The purpose of this chapter is to explain how human societies have developed over time; and how the movement from one civilization to another has caused each society to go through a transitional period. During these transitional periods, older civilizations lose the major characteristics of their cultures, economies and societies, causing the new civilization to be fundamentally different from the older one; the transition also causes the older civilization and its people to become dependent on the new one and its people.
Social scientists seem to agree that the greatest revolutions in human history were the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, which gave birth to the agricultural and industrial civilizations. There is also an agreement on three major civilizations: tribal, agricultural and industrial. Nevertheless, a growing number of scholars believe that the twin revolutions of information and communications represent another historical revolution that is destined to transform the totality of life conditions everywhere. This new stage is often referred to as the information age or the globalization age; I call it the knowledge age, because it is knowledge that includes the twin revolutions and recent innovations and scientific discoveries that launched the Knowledge Revolution in the mid-1990s, causing all aspects of life to go through fundamental transformation. Analyzing how these stages developed and how they relate to each other should enable us to place all changes in their proper historical contexts and track the course of transformation over time. It should also enable us to depict the major trends of change and to put us in a good position to make sound predictions.
Historical records suggest that long before the development of agriculture human beings were able to get enough food and attain sufficient security to survive and grow. Familial ties, customs and traditions served as the social glue that held early societies together and gave meaning to people’s lives. This means that the roots of civilization came into existence probably 30,000 years ago. However, this was a primitive civilization, in which society depended primarily on the hunting of animals and fish and the collecting of wild fruits and vegetables. However, at the end of this stage, man was able to domesticate many animals, and that enabled the tribal society to fully develop and become sustainable; and in some instances semi-settled tribal societies appeared, paving the way for the development of agriculture.
With the development of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, the economic base began to change, causing culture and social and economic structures of society to change fundamentally. “Plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses and the animal-based means of transporting those surpluses, were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies.”1 But after agriculture was established and its culture fully developed, the pace of change slowed, causing socioeconomic and sociocultural conditions to stabilize. Nevertheless, the later centuries of the agricultural era witnessed the birth of organized religion, the development of writing, the formation of states and empires, expansion of trade and the incorporation of merchant life into the life of society.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, the production of manufactured goods emerged in England as the most important economic activity. This development heralded the coming of a new era, the industrial age, and the dawn of rapid change in all aspects of life. The coming together of major social, cultural, scientific, and particularly economic and technological developments is what we call the Industrial Revolution. It was a revolution that changed the mode of production and production relations, forcing all aspects of life to change drastically. “Our fathers started the revolution and we are still living it. We could not stop it even if we wanted to.”2 In the early 1990s, industrial society in general began to experience a new wave of drastic change driven by knowledge, the information and communications revolutions and globalization. In the mid-1990s, the knowledge age began to impose its logic on the prevailing ways and states of living, causing all aspects of life to undergo fundamental change.
The Tribal Age
This age lasted longer, but experienced less change than any other age. Its roots go back to the hunter-gatherer era, probably 100,000 years ago, and continued until the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago. People during this age lived in small families that survived through the hunting of animals and the gathering of fruits and vegetables. About 30,000 years ago, tribal society emerged, causing small families to become part of a larger family, while enabling the new society to organize life in ways that made it more secure and dynamic. The domestication of animals some 11,000 years ago enabled nomads to strengthen their economic base and to further develop their way of life. Domesticated animals made tribal life easier and sustainable; the meat of some animals was used for food, while the skin and fur of others was used for clothing and the bones of some served as tools, weapons, musical instruments and ornaments. In addition, people employed some animals, such as the camel, horse and elephant, as means of transportation, which enabled them to move across difficult terrains and interact peacefully and otherwise with other tribes. The intellectual horizon of tribal people, however, remained “limited to their allegiance to the tribe and its traditions and legacy.”3 Culture in this age was in essence a way of life based on inherited norms and a history of feuding with other tribes. The social and cultural aspects of life, or what I call the sociocultural process, governed the pace of change and influenced its nature for many generations thereafter.
Since economic conditions were basically the same everywhere, the environment became the primary force influencing the course of change. And because environmental conditions were similar in most inhabited places, they produced similar patterns of living. Consequently, tribal cultures displayed almost identical characteristics in content, attitude, character and outlook; all had the same internal and external dynamics. “Many events in human history seem to correlate very remarkably with environmental controls … The historical theory that ascribes many events in the human record to environmental causes thus receives powerful support from geology.”4
But since the places where tribes lived were different in geography and topography and the distribution of plants and animals, different tribes domesticated different animals and developed slightly different cultures. Because of this diversity, argues Jared Diamond , some regions were able to develop faster and make more progress than others. “Hence the availability of domestic plants and animals ultimately explains why empires, literacy, and steel weapons developed earlier in Eurasia and later, or not at all, on other continents.”5 In addition, nature and the dictates of a nomadic life denied people the opportunity to establish roots in one place, leading them to have no attachment to a country or nation. The family house was the place to which tribal people exhibited most attachment, and the tribe was the nation to which they belonged.
The Agricultural Age
About 10,000 years ago, man began to domesticate plants and develop agriculture. Although no one knows how this discovery came about, historical records strongly suggest that agriculture was first practiced in present-day Palestine , Syria , Lebanon and Egypt . From there, it traveled to other Asian , African and European countries. It is also believed that agriculture may have developed independently in other regions, particularly in China and New Guinea. It is significant that “the long transition from foraging to agricultural life … happened in several places seemingly independently, yet within a few thousand years of one another.”6 Year-round warm weather and the abundance of water and fertile land made a semi-nomadic life possible. And this enabled man to observe nature closely and follow its course, and ultimately to discover the lifecycle of plants and develop agriculture.
Since tribal men were forced by nature and culture to spend most of their time foraging, I believe that women were responsible for the discovery of the lifecycle of plants and thus the development of agriculture. In fact, women in many agricultural societies have continued to spend most of their time cultivating the land, tending plants, preparing produce for food, and preserving vegetables and fruits for cold seasons and hard times. Therefore, women should be given credit for causing the most important revolution in human history.
The development of agriculture changed the way in which societies and economies were organized and transformed cultures and people’s relationships to each other and to their environment. Agriculture brought about a new civilization, with its own society, economy, culture, social and economic structures, and political organization. “The change from hunting and gathering to agriculture involved more than a mere change in subsistence pattern; it represented a complete change in the social and cultural fabric of life.”7 As a consequence, the old way of life had to recede and the building of a different way of life had to begin. And as agriculture became an established way of life, permanent settlements began to appear and grow in size, leading people to build houses and communities, and to make roots in scattered hamlets and villages. As a result, land acquired a new meaning that forced societies to reorganize their social and economic life around it. “Compared with the thousands of years humans spent foraging, the construction of villages represented another revolutionary change in culture, subsistence, technology, social organization and history. In many respects, humans still have not successfully completed this major transition.”8 The importance of land to people led eventually to private ownership of land, causing society to be divided into two social classes separated mainly by land ownership.
The farming of the land from permanent bases caused people to develop a strong attachment to their environment, which led individuals and families to acquire a sense of belonging to a place and community, and later to a society and state. As a result, people were forced to develop new traditions, initiate new internal and external relationships, and compete to improve the quality of their lives. And as communities grew in size and number, trade appeared and began to play an increasing role in societal life, leading economies to grow and diversity. And with the expansion of trade, a need for a superstructure or state was created to regulate access to water and land resources, and to protect agricultural communities and traders from roaming tribesmen. Subsequently, politics and political institutions, or what I call the political process, emerged to play an important role in societal life.
Learning from their experience and environment, people began to develop knowledge and make tools, causing land and labor productivity to rise and needs and desires to grow in ways that affected people’s ways of living and social relations. In the meantime, the accumulation of knowledge, the institutionalization of private property and the ability to produce a food surplus worked together to introduce the idea of progress to human life. One of the new forces that played a pivotal role in the development of both state and culture was organized religion. This emerged in response to certain human needs, particularly man’s inability to explain nature, its workings and many of its manifestations. Religion was also needed to provide ethical and moral codes of conduct and regulate social relations, especially during the formative stages of agricultural communities. Since some of the questions raised by man thousands of years ago continue to elude science even today, religions have continued to play a major role in individual and group lives, influencing social relationships and people’s worldviews.
Since the means of survival during the agricultural age were almost the same everywhere, cultures were similar in content and character. The little change that cultures exhibited during these times came largely as a result of external rather than internal forces, which compelled some groups to interact with each other through travel, trade, migration, war and conquest. “The ways in which different societies responded to challenges distinguished Chinese civilization from that of the Aztecs, or Egyptian civilization from that of India . Problems produced unique responses and further differentiated one culture from another.”9 Nevertheless, the production and consumption of food continued to be the focal point of the life of agricultural society. As a result, agricultural man ate to live and lived to eat, making food production and consumption the essence of the culture of the agricultural age both past and present.
With the building of empires, cultures began to play a more active role in life, viewing external forces not only as threats to be avoided, but also as challenges to be faced and potential opportunities to be harnessed. Cultures that viewed external forces as challenges and possible opportunities were able to change faster and make more progress. In contrast, cultures that viewed external challenges as threats to be avoided became suspicious and inward-looking, and thus less able to change and make meaningful progress. Consequently, culture emerged as a force that shaped people’s ways of thinking and attitudes, defining individual and community identities and goals, setting priorities and influencing the nature of responses to varied challenges. Nevertheless, cultures, regardless of place and time, have always shown little enthusiasm for change, especially change introduced from the outside.
The Industrial Age
Until the fifteenth century, no nation anywhere in the world had experienced profound change to distinguish itself from other nations. “The world formed a single, albeit large, social system that operated at a much slower pace than that to which we have become accustomed.”10 But around the middle of the fifteenth century, the pace of social, cultural, political, economic, and technological change began to accelerate, causing social systems to enter a period of transformation. Trade, which by then ...