"The continuity of the cultural field" (4). The axioms of civilizations

Part 3.  the axioms of civilizations

Introduction  

I plan on publishing this part 3 in its entirety on this blog (6-8 more articles). 

Being one part of a book, that is in the final stages of editing, these articles do not give a footnote explanation for some dates and facts because these facts have been touched upon in the earlier sections of the book.

Civilizations emerged as a consequence of a chain of events that started with an abrupt climate change at the tail end of the Younger-Dryas sometime around 11,700 years ago which resulted in increased population levels that filled the entire Mesopotamian alluvial plains. In this chain of events the tribal model of society got eventually overwhelmed and then rapidly lost its organizational functionality.


Ever more important increases of population in the Mesopotamian alluvial plains forced the adoption of agriculture on those who were ejected by their tribes and sometime around 10,000 years ago agricultural villages started to appear on the margin of tribal territories as an answer of the complete tribal occupation of these alluvial plains. Due to its own outsized alluvial plains China’s tribal population management was never hampered by the kind of limitation that was suffered in Mesopotamia and its adaptation to the population growth that resulted from an abruptly warming climate took thus a radically different turn than it did in the TCA as described extensively in “2.2.3. Early power societies were very unstable”.


The early villages in Mesopotamia suffered a constant flow of tribal excess population and their demography became uncontrollable which engaged them in an ever increasing competition for land with the existing tribes. The necessity to expand villages, by constant conquest of more tribal territory, got organized by chieftains. But power relations in villages were rapidly generating social inequality and instability while their constant expansion forced tribes to flee the violence. The villages got soon engaged in an unstoppable conquest of the alluvial plains while the tribes were relegated on the mountainous or desert margins of the alluvial plains. This is when Gebekli Tepe was abandoned and covered under a thick layer of dirt so that the villagers should forget animism and subscribe to the early-religious stories that started to circulate between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago.

 

This whole process fusing power and knowledge was somehow the conclusion of a very long transition that had been marked by a lot of violence during which competing villages pushed all tribes outside of the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia toward the mountains and deserts on their margins. The exclusion of the tribes from the alluvial plains was accompanied by a rejection of animism inside the villages. Both had started to happen sometime between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago  (1) which fostered a long period of maturation, and of trials and errors, before new stories got accepted in the minds of the citizens of all the societies that had been annexed to the kingdom or empire. 

The more territory the villages reclaimed from tribes the more the chieftains started to compete among themselves for the control of existing villages. But the larger the territory they controlled the more difficult it became for them to maintain their power by  the sole exercise of force. Taking the control over a territory and rapidly losing that control became the new normal which lasted from 9-8,000 to 6-5,000 years ago.


The first city-states that succeeded to reproduce over the longer haul, in the TCA, appeared in Southern Irak sometime between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago. The biggest among them was Uruk which, around 5,000 years ago, had some 50,000 inhabitants. Between 5,000 and 4,000 years ago, the cities entered a furious race for domination in the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia which heralded the coming of Confederate cities that would form the first kingdoms and empires. This was a time of increased violence that led to the construction of protection walls and undefended villages disappeared while their populations flocked to the walled cities.


Archaeologists are still debating what was the first confederation of city-states and what king governed it. Was it Enmerkar of Aratta, Gilgamesh of Uruk, or Enmebaragesi of Kish ? For my personal purpose this question is without merit. What I try to get at is the chain reactions of transformations that powered the transition from tribal to power societies. The name of a particular king is meaningless in that optic.


Once confederations of city-states emerged they started to compete among themselves at the image of the competition between cities. And the first empires that emerged from this competition were those that succeeded to stabilize and to reproduce their institutions of power over the long haul of many generations.


This stabilization and reproduction of the institutions of power was not resulting from the application of force solely. It was the result of a cooperation of the men of power with some men of knowledge who succeeded to spread a commonly shared worldview among the citizens. This sharing of a common understanding about the working of reality glued the minds of the citizens in a cohesive whole that automatically reproduced the state of affairs of the group over the generations.


I call such worldviews that stabilized kingdoms and empires prime or foundational worldviews. These were indeed the worldviews that grounded the first civilizations of the Tri-Continental-Area. And they were foundational for the good reason that they had been instrumental in stabilizing their institutions of power over the long haul. These foundational worldviews were the first whose narratives were shared with the citizens and this sharing is what permitted to stabilize and reproduce the first power societies over the long haul of many generations. This, in the end, is what has kept them in the eye of history. But being first also conveys the idea that they were the first narrative in the new age after the rupture with animism.


Over time the roots of the first worldviews of power-societies got imprinted in the subconscious of their citizens and they started to act as the foundational truths of their civilizations. Such subconscious foundational truths guide, or force, the thinking process of the individuals along a path that is traced, that is given, by the intrinsic meaning in the narrative of the foundational worldview. This intrinsic meaning acts like the axiomatic sap that nourishes the trunk of the tree of civilization and thus the appellation 'the axioms of civilization' in analogy of the ‘axioms of mathematics’.


With both these classes of axioms human logic is set to build-up a complex system that has its own reason and finality. In mathematics axioms are the foundations from which logic derives sets of abstract theorems that will eventually lead to theories addressing the advancement of the human understanding about the nature of reality. In a civilization axioms are the foundations from which human logic derives sets of principles that will eventually lead to theories addressing the advancement of the human understanding about the nature of life. In this sense the axioms of civilization are like abstract condensates, of first worldviews, that drive the formation of all future ideation about the nature of life as well as the nature of reality.


Abstract logical systems about reality and about life start with the observation that their nature resides in the whole ensemble that set theory recognizes as U. The second general observation was derived from within the human habitat and related to ‒ the flux of time distinguishing day from night ‒ the flux of life distinguishing female from male. The same kind of observation was then observed in all kinds of aspects relating to the human habitat and so appeared the abstract notion that all elements are driven by constitutive pairs : ‒ the mix of black (no color) and white (all colors) is giving the whole gamut of colors ‒ the mix of good and evil is giving the whole gamut of human behaviors ‒ the mix of individual actions and societal actions is driving the substantiation of life into species ‒ and so on and on.

1. All around the world worldviews started with the observation that “the whole” is composed of a multitude of elements while each of those elements gets its substance from its interacting pairs. But the similarity between all worldviews ended with this observation that pairs animate the elements. They all started to diverge in their interpretation of what these interacting pairs are all about :
   
   In the TCA and, by extension, in the West these pairs are believed to be dualities of interacting forces that fight each other till death. The religions of the word consider that god is the creator of reality and that he represents the ultimate good. Believers think that they stand on god’s side because they believe in him.
   
   And because they believe that their god represents the ultimate good they think that they themselves represent all that is good. And as such they think that the otherness of the other represent evil and the otherness of his belief represents thus the ultimate evil. So they think that the otherness of the other has to be eliminated. They firmly believe indeed that they have to convert the other and if he refuses to convert they think that they have the obligation to liquidate him. The Torah and the Old Testament are filled with the kind of raw violence that results from such a thought process.


2. In China, and by extension in all the societies in the Confucian realm, these pairs are thought to be complementary polarities that are animated by the Yin-Yang principle of give and take which eventually concludes in a win-win agreement between the polarities. In this understanding the Yin-Yang principle acts like the energetic principle that powers the transformation of the present moment to the next.
   
   The Yin-Yang principle is thus not adhering to this notion of a constant fight between good and evil in which the individual is entangled for the whole of his life. The Yin-Yang principle is a purely pragmatic and instrumental principle that explains the true nature of reality which the Chinese understand as being constant change.
   
   The pragmatism of the Yin-Yang principle is fact based. It is never judgmental of the other. The otherness of the other is simply viewed as for what it is : an other that could eventually be enriching the East-Asian individual or his society. And for this reason the East-Asian individual, or his society, accept the other and his otherness and engage in trade with him.

Early-power-societies got their interpretation of what these interacting pairs are all about from their prime worldview and so they got to share the same axioms as the other societies participating in the territorial realm of their civilization. And over time these axioms got imprinted in the subconscious of their citizens giving their societies a civilizational substrate of meaning that follows them for the whole of their existence.


This civilizational substrate of meaning participates in driving the societal formation of all future ideation about the nature of reality, about the nature of life, and about the synchronization of the physical and societal realities of the present day with their worldview. This constant synchronization procures societies with the mechanisms that power their cultural evolution :

1. the actualization of their daily culture :
   
   Daily culture is understood here as the totality of beliefs, behaviors, and actions that are expressed by the individuals in the present of a given society. The physical and societal realities of the present day are indeed constantly changing. And the constant synchronization of these changing realities with the societal worldview forces, or substantiates, the totality of beliefs, behaviors and actions, of the citizens which means that free-will is decidedly limited.
   
   This also implies a vision of daily culture that includes all fields of daily life that under Modernity got unfortunately separated. And so Westerners got used to separate all aspects of the present reality in economic, financial social cultural Geo-political, and other specialized silos. But this separation forced our societies to build a set of separate abstract systems which, in the absence of interactivity with the abstractions in the other silos, got completely detached from the societal and physical realities that are grounding life. These are the abstract systems that are being taught to the children ! Is it any surprise then that madness is now overwhelming the working of Western societal systems ?
   
   This separation permitted the supply of knowings to the big capital holders which they eagerly put in application in the production of goods and services and societies got loaded with consumerism, hedonism, and nonchalance. But this unfortunately got us also loading multiple hidden side-effects that only started to attract our attention over the last decades when “the great convergence of Late-Modernity” was already so advanced that it had become a predicament.


2. the actualization of the societal worldview : Worldviews are narratives about the working of reality that, once shared by the citizens of a society, procure the following advantages :
   
   
   • they answer the existential questions of the individuals which quietens their anxiety
   
   
   • sharing a common narrative, that answers peoples' existential questions, instills trust among the members of the group and this boosts societal cohesion which, in turn, eases the reproduction of the societal institutions over the long haul of many generations
   
   
   • sharing common narratives, consciously or unconsciously, allows for the smooth operation of their synchronization with the memes that succeed to replicate over time in the daily culture. The mechanism is a carbon copy of the operation of genetic replication in biological evolution. What this means is that a meme that is subscribed by successive generations gets automatically integrated in the narrative of the societal worldview.
     

The predicament of “the great convergence of Late-Modernity” is what now gets synchronized with our worldview !   In its complete ignorance the West is thus doubling down on madness as a strategy of societal evolution.


These mechanisms of actualization are powering the cultural evolution of societies. The fact is that axioms of civilization remain constantly active in the background of societal worldviews which secures their integrity ‒ from undue synchronization with non-replicating memes that the wild pressures of daily culture would like to impose  ‒ from the wild pressures, by exceptionally powerful physical and societal realities, to limit its capacity to synchronize daily culture.


Seen in this sense, during the entirety of its existence, a civilization represents the totality of interactions operating between its axioms, its societal worldviews, and its daily or living cultures. Such interactions are the reason why civilizations eventually end up regrouping different societies with differentiating worldviews and cultures that, time passing, move eventually ever further apart. Western European and Confucian societies are good examples of such a differentiation into societal branches whose origins can get hidden over the long haul.


Axioms of civilization are not readily available to human perception. To possibly attain the consciousness that something like 'civilizational axioms' exist at all it is necessary to experience societal relativity over the long run. By that I mean the observation over the long run of both, ‒ the daily life ‒ the intellectual inquiry, of different countries that participate in different civilizational realms. It is the shock, of living for extended periods of time in different civilizations than the one from one’s own societal birth, that opens the subconscious mind of the seeker to the intrinsic meaning, or the axiomatic sap, that flows in the roots of the foundational worldview of the civilizations she or he experiments living in.


Leaving Europe in my thirties, and landing in China in the mid-eighties, forced me to experience personally the intensity of this kind of shock. And I can say without exaggeration that such a shock is world awakening indeed. In sum what I mean to say here is that our societal domestication forces us since our birth to integrate consciously and unconsciously the axioms of our own civilization and the worldview of our society of birth. And the fact is that we share with our fellow citizens, consciously or unconsciously, a common narrative about what reality is all about that guides our daily thoughts, behaviors and actions.


And when we enter another country, that is part of a different civilizational realm than our own, we may eventually get shocked by attitudes, behaviors, beliefs and so on that are so different that they stand in opposition to the ones we are accustomed to. But this kind of shock only gets its full significance after living in that country for quite some time.  For the mind to become aware the eyes first get to see, the ears first get to hear, the nose first gets to smell the different ranges and dept of all the stimuli that only time renders perceptible.  (2)


Having said all this the fact is that it is still no more the skin of that society. To get a sense of why people think, behave, believe in their native ways it is necessary to go deeper in the history and the arts of their country. But even that I discovered is not sufficient yet for a Westerner to appreciate the real dept and richness of Traditional Chinese Culture. All in all it has taken me nearly thirty yeas of observations, interactions, and learning to discover that I did not have the conceptual tools to make sense of what I was trying to understand. To address this short-coming I started to write. Writing imposes discipline and the discovery of the unknown through thinking.


I have been writing since 6-7 years and this series “From Modernity to After-Modernity” is my most serious effort to untangle China’s other-worldliness. I’m writing for myself. I’m not writing to publish a book. I’m solely interested to understand how societal evolution operates and how Western Europe and China could possibly have such a profoundly other way to view reality and to operate their societal daily life. Since writing concludes, with pages of text that eventually add up into books, I make these available to kindred spirits who might be interested in my thinking experience.


Having said all that the fact is that we can't avoid the shaping of our thinking and behavior because, in the end, these axioms are the foundations of the worldviews and the cultures practiced by all in the milieu we were born and lived in. In other words our axioms of civilization and our worldviews form a cultural continuum that is forcing on us our societal culture of the day. And when we plunge into societies that participate in another civilization our minds are regularly blown away by incomprehension of the differences we observe in how people handle their day to day ways of doing and thinking.


It takes a real and consistent effort to accept that such different ways are not necessarily worse than our own ways. Such an honest recognition is an absolute necessity to possibly being able to start accepting the other in his otherness. And I think that this is also the necessary pre-requisite of any inquiry into why and how those differences came about in the first place.

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So how did the world divide along the lines of different axioms of civilization ?


I'll try to answer that question by reviewing the last stages of the transition from tribal to power societies : 

 

1. the formation of Early Kingdoms and Empires
2. imperial stabilization in different physical habitats
3. Compared narratives : the “axioms of civilization” in the West and in China.
   

I’ll then investigate how the realities, that sustain these theoretical abstractions, are fostering or forcing on all of us the unfolding of our daily lives. But rest reassured what I’m talking about is not like predestination. I'll then conclude this part 3 with the following :

 

   4. How do axioms of civilization apply in daily life .

I'll publish these 4 sections as articles on his blog within the following days and weeks.

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Notes

1. This was the time when animism came under attack in Göbekli Tepe. To eliminate its memory from the minds of the people the sanctuary was finally covered under a thick layer of dirt around 8,000 years ago...

 

2.  See for example “A guide on how not to embarrass yourself while traveling in Japan” in by Monica Buchanan Pitrelli. 2021-03-03.