“I AM the Lord thy God. You shall have no other Gods before me.”
“I am The Way, The Truth, and The Life.”
“Allah – there is no deity except Him.”
Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Together, their followers account for 55% of the world’s population.
21 countries list Christianity as their state religion. “Western civilisation” is a nebulous term, but if we think of it as those countries whose cultures are based on Judeo-Christian principles, it would cover most of Europe, Russia, America, and the Commonwealth countries, but the Jewish/Christian influence spreads much further than that. Although America has the highest number of Christians at 260 million, or nearly 80% of the population, The Philippines, Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Congo all make the top ten worldwide.
Additionally, 28 countries are officially Islamic. Indonesia has the most Muslims (230 million), followed by Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. We in the West think of Islamic culture as being the polar opposite of our own, yet in reality we are close cousins. Not only does Islam share recognition of the patriarchs, but most importantly it shares an insistance that God is the One True God.
A Definition of Totalitarianism
In my second post in this series I discussed how the agricultural revolution which occurred around 10,000 years ago marks the boundary line between pre-history and history. Before this revolution, people were living tribally as hunter-gatherers. Many of these people practiced some form of basic agriculture, enough to make it likely that their preferred foods would be available, but their agriculture did not provide huge surpluses of food.
Thanks to the agriculural revolution, ours does produce those surpluses. That surplus in turn produces growth. That growth requires more land, which produces more surplus, which produces more growth. In other words, the agriculture practiced by those involved in the agricultural revolution was expansionist by nature. To get the land, tribes involved in the agricultural revolution expanded out into areas that others were already inhabiting, and either conquered or assimilted those people. Because of this, the agriculture produced by the revolution is called ‘totalitarian agriculture’.
Before we go on, I want to offer a definition for totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is the insistance that one particular paradigm is objectively the best, and involves the imposition of this paradigm on others, whether by force or persuasion.
Gently Boiling Frogs
If Steven Pinker were alive 10,000 years ago, he would have extolled the virtues of the agricultural revolution. “We have more food than anyone has ever had before!” he would have enthused. Some might have pointed out that on the other hand, we were also having to toil all day to produce this food whether we wanted to or not, and that the surplus was not evenly distributed. Rulers who took control of the surplus were beginning to emerge, and they brought with them a military class to guard the surplus from the masses. But Steven Pinker wouldn’t care. The existence of the surplus alone, and the fact that at least some of it was doled out to the masses, would be proof enough that we were living in the best time humans had ever enjoyed.
In fact, many people likely thought they were living in the best time humans had ever enjoyed. Certainly, over the next few thousands years we forgot that there was another way. We came to believe that the order of society was the natural order of man. We traded our freedom for the promise of food security (although not actual food security — famines continue to this day), and told ourselves that there was no alternative. We told ourselves that it was our divinely ordained role in the world to be civilised beings.
As surplus creates growth, both economic and population, we also became acclimatized to endless growth and expansion, seeing this too as our divinely ordained destiny. We witnessed the rise of empires, and the fall — either by conquest or assimilation — of other ways of life and took this as proof of divine guidance. And we convinced ourselves that this, too, was the natural order of man. It seemed that God had made us to have dominion over all the Earth, and that our destiny was to keep moving ever upward in terms of cultural complexity. It became unimaginable that this might all just be a way of life a few people had once chosen for themselves and then imposed upon others.
Around 4,000 years ago, a man was born in the same place that the totalitarian agricultural revolution had occured in 6,000 years previously. Over those 6,000 years, totalitarian agriculture had taken hold of large swathes of the Earth and was busy turning the yellow parts of the map below green, the green parts orange, and the orange parts blue (fast-forward 4,000 years, and the map in our time is almost totally blue).
Key
Yellow = hunter-gatherers
Purple = nomadic herders
Green = simple farming societies
Orange = complicated farming societies / chiefdoms
Blue = state societies
Red line = bronze working taking place
That man, who was born in the city state of Ur (the blue blob roughly where Iraq is today) was birthed into a culture totalitarian by nature. That doesn’t mean that it was necessarily ruled by dictators and despots, but it does mean that it was a culture which already saw its destiny as being to ever evolve and expand.
The man was Abram. The Bible tells us that he was “exteremely wealthy in livestock, silver and gold”, and that his nephew Lot who travelled with him was also wealthy, “But the land could not support them while they stayed together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to stay together.” It also mentions that “The Canaanites and Perizzites were also living in the land at that time.”
Eventually Abram and Lot decide to separate. “Lot chose for himself the whole plain of the Jordan and set out toward the east,” while Abram stayed in Canaan. “The Lord said to Abram after Lot had parted from him, “Look around from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west. All the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever.”” (Genesis 13).
This is as neat a summary of agricultural totalitarianism as the Bible could deliver up: having gained great wealth, more than is sustainable in the area they already inhabit, Abram and Lot decide to take for themselves land that other people are living on so that they can further expand their wealth. In effect Abram was the JP Morgan or James Rockefeller of his day: already fabulously wealthy but still wanting more, clearing aside anyone who stood in his way. And this is the man, we are told, whom God blesses by making him the founding patriarch of three global religions.
This singular, expansionist mindset is exactly the sort of mindset required for the invention of the next booster rocket placed under global totalitarianism: monotheism.
Polytheistic religions with their hundreds, even thousands of gods and spirits are reflective of the richness of human life. Assigning gods to every event, situation and place acknowledges the great diversity of experiences we have: gods for birth and gods for death, gods for stone and and gods for tree, gods for sun and gods for rain; each have their role and all must be acknowledged.
Monotheism replaces this rich diversity with the One God, who is a LORD (a concept that doesn’t exist in non-totalitarian cultures) and must be worshipped. And note, the Bible doesn’t deny that other gods exist. Baal is regularly referenced as a rival god. The first comandment isn’t “No other gods exist,” it’s “You shall have no other god but me.” It’s my way or the highway, buddy.
So, monotheism is a totalitarian form of religion. Is it such a shock, therefore, that cultures based on monotheistic religions a) believe in thier own supremacy and b) are willing to war with other cultures who claim to rival their supremacy?
This belief, and the willingness to die to defend it, propelled the followers of these three religions further along the road to civilisation than any culture had gone before, building huge empires as they went. In terms of geographic reach, at the height of its power the British Empire was truly the empire on which the sun never set, and lasted some 400 years. The Ottoman Empire was smaller but more longlived — it lasted some 600 years. But it was the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity which really turned up the burners. It can be argued that the Roman Empire is still in existance today, some 1,500 years after its founding, and now stretches around the globe from America’s western coast (brought there by Manifest Destiny) to Russia’s east.
But nothing can escape the natural laws. These religions, and the cultures they gave rise to, are as subject to the law of entropy as species are. Judaism gave rise to numerous sects, one of which evolved into Christianity which in turn split into Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Protestantism, which in turn gave rise to the enlightenment, rationalism and atheism (and Marxism). Islam picked up the Abrahamic mantle and almost immediately split into Sunni and Shia. And all of these inherited the deeply held belief that they were the One True Way.
To this day, our global culture is saturated with totalitarian claims, from American exceptionalism to Islamic Jihad to Chinese expansionism; from Neo-Marxist Woke fanaticism to environmentalism to the globalisation of capital markets to the WEF’s Great Reset. All of these rival iterations carry at their heart the message: “It’s my way or the highway, buddy.”
And that's a problem on multiple levels. Not only does it create conflict, it also makes us much more vulnerable as a species because it strips diversity from the population. Which means that when conditions change — and eventually they always do — we have less chance of weathering those changes.
Think back to our hypothetical tribes of hunters, fishermen, and a mixture of the two who we encountered in Part I.
If everyone were fishermen, the human race would not survive a shortage of fish. If everyone were hunters, humanity would not survive a shortage of meat. We need diversity within the species to adapt to changing circumstances. And yet a human race of only fisherman or only hunters is exactly what totalitarian culture creates.
The second law of thermodynamics states that all systems move to increased disorder. That includes our own. The longer our civilisation persists, the more likely that some destabilising factor will emerge. Yet at the same time we are busy stripping out our only protection against system shock as we race pell mell toward a unified global culture. We are in effect, guaranteeing our own destruction. At some point that destabilising system shock will come, and when it does, it is now almost certain to wipe us out wholesale. Perhaps it already has come and we're living on borrowed time.
What Goes Up Must Come Down
Meanwhile, the assumption of never-ending growth which we inherited from those first totalitarian farmers is also still with us. It’s implied every time the economy ‘stalls’ to just two percent growth a year and the government promises to get it going again. Yet a moment’s thought tells us that growth can’t actually go on forever. Every habitat has a natural carrying capacity. Expecting growth to go on indefinitely is akin to throwing a ball high into the air and expecting it to never drop. Sooner or later the natural law of gravity is going to kick in. Sooner or later the carrying capacity of the planet is going to kick in. This is not an environmentalist claim. I’m not suggesting that we have ravaged the planet and it now can’t sustain us. I’m saying that we are now in each other’s way. Everyone wants to expand, but the only territories available are already held by rivals who also want to expand. It’s a recipe for ultimate war.
I believe that what we are currently witnessing in the disintegration of our societies is the ball beginning to drop. We have saturated the whole planet with the totalitarian impulse, and not a single group is willing to back down. Short of doing as Elon Musk wishes and expanding ever onwards, out to the Moon, Mars and beyond, we have two choices: we can take up arms and fight to the death, or we can put down arms and agree that my way might work for me, but I have no right to impose it on you — and I’m talking about radically so, right down to the community level.
In part to stave off criticisms of wokism, I’d like to give a sneak peak of my next blog post in this series to outline a potential solution.
In the Middle Ages, a new class arose between the peasants and the nobility. They were the Burghers. Some sources refer to them as the ‘middle classes,’ but they were more than that. They were merchants and skilled craftsmen, and they were free-men. As the class evolved they formed guilds and became the natural leaders in their local towns, deciding on matters of planning, law and commerce. Through their guilds, they acted as a counterbalance of power to the nobility.
What we need is a call to radical localism, one in which each town and village runs its own affairs, free from the overarching power of the current nation states. This will give us direct representation in our own communities without the need to elect representative leaders who cannot possibly speak for all the conflicting desires of their constituents. And it will do away with a ruling class that has the power to control and dictate to the masses completely.
There’s nothing to stop groups of towns gathering together to decide matters that affect them all, if they so wish. For example, all the towns situated along a river might wish to hold a conference on the management of that river’s resources, but you don’t need a national government to decide for you. Radical localism will also open up communities to properly be able to diversify and trade again, free from the dictats of central planning.
But the biggest boon it will bring is a return to truly diversified cultures. The people of Cornwall can do things differently to the poeple of Yorkshire and Kent. The people of Brighton and Bristol can form a collective and leave the rest of us out of it. Manchester and Liverpool can come up with completely different ways of running transport, or football, in their towns.
The winner in this experiment of radical diversity will be all of us.
Brilliantly well-written, Donna! Such a refreshing feature to have your intelligence still remaining a feature of this increasingly fragmented world!