Chapter 9.                                Part H                                               

                   

                                         harvesting grain (ancient Egyptian hieroglyph)

 

            Agricultural societies succeeded hunter-gatherer ones, and values such as patience, foresight, diligence, and perseverance quadrupled in importance. Farming requires them. These values, of course, would not replace the hunter-gatherer’s ones totally and immediately, but the farmers' values and their way of life grew until they, in their prolific societies, had largely overrun the old hunters' values and ways. The new agricultural way of life was just better at making more humans over the generations.

                                                                ruins of Ur, ancient Mesopotamian city

            When hard grains that could be stored indefinitely were domesticated, cities became useful to store the community’s food wealth in a central, defensible site. Of course, the progress from stage to stage had many recursions. Nomadic tribes that had little food and plenty of aggression to spare were lurking, and the most aggressive of these tribes might for a time subjugate and exploit the city dwellers. Two ways of life were tested against each other. But in the end, the city dwellers won.

            Inside a city's defenses, governing bodies with administrative offices became necessary in order to ensure fair distribution of the tribe's food and to organize the tribe's members in ways that brought domestic order and protection from invaders. Following them, came craftsmen and merchants who found a protected, central site with a large population more conducive to the full-time practice of their arts than rural life could ever be.

                                                       a potter in action at a potter's wheel

               

            Cities and their ways proved fitter than decentralized farm communities or nomadic tribes had. More citizens working in more and more specialized skilled tasks made even more people. Values shifted toward making citizens that were comfortable while functioning in densely populated neighborhoods, causing the rise of respect behaviors that encouraged citizens to let their neighbors have their small space undisturbed. Don't bear false witness against your neighbor and don't covet the things that he has in his yard right next door. The Bible, for example, directed believers not to covet their neighbors' goods because envy leads to friction and then violence.

       

            The city's laws weren't just the farmer's rough guidelines for living in a thinly populated farming community of familiar faces. The city's laws prescribed in writing more precisely what kinds of behaviors were acceptable in nearly all activities of city life. Urban crowding requires more civility. Even the word "law" came to be associated with reverent feelings (e.g. for Socrates). (7.)  

               

            Most of all, the city had at its immediate beck and call, large numbers who could fight off an enemy attack. Successful cities even progressed to the point at which they could even afford to keep, feed, arm, and train full-time soldiers, professionals who were capable of outfighting almost any swarm of invading amateurs. The farmers still out in the hinterland moved in closer to the city. Life was just better there. Even one generation of life close to, or inside of, the city taught you very deeply to love this homeland. The programming that survived made loyalty to your city-state automatic; patriotism is a virtue that is conducive to the city-state's survival. Away from your city, people, art, morés, and values, you felt there was no truly human life.       

               

                                       

                                          urn showing blacksmith at work in ancient Greece

            Writing, metals, machines, and the technologies of communications, electricity, and computers all brought values shifts to the nations in which they first arose. When the ways of life that they fostered proved more vigorous than those of any of the nearby competing societies, the values shifts, mores, and behavior patterns that rose up with the new technologies were eventually adopted by other societies in the area (usually with accompanying revolutions, both violent and non-violent). Of course, societies that resist these value-moré shifts must find or create competing alternative behavior-generating programs within their own cultures, programs that are equally effective in the cultural-evolution game. Or they get overrun.