Civilization and Barbarism
The Struggle for Survival or Supremacy
Frederick Feied
Copyright 2018 Frederick Feied
All rights reserved
First Edition
PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.
New York, NY
First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2018
ISBN 978-1-64298-038-7 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-64298-039-4 (Digital)
Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Also by Frederick Feied:
No Pie In The Sky
The Tidepool and the Stars
Corktown
To my children, Craig, Clint, Nicole, and Malcolm, and their mother, Barbara.
To my two lost sons, Shawn and Lonnie, and their mother, June.
Also, my love and eternal gratitude to Craig for his intellectual companionship, his unstinting help to me, and his generous support of all our family endeavors.
Foreword
War and Peace, Religion and Society
Civilization and Barbarism is an inquiry into the human condition, challenging conventional assumptions about war and peace, evolution, religion, and society, and broadening the scope or study of history to include our biological history as well. Its working hypothesis is that biology, sociology, and history are causally connected parts of a whole, and that even phenomenon that are commonly regarded as uniquely historical or sociological may be seen to have a biological basis or component.
The basis of all life is biological, but students of history and society have largely ignored or underestimated the part that natural disasters, together with fluctuations in population and cycles of expansion and contraction, scarcity and plenty play in creating chaos and volatility in the marketplace. This uncertainty and volatility intensifies the struggle for survival, rousing basic biological drives for war and genocide as men and nations compete for the necessities of life.
The methodology employed in this study is interdisciplinary and non-teleological. Simply stated, non-teleological thinking is the attempt to discover what is without a priori assumptions about design or purpose in the universe. It stipulates that one must approach the study of human biology or human behavior with the same degree of objectivity that one would in the study of an amoeba or some other form of life with which one had no emotional or sentimental attachment.
The central premise or conclusion of this work is that the struggle for survival or supremacy is the motive or driving force in the evolution of societies as well as species . The mechanism and the result are the same in both cases. The struggles of pack against pack, man against man, class against class, and nation against nation have driven our biological, social, and technological evolution from the origin of species to the superstate, from the stone ax to the H-bomb with technological evolution extending or supplanting the role of biological mutations in the struggle for survival.
As a biological entity, humanity has social, technological, and ideological aptitudes and capabilities that it employs and deploys in its relations with other species, other classes, and other nations. This social and ideological component plays a key role in the struggle between nation states and may involve hundreds, thousands, or even millions of men, employing the most advanced weapons of war. Natural defense systems, such as biological mutations which provide such weapons as teeth, claws, and toxins, pale in comparison with human technological innovations such as bullets, chemicals, rockets, airborne bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, poison gas, and H-bombs.
Acknowledgements
DARWIN, MALTHUS AND MARX REVISITED
T.H. HUXLEY, HERBERT SPENCER. ADAM SMITH
PLATO, LAMARCK, KEYNES, BOURNE, STEINBECK
RICKETTS, ATTENBOROUGH AND UNNAMED SCIENTISTS
AND SCHOLARS WHOS WORK IS USED WITHOUT REFERENCE
AS THE COMMON HERITAGE OF ALL HUMANITY
He never completed his history of Ephesus, but his name was mentioned in numerous prefaces.
With this brief bit of doggerel, I apologize to all those who dote on footnotes, bibliography, and polemic commentary. The trend has been against half-page-long footnotes for some decades, and in this electronic age when all one need do is consult a search engine to learn more about a subject, it has become less and less necessary. There is one more immediate and substantive reason why, except in the chapter titled Language and Teleology: Is thinkingthe Non-Teleological Method, I did not find it useful to burden my text with footnotes. That is because I am, in essence, depending on and blaming no one but myself for any statement or proposition with which anyone wants to take issue. I allege that this work is mine and mine alone and that although the formulations, theories, and arguments may be part of human culture and human learning, the uses I have made of them is, I believe, new and original with me.
Introduction
From Barbarism to Civilization and Back to Barbarism Again
Throughout our history, we have been in the grip of forces we could neither understand nor control. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, drought, or disease wiped out entire populations. Cycles of expansion and contraction, scarcity and plentysymbolized by the seven fat kine and seven lean kine of biblical Egyptsent shock waves through every civilization, setting class against class, nation against nation, and triggering wars for survival or supremacy before the balance between nature and society could be restored. The combination of natural and social forces overwhelmed men as well as animals, driving species and varieties, tribes and clans as well as powerful civilizations to the brink of extinction.
Over the millennia, we have come to understand the nature of some of the forces acting on us. We now know that living creatures evolved from simple organisms to more and more complex species and that the mechanism of biological evolution is natural selection of the best-adapted or fittest varieties.
However, although we now understand the mechanism of biological evolution, we are in denial about the process of social evolution and remain at the mercy of the ecological complex of which we are part. Darwins theory of biological evolution brought the wrath of the established church as well as the government down on his head, and any attempt to discuss the social implications of Darwins work or to suggest parallels between biological and social evolution are certain to be met with contention and controversy.
The unacknowledged but undeniable fact is that civilizations or societies compete for survival and evolve through natural selection much as biological organisms do. Life has one commandment for living things: Survive! Steinbeck and Ricketts declared in the The Log from the Sea of Cortez . This commandment applies with equal force to social organisms or organizations such as civilizations or societies, which are composed of aggregates of men organized for a common purpose. These groups, whether classes or corporations, emerging nation states or fully-fledged superpowers, compete for territory or trade much as biological organisms compete for territory, food, or water.
Conflict and competition, along with periodic bouts of bloodletting and genocide, appear to be part of the evolutionary process. Wars and revolutions accelerate the process by eliminating all but the best-adapted, the fittest , or most warlike societies as well as species .
