I'm reading this fabulous book right now; it re-imagines world history, supposing the Europeans had mostly died out from the Plague in the 14th century (or whenever it was). This is an excerpt from later on in the book, Section 6, "Widow Kang." The point of view is a Muslim scholar; the location is what we would call western China, and the historical setting of the book at the moment in time in which this bit is written is that the two primary world religions--Islam and Buddhism--are clashing, and there is war and turmoil. (The bracketed [ ] inserts are my own.) (The time, in our Christian calendar, is about 1820 AD.)
Wealth and the Four Great Inequalities
The scattered records and broken ruins of the Old World tell us that the earliest civilizations arose in China, India, Persia, Egypt, the Middle West, and Anatolia. The first farmers in these fertile regions taught themselves farming and storage methods that created harvests beyond the needs of the day. Very quickly soldiers, supported by priests, took power in each region, and their own numbers grew, gathering these new abundant harvests largely into their own hands, by means of taxes and direct seizures. Labor divided into the groups described by Confucius and the Hindu caste system: the warriors, priests, artisans, and farmers. With this division of labor, the subjugation of farmers by warriors and priests was institutionalized, a subjugation that has never ended. This was the first inequality.
In this division of civilized labor, if it had not happened earlier, men established a general domination over women. It may have happened during the earlier ages of bare subsistence, but there is no way to tell; what we can see with our own eyes is that in farming cultures women labor both at home and in the fields. In truth the farming life requires work from all. But from early on, women did as men required. And in each family, the control of legal power resembled the situation at large: the king and his heir dominated the rest. These were the second and third inequalities, of men over women and children.
The next small age saw the beginning of trade between the first civilizations, and the silk roads connecting China, Bactria, India, Persia, the Middle West, Rome, and Africa moved the surplus harvests around the Old World. Agriculture responded to the new chances to trade, and there was a great rise in the production of bulk cereals and meats, and specialized crops like olives, wine, and mulberry trees. The artisans also made new tools, and with them more powerful farming implements and ships. Trading groups and peoples began to undermine the monopoly on power of the first military-priest empires, and money began to replace land as the source of ultimate power. All this happened much earlier than Ibn Khaldun and the Maghribi historians recognized. By the time of the classical period--around 1200 b.H. [ca. 600 BC]--the changes brought by trade had unsettled the old ways and spread and deepened the first three inequalities, raising many questions about human nature. The great classical religions came into being precisely to attempt to answer these questions--Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in India, and the rationalist philosophers in Greece. But no matter their metaphysical details, each civilization was part of a world transferring wealth back and forth, back and forth, eventually to elite groups; these movements of wealth became the driving force of change in human affairs--in other words, of history. Gathered wealth gathered more wealth.
From the classical period to the discovery of the New World (say 1200 b.H. to 1000 a.H.) [ca. 600 BC to 1600 AD], trade made the Middle West the focal point of the Old World, and much wealth ended up there. At about the midpoint of this period, as the dates indicate, Islam appeared, and very quickly it came to dominate the world. Very likely there were some underlying economic reasons for this phenomenon; Islam, perhaps by chance but perhaps not, appeared in the "center of the world," the area sometimes called the Isthmus Region, bounded by the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea. All the trade routes necessarily knotted here, like dragon arteries in a feng shui analysis. So it is not particularly surprising that for a time Islam provided the world with a general currency--the dinar--and a generally used language--Arabic. But it was also a religion, indeed it became almost the universal religion, and we must understand that its appeal as a religion arose partly from the fact that in a world of growing inequalities, Islam spoke of a realm in which all were equal--all equal before God no matter their age, gender, occupation, race, or nationality. Islam's appeal lay in this: that inequality could be neutralized and done away with in the most important realm, the eternal realm of the spirit.
Meanwhile, however, trade in food and in luxury goods continued all across the Old World, from al-Andalus [the Iberian Peninsula] to China, in animals, timber and metals, cloth, glass, writing materials, opium, medicines, and, more and more as the centuries passed, in slaves. The slaves came chiefly from Africa and they became more important because there was more labor to be done, while at the same time the mechanical improvements allowing for more powerful tools had not yet been made, so that all this new work had to be accomplished by animal and human effort alone. So added to the subjugation of farmers, women, and the family was this fourth inequality, of race or group, leading to the subjugation of the most powerless peoples to slavery. And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.
The discovery of the New World has only accelerated these processes, providing both more wealth and more slaves. The trade routes themselves have moved substantially from land to sea, and Islam no longer controls the crossroads as it did for a thousand years. The main center of accumulation has shifted to China; indeed, China may have been the center all along. It has always had the most people; and from ancient times people everywhere else have traded for Chinese goods. Rome's trade balance with China was so poor that it lost a million ounces of silver a year to China. Silk, porcelain, sandalwood, pepper--Rome and all the rest of the world sent their gold to China for these products, and China grew rich. And now that China has taken control of the west coasts of the New World, it has also begun to enjoy a direct infusion of huge amounts of gold and silver, and slaves. This doubled gathering of wealth, both by trade of manufactured goods and by direct extraction, is something new, a kind of cumulation of accumulations.
So it seems apparent that the Chinese are clearly the rising dominant power in the world, in competition with the previous dominant power, Dar al-Islam, which still exerts a powerful attraction to people hoping for justice before God, if no longer much expecting it on Earth. India then exists as a third culture between the other two, a go-between and influence on both, while also, of course, influenced by both. Meanwhile the primitive New World cultures, newly connected to the bulk of humanity and immediately subjugated by them, struggle to survive.
So. To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one center of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalities. This is history. Nowhere, as far as I know, has there ever been a civilization or moment when the wealth of the harvests created by all has been equitably distributed. Power has been exerted wherever it can be, and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy the armed power they need to enforce the growing inequality. And so the cycle continues.
The result has been that while a small percentage of human beings have lived in a wealth of food, material comfort, and learning, those not so lucky have been the functional equivalent of domestic beasts, in harness to the powerful and well-off, creating their wealth for them but not benefiting from it themselves. If you happen to be a young black farm girl, what can you say to the world, or the world to you? You exist under all four of the great inequalities, and will live a shortened life of ignorance, hunger, and fear. Indeed it only takes one of the great inequalities to create such conditions.
So it must be said that the majority of humans ever to have lived, have existed in conditions of immiseration and servitude to a small minority of wealthy and powerful people. For every emperor and bureaucrat, for every caliph and qadi, for every full rich life, there have been ten thousand of these stunted, wasted lives. Even if you grant a minimal definition of a full life, and say that the strength of spirit in people, and the solidarity among people, have given many of the world's poor and powerless a measure of happiness and achievement amidst their struggle, still, there are so many who have lived lives destroyed by immiseration that it seems impossible to avoid concluding that there have been more lives wasted than fully lived.
All the world's various religions have attempted to explain or mitigate these inequalities, including Islam, which originated in the effort to create a realm in which all are equal; they have tried to justify the inequalities in this world. They all have failed; even Islam has failed; the Dar al-Islam is as damaged by inequality as anywhere else. Indeed I now think that the Indian and Chinese description of the afterlife, the system of the six lokas or realms of reality--the devas, asuras, humans, beasts, pretas, and inhabitants of hell--is in fact a metaphorical but precise description of this world and the inequalities that exist in it, with the devas sitting in luxury and judgment on the rest, the asuras fighting to keep the devas in their high position, the humans getting by as humans do, the beasts laboring as beasts do, the homeless preta suffering in fear at the edge of hell, and the inhabitants of hell enslaved to pure immiseration.
My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.
To put it in religious terms, we are still indeed in the bardo, waiting to be born.
