Patterns Tell Something
Can the past be explained? Some scholars see history as a random process. Yuval Noah Harari states this position clearly: “The better you know a particular historical period, the harder it becomes to explain why things happened one way and not another.”[i] He is right about the kind of events historians generally study. Take the example of the rise of Macedonia under King Philip and his son Alexander, who, in the 4th century BCE, transformed Greece into an imperial power. None could have predicted this momentous development even ten years before Philip’s victory over Thebes. If he had lost that battle, we would be reading a different history of Greece and the Near East. Alexander’s success against the larger army of the Persian emperor Darius III was as unexpected as it was spectacular. Such phenomena can only be viewed as random developments.
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History, however, operates on two levels. The upper, visible level is the playground of random events like Alexander’s military success, Emperor Constantine’s vision of Christ, and Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic. The deeper level of history is where more fundamental and long-term processes, such as the intellectual and cultural rise of Greece during the classical period, the spread of Christianity among the suffering masses of the Roman Empire, and the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of European Renaissance, took place. Those ground-shifting changes probably went unnoticed by most people at that time. Current affairs analysts who sift through piles of data every day often fail to see the deep structure of the causal factors. In an essay in Foreign Policy magazine, published just after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, the Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani asked why the United States repeatedly failed in its foreign ventures. He suggested that America’s policymakers “search for explanations in events and personalities”, ignoring the “deep structural reasons for these spectacular failures.”[ii]
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One common theme in history is the disruption of the status quo and the birth of a new era. The historian David Potter, a professor at the University of Michigan, believes that social disruptions follow a clear pattern.[iii] Citing historical examples, including the transformation of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine, the expansion of the Arab-Islamic Empire, the Protestant Reformation, and the French and Bolshevik revolutions, he argues that disruptive historical events have three common characteristics: 1) They stem from a loss of faith in a society’s central institutions; 2) they establish a set of ideas from what was once the fringe of the intellectual world, placing them at the center of a revamped political order; and 3) they involve a coherent leadership group committed to the change.
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When historians Nicholas Baumard and co-researchers studied the rise of moralistic thinking during the so-called Axial Age, they, too, looked for underlying causes for a phenomenon that impacted several regions of the Old World in the second half of the 1st millennium BCE. India saw the rise of Buddhism, Jainism, and philosophical Hinduism; Zoroastrian faith flourished in Iran; Rabbinic Judaism became predominant in the Jewish heartland. Buddhism also spread into China. Greece underwent no religious reform, but Greek society addressed moral questions in their literature and philosophical discourses. On the surface, what happened in different regions were isolated events. Buddha’s abdication of princely life had no connection with the rise of Rabbinic Judaism. Their teachings were different, too. Judaism emphasizes submission to God, while Buddhism is ambivalent. Still, those ideas had a common theme— an emphasis on a virtuous life in place of hedonism and extravagant rituals. Baumard et al. explain that the Axial Age phenomenon was a reaction to affluence indicated by high levels of energy consumption.[iv] Many people of the time were dismayed by wasteful consumption, immoral lifestyles, and excess rituals that came with prosperity. The situation prompted them to reconsider life’s purpose and slow down life’s pace.
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The rise of six civilizations independently in ancient times calls for a similar explanation because the probability of similar developments happening randomly would be extremely low. Joan Feynman and Alexander Ruzmaikin’s research gives us some idea of such probability. They investigated the fact that agriculture was invented in seven independent locations within 5,000 years. That may sound like a very long time, but in the background of the previous 100,000 years, when humans had the mental capacity for farming but did not practice it, seven independent cases of the invention in five millennia are almost miraculous. Feynman and Ruzmaikin calculated that the likelihood of such a lucky coincidence was about 1 in 46,000—which means very unlikely.[v] All ancient civilizations emerged after the introduction of farming in those areas. So, the chances of half a dozen civilizations developing independently without common underlying causes would be even less.
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Seeking explanations from patterns or repetitions in nature is the hallmark of science. The laws of science are statements of regularities. By contrast, humanities aim to understand human concerns and values by focusing on particular instances rather than seeking general laws. Sometimes, this leads to interpreting cultural practices with the help of legends, myths, and beliefs. The trouble is that people often create myths to justify their actions, especially when such actions involve unpleasant choices. Some Hindu communities once encouraged widows to immolate themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres. This practice, known as Suttee or Sati, was justified on the ground that the act elevated the woman’s soul to a sinless state. The Australian anthropologist and blogger Linda Heaphy has a far better explanation. She wrote: “The common deciding factor was often the ownership of wealth or property since all possessions of the widow devolved to the husband’s family upon her death... At the very least, the women committing suttee were encouraged by priests (who received the best items from the women’s possessions as payment), the relatives of both families (who received all the women’s remaining possessions and untold blessings), and by general peer pressure.”[vi] This misogynist custom was eventually outlawed in 1861.
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As the above examples suggest, a growing number of researchers are now seeking objective explanations to understand human culture. Evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that many societal norms, from moral choices to mate selection, once considered purely “cultural,” have evolutionary roots. For example, the use of spices in food is not just a cultural choice. Indians use a lot of spices, while the Siberians use almost none because India is located in a hot and humid climatic zone where spices help preserve food. There is a clear correlation—the hotter and more humid a region, the greater the amounts of spices used.
Before scientific research into the origin of agriculture began, people believed in various myths. For the Semitic people, who were originally pastoral, agriculture was viewed as a punishment from God. On the other hand, Chinese mythology tells of the divine farmer Shennong, whom the gods sent to teach humans how to cultivate land with a plow. Studies in various climatic zones confirm that the choice between foraging and farming is guided mainly by which method gives higher net calorific returns (the amount of energy—calories—obtained from the harvest minus the amount spent on gathering or growing crops), even though people may not be aware of this.[vii]
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In the introduction to The Evolution of Human Societies, Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle saw the need to balance the concern for human values with choosing the right approach to understand social evolution: “Yet this cultural relativism—anthropology’s effort to recognize and respect cultural integrity—must coexist in a dynamic tension with the effort to identify and explain cross-cultural patterns in the development and operation of human societies.” This book aims to understand social evolution and the origin of civilization. Cross-cultural patterns suggest that people faced similar environmental and social challenges and responded with similar choices of solutions as if they had the same preferences everywhere. Enough research data is now available to understand our past objectively. The next seven chapters of the book present the likely scenarios of prehistory based on discoveries in several disciplines.
End Notes:
[i] Yuval Noah Harari; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind; McClelland and Stewart; 2014
[ii] Kishore Mahbubani; “Don’t Blame the Afghans”; Foreign Policy; August 24, 2021
[iii] David Potter; “How Disruptions Happen”; Aeon Magazine; 23 December 2021
[iv] Nicolas Baumard, Alexandre Hyafil, Ian Morris, and Pascal Boyer; “Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions”; Current Biology 25, 10–15, January 5, 2015.
[v] Joan Feynman and Alexander Ruzmaikin; “Climate stability and the development of agricultural societies”; Climatic Change (2007) 84:295–311 DOI 10.1007/s10584-007-9248-1
[vi] http://www.kashgar.com.au/articles/life-in-india-the-practice-of-sati-or-
widow-burning
[vii] K. Hill, H. Kaplan, K. Hawkes, A.M. Hurtado; “Foraging Decision among Ache Hunter-gatherers”; Ethology and Sociobiology 8:1-36 (quoted by Doulas Kennett, et al in “Ecological Model for the Origin of Maize-based Food Production on the Pacific Coast of Southern Mexico”; Behavioral Ecology and Transition to Agriculture; University of California Press; 2006
Chapter 2