Blank slate: post-collapse back-to-basics
Written by Michael Heller
In order more fully to describe the nature of the most elemental differentiations that characterise T1 individualism and carry over strongly into the T2 communalistic, T3 coordinated and T5 participatory societies I will now consider what could occur within populations left to fend for themselves ungoverned in the wake of the collapse of an historically advanced society. Will the memories of the pre-collapse society be so compelling in logic and practicality that people will seek to replicate it? Or, will they perforce innovate and attempt to create a new type of society? Or, finally, will they follow their biologically-given animalistic rationality and start over again instinctively without even knowing that the natural evolutionary progression tends to run from individualism to communalism or coordinated leadership? Probably the answer will be a mixture of all three. The pre-collapse model will have had its attractions, and subsequently it will have its noble legends. However, following the trauma of collapse it may be people’s overriding desire to avoid the undesirable features that were always present in the old model of governance—a model which, after all, was not necessarily of their making. They will certainly also want to avoid creating a society that will be vulnerable to collapse. Yet, the collateral casualties of collapse, though not lacking in post-crisis economic and political incentives, will not yet possess sufficient social and political order or accumulated knowledge and organisational experience to allow for rapid innovations. A full recovery inevitably demands a long process of relearning.
As it turns out there is an illuminating case study available. There was a curious discontinuity in Greek history roughly between 1200 and 600 BCE during which pre-administrative forms of governance were revived or rediscovered. The cause of the collapse sometime around 1200 remains hotly debated. It may have been a cataclysm, a conquest, a coup, or exponential growth in region-wide trade that finally caused Greek rulers to lose control over their profitable, tightly integrated and administered territorial economies. Perhaps there occurred a combination of such causes. Only two facts are certain: the destruction of the palaces of the Mycenaean kings, and the end of wide-scale centralised rulership of the kind that was still common in nearby parts of the Near East, and which Greece itself had known since the 4th millennium BCE.
Even in the most recent literature one still finds Greece’s 1100-800 BCE interlude referred to as the ‘Dark Age’ — ‘dark’ because of the paucity of data but also in the catastrophic sense of civilisational collapse, relative impoverishment, and consequent population reduction or dispersal. One historian describes what transpired in Greece after 1200 as “a genuine apocalypse”. There clearly were severe reductions in living standards and medium term shrinkage of commercial interactions within impacted territories. Over generations the skills and know-how that had sustained the kingdoms—such as writing, administration, and all forms of artisanal expertise and specialised divisions of labour required by diversified economies for large societies reliant on mass market agricultural production—were lost. The relative security of life under the laws and protections of kings was also lost. There is every indication—as in literary sources and remains of weaponry and fortifications—that this Dark Age made for a potentially violent, swindling, and predatory environment. For this reason attention soon turned, as a priority, to inventing rules of social action and creating consensus.
In material terms it is equally clear that the adaptation to these new circumstances inevitably required a resurgence of ‘Neolithic’ (or certainly pre-administrative) low-density small-scale householder economies combining cultivation and pastoralism with the construction of storage facilities. In post-collapse Greece the recreation of a dynamic economies also required constructing long distance exchange networks with neighbouring regions for imports and exports of diverse produce and, especially, the importation of new materials, techniques and technologies (iron, tools, writing, etc.).
The point here is that the turn back to an ‘oikos’ householder socioeconomic model reflected the massive fragmentation of societies and effectively limited the choices for governance to T1, T2, and T3 only. For obvious reasons—given the complexity and formidable cognitive requirements—T4 was not on the menu, and no T4 territorial power in the wider region was in a hurry to ‘come to the rescue’ by incorporating the ungoverned populations and lands of archaic Greece into its own administered orbit.
New small core-periphery settlement polities did gradually emerge in Greece. That pathway was slow because it depended on giving scattered families good trustworthy reason and assurance to risk new settlement and ‘group stress’ among strangers. It is precisely this experimental re-creative process that is of primary interest. The trend in the territories previously ruled by wealthy Mycenaean kings was a reversion to small scale forms of pre-kingship governance. For centuries Greece would hover creatively—or shift cautiously and laboriously—between group-over-person communalism and coordinated person-over-group leadership. I will try to show what can be known with reasonable certainty—in contemporary archeology and analyses of writings by Greek poets who drew on legends and their own direct experiences—about the painstaking generation of new rules for conduct and for decision making, from scratch, on a blank slate. As Robin Osborne has written of Greek populations during the Dark Age:
“upon the clean slate they could, and did, write their own beginnings, creating for themselves the past for which contemporary realities and desires for the future made them wish. They could, and did, invent themselves.”
Looking ahead we see that from 800-700 BCE the consolidated ‘polity’ trend was towards elite leadership, essentially along the traditional cooperative lines familiar in many studies of chiefdoms, but with the rhetorical flourishes and misnaming that one would expect among peoples versed in legends about Mycenaean ‘kings’. By 600-500 BCE the trend was reversing toward forms of communalistic participation in decision making, though with hitherto unprecedented levels of formal organisation and legal regulation. Despite the fact that 600-400 BCE pathways presented themselves in a ‘modern’ formal organised or regulated form (by comparison with hunter-gatherer communalism or Neolithic settlements) the important factor to keep in mind is that both avenues were broadly negotiated or imposed—then tried and tested on primitively clean slates—between 1100-700 BCE. Greece during the Dark Age presents a compressed back-and-forth evolution through three types of society.
We have the good fortune of being presented with this blank canvass upon which to depict a post-T4 model of T1 individualism in process as it modulates T2 communalism and T3 cooperation. We need to know these late recreations of prehistoric process (the ‘originals’ can quite safely be assumed to have existed 5000-50000 years earlier). We need them in order to compare and contrast poorly understood differences between the forms of ‘participatory governance’ that subsequently were recorded in Greece and Rome, and about which there is still much debate. The foundational ‘political’ differences between ancient Greece and ancient Rome participatory governance are—I propose—an outcome of two distinct ways in which T1 individualism had already modulated prior Greek/Roman T2 communalistic or T3 coordinative experience.
T1 ‘individualism’ in the Greek Archaic again means the biological differentiations of age, sex, strength, personality, and cognitive ability. The literary output at the end of the Dark Age (800-700) can reveal to us a great deal about the probable individualistic features of the unrecorded first societies. Homer and Hesiod knew the stories handed down through generations about life during the times of Mycenaean kings, and were also immediately witness to the evolution of new societies built on clean slates where the elemental biological factors were back in full force — for example, the importance of heroic, competitive physical strength, agility, and oratorial or storytelling charisma; the sharp definition of polarised gender roles; the enormous cognitive challenges of soundly intelligent judgement and memory in devising and applying rules for good order; and the inevitable traditional reliance on elders to give their community the needed authority to advise and adjudicate for the benefit of all. These are versions of the differentiations I earlier hypothesised for a Palaeolithic cave-dwelling T1 sextet.
This period after the Mycenaean collapse is valuable in being the first for which there are written accounts—albeit embroidered with the motive of telling compelling and dramatic narratives—of re-creating societies founded on individual differences while instinctively, ineluctably and rapidly re-learning basic combinations of horizontal and vertical decision making that in ages past generated communalistic and coordinated societies, and which were to be rejuvenated again in the 4th and 5th centuries BCE.
To summarise: my interest in this segment of a much larger history and theory of society from prehistory to modernity lies in how the individual differentiations became interwoven with a rebuilding of governance in 8th and 7th century Greece, as recounted by Homer and Hesiod (and analysed by modern scholars). Each poet had one foot loosely planted in the legends of late Bronze Age Peloponnesus and one foot firmly and empirically planted in his own environment. As men of the elite they may be biased narrators. However, they provide the essential information. Not surprisingly they emphasise the role of elders. Yet we also learn also about qualities of governing associated with differential cognition, male strength, male charisma, male gender dominance, and the ubiquitous and deterministic insider-outsider dynamics of social closure. My focus will be on decision making, and formation and application of rules.
This is by way of an introduction to T1 preceding or following accounts to be offered for earlier periods by Herbert Spencer, William Golding (a keen reader of Homer), and the best up-to-date social scientific insights of biology, anthropology and archeology.
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Bibliographic references will be included in final versions only..
‘T1’ to ‘T10’ are summarised on the Social Science Files ‘About’ page..
Today’s illustration:
A way of flying (Modo de volar) by Francisco Goya (Date: 1816-1823)