Agriculture and the roots of tyranny
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put together their theories about human political and economic systems out of incomplete data concerning Native America brought back to Europe by 18th- and 19th-century anthropologists. At that time, what was known about North American peoples was how free they seemed, how uncorrupted by the things that beset European and Asian societies and cultures, and how lacking in the sort of tyrannies and institutional cruelties that have unhappily characterized so much of human history. What those anthropologists of the time noticed was the lack of great empires and dictatorships among North American peoples, but the why of it was still not then known.
Another thing that was not well known among Europeans of the time, except for Spaniards and the Roman Catholic Church, due to their settlements in the Americas, was the nature and extent of highly socially, economically, and culturally stratified societies among South American peoples, e.g., the Incas, Toltecs, Aztecs, and Mayas. There had been a number of powerful empires and religious tyrannies in South and Central America by the time the first Spanish explorers came to the New World.
In particular, the Aztecs, who dominated a good deal of Mesoamerica before Hernan Cortés came calling, ruled a horrifically aggressive empire that had made a practice of invading and conquering its neighbors and carrying off huge numbers of their people, because they had an even more horrific religion that required the daily sacrifice of great numbers of people, supposedly to keep the Sun alive and thus prevent the end of the world. By acquiring as many prisoners of war as possible, they could, they believed, keep the Sun alive by sacrificing those hapless POWs on the altars of their Gods.
It was all there, all the stuff of the most evil, horrifying tyrannies and oppressors Europe and Asia had ever known, in Central and South America -- but Marx and Engels didn't know that. All they knew from the reports of European anthropologists returned home after exploring America and studying its natives was that for whatever reason the various peoples of North America seemed to be extraordinarily free of the fetters under which so many European and Asian peoples had groaned. Why? What was their secret? In trying to work that out, Marx and Engels developed their ideas about why human societies become burdened with oppressors on the basis of that anthropological data in combination with the theories of Charles Darwin on evolution, and in particular on human evolution. The problem was that they didn't know the rest of the story -- that would only become evident much later, through the research of numerous anthropologists during the 20th century not only on North American native societies and peoples, but also into the nature various Polynesian, Melanesian, African, Australian, and other native societies and cultures.
Two factors were involved. The first, a rather obvious one the implications of which Marx and Engels should have realized, was the very low human population density in North America both prior to Columbus's voyages to the New World and in the first one or two centuries after that. Compared to European and Asian societies, there simply weren't very many people in all of North America, only some 10-12 million in over 4 million square miles of territory. Central and South America, on the other hand, were simultaneously relatively rather crowded -- and that was the clue to the solution to the puzzle. Why were the numbers of the human populations of the two continents so disparate, so few in North America, so many in South and Central America?
Most of North America is in either the Temperate or the Arctic zones, regions that do not strongly support intensive agriculture. Some parts of North America, particularly Mexico and the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, receive enough warmth during the year to support intensive agriculture, but even then, Winters in what is now called the American South, which comprises everything east of the Mississippi, north of Mexico, and south of the 35th parallel, can be very cold, cold enough for snow to fall. Even Florida has lost numerous crops of oranges and other cold-sensitive fruits to frost, in some years so much so as to make a serious dent in that state's economy.
But Mexico is entirely within subtropical and tropical belts, as is all of northern South America, while Central America is entirely within the tropics. And it is within the tropical regions of the world that intensive agriculture flourishes. Hence the higher human population numbers and densities in South and Central America than in most of North America. But there's a catch associated with all that wonderful sunlight and agricultural opportunities: agriculturists become tied to their land by investment of labor, the reaping of the rewards of the fruits of that labor, and the children that they are able to support in consequence of the great abundance of food they produce. Once a people begins practicing agriculture, they are no longer able to just pull up stakes and go elsewhere if the going becomes too rough, politically or economically, in the area where they have been living. After a few generations in that area, their ancestors evolved particular religions, philosophies, and ways of life on which they based everything in their lives from the begetting and raising of children to the production of crops to the establishment of dynasties of rulers and their duties and obligations to those rulers. In leaving that area they would have to leave most of what had made their lives meaningful behind -- including the grandchildren and great-grandchildren their children might already have produced, and who would eventually establish their own lives in that homeland.
Furthermore, once you give up the way of life of a hunting and gathering people for agriculture, after a while you can't go back to the old ways, any more than most of today's Americans could survive a return to 19th-century technology and medical care. You become so adapted to and dependent on the new ways of doing things that you can't go back to your ancestors' ways and survive, certainly not as a people. The Neolithic lifestyle gives you great advantages over Paleolithic ways in the form of (usually) more abundant and predictable supplies of food, semi-permanent or permanent separate soldier castes who can protect the farmers among their people from attempted invasions and conquest by outsiders, castes of specialists such as shamans, priests, healers, Magickians, politicians, and others whose skills are needed in such complex, rigorously stratified societies to keep everything running smoothly, bring water in for irrigation and other things to ensure abundant crops, and otherwise provide for the survival and well-being of as many members of that society as possible. Once you adopt those ways, however, you forget the old ways and cannot take them up again if you leave the agricultural settlement that is your home. And so agriculture itself becomes the oppressor, because you need it and it needs you, a mutualistic relationship much like that between a recreational drug and someone who is both a user of and a dealer in that drug. Once that relationship between human beings and their crops and livestock is established, once they make that irrevocable commitment to the settled way of life, for them to give it up is, in most cases, to die. And not only die, but have their lineages go extinct, because they can't support children who might otherwise carry on their genes.*
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*There are, of course, exceptions. Individuals can often do what groups of people cannot, including abandoning their way of life in order to escape whatever burdens they have had in their homeland, and managing to survive the transition. "Lighting out for the territories" is an ancient way of getting out from under anything from a warrant for one's arrest for a crime or having to pay alimony to an ex-spouse to escaping a totalitarian regime and seeking real freedom. But if one is to be successful at it and to have a life worth living afterward or, indeed, survive at all, to do so requires abandoning a great deal of what one has invested one's life in. An individual might survive that and, indeed, many individuals have done so. Small families might do so, also. But the hardships involved in doing so make it nearly impossible for groups much larger than a family -- as witness, e.g., the terrible hardships endured by so many of those who took part in European colonization of North America "You can't go home again" is an old saying that is literally true for many people; and if what you need to survive can be found only at home and nowhere else, as is so often the case, fleeing your home will kill you. In this case, "home" is a way of life and the conditions that support it which, for all you know, don't exist elsewhere, and which are absolutely necessary for the survival and well-being of you and your family. Only when death itself would be a mercy, given what you have endured in your homeland, does flight from that land begin to look attractive to you.
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And at that point the parasites begin to show up, those who ferret out niches within such a society and begin exploiting them for their own benefit. Which is how tyrants and tyrannical regimes are born. Which is the sort of thing that happened in Europe and Asia so many times, with such terrible results. But those parasites would never have had those niches to exploit if humanity hadn't invented agriculture and found regions where they could pursue ways of life devoted to agriculture and animal husbandry to the fullest.
You want to eliminate tyranny and oppression? Then kill all the farmers, ranchers, silvaculturists, and anyone else who produces food for our tables, and killing any new ones who come to take their place. Because otherwise the thing that makes tyrants possible, the unbreakable symbiotic relationship between human food producer and the plants and animals he cultivates, will endure and continue to breed tyrants. Somehow, Marx, Engels, and their disciples, right down to the present day, never figured that out -- nor the obvious corollary, which is that as long as humanity practices animal husbandry and agriculture, the sole defense against the rise and establishment of tyranny is eternal vigilance. Which the Founding Fathers of this nation figured out clear back in the 18th century.. How about that?
Further reading: William Brandon, The Last Americans : The Indian in American Culture; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies; and Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 and The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.
Another thing that was not well known among Europeans of the time, except for Spaniards and the Roman Catholic Church, due to their settlements in the Americas, was the nature and extent of highly socially, economically, and culturally stratified societies among South American peoples, e.g., the Incas, Toltecs, Aztecs, and Mayas. There had been a number of powerful empires and religious tyrannies in South and Central America by the time the first Spanish explorers came to the New World.
In particular, the Aztecs, who dominated a good deal of Mesoamerica before Hernan Cortés came calling, ruled a horrifically aggressive empire that had made a practice of invading and conquering its neighbors and carrying off huge numbers of their people, because they had an even more horrific religion that required the daily sacrifice of great numbers of people, supposedly to keep the Sun alive and thus prevent the end of the world. By acquiring as many prisoners of war as possible, they could, they believed, keep the Sun alive by sacrificing those hapless POWs on the altars of their Gods.
It was all there, all the stuff of the most evil, horrifying tyrannies and oppressors Europe and Asia had ever known, in Central and South America -- but Marx and Engels didn't know that. All they knew from the reports of European anthropologists returned home after exploring America and studying its natives was that for whatever reason the various peoples of North America seemed to be extraordinarily free of the fetters under which so many European and Asian peoples had groaned. Why? What was their secret? In trying to work that out, Marx and Engels developed their ideas about why human societies become burdened with oppressors on the basis of that anthropological data in combination with the theories of Charles Darwin on evolution, and in particular on human evolution. The problem was that they didn't know the rest of the story -- that would only become evident much later, through the research of numerous anthropologists during the 20th century not only on North American native societies and peoples, but also into the nature various Polynesian, Melanesian, African, Australian, and other native societies and cultures.
Two factors were involved. The first, a rather obvious one the implications of which Marx and Engels should have realized, was the very low human population density in North America both prior to Columbus's voyages to the New World and in the first one or two centuries after that. Compared to European and Asian societies, there simply weren't very many people in all of North America, only some 10-12 million in over 4 million square miles of territory. Central and South America, on the other hand, were simultaneously relatively rather crowded -- and that was the clue to the solution to the puzzle. Why were the numbers of the human populations of the two continents so disparate, so few in North America, so many in South and Central America?
Most of North America is in either the Temperate or the Arctic zones, regions that do not strongly support intensive agriculture. Some parts of North America, particularly Mexico and the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, receive enough warmth during the year to support intensive agriculture, but even then, Winters in what is now called the American South, which comprises everything east of the Mississippi, north of Mexico, and south of the 35th parallel, can be very cold, cold enough for snow to fall. Even Florida has lost numerous crops of oranges and other cold-sensitive fruits to frost, in some years so much so as to make a serious dent in that state's economy.
But Mexico is entirely within subtropical and tropical belts, as is all of northern South America, while Central America is entirely within the tropics. And it is within the tropical regions of the world that intensive agriculture flourishes. Hence the higher human population numbers and densities in South and Central America than in most of North America. But there's a catch associated with all that wonderful sunlight and agricultural opportunities: agriculturists become tied to their land by investment of labor, the reaping of the rewards of the fruits of that labor, and the children that they are able to support in consequence of the great abundance of food they produce. Once a people begins practicing agriculture, they are no longer able to just pull up stakes and go elsewhere if the going becomes too rough, politically or economically, in the area where they have been living. After a few generations in that area, their ancestors evolved particular religions, philosophies, and ways of life on which they based everything in their lives from the begetting and raising of children to the production of crops to the establishment of dynasties of rulers and their duties and obligations to those rulers. In leaving that area they would have to leave most of what had made their lives meaningful behind -- including the grandchildren and great-grandchildren their children might already have produced, and who would eventually establish their own lives in that homeland.
Furthermore, once you give up the way of life of a hunting and gathering people for agriculture, after a while you can't go back to the old ways, any more than most of today's Americans could survive a return to 19th-century technology and medical care. You become so adapted to and dependent on the new ways of doing things that you can't go back to your ancestors' ways and survive, certainly not as a people. The Neolithic lifestyle gives you great advantages over Paleolithic ways in the form of (usually) more abundant and predictable supplies of food, semi-permanent or permanent separate soldier castes who can protect the farmers among their people from attempted invasions and conquest by outsiders, castes of specialists such as shamans, priests, healers, Magickians, politicians, and others whose skills are needed in such complex, rigorously stratified societies to keep everything running smoothly, bring water in for irrigation and other things to ensure abundant crops, and otherwise provide for the survival and well-being of as many members of that society as possible. Once you adopt those ways, however, you forget the old ways and cannot take them up again if you leave the agricultural settlement that is your home. And so agriculture itself becomes the oppressor, because you need it and it needs you, a mutualistic relationship much like that between a recreational drug and someone who is both a user of and a dealer in that drug. Once that relationship between human beings and their crops and livestock is established, once they make that irrevocable commitment to the settled way of life, for them to give it up is, in most cases, to die. And not only die, but have their lineages go extinct, because they can't support children who might otherwise carry on their genes.*
*********************************************************************
*There are, of course, exceptions. Individuals can often do what groups of people cannot, including abandoning their way of life in order to escape whatever burdens they have had in their homeland, and managing to survive the transition. "Lighting out for the territories" is an ancient way of getting out from under anything from a warrant for one's arrest for a crime or having to pay alimony to an ex-spouse to escaping a totalitarian regime and seeking real freedom. But if one is to be successful at it and to have a life worth living afterward or, indeed, survive at all, to do so requires abandoning a great deal of what one has invested one's life in. An individual might survive that and, indeed, many individuals have done so. Small families might do so, also. But the hardships involved in doing so make it nearly impossible for groups much larger than a family -- as witness, e.g., the terrible hardships endured by so many of those who took part in European colonization of North America "You can't go home again" is an old saying that is literally true for many people; and if what you need to survive can be found only at home and nowhere else, as is so often the case, fleeing your home will kill you. In this case, "home" is a way of life and the conditions that support it which, for all you know, don't exist elsewhere, and which are absolutely necessary for the survival and well-being of you and your family. Only when death itself would be a mercy, given what you have endured in your homeland, does flight from that land begin to look attractive to you.
*********************************************************************
And at that point the parasites begin to show up, those who ferret out niches within such a society and begin exploiting them for their own benefit. Which is how tyrants and tyrannical regimes are born. Which is the sort of thing that happened in Europe and Asia so many times, with such terrible results. But those parasites would never have had those niches to exploit if humanity hadn't invented agriculture and found regions where they could pursue ways of life devoted to agriculture and animal husbandry to the fullest.
You want to eliminate tyranny and oppression? Then kill all the farmers, ranchers, silvaculturists, and anyone else who produces food for our tables, and killing any new ones who come to take their place. Because otherwise the thing that makes tyrants possible, the unbreakable symbiotic relationship between human food producer and the plants and animals he cultivates, will endure and continue to breed tyrants. Somehow, Marx, Engels, and their disciples, right down to the present day, never figured that out -- nor the obvious corollary, which is that as long as humanity practices animal husbandry and agriculture, the sole defense against the rise and establishment of tyranny is eternal vigilance. Which the Founding Fathers of this nation figured out clear back in the 18th century.. How about that?
Further reading: William Brandon, The Last Americans : The Indian in American Culture; Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies; and Brian M. Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 and The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.