Our cartoon view of history goes straight from the Flintstones to Jetsons without developmental stages of any consequence in between. Hunter-gatherers and settled modern civilizations loom large, as bookends, in our study of history. The more I study history though, the more I realize that hunter-gatherer lifestyles are mostly of importance in evolutionary prehistory, not in history proper. If you think about history proper, a different lifestyle, pastoral nomadism, starts to loom large, and its influence on the course of human history is grossly underestimated. This is partly because civilizations and pastoral nomad cultures have a figure-ground relationship. You need to understand both to understand the gestalt of world history.
Modern hunter-gatherer lifestyles are cul-de-sacs in cultural evolution terms. They stopped mattering by around 4000 BC, and haven’t significantly affected world events since. Pastoral nomads though, played a crucial role until at least World War I. Until about 1405 (the year Timur died), they actually played the starring role. And in reconstructed form, the lifestyle may again start to dominate world affairs within the next few decades. Their eclipse over the last 5oo or so years, I am going to argue, was an accident of history that is finally being corrected.
The barbarians are about to return to their proper place at the helm of the world’s affairs, and the story revolves around this picture:
Savagery, Barbarism and Civilization
From hunter-gatherers to early pastoral nomads, you get a gradual evolution, and at some point (the Neolithic revolution, probably between 15,000 to 10,000 BC) you get a fork in the road. One path leads to settled civilizations and the other leads to increasingly sophisticated modes of pastoralism. Pre-Columbian Plains Indians could be viewed as being right at the fork: they didn’t quite herd domesticated beasts so much as follow buffalo around on their normal migratory routes. There were also other tribes that were more sedentary, but didn’t develop into full-blown settled civilizations like their cousins further south in Central and Latin America.
On the pastoral nomad branch of the fork, you get, in reverse chronological order of influence on world history, Turks, Mongols, Arabs, Northern Europeans and Proto Indo-Europeans.
On the sedentary branch, you get, in no particular order, American, Soviet, British, Continental-European, Persian, Graeco-Roman, Ancient Near Eastern, later-stage Arabic (the Abbassids more than the Ummayads), Sinic and Indian. There aren’t actually more of them, though it looks that way. They are merely easier to count off since they stay in one place and give each other names that stick.
I like Thorstein Veblen‘s labels for hunter gatherers, pastoral nomads and settled peoples (savage, barbarian and civilized respectively, from his 1899 classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class) but lest you take offense (and in case it isn’t obvious), in this post, “barbarian” is a term of approbation, while “civilized” is an insult. The term for hunter-gatherers, “savage,” is neutral. They don’t feature much in this story, but they will if I ever do a post on prehistory between 100,000 BC to 10,000 BC.
My treatment also differs from Veblen’s in one crucial way: what he views as a linear progression, I view as a forking path with barbarian and civilized branches evolving interdependently and in parallel. Like others thinkers of the 19th century, he also used the metaphor of progression from childlike to adult stages (a sort of “ontogeny recapitulates phyllogeny” idea applied to cultural evolution) to think about the linear model, which I think is fundamentally mistaken (though it persists as a trope in movies and television). So to acknowledge my debt to Veblen while distinguishing my views from his, I am going to call the anchor picture the Neo-Veblen Fork.
This post is partly an attempt to reconstruct a portion of Veblen’s ideas, but you can read it independently of the book. I strongly recommend the book though, another one of my top 10 reads. It covers vastly more territory than this post (though mostly within the context of late 19th century Robber Baron America), and most of it applies without any reconstruction in 2011.
The Idle Savage
Hunter gatherers need and create very little technology. They manage to live in a stable relationship with their environments. To the extent that they follow their main prey species around, they are more like proto-nomads. To the extent that they live around their main plant food sources, they are like proto-sedentary cultures. These are the lifestyles Veblen labeled savage.
The biblical archetype for hunter-gatherers has traditionally been the Garden of Eden. Savages are minimalist predators, and simply live off the bounty of nature, in areas where it is effectively inexhaustible. To the extent that their gathering has evolved into agriculture, it is slash-and-burn agriculture based on immediate consumption and natural renewal rather than accumulation and storage of vast quantities of non-perishable food over long periods of time. You could call their style of farming “nomadic” farming, since they move from cultivating one cleared patch of forest to the next, rather than staying put and practicing crop rotation in a small confined (and “owned”) patch of land.
For the record, I think the Garden of Eden story has it right. Savagery is the most pleasurable state of existence, if you can get it (until you annoy the witch doctor or get a toothache). Not in the sense of noble savage (an idea within what is known as romantic primitivism that is currently enjoying a somewhat silly revival thanks to things like the Paleo diet), but in the sense of what you might call the idle savage state. In some ways, an idle savage is what I am, in private, on weekends.
Though they don’t play a big part in this story, don’t underestimate what they did when they were center-stage: fire, spoken language, art and archery are all savage inventions. Wisely, they didn’t get addicted to invention and stayed idle.
Idle savagery is basically unsustainable today unless you retreat completely from the mainstream, so though I’d like to be an idle savage, I’ve settled for the compromise state of being a barbarian. That’s where it gets interesting.
The Illegible Barbarian
Pastoral nomads need, and develop, a good deal more technology, and in areas that matter to them, are usually ahead of settled civilizations. They are not quite as predatory as hunter-gatherers. Unlike hunter-gatherers, they don’t just follow prey around. They consciously domesticate and manage their herds. Rather than let the herds move by instinct, they direct their migratory instincts (hence “herding”). They don’t just occasionally slaughter what they need for food and clothing. They develop dairy, husbandry and veterinary practices as well . You could say they cultivate animals (a more demanding task than cultivating plants). The biblical reference point is of course Abel the shepherd, of killed-by-Cain fame (at one point I was enamored of Daniel Quinn’s reading of the Cain-Abel tale in Ishmael, which I now think is completely mistaken, and a case of confusing hunter-gatherers with pastoral nomads).
I’ve already argued that barbarians were responsible for the development of iron technology. I’d also credit them for the invention of the wheel, chariots, leather craft, rope-making, animal husbandry, falconry and sewing (via sewing of hide tents with gut-string and bone needles, which clearly must have come before cloth woven from plant fibers needed sewing). Basically, if anything looks like it came out of a mobile lifestyle, pastoral nomads probably invented it. At a more abstract level, barbarian cultures create fundamentally predatory technologies: technologies that allow you to do less work to get the same returns, freeing up time for idleness. What Hegel would have called “Master” technologies. The barbarian works to earn the idleness which the luckier savage gets for free.
Barbarian technologies, like savage technologies, are fundamentally sustainable, since using them tends to fulfill immediate needs rather than causing wealth accumulation. The connection to mobility is central to this characteristic: nomadic cultures do not accumulate useless things. It is a naturally self-limiting way of life. If it doesn’t fit in saddlebags or is too heavy to be carried by pack animals, it isn’t useful.
Mobility is also the fundamental reason why barbarian cultures are illegible (see my post A Big Little Idea Called Legibility) to civilized ones in literal and abstract ways.
They self-organize in sophisticated ways, but you cannot draw organization charts (the Romans tried and failed).
For most of history, they’ve owned most of the map of the world, yet you cannot draw boundaries and identify proto-nations, since they are defined by patterns of movement rather than patterns of settlement.
They practice the most evolved forms of leadership, but actual leaders change from one situation to the next (a fact which confused the Roman army no end when it fought them).
Pastoral nomads come in two varieties, which Veblen called lower and higher barbarian stages. Lower barbarian pastoral nomads include groups like the 12th century Mongols. Higher barbarian stages look like settled civilizations on the surface, but (and this was Veblen’s enduring contribution in his book) are characterized by a vigorous ruling class, with roots in pastoral nomadism, that generally maintains at least a metaphoric version of that lifestyle.
Among the more obvious symbols, as late as the 19th century, the higher barbarians often maintained herds of unnecessary domestic animals, hunted for sport (rather than for sustenance, unlike the hunter-gatherers) and generally spent their wealth recreating idealized pastoral nomad landscapes.
When the vigorous leaders of a higher barbarian culture start to settle down like their subjects, you get civilization.
The Stationary Civilized
Veblen’s notion of “civilized” roughly corresponds to agrarian (or more generally, production-accumulation based) cultures governed by social contracts and non-absolute rulers. By this measure, parts of the Near East became “civilized” by about 1500 BC (I regard the Hittites as the first true examples), followed by southern Europe around 800 BC and northern Europe around the time of the Magna Carta.
Asian cultures are much harder to track: Veblen considered them all “higher barbarian,” but depending on how you read the history of Persia, China and India, they’ve oscillated between “higher barbarian” and “civilized” over the centuries (for instance, the “growth and consolidation” reigns of Ashoka and Akbar were civilized while the entrepreneurial “startup” reigns of their respective grandfathers, Chandragupta Maurya and Babur, were higher barbarian; I don’t know Persian and Chinese history well enough to cite equivalent examples).
The mark of “civilization” is the replacement of sustainable predatory patterns of life based on immediate consumption with unsustainable non-predatory ones based on accumulation.
Civilized cultures create different types of technology compared to barbarian cultures. What Hegel would have called “Slave” technologies. Technologies that keep you working harder and harder to accumulate stuff.
Civilization is the opposite of idleness. It is a treadmill of increasing industriousness and productivity.
This isn’t irrational: sedentary lifestyles allow you to store everything from grain to gold in large quantities and lower the risk of future starvation. The carrot and stick of surplus-fueled hedonism and starvation-avoiding accumulation lock sedentary people into human zoos that become fundamentally harder to break out of over time.
But the effects are inevitable. As you settle down and accumulate stuff, the risks of existence gradually decrease and the surpluses available for hedonism increase. The net effect of both is that less actual thinking, but more work, is required to exist.
To peek ahead a bit, settled civilization is a fundamentally Gollumizing force. It makes you comfortable, stupid and addicted to the security and accumulated fruits of your labor.
Which brings us to the figure-ground interaction pattern that scripts world history.
The Barbarians and the Civilized
The most famous lower and higher barbarians in history are Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan respectively. They represent the classic historical pattern of interaction between pastoral nomads and civilized peoples.
The pattern is a simple one: a settled civilization grows old, stupid and tired, and a vigorous barbarian culture swoops in and takes over from the top, and gradually gets civilized and stupid in turn, until it too is ripe for destruction by pastoral nomads on its periphery.
Modern Europeans since the time of Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) have managed to rejoice in a rather contradictory view of themselves: they celebrate their dual origins in the vigorous barbarian cultures of the North and the exhausted cultures of antiquity. Over the protests of modern Italians and Greeks, Northern Europeans have successfully managed to appropriate for themselves the role of “true” stewards of the achievements of Greece and Rome, cultures that their barbarian forbears were instrumental in destroying (if you want to know which origin myth is closer to the hearts of Europeans, look no further than the tattoos of white gangs in prisons: they tend to be drawn from Scandinavian mythologies).
Here’s a rather suggestive piece of European history that illustrates the barbarian/civilized dynamic. In the traditional account of the “civilization of Europe,” wine played an interesting role. The Gauls (so the story goes, according to Gibbon) became Romanized first, as Roman wine-making techniques spread to what is today modern France. The Goths were interested in many of the luxuries of Rome, but the one that tempted them the most was wine, which they grew to prefer over the cruder spirits they themselves distilled.
I don’t want to hang my entire theory of civilization on this little item, but it is interesting that the barbarians were civilized, in part, through the temptations of an addiction: better booze, the refined product of an agrarian accumulation culture.
Enough examples, let’s note the two interesting questions that emerge, that deserve analysis:
First, how is it that apparently “inferior” cultures have repeatedly swooped in and destroyed and/or taken over “superior” cultures? Why was Genghis Khan able to take over China, and how did his grandson successfully create the Yuan dynasty? How did Arab armies conquer the vastly more civilized and sophisticated Persian society? How did Turks pretty much take over most of South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa? Going further back, how did the Proto Indo-European (or “Aryans”) take down the entire Bronze Age family of civilizations?
Second, given the astounding win record of the “barbarians” against the “civilized,” how come history isn’t written from the point of view of the pastoral nomads? Why aren’t the histories of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Babylon, Persia, India and China sideshows, with pride of place being given to Mongols, Turks, Arabs and Northern Europeans (pre 1000 AD)? Isn’t history supposed to be written by the winners?
Refinement and Stupidity
Here’s the answer to the first question: “barbarians” are on average, individually smarter, but collectively stupider than a thriving settled civilization.
One-on-one, a lower barbarian can outthink, outfight, and out-innovate a civilized citizen any day.
But a settled civilization at its peak can blow a lower barbarian civilization away. Not least because at the very top, you still have Veblen’s “uncivilized” higher barbarians (or, to use the Ribbonfarm term, sociopaths). But once it begins its decline, the greater live intelligence of the barbarians begins to take effect.
The explanation for this contradiction is a very simple one: by definition, civilization is the process of taking intelligence out of human minds and putting it into institutions. And by “institution” I mean something completely general: any codified organizational form based on writing will do. Writing, as Plato noted in Phaedrus, is the main medium through which intelligence passes from humans to institutions.
“[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own…You’d think they[written words] were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.” (Phaedrus 275d-e)
In the short term this works brilliantly. The ideas of the smartest people (usually embedded higher barbarians) are externalized and encoded into the design of institutions, which can then make far stupider people vastly more effective than their raw capabilities would allow (this is the reason why the modern economic notion of “productivity” is so misleading).
But in the long term this fails. The smart people die, and their ideas become obsolete and ritualized. Initially, more intelligence is being externalized into institutions than is being taken away through ritualization, but at some point, you get a peak, and the decline begins. As entropy accumulates, it becomes a simple matter for another wave of lower barbarians on the periphery to take down the civilization.
The reason this seems like a strange phenomenon is that we confuse refinement with advancement. Finely-crafted jewelry is not more advanced than roughly-hewn jewelry. A Boeing 747 is about a million times more capable than the Wright Flyer I, but it does not contain a million times as much intelligence. It is merely more refined (in the sense of cocaine, by the same logic I applied in The Gollum Effect). The difference between advancement and refinement is clearest in disruption. A beautifully-crafted sword is not more advanced than a crude gun. It is merely more refined.
Or to go back to our earlier example, wine isn’t more intelligent than a crude country-brew. It is merely more refined.
The intelligence manifest in an artifact is simply the amount of human thought that has been externalized into it. Refinement on the other hand, is a measure of the amount of work that has gone into it. In Hegelian terms, intelligence in design is fundamentally a predatory quality put in by barbarian-Masters. Refinement in design is a non-predatory quality put in by civilized-Slaves.
We miss this dynamic because of a curious phenomenon: history is only written by the winners if the winners can actually write. At their apogee, when civilizations have the most surplus wealth, they indulge in the most refined forms of writing: writing histories with autocentric conceit, they focus on the visibly-refined glories of their own age, rather than the higher-barbarian sensibilities at the foundations. Genghis Khan is the sole exception in being more famous than his grandson. In the other two examples I’ve mentioned, Ashoka and Akbar both traditionally get “the Great” added to their names. Their empire-founding barbarian grandfathers do not. The most famous symbol of the Mughal empire is the Taj Mahal, which was built by Shah Jahan, who bankrupted his empire in the process, hastening the fall that followed his reign. Babur’s tomb is a modest little building in Kabul that few would recognize in a photograph.
As a civilization becomes increasingly refined, and far less intelligent, it becomes easy prey for pastoral nomads on the margins, who swoop in cleanse the culture of accumulated stupidity, and revitalize it with a fresh infusion of barbarian blood at the top.
You might even say that barbarians operate at a meta-level: they plant and harvest value out of civilizations. They are civilization farmers, just as they are animal herders.
The Eclipse and Return of the Barbarian
The reign of Timur was the last time a true barbarian ruled a significant proportion of the world. Since his death in 1405, the barbarian has been in decline. The process reached its peak during the Cold War. In America, the Organization Man threatened to squeeze higher barbarians out of the capitalist world, while in Soviet Russia, forced settlement and collectivization in Siberia and Mongolia threatened to corral the last of the wandering lower barbarians.
It almost seemed like the fountain of barbarian culture at which humanity drinks to renew itself, was about to be completely exhausted once and for all.
The moment, thankfully passed. The Gervais Principle kicked in to re-invigorate capitalism, and the High Modernist doctrines of the Soviet state collapsed (followed by a remarkably quick return to pastoral nomadism in Mongolia and Siberia).
That was just the opening act. Today as institutions of all sorts crumble and collapse, and the written word becomes a living, dancing, hyperlinked thing that would have made Plato happy, the barbarian is set to return. I’ll blog about this in a future piece, when I extrapolate this speculative history into a speculative future.
Note, some of the ideas in this post were inspired by Seb Paquet’s two-part series on how social movements happen. I don’t entirely agree with Seb’s model, but you should check it out if these things interest you.
This was also partly motivated by the impending April 12th release of Francis Fukuyama’s new book, The Origins of Political Order. I wanted to get my own thoughts on the subject down before tackling his. His first book, The End of History and the Last Man, was in many ways my personal introduction to this sort of subject matter. And no, I am not a neocon.