A thousand years ago, as the first millennium turned, Ralph Glaber, a French monk, was disturbed. The world was tormented by greed, corruption, scandal, incontinence, lies, manslaughter, volcanic eruptions, fires, famines and plagues: it must be the End of Days. "Manifold signs and prodigies came to pass in the world, some earlier and some later, about the thousandth year from our Lord's birth," he wrote.
But less than a hundred years later, on a field outside Claremont, Urban II preached the first crusade. As Robert, probably another French monk, remembered, the pope told the faithful in his speech that it was time to spread out. "This land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another." Urban had a destination in mind. "Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. That land which as the Scripture says ‘floweth with milk and honey'." So an era of exploration, expansion and, eventually, egalitarianism began.
At least partly as a result, millennial predictions over the past few years have been good. Eight years before the year 2000, and just a handful of years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, saw a future for global democracy in his book on The End of History. "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government," he wrote. Then in the millennial year, in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright, the New York Times opinionator and Bloggingheads diavlogger, looked forward to a culmination of human progress as a result of the internet, and other forms of interdependence. "A magnificent new social structure -- our future home -- is being built before our eyes," he thought. Seven years later, the British economist Gregory Clark, in A Farewell to Alms: A Brief History of the Economic World, saw the rise of prosperity as an effect of people with hard-working ethics outreproducing people with not-so-hard-working ethics in preindustrial England. "I have suggested ways in which the Malthusian era, through differential survival of individuals, can predict success or failure for modern societies, and also predicts a continuing future of economic growth," he summed up. And this month, Matt Ridley, the former bank chairman and Economist editor, has published The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. He sees in the exchange of ideas and artifacts the rise of a "collective brain," and foresees a future "affluence for all."
But as always, a problem with unidirectional theories is that history has its ups and downs. Another problem is that things have often gotten better for somebody, but worse for somebody else.
For more than 100,000 years, people lived mostly mobile lives. They hunted and gathered for a living in small, family groups; and whenever there was a conflict, they moved away. But some societies were more sedentary than others. From the fish-rich mountain-bordered beaches of North America's Pacific Rim, to the fish-rich river valleys of the Pacific Rim in Japan -- where the people who stayed were more likely to be safe and well fed, and the people who left were more likely to be eaten or starve -- losers in a conflict became slaves, and winners became "big men." They lived in bigger houses, ate better food, and supported more of their own children.
Then on the order of 10,000 years before the current era, in and around the Fertile Crescent, people settled down and started to farm. Overlords, who supported specialists and long distance traders, buried more than their share of women, with exotic bracelets and artistic rings. But most farmers, who worked harder and longer than they had as foragers, lived on worse diets, and were more likely to die young.
After 5000 years ago, there were empires -- from the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, to the black lands of the Nile, to the bend in the Yellow River, to the Indus and Ganges, to islands in the Aegean, to the Mediterranean Basin -- where thousands of women were brought to imperial palaces as war captives, or recruited as tribute on a regular basis, and emperors fathered hundreds of children. But -- on the Mediterranean Basin, in and around Rome -- as many as 10 million unmarried slaves worked in mines or on farms, and thousands of eunuchs worked in the civil service as members of a sterile caste.
Around which time a man who called himself John, who may have been living in exile on the island of Patmos, as an offender against the imperial majesty of the Roman emperor Domitian, wrote about a Revelation he had. He saw an angel coming down from heaven with the keys to a bottomless pit, who locked the devil away for a thousand years. "After that he must be loosed for a little while," John wrote.
Ralph Glaber was worried about that. But for most of the last millennium, since Urban II's crusade, commerce, a work ethic and interdependence have thrived, and we've been relatively free. Let's hope we stay that way.
References:
http://laurabetzig.org/pdf/EndofRepbulic.pdf
http://laurabetzig.org/pdf/PLS09.pdf
Photo credit:
http://www.pbase.com/spepple
