Once We Lived This Way

Traditional society described

Foreword

This begins a series of pieces that will end by looking at the current state of copyright from a historical point of view. The whole argument is a long one, so I have broken it into these posts.

Questions

Once upon a time, men lived in traditional society. Many men today still live in traditional society. But when the bourgeoisie of Europe took power from their kings and landed nobles in a series of violent revolutions beginning more than 300 years ago, they began to root out and destroy the last remnants of traditional society wherever they could find it. Capitalism, socialism, communism, and fascism: these are the different forms the money-class has proposed to replace traditional society.

They have all proved ruinous in one way or another.

The question then arises, if man developed traditional society over millions of years to suit his life, and modern society in all its forms is a radical break with traditional society, how can it suit man’s life? Has man changed as much as his society? Are we all now a mutant form of man? Or is modern society doomed to fail?

The First World

Traditional society forms itself out of families and clans, not individuals. These clans are bound by kinship extending back no more than a generation or two, and they dwell in a small area of land. They have dwelt in this land for generations. Each child as it grows up never thinks he will ever live anywhere else. The members of the clan have long memories, and they know their land well with all its beasts and plants. They know its weather and its seasons, and they pass down tales that mark the worst of times and how their fathers coped with those crises.

Traditional society has its laws and its justice, and these are not set in rigid, written law-codes that must be obeyed and enforced even when the result of doing so outrages all the living members’ sense of fairness and right. Personality plays a large part of rule and law, because everyone in the clan knows everyone else, and everyone is related to everyone else. Anonymity is impossible.

Traditional society has its religion and superstition and these form a part of its laws and government. The rules the priests ascribe to the spirits have as much legal force as the laws the elders make. Much of the law system springs from the taboos and demands of the spirit world. These dictates of ghosts, demons, and gods are not written down and are understood as broad and general decrees, which are then interpreted by the holy men and women. The ghosts do not speak from eternity but their whims and tempers change in time, as often, maybe, as the weather.

Traditional society lives with Nature in its area, but it is almost as prone to damage and undermine that natural system as we are in modern societies. The old fathers of the past and of today’s traditional societies are yet men, and all men may err from time to time. There are differences, though, between how traditional societies could destroy their habitat and haw modern societies can. First there are fewer men to the square kilometer in traditional society. Second their tools are less powerful, and thus each man can do less damage by himself. Third the traditional society has no sense of human rights, and this means no one man can flout the opinions of his fellow clansmen and hide behind a legal argument that it is his right to poison streams or wells. Fourth there is personal property and local spheres of influence over parts of the land in traditional society, but there is no ‘property’ as we know it in modern society. The land the clan holds and works and guards against other rival clans is held by the clan as a whole, and not by any individual members of the clan. So the leaders of the clan decide what should be done with the land, and as we noted, the leaders can decide what they want, inside only the loose web of their traditions of law and the dictates of ghosts, demons, and gods.

Traditional society has a different sense of time than modern society does. Time for traditional societies does not march on in a line, as we think it does, but instead wheels in a series of loops and circles large and small. The end of all the circles comes back to their beginning. ‘Progress’ is unknown. Man’s life and god’s life are unchanging in the same way that Nature is unchanging. The sin ruses, brightens, wanes and sets, and then it rises once more. Dry seasons follow wet seasons and wet seasons follow dry seasons. There is no thought that the sun will just grow brighter and brighter forever until all the world’s afire. There is no thought that the rains will fall harder and more often until all the world’s aflood. (Contrast that with the bland assertions of political and economic leaders in the modern world that ‘growth’ can continue in exponential curves … forever.) Man in traditional society knows many changes and constant change, but he trusts that the end of all the changes will come back to the beginning. For every rise there is a fall, for every birth there is a death. The way men live today, as the clansman sees it, is the same way men lived a hundred generations ago. This is the sense of time you find in fairy tales — an eternal present with only ‘local’ past and futures that sit atop an unchanging base. (In truth this sense of time is wrong: had traditional societies never changed, the modern world would never have been born. But this sense of time unchanging gives man in traditional society a certain security. ‘All things must pass and go back to whence they came’ is a sentiment that soothes the pain of crises. Man in modern society, beset with constant and escalating change, feels anxious lest he be left behind, and he feels that these changes take place and he has no control over them, no way to shape them or slow them down, let alone stop them.)

In traditional society, the individual man has relations with his kinsmen (in the varying degrees of kinship) and with his friends and fellows (fellow hunters, fellow elders, fellow miners). But he has no relationship to the State as we know it in modern society. (The State, in face, does not exist as something separate from the will of the clan.) He is thus never alone, never separate. He has almost no privacy. He has small choice over his destiny. He knows he is a part of his family, his kin, the wider clan. He has a place there and he can’t even think of what his life might be like if he were ever to lose that place. To be sent in exile and cut off from the clan is about the same thing as to die.

Rise of the City

The first change to threaten traditional society was the creation of the City. The City could come to be only when agriculture gave rise to an abundance of food that could be grown by a small number of men in the community, and that could be relied upon from year to year. The warriors who guarded the territory no longer had to fish or hunt or grow food for themselves, and the warriors became captains and kings, and the kings became emperors. The great kings took vast amounts of grain to feed the men to build their palaces, and more grain they gave to metal workers and poets and whores and cooks and armorers and boot-makers and dressmakers and barbers. So cities grew up around the palaces, with tilled fields around the cities, and mountains, grazing range, and forests around the tillage.

Most of the society stayed traditional, but there were tears in the traditional fabric. Young men and girls ran away from home to seek a better life in the City. City life itself put a higher store in men’s trade and commerce than in kinship. The growth of cities where only fields and rivers once had looked up to the sky, broke the old notion of circles in unchanging time. A town became a city, a city grew to a metropolis, a king conquered rival kings and made himself an emperor. Or the king was himself conquered and fell, and his people were enslaved; they lost their king to a foreign overlord, and they did not go back to the life they had before they got the king.

Rise of the Burghers

The bourgeoisie was born out of the city. They were themselves craftsmen and related to one another on a cash basis, as money was the measure of commerce. Trade was their way of life and all things they measured by the amount of money the things would fetch. Masters took apprentices, merchants hired employees. Men and women were bought and sold. Poor fathers who in traditional society might have been forced to expose their infants to death in the wild when there lacked enough food to support the family and the infants, now sold their children to rich merchants to live in slavery or learn a trade, one day maybe (if they should prove sharp or ambitious or cunning or unscrupulous enough to manage it) to gain their own freedom and wealth enough to buy slaves and employees of their own.

The City was born soon after the neolithic revolution in agriculture, some ten or twelve thousand years ago. The rise of kingdoms and empires grew slowly after that. In many ways the society remained traditional, but abundant food, money, and the specialization of trades that followed, pushed society down a new path: the path to the modern world.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday, March 18, 2008)