Genesis of the New Ways
Answering the question: “Why and how has it come to this?” revolves around the extraordinary transition of lifeways that occurred about five thousand years ago.
The original way of human life was the basic, natural way (territorial bands and tribes). It prevailed for 99% of our species history, since the evolution of homo two million years ago and then the evolution of sapiens three hundred thousand years ago. There have since been a series of dramatic developmental inflection points:
* the “Great Cultural Leap Forward” about fifty thousand years ago, where evidence first appears of sophisticated symbolic behavior (e.g., art, ornamentation), music and dance, exploitation of large game, and blade technology
* the Neolithic Revolution about ten thousand years ago was characterized by the transition from nomadic hunting/gathering to agriculture and settlement
* the emergence five thousand years ago of the “New Ways” fostering complex technologies and institutions (notably: the state), urbanism, private property, wealth accumulation, class division; which set in motion civilizational trajectories that accelerated greatly after . . .
During the last four hundred years we’ve harnessed electricity, globalized trade, paved over the earth, split the atom, incinerated Hiroshima, conquered space, engineered biota, polluted and denuded the planet, exacerbated ecological imbalances, and decimated local community life. Progress? The next inflection point, characterized by the Sixth Mass Extinction, can hardly be called a higher stage of development.
Social scientists debate the genesis of such trajectories. Naturally the explanation figures to be somewhat complex, but, personally, I used to think that the key factor was population density. Homo sapiens has been a successful species; therefore it has experienced population growth. For millennia the solution to the problem of population becoming too high relative to hunter-gatherer provision was tribal disjunction — some members would go off to find virgin territory. But once humans had spread out across most of the habitable areas of a region they needed to intensify self-production of food instead of simply relying on the bounty of nature for provision. Hence irrigation agriculture arose, along with productivity values (in place of sociality values), ownership of the hard-worked produce, accumulation, wealth, and then all the rest.
I still think that’s true, but I’ve come to feel that there was actually a second key factor involved. (It was such an extreme cultural rupture, such a radical transition of lifeways, that perhaps a confluence of two factors is required to explain it.)
The second factor is psychological.
The Great Leap Forward indicates heightened development of consciousness and imagination. Becoming subjected to such an acute consciousness of vulnerability, precarity, infirmity, mortality — and an imagination of potential dire consequences — caused humans to become neurotic (or worse) . . . needful of a cocoon of cultural assuagement and psychic palliation. Hence the emergence of mythology, religion, stories providing meaning, authorities providing protection, institutions providing transcendence, technologies providing power/control over natural forces.
If this is true, then development was spurred not only by the new centrality of productivity values resulting from “the stick” of population over-density, but also by “the carrot” of the psychic benefits (or hoped-for benefits) of the New Ways complex.
It’s understandable. It didn’t work out too well.
