Surplus for the gods!

‘Divinity’ and ‘superior power’ lives and breaths at the base of modern techno-industrial civilization.

Kings and queens, priests and the wise ones, ancient and medieval, throughout recorded history arrogated ‘divine powers’. They did so standing above a given population, a collection of people that equated to “human machines”. Organized labor upon which the great pyramids of Egypt or the megalithic monuments of Alcalar (Portugal) and all succeeding ‘great empires’ were built. Thousands of palaces, fortified cities, mausoleums, churches and ornate temples, structured around divine power, of one form or another. Protective symbols of god, invention of better weapons and surplus food, together resulted in an immense explosion of ‘latent’ human energy. Almost like a nuclear reaction! The burst also created a new form of governance, a tremendous change in human behavior, which did not exist earlier in a Neolithic village or Paleolithic cave.

“Unconditional obedience to their king’s superior will, could not have been established: it took extra, supernatural authority, derived from a god or a group of gods, to make kingship prevail throughout a large society. Arms and armed men, specialists in homicide were essential; but force alone was not enough.” (Lewis Mumford, Myth Of The Machine Volume One)

So why bother now? about all those archaic things, caste away long ago by our modern history and amazing evolution. Yet the myth of ‘divinity’ and ‘superior power’ did not loose it’s grip. The universal subordination of individuals, converting them into “human machines” that executed the glorious projects of empires, monarchs, colonizers, imperial legacies, dictators right down to our current forms of democracy, governance, architecture and most aspects of organized life. ‘Divinity’ and ‘superior power’ lives and breaths at the base of modern techno-industrial civilization.

In this story, lets oscillate between the past and present, to spot the innate relationship between the “keepers” and the “givers”. Something we never relinquished in spite our great egalitarian revolutions and achievements. False ‘divinity’ and violent ‘superior power’ has mentally and physically conditioned people for thousands of years now. That internalization, a type of ‘serfdom’ persists, regardless of United Nations conventions or Socialism or Marxism or many ‘revolutions’ of the past to overthrow the given order, the elites and oppressors.

Defined by Henry David Thoreau more than 100 years ago as “blind loyalty and awestruck obedience”. And no one better to expose the “mechanical nature of all work” than Walter Benjamin (1930-35) in ‘Weimer’ Germany, at it’s industrial apex.

“Strict all-embracing order began at the top: consciousness of the predictable movements of the sun and the planets. In giant collective works, as in the temple ceremonials, it was the king who gave forth the original commands… the alpha-male who demanded absolute conformity and who punished, even trivial disobedience…” (Lewis Mumford, Myth Of The Machine Volume One)

Maker of pyramids and sovereign nations.
Many people believe that human beings are fundamentally technological, which makes sense when we see the gigantic pyramids of ancient Egypt or the massive Nurek Dam built during the Soviet era. The Egyptian pyramids were an outcome of men wielding godlike power, by turning thousands of fellow men and women into a mechanical system (of subordination) described as a “mega-machine” that lasted for centuries. The pyramids are a symbol of collective human energy and obedience and not just superior architecture. Run along the timeline, almost 4550 years later, Soviet leaders and nation builders appear no less ruthless, like the Pharaohs of Egypt, equally godlike, who subjected millions of Gulag prisoners to toil, starve, freeze and perish in the service of nation building and ‘Mother Russia’.

2800 - 2000BC. “For this was the ‘Age of the Builders’: and the new cities that arose were deliberately designed as a ‘simulacrum’ of Heaven. Holding people at it’s center by design. Never before had so much energy been available for magnificent permanent public works. Surviving walls, fortifications, highroads, canals and tunnels, validate the various projects and acts of sovereign power. The big public activities in ancient Egypt were mainly directed to celebrate the Pharaoh and collect gifts, for his divinity and immortality.” (Lewis Mumford, Myth Of The Machine)

1920-1950AD. “…in the course of a few years, of arresting and imprisoning millions, they eventually broke the back of the nation, made of old Russian soldiers, engineers, scientists, farmers, even artists, poets… all who had constituted to the glory of the revolution. Sentenced to work in the mines, to dig canals, build dams, highways, military barracks, statues of Stalin, Lenin and Marx... For most of us still alive, decades had passed within the penal system. For the period I served in the mines in Norlisk, the rule was simple: whoever coughed up gold got bread and water…(Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago)

We marvel at the tall and enormous, ancient and medieval architecture, encrusted with precious stones, gold and silver, or take selfies next to giant murals depicting the power of ancient gods, goddesses, mythical creatures, lions and bulls. In effect we ‘attach’ ourselves to immense communal pride of the past. Many sites still captivate our awe and pride, like it would have for an average person back then. Like the Eiffel Tower (19th century) or the Empire State Building (20th century). Pride very similar, that people may feel for the Burj Khalifa (Dubai) or the Shanghai Tower today. It could also be your favorite Superbowl stadium or any imposing ‘megastructure inside a megacity’.

Ancient cities, which take up significant relevance within our history (6000 BC onward) were places where common people indulged in feats of power, construction and imperial divinity. Power and fantasy, seen as religion, also wielded massive temples, big festivities, new art, music, better weapons, tools etc. Is natural to imagine all such ‘royal splendor’ was beyond the grasp of the ancient (and perhaps humble) peasant or herdsman. Just like people today living inside the modern techno-industrial civilization are awestruck by the intensity of an Olympic ceremony or a rock concert or by the size of a new shopping mall, trade center, airport etc.

In ancient times, like astronomical knowledge (of the priests) and the gigantic ideas (of kings and a few queens) made history, the immense knowledge of science and the power of technology utilized by the ruling elite, marks modern history. An active ingredient in both cases is the fantasy of “effortless affluence” (Lewis Mumford) most often exercised by the chosen few, upon the many. Divinity and superiority, devotion and effort.

“The chief burden of civilization”
Structurally speaking, for the moment if we erase the glory and visual propensity of great kings and empires, almost every royal reign was also a reign of terror. This is not specific to historic cliches like Alexander The Great or Caligula or Genghis Khan or Suleiman the Magnificent or Ivan The Terrible or the ‘Sun God’ of Versailles etc. As Mumford aims at the heart of the subject by saying “the chief burden of civilization” - was it’s ability to wage war, invade foreign lands, enslave foreigners, impose “collective human sacrifice” and extract natural resources. All of which, to me appears as the ‘identifying markers’ of sovereign power, happening over and over again in history. Fantasies of the ruling order and sadistic impulses of emperors and kings, or even modern leaders and visionaries were often smashed due to their own vainglorious overshoot or better self-destructed from within thanks to the “human machine” itself.

Case1-
Japan was once one of the most unequal, illiterate places on earth (1800-1900). By 1936 the wealth gap had changed so drastically that the richest 1% Japanese, excluding the Emperor, owned as little as 8% of the nation’s wealth (The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel). No thanks to communists nor any civil war, but to Japan’s imperial size and it’s military industrial complex that had exponentially grown, from China to Burma, from Micronesia in the east to the Aleutians near the Arctic Circle to the Solomon Islands. At it’s peak, ‘divine’ Emperor Hirohito ruled roughly as many “souls” as the British empire did - close to one fifth of the people on earth. That peak lasted exactly 14 years. The rest of Japan’s history, WW2, Hiroshima Nagasaki and later is well documented in our living memory. Hirohito did not commit Seppuku but insisted that the “emperor of Japan should be considered a descendant of the gods” (Hirohito Trail, 1946). In any case, the short lived Japanese empire adds up to the repeated death of civilization from “internal disintegration and outward assault”.

Case2- Spain is a land of abandoned mines. From the Asturias in the north to Galicia in the west to Huelva in Andalusia, there are more than 1300 defunct mines which represent over 2500 years of extraction and ‘ecosystem sacrifice’. Mining which amplified over invasions and counter invasions. The Iberians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Moors, Arabs and eventually the Spanish knew that a steady supply of gold, silver, copper, tin and iron were key to maintaining an empire, production of weapons, coin making, ship building, buying slaves etc, all leading to a sound financial enterprise. Traces of Spanish silver have been discovered as far as India and China. In this aspect, the ravenous demand for metal and ore, which eventually destroys the ‘carrying capacity’ of an ecosystem and it’s natural capital, became an extension of Spanish colonialism and the conquest of the New World (1492). A christian explosion, of awful power blessed yet again by “divine providence” (of the holy catholic cross). Empire building and “divine discovery” in it’s path wiped out millions of people, by exhaustive labor, slavery, torture and disease, while creating “detonator landscapes” across two continents, from California to Chile (1500-1650). A rapidly overshot empire, which sequestered all the new found wealth in overseas wars and vicious corruption within, lay in tatters collapsing by late 1700s.

Is difficult to imagine a world where there are no empires, divine superiority or bureaucracy or warring nations. Where people are not engaged 24/7 creating surplus for a better future like our ancestors did as “surplus for the gods”. A world without heroic or humongous projects, which always depend on superhuman effort, devotion and endurance. Not able to envision any better because we are perhaps so deeply and mechanically organized. At best feel good watching dumb hogwash like V for Vendetta. 8 billion people as instruments of political and economic control. Civilization is a giant crushing of people and ecosystems, over eons.

To wrap, as Mumford outlines the basis of any empire, back then or today, where a vast majority is predisposed to a life of subordination: “the two poles of civilization, one mechanically organized work and the other mechanically organized destruction and extermination” of nature, organisms and people.

Willem Swanenburgh, The Anatomical Theater in Leiden, Holland 1602.