There is a consistent pattern, among those who describe societies and economies, past and present, to reverse cause and effect in significant events. I would like to dub this the Emperor Josef Wrote Don Giovanni Syndrome. This is the tendency to shift attention from those who create to those who rule, sometimes bluntly, sometimes subtly, until one has the vague impression that those who rule are the ones who create.
This, of course, begins at the crudest level when historians casually assert that something that happened to come into existence during the reign of a king, or an emperor, or a pharaoh was “made” by them or “built” by them. The historian may retreat to the excuse that this is a conventional form, understood by all to mean its opposite, but this leaves unexplained why there should be any need to have a formulaic phrasing so misleading and perverse. In fact, it is usually easy enough to tell from the context that the author does not really contradict or qualify, in his mind, the conventional phrase, and really does believe that a ruler is the creative force, in every sense, behind whatever admirable achievements happen to be known from his reign. The more distant the events are in time, the more this prevails. No historian can get away with claiming that the Emperor Joseph II was the composer of Don Giovanni, but that is because the events are recent, and approaching the time when composers were beginning to be be perceived as important people. However, those who know Mozart know that it was a close call. He was a celebrity as a child, because of his precocity, but anyone who understands the era knows that the aristocracy of the Austro-Hungarian empire thought of him as nothing more important than a servant, and when he left their brief attention span, he died in poverty. His body vanished into an anonymous pauper’s grave. If his reputation had not been relentlessly championed by musicians who knew him, his named would have been forgotten.
If these events had taken place a few centuries earlier, then the fact that Josef II took music lessons would have been taken as sufficient evidence that he composed the opera, in the same way that the popular song “Greensleeves” is continuously, and absurdly attributed to Henry VIII (though the known provenance and style prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the attribution is impossible, I possess several recordings that assert it in their liner notes). The threshold of credulity for this sort of thing is very low. Specific attribution by evidence is deemed unnecessary when the events take place any time before 1400, when the individual authors of most creative works remain anonymous. We are told, with monotonous regularity that various kings, emperors, and barbarians who burned cities and stacked skulls in pyramids were brilliant architects, poets, artists, philosophers, inventors, scientists and civil engineers. If an aqueduct was built during some king’s reign, we are given the vague impression that, in between assassinations and military campaigns, he spent all his spare time surveying, drawing up construction plans, and studying hydraulic engineering. The impression is based on nothing, conveyed by implication, and propped up by repetition. The more limited our knowledge of the era, the more the association of a ruler and his “works” becomes part of our mental furniture. Slapping a ruler’s name on something pretty much clinches the deal. People are quick to admire Hadrian’s craftsmanship in “Hadrian’s “ Wall, and can barely be restrained from pointing out the deft strokes with which he troweled the mortar. If a legal code or a proclamation survives from a monarch’s lifetime, historians are quick to see it as evidence of the workings of his mind, even if common sense tells us that it was probably conceived, devised and written by some nameless clerk, while the monarch was snoring and farting, dead drunk, sprawled on the cushions of the harem. Just because the title “Code of Hammurabi” is poked in cuneiform wedges at the top of the clay tablet doesn’t mean that he either wrote it or thunk it. Yet, even if a historian concedes this in a footnote, it is instantly forgotten, and every word written on the subject belies the footnote, and promotes the fantasy.
I would call attention to the events in Romania, in very recent times. The Communist regime required all scientists and scholars to publish their books, reports and papers with the authorship attributed to the wife of the dictator, who was referred to in every reference source, broadcast, and public record as “the greatest scientific mind of the century”. In reality, she was barely able to read, and had all the knowledge and intelligence of a lump of stale cookie dough. Yet thousands upon thousands of written documents survive, in libraries scattered around the world, with her name on them, and a few hundred years from now, scholars will be certain that there existed a woman of unparalleled genius, a shining Communist Queen of Romania. If any references to the fraud survive, they will be dismissed as propaganda from jealous enemies, outweighed by the “balance” of evidence. Historians want shining queens, not sordid little brainless sluts who giggle while they order scientists and poets to be dragged to the basement and tortured with electric cattle prods. Fidel Castro imagined himself an expert on agronomy and animal husbandry, and his idiotic decrees reduced Cuban agriculture to a shambles, but I can find no end of references to his genius in the matter. Mao Zedong’s delusions that he was an expert on steel manufacture not only wrecked the Chinese economy, and killed off tens of millions in famine, but produced no usable steel. Yet China’s literature and history books are now full of his imaginary accomplishments, and practically none of China’s billion people have any other source of information. Even though the evidence for the truth is irrefutable, it will gradually be suppressed in the rest of the world, too, as the historian’s instinct to glorify the powerful, because they are powerful, gradually overcomes mere truth. In a century, Hitler’s reputation as a monster will fade, under the same impulse, which will be unchecked when the last of the survivors of the Holocaust die off. He will morph into that clever guy who briefly “unified Europe” and built the Autobahn. After all, he was an “artist”, and an artist couldn’t really do bad things, unless compelled to by political necessity. Surely someone who painted such charming water-colours could not have been a bad man. There will be dramas filmed in which he is shown surrounded by his architectural models, looking up from his sketchbook, and tearfully philosophising about the tragic necessity that compelled him to resolve the Jewish Problem. There won’t be a dry eye in the house.
An interesting variant of the Emperor Josef Wrote Don Giovanni Syndrome is the Tory Interpretation of wealth creation. This is the belief that whomever happens to be richest and most powerful, or live in the biggest houses, must be the creators and generators of a society’s wealth. You could see this attitude in the “trickle down” nonsense peddled by Neo-Conservative economists back in the days of Ronald Reagan, and still taught in many macro-economic textbooks. A notoriously disastrous taxation policy was based on it, but there is no shortage of people today eager to repeat it. The argument was that tax breaks should be given to the rich, because rich people are the “productive class”, the engine of economic creativity, and if they have lower taxes, then they will automatically invest their wealth in creating new wealth. Everyone will be better off, because their creativity will generate so much wealth that the benefits will “trickle down” to the middle class and the poor, who will then generate more tax revenue. It all presumed that the rich are the “creative” component of the economy. It was bullshit, of course. In the economy of a country like United States or Canada, new enterprises and wealth have always been created by people without money, who are trying to make some, not by those who were already rich. It is the number of burdens and restrictions on those people, the struggling have-nots, that determines whether new wealth will be generated. Investment in new enterprises by rich people plays little part in the success of these enterprises ― the bulk of investment capital comes from pension funds, bank deposits, and various forms of pooled savings generated by people of modest means.
At the height of the “Reaganomics” folly, useful government services were cut back, while useless ones were preserved, and economically destructive military spending was increased. Since taxes on the wealthy were cut back, everyone else took up a heavier tax burden, and it was precisely these people, the ones who actually produce new enterprises and new wealth, who were stifled. The rich did not invest their windfall of cash in new enterprises at all. Instead, they did what the rich always prefer to do: they exported their capital to other countries, ploughed it into established and protected business, or spent it on real estate. No amount of buying real estate generates new wealth. It merely generates empty speculative bubbles. Neo-Conservative dogma also mandated infinitely expanding spending on the military. This is an economic dead end that further exports capital, or turns it into firecrackers. These trends could only create massive debts and paralyze economic creativity. The occasional technical spinoff from military technology does not come close to offsetting these loses. These results have, in fact, come to pass in the United States, a sad journey to bankruptcy that can be charted in a spectacular upward arrow of national debt, starting in Reagan’s first term. If you don’t care for charts, you can just look out the window, and learn the same thing.
Underlying all this economic disaster was the notion that those who have received and accumulated wealth must, ipso facto, be the people who created it. Now, it is sometimes true, in particular cases, that individual wealth can be traced to creative enterprise in the person who has it, but the bulk of great wealth in the United States and Canada has been accumulated through holding corporations and other economic mechanisms by which already existing enterprises are bought up (and sometimes gutted and ruined), Increasingly, they just come from handouts from the taxpayer ― like the thirty billion dollars in subsidies given to six sugar industry families in Florida, quid-pro-nothing. The taxation and banking systems are rigged to force the inventors and creators of new enterprises to hand them over to holding corporations, which perform no function other than to own them, and divert profits to their key shareholders. These shareholders are, by and large, already wealthy families, who preserved their wealth over generations through trust funds, foundations, and other legal devices not available to smaller property owners. They hire professional managers to manage the process. There is a minor creative component ― some particular configurations of these accumulated enterprises work better than others ― but for the last half century it has been quite rare for anyone who created a new product, or developed a new process, or invented something, or built an enterprise from scratch, to retain control or ownership of it past its initial stages. Banks, for example, start pressuring entrepreneurs to relinquish control the second their enterprises start to show a profit, usually succeeding to oust them at the point were investment capital is critical. Taxation is, and has always been, set up to favour large holdings over small enterprise. Value Added taxes, for example, always popular with established power, automatically benefit existing large enterprises, since small enterprises must depend on a greater percentage of external transactions. This, and hundreds of other subtle pressures, act to shove the results of creative enterprise into the hands of a wealthy minority who cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as the “engine” or the “creative force” of wealth. These processes have nothing to do with the operations of a free market. They are invariably determined by law, and by government policy.
Such practices are not exclusive to an industrial economy or the product of “modernity”. Among native cultures of the Americas, for example, there is a long history of long-distance trade. This trade depended on the discovery and maintenance of trade routes, which was often the result of the individual enterprise of ambitious explorers, who would risk life and limb to map out and establish them. This risky and difficult activity was open to anyone, and, in theory, much of the resulting profits would come to the entrepreneur. But most of the societies that engaged in this type of trade were divided into clans. These clans were, in theory, supposed to be equal entities, but there were ways of manipulating the existing ceremonial, religious, and political institutions to accumulate prestige and special powers in favoured clans. These clan-based societies had proto-democratic conciliar government, but the possession of sacred bundles or totems, gains and losses in war, and accumulated political payoffs presented openings for asserting an aristocratic or favoured status. The leading figures in these preferred clans rarely undertook to create new trade routes themselves, but they had a way of accumulating ownership of them. Entrepreneurs would face ritual and ceremonial demands, need special permissions or face harassment through the councils, need loans, go bankrupt, and so on. Sooner or later, all the trade routes and their profits would belong to the pre-eminent clan, which had done nothing to create them. During the periods when tribes created new wealth, explored and developed new trade routes and linkages, the work was done largely by entrepreneurs in low-prestige clans, but during the periods of economic decline, it was usually sewn up in the power of a single clan, or a single family. If you asked the head of that clan who had “made” the wealth, you can be pretty sure of what answer you would get, and pretty sure that it was wrong.
This is a pattern that would be familiar to a citizen of Detroit, or 19th century Manchester, or any “one-industry town” that went into precipitous decline after its brief day in the sun. Examples of this process can be found everywhere from Medieval Europe to Communist China, from headhunting villages in remote jungles to corporate boardrooms in New York. Elites do it whenever they can get away with it, in any place and any time, and the same mis-identifiction of the “creative element” can expected,
I’ve been led to reflect on this during my recent reading. Historians and archaeologists are trying to imagine how agriculture originated, and how it spread. The archaeological evidence, of course, is only useful if interpreted, and the interpretations depend on ideas of what sort of thing causes what, of how societies, and economies work in general. I find the problem very interesting, because these very abstract ideas appear in the raw, so to speak. There are so few facts ― mostly assemblages of site materials, our ever-changing knowledge of animal and plant biology, climate history, and competing theories of population dynamics and ecology. This is not the sort of thing you can solve by finding a chronicle in a monastery.
What strikes me is that most of the theorizing seems to follow one or another, or sometimes a fusion, of these two versions of the Emperor Josef Wrote Don Giovanni Syndrome. It appears to be accepted, without any skepticism, by most theoreticians on the subject, that elite power of some sort was the source of ancient innovations. This is an old shibboleth. Cities were “created” by temple elites and kings. Agriculture was “made possible” by social stratification. In fact, a maze of intellectual constructions have depended, ever since the days of Gordon Childe, on defining “social complexity” as the presence of ranked priviledge and power. The scheme of an inevitable “evolutionary process” in which progress is determined by the appearance of powerful chieftains, priesthoods, and then kings and mperors, was taken to be the very essence of civilization. The theoretical landscape is still dominated by squabbles about exactly how this “complexity” comes into being, and what abstract forces (climate, population pressure, religion, “carrying capacity”) created the social inequality that marks “complexity”. It is simply taken for granted, without question, that whoever holds the most wealth or power, has the highest status, or commands the most fear, must be responsible for technological change, the introduction of new lifestyles, any increase in productivity, or anything perceived as an advance. This is our old friend Emperor Josef, again.
I’m pleased that there is starting to be some small, tentative steps towards recognizing the importance of trade in such historical events as the domestication of animals and plants, the development of village life, the spread of agriculture from region to region, and the development of the first cities. Historians began by imagining that trade didn’t even exist in ancient times, that it was something that developed late human history. Gradually, they were forced by accumulated evidence to acknowledge that it existed in ancient civilizations, then in early urban centers, then in early village life, and even in non-sedentary life, though they squirmed constantly to redefine it or qualify it in some way that made it appear less “commercial” whenever they could. I have never felt such discomfort. I begin with the assumption that trade is built into human culture from its earliest stages. In fact, I see trade as probably being the activity that brought about many of the changes that have been attributed to “complexity”. I see domestication, village life, urbanization, and changes in technology as side-effects of trade ― a cumulative chain of causation linking social and technological developments with trading activity, going back into the dimmest recesses of time. I see trade as an essentially co-operative activity, closely linked to the same psychology that produces egalitarian political institutions.
Some few theoreticians do, nowadays, see a role for trade in these questions, but unfortunately, they seem to approach it from the Emperor Josef point of view, and try to figure out how social inequality causes trade, or trade depends on inequality. Whenever archaeological evidence suggests a correlation, the wrong causal direction is inferred. Because prestige burials appear in agricultural villages, it is assumed that the skeletons in those prestige burials must have been the determinants, the cause, the creators of agriculture, just as in earlier controversies about the formation of cities in Mesopotamia, it was assumed the priests in the temples must have created urbanism. In fact, I think we can better hypothesize, and that we will eventually demonstrate clearly, that trade created the villages, created agriculture, created pastoralism, created the early cities ― and that the Chiefs and Big Men, and the Temples and the Priests and the Kings were all, at various times, non-creative and non-productive phenomena that exploited openings and vulnerabilities in those communities.
The error of inverse causality is similar to someone concluding that, since the presence of cars in any society is always accompanied by the presence of car theft, then it must be car thieves who invented cars.
The presence of social ranking in a society does not constitute “complexity”. It is, on the contrary, a gross over-simplication of something previously complex. It is the maintenance of social equality that requires social complexity, in the form of checks and balances, divisions of power, institutions of consultation, compromise and consent. When this true complexity breaks down, a much cruder, less sophisticated form of social organization replaces it: a big tough guy makes you do stuff, and if you don’t do it, he hits you or kills you. There is absolutely no evidence that such big tough guys are producers of wealth, innovations, or “evolutionary” advances in anything. Their grave mounds or pyramids or temples are not proof that they produced anything. They are merely evidence that the societies in question possessed something worth stealing, and failed to prevent it from being stolen.
If we look at the archaeological record of Uruk, the first known city, we see it beginning with a rapid increase in population, accompanied by evidence of extremely active long-distance trade. This concentrates in one point, the city, clearly placed in a place ideal for the conjunction of trade from four directions, each accessing dramatically different products. It is surrounded by a network of prosperous hamlets and individual landholdings, and interacts intensely with transhumant specialists who move in and out. Modest temples are attended with offerings of fish, the initial staple of the region, but the city is producing textiles for export. Agriculture is rapidly expanding, based on a system of irrigation managed by local committees and councils, of which we have clear evidence. The city itself has a council.
Then, in a very rapid alteration, the temple turns into an immensely wealthy organization, domestic manufacture of textiles is replaced by temple production based on slave labour, and large chunks of land are converted to a different, more centralized form of irrigation, one possible only when the land is assigned to sharecroppers and dependents, administered by a bureaucracy. Kings and nobility appear, subverting and dismantling the city council. There is an orgy of warfare, and construction of palaces and expanded temple buildings.
In a very short time after this metamorphosis, the web of outlying villages collapses, and the countryside rapidly depopulates. The population of the city briefly swells, as people seek refuge from the economically dead countryside. Unemployed mobs riot, the aristocracy cracks down. Technical management vanishes. The irrigation systems disintegrate. Food vanishes. The social system collapses. The population flees, and the city shrivels into a pile of dust. The Mesopotamian plain is covered with hundreds of piles of dust. George Bush, Haliburton, and Company are currently creating some new ones.
What we see here is not social hierarchy creating a city, but the crude oversimplification of hierarchy destroying a city that was created by the far more sophisticated and complex process of social equality.
Again and again, this process of complex equality being destroyed by crude inequality would be repeated. Urban civilizations would go through it every time the productive efforts of ordinary people produced something worth stealing.
I think we will eventually come to the conclusion that this struggle between the producers and the thieves is ongoing, characteristic of all societies at all times. The egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies of prehistory were not unchallenged by hierarchical predation. The challenge always existed, but there were long stretches of standoff in the permanent cold-war. [see Sixth Meditation on Democracy]. However, each innovation ― fishing techniques, new luxury goods, metallurgy, horticulture, animal husbandry, arboriculture, viniculture, domestication, dehesas; new ceremonial and religious practices ― opened up a new angle, a new opportunity for power seekers to exploit, which had to be countered by some egalitarian strategy. Disasters, disease, climate change, migrations had the same effect. Whenever something changes, there will be somebody up there in a flash, explaining convincingly why you now need to start taking orders. There’s always a Patriot Act lurking around the corner. I suspect that the wave of changes that took place in the millennia starting in the Mesolithic, and proceeding through antiquity, represent an era when egalitarian responses could not keep up with hierarchical challenges.
This is quite analogous to our biological relationship to infectious disease. Some infectious diseases are known as “DDDs” (Density Dependent Diseases), because they cannot sustain infections outside of dense populations. Historically, when we have sought the economic and social advantages of crowded cities, we have simultaneously made ourselves more vulnerable to such diseases, to which we have much less evolutionary experience. From the time that we first created cities, until we finally developed effective strategies against disease, a century ago, we paid a heavy price in mortality and suffering for the benefits of city life.
Village life, agriculture, cities, brought new wealth and new comforts, but they opened up new vulnerabilities, as well. Grow crops, and a king needs only a small army to screw you up at harvest time. Best cut a deal and let him “protect” you, for a price. What happened to the village council? Oh, now it’s the King’s council. Where’s the little temple where grand-dad went to make an offering, rejoicing at the bountiful harvest on his plot of land? Now it’s a big temple, and half the harvest is taken, not given, and the plot of land ain’t yours, it’s theirs. New ploys, new scams, new demands, coming faster than the old protective strategies can deal with, culminating in the brutal slave empires of antiquity. We have only very slowly developed appropriate counter-measures, and those only partially effective. But we should not make the error of assuming that, because aristocracy, monarchy, and tyranny held sway for centuries, that they were creative forces. They are no more “responsible” for creating civilization than disease is responsible for creating cities. To assume so is to lose sight of exactly who it was who composed Don Giovanni.
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