The Dawn of Civilization

68:1.1When brought closely to­gether, men of­ten learn to like one an­other, but prim­i­tive man was not nat­u­rally over­flow­ing with the spirit of broth­erly feel­ing and the de­sire for so­cial con­tact with his fel­lows. Rather did the early races learn by sad ex­pe­ri­ence that “in union there is strength”; and it is this lack of nat­u­ral broth­erly at­trac­tion that now stands in the way of im­me­di­ate re­al­iza­tion of the broth­er­hood of man on Uran­tia.

68:1.2As­so­ci­a­tion early be­came the price of sur­vival. The lone man was help­less un­less he bore a tribal mark which tes­ti­fied that he be­longed to a group which would cer­tainly avenge any as­sault made upon him. Even in the days of Cain it was fa­tal to go abroad alone with­out some mark of group as­so­ci­a­tion. Civ­i­liza­tion has be­come man’s in­sur­ance against vi­o­lent death, while the pre­mi­ums are paid by sub­mis­sion to so­ci­ety’s nu­mer­ous law de­mands.

68:1.3Prim­i­tive so­ci­ety was thus founded on the reci­procity of ne­ces­sity and on the en­hanced safety of as­so­ci­a­tion. And hu­man so­ci­ety has evolved in age­long cy­cles as a re­sult of this iso­la­tion fear and by means of re­luc­tant co-op­er­a­tion.

68:1.4Prim­i­tive hu­man be­ings early learned that groups are vastly greater and stronger than the mere sum of their in­di­vid­ual units. One hun­dred men united and work­ing in uni­son can move a great stone; a score of well-trained guard­i­ans of the peace can re­strain an an­gry mob. And so so­ci­ety was born, not of mere as­so­ci­a­tion of num­bers, but rather as a re­sult of the or­ga­ni­za­tion of in­tel­li­gent co-op­er­a­tors. But co-op­er­a­tion is not a nat­u­ral trait of man; he learns to co-op­er­ate first through fear and then later be­cause he dis­cov­ers it is most ben­e­fi­cial in meet­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties of time and guard­ing against the sup­posed per­ils of eter­nity.

68:1.5The peo­ples who thus early or­ga­nized them­selves into a prim­i­tive so­ci­ety be­came more suc­cess­ful in their at­tacks on na­ture as well as in de­fense against their fel­lows; they pos­sessed greater sur­vival pos­si­bil­i­ties; hence has civ­i­liza­tion steadily pro­gressed on Uran­tia, not­with­stand­ing its many set­backs. And it is only be­cause of the en­hance­ment of sur­vival value in as­so­ci­a­tion that man’s many blun­ders have thus far failed to stop or de­stroy hu­man civ­i­liza­tion.

68:1.6That con­tem­po­rary cul­tural so­ci­ety is a rather re­cent phe­nom­e­non is well shown by the pres­ent-day sur­vival of such prim­i­tive so­cial con­di­tions as char­ac­ter­ize the Aus­tralian na­tives and the Bush­men and Pyg­mies of Africa. Among these back­ward peo­ples may be ob­served some­thing of the early group hos­til­ity, per­sonal sus­pi­cion, and other highly an­ti­so­cial traits which were so char­ac­ter­is­tic of all prim­i­tive races. These mis­er­able rem­nants of the nonso­cial peo­ples of an­cient times bear elo­quent tes­ti­mony to the fact that the nat­u­ral in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic ten­dency of man can­not suc­cess­fully com­pete with the more po­tent and pow­er­ful or­ga­ni­za­tions and as­so­ci­a­tions of so­cial pro­gres­sion. These back­ward and sus­pi­cious an­ti­so­cial races that speak a dif­fer­ent di­alect ev­ery forty or fifty miles il­lus­trate what a world you might now be liv­ing in but for the com­bined teach­ing of the cor­po­real staff of the Plan­e­tary Prince and the later labors of the Adamic group of racial up­lifters.

68:1.7The mod­ern phrase, “back to na­ture,” is a delu­sion of ig­no­rance, a be­lief in the re­al­ity of the one­time fic­ti­tious “golden age.” The only ba­sis for the leg­end of the golden age is the his­toric fact of Dala­ma­tia and Eden. But these im­proved so­ci­eties were far from the re­al­iza­tion of utopian dreams.