Barbarism and Civilisation:

A synopsis

Around 10,000 years ago, the last Ice Age ended, and the earth entered a prolonged warm spell. There had been previous warm spells during which man had flourished, but during this warm spell man gradually emerged as a dominant creature - more dominant than any creature before. How did this happen? How did man emerge to dominate the earth?

The story can be seen in terms of three revolutions - three major changes. The first was the Agricultural Revolution which began somewhere around 6,000 BC, when man ceased to be a mobile hunter and gatherer and instead settled down to become a farmer.

The second revolution was the revolution of Greece and Rome. This was no so much the rise of great cities and a powerful empire, - there had been great cities and powerful empires before - but the rise of new ideas, and new ways of living; of freedom and democracy, of a new form of art, and a new type of economy based on that most controversial of subjects - money.

And then the Third Revolution is the Industrial Revolution , beginning in the 18th century in Britain, spreading fast to American and Europe, continuing in the 19th and 20th centuries, and now accelerating every further with the rise of the computers and the internet.

These pages concentrate on the second of these revolutions - to look in particular at the rise of Greece and Rome; to see how they differed from the societies that had gone before; and to look at the Decline and Fall, and at the succeeding Middle Ages, when it took a long long time to struggle back to the ideals that had begun to be glimpsed by the Greeks and Romans.

And intermingled with all this will be the philosophical question of the meanings of Civilisation and barbarism and at the extra degree of freedom that is the essential ingredient of civilisation. For what is history if it does not try to tackle some of the big questions of mankind?

Interludes and Conclusions: Society | Art | Religion | Ethics | Law | Sex

1. The Neolithic Revolution

The farming revolution came to different parts of the world in different forms. In the Near East and Europe, it was based on wheat and barley. In the far East it was based on rice. In the Americas it was based on a wide range of vegetables. But everywhere it involved settling down into ; men began to live together, at first in villages, and then later, in towns.

2. How early societies work.

Early societies were different in many ways to modern societies, particularly in their economics. To study these early societies we need to turn to anthropology: a good place to start is with a visit to the Trobriand islands in the South Pacific, studied by Bronislaw Malinowski during the first World War, and the subject of his great book The Argonauts of the South Pacific. This is perhaps the best exposition of early economics, based, not on barter, but on gift exchange.

3. The Higher Barbarisms

Having studied barbarism from the anthropological point of view, we then turn to look at some classic example of barbaric, that is centrally-organised societies in the ancient world. We look at Egypt - the classic example - and Minoan Crete, which in many ways is an even better example. Crete is a splendid example of a barbarian economy, with goods flowing into the palaces, and being stored there, before being given out in the form of gifts. The Minoan Linear B tablets are a splendid demonstration of the workings of this centralised (and therefore barbarian) economy.

4. Greece: Athens and Sparta

What made Greece great? Why was the Greco-Roman civilisation different from anything that had come before? The answer is that the Greeks invented money, and they therefore became the world's first market economy. Money (qua money) was invented between 550 and 500, and 500 is around the date when the entirely new society known as Classical Greece emerged, with new ideas such as democracy (born 510 with Cleisthenes), new types of literature such as Herodotus, the father of both History and Anthropology - to say nothing of theatre, comedy, and philosophy.
Greece also saw the first reaction against money in the form of Sparta, which voted against the use of money sometime around 525 BC and developed all the characteristics of a totalitarian state: centralised eating, harsh education, a brutal secret police, success in war, and the praise of intelligentsia enjoying the benefits of freedom in more civilised states.

(It would be nice also to do a chapter on China, which also invented money, quite independently, 300 years after Greece. But what happened in China? Why did it develop as a bureaucracy, and not as a market economy? )

5. Rome

Politically the big success is Part II of the story, that is the Romans. Today the Romans have a very bad press. They were imperialist and colonialists and above all they were successful. The secret is that they proved very good at delegating, and thus their colonies colonies and provinces, once established, tended to have a considerable degree of self-government. Thus decisions were delegated to the provinces, and within the provinces decisions were delegated to the cities: if you want a new theatre, you pay for it! One suspects that for most people Roman rule was rather less burdensome than what went before, and most of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire felt freer than they had under their barbarian rulers.

But note how the extent of the Roman empire corresponds to the spread of money in the pre-Roman Celtic societies: Rome failed to conquer Scotland or Germany, the countries where money had not already penetrated.

6. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

The end of the Roman empire came most suddenly in Britain, where it has been most extensively studied. The money supply in the Roman world was in the form of soldiers' pay; and when the legions marched out in 407, the money supply disappeared, and the market economy vanished almost at once. This can be demonstrated by the collapse of the pottery industries, which were highly sophisticated in the 4th century, but which vanished when money disappeared. Within a generation, towns and villas were deserted, and civilisation had been replaced by barbarism. This is the age of King Arthur, the prototype barbarian hero.

7. The Middle Ages.

A fascinating example of a half and half economy. Obviously, money was known, but it was not used. The feudal system in particular is a classic example of a barbarian stratified society. Similarly the monasteries (which comprised at least a third of the economy) are a classic form of a barbarian economy with goods flowing into the centre and out again, rather than round the periphery.

8. The Renaissance

After the long night of the Middle Ages, at last the power of the church began to crack. Reformation was in the air, and there was a new birth of the ideas of the classical civilisations, and new stirring s of some of the old liberal ideals. But it remained a somewhat rumbustious form of society where kings and tyrants still predominated, and religion became a major divisive force.

9. The Glorious and Bloodless Revolution of 1688

When did Britain become Britain? It is fashionable these days to deride the very notion of Britishness, but the concept has a meaning and has a date. That date is 1688, the Glorious and Bloodless Revolution, followed a few years later by the union of the Parliaments of England and Scotland, which was when the changes that led to the modern world really got going.

We decided that religion, which had taken up so much energy, should be essentially a private matter; that the best kings were weak, obedient and preferably foreign, and that parliament was best when ‘It did nothing in particular and did it very well’. The economy instead of being the hierarchical and down structure of the feudal system has the sideways distribution of the market place; and this led to the sideways structure of society. In short we get John Bull, the archetypal figure of the free society, a sturdy independent yeoman, beholden to no man, well fed – the market economy feeds you well - and standing on his own feet, prosperous and happy. In short the essence of civilisation.

Note how the rise of the country house parallels the rise of the Roman villa. These are essentially displays of the wealth of market economies, wealth that is for the most part independent of political power.

10. The French Revolution.

This is a classic example of the dangers of inflation.
The Revolution began as a Good Thing - the deposition of a worthless monarchy - but it then destroyed itself by a crazy printing of money - the assignats - which led to violent inflation, which led to the terrors of 1793. By 1795 the inflation had blown itself out and a new "Margaret Thatcher" figure came along, called Napoleon, who was a sound money man, replacing the worthless old money with new money based on gold - modestly called the 'Napoleon'. Unfortunately Napoleon, though essentially a sound money man, carried with him the ideological baggage of the left, and he became a tyrant, which led to his downfall.

11. The Industrial Revolution

The third great revolution is the Industrial Revolution. This began in the Britain, in the 18th century but really got going in the 19th century, when Britain became the ‘workshop of the World’. But by the end of the 19th century the impetus in Britain was faltering, and Germany and America began increasingly to take the lead, while the 20th century was very much the century of America.

But why did this take place in Britain? What were the ingredients that made this revolution possible? And why did America take over the lead and carry it forward?

12. The Secret History of the 19th and 20th centuries

Money is the hidden glue of civilisation, and underlying all recent history is the history of money. Some of it is well-known, such as the part played by the Great German inflation of the 1923 in the subsequent rise of the Nazis.

Other aspects are less well-known. There is the prolonged depression of the late Victorian era, from the 1870s still around 1896. Yet this had a monetary cause. Throughout the 19th century, Britain was on the gold standard, and gold was needed to provide a backing for the money. Other countries were also coming onto the gold standard, so the demand for gold was steadily rising. Supply of gold however was static, and this in turn led to the depression which knocked the stuffing out of late Victorian England. Then in 1896, the South African gold mines were discovered, and in over the next 20 years, the amount of gold in circulation, and thus the money supply went up steadily, leading to the mild but steady inflation of the Edwardian era.

A similar monetary cause underlies the Great Depression of the early 1930s, as Milton Friedman has shown. The Depression began as a fairly normal slump on the Stock Exchange. However this led the US Federal Reserve to squeeze the money supply, thus turning what should have been a fairly short downturn into a prolonged slump. Many such monetary causes underlie the histories of the 19th and 20th century.

Interludes and conclusions: into the future

Having studied the past, it is time to conclude with some interludes.

Society

There are only two forms of Society, Class Society, and Caste Society. A caste or kin-based society is the barbarian form, where your position is based on birth, and family relations are all-important. A Class society on the other hand is the civilised form of society, which is a flexible form of society, where one's associations are based largely on choice. In a class society you choose your associates, and these associates make up your 'class'. Marx realised that the class system is the glue that holds together market liberalism, and therefore very successfully libelled the class form of society. However this has also meant that Communist societies have always ended up as caste societies. We must re-instate the class system, which forms the glue of a civilised society.

Art

Barbaric art is often better than civilised art - go round any museum and look at the jewellery - barbaric jewellery is the more flamboyant and has more zing to it: compare Greek with Scythian jewellery, Etruscan with Roman, Anglo-Saxon with Romano-British. Note too that it is often the chieftains and tyrants who are the best sponsors of art - note the Renaissance princes who sponsored Michelangelo - or the German princes who sponsored Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. However note artificial re-introduction of barbarism into 20th century art e.g. Gaugin, and the effects of the Arts Council - which encourages pretentious form with vapid content.

Religion

Just as there are three basic levels of development - tribal, chiefdom and market economy, so there are three basic types of religion. The tribal society is reflected by a tribal religion - each village has its own gods, and when you visit a neighbouring village, you naturally make a polite nod to their gods. The second level is the chiefdom type of religion, where the big chief is echoed by a big god. These are the monotheistic religions, which tend to be very intolerant, dominated by a central and unique god, jealous of all other gods.

Finally there is the more sophisticated type of religion, the market economy religion. Here there are a number of gods competing against each other: the best example is the Greco-Roman religion. Here we can follow the ups and downs of the various gods as on a stock exchange, by studying their portrayal in art and small dedications. Some gods fail to maintain their value and fall in the market - notably Zeus and Hera; other gods, - and the prime example is Aphrodite/Venus, maintain their market position throughout and prove a valuable long-term stock, essential in any portfolio. Other gods show a steady rise, notably Hercules and Dionysus, appealing respectively to the keep-fit and the get-drunk markets. The later periods also see two new phenomena: first the rise of the abstract-noun gods, notably Fortuna; and then there is the rise of the mystery eastern religions, Isis, Cybele, Mithras and others. Here in the Greco-Roman world is the best demonstration of a market religion in action, demonstrating the essential tolerance that is such an attractive feature of the market economy.

Business Ethics

The application of the 'normal' practice of gift exchange is called 'bribery' by unsympathetic western governments. We should be more tolerant.

The Rule of Law

There are three great bases for civilisation: The Rule of Law; the market economy, and democracy. Of these the most important is the Rule of Law. Yet it is often the most neglected, and the case needs to be made out once again of the crucial underlying importance of the Rule of Law as the foundation of civilisation.

Sex

If the essence of civilisation is the increased range of choice, then civilised sex should be marked by a greater range of choice and variety.
A single chapter in Leviticus has ensured that the three great 'religions of the Book' have also had somewhat unusual and repressive attitudes towards sex; as a result it is difficult for us in the west today to know what is the ‘norm’ for sex. Today the advent of the pill, and easy abortion has given further opportunities to revise the sexual norms. Of all the challenges facing mankind, this is surely the one of the most difficult to predict.

Interludes and Conclusions: Society | Art | Religion | Ethics | Law | Sex

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December 2000