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The Economic Elements of CivilizationI #2 | | |
IN one important sense the “savage,” too, is civilized, for he carefully transmits to his children the heritage of the tribe—that complex of economic, political, mental and moral habits and institutions which it has developed in its efforts to maintain and enjoy itself on the earth. It is impossible to be scientific here; for in calling other human beings “savage” or “barbarous” we may be expressing no objective fact, but only our fierce fondness for ourselves, and our timid shyness in the presence of alien ways. Doubtless we underestimate these simple peoples, who have so much to teach us in hospitality and morals; if we list the bases and constituents of civilization we shall find that the naked nations invented or arrived at all but one of them, and left nothing for us to add except embellishments and writing. Perhaps they, too, were once civilized, and desisted from it as a nuisance. We must make sparing use of such terms as “savage” and “barbarous” in referring to our “contemporaneous ancestry.” Preferably we shall call “primitive” all tribes that make little or no provision for unproductive days, and little or no use of writing. In contrast, the civilized may be defined as literate providers. #3 | | |
I. FROM HUNTING TO TILLAGE #4 | | |
Primitive improvidence—Beginnings of provision—Hunting and
fishing—Herding—The domestication of animals—Agriculture—
Food—Cooking—Cannibalism #5 | | |
“Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast.”2 The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day.3 The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bushmen of Africa it is always “either a feast or a famine.”4 There is a mute wisdom in this improvidence, as in many “savage” ways. The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the “thoughtless” native disappears. The American Negro is making this transition today. “Of what are you thinking?” Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. “I do not have to think,” was the answer; “I have plenty of meat.” Not to think unless we have to—there is much to be said for this as the summation of wisdom. #6 | | |
Nevertheless, there were difficulties in this carelessness, and those organisms that outgrew it came to possess a serious advantage in the struggle for survival. The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day—these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they, or other subtle creatures like them, who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer’s time of plenty. #7 | | |
With what skill those ancestors ferreted out, from land and sea, the food that was the basis of their simple societies! They grubbed edible things from the earth with bare hands; they imitated or used the claws and tusks of the animals, and fashioned tools out of ivory, bone or stone; they made nets and traps and snares of rushes or fibre, and devised innumerable artifices for fishing and hunting their prey. The Polynesians had nets a thousand ells long, which could be handled only by a hundred men; in such ways economic provision grew hand in hand with political organization, and the united quest for food helped to generate the state. The Tlingit fisherman put upon his head a cap like the head of a seal, and hiding his body among the rocks, made a noise like a seal; seals came toward him, and he speared them with the clear conscience of primitive war. Many tribes threw narcotics into the streams to stupefy the fish into cooperation with the fishermen; the Tahitians, for example, put into the water an intoxicating mixture prepared from the huteo nut or the hora plant; the fish, drunk with it, floated leisurely on the surface, and were caught at the anglers’ will. Australian natives, swimming under water while breathing through a reed, pulled ducks beneath the surface by the legs, and gently held them there till they were pacified. The Tarahumaras caught birds by stringing kernels on tough fibres half buried under the ground; the birds ate the kernels, and the Tarahumaras ate the birds.5 #8 | | |
Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death. For hunting was not merely a quest for food, it was a war for security and mastery, a war beside which all the wars of recorded history are but a little noise. In the jungle man still fights for his life, for though there is hardly an animal that will attack him unless it is desperate for food or cornered in the chase, yet there is not always food for all, and sometimes only the fighter, or the breeder of fighters, is allowed to eat. We see in our museums the relics of that war of the species in the knives, clubs, spears, arrows, lassos, bolas, lures, traps, boomerangs and slings with which primitive men won possession of the land, and prepared to transmit to an ungrateful posterity the gift of security from every beast except man. Even today, after all these wars of elimination, how many different populations move over the earth! Sometimes, during a walk in the woods, one is awed by the variety of languages spoken there, by the myriad species of insects, reptiles, carnivores and birds; one feels that man is an interloper on this crowded scene, that he is the object of universal dread and endless hostility. Some day, perhaps, these chattering quadrupeds, these ingratiating centipedes, these insinuating bacilli, will devour man and all his works, and free the planet from this marauding biped, these mysterious and unnatural weapons, these careless feet! #9 | | |
Hunting and fishing were not stages in economic development, they were modes of activity destined to survive into the highest forms of civilized society. Once the center of life, they are still its hidden foundations; behind our literature and philosophy, our ritual and art, stand the stout killers of Packingtown. We do our hunting by proxy, not having the stomach for honest killing in the fields; but our memories of the chase linger in our joyful pursuit of anything weak or fugitive, and in the games of our children—even in the word game. In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply. The cathedral and the capitol, the museum and the concert chamber, the library and the university are the façade; in the rear are the shambles. #10 | | |
To live by hunting was not original; if man had confined himself to that he would have been just another carnivore. He began to be human when out of the uncertain hunt he developed the greater security and continuity of the pastoral life. For this involved advantages of high importance: the domestication of animals, the breeding of cattle, and the use of milk. We do not know when or how domestication began—perhaps when the helpless young of slain beasts were spared and brought to the camp as playthings for the children.6 The animal continued to be eaten, but not so soon; it acted as a beast of burden, but it was accepted almost democratically into the society of man; it became his comrade, and formed with him a community of labor and residence. The miracle of reproduction was brought under control, and two captives were multiplied into a herd. Animal milk released women from prolonged nursing, lowered infantile mortality, and provided a new and dependable food. Population increased, life became more stable and orderly, and the mastery of that timid parvenu, man, became more secure on the earth. #11 | | |
Meanwhile woman was making the greatest economic discovery of all—the bounty of the soil. While man hunted she grubbed about the tent or hut for whatever edible things lay ready to her hand on the ground. In Australia it was understood that during the absence of her mate on the chase the wife would dig for roots, pluck fruit and nuts from the trees, and collect honey, mushrooms, seeds and natural grains.7 Even today, in certain tribes of Australia, the grains that grow spontaneously out of the earth are harvested without any attempt to separate and sow the seed; the Indians of the Sacramento River Valley never advanced beyond this stage.8 We shall never discover when men first noted the function of the seed, and turned collecting into sowing; such beginnings are the mysteries of history, about which we may believe and guess, but cannot know. It is possible that when men began to collect unplanted grains, seeds fell along the way between field and camp, and suggested at last the great secret of growth. The Juangs threw the seeds together into the ground, leaving them to find their own way up. The natives of Borneo put the seed into holes which they dug with a pointed stick as they walked the fields.9 The simplest known culture of the earth is with this stick or “digger.” In Madagascar fifty years ago the traveler could still see women armed with pointed sticks, standing in a row like soldiers, and then, at a signal, digging their sticks into the ground, turning over the soil, throwing in the seed, stamping the earth flat, and passing on to another furrow.10 The second stage in complexity was culture with the hoe: the digging stick was tipped with bone, and fitted with a crosspiece to receive the pressure of the foot. When the Conquistadores arrived in Mexico they found that the Aztecs knew no other tool of tillage than the hoe. With the domestication of animals and the forging of metals a heavier implement could be used; the hoe was enlarged into a plough, and the deeper turning of the soil revealed a fertility in the earth that changed the whole career of man. Wild plants were domesticated, new varieties were developed, old varieties were improved. #12 | | |
Finally nature taught man the art of provision, the virtue of prudence,II the concept of time. Watching woodpeckers storing acorns in the trees, and the bees storing honey in hives, man conceived—perhaps after millenniums of improvident savagery—the notion of laying up food for the future. He found ways of preserving meat by smoking it, salting it, freezing it; better still, he built granaries secure from rain and damp, vermin and thieves, and gathered food into them for the leaner months of the year. Slowly it became apparent that agriculture could provide a better and steadier food supply than hunting. With that realization man took one of the three steps that led from the beast to civilization—speech, agriculture, and writing. #13 | | |
It is not to be supposed that man passed suddenly from hunting to tillage. Many tribes, like the American Indians, remained permanently becalmed in the transition—the men given to the chase, the women tilling the soil. Not only was the change presumably gradual, but it was never complete. Man merely added a new way of securing food to an old way; and for the most part, throughout his history, he has preferred the old food to the new. We picture early man experimenting with a thousand products of the earth to find, at much cost to his inward comfort, which of them could be eaten safely; mingling these more and more with the fruits and nuts, the flesh and fish he was accustomed to, but always yearning for the booty of the chase. Primitive peoples are ravenously fond of meat, even when they live mainly on cereals, vegetables and milk.11 If they come upon the carcass of a recently dead animal the result is likely to be a wild debauch. Very often no time is wasted on cooking; the prey is eaten raw, as fast as good teeth can tear and devour it; soon nothing is left but the bones. Whole tribes have been known to feast for a week on a whale thrown up on the shore.12 Though the Fuegians can cook, they prefer their meat raw; when they catch a fish they kill it by biting it behind the gills, and then consume it from head to tail without further ritual.13 The uncertainty of the food supply made these nature peoples almost literally omnivorous: shellfish, sea urchins, frogs, toads, snails, mice, rats, spiders, earthworms, scorpions, moths, centipedes, locusts, caterpillars, lizards, snakes, boas, dogs, horses, roots, lice, insects, larvae, the eggs of reptiles and birds—there is not one of these but was somewhere a delicacy, or even a pièce de résistance, to primitive men.14 Some tribes are expert hunters of ants; others dry insects in the sun and then store them for a feast; others pick the lice out of one another’s hair, and eat them with relish; if a great number of lice can be gathered to make a petite marmite, they are devoured with shouts of joy, as enemies of the human race.15 The menu of the lower hunting tribes hardly differs from that of the higher apes.16 #14 | | |
The discovery of fire limited this indiscriminate voracity, and coöperated with agriculture to free man from the chase. Cooking broke down the cellulose and starch of a thousand plants indigestible in their raw state, and man turned more and more to cereals and vegetables as his chief reliance. At the same time cooking, by softening tough foods, reduced the need of chewing, and began that decay of the teeth which is one of the insignia of civilization. #15 | | |
To all the varied articles of diet that we have enumerated, man added the greatest delicacy of all—his fellowman. Cannibalism was at one time practically universal; it has been found in nearly all primitive tribes, and among such later peoples as the Irish, the Iberians, the Picts, and the eleventh-century Danes.17 Among many tribes human flesh was a staple of trade, and funerals were unknown. In the Upper Congo living men, women and children were bought and sold frankly as articles of food;18 on the island of New Britain human meat was sold in shops as butcher’s meat is sold among ourselves; and in some of the Solomon Islands human victims, preferably women, were fattened for a feast like pigs.19 The Fuegians ranked women above dogs because, they said, “dogs taste of otter.” In Tahiti an old Polynesian chief explained his diet to Pierre Loti: “The white man, when well roasted, tastes like a ripe banana.” The Fijians, however, complained that the flesh of the whites was too salty and tough, and that a European sailor was hardly fit to eat; a Polynesian tasted better.20 #16 | | |
What was the origin of this practice? There is no surety that the custom arose, as formerly supposed, out of a shortage of other food; if it did, the taste once formed survived the shortage, and became a passionate predilection.21 Everywhere among nature peoples blood is regarded as a delicacy—never with horror; even primitive vegetarians take to it with gusto. Human blood is constantly drunk by tribes otherwise kindly and generous; sometimes as medicine, sometimes as a rite or covenant, often in the belief that it will add to the drinker the vital force of the victim.22 No shame was felt in preferring human flesh; primitive man seems to have recognized no distinction in morals between eating men and eating other animals. In Melanesia the chief who could treat his friends to a dish of roast man soared in social esteem. “When I have slain an enemy,” explained a Brazilian philosopher-chief, “it is surely better to eat him than to let him waste.. . . The worst is not to be eaten, but to die; if I am killed it is all the same whether my tribal enemy eats me or not. But I could not think of any game that would taste better than he would. . . . You whites are really too dainty.”23 #17 | | |
Doubtless the custom had certain social advantages. It anticipated Dean Swift’s plan for the utilization of superfluous children, and it gave the old an opportunity to die usefully. There is a point of view from which funerals seem an unnecessary extravagance. To Montaigne it appeared more barbarous to torture a man to death under the cover of piety, as was the mode of his time, than to roast and eat him after he was dead. We must respect one another’s delusions. #18 | | |
II. THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDUSTRY #19 | | |
Fire—Primitive Tools—Weaving and pottery—Building and transport—Trade and finance #20 | | |
If man began with speech, and civilization with agriculture, industry began with fire. Man did not invent it; probably nature produced the marvel for him by the friction of leaves or twigs, a stroke of lightning, or a chance union of chemicals; man merely had the saving wit to imitate nature, and to improve upon her. He put the wonder to a thousand uses. First, perhaps, he made it serve as a torch to conquer his fearsome enemy, the dark; then he used it for warmth, and moved more freely from his native tropics to less enervating zones, slowly making the planet human; then he applied it to metals, softening them, tempering them, and combining them into forms stronger and suppler than those in which they had come to his hand. So beneficent and strange was it that fire always remained a miracle to primitive man, fit to be worshiped as a god; he offered it countless ceremonies of devotion, and made it the center or focus (which is Latin for hearth) of his life and home; he carried it carefully with him as he moved from place to place in his wanderings, and would not willingly let it die. Even the Romans punished with death the careless vestal virgin who allowed the sacred fire to be extinguished. #21 | | |
Meanwhile, in the midst of hunting, herding and agriculture, invention was busy, and the primitive brain was racking itself to find mechanical answers to the economic puzzles of life. At first man was content, apparently, to accept what nature offered him—the fruits of the earth as his food, the skins and furs of the animals as his clothing, the caves in the hillsides as his home. Then, perhaps (for most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice), he imitated the tools and industry of the animal: he saw the monkey flinging rocks and fruit upon his enemies, or breaking open nuts and oysters with a stone; he saw the beaver building a dam, the birds making nests and bowers, the chimpanzees raising something very like a hut. He envied the power of their claws, teeth, tusks and horns, and the toughness of their hides; and he set to work to fashion tools and weapons that would resemble and rival these. Man, said Franklin, is a tool-using animal;24 but this, too, like the other distinctions on which we plume ourselves, is only a difference of degree. #22 | | |
Many tools lay potential in the plant world that surrounded primitive man. From the bamboo he made shafts, knives, needles and bottles; out of branches he made tongs, pincers and vices; from bark and fibres he wove cord and clothing of a hundred kinds. Above all, he made himself a stick. It was a modest invention, but its uses were so varied that man always looked upon it as a symbol of power and authority, from the wand of the fairies and the staff of the shepherd to the rod of Moses or Aaron, the ivory cane of the Roman consul, the lituus of the augurs, and the mace of the magistrate or the king. In agriculture the stick became the hoe; in war it became the lance or javelin or spear, the sword or bayonet.25 Again, man used the mineral world, and shaped stones into a museum of arms and implements: hammers, anvils, kettles, scrapers, arrow-heads, saws, planes, wedges, levers, axes and drills. From the animal world he made ladles, spoons, vases, gourds, plates, cups, razors and hooks out of the shells of the shore, and tough or dainty tools out of the horn or ivory, the teeth and bones, the hair and hide of the beasts. Most of these fashioned articles had handles of wood, attached to them in cunning ways, bound with braids of fibre or cords of animal sinew, and occasionally glued with strange mixtures of blood. The ingenuity of primitive men probably equaled—perhaps it surpassed—that of the average modern man; we differ from them through the social accumulation of knowledge, materials and tools, rather than through innate superiority of brains. Indeed, nature men delight in mastering the necessities of a situation with inventive wit. It was a favorite game among the Eskimos to go off into difficult and deserted places, and rival one another in devising means for meeting the needs of a life unequipped and unadorned.26 #23 | | |
III This primitive skill displayed itself proudly in the art of weaving. Here, too, the animal showed man the way. The web of the spider, the nest of the bird, the crossing and texture of fibres and leaves in the natural embroidery of the woods, set an example so obvious that in all probability weaving was one of the earliest arts of the human race. Bark, leaves and grass fibres were woven into clothing, carpets and tapestry, sometimes so excellent that it could not be rivaled today, even with the resources of contemporary machinery. Aleutian women may spend a year in weaving one robe. The blankets and garments made by the North American Indians were richly ornamented with fringes and embroideries of hairs and tendon-threads dyed in brilliant colors with berry juice; colors “so alive,” says Father Théodut, “that ours do not seem even to approach them.”27 Again art began where nature left off; the bones of birds and fishes, and the slim shoots of the bamboo tree, were polished into needles, and the tendons of animals were drawn into threads delicate enough to pass through the eye of the finest needle today. Bark was beaten into mats and cloths, skins were dried for clothing and shoes, fibres were twisted into the strongest yarn, and supple branches and colored filaments were woven into baskets more beautiful than any modern forms.28 #24 | | |
Akin to basketry, perhaps born of it, was the art of pottery. Clay placed upon wickerwork to keep the latter from being burned, hardened into a fireproof shell which kept its form when the wickerwork was taken away;29 this may have been the first stage of a development that was to culminate in the perfect porcelains of China. Or perhaps some lumps of clay, baked and hardened by the sun, suggested the ceramic art; it was but a step from this to substitute fire for the sun, and to form from the earth myriad shapes of vessels for every use—for cooking, storing and transporting, at last for luxury and ornament. Designs imprinted by finger-nail or tool upon the wet clay were one of the first forms of art, and perhaps one of the origins of writing. #25 | | |
Out of sun-dried clay primitive tribes made bricks and adobe, and dwelt, so to speak, in pottery. But that was a late stage of the building art, binding the mud hut of the “savage” in a chain of continuous development with the brilliant tiles of Nineveh and Babylon. Some primitive peoples, like the Veddahs of Ceylon, had no dwellings at all, and were content with the earth and the sky; some, like the Tasmanians, slept in hollow trees; some, like the natives of New South Wales, lived in caves; others, like the Bushmen, built here and there a wind-shelter of branches, or, more rarely, drove piles into the soil and covered their tops with moss and twigs. From such wind-shelters, when sides were added, evolved the hut, which is found among the natives of Australia in all its stages from a tiny cottage of branches, grass and earth large enough to cover two or three persons, to great huts housing thirty or more. The nomad hunter or herdsman preferred a tent, which he could carry wherever the chase might lead him. The higher type of nature peoples, like the American Indian, built with wood; the Iroquois, for example, raised, out of timber still bearing the bark, sprawling edifices five hundred feet long, which sheltered many families. Finally, the natives of Oceania made real houses of carefully cut boards, and the evolution of the wooden dwelling was complete.30 #26 | | |
Only three further developments were needed for primitive man to create all the essentials of economic civilization: the mechanisms of transport, the processes of trade, and the medium of exchange. The porter carrying his load from a modern plane pictures the earliest and latest stages in the history of transportation. In the beginning, doubtless, man was his own beast of burden, unless he was married; to this day, for the most part, in southern and eastern Asia, man is wagon and donkey and all. Then he invented ropes, levers, and pulleys; he conquered and loaded the animal; he made the first sledge by having his cattle draw along the ground long branches bearing his goods;IV he put logs as rollers under the sledge; he cut cross-sections of the log, and made the greatest of all mechanical inventions, the wheel; he put wheels under the sledge and made a cart. Other logs he bound together as rafts, or dug into canoes; and the streams became his most convenient avenues of transport. By land he went first through trackless fields and hills, then by trails, at last by roads. He studied the stars, and guided his caravans across mountains and deserts by tracing his route in the sky. He paddled, rowed or sailed his way bravely from island to island, and at last spanned oceans to spread his modest culture from continent to continent. Here, too, the main problems were solved before written history began. #27 | | |
Since human skills and natural resources are diversely and unequally distributed, a people may be enabled, by the development of specific talents, or by its proximity to needed materials, to produce certain articles more cheaply than its neighbors. Of such articles it makes more than it consumes, and offers its surplus to other peoples in exchange for their own; this is the origin of trade. The Chibcha Indians of Colombia exported the rock salt that abounded in their territory, and received in return the cereals that could not be raised on their barren soil. Certain American Indian villages were almost entirely devoted to making arrow-heads; some in New Guinea to making pottery; some in Africa to blacksmithing, or to making boats or lances. Such specializing tribes or villages sometimes acquired the names of their industry (Smith, Fisher, Potter . . .), and these names were in time attached to specializing families.30a Trade in surpluses was at first by an interchange of gifts; even in our calculating days a present (if only a meal) sometimes precedes or seals a trade. The exchange was facilitated by war, robbery, tribute, fines, and compensation; goods had to be kept moving! Gradually an orderly system of barter grew up, and trading posts, markets and bazaars were established—occasionally, then periodically, then permanently—where those who had some article in excess might offer it for some article of need.31 #28 | | |
For a long time commerce was purely such exchange, and centuries passed before a circulating medium of value was invented to quicken trade. A Dyak might be seen wandering for days through a bazaar, with a ball of beeswax in his hand, seeking a customer who could offer him in return something that he might more profitably use.32 The earliest mediums of exchange were articles universally in demand, which anyone would take in payment: dates, salt, skins, furs, ornaments, implements, weapons; in such traffic two knives equaled one pair of stockings, all three equaled a blanket, all four equaled a gun, all five equaled a horse; two elk-teeth equaled one pony, and eight ponies equaled a wife.33 There is hardly any thing that has not been employed as money by some people at some time: beans, fish-hooks, shells, pearls, beads, cocoa seeds, tea, pepper, at last sheep, pigs, cows, and slaves. Cattle were a convenient standard of value and medium of exchange among hunters and herders; they bore interest through breeding, and they were easy to carry, since they transported themselves. Even in Homer’s days men and things were valued in terms of cattle: the armor of Diomedes was worth nine head of cattle, a skilful slave was worth four. The Romans used kindred words—pecus and pecunia—for cattle and money, and placed the image of an ox upon their early coins. Our own words capital, chattel and cattle go back through the French to the Latin capitale, meaning property: and this in turn derives from caput, meaning head—i.e., of cattle. When metals were mined they slowly replaced other articles as standards of value; copper, bronze, iron, finally—because of their convenient representation of great worth in little space and weight—silver and gold, became the money of mankind. The advance from token goods to a metallic currency does not seem to have been made by primitive men; it was left for the historic civilizations to invent coinage and credit, and so, by further facilitating the exchange of surpluses, to increase again the wealth and comfort of man.34 #29 | | |
III. ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION #30 | | |
Primitive communism—Causes of its disappearance—Origins of private property—Slavery—Classes #31 | | |
Trade was the great disturber of the primitive world, for until it came, bringing money and profit in its wake, there was no property, and therefore little government. In the early stages of economic development property was limited for the most part to things personally used; the property sense applied so strongly to such articles that they (even the wife) were often buried with their owner; it applied so weakly to things not personally used that in their case the sense of property, far from being innate, required perpetual reinforcement and inculcation. #32 | | |
Almost everywhere, among primitive peoples, land was owned by the community. The North American Indians, the natives of Peru, the Chittagong Hill tribes of India, the Borneans and South Sea Islanders seem to have owned and tilled the soil in common, and to have shared the fruits together. “The land,” said the Omaha Indians, “is like water and wind—what cannot be sold.” In Samoa the idea of selling land was unknown prior to the coming of the white man. Professor Rivers found communism in land still existing in Melanesia and Polynesia; and in inner Liberia it may be observed today.35 #33 | | |
Only less widespread was communism in food. It was usual among “savages” for the man who had food to share it with the man who had none, for travelers to be fed at any home they chose to stop at on their way, and for communities harassed with drought to be maintained by their neighbors.36 If a man sat down to his meal in the woods he was expected to call loudly for some one to come and share it with him, before he might justly eat alone.37 When Turner told a Samoan about the poor in London the “savage” asked in astonishment: “How is it? No food? No friends? No house to live in? Where did he grow? Are there no houses belonging to his friends?”38 The hungry Indian had but to ask to receive; no matter how small the supply was, food was given him if he needed it; “no one can want food while there is corn anywhere in the town.”39 Among the Hottentots it was the custom for one who had more than others to share his surplus till all were equal. White travelers in Africa before the advent of civilization noted that a present of food or other valuables to a “black man” was at once distributed; so that when a suit of clothes was given to one of them the donor soon found the recipient wearing the hat, a friend the trousers, another friend the coat. The Eskimo hunter had no personal right to his catch; it had to be divided among the inhabitants of the village, and tools and provisions were the common property of all. The North American Indians were described by Captain Carver as “strangers to all distinctions of property, except in the articles of domestic use. . . . They are extremely liberal to each other, and supply the deficiencies of their friends with any superfluity of their own.” “What is extremely surprising,” reports a missionary, “is to see them treat one another with a gentleness and consideration which one does not find among common people in the most civilized nations. This, doubtless, arises from the fact that the words ‘mine’ and ‘thine,’ which St. Chrysostom says extinguish in our hearts the fire of charity and kindle that of greed, are unknown to these savages.” “I have seen them,” says another observer, “divide game among themselves when they sometimes had many shares to make; and cannot recollect a single instance of their falling into a dispute or finding fault with the distribution as being unequal or otherwise objectionable. They would rather lie down themselves on an empty stomach than have it laid to their charge that they neglected to satisfy the needy. . . . They look upon themselves as but one great family.”40 #34 | | |
Why did this primitive communism disappear as men rose to what we, with some partiality, call civilization? Sumner believed that communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups.41 Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast as “so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon the expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce with them. Since the industrious thus enjoy no more of the fruits of their labor than the idle, they plant less every year.”42 Darwin thought that the perfect equality among the Fuegians was fatal to any hope of their becoming civilized;43 or, as the Fuegians might have put it, civilization would have been fatal to their equality. Communism brought a certain security to all who survived the diseases and accidents due to the poverty and ignorance of primitive society; but it did not lift them out of that poverty. Individualism brought wealth, but it brought, also, insecurity and slavery; it stimulated the latent powers of superior men, but it intensified the competition of life, and made men feel bitterly a poverty which, when all shared it alike, had seemed to oppress none.V #35 | | |
Communism could survive more easily in societies where men were always on the move, and danger and want were ever present. Hunters and herders had no need of private property in land; but when agriculture became the settled life of men it soon appeared that the land was most fruitfully tilled when the rewards of careful husbandry accrued to the family that had provided it. Consequently—since there is a natural selection of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups—the passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property to family property; the most economical unit of production became the unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose. Frequently an enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest, the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual property began.43a As the pressure of population increased, and older lands were exhausted, such reclamation went on in a widening circle, until, in the more complex societies, individual ownership became the order of the day. The invention of money coöperated with these factors by facilitating the accumulation, transport and transmission of property. The old tribal rights and traditions reasserted themselves in the technical ownership of the soil by the village community or the king, and in periodical redistributions of the land; but after an epoch of natural oscillation between the old and the new, private property established itself definitely as the basic economic institution of historical society. #36 | | |
Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities slavery had been unknown; the hunter’s wives and children sufficed to do the menial work. The men alternated between the excited activity of hunting or war, and the exhausted lassitude of satiety or peace. The characteristic laziness of primitive peoples had its origin, presumably, in this habit of slowly recuperating from the fatigue of battle or the chase; it was not so much laziness as rest. To transform this spasmodic activity into regular work two things were needed: the routine of tillage, and the organization of labor. #37 | | |
Such organization remains loose and spontaneous where men are working for themselves; where they work for others, the organization of labor depends in the last analysis upon force. The rise of agriculture and the inequality of men led to the employment of the socially weak by the socially strong; not till then did it occur to the victor in war that the only good prisoner is a live one. Butchery and cannibalism lessened, slavery grew.44 It was a great moral improvement when men ceased to kill or eat their fellowmen, and merely made them slaves. A similar development on a larger scale may be seen today, when a nation victorious in war no longer exterminates the enemy, but enslaves it with indemnities. Once slavery had been established and had proved profitable, it was extended by condemning to it defaulting debtors and obstinate criminals, and by raids undertaken specifically to capture slaves. War helped to make slavery, and slavery helped to make war. #38 | | |
Probably it was through centuries of slavery that our race acquired its traditions and habits of toil. No one would do any hard or persistent work if he could avoid it without physical, economic or social penalty. Slavery became part of the discipline by which man was prepared for industry. Indirectly it furthered civilization, in so far as it increased wealth and—for a minority—created leisure. After some centuries men took it for granted; Aristotle argued for slavery as natural and inevitable, and St. Paul gave his benediction to what must have seemed, by his time, a divinely ordained institution. #39 | | |
Gradually, through agriculture and slavery, through the division of labor and the inherent diversity of men, the comparative equality of natural society was replaced by inequality and class divisions. “In the primitive group we find as a rule no distinction between slave and free, no serfdom, no caste, and little if any distinction between chief and followers.”45 Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the weak.VI Inheritance added superior opportunity to superior possessions, and stratified once homogeneous societies into a maze of classes and castes. Rich and poor became disruptively conscious of wealth and poverty; the class war began to run as a red thread through all history; and the state arose as an indispensable instrument for the regulation of classes, the protection of property, the waging of war, and the organization of peace. #40 | | |
I Despite recent high example to the contrary,1 the word civilization will be used in this volume to mean social organization, moral order, and cultural activity; while culture will mean, according to the context, either the practice of manners and the arts, or the sum-total of a people’s institutions, customs and arts. It is in the latter sense that the word culture will be used in reference to primitive or prehistoric societies. #41 | | |
II Note the ultimate identity of the words provision, providence and prudence. #42 | | |
III Reduced type, unindented, will be used occasionally for technical or dispensable matter. #43 | | |
IV The American Indians, content with this device, never used the wheel. #44 | | |
V Perhaps one reason why communism tends to appear chiefly at the beginning of civilizations is that it flourishes most readily in times of dearth, when the common danger of starvation fuses the individual into the group. When abundance comes, and the danger subsides, social cohesion is lessened, and individualism increases; communism ends where luxury begins. As the life of a society becomes more complex, and the division of labor differentiates men into diverse occupations and trades, it becomes more and more unlikely that all these services will be equally valuable to the group; inevitably those whose greater ability enables them to perform the more vital functions will take more than their equal share of the rising wealth of the group. Every growing civilization is a scene of multiplying inequalities; the natural differences of human endowment unite with differences of opportunity to produce artificial differences of wealth and power; and where no laws or despots suppress these artificial inequalities they reach at last a bursting point where the poor have nothing to lose by violence, and the chaos of revolution levels men again into a community of destitution. #45 | | |
Hence the dream of communism lurks in every modern society as a racial memory of a simpler and more equal life; and where inequality or insecurity rises beyond sufferance, men welcome a return to a condition which they idealize by recalling its equality and forgetting its poverty. Periodically the land gets itself redistributed, legally or not, whether by the Gracchi in Rome, the Jacobins in France, or the Communists in Russia; periodically wealth is redistributed, whether by the violent confiscation of property, or by confiscatory taxation of incomes and bequests. Then the race for wealth, goods and power begins again, and the pyramid of ability takes form once more; under whatever laws may be enacted the abler man manages somehow to get the richer soil, the better place, the lion’s share; soon he is strong enough to dominate the state and rewrite or interpret the laws; and in time the inequality is as great as before. In this aspect all economic history is the slow heart-beat of the social-organism, a vast systole and diastole of naturally concentrating wealth and naturally explosive revolution. #46 | | |
VI So in our time that Mississippi of inventions which we call the Industrial Revolution has enormously intensified the natural inequality of men. #47 | | |
