An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

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

Modernity

Progress is the residue of a multitude of failing histories

History has witnessed both magnificent and gruesome inventions, and some people wonder if it would not be better if humanity had remained ignorant, and had never constructed nuclear weapons or ravaged the earth’s biosphere. Indeed technology puts the very same people at risk who expect to benefit from it. The embankment of a riverside, built to reduce the frequency of inundations, can either bring safety or in the end kill more people, because the scarcer inundations will be more violent and less expected, or will be forced into more crowded areas.

Many people, witnessing how technology expands while their world becomes ever more aggressive, fear that technology will soon make every acceptable way of life impossible. But the real cause of growing aggression is that the human population no longer can be supported in a relaxed manner, by the available natural resources of our planet. When we see technology deployed in various problem fields, this correlation makes us blame technology. But the picture would be totally different if we would keep our population in pace with our environment and at the same time deploy technology for our comfort, safety and enjoyment.

Progress is not the simple aggregate of successive innovations, it is the growth of the dignity of each individual. Progress needs innovations, but innovations don’t guarantee progress.

It is unknown how many times humans made a slight step forward in speech, fire keeping or tool making, but to be saved from oblivion only once it was necessary that advances were dispersed over many different bands living separate histories. Sometimes a band survived long enough to keep a skill alive and pass it on. One exceptional intelligent band would not be sufficient to guard small and vulnerable technologies for thousands of centuries, through catastrophic changes in the environment, let alone turn those technologies into stepping-stones to further development. The progress made over the last two million years is not accomplished by one civilization or race. It is even the accumulation of innovations of three successive human species.

Progress is the residue of a multitude of failing histories, of which not everything is lost every time.

Because progress continues while civilizations disappear, it can only persist and grow if borders are crossed. Whenever technologies from various places came together and were recognized as different practices to reach similar goals, the aggregate of such variations revealed wider possibilities. Local magic joined into crafts, and crafts into theories. Still new encounters made such theories interfere, compete and evolve. In this way our minds developed awareness of alternatives and choice – qualities essential to thinking.

Take medicine for example. Still today the very large majority of prescribed drugs have a history going back to prehistoric knowledge about healing plants. Because differing cultures exchanged medicinal experiences, observations and imageries over a long period of time, this knowledge could reach our time. Study of this knowledge inspired contemporary pharmacologists to new synthetical drugs.

The crossing of social barriers has even so contributed to the advance of medicine. In 1883 CE Bismarck installed a health security system in Germany, in order to fend off socialist revolutionaries. In the next century public health care grew into an essential element of modernity. During this one century, more people have been examined by a doctor, and doctors have gathered more experience in diagnostics, than in all the centuries before, and as a consequence medicine changed beyond recognition. Growing public health in its turn added many fresh minds and viewpoints to the human task force, and as a consequence affected progress in all other fields. Heidegger, Jaspers, Einstein, Max Planck, Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann etc. all grew up in the shelter of this health system. Progress is not a sudden wonder of the last centuries, its origins involve the whole human past and all human strata.

Appreciated in this manner the interim balance of progress, achieved by humanity as a whole and accidentally fallen to Western society at this moment in time, shows a surplus beyond doubt. In the end, progress exists, and we carefully need to consider its benefits.

The difference between progress and civilization

Progress happens out of need and good fortune, when opportunities allow the furthering of improvements made by others, in earlier times and in other places. Often more recent civilizations look down on out-dated knowledge, or at its exotic formulation. Yet the present knowledge is only made possible by the ideas that came first. Although recent ideas always seem to be more crucial, the preceding were always more challenging. The first paper sheet was more difficult to make than the billion sheets produced today, and the invention of gun powder was more difficult than the invention of a rocket. Even Aristotle, the celebrated 'father of science' of European ideology, acknowledged this:

For in the case of all discoveries the results of previous labours that have been handed down from others have been advanced bit by bit by those who have taken them on, whereas the original discoveries generally make advance that is small at first though much more useful than the development which later springs out of them. For it may be that in everything, as the saying is, ‘the first start is the main part’: and for this reason also it is the most difficult; for in proportion as it is most potent in its influence, so it is smallest in its compass and therefore most difficult to see: whereas when this is once discovered, it is easier to add and develop the remainder in connection with it.313

The difference between progress and an accidental civilization is visible in the life span of each. The famous Arnold Toynbee identified thirty-four civilizations flourishing within the last five thousand years. Some of those civilizations supposedly existed for millennia.314 This is a miscalculation consistent with mythical records of legendary lifetimes of forefathers and kings, and is explicable by Toynbee’s preoccupation with the mental, religious and ethical echoes in such records. It is meaningful that the civilizations of which we know the most, are assigned the shortest duration. When our knowledge about seemingly long living civilizations is refined, they fall apart in separate civilizations lasting a few centuries each. The Egyptiac civilization, estimated by Toynbee to have survived for three millennia, is the most remarkable discrepancy. Although Toynbee had access to data unavailable to Ancient Roman historians, Lucretius seem to have better understood the conceited claims of civilizations:

we live as mortals by eternal give and take.
The nations wax, the nations wane away;
In a brief space the generations pass,
And like to runners hand the lamp of life
One to another. 315

Unfortunately those verses are often interpreted as pessimistic romanticism instead of the sharp observation they are. Appendix A presents a rough reconstruction of the duration of some seventy civilizations, not by relying on their own persistence myths, but on intermittent periods of disorder and decay. Those periods may seem details if seen from afar, but in reality exceed the hundred-years horizon, and thus where unbridgeable by anything other than mythology. In this reconstruction the life time of a civilization is seldom more than four centuries.

Each step of progress has been countered and recuperated by official clerkdom. Progress comes under pressure with each flourishing civilization. Knowledge, as it is right then, is frozen in a new, fixed cosmology. Because the dominance of the world must be unquestionable, knowledge of the world must be complete and final. Changes are unacceptable violations of sacred power and universal truth.

In the end we see undeniable progress survive, not because, but despite civilizations. It took three to four million years to evolve from the first stone chopper with just one sharp edge, over stone axes trimmed by a mounting number of blows, up to metal knifes. Such progress is not carried as an ark of wisdom by one race or one enduring civilization, but has stone stepped over dozens of rigid civilizations while suspiciously avoiding painful blisters from their burning stakes.

The Atlantic civilization can be used to demonstrate how civilizations work. Pharmacological knowledge for example suffered during the Roman Empire, when elegant theories based on the four elements were preferred to explain illness above seemingly unstructured, unfinished lists of random plants. The only treatise on pharmacology, written by Dioscorides in the first century CE, was seldom copied, or the copyists did not bother to include the indispensable pictures. Whatever survived was completely eradicated during Medieval which hunts.

When the use of quinine was learned from Peruvian Indians, European clerks detested and resisted it for decades as a herb from the devil. But when its benefits could no longer be denied, quinine became a European achievement, and the same people who had resisted the drug took quinine to their missions on other continents to demonstrate the superiority of their own ancient tradition. Refutation and recuperation could happen simultaneously: while Galilei was persecuted by the Inquisition in Rome, missionaries propagated his inventions in China.

The divide between superstition and reason was never as clear-cut as historians of Western science want us to believe. Superstition did not end in classical Greece - not even in modern Europe. Descartes was convinced that ‘the knowledge of all things depends upon the knowledge of God’.316 Isaac Newton was convinced that gravitation would stop immediately if God were not actively involved: ‘blind fate could never make all the planets move.’317 Leibniz wrote that ‘God has been determined by reasons of wisdom and order to give nature those laws which we observe in it,’ and criticized the Cartesians of his days for their assumption that God had commanded the course of the universe once, at the beginning, because this would put an end to free will and make God responsible for our sins.318

Like the ideologies of all civilizations, Atlantic ideology built persistence myths by freely picking or refuting ancient texts.

The study of progress

There are two options to compose a chronicle of progress: the first is to concede to burners of books, and accept that nobody had anything useful to say before and outside the canon of the accidental civilization.

The other option is to try to reconstruct, out of the bits that have been left, the steady human progress towards modernity in the face of physical and ideological counteractions by succeeding ideologies. This second option stands no chance if we stick to the thesis that none but the surviving historical documents have ever existed, and abide by the dogma that the documents that were allowed to survive do not testify of humanity as a whole, but only of conveniently delimited races or populations.319 We must, for example, resolutely reject the common but unfounded assertion that the writings of Aristotle are representative of the ‘Greek (read: European) mind’. Most Greeks not even comprehend them, as neither do most people in other countries.

We must provisionally allow the hypothesis that thinkers on any continent, as far as they lived under comparable conditions, faced roughly the same challenges at roughly the same time and comparable circumstances, because during most of history ideas, by force of curiosity and excitement, moved around the world within a few years as today within a few seconds.320 Unless racial discrepancies are taken for granted, it must be expected that all civilizations arrive at simular questions and similar answers under similar circumstances. The most important circumstances in this respect are social structures, production modes and cultural exchange.

The intrinsic value of an ancient document can only be revealed by reducing the impact of three capturing frames: the first frame is the cultural environment to which the maker had to concede, possibly unaware, in order to have his work circulated; the second frame is the cultural environment of the beholder, who inevitably applies his own semantics, imagery and preferences. This frame changes the meaning of texts, works of art and monuments each century. The third frame, the most difficult to distinguish, is set up by translators, editors and spoilers in between. To evaluate a document, it must be appreciated how and why it arrived at this place and time, how it has been edited in the course of time, and if alternative versions or additional texts have been destroyed, by extrapolating ideological campaigns, by following trails of refugees, and by filling gaps by means of comparision with other cultures, without admitting cultural particularism.321

Spontaneous generation of knowledge is as ludicrous as spontaneous generation of animals. Just as mice come from parent mice and so on, and not from a pile of garbage, knowledge did not pop up in the recent civilization, but evolved over millions of years, while it was exchanged between passing bands, tribes and cultures. To pick out one mice and say that for that mice it ‘has not been proven’ that it had a mother would be scorned by scientists, while the same claim for their civilization is praised.

The less traditions persist, the more tradition is stressed. In a living society more relevant things change faster. What remains unchanged are hollow symbols, meaning different things in every century.

The tremendous significance of ancient artefacts, monuments and texts lies not in their prevalence or righteousness, but in their potency to educate us about humanness and the hazards of history. Just as the destruction of an ecosystem can destroy a cure for cancer, the demolition of the world’s historic and cultural inheritance can bereave us from a path to a better existence.

Texts, monuments and artworks, whenever they overcame destruction and oblivion, should be recognized as the combined legacy of the whole of humanity. Then we un-burn the books in a sense, and even more: we invite the world community to take further part in the astounding modernity that inspires our time.

The difference between progress and democracy

Democracy is not the same as voting. Most societies are democratic, in the sense that those in power are endorsed by the majority of the people. When a demagogue can convince a sufficiently large group that he is the right dictator, he can be brought to power by the majority, if necessary by means of violence. This majority runs the economy, pays taxes, delivers clerks, troops and maybe executioners. No ballot will deny such a dictator's position. Except for interventions by foreign powers, stable societies have, generally speaking, a government desired by the majority of their population. If such a government is no longer desired, it will inevitably be replaced by means of street protests, mutiny, revolution etc. In a democracy based on polls it is all the same possible that the lawful majority maltreats minorities, wages wrong wars or commits injustice in many other ways. In all those cases there is little difference between the law of the jungle and democracy.

Only progress and modernity can make a real direct democracy possible, because such a democracy requires a population of emancipated individuals, with free minds, unhampered by destitution, borders, censorship or secrecy. Only such individuals can evaluate practices of human rights, warmongering, corruption, repression etc.

In order to present the Atlantic civilization as the cradle of modern democracy, every vote against its interests is categorized as undemocratic. Like divine grace only comes from heaven, freedom only comes from the the Atlantic civilization. Ballot victories of unreliable parties, for example in Venezuela when Hugo Chávez became president,322 or in Palestine when the Hamas movement won authority,323 are deemed undemocratic, in contrast with the bombardment of foreign cities and the handling of politics in foreign countries. A democracy imposed by armed forces from abroad – even if called 'nation building' - hardly deserves that name. It is a ghost-democracy.

A sort of freedom

Still using the Atlantic civilization as a showcase for civilizions in general, we must examine the ideology behind the export of freedom. The justification is an amalgamation of a sort of democracy, invented of course by the ancient Greeks and brought to its highest expression in the West, and the Free Market, which must be understood as unleashed capitalism. Democracy and freedom defined in this manner are the Burger King and Pepsi of world politics. A country refusing it must either be out of its mind, or plain evildoers.

Despite all visionary claims of its superiority, this Free Market would go off the rails the moment heavily armed states would stop interfering. Never before so many borders were guarded so severely as during the era of the Free Market. It needs laws and armed forces for tax import, for the promotion of export, to regulate competition and prices, to restrict wages, to build roads, ports, railways, to provide security and so on. The Free Market is conceived together with the nation state, and can not survive without its strong arm. Al this has not so much to do with the dignity and liberties of humanity.

One example of how Atlantic civilization had changed freedom from a universal human right into vulgar greed is the Economic Freedom Index of the World, as presented in the 2005 Annual Report from the Fraser Institute. The report was created with the support of many eminent economists, most notably Noble Prize winner and free market champion Milton Friedman.324 The Fraser Institute calls it its mission to promote ‘greater choice, competitive markets, and personal responsibility.’ It should surprise nobody that the thorough research of the Institute demonstrates time and again that a government without income and yet defending unconstrained foreign voracity is good for everyone.

The report ‘would prefer to have components that can be measured objectively’ but leans heavily on perceptions of business leaders and investment experts.325 As a consequence, countries that promote investments score well on the Economic Freedom Index. What is best for foreign investors is also best for the local population, as long as there is no environmental or human rights regulation, no social security, no health care and so on.

But a hundred economists can’t talk straight what’s twisted. The first interesting discrepancy in the report is that a genuine scientific study which states that economic freedom ‘requires governments to do some things but refrain from doing others’, would at least estimate the taxes required ‘to do some things'. Yet countries get higher ratings if they have smaller budgets, and the highest rating if they have no budget at all. A scientific study without ideological bias should consider both the benefits and the deficits of taxes, or frankly admit that taxes are superfluous because it is bad for the economy if citizens are protected from exploitation and other calamities.

Even more bewildering is the absence of any causal analysis. The report says that the countries ranking higher on the Economic Freedom Index perform better in the fields of peace and wealth, and implicates unargumented that the first is the cause of the latter. It is evidently better to invest in more stable environments, disregarding how this stability came about. What if the scientific study of the honoured Fraser Institute - surely to everyone's surprise - would proof beyond doubt that we can become richer by investing under a reign of terror or in a society where chattel slavery is firmly established? This is not as far-fetched as it sounds.

One country featuring in the top ten list is the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, of which reports mention abuse of migrant workers to the brink of slavery, child sex tourism, offhand flogging of (mostly Asian) prisoners, and ineffective health care.326

Singapore, scoring the second best out of 127 nations on the Economic Freedom Index, is known by Amnesty International and by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child for its bad human rights record, with thirty-seven individuals held without charge or trial, and an execution rate of 86 lives in three years. Whipping and caning is routine; foreign domestic workers are mistreated by employers and employment agents;327 freedom of expression and assembly are curbed by legislation, censorship and government controls;328 and Jehovah’s witnesses and homosexuals are persecuted. Four out of five people live in housings built, owned and maintained by government, and the leading newspaper (the Strait Times) is closely linked to government. Maybe this are 'some things' a government should do after all.329

People have an unalienable right to freedom, because they are born that way, not because it makes money. And this right should also be unalienable to local populations, even if this makes investmens less attractive on the short term. This is an other kind of democracy.

The difference between progress and development

The starting point of progress lies deep in prehistory. The starting point of development, on the other hand, lies in the difference in wealth between a metropolis and the outskirts of its civiliziation. Underdeveloped societies are imagined for the first time in the sixteenth century CE. Before they were degenerated, later retarded, then underdeveloped and finally developing. In any case they are seen as immature countries which must follow the guidance of the civilization to escape their age old poverty. Progress is then no longer simple improvement, but submission.

It is more accurate and a lot simpler to speak of poor countries. Poverty is not natural nor normal. Poor countries are deceived in two ways, and both hinder escape from poverty: the first deception is that their poverty is typical for savage continents, and that they are primitives growing up into full members of the civilization.330 The second deception is that all what is needed is to end poverty, is to see through the first deception.

International organizations like the World Bank and the IMF profess that progress is synonym to industrialization, based on capital investment. But if plunder is to take away masses of goods and give little in return, industry can be a plundering tool or a development tool. David Landes writes:

The Industrial Revolution made some countries richer and others (relatively) poorer; or more accurately, some countries made an industrial revolution and became rich; and others did not and stayed poor.

This sounds as if the smart guys deserved to become rich, and nobody was really harmed in the process, but it is in fact a reiterating of the degeneration theory of the first missionaries. The only difference is that missionaries took Christianity, while Landes takes economy for reference. Landes adds a few paragraphs further:

And for still others, as for the Amerindians or Tasmanians, it was apocalypse, a terrible fate imposed from without.331

Despite this casual but chilling addition the first slogan remains firmly printed and spreads unfounded relieve among whoever is in need of it: the poor have to blame themselves, they should have made an industrial revolution like normal people. Landes never really assessed in a scientific manner the poverty of countries which before industrialization lived happily without national income accounting, and he can not represent in financial graphs the poverty of the exterminated populations he mentions in between. Conveniently the victims are either dead, numb or lazy – anything as long as no claim can be filed against those countries that deserved to become richer. A less biased historian will under the given circumstances listen to the victims to quantify poverty and progress, and will soon dismiss the cynical proposition that some became rich while fortunately everyone else either maintained the same quality of life or died out.

The same economists who would cry for the police if a cactus was stolen from their driveway, invest much effort in rationalizing a one-sided free market in which continents are destroyed at a scale undreamed of by Alexander.

Post-colonial development

When the European colonization period was over, only a few non-Western states managed to build an economy comparable to the poorest members of the European Union. They became known as ‘the four dragons’: South Korea, Hong-Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Mike Mason explains:

None of the Dragons developed on the basis of the strategies recommended by the IMF and the World Bank – that is, on the principles of the “free market.” Rather, all of them developed within the embrace of “the plan” – that is, the dirigist and protectionist state. Finally, they all were small: two of them, Hong-Kong and Singapore, are essentially islands. It is doubtful just how far their lessons can be adopted to larger, more complex societies. 332

The bulk of poor countries tried to play the free market with too massive and too cheap agricultural exports, and got entrapped in debts. Their situation worsened each time they obeyed the Western directed IMF and World Bank to industrialize production further, and made prices collapse.

Massive export of low-valued products provokes the exact opposite of progress: it leads to the deterioration of land, labour and life, and eventually to suicide on the international market place. All countries which invested in mass production destroyed or sold out valuable resources and environments, only to become victims of the oil crisis of the seventies and the recession of the eighties. It is a reiteration of the ten millennia old custom of raiding and plundering subjected ground, now called development.

Sri Lanka came in serious debt when massive tea production, recently introduced as development in African countries, divided the tea price by two. Tanzania went down the same path when the sisal price tumbled because synthetic ropes hit the market, and Ghana suffered from the same scenario with its cocoa export…

Primary products, with very few exceptions, are a bad business to be in if you want a steady livelihood, but most of the developing countries depend on just one, two or at most three commodities. Hence their balance of payments, and the foreign exchange they need to buy machinery for their fledgling industries, is completely at the mercy of the fickle commodity trade winds.333

Once poor countries are convinced that they will become rich by massively flooding the world markets with cheap commodities, they beg for the industrialization and mass production of their own pillage. After the exhaustion of their local resources, as happened before with European forests, African ivory and American Wide Range herds, they become forever entrapped in the international aid industry.

Western dominated international organizations and multinational companies control market prices to a large extent. While poor countries are working on the edge of calamity to sell out, those in international power need only to give a little push in one direction and make a whole country go bankrupt. The debts piled up in the process are a catastrophe to the poor, while their creditors consider them a bargain price for world power.

In 1987 CE, Graham Hancock wrote, the debt-service obligations of Somalia were 167 % of export earnings. As a consequence, Somalia’s economy is dominated by foreign aid.334 Argentina took up tremendous loans to throw tons of fish and agricultural products on the world market for almost nothing. Distributors in other countries sell this food for a fraction of the price of their home-grown products. Despite the massive production, Argentinian debts and unemployment are high, and millions suffer increasing poverty. Mass production of export goods had brought about mass production of unemployment and cheap labour at home and abroad. Argentina went bankrupt.

Graham Hancock concludes that development aid most of all uses poor countries as a market for Western employment and as a garbage dump. He wrote:

During the past twenty years millions of rural people in Africa, in Asia and in Latin America have been forcibly removed from their homes to make space for the expanding reservoirs of giant hydroelectric dams [..] In Ethiopia’s Awash valley, Afar nomads whose traditional dry season pasture lands have been sown with cash crops and surrounded by barbed wire are today reduced to absolute penury, their independence gone, their way of life shattered, their dignity destroyed as they queue in line for food handouts. Brazilian Indians whose rainforests have been felled in the name of progress now face genocide; their unique knowledge and skills are about to be lost to mankind forever. In Indonesia’s ‘thousand island’ paradise, tribal people are remorseless being extinguished and priceless ecological resources turned to ash and mud amidst the folly of the largest resettlement programme in history…335

Ancient and recent modernity

We sometimes met modernity for too short a while on the long, precarious path of progress. It survived life threatening attacks of many ephemeral ideologies: Muslim, Christian and other civilizations have executed innocent and valuable people to stop the same progress and modernity they claim as their own achievements, once they enter their golden century of power.

As abundant as traces of modernity are in recent centuries, as difficult is it to reconstruct the evolution of modernity in the rest of history. While the great civilizations have left ruins of hard granite and treasures of imperishable gold, the traces left behind by short-lived moments of modernity are made of softer clay and perishable wood. Nonetheless, over millenaries such modernity cropped up in Egypt, India, Babylon, Alexandria and Europe.

One hint of emerging modernity can be the decay of central power. Other hints are vanishing borders, either when central power is unable to control a growing territory, or when the supervision of remote territories is commissioned to local aristocrats. Since wars cross borders per sé, they engender exchange, both in the course of actual hostilities and in the anarchy of their aftermath.

A common trace of modernity is the shift of concern to the individual person. Poetry, music and arts begin to express more personal feelings; persons of all ages and classes dare to voice individual views; philosophies attach increasing importance to real life suffering.

Living together implies that most of the time people can rely upon not being harmed by others. The only way to find out how not to harm equals, is by recalling what is harmful for oneself. The Golden Rule ‘treat others as you want to be treated yourself’ expresses the essence of those ethics. The rule was uttered simultaneously during the sixth century BCE in Persia, China and India. It has made its way into the Hindu Mahabharata, the Jewish Talmud, the Christian bible and the Islamic Sunnah, and has been defended by Socrates, Seneca and Jesus. Whenever this Golden Rule - also called ‘reciprocal ethics’ - is taken as an universal ethical conduct among equally responsible individuals, it is a token of modernity.336

Finally modernity is given away by the rise of skepticism towards official theories, if it left traces in surviving documents.

The spirit of the age

Often the Spirit of the Age is called upon to explain historical differences in dressing, artistic styles and thinking.337 Thinking is indeed different in different times, because experience evolves and thoughts stem from experience. But unfortunately the Spirit of the Age is also used endorse whatever wrong was performed in the past by ideological forebears. Backfiring, it can be used to endorse present day injustice.

Slavery, crucifying enemies, throwing heretics before the lions, burning at the stake, torture and pogroms are all absolved by the benevolent Spirit of the Age. On the other hand, throwing Christians before the lions, crucifying Jesus, stealing four grains of gold are despicable acts, throughout all succeeding ages.

It is appalling to claim that there was ever a time when victims experienced physical abuses different from ourselves, or that they were inflicted in such a way that the executers could remain ignorant of the suffering. And in this matter, as in others, there is no split between writing ideology on the one hand, and kindling the stake on the other: both are the ideological and the industrial side of the same violence.

A deplorable consequence of supposed relativity of suffering is that it allows to doubt suffering any time and anywhere. If suffering is not the same for everyone at all times, the spirit of the present age can be invoked to fabricate excuses for any atrocity. Thus a multi-cultural nephew of the old spirit has emerged. The Vietnamese did not mind to be killed all that much, because they mourned in white dresses. Palestinian suicide attacks are explained as a cultural curiosity, which is even more appalling if this reasoning comes from Muslims living in good health who brag that they are not afraid of dying.

Suffering is suffering. Always. Everywhere.

The Spirit of The Age is also used in a blatant circular reasoning. Believers are continuously asked to step outside the spirit of their age in order to condone acts of founders, prophets and priests, who supposedly acted in the spirit of their age. More intellectual effort is asked from followers and heathens than from venerated authorities, who are otherwise hailed as challengers of the same spirit.

Hints of modernity

Halfway the third millennium BCE the civilization of the pyramid builders had worn out its golden age. While Egyptian central power withered, trade with Syria, Anatolia, Mesopotamia and tropical Africa grew, and modernity flourished for a few centuries. Archaeologists discovered, between the monumental ruins, statues of clay of this period, not expressing the reticence of the gods or the power of kings, but lively, feeling humans. One artefact is a little statue of Pharaoh Raneferef, who died in 2416 BCE without managing to build more than a few stone layers of his pyramid. He is portrayed as a man with a still smile, his head slightly bowed, as in contemplation.338 From the same time stem various other small clay statues, all portraits with stunningly personal traits; the best known is possibly the portrait of a scribe, friendly but attentively looking up from his work. Looking in one particular person’s thoughtful eyes over a distance of four millennia is a shivering experience, but also a fascinating proof of the antiquity of modernity.339

From about the same time date statuettes of a similar style, but discovered In the Ishtar temple of Mari, in the Euphrates region. At the time Mari was a border city, more aware of various traditions and thus more perceptible to skepticism. Some twenty small statuettes of men, women and couples reside in the Musée du Louvre. They all radiate a personal state of mind similar to their Egyptian counterparts, a thousand kilometres away. The most famous statuette from Mari is one made of translucent alabaster, representing the high priest Ebih-Ili as a pensive individual, silent but with astounding vivacity.340

The hierarchic world-image was based on the presumption that living things, including gods, demons, plants and animals have their own ‘nature’ or ‘substance’, which defined their social place. A slave was naturally a slave, an emperor was naturally an emperor, and so on. This world was unchangeable.

In pre-dynastic times the Nile Delta belonged to the cultural region of the Middle East. In this region vegetation gods – Osiris, Dionysus, Baal, Tammuz - were prevalent. The worship of those gods stemmed from forefather cults.

In a temple in the Nile Delta a dinosaur fossil was revered as Osiris’ backbone, and the magical properties of this relic certainly contributed to his growing popularity.341 Osiris obtained a minor place in the Egyptian pantheon, and became involved in complex magical rituals, devised to liberate the deceased Pharaoh from the underworld and to lead him towards eternal life.

As wealthy owners of country estates, officials and nobility had always been susceptible to the imagery of an underworld god, responding to prayers for good harvests and prosperity. When the power of the deified Pharaoh declined, Osiris recruited a growing number of worshippers among them.

Osiris’ success forced pharaonic ideologists to link him to Ra, sun god and father of the Pharaoh. In one myth Ra turned into Osiris during nightfall, and Osiris was even called ‘the Ba342 of Ra’. When the Pharaoh died, Osiris guided him through darkness, and each morning the Pharaoh, like the rising sun, mounted to the throne.

Nobility followed the Pharaoh's footsteps in the underworld, and urged the priesthood to trust their own afterlife in the hands of Osiris. But to bestow immortality on regular humans remained an awkward thing to do, and in the Coffin Texts we find passages where the deceased was magically disguised as the immortal Osiris, in order to transverse unharmed the difficult path to afterlife. 343 This more ‘democratic’ connection of Osiris with nobility left traces in Osiris' hymns:

Thou art a shining noble at the head of the nobles, permanent in big rank, established in sovereignty, the beneficent power of the company of the gods.

Because of his significance for the dispersed aristocracy, Osiris acquired temples in numerous cities and evolved to the most widespread god of ancient Egypt. Just like the Jews demanded that there be only one temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem, and Muslims turn to Mecca wherever they say their prayers, Egyptian clerkdom tried to concentrate and check power in one chosen metropolis: it was a question of power politics, but it was also common-sense to stick to one household for one god. Now a new myth was needed to explain how the worship of Osiris had become so dispersed - how it was possible that just one god could be worshipped in so many temples. In this myth another deity, Set, was accused of tearing the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces and to have scattered them throughout the land of Egypt. This deity, Set, had been popular during the second dynasty. The myth continues with Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, sailing the Nile and building a temple wherever she found one part of Osiris.344

For the first time we know, an escape from the underworld other than oblivion passed the hundred-years horizon, became conceivable for beings without divine nature.345 In the Book of Death the deceased, going through severe ordeals to ward off his second death, asks Atum ‘how long have I to live?’. The god answers:

Thou shalt exist for millions of millions of years, a period of millions of years.346

This new doctrine - that there exists for humans a way out to immortality – not only spread rapidly throughout Egypt, but eventually reached an even wider audience. Fresh and fascinating, it found its way into many cultures, and merged in the process with Shamanistic and Vedic imagery. It became a mysterious secret whispered in dark abodes, as well as a dogma of triumphant ideologies. It terrified the gods of Genesis, who chased the first man from paradise ‘lest he would take of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’347; combined with Indian influences it entered Greece in the Orphic mysteries and evolved to Pythagoreanism. It influenced Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle and others. It led to the transformation of the ephemeral, ghostly appearances of the dead into immortal souls. It inspired Zoroaster and Ezekiel to modify age-old legends of the victorious resurrection of tribal warriors, into a vision of the revival of the bones of the faithful and, unified with their immortal souls, living in an eternal golden age. In contrast, it made Plato and his followers, up to Gnosticism and Manicheanism, to imagine that the soul could live on by itself, without the need for a revolting mortal body. It also invoked the widespread Roman Isis-cult and the ensuing European Maria cult.

Ancient Egyptian funerary customs were still widely practised at the beginning of the first millennium CE, but were now open to the broadest range of wealthy citizens. The Musée du Louvre (as well as the British Museum) possesses a number of burial objects dating from this period discovered in the oasis of Fayum, a flourishing community of Egyptians, Greeks, Libyans and others.

For a long time the objects from Fayum were stowed away in the catacombs of the Louvre, because the curator considered them too difficult to classify. Like illegitimate bastards, they did not fit into the Egyptian department, nor in the Greco-Roman department. This was not just a problem of arrangement – it was another testimony of the widespread academic mistake that high cultures are necessarily ‘pure’ and that exchange is synonymous to defilement. Put otherwise, the curator did not fully grasp ancient modernity, and its tremendous importance for history.

At this moment the artefacts from the Egyptian oasis have found their own spot in the museum, and especially the funerary portraits, painted on wood and placed over the coffin, are fascinating. Speaking, lucid, delicate and utterly individual, they are the most touching testimonies of modernity in antiquity.

The rather detailed historical records we have of Egypt are in contrast with our absolute ignorance of the Indian past. Yet archaeologists have discerned a period of intensive trade between the Indic civilization and Mesopotamia during the same centuries mentioned above for Egypt. Consequently, India might have experienced a local rise modernity at about the same time as Egypt and Mesopotamia. In the Rig Veda, a long list of hymns, spells and prayers, appear paragraphs with surprisingly skeptical insight, which are difficult to date but possibly were composed at the end of the third millennium BCE:

Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?
The gods are later than this world’s creation. Who knows then whence it first came into being?
He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.348

Towards the end of the second millennium BCE the human avalanche ruined all old civilizations. The endurance eagerly professed in the cosmologies of civilizations had flawed under growing population pressure, still reinforced by unrelenting immigration of Northern savages.349 Humanity became trapped in warfare and repression; the rage of war either left no room for moments of modernity, or destroyed all its traces. At the time borders were still hazy. Natural obstacles like rivers, wastelands and mountain rims were never completely sealed: nomad tribes found their way through fords and gorges, and even took part in economies at either side of the frontier. As land became ever more scarce, growing conflicts with new settlers eventually changed borders into forts overlooking strategic passages, unpredictable raider encampments, and random battle fields on muddy plains. Tribal leagues gathered around warrior gods and begged them for courage and victory. Phoenicians colonized Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. Following discourse was spoken by Moses to fire his tribes when invading Palestine, but similar verses must have been heard from Africa to China, among tribes and confederations raiding the Mediterranean, and among leagues of Libyans, Hittites, Hsiung-Nu and so on:

There is none like the God of Jeshurun, who rides upon the heaven [..] and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, destroy them.[..] and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places.350

In the course of those wars iron replaced copper as the main constituent of weaponry. Since iron is produced in the manner of bronze, it must have been found by accident many times. Yet it had been neglected until then: it needed more combustibles to build up more heat, was harder to smith, much less durable and, even more important, its sombre colour and rusting nature contradicted the glittering essence of invincible splendour, uttered in innumerable myths, and so well illustrated by bronze. Homer, tough deep in the Iron Age, chose to adorn a hero ‘all glorious in his armour of gleaming bronze’. But as fights in the real world became grimmer, the dark but sharper metal substituted the glittering but weaker. Humanity had to meet its growing numbers with more efficient killing equipment, and iron was deadly effective. The black metal’s power bestowed it with magical repute wherever it was deployed. The Khoisan foragers believed humans can be killed by nothing but the natural poison that iron possesses, a conviction that reveals the vast shift in human relations brought about in forager communities by this metal. Krishna was also killed with an iron arrow in his foot, and his death was the beginning of the sombre Kali age, reflected in the iron age of Persian, Greek and biblical mythology. Sir James Frazer has given many illustrations of the frightening power of iron:

Roman and Sabine priests might not be shaved with iron but only with bronze razors or shears [..]. As a general rule iron might not be brought into Greek sanctuaries. In Crete sacrifices were offered to Menedemus without the use of iron, because the legend ran that an iron weapon in the Trojan War had killed Menedemus. The Archon of Plataea might not touch iron [..]. To this day a Hottentot priest never uses an iron knife, but always a sharp splint of quartz, in sacrificing an animal or circumcising a lad. Among the Ovambo of South-west Africa custom requires that lads should be circumcised with a sharp flint; if none is to hand, the operation may be performed with iron, but the iron must afterwards be buried. Among the Moquis of Arizona stone knives, hatchets, and so on have passed out of common use, but are retained in religious ceremonies. After the Pawnees had ceased to use stone arrow-heads for ordinary purposes, they still employed them to slay the sacrifices, whether human captives or buffalo and deer. Among the Jews no iron tool was used in building the Temple at Jerusalem or in making an altar... 351

The last millennium BCE, marked by disintegrating civilizations and splendid ruins, the prospect of modernity shined briefly through periods of hopeless obscurity - like when after nights filled with thunderstorms, just before dawn the clouds break up, and light is cast low over the day ahead.

Under Persian influence Greek scholars taught that the individual was more important than the community; that religious motivation was untrustworthy; that people had to decide themselves how to act for the better; that all knowledge was doubtable, and that absolute knowledge was the most dubious of all; that races, social classes and populations had to be valued equally; and finally, that slavery was despicable.

We know those 'sophistes' mostly because of their derision in later writings, and the best preserved proof of their existence is the fierce opposition by a terrified Plato. In his writings Plato rejected the open society and progress, in favour of an immovable higher world, in which eternal power was never contested, the ideal form of earthly dictatorship with closed borders and imposed austerity. His arguments are reiterated by most coercive religions which flourish today in the East and in the West.352

Around the seventh century BCE sacrifice could no longer provide the credibility and luxury of the large temple staffs, and at the same time deliver enough surpluses to distribute among all segments of society. The powerful appeal of the temples in Asia and Africa started withering away. Karl Jaspers coined this moment in history the axis age, and depicted it in an idealistic manner, as if it was the sudden outbursts of new moral consciousness, an evolutionary step forward in humanness. In reality, the decay of the temples lead - occasionally - to the reappraisal of rules of conduct which civilizations had ignored and even suppressed, but had never been completely annihilated in villages and slums. The challenge of thinkers was to find a pathway through the chaotic turmoil of cosmological claims and constructions, and to rebuild the forgotten language of essential social awareness.

A growing number of people lost confidence in official ceremonies and turned to charlatans, prophets, shamans, renegade priests, philosophers and outcasts, dressed in wilfully ragged or flamboyant clothing, sometimes self-mutilated or their faces coloured with paint, blood and ashes, enticing their audience with cheap magic, or making them laugh with rude spectacle, consecrating harlots, gaining a few miserable gifts of food or drinks - and transforming humanity in the course. Some of them would retreat to a temple ruin or sacred site of pilgrimage, enhancing their performance by the fame of the scenery. Others would travel along fairs, festivals, markets and temple porches, and even gather an entourage on the route. Disciples might be sent ahead to warm the public, assisted in staged wonders, and mingled among the audience with their begging naps. Herodotus witnessed such a spectacle when a male goat on the porch of an Egyptian temple was made to penetrate a woman. Other priests appear in the Rig Veda ‘satisfied recitating hymns, wandering around, brabbling nonsense’353. The Khandogya Upanishad calls those priests dogs

holding together, each dog keeping the tail of the preceding dog in his mouth […] they began to say Hin: Om, let us eat! Om, let us drink! Om, may the divine Varuna, Pragapati, Savitri bring us food! Lord of food, bring hither food, bring it, Om!354

The Bible also seizes those omnipresent stray dogs to portray the loud-mouthed enemies of the true faith:

They return at evening: they make a noise like a dog, and go round about the city. Behold, they belch out with their mouth: swords are in their lips: for who, say they, doth hear? But thou, O Lord, shalt laugh at them; thou shalt have all the heathen in derision.355

Pythagoras was revered as Apollo Hyperboreus – god of the high north - referring to shaman powers attributed to him, while the skeptic Heracleitus called him an imposture who ‘claimed for his own wisdom what was but a knowledge of many things’.

Empedocles was said to have awaken a woman who had been dead for thirty days, and healed a madman by means of music – a Pythagorean trait. Like Pythagoras he was an apostate adept of Orphism, and like Pythagoras he claimed to be a god:

I go about among you an immortal god, no mortal now, honoured among all as is meet, crowned with fillets and flowery garlands. Straightway, whenever I enter with these in my train, both men and women, into the flourishing towns, is reverence done me; they go after me in countless throngs, asking of me what is the way to gain; some desiring oracles, while some, who for many a weary day have been pierced by the grievous pangs of all manner of sickness, beg to hear from me the word of healing.

Heracleitus also sneered at ‘night-walkers, magians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine barrel, and the initiated of Orphism, Pythagoreans…’, and Plato complains about similar swindlers in his Republic:

mendicant prophets go to rich men’s doors and persuade them that they have a power committed to them by the gods of making an atonement for a man’s own or his ancestor’s sins by sacrifices or charms, with rejoicings and feasts; and they promise to harm an enemy, whether just or unjust, at a small cost; with magic arts and incantations binding heaven, as they say, to execute their will .[..] And they produce a host of books written by Musaeus and Orpheus, who were children of the sun and the muses - that is what they say - according to which they perform their ritual, and persuade not only individuals, but whole cities, that expiations and atonements for sin may be made by sacrifices and amusements which fill a vacant hour, and are equally at the service of the living and the dead; the latter sort they call mysteries, and they redeem us from the pains of hell, but if we neglect them no one knows what awaits us.

A few serious thinkers travelled with this jumble, while many took a position in between: not always cheating, but sometimes stressing their views with an effective piece of magic; not always jabbering fantasies, but sometimes speaking as one who had glimpsed bewildering new things. From this racket arose fresh imageries, which could not have been made by the blessed, nor by the rude on their own.

In certain unusual crises it takes a fool to find a breakout, and the blind leading the blind sometimes is the last option available – and might by mere luck disclose passages no one else dared to go.

The most important distillates out of this boiling retort were growing skepticism towards the temples and their myths and rites, and revaluation of practical ethics. Gods responded less to pleas and offerings, and people lost interest in the ideologies proclaimed by their temples. Yet there was no way back to the ancient state of mind: cosmologies could not be narrowed away, their place could only be filled by equally elaborated doctrines with more reticent gods. Complex mythologies anticipated complex science.

At the beginning of the last millennium BCE, after centuries of migration and warfare, decay sneaked in. Wood rots, people grow old and sick, and die. Houses decay, cities become ruins, kingdoms fall. Of course this had always been the case, but now it seemed as for the first time decay crept out the far off slums, grew out of control and ruled all parts of the visible world up to the most splendid palaces. Ideologies and myths about everlasting dynasties had to compete wit a new urgent question: was there an escape, an uncontaminated shelter?

When India was exhausted, offered meat became at first restricted to the priesthood, but this caused protest and reformers banned all slaughter of cattle. Buddha stated:

Purify your hearts and cease to kill; that is true religion. Rituals have no efficacy; prayers are vain repetitions; and incantations have no saving power. But to abandon covetousness and lust, to become free from evil passions, and to give up all hatred and ill-will, that is the right sacrifice and the true worship.356

In Judah at about the same time, the temple institutions, still polytheistic, came under pressure when factions acted against consumption of certain animals and against the creation of images of living beings, and propagated the Babylonian week, with one fixed day of rest and offering replacing the declining festivals. More austere laws and commandments replaced gradually the complex Near-Eastern mythology and indulgent feasts.

Jeremiah, orating in the temple gates, warned the entering public not to trust in ‘lying words, saying the temple of the Lord’: prosperity could only be restored if bloody offerings were replaced by mutual care:

Thoroughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye thoroughly execute judgement between a man and his neighbour; if ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place.357

And sacrifices had never been good religion anyway:

Thus saith the Lord […]: I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices, but this thing commanded I them, saying, obey my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my people. 358

The Chinese temple economy never developed centres as powerful as those of the Babylonian or Egyptian civilizations. The Yellow River is surrounded by fertile loess soils, and thus lacked the integrative force of rivers banks in more arid regions. Clerks never created a real priesthood power, but remained committed to the feudal ministries. As elsewhere, those ministries where never entirely profane because the nearness of power, which is always sacred to some extent, inevitably caught the institution in a light of pagan devotion and solemn knowledge. A king is always sacred to some extent, and there is no clear division between ministries and monasteries.

In the time of Buddha and Jeremiah, Lao-tsu was an archivist at the declining Chou court. While barbarian invaders disintegrated the Chinese empire into warrior states fighting each other in ephemeral alliances, he became a restless wanderer, everywhere teaching the doctrine that happiness is only possible by tempering of desire. This doctrine, the Tao, is recorded in the Tao-te Ching.359 Because China had no dominating central ideology, Taoism and Confucianism had a head start in dealing with the crucial question: how can we live a good life?

Lao-tsu believed that long time ago the world lingered in a natural, paradisical state of quietude. Although it seems that he praised emptiness, Lao-tsu had a practical agenda, purposely contrasting with the bigger-than-life mythology and philosophy of which his time was tired:

In this manner the sage cares for people: he provides for the belly, not for the senses; he ignores abstraction and holds fast to substance.

Western philosophy never managed to reject entirely the fuzziness of world systems expressed in persistence myths. From Plato to Hegel the feeling remained that anything interesting should at least have mythological magnitude and pomposity. Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, tackled the issue that precedes all other issues: our tangible existence. The Tao-Te-Ching reads:

Powerful men are well advised not to use violence, for violence has a habit of returning; thorns and weeds grow wherever an army goes, and lean years follow a great war [..] even the strongest force will weaken with time, and then its violence will return, and kill it.

The aged Lao-tsu met the young Confucius (Chinese K’ung Fu-tzu) on several occasions. While Lao-Tsu - if not his followers - was sometimes carried away by fancy exaggerations, Confucius went still further in practicality, and, witnessing how clerks not only failed to prevent the many social troubles of his time, but even caused some themselves, spent his life pondering the problems of good society.

Rather than to declare big-headed, complicated constructs of thought, both thinkers constantly replied to laborious questions with mild simplicity. In the Analects the disciple Tsze-kung asks Confucius:

“Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?”

Confucius answers:

“Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others”. 360

The Romans

Our perception of the time after Alexander the Great is flawed in two ways. The first is the caricature of a radiating Greek (read Germanic) genius. This caricature depicts the spread of European civilization in a barbarous, retarded world. The second flaw is the presentation of Rome as a grisly world, only changed by Christianity into a humane society at the cost of much effort and sacrifice.

The following are a few quotes from a poem written at the end of the last millennium BCE by the otherwise unknown Titus Lucretius Carus. Written by an unheard of heathen, we would never know the poem if Cicero had not published it himself. Cicero was highly esteemed by Saint Augustine, who knew him badly. As a consequence, the poem became one of the very few heathen works which, by mistake, was not burned.361

Lucretius was an adept of the besmirched Epicurus, but his work rather represents the imagery of a wider range of Roman citizens . The poem wants to counter the fear to die, much instigated by coercive religions, with the help of reason:

But most to see with reasonable eyes
Of what the mind, of what the soul is made,
And what it is so terrible that breaks
On us asleep, or waking in disease,
Until we seem to mark and hear at hand
Men’s bones that earth embraced longtime ago.

This fear must indeed be countered by putting things in a wider perspective:

Many a river seems huge
To him who never saw a larger one;
Thus huge seems tree or man. And everything
Which mortals see the biggest of each class,
That he imagines to be “huge”; though yet
All these, with sky and land and sea to boot,
Are all as nothing to the sum of all.

The gods have no part to play in society, and have no dealings with humans:

For all the gods must of themselves enjoy
Immortal aeons and supreme repose,
Withdrawn from our affairs, detached, afar…

Social status and destiny are not given by nature and are not innate, they are only unreliable twists of fate:

But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth,
Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else
Which come and go whilst Nature stands the same,
We are wont, and rightly, to call accidents.

Heracleitus, ‘famous for dark speech among the silly’, is refuted for his gratuitous theory that war and fire are the roots of the cosmos. There simply is no rigid universe led by a distinct succession of causes, modelled after hierarchic society or after chains of military command. There is no central power ruling the cosmos. The universe is free of nonsense like the ‘first mover’, ‘supreme being’, ‘most perfect’, ‘highest power’, ‘almighty’. It is fluid and egalitarian, composed of an infinite shower of atoms, ‘germs of things’, merged with void, combining into transient, accidental reality.

For truly matter coheres not, crowds not tight,
Since we behold each thing to wane away,
And we observe how all flows on and off,

Only a few sparks of this surge of modernity remained slumbering below the surface of monotheism.362

Europe

We can more easily discern modernity in recent European artefacts. From the sixteenth century on we are flooded by texts, paintings and other documents celebrating the value of individuals. They are so abundant that even traditionalists do not hesitate to call upon those divergences of old to defend ‘Western values’ or ‘Western tradition’ while fending off every new divergence from their own way of life.363

It will be difficult to find a more clear division between ancient and modern art than between the works of the fifteenth century painter Jan Van Eyck and the sixteenth century painter Pieter Bruegel. All becomes clear in the comparison of two works.

The Adoration of The Lamb of Van Eyck an eternal immovable world is built around the definitive ruler of the world, Jesus Christ, enthroned in full splendour, a giant figure amidst hundreds of worshippers. The painting the most antagonistic with The Adoration of the Lamb is Bruegel’s Procession to Calvary. Bruegel is the painter of common people, alive at the verge of coarseness. The colour of holiness was not on his pallet. As in many of his works, this one shows hundreds of people in a jumble of daily occupations. Only after some time the uninformed but attentive viewer will discover that one of the small figures is struggling with a huge wooden cross on his back, while heading towards a hill in the background. Only a few of the other figures seem to be interested in the drama going on. In another background corner, a steep rock is painted. On this rock a windmill, turning with the squalls, is kept upright by ropes. A gospel quote of Jesus comes easily to mind: ‘upon this rock I will build my church’.364