was determined by his place in the social hierarchy and by what other people said of him 8B the imagined order shapes our desires most people do not wish to accept that the order governing their lives is imaginary but in fact every person is born into a pre-existing imagined order and his or her desires are shaped from birth by its dominant myths our personal desires thereby become the imagined order's most important defenses for instance the most cherished desires of present day westerners are shaped by romantic nationalist capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries friends giving advice often tell each other follow your heart but the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day and the Very recommendation to follow your heart was implanted in our minds by a combination of 19th century romantic myths and 20th Century consumerist myths the Coca-Cola company for example has marketed Diet Coke around the world under the slogan Diet Coke do what feels good even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order let's consider for example the popular desire to take a holiday abroad there is nothing natural or obvious about this a chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighboring chimpanzee band The Elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummied but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia people today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are True Believers in the myths of romantic consumerism Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many de experiences as we can we must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions we must sample various kinds of relationships we must try deant Cuisines we must learn to appreciate deant styles of music one of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routine leave behind our familiar setting and go traveling in distant lands where we can experience the culture the smells the tastes and the Norms of other people we hair again again the Romantic myths about how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible if we feel that something is missing or not quite right then we probably need to buy a product a car new clothes organic food or a service housekeeping relationship therapy yoga classes every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better Romanticism which encourages variety meshes perfectly with consumerism their marriage has given birth to the infinite Market of experiences on which the modern tourism industry is founded the tourism industry does not sell at tickets and hotel bedrooms it sells experiences Paris is not a city nor India a country they are both experiences the consumption of which is supposed to widen our Horizons full our our human potential and make us happier consequently when the relationship between a millionaire and his wife is going through a rocky patch he takes her on an expensive trip to Paris the trip is not a reaction of some independent desire but rather of an ardant belief in the myths of romantic consumerism a wealthy man in ancient Egypt would never have dreamed of solving a relationship crisis by taking his wife on holiday to Babylon instead he might have built for her the sump tomb she had always wanted 18 the Great Pyramid of Giza the kind of thing rich people in ancient Egypt did with their money like the elite of ancient Egypt most people and most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids only the names shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other they may take the form for example of a Suburban Cottage with a swimming pool and an Evergreen Lawn or a gleaming pen house with an enviable view few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place see the imagined order is inter subjective even if by some superhuman Nord I succeed in freeing my personal desires from the grip of the imagined order I am just one person in order to change the imagined order I must convince millions of strangers to cooperate with me for the imagined order is not a subjective order existing in my own imagination it is rather an inter subjective order existing in the shared imagination of thousands and millions of people in order to understand this we need to understand the deance between objective subjective and intersubjective an objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs radioactivity for example is not a myth radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them Marie curri one of the discoverers of radioactivity did not know during her long years of studying radioactive materials that they could harm her body while she did not believe that radioactivity could kill her she nevertheless died of a plastic anemia a disease caused by overexposure to radioactive materials the subjective is something that exists depending on the Consciousness and beliefs of a single individual it disappears or changes if that particular individ idual changes his or her beliefs many a child believes in the existence of an imaginary friend who is invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world the imaginary friend exists solely in the child's subjective Consciousness and when the child grows up and ceases to believe in it the imaginary friend Fades away the inter subjective is something that exists within the communication Network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals if a single individual changes his or her beliefs or even dies it is of little importance however if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs the inter subjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear inter subjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignicant Shades they exist in a de way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity but their impact on the world may still be enormous many of history's most important drivers are inter subjective law money God Nations PUO for example is not the imaginary friend of pu's CEO the company exists in the shared imagination of millions of people the CEO believes in the company's existence because the board of directors also believes in it as do the company's lawyers the secretaries and the near bios the tellers in the bank the Brokers on the stock exchange and car dealers from France to Australia if the CEO alone were suddenly to stop believing in Jo's existence he'd quickly land in the nearest mental hospital and someone else would occupy his office similarly the Dollar Human Rights and the United States of America exist in the shared imagination of billions and no single individual can threaten their existence if I alone were to stop believing in the dollar in human rights or in the United States it wouldn't much matter these imagined orders are inter subjective so in order to change them we must simultaneously change the consciousness of billions of people which is not easy a change of such magnitude can be accomplished only with the help of a complex organization such as a political party an ideological movement or a religious cult however in order to establish such complex organizations it's necessary to convince many strangers to cooperate with one another and this will happen only if these strangers believe in some shared myths it follows that in order to change an existing imagined order we must first believe in an alternative imagined order in order to dismantle PUO for example we need to imagine something more powerful such as the French legal system in order to dismantle the French legal system we need to imagine something even more powerful such as the French State and if we would like to dismantle that too we will have to imagine something yet more powerful there is no way out of the imagined order when we break down our Prison Walls and run towards Freedom we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison seven memory overload Evolution did not endow humans with the ability to play football true It produced legs for kicking elbows for fouling and mouths for cursing but all that this enables us to do is perhaps practice penalty kicks by ourselves to get into a game with the strangers we Endy in the schoolyard On Any Given afternoon we not only have to work in concerts with 10 teammates we may never have met before we also need to know that the 11 players on the opposing team are playing by the same rules other animals that engage strangers in ritualized aggression do so largely by Instinct puppies throughout the world have the rules for Rough and Tumble play hardwired into their genes but human teenagers have no genes for football they can nevertheless play the game with complete strangers because they have all learned an identical set of ideas about football these ideas are entirely imaginary but if everyone shares them we can all play the game the same applies on a larger scale to kingdoms churches and trade networks with one important deance the rules of football are relatively simple and concise much like those necessary for cooperation in a forager band or small village each player can easily store them in his brain and still have room for songs images and shopping lists but large systems of cooperation that involve not 22 but thousands or even millions of humans require the handling and storage of huge amounts of information much more than any single human brain can contain and process the large societies found in some other species such as ants and bees are stable and resilient because most of the information needed to sustain them is encoded in the genome a female honeybee larva can can for example grow up to be either a queen or a worker depending on what food it is fed its DNA programs the necessary behaviors for whatever role it will full in life highs can be very complex social structures containing many de kinds of workers such as Harvesters nurses and cleaners but so far researchers have failed to locate lawyer bees bees don't need lawyers because there is no danger that they might forget or violate the hive con stitution the queen does not cheat the cleaner bees of their food and they never go on strike demanding higher wages but humans do such things all the time because the Sapient social order is imagined humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these onto their progeny a conscious sword has to be made to sustain laws Customs procedures and manners otherwise the social order would quickly collapse for example kingham or Robie decreed that people are divided into superiors commoners and slaves unlike the Beehive class system this is not a natural division there is no trace of it in the human genome if the Babylonians could not keep this truth in mind their society would have ceased to function similarly when hamurabi passed his DNA to his offspring it did not encode his ruling that a superior man who killed a commoner woman must pay 30 silver Sheed Les hamurabi deliberately had to instruct his sons in the laws of his Empire and his sons and grandsons had to do the same Empires generate huge amounts of information Beyond laws empires have to keep accounts of transactions and taxes inventories of military supplies and Merchant vessels and calendars of festivals and victories for millions of years people stored information in a single place their brains unfortunately the human brain is not a good storage device for Empire sized databases for three main reasons first its capacity is limited true some people have astonishing memories and in ancient times there were memory professionals who could store in their heads the topographies of whole provinces and the law codes of entire States nevertheless there is a limit that even Master mins cannot transcend a lawyer might know by heart the entire law code of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts but not the details of every legal proceeding that took place in Massachusetts from the Salem wish trials onward secondly humans die and their brains die with them any information stored in a brain will be erased in less than a century it is of course possible to pass memories from one brain to another but after a few Transmissions the information tends to get garbled or lost thirdly and most importantly the human brain has been adapted to store and process only particular types of information in order to survive ancient hunter gatherers had to remember the shapes qualities and behavior patterns of thousands of plant and animal species they had to remember that a wrinkled yellow mushroom growing in Autumn under an elm tree is most probably poisonous whereas a similar looking mushroom growing in Winter under an oak tree is a good stomach ache remedy hunter gatherers also had to bear in mind the opinions and relations of several dozen band members if Lucy needed a band member's help to get Jon to stop harassing her it was important for her to remember that Jon had fallen out last week with Mary who would thus be a likely and enthusiastic Ally consequently evolutionary pressures have adapted the human brain to store immense quantities of Botanical Zoological topographical and social information but when particularly complex societies began to appear in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution a completely new type of information became vital numbers foragers were never obliged to handle large amounts of mathematical data no Foreigner needed to remember say the number of fruit on each tree in the forest so human brains did not adapt to storing and processing numbers yet in order to maintain a large Kingdom mathematical data was vital it was never enough to legislate laws and tell stories about Guardian Gods one also had to to collect taxes in order to tax hundreds of thousands of people it was imperative to collect data about people's incomes and possessions data about payments made data about careers debts and NES data about discounts and exemptions this added up to millions of data bits which had to be stored and processed without this capacity the state would never know what resources it had and what further resources it could tap when confronted with the need to memorize recall and handle all these numbers most human brains overdosed or fell asleep this mental limitation severely constrain the size and complexity of human collectives when the amount of people and property in a particular society crossed a critical threshold it became necessary to store and process large amount of mathematical data since the human brain could not do it the system collapsed 4 thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution humans social networks remained relatively small and simple the rst to overcome the problem were the ancient Sumerians who lived in southern Mesopotamia there a scorching Sun beating upon Rich muddy Plains produced plentiful harvests in prosperous towns as the number of inhabitants grew so did the amount of information required to coordinate their hirs between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC some unknown Sumerian Geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains one that was custombuilt to handle large amounts of mathematical data the sumerin thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain opening the way for the appearance of cities kingdoms and Empires the data processing system invented by the Sumerians is called writing signed kasham writing is a method for storing information through material signs the Sumerian writing system did so by combining two types of signs which were pressed in clay tablets one type of signs represented numbers there were signs for 1 10 60 600 3, 636,000 the Sumerians used a combination of Base 6 and base 10 numeral systems their base six system bestowed on us several important legacies such as the division of the day into 24 hours and of the circle into 360° the other type of signs represented people animals merchandise territories dates and so forth by combining both types of signs the Sumerians were able to preserve far more data than any human brain could remember or any D chain could encode 19 a clay tablet with an administrative text from the city of Ruck circuit 3400 to 3,000 BC gusa may be the generic title of an office holder or the name of a particular individual if gam was indeed a person he may be the first individual in history whose name is known to us while the names applied earlier in human history the Neanderthals the natu fans chalave gole are modern inventions we have no idea what the Builders of gole actually called the place with the appearance of writing we are beginning to hear history through the ears of its protagonists when Kim's neighbors called out to him they might really have shouted kushim it is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant rather than a prophet a poet or a great conqueror do one at this early stage writing was limited to facts and geurs the great sumarian novel if there ever was one was never committed to clay tablets writing was timeconsuming and the reading public tiny so no one saw any reason to use it for anything other than essential recordkeeping if we look for the rst words of wisdom reaching us from our ancestors 5,000 years ago we are in for a big disappointment the earliest messages our ancestors have left us read for example 29086 measures burle 37 months kushim the most probable reading of this sentence is a total of 29,8 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months signed kasham alas the rst texts of History contain no philosophical insights no poetry Legends laws or even Royal triumphs they are hum drum economic documents recording the payment of taxes the accumulation of debts and the ownership of property partial script cannot express the entire spectrum of a spoken language but it can express things that fall outside the scope of spoken language partial scripts such as the Sumerian and mathematical scripts cannot be used to write poetry but they can keep tax accounts very effectively only one other type of text survived from these ancient days and it is even less exciting lists of words copied over and over again by Apprentice scribes as training exercises even had a board student wanted to write out some of his poems instead of copyable of sale he could not have done so the earliest sumarian writing was a partial rather than a full script full script is a system of material signs that can represent spoken language more or less completely it can therefore express everything people can say including poetry partial script on the other hand is a system of material signs that can represent only particular types of information belonging to a limited ELD of activity Latin script Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Brar full scripts you can use them to write tax registers love poems history books food recipes and business law in contrast the earliest Sumerian script like modern mathematical symbols in musical notation are partial scripts you can use mathematical script to make calculations but you cannot use it to write love poems 20 a man holding a kipo as depicted in a Spanish manuscript following the fall of the Inca Empire it didn't disturb the Sumerians that their script was Ill suited for writing poetry they didn't invent it in order to copy spoken language but rather to do things that spoken language failed at there were some cultures such as those of the pre-colombian Andes which used only partial scripts throughout their entire histories unfazed by their scripts limitations and feeling no need for a full version andyan script was very deant from its suan counterpart in fact it was so deant that many people would argue it wasn't a script at all it was not written on clay tablets or pieces of paper rather it was written by tying knots on colorful chords called cus each kipo consisted of many chords of De colors made of wool or cotton on each cord several knots were tied in deant places a single keepo could contain hundreds of chords and thousands of knots by combining deant knots on deant chords with deant colors it was possible to record large amount of mathematical data relating to for example tax collection and property owner ownership. two for hundreds perhaps thousands of years quias were essential to the business of cities kingdoms and Empires do three they reached their full potential under the Inca Empire which ruled 10 to 12 million people and covered today's Peru Ecuador and Bolivia as well as chunks of Chile Argentina and Colombia thanks to quipus the Incas could save and process large amounts of data without which they would not have been able to maintain in the complex administrative Machinery that an Empire of the size requires in fact quiet were so active and accurate that in the early years following the Spanish conquest of South America the Spaniards themselves employed quipus in the work of administering their new Empire the problem was that the Spaniards did not themselves know how to record and read quias making them dependent on local professionals the continent's new rulers realized that this placed them in a tenuous position the native kipu experts could easily mislead and cheat their overlords so once Spain's Dominion was more early established quipus were phased out and the new Empire's records were kept entirely in Latin script and numerals very few quias survived the Spanish occupation and most of those remaining are undecipherable since unfortunately the art of reading quipus has been lost the wonders of bureaucracy the Mesopotamians eventually started to want to write down things things other than monotonous mathematical data between 3,000 BC and 2500 BC more and more signs were added to the Sumerian system gradually transforming it into a full script that we today call unia form by 2500 BC kings were using hunia form to issue decrees priests were using it to record oracles and less exalted citizens were using it to write personal letters at roughly the same time Egyptians developed another full script known as hieroglyphics other full scripts were developed in China around 1200 BC and in Central America around 1,000 to 500 BC from these initial centers full scripts spread far and wide taking on various new forms and novel tasks people began to write poetry history books romances dramas prophecies and cook books yet writing's most important task continued to be the storage of reams of mathematical data and that task remained the prerogative of partial script the Hebrew Bible the Greek Iliad the Hindu mahab barata and the Buddhist TOA all began as oral works for many generations they were transmitted orally and would have lived on even had writing never been invented but tax Registries and complex bureaucracies were born together with partial script and the two remain inexorably linked to this day like siamese twins think of the cryptic entries in computerized databases and spreadsheets as more and more things were written and particularly as administrative archives grew to huge proportions new problems appeared information stored in a person's brain is easy to retrieve my brain stores billions of bits of data yet I can quickly almost instantaneously recall the name of Italy's Capital immediately afterwards recollect what I did on September 11th 2001 and then reconstruct the route leading from my house to to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem exactly how the brain do it remains a mystery but we all know that the brain's retrieval system is amazingly ecient except when you are trying to remember where you put your car keys how though do you find and retrieve information stored on keepo cords or clay tablets if you have just 10 tablets or 100 tablets it's not a problem but what if you have accumulated thousands of them as did one of ham or robie's contemporary King zum of Mari imagine for a moment that it's 1776 BC two marians are quarreling over possession of a wheat ELD Jacob insists that he bought the ELD from Esau 30 years ago Esau retorts that he in fact Tred the yelled to Jacob for a term of 30 years and that now the term being up he intends to reclaim it they shout and Wrangle and start pushing one another before they realize that they can resolve their dispute by going to the Royal archive where are housed the deeds and bills of sale that apply to all the kingdoms real estate upon arriving at the archive they are shuttled from one oal to the other they wait through several herbal te breaks are told to come back tomorrow and eventually are taken by a grumbling clerk to look for the relevant clay tablet the clerk opens a door and leads them into a huge room lined o or to ceiling with thousands of clay tablets no wonder the clerk is sour-faced how is he supposed to locate the deed to the disputed we written 30 years ago even if he NES it how will he be able to cross check to ensure that the one from 30 years ago is the latest document relating to the ELD in question if he can't end it does that prove that Esau never sold or rented out the ELD or just that the document got lost or turned to Mush when some rain leaked into the archive clearly just imprinting a document in Clay is not enough to guarantee eent accurate and convenient data processing that requires methods of organization like cataloges methods of reproduction like photocopy machines methods of rapid and accurate retrieval like computer algorithms and pedantic but hopefully cheerful Librarians who know how to use these tools inventing such methods proved to be far more de difficult than inventing writing many writing systems developed independently and cultures distant in time and place from each other every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts some of them might prove to be even older than the suan scratches and Clay but most of them remain Curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent acient ways of cataloging and retrieving data what set aart Sumer as well as Pharaoh on Egypt ancient China and the Inca Empire is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving cataloging and retrieving written records They also invested in schools for scribes clerks Librarians and accountants a writing exercise from a school in ancient Mesopotamia discovered by modern archaeologists gives us a glimpse into the lives of these students some 4,000 years ago I went and and sat down and my teacher read my tablet he said there is something missing and he caned me one of the people in charge said why did you open your mouth without my permission and he caned me the one in charge of rules said why did you get up without my permission and he caned me the gatekeeper said why are you going out without my permission and he caned me The Keeper of the beer jug said why did you get some without my permission and he caned me the Sumerian teacher said why did you speak Cadian and he caned me my teacher said your handwriting is no good and he caned me do four ancient scri rbes learn not merely to read and write but also to use cataloges dictionaries calendars forms and tables they studied and internalized techniques of cataloging retrieving and processing information very de from those used by the brain in the brain all data is freely Associated when I go with my spouse to sign on a mortgage for our new home I am reminded of the rst place we lived together which reminds me of our honeymoon in New Orleans which reminds me of alligators which remind me of dragons which remind me of the Ring of the nbel engine and suddenly before I know it there I am humming the SE Fray light Motif to a puzzled Bank clerk in bureaucracy things must be kept apart there is one drawer for home mortgages another for marriage certicates a third for tax registers and a fourth for lawsuits otherwise how can you Indie anything things that belong in more than one drawer like vagian music dramas do I them under Music Theater or perhaps invent a new category altogether are a terrible headache soone is forever adding deleting and rearranging drawers in order to function the people who operate such a system of drawers must be reprogrammed to stop thinking as humans and to start thinking as clerks and accountants as everyone from ancient times till today knows clerks and accountants think in a non-human fashion they think think like link cabinets this is not their fault if they don't think that we their drawers will all get mixed up and they won't be able to provide the services their government company or organization requires the most important impact of script on human history is precisely this it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalization and bureaucracy the language of numbers as the centuries past bureaucratic methods of data processing grew ever more deant from the way humans naturally think and ever more important a critical stamp was made sometime before the 9th century ad when a new partial script was invented one that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented deciency this partial script was composed of 10 signs representing the numbers from 0 to 9 confusingly these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were RSD invented by the Hindus even more confusingly modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite de from Western ones but the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system understood its usefulness Ren it and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe when several other signs were later added to the Arab numerals such as the signs for addition subtraction and multiplication the basis of modern mathematical notation came into into being although this system of writing remains a partial script it has become the world's dominant language almost all states companies organizations and institutions whether they speak Arabic Hindi English or Norwegian use mathematical script to record and process data every piece of information that can be translated into mathematical script is stored spread and processed with mindboggling speed and efficiency a person who wishes to inuence the decisions of governments organizations and companies must therefore learn to speak in numbers experts do their best to translate even ideas such as poverty happiness and honesty into numbers the poverty line subjective well-being levels credit rating entire elves of knowledge such as physics and Engineering have already lost almost all touch with the spoken human language and are maintained solely by mathematical script an equation for calculating the acceleration of Mass ey under the influence of gravity according to the theory of relativity when most lay people see such an equation they usually panic and freeze like a deer caught in the headlights of a speeding vehicle the reaction is quite natural and does not betray a lack of intelligence or curiosity with rare exceptions human brains are simply incapable of thinking through Concepts like relativity and quantum mechanics physicists nevertheless managed to do so because they set aside that traditional human way of thinking and learn to think a new with the help of external data processing systems crucial parts of their thought process take place not in the head but inside computers or on classroom blackboards more recently mathematical script has given rise to an even more revolutionary writing system a computerized binary script consisting of only two signs zero and one the words I am now typing on my keyboard are written within my computer by different combinations of zero and one writing was born as the made servant of human consciousness but is increasingly becoming its Master our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks feels and dreams so we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk feel and dream in the language of numbers which can be understood by computers and this is not the end of the story The ELD of articial intelligence is seeking to create a new kind of intelligence based solely on the bind script of computers science movies such as the Matrix and the Terminator tell of a day when the binary script throws out the Yol of humanity when humans try to regain control of their rebellious script it responds by attempting to wipe out the human race eight there is no justice in history understanding human history in the millenia following the Agricultural Revolution boils down to a single question how did humans organize themselves in Mass cooperation networks when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks the short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts these two inventions led the gaps left by our biological inheritance however the appearance of these networks was for many a dubious blessing the imagin orders sustaining these networks were neither neutral nor fair they divided people into make believe groups arranged in a hierarchy the upper levels enjoyed Privileges and power while the lower ones swered from discrimination and oppression H Mor Rob's code for example established a becking order of superiors commoners and slaves superiors got all the good things in life commoners got what was left slaves got a beating if they complained despite its proclamation of the equality of all men the imagined order established by the Americans in 1776 also established a hierarchy it created a hierarchy between men who Ben eded from it and women whom it left disempowered it created a hierarchy between whites who enjoyed Liberty and blacks and American Indians who were considered humans of a lesser type and therefore did not share in the equal rights of men many of those who signed the Declaration of independent were slaveholders they did not release their slaves upon signing the Declaration nor did they consider themselves Hypocrites in their view the rights of men had little to do with Negroes the American order also consecrated the hierarchy between rich and poor most Americans at that time had little problem with the inequality caused by wealthy parents passing their money and businesses onto their children in their view equality meant simply that the same laws applied to rich and poor it had nothing to do with unemployment benets integrated education or health insurance Liberty to carried very dear connotations than it does today in 1776 it did not mean that the disempowered certainly not blacks or Indians or God forbid women could gain and exercise power it meant simply that the state could not except in unusual circumstances concate a citizen's private property or tell him what to do with it the American order thereby upheld the hierarchy of wealth which some thought was mandated by God and others viewed as representing the immutable laws of nature nature it was claimed rewarded merit with wealth while penalizing indolence all the above mentioned distinctions between free persons and slaves between whites and blacks between rich and poor are rooted inci the hierarchy of men and women will be discussed later yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its chal Origins and claims to be natural and inevitable for instance many people who have viewed the hierarchy of free persons and slaves as natural and correct have argued that slavery is not a human invention hamurabi saw it as ordained by the gods Aristotle argued that slaves have a slavish nature whereas free people have a free nature their status in society is merely a reflection of their innate nature ask white supremacists about the racial hierarchy and you are in for a pseudo scientic concerning the biological deces between the races you are likely to be told that there is something in Caucasian blood or genes that makes whites naturally more intelligent moral and hardworking ask a Die Hard capitalist about the hierarchy of wealth and you are likely to hear that it is the inevitable outcome of objective dear ances and abilities the rich have more money in this view because they are more capable and diligent no one should be bothered then if the wealthy Get Better Health Care better education and better nutrition the rich richly deserve every perk they enjoy 21 a sign on a South African Beach from the period of a part hide restricting its usage to whites only people with lighter skin color are typically more in danger of sunburn than people with darker skin yet there was no biological logic behind the division of South African beaches beaches reserved for people with lighter skin were not characterized by lower levels of ultraviolent radiation Hindus who adhere to the cast system believe that Cosmic forces have made one cast Superior to another according to a famous Hindu creation myth the gods fashioned the world out of the body of a primeval being the perusa the sun was created from the pera's eye the moon from the pera's brain the brahin priests from its mouth the chrias Warriors from its arms the Vas pres in Merchants from its thighs and the shudras servants from its legs accept this explanation and the sociopolitical deces between Brahman and shuters are as natural and eternal as the deces between the Sun and the Moon one the ancient Chinese believed that when the goddess newwa created humans from Earth she needed Aristocrats from n yellow soil whereas commoners were formed from brown mud. to yet to the best of our understanding these hierarchy are all the product of human imagination brahin and shuters were not really created by the gods from different body parts of a primeval being instead the distinction between the two casts was created by laws and Norms invented by humans in Northern India about 3,000 years ago contrary to Aristotle there is no known biological deance between slaves and Free People human laws and Norms have turned some people into slaves and others into Masters but between blacks and whites there are some objective biological deces such as skin color and hair type but there is no evidence that the differences extend to intelligence or morality most people claim that their social hierarchy is natural and just while those of other societies are based on false and ridiculous criteria modern westerners are taught to SEO at the idea of racial hierarchy they are shocked by laws prohibiting blacks to live in white neighborhoods or to study in white schools or to be treated in white hospitals but the hierarchy of rich and poor which mandates that rich people live in separate and more luxurious neighborhoods study in separate and more prestigious schools and receive medical treatment in separate and better equipped facilities seems perfectly sensible to many Americans and Europeans yet it's a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason that they were born into a rich family While most poor people will remain poor throughout their lives simply because they were born into a poor family unfortunately complex human sociey seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination of course not all hierarchies are morally identical and some societies swer from more extreme types of discrimination than others yet Scholars know of no large society that has been able to dispense with discrimination altogether time and again people have created order in their societies by by classifying the population into imagined categories such as superiors commoners and slaves whites and blacks patricians and plebians brahin and shras or rich and poor these categories have regulated relations between millions of humans by making some people legally politically or socially Superior to others hierarchies serve an important function they enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to be become personally acquainted in George Bernard Shaw's Pig million Henry Higgins doesn't need to establish an intimate acquaintance with Eliza do little in order to understand how he should relate to her just hearing her talk tells him that she is a member of the honor class with whom he can do as he wishes for example using her as a pawn in his bet to pass o or girl as a duchess a modern Eliza working at aists needs to know how much or to put into selling roses and gladioli to the dozens of people people who enter the shop each day she can't make a detailed inquiry into the tastes and wallets of each individual instead she uses social cues the way the person is dressed his or her age and if she's not politically correct his skin color that is how she immediately distinguishes between the accounting RM partner who's likely to place a large order for expensive roses and a messenger boy who can only aort a bunch of daisies of course deces and natural abilities also play a role in the formation of social distinctions but such diversities of aptitudes and character are usually mediated through imagined hierarchies this happens in two important ways first and foremost most abilities have to be nurtured and developed even if somebody is born with a particular talent that Talent will usually remain ladened if it is not fostered honed and exercised not all people get the same chance to cultivate and Renee their abilities whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society's imagined hierarchy Harry Potter is a good example removed from his distinguished wizard family and brought up by ignorant Muggles he arrives at Hong wallarts without any experience in Magic it takes him seven books to gain or command of his powers and knowledge of his unique abilities second even if people belonging to deant classes develop exactly the same abilities they unlikely to enjoy equal success because they will have to play the game by De rules if in British ruled India and Untouchable a Brahman a Catholic Irishman and a Protestant Englishman had somehow developed exactly the same business Acumen they still would not have had the same chance of becoming rich the economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and uncial glass ceilings The Vicious Circle all societies are based on imagined hierarchies but not NE necessarily on the same hierarchies what accounts for the deces why did traditional Indian Society classify people according to cast ottoman Society according to religion and American society according to race in most cases the hierarchy originated as the result of a set of accidental historical circumstances and was then perpetuated and refined over many generations as different groups developed vested interests in it for instance many scholars surmise that the Hindu cast system took shape when Indo arean people invaded the Indian subcontinent about 3,000 years ago subjugating the local population the Invaders established a sted society in which they of course occupied the leading positions priests and warriors leaving the natives to live as servants and slaves the Invaders who were few in number feared losing their privileged status and unique identity to forestall this danger they divided the population into casts Each of which was required to pursue a speciic occupation or perform a speciic role in society each had deer and legal status Privileges and duties mixing of casts social interaction marriage even the sharing of meals was prohibited and the distinctions were not just legal they became an inherent part of religious mythology and practice the rulers argued that the cast system reacted an eternal Cosmic reality rather than a chance historical Dev development concepts of Purity and impurity were essential elements in Hindu religion and they were harnessed to butress the social pyramid Pious Hindus were taught that contact with members of a deant cast could pollute not only them personally but society as a whole and should therefore be abhor such ideas are hardly unique to Hindus throughout history and in almost all societies concepts of pollution and Purity have played a leading role in enforcing social and political division and have been exploited by numerous ruling classes to maintain their privileges the fear of pollution is not a complete fabrication of priests and princes however it probably has its roots in biological survival mechanisms that make humans feel an instinctive revulsion towards potential disease carriers such as sick persons and dead bodies if you want to keep any human group isolated women Jews Roma gays blacks the best way to do it is convinc everyone that these people are a source of pollution the Hindu cast system and its attendant laws of Purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture long after the Indo Arian invasion was forgotten Indians continued to believe in the cast system and to abhor the pollution caused by cast mixing casts were not immune to change in fact as time went by large casts were divided into subcast eventually the original forec casts turned into 3,000 deant groupings called jaty literally birth but this proliferation of casts did not change the basic principle of the system according to which every person is born into a particular Rank and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole a person's jaty determines her profession the food she can eat her place of residence and her eligible Marriage Partners usually a person can marry only within his or her cast and the resulting children inherit that status whenever a new profession developed or a new group of people appeared on the scene they had to be recognized as a cast in order to receive legitimate place within Hindu Society groups that failed to win recognition as a cast were literally outcasts in this stred Society they did not even occupy the lowest rung they became known as Untouchables they had to live apart from all other people and scrape together a living and humiliating and disgusting ways such as sifting through garbage dumps for scrap material even members of the lowest cast avoided mingling with them eating with them touching them and certainly marrying them in Modern India matters of marriage and work are still heavily unnuanced by the cast system despite all attempts by the democratic government of India to break down such distinctions and convince Hindus that there is nothing polluting and cast mixing do three Purity in America a similar vicious circle perpetuated the racial hierarchy in modern America from the 16th to the 18th century the European conquerors imported millions of African slaves to work the mines and plantations of America they chose to import slaves from Africa rather than from Europe or East Asia due to three circumstantial factors fiercely Africa was closer so it was cheaper to import slaves from senagal then from Vietnam secondly in Africa there already existed a well-developed Slave of trade exporting slaves mainly to the Middle East whereas in Europe slavery was very rare it was obviously far easier to buy slaves in an existing Market than to create a new one from the scratch thirdly and most importantly American plantations in places such as Virginia Haiti and Brazil were plagued by malaria and yellow fever which had originated in Africa Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases whereas Europeans were totally defenseless and died in droves it was consequently wiser for a plantation owner to invest his money in an African slave than in a European slave or indentured laborer paradoxically genetic superiority in terms of immunity translated into social inferiority precisely because Africans work in tropical climates than Europeans they ended up as the slaves of European Masters due to these circumstantial factors the buring new societies of America were to be divided into a ruling cast of White Europeans and a subjugated cast of black Africans but people don't like to say that they keep slaves of a certain race or origin simply because it's economically expedient like the Aryan conquerors of India white Europeans in the Americas wanted to be seen not only as economically successful but also as Pious just and objective religious and scientic myths were pressed into service to justify this division theologians argued that African descent from Ham son of Noah saddled by his father with a curse that his offspring would be slaves biologists argued that blacks are less intelligent than whites and their moral sense less developed doctors alleged that blacks live in filth and spread diseases in other words they are a source of pollution these myths struck a cord in American culture and in Western culture generally they continued to exert their inuence long after the condition that created slavery had disappeared in the early 19th century Imperial Britain outlawed slavery and stopped the Atlantic slave trade and in the decades that followed slavery was gradually outlawed throughout the American continent notably this was the rstd and only time in history that slaveholding societies voluntarily abolished slavery but even though the slaves were freed the racist myths that just hied slavery persisted separation of the races was maintained by racist legislation and social custom the result was a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and Deb a vicious circle consider for example the Southern United States immediately after the Civil War in 1865 the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution outlawed slavery and the 14th Amendment mandated that citizenship and the equal protection of the law could not be denied on the basis of race however two centuries of slavery meant that most black families were far poorer and far less educated than most white families a black person born in Alabama in 1865 thus had much less chance of getting a good education and a well-paid job than did his white neighbors his children born in the 1880s and 1890s started life with the same disadvantage they too were born to an uneducated poor family but economic disadvantage was not the whole story Alabama was also home to many poor whites who lacked the opportunities available to their better o racial brothers and sisters in addition the Industrial Revolution and the waves of immigration made the United States an extremely Society where Rags could quickly turn into riches if money was all that mattered the sharp divide between the races should soon have blurred not least through intermarriage but that did not happen by 1865 whites as well as many blacks took it to be a simp simple matter of fact that blacks were less intelligent more violent and sexually dissolute lazier and less concerned about personal cleanliness than whites they were thus the Agents of violence theft rape and disease in other words pollution if a black Alabama in 1895 miraculously managed to get a good education and then applied for a respectable job such as a bank teller his odds of being accepted were far worse than those of an equally qualif white candidate the stigma that labeled blacks as by Nature unreliable lazy and less intelligent conspired against him you might think that people would gradually understand that these stigmas were myth rather than fact and that blacks would be able over time to prove themselves just as competent law-abiding and clean as whites in fact the opposite happened these prejudices became more and more entrenched as time went by since all the best jobs were held by whites it became easier to believe that blacks really are inferior look said the average white citizen blacks have been free for Generations yet there are almost no black professors lawyers doctors or even bank tellers isn't that proof that blacks are simply less intelligent and hardworking trapped in this Vicious Circle blacks were not hired for White Collar jobs because they were deemed unintelligent and the proof of their inferiority was the pity of blacks and white collar jums The Vicious Circle did not stop there as anti-black stigmas grew stronger they were translated into a system of Jim Crow laws and Norms that were meant to safeguard the racial order blacks were forbidden to vote in elections to study in white schools to buy in white stores to eat in white restaurants to sleep in white hotels the justification for all of this was that blacks were foul slothful and vicious so whites had to be protected from them whites did not want want to sleep in the same hotel as blacks or to eat in the same restaurant for fear of diseases they did not want their children learning in the same school as black children for fear of brutality and bad an nuances they did not want blacks voting in elections since blacks were ignorant and immoral these fears were substantiated by scientic studies that proved that blacks were indeed less educated that various diseases were more common among them and that their crime rate was Far higher the studies ignor the fact that these facts resulted from discrimination against blacks by the mid 20th century segregation in the former Confederate States was probably worse than in the late 19th century Klan King a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958 was forcefully committed to a mendal Asylum the presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi the VIS ious Circle a chance histoical situation is translated into a rigid social system nothing was as revolting to American Southerners and many Northerners as sexual relations and marriage between black men and white women sex between the races became the greatest taboo and den violation or suspected violation was viewed as deserving immediate and summary punishment in the form of lynching the Klux Clan a white supremacist secret society perp trated many such killings they could have taught the Hindu brahmans a thing or two about purity laws with time the racism spread to more and more cultural Arenas American aesthetic culture was built around white standards of beauty the physical attributes of the white race for example light skin fair and straight hair a small upturn nose came to be identied as beautiful typical black features dark skin dark and bushy hair uten nose were deemed ugly these preconceptions ingrain the imagined hierarchy at an even deeper level of human consciousness such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even Millennia perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence unjust discrimination often gets worse not better with time money comes to money and poverty to Poverty education comes to education and ignorance to ignorance those once victimized by history are likely to be victimized yet again and Those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again most sociopolitical hierarchies lack logical or biological basis they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths that is one good reason to study history if the division into blacks and whites or brahin and shudras was grounded in biological realities that is if brahin really had better brains than shris biology would be suent for understanding Human Society since the biological distinctions between de groups of homo sapians are in fact negligible biology can't explain the intricacies of Indian Society or American racial Dynamics we can only understand those phenomena by studying the events circumstances and power relations that transforms of imagination into cruel and very real social structures he and she deant societies adopt deant kinds of imagined hierarchies race is very important to Modern Americans but was relatively insignicant to Medieval Muslims cast was a matter of life and death and medieval India whereas in modern Europe it is practically non-existent one hierarchy however has been of supreme importance in all known human societies the hierarchy of gender people everywhere have divided themselves into men and women and almost everywhere men have got the better deal at least since the Agricultural Revolution some of the earliest Chinese texts are Oracle bones dating to 1200 BC used to Divine the future on one was engraved the question will lady how's childbearing be lucky to which was written the reply if the child is born on a ding day lucky if on a jang day vastly auspicious however lady how was to give birth on a Jaan day the text ends with the morosa observation 3 weeks and one day later on Jan day the child was born not lucky it was a girl do four more than 3,000 years later when communist China enacted the one child policy many Chinese families continued to regard the birth of a girl as a misfortune parents would occasionally abandon or murder newborn baby girls in order to have another shot at getting a boy in many societies women were simply the property of men most often there fathers husbands or brothers rape in many legal systems falls under property violation in other words the victim is not the woman who was raped but the male who owns her this being the case the legal remedy was the transfer of ownership the rapist was required to pay a bride price to the woman's father or brother upon which she became the rapist's property the Bible decrees that if a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and seizes her and lies with her and they are found then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman shekels of silver and she shall be his wife Deuteronomy 22:28 to9 the ancient Hebrews considered this a reasonable Arrangement raping a woman who did not belonged to any man was not considered a crime at all just as picking up a lost coin on a busy street is not considered theft and if a husband raped his own wife he had committed no crime in fact the idea that a husband could rape his wife was an oxymoron to be a husband was to have full control of your wife's sexuality to say that a husband raped his wife was as illogical as saying that a man stole his own wallet such thinking was not confined to the ancient Middle East as of 2006 there were still 53 countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife even in Germany rape plaws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape. five is the division into men and women a product of the imagination like the cast system in India and the racial system in America or is it a natural division with deep biological roots and if it is indeed a natural division are there also biological explanations for the preference given to men over women some of the cultural legal and political disparities between men and women react the obvious biological deces between the sexes childbearing has always been women's job because men don't have wombs yet around this hard Universal kernel every society accumulated layer upon layer of cultural ideas and Norms that have little to do with Biology societies associate a host of attributes with masculinity and femininity that for the most part lack a RM biological basis for instance in Democratic happens of the fth century BC an individual possessing n w had no independent legal status and was forbidden to participate in popular assemblies or to be a judge with few exceptions such an individual could not benit from a good education nor engage in business or in philosophical discourse none of Athens political leaders none of its great philosophers Auditors artists or Merchants had a womb does having a womb make a person un biologically for these professions the ancient Athenians thought so modern Athenians disagree in present day Athens women vote are elected to publicos make speeches design everything from jewelry to buildings to software and go to university their wounds do not keep them from doing any of these things as successfully as men do true they are still underrepresented in politics and business only about 12% of the members of Greece's parliament are women but there is no legal barrier to their participation in politics and most modern Greeks think it is quite normal for a woman to serve in public office many modern Greeks also think that an integral part of being a man is being sexually attracted to women only and having sexual relations exclusively with the opposite sex they don't see this as a cultural bias but rather as a biological reality relations between two people of the opposite sex are natural and between two people of the same sex unnatural in fact though mother nature does not mind if men are sexually attracted to one another it's only human mothers steeped in particular cultures who make a scene if their son has a in with the boy next door the mother's Tantrums are not a biological imperative a cynic and number of human cultures have viewed homosexual relations as not only legitimate but even socially constructive ancient Greece being the most notable Example The Iliad does not mention that thetus had any objection to her son Achilles relations with Petrus queen olympius of Macedon was one of the most temperamental and forceful women of the ancient world and even had her own husband King Phillip assassinated yet she didn't have a tea when her son Alexander the Great brought his lover hean home for dinner how can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths A good rule of thumb is biology enables culture forbids biology is is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities it's culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others biology enables women to have children some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural but from a biological perspective nothing is unnatural natural whatever is possible is by deinition also natural a truly unnatural Behavior one that goes against the laws of nature simply cannot exist so it would need no prohibition no culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesize women to run faster than the speed of light or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other in truth our Concepts natural and unnatural are taken not from biology but from Christian theology the theological meaning of natural is in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature Christian theologians argued that God created the human body intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose if we use our Limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God then it is a natural activity to use them deant than God intends is unnatural but evolution has no purpose organs have not evolved with a purpose and the way they are used is in con Conant Ducks there is not a single organ in the human body that only does the job its prototype did when it rst appeared hundreds of millions of years ago organs evolve to perform a particular function but once they exist they can be adapted for other usages as well mouths for example appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies we still use our mouths for that purpose but we also use them to kiss speak and if we are Rambo to pull the pins out of hand grenades are any of these uses unnatural simply because our worm like ancestors 600 million years ago didn't do those things with their mouths similarly Wings didn't suddenly appear in all their aerodynamic Glory they developed from organs that served another purpose according to one Theory insect Wings evolved millions of years ago from body protrusions on nless bugs bugs with bumps had a larger surface area than those without bumps and this enabled them to absorb more sunlight and thus stay warmer in a slow evolutionary process these solar heaters grew larger the same structure that was good for maximum sunlight absorption lots of surface area little weight also by coincidence gave the insects a bit of a lift when they skipped and jumped those with bigger protrusions could Skip and jump farther some insects started using the things to Glide and from from there it was a small step to wings that could actually Propel the bug through the air next time a mosquito buzzes in your ear accuse her of unnatural Behavior if she were well behaved and content with what God gave her she'd use her wings only as solar panels the same sort of multitasking applies to our sexual organs and behavior sex rstd evolved for procreation and courtship rituals as a way of sizing up the nest of a potential mate but many animals now put both use for a multitude of social purposes that have little to do with creating little copies of themselves chimpanzees for example use sex to cement political alliances establish intimacy and diffuse tensions is that unnatural sex and gender there is little sense then in arguing that the natural function of women is to give birth or that homosexuality is unnatural most of the laws Norms rights and obligations that Dean manhood and Womanhood react human imagination more than biological reality biologically humans are divided into males and females a male Homo sapiens is one who has One X chromosome and one Y chromosome a female is one with two x's but man and woman name social not biological categories while in the great majority of cases in most human societies men are males and women are females the social terms carry a lot of baggage that has only a tenuous if any relationship to the biological terms a man is not a sapiens with particular biological qualities such as the chromosomes testicles and lots of testosterone rather he TS into a particular slot in his society's imagined human order his cultures myths assign him particular masculine roles like engaging in politics rights like voting and duties like military service likewise a woman is not a sapiens with two ex chromosomes a womb and plenty of estrogen rather she is a female member of an imagined human order the myths of her Society assign her unique feminine roles raising children rights protection against violence and duties obedience to her husband since myths rather than biology Dean the roles rights and duties of men and women the meaning of manhood and Womanhood have varied immensely from one Society to another to make things less confusing Scholars usually distinguish between sex which is a biological category and gender a cultural category sex is divided between males and females and the qualities of this division are objective and have remained constant throughout history gender is divided between men and women and some cultures recognize other categories so-called masculine and feminine qualities are inter subjective and undergo constant changes four example there are far-reaching deces in the behavior desires dress and even body posture expected from women in classical Athens and women in modern athens. 6 sex is Child's Play but gender is serious business to get to be a member of the male sex is the simplest thing in the world you just need to be born with an ex and a white chromosome to get to be a female is equally simple a pair of EX chromosomes will do it in contrast becoming a man or a woman is a very complicated and demanding undertaking since most masculine and feminine qualities are cultural rather than biological no Society automatically crowns each male a man or every female a woman nor are these titles Laurels that can be rested on once they are acquired males must prove their masculinity constantly throughout their lives from Cradle to grave in an endless series of Rights and performances and a woman's work is never done she must continually convince herself and others that she is feminine enough Success is Not Guaranteed males in particular live in constant dread of losing their claim to manhood throughout history males have been willing to risk and even sacrifice their lives just so that people will say he's a real man what's so good about men at least since the Agricultural Revolution most human societies have been patriarchal societies that value valued men more highly than women no matter how a society dend man and woman to be a man was always better patriarchal societies educate men to think and act in a masculine way and women to think and act in a feminine way punishing anyone who dares cross those boundaries yet they do not equally reward those who con form qualities considered masculine are more valued than those considered feminine and members of a society who personify the feminine ideal get less than those to exemplify the masculine ideal fewer resources are invested in the health and education of women they have fewer economic opportunities less political power and less freedom of movement gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for their bronze medal true a handful of women have made it to the alpha position such as Cleopatra of Egypt andess W of China Circa ad700 and Elizabeth I of England yet they are the except that prove the rule throughout Elizabeth's 40v year reign all members of parliament were men all ERS and the Royal Navy and army were men all judges and lawyers were men all Bishops and archbishops were men all theologians and Priests were men all doctors and surgeons were men all students and professors in all universities and colleges were men all Mayors and sheriffs were men and almost all the writers Architects poets philosophers painters musicians and scientists were men patriarchy has been the Norman almost all Agricultural and industrial societies it has tenaciously weathered political upheavals social revolutions and economic Transformations Egypt for example was conquered numerous times over the centuries Assyrians Persians macedonians Romans Arabs mamluks Turks and British occupied it and this Society always remained patriarchal Egypt was governed by phonic law Greek law Roman law Muslim law ottoman law and British law and they all discriminated against people who were not real men since patriarchy is so Universal it cannot be the product of some vicious circle that was kickstarted by a chance occurrence it is particularly noteworthy that even before 1,492 most Societies in both America and afro Asia were patriarchal even though they had been out of contact for thousands of years if patriarchy in afro Asia resulted from some chance occurrence why were the Aztecs and Incas patriarchal it is far more likely that even though the precise deinition of man and woman varies between cultures there is some Universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over Womanhood we do not know what this reason is there are plenty of theories none of them convincing muscle power the most common theory points to the fact that men are stronger than women and that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission a more subtle version of this claim argues that their strength allows men to monopolize tasks that demand hard manual labor such as plowing and harvesting this gives them control of food production which in turn translates into political clout there are two problems with this emphasis on muscle power first the statement that men are stronger than women is true only on average and only with regard to certain types of strength women are generally more resistant to hunger disease and fatigue than men there are also many women who can run faster and lift heavier weights than many men furthermore and most problematically for this Theory women have throughout history been excluded mainly from jobs that require little physical Lord such as the priesthood law and politics while engaging in hard manual labor in the El in crafts and in the household if Social Power were divided in direct relation to physical strength or stamina women should have got far more of it even more importantly there simply is no direct relation between physical strength and Social Power among humans people in their 60s usually exercise power over people in their 20s even though 20s somethings are much stronger than their Elders the typical plantation owner and in Alabama in the mid 19th century could have been wrestled to the ground and seconds by any of the slaves cultivating his cotton Els boxing matches were not used to select Egyptian pharaohs or Catholic Popes in forger societies political dominance generally resides with the person possessing the best social skills rather than the most developed musculature in organized crime the big boss is not necessarily the strongest man he is often an older man who very rarely uses his own SS he gets younger aner men to do the dirty jobs for him a guy who thinks that the way to take over the Syndicate is to beat up the Don is unlikely to live long enough to learn from his mistake even among chimpanzees the alpha male wins his position by building a stable Coalition with other males and females not through mindless violence in fact human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prow and Social Power in most societ ities it's the lower classes who do the manual labor this may react Homo sapiens position in the food chain if all that counted were raw physical abilities sapiens would have found themselves on a middle rung of the ladder but their mental and social skills place them at the top it is therefore only natural that the chain of power within the species will also be determined by mental and social abilities more than by brute force it is therefore hard to believe that the most inuential and most most stable social hierarchy in history is founded on men's ability physically to coerce women the scum of society and other Theory explains that masculine dominance results not from strength but from aggression millions of years of evolution have made men far more violent than women women can match men as far as hatred greed and abuse are concerned but when push comes to shove the theory goes men are more willing to engage in raw physical violence this is why through throughout history Warfare has been a masculine prerogative in times of War men's control of the Armed Forces has made them the masters of Civilian Society to they then use their control of Civilian Society to ght more and more Wars and the greater the number of Wars the greater men's control of society this feedback loop explains both the ubiquity of War and the ubiquity of patriarchy recent studies of the hormonal and cognitive systems of men and women strengthen the assumption that men indeed have more aggressive and violent tendencies and are therefore on average better suited to serve as common soldiers yet granted that the common soldiers are all men does it follow that the ones managing the war and enjoying its fruits must also be men that makes no sense it's like assuming that because all the slaves cultivating cotton Els are black plantation owners will be black as well just as an all black Workforce Force might be controlled by an all-white management why couldn't an all male soldiery be controlled by an all female or at least partly female government in fact in numerous societies throughout history the top hosters did not work their way up from the rank of private aristocrats the wealthy and the educated were automatically assigned officer rank and never served a day in the ranks when the Duke of Wellington Napoleon's Nemesis enlisted in the British army at the age of 18 he was immediately commissioned as a ner he didn't think much of the plebians under his command we have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers he wrote to a fellow Aristocrat during the wars against France these common soldiers were usually recruited from among the very poorest or from ethnic minorities such as the Irish Catholics their chances of ascending the military ranks were negligible the senior ranks were reserved for Dukes princes and kings but why only for dukes and not for duchesses the French Empire in Africa was established and defended by the sweat and blood of sagales algerians and workingclass Frenchmen the percentage of well-born Frenchmen within the ranks was negligible yet the percentage of well-born Frenchmen within the small Elite that led the French army ruled the Empire and enjoyed its fruits was very high why just Frenchmen and not French women in China there was a long tradition of subj negating the Army to the civilian bureaucracy so manin who had never held a sword often ran the wars you do not waste good iron to make nails when the common Chinese saying meaning that really talented people join the civil bureaucracy not the Army why then were all of these mandarins men one can't reasonably argue that their physical weakness or low testosterone levels prevented women from being successful mandarins generals and politicians in order to manage a war you surely need stamina but not much physical strength or aggressiveness Wars are not a pub brawl they are very complex projects that require an extraordinary degree of organization cooperation and appeasement the ability to maintain peace at home acquire allies abroad and understand what goes through the minds of other people particularly your enemies is usually the key to Victory hence in aggressive brute is often the worst choice to run a war much better is a Cooperative person who knows how to appease how to manipulate and how to see things from deant perspectives this is the St Empire Builders are made of the militarily incompetent Augustus succeeded in establishing a stable Imperial regime achieving something that eluded both Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great who were much better generals both his admiring contemporaries and modern historians often attribute this feed to his virtue of claiming IA mildness and clemency women are often stereotyped as better manipulators and appeasers than men and are famed for their Superior ability to see things from the perspective of others if there's any truth in these stereotypes then women should have made excellent politicians and Empire Builders leaving the dirty work on the battlefields to testosterone charged but simple-minded machos popular myths not withstanding this rarely happened in the real world it is not at all clear why not patriarchal genes a third type of biological explanation gives less importance to brute force and violence and suggests that through millions of years of evolution men and women evolved dear in survival and reproduction strategies as men competed against each other for the opportunity to impregnate fertile women and individuals chances of reproduction depended above all on his ability to outperform and defeat other men as time went by the masculine jeans that made it to the next Generation were those belonging to the most ambitious aggressive and competitive men a woman on the other hand had no problem need a man willing to impregnate her however if she wanted her children to provide her with grandchildren she needed to carry them in her womb for nine arduous months and then nurture them for years during that time she had fewer opportunities to obtain food and required a lot of help she needed a man in order order to ensure her own Survival and the survival of her children the woman had little choice but to agree to whatever conditions the man stipulated so that he would stick around and share some of the burden as time went by the feminine genes that made it to the next Generation belonged to women who were submissive caretakers women who spent too much timeing for power did not leave any of those powerful genes for future Generations the result of these de and survival strategies so the theory goes is is that men have been programmed to be ambitious and competitive and to excel in politics and business whereas women have tended to move out of the way and dedicate their lives to raising children but this approach also seems to be aligned by the empirical evidence particularly problematic is the assumption that women's dependence on external help made them dependent on men rather than on other women and that male competitiveness made men socially dominant there are many species of animals such as elephants and bonabo chimpanzees in which the Dynamics between dependent females and competitive males results in a matriarchal society since females need external help they are obliged to develop their social skills and learn how to cooperate into peas they construct all female social networks that help each member raise her children males meanwhile spend their time Ting in competing their social skills and social bonds remain underdeveloped but bonabo and elephant societies are controlled by strong networks of Cooperative females while the self-centered and uncooperative males are pushed to the sidelines though bonabo females are weaker on average than the males the females often gain up to beat males who overstep their limits if this is possible among babos and elephants why not among Homo sapiens sapiens are relatively weak animals whose Advantage rests in their ability to cooperate in large numbers if so we should expect that dependent women even if they are dependent on men would use their Superior social skills to cooperate toout maneuver and manipulate aggressive autonomous and self-centered men how did it happen that in the one species whose success depends above all on cooperation individuals who are supposedly less Cooperative men control individuals who are supposedly more Cooperative women at present we have no good answer maybe the common assumptions are just wrong maybe males of the species Homo sapiens are characterized not by physical strength aggressiveness and competitiveness but rather by Superior social skills and a greater tendency to cooperate we just don't know what we do know however is that during the last century gender roles have undergone a tremendous Revolution more and more societies today not only give men and women equal legal status political rights and economic opportunities but also also completely rethink their most basic conceptions of gender and sexuality though the gender gap is still signicant events have been moving at a breathtaking speed at the beginning of the 20th century the idea of giving voting rights to women was generally seen in the USA as outrageous the prospect of a female cabinet secretary or Supreme Court justice was simply ridiculous whereas homosexuality was such a taboo subject that it could not even be openly discussed at the beginning of the 20 RSD Century women's voting rights are taken for granted female cabinet secretaries are hardly a cause for comment and in 2013 V US Supreme Court Justices three of them women decided in favor of legalizing same-sex marriages overruling the objections of for male justices these dramatic changes are precisely what makes the history of gender so bewildering if as is being demonstrated today so clearly The Patriot Aral system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts what accounts for the universality and stability of this system part three the unification of humankind nine the arrow of history after the Agricultural Revolution human societies grew ever larger and more complex while the imagin constructs sustaining the social order also became more elaborate myths ANS accustom people nearly from the moment of birth to think in certain ways to behave in accordance with certain standards to want certain things and to observe certain rules they thereby created articial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively this network of artificial instincts is called culture during the RSD half of the 20th century Scholars taught that every culture was complete and harmonious possessing an unchanging Essence that dend it for all time each human group had its own world viiew and system of social legal and political Arrangements that ran as smoothly as the planets going around the Sun in this view cultures left to their own devices did not change they just kept going at the same pace and in the same direction only a force applied from outside could change them anthropologists historians and politicians thus referred to Samoan culture or Tasmanian culture as if the same beliefs norms and values had characterized Samoans and tasmanians from time immemorial today most Scholars of culture have concluded that the opposite is true every culture has its typical beliefs norms and values but these are Inc constant Ducks the culture May transform itself in response to changes in its environment or through interaction with neighboring cultures but cultures also undergo transitions due to their own internal Dynamics even a completely isolated culture existing in an ecologically stable environment cannot avoid change unlike the laws of physics which are free of inconsistencies every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions and this process fuels change for instance in medieval Europe the nobility believed in both Christianity and chivalry a typical nobleman went to church in the morning and listened as the priest held forth on the lives of the same Saints vanity of vanities said the priest all is Vanity riches lust and honor are dangerous Temptations you must rise above them and follow in Christ's footsteps be meek like him avoid violence and extravagance and if attacked just turn the other cheek returning home in a Meek and pensive mood the nobleman would change into his best silks and go to a banquet in his Lord's castle there the wine OED like water the minstral sang of Lan salot and gwy and the guests exchanged dirty jokes and bloody war Tales it is better to die declared the Barons then to live with shame if someone questions your honor only blood can wipe out the insult and what is better in life than to see your enemies flee before you and their pretty daughters tremble at your feet the contradiction was never fully resolved but as the European nobility clergy and commoners grappled with it their culture changed one attempt to gear it out produced The Crusades on Crusade Knights could demonstrate their military prowess and their religious devotion at one stroke the same contradiction produced military orders such as the Templars and hospitallers who tried to mesh Christian and chalri ideals even more tightly it was also responsible for a large part of medieval art and literature such as the tales of King Arthur and the holy grao what was Camelot but an attempt to prove that a good KN can end should be a good Christian and that good Christians make the best nights another example is the modern political order ever since the French Revolution people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual Freedom as fundamental values yet the two values contradict each other equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better o guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short changes equality the entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of 19th century Europe gave priority to individual Freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets anyone who has read a novel by Alexander souls in its knows how communism's egalitarian idea produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction Democrats want a more Equitable Society even if it means raising taxes to fund programs to help the poor elderly and enam but that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college Republicans on the other hand want to maximize individual Freedom even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity so the modern world fails to square Liberty with equality but this is no defect such contradictions are an Inseparable part of every human culture in fact they are cultures engines responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species just as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music forward so Discord in our thoughts ideas and values compel us to think re-evaluate and criticize consistency is the playground of doll Minds if tensions conics and the resolvable dilemmas are the Spice of every culture a human being who belongs to any particular C culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be Riven by incompatible values it's such an essential feature of any culture that it even has a name cognitive dissonance cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche in fact it is a vital asset had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture if say a Christian really wants to understand and the Muslims who attend that mosque down the street he shouldn't look for a pristine set of values that every Muslim holds dear rather he should inquire into the catch 22s of Muslim culture those places where rules are at War and standard scho it's at the very spot where the Muslims teet are between two imperatives that you will understand them best the spy satellite human cultures are in constant XX is this XX completely random or does it have some overall pattern in other words does history have a direction the answer is yes over the Millennia small simple cultures gradually coales into bigger and more complex civilizations so that the world contains fewer and fewer Mega cultures Each of which is bigger and more complex this is of course a very crude generalization true only at the macro level at the micro level it seems that for every group of cultures that coalesces into a mega culture there's a G culture that breaks up into pieces the Mongol Empire expanded to dominate a huge sede of Asia and even parts of Europe only to shatter into fragments Christianity converted hundreds of millions of people at the same time that it splintered into innumerable sex the Latin language spread through Western and Central Europe then split into local dialects that themselves eventually became national languages but these breakups are temporary reversals in an inexorable Trend towards Unity perceiving the direction of history is really a question of vantage point when we adopt the proverbial bird's eye view of History which examines developments in terms of decades or centuries it's hard to say whether history moves in the direction of unity or of diversity however to understand long-term processes the bird's eye view is too myopic we would do better to adopt instead the Viewpoint of a cosmic spy satellite which scans Millennia rather than centuries from such a vantage point it becomes crystal clear that history is moving relentlessly towards Unity the sectioning of Christianity and the collapse of the mangol Empire are just speed bumps on history's Highway the best way to appreciate the general direction of history is to count the number of separate human worlds that coexisted at any given moment on planet Earth today we are used to thinking about the whole planet as a single unit but for most of History Earth was in in fact an entire galaxy of isolated human worlds considered Tas Mania a medium-sized Island South of Australia it was cut off from the Australian mainland in about 10,000 BC as the end of the Ice Age caused the sea level to rise a few thousand hunter gatherers were left on the island and had no contact with any other humans until the arrival of the Europeans in the 19th century for 12,000 years nobody else knew the tasmanians were there and they didn't know know that there was anyone else in the world they had their Wars political struggles social oscillations and cultural developments yet as far as the Emperors of China or the rulers of Mesopotamia were concerned Tasmania could just as well have been located on one of Jupiter's moons the tasmanians lived in a world of their own America and Europe too were separate worlds for most of their histories in ad. 378 the Roman Emperor veillance was Was Defeated and killed by the Goths at the Battle of adrianopel in the same year king chak takak of Tia Was Defeated and killed by the army of teot TI wakan Tikka was an important Mayan city state while teot TI wakan was then the largest city in America with almost 250,000 inhabitants of the same order of magnitude as its contemporary Rome there was absolutely no connection between the defeat of Rome and the rise of teot TI Waka Rome might just as well have been located on Mars and teot wakan on Venus how many deant human worlds coexisted on Earth around 10.00 BC our planet contained many thousands of them by 2000 BC their numbers had dwindled to the hundreds or at most a few thousand by ad. 1450 their numbers had declined even more drastically at that time just prior to the age of European exploration Earth still contained a signicant number of dwarf worlds such as Tasmania but close to 90% of humans lived in a single Mega world the world of Afro Asia most of Asia most of Europe and most of Africa including substantial chunks of subsaharan Africa were already connected by syin cultural political and economic ties most of the remaining tenth of the world's human population was divided between four worlds of considerable size and complexity one the Miso American World which encompassed most of Central America and parts of North America Two the Indian World which encompassed most of Western South America three the Australian World which encompassed the continent of Australia four the oceanic World which encompassed most of the islands of the southwestern Pacific Ocean from Hawaii to New Zealand over the next 300 years the afro Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds it consumed the Miso American World in 1521 when the Spanish conquered the Aztec empire it took its rstd bite out of the oceanic world at the same time during ferdin and mellan circumnavigation of the globe and soon after they completed its Conquest the Indian World collapsed in 1532 when Spanish conquested or crushed the Inca Empire the rst European landed on the Australian Contin in 16006 and that pristine world came to an end when British colonization began in Earnest in 1788 15 years later the Britains established their RSD settlement in Tasmania thus bringing the last autonomous human world into the afro Asian sphere of influence it took the afro Asian giant several centuries to digest all that it had swallowed but the process was irreversible today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system the entire planet it is divided into internationally recognized States the same economic system capitalist Market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe the same legal system human rights and international law are valid everywhere at least theoretically and the same scientic system experts in Iran Israel Australia and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis the single Global culture is not homogeneous just as a single organic body contains many de kinds of organs and cells so our single Global culture contains many de types of Lifestyles and people from New York Stock Brokers to Afghan Shepherds yet they are all closely connected and they inuence one another in Myriad ways they still argue NG ght but they argue using the same Concepts NG ght using the same weapons a real Clash of civilizations is like the proverbial dialogue of the de nobody can grasp what the other is saying today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another they both speak the language of nation states capitalist economies International rights and nuclear physics map three Earth in ad 1450 the named locations within the afro Asian world were places visited by the 14th century Muslim traveler Ian bad a native of Tangier in Morocco iban bad visited timbuk to Zanzibar Southern Russia Central Asia India China and Indonesia his travels illustrate the unity of Afro Asia on the eve of the modern era we still talk a lot about authentic cultures but if by authentic we mean something that developed independently and that consists of ancient local Traditions free of external Inn nuances then there are no authentic cultures left on Earth over the last few centuries all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences one of the most interesting examples of this globalization is ethnic cuisine in an Italian restaurant we expect to indd spaghetti and tomato sauce in Polish and Irish restaurants lots of potatoes in an Argentinian restaurant we can choose between dozens of kinds of beef steaks in an Indian restaurant hot chilies are incorporated into just about everything and the Highlight at any Swiss Cafe is thi hot chocolate under an Alp of whipped cream but none of these Foods is native to those Nations Tomatoes Chili Peppers and cocoa are all Mexican in origin they reach Europe and Asia Only After the Spaniards conquered Mexico Julius Caesar and Dante aari never twirled tomato drenched spaghetti on their Forks even Forks hadn't been invented yet William Tel never tasted chocolate and Buddha never spiced up his food with chili potatoes reached Poland and Ireland no more than 400 years ago the only stake you could obtain in Argentina in 1492 was from a Lama Hollywood LMS have perpetuated an image of the pl Indians as Brave Horsemen courageously charging the wagons of European Pioneers to protect the customs of their ancestors however these Native American Horsemen were not the Defenders of some ancient authentic culture instead they were the product of a major military and political revolution that swept the plains of Western North America in the 17th and 18th centuries a consequence of the arrival of European horses in 1492 there were no horses in America the culture of the 19th century Su and Apache has many appealing features but it was a modern culture a result of global forces much more than authentic the global vision from a practical perspective the most important stage in the process of global unication occurred in the last few centuries when Empires grew in trade intensity ever tightening links were formed between the people of Afro Asia America Australia and Oceania thus Mexican Chili Peppers made it into Indian food and Spanish cattle began grazing in Argentina yet from an ideological perspective an even more important development occurred during the rst millennium BC when the idea of a universal order took roote 4 thousands of years previously history was already moving slowly in the direction of global Unity but the idea of a universal order governing the entire world was still alien to most people 25 Sur Chiefs 1905 neither the sun nor any other great PLS tribe had horses prior to 1,492 Homo sapiens evolved to think of people as divided into Us and Them us was the group immediately around you whoever you were and them was everyone else in fact no social animal is is ever Guided by the interests of the entire species to which it belongs no chimpanzee cares about the interests of the chimpanzee species no snail will lift a tentacle for the global snail community no lion alpha male makes a bid for becoming the king of all lions and at the entrance of no beehive can one find the slogan worker bees of the World Unite but beginning with the cognitive Revolution Homo sapiens became more and more exceptional in this respect people began to cooperate on a regular basis with complete strangers whom they imagined as brothers or friends yet this Brotherhood was not Universal somewhere in the next Valley or beyond the mountain range one could still sense them when the rst Pharaoh men's United Egypt around 3,000 BC it was clear to the Egyptians that Egypt had a border and Beyond The Border lurked barbarians The Barbarians were alien threatening and interesting only to the extent that they had land or natural resources that the Egyptians wanted all the imagined orders people created tended to ignore a substantial part of humankind the rst millennium BC witnessed the appearance of three potentially Universal orders whose devotes could for the rst time imagine the entire world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws everyone was us at least potentially there was no longer them the RS Universal order to appear was economic the monetary order the second Universal order was political the Imperial order the third Universal order was religious the order of universal religions such as Buddhism Christianity and Islam Merchants conquerors and prophets were the RSD people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division US versus them and to foresee the potential Unity of humankind for the merchants the ENT entire world was a single market and all humans were potential customers they tried to establish an economic order that would apply to all everywhere for the conquerors the entire world was a single Empire and all humans were potential subjects and for the prophets the entire world held a single truth and all humans were potential believers they to tried to establish an order that would be applicable for everyone everywhere during the last three Millennia people made a more and more ambitious attempt to realize that global vision the next three chapters discuss how money Empires and Universal religions spread and how they laid the foundation of the United World of today we begin with the story of the greatest conqueror in history a conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability thereby turning people into Ardent disciples this conqueror is money people who do not believe in the same God or obey the same King are more than willing to use the same money Osama Bin Laden for all his hatred of American culture American religion and American politics was very fond of American dollars how did money succeed where gods and Kings failed 10 the scent of money I in 1519 hernon Cortez and his conquested or his invaded Mexico hither to an isolated human world the Aztec as the people who lived there called themselves quickly noticed that the alien showed an extraordinary interest in a certain yellow metal in fact they never seemed to stop talking about it the natives were not unfamiliar with gold it was pretty and easy to work so they used it to make jewelry and statues and they occasionally used gold dust as a medium of exchange but when a Aztec wanted to buy something he generally paid in cocoa beans or bolts of cloth the Spanish obsession with Gold Dust seemed inexplicable what was so important about a metal that could not be eaten drunk or woven and was too soft to use for tools or weapons when the natives questioned Cortez as to why the Spaniards had such a passion for gold the conquested or answered because I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart which can be cured only with gold do one in the afro Asian World from which the Spaniards came the obsession for gold was indeed an epidemic even the bitterest of enemies lusted after the same useless yellow metal three centuries before the conquest of Mexico the ancestors of Cortez and his army waged a bloody war of religion against the Muslim Kingdoms in Iberia and North Africa the followers of Christ and the followers of Alla killed each other by the thousands devastated Els and Orchards and turned prosperous cities into smoldering ruins all for the greater glory of Christ or Allah as the Christians gradually gained the upper hand they marked their victories not only by destroying mosques and building churches but also by issuing new gold and silver coins bearing the sign of the cross and thanking God for his help in combating the indels yet alongside the new currency the victors minted another type of coin called The Millers which carried a somewhat deant message these Square coins made by the Christian conquerors were emblazoned with oen Arabic script that declared there is no God except allaha and Muhammad is Al's messenger even the Catholic Bishops of mguel and a issued these faithful copies of Po Muslim coins and God-fearing Christians happily use them do two tolerance s on the other side of the Hill too Muslim merchants in North Africa conducted business using Christian coins such as the Florentine Orin the Venetian Ducket and the Neapolitan gigato even Muslim rulers who called for Jihan against the Indo Christians were glad to receive taxes and coins that invoked Christ and his virgin mother do three how much is it hunter gatherers had no money each band hunted gathered and manufactured almost everything it required from meat to medicine from sandals to sorcery deant band members may have specialized in deant tasks but they shared their goods and services through an economy of favors and obligations a piece of meat given for free would carry with it the Assumption of reciprocity say free medical assistance the band was economically independent only a few rare items that could not be found locally seashells pigments obsidian and the like had to be obtained from strangers this could usually be done by simple barter we'll give you pretty seashells and you'll give us high quality Flint little of this Chang with the onset of the Agricultural Revolution most people continued to live in small intimate communities much like a hunter gatherer band each Village was a self- suent economic unit maintained by Mutual favors and obligations plus a little barter with Outsiders one villager may have been particularly Adept at making shoes another at dispensing medical care so villagers knew where to turn when Barefoot or sick but Villages were small and their economies limited so there could be no full-time shoe makers and doctors the rise of cities and kingdoms and the Improvement in transport infrastructure brought about new opportunities for specialization densely populated cities provided full-time employment not just for for professional shoemakers and doctors but also for Carpenters priests soldiers and lawyers Villages that gained a reputation for producing really good wine olive oil or Ceramics discovered that it was worth their while to specialize nearly exclusively in that product and trade it with other settlements for all the other Goods they needed this made a lot of sense climates and soils differ so why drink mediocre wine from your backyard if you can buy a smoother variety from a place whose soil and climate is much better suited to Grape Vines if the clay in your backyard makes stronger and prettier pots then you can make an exchange furthermore full-time specialist vendors and Potters not to mention doctors and lawyers can hone their expertise to the benit of all but specialization created a problem how do you manage the exchange of goods between the Specialists an economy of favors and obligations doesn't work when large numbers of Rangers try to cooperate it's one thing to provide free assistance to a sister or a neighbor a very dear and thing to take care of foreigners who might never reciprocate the favor one can fall back on barter but barter is active only when exchanging a limited range of products it cannot form the basis for a complex economy. 4 in order to understand the limitations of barter imagine that you own an apple orchard in the Hill Country that produces the crispest sweetest apples in the entire Province you work so hard in your orchard that your shoes wear out so you harness up your donkey cart and head to the market town down by the river your neighbor told you that a Shoemaker on the south end of the marketplace made him a really sturdy pair of boots that's lasted him through the seasons you and the Shoemaker shop and ow her to barter some of your apples in exchange for the shoes you need the shoe maker hesitates how many apples should he ask for in payment every day he encounters dozens of customers a few of whom bring along sacks of apples While others carry wheat goats or cloth all of varying quality still others ow their expertise in petitioning the king or curing back AES the last time the Shoemaker exchanged shoes for apples was 3 months ago and back then he asked for three sacks of apples or was it four but come to think of it those apples were sour Valley apples rather than Prime Hill apples on the other hand on that previous occasion the apples were given in exchange for small women's shoes this fellow is asking for mansiz boots besides in recent weeks a disease has decimated the ox around town and Skins are becoming scarce the tenners are starting to demand twice as many nich shoes in exchange for the same quantity of leather shouldn't that be taken into consideration in a barter economy every day the shoe maker and the Apple grower will have have to learn and knew the relative prices of dozens of Commodities if 100 deant Commodities are traded in the market then buyers and sellers will have to know 4,950 deant exchange rates and if 1,000 deant Commodities are traded buyers and sellers must juggle 499,00 deant exchange rates exclamation mark 5 how do you figure it out it gets worse even if you manage to calculate how many apples equal 1 pair of shoes berter is not always possible after all a trade requires that each side want what the other has to ow what happens if the Shoemaker doesn't like apples and if at the moment in question what he really wants is a divorce true the farmer could look for a lawyer who likes apples and set up a three-way deal but what if the lawyer is full up on apples but really needs a haircut some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collect Ed products from specialist Growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them the largest and most famous such experiment was conducted in the Soviet Union and it failed miserably everyone would work according to their abilities and receive according to their needs turned out in practice and to everyone would work as little as they can get away with and receive as much as they could grab more moderate and more successful experiments were made on other occasions for example in the Inca Empire yet most societies found a more easy way to connect large numbers of experts they developed money shells and cigarettes money was created many times in many places its development required no technological breakthroughs it was a purely mental Revolution it involved the creation of a new inter subjective reality that exists solely in people's shared imagination money is not coins and Bank notes money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services money enables people to compare quickly and easily the value of deant Commodities such as apples shoes and divorces to easily exchange one thing for another and to store wealth conveniently there have been many types of money the most familiar is the coin which is a standardized piece of imprinted metal yet money existed long before the invention of coinage and cultures have prospered using other things as currency such as shells cattle skins salt grain beads cloth and promisory notes cowry shells were used as money for about 4,000 years all over Africa south Asia East Asia and Oceania taxes could still be paid in cowry shells in British Uganda in the early 20th Century 26 in ancient Chinese script the cow R shell sign represented money in words such as to sell or reward in modern prisons and pal camps cigarettes have often served as money even non-smoking prisoners have been willing to accept cigarettes in payment and to calculate the value of all other goods and services and cigarettes One awit Survivor described the cigarette currency used in the camp we had our own currency whose value no one questioned the cigarette the price of every article was stated in cigarettes in normal times that is when the candidates to the gas Chambers were coming in at a regular Pace a loaf of bread cost 12 cigarettes a 300 G package of margarine 30 a watch 80 to 200 a liter of alcohol 400 cigarettes exclamation mark six in fact even today coins and Bank notes are a rare form of money in 2006 the sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion yet the sum total of coin coins in Bank notes was less than $6 trillion. 7 more than 90% of all money more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts exists only on computer servers accordingly most business transactions are executed by moving electronic data from one computer L to another without any exchange of physical cash only a criminal buys a house for example by handing over a suitcase full of Bank notes as long as people are willing to trade goods and services in exchange for electronic data it's even better than shiny coins and crisp Bank notes lighter less bulky and easier to keep track of for complex commercial systems to function some kind of money is indispensable a Shoemaker in a money economy needs to know only the prices charged for various kinds of shoes there is no need to memorize the exchange rates between shoes and apples or goats money also frees Apple experts from the need to search out Apple craving shoemakers because everyone always wants money this is perhaps its most basic quality everyone always wants money because everyone else also always wants money which means you can exchange money for whatever you want or need the Shoemaker will always be happy to take your money because no matter what he really wants apples goats or a divorce he can get it in exchange for money money is thus a Universal Medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else Braun gets converted to brain when a discharged Soldier nances his college tuition with his military benets land gets converted into loyalty when a baron sells property to support his retainers health is converted to Justice when a physician uses her fees to hire a lawyer or bribe a judge it is even possible to convert sex into salvation as 15th century prostitutes did when they slept with men for money which they in turn used to buy by indulgences from the Catholic Church ideal types of money enable people not merely to turn one thing into another but to store wealth as well many valuables cannot be stored such as time or beauty some things can be stored only for a short time such as strawberries other things are more durable but take up a lot of space and require expensive facilities and Care grain for example can be stored for years but to do so you need to build huge storehouses and guard against trats mold water re and thieves money whether paper computer bits or cowry shells solves these problems cowy shells don't rot are unpalatable to rats can survive reason or compact enough to be locked up in a safe in order to use wealth it is not enough just to store it it often needs to be transported from place to place some forms of wealth such as real estate cannot be trans transported at all Commodities such as wheat and rice can be transported only with deulti imagine a wealthy farmer living in a moness land who immigrates to a distant Province his wealth consists mainly of his house and rice patties the farmer cannot take with him the house or the patties he might exchange them for tons of rice but it would be very burdensome and expensive to transport all that Rice money solves these problems the farmer can sell his property in exchange for a sack of cowry shells which he can easily carry wherever he goes because money can convert store and transport wealth easily and cheaply it made a vital contribution to the appearance of complex commercial networks and dynamic markets without money commercial networks in markets would have been doomed to remain very limited in their size complexity and dynamism how does money work cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper or their color or their shape in other words money isn't a material reality it is a psychological construct it works by converting matter into mind but why does it succeed why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice Patty for a handful of useless cowry shells why are you willing to IP hamburgers sell health insurance or babysit three obnox just brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of colored paper people are willing to do such things when they Trust augments of their Collective imagination trust is the raw material from which all types of money are Meed when a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and traveled with them to another Province he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice houses and elves in exchange for the shells money is accordingly a system of of mutual trust and not just any system of mutual trust money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised what created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political social and economic relations why do I believe in the cowry Shell or gold coin or dollar bill because my neighbors believe in them and my neighbors believe in them because I believe in them and we all believe in them because our King believes in them and demand demands them in taxes and because our priest believes in them and demands them in ties take a dollar bill and look at it carefully you will see that it is simply a colorful piece of paper with the signature of the US Secretary of the Treasury on one side and the slogan in God we trust on the other we accept the dollar in payment because we trust in God and the US Secretary of the Treasury The crucial role of trust explains why our nancial systems are so tightly bound up with our political social and ideological systems Financial crises are often triggered by political developments and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way Traders feel on a particular morning initially when the rst versions of money were created people didn't have this sort of trust so it was necessary to Dean as money things that had real intrinsic value history's first known money suan barley money is a good example it appeared in Su around 3000 BC at the same time and place and under the same circumstances in which writing appeared just as writing developed to answer the needs of intensifying administrative activities so barley money developed to answer the needs of intensifying economic activities barley money was simply barley amounts of barley grains used as a universal measure for evaluating and exchanging all other goods and services the most common measurement was the Sila equivalent to roughly one liter standardized bowls each capable of containing one Sila were mass-produced so that whenever people needed to buy or sell anything it was easy to measure the necessary amounts of barley salaries too were set and paid in silus of barley a male laborer earns 60 silus a month a female laborer 30 silus a foreman could earn between 1,200 and 5,000 silus not even the most ravenous Foreman could eat 5,000 L of barley a month but he could use the silus he didn't eat to buy all sorts of other Commodities oil goats slaves and something else to eat besides barley do8 even though barley has intrinsic value it was not easy to convince people to use it as money rather than as just another commodity in order to understand why just think what would happen if you took a sack full of barley to your local shopping center and try to buy a shirt or a pizza the vendors would probably call security still it was somewhat easier to build trust in barley as the RS type of money because barley has an inherent biological value humans can eat it on the other hand it was de cult to store and transport barley the real breakthrough in monetary history occurred when people gained trust in money that lacked inherent value but was easier to store and transport such money appeared in ancient Mesopotamia in the middle of the third millennium BC this was the Silver shekele the silver shekele was not a coin but rather 8.33 grams of silver wi ham or Robbie's code declared that a superior man who killed a slave woman must pay her owner 20 silver shekels it meant that he had to pay 166 G of silver not 20 coins most monetary terms in the Old Testament are given in terms of silver rather than coins Joseph's brothers sold him to the ishmaelites for 20 silver shekel or rather 166 G of silver the same price as a slave woman he was a youth after all unlike The Barley cila the silver shekele had no inherent value you cannot eat drink or clothe yourself in silver and it's too soft for making useful tools plow shares or swords of silver would crumble almost as fast as ones made out of aluminium foil when they are used for anything silver and gold are made into jewelry crown and other status symbols luxury goods that members of a particular culture identify with high social status their value is purely cultural set weights of precious metals eventually gave birth to coins the rst coins in history were struck around 640 BC by King Ellet of lyia in Western Anatolia these coins had a standardized weight of gold or silver and were imprinted with an identication Mark the mark test tied to two things first it indicated how much precious metal the coin contained second it identied the authority that issued the coin and that guaranteed its content almost all coins in use today are descendants of the lyan coins coins had two important advantages over unmarked metal ingots first the ladder had to be weighed for every transaction second weighing the Ingot is not enough how does the Shoemaker know that the silver Ingot I put down for my boots is really made of pure silver and not of lead covered on the outside by a thin silver coating coins help solve these problems the mark imprinted on them testies to their exact value so the Shoemaker doesn't have to keep a scale on his cash register more importantly the mark on the coin is the signature of some political Authority that guarantees the coin's value the shape and size of the mark varied tremendously throughout history but the message was always the same I the great king so and so give give you my personal word that this metal disc contains exactly V GS of gold if anyone dares counterfeit this coin it means he is fabricating my own signature which would be a blot on my reputation I will punish such a crime with the utmost severity that's why counterfeiting money has always been considered a much more serious crime than other acts of deception counterfeiting is not just cheating it's a breach of sovereignty an act of subversion against the power privileges and person of the king the legal term is Lee's Majesty violating majesty and was typically punished by torture and death as long as people trusted the power and integrity of the king they trusted his coins total strangers could easily agree on the worth of a Roman Daenerys coin because they trusted the power and integrity of the Roman Emperor whose name and picture adorned it 27 one of the earliest coins in history from Lydia of the 7th Century BC in turn the power of the emperor rested on the Daenerys just think how dicult it would have been to maintain the Roman Empire without coins if the emperor had to raise taxes and pay salaries in barley and wheat it would have been impossible to collect barly taxes in Syria transport the funds to the central treasury in Rome and transport them again to Britain in order to pay the legions there it would have been equally de difficult to maintain the Empire if the inhabitants of the city of Rome believed in gold coins but the subject populations rejected this belief putting their trust instead in cow shells Ivory beads or rolls of cloth the gospel of gold the Trust In Rome's coins was so strong that even outside the Empire's borders people were happy to receive payment in daer in the RSD Century ad Roman coins were an accepted medium of Exchange in the markets of India even though the closest Roman legion was thousands of kilometers away the Indians had such a strong condense in the Denarius and the image of the emperor that when local rulers struck coins of their own they closely imitated the daus down to the portrait of the Roman Emperor the name Daenerys became a generic name for coins Muslim cffs Arab bid this name and issue Dinars the dinar is still the oal name of the currency in Jordan Iraq Serbia Macedonia Tunisia and several other countries as thean style coinage was spreading from the Mediterranean into the Indian Ocean China developed a slightly deant monetary system based on bronze coins and unmarked silver and gold ingots yet the two monetary systems had enough in common especially the Reliance on gold and silver that close monetary and Commercial relations were established between the Chinese Zone and the Lan Zone Muslim and European merchants and conquerors gradually spread the lydian system and the gospel of gold to the Far Corners of the Earth by the late modern era ER the entire world was a single monetary Zone relying rst on gold and silver and later on a few trusted currencies such as the British pound and the American dollar the appearance of a single transnational and transcultural monetary Zone laid the foundation for the unication of Afro Asia and eventually of the entire Globe into a single economic and political sphere people continue to speak mutually incomprehensible languages obey deant rulers and worship distinct Gods but all believed in gold and silver and in gold and silver coins without this shared belief global trading networks would have been virtually impossible the gold and silver that 16th century conquistadors found in America enabled European Merchants to buy silk porcelain and spices in East Asia thereby moving the wheels of economic growth in both Europe and East Asia most of the gold and silver mined in Mexico and the Andy slipped through European Jersey to IND a welcome home in the purses of Chinese silk and Porcelain manufacturers what would have happened to the global economy if the Chinese hadn't swer from the same disease of the heart that Ted Cortez and his companions and had refused to accept payment in gold and silver yet why should Chinese Indians Muslims and Spaniards who belong to very deant cultures that failed to agree about much of anything nevertheless share the belief in Gold Why didn't it happen that Spaniards believed in Gold while Muslims believed in barley Indians in cowry shells and Chinese in rolls of silk economists have already answer once trade connects two areas the forces of supply and demand tend to equalize the prices of transportable goods in order to understand why consider a hypothetical case assume that when regular trade opened between India and the Mediterranean Indians were uninterested in Gold so it was almost worthless but in the Mediterranean gold was a coveted status symbol hence its value was high what would happen next Merchants traveling between India and the Mediterranean would notice the deance in the value of gold in order to make a br they would buy gold cheaply in India and sell it dearly in the Mediterranean consequently the demand for gold in India would Skyrocket as would its value at the same time the Mediterranean would experience an inux of gold whose value would consequently drop within a short time the value of gold in India and the Mediterranean would be quite similar the mere fact that Mediterranean people believed in Gold would cause Indians to start believing in it as well even if Indians still had no real use for gold the fact that Mediterranean people wanted it would be enough to make the Indians value it similarly the fact that another person believes in cowry shells or dollars or electronic data is enough to strength strengthen our own belief in them even if that person is otherwise hated despised or ridiculed by us Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief because whereas religion asks us to believe in something money asks us to believe that other people believe in something for thousands of years philosophers thinkers and Prophets have besmer merched money and called it the root of all evil be that as it may money is also the AP of human tolerance money is more open-minded than language state laws cultural codes religious beliefs and social habits money is the only trust System created by humans that can Bridge almost any cultural Gap and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion gender race age or sexual orientation thanks to money even people who don't know each other and don't trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively the price of money money is based on two Universal principles a universal convertibility with money as an alchemist you can turn land into loyalty Justice into health and violence into knowledge B Universal trust with money as a go between any two people can cooperate on any project these principles have enabled millions of strangers to cooperate actively in trade and industry but these seemingly benign principles have have a dark side when everything is convertible and when trust depends on Anonymous coins and cowry shells it corrodes local Traditions intimate relations and human values replacing them with the cold laws of supply and demand human communities and families have always been based on belief in Priceless things such as honor loyalty morality and love these things lie outside the domain of the market and they shouldn't be bought or sold for money even if the market Market overs a good price certain things just aren't done parents mustn't sell their children into slavery a devout Christian must not commit a mortal sin a loyal Knight must never betray his Lord and ancestral tribal land shall never be sold to foreigners money has always tried to break through these barriers like water seeping through cracks in a dam parents have been reduced to selling some of their children into slavery in order to buy food for the others devout Christians have murdered stolen and cheated and later used their spoils to buy forgiveness from the church ambitious Knights auctioned their allegiance to the highest bidder while securing the Loyalty of their own followers by cash payments tribal lands were sold to foreigners from the other side of the world in order to purchase an entry ticket into the global economy money has an even darker side for although money builds Universal trust between strangers this trust is invested not in humans communities or or sacred values but in money itself and in the impersonal systems that back it we do not trust the stranger or the nextd door neighbor we trust the coin they hold if they run out of coins we run out of trust as money brings down the dams of community religion and state the world is in danger of becoming one big end rather heartless Marketplace hence the economic history of humankind is a delicate dance people rely on money to facilitate cooperation ation with strangers but they're afraid it will corrupt human values and intimate relations with one hand people willingly destroy the communal dams that held at Bay the movement of money and commerce for so long yet with the other hand they build new dams to protect Society religion and the environment from enslavement to Market forces it is common nowadays to believe that the market always prevails and that the Dems erected by Kings priests and communities cannot long hold back the tides of money this is naive brutal Warriors religious Fanatics and concerned citizens have repeatedly managed to troun calculating merchants and even to reshape the economy it is therefore impossible to understand the unication of humankind as a purely economic process in order to understand how thousands of isolated cultures coales over time to form the global village of today we must take into account the role of gold and silver but we cannot disregard the equal crucial role of Steel Two Imperial Visions the ancient Romans were used to being defeated like the rulers of most of History's great Empires they could lose battle after battle but still win the war an Empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an Empire yet even the Romans found it hard to stomach the news arriving from northern Iberia in the middle of the 2 Century BC a small insignificant mountain town called new Mania inhabited by the peninsula's native Celts had dared to throw over the Roman yoke Rome at the time was the unquestioned master of the entire Mediterranean Basin having vanquished the Macedonian and cusd Empires subjugated the proud city states of Greece and turned Carthage into a smoldering ruin the new Mansions had nothing on their side but their Earth's love of freedom and their inhospitable terrain yet they forced Legion after Legion to surrender or retreat in shame eventually in 134 BC Roman patience snapped the Senate decided to send cpio am milanus Rome's foremost General and the man who had leveled Carthage to take care of the new Mansions he was given a massive Army of more than 30,000 soldiers cpio who respected the king spirit and Marshal skill of the new Mansions preferred not to waste his soldiers in unnecessary combat instead he encircled new Mantia with a line of fornications blocking the town's contact with the outside world hunger did his work for him after more than a year the food supply ran out when the new Mansions realized that all hope was lost they burned down their Town according to Roman accounts most of them killed themselves so as not to become Roman slaves num Mania later became a symbol of Spanish Independence and courage Miguel de cantes the author of Don kote wrote a tragedy called The Siege of num Mania which ends with the town's destruction but also with vision of Spain's future greatness poets composed pians to its Earth Defenders and Painters committed Majestic depictions of The Siege to canvas in 1882 its ruins were declared a national monument and became a pilgrimage site for Spanish Patriots in the 1950s and 1960s the most popular comic books in Spain weren't about Superman and Spider-Man they told of The Adventures of el jabato an imaginary ancient Iberian hero who fought against the Roman oppressors the ancient new Mansions are to this day Spain's Paragons of heroism and patriotism cast as role models for the country's young people yet Spanish Patriots EXO the new mansions in Spanish a romance language that is a progyny of cpio Latin the new Mansions spoken now Dead and Lost Celtic language Cervantes wrote The Siege of num Mania in Latin script and the play follows Greco Roman artistic models new Mania had no theaters Spanish Patriots who admire new mansion heroism tend also to be loyal followers of the Roman Catholic Church don't miss that rst word a church whose leader still sits in Rome and whose God prefers to be addressed in Latin similarly modern Spanish law derives from Roman law Spanish politics is built on Roman foundations and Spanish cuisine and architecture owe a far greater that to Roman legacies than to those of the Kelts of Iberia nothing is really left of new Mania sa ruins even its story has reached us thanks only to the writings of Roman historians it was tailored to the tastes of Roman audiences which relished Tales of Freedom loving barbarians the victory of Rome over new Mania was so complete that the victors co-opted the very memory of the vanquished it's not our kind of story we like to see underdogs win but there is no j jce in history most past cultures have sooner or later Fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless Empire which have consigned them to Oblivion Empires to ultimately fall but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies almost all people in the 21st century are The Offspring of one Empire or another what is an Empire an Empire is a political order with two important characteristics first to qualify for that designation you have to rule over a signicant number of distinct peoples each possessing a deant cultural identity and a separate territory how many peoples exactly two or three is not suent 20 or 30 is plenty the Imperial threshold passes somewhere in between second Empires are characterized by exible borders and a potentially unlimited appetite they can swallow and digest more and more Nations and territories without altering their basic structure or identity the British state of today has fairly clear borders that cannot be exceeded without altering the fundamental structure and identity of the state a century ago almost any place on Earth could have become part of the British Empire cultural diversity and territorial exibility give empires not only their unique character but also their Central role and history it's thanks to these two characteristics that empires have managed to unite diverse ethnic groups and ecological zones under a single political umbrella thereby fusing together larger and larger segments of the human species and of planet Earth it should be stress that an Empire is DED solely by its cultural diversity and exib borders rather than by its Origins its form of government its territorial extent or the size of its population an Empire need not emerge from military conquest the Athenian Empire began its life as a voluntary league and the hburg empire was born in wedlock cobbled together by a string of shrewd marriage alliances nor must an Empire be ruled by an autocratic Emperor the British Empire the largest Empire in history was ruled by a democracy other Democratic or at least Republican empires have included the modern Dutch French Belgian and American Empires as well as the premodern empires of nav garad Rome Carthage and Athens size 2 does not really matter Empires can be puny the Athenian Empire at its Zenith was much smaller in size and population than today's Greece the Aztec Empire was smaller than today's Mexico both were nevertheless Empires whereas modern Greece and modern Mexico are not because the former gradually subdued dozens and even hundreds of deant polities while the latter have not Athens lorded it over more than 00 formerly independent city states whereas the Aztec empire if we can trust its taxation records ruled 371 dear in tribes and peoples do one how was it possible to squeeze such a human popori into the territory of a modest modern state it was possible because in the past there were many more distinct peoples in the world Each of which had a smaller population and occupied less territory than today's typical people the land between the Mediterranean in the Jordan River which today struggles to satisfy the Ambitions of just two peoples easily accommodated in biblical times dozens of Nations tribes Betty kingdoms and city states Empires were one of the main reasons for the DraStic reduction in human diversity the Imperial Steamroller gradually obliterated the unique characteristics of numerous peoples such as the new Mansions forging out of them new and much larger groups evil empires in our time imperialist rank second only to fascist in the Lexicon of political swear words the Contemporary critique of Empires commonly takes two forms one Empires do not work in the long run it is not possible to rule actively over a large number of conquered peoples two even if it can be done it should not be done because Empires are evil engines of Destruction and exploitation every people has a right to self-determination and should never be subject to the rule of another from a historical perspective the RS statement is plain nonsense and the second is deeply problematic the truth is that Empire has been the world's most common form of political organization for the last 2,500 years most humans during these two and a half Millennia have lived in Empires Empire is also a very stable form of government most empires have found it alarmingly easy to put down rebellions in general they have been toled only by external Invasion or by a split Within in the ruling Elite conversely conquered peoples don't have a very good record of freeing themselves from their Imperial overlords most have remained subjugated for hundreds of years typically they have been slowly digested by the Conquering Empire until their distinct cultures fizzled out for example when the Western Roman Empire n fell to invading dramatic tribes and 476 ad the new Mansions AR ver helvian samnites lucanians umbrians rans and hundreds of other forgotten peoples whom the Romans conquered centuries earlier did not emerg from the Empire's eviscerated carcass like Jonah from the belly of the great sh none of them were left the biological descendants of the people who had identied themselves as members of those Nations who had spoken their languages worshiped their gods and told their Myths and Legends now thought spoke and worshiped As Romans in many cases the destruction of one Empire hardly meant Independence for subject peoples instead a new Empire stepped into the vacuum created when the old one collapsed to retreated nowhere has this been more obvious than in the Middle East the current political constellation in that region a balance of power between many independent political entities with more or less stable borders is almost without parallel any time in the last several Millennia the last time the Middle East experienced such a situation was in the 8th Century BC almost 3,000 years ago from the rise of the Neo Assyrian Empire in the 8th Century BC until the collapse of the British and French empires in the mid 20th century ad the Middle East passed from the hands of one empire into the hands of another like a baton in a relay race and by the time the British and French n dropped the Baton the arameans the ammonites the Phoenicians the Philistines the mobites the Edom and the other peoples conquered by the Assyrians had long disappeared true today's Jews Armenians and Georgians claim with some measure of justice that they are the ospring of ancient Middle Eastern peoples yet these are only exceptions that prove the rule and even these claims are somewhat exaggerated it goes without saying that the political economic and social practices of modern Jews for example owe far more to the empires under which they lived during the past two millennial into the traditions of the ancient Kingdom of Judea if King David were to show up in an ultra Orthodox synagogue in present day Jerusalem he would be utterly bewildered to ende people dressed in East European clothes speaking in a German dialect yish and having endless arguments about the meaning of a Babylonian text the talwood there were neither synagogues volumes of talwood nor even Torah Scrolls in ancient Judea building and maintaining an Empire usually required The Vicious Slaughter of large populations and the brutal oppression of everyone who was left the standard Imperial tool could included Wars enslavement deportation and genocide when the Romans invaded Scotland in 83 they were met by Earth resistance from local Caledonian tribes and reacted by laying waste to the country in reply to Roman peace overs the chief calgacus called the Romans the runs of the world and said that to plunder slau water and robbery they give the line name of Empire they make it desert and call it piece apostrophe do to this does not mean however that Empires leave nothing of value in their wake to color all Empires black and to disavow all Imperial legacies is to reject most of human culture Imperial Elites used the prots of Conquest to n not only armies and forts but also philosophy art Justice and charity a signicant proportion of Humanity's cultural achievements so their existence to the exploitation of conquered populations the prot and prosperity brought by Roman imperialism provided CIS Sena and St Augustine with the Leisure and wherewith all to think and write the Taj Mahal could not have been built without the wealth accumulated by muggle exploitation of their Indian subjects and the hapsburg empir PRS from its rule over it Slavic Hungarian and Romanian speaking provinces paid Highland salaries and Mozart's commissions no calonia writer preserved hakus speech for posterity we know of it thanks to the Roman historian tacitus in fact tacitus probably made it up most Scholars today agree that tacitus not only fabricated the speech but invented the character of G gakis the Caledonian Chieftain to serve as a mouthpiece for what he and other upper class Romans thought about their own country even if we look Beyond delete culture and high art and focus instead on the world of common people we and the Imperial legacies in the majority of modern cultures today most of us speak think and dream in Imperial languages that were forced Upon Our Ancestors By The Sword most East Asians speak and dream in the language of the Han Empire no matter what their Origins nearly all the inhabitants of the two American continents from Alaska's Barrow Peninsula to The Straits of mellan communicate in one of four Imperial languages Spanish Portuguese french or English present day Egyptians speak Arabic think of themselves as Arabs and identify wholeheartedly with the Arab Empire that conquered Egypt in the 7th century and crushed with an iron St the repeated revolts that broke out against its rule about 10 million Zulus in South Africa hark back to the Zulu age of Glory in the 19th century even though most of them descend from tribes who fought against the Zulu Empire and were incorporated into it only through bloody military campaigns it's for your own good the rst empire about which we have DEA of information was the Acadian Empire of Sargon the Great circuit 2250 BC Sargon began his career as the king of Kish a small City stating Mesopotamia within a few decades he managed to conquer not only all other Mesopotamian city states but also large territories outside the Mesopotamian hardland Saron boasted that he had conquered the entire world in reality his Dominion stretched from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and included most of today's Iraq and Syria along with a few slices of modern Iran and turkey the Acadian empire did not last long after its Founders death but Saron left behind an imperial mandle that seldom remained unclaimed for the next 1,700 years Assyrian Babylonian and hittite Kings adopted Saron as a role model boasting that they to had conquered the entire world then around 550 BC Cyrus the Great of Persia came along with an even more impressive boast Matt four the Acadian Empire and the Persian Empire the kings of Assyria always remained the kings of Assyria even when they claimed to rule the entire world it was obvious that they were doing it for the greater glory of Assyria and they were not apologetic about it Cyrus on the other hand claimed not merely to rule the whole world but to do so for the sake of all people we are conquering you for your own Bennett said the Persians Cyrus wanted the peoples he subjected to love him and to count themselves lucky to be Persian vassals the most famous example of cus Innovative art to gain the approbation of a Nation living under the thumb of his Empire was his command that the Jewish Exiles in Babylonia be allowed to return to their Judean Homeland and rebuild their Temple he even oered them natur assistance Cyrus did not see himself as a Persian king ruling over Jews he was also the king of the Jews and thus responsible for their welfare the presumption to rule the entire world for the benit of all its inhabitants was startling Evolution has made Homo sapiens like other social mammals a xenophobic creature sapiens instinctively divide Humanity into two parts we and they we are people like you and me who share our language religion and Customs we are all responsible for each other but not responsible for them we were always distinct from them and owe them nothing we don't want to see any of them in our territory and we don't care in Iota what happens in their territory they are barely even human in the language of the Dinka people of the Sudan Dinka simply means people people who are not Dinka or not people the dink's bitter enemies are the newer what does the word newer mean in newer language it means original people thousands of kilometers from the Sudan deserts in the Frozen icelands of Alaska and Northeastern Siberia live the upix what does upic mean in upic language it means real people apostrophe do3 in contrast with this ethnic exclusiveness Imperial ideology from Cyrus onward has tended to be inclusive and all-encompassing even though it has often emphasized racial and cultural deces between rulers and ruled it has still recognized the basic unity of the entire world the existence of a single set of principles governing all places and times and the mutual responsibilities of all human beings humankind is seen as a large family the Privileges of the parents go hand inand with the responsibility for the welfare of the children this new Imperial Vision passed from Cyrus and the Persians to Alexander the Great and from him to helenistic Kings Roman emperors Muslim cffs Indian dynasts and eventually even to Soviet premieres and American Presidents this benevolent Imperial Vision has just tied the existence of Empires and negated not only attempts by subject peoples to Rebel but also attempts by independent peoples to resist Imperial expansion similar Imperial Visions were developed independently of the Persian model and other parts of the world most notably in Central America in the Indian region and in China according to traditional Chinese political Theory Heaven tion is the source of all legitimate Authority on Earth Heaven chooses the most worthy person or family and gives them the Mandate of Heaven this person or family then rules over all under Heaven Dania for the benit of all its inhabitants thus a legitimate Authority is by denition Universal if a ruler lacks the Mandate of Heaven then he lacks legitimacy to rule even a single City if a ruler enjoys the Mandate he is obliged to spread Justice and Harmony to the entire world the Mandate of Heaven could not be given to several candidates simultaneously and consequently one could not legitimize the existence of more than one independent state the rst emperor of the United Chinese Empire kinshi hang da boasted that throughout the six directions of the universe everything belongs to the emperor wherever there is a human footprint there is not one who did not become a subject of the emperor his kindness reaches even oxen and horses there is not one who did not benett every man is safe under his own roof. foreign Chinese political thinking as well as Chinese historical memory Imperial periods were henceforth seen as Golden Ages of order and Justice in contradiction to the modern Western View that a just world is composed of separate nation states in China periods of political fragmentation were seen as dark dark ages of chaos and Injustice this perception has had far-reaching implications for Chinese history every time an Empire collapsed the dominant political Theory go to the powers that be not to settle for poultry independent principalities but to attempt reunification sooner or later these attempts always succeeded when they become us empires have played a decisive part in amalgamating many small cultures into fewer big cultures idea people goods and Technology spread more easily within the borders of an Empire than in a politically fragmented region often enough it was the empires themselves which deliberately spread ideas institutions customs and Norms one reason was to make life easier for themselves it is the cult to rule an empire in which every little district has its own set of laws its own form of writing its own language and its own money standardization was a boon to emperor a second and equally important reason why Empires actively spread a common culture was to gain legitimacy at least since the days of Cyrus and kinshi hang da empires have just tied their actions whether Road building or Bloodshed as necessary to spread a superior culture from which the conquered Bennett even more than the conquerors the Bennetts were sometimes Salient law enforcement urban planning standardization of weights and measures and sometimes questionable taxes conscription Emperor worship but most Imperial Elites earnestly believed that they were working for the general welfare of all the Empire's inhabitants China's ruling class treated their country's neighbors and its foreign subjects as miserable barbarians to whom the Empire must bring the benets of culture the Mandate of Heaven Was bestowed upon the emperor not in order to exploit the world but in order to educate Humanity the Romans to just hide their Dominion by AR arguing that they were endowing the barbarians with peace Justice and rement the wild Germans and painted GS had lived in squalor and ignorance until the Romans tamed them with law cleaned them up in public bath houses and improved them with philosophy the Moran Empire in the 3r century BC took as its Mission the dissemination of Buddhist teachings to an ignorant world the Muslim cffs received a Divine mandate to spread the prophet's Revelation peacefully if possible but by the sword if necessary AR the Spanish and Portuguese Empires proclaimed that it was not riches they sought in the Indies and America but converts to the true Faith the Sun never set on the British mission to spread the twin gospels of liberalism and free trade the Soviets felt Duty bound to facilitate the inexorable historical March from capitalism towards the utopian dictatorship of the proletariat many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring third world countries the benets of democracy and human rights even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and f-16s the cultural ideas spread by empire were seldom the exclusive creation of the ruling Elite since the Imperial Vision tends to be Universal and inclusive it was relatively easy for Imperial Elites to adopt ideas norms and traditions from wherever they found them rather than to stick fanatically to a single hidebound tradition while some Emperors sought to purify their cultures and return to what they viewed as their roots for the most part empires have begot hybrid civilizations that absorb much from their subject peoples the Imperial culture of Rome was Greek almost as much as Roman the Imperial AISD culture was part Persian part Greek part Arab Imperial Mongol culture was a Chinese copycat in the Imperial United States an American president of Kenyan blood can munch on Italian pizza while watching his favorite LM Lawrence of Arabia a British epic about the Arab Rebellion against the Turks not that this cultural Melting Pot made the process of cultural assimilation any easier for the vanquished the Imperial civilization May well have absorbed numerous contributions from various conquered peoples but the hybrid result was still alien to the vast majority the process of assimilation was often painful and traumatic it is not easy to give up a familiar and loved local tradition just as it is dult and stressful to understand and adopt a new culture worse still even when subject peoples were successful in adopting the Imperial culture it could take decades if not centuries until the Imperial Elite accepted them as part of us the generations between conquest and acceptance were left out in the cold they had already lost their beloved local culture but they were not allowed to take an equal part in the Imperial World on the contrary their adopted culture continued to view them as barbarians imagine an Iberian of good stock living a century after the fall of num Mania he speaks his native Celtic dialect with his parents but has acquired impeccable Latin with only a slight accent because he needs it to conduct his business and deal with the authorities he indulges his wife's pant for elaborately ornate bobbles but is a bit embarrassed that she like other local women retains this relic of Celtic taste he have her adopt the clean Simplicity of the jewelry worn by the Roman Governor's wife he himself wears Roman tunic sand thanks to his success as a cattle Merchant doing no small part to his expertise in the intricacies of Roman commercial law he has been able to build a Roman style Villa yet even though he can recite book the third of Virgil's jaw urx by heart the Romans still treat him as though he's semi Barbarian he realizes with frustration that he'll never get a government appointment or one of the really good seats in the amphitheater in the late 19th century many educated Indians were taught the same Lesson by their British Masters one famous anecdote tells of an ambitious Indian who mastered the intricacies of the English language took lessons in western style dance and even became accustomed to eating with a knife and fork equipped with his new manners he traveled to England studied law at University College London and became a qualite barister yet this young man of law bed and sutin Tha was thrown out a train in the British colony of South Africa for insisting on traveling rst class instead of settling for third class where colored men like him were supposed to ride his name was mohand is Kar K Gandhi in some cases the processes of a culturation and assimilation eventually broke down the barriers between the newcomers and the old Elite the conquered no longer saw the Empire as an alien system of occup and the conquerors came to view their subjects as equal to themselves rulers and Rule Delight came to see them as us all the subjects of Rome eventually after centuries of Imperial rule were granted Roman citizenship non-romans Rose to occupi the top ranks in the aser core of the Roman Legions and were appointed to the senate in ad48 the emperor Claudius admitted to the Senate several G notables who he noted in a speech through customs culture and the ties of marriage have blended with ourselves snobbish Senators protested introducing these former enemies into the heart of the Roman political system Claudius reminded them of An Inconvenient Truth most of their own senatorial families descended from Italian tribes who once fought against Rome and were later granted Roman citizenship indeed the emperor reminded them his own family with aine ancestry do5 during the 2 Century ad Rome was ruled by a line of Emperors born in Iberia in whose veins probably owed at least a few drops of local Iberian blood the Reigns of Tran hadrien antonus pus and Marcus orelus are generally thought to constitute the Empire's Golden Age after that all the ethnic dams were let down Emperor Septimus Severus 193 to 2011 was the sign of a Punic family from Libya babilis 218 to 22 was a syri Emperor Philip 244 to9 was known colloquially as Philip the Arab the Empire's new citizens adopted Roman Imperial culture with such zest that for centuries and even Millennia after the Empire itself collapsed they continued to speak the Empire's language to believe in the Christian God that the Empire had adopted from one of its levantine provinces and to live by the Empire's laws a similar process occurred in the Arab Empire when when it was established in the mid 7th Century ad it was based on a sharp division between the ruling Arab Muslim Elite and the subjugated Egyptians syrians Iranians and berbers who were neither Arabs nor Muslim many of the Empire's subjects gradually adopted the Muslim faith the Arabic language and a hybrid Imperial culture the old Arab Ali looked upon these parvenues with deep hostility fearing to lose its unique status and identity the frustrated converts clamored for an equal share within the Empire and in the world of Islam eventually they got their way Egyptians syrians and Mesopotamians were increasingly seen as Arabs Arabs in their turn whether authentic Arabs from Arabia or newly minted Arabs from Egypt and Syria came to be increasingly dominated by non-arab Muslims in particular by Iranians Turks and bers the great success of the Arab Imperial project was that the Imperial culture it created was wholeheartedly adopted by numerous non-arab people who continued to uphold it develop it and spread it even after the original Empire collapsed and the Arabs as an ethnic group lost their Dominion in China the success of the Imperial project was even more thorough for more than 2,000 years a Welter of ethnic and cultural groups arest he termed barbarians were successfully integrated into imperial Chinese culture and became Han Chinese so named after the Han Empire that ruled China from 206 BC to ad. 220 the ultimate achievement of the Chinese Empire is that it is still alive and kicking yet it is hard to see it as an Empire except in outlining areas such as Tibet and Zing Jang more than 90% of the population of China are seen by themselves and by others as Han we can understand the decolonization process of the last few decades in a similar way during the modern era Europeans conquered much of the globe under the guise of spreading a superior Western culture they were so successful that billions of people gradually adopted synic parts of that culture Indians Africans Arabs Chinese and mayores learned French English and Spanish they began to believe in human rights and the principle of self-determination and they adopted Western ideologies such as liberalism capitalism communism feminism and nationalism the imper IAL cycle during the 20th century local groups that had adopted Western values claimed equality with their European conquerors in the name of these very values many anti-colonial struggles were waged under the banners of self-determination socialism and human rights all of which are Western legacies just as Egyptians Iranians and Turks adopted and adapted the Imperial culture that they inherited from the original Arab conquerors so today's Indians Africans and Chinese have accepted much of the Imperial culture of their former Western overlords while seeking to mold it in accordance with their needs and traditions good guys and bad guys in history it is tempting to divide history neatly into good guys and bad guys with all Empires among the bad guys for the vast majority of Empires were founded on blood and maintained their power through oppression and War yet most of today's cultures are based on Imperial Legacies Empires are by denition bad what does that say about us there are schools of thought in political movements that seek to purge human culture of imperialism leaving behind what they claim is a pure authentic Civilization untainted by sin these ideologies are at best naive at worst they serve as disingenuous window dressing for crude nationalism and bigotry perhaps you could make a case that some of the Myriad cultures that emerged at the dawn of recorded history were pure touched by sin and unadulterated by other societies but no culture sense that Dawn can reasonably make that claim certainly no culture that exists now on Earth all human cultures are at least in part the legacy of Empires and Imperial civilizations and no academic or political surgery can cut out the Imperial legacies without killing the patient think for example about the LoveHate relationship between the independent Indian Republic of today and the British R the British conquest and occupation of India cost the lives of millions of Indians and was responsible for the continuous humiliation and exploitation of hundreds of millions more yet many Indians adopted with the zest of converts Western ideas such as self-determination and human rights and were dismayed when the British refused to live up to their own declared values by granting Native Indians either equal rights as British subjects or Independents nevertheless the modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire the British killed injured and persecuted the inhabitants of the subcontinent but they also United a bewildering Mosaic of war in kingdoms principalities and tribes creating a shared National Consciousness and a country that functioned more or less as a single political unit they laid the foundations of the Indian Judicial System created its administrative structure and built the railroad Network that was critical for economic integration Independent India adopted Western democracy in its British Incarnation as its form of government English is still the subcontinent lingua franka and neeral tongue that native speakers of Hindi DL and Mal yum can use to communicate Indians are passionate cricket players and chai tea Drinkers and both game and beverage or British legacies commercial tea farming did not exist in India until the mid 19th century when it was introduced by the British East India Company it was the snobbish British seibs who spread the custom of tea drinking throughout the subcontinent 28 the katrapati shy vaji train station in Mumbai it began its life as Victoria Station Bombay the British built it in the Neo Gothic style that was popular in late 19th century Britain a Hindu nationalist government changed the names of both City and station but showed no appetite for raising such a magnificent building even if it was built by Foreign oppressors how many Indians today would want to call a vote to devest themselves of democracy English the railway Network the legal system cricket and tea on the grounds that they are imperial legacies and if they did wouldn't the very Act of calling a vote to decide the issue demonstrate their debt to their former overlords 29 the Taj Mahal an example of authentic Indian culture or the alien creation of Muslim Imperial ISM even if we were to completely disavow the legacy of a brutal Empire in the hope of reconstructing and safeguarding the authentic cultures that preceded it in all probability what we will be defending is nothing but the legacy of an older and no less brutal Empire those who resent the mutilation of Indian culture by the British Raj inadvertently sanctify the legacies of the mugle Empire and the Conquering sultanate of Delhi and whoever attempts to rescue authentic Indian culture from the alien and new inces of these Muslim empires San the legacies of the Gupta Empire the kashan Empire and the Mora Empire if an extreme Hindu nationalist were to destroy all the buildings left by the British conquerors such as mumbai's main train station what about the structures left by indiia Muslim conquerors such as the Taj Mahal nobody really knows how to solve this thorny question of cultural inheritance whatever path we take the rst step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere unless of course we are willing to admit that we usually follow the lead of the bad guys the new Global Empire since around 200 BC most humans have lived in Empires it seems likely that in the future two most humans will live in one but this time the Empire will be truly Global the Imperial vision of dominion over the entire world could be imminent as the 20 RSD Century unfolds nationalism is fast losing ground more and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political Authority rather than the members of a particular nationality and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be The Guiding Light of politics if so having close to 200 independent states is a hindrance rather than a help since sweet Indonesians and Nigerians deserve the same human rights wouldn't it be simpler for a single Global government to safeguard them the appearance of essentially Global problems such as melting ice caps nibbles away at whatever legitimacy remains to the independent nation states no sovereign state will be able to overcome global warming on its own the Chinese Mandate of Heaven was given by heaven to solve the problems of humankind the modern Mandate of Heaven will be given by humankind to solve the problems of Heaven such as the hole and the ozone layer and the accumulation of greenhouse gases the color of the global Empire May well be green as of 2014 The World Is Still politically fragmented but states are fast losing their independence not one of them is really able to execute independent economic policies to declare and wage Wars as it pleases or even to run its own internal errors as it sees te states are increasingly open to the machinations of global markets to the interference of global companies and Nos and to the supervision of global public opinion and the international Judicial System states are obliged to conform to Global standards of nancial behavior environmental policy and Justice immensely powerful currents of capital labor and information turn and shape the world with a growing disregard for the borders and opinions of states the global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group much like the late Roman Empire it is ruled by a multiethnic elite and is held together by a common culture and common interests throughout the world more and more entrepreneurs Engineers experts Scholars lawyers and managers are called to join the Empire they must Ponder whether to answer the Imperial call or to remain loyal to their state and their people more and more choose the empire 12 the law of religion in the medieval Market in Sam marant a City built on a Central Asian Oasis Syrian Merchants ran their hands over knee Chinese silks Ur tribesmen from the steps displayed the latest batch of straw-haired slaves from the Far West and shopkeepers pocketed shiny gold coins and printed with exotic scripts and the pears of unfamiliar Kings here at one of that here is major crossroads between east and west north and south the UN of humankind was an everyday fact the same process could be observed at work when kon's Army mustered to invade Japan in 1281 Mongol Cavalry men in skins and furs rubbed shoulders with Chinese foot soldiers in bamboo hats drunken Korean auxiliaries picked ghts with tattooed Sailors from the South China Sea Engineers from Central Asia listened with dropping Jaws to The Tall Tales of European adventurers and all obeyed the command of a single emperor meanwhile around the holy kab in Mecca human unication was proceeding by other means had you been a pilgrim to Mecca circling Islam's holiest Shrine in the year 1,300 you might have found yourself in the company of a party from Mesopotamia their robes oing in the wind their eyes blazing with ecstasy and their mouths repeating one after the other the 99 names of God just ahead you might have seen a weather-beaten Turkish patriarch from the Asian STS hobbling on his stick and stroking his beard thoughtfully to one side gold jewelry shining against jet black skin might have been a group of Muslims from the African kingdom of Mali the aroma of clove turmeric cardamom and sea salt would have signaled the presence of brothers from India or perhaps from the mysterious Spice Islands further east today religion is often considered a source of discrimination disagreement and disunion yet in fact Rel has been the third great uni of humankind alongside money and Empires since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined they are all fragile and the larger the society the more fragile it is the crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures religions assert that our laws are not the result of human Caprice but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority this helps place at least some fundamental laws Beyond challenge thereby ensuring social stability religion can thus be dented as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order this involves two distinct criteria one religions hold that there is a superhuman order which is not the product of human whims or agreements professional football is not a religion because despite its many laws rights and often bizarre rituals everyone knows that human beings invent did football themselves and FIFA May at any moment enlarge the size of the goal or cancel the off sign rule two based on this superhuman order religion establishes norms and values that it considers binding many westerners today believe in ghosts fairies and reincarnation but these beliefs are not a source of moral and behavioral standards as such they do not constitute a religion despite their ability to legitimize widespread social and political orders not all religions have actuated this potential in order to unite under its sieges a large expanse of territory inhabited by disperate groups of human beings a religion must possess two further qualities first it must espouse a universal superhuman order that is true always and everywhere second it must insist on spreading this belief to everyone in other words it must be Universal and missionary the best known religions of History such as such as Islam and Buddhism are Universal and missionary consequently people tend to believe that all religions are like them in fact the majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive their followers believed in local deities and spirits and had no interest in converting the entire human race as far as we know Universal and missionary religions began to appear only in the rst millennium BC their emergence was one of the most important Revolutions in his history and made a vital contribution to the unication of humankind much like the emergence of universal Empires and Universal money silencing the Lambs when animism was the dominant belief system human norms and values had to take into consideration the Outlook and interests of a multitude of other beings such as animals plants fairies and ghosts for example a forager band in the Ganges Valley may have established a rule forbidding people to cut down a particularly large G3 lest the G3 Spirit become angry and take revenge another forager Band living in the indust valley may have forbidden people from hunting white-tailed foxes because a white-tailed Fox once revealed to a wise old woman where the band might find precious obsidian such religions tended to be very local in Outlook and to emphasize the unique features of speciic locations climates and phenomena most foragers spent their entire lives within an are area of no more than a, Square kilomet in order to survive the inhabitants of a particular Valley needed to understand the Superhuman order that regulated their Valley and to adjust their behavior accordingly it was pointless to try to convince the inhabitants of some distant Valley to follow the same rules the people of the indust did not bother to send missionaries to the Ganges to convince locals not to hunt white-tailed foxes the Agricultural Revolution seems to have been accompanied by a religious Revolution hunter gatherers picked and pursued wild plants and animals which could be seen as equal in status to Homo sapiens the fact that man hunted sheep did not make sheep inferior to man just as the fact that Tigers hunted man did not make man inferior to Tigers beings communicated with one another directly and negotiated the rules governing their shared habitat in contrast Farmers owned and manipulated plants and animals and could hardly degrade themselves by negotiating with their possessions hence the RSD religious Act of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual Round Table into property this however created a big problem Farmers may have desired absolute control of their sheep but they knew perfectly well that their control was limited they could lock the sheep in pens castrate Rams and selectively breed use yet they could not Ensure that the youth conceived and gave birth to healthy Lambs nor could they prevent the eruption of deadly epidemics how then to safeguard the fecundity of the flocks a leading theory about the origin of the Gods argues that Gods gained importance because they AED a solution to this problem Gods such as the fertility goddess the sky God and the god of medicine took Center Stage when plants and animals lost their ability to speak and the God's main role was to mediate between humans and the mute plants and animals much of ancient mythology is in fact a legal contract in which humans promise Everlasting Devotion to the Gods in exchange for Mastery over plants and animals the rst chapters of the Book of Genesis are a prime example 4 thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution religious liturgy consisted mainly of humans saccing Lambs wine and cakes to Divine Powers who in exchange promised abundant harvests and Feen flocks the Agricultural Revolution initially had a far smaller impact on the status of other members of the animist system such as rocks Springs ghosts and demons however these two gradually lost status in favor of the new Gods as long as people live their entire lives within limited territories of a few hundred square kilometers most of their needs could be met by local spirits but once kingdoms and trade networks expanded people needed to contact entities whose power and author Authority encompassed a whole Kingdom or an entire trade Basin the attempt to answer these needs led to the appearance of polytheistic religions from the Greek P equals many Theos equals God these religions understood the world to be controlled by a group of powerful Gods such as the fertility goddess the rain God and the war god humans could appeal to these gods and the gods might if they receive devotions and sacrices Dain to bring Reign Victory and health animism did not entirely disappear at the Advent of polytheism demons fairies ghosts holy rocks holy Springs and holy trees remained an integral part of almost all polytheist religions these Spirits were far less important than the great Gods but for the mundane needs of many Ordinary People they were good enough while the king in his Capital City Sac dozens of fat Rams to the Great War God praying for victory over the barbarians The Peasant in his Hut lit a candle to the Fig Tree fairy praying that she help cure his sick son yet the greatest impact of the rise of great Gods was not on sheep po demons but upon the status of homo sapiens animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world polytheists on the other hand increasingly saw the world as a reaction of the relationship between gods and humans our prayers our sacrices our sins and our Good Deeds determined the fate of the entire ecosystem a terrible oud might wipe out billions of ants grasshoppers Turtles antelopes GS and elephants just because a few stupid sapiens made the gods angry polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the Gods but also that of humankind less fortunate members of the old animist system lost their stature and became either extras or silent deor in the great drama of man's relationship with the gods the benefits of idolatry 2,000 years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry this is an unjust stereotype in order to understand the inner logic of polytheism it is necessary to grasp the central idea buttressing the belief in many gods polytheism does not necessarily dispute the existence of a single power or law governing the entire universe in fact most polytheist and even animist religions recognized such a supreme power that stands behind all the de and gods demons and holy rocks in classical Greek polytheism Zeus Hira Apollo and their colleagues were subject to an omnipotent and all-encompassing power fate Moira and Ani Nordic gods too were inthrall to fate which doomed them to perish in the cataclysm of Ragnarok the Twilight of the Gods in the polytheistic religion of the Yia of West Africa all gods were born of the supreme god ottimer and remained subject to him in Hindu polytheism a single principle Amman controls the Myriad gods and Spirits humankind and the biological and physical world otman is the Eternal essence or soul of the entire universe as well as of every individual and every phenomenon the fundamental Insight of polytheism which distinguishes it from monotheism is that the Supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires cares and worries of humans it's pointless to ask this power for victory in war for health or for Reign because from its all-encompassing vantage point it makes no deance whether a particular Kingdom wins or loses whether a particular City prospers or Withers whether a particular person recuperates or dies the Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on fate and Hindus built no temples to otan the only reason to approach the supreme power of the universe would be to renounce all desires and embrace the bad along with the good to embrace even a defeat poverty sickness and death th some Hindus known as sadus or sanus devote their lives to uniting with otoman thereby achieving Enlightenment they strive to see the world from the Viewpoint of this fundamental principle to realize that from its Eternal perspective all mundane Des desires and fears are meaningless and ephemeral phenomena most Hindus however are not sadus they are sunk deep in the morass of mundane concerns where Rodman is not much help for assistance in such matters Hindus approach the gods with their partial Powers precisely because their powers are partial rather than all-encompassing Gods such as gangaw latchmi and Saras have interests and biases humans can therefore make deals with these partial powers and rely on their help in order to win Wars and recuperate from illness there are necessarily many of these smaller Powers since once you start dividing up the all-encompassing power of a supreme principle you'll inevitably end up with more than one deity hence the plurality of gods the Insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance since polytheists believe on the one hand in one supreme and completely disinterested power and on the other hand in many partial and biased Powers there is no de difficulty for the devotes of one God to accept the existence and a Casey of other gods polytheism is inherently open-minded and rarely persecutes Heretics and infidels even when polytheists conquered huge Empires they did not try to convert their subjects the Egyptians the Romans and the Aztecs did not send missionaries to foreign lands to spread the worship of Osiris Jupiter or weelo Poley the chief as Tech God and they certainly didn't dispatch armies for that purpose subject peoples throughout the empire were expected to respect the Empire's gods and rituals since these gods and rituals protected and legitimized the Empire yet they were not required to give up their local gods and rituals in the Aztec empire subject peoples were obliged to build temples for wheat silow poly but these temples were built alongside those of local Gods rather than in their stad in many cases the Imperial Elite itself adopted the gods and rituals of subject people the Romans happily added the Asian goddess sibile and the Egyptian goddess Isis to their Pantheon the only God that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic and evangelizing God of the Christians the Roman Empire did not require the Christians to give up their beliefs and rituals but it did expect them to pay respect to the Empire's protector gods and to the Divinity of the emperor this was seen as a declaration of political loyalty when the Christians vehemently refused to do so and went on to reject all attempts at compromise the Romans reacted by persecuting what they understood to be a politically subversive faction and even this was done half-heartedly in the 300 years from the crus of Christ to the conversion of emperor Constantine polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians local administ trators and governors incited some antichristian violence of their own still if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions it turns out that in these three centuries the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians died one in contrast over the course of the next 1,500 years Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly deant interpretations of the religion of love and compassion the religious war is between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries are particularly notorious all those involved accepted Christ's Divinity in his Gospel of compassion and love however they disagreed about the nature of this love Protestants believed that the Divine love is so great that God was incarnated in Ash and allowed himself to be tortured and crused thereby Redeeming the original sin and opening the gates of Heaven to all those who professed faith in him Catholics maintain that faith while essential was not enough to enter Heaven Believers had to participate in church rituals and do good deeds Protestants refuse to accept this arguing that this quid proquo Littles God's greatness and love whoever thinks that entry to Heaven depends upon his or her own Good Deeds magnys his own importance and implies that Christ's sewering on the cross and God's love for humankind are not enough these theological disputes turned so violent that during the 16th and 17th centuries Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands on August 23rd 1572 French Catholics who stressed the importance of Good Deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God's love for humankind in this attack the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than 24 hours when the Pope in Rome heard the news from France he was so overcome by joy that he organized festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Georgio Azari to decorate one of the Vatican rooms with a fresco of the massacre the room is currently all limits to visitors two more Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those 24 hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence God is one with time some followers of polytheist gods became so fond of their particular Patron that they drifted away from the basic polytheist Insight they began to believe that their God was the only God and that he was in fact the supreme power of the universe yet at the same time they continued to view him as possessing interests and biases and believed that they could strike deals with him thus were born monotheist religions whose followers beseech the supreme power of the universe to help them recover from illness win the lottery and gained victory in war the rst monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt Circa 350 BC when Pharaoh ainan declared that one of the minor deities of the Egyptian Pantheon the god Aon was in fact the supreme power ruling the universe ainan institutionalized the worship of Aon as the state religion and tried to check the worship of all other gods his religious Revolution however was unsuccessful after his death the worship of aan was abandoned in favor of the old Pantheon poly ISM continued to give birth here and there to other monotheist religions but they remained marginal not least because they failed to digest their own Universal message Judaism for example argued that the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases yet his chief interest is in the tiny Jewish nation and in the Obscure land of Israel Judaism had little to owe other nations and throughout most of its existence it has not been a missionary religion this stage can be called the stage of local monotheism the big breakthrough came with Christianity this Faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited Messiah however one of the sex rst leaders Paul of Tarsus reasoned that if the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases and if he had bothered to Incarnate himself in the Ash and to die on the cross for the Salvation of humankind then this is something everyone should hear about not just Jews it was thus necessary to spread the good word the gospel about Jesus throughout the world Paul's arguments fell on fertile ground Christians began organizing widespread missionary activities aimed at all humans in one of History's strangest twists this esoteric Jewish sect took over the mighty Roman Empire Christian success served as a model for another monotheist religion that appeared in the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century Islam like Christianity Islam to began as a small sect in a remote corner of the world but in an even stranger and swifter historical surprise it managed to break out of the deserts of Arabia and Conquer an immense Empire stretching from the Atlantic ocean to India henceforth the monotheist idea played a central role in world history monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists a religion that recognizes the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that it God is not the supreme power of the universe or that it received from God just part of the universal truth since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of The One and Only God they have been compelled to discredit all other religions over the last two Millennia monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently Exterminating all competition it worked at the beginning of the RSD century add there were hardly any monotheists in the world around ad500 one of the world's largest Empires the Roman Empire was a Christian poity and missionaries were busy spreading Christianity to other parts of Europe Asia and Africa by the end of the rst Millennium ad most people in Europe West Asia and North Africa were monotheists and Empires from the Atlantic Ocean to the Himalayas claimed to be ordained by the single great God by the early 16th century monotheism dominated most of Afro Asia with the exception of East Asia and the southern parts of Africa and it began extending long tentacles towards South Africa America and Oceania today most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion nor another and the global political order is built on monotheistic foundations yet just as animism continued to survive within polytheism so polytheism continued to survive within monotheism in theory once a person believes that the supreme power of the universe has interests in biases what's the point in worshiping partial Powers who would want to approach a lowly bureaucrat when the president sour is open to you indeed monotheist theology tends to deny the existence of all gods except the supreme god and to pour heler and brimstone over anyone who dares worship them matth five the spread of of Christianity and Islam yet there has always been a Chasm between theological theories and historical realities most people have found it ult to digest the monotheist idea fully they have continued to divide the world into we and they and to see the supreme power of the universe as too distant and da and for their mundane needs the monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare only to take them back and through the side window Christianity for example developed its own Pantheon of saints whose Cults deaired little from those of the polytheistic Gods just as the god Jupiter defended Roman wheat soow poly protected the eztec Empire so every Christian kingdom had its own patron saint who helped it overcome difficulties and win Wars England was protected by St George Scotland by St Andrew Hungary by St Steven and France had St Martin cities and towns Prof possessions and even diseases each had their own Saint the city of Milan had St Ambrose while St Mark watched over Venice St Florian protected chimney cleaners whereas St Matthew lent a hands to tax collectors in distress if you sore from headaches you had to pray to St agus but if from toothaches then St Apollonia was a much better audience the Christian Saints did not merely resemble the old polytheistic gods often they were these very same gods in Disguise for example the chief goddess of Celtic Ireland prior to the coming of Christianity was Bridget when Ireland was christianized Bridget too was baptized she became Saint Bridget who to this day is the most revered Saint in Catholic Ireland the Battle of Good and Evil polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions but also to dualistic ones dualistic religions isow the existence of two opposing Powers good and evil unlike monotheism dualism believes that evil is an independent power neither created by the good God nor subordinate to it dualism explains that the entire universe is a Battleground between these two forces and that everything that happens in the world is part of the struggle dualism is a very attractive world viiew because it has a short and simple answer to the famous problem of evil one of the fundamental concerns of human thought why is there evil in the world why is there sewering why do bad things happen to good people monotheists have to practice intellectual gymnastics to explain how in all- knowing all powerful and perfectly good God allows so much sewering in the world one well-known explanation is that this is God's way of allowing for human Free Will were there no evil humans could not choose between good and evil and hence there would be no free will this however is a non-intuitive answer that immediately raises a host of new questions freedom of will allows humans to choose evil many indeed choose evil and according to the standard monotheist account this Choice must bring Divine punishment in its wake if God knew in advance that a particular person would use her free will to choose evil and that as a result she would be punished for this by Eternal tortures in hell why did God create her theologians have written countless books to answer such questions some indeed the answer is convincing some don't what's undeniable is that monotheists have a hard time dealing with the problem of evil for dualists it's easy to explain evil bad things happen even to good people because the world is not governed single-handedly by a good God there is an independent evil power loose in the world the evil power does bad things dualism has its own drawbacks while solving the problem of evil it is unnerved by the problem of order if the world was created by a single God it's clear why it is such an orderly place where everything obeys the same laws but if good and evil battle for control of the world who enforces the laws governing this Cosmic War Two rival states can ght one another because both obey the same laws of physics a missile launched from Pakistan can hit Targets in India because gravity works the same way and both countries when good and evil ght what common laws do they obey and who decreed these laws so monotheism explains order but is mistied by evil dualism explains evil but is puzzled by order there is one logical way of solving the riddle to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe and he's evil but nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief dualistic religions ourish for more than a thousand years sometime between 1500 BC and 1,000 BC a prophet named zoroaster zerra was active somewhere in Central Asia his Creed passed from generation to generation until it became the most important of dualistic religions Zoroastrianism zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good God Aura Mazda and the evil God angr Manu humans had to help the good God in this battle Zoroastrianism was an important religion during the AG Meed Persian Empire 550 to 330 BC and later became the oal religion of the succed Persian Empire ad. 224 to 651 it exerted a major influence on almost all subsequent Middle Eastern and Central Asian religions and it inspired a number of other dualist religions such as nosism and manism during the 3rd and fourth centuries at the Manan cre greed spread from China to North Africa and for a moment it appeared that it would beat Christianity to achieve dominance in the Roman Empire yet the manin lost the soul of Rome to the Christians the Zoro asrian succed Empire was overrun by the monotheistic Muslims and the dualist wave subsided today only a handful of dualist communities survive in India and the Middle East nevertheless the rising tide of monotheism did not really wipe out dualism Jewish Christian and Muslim monotheism absorbed numerous duelist beliefs and practices and some of the most basic ideas of what we call monotheism are in fact dualist in origin and spirit countless Christians Muslims and Jews believe in a powerful evil force like the one Christians call the devil or Satan who can act independently ght against the good God and wreak havoc without God's permission how can a monotheist adhere to such a dualistic belief which by the way is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament logically it is impossible either you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing Powers neither of which is omnipotent still humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions so it should not come as a surprise that millions of Pious Christians Muslims and Jews manage to believe at one and the same time in an omnipotent God and an independent devil countless Christians Muslims and Jews have gone so far as to imagine that the good God even needs our help in its struggle against the devil which inspired among other things that call for jihads and Crusades another key dualistic concept particularly in gnosticism and manism was the sharp distinction between Body and Soul between matter and spirit gnostics and manin argued that the good God created the spirit and the Soul whereas matter and bodies are the creat cretion of the evil God man according to this view serves as a Battleground between the good soul and the evil body from a monotheistic perspective this is nonsense why distinguish so sharply between Body and Soul or matter and spirit and why are you that body and matter are evil after all everything was created by the same good God but monotheists could not help but be captivated by dualist dichotomies precisely because they helped them address the problem of evil so such oppositions eventually became cornerstones of Christian and Muslim thought belief in heaven the realm of the good God and Hell the realm of the evil God was also dualist in origin there is no trace of this belief in the Old Testament which also never claims that The Souls of people continue to live after the death of the body in fact monotheism as it has played out in history is a kaleidoscope of monotheist dualist polytheist and animist Legacies jumbling together under a single Divine umbrella the average Christian believes in the monotheist God but also in the dualist devil in polytheist Saints and in animist ghosts Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of deant and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from deant sources it's called syncretism syncretism might in fact be the single great world religion the law of nature all the religions we have discussed so far share one important characteristic they all focus on the belief in Gods and other Supernatural entities this seems obvious to westerners who are familiar mainly with monotheistic and polytheist Creeds in fact however the religious history of the world does not boil down to the history of gods during the rst millennium BC religions of an altogether new kind began to spread through afro Asia the newcomers such as gism and Buddhism in India deism and Confucianism in China and stoicism cynicism and epicureanism in the Mediterranean Basin were characterized by their disregard of gods these Creeds maintain that the Superhuman order governing the world is the product of natural laws rather than of divine wills and whims some of these natural law religions continued to espouse the existence of gods but their God gods were subject to the laws of nature no less than humans animals and plants were Gods had their niche in the ecosystem just as elephants and porcupines had theirs but could no more change the laws of nature than elephants can a prime example is Buddhism the most important of the ancient natural law religions which remains one of the major faiths the central gear of Buddhism is not a God but a human being sidartha Goda according to Buddhist tradition Goda was was air to a small Himalayan Kingdom sometime around 500 BC the Young Prince was deeply acted by the sewer inevident all around him he saw that men and women children and old people all sewer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague but also from anxiety frustration and discontent all of which seem to be an Inseparable part of the human condition people pursue wealth and power acquire knowledge and possessions beget sons and daughters and build houses and palaces yet no matter what they achieve they are never content those who live in poverty dream of riches those who have a million want 2 million those who have 2 million want 10 million even the Rich and Famous are rarely satised they too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries until sickness old age and death put a Bitter End to them everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke life is a pointless Rat Race but how to escape Escape it at the age of 29 Godus slipped away from his Palace in the middle of the night leaving behind his family and possessions he traveled as a homeless Vagabond throughout Northern India searching for a way out of sewering he visited ashims and sat at the feet of gurus but nothing liberated him entirely some dissatisfaction always remained he did not despair he resolved to investigate sewering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation he spent six years meditating on the essence causes and cures for human anguish in the end he came to the realization that sewering is not caused by ill Fortune by social injustice or by Divine whims rather sewering is caused by the behavior patterns of one's own mind God's Insight was that no matter what the Mind experiences it usually reacts with craving and craving always involves dissatisfaction when the Mind experiences something distaste it craves to be rid of the irritation when the Mind experiences something pleasant it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify therefore the mind is always de sazed and Restless this is very clear when we experience unpleasant things such as pain as long as the pain continues we are de sazed and do all we can to avoid it yet even when we experience Pleasant things we are never content we either fear that the pleasure might disappear or or we hope that it will intensify people dream for years about ending love but are rarely satised when they end it some become anxious that their partner will leave others feel that they have settled cheaply and could have found someone better and we all know people who manage to do both MTH six the spread of Buddhism great Gods can send us reain social institutions can provide Justice and good health care and lucky coincidences can turn us into millionaires but none of them can change our basic mental patterns hence even the greatest kings are doomed to live in anst constantly aing grief and anguish forever chasing after greater Pleasures Goda found that there was a way to exit this Vicious Circle if when the Mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant it simply understands things as they are then there is no sewering If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away you continue to feel sad sadness but you do not sewer from it there can actually be richness in the sadness If you experience Joy without craving that the joy linger and intensify you continue to feel Joy without losing your peace of mind but how do you get the mind to accept things as they are without craving to accept sadness as sadness joy as Joy pain is pain godam a developed a set of meditation techniques that train the mind to experience reality as it is without craving these practices train the mind to focus all its attention on the question what am I experiencing now rather than on what would I rather be experiencing it is difficult to achieve this state of mind but not impossible godam a grounded these meditation techniques and a set of ethical rules meant to make it easier for people to focus on actual experience and to avoid falling into cravings and Fantasies he instructed his followers to avoid killing permis was sex and theft since such acts necessarily stoke the re of craving for power for sensual pleasure or for wealth when the aims are completely extinguished craving is replaced by a state of perfect contentment and serenity known as Nirvana the literal meaning of which is extinguishing the re those who have attained Nirvana are fully liberated from all sewering they experience reality with the utmost Clarity free of fantasies and delusions while they will most like still encounter unpleasantness and pain such experiences cause them no misery a person who does not crave cannot suffer according to Buddhist tradition godma himself attained Nirvana and was fully liberated from sewering henceforth he was known as Buddha which means the enlightened one Buddha spent the rest of his life explaining his discoveries to others so that everyone could be freed from sewering he encapsulated his teachings in a single law sewering arises from craving the only way to be fully liberated from sewering is to be fully liberated from craving and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is this law known as Dharma or dama is seen by Buddhists as a universal law of nature that sewering arises from craving is always and everywhere true just as in modern physics he always equals I'm C too Buddhists are people who believe in this law and make it the full Crim of all their activ ities belief in Gods on the other hand is of minor importance to them the rst principle of monotheist religions is God exists what does he want from me the rst principle of Buddhism is suffering exists how do I escape it Buddhism does not deny the existence of gods they are described as powerful beings who can bring Reigns and victories but they have no inuence on the law that sewering arises from craving if the mind of a person is free of all craving no God can make him miserable conversely once craving arises in a person's mind all the gods in the universe cannot save him from suffering yet much like the monotheist religions premodern natural lore religions such as Buddhism never really rid themselves of the worship of gods Buddhism told people that they should aim for the ultimate goal of complete Liberation from sewering rather than for stops along the way such as economic prosperity and pol itical power however 99% of Buddhists did not attain Nirvana and even if they hope to do so in some future lifetime they devoted most of their present lives to the pursuit of mundane achievements so they continued to worship various Gods such as the Hindu gods in India the ban gods in Tibet and the shindo Gods in Japan moreover as time went by several Buddhist sex developed panths of Buddhist and Buddhist ARIS these are human and non-human beings with the capacity to achieve full Liberation from suffering but who forgo this Liberation out of compassion in order to help the countless beings still trapped in the cycle of misery instead of worshiping Gods many Buddhists began worshiping these enlightened beings asking them for help not only in attaining Nirvana but also in dealing with mundane problems thus we indeem many buddh and Buddhist SAS throughout East Asia to spend their time bringing rain stopping plagues and even winning bloody wars in exchange for prayers colorful lowers fragrant incense and Gifts of rice and Candy the worship of man the last 300 years are often depicted as an age of growing secularism in which religions have increasingly lost their importance if we are talking about theist religions this is largely correct but if we take into consideration natural law religions then modernity turns out to be an age of intense religious fervor unparalleled missionary ORS and the bloodiest Wars of religion and history the modern age has witnessed the rise of a number of new natural law religions such as liberalism communism capitalism nationalism and Nazism these Creeds do not like to be called religions and refer to themselves as ideologies but this is just a semantic exercise if a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a super human order then Soviet communism was no less a religion than Islam Islam is of course de from communism because Islam sees the Superhuman order governing the world as the Edict of an omnipotent Creator God whereas Soviet communism did not believe in Gods but Buddhism too gives short shrift to gods and yet we commonly classify it as a religion like Buddhists Communists believed in a superhuman order of natural and immutable laws that should guide human actions whereas Buddhists believe that the law of nature was discovered by sidarth aoda Communists believed that the law of nature was discovered by Karl Marx friedrick Engles and Vladimir elich Lenin the similarity does not end there like other religions communism too has its holy scripts and prophetic books such as Marx's doop at all which foretold that history would soon end with the inevitable victory of the proletariat Communism had its holidays and festivals such as the 1st of May and the anniversary of the October Revolution it had theologians Adept at Marxist dialectics and every unit in the Soviet Army had a chaplain called a commissar who monitored the piety of soldiers and ERS Communism had Martyrs Holy Wars and heresies such as drism Soviet communism was a fanatical and missionary religion a devout communist could not be a Christian or a Buddhist and was expected to spread the gospel of Marx and lenon even at the price of his or her life religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order the theory of relativity is not a religion because at least so far there are no human norms and values that are founded on it football is not a religion because nobody argues that its rules reflect superhuman etics Islam Buddhism and communism are all religions because all are systems of human norms and values that are founded on belief in a superhuman order note the difference between superhuman and Supernatural the Buddhist law of Nature and the Marxist laws of History are superhuman since they were not legislated by humans yet they are not Supernatural some readers may feel very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning if it makes you feel better you are free to go on calling communism an ideology rather than a religion it makes no deance we can divide Creeds into god- centered religions and Godless ideologies that claim to be based on natural laws but then to be consistent we would need to catalog at least some Buddhist deist and stoic sex as ideologies rather than religions conversely we should note that belief in Gods persists within many modern ideologies and that some of them most notably liberalism make little sense without this belief it would be impossible to survey here the history of all the new modern Creeds especially because there are no clear boundaries between them they are no less syncretic than monotheism and popular Buddhism just as a Buddhist could worship Hindu deities and just as a monotheist could believe in the existence of Satan so the typical American nowadays is simultaneously a nationalist she believes in the existence of an American Nation with a special role to play in history a free market capitalist she believes that open competition and the pursuit of self-interest are the best ways to create a prosperous society and a liberal humanist she believes that humans have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights nationalism will be discussed in chapter 18 capitalism the most successful of the modern religions gets a whole chapter chapter 16 which expounds its principal beliefs and rituals in the remaining pages of this chapter I will address the humanist religions theist religions focus on the worship of gods humanist religions worship Humanity or more correctly Homo sapiens humanism is a belief that homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature which is fundamentally de from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena humanists believe that the unique nature of homo sapiens is the most important thing in the world and it determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe the Supreme good is the good of homo Ians the rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of this species all humanists worship Humanity but they do not agree on its denition humanism has split into three rival sexs that ght over the exact denition of humanity just as rival Christian sects fought over the exact denition of God today the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism which believes that humanity is a quality of individual humans and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacran according to liberals the sacred nature of humanity resides within each and every individual Homo sapiens the inner core of individual humans gives meaning to the world and is the source for all ethical and political Authority if we encounter an ethical or political dilemma we should look inside and listen to our inner voice the voice of humanity the chief Commandments of liberal humanism are meant to protect the Liber of this inner voice against intrusion or harm these Commandments are collectively known as human rights this for example is why liberals object to torture and the death penalty in early modern Europe murderers were thought to violate and destabilize the cosmic order to bring the cosmos back to balance it was necessary to torture and publicly execute the criminal so that everyone could see the order reestablished attending gruesome executions was a favorite pastime for londoners and parisians in the era of Shakespeare and molier in today's Europe murder is seen as a violation of the Sacred nature of humanity in order to restore order present day Europeans do not torture and execute criminals instead they punish a murderer in what they see as the most humane way possible thus safeguarding and even rebuilding his human sanctity by honoring the human nature of the murderer everyone is reminded of the sanctity of humanity and order is restored by defending the murderer we write what the murderer has wronged even though liberal humanism sanc humans it does not deny the existence of God and is in fact founded on monotheist beliefs the liberal belief in the free and sacred nature of each individual is a direct Legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual Souls without recourse to Eternal souls and a creator God it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what is so special about individual sapiens another important sect is socialist humanism socialists believe that humanity is collective rather than individualistic they hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual but the species Homo sapiens as a whole whereas liberal humanism seeks as much Freedom as possible for individual humans socialist humanism seeks equality between all humans according to socialists inequality is the worst blasphemy against the sanctity of humanity because it privileges peripheral qualities of humans over their Universal Essence for example when the rich are privileged over the poor it means that we value money more than the universal essence of all humans which is the same for rich and poor alike like liberal humanism socialist humanism is built on monotheist foundations the idea that all humans are equal is a Revenge amped version of the monotheist conviction that All Souls are equal before God the only humanist sect that has actually broken loose from traditional monotheism is evolutionary humanism whose most famous representatives are the Nazis what distinguished the Nazis from mother humanist sex was a dear denition of humanity one deeply inuenced by the theory of evolution in contrast to other humanists the Nazis believed that humankind is not something Universal and eternal but but rather immutable species that can evolve or degenerate man can evolve into Superman or degenerate into a subhuman the main ambition of the Nazis was to protect humankind from degeneration and encourage its Progressive Evolution this is why the Nazis said that the Aryan race the most advanced form of humanity had to be protected and fostered while degenerate kinds of homo sapiens like Jews Roma homosexuals and the mentally ill had to be quarantined and even exterminated the Nazis explained that homo sapiens itself appeared when one Superior population of Ancient humans evolved whereas inferior populations such as the Neanderthals became extinct these deant populations were at rst no more than deant races but developed independently along their own evolutionary paths this might well happen again according to the Nazis Homo sapiens had already divided into several distinct races each with its own unique qualities one of these races The Aryan race had the nest qualities rationalism Beauty Integrity diligence the Aryan race therefore had the potential to turn man into Superman other races such as Jews and blacks were today's neanderthals possessing inferior qualities if allowed to breed and in particular to intermar with Aryans they would adulterate all human populations and doom homo sapiens to Extinction biologists have since debunked Nazi racial theory in particular genetic research conducted after 1945 has demonstrated that the deces between the various human lineages are far smaller than the Nazis postulated but these conclusions are relatively new given the state of scientic knowledge in 1933 Nazi beliefs were hardly outside a pale the existence of deant human races the superiority of the white race and the need to protect and cultivate this Superior race were widely held beliefs among most western Elites scholars in the most prestigious Western universities using the Orthodox scientic methods of the day published studies that allegedly proved that members of the white race were more intelligent more ethical and more skilled than Africans or Indians politicians in Washington London and canboro took it for granted that it was their job to prevent the adulteration and degeneration of the white r by for example restricting immigration from China or even Italy to Aryan countries such as the USA and Australia humanist religions religions that worship Humanity these positions did not change simply because new scientic research was published sociological and political developments were far more powerful engines of change in this sense Hitler dug not just his own grave but that of racism in general when he launched World War War I he compelled his enemies to make clear distinctions between us and them afterwards precisely because Nazi ideology was so racist racism became discredited in the west but the change took time white supremacy remained a mainstream ideology in American politics at least until the 1960s the white Australia policy which restricted immigration of non-white people to Australia remained in force until 1973 Aboriginal law Australians did not receive equal political rights until the 1960s and most were prevented from voting in elections because they were deemed unfit to function as Citizens the Nazis did not loath Humanity they fought liberal humanism human rights and communism precisely because they admired humanity and believed in the great potential of the human species but following the logic of darwinian evolution they argued that natural selection must be allowed to doubt un individuals and leave only the test to survive and reproduce by suckering the weak liberalism and communism not only allowed UNT individuals to survive they actually gave them the opportunity to reproduce thereby undermining natural selection in such a world the test humans would inevitably drown in a sea of UND deener mates humankind would become less and less tea with each passing generation which could lead to its Extinction a 194 2 German biology textbook explains in the chapter the laws of nature and Mankind that the supreme law of nature is that all beings are locked in a remorseless struggle for survival after describing how plans struggle for territory how Beatles struggle to Endy mates and so forth the textbook concludes that the battle for existence is hard and unforgiving but is the only way to maintain life this struggle eliminates everything that is on for life and selects everything that is able to survive these natural laws are incontrovertible living creatures demonstrate them by their very survival they are unforgiving those who resist them will be wiped out biology not only tells us about animals and plants but also shows us the laws we must follow in our lives and steals our Wills to live in ght according to these laws the meaning of life is struggle woe to him who sins against these laws then follows a quotation from mine Camp the person who attempts to ght the iron logic of nature thereby ghts the principles he must thank for his life as a human being to fight against nature is to bring about one's own destruction do three at the dawn of the third millennium the future of evolutionary humanism is unclear for 60 years after the end of the war against Hitler it was taboo to link humanism with Evolution and to Advocate using biological methods to upgrade homo sapiens but today such projects are back in Vogue no one speaks about Exterminating lower races or inferior people but many contemplate using our increasing knowledge of human biology to create superhumans at the same time a huge Gulf is opening between the tenants of liberal humanism and the latests of the life sciences a gulf we cannot ignore much longer our liberal political and Judicial Systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature indivisible and immutable which gives meaning to the world and which is the source of all ethical and political Authority this is a Reincarnation of the traditional Christian belief in a free and Eternal Soul that resides within each individual yet over the last 200 years the life sciences have thoroughly undermined this belief scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there they increasingly argue that human behavior is determined by hormones genes and synapses rather than by free will the same forces that determine the behavior of chimpanzees wolves and dance our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient discoveries under the carpet but in all frankness how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the Departments of Law and political science 13 The Secret of success Commerce Empires and Universal religions eventually brought virtually every sapiens on every continent into the global world we live in today not that this process of expansion and unication was linear or without interruptions looking at the bigger picture though the transition from many small cultures to a few large cultures and finally to a single Global Society was probably an inevitable result of the Dynamics of human history but saying that a global Society is inevitable is not the same as saying that the end result had to be the particular kind of global Society we now have we can certainly imagine other outcomes why is English so widespread today and not Danish why are there about 2 billion Christians and 1.25 billion Muslims but only 15,000 zoroastrians and no manans if we could go back in time to 10,000 years ago and set the process going again time after time would we always see the rise of monotheism and the decline of dualism we can't do such an experiment so we don't really know but an examination of two crucial characteristics of History can provide us with some Clues one the hindsight fallacy every point in history is AC Crossroads a single traveled Road leads from the past to the present but Myriad paths forco into the future some of those paths are wider smoother and better marked and are thus more likely to be taken but sometimes history or the people who who make history takes unexpected turns at the beginning of the 4th Century ad the Roman Empire faced a wide Horizon of religious possibilities it could have stuck to its traditional and variegated polytheism but its emperor Constantine looking back on a fractious Century of Civil War seems to have thought that a single religion with a clear Doctrine could help unify his ethnically diverse realm he could have chosen any of a number of contemporary Cults to be his National faith manism mithraism the Cults of Isis or sibile Zoroastrianism Judaism and even Buddhism were all available options why did he opt for Jesus was there something in Christian theology that attracted him personally or perhaps an aspect of the faith that made him think it would be easier to use for his purposes did he have a religious experience or did some of his advisers suggest that the Christians were quickly gaining adherence and that it would be best to jump on wagon historians can speculate but not provide any denitive answer they can describe how Christianity took over the Roman Empire but they cannot explain why this particular possibility was realized what is the deance between describing how and explaining why to describe how means to reconstruct the series of speciic events that led from one point to another to explain why means to ND causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others some Scholars do indeed provide deterministic explanations of events such as the rise of Christianity they attempt to reduce human history to the workings of biological ecological or economic forces they argue that there was something about the geography genetics or economy of the Roman Mediterranean that made the rise of a monotheist religion inevitable yet most historians tend to be skeptical of such deterministic theories this is one of the distinguishing marks of history as an academic discipline the better you know a particular historical period the harder it becomes to explain why things happen one way and not another those who have only a superal knowledge of a certain period tend to focus only on the possibility that was eventually realized they offer a just so story to explain with hindsight why that outcome was inevitable those more deeply informed about the period are much more cognizant of the roads not taken in fact the people who knew the period best those alive at the time were the most clueless of all for the average Roman in Constantine's time the future was a fog it is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time today is no deant are we out of the global economic crisis or is the worst still to come will China continue growing until it becomes the leading superpower will the United States lose its hegemony is the upsurge of monotheistic fundamentalism the wave of the future or a local Whirlpool of little long-term syic can are we heading towards ecological disaster or technological Paradise there are good arguments to be made for all of these outcomes but no way of knowing for sure in a few decades people will look back and think that the answers to all of these questions were obvious it is particularly important to stress that possibilities which seem very unlikely to contemporaries often get realized when Constantine assumed the throne in 3006 Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect if you were to suggest then that it was about to become the Roman State religion you'd have been laughed out of the room just as you would be today if you were to suggest that by the year 2050 her Krishna would be the state religion of the USA in October 1913 the Bolsheviks were a small radical Russian faction no reasonable person would have predicted that within a mere four years they would take over the country in ad600 the notion that a band of desert dwelling Arabs would soon conquer an expande stretching from the Atlantic ocean to India was even more Preposterous indeed had the Byzantine Army been able to repel the initial Onslaught Islam would probably have remained an obscure Cult of which only a handful of Kanye shenti were aware Scholars would then have a very easy job explaining why a faith based on a revelation to a middle-aged mechan Merchant could never have caught on not that everything is possible geographical biological and economic forces create constraints yet these constraints leave amble room for surprising developments which do not seem Bound By any deterministic laws this conclusion disappoints many people who prefer history to be deterministic determinism is appealing because it implies that our world and our beliefs are natural and in able product of History it is natural and inevitable that we live in nation states organize our economy along capitalist principles and fervently believe in human rights to acknowledge that history is not deterministic is to acknowledge that it is just a coincidence that most people today believe in nationalism capitalism and human rights history cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic so many forces are at work and their interactions are so complex that extremely small variations in the strength of the forces and the way they interact produce huge deces and outcomes not only that but history is what is called a level two chaotic system chaotic systems come in two shapes level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it the weather for example is a level one chaotic system though it is unnuanced by Myriad factors we can build computer modules that take more and more more of them into consideration and produce better and better weather forecasts level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it and therefore can never be predicted accurately markets for example are a level two chaotic system what will happen if we develop a computer program that forecasts with 100% accuracy the price of oil tomorrow the price of oil will immediately react to the forecast which would consequently fail to materialize if the current price of oil is $90 a barrel and the infallible computer program predicts that tomorrow it will be $100 Traders will rush to buy oil so that they can Pro from the predicted price rise as a result the price will shoot up to $100 a barrel today rather than tomorrow then what will happen tomorrow nobody knows politics two is a second order chaotic system many people criticize sovietologists for failing to predict the 1989 revolutions and castigate Middle East experts for not anticipating the Arab Spring Revolutions of 2011 this is unfair revolutions are by denition unpredictable a predictable Revolution never erupts why not imagine that it's 2010 and some genius political scientists in Cuts with a computer wizard have developed an infallible algorithm that incorporated into an attractive interface face can be marketed as a revolution predictor they owe their services to president hosy Mubarak of Egypt and in return for a generous down payment tell Mubarak that according to their forecasts a revolution would certainly break out in Egypt during the course of the following year how would Mubarak react most likely he would immediately lower taxes distribute billions of dollars in handouts to the citizenry and also beef up his secret police force just in case the preemptive measures work the year comes and goes and surprise there is no Revolution Mubarak demands his money back your algorithm is worthless he shouts at the scientists in the end I could have built another Palace instead of giving all that money away but the reason the revolution didn't happen is because we predicted it the scientists say in their defense prophets who predict things that don't happen Mubarak remarks as he motions his guards to grab them I could have picked up a dozen of this for next to nothing in the chairo marketplace so why study history unlike physics or economics history is not a means for making accurate predictions we study history not to know the future but to widen our Horizons to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine for example studying how Europeans came to dominate Africans enables us to realize that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the racial hierarchy and that the world might well be arranged differently two blind Cleo we cannot explain the choices that history makes but we can say something very important about them history's choices are not made for the benit of humans there is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along there is no proof that cultures that are benal to humans must inexorably succeed and spread while Les benial cultures disappear there is no proof that Christianity was a better choice than manism or that the Arab Empire was more beneficial than that of the succed Persians there is no proof that history is working for the benit of humans because we lack an objective scale on which to measure such benit deant cultures Dean the good dear andly and we have no objective yard stick by which to judge between them the victors of course always believe that their denition is correct but why should we believe the victors Christians believe that the victory of Christianity over manism was benal to humankind but if we do not accept the Christian world view then there is no reason to agree with them Muslims believe that the fall of the succed empire into Muslim hands was benal to human kind but these benets are evident only if we accept the Muslim world view it may well be that we'd all be better oh if Christianity and Islam had been forgotten or defeated ever more Scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite with humans as its unwitting host organic parasites such as viruses live inside the body of their hosts they multiply and spread from one host to the other feeding over their hosts weakening them and sometimes even killing them as long as the hosts live long enough to pass along the parasite it carries little about the condition of its host in just this fashion cultural ideas live inside the minds of humans they multiply and spread from one host to another occasionally weakening the hosts and sometimes even killing them a cultural idea such as belief in Christian Heaven above the clowns or communist Paradise here on Earth can compel a human to dedicate his or her life to spreading the idea even at the price of death the human dies but the idea spreads according to this approach cultures are not conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others as marxists tend to think rather cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them this approach is sometimes called mimetics it assumes that just as organic evolution is based on the replication of organic information units called genes so cultural evolution is based on the replication of cultural information units called memes apostrophe one successful cultures are those that Excel and reproducing their memes irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human hosts most scholars in the humanities disdain meme eics seeing it as an amateurish attempt to explain cultural processes with crude biological analogies but many of these same Scholars adhere to mtic twin sister postmodernism postmodernist thinkers speak about discourses rather than memes as the building blocks of culture yet they too see cultures as propagating themselves with little regard for the benit of humankind for example postmodernist thinkers describe nationalism as a deadly plague that spread throughout the world in the 19th and 20th centuries causing Wars oppression hate and genocide the moment people in one country were infected with it those in neighboring countries were also likely to catch the virus the IST virus presented itself as being beneficial for humans yet it has been beneficial mainly to itself similar arguments are common in the social sciences under the ages of Game Theory Game Theory explains how in multiplayer systems views and behavior patterns that harm all players nevertheless manage to take root and spread arms races are a famous example many arms races bankrupt all those who take part in them without really changing the military balance of power when Pakistan buys Advanced airlanes India responds in kind when India develops nuclear bombs Pakistan follows suit when Pakistan enlarges its Navy India counters at the end of the process the balance of power May remain much as it was but meanwhile billions of dollars that could have been invested in education or health are spent on weapons yet the arms race Dynamic is hard to resist arms racing is a pattern of behavior that spreads itself like a virus from one country to another harming everyone but beneting itself under the evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction keep in mind that an arms race like a gene has no awareness it does not consciously seek to survive and reproduce its spread is the unintended result of a powerful Dynamic no matter what you call it Game Theory postmodernism or mics the Dynamics of History are not Direct Ed towards enhancing human well-being there is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens like Evolution history disregards the happiness of individual organisms and individual humans for their part are usually far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to their own Advantage history proceeds from one Junction to the next choosing for some mysterious reason to follow our rest he this path then another around ad 1500 history made its most momentous Choice changing not only the fate of humankind but arguably the fate of all life on Earth we call it the scientic revolution it began in Western Europe a large Peninsula on the western tip of Afro Asia which up till then played no important role in history why did the scientic revolution begin there of all places and not in China or India why did it at the midpoint of the second Millennium ad rather than two centuries before or three centuries later we don't know Scholars have proposed dozens of theories but none of them is particularly convincing history has a very wide Horizon of possibilities and many possibilities are never realized it is conceivable to imagine history going on for Generations upon Generations while bypassing the scientic revolution just as it is conceivable to imagine history without Christian without a Roman Empire and without gold coins part four the Scientific Revolution 32 Alam magoro July 16th 1945 529 and 53 seconds 8 seconds after the first atomic bomb was detonated the nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer upon seeing the explosion quoted from the bag of AA now I am become death the destroyer of worlds 14 the discovery of ignorance were say a Spanish peasant to have fallen asleep in 81,000 and woken up 500 years later to the den of Columbus Sailors boarding ban Nina Pinta and Santa Maria the world would have seemed to him quite familiar despite many changes in technology manners and political boundaries this medieval Rip Van winko would have felt at home but had one of Columbus Sailors fallen into a similar Slumber and woken up to the ringtone of a 20 rst Century iPhone he would have found himself in a world strange Beyond Comprehension is this Heaven he might well have asked himself or perhaps hell the last 500 years have witnessed a phenomenal and unprecedented growth in human power in the year 1,500 there were about 500 million Homo sapiens in the entire world today there are 7 billion. one the total value of goods and services produced by humankind in the year 1,500 is estimated at $250 billion in today's dollars. two nowadays the value of a year of human production is close to $60 trillion do3 and 1500 Humanity consumed about 13 trillion calories of energy per day today we consume 1,500 trillion calories a day. 4 take a second look at those GE human population has increased 14 fold production 240 fold and energy consumption 115 fold suppose a single modern Battleship got transported back to Columbus time in a matter of seconds it could make Driftwood out of the Nina Pinta and Santa Maria and then sink the Navies of every great world power of the time without sustaining a scratch five modern Freighters could have taken on board all the cargo born by the whole world's Merchant tense. 5 a modern computer could easily store every word and number in all the Codex books and Scrolls in every single medieval library with room to spare any large bank today holds more money than all the world's premodern kingdoms put together do 6 in 1500 few cities had more than 100,000 inhabitants most buildings were constructed of mud wood and straw a three-story building was a skyscraper the streets were rot in dirt tracks Dusty in summer and muddy in Winter fed by pedestrians horses goats chickens and a few cards the most common Urban noises were human and animal voices along with the occasional hammer and saw at Sunset the cityscape went black with only an occasional candle or torch cing in the Gloom if an inhabitant of such a city could see modern Tokyo New York or Mumbai what would she think prior to the 16th century No human had circumnavigated the Earth this changed in 1522 when Mel D's Expedition returned to Spain after a journey of 72,000 km it took 3 years and cost the lives of almost all the crew members mellin included in 1873 Jules ver could imagine that filus fog a wealthy British Adventurer might just be able to make it Around the World in 80 Days today anyone with a middle class income can sa F and easily circumnavigate the globe in just 48 hours in 1500 humans were conned to the Earth's surface they could build towers and climb mountains but the sky was reserved for Birds angels and deities on July 20th 1969 humans landed on the moon this was not merely a historical achievement but an evolutionary and even Cosmic feat during the previous 4 billion years of evolution no organism managed even to leave the Earth's atmosphere and certainly none left a foot or tentacle print on the moon for most of History humans knew nothing about 99.99% of the organisms on the planet namely the microorganisms this was not because they were of no concern to us each of us Bears billions of one-celled creatures within us and not just as Free Riders they are our best friends and deadliest enemies some of them digest our food and clean our guts While others cause illnesses and epidemics yet it was only in 16 74 that a human irst saw a microorganism when Anton van leuo took a peak through his homemade microscope and was startled to see an entire world of tiny creatures Milling about in a drop of water during the subsequent 300 years humans have made the acquaintance of a huge number of microscopic species we've managed to defeat most of the deadliest contagious diseases they cause and have harnessed microorganisms in the service of medicine and Industry to today we engineer bacteria to produce medications manufacture biofuel and kill parasites but the single most remarkable and dinning moment of the past 500 years came at 529 and 45 seconds on July 16th 1945 at that precise second American scientists detonated the RSD atomic bomb at halam magoro New Mexico from that point onward humankind had the capability not only to change the course of his history but to end it the historical process that led to Alam magoro and to the moon is known as the scienic revolution during this revolution humankind has obtained enormous new powers by investing resources in scientific research it is a revolution because until about a. 1500 humans the world overd doubted their ability to obtain new medical military and economic Powers while government and Wealthy patrons allocated funds to education and scholarship the aim was in general to preserve existing capabilities rather than acquire new ones the typical premodern ruler gave money to priests philosophers and Poets in the hope that they would legitimize his Rule and maintain the social order he did not expect them to discover new medications invent new weapons or stimulate economic growth during the last V centuries humans increasingly came to believe that they could increase their capabil abilities by investing in scientic research this wasn't just Blind Faith it was repeatedly proven empirically the more proofs there were the more resources wealthy people and governments were willing to put into science we would never have been able to walk on the moon engineer microorganisms and split the atom without such Investments the US government for example has in recent decades allocated billions of dollars to the study of nuclear physics the knowledge prod produced by this research has made possible the construction of nuclear power stations which provide cheap electricity for American Industries which pay taxes to the US government which uses some of these taxes to finance further research in nuclear physics the scientific revolutions feedback loop science needs more than just research to make progress it depends on the mutual reinforcement of science politics and economics political and Economic Institutions provide provide the resources without which scientific research is almost impossible in return scientific research provides new powers that are used among other things to obtain new resources some of which are reinvested in research why did modern humans develop a growing belief in their ability to obtain new powers through research what forged the bond between science politics and economics this chapter looks at the unique nature of modern science in order to provide part of the answer the next two chapters examine the formation of the alliance between science the European Empires and the economics of capitalism ignoramus humans have sought to understand the universe at least since the cognitive Revolution our ancestors put a great deal of time and or into trying to discover the rules that govern the natural world but modern science deers from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways a the willingness to admit IGN IGN an modern Science is based on the Latin injunction ignor mustash we do not know it assumes that we don't know everything even more critically it accepts that the things that we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge no concept idea or theory is sacred and Beyond Challenge B the centrality of observation and Mathematics having admitted ignorance modern science seems to obtain new knowledge it does so by gathering OB observations and then using mathematical tools to connect these observations into comprehensive theories C the acquisition of new powers modern science is not content with creating theories it uses these theories in order to acquire new powers and in particular to develop new technologies the scientic revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge it has been above all a revolution of ignorance the Great Discovery that launched the scientic Revolution was the Discover y that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam Christianity Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known the great gods or the one almighty God or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral Traditions ordinary Mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly it was inconceivable that the Bible the Quran or the vetus were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe a secret that might yet be discovered by Ash and blood creatures ancient traditions of knowledge admitted only two kinds of ignorance first an individual might be ignorant of something important to obtain the necessary knowledge all he needed to do was ask somebody wiser there was no need to discover something that nobody yet knew for for example if a peasant in some 13th century Yorkshire Village wanted to know how the human race originated he assumed that Christian tradition held a DEA of answer all he had to do was ask the local priest second an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things by denition whatever the great gods or the wise people of the past did not bother to tell us was unimportant for example if our Yorkshire peasant wanted to know how spiders weave their webs it was pointless to ask the priest because there was no answer to this question in any of the Christian scriptures that did not mean however that Christianity was dish rather it meant that understanding how spiders weave their webs was unimportant after all God knew perfectly well how spiders do it if this were a vital piece of information necessary for human prosperity and salvation God would have included a comprehensive explanation in the Bible Christianity did not forbid people to study spiders but spider Scholars if there were any in medieval Europe had to accept their peripheral role in society and the irrelevance of their NS to the Eternal truths of Christianity no matter what a scholar might discover about spiders or butteries or galopagos Ines that knowledge was little more than trivia with no bearing on the fundamental truths of society politics and economics in fact things were never quite that simple in every age even the most Pious and conservative there were people who argued that there were important things of which their entire tradition was ignorant yet such people were usually marginalized or persecuted or else they founded a new tradition and began arguing that they knew everything there is to know for example the prophet Muhammad began his religious career by condemning his fellow Arabs for living in ignorance of the Divine truth yet Muhammad himself very quickly began began to argue that he knew the full truth and his followers began calling him the Seal of the prophets henceforth there was no need of Revelations Beyond those given to Muhammad Modern Day science is a unique tradition of knowledge in as much as it openly admits Collective ignorance regarding the most important questions Darwin never argued that he was the Seal of the biologists and that he had solved the riddle of Life once and for all after centuries of extensive scientific research biologists admit that they still don't have any good explanation for how brains produce Consciousness physicists admit that they don't know what caused the Big Bang or how to reconcile quantum mechanics with the theory of general relativity in other cases competing scientic theories are vociferously debated on the basis of constantly emerging new evidence a prime example is the debates about how best to run the economy though individual economists may claim that their method is the best Orthodoxy changes with every natural crisis and Stock Exchange bubble and it is generally accepted that the now word on economics is yet to be said in still other cases particular theories are supported so consistently by the available evidence that all Alternatives have long since Fallen by the wayside such theories are accepted as true yet everyone agrees that where new evidence to emerge that contradicts the theory it would have to be revised or discarded good examples of these are the pl tectonics theory and the theory of evolution the willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more Dynamic sble and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge this has hugely expanded our capacity to understand how the world works and our ability to invent new technologies but it presents us with a serious problem that most of our ancestors did not have to cope with our current assumption that we do not know everything and that even the knowledge we possess is tentative extends to the shared myths that enable millions of strangers to cooperate actively if the evidence shows that many of those myths are doubtful how can we hold Society together how can our communities countries and International System function all modern attempts to stabilize the sociopolitical order have had no choice but to rely on either of two unscientific methods a take a scientic theory and in opposition to Common scienic practices declare that it is a now and absolute truth this was the method used by Nazis who claimed that their racial policies were the cor laries of biological facts and Communists who claimed that Marx and Lenin had divined absolute economic truths that could never be refuted B leave science out of it and live in accordance with the non- scientic absolute truth this has been the strategy of liberal humanism which is built on a dogmatic belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings a Doctrine which has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of homo sapiens but that shouldn't surprise us even science itself has to rely on religious and ideological beliefs to justify and finance its research modern culture has nevertheless been willing to embrace ignorance to a much greater degree than has any previous culture one of the things that has made it possible for modern social orders to hold together is the spread of an almost religious belief and technology and the methods of scientif research which have replaced to some extent the belief in absolute truths the scientific Dogma modern science has no Dogma yet it has a common core of research methods which are all based on collecting empirical observations those we can observe with at least one of our senses and putting them together with the help of mathematical tools people throughout his history collected empirical observations but the importance of these observations was usually limited why waste precious resources obtaining new observations when we already have all the answers we need but as modern people came to admit that they did not know the answers to some very important questions they found it necessary to look for completely new knowledge consequently the dominant modern research method takes for granted the ins sueny of old knowledge instead of studying old tradition emphasis is now placed on new observations and experiments when present observation collides with past tradition we give precedence to the observation of course physicists analyzing the Spectra of distant galaxies archaeologists analyzing the NDS from a Bronze Age City and political scientists studying the emergence of capitalism do not disregard tradition they start by studying what the wise people of the past have said and written but from their arrest year in college aspiring physicists archaeologists and political scientists are taught that it is their mission to go beyond what heinstein Heinrich Schon and Max Weber ever knew mere observations however are not knowledge in order to understand the universe we need to connect observations into comprehensive theories earlier Traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories modern science uses mathematics there are very few equations s graphs and calculations in the Bible the Quran the vetus or the Confucian Classics when traditional mythologies and scriptures laid down general laws these were presented in narrative rather than mathematical form thus a fundamental principle of manichan religion asserted that the world is a Battleground between good and evil an evil force created matter while a good Force created Spirit humans are caught between these two forces and should choose good over evil yet the prophet Mani made no attempt to ow a mathematical formula that could be used to predict human choices by quantifying the respective strength of these two forces he never calculated that the force acting on a man is equal to the acceleration of his Spirit divided by the mass of his body this is exactly what scientists seek to accomplish in 1687 Isaac Newton published the mathematical principles of natural philosophy arguably the most important book in modern history Newton presented a general theory of movement and change the greatness of Newton's theory was its ability to explain and predict the movements of all bodies in the universe from falling apples to shooting stars using three very simple mathematical laws henceforth anyone who wished to understand and predict the movement of a cannonball or a planet simply had to make measurements of the object's Mass Direction and acceleration and the forces acting on it by by inserting these numbers into Newton's equations the future position of the object could be predicted it worked like magic only around the end of the 19th century did scientists come across a few observations that did not tee well with Newton's laws and these led to the next Revolutions in physics the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics Newton showed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics some chapters for example boil down to a clear cut equation but Scholars who attempted to reduce biology economics and psychology to need Newtonian equations have discovered that these elds have a level of complexity that makes such an aspiration feudal this did not mean however that they gave up on mathematics a new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspects of reality statistics in 1744 two Presbyterian clergymen in Scotland Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace decided to set up a Life Insurance Fund that would provide pensions for the widows and Orphans of dead clergymen they proposed that each of their Church's ministers would pay a small portion of his income into the fund which would invest the money if a minister died his widow would receive dividends on the funds protes this would allow her to live comfortably for the rest of her life but to determine how much the ministers had to pay in so that the fund would have enough money to live up to its obligations Webster and Wallace had to be able to predict how many ministers would die each year how many widows and orphans they would leave behind and by how many years the widows would outlive their husbands take note of what the two churchmen did not do they did not pray to God to reveal the answer nor did they search for an answer in the Holy scriptures or Among The Works of ancient theologians nor did they enter into an abstract philosophical disputation being Scot they were practical types so they contacted a professor of mathematics from the University of Edinburgh colon mclen the three of them collected data on the ages at which people died and used these to calculate how many ministers were likely to pass away in any given year their work was founded on several recent breakthroughs in the elds of statistics and probability one of these was Jacob Buu's law of large numbers berui had Codi the principle that while it might be de difficult to predict with certainty a single event such as the death of a particular person it was possible to predict with great accuracy the average outcome of many similar events that is while mclen could not use maths to predict whether Webster and Wallace would die next year he could given enough data tell Webster and Wallace how many Presbyterian ministers in Scotland would almost certainly die next year fortunately they had already made data that they could use actuary tables published years previously by Edmund hi proved particularly useful hi had analyzed records of 1,238 births and 1,174 deaths that he obtained from the city of bre laau Germany hi's tables made it possible to see that for example a 20-year-old person has a 1 to 100 chance of dying in a given year but a 50-year-old person has a 139 chance processing these numbers Webster and Wallace concluded that on average there would be 930 living Scottish Presbyterian ministers at any given moment and an average of 27 ministers would die each year 18 of whom would be survived by widows five of those who did not leave widows would leave orphan children and two of those survived by widows would also be outlived by children from previous marriages who had not yet reached the age of 16 they further computed how much time was like to go by before the Widow's death or remarriage in both these eventualities payment of the pension would cease these gears enabled Webster and Wallace to determine how much money the ministers who joined their fund had to pay in order to provide for their loved ones by contributing 22 12 Tod a year a minister could guarantee that his widowed wife would receive at least 10 a year a hefty sum in those days if he thought that was not enough he could choose to paying more up to a level of £6 11s 3D a year which would guarantee his widow the even more handsome sum of £25 a year according to their calculations by the year 1765 the fund for a provision for the widows and Children of the Ministers of the Church of Scotland would have Capital totaling 58,300 their calculations proved amazingly accurate when that year arrived the funds capital stood at 58347 just one pound less than the prediction this was even better than the Prophecies of habak hu Jeremiah or St John today Webster and Wallace's fund known simply as Scottish widows is one of the largest pension and insurance companies in the world with assets worth 100 billion pounds it ures not only Scottish widows but anyone willing to buy its policies do7 probability calculations such as those used by the two Scottish ministers became the foundation not merely of Actuarial science which is Central to the pension and insurance business but also of the science of demography founded by another clergyman the Anglican Robert malus demography in its turn was the Cornerstone on which Charles Darwin who almost became an Anglican Pastor built his theory of evolution while there are no equations that predict what kind of organism will evolve under a speci IC set of conditions geneticists use probability calculations to compute the likelihood that a particular mutation will spread in a given population similar probabilistic modules have become Central to economics sociology psychology political science and the other social and Natural Sciences even physics eventually supplemented Newton's classical equations with the probability clouds of quantum mechanics we need merely look at the history of education to real ize how far this process has taken us throughout most of History mathematics was an neoteric help that even educated people rarely studied seriously in medieval Europe logic grammar and rhetoric formed the educational core while the teaching of mathematics seldom went beyond simple arithmetic and geometry nobody studied statistics the Undisputed monarch of all Sciences was theology today few students study rhetoric logic is restricted to philosophy departments and theology to seminaries but more and more students are motivated or forced to study mathematics there is an irresistible drift towards the exact Sciences defined as exact by their use of mathematical tools even fields of study that were traditionally part of the humanities such as the study of human language Linguistics and the human psyche psychology rely increasingly on mathematics and seek to present themselves as exact Sciences statistics courses are now part of the basic requirements not just in physics and biology but also in Psychology sociology economics and political science in the course catalog of the psychology department at my own University the RSD required course in the curriculum is Introduction to statistics and methodology in psychological research seconde psychology students must take statistical methods in psychological research confusion Buddha Jesus and Muhammad would have been bewildered if you told them that in order to understand the human mind and cure its illnesses you must first study statistics knowledge is power most people have a hard time digesting modern science because its mathematical language is De cult for our minds to grasp and it thingss often contradict Common Sense out of the 7 billion people in the world how many really understand quantum mechanics cell biology or macroeconomics science nevertheless enjoys immense Prestige because of the new powers it gives us presidents and Generals may not understand Nuclear Physics but they have a good grasp of what nuclear bombs can do in 1620 Francis Bacon published a scientific Manifesto tied a new instrument in it he argued that knowledge is power the real test of knowledge is not whether it is true but whether it empowers us scientists usually assume that no theory is 100% correct consequently truth is a poor test for knowledge the real test is utility a theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge over the centuries science has aired us many new tools some are mental tools such as those used to predict death rates and economic growth even more important are technological tools the connection forged between science and technology is so strong that today people tend to confuse the two we often think that it is impossible to develop new technologies without scientic research and that there is little point in research if it does not result in new technologies in fact the relationship between science and technology is a very recent phenomenon prior to 1,500 Science and Technology were totally separate he when bacon connected the two in the early 17th century it was a revolutionary idea during the 17th and 18th centuries this relationship tightened but the knot was tight only in the 19th century even in 1800 most rulers who wanted a strong Army and most business magnates who wanted a successful business did not bother to finance research in physics biology or economics I don't mean to claim that there is no exception to this rule a good historian can end de precedent for everything but an even better historian knows when these precedents are but curi iOS ities that cloud a big picture generally speaking most premodern rulers and business people did not Nance research about the nature of the universe in order to develop new technologies and most thinkers did not try to translate their endings into technological gadgets rulers nced educational institutions whose mandate was to spread traditional knowledge for the purpose of buttressing the existing order here and there people did develop new technologies but these were usually created by uneducated Craftsman using trial and error not by Scholars pursuing systematic scientic research cart manufacturers built the same carts from the same materials year and year out they did not set aside a percentage of their annual protes in order to research and develop new cart models C design occasionally improved but it was usually thanks to the Ingenuity of some local Carpenter who never set foot in a university and did not even know how to read this was true of the public as well as the private sector whereas modern States call in their scientists to provide Solutions in almost every area of national policy from energy to health to waste disposal ancient kingdoms seldom did so the contrast between then and now is most pronounced in Weaponry when outgoing president Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of The Growing Power of the military industrial complex he left out a part of the equation he should have alerted his country to the military industrial scientic complex because today's Wars are scientic Productions the world's military forces initiate fund and steer a large part of Humanity's scientific research and technological development when World War I bogged down into interminable trench warfare both sides called in the scientists to break the dead luck and save the nation the men in white answered the call and out of the Laboratories rolled a constant stream of new Wonder Weapons combat aircraft poison gas tanks submarines and ever more efficient machine guns artillery pieces rifles and bombs 33 German V2 rocket ready to launch it didn't defeat the Allies but it kept the Germans hoping for a technological Miracle until the very last days of the war science played an even larger role in World War II by late 1944 Germany was losing the war and defeat was imminent a year earlier the Germans allies the Italians had toppled musolini and surrendered to the Allies but Germany kept on even though the British American and Soviet armies were closing in one reason German soldiers and civilians thought not all was lost was that they believed German scientists were about to turn the tide with so-called Miracle weapons such as the V2 rocket and jet powered aircraft while the Germans were working on rockets and jets the American Manhattan Project successfully developed atomic bombs by the time the bomb was ready in early August 1945 Germany had already surrendered but Japan was getting on American forces were poised to invade its home Islands the Japanese vowed to resist the invasion and ght to the death and there was every reason to believe that it was no Idol threat American generals told President Harry EST druman that an invasion of Japan would cost the L of a million American soldiers and would extend the war well into 1946 Truman decided to use the new bomb two weeks and two Adam bombs later Japan surrendered unconditionally and the war was over but science is not just about ends of weapons it plays a major role in our defenses as well today many Americans believe that the solution to terrorism is technological rather than political just give Millions more to the nonot technology industry they believe and the United States could send bionic spy eyes into every Afghan cave yemenite redout in North African encampment once it's done Osama Bin Laden's heirs will not be able to make a cup of koi without a CIA spy why passing this Vital Information back to headquarters in Langley allocate Millions more to brain research and every airport could be equipped with ultra sophisticated fmri scanners that could immediately recognize angry and hateful thoughts in people's brains will it really work who knows Is it wise to develop bionic eyes and thought reading scanners not necessarily be that as it may as you read these lines the US Department of Defense is transferring millions of dollars to nonot technology and brain Laboratories for work on these and other such ideas this obsession with military technology from tanks to adom bombs to spy eyes is a surprisingly recent phenomenon up until the 19th century the V majority of military revolutions were the product of organizational rather than technological changes when alien civilizations met for the rst time technological gaps sometimes played an important role but even in such cases few thought of deliberately creating or enlarging such gaps most Empires did not rise thanks to technological Wizardry and their rulers did not give much thought to technological Improvement the Arabs did not defeat the suced Empire thanks to Superior bows or swords the sjs had no technological advantage over the byzantines and the Mongols did not conquer China with the help of some ingenious new weapon in fact in all these cases the vanquished enjoyed Superior military and civilian technology the Roman army is a particularly good example it was the best army of its day yet technologically speaking Rome had no Edge over Carthage Macedonia or the cusd Empire it's Advantage rested on efficient organization iron discipline and huge Manpower reserves the Roman army never set up a research and development department and its weapons remained more or less the same for centuries on end if the legions of cpio M milanus the general who leveled Carthage and defeated the new mansions in the 2 Century BC had suddenly popped up 500 years later in the age of Constantine the Great cpio would have had a fair chance of beating Constantine now imagine what would happen to a general from a few centuries back say Napoleon if he led his troops against a modern armor and Brigade Napoleon was a brilliant tactician and his men were crack professionals but their skills would be useless in the face of modern Weaponry as in Rome so also in ancient China most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons the most important military invention in the history of China was gunpowder yet to the best of our knowledge gunpowder was invented accidentally by deist Alchemists searching for The Elixir of Life gunpowder's subsequent career is even more telling one might have thought that the deist Alchemists would have made China Master of the world in fact the Chinese used the new compound mainly for rec crackers even as the song Empire collapsed in the face of a Mongol invasion no Emperor set up a medieval Manhattan Project to save the Empire by inventing a doomsday weapon only in the 15th century about 600 years after the invention of gunpowder did cannons become a decisive Factor on afro Asian battlefields why did it take so long for the deadly potential of this substance to be put to military use because it appeared at a time when neither Kings Scholars nor Merchants thought that new military technology could save them or make them Rich the situation began to change in the 15th and 16th centuries but another 200 years went by before most rulers evinced any interest in nancing the research and development of new weapons Logistics and strategy continued to have far greater impact on the outcome of Wars than technology the Napoleonic military machine that crushed the armies of the European powers at austar litz 1805 was armed with more or less the same Weaponry that the army of Louis the 16th had used Napoleon himself despite being an artillery had little interest in new weapons even though scientists and inventors tried to persuade him to fund the development of flying machines submarines and Rockets science Industry and Military technology intertwined only with the Advent of the capitalist system in the industrial revolution once this relationship was established however it quickly transformed the world the idea of progress until the scientic revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress they thought the Golden Age was in the past and that the world was stagnant if not deteriorating strict adherence to the wisdom of the ages might perhaps bring back the good old times and human Ingenuity might conceivably improve this or that facet of daily life however it was considered impossible for human know how to overcome the world's fundamental problems if even Muhammad Jesus Buddha and confucious who knew everything there is to know were unable to abolish famine disease poverty and War from the world how could we expect to do so many faiths believed that someday a messiah would appear and end all wars famines and even death itself but the notion that humankind could do so by discovering new knowledge and inventing new tools was worse than ludicrous it was Hubris the story of the Tower of Babel the story of Icarus the story of the Golem and countless other myths taught people that any attempt to go beyond human limitations would inevitably lead to disappointment and disaster when modern culture admitted that there were many important things that it still did not know and when that admission of ignorance was married to the idea that scientic discoveries could give us new powers people began suspecting that real progress might be possible after all as science began to solve one unsolvable problem after another many became convinced that humankind could overcome any and every Problem by a AC iring and applying new knowledge poverty sickness Wars famines old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind they were simply the fruits of our ignorance 34 Benjamin Franklin disarming the gods a famous example is lightning many cultures believed that lightning was the hammer of an Angry God used to punish sinners in the middle of the 18th century in one of the most celebrated experiments in science IC history Benjamin Franklin knew a kite during a lightning storm to test the hypothesis that lightning is simply an electric current Franklin's empirical observations coupled with his knowledge about the qualities of electrical energy enabled him to invent the lightening rod and disarm the gods poverty is another case in point many cultures have viewed poverty as an inescapable part of this imperfect world according to the New Testament shortly before the crus a woman anointed Christ with precious oil worth 300 dener Jesus disciples scolded the woman for wasting such a huge sum of money instead of giving it to the poor but Jesus defended her saying that the poor you will always have with you and you can help them any time you want but you will not always have me Mark 14-7 today fewer and fewer people including fewer and fewer Christians agree with Jesus on this matter poverty is increasingly seen as a technical problem amable to intervention it's common wisdom that policies based on the latest NS in Agronomy economics medicine and sociology can eliminate poverty and indeed many parts of the world have already been freed from the worst forms of deprivation throughout history societies have sred from two kinds of poverty social poverty which withholds from some people the opportunities available to others and biological poverty which puts the very lives of individuals at risk due to lack of food and shelter perhaps social poverty can never be eradicated but in many countries around the world biological poverty is a thing of the past until recently most people hovered very close to the biological poverty line below which a person lacks enough calories to sustain life for long even small miscalculations or misfortunes could easily push people below that line into starvation natural design Masters and men-m made calamities often plunge entire populations over the abyss causing the death of millions today most of the world's people have a safety net stretched below them individuals are protected from personal Misfortune by Insurance state sponsored Social Security and a plethora of local and international NOS when Calamity strikes in entire region worldwide relief WS are usually successful in preventing the worst people still sewer from numerous de degradations humiliations and poverty related illnesses but in most countries nobody is starving to death in fact in many societies more people are in danger of dying from obesity than from starvation the Gilgamesh project of all Mankind's ostensibly ins soluble problems one has remained the most vexing interesting and important the problem of death itself before the late modern era most religions and ideologies took it for granted that death was our inevitable fate moreover most faiths turned death into the main source of meaning in life try to imagine Islam Christianity or the ancient Egyptian religion in a world without death these Crees taught people that they must come to terms with death and pin their hopes on the afterlife rather than seek to overcome death and live forever here on Earth the best Minds were busy giving meaning to death not trying to escape it that is the theme of the most ancient myth to come down to us the Gilgamesh myth of ancient Sumer its hero is the strongest and most capable man in the world king gilgames of Ruck who could defeat anyone in battle One Day gilgamesh's best friend inadu died Gil gesh Sat by the body and observed it for many days until he saw a worm dropping out of his friend's nostril at that moment Gilgamesh was gripped by a terrible horror and he resolved that he himself would never die he would somehow and a way to defeat death Gilgamesh then undertook A Journey to the End of the Universe killing Lions battling scorpion men ending his way into the underworld there he shattered the stone giants of vabi and the Fairman of the river of the dead and found dut nisham the last survivor of the primordial UT yet Gilgamesh failed in his quest he returned home empty-handed as mortal as ever but with one new piece of wisdom when the gods created man gilgames had learned they set death as man's inevitable Destiny and man must learn to live with it Disciples of progress do not share this defe attitude for men of science death is not an inevitable Destiny but merely a technical problem people die not because the gods decreed it but due to various technical failures a heart attack cancer and infection and every technical problem has a technical solution if the heart utters it can be stimulated by a pacemaker or replaced by a new heart if cancer Rampages it can be killed with drugs or radiation if bacteria proliferate they can be subdued with antibiotics true at present we cannot solve all technical problems but we are working on them our best minds are not wasting their time trying to give meaning to death instead they are busy investigating the physiological hormone Al and genetic systems responsible for disease and old age they are developing new medicines revolutionary treatments and artial organs that will lengthen our lives and might one day Vanquish the Grim Reaper himself until recently you would not have heard scientists or anyone else speak so bluntly defeat death what nonsense we are only trying to cure cancer tuberculosis and Alzheimer's disease they insisted people avoided the issue of death because the goal seemed too elusive why create unreasonable expectations we now at a point however where we can be frank about it the leading project of the scientic revolution is to give humankind eternal life even if killing death seems a distant goal we have already achieved things that were inconceivable a few centuries ago in 1199 King Richard The Lion Heart was struck by an arrow in his left shoulder today we'd say he occurred a minor injury but in 1199 in the absence of antibiotics and active sterilization methods this minor Ash wound turned infected and garine set in the only way to stop the spread of garine in 12th century Europe was to cuto the infected limb impossible when the infection was in his shoulder the gang ring spread through the lion Hart's body and no one could help the king he died in great Agony two weeks later as recently as the 19th century the best doctors still did not know how to prevent infection and stop the putrefaction of tissues in El hospitals doctors routinely cut over the hands and legs of soldiers who received even minor limb injuries fearing gang grein these amputations as well as all other medical procedures such as tooth extraction were done without any anesthetics the RSD anesthetics ether chloroform and morphine endered regular usage in Western medicine only in the middle of the 19th century before the Advent of chloroform Four soldiers had to hold down a wounded comrade while the doctor saw do the injured limb on the morning after the battle of waterl 1815 heaps of saw no hands and legs could be seen adjacent to the El hospitals in those days carpenters and butchers who enlisted to the Army were often sent to serve in the medical core because surgery required little more than knowing your way with knives and saws in the two centuries since water loot things have changed beyond recognition pills injections and sophisticated operations save us from a spade of illnesses and injuries that once dealt in inescapable death sentence they also protect us against countless daily aches and ailments which pre-modern people simply accepted as part of life the average life expectancy jumped from around 25 to 40 years to around 67 in the entire world and to around 80 years in the developed world8 deaths were its worst setbacks in the arena of child mortality until the 20th century between a quarter and a third of the children of agricultural societies never reached adulthood most succumbed to Childhood diseases such as deia measles and smallpox in 17th century England 150 out of every 1,000 newborns died during their RSD year and a third of all children were dead before they reached 15.9 today only V out of 1,000 English babies die during their first year and only seven out of 1,000 die before age 15.10 we can better grasp the full impact of these gears by setting aside statistics and telling some stories a good example is the family of king Edward I of England 1237 to 1307 and his wife Queen Eleanor 1,241 to 90 their children enjoyed the best conditions and the most nurturing surroundings that could be provided in medieval Europe they lived in palaces ate as much food as they liked had plenty of warm clothing well stocked replaces the cleanest water available an army of servants and the best doctors the soures mention 16 children that Queen elanar bore between 1255 and 1284 1 an anonymous daughter born in 1255 died at Birth two a daughter Catherine died either at age one or age three three a daughter Joan died at 6 months four a son John died at age five five a son Henry died at age six six a daughter Eleanor died at age 29 seven an anonymous daughter died at 5 months eight a daughter Joan died at age 35 nine a son Alonso died at age 10 10 a daughter Margaret died at age 58 11 a daughter bangera died at age 2 12 an anonymous daughter died shortly after birth 13 a daughter Mary died at age 53 14 an anonymous son died shortly after birth 15 a daughter Elizabeth died at age 34 16 a son Edward the youngest Edward was the rst of the boys to survive the dangerous years of childhood and at his father's death he ascended the English Throne as King Edward II in other words it took Elanor 16 tries to carry out the most fundamental mission of an English Queen to provide her husband with a male Heir Edward II's mother must have been a woman of exceptional patience and fortitude not so the woman Edward chose for his wife Isabella of France she had him murdered when he was 43.1 to the best of our knowledge elanar and deadward the first were a healthy couple and passed no fatal hereditary illnesses onto their children nevertheless 10 out of the 16 62% died during childhood only six managed to live beyond the age of 11 and only three just 18% lived beyond the age of 40 in addition to these births Elanor most likely had a number of pregnancies that ended in miscarriage on average Edward and ellan are lost a child every 3 years 10 children one after another it's nearly impossible for a parent today to imagine such loss how long will the Gilgamesh project the Quest for immortality take to complete a 100 years 500 years a th000 years when we recall how little we knew about a human body in 1900 and how much knowled we have gained in a single Century there is cause for optimism genetic Engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of kener habd elegans worms do12 could they do the same for Homo sapiens nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of Nono robots who would inhabit our bodies open blocked blood vessels ght viruses and bacteria eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse aging processes do3 a few serious Scholars suggest that by 2050 Some Humans will become immortal not Immortal because they could still die of some accident but Immortal meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely whether or not project Gilgamesh succeeds from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late modern religions and ideologies have already taken death in the afterlife out of the equation until the 18th century religions considered death and its aftermath Central to the meaning of life beginning in the 18th century religions and ideologies such as liberalism socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife what exactly happens to a communist after he or she dies what happens to a capitalist what happens to a feminist it is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx Adam Smith or Simone toir the only modern ideology that still Awards death a central role is nationalism in its more poetic and desperate moments nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will forever live in its Collective memory yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it the sugar daddy of science we are living in a technical age many are convinced that Science and Technology hold the answers to all our problems we should just let the scientists and technicians go on with their work and they will create Heaven here on Earth but science is not an Enterprise that takes place on some Superior moral or spiritual plane Above the Rest of human activity like all other parts of our culture it is shaped by economic political and religious interests science is a very expensive air a biologist seeking to understand the human immune system requires Laboratories test tubes chemicals and electron microscopes not to mention lab assistants electricians plumbers and cleaners an economist seeking to model credit markets must buy computers set up giant datab Banks and develop complicated data processing programs an archaeologist who wishes to understand the behavior of archaic hunter gatherers must travel to distant lands excavate ancient ruins and de fossilized bones and artifacts all of this costs money during during the past 500 years modern science has achieved wonders thanks largely to the willingness of governments businesses foundations and private donors to channel billions of dollars into scientific research these billions have done much more to chart the universe map the planet and catalog the animal kingdom than did Galileo galile Christopher Columbus and Charles Darwin if these particular Geniuses had never been born their insights would probably have occurred to others but if the proper funding were unavailable no intellectual Brilliance could have compensated for that if Darwin had never been born for example we'd today attribute the theory of evolution to Alfred Russell Wallace who came up with the idea of evolution via natural selection independently of Darwin in just a few years later but if the European powers had not nanced geographical Zoological and Botanical research around the world neither Darwin nor Wallace would have had the necess Neary empirical data to develop the theory of evolution it is likely that they would not even have tried why did the billions start owing from government and business goers into labs and universities in academic circles many are naive enough to believe in pure science they believe that government and business altruistically give them money to pursue whatever research projects strike their fancy but this hardly describes the realities of science funding most scientic studies are funded because somebody believes they can help attain some political economic or religious goal for example in the 16th century Kings and bankers channeled enormous resources to n geographical Expeditions around the world but not a penny for studying child psychology this is because Kings and bankers surmise that the discovery of new geographical knowledge would enable them to conquer new lands and set up trade Empires whereas they couldn't see any PR in understanding child psychology in the 1940s the governments of America and the Soviet Union channeled enormous resources to the study of nuclear physics rather than underwater archaeology they surmised that studying nuclear physics would enable them to develop nuclear weapons whereas underwater archaeology was unlikely to help in Wars scientists themselves are not always aware of the political economic and religious interests that control the ow of money many scientists do in fact act out of pure intellectual curiosity however only rarely do scientists dictate the scientific agenda even if we want to denance Pure science uned by political economic or religious interests it would probably be impossible our resources are limited after all ask a congressman to allocate an additional million dollars to the National Science Foundation for basic research and he'll jly ask whether that money wouldn't be better used to fund teacher training or to give a needed break to a troubled Factory in his district to channel limited resources we must answer questions such as what is more important and what is good and these are not scientific questions science can explain what exists in the world how things work and what might be in the future by definition it has no pretensions to knowing what should be in the future only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions consider the following quandry two biologists from from the same Department possessing the same professional skills have both applied for a million dooll Grant to Nance their current research projects Professor slug horn wants to study a disease that infects the utterers of cows causing a 10% decrease in their milk production Professor Sprout wants to study whether cows sewer mentally when they are separated from their calfs assuming that the amount of money is limited and that it is impossible to n both research projects which one should be funded there is no scienic answer to this question there are only political economic and religious answers in today's world it is obvious that slug horn has a better chance of getting the money not because other diseases are scientically more interesting than Bine mentality but because the dairy industry which stands to benit from the research has more political and economic Cloud than the animal rights Lobby perhaps in a strict Hindu Society where cows are sacred or in a society committed to animal rights Professor Sprout would have a better shot but as long as she lives in a society that values the commercial potential of milk and the health of its human citizens over the feelings of cows she best write up her research proposal so as to appeal to those assumptions for example she might write that depression leads to a decrease in milk production if we understand the mental world of dairy cows we could develop psychiatric medication that will improve their mood thus raising milk production by up to 10% I estimate that there is a global annual Market of $250 million for bovine psychiatric medications science is unable to set its own priorities it is also incapable of determining what to do with its discoveries for example from a purely scientic Viewpoint it is unclear what we should do with our increasing understanding of genetics should we use this knowledge to cure cancer to create a race of genetically engineered Supermen or to engineer dairy cows with supersized dutters it is obvious that a liberal government a communist government a Nazi government and a capitalist business Corporation would use the very same scientific discovery for a completely deant purposes and there is no scientific reason to prefer one usage over others in short scientic research can now Ron in Alliance with some religion or ideology the ideology just EES the costs of the research in exchange the ideology and nuances the scientic agenda and determines what to do with the discoveries hence in order to comprehend how humankind has reached Talam magoro and the moon rather than any number of alternative destinations it is not enough to survey the achievements of physicists biologists and sociologists we have to take into account the ideological political and economic forces that shaped physics biology and sociology pushing them in certain directions while neglecting others two forces in particular deserve our attention imperialism and capitalism the feedback loop between science Empire and capital has arguably been history's Chief engine for the past 500 years the following chapters analyze its workings first we'll look at how the twin turbines of Science and empire were lashed to one another and then learn how both were hitched up to the money pump of capitalism