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Overview
It expertly explores the foundations of our developing society by showing how these grand themes have recurred throughout the various phases of global history. From communities of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, through feudalism and onto the capitalistic machine-civilisation of recent centuries, Willie Thompson takes us on a journey that is fundamentally opposed to mainstream histories which concentrate on monarchs, politicians and military commanders.
At the centre of this book lies the interaction between humans and their environment. By exploring history in this way, it reveals a simple yet powerful materialist understanding of how we got to where we are today, and opens a door to a different reading of our world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783712731 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 154,911 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Willie Thompson was Professor of Contemporary History at Glasgow Caledonian University. His books include Work, Sex and Power (Pluto, 2015), Ideologies in the Age of Extremes (Pluto, 2011) and What Happened to History? (Pluto, 2000). He is currently vice-president of the Socialist History Society.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Cosmos, Creatures and Consciousness
Our Place in the Cosmos
In the English language the term 'history' has two distinct though connected meanings. In one sense it can mean a record of human doings, embodied in a written narrative or analysis, sometimes referred to as historiography, and in another the actuality of what occurred in the past. In the narrower sense of the first, the reconstruction of the events involved depends on written records (sometimes supplemented by artwork) – the general form in which the science of historiography is understood, and has a timespan of roughly 5,000 years.
The approximately 2.6 million years of hominin existence on the planet prior to that are reconstructed by archaeologists through material remains of artefacts or preserved body parts. The drawing together of evidence from the millennia of written history and from the longer stretch of archaeological investigation is sometimes referred to as 'Deep History'. The much lengthier span of organic life, extends to around 3.6 billion years, and is studied through biology and evolutionary history. An even greater timespan which saw the formation of the stars, including our own with its planets, and eventually the Big Bang which generated the universe and where it all started, is the province of cosmology. This in its entirety has lately been referred to by some as 'Big History' and all of it is relevant to the present situation of human beings.
We read from time to time, in discussions of the possible universes that might have emerged from the Big Bang, approximately 13.7 billion years ago, assertions that it was fortunate for us that the one which happened to be actualised was also one that happens to be 'favourable to life'. That is a basic error; our universe is for the most part totally inimical to life, which could not conceivably exist either in the cold of interstellar space or in the interior of a star. Its only possible location is as a thin skin on a planet receiving energy inputs from its parent star, along with other conditions which permit the complex chemistry of life to function; and from what is known of our own solar system or the exoplanets identified so far in other systems, few, if any of these, are anywhere like suitable.
Certain conclusions however strongly suggest themselves. The number of exoplanets so far identified is around 5,000 and rising, and these are all comparatively near us by cosmic standards. It is therefore a virtual certainty that there exist many billions of planets throughout our own galaxy. Another near certainty is that the process of evolution that has taken place on our own world was an enormously unlikely outcome. Among the billions of these exoplanets some must be suitably constituted and placed to harbour life forms. The likelihood therefore is that life is actually quite prevalent in the universe. The probability is also that it is mainly if not overwhelmingly unicellular, as it was for most of earth's history and that any multicellular organisms that happen to arise are likely to be primitive and simple.
So far as our own sun's family is concerned, on no other of its planets could multicellular organisms survive for more than a few seconds. Extremophile bacteria could perhaps just possibly cope with Mars, some of the Jovian moons or Saturn's moon Titan, but even that is extremely doubtful, and in any case hardly counts. In this particular region of our galaxy, at any rate, we are utterly alone. A further consideration applies to the galaxy as a whole.
It seems that our own galaxy is untypical compared to its neighbours, especially the nearest one, the Andromeda galaxy (with which we are on eventual collision course). The big black hole at the centre of our galaxy, though millions of times larger than the sun, is relatively small as such entities go, and unusually quiescent. The one in Andromeda is much larger and much more active, blasting out deadly radiation in every direction as it consumes interstellar gas and stars caught in its gravitational field and probably making life impossible on any of the planets that galaxy contains. As long ago as 1930, Olaf Stapledon's science-fiction novel First and Last Men envisaged an end to human life due to the radiation of a nearby supernova – which is by no means an impossible scenario.
What applies to cosmic space also applies to cosmic time. Although the earth has existed for around a third of the universe's age, that span constitutes the merest blink on its scale – recent calculations show a future of 100 trillion years before the last stars are extinguished and an inconceivable 10 years before all matter disintegrates and what was the universe consists of nothing but radiation. In what we think of as the present, 'the train of cosmic time has barely left the station'. Needless to say, humans will be long gone well before the universe looks any different from how it does at the moment, even considerably before the sun expands to vaporise the inner planets, as it inevitably will in another five billion years or so.
The Biological Reality - Our Place in the Organic World
The sponge is not, as you suppose,
This rhyme prefaced a popular textbook of biology from which I learned a great deal as a teenager. However the last line is open to challenge. Sponges are as much evolved as any other life form, including humans, and are adapted to fit into their environmental niche as much as ourselves. To be sure, they are much less structured or complex than any vertebrate creature, or indeed most other invertebrates, but the sponges, if they had the capacity to reflect on these matters, might not necessarily consider that to be a disadvantage, for while structure and complexity has its advantages and privileges it also has its downsides – which apply to societies as well as to individual organisms; and sentience all too often equals suffering.
Humans, members of the biological domain (or superkingdom) of eukaryotes, and the animal kingdom, share the planet with a multitude of other species in that kingdom, not to speak of the kingdoms of plants and fungi, and the two domains of the prokaryotes (less complex unicellular organisms), archaea and bacteria. Any adequate appreciation of the human story has to take account of these absolutely fundamental relationships.
To get a sense of perspective of where modern humans stand in earth's history, famously, if the whole of that history were compressed into one year, the first clearly fossilised multicellular animals, most famously the trilobites, began to flourish in the seas only in late November, the dinosaurs were extinguished around Christmas, Homo sapiens appeared about 20 minutes before the end of the year, with the building of the Egyptian pyramids and everything else that has followed in the last two minutes.
At first glance there appears to have been a continuous drift towards greater complexity throughout life history – prokaryotes to eukaryotes, eukaryotes to multicellular life forms, evolution of these towards continually more complex forms until that process resulted in the human brain, the most complex object in the known universe. This appearance however is almost certainly illusory. For about two thirds of life history, originating approximately 3.5 billion years BP (before present) the prokaryotes were the only life forms, and for at least 80 per cent of the time life has existed on earth the only organisms were unicellular ones. It is an open question whether the initial appearance of living organisms was accidental or possibly predetermined by the chemistry and environment of the era in which they first evolved, but the much later development to eukaryotes and then multicellular organisms was more likely accidental.
The late Stephen Jay Gould argued that if the film of life could be rerun from its beginnings, there is no likelihood that the second showing would produce the same or even similar outcomes. His contention is disputed, opponents pointing to the convergent evolution of life forms to suggest that similar evolutionary pressures would bring about similar if not identical results – the eye for example has evolved several times in slightly different ways, and growing brain power does seem to be an overall feature of life's story to date. Nonetheless Gould's contention appears to be the more convincing. The ancestors of the vertebrates were merely one of many competing phyla in the Cambrian seas, with no more likelihood of survival than several others which failed to make it beyond that era. Jumping forward to the Pleistocene, the era in which H. sapiens evolved, if matters had gone slightly differently it would have been the Neanderthals who survived and modern humans who suffered extinction. Whether the former, given time, could have replicated the achievements of the latter is an open question.
The Evolutionary Record
Early life most likely evolved in the seas and so certainly did the original multicellular organisms, of which the ancestors of the fish, the earliest of the vertebrate phylum, were one. Between 400 and 350 million years ago one lineage of lobe-finned fish evolved lungs and colonised the land (arthropods – 'jointed legs' – in various genera including insects and arachnids were there before them). These pioneering vertebrates were confined to watery landscapes both on account of their skins and the necessity of laying their eggs in water, as amphibians do. The development of amniote reproduction by means of shell-enclosed eggs enabled opportunities for wider colonisation and was taken advantage of by two lineages, one of which led to reptiles and their bird relatives, and the other, the synapsids (one of the latter, though it was not ancestral, being the famous sail-backed dimetrodon), to mammals. Early reptiles and synapsids, both descended from amphibians, looked externally very similar.
The emergence of the earliest dinosaurs and the earliest mammals was roughly contemporaneous, but for tens of millions of years the former dominated the macro zoology of the planet. The antiquity of the primate lineage, to which humans belong, is uncertain, though it could extend as far back as 85 million years when the dinosaurs were still flourishing. The ancestors of the primates lived in the trees of tropical forests and evolved characteristics suited to that way of life, including advanced colour vision. Most mammals lack significant colour vision as their ancestors were nocturnal and depended primarily on smell. Primates however possess it, for a tree-dwelling lifestyle necessitates the ability to recognise the ripeness or otherwise of fruit. Arboreal life also resulted in the development of forelimbs which were evolutionarily designed for grasping rather than walking, especially the thumb-like character of the fifth digit.
Most primates are even now primarily arboreal (gorillas and baboons are exceptions) and none apart from the ancestral human lineage, extending back between five and nine million years, are bipeds who walk upright, freeing their forelimbs, no longer principally devoted to climbing, for all manner of other purposes. Modern humans are the only existing mammalian true biped – indeed such ability is the distinguishing anatomical feature of the Homo lineage. Donald V Kurtz notes that 'Bipedalism and erect posture required morphological changes in the hominins from head to toe and complementary physiological and metabolic changes that affected females in particular ... Bipedalism is the key factor that defines early humans'.
Palaeontology indicates that around 15 million years ago a large number of ape species flourished in the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa and Eurasia (none existed in the Americas). Only half a dozen or so now remain, including that hyper-predator with a grossly overdeveloped brain, H. sapiens. Humans as well as being social animals are also conscious ones – which is not to say that other animals are necessarily without this attribute, but the complexity of the human form is without parallel in the animal kingdom and is fundamental to history. The question of how much longer human life on earth is likely to persist is one which has increasingly come to the fore. Even if we avoid self-extermination or self-created environmental catastrophe, our own species' lifespan is nonetheless limited as much as is the span of an individual life – or that of any particular species, none of which is forever.
Nevertheless, life on planet earth is extraordinarily tenacious overall and has come through unimaginably catastrophic episodes, including the snowball earth which preceded the Cambrian era, the name attached to the emergence of complex life forms around 550 million years ago with a variety of body plans that are still with us today. Later, enough of life survived the worst era of extinction at the end of the Permian 250 million years ago to evolve the enormous complexity which has characterised the following aeons.
All the life forms visible to the human eye, from the titchiest near-microscopic mite to the mightiest redwood and everything in between, are structured assemblages of eukaryotic cells and in the 'wild', are either looking for another one to eat or liable to being eaten. Among animal species this also applies to each other, apart from a few exceptions such as herbivores so big and powerful (elephants and gorillas for example) as to have no natural predators. These were the grim and brutal realities which confronted the earliest humans.
A Social Animal
Human beings are social animals, a characteristic we share with many other species, both vertebrate and invertebrate, but we occupy a unique position on the planet in two critical respects. Recent research has demonstrated that many species of non-human animals – from birds to primates especially – exhibit cultural differences, characteristic social patterns of behaviour varying between different groups; but humans, by means of their unique attribute of language, do so on a scale wholly beyond comparison with any other animal. Secondly humans, also equipped with hands bearing opposable thumbs, beggar all comparisons in their ability to consciously alter and manipulate the surrounding environment to their convenience. The limited use of tools by non-human species are natural phenomena; culture as it is understood by humans is something very different — and it was not invented by the presently existing species of human.
The distinctive feature of later hominin behaviour, beside the use of language, is the control of fire, something that every other animal avoids. It is this ability above everything else that can be said to mark the transition from nature to culture. The first unambiguous evidence of control and use of fire goes back around 400,000 years but was almost certainly practised from around 1.5 million years BP – it was, like the knapping of stones for greater convenience, first undertaken by earlier species of hominin, from whom Homo sapiens undoubtedly inherited it as the first critical step in cultural evolution, marking an existential separation from nature.
The entire span of human history can be reasonably interpreted as a sustained endeavour to increase the separation from nature, to control and eliminate as far as possible the natural constraints that the flesh is heir to and must have afflicted severely the earliest members of the species – attacks by predators, failure of food supply, constant discomfort, constant assault from internal and external parasites and dangerous microbes, early death. Most readers of this volume live in societies and cultures where that project has succeeded spectacularly – too spectacularly indeed for the good of the species. However it required a very long time – around 150 – 170 thousand years as far as can be ascertained – before H. sapiens culture took a dramatic leap forward both in the material sense of made objects and the abstract one of symbolic expression.
In the course of organic history this last represented another dramatic novelty. While the neurological processes of the trilobite or the triceratops (at least 150 million years apart) are not open to investigation, we can take it for granted that neither they nor coexisting animals gave any thought to the meaning of their lives or reflected upon the origins of the world they lived in. Rather, like every other creature, they simply got on with their invertebrate or reptilian thing – namely feeding and breeding, the dominant concern of every animal apart from Homo sapiens. Humans though are different; they possess a unique form of consciousness and through that consciousness they are situated in history as well as nature.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Work, Sex and Power"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Willie Thompson.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface and AcknowledgementsHistorical Timeline
Introduction: The Fabric of History
1. Cosmos, Creatures and Consciousness
2. Cooperation, Stone, Bone and Dispersal
3. The Neolithic Transformation and Its Consequences: Settlement, Wealth and Social Differentiation
4. Gender Differentiation, Sex and Kindred
5. Status Differentiation, Hierarchy and Hegemony
6. Exploitation and Violence
7. Ethics, Ambitions, Crime and Punishment
8. The Origins of Belief in the Supernatural and the First Salvation Religions
9. Monotheism
10. Imagined Communities: Signs and Symbols, Identities and Nations
11. A Broad View – The Rhythm of Empire
12. Human Reality in Transformation: Modern Population, Migration and Labour
13. Inhuman Powers: Capitalism, Industry and Their Consequences
14. No Such Thing as a Free Lunch: Trade-Offs, Opportunity Cost and the Dynamic of Unintended Consequences
15. Social Critique
16. Socialism: Its Promise and Paradox
17. Desperately Seeking Significance
Notes
Index