Editorial,
The Week in Review – Analysis, Commentary, Opinion
04.30.2016
The Division of Labor in the Ancient World
The Rise of Agrarianism and the Onset of
Slavery
Part I - Introduction
Everything
eats. There is no life without food; without nourishment there is only death.
The
abundance of food, or its scarcity, determine the quality of human life. The
more time, and energy (in terms of human labor) we spend acquiring, or
producing food, the more food we need; conversely, the less time we spend at
rest, in a mode of being that allows us to reflect on life, in a qualitative
state of living that brings us both joy and satisfaction.
This
essay will examine the role that agrarianism (social and cultural development
in conjunction with agricultural advancement) played in the ancient world; in
the concentration of wealth, in the sustenance of large populations, and in the
institution of classism – or slavery.
This
essay will examine those themes through primary sources, from the perspective
of writers from the ancient world; in their poetry, philosophy, mythology, and legal
codes. It will explore themes of life and death, work and leisure, wealth and
poverty, servitude and governance.
Finally,
in this essay I will show how the social values that I explore in those
writings, and social structures, entered society (roughly five thousand years
ago), through the rise of agrarianism; the commodification of grain, and the
division of labor - into classes of laborers, and how those structures and
values continue to influence our society today in ways that are largely
unchanged.
Part II
It
would be difficult to press an argument that the advent of farming has been bad
for human culture, and so I will not try to do that. It would be nearly
impossible to argue that advances in agriculture lead to an increase in human
misery. The more that human beings have advanced their skill at farming, the
more human beings those advanced societies have been able to support; agriculture
supports larger populations, with longer life spans, and greater immunity to
disease. I am not arguing that the rise of agrarianism has been harmful to
humanity, but I will show that some of the social structures which emerged together
with agrarian culture were fundamentally unjust, and that these social
structures, like slavery, and classism, leading to the concentration of wealth,
have perpetuated injustice throughout the centuries and across the millennium.
These structures were not planned. They evolved over centuries; along with the
legal codes that supported them, and it will require insight, and planning if
we are to deconstruct them; if, in the interest of a more just society we
should choose to do so.
We
must understand the roots of our social order, in particular, the root causes
of the injustices that permeate it. The greater our understanding; the more
empowered we will be to change it.
Human
beings are not static creatures. We are dynamic; as such, we do not have to
live with static social systems. We are free to change them. If we are to exemplify
the principles of justice, if we are to broaden its franchise to everyone
living within the aegis of our social system; we must.
This
essay looks into the earliest commentaries and myths regarding the rise of
city-states, and agrarian societies, to the instantiation of the economic and
social forces which separated people into classes, the forces that established
the institutions of slavery and provided for the mass concentration of wealth. The
essay will also explore the earliest warnings human beings sounded regarding
those corrupting forces given in the most ancient commentaries, texts, and
myths regarding the dangers of these systems to the future well-being of
humanity.
Part III
In
the fourth century B.C.E. the philosopher Plato wrote a treatise titled On Justice, in which he seeks to present
his understanding of how the qualities of justice and virtue emerge in a human
being. This treatise became his most famous piece of writing and is popularly
known as The Republic.[i] Plato probes the notion of how the qualities of justice and
virtue, and of goodness itself emerge in a human being. To do so he thought it
would be good to make the rhetorical shift of first looking at how those
qualities emerge in a city-state; in a republic (hence the popular title).
Plato famously employs this shift in focus; from the individual human being to
the city-state, asserting that a human being and a city state, are analogs of
one another. He asserts that a city-state is like an individual entity; only
larger, and that a human being is really a society of values and desires; only
smaller. Plato tells us; to look at the city-state as a representation of a
human being is like seeing the human being with all of her or his desires and
ambitions under a magnifying glass.[ii] It is to see them writ large.
Plato
discusses of the origin of the city-state. He does this, not as a historian,
but as a philosopher. The emergence of city-states is something that begun to
take place nearly two-thousand five-hundred years earlier; in a time we think
of as pre-historical (because there are no written records).[iii] Even though Plato is not
a historian he has something to say about how human society became organized
into cities. His insight comes from his synthesis of all of the data available
to him; data which for him was historical, mythological and rooted in practical
knowledge, drawn from direct observation[iv].
Plato
says that: “a city comes to be because
none of us is self sufficient, but we all need many things…our first and
greatest need is to provide food to sustain life…our second is for shelter, and
our third for clothes.[v]” He then goes on to
suggest that a city-state must be able to meet each of these needs, and that at
a minimum it would have about five people: a farmer, a builder, a weaver, a
cobbler and a doctor.[vi] A little further into the
discussion he submits the idea that these four trades are not enough to sustain
a city-state; because each trade requires tools that are unique to itself and
that the production of these tools is a special skill unto itself, and so
carpenters and metal workers, cowherds and shepherds, other craftsmen and other
herders will also be needed,[vii] to form the city-state.
Plato
delineates the notion that different people have different natures, that these
natures are fixed, and that each person should be placed in a trade according
to that nature. He reduces this to the idea that; just as a person is a single
being, so should they have a singular occupation,[viii] a specialization. It is
on the idea of specialization that the division of labor is based.
Plato
elaborates on this model. In the dialog he begs agreement from his audience,
and receives it; that no city-state could possibly have all the materials they
need to live a quality life, and for this reason it would be necessary not only
to have craftsmen, farmers, and herders, but to have people who specialize in
importing and exporting goods from other city-states; whom he calls merchants,
those engaged in the specialized labor of trading. He then argues for the
necessity of having people in the marketplace to buy and sell the goods that
the craftsmen, farmers and herders produce, and which the merchants have
brought to the city-state through trade. Plato asserts that these people are
those who specialize in handling money. He calls them retailers, and he asserts
that “they’ll usually be people whose bodies are weakest and aren’t fit to do
any other work. They’ll stand around the market exchanging money for the goods
of those who have something and then exchanging those goods for the money of
those who want them.”[ix]
Plato
explains the necessity of having people in the city who have no skills at all;
who are merely strong, “other servants (he says) whose minds alone wouldn’t
qualify them for membership in our society but whose bodies are strong enough
for labor. These sell the use of their strength for a price called a wage and
hence are themselves called wage earners.”[x]
In
this way Plato continues to describe the various components of the social
organism that is the city-state. In the dialog, he and his audience agree that
the organism they have described to this point would be a healthy city, but not
a particularly large or luxuriant one. It would be small and ordinary,
uninspiring and nothing at all like Athens, the city-state in which this
discussion is taking place, and the closest to their ideal. So in order to get
to the issue of justice, what it is and where it lies (which is the point of
the dialog), they agree that they must enlarge the city-state even further, and
add to it a long list of other professions, other goods, and other services than
we have already enumerated, which must also be available in the city-state.[xi]
Plato
continues to build the model city-state into a place which has so much wealth
that it must be protected, and that the defenders of the city-state, a
“guardian-class” as he calls them, must specialize in warfare. Protectors,
defenders, guardians; by whatever name you call them, they are a warrior-class.
Plato
says that; like farmers who farm, and weavers who weave, like cobblers and
herders who are engaged in their respective trades, soldiers must be engaged in
soldiery.[xii]
He enters into a lengthy discussion of how a soldier must be educated; in order
to ensure that they be fair minded people, not given to greed, neither lustful
nor hot-tempered.[xiii]
Plato asserts that the process of educating the guardians, and then testing
them through years of service, will ultimately reveal the final class of people
who should rule the city-sate; a “golden-class” of people whom he calls the
philosopher-kings.[xiv] Through this analysis Plato
asserts that there are essentially three classes of people: the rulers of the
city-state belong to the golden-class, the guardians of the city-state, its
warriors; belong to the silver-class. Farmers and other craftsmen belong to the
class of bronze and, or iron. He asserts that these classes would by nature be
hereditary, but that on occasion a golden-child will be born to another class
and vice versa. In which case; the
golden-child, who is born to an iron-craftsmen, should be lifted up and
honored, while the bronze child born to a golden-parent should be cast out
without pity. It is in the lives of these golden-people that he believes true
justice will be found, and through whom it will flow.
Part IV
Even
though Plato was living in the fourth century B.C.E.; Plato could have been
describing the human components of a modern city, from farmers and tradesmen,
to financiers. It appears that not a lot has changed. He describes a society in
which the classes of law-givers, law-enforcers and all others are governed
primarily by heredity, with some exception being made for the outstanding merit
(or de-merits) of specific individuals. There are many ways in which this
remains true today. There is much more freedom of movement in the modern United
States of America than there was in ancient Athens, but true mobility; the
freedom to move between the classes remains almost as impenetrable today as it
did in 400 B.C.E. There is significantly greater freedom in the choice of
occupations, the son of a farmer is not bound to be a farmer, neither is the
daughter of a weaver bound to remain a weaver, but nevertheless the daughters
and sons of working class people in the United States are statistically
unlikely to change their economic status in a significant way.
A
Pew Research Survey, titled Wealth Gaps
Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics[xv] written by, By Paul Taylor, Richard Fry, and Rakesh Kochhar; shows
that household wealth has dropped among poor and middle income whites, blacks
and Hispanics. At the same time that the average household wealth has been
going down for all three of these (working-class) demographic groups; the
difference between the white demographic (the most privileged group in our
society), and the two largest minority groups has grown even faster. At the
same time that the wealth of working class citizens is shrinking. The wealth
concentrated in the top one percent of earners is growing at an ever increasing
rate.
I am
not suggesting that we apply the Platonic categories of gold, silver and bronze
to the demographic groups of white, black and Hispanic. Those kinds of
evaluations are unjust, and unseemly and belong to that ancient world.
Nevertheless, this study looks at status of working-class people, who Plato
would classify as bronze or iron. In that Platonic context we can say that; though
we have a professional military, we have no silver class in the United States,
because the military and the police force, our modern day guardians, are made
up of the sons and daughters of working-class people, and rank among the
poorest groups. The ruling-class (such as we have it), our golden-class is comprised
of that top one percent of income earners.
A
Wall Street Journal blog post, titled Income
Growth of Top 1% Over 30 Years Outpaced Rest of U.S.,[xvi] written by Corey Boles,
shows how the income of the top one percent of American households has grown by
two-hundred and seventy-five percent over the past thirty years; while the
average income of every other group has shrunk during the same period of time.
This illustrates my point regarding the relative lack of freedom the average
person has today to move between classes. Statistically speaking you are most
likely to remain in the class you were born to. A person is free to change
occupations; several times in their life if they should desire, but they will
find it exceedingly difficult to move between classes. That is how the division
of labor works in the United States today. That is how the division of labor
has worked for the past two-thousand five-hundred years since Plato, and from
the dim reaches of history before him. Most people accept this as natural, or
do not question it at all. The unquestioning stance we take toward it is at the
root of social injustice
To
be fair to Plato, he envisioned a ruling-class that would never touch money. He
did not believe in a Plutocracy (governance by the wealthy). In his ideal
state, philosopher-kings would not hold private property, but would be
supported by the people. It would be unlawful for them to even touch gold or
silver, “they mustn’t be under the same roof as it (gold), wear it as jewelry,
or drink from gold or silver goblets.” However, his idealism was just that;
idealism. The ruling-class of his day, and from that day forward, adopted what
they wanted from his politics and policies, and they left behind what they did
not want. They used his authority to justify their hold on wealth and power
rather than to modify it in the interest of justice.
In
his discussion on how to build a city, Plato was correct to state that the
first need that had to be fulfilled was food. Without food there is no society
whatsoever. With an abundance of food comes the means to support a large and
diverse population, to support a population of sufficient diversity to organize
a luxuriant city-state as Plato described.
Plato
believed that a society had to grow to a sufficient degree of complexity, and
diversity; it had to possess a sufficient degree of wealth, in order for it to
be able to support institutions of wisdom and justice. What is axiomatic to
this growth paradigm is the availability of food. The wealth that makes all
other wealth possible is food wealth.
In
the United States today, the largest privately held corporation, a corporation
owned by one family, is Minnesota based Cargil, an international agriculture
conglomerate; with over one-hundred billion dollars in revenue per year. Four
of the top ten wealthiest and most profitable privately held corporations are
either food growers, food processors, or food sellers; comprised of Cargil,
Mars, Publix Supermarkets, and C & S Wholesale Grocers.[xvii] Agricultural wealth,
wealth in food - is bigger than oil, bigger than bombs, bigger than anything
and everything else. Remembering Plato, it is interesting to note that it is
not the farmers (the growers) themselves who control this wealth. Plato’s model
is still in place. The growers of food do not profit nearly as much as the
brokers, merchants, and retailers.
Here
are some facts; most farmers live in a perpetual cycle of debt, either that or
they till the soil as wage earners for corporations like Cargil. The market
forces that keep this pattern in place are not immutable, but they are
regularly reinforced through the laws that govern private property, through
contract law, intellectual property law, and other judicial powers; juridical powers
that are far easier for those who are already posses wealth to manipulate, than
they are for those who are living on the margins.
Part V
In a
period of time between one-hundred and fifty and five-hundred and fifty years
before Plato, the Jewish writers of the Hebrew Scriptures; in their mythology, passed
on to us some of their insight into the rise of agrarianism and the onset of
slavery. The book of Genesis[xviii]
offers a significant and telling narrative about the rise of these social
institutions. Genesis 9:20 tells us that Noah was a tiller of soil; “Noah, a
man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard.” Shortly after this (in the
span of five lines of text), Genesis 9:26-27, Noah also gives us the
institution of slavery. Cannan, the son of Noah; becomes the slave of his two
brothers, Shem and Japheth. The first farmer becomes the first slave holder.
Genesis
11:1-9 gives us the story of the Tower of Babel. It tells of how the descendants
of Noah determined to build a tower, and a city, so that they would be unified
as a people.
1 The whole world
had the same language and the same words…3 They said to one another…4 “Come,
let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky,* and so make
a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth.” 5
The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built. 6
Then the LORD said: If now, while they are one people and all have the same
language, they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out
of their reach. 7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so
that no one will understand the speech of another. 8 So the LORD scattered them
from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is
why it was called Babel,* because there the LORD confused the speech of all the
world. From there the LORD scattered them over all the earth.
On
the surface this narrative is a simple etiological myth (a myth of origins) explaining
the reason why human beings speak different languages. In addition, this
narrative is often presented as a cautionary tale; warning the reader, or
listener, not to plan too far in advance; because God may have something else
in mind for us than we have for ourselves. God may decide to frustrate our
purposes and reverse our intentions at any time. In the narrative the people
set out to build something that would give them unity, and hold them together,
but instead they became unable to communicate with each other, and were
scattered over the earth. The narrative is unclear about whether God’s
intentions are to punish the people for hubris, whether God is acting out of
fear, or whether God’s motive is pure caprice. Nevertheless, this myth reveals
something of historical significance.
The
Tower of Babel is a type of ziggurat, like the Babylonian temple-tower of
Etemenaki.[xix]
Ziggurats served many purposes, they were often located in the center of a city.
They were among the most heavily fortified structures within the city walls. A
large amount of a city’s wealth would be stored there, not only wealth in gold
and silver; the treasury, but also including granaries for the storage of the
wealth in foodstuffs that a city would have saved up to support itself in times
of scarcity,[xx]
or siege. Without such granaries there would be no cities. And so, the Tower of
Babel myth, following as it does the story of the first farmer, and as a
continuation of that theme, is a story about the building of the first granary,
the first city (after the flood) and the advent of an agrarian society. It is a
prime example of the model that Plato would illustrate a few centuries later.
When
God confuses the tongues of men, this appears on the surface to be an act of
divine judgment, as if they were being punished for their pride, even though
the text does not state that this is being done as punishment, it is nevertheless
a fairly common interpretation is; “The narrative…suggests that civilization,
which seeks to bring order out of cultural, economic and political chaos, can
become an end in itself thus amounting to rebellion against God, and resulting
in self defeat.”[xxi]
The confusion of languages is an onerous development, whether or not it is the result
of divine judgment, it amounts self-defeat.
The
biblical narrative tells us that the builders of this mythological temple, the first
of its kind, and the first city, sought to derive unity from the process, but
ended up confused and at odds with each other. I contend that trope is not
meant to depict when human language suddenly became confused, but that this is
a reference to the changes in the social order which manifested themselves out
of the process of building the mythological city. This myth recalls the
transition in human culture from one that was basically egalitarian and nomadic,
into one that was hierarchical, and governed by class; one in which the
institution of slavery became a present reality. Plato synthesized this history
in The Republic, his dialog On Justice; the building of the city
necessitates the building of a social order. Workers become fixed into
hereditary occupations, ranging from slave to king, with priests, warriors,
merchants, and craftsmen occupying all of the stations in between. It was
agrarianism and the securitization of grain which made this possible.
Further
evidence exists for this sequence of developments in Hammurabi’s Code, given in the year 1726 B.C.E., by Hammurabi, a
king of the Amorite dynasty of Old Babylon in Mesopotamia. This law code treats
grain as a commodity, establishes standard values in gold and silver for it,
rates of interests for the lending of it, which are different from the rates of
interests attached to the lending of coin. Hammurabi’s
Code recognizes a class system with state officials, priests, warriors,
middle class people, lower class people, merchants, money lenders, wage earners
and slaves. The Hebrew Scriptures reference Hammurabi’s
Code thirty-two times, in Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Ruth.[xxii] The code became a
template for all other legal systems in the ancient world of the Near East.
In
or around the year 1500 B.C.E., the Code
of Manu[xxiii]
was given to the people of India. Like Hammurabi’s Code, it also establishes a
cast system:
88. To Brahmanas
he assigned teaching and studying (the Veda), sacrificing for their own benefit
and for others, giving and accepting (of alms).
89. The Kshatriya
he commanded to protect the people, to bestow gifts, to offer sacrifices, to
study (the Veda), and to abstain from attaching himself to sensual pleasures;
90. The Vaisya to
tend cattle, to bestow gifts, to offer sacrifices, to study (the Veda), to trade,
to lend money, and to cultivate land.
91. One occupation
only the lord prescribed to the Sudra, to serve meekly even these (other) three
castes.
The
slave, the farmer, the money lender, the merchant, the warrior, and the priest;
they are all present. The religious observance of the Code of Manu would remain the effective law of India; into the
twentieth century C.E., at which point most of the unjust aspects of the system
it prescribes; such as the virtual slavery of the Sudra caste, were abolished by
Mohatma Gandhi, through the ratification of India’s Constitution in 1950 C.E..
Hammurabi’s Code, and the Code of Manu were merely written in this
time frame. It is almost certain that when these codes were written they were
only codifying what was already the standard way of life for these peoples; a
way of life which probably began with the rise of agrarianism, occurring nearly
simultaneously in Mesopotamia, India, and Egypt; around the year three-thousand
B.C.E.. Human beings had been practicing agriculture long before then, but
major agrarian societies emerged at this point, in the third millennium B.C.E.,
and with it major changes in human culture on a scale that humanity would not
see again until the twentieth century.
Part VI
In
the twentieth century major advances in medical technology came, immunizations
and sanitation provided much of what was necessary for a vast expansion in the
human population. But, what was needed most were changes in agronomy, in the
production and distribution of food. When that happened, human population
exploded.
In
the year 1000 C.E. it is estimated that there were two-hundred and sixty-five
million people living on Earth. The entire population of the world dis little
more than double by the time Plato is writing six-hundred years later.
In
1900 C.E. the world population was approximately 1.6 billion people. The
population had risen by a factor of three over the course of nine-hundred
years.
Between
1900 C.E. and 1950 C.E. we added about nine-hundred million more people. Many societies,
in the non-industrialized world were experiencing famine, and then, a radical
change in the science of agronomy took place, facilitated by an American named
Norman Borlaug. Genetic engineering of crops, and chemical fertilization began
to rapidly improve crop yields. The population of the world grew to a
staggering seven billion people; nearly tripling in the space of fifty years[xxiv], between 1950 and 2000
C.E.
Norman
Borlaug was given the Nobel Peace prize in 1970, for teaching the world to feed
itself. ‘“More than any other single
person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world,”’ ‘the
Nobel committee said in presenting him with the Peace Prize.’ ‘“We have made
this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.”’[xxv] Nevertheless, it remains
true that food scarcity is the easiest way to move a city, a state, or a nation
from progress to chaos, from restfulness to unease the abundance of food has
not brought peace to the world, just more people. As Plato said, food is the
first of our needs, with it the state will grow, without it there is nothing.
In
the same time frame that Norman Borlaug’s contribution to agriculture,
agronomy,and the world’s food supply, was making an impact on the global population,
those same advances were making a significant impact on corporate profits.
For
instance, in 1950, Minnesota’s Cargil corporation had annual revenues of four-hundred
and twenty-three million dollars.[xxvi] In the period of time
that we are talking about; 1950 – 2000, when the world’s population tripled,
Cargil’s revenues grew by two-hundred and fifty times, and all of the machinery
of the world governments turned around it.
There
is an ancient saying:
“The
more things change, the more they remain the same.”[xxvii]
Plato
imagined philosopher-kings and queens, a golden-class who did not own private
property, and did not taint their virtue by coming into contact with coin;
idealism. However, he did not have the tools to imagine how we could actually arrive
at the place where wisdom and justice do in fact govern, not wealth. Even the
most innocent and the best intentions, like those held by men such as Norman
Borlaug; to feed the hungry, are milled into profits for the power brokers, the
food financiers and the keepers of grain.
Everything
eats. There is no life without food. Its abundance, or its scarcity directly
determine the quality of human life. There is great competition for it; not
only for basic foodstuffs but for the luxuriant foods as well. There are many
of us who are comfortable with the idea that farm hands go hungry so they can
pick coffee beans for the breakfast table in American and European homes. This
is not the justice that Plato envisioned, though it is perhaps what he
expected.
The
question remains to be answered, and I cannot do it here. How do we change the
cycle of commerce when the pattern for it was set in our culture so many
thousands of years ago, and when the pressure to continue to produce, to keep
the machinery humming, is so great; when, if the gears grind even a little bit,
entire nations starve, not because we don’t have the food, but because we
cannot get it to where it is needed most?
How
can we ensure that everyone we are able to feed can also have clean water,
medicine, electricity, heat, and education?
Part VII - Conclusion
Just
as we saw with our examination of Plato, and the ancient law codes, which
described the social classes, occupations, and roles that human cultures
continue to foster today; there is also wisdom to be gleaned from the ancient
myths, and more understanding of the social forces that were shaping their
cultures than may at first appear on the surface.
Consider
the tale of Hades (Pluto) and Persephone; it recalls a state of paradise when
human beings lived in the care of Demeter, goddess of grain and the harvest. That
time was a time of endless summer, idyllic, perfect; there was a
super-abundance of food. There was no want.
Now, Persephone was Demeter’s daughter,
and one day she was walking alone in the fields when Pluto, lord of the underworld,
saw her. Upon seeing her he was filled with desire. He harnessed his team of
horses and rode his chariot from his kingdom in the underworld to the fields
wherein Persephone wandered. There he took her. He carried her away with him,
back beneath the ground.
When Demeter realized that her daughter
was missing she searched for her, looking over the face of the whole earth. When
she could not find Persephone, she mourned for her as if she were dead. Indeed
Death had taken Persephone.
Through the sorrow of Demeter, winter
entered the world. The harvest came to an end. Fields that were once full of
grain; froze, and the human race, which had never known want, and had never
prepared for a time of need; grew hungry and starved. The hand of Death, which
had seized Persephone, now spread its shadow over the face of the earth.
Zeus, king of the gods, saw what was
transpiring, and he grieved for the fate of the human race. He called Demeter
to court, and he ordered her to restore the harvest, Demeter was inconsolable,
and she refused on account of her grief. For she loved her daughter. Zeus
therefore, sent Hermes, his herald, to search for Persephone. Hermes found her
enthroned, as queen of the underworld; the bride of Pluto.
When Hermes reported his discovery to Zeus;
Zeus called Pluto and Persephone to court, where, in the presence of Demeter,
Zeus ordered that Persephone be restored to her mother. Pluto refused, and Zeus,
as great as he was, was powerless to compel what he had ordered; for Persephone
had dined with Pluto, and the meal she shared with him, consummated their
marriage, it bound her to him as at a wedding feast.
It seemed to Zeus that there was no hope.
Demeter was mad with despair, and the human race would starving for it.
Zeus sought a compromise.
The king of the god’s asked Pluto to
relent, to allow Persephone to spend half of the year with her mother, and
return to the underworld to spend the other half of the year with him.
Demeter’s heart would warm in the presence of her daughter, in that warming life
would return to world. In that time Human beings would work hard to grow,
harvest, and store grain, for the winter months; when Demeter’s heart would turn
cold in her loneliness, and the fruit of the field would wither and die.
Demeter begged Pluto to agree, and though
he acted as if he was being put upon, and that his rights were being circumscribed,
in fact he was only too happy to make the deal; this is because Pluto is more
than lord of the underworld, he is also god of the Earth’s fertility. Pluto had
no desire to leave the fields sterile, that would infringe on his fecundity, though
more important than this may be that Pluto is also the god of wealth. By
limiting the harvest, by forcing human beings to work for their food, he took
possession of the entire growing cycle, and with it the cycles of human labor. Through
the principle of scarcity, Pluto commodified food, and monetized work;
transforming sweat into silver and grain into gold.[xxviii]
The
human race, human culture has come a long way since Noah sentenced his son to
slavery, since Hammurabi and Manu wrote their law codes, and since Plato
offered his reflections on justice, in the Republic.
In our day; “We have warehouses of butter, and oceans of wine; we have famine
when we need it, and designer crime.”[xxix] The commodification of
grain, its over-production, has allowed for the birth of more human beings,
generated more ergs of labor, and produced more wealth than the original
authors of the myth of Pluto and Persephone could have possibly imagines. But
the warnings that were embedded in their myth, through their archetypes, holds
true. The warning is for the seven billion people now living in the world,
which our means of industrial food production has provided for; The myth warns
that we should be concerned with how much sway the lord of the underworld has
gained over the real world, cycles of labor, cycles of harvest, cycles of life
and death. The laws of scarcity, and the laws of supply and demand ensure that
the more mouths there are to feed the more valuable food resources become; while
at the same time guaranteeing that there are more sales to be made, and so
creating an incentive to push the population beyond sustainable limits. The
earth itself is threatened by the numbers of people living on it, all the more
so if we have the desire to distribute the good things of modern life in such a
way that everyone has, heat, electricity, clean water and the other things…like
time and leisure, which make of life something more than a state of drudgery.
Plato, Complete
Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, trans. by G.M.A. Grube
and C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1997.
The Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church,
edited by F. L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, Oxford University Press, New York,
1997.
The Encyclopaedia
Brittanica, 11th edition,
vol. II, edited by High Chisholm, 1910.
Wayne G. Broehl, Jr., Cargil,
Trading the World’s Grain, University
Press of New England, Hanover, 1992.
The Interpreter’s
One Volume Commentary on the Bible, edited by Charles M. Laymon, Abingdon Press, 1971.
The Ancient Near
East, Vol. I, edited by James B.
Pritchard, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1958.
[i]
Plato, Complete Works, The
Republic, edited by John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson, trans. by G.M.A.
Grube and C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1997.
[ii]
Ibid., p. 1008.
[iii]
It occurs to me that on a time line that stretches from the origins of the
earliest agricultural city-states; through the present day, Plato is at the
mid-way point of that delineation. It has been roughly two thousand five
hundred years since he lived and wrote.
[iv]
The Greeks of his day were a colonial power. They had been for several hundred
years; establishing colonies all throughout the Mediterranean region. Plato
would have had knowledge of all of the things and people that would be
necessary to establish a city from the ground up.
[v]
Plato, Complete Works, The
Republic, p. 1008.
[vi]
Ibid., p. 1009.
[vii]
Ibid., p. 1009-1010.
[viii]
Ibid., p. 1009.
[ix]
Ibid., p. 1010.
[x]
Ibid., p. 1011.
[xi]
Ibid., pp. 1011 – 1013.
[xii]
Ibid., p. 1013.
[xiii]
Ibid., p. 1013 – 1050.
[xiv]
Ibid., p. 1100, “Until philosophers
rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men philosophize,
that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide …cities will have
no rest from evils…nor, I think will the human race.”
[xv]
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/
[xvi]
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/10/25/income-growth-of-top-1-over-30-years-outpaced-rest-of-u-s/
[xvii]
http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/01/largest-private-companies-business-private-companies-10-intro.html
[xix]
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian
Church, edited by F. L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, p. 141, Oxford
University Press, New York, 1997.
[xx]
The Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 11th edition, vol. II, edited by
High Chisholm, p. 374, 1910.
[xxi]
The Interpreter’s One Volume Commentary
on the Bible, edited by Charles M. Laymon, The Book of Genesis, John
H. Marks, Abingdon Press, 1971.
[xxii]
The Ancient Near East, Vol. I, edited
by James B. Pritchard, pp. 138-167, Princeton University Press, New Jersey,
1958.
[xxiii]
Indian History Sourcebook, The
Laws of Manu, c. 1500 BCE, translated by G. Buhler,
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/india/manu-full.asp
[xxiv]
http://worldhistorysite.com/population.html
[xxv]
Norman Borlaug, Plant Scientist Who Fought Famine, Dies at 95, By Justin
Gillis, Published: September 13, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/energy-environment/14borlaug.html?pagewanted=all
[xxvi]
Cargil, Trading the World’s Grain, by
Wayne G. Broehl, Jr., p. 740, University Press of New England, Hanover, 1992.
[xxvii]
Anonymous.
[xxviii]
My rendition of the myth.
[xxix]
Roger Waters, Amused to Death, 1991.
