And then I asked about other things. The laws of the universe are very much
invisible to us. It took a genius to see
why a ball rolling off the top of a table falls to earth to understand and
formulate it as a law, and see that the universe is a giant success story
written in invisible ink. I wanted to
know, specifically of you, why civilization is hierarchical - why all
civilizations (and there have been several) have been hierarchies? Again, it's like the clouds: you look at the
clouds and say, "What else could they do?
So they don't fall down. Well,
you know, they're clouds." And looking
at the civilizations, people say, "Well, yeah.
They're civilizations. What else
would they be except hierarchies?" I
can't stop there.
So I go back and look at the beginnings, how
civilizations begin; and they all begin the same way: with people deciding to
try a new way of life, deciding to live off all of their own food, instead of
living off just the food that grows naturally all around them.
Rob Kall: Hunting
and foraging, you mean, right?
Daniel Quinn Yeah. So they give up the hunting and gathering
life, and become agricultural as farmers, and very quickly gather together into
farming villages. The reason that they
could settle, the reason that hunting gatherers cannot settle, is that if they
stay in one place, they will quickly exhaust all of the resources around
them. The game will all be hunted
down. All the collectable food will be
collected, and they'll starve. So they
have to move on, they have to keep moving forever.
The reason that agriculturalists can stay in one
place, can settle into a village, is that agriculture gives them surpluses, so
that when the seasons change, they don't have to move on. They can stay there and live off the surpluses. And when surpluses get low, the grow
more. No problem. This is what enables them to stay in one
place.
But once the surpluses are there, they can't just
leave them around in the open sitting around in piles. They have to store them. They have to keep them away from other
animals, and they have to keep them away from other people. Perhaps initially, just initially, they were
just open to anyone in the village, anyone can go and get what they want from
the stores. But you can imagine how long
a supermarket would last if all the food on he shelves was free. Of course it wouldn't last, and I think it
would quickly become apparent that the stores, the whatever they were, had to
be under lock and key.
Rob Kall: Although --
in the hunter-gatherer world, there are no locks and keys, and all the food
that's out there is free for the taking by anybody.
Daniel Quinn
Absolutely. That's why they are
not hierarchies: it's that there is no one holding the key to the lock; Anyone
can go and get whatever they want. But
in the village, someone had to organize the storage of the food, organize the
guarding of the food. Once the food was
there, the village was a target for peoples around them. If you think of Seven Samurai, the
Japanese film about the Samurai who came to a village to show them how to
defend themselves against the barbarians that wanted to come in and take their
stuff.
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