Have We Been Conned Into Civilization?

And is our defense of civilization still faith-based?

Here are two well-established facts about the origin of civilization that call for an explanation:

• First, the Stone Age in which protohumans lived as small bands of nomadic, egalitarian hunter-gatherers dwarfs the age of civilization. The Stone Age of prehistory, when primates in the genus Homo used stone to make tools lasted for roughly 3.4 million years. By contrast, civilizations, in which special social functions developed in large, sedentary, hierarchical societies have been around for 12 thousand years.
• Second and contrary to our modern myths of inevitable progress, the transition to agriculture and to large societies by the domestication of plants and animals wasn’t overwhelmingly beneficial to the early revolutionaries. There were some advantages, especially over the long term, such as protection from predators, increases in birth rate and life span, and technological advances. But in the early millennia of the agricultural revolution, there were severe drawbacks, as Jared Diamond explained in “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”

Judging from the state of ancient skeletons and from other indicators, archeologists have discovered that the early civilized, sedentary people suffered from lower life spans, shorter heights, and other signs of malnutrition. Diamond points out that hunter-gatherers had a more varied diet, didn’t run the risk of starvation due to a failed crop and were spread out in the wild so they weren’t overrun by outbreaks of infectious diseases.

There were other drawbacks too. We think of social specialization as progressive because large societies enable us to use our leisure time to pursue our individual interests, whereas hunter-gatherers all had a similar job by necessity, namely the obtaining of food for the day. But the idea of specialization masks the downside of inequality between the emerging social classes.

Most early kingdoms and civilizations eventually became patriarchal, so women often labored harder than men and were fed more poorly, judging again from the state of their fossils. The upper classes that formed around the kings lived in comparative luxury, while the slaves and the farmers (whose labor only became less valued when they managed to secure food surpluses) enjoyed fewer fruits of civilization.

The Mystery: What Sustained Early Kingdoms and Civilizations?

Jared Diamond sums this up by saying:

“with the advent of agriculture the elite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.”

The mystery, you see, is that for unimaginable tens of millions of years, we lived as relatively healthy, free, albeit poor, ignorant nomads. This was the vast period remembered in Western religious traditions as Edenic paradise. We switched over to agriculture and to a sedentary, “civilized” lifestyle which paid off in some ways over the long run, with scientific and technological achievements, for example. But that transition may prove even more costly in the end, as the Anthropocene threatens the world’s ecosystems with global warming, human overpopulation, and our genocide against wild species (as we make more room for farms).

Regardless, the early large societies couldn’t have foreseen either the long-term advantages or disadvantages of the monumental transition. Yet the early period of farming was marked by plagues that were unknown to the nomadic bands. Why, then, did so many people double down on civilization instead of returning to the old, wilder ways?

There are likely numerous reasons to account for the persistence of agriculture. Perhaps there was no choice because farming was needed to support the increasing population. Maybe as Diamond says, the farmers drove the hunter-gatherers to near extinction as big-city folks seized the best land for farms, in which case the large societies might eventually have forgotten how to survive as nomads in the wild.

One motivation I’ve posited elsewhere is the rise of humanistic, progressive values. Certainly, in the long term, this ideology sustains confidence that the sacrifices in large societies are worth it because we’re learning how to dominate nature and to turn ourselves into gods, thus avenging our losses against nature’s inhuman creativity and absurd indifference.

But this could have been only an implicit factor, at best, in the Neolithic and Upper Paleolithic periods, as is apparent from the shamanic attempts to predict and to magically control natural processes. The overriding mindset was animistic, which means that prehistoric people likely regarded nature as enchanted and as being full of sociable spirits, not as pointless and as indifferent to our welfare. The humanistic values would have arisen explicitly with advances in philosophical reasoning, as we see especially in the Axial Age in the mid-first millennium BCE and in early modern Europe, in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

The Theocratic Mythos

Another possibility presents itself when we reflect further on social specialization, which is one of the presumed advantages of large, sedentary societies. Pyramidal social hierarchies developed to maintain order within the expanding, confined populations. There were exceptions such as the earliest transitional proto-cities that retained the nomad’s egalitarian values, but eventually, kings centralized power to manage the social classes and to distribute resources. And because the noble class fared better in large societies than did the lower classes, the nobles had a selfish incentive to maintain this social arrangement.

For reasons emphasized in Joseph Abraham’s Kings, Conquerors, and Psychopaths, the centralization of political power and authority would likely have corrupted virtually anyone who would have been presented with such privileges that are easily abused. Additionally, these hierarchies would have attracted the more aggressive, authoritarian members of the population as candidates for reaching the pinnacle in the first place. Thus, the contenders would have fought like mobsters for prestige and for the benefits of a dominant social position.

Certainly, by the time of the first empires or grand civilizations, the social structures were theocratic, which means the power asymmetries were rationalized by the state religion. Just as the prehistoric nomads perceived nature’s divinity as the diffuse presence of animated spirits, to reflect their free-ranging lifestyle, civilizations concentrated divinity in a pantheon of gods, to suit their cloistered societal arrangements. The greatest gods communed with the upper classes, as in the Pharaoh's union with Osiris, while the less powerful gods cheered on the lower classes.

This was the beginning of the divine right of kings, of the mythos that justified the civilized ethos, the set of patriarchal values of drudgery, decadence, and rapacity. This underlying ethos still drives what we view as social progress.

True believers think the gods bestowed on us this meta-cultural norm. The Sumerian King List says, “kingship descended from heaven,” and the myths have it that Prometheus taught us the arts and sciences, that Yahweh gave Moses the Ten Commandments, and that Heaven (Tian) supported Confucius’s social reforms.

Likewise, the gods were supposed to have ordained the rule of warlords (the victors) who waged the wars to form the early empires in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, as the kings attempted to conquer territory to add slaves (farmers, servants, and soldiers) to sustain their burgeoning populations.

The patron gods were the mascots that cheered on the home team, as well as the icons that established the symbolic power of the people’s religiopolitical brand. Lewis Mumford called this dynamic the societal “megamachine,” the automation of civilizational growth by the built-in ideological excuses for the plain injustice of carrying out the oppressive, expansionist ventures. Civilization operated like a machine with moving parts — with the castes or social classes — that had to interact efficiently, as dictated by the rules of civility.

The social functions might as well have been computer programs.

The Civilizational Con

But what if, contrary to the conservatives who still prefer a dubious literalistic reading of scriptures, these theocratic ideologies had no such divine origin?

What if the mythical antediluvian kings listed in the Sumerian King List were concocted, for example, to justify the much-later invention of kingship in Mesopotamia, when the kings saw themselves as stewards for the gods that owned the land? What if the Jewish scriptures, too, were compiled late in the Babylonian captivity, long after the foundational events in Jewish history were supposed to have taken place? And what if the monotheistic imperative was read back into that history, to justify a self-serving priestly mentality?

In short, what if ancient theocracy and thus civilization itself functioned as a colossal, global fraud? What if the elites who benefited the most from agriculture, technology, and the mega-scale of city life exploited the illiteracy and gullibility of the masses, providing a religious drama to reassure them that civilization was for the best because it was mandated by the patron gods? What if the naïve ancients practically hallucinated this spiritual dimension of their societies, perceiving social functions as the powers of gods?

To the extent that this rank con artistry at least played some role in sustaining cities, kingdoms, and empires — and possibly a predominant role in the theocratic norm before the rise of modern republics — we might wonder whether even our secular societies are similarly groundless.

I’ve argued elsewhere that capitalism operates as a largescale fraud. Religions run out our clocks by pinning our hopes for a reward for our drudgery and sacrifices, on a dubious afterlife, while the main rewards for most people in capitalist societies are held off until retirement. The latter is a dwindling prospect for the majority, as these societies tend to become plutocratic and unjust without governmental corrections. And this is especially true for workaholic countries like the United States.

Still, modernity presented us with the chance for a re-examination of the merits of civilization. Obviously, after the churches lost their political power in Europe, we chose to continue with civilization rather than to try our luck with a revival of nomadic shamanism, buoyed as we were by stupendous scientific and technological advances. But the new individualism and skepticism entailed a loss of religious faith, which meant we’d shaken off the old fraud and had to face with sobriety the consequences of civilizational growth. No longer deferring to priests and to theocratic myths, we couldn’t pretend that everything always works out for the best because the gods control the world just as kings controlled their kingdoms.

We suffered eventually from late-modern ennui, which has led, for example, to an epidemic of opioid overdoses. As Friedrich Nietzsche worried, despite the rise of First World wealth and luxuries, we might lack the motivation to carry on after the “death” of God. What would the new, godless morals be to inspire our civilizational adventure, especially after we discovered that historical progress might have been self-destructive all along?

Hyper-rational communism and Romantic fascism failed in the twentieth century, and American-style capitalism seems as fraudulent as ancient theocracy, as I suggested. Indeed, it’s not obvious that there’s any such viable, authentic (non-fraudulent) secular ethos. Even a scientific rationale for modern civilization, such as transhumanism, rests on faith that we’ll fulfill the utopian promise of technological progress, the one set out by optimistic science fiction authors.

The problem is that any late-modern defense of civilization must reckon with the dire environmental cost of our progress, and must avoid the existential letdown of succumbing to archaic forms of religious faith which have arguably been revealed as lingering theocratic cons.

The Prospects of Civilization

We have some reason to think that if civilization began largely as a fraud that excused the manipulations that enabled the wealthy rulers alone to live like gods, civilization is unlikely to end well. It’s not that the collapse of the ecosystems due to short-sighted human expansion would be a case of bad karma or poetic justice.

Rather, civilization wouldn’t have been designed to be as stable or sustainable as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. On the contrary, the roots of civilization would have been planned by psychopathic or narcissistic rulers who tended to be unconsciously self-destructive.

Psychopaths are impulsive and reckless because they usually feel that all life is worthless, including theirs (despite the megaliths they may have erected in their name to protest too much). Narcissists think they can do no wrong, so they systematically underestimate their opposition; they live in a self-inflated bubble that the real world can burst at any time.

This origin — the recklessness of civilization’s architects— doesn’t bode well for us; indeed, if civilization is based on an insidious fraud, its long-term survival would be a miracle.

Ideally, then, with the benefit of all this hindsight, we should renew our trust in civilization for good reasons or we ought to have the strength of character and the creative vision to develop something better.