An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Civilizations

Grounds and groundworks of civilizations

'Civilization’ is not a synonym for ‘being civilized’, ‘progress’, ‘religion’ or ‘culture’. Civilizations are broad societies, striving for the accumulation and consolidation of wealth and power in one center.146 A civilization has vague borders, and power tends to be centralized in a metropolis. Although it is in the habit of civilizations to present an image of stability by means of myth, history writing, rituals and laws, civilizations rise by compulsive accumulation of goods, and thus inevitably disintegrate when resources – human and natural – become exhausted. Endorsed innovations are mostly meant to intensify this exhaustion. Civilizations crave for eternity, but like rare plants, they only grow on special spots for a limited amount of time – typically three to four centuries. As all life forms a civilization can be hampered or aborted at any moment.

As other human organizations, civilizations are neither exclusively material, nor solely spiritual.

Civilizations are conservative by nature. Culture, as a dynamic process, is their opposite. In the best of times they are in conflict. The persecution of Protagoras or Galilei are conflicts between the natural sclerosis of civilizations and the natural dynamics of culture.

Civilizations and empires

Webster defines an empire as ‘an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority’, but defines imperialism as ‘a policy of extending a country’s power’.147

Civilizations could be regarded superstates, and imperialism a phase in the lifecyle of a civilization.

The widespread confusion between empires and civilizations is due to the interference of ideology in the science of history. Civilizations are no spiritual or psychic unions in the style of Hegel or Toynbee. There are no objective criteria to detect such unions: their demarcation depends completely on subjective appreciation by occasional observers or on mythology. If it would ever be possible to objectively determine mental states from the past, it would show that they never outlived the hundred-years horizon.

When civilizations collapse from exhaustion or remain curtailed and unfinished, the void might be filled in various ways: a new metropolis might rise, decades of tribal or nation warfare can follow. A period of decentralized wealth and civilian autonomy might appear as a window for modernity.

The successor of a civilization is not necessarily its challenger. If both are exhausted by the struggle, centuries of anarchy may follow. Then it is likely that a third, fresh party will take power, and start to elaborate its own persistence myths out of the chaos left behind by its predecessor.

Europe has been the home of three main civilizations: the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and the Atlantic civilization. Larger continents have produced more civilizations sooner.

Civilizations and idealism

Scholars like Allan Bloom have proclaimed affinity of American academies with ancient Athens.148 There exists however no bridge strong enough to span twenty four centuries: the ancient Athenians believed that a vacuum was impossible, that gods dwelled among them, that women were despicable. They had sex with their slaves. Furthermore, America never benefited from the trade of ancient Athens. The economic disparity between both is as wide as the philosophical and cultural alienation. Between ancient Athens and contemporary Harvard no objective relation exists - therefore they do not pertain to the same civilization.

Recently Stephen Blaha defended that a civilization is defined by the inner strength or the psyche of its people. This Hegelian spirit can be measured in

political and social institutions, social cohesion, ability to innovate to solve social problems, capacity for technological innovation, flexibility in finding solutions, enterprise in meeting challenges.149

This standpoint is consistent with the general attitude of Atlantic ideology. There is however no historical ground to connect innovation with social institutions or social cohesion. Social institutions persecuted and killed innovators like Ibn al-Muqaffa and Vanini. Descartes wrote during the social non-cohesion of the Thirty Years War, and American institutions attacked the cohesion of enterprises like AT&T with anti-trust laws. Ernst Bloch and Carl Jaspers fled the social and political institutions of Nazism and the cohesion of Nazi mobs. Above such simplifications shines the halo of Atlantic civilization. All good things are attributed to civilizations, and the own civilization is the highest civilization of all.

Still today the thriving of a civilization is explained as a proof of superiority, either expressed in the excellence of a war god, the blood line of the ruler or racial superiority. The latter ideology has been propagated by Hegel, Weber, Landes and many others. In line with this imagery the death of a civilization is interpreted as a celestial or moral chastisement. When a metropolis was set on fire, the resistance crucified and survivors enslaved, there was no doubt that it was punished for its decadence. The Roman Empire was blamed for the same by Augustine. His verdict was adopted by Edward Gibbon (who also blamed Augustine) and has since become common speech.

Toynbee believed that civilizations can last for some thousand years, but within this life span allowed ‘times of troubles’, ‘interregnums’ and all kinds of collapses. Such collapses obviously are devised to bridge centuries of decay to knit separated civilizations together, emulating endurance where there was none. In this way the propaganda of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom is endorsed for cleverly imitating the style of the Ancient Kingdom, two civilizations separated by hundreds of years and hundreds of miles.

Civilization life cycle

A typical civilization exists about four centuries, divided as follows.

The first century is a century of accumulation. This accumulation is triggered by occasional circumstances, not by some national character or virtue. Such circumstances can be a discrepancy between power balance and resource balance, or the discovery of a new land or route. In this century military action is always successful, simply because accumulation is only feasible amidst weaker adversaries, not because of mythical qualities of this one civilization. In the first century of a civilization the cost-benefit balance of war is positive, or there will be no civilization.

The second century is a ‘golden age’, excelling in power, luxury, art, architecture, bureaucracy and mythology. Old civilizations are examined and imitated to fabricate a glorious, ancient past. The own superclass is regarded as forever superior, and others are maltreated and exploited without remorse or fear for retaliation. Luxury and power are taken for granted, change becomes inconceivable.

But just when all major problems seem to be taken care of, resources fall short, and the accumulated power is spent to obtain supplements, both from abroad, with political and military efforts, or by mounting attacks on the environment. In this third century the cost-benefit balance of war turns negative. In spite of the further expanding mythology, the death-sentence is already signed by inflation.

In its final century a civilization dies of the growing cost of standing armies, and of the critical mass of the exponentially growing bureaucracy. Dissidents are attacked increasingly while ideology spreads over the emerging ruins. The metropolis tries in vain to defend its position with increased compulsion and intensified production, and prophets fling visions of defeat and restoration. Finally exhaustion of human and environmental resources become irrevocable. Those root causes remain hidden. As the civilization’s resilience dwindles, it is eventually broken by an occasional dramatic catastrophe, either military or environmental.

Origins

Civilizations are founded on forced labour, and the most prevailing kind of ancient forced labour, agriculture, was initially only possible on soils deposited by either wind (loess) or water (clay). Those deposits are finer than sand originating from weathered rocks. They are free of rubble and can hold moist for a long time.

A belt of fertile loess soil demarcates the ice borders during the latest glacial period. It was deposited in thick layers by tundra storms, out of sea beds after the water was accumulated in the northern icecap. Once defrosted, this loess was invaded by vast beach and oak forests, and foraging bands came to live on its rich variety of plants and animals. The first farmers emigrated along the loess belt, burning down vegetation to sow their grains. Initially, when the harvest was gathered, the exhausted soil was left behind. When population increased, the same parcel needed to be toiled again: the time before it was reused became shorted as population pressure grew. Ever more free land was submitted to ever intensifying agriculture. Foragers, if surviving at all, saw their hunting grounds decline year after year, and eventually had no other choice than to be exterminated or to submit to hard labour.

Clay of oases, pounds, confined riverbeds and marshes also allowed primitive agriculture. Like loess soils, they attracted emigrating farmers who drove back foragers, but neither were suited to engender civilizations.

Civilizations only arose on soils that by their nature pushed towards central power. Rivers fertilizing their borders with fresh layers of clay year by year, and yet surrounded by barren grounds, attracted the most immigrants, and allowed effective concentration and control of vast numbers of labourers. Large rivers were the environments pushing for civilizations. On all suitable continents, among different races and in all kinds of climates, large civilizations appeared along riverbeds whenever forced by population pressure.

Each erring band coming across such a river valley would stay, either as slaves or as enslavers. Some would become thieves, robbers, masters or kings - warlords, landlords or Mafiosi. While already worn out families were pushed ever deeper in the river mud or died in the recurring confrontations about land or power, hierarchical society developed, sometimes as a submission and sometimes as a disparate armistice. Emerging river civilizations are similar to a savannah drinking pool, where predators lie in ambush, awaiting the cattle.

Yet societies on river banks have no longer lifespan than other kingdoms. Intensified production inevitably lead to increasing risks. Plagues – in humans, plants and animals - prosper in more dense populations. Natural catastrophes are closer, and strike harder in a dense society. Rivers overflow their banks year after year, fertilizing the soil with clay minerals, but every few years inundations surpass the usual, and once or twice in a century, always when the least expected, a disastrous flood occurs. Such floods, possibly in combination with cloudbursts and thunderstorms, could dissolve and swipe away farms, settlements and villages made of dry mud, annihilated populations, and only leave behind the stuff for new civilization myths.

Heritage

As long as there remained still new land to toil, heritage was split even, and superfluous heirs emigrated to set up new households. When all suitable land was occupied, emigration became problematic. Sons now competed for succession, and the ill fated were cut out in many ways. In Israel, king David drew on the custom of sacrificing young men in times of famine to get rid of all competing princes of the Saul dynasty: after the hanging Yahweh was ‘entreated for the land’.150 It was told in ancient Rome that once upon a time Amulius killed his brother and made his brother’s daughter a Vestal Virgin, in order to prevent a rivalling dynasty to rise. The plan failed as Mars raped her and she begot Romulus and Remus. Three years before his conversion to Christianity, Constantine had murdered his father in law, the emperor Maximian. Ten years later, in 324 CE, Maximians son Licinus and his grandson were executed. Still two years later Constantine was celebrated in Rome as the first Christian emperor. At that very moment he had his wife Fausta and his eldest son Crispus killed at home.151 When Selim I assumed power over the Ottoman Empire in 1512 CE, he killed all his brothers and all their sons, and killed all his own sons except the crown prince of his choice. In Buganda before the eighteenth century CE, all brothers of each new king were exiled; later, when no space remained for exiles to start a new life, the queen mother waited for the birth of a crown prince, and then ordained the execution of her other sons.152 During the eighteenth century CE, the third generation of European immigrants in New England found no more land fit for expansion, and the custom to split inheritance was replaced by the exclusive right of the firstborn.153

The drive to expand and the enslavement of savages

Once human emigration had reached all corners of the earth – Polynesia and last of all New Zealand, three millennia ago – further migration was at the expense of natives.

The promised land always seems free to take ascompared with the impoverished homeland. This was for instance the case when Europeans entered America. The land seemed untouched in the eyes of people who had lived through a dissonance of burning, fighting, hunger and plagues. In reality the new land was in its entirety taken for the more relaxed production modes of hunter-gatherers and extensive farmers. But savages were easy to eliminate – and, as the Bible said, they deserved to be thrown out of paradise and to toil.

While ever more land was occopied by more intensive farming, a variety of relations with the remaining hunter-gatherers was established, although never with a long time assurance of the latter’s independence. The Egyptians bartered with bashful foraging tribes by leaving goods on sacred places near the woods, and returning the following day to pick up whatever was exchanged for it. Bantu farmers in Central Africa regarded the Pygmies as vassals, but complained a lot about ‘their’ labourers disappearing in the forest when work has to be done. In South America, some Indian farmers rely on hunting bands for armed protection against competing villages.

But in the end, the proliferation of labour was unstoppable and nearly all foragers inevitably became extinct or enlisted. Mesopotamian squads raided mountain hamlets for slaves, and wrote ‘slave’ as a combination of ‘mountain’ and ‘man’ or ‘woman’. The Slavs provided the word ‘slave’ when the Holy Roman Empire chased them from the ninth century CE on – a practice Hitler planned to reintroduce. In nineteenth century Europe, the last savages were hired as day-labourers to fell trees for the hungry furnaces of industry, and in this manner became themselves the destroyers of the woods they had lived by. Eventually they delivered themselves as industrial workers, as before they had delivered their environment as industrial fuel.

As labour expanded, foragers had to give up their freedom to survive as slaves, serfs or day-labourers. Poor families were labouring families. In good times poverty might be tolerable, but climate and politics were never certain, and most of the time labourers lived worse than less reproductive animals. In the toiling seasons they were driven to the fields as mindless cattle, fearing the clerks’ pen when the harvest was counted, and fearing the whip when the harvest fell short. The poor lived in fear forever, for punishment, hunger, plagues, even in fear for hope as yet another source of pain: after centuries, want was blamed instead of shortage, and it became a new religious zeal to submit with all your heart, and to give up all desires and dreams.

Working and feasting

In seasons requiring less land labour, temples and palaces were built. There is no mystery involved in ancient monuments: because the size of monuments was meant to show the power of the ruler, and not his wit, the only important technique was to mobilize as many labourers as available, and make them work without mercy.154 It is even possible to roughly calculate population numbers from the quantity and distance of displaced rock and earth.

No work done was ever enough. Women were even refused a working stop to give birth, for example when they were baking bricks or were driven together with the whip, in one close formation to thump the earthen floors of a new construction. When, after endless stamping, a girl lost her foetus, the whipping and thumping continued back and forth, and the foetus was mashed under the feet and smoothed away in the hardening floor.

Labourers received a minimal portion of grain daily, while regular temple feasts or religious carnivals were organized to distribute anything above a bowl of porridge or a piece of bread, especially fat, meat and ale. Before weeks were introduced, labourers depended fully on such temple feasts for surviving. People consumed meat only on religious occasions. An uncertain chain of propagandistic food distributions was not a fancy: it was propaganda for the powerful and a life necessity for the less fortunate. Already in early gift economies, big men and chiefs gathered prestige by organizing feasts. Potlatches are a kind of giving contests, found by Franz Boaz among the North-American Kwakiutl, by Poseidonius among the Celtic Arverni (from Auvergne in France), by captain James Wilson155 in Tahiti and in contemporary election campaigns and business relations. Guests are loaded with gifts in order to win power. Potlatches sometimes lead to massive destruction of goods when chiefs get entangled in direct rivalry. Goods were burned, slaves were sacrificed, and one Kwakiutl chief, carried away by the moment, even threw his daughter in the bonfire.

Temple feasts had to appeal to all layers and sorts of the community, and nothing was left out to obtain this goal: dancers and singers, phallic representations, enticing harlots, decorated gods, enacted myths, obscene, grave and frightening spectacles, colours and flowers, fattened animals. When populations became to large and widespread for solemn gatherings around temples, the riches and spectacles were carried along the masses in the style of the triumph marches of armies returning with their booty.

Religious processions were clearly inspired by kings returning from the battlefield, in triumph displaying their booty, and at times the difference between religious processions and triumph marches was hard to tell. Returning from a military campaign, Assyrian kings assigned a large part of the booty to the maintenance, restoration and treasures of the temples. Tiglat-Pileser I offered even the gods he had conquered. Ashur-bani-pal, on his victorious return from his campaign against the Elamites, sent the best slaves and the most valuable pieces of loot to the temples. Citizens offered land, slaves, valuables and even children.

Feasts were always connected to events in the lives of kings or gods: in this manner all of society sympathized with the birth or marriage of a prince, the resurrection of a godhead or any other elevated occasion: worship, submission, joy and relief were forced into emotional alignment. In Ancient Egypt, before the weeks were counted, festivals took place every three or four days on the average. In Medieval Europe half of the days were ‘holy days’, in French jours de fête, days of feast.

Altars played an important part in offering feasts. Humans or animals were slaughtered, cooked and consumed in communion with the gods. Of course, those gods usually received only a symbolic part of the sacrificed animal – a libation, or blood, bones -, as the rest was a sacred meal consumed by the community. Exceptionally, when a god had to be urged in the strongest way, the god through fire consumed the entire sacrificed animal. This is what the Greeks called a holocaust.

The Aztecs – living on a continent lacking bovines – organized raids on neighbouring villages, and thousands of captured humans were fattened in anticipation of the feast. Then their hearts were ripped out and consecrated to the sun god, while the bodies were thrown off the temple stairs and grabbed by the populace, to be cooked and consumed. Local temples subsisted on gifts from people in need of exalted relief. Sometimes – as under Solomon – only animals farmed by the temple staff were accepted as a valid sacrifice, and must be paid for by the faithful.

Altars were built in the open to air out the appalling smell of rotting flesh and blood. In Central America altars were located on top of the temples, while in the Middle East they were situated in their vicinity, often within the courtyard. An important trade in incense and myrrh, aimed to overcome the rotten smell, brought wealth to kingdoms in eastern Africa and Southern Arabia. The Egyptian queen Hatshepsut, when building her temple in Western Thebes, had carved on the walls an expedition into African Punt, culminating in piles of myrrh gum and thirty potted myrrh trees; and when the queen of Sheba undertook her voyage to the court of Solomon, she crossed the Arabian Desert with a train of camels loaded with incense resins.

Emergence of clerkdom: temples, monasteries, academies

A complex society needs a large administration to direct labour; to create and spread ideology, including religion; to organize propagandistic feasts and processions; to compose hymns and design cosmology; to redistribute goods gathered by warfare and labour. Clerks initially live in the ruler’s palace, but depending on the twists of history, bureaucracy can evolve to an independent commercial enterprise or even assume military power – the Indian Kayastha caste for example is represented wit an ink-pot in one hand and a sword in the other. Clerks can challenge kingship power when complexity of administration outgrows the importance of arms.

In order to rule vast territories a middle class is indispensable. But the rise of an aristocracy also increases the number of superfluous middle class youngsters. While exile and murder had worked well to eliminate challengers of the king's throne, those remedies could hardly be generally used to protect aristocratic estates without jeopardizing social stability. Those youngsters were recruited by the clerkdom and locked away in ministries, temples and monasteries. Lifelong imprisonment of oblate children became a general practice.

Depending on the prestige of their families and the gifts coming along with them, oblate children could become monk, priest, slave, prostitute or performer. The career of the biblical Samuel, founder and first priest-king of Israel, was started when his mother offered him to the temple:

When she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bullocks, and one ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, and brought him unto the house of the Lord in Shiloh: and the child was young. And they slew a bullock, and brought the child to Eli. [..] as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord. 156

In European medieval times, monasteries had children’s dormitories. For children below ten, the parents took the vow of lifelong chastity on their behalf. To break this vow – either as the child or as the parent - was a serious crime. Youngsters not always carried their fate in submission, and runaways were often chased and punished. A story about Saint Benedict allows a glimpse in the mind of an oblate:

Saint Benedict ate, and a young man which was son to a great lord held to him a candle, and began to think in his heart who is this that I serve? I am son unto a great man; it appertaineth not that one so gentle a man as I am be servant to him... 157

During the Chinese Chou dynasty in the twelfth century BCE, the Shih, clerks at the feudal courts, turned into a new class, in between nobles and commoners. Those studious people, eager for a kind of honourable alternative to knighthood, brought forth and embraced wandering teachers as Confucius and Mencius.

Thomas Aquinas was donated as a six year old to the Benedictine monastery at Italian Monte Cassino, and thus found opportunities for an intellectual career, in his days only available in this type of households.

While being trained in writing and bookkeeping, those youngsters grew into an intellectual class of clerks, taking pride not in battle, but in study. In their own view they were not discarded, but had proudly forsaken the coarse, illiterate world themselves. The pride and esteem of warfare was sided by the pride and esteem of study and office. Both as a group and as individuals, they were forever torn apart between ideology and curiosity, rage and reason. They became bearers of the worst threat to humanity, as well as its only change of deliverance.

Soldiers and clerks

For a long time clerks were a servile workforce to the palace, organising yards, writing records and singing hymns, packing palaces with wealth and predicting the future, all in the ruler’s favour. But while kingdoms expand their territory over a critical limit, the rulers are obliged to entrust ever more power to bureaucracy. Inevitably clerkdom evolved to a new force, seeking independence, building own households and challenging kingship. Extensions to the household of the ruler, at first built in honour of his forefather god, evolved to the god’s – read the clerk’s - temples. Those temples followed the customs of the palaces they copied, and even could surpass them in luxury with dancers, musicians, poets and warehouses. After time the palace might specialize in warfare and the temple in storage, and inevitably bureaucracy would benefit ever more of fresh supplies, either distributed, stored away or exposed in splendour.

The internal dynamics of a civilization is largely defined by the antagonism between the palace household with its king and warriors, and the temple household with its high priests and administrators. The nature of a civilization is such that those two can not exist without each other, while they are always entangled in a political conflict or worse. Rarely was the conflict between temple and palace appeased for more than one or two generations. Sometimes the clerks managed to appoint generals or kings from their ranks; sometimes they managed to make a king their marionette. Kings had to play their cards daring but cautiously, and often external warfare was needed to find the riches needed to appease the clerks. When Constantine substituted classic religion for Christianity, he replaced a too expensive bureaucracy by a dynamic new one, for the price of only daily bread.

In the Atlantic civilization the old institution of clerks is as imperative as in any other. Like in all times clerks are torn between satisfying their masters need for power on the one hand, and intellectual freedom on the other, and are sentenced forever to this plight.

Powers of clerks can turn into personal attributes, and ancient gift and barter customs can become part of the execution of their function. This can range from requiring fees - lawfully or not - to obeisance or at least some submissive display. Central power can punish such customs or, in order to construct a chain of authority, approve such practices and officalize stipends. The exact borderline between corruption and barter depends on the cultural setting and is not always clear. Priests in India and in Europe, and in many other places, lived by the money paid for rituals; European Church princes benefited from prebends; some African customs-officers expect fees; some judges in the Middle East today, and in seventeenth century Europe (for example in the case of Francis Bacon) expected gifts from the accused. An extreme example of a judge accepting gifts from the prosecuted is found in the final judgement of monotheism, an imagery certainly modelled after traditional practices.

From the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea

Until three thousand years ago the Arabian Sea was part of a waterway connecting the Southeast Asian islands to the east coasts of Africa. The Malayo-Polynesian language reached Madagascar along this way. Surrounded by the Indus river, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea like sunbeams, the Arabian Sea was also a meeing place of Asian and African cultures. Here the Phoenicians transported Egyptian and Assyrian cargo, and even rounded the African continent millenaries before Vasco da Gama, who is today commonly credited as the first to have achieved this feat.158

But there was more at stake than trade alone: no civilization can reach a certain level of complexity without sufficient interaction. Despite clerks zealously constructing myths to prove their exceptional status, none of the civilizations around the Arabian Sea could have grown to the full without the others.

By the twelfth century BCE new migrations had set the whole world from Egypt to Assyria and beyond on fire. An immense torrent shattered the course of the Indus river, and the Indus civilization collapsed in bloodshed. The wise Vyasa summarized this drama in only a few words when soothing a mourning prince:

“You and your brothers have done your duty. Do not mourn for the fall of the Yavadas, because their time is fulfilled. Time is the seed of victory and the seed of destruction.” Then a flood unseen before swallowed the city of Dvaraka.159

The Persians – in the opinion of Herodotus the best historians of their time – recounted that the Phoenicians migrated from the Arabian Sea to the Mediterranean. Traders of old, the Phoenicians brought with them a better art of writing and of long distance travel.

Before the dawn of the last millenium BCE, all great civilizations that had thrived in Asia and Africa had disappeared. Fresh warlords tried to rebuild and imitate the splendid ruins of ancient monuments and empires. The Mediterranean was dominated, one after the other, by Phoenicians, Minoans, Lydians, Greeks and Romans. Each of their civilizations was influenced by others through trading, warfare, travelling and enslaving, while everything was done to eradicate traces of such influences and to depict their society as the outcome of an unpolluted lineage founded by the gods. In this, there was no difference with older civilizations. But no civilization can rise on its own.

The warfare, started by large movements of populations in search of new land, grew into and incurable cancer. The immense Persian army was just one step. Cities and countries fell evermore victim to killing and plunder. After Alexander warfare gave up the illusion of society building. War between expanding populations became ordinary practice, and the growth of armies and of the catastrophes they caused raised to their power. Always larger packs were driven against each other with blades and clubs, and stole, raped and burned everything on their way. The whole inhabited world was scoured by hollow scum yelling names of gods, as a pest of rats raging through desolate ruins, parading in each devastated city as heroes clad in stylish armour, posing sturdy as saviours with victims muted by pain – an unreal nightmare breaking over and over into the daylight of reality. And all were dumb enough to believe they served a worthy cause.

By the time of the Roman empire warfare had become daily life, war for the sake of war, completely absorbed in folklore: new booty had to be paraded at regular intervals in the metropolis’ avenues. Hailing Victory had become official religion, and violence had become fashionable at the home front, where theatres were built to keep the bloodshed going in between, in continuous performances from dawn till dusk.

Amidst those ancient ruins, unstable borders, altering mythologies and hostile ideologies, uncertain tides of progress and modernity searched their way.