The Dawn of Civilization

68:5.1Land is the stage of so­ci­ety; men are the ac­tors. And man must ever ad­just his per­for­mances to con­form to the land sit­u­a­tion. The evo­lu­tion of the mores is al­ways de­pen­dent on the land-man ra­tio. This is true not­with­stand­ing the dif­fi­culty of its dis­cern­ment. Man’s land tech­nique, or main­te­nance arts, plus his stan­dards of liv­ing, equal the sum to­tal of the folk­ways, the mores. And the sum of man’s ad­just­ment to the life de­mands equals his cul­tural civ­i­liza­tion.

68:5.2The ear­li­est hu­man cul­tures arose along the rivers of the East­ern Hemi­sphere, and there were four great steps in the for­ward march of civ­i­liza­tion. They were:

68:5.31. The col­lec­tion stage. Food co­er­cion, hunger, led to the first form of in­dus­trial or­ga­ni­za­tion, the prim­i­tive food-gath­er­ing lines. Some­times such a line of hunger march would be ten miles long as it passed over the land glean­ing food. This was the prim­i­tive no­madic stage of cul­ture and is the mode of life now fol­lowed by the African Bush­men.

68:5.42. The hunt­ing stage. The in­ven­tion of weapon tools en­abled man to be­come a hunter and thus to gain con­sid­er­able free­dom from food slav­ery. A thought­ful An­don­ite who had severely bruised his fist in a se­ri­ous com­bat re­dis­cov­ered the idea of us­ing a long stick for his arm and a piece of hard flint, bound on the end with sinews, for his fist. Many tribes made in­de­pen­dent dis­cov­er­ies of this sort, and these var­i­ous forms of ham­mers rep­re­sented one of the great for­ward steps in hu­man civ­i­liza­tion. To­day some Aus­tralian na­tives have pro­gressed lit­tle be­yond this stage.

68:5.5The blue men be­came ex­pert hunters and trap­pers; by fenc­ing the rivers they caught fish in great num­bers, dry­ing the sur­plus for win­ter use. Many forms of in­ge­nious snares and traps were em­ployed in catch­ing game, but the more prim­i­tive races did not hunt the larger an­i­mals.

68:5.63. The pas­toral stage. This phase of civ­i­liza­tion was made pos­si­ble by the do­mes­ti­ca­tion of an­i­mals. The Arabs and the na­tives of Africa are among the more re­cent pas­toral peo­ples.

68:5.7Pas­toral liv­ing af­forded fur­ther re­lief from food slav­ery; man learned to live on the in­ter­est of his cap­i­tal, the in­crease in his flocks; and this pro­vided more leisure for cul­ture and prog­ress.

68:5.8Prepas­toral so­ci­ety was one of sex co-op­er­a­tion, but the spread of an­i­mal hus­bandry re­duced women to the depths of so­cial slav­ery. In ear­lier times it was man’s duty to se­cure the an­i­mal food, woman’s busi­ness to pro­vide the veg­etable ed­i­bles. There­fore, when man en­tered the pas­toral era of his ex­is­tence, woman’s dig­nity fell greatly. She must still toil to pro­duce the veg­etable ne­ces­si­ties of life, whereas the man need only go to his herds to pro­vide an abun­dance of an­i­mal food. Man thus be­came rel­a­tively in­de­pen­dent of woman; through­out the en­tire pas­toral age woman’s sta­tus steadily de­clined. By the close of this era she had be­come scarcely more than a hu­man an­i­mal, con­signed to work and to bear hu­man off­spring, much as the an­i­mals of the herd were ex­pected to la­bor and bring forth young. The men of the pas­toral ages had great love for their cat­tle; all the more pity they could not have de­vel­oped a deeper af­fec­tion for their wives.

68:5.94. The ag­ri­cul­tural stage. This era was brought about by the do­mes­ti­ca­tion of plants, and it rep­re­sents the high­est type of ma­te­rial civ­i­liza­tion. Both Cali­gas­tia and Adam en­deav­ored to teach hor­ti­cul­ture and agri­cul­ture. Adam and Eve were gar­den­ers, not shep­herds, and gar­den­ing was an ad­vanced cul­ture in those days. The grow­ing of plants ex­erts an en­nobling in­flu­ence on all races of man­kind.

68:5.10Agri­cul­ture more than quadru­pled the land-man ra­tio of the world. It may be com­bined with the pas­toral pur­suits of the for­mer cul­tural stage. When the three stages over­lap, men hunt and women till the soil.

68:5.11There has al­ways been fric­tion be­tween the herders and the tillers of the soil. The hunter and herder were mil­i­tant, war­like; the agri­cul­tur­ist is a more peace-lov­ing type. As­so­ci­a­tion with an­i­mals sug­gests strug­gle and force; as­so­ci­a­tion with plants in­stills pa­tience, quiet, and peace. Agri­cul­ture and in­dus­tri­al­ism are the ac­tiv­i­ties of peace. But the weak­ness of both, as world so­cial ac­tiv­i­ties, is that they lack ex­cite­ment and ad­ven­ture.

68:5.12Hu­man so­ci­ety has evolved from the hunt­ing stage through that of the herders to the ter­ri­to­rial stage of agri­cul­ture. And each stage of this pro­gres­sive civ­i­liza­tion was ac­com­pa­nied by less and less of no­madism; more and more man be­gan to live at home.

68:5.13And now is in­dus­try sup­ple­ment­ing agri­cul­ture, with con­se­quently in­creased ur­ban­iza­tion and mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of nona­gri­cul­tural groups of cit­i­zen­ship classes. But an in­dus­trial era can­not hope to sur­vive if its lead­ers fail to rec­og­nize that even the high­est so­cial de­vel­op­ments must ever rest upon a sound ag­ri­cul­tural ba­sis.