Below is Chapter 3 of my latest published book:
"The Global Way: the Integral Economics of the Post-Modern World".
I publish this here now as it neatly sets out my position on the process of human evolutionary development which many of my colleagues especially especially
Social Evolution
To sail beyond the sunset till the day I die
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield
Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson
In his original state of being, somewhere in Africa, man was a hunter-gatherer, who collected from the earth’s bounty at will. It is likely that, at that time, man behaved like other animals. Territory would be defined. If one found others assertively occupying a space, then one simply accommodated to them and moved elsewhere.
Some humans still live in this way: the Kalahari Bushmen, some Australian aboriginals, etc. They achieve this by being in sustainable balance with their environment in places where others do not wish to go. Elsewhere, as man became better at using his environment, he accommodated to others by dispersing across the planet’s surface.
Two processes are at work here. One yields the food of life locally, on a daily basis. This is limited by the ability of the planet locally to support it. A second social process is then required to limit the local population to what is sustainable. Population growth beyond this is resolved by dispersal.
Thus local sustainability requires the evolution of social forces that constrain population growth to a size that maintains any increased local need for more energy to survive, day by day, in balance with the planet’s local capacity to produce it.
The dispersal strategy breaks these bounds. Eventually the whole land mass became occupied. All were then constrained to locally available sustenance. Thus social strategies evolved to restrict population to what the planet could support locally, and pressure built up to find new ways to sustain a larger population locally.
The earth’s bounty at one spot at any time is not the same as that at another, so a little trade across territorial boundaries allowed the excess of one place to be traded for that of another. This improved efficiency but, given the limited transportation available, it could not support significantly larger populations.
On the other hand, the slow discovery that one could farm one’s bounty, grow crops, breed animals, etc., changed that. Farming was new knowledge. It enabled man to satisfy his needs by using the planet’s potential more effectively. More recently, as we have exhausted the sea, we have started to farm seafood.
Hunter-gatherers do not store food. There is no payoff from stealing what they have. It has to be gathered again the next day. For farmers, the economics of theft are different. Farmers work to the rhythm of the planet, which is annual. There is a time for growing and a time for harvest. A harvest has to support farmers throughout the year. A theft of produce at harvest will thus support its thief for a year.
However, farmers learn that it pays to store even more than this. Weather, and so harvests, vary from year to year. Farmers therefore store more in the good years to support them in the bad years. This makes farmers an even more attractive target for thieves.
To protect this stored bounty from avaricious neighbours, and to guarantee a return from the work put into land improvement, e.g., irrigation, the annual farming enterprise evolved a long-term social structure to protect it: a state.
States aggressively defend territory and police any tendency of citizens to prey on each other. As we have seen, such exclusivity is aggressive to others. War is then likely, unless gifts or trade are proffered as alternatives to rape and pillage.
The Vandals, the Huns, the Vikings, the Mongols, etc., all raped and pillaged as adjuncts to their stable nomadic lifestyle. However, in the end they became part of the communities they penetrated. If one is to survive, one’s prey must also do so. For example, the Mongols became part of developing Han Chinese culture, and they did so while maintaining a separate identity as locally sustainable nomads in Central Asia.
In Asia, and especially North East Asia, the rich soil and the communal governance system adopted to support agriculture were so successful that the richest states in the world were found there until the 19th century.
In the West, a feudal system evolved, based on individual rights and obligations. This proved less stable. War became perennial. Wealth and power moved from empire to empire, state to state, locale to locale, over a long period of time.
Stability and civilisation wandered like nomads in this desert of social chaos. It had strong beginnings in the autonomous city states of Greece, but it was then captured by the Roman Empire, which eventually split in two: its Eastern part was absorbed by the Islamic world and dominated the Central Asian trade routes, the Silk Road, that connected East and West for five centuries.
It stayed thus until the religious authorities and the Islamic states closed the Gates of Ishtehad in the 15th Century. Ishtehad permits freedom of action, thought, ideas and expression for everything not explicitly prohibited by the Koran, or by the sayings (Haddith) of God’s last Prophet, Mohammed. Everything new was thus free of regulation. This provided a powerful incentive for creative inventiveness. However, this may be destabilising. The Caliphates governing Islam grew wary of this and began to suppress such creativity. They closed the Gates of Ishtehad and spawned Islamic fundamentalism.
At this point, civilisation moved back to the West, at a time when intra-European trade was beginning to flourish. In Italy, the basis of the old Roman Empire, there occurred the Renaissance.
The disturbances in Islam made the land bridge to the East, the Silk Route, more problematic. It was operated by Muslim traders. This led those seeking wealth and power in an increasingly commercial West to seek new connections to the East.
A Genovese Italian, Christopher Columbus, convinced the Spanish government to explore a Westerly route to China. Columbus discovered the Americas. Portuguese traders found routes around Africa into the Indian Ocean. These Spanish and Portuguese navigators were soon replaced by the French, Dutch and British. In the end, the latter dominated the trade connection to the East.
The intellectual and commercial seed of the West, as described earlier, depended for its success on self-seeking expression, and the huge returns that could be earned from trade, especially in the exotic products of the Far East: spices, tea, silk, etc.
Those seeking to learn new ways of using the planet’s potential to greater advantage thus thrust aside the bounds that existing knowledge and social control placed on social evolution.
These new systems of enterprise required expensive equipment, e.g., ships, machinery and factories, the costs of which only significant international trade could cover. Such trade has huge inbuilt gains in efficiency because it evens out the local variations in agricultural return that result from local variations in weather. It also enabled the solar energy stored in the body of the planet to be used to advantage, in the form first of coal, then oil.
The protection of a right of access to foreign markets, and of the ability to provide domestic stability for industrial production, based on machinery—capital—led to an evolution in the nature of the state and of people’s social roles. This required people to move from the country to cities, where they relied on a cash economy to sustain them, rather than direct access to food, clothing and shelter.
In the course of this industrialisation, agriculture as a value generator became relatively, but not absolutely, less significant. Humans still need the food, clothing and shelter that agriculture provides. In the First Industrial Nation, the UK, agriculture fell from 95% of GDP around 1800 to less than 3% now.
However, the feudal state had not evolved in a way that supported commerce. In fact, its vigour in defending local and international borders inhibited trade. However, artisan artefacts and their manufacture require a monetary economy in which to survive. This requires the protection of private property in sellable manufactured objects that can be moved around the planet. Feudalism was designed to protect immovable land.
The role of the state had thus to evolve to provide law for the enforcement of contracts, to protect international trade and to guarantee the value of currency in trade. All this requires a political order based on commerce as its source of power, not agriculture.
One interesting new feature of this world of industry and commerce is that it is driven by the continuous generation of knowledge and learning: learning how to manufacture ever more useful things, learning of the existence of new places to sell, learning how to extract ever more energy and materials from the planet, etc.
This system is thus continuously challenging itself. The existing order has to give way to the new on a continuing basis: old manufacturing techniques have to be replaced by the new, new sources of material have to be exploited in new places, etc. Those with existing wealth and power need to be replaced on a regular basis by those representing the new. The social order must thus be able to change at a rate consistent with the needs of enterprise.
The main consequence of this was the growth of states, based on leaderships that must regularly seek a new mandate, to ensure that they are well adapted to current needs. A constitution protects the longer-term stability required for commerce and industrialism. To survive, however, the international dimension of such capitalistic commerce creates a renewed need for war. Exclusivity of trading rights was a threat to the survival of this system, and rights to access and attempts to limit them tended to be vigorously opposed by capitalist states. This led to war.
One again we observe a short-term process aimed, in this case, at the self-interested exploitation of global resources, made conceivable by the actions of states, which were intended to produce longer-term social stability, and access to the planet as a market for a state’s products. The principal communication systems underlying this were set by the speed at which ships and trains could traverse the seas and land, respectively.
Under capitalism, we moved from the protection of an immovable asset, land, to that of a movable asset, machinery. To be cost-effective, machinery had to produce large volumes of products, and thus achieve low unit prices. For this to work successfully, one needed an accumulation of capital sufficient to fund the living of those needed to create it: it might take two years to build a ship before it could earn a return, and three or four years to construct a large factory. In the meantime, those involved in the project needed to survive and be protected. There thus sprang into existence capital-based enterprises protected by states based on professional armies and police forces, and funded out of general taxation.
We now stand on the threshold of a new social evolutionary era. Value is now created, not by the freely available bounty of the planet, nor by the cultivation of such bounty, nor by the exploitation of its accumulated reserves of energy and other physical resources, but by humanity’s ability to organise all of these using Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and thus implement them all at high and ever-increasing levels of productivity.
The new manufacturing and distribution technology that the ICT industry makes possible is now having a profound effect on how things are done. The knowledge and know-how required to effect these changes are now driving value to a far greater extent than the ownership of capital. JITs and ERP systems, and increasingly what we like to call Global Resource Planning (GRP), are now becoming the norm. These systems are inter-penetrating the boundaries set by traditional states and enterprise, in both agriculture and industry.
This requires the evolution of new longer-term processes to provide the stability within which this new form of enterprise can operate. As yet, it is unclear what will evolve to achieve this. It is clear, however, that people are using the Internet to coordinate, on a global basis, with others who share their view of the world. Greenpeace and Amnesty International are pacific examples of such means of organising, and Al Quaeda is an example of aggressive coordination to achieve shared ends. Such organisations are in many way indicative of humanity’s increasing wish to bypass organisations set up to achieve international coordination by traditional states—for example, the UN, the EU, NATO and the WTO—by creating organisations that express a shared global vision, as opposed to an international one that endorses the current socio-political hierarchy.
These new NGOs have very clear and specific long-term aims, to which both existing states and enterprises must pay attention when pursing their short-term commercial interest. They may therefore be indicative of the nature of a self-organising world order operating in the planet’s long-term interest, rather than in that of human beings’ individual, commercial or national view of what might serve them best.
We have foreshortened our story of social evolution into four eras, each of them presaged by new opportunities for the enterprising, as human knowledge and understanding of itself and the universe it inhabited moved forward. It is clear that this broad-brush approach ignores huge amounts of the detail of similar processes of social evolution that occurred in a shorter time scale in each successive locale.
However, it seems true to say that, in each age of social evolution, the more successful parts of the planet seem to have become stuck in the past while other parts have moved on. The impact of the artistic, scientific and social creativity that drove Western development was almost totally missing in the East, until they were rudely confronted by it in the late 19th century, and most of the 20th. This region of the world has now used its communal cohesion to catch up with a vengeance. It is fast becoming the industrial powerhouse of the planet, but it has yet to emerge as a centre of true creativity. This position is still held by North America and Europe.
The key thing to be observed from these stories, as we have told them, is that the observable result comes from the emergence of a human understanding of a potential in the planet that has yet to be exploited. This leads to a pushing aside of the current social order, and to explosive growth that, from within itself, generates the need for a new social order supportive of a longer-term stable social context, in which enterprising activity can realistically be sustained in exploiting available resources more effectively.
Most current global social activity now seems directed at finding a means to come to terms with stable sustainability in the information age, where value is now driven as much by human knowledge and “know-how” as it is by natural, farmed or industrially produced resources. In this New Age, there now exist serious challenges to traditional means of generating and distributing wealth. To these we now turn.
