Judaism
The Origins of Culture and Religion
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 6 September 2007
Seeking Religious Origins
The Romans of the classical periods had already forgotten the original meaning of the word, “religion”, a word which belongs to the earliest period of the Latin language. They surmised it came from the word “bind” (“ligare” or “religare”), and literally means “what binds man to the gods”, but the word would then have to be “religation”, not “religion”, so we are looking at Latin popular etymology here rather than anything scientific. Robert Graves speculated that the root of the word “religion” might be the Latin expression “rem legere” meaning “to choose a thing”—the tribe’s shamans or diviners had to choose whatever thing or course of action that might obtain divine favour—meaning, be successful. If the origin of the word “religion” is in the Latin meaning “to bind”, it is more likely to concern the old habit of tying charms, letters or potients on a chord around the neck, or tied to a sleeve or a belt, and therefore called “ligatures”.
One way or another, religion came to mean, “the belief in and worship of gods”. Religious skeptics in ancient Greece and Rome speculated about how mankind came to believe in gods. The Roman poet Lucretius explained:
Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods.
Since then there have been many attempts to understand how this strange and widespread phenomenon arose. It has to be admitted that nobody knows and it is likely that no one will ever know. To study the emergence of religion in mankind is to study the emergence of mankind, or at least civilization. No men are currently emerging from apes, so the occurrence cannot be studied directly. Plainly, it could not have evolved until human consciousness evolved, but unlike the evolution of species, which leave fossils, however inadequate they might be, the evolution of such human traits as language and religion have left nothing that can unequivocally be attributed to them until so late in human development that they can be of no assistance in determining origins.
Defining religion is a poor way to start an anthropological study, if it is to be based on field work. If no one knows how religion began, then any definition of it might cut off some important element that fell outside the definition. So anything like totemism, magic, taboo, superstition, witchcraft has to be considered as legitimate. Nineteenth century intellectuals, who categorised primitive people of today as unintelligent or incapable of having religious thoughts, were being purely racialist.
Those same middle class intellectuals did not even know how the working classes of their own society lived, yet made pronouncements about the mentality of Negroes, Bushmen, Aboriginals, American Indians, Melanesians and others. They said the Veddahs of Ceylon could not speak except in grunts and signs and could not make themselves intelligible in the dark. They speak Sinhalese! Sinhalese is an Indo-European language related to English, German, Latin and Russian! The Veddahs had no religion, the nineteenth century armchair anthropologists wrongly told us. People so primitive that they hardly had a language can not have had a religion.
Though they were wrong about the Veddahs, the deduction that there could be no religion without language seems reasonable, though only speculative. Religion is a social phenomenon that could be present only in social animals, and requires communication between them. It cannot have grown without language. People born to certain parents had no more choice of their religion than they had of their language.
Religion is like language also in giving local cultures an identity. The extinction of a language is the extinction of a people—ask a Welshman! People feel the same about their religion. Whatever is apparently revered in a religion is at core a symbol of the people themself. The god, totem or fetish of a clan is the clan, in a sense that is real to the members of it but is unexpressed. The individual identifies with the clan and the clan lives on after the individual dies, so the individual accepts that they have part that is immortal—their soul. So, warriors might say that they might die in battle but their souls will be spiritually with the surviving soldiers. Whence the idea of guardian angels.
All of recorded history and much of human prehistory of the last 40,000 years concerns the social, cultural and technological evolution of modern people. The species, Homo sapiens has not altered physically in any detectable way in that time. The change has been entirely in knowledge and the application of the brain. Religion is part of this change, it is cultural, and we need to know how culture arose to know how religion did.
The Real Garden of Eden
The stone age was truly a Garden of Eden. Human beings evolved as social animals. They had formed groups out of a need for cooperation to survive in their environments. Our closes animal relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos are similarly social animals, but gorillas and orang-utans, a little further removed are solitary. Individuals ran a higher risk of going without food, being attacked by others or wild animals, and so not passing on their genes. Together, resources were shared, mates were made available, and protection was provided. Human hunter gatherers moved around, hunting animals and foraging for food. Then tribal people settled in a location, but still hunted and gathered, perhaps practising some light gardening.
Marvin Harris (Cannibals and Kings) describes the evolution of civilization from these primitive bands of hunters and gatherers, deploying evidence from ancient peoples, primitive communities still extant, and examples in the modern world. To correct the problems that civilization faces, we must understand how these problems arose and continued throughout history. His hypothesis is called cultural materialism. It is the idea that material and ecological conditions explain socio-cultural practices.
Drawing on proposals of T Malthus and K Marx, Harris suggested ecological crises arose from the intensification of food production to maintain living standards threatened by population increase. People try to compensate for decreasing material resources with technological developments, like the plough and irrigation, that temporarily boost production, but then permits a further population increase so that returns per head again fall. Each increase in intensification depleted the environment more, again reducing the efficiency of production, and extending the crisis.
Stone age people were healthier than almost any others until modern times. Even in early nineteenth century England, life expectancy was little different from what it was 20,000 years before. By abandoning hunter-gathering for agriculture, humanity definitely became unhealthier. So, why did they do it? Part of the answer is that most of them did not. All innovations begin with just a few, but those few did it, and must have had a reason. The answer is competition for resources, in those days, mostly food. Population rises slowly but inexorably until the food is insufficient for all of those who want it. Then people have to compete for it or regulate the population by killing unwanted people, usually infants.
Today, in our Christian culture, this is forbidden, but in early cultures in human history, it was permitted and sensible, in the absence of effective contraceptives. The culling of surplus children was done by neglect—not nurturing them—or exposure to Nature—wild animals or the cold. It was up to a Roman father to decide whether he could support another child when his wife got pregnant. If he could not, the child was exposed to the elements and wild beasts and returned to the gods. E E Evans-Pritchard made a close study of the Nuer of Sudan finding among many other things that when someone was struck by lightning, not an uncommon occurrence, they do not mourn because they consider god to have taken back his own!
The Canaanites gave unwanted children back to their sun god, in the bible called Moloch (Baal Melekh), and the offering of Isaac, tied to the top of a pyre, by Abraham was the same practice. It was tragic for parents, particularly mothers who had carried the child to full term, and that was why it was presented as a sacrifice to their god, or the return of an unwanted gift—it ameliorated the pain—but the ashes of the little offerings were kept in a Garden of Rest called a tophet and treated with the deepest reverence. These parents knew that they could not keep the gift without harming their existing children, for every child born could not be supported by the family or by society. The parents had to make an unenviable choice, but without it early civilizations could not have survived without stretching resources to breaking point.
Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth century vicar, showed that, without control, population would always grow until there was murderous competition for food. Today condoms and contraceptive pills make it unnecessary, if people only used them… were allowed to use them!
Population growth, as Malthus showed, put pressure on our hunter gatherer ancestors once it went beyond a certain low level. Climate change from the last ice age was changing animal populations so that the herds disappeared from some regions and people were faced with overpopulation locally. Hunter gatherer women breast feed much later than settled women, until their infants were three or four, and this kept them quite naturally from being fertile while they had a child already being suckled. The nursing infant took around 1000 kcals a day from the mother so she could only manage one realistically, and even then needed to have accumulated a store of fatty tissue to be able to feed the child. So human women have some degree of hormonal control of fertility while they are nursing at the breast.
Even so, it is not foolproof, and a woman might get pregnant anyway. Then the new child would have to be killed for the sake of the mother and existing child, and the whole band for whom excess infants were a liability. When the population reached a point where competion for the food resources began to get tight, infanticide was a natural way of keeping the population of local bands of humans down. It was depletion of the herds that was the pressure. The women could still gather nuts, roots, berries, grubs and grain, but the boost of animal protein began to be harder to get. Then the qualititative jump to agriculture became necessary.
Why did it not happen earlier? It is because the bands of humans enjoyed an idyllic existence as long as the herds were not over hunted, and they deliberately regulated their population for considerable periods by infanticide, thus having no compelling need to change their life style. Studies of the hunter gatherer bands that have survived into modern times shows that they control their population this way, thereby keeping human and animal populations stable.
They were not trying to avoid a future in agriculture which they obviously could not foresee, but knew that overpopulation would be disastrous. They understood their own situation and that there were practical limits to the size of the bands that, when they grew to beyond a certain size, necessitated them splitting, but then two bands would be in competition. So, they kept the size of their own band below a critical point. As long as they did this, life was pretty hunky-dory.
Richard Lee of Toronto university showed that Kalahari Bushmen, though living in a desert, needed to work only three hours a day per adult to survive comfortably—that is, they had sufficient to eat, of good enough quality. Studies of Amazon indians gave similar findings, only slightly more effort being needed. How they apportioned the time was entirely their own decision. They had no bosses, and no foremen.
The Bushman’s wife might decide to gather with her chums and their kids for the whole of one day, yielding enough to feed the family for the next two as well, so, in those, she could visit her mother or entertain her mother in law, or she could make clothes, or sit around and chatter. Some of the time she did have to devote to domestic duties, collecting fuel for cooking, cooking the food and getting water, but it all took between one and three hours depending on how near the resources were. In Europe and the ANE, 20,000 years ago, the resources were more bountiful than in the Kalahari desert, so the effort needed was less. It was still the Garden of Eden, but pressures were growing in certain localities.
The hunter gatherer paradise depends on the population not exceeding certain limits, so that the resources, notably the herds of large animals were not depleted too much. They had an incentive to control their population and infanticide was their method. Some modernists, over influenced by Christian morality, cannot imagine that infanticide can happen, calling it “evil”, and they accept Thomas Hobbes’ description of the life of the hunter gatherer as “poor, nasty, brutish and short” because his death rate was high, allegedly mainly from disease.
Yet diseases are mainly a product of high population densities and malnutrition brought by civilization. It is low among hunter gatherers. One criterion of health is size at maturity. J L Angel found that Palaeolithic males stood 177cm (5ft 10ins) tall, and females 165cm (5ft 5ins) tall. The earliest agriculturalists were 165cm (5ft 5ins) and 153cm (4ft 10ins) tall respectively. Teeth tells a similar story, being markedly influenced by diet, and more being lost in agricultural times than earlier.
The stone age people only lived until they were about thirty years old. That is pretty short by modern standards, but no shorter than it was for agriculturalists in most of human history. Even dying at thirty, and, accepting the restriction on fertility of suckling a child until the age of three or so, the hunter gatherer woman could give birth to five children. Each woman has to have no more than two children who reach maturity to keep the population from growing. Three of each woman’s children died before maturity because, for millennia, the human population was almost stable. It rose at a tiny fraction of a percentage.
Maybe, illness and accidents could account for the three deaths, but comparisons with modern stone age people, like native Australian Aboriginals and many other primitive tribes, suggest that up to a half of all children born were killed. Stone age people also have methods of abortion, but they are inefficient and dangerous to the mother, so culling the unwanted children was safer. In times of famine, stone age people also kill their old people, or rather the old people volunteer to die by staying behind when the band moves camp, or by walking into the jungle to die like captain Oates in Scott of the Antarctic—“I’m going outside. I may be some time.” Gerontocide does not help control the population in the long term. Infanticide does that.
So, about two of five infants were killed. Men cannot increase the population, only women bear children, so it was female infants who were most often neglected or abandoned. It seems appalling today because Christianity has always taught the sanctity of life, though it is only a partial sanctity because it has never deterred them from killing men, women and older children, only new born ones. Moreover, they have often chosen ways of killing that cause the maximum amount of suffering, and they have never bothered about the suffering caused to older children by their insisting all children born must live. Christianity has it that twenty unloved, starving, disease prone children destined for miserable and criminal lives, are better than two healthy, loved ones with successful lives guided by their caring parents.
An infant killed at birth suffers minimally and without conscious awareness, whereas older children and adults know, and feel consciously what is going on. Christian morality causes unnecessary suffering. The people Christians burnt at the stake for defying them suffered unimaginably. They were meant to suffer! Why else were they burnt over a slow fire?—people who could feel the pain of their blistering and charring feet, then legs, then their private parts, and then their bodies, fully aware of what was happening to them before they died? Yet the new born child has no knowledge of what is happening to it. If death is needed for population control, then the human thing is to cause death in the way that does not cause conscious suffering. Primitive people realized it. Christians do not.
Eviction from Paradise
The eviction from paradise began when human beings learnt how to kill large animals routinely and in large numbers. For myriads of years human ancestors had scavanged the corpses of large beasts killed by predators or that had died naturally, while they practised killing smaller and injured prey. When they discovered how to kill in large numbers, they began to change the world. In the New World, they had driven most big game extinct before they realized the consequences. Humans arrived in the new world about 20,000 BC, and by 7000 BC, 32 genera of large animals had disappeared. As the big animals were hunted out, people had to turn to smaller ones, and species of decreasing sizes were sent extinct.
Paul C Martin has shown by simulation that an initially tiny band of 100 hunters, doubling its population each generation, could kill off all the large beasts in North America in only 300 years. The parameters are not meant to be realistic but merely to demonstrate that what seems impossible is not at all. More than 100 would have arrived over a more extended period, but they would not have been doubling their population each generation. The extinctions took much longer, and the humans will have realized what they were doing before the end, but by then it was too late. Even, if further killing had been tabooed, the animal populations were too small and dispersed to survive the renegades who preferred to ignore the taboo, and the species went.
As the hunters’ prey disappeared or became smaller, the amount of animal protein in the human groups’ diet fell too, and more and more emphasis fell on gathering, which gradually was evolving into gardening. Favoured plants and roots had been deliberately put back. Large potatoes would be taken but small ones replanted, and that led to patches of potatoes being grown in favourable spots where the women and kids could return each year confident they would find food. Plants had been domesticated.
Moreover, each stage of extinction led to innovations in hunting technology. Gardening, horticulture, itself eventually evolved into larger scale production—agriculture. The wandering bands that had followed the herds, settled down to a life of labour and drudgery. Settlement meant greater intensification even though growing plants fed more people but not as well as they had been fed when the herds were plentiful. They did not get as much first class protein and they fell in stature. The new method of food production needed technological developments and new skills, and each new technology advanced the degree of intensification.
Old World humans followed the same sort of path. They found that taking the grass seeds—the barley and wheat—they had collected back to their camps and villages sowed them en route, and they began to do it deliberately. Soon they began to build permanent compunds to store grain, which became permanent villages. Storage pits, grindstones and ovens had to be fixtures, and so they settled down to agriculture. The spaces around the villages were soon growing the grasses also, and wild grass eating animals like sheep and goats ventured to the edges of the villages to feed and became domesticated. The animals had started coming to the hunters, and the hunters saw the advantage of letting them have the stalks and stubble of the grasses they grew for grain. Besides providing animal protein by slaughtering them, they also could be milked to give another source of food. All of it happened around 10,000 BC in Iraq and Iran.
The domestication of goats and sheep was followed by pigs, cattle, donkeys, horses and camels. Some of them were suitable as traction animals and were then used to pull ploughs. Some were useful for dragging loads on sledges, then rollers were added and eventually the wheel invented. The wheel was also invented in the New World, though the north American indians had exterminated all the animals suitable as draught animals. The wheel was used to throw pottery and as a child’s toy, but never on vehicles, even though they must have been useful even pulled by human beings. It meant that many inventions based on wheels like cogs, pulleys and gears were never invented leaving the American indians at a severe cultural disadvantage.
Settlement into villages was driven by the depletion of animal resources in certain localities through over-hunting. Settlement meant women were not compelled only to have one young child at a time because they could be fed animal milk. Nor were they constantly on the move, for which too many children were a hindrance, and children were useful in the fields, just as they had always helped their mothers gathering. Population began to rocket. In 8000 BC, the population of the ANE was about 100,000, but was over three million by 4000 BC, even then a growth rate of an imperceptible 0.1% per anuum.
It began a new phase of intensification. Forests were cut for fuel and to clear land for fields, but large areas became scrubland and desert, soil eroded and new incursions into virgin forests were needed. Domesticated animals spread disease to humans, who spread them to each other because they were living at a high density. Resources got tighter, and the outcome was war.
Warfare
Deliberately broken human skulls are found from way back, but no unequivocal signs of warfare appeared before humans settled down. The skulls earlier on were probably broken because of cannibalism—people ate those they especially honoured, their closest relatives, a devout act in those days not at all like stuffing your father’s ashes up your nose with cocaine. By 7000 BC, the oldest fortified town, Jericho had appeared. Walls, towers and defensive ditches had been built around it, so its inhabitants had reason to fear attack. Wars started in Israel.
It is not that hunter gatherers do not fight each other. They do, and did, but almost exclusively it was highly stylized warfare—ritualized warfare. The adjacent bands of humans that fought were closely related people some of whom had built up grievances. On the battle field, a ritual place agreed for the battle, the two parties stand and hurl insults at each other, airing their grievances. Women usually had a big role in this, perhaps because they were more articulate than the men.
Throwing the spears was an honour kept for old men. Though not that old by modern standards they will have been old in their own terms, often had suffered injuries in their lives, and some were genuinely old, so all in all, they were no longer too proficient in the art of hurling spears, and they did not cause many casualties. Moreover, as soon as blood was drawn, the battle was halted for treatment, and often, like eighteenth century duals, honour had been satisfied and the war was ended. As the groups were small, less than a hundred in total, with less than 25 able bodied men, every casualty was serious.
This sort of war has a large element of play or sport in it. Sport began as the training of young men for battle, by wrestling, racing and weaponry like javelin throwing. Often the hero was the man who took risks rather than a brutal killer, but not all the men had to try to be heroes. Being a cissie seems to have been accepted in primitive tribes—great plains Indians had them dressed up as women and serving the warriors, ignominious but evidently accepted, the first cross-dressers and perhaps homosexuals.
Some people say it is human nature to fight wars, but even in the worst times people want peace, and accept war because their leaders tell them it is unavoidable, usually for their own vested interests. Furthermore, allegedly warlike nations can suddenly become peaceful, and vice-versa. Germans were supposed to be war-like and were called Huns, but without madmen leading them, they have remained perfectly peaceful for sixty years. Jews were thought to be timid, and willingly went to their deaths at the hands of the Hunnish Germans, but those who escaped to Israel now have the reputation the Germans had as cruel provokers of a defenceless people, the Palestinians, whom they evicted by terrorism from the home they had had for 1000 years or more. So there is no human aptitude for war. Passive victims in one generation can become militaristic in the next, according to the circumstances and their leadership.
Modern wars are political and economic, and political and economic problems can be solved, or at least ameliorated, without war. One state, or its elite, stands to gain from the war at someone else’s expense, whether is is standard of living or an exploitable resource—that it why they are political and economic—and the trouble is that the elites who gain most by them are not willing to compromise. Propaganda serves to put a less obvious spin on it, as religious, or a defence of democracy, or whatever else that will fool a majority of the population into acceptance. Harris tells us that states were formed in the first place to conduct wars of territorial conquest and plunder, leading on, for the strongest of them, to imperialism.
At the primitive level warfare has no such motivations. When warfare gets serious at this level, the bands of humans are forced to disperse and spread into new unoccupied or sparsely occupied territory. The deaths caused by war are unimportant in population control, it is dispersion that reduces local pressure on resources. Wars in those times mainly killed men, but women producing children are what causes population growth. Most males are superfluous beyond the number needed to keep women pregnant. On man to every ten women would be enough, and probably much less than that. Yet, better muscled males can do any fighting deemed necessary. Most men therefore are drones and soldiers. Thus killing the girls is what regulates the population, while the hunters and soldiers survive to do the heavy work of murdering, the lighter work being done by the remaining women and children.
W Divale has measured the sex ratios in warring bands. 105 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio of boys to girls under 14 years old was 128:100, and among adults is almost even at 101:100. Twenty to twenty five percent of girls are neglected or killed at birth, so that there is an excess of young boys. Warfare is what mainly brings the ratio into balance in adulthood. So competition for limited resources necessitates female infanticide and wars. Without any ecological pressure, they would be unnecessary. If population is stabilized or better still reduced by benign methods like contraception, the need for warfare would disappear. No doubt, greedy rulers would still find ways of having them, but there would be no real need for them.
Female infanticide and localized wars are ways of restricting and dispersing populations in primitive societies when there seems no way of intensifying production. Christian missionaries stopped it without showing native people any way of solving their food problem. They condemned simple people to starvation and misery, then felt superior because these people were inept, unlike them. Even when they brought them modern implements of iron like machetes and axes, all it did was allow them to over-exploit resources that previously they had no way of doing with stone tools. That was a cause of localized warfare! Warfare peaks in these tribes when villages are in competition to exploit some resource, usually a food source, and here was an encouragement to do just that. Left to themselves, traditional methods of population limitation and dispersal acted to prevent over exploitation of the eco-system, though they only began to operate at the limits, so that terrible damage had already been done.
From studies of the warlike Yanomamo Indians, originally hunter gatherers but partly settled as gardeners growing plantains, an imported food plant, Harris pointed out that as a band or village got bigger, the hunters had to travel further to get enough provisions for everyone. At some point, they could go no further without having to stay away overnight, but were reluctant to do it, especially when they were competing with a neighbouring band or village. Then they had to accept less each to eat, or the band had to split.
The split often happened over women who got scornful of their men when they could not bring home enough for them all to eat. The village factionalised and then divided, the weaker faction being expelled. Those forced to move were not abandoned for they remained the kin of those they left and had some support from them, paradoxically enough. They were allowed to take some cuttings of the banana they had been cultivating locally, but they were still disadvantaged until established in the new spot, and that took time. Doubtless the less successful hunters were expelled, and they had to improve their skills quickly to survive until they were established in their new location.
Male dominance is a function of their importance in the wars, and as the warring is not natural when everyone has sufficient, there is no reason to think male dominance is either. At some stage, before the herds were locally spoiled and competition began, males hunted and women and children gathered, but most of the staple food came from the women and children, even though the valued protein food came from the kills of the men. War goes back a long time, but they were ritualized brawls mainly, and though casualty rates among the small groups were high over a lifetime, in small populations, the numbers dying were small. Modern wars are mass murder in comparison.
In only about ten percent of over a thousand primitive societies studied do married men go to live with their wife’s families, the large majority of wives joining their husband’s families. Similarly most kids were brought up in their father’s not their mother’s tribe. Even in matrilineal societies often the children lived with their mother’s brother who acted as a father to them. Matrilineal societies could be extremely cruel and warlike, like the Iroquois, their warfare differing from that of patrilineal tribes in being external whereas patrilineal warfare was internal.
The difference is in the the tribe’s culture and language. Patrilineal wars were intratribal, while matrilineal wars were with other tribes, sometimes a long way off. External war was by large raiding parties ready to travel a long way for plunder. Because men move to their wife’s tribe, the warriors in the different tribes are often closely related, as fathers, sons and brothers, and that restricted the preference for internal wars, relatively slight as they were, so the warriors raided at distance, peoples they had little in common with. Indeed, matrilineal villages and bands joined together to form the large parties needed for an effective raid.
As the men are away for long periods on these sorties, the women who remained behind took on the responsibility for tribal organization, and in particular a man’s sister took on his responsibilities rather than his wife. It was the reason why the woman did not leave the tribe for her husband’s. Her brother depended on her to look after the family’s interests. So instead the man moved to his wife’s tribe, and we have the matrilineal system. So when the men had to spend extended periods away, usually fighting wars, the matrilineal system was justified.
However, though tribes like these were matrilineal, they were rarely matriarchal. The importance of male power as warriors through violence ensured it. If there were matriarchal societies, they preceded the need for warfare through competition for depleted resources. Once women became mothers, they were dependent on their husbands, and so their families paid a bride price that was meant to defray this cost. Harris thought the Iroquois got closest to being a matriarchy. The powerful women of the tribe could raise and depose the male elders, and through this power could influence even the treaties made, but they were forbidden to serve as elders themselves.
Every Augustus needs his Livia—strong men often have a strong woman behind them, but few women indeed ever make it to the front, and the reason is male dominance through war. Males are more aggressive than females but war is the reason. Successful warriors were more likely to be selected for mating by the young women, and the men favoured passive wives but began to worry about their masculinity as serving choice women was their main reward for warrior success.
The Big-Man and State Formation
Paradise lasted for tens of thousands of years. Everyone had to earn a living, but it was easy, and people were free to do it when they chose to. Men decided for themselves that today was a day for hunting, fishing, building a shelter, fashioning a weapon or just sitting around with their mates. Women themselves decided whether it was a good day for collecting roots, grubs, firewood, basket making or visiting her mother. Once agriculture began, only the privileged elite lived like that. Ordinary men were now tied to the land, subject to the physical violence and coercion of a lord, and subject to the superstitious power of priests far more powerful than the old shaman.
In the Old World, the first states were in Sumeria and Egypt before 3000 BC, then in the Indus valley and the Chinese plains about 2000 BC. In the New World, they arose about 100 BC with the Peruvians, then about 300 BC with the Mexican Indians. The driving force was the need to intensify production to meet the rising population and the falling availability of animal protein.
Anthropologists have found that, in primitive societies, some particularly hard working and public spirited men can gather a following by holding feasts. With the promise of the feast, these men, termed big men cajole, inveigle and bribe others to work to help them bring about the promised feast. There was honour among the people for the big man and his helpers, who also had as inducements the big man’s gifts from the surplus food they produced.
Amazing as it is to us, the big men did not take on the extra work of co-ordinating the additional production and storing of the surplus for any material gain himself, at least in the primitive pre-state period. They actually set an example by taking less of the normal produce to put more into the store for the feast. What they had was the kudos, the admiration of the tribe, the status, and it was this that led them to become chiefs and then kings, once states were formed. Sometimes the big man’s helpers grumbled about all the extra work involved, but they had the rewards he gave them, as well as respect and a degree of relected glory from being associated with the great man.
The system worked because life was basically easy, and people need not work too hard to live, and so that is what they tended to do. The big man gave them inducements to work harder than they needed to, and produce a surplus which he stored and then brought out for the feast. His ability to organize made him a natural to be invited to lead in difficult times, like war, and occasionally, a tribal big man is reported to have had a few prisoners of war as helpers in bringing on the feast, effectively therefore slaves.
The construction of large monuments, like the pyramids of Egypt, the dolmen tombs and henges of the stone age, and the large mounds of the plains and central American Indians were the extension of the big man’s effort in cajoling extra work out of people. These were not built by slaves but by voluntary labour as prestige projects with inducements by the local big man for peasants and farmers to work when their crops were growing, or when they could not grow. As these schemes were usually of a religious type, they brought in pilgrims when they were finished, so they actually brought prosperity to the people who had put in the effort, for pilgrimages were prehistoric tourism.
All were an extension of the big man intesification of the use of labour, which passed from being voluntary to being a subject’s obligation, as the big man passed from being a benefactor to being a king. The adjutants of the big man became nobles, and together they ruled the people whose efforts brought them the privileged lifestyle they enjoyed. Effectively a voluntary labour had become a labour tax, though there will have been benefits on completion of these projects, or at the end of each year, when they took years to finish. A ceremony was held and a feast! It has become a custom. We still do it.
And the big man king had responsibilities. He was still a provider as controller of the grain store and the treasury, and his own guards were the core of an army to defend the people when they were attacked from outside. He still provided feasts that people looked forward towards on state and religious occasions, and he appointed priests and magicians to run these events, some of which became rituals. Even into feudal Europe, kings had a role of provider, giving the people a spectacle and a feast to keep them satisfied, as they toured the country with their retinue.
The pressure on ordinary peasants to yield their freedom to a lord was an economic one. Populations had spread and grown until any attempt to go it alone, Walden fashion, outside the intensified labour system of the big man would have meant a fall in standard of living. All of the main centers of state formation were circumscribed by physical boundaries, oceans, mountains and particularly deserts.
Karl Wittfogel has noted that all of the ancient empires were in the valleys of large rivers in arid land, and so water management was an intensification method. He called them “hydraulic societies”. The state arranged the construction, then managed and controlled the dams, canals and irrigation systems. Every so often, corruption, or invasion would mean the breakdown of the hydraulic system, but each succeeding dynasty had to repair it.
Marx had observed the “Asiatic mode of production” as depending on public works to control the flow of irrigation water from rivers, and managed by an imperium that united the interests of all those benefitting from the irrigation scheme. Marx saw that these societies sometimes broke, but repaired themselves with no obvious change, so disparaged them as “stagnant”. But a large number of powerless peasants saw the importance of the projects to them, and gave their labour communally to keep the schemes working.
As civilization mostly began in fertile river valleys surrounded by arid or desert land, those wanting to resist the militarization of labour would have had to become outcasts. Outcasts from the proto-kingdom, and defeated peoples, could only flee to the marginal land or into the territories of other tribes likely to eat them or repel them, so they had to accept a subject status. The economic pressure was to stay in the chief’s band to take advantage of his redistributive feasts even though his labour was no longer optional. They could live.
Moreover, the redistributive system introduced the advantages of the division of labour and specialization, and the big man would engage in trade, swapping produce with adjacent tribes to provide something novel, so was much more productive for those reasons too. No doubt some refused to join and fled to become the primitives studied by modern anthropologists. History is the history of labour intensification, of those who were willing to work harder and specialize, if need be, for a higher standard of living, rather than live naturally.
The places where states first arose all experienced a large growth in population just before statehood emerged. The population of Egypt doubled from 4000 BC to 3000 BC, only an imperceptible 0.07% growth rate per year, but enough to cause stiff pressure for production to be intensified. Archaeology suggests that these states grew up in a war zone—the pre-state tribes were fighting each other quite savagely. It was external warfare, the sort often associated with matrilineal society, and much evidence suggests that these societies were or recently had been matrilineal.
Many customs show it, not least the Pharaonic habit of sister marriage. The word we use for our mother’s or father’s brother is uncle, from the Latin avunculus meaning specifically a mother’s brother. It derives from the Latin for ancestor implying our ancestors are in our mother’s line, which they plainly are, if we want to be sure of it. The Latin for our father’s brother was patruus, relating only to father. The emphasis on the female line implies matrilinearity. It ties in with the huge emphasis on women found in stone age figurines. The rise of the proto-state and then the state society put power firmly in male hands.
The rise of the state meant that men did not need to spend as much time at war because some men specialized in it, and the place of post marital residence, with the woman’s or the man’s family became less important. Once primary states had formed, their neighbours were under pressure to follow suit, to be able to plunder the rich states, or be continually plundered themselves. Thus, pastoral people, living at low population densities and under no population pressure to form states, did it to be able to plunder and raid primary states that had formed and become rich pickings. Not that the people who formed primary states at the time understood what they were doing or why, but the forces of economics and ecology combined to condition where people could go culturally. “Everyday consciousness cannot explain itself”, as Harris said. Religious and mythical explanations were invented for what they did, but were not the real reasons for it. Initial local needs and limited aims triggered a complex of changes.
Over the generations, the majority chose to be subject to lords and priests but thereby benefit from an organized distributive system yielding a higher standard of living, even though they had to work much harder than they once had. Each step that the big man took to increase his own authority did not seem particularly unusual or illegal, and the move to material gains as opposed to social esteem was doubtless a slow process, and unconscious to the big man himself until the final big step it was leading towards. That step crossed an invisible line, and the old council of elders realized the chief had usurped their power and a kingdom had formed.
Animal Sacrifice and Cannibalism
The evidence of modern primitive societies is that human sacrifice pre-dates the rise of states and imperial religions. Sacrificed animals were never burnt to a cinder, or left to be eaten by maggots in the sun. They were too valuable for that. They were always meant to be eaten, and the priests always had the first choice—the choice bits! It ought to be clear to Christians, if they have read Paul’s epistles in the New Testament, for he constantly rails against his converts eating meat sacrificed to idols. It follows that human sacrifices were also eaten. Human sacrifice implies cannibalism at some time in the past. The many people sacrificed by the Aztecs were a valuable source of animal protein to them.
…and they took out their hearts and struck off their heads. And later they divided up all the body among themselves and ate it…Bernardino de Sahagún
The heart was offered up to the sun and blood shaken towards it, while any other blood collected was put into a gourd for the warrior that had captured the victim. The body was rolled down the steps of the pyramidal platform, representing the setting of the sun, coming to rest in the plaza at the foot of the pyramid. Old men called quaquacuiltin retrieved the bodies and took them to tribal temples called calpulli, where it was ritually butchered into joints. Finally, the warriors and their families enjoyed a great feast. Most of the sacrifices were prisoners of war, and were kept until the sacrificial date, being adequately fed in the meantime, to keep them sufficiently fatty and tasty. Just before the sacrifice, they were tortured for amusement and training of future warriors in callousness.
Warfare of the external type was an integral part of of this method of intensification. Soldiers were particularly motivated and ruthless for knowing their fate, if they were captured, was to be eaten, though there was not the horror in it that it holds for us. Men killed on the battlefied were considered as having given their lives for the gods. Victorious warriors also were hailed on the basis of their success in battle, so they brought back suitable mementoes of their prowess—a penis, called a scalp in the movies, but a man only has one penis!
However powerful, no purely religious urge can maintain itself successfully for any material length of time counter to fundamental economic resistance.Sherburne Cook, cited by Harris
The point of systems like those of the Aztecs is that human sacrifice was what kept the race alive. It was an economic necessity, because they had no large domesticated animals, and large prey animals had been hunted to extinction. Eating prisoners was their source of animal protein, and the constant warfare that accompanied it culled the population. Cook estimated that the death rate was 25% higher through warfare and prisoner sacrifice. In short, the population was beyond its subsistence level, if people were not eaten! It will have been accompanied also by female infanticide, and when the Europeans stopped it on religious grounds the Indians fell into destitution, where they have mainly been since.
The Old World did not get to any such extreme. Ecological pressures forced intensification, but large animals had never been exterminated, and many species—sheep, goats, cattle and pigs, had been domesticated, so technological advances sufficed without cannibalism on anything like that scale. But humans were sacrificed even into classical times, and although our sources do not say they were ever eaten, it seems that they must have been at an earlier stage. In primitive societies, great relatives and great men generally were eaten when dead.
Right up until the twentieth century, hundreds of tribes in Africa, South east Asia, the Amazon and Oceania practised small scale cannibalism of prisoners, and it seems unlikely that such a widespread custom never reached Europe or the ANE. Northern European barbarians, according to Caesar, Tacitus and Plutarch, were known to sacrifice prisoners, but they do not say they were eaten. Perhaps it was too unpleasant a thought even for Romans. The Gauls used to take the heads of their enemies and keep them as mementoes, hanging them from rafters and putting them in niches where they might have had an oracular purpose to judge by Celtic legends of Taking heads. They might have been sacrificed and become thereby a link with the gods, the body eaten and the head retained to bring its divine oracles.
Ignace Gelb of Chicago university, from an inscription at Lagash, says prisoners were sacrificed in the temples of the early Mesopotamian city states. The bible has several instances of human sacrifice to Yehouah besides the instance when it was stopped in the case of Isaac. It is a message that God no longer required human sacrifice, though Abraham’s readiness to do it, suggests He had before then! As the bible is much later than anyone until recently had thought, it is a much more recent warning than it seems. The Persians stopped it.
Isaac was tied to a funeral pyre ready to be cooked, and the Phœnicians and Carthaginians offered burnt human sacrifices to their sun god—considered by the Greeks to have been Herakles—called Baal Melekh but disparagingly called Moloch in the bible. In fact, the offerings were always children up until the age of twelve, when they were considered adult, and the purpose was likely originally to have been population control. The Canaanites always had the utmost reverence for the remains of the sacrificed children, kept in gardens of peace called tophets, so they were not doing it with any glee. Contrary to the impression given in the bible, Jews and Israelites were Canaanites until the Persians elevated the Jews into being a “Nation of Priests”, so they had followed the same customs until the Persians fobade it, whence the story of Isaac and Abraham in Genesis.
As sacrifices to gods were occasions for redistributive feasts, the temples were equivalent to great restaurants, and worshippers brought bowls, spoons and goblets with them. They were a public restaurant, or rather a banqueting hall. The Christian Eucharist is a relic of these temple feasts, even being a symbolic cannibalistic feast in which the flesh of a man is ritually consumed as a wafer, and his symbolic blood drunk, though the wine, the symbolic blood, has long been kept for the priests. The wafer is the “host”, from the Latin words “hostis”, a sacrifice, and “hostia”, an enemy! The Eucharist was indeed a feast at the beginning of Christianity, the agape or love feast, but, as Paul tells us, it had fallen into disrepute even before the first books of the New Testament had been set down. In 363 AD, only half a century after the Roman triumph of Christianity, the Council of Laodicea put an end to it.
All slaughter of animals was a sacrifice to the gods, a religious act, for long periods of history, and a priest had to be present to kill the beast with the proper ritual. That is why they became so rich and influential. The end of animal sacrifice ended priestly redistributive feasting, but even today, pious religious groups of Jews and Moslems insist on the ritual sacrifice of meat by a priest so that it is kosher or halal. Instead of keeping poor people from being utterly starved by giving redistributive feasts, they discovered something all together cheaper—spiritual food, whence the Eucharistic host being only a wafer biscuit. Spiritual food promised the partaker a feast in heaven after death, and an eternal life of bliss, so long as they did not complain or cause trouble in this one. At last, the duty of the big man, chief, priest, king or emperor to provide feasts for hungry people to give them something to look forward to, had ended—they now promised it all after death. Great scam!
The animals that were sacrificed were always domesticated herbivores, never flesh or grain eating animals. It suggests their redistributive purpose. These animals turned hay, useless waste as far as humans were concerned, into edible flesh, the finest food there was. There is no point in raising animals that ate the same as humans did. They were then just competitors for the grain or flesh. So the sacrificed animals were sacrificed precisely because they were food, and raised economically.
Eating captives makes use of their proteins, but once states got big enough and strong enough, it is more economical for them to make use of them as labour. At first only women and children were used as slaves, the men having been killed in battle or eaten, but once a band of captive males could be safely kept under control, they too were used as slaves. Indeed, in the ANE, they were not enslaved, but able captives were deported to some place distant from their own home, and put in charge of some unruly people who had been incorporated into empire. They administered what was a kind of slavery of people in their own country. They had to be effective or their subjects would murder them in an uprising, so the imperialist nation was able to tax the people incorporated into empire, yet left the main administrative burden to others whose lives depended on it. The reason they were not eaten, though, is because there was no pressing need for human protein because there were plenty of domesticated food animals in the ANE. The Aztecs were not in the same situation, and Incas had llamas.
Imperial Religions and Food Taboos
Hammurabi made the protection of the weak against the strong a fundamental principle of Babylonian imperial rule. He was the “Great Provider”, “Giver of Abundance”, “Bringer of Wealth”, “Provider of Holy Feasts”, “the Shepherd”, and so on, largely suggestive of his role having developed from that of the big man. It is also the origin of Christianity’s sentiments. They are those of early imperialism meant to secure acquiescence among the impoverished masses. Christians have been keen on propagating a view of religious progress culminating in Christianity, but, though Christianity is still with us, history does not support any idea of religious progress. Wars are far more brutal and bloody than they were in primitive societies, and the prevalence of Christianity has not only never stopped them, it has often provoked them.
It was the ordinary workers who went without animal protein. It is ten times more efficient to feed people by growing grain for humans than to feed animals for human consumption, though animals do have by-products that are also useful, like milk, leather and dung for fertilization, further reasons for domesticating them. But animal flesh was a luxury. In some places (India) eating beef was even forbidden, and religious doctrine developed that righteousness required people to be vegetarian. The trouble is that, as meat is the best source of the twenty two amino acids that human must eat for health, vegetarians on a subsistence diet are inevitably malnourished. So beef was not banned in most places, and instead redistributives feasts were used to make sure that everyone had some of it.
The specific reason that India differed was the high population and the unreliability of the monsoon. It meant that famine was a regular occurrence, when the monsoon failed, and then people literally starved, and were tempted to eat their cows. Yet the cows were essential to the recovery in the following years when the monsoon came. People who ate their cows were one step away from cannibalism. Ancient texts describe it as happening quite often, and in severe droughts:
In that dreadful age when righteousness was at an end, men began to eat one another.
So, eating them at all was forbidden.
In India, animals were domesticated and eaten, and grains grown, as elsewhere, but, from sometime before 1000 BC, the cattle herding Aryans, speaking Sanskrit, gradually moved in and settled in the Ganges valley, where they continued to rear and eat cattle, buffalo and sheep. Om Prakash (Food and Drinks in Ancient India) says they killed barren cows for food at feasts such as weddings, they sacrificed oxen and goats, so someone was eating them, and an abbatoir is mentioned in a Vedic text. Horses, rams, cows, buffalo and birds were all killed and eaten. All of this continued in the later Vedic period, judging by the texts, but now there are contradictory exhortations too, condemning meat eating, either later interpolations, or suggesting a transitional period of opposition. A N Bose thought beef was eaten throughout the first millennium BC, but increasingly frowned upon.
The Vedic kingdoms had a caste of priests called Brahmans, whose role was that of the Persian Magi, the Celtic Druids and the Jewish Levites—they specialized in ritual sacrifice for redistributive feasts. By the middle of the first millennium, the population was outgrowing the supply of animal flesh. Gradually beef became a luxury of the ruling classes. Lower class families had a pair of oxen and a cow, but needed to keep them alive for traction. This was the time when Hinduism began to prescribe that vegetarianism was akin to holiness, though rulers and priests continued to enjoy beef.
Evidence of the timing is the birth of Buddhism and Jainism, as rivals to Brahmanism. Both abolished class distinctions and ritual sacrifice, making poverty a spiritual necessity. Life was sacred to both religions, but the Jains knew all life was one, with a single soul, whereas Buddhists accepted that life came in higher and lower forms with their own souls. Jains made sacrifice of any animal the equal of murdering a human being, but Buddhists allowed the consumption of meat, and forbade only killing it. Jains would not kill or eat any animal. So, the “spiritualization” of religions happened through economic pressure, as part of intensification. There simply was not enough meat for everyone, and the other worldliness of religions justified abstention and poverty as roads to holiness, the reward of which was the extention of life after death.
Asoka, the first emperor of India took up Buddhism in the third century BC, spreading its popularity. Buddhist and Jain practises obliged the Hindu Brahmans to adopt non-violence and the sacredness of life, but it took a while. Prakash says they were holding feasts to commemorate the dead until 350 AD. By then, all large animals, horses and elephants as well as cows were being pampered, protected, garlanded and bathed in veneration of them as living creatures like human beings. By the time of the Moslem intrusions into India 400 years later, the cow was becoming sacred, and was perhaps declared sacred as a distinction from Islam which tabooed pig, but had no thoughts on cows.
Pigs are three times as effective at producing calories out of waste suitable for human consumption than cattle, and twice as efficient as chickens, but they cannot live on stubble, and need shade and moisture. When there were still plenty of forested land in the ANE, pigs were useful and accepted. In forests and damp shady riversides, they nuzzled out roots, fallen nuts and fungus, and ate human leftovers, and so fed themselves on stuff valueless to humans. They were an asset, but when deforestation left the land drier and treeless, pigs were a liability, they were utterly useless and even competitors for food with humans, and so were widely tabooed—not just by Jews.
Where the forests remained, pigs were not tabooed. The Chinese, in their temperate river valleys made them their main source of animal protein. They never made much use of oxen as draught animals, probably because the plots were too small where the oxen could operate, and were too uneven and unsuitable where they were bigger, because the land was marginal. So, they took to pigs rather than cows, consequently never developed the ability to metabolize cows’ milk, and so never had the incentive to try. Even Greeks on an arid mountainous peninsula never tabooed pigs, never losing their forests, and their rivers, though short, always flowed.
The popular myth that the Jews did not eat pig because they carried the tapeworm is false. It never bothered vast numbers of Chinese, nor seemed to have eny effect on their ability to reproduce or build empires and cultures, and the same is true of Greeks and the rest of the Europeans. In the USA, the pig used to be the most eaten meat until beef producers engineered a preference for beef. Epidemiology shows that the pig rarely transmits the parasite in hot dry climates.
Moreover, the other perfectly acceptable animals also carry parasites, and diseases that are often worse than tapeworm, like anthrax, but it did not mean they were tabooed. In any case, making sure the animal is well cooked is all that is needed to make sure the tapeworm cannot infect humans, and every advanced people realised it. The pig was banned in the ANE for practical reasons, not hygeinic ones. Even Egyptians had a prejudice against pigs, associating it with the wicked god, Seth, but it never led to a ban, because they lived in a flood plain with swamps, and so rearing pigs was not the economic liability it was in drier places, and they also used pigs for treading seed into wet fields. But they were handled by a special caste of swineherds who were untouchables.
Population growth from 7000 BC to 2000 BC and the herding of sheep and goats caused immense ecological damage by deforestation on the desert margins in the ANE, making the pig unsuited to the enviroment. The pig became a liability. In Mesopotamia where the Jewish taboo on pork came from, along with Judaism itself, pigs were common until the middle of the third millennium, then they fell out of favour. This was the time when agricultural intensification was stepped up with the building of an irrigation system, canals draining the swamps, and the water being ducted or lifted as needed into the fields. It led to salination, the substitution of the more salt tolerant barley for wheat, and eventually the collapse of the Sumerian civilization. The civilizations of Babylon and Assyria upstream replaced them.
Pigs were only useful as food, but oxen had a use for traction too. That is why pigs were abominated when raising them became a burden, whereas cows were sanctified. But there are twice as many oxen as cows, so cows plainly are killed despite the taboo. Oxen are more useful than cows as traction animals, but a cow can be used if there is no alternative, and cows bring along the next generation of beasts. Moreover, the Indian zebu cows stored food, like camels, in their humps, so could endure a famine, and can survive long periods without food or water. It was another factor that made them sacred rather than disgusting.
In China oxen are necessary, but in the cooler, damper climate, pigs thrived on human waste and provided fats for cooking, whereas the Indians used ghee, a clarified butter. The ox in China was never sanctified, but was not eaten in practice except perhaps when it was old. So beef never had any large part in the Chinese diet, the pig being far more practicable for typical Chinese smallholdings.
Despite intensification of production, a stage was reached when population stabilized at a subsistence level, because no more could be fed. India’s population remained stable for 2000 years from about 300 BC. In Egypt, despite fluctuations, it remained essentially level for 3000 years from 2,500 BC. China also levelled off despite local fluctuations. Female infanticide was the method used. People worked for the state for a part of their time, and were rewarded with sacrificial redistributive feasts. The people barely had enough, but the lords lived well.
They asserted their authority through religion, being divinely appointed or even themselves gods, and ordinary people had to treat them appropriately. They had to kowtow by falling forward to hit their heads and knees on the ground, and remain thus utterly submissive. It is the same old submissive posture used today by Moslems at prayer, and by Jehu, king of Israel, before the Assyrian king almost 3000 years ago. In Egypt, the subject fell flat on his face. Kings were distrustful, and they spied on their subjects, and readily tortured and killed any they thought might have been plotting or otherwise disobedient. The Old Testament prophets were probably king’s spies, and propagandists.
Dark Age Europe to the Present
Some scholars, hoping to be iconoclasts, or because they are Christians, pretend there were no dark ages in Europe after the collapse of civilization in the fifth century, because people remained skilful in some things. They seem to think dark age means everyone was in the dark! The people then were just like us, just as thoughtful and just as able to learn skills. What had broken was society—civilization.
Christianity put no store on learning, quite the opposite, it was vanity, so it was forgotten, and books were destroyed or allowed to decay. No records were kept, administration collapsed, urban life fell apart, and people had to get on as best they could. They fell back on to their resourcefulness, and survived essentially at a more basic level of existence for half a millennium. The ages are called dark because we know little about them, there being no literature to speak of. But people did not stop earning a living, and some skills among the general population spread, like smithying. What mitigated the dark ages in Europe was the blacksmith.
When it is every man for himself, practical skills become more important than abstract ones. Learning and literacy generally disappeared, but the skills of smithying spread and improved. Perhaps the Roman military had somehow restricted smithying, keeping it in house with their armourers because they saw it as dangerous in the wrong hands, but whatever the reason, the cost of axes and ploughs fell in the first few centuries of the dark ages. It facilitated the cutting down of the northern European forests, and the settling of land formerly inaccessible—intensification. The use of wood accordingly expanded, and later stoneworking was another skill added, because the iron chisels made it possible. The new plough, and initially low population density kept feudalism going. The lord of the manor owned commonly needed expensive equipment like ploughs, draught horses and the blacksmith, as well as the land, and the peasant worked them in exchange for his tithes.
Eventually, intensification through the use of the iron tools, the prevention of infanticide by the new Christian morality about the sanctity of life, and pressure from the east caused a population increase. The produce per head fell and some peasants had to be forced off the land by the landlords to keep their standard of living up. More and more landless artisans were travelling the country selling their services and spreading social and religious dissension. Some settled in the towns, and the cities again began to grow. Some urban settlers became merchants, trading between the lords, and even exporting, for the lords tried to maximise their profitability by specialising, particularly in sheep for their wool, then more peasants were being expelled to make way for sheep. The price of wheat trebled from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, while exports of wool grew 40%.
The overloading of the system and intensification of exploitation led to greater female infanticide, despite the Christian restrictions. The sex ratios of children rose to 130 males to every 100 females, showing that infant girls were being preferentially killed at birth. How could it be done? Lots more infant children died in domestic accidents, like falling into boiling pans of water, or tipping them over themselves, falling into fires or down wells, and so on, and even more were overlain in bed by their mothers! The parish priest dealt with this last case, not the coroner, and he meted out a penance of bread and water for the careless mother. Curiously, baby girls were more likely to be accidentally killed in this way. Despite it, population did not stop growing until the Black Death of 1348 cut back the population by about a third. Poor health and conditions contributed to the deadliness of the plague, and a century of warfare then followed, the Hundred Years’ War. The feudal system of production was at the end of its tether, and capitalism was just stretching its legs.
The feudal land owners found they made more money out of commodity wool production than they did by having a load of hungry and stroppy peasants. Sheep only needed to be fed grass. So despite the drop in population they were not inviting back the displaced villeins. Instead, they employed a few as shepherds, and made money by selling produce at the markets that were being given charters in the towns. People continued to starve, and peasant revolts broke out. Landlords wanted capital, and stole common lands by fencing them in for more sheep, making more peasants destitute.
The lord was now a capitalist and wanted better returns on his investment. Trade and technical innovation were the only ways, so pressure to develop better technology arose, especially for cloth manufacture. Then the need for capital intensification drove technical innovation to become science. Science was born, and quickly began to show that Church dogmata were false. Capitalism, science and technology have always been interrelated, and contradicted Christian dogma from the outset, so it is surprising today that so many capitalists are anti-science and pro-religion. It shows how intrinsically stupid many of them are even if they are rich. From the fourteenth century onwards, capitalism grew at the expense of feudalism. It took a few more centuries, but by degrees, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, feudalism was dismantled, and the new system substituted for it.
A benefit also not fully appreciated by many modern capitalists is that people were freed. It was a benefit not just for the people themselves, but for the system. Social mobility, which depends on freedom, and centralized health and education systems help capitalism to succeed, supplying a pool of highly trained, healthy and often talented people competing for employment. Why then do a surprising number of the upper and managerial classes oppose public spending on such trivialities, and support instead fascistic changes that would create a poor and rebellious underclass? They advocate a politics that contradicts their own best interests, and do not realize it. Needless to say, the USA is at the front of this movement, typified by the neocons. Its dogmatic approach to capitalism has already created an underclass there, so they are already fighting an undeclared civil war with their own people, which neocons feel they should take to its logical conslusion—fascism.
Intensification of production is always needed, if a corporation is to remain profitable. It must have labour saving innovations, and markets always have to expand and be fed novelties to avoid saturation. Yet people are the market, so cannot be allowed to get poor. If machines replaced people in manufacturing, who would buy the goods? Not the machines, and not the unemployed people! People must be employed always, and if machines ever did replace people, then people would have to be paid by the state for doing nothing, or for trivial work in leisure and other service industries including public service. Governments have to ensure people have the money and education to keep markets alive. Too many capitalists do not get it. Hammurabi did, 3,700 years ago!
