A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (3 page)

Fifteen thousand years ago, these still nomadic men of Mesopotamia dig wells and hold sway over flocks of wild animals they have not yet tamed: they attach increasing importance to succeeding generations, and to a certain extent seek to husband nature as an expression of the gods.

Ten thousand years ago, in order to hunt game swifter than himself, man invents two revolutionary instruments that allow him for the first time to increase his own strength: the spearthrowing stick (his first lever), and the bow (his first motor).

At this same time, in Mesopotamia, men are more and more able to distinguish between an act and its consequences. They learn to water their plots, to promote the reproduction of captive animal species, to reuse seeds, to stock reserves in silos. This requires communal living at fixed sites. And since these men are beginning to live a little longer, they also enjoy a little more time to pass on their knowledge. Cosmogonies grow more complex, with an increasing focus on land and farming. Gods required for travel are relegated to a lower level. And thus, 150,000 years since his appearance,
Homo sapiens sapiens
invents sedentary living. The sacred tips over into glorification of the ownership of land: the gods are masters of both earth and sky.

A thousand years later (some nine thousand years ago), our Mesopotamian begins through progressive crossings to breed new animal species better adapted to his needs. He also becomes a herder. In China at the same time, another kind of agricultural economy evolves, based on millet, pork, dogs, and poultry.

Sedentarism, or fixed living, is thus a hunter’s idea. Farming is a nomadic invention, and herding flocks a peasant practice.

Man discovered the need to take control of his foodstuffs. For the past 50,000 to 100,000 years
Homo sapiens
has possessed the same physical and mental motor skills. But sedentarism is not sufficient unto itself; it has to be combined with something else. For a long time, hunter-gatherers remained sedentary in the north of Eurasia, Japan, and along the Pacific Northwest of what is now Canada and the United States. Their presence there was for the most part due to a ready access to water, plentiful supply of animals, and early efforts at growing crops for food.

The Near East is the precursor of Neolithic Europe. Many of the foodstuffs used in Europe emanate from that region, a zone that stretches from the Sinai to southeastern Turkey. The Neolithic period evolved slowly: the first attempts to grow grain date back to 9,500 years ago. The first signs of domestication appear only a thousand years later. Domestic animals arrive on the scene around 8,000 years ago and communities devoted solely to farming some five hundred years later.

Between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago, in the Near East, men begin to build circular houses surrounded by protective moats or pits, as well as four-sided houses
composed of various materials: wood, stone, and molded and dried bricks. On the contrary, in Europe, large Danubian houses, stylistically quite different, arrive roughly 5,500 years ago. Made of wood, they vary from 35 to 130 feet in length.

In the Near East, the earliest Stone Age culture is that of the Natufians (whose name derives from a valley in what is now Israel, the Wadi Natuf), which focuses on the cultivation of wheat and wild barley.

Between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, various Stone Age entities appear not only in the Near East but also in Mexico, the Andes, China, and New Guinea. Seven thousand years ago, there are many important villages in the Near East that consist of several thousand inhabitants each. Then, a thousand years later, this tendency disappears. The Stone Age at that point in history extends from Turkey through Central Asia and into Europe, where Neolithic techniques disseminate along two routes: the Mediterranean coast and the Danube. Over the next two thousand years the entire European continent will be populated as far as the Atlantic, by which point farmers feel obliged to seek out new ways to increase productivity, and a number of key inventions follow: the wheel, the plow to till hard soil, metallurgy, and the agricultural use of animals.

In Mesopotamia as in Asia, where humankind has become sedentary, progress now comes fast and furious. Central Asian tribes (which we now call Mongols, Indo-Europeans, or Turks) learn to master the horse, the reindeer, and the camel. They also discover the wheel, revolutionizing transport and mobile warfare, and race
to conquer the more welcoming plains of Mesopotamia, India, and China.

To meet the threat, the first villages erect barricades. Houses and ramparts are built of stone. Leaders collect the first taxes to raise armies. Although the villages are sedentary by nature, the first states are born to counter these attackers, who are by nature nomadic. The sedentary now need travelers only to sell their wares and defend them in outposts against other nomads. In several places at once, the sedentary also discover copper, which they turn into arrowheads, then mix it with tin to make bronze. Lesson for the future: conflict between nomads and the sedentary is essential to man’s acquisition of power and freedom.

Around five thousand years before the common era (BCE), vaster and vaster spaces are taken over under the authority of a single chief in China. Also in China, they probably invent what will become ceramics and the steering oar, and above all they move toward the beginnings of writing. In the north, the Yang Shao culture develops a system of farming founded on millet. In the south, in the maritime provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, they begin to cultivate the rice that originated in the islands of the Pacific.

Six thousand years ago, kingdoms regroup villages and tribes scattered over ever-increasing territories. The sacred retreats in the face of military power, the religious
evaporates before military force. Here men’s labor is forced from them by violence, and “essential knowledge” becomes that which makes it possible to produce an agricultural surplus. Objects no longer possess proper names or personalities: they are artifacts, tools, exchangeable as such. The enslavement of the majority is the condition of freedom for the few. The chief of each kingdom or empire is at once prince, priest, and war leader, master of time and power — Man-God. He alone may leave traces of his death in an identifiable tomb. All others die unrecorded. The concept of an individual is thus born with the ruling prince, and it is under his dictatorial sway that the dream of freedom awakes.

An empire is born when it takes control of a trade or agricultural surplus, allowing it to defend itself and attack other empires. It declines when it no longer accumulates enough of the surplus to guarantee control of strategic routes.

In North China in 2697 BCE (the first more or less accepted date we possess), there reigns the first high prince whose name has come down to us: Huang Di. At the same time, a little farther south, the Long Shan culture is born — villages protected by high packed-earth walls and by the organization of the region into principalities, such as Hao Xiang. They raise beef and mutton, they grow wheat and rye. Disorder within the region is total. This is the period known as the Ten Thousand Kingdoms.

In Egypt at the same time, King Menes (the first Western ruler to leave a written trace) unifies Upper and Lower Egypt and has stone monuments erected to his
glory. Other peoples, known as Indo-Europeans and Turks, found civilizations in northern India and in Mesopotamia. Still others (Turks and Mongols) create city-states in Mesopotamia (Ur, Sumer, Nineveh, and Babylon). A new revolutionary invention that appeared somewhat earlier, cuneiform writing, preserves for us one of the first cosmogonies, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a reflection on desire as the motor of history, the matrix of most sacred texts in the region. Simultaneously in India, the Upanishads are written, a monumental new vision of the world and a new ethos built on rejection of desire. The two great visions of the contemporary world are already there, in situ.

In Egypt, in 2400 BCE, the pharaoh Cheops orders construction of the pyramid that still bears his name. Aryans, Mongols, Indo-Europeans (Scythians followed by Samarians), and Turks develop civilizations of the highest refinement in the Mediterranean region, in China, Siberia, Central Asia, and North India, made up of cities, palaces, ramparts, fortresses, works of art, armies, jewelry, ritual ceremonies, and bureaucracies. All are organized around the forced appropriation of the surplus. In China — already the most populated, most active, most mercantile region of the planet — metallurgy enters the field. So do the first decorated tortoiseshells, the source of Chinese writing. In China too, a philosophy of history is developed, dominated by the Yin and Yang and influenced by the five elements and the I Ching’s hexagrams. The literature now speaks of a “Yellow Emperor” — whose existence is just as mythical as his dynasty, the Xia.

And now, just like its predecessors, each civilization is toppled by others, which sometimes make determined efforts to erase every trace of what went before.

In 1792 BCE, the Babylonian emperor Hammurabi incorporates traces of his laws in a code that will serve as a foundation for many others following him, just before his empire is laid waste by Hittite invaders. China sees the arrival of the Chang dynasty, which masters architecture and bronze-working, manufactures earthenware sacrificial vessels, and practices divination by interpreting the carapaces of tortoises. Indo-Europeans (Tokharites) bring the chariot to China, thus giving it mastery of Central Asia. In 1674 before our era, Egypt is in decline, invaded by warrior tribes from Asia, the Hyksos, who use horses and war chariots. They create a new pharaonic dynasty.

In America and Africa, many civilizations ignorant of the wheel and the horse disappear as soon as local natural resources are exhausted.

In 1364 BCE, still in Egypt, a strange pharaoh, Amenophis IV (who becomes Akhenaton), briefly re-discovers the idea of a one God. A little later, in 1290 BCE, one of his successors, Ramses II, repulses a Hittite invasion from Mesopotamia and extends his empire over distances never yet dreamed of.

At this point, more than fifty empires coexist on the planet, fighting one another or dying of exhaustion. It is becoming increasingly difficult to control ever more extensive population groups. More slaves, more soldiers, and more physical space are needed. The imperial order itself begins to lose its meaning: force is no longer enough.

At the same time, amid all these empires, a few tribes from Asia settle on the Mediterranean coast and islands. Unlike most people before them — barricaded within their fortresses and bound by the cyclic demands of agriculture — these tribes (Mycenaeans, Phoenicians, and Hebrews) are fond of change, which in one form or another they call “progress.” Although they too revere their ancestors, the intermediaries with their gods, although they worship their lands to which they impute divinity, these Mediterraneans swear only by the political and economic rights of the living. Trade and money are their surest weapons, sea and seaports their chief hunting grounds.

Thus, in the very bosom of the imperial order, tiny, marginalized, radically new societies emerge at the origins of the idea of freedom. Here begins what will much later become market democracy, the mercantile order.

I
f we are to understand the extraordinary surprises the future may hold in store, we must know the essentials of such surprises in the past. They allow us to determine what is possible, what changes, and what is unvarying. Above all, they help us to awareness of history’s amazing potential.

On the shores of the Mediterranean twelve centuries before our era, the first markets and the first democracies flower in the narrow interstices between empires. Two thousand years later, they will constitute the mercantile order. We are still there, and will doubtless long remain. Here follow its history and its laws, which are also those of the future.

Although even today the history books show more interest in the fate of ruling princes than that of merchants (and although they prefer to record the rise and fall of empires, which will continue to share the world between them over the next millennia), the essentials of history’s march are now played out here — in the birth of an individualist order that sees the rights of man as the loftiest of all ideals. An order that, by ceaselessly violating its own ideal, produces more wealth than anything that has gone before.

At first this order is nothing more than a microscopic parasite living within theological or imperial societies. Then it competes with them, progressively substituting merchants for ruling princes, manufactured products for all other services. Over increasingly vast spaces, deploying technologies increasingly efficient in the practice of violence, injustice, and splendor, it fosters the market and democracy —
market democracy
. Despite a thousand ups and downs that continue to block the vision of many, it gives birth to the mercantile order. It raises the triumphant ideal of freedom for every man, or in any case for those best prepared to conquer it. Over the centuries it purges every institution until, not much later, it turns convulsive.

Around 1300 BCE, the cyclical notion of the world is turned on its head by a few unbelievably inventive Mediterranean peoples — the aforementioned Greeks, Phoenicians, and Hebrews. They share a passion for progress, metaphysics, action, and for the new and beautiful.

The better to defend themselves against their neighbors, the Greeks revolutionize their ships, weapons, pottery, and their cosmogonies. The Phoenicians, settled in Syria and along the Mediterranean coast, create the first alphabet, allowing transcription of their writings into other languages in the interest of less trouble-fraught trade with their neighbors. At exactly
the same time a few herders (who call themselves Hebrews in order to affirm their identity) leave Mesopotamia for Canaan, the land promised them by their one and universal God.

For these three peoples, human life comes before anything else. For them, every man is equal to his neighbor (with the exception of slaves and “half-breeds”). Poverty is a curse: the world cries out to be tamed, to be improved, and to be structured until such time as a Savior arrives to change its laws. For the first time, the human future is conceived of as able — as obligated — to be better than the past. For the first time, material enrichment is perceived as a way of drawing nearer to God or the gods. Such is the ideal that takes hold. It will become the ideal of the West, then of the whole mercantile order down to this day — the
Judeo-Greek ideal
.

A century later, around 1200 BCE, the Phoenicians found Tyre, Sidon, Utica, and Gades (Cádiz). The Hebrews leave Canaan for Egypt. In the Peloponnese and Attica, two other peoples from Central Asia (Dorians and Ionians) develop a handful of cities, including Sparta — a farming city employing many slaves — and Athens — a small trading port wholly turned toward the open sea. The Spartans, sedentary peasants, become a military nation out of fear of their own slaves, whereas the Athenian — traders, men of letters, sailors — develop a formidable fleet to fend off their enemies. According to legend, Knossos disappears at the assaults of the Mycenaeans.

Philosophers, interpreters, seamen, physicians, artists, and traders (Greek, Phoenician, and Jewish, but
also Mongol, Indian, and Persian) create commercial circuits connecting all the empires of Eurasia. Crossing every border, even during wars, they transmit ideas and products from the Iberian Peninsula to China, where the Chang are now overthrown by the Zhou, the first dynasty whose existence has been historically confirmed and whose chiefs take the title of Tianzi (“Sons of Heaven”).

Around 1200 before our era the Jewish people, back from their Egyptian sojourn, elect judges to lead themselves. But in 1000 they finds themselves under serious threat from the Philistines. With death in its heart, they agree to install a monarchy (Saul, then David, then Solomon). They too have been historically validated. In 931 BCE, they split into two kingdoms.

Shortly thereafter, the merchants of Athens assert their rights against the owners of the agricultural hinterland. For their sole benefit, they invent the rudiments of what will become democracy and money.

The first of these dooms dynastic empires. The second makes it possible to express the value of any object by means of a single standard. Both aim to wrest power from the religious and military orders and entrust it to merchants. Slaves, so essential to the former orders, long remain necessary to the smooth functioning of this new order.

The Judeo-Greek ideal grows more precise: freedom is a final objective; respect for a moral code is a condition of survival; wealth is a gift from heaven; poverty is a threat. Individual freedom and the mercantile order will from now on be inseparable, marching in lockstep all the way to the present day.

Around 850 BCE, the Phoenicians refine their alphabet: it is still in use today. Aramaeans settle in Syria, while in Israel next door Amos, Isaiah, and Hosea deliver their prophecies.

A little later (753 BCE), tiny Athens is becoming one of the world’s most influential powers, thanks less to its armed forces than to its ideas and artistic achievements. Meanwhile in China, far and away the greatest demographic power of the day, the Zhou tear one other apart during the Warring Kingdoms phase. At the same time, in the central Mediterranean, another village is founded amid universal indifference — Rome.

At the meeting point between Asia and the West, Mesopotamia is now the setting for all invasions and great population movements. In 722, Sargon’s Assyrians take Samaria and exile the Jewish people to Assyria, only to be driven from their land in 630 BCE by the Medes, who return the Jews to their homeland.

The course of the next two centuries is dizzying: the ground rules of individualism become clearer still as events with lasting repercussions gather speed. In 594, Solon imposes on the Athenians history’s first democratic constitution. In 586, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroys Jerusalem and deports the Jewish people yet again — this time to Babylon. In 538, the Persians, newcomers from the mountains, led by their king Cyrus, also head for Mesopotamia’s fertile plains. They seize Babylon and send the Jews back to Israel a second time. They then invade the whole region from Mesopotamia to Egypt, putting a permanent end (in 525 BCE) to the two-thousand-year-old Egyptian empire. In the same period, a Chinese man of letters, Lao
Tsu, declares that happiness lies in inaction and that the only true freedom is that which relieves you of dependence on your own desires. A wealthy prince in India, Gautama, refuses to succeed his father on the throne and becomes “the Enlightened One,” the Buddha, injecting new life into the ancient Indian doctrine of Hinduism. Shortly afterward in China, another man of letters, Confucius, says that happiness demands respect for good manners, the family, and the traditions of the sociopolitical hierarchy and the Ancients.

Here we face the great turning point of which we are still the heirs and of which the future will long bear the traces — Asia sets out to free man from his desires, while the West seeks to make him free to realize them. The first chooses to view the world as an illusion, the second to make it the only arena for action and happiness. One speaks of the transmigration of souls, the other of their salvation.

In the Mediterranean (where in 510 Rome becomes a republic for a few free citizens), tiny Athens stands up (to universal astonishment) against the assault of the Persian empire’s formidable troops — who nevertheless conquer one by one all the Greek cities of Asia Minor. More surprising still: Athens, with Sparta’s help, sends the Persian armies flying — and Darius, an admirer of Heraclitus, the greatest Greek philosopher of the day, is defeated at Marathon in 490 BCE. His successor, Xerxes, is crushed ten years later by seaborne Greek guile at Salamis. For the first time, a tiny city resists an empire. It will not be the last.

The small mercantile world, not yet taken seriously, thus proves that it is already inhabited by an inner
rage — by a ferocious desire to live free — and that it can defy bigger enemies. And, also for the first time, the West repels invaders from the East. Now the mercantile order excites the interest of many peoples. It gains strength, and its values grow clearer.

While the prophets announce disasters to come in Israel, Pericles, uncontested master of Athens in 444 BCE, turns the Hellenic city into a great military, cultural, and economic power. For twenty years, sculpture, poetry, theater, philosophy, and the democratic ideal flourish there — until, in 431, an absurd war against Sparta leads to a victory in 338 by a western neighbor, Philip, king of Macedon. In 404, Sparta wins its war against Athens.

Universal lesson: when a superpower is attacked by a rival, it is often a third party that carries the day. Another lesson: the conqueror often makes the culture of the conquered his own. One final lesson: power over the world continues to shift westward, even if most of its wealth remains in the East.

After Philip takes control of the Peloponnese, his son Alexander, pupil of Aristotle, dreams obsessively of India. He reaches the subcontinent in 327, leaving it two years later to die in the Persian capital. His empire then splits into three parts — Greece, Persia, and Egypt — whose splendor continues to flicker on. But Greece has had its day.

The wealth remains in the East. In India, countless small Aryan kingdoms blossom. In China, starting in 220 BCE and through eleven years of an astounding reign, the emperor Qing Shi Huang unifies the country by constructing a capital city, Xianyang, standardizing
writing and building the Great Wall. He then has himself buried along with four terra-cotta armies. Closer to our own era a new dynasty, the Han, adopts Confucianism, wars against fresh invaders (known as “Xiongnu”), and opens the Silk Road, the first trading link with the Occident.

To the West, Rome becomes heir to the Greeks without ever truly fighting them. It builds a new empire, the first whose core is in the West. Rome sees itself as an imitation of Athens on a larger scale, even adopting Athens’s religious pantheon and its political system. Having digested the lessons of Athens’s defeat by the Macedonians, and its own humiliation by Brennus’s Gallic warriors, Rome equips itself with a very powerful land army. Soon the city controls all of western Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean, and probes into northern Europe and the Balkans. In 170, Antiochus IV plunders the Temple in Jerusalem. In 125 BCE, southern Gaul becomes Roman. The Pax Romana is at its height when (in 44 BCE) a general named Julius Caesar returns in triumph from northern Gaul, brings the Senate of the Republic to its knees, forces the admission of representatives of the conquered lands, attempts to have himself proclaimed emperor, and hunts his rivals as far afield as Egypt, whence he returns to be assassinated. In 27 BCE, his successor Octavius becomes Caesar Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. Anxious to avoid any spark of rebellion at Rome’s frontiers, his successors crush the Egyptian revolt and silence every dissident. Among them are a Jerusalem rabbi named Jesus and other rebellious Jews. Rome finally destroys
Jerusalem and massacres all its Jews yet again. Christianity is born.

During a first council in Jerusalem in the year 48, Christianity (at first the ally of Rome against the Jews before being caught up in the universal orgy of Roman hatred) transforms the message of Judaism — all men are united in Jesus Christ — and carries it to the pagans. And since the promised Messiah has arrived, the Jewish people (who had announced His arrival) no longer have a reason for existing and must join Christianity. The church will be the new chosen people. Poverty and non-violence will be the only roads to salvation; love is the condition of eternity; creation of wealth is no longer a blessing; progress is no longer of any interest. The Judeo-Greek ideal finds itself seriously compromised.

There now emerges a degree of common thinking among Christian, Roman, Greek, and Jewish thought systems. Love of God is the most precious of values. Only the church — and incidentally the rulers who are its subjects — may accumulate wealth, which is intended solely to help everyone prepare his own salvation.

Through the sole power of its philosophy, Christianity garners an increasing number of believers in the Roman Empire. This should now have led to a retreat by the mercantile order, by freedom and individualism, to the benefit of brotherhood, equality, nonviolence, frugality, and humility. But this does not come to pass. Lesson for the future: no matter how influential, a religious doctrine fails to slow the march of individual freedom. In fact, to this day, no religious or secular power has succeeded in durably slowing its course.

Unlike preceding empires, Rome at this juncture has no rivals, merely enemies. Tribes coming in from the East, eager to benefit from the Mediterranean’s wealth and climate, assail it from every quarter.

Rome is therefore obliged to garrison increasingly costly armies on its frontiers. It has to accommodate the multiple languages and beliefs of its soldiers, manage the burdens of logistics, deal with the challenge of meeting the costs. The emperor Marcus Aurelius goes so far as to spend twenty years, from 160 to 180, on the frontiers of the empire.