Development of Modern Civilization

81:2.1The growth of cul­ture is pred­i­cated upon the de­vel­op­ment of the tools of civ­i­liza­tion. And the tools which man uti­lized in his as­cent from sav­agery were ef­fec­tive just to the ex­tent that they re­leased man power for the ac­com­plish­ment of higher tasks.

81:2.2You who now live amid lat­ter-day scenes of bud­ding cul­ture and be­gin­ning prog­ress in so­cial af­fairs, who ac­tu­ally have some lit­tle spare time in which to think about so­ci­ety and civ­i­liza­tion, must not over­look the fact that your early an­ces­tors had lit­tle or no leisure which could be de­voted to thought­ful re­flec­tion and so­cial think­ing.

81:2.3The first four great ad­vances in hu­man civ­i­liza­tion were:

81:2.41. The tam­ing of fire.

81:2.52. The do­mes­ti­ca­tion of an­i­mals.

81:2.63. The en­slave­ment of cap­tives.

81:2.74. Pri­vate prop­erty.

81:2.8While fire, the first great dis­cov­ery, even­tu­ally un­locked the doors of the sci­en­tific world, it was of lit­tle value in this re­gard to prim­i­tive man. He re­fused to rec­og­nize nat­u­ral causes as ex­pla­na­tions for com­mon­place phe­nom­ena.

81:2.9When asked where fire came from, the sim­ple story of An­don and the flint was soon re­placed by the leg­end of how some Prometheus stole it from heaven. The an­cients sought a super­nat­u­ral ex­pla­na­tion for all nat­u­ral phe­nom­ena not within the range of their per­sonal com­pre­hen­sion; and many mod­erns con­tinue to do this. The de­per­son­al­iza­tion of so-called nat­u­ral phe­nom­ena has re­quired ages, and it is not yet com­pleted. But the frank, hon­est, and fear­less search for true causes gave birth to mod­ern sci­ence: It turned as­trol­ogy into as­tron­omy, alchemy into chem­istry, and magic into med­i­cine.

81:2.10In the prema­chine age the only way in which man could ac­com­plish work with­out do­ing it him­self was to use an an­i­mal. Do­mes­ti­ca­tion of an­i­mals placed in his hands liv­ing tools, the in­tel­li­gent use of which pre­pared the way for both agri­cul­ture and trans­porta­tion. And with­out these an­i­mals man could not have risen from his prim­i­tive es­tate to the lev­els of sub­se­quent civ­i­liza­tion.

81:2.11Most of the an­i­mals best suited to do­mes­ti­ca­tion were found in Asia, es­pe­cially in the cen­tral to south­west re­gions. This was one rea­son why civ­i­liza­tion pro­gressed faster in that lo­cal­ity than in other parts of the world. Many of these an­i­mals had been twice be­fore do­mes­ti­cated, and in the And­ite age they were re­tamed once again. But the dog had re­mained with the hunters ever since be­ing adopted by the blue man long, long be­fore.

81:2.12The And­ites of Tur­kes­tan were the first peo­ples to ex­ten­sively do­mes­ti­cate the horse, and this is an­other rea­son why their cul­ture was for so long pre­dom­i­nant. By 5000 B.C. the Mes­o­po­ta­mian, Tur­kes­tan, and Chi­nese farm­ers had be­gun the rais­ing of sheep, goats, cows, camels, horses, fowls, and ele­phants. They em­ployed as beasts of bur­den the ox, camel, horse, and yak. Man was him­self at one time the beast of bur­den. One ruler of the blue race once had one hun­dred thou­sand men in his colony of bur­den bear­ers.

81:2.13The in­sti­tu­tions of slav­ery and pri­vate own­er­ship of land came with agri­cul­ture. Slav­ery raised the mas­ter’s stan­dard of liv­ing and pro­vided more leisure for so­cial cul­ture.

81:2.14The sav­age is a slave to na­ture, but sci­en­tific civ­i­liza­tion is slowly con­fer­ring in­creas­ing lib­erty on man­kind. Through an­i­mals, fire, wind, wa­ter, elec­tric­ity, and other undis­cov­ered sources of en­ergy, man has lib­er­ated, and will con­tinue to lib­er­ate, him­self from the ne­ces­sity for un­remit­ting toil. Re­gard­less of the tran­sient trou­ble pro­duced by the pro­lific in­ven­tion of ma­chin­ery, the ul­ti­mate ben­e­fits to be de­rived from such me­chan­i­cal in­ven­tions are in­es­timable. Civ­i­liza­tion can never flour­ish, much less be es­tab­lished, un­til man has leisure to think, to plan, to imag­ine new and bet­ter ways of do­ing things.

81:2.15Man first sim­ply ap­pro­pri­ated his shel­ter, lived un­der ledges or dwelt in caves. Next he adapted such nat­u­ral ma­te­ri­als as wood and stone to the cre­ation of fam­ily huts. Lastly he en­tered the cre­ative stage of home build­ing, learned to man­u­fac­ture brick and other build­ing ma­te­ri­als.

81:2.16The peo­ples of the Tur­kes­tan high­lands were the first of the more mod­ern races to build their homes of wood, houses not at all un­like the early log cab­ins of the Amer­i­can pi­o­neer set­tlers. Through­out the plains hu­man dwellings were made of brick; later on, of burned bricks.

81:2.17The older river races made their huts by set­ting tall poles in the ground in a cir­cle; the tops were then brought to­gether, mak­ing the skele­ton frame for the hut, which was in­ter­laced with trans­verse reeds, the whole cre­ation re­sem­bling a huge in­verted bas­ket. This struc­ture could then be daubed over with clay and, af­ter dry­ing in the sun, would make a very ser­vice­able weath­er­proof habi­ta­tion.

81:2.18It was from these early huts that the sub­se­quent idea of all sorts of bas­ket weav­ing in­de­pen­dently orig­i­nated. Among one group the idea of mak­ing pot­tery arose from ob­serv­ing the ef­fects of smear­ing these pole frame­works with moist clay. The prac­tice of hard­en­ing pot­tery by bak­ing was dis­cov­ered when one of these clay-cov­ered prim­i­tive huts ac­ci­den­tally burned. The arts of olden days were many times de­rived from the ac­ci­den­tal oc­cur­rences at­ten­dant upon the daily life of early peo­ples. At least, this was al­most wholly true of the evo­lu­tion­ary prog­ress of man­kind up to the com­ing of Adam.

81:2.19While pot­tery had been first in­tro­duced by the staff of the Prince about one-half mil­lion years ago, the mak­ing of clay ves­sels had prac­ti­cally ceased for over one hun­dred and fifty thou­sand years. Only the gulf coast pre-Sume­rian Nod­ites con­tin­ued to make clay ves­sels. The art of pot­tery mak­ing was re­vived dur­ing Adam’s time. The dis­sem­i­na­tion of this art was si­mul­ta­ne­ous with the ex­ten­sion of the desert ar­eas of Africa, Ara­bia, and cen­tral Asia, and it spread in suc­ces­sive waves of im­prov­ing tech­nique from Mes­o­po­ta­mia out over the East­ern Hemi­sphere.

81:2.20These civ­i­liza­tions of the And­ite age can­not al­ways be traced by the stages of their pot­tery or other arts. The smooth course of hu­man evo­lu­tion was tremen­dously com­pli­cated by the regimes of both Dala­ma­tia and Eden. It of­ten oc­curs that the later vases and im­ple­ments are in­fe­rior to the ear­lier prod­ucts of the purer And­ite peo­ples.