Is PCD, Programmed Cell Death, Now an Acronym for Programmed Civilization Death?
Part 2: Does Social Collapse Have a Template in Ancient Egypt?
One of the world’s premier Egyptologists and onetime director of archaeological surveys at Amarna for the Egypt Exploration Society is University of Cambridge archeologist Barry J. Kemp. He spent over 50 years chasing the cause for Egypt’s rise and multiple falls over its 3000-year history, a history 12-times longer than America. In the introduction to his Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Kemp elaborates why at age 77, he would sink so much effort into a 3rd edition of this text, years after his retirement from Oxford. In 2018, after Trump’s election, after Orban’s conversion of Hungary and fascisms near success by Marie Le Pen in France, he wrote, “I recall a wish somehow to convey an angry feeling that the story of ancient Egypt is simultaneously a record of human achievement in the distant past and a pointer to the future of humanity — which is with us now — to face the destructive consequences of those achievements.” One might hear echoes of Patrick J. Deneen’s suspicion that the seeds of our own republic’s demise were unwittingly planted by the Founders and Enlightenment itself, but with the additional penalties (and there were benefits) of all that came before it.
One thing that makes Kemp’s lifetime of investigation so engaging is the high-altitude perspective he gained of civilizations in general from detailed excavations in the dirt of Egypt. Though long dead, ancient Egypt serves as one of many experiments in collective human behavior under social organizations dominant after agriculture’s revolution, that epic conversion from a hunter-gather lifestyle to the constant churn of civilizations. “What mostly characterizes the history of humanity as a whole since the Neolithic [he means since the commencement of agriculture] is the conscious search for improved systems…”
The mechanism by which this replacement of one system for another is, per Kemp, driven by the imagination of dreamers and idealists. Others then implement these great ideas with less creative talent but skills of supervision. “Creative minds within the community strengthen the bonds of identity [let’s call that meaning] by the exercise of their imagination. They invent — though it might seem at the time to be revelation — myths, symbols, and ideologies, which become in their time, essential knowledge. Ambitious individuals [then] create from that framework a basis of power, establishing systems of conduct which direct the energies and resources of others.” Here, we see through the power of imagination that creation of a “dual reality” which Yuval Noah Harari calls out in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind: “On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities like the United States and Google.”
But how do managers enforce their framework built on the ideas of innovators? Kemp elaborates: “The instrument of subjugation is hierarchy, or more properly dominance hierarchy. This sustains a way of life in which people commonly have unequal access to resources and unequal degrees of authority over others. The balancing mechanism is deference [which] also co-exists with its opposite, angry rejection of subservience… Despite what is common in primate societies, for the greater part of [human existence], at least 200,000 years, dominance hierarchy probably barely existed. In their hunter-gatherer groups of a few dozen individuals, it was…kept in check through various forms of sanction that achieved socio-political leveling and thus a way of life in which some measure of equality prevailed.”
That groups were breaking away from self-restraint and allowing dominance hierarchies to establish themselves in the Near East “begin to appear in the ninth millennium BC [proximate with the Agricultural Revolution],” writes Kemp. “Once started, the process — still the subject of much speculation — reinforces itself almost irreversibly.”
Sociologist Robert Bellah labeled this the “U-shaped curve of despotism — from the despotic apes to the egalitarian hunter-gatherers to the reemergence of despotism in complex societies.” Early humans innovated a relatively open, classless, communal existence from that of their primate relatives of similar group size. But recall how David Livingstone Smith’s treatment of the evolution of deception was a function of that size. The more individuals there are to deal with, the more complex manipulation gets. There’s a direct correlation between primate brain volume and group size, implying that intellectual horsepower evolved from the demands of social life. Smith also notes the exponential rise in complexity, complicating social manipulation much faster than the rise in group membership.
And what expanded the number of people? The success of agriculture. “The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but copies of DNA,” writes Harari. “Just as the economic success of a company is measured by dollars in a bank, not how happy its employees are. This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.” Could the process of dominance hierarchy be “almost irreversible” because there would never again be human numbers humans can deal with? The success of agriculture in terms of population created overpopulation destructive to original tribes of true community.
When a population threshold is crossed, is force a requirement to maintain order because the complexity of manipulation far exceeds human cognitive capacity? Are despotism, tyranny, and liars an ineluctable outcome of too many strangers to manage? The lower an individual leader’s cognitive capacity, the sooner force should be expected to reveal itself. Consider the unifying leadership of Winston Churchill with Donald Trump’s immediate recourse to divisive violence. And leadership not in the face of world war as Churchill faced, but Trump’s absence of leadership in the face of petty hecklers at his pep rallies.
Once despotism arrives — and it happens in every civilization — the cycle appears sealed. There will be loyalists and resistors, though compared to the ancients, the path to confrontation has been vastly accelerated by modern mass communications. This despotism visits humanity with the age of chiefdoms, then kings, then states. Per Kemp, “Individuals appreciate the scope that exists for ever greater ambitions and, in a time that is short by the timescale of prehistory and human evolution, states begin to appear.” As philosopher and historian Marcel Gauchet elucidates, states are a new entity that struggle to hold themselves together as they simultaneously hurl themselves apart. The latter a result of ambition, the former as fallout from it.
Whether compensation, correctives, or adjustments can be made and what they should be is — perhaps impossibly — hard to pin down. One factor Kemp notes that makes this so bedeviling — “resistant to precise modeling and prediction,” he says — is what he calls human perversity. “Whilst one direction of human endeavor is towards inhabiting a stable system — a cozy home under a harmonious community under a benign government, at every level a triumph of order over chaos — it stands constantly in tension with jagged moments of long-nurtured schemes of rejection… Fears of disorder and of alienation in a hostile world were a theme of thoughtful ancient Egyptian literature as far back as the early third millennium BC., and from time to time, Egyptian society took on a more fragmented mode which promoted internal conflict.”
But what long-term benefit would contrary behavior serve? “Why are people so perverse?” asks Kemp. “That many people evidently find the idea of a safe, ordered but at the same time controlled existence unwholesome only underlines the puzzle: why do we not like the idea of living under an ordered and perhaps very comfortable hive-like existence? In the long run, it seems, complacency is an unsustainable condition, and hard-won stability an abhorrence. When a time of tribulation has passed, people grow bored with consensus and prosperity.”
Now, isn’t that odd? Or does it make complete sense for the correct human definition? Kemp avoids speculating on the psychological cause, but there’s something fishy — especially if we find this in other civilizations (hint: we will) — about human nature that makes this fundamental to the definition of us.
Kemp’s assessment echos elements of Brooks Adam’s cycle chronicled in his Law of Civilization and Decay. From fear, superstition, and meaning in faith, to a growing control of both nature and the rising number of strangers in society, expanding productivity and prosperity, to a people eviscerated by “the grind,” with a yearning for change and food for the soul. From meaning to purpose to meaning again.
Ultimately, what psychological foundation does this stem from? Is human perversity an evolutionary adaptation or a reaction to violations of some beneficial adaptation now lost? Was that beneficial adaptation the hunter-gatherer lifeway? Has the constant search for improved systems been because we humans could never contrive a plan of social order satisfying human nature the way hunter-gatherers did, or is something else going on?
More analysis required.
References not linked to above:
Paragraph 2: “I recall a wish…” Kemp, pg. 1
Paragraph 3: “What mostly…” Ibid. pg. 9
Paragraph 4: Ibid. pg. 3. “On the one hand…” Harari, pg. 36
Paragraph 5: “The instrument…” Kemp, pg. 3
Paragraph 6: Ibid. “begin to appear…”, pg. 3
Paragraph 7: Bellah, 178
Paragraph 8: Harari, pg. 94
Paragraph 10: Kemp, pg. 3
Paragraph 11: “resistant to…” Ibid. pg. 9. “Whilst one…” Ibid. pg. 9, 10, italics added
Paragraph 12: Ibid. “Why are people…” Ibid. pg. 10, italics added
