Why did Humans create States?

[ThinkerX]

I studied the societies and histories of the native American hunter-gather tribes around here (Alaska).  Put bluntly, as a lifestyle, it sucks.  Always a notch or three from starvation.  The tribes hereabouts detested each other big time; so much so they fought miniature genocidal wars against each other.  Three major local battles, each with around 1000 dead (villages not that numerous to begin with), creeks running red with blood.  Cleared the way for the Russian takeover back in the 18th century. 

[Isalie]

I don't understand what you meant by the quote on the last page, but the notion that humans should've considered the risk of increased inequality as they formed in larger groups over thousands of years seems kind of bizarre. We can not even comprehend the climate changing even though it's happening basically within our lifetime.

I think that people wanting to live as hunters and gatherers make the same mistake as someone wanting to live in Westeros makes in thinking he or she would be born a Stark, while he or she most likely would be born a small folk and quite possibly die within the first year. There's been periods when HGs would live in abundance, but if you went back in time, you may very well starve to death.  

[Rippounet]

Depending on how you define a state there should be many other factors involved like writing and means of communication, calculus and basic administration, or even an organized clergy. Even culture would be instrumental. There would be many reasons why it took time for states to emerge. Otoh once a state came to be it would easily dominate other forms of organization in almost every conceivable way. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

2 hours ago, Mikael said:

I don't understand what you meant by the quote on the last page, but the notion that humans should've considered the risk of increased inequality as they formed in larger groups over thousands of years seems kind of bizarre. We can not even comprehend the climate changing even though it's happening basically within our lifetime.

I think that people wanting to live as hunters and gatherers make the same mistake as someone wanting to live in Westeros makes in thinking he or she would be born a Stark, while he or she most likely would be born a small folk and quite possibly die within the first year. There's been periods when HGs would live in abundance, but if you went back in time, you may very well starve to death.  

So much this.  It's not like a bunch of ancient people held an entmoot type thing one day and all agreed to become a state and all that implies. 

 

And any technology or social change we've ever created or discovered has taken generations or more for its effect on the larger world to become apparent.   I'm not sure why the rise of states would be some kind of exception to this.  It's not like everyone just decided 'well, this will make us less equal but confer these benefits, so, let's all go into state mode'.  At least, I'd be very surprised if that happened.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 hours ago, Mikael said:

I don't understand what you meant by the quote on the last page, but the notion that humans should've considered the risk of increased inequality as they formed in larger groups over thousands of years seems kind of bizarre. We can not even comprehend the climate changing even though it's happening basically within our lifetime.

I think that people wanting to live as hunters and gatherers make the same mistake as someone wanting to live in Westeros makes in thinking he or she would be born a Stark, while he or she most likely would be born a small folk and quite possibly die within the first year. There's been periods when HGs would live in abundance, but if you went back in time, you may very well starve to death.  

Mikael,

The point of the quote, and another that I will provide later, that suggests as much as a 4,000 year gap between the adoption of agriculture and the creation of early States is that the causal link between agriculture/sedantary lifestyles (not that people sat around doing nothing all day but that they were no longer traveling all the time) and the creation of the first States may not be accurate.  That States came to be for some reason other than agriculture and sedentary lifestyles.

LtI,

4,000 years is a great deal more than just a few generations.  That is 200 generations.  That’s as long as between the end of the Sumerian civilization (who the Greeks called “ancient”) and today.

[Seli]

7 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

From Against the Grain:

There seems to have been a focus on the staple crops that gave rise to the current big civilizations. There is also a whole slowly rediscovered history of landscape and forest managing humans have also excelled in. Any traces of which are probably mostly destroyed in Eurasia.

In the Americas there is still ample historical evidence humans shaped the forests around them for their own purposes. From the cultivation of the Amazon basin http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/hundreds-years-later-plants-domesticated-ancient-civilizations-still-dominate-amazon to the planting of nut producing species and using fires for forest renewal in North America.

This indicates that there are probably several local optima, which give a reasonably stable society. And there probably have been disruptions that shifted some of those mixed systems to the more and more specialized ones (that can be more productive) that gave rise to states and empires.

[maarsen]

8 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

From Against the Grain:

Scot I wanted to expand my answer but my wife and I were watching an Aussie show called Rake on TV. Here goes. 

The first evidence of storing cultivated grain is not as flour or as whole grains, but the grain was converted to beer and then stored in clay jugs. While watching Rake, it occurred to me that the state would arise quite easily if one considers the effects of beer on the culture. To ensure the continuation of the beer production and the continuation of the society, some form of social control is needed. Hence the state.

Rake the show has a lot of fun satirizing drunken lawyers and politicians in Australia and that was when this occurred to me. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

6 minutes ago, maarsen said:

Scot I wanted to expand my answer but my wife and I were watching an Aussie show called Rake on TV. Here goes. 

The first evidence of storing cultivated grain is not as flour or as whole grains, but the grain was converted to beer and then stored in clay jugs. While watching Rake, it occurred to me that the state would arise quite easily if one considers the effects of beer on the culture. To ensure the continuation of the beer production and the continuation of the society, some form of social control is needed. Hence the state.

Rake the show has a lot of fun satirizing drunken lawyers and politicians in Australia and that was when this occurred to me. 

Beer, my delight, and the true source of social inequality?

[maarsen]

3 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Beer, my delight, and the true source of social inequality?

These are my thoughts as I have never come across this in any books or articles. I enjoy a cold beer also and the thought of someone spoiling the batch due to drunkennss wwuld make me want to exert some control over their behaviour. 

[Isalie]

14 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Mikael,

The point of the quote, and another that I will provide later, that suggests as much as a 4,000 year gap between the adoption of agriculture and the creation of early States is that the link between agriculture/sedantary lifestyles (not that people sat around doing nothing all day but that they were no longer traveling all the time) and the creation of the first States may not be accurate.  That States came to be for some reason other than agriculture and sedentary lifestyles.

Sure, agriculture wouldn't be the sole reason, Rippounet listed a bunch of other factors that probably were important too. However, it's pretty much impossible to see a state rise without agriculture, since HGs would never be able to sustain a large population. 

I think prehistory is fascinating, and I find it quite baffling how advanced the early societies were when it comes to stuff like math. That said, besides it being quite sad how those fairly advanced societies spent so much time warring with each other, I don't find it surprising that states arose. But, I think you have to view it as something that grew organically, bearucracy didn't happen over night, but someone somewhere had so much stuff that he had to count it and someone somewhere decided that it would be better to draw a map of the land and who owned it than to have yet another conflict after the next flooding of the Nile.

Anyway, once we made the switch in large scale, the state was probably the worst kind of society, except for every other kind...

[Isalie]

8 minutes ago, maarsen said:

These are my thoughts as I have never come across this in any books or articles. I enjoy a cold beer also and the thought of someone spoiling the batch due to drunkennss wwuld make me want to exert some control over their behaviour. 

I've come across the theory that beer was the first reason for agriculture so at least you are not on your own in this. I think the Gobekli Tepe was mentioned in the same theory. Even though I drink mostly wine, I kind of like that my alcohol consumption has that kind of historical roots  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

11 minutes ago, maarsen said:

These are my thoughts as I have never come across this in any books or articles. I enjoy a cold beer also and the thought of someone spoiling the batch due to drunkennss wwuld make me want to exert some control over their behaviour. 

It is an interesting speculation.

[maarsen]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

It is an interesting speculation.

I have always found that simple things have great repercussions. 30 years of fixing machinery gave taught me that much. It always comes down to a simple problem in the end. You just have to find the root cause of the failure. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

30 minutes ago, Mikael said:

Sure, agriculture wouldn't be the sole reason, Rippounet listed a bunch of other factors that probably were important too. However, it's pretty much impossible to see a state rise without agriculture, since HGs would never be able to sustain a large population. 

I think prehistory is fascinating, and I find it quite baffling how advanced the early societies were when it comes to stuff like math. That said, besides it being quite sad how those fairly advanced societies spent so much time warring with each other, I don't find it surprising that states arose. But, I think you have to view it as something that grew organically, bearucracy didn't happen over night, but someone somewhere had so much stuff that he had to count it and someone somewhere decided that it would be better to draw a map of the land and who owned it than to have yet another conflict after the next flooding of the Nile.

Anyway, once we made the switch in large scale, the state was probably the worst kind of society, except for every other kind...

Mikael,

I don’t know that I agree with that last statement.  I can see the necessity of the State once population reaches a certain level to maintain agriculture and to attempt to prevent mass human die offs, but, I can’t say given all the baggage of social inequality that comes with the State, that it is better than what came before.  That’s a harder qualitative argument in my opinion.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Maarsen, Mikael,

Another quote from Against the Grain:
 

Quote

Yet sedentism long predates the domestication of grains and livestock and often persists in settings where there is little or no cereal cultivation.  What is also absolutely clear is that domesticated grains and livestock are known long before anything like an agrarian state appears- far longer than previously imagined.  On the basis of the latest evidence, the gap between these two key domestications and the first agrarian economies based on them is now reckoned to stretch for 4,000 years. (citing, Zeder, "The Origins of Agriculture")  Clearly our ancestors did not rush headlong into the Neolithic revolution or into the arms of the earliest states.

 

The point is that while agriculture does seem to be a necessary precursor to States.  Making agriculture primary the causal factor for the rise of states doesn't make sense if it takes 200 generations for agriculture to prompt people to create States.  There is something else that is pushing the creation of States.

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Mikael,

I don’t know that I agree with that last statement.  I can see the necessity of the State once population reaches a certain level to maintain agriculture and to attempt to prevent mass human die offs, but, I can’t say given all the baggage of social inequality that comes with the State, that it is better than what came before.  That’s a harder qualitative argument in my opinion.

It seems to me this is a bit like comparing ancient Gaul with Rome. Of course,  there was less inequality in Gaul, but in the end Rome proved both more efficient and advanced. 

I think that, while the State has certain drawbacks it was always an ineluctable step in human evolution. I'd be more interested in how to move past it than discussing its origins. 

[Isalie]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Mikael,

I don’t know that I agree with that last statement.  I can see the necessity of the State once population reaches a certain level to maintain agriculture and to attempt to prevent mass human die offs, but, I can’t say given all the baggage of social inequality that comes with the State, that it is better than what came before.  That’s a harder qualitative argument in my opinion.

Well, how would you like the alternative to look? It may (very well) be that I'm narrow minded, but I can't think of a better alternative than a strong state.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

It seems to me this is a bit like comparing ancient Gaul with Rome. Of course,  there was less inequality in Gaul, but in the end Rome proved both more efficient and advanced. 

I think that, while the State has certain drawbacks it was always an ineluctable step in human evolution. I'd be more interested in how to move past it than discussing its origins. 

Rippounet,

That is where I'd like this discussion to go.  Can human's move past the State?

I met my wife in a class my third year in Law School called "Law and Cultural Evolution".  The professor, an attorney who was teaching as an ad junct, had an interesting thesis.  He tied human cultural evolution to caloric production and expenditure.  He postulated that Hunter/Gatherer societies had a 1-1 caloric production and expenditure ratio.  Those societies were governed by tradition and custom, to our knowledge nothing was particularly formalized ("Phase I"). 

He then talks about the agricultural revolution and the creation of a surplus he assigned agricultural societies a ration of 10-1.  He noted that this surplus was created by exploiting human and animal labor in rather difficult conditions.  He postulated that this is where law comes from.  The need to keep people in particular roles in life (roles that they may not particularly enjoy) and as such fairly harsh measures were required to keep people working the land.  Thus, States and law arises ("Phase II"). 

Finally, he talks about the mechanical revolution and postulates a ratio of 100-1 for production and caloric intake.  The surplus has increased by an order of magnitude and doesn't require human or animal work to maintain that ratio.  

The question he asked of the class was if we have Phase I governed by tradition and custom.  Phase II governed by States and Law.  What was coming for Phase III?  I really don't know.  One student of his called Phase III "the Artificial Garden" and speculated a return to tradition and custom.  I doubt that.  There are far too many people for that to work and the State will fight to preserve its own power.  It is a fascinating question. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, Mikael said:

Well, how would you like the alternative to look? It may (very well) be that I'm narrow minded, but I can't think of a better alternative than a strong state.

I think you are correct as human populations rose some form of "official" organization was inevitable.  Perhaps it was population pressures that gave rise to the State.  I'm not sure.  We, perhaps, could have retained Stateless societies if humans had not started concentrating populations and remained in smaller communities.  Who knows.  

See my response to Rippounet above for what I think is the crux of this issue.  Where are we going to go from here?  Will States always be the way we organize ourselves?

[Eggegg]

My guess is we pass all governmental power over to one big supercomputer that deals with all issues of security, law and infrastructure, while we all go off and play all day.