Historical Background

Abstract

This chapter tries to familiarize the reader of the historical transformations that humanity went through to reach the current situation, moving from the hunter-gatherer stage to the tribal stage, to the agricultural stage, to the industrial stage, and finally to the knowledge stage in which we are living today. It also explains the process of transformation and the forces that caused it.

On their way to the current age, human societies passed through three major stages of societal development or civilizations, with each stage causing all aspects of life to change fundamentally and irreversibly; change included society, economy, and culture, as well as social, economic, and political structures and production relations. Most historians and social scientists seem to acknowledge that the greatest revolutions in human history were the agricultural and industrial revolutions, which gave birth to the agricultural and industrial civilizations, respectively. Historians also agree that those two revolutions have had the greatest impact on people’s life conditions and their perspective on life and the future. There is also an agreement on at least three major stages of societal development: the pre-agricultural or the tribal stage, the agricultural stage, and the industrial stage.

Furthermore, a number of social thinkers believe that the information and communications revolutions of the 1990s represent another transformational change in our social history that is transforming the social, cultural, and economic conditions of life and how societies are organized. This new stage is often referred to as the information age, or the globalization age, or the digital age. However, I call it the Knowledge Age because it is knowledge that includes the information and telecommunications revolutions, and the recent technological innovations and scientific discoveries and ideas that launched the Knowledge Revolution in the mid-1990s. Analyzing these stages and how they relate to each other should enable us to place social, cultural, political, and economic changes in their proper historical and societal contexts and track the course of societal development over time, and thus understand where we came from, where we are now, and where we are expected to go.

Each stage of development had come after a difficult, oftentimes long transitional period; during which the major institutions, roadmaps, theories, and ideas of the old society lose their validity and ability to explain the changing life conditions and manage change. In fact, each transitional period represents a historical discontinuity, during which the history and historical logic and wisdom of the passing era come to an end; and this paves the way for the new era to chart its history and depict its particular logic. Since no one knows in such circumstances what lies ahead, chaos rather than order characterizes life conditions and causes the theories and institutions and grand ideas that had managed all aspects of life to start crumbling, while no new ones are developed in time to replace them. As chaos spreads and prevails, a general sense of loss of direction overwhelms society, causing people in charge of managing the many aspects of life to feel confused and disoriented. Nevertheless, at the end of each transitional period a new civilization emerges having its own society, culture, and economy; and this causes the old social and economic structures and production relations to change fundamentally.¹

Historical discontinuities are unique developments that make people’s experience similar to that of a driver entering an unfamiliar mountainous terrain. As the driver takes a long curve on a winding road, he loses sight of the familiar landscape that lies behind him, while the mountains he negotiates block his view, preventing him from seeing the landscape that lies ahead, causing his speed and control of the vehicle to become subject to the rough terrain. As a consequence, his expectations and confidence become subject to the ups and downs of the winding road. The familiar landscape that lies behind no longer helps; the horizon that looms in the sky is so vast and obscured it provides little clues to what lies ahead.²

Historical records of older times suggest that long before the development of agriculture human beings were able to get enough food and attain a sufficient level of security to survive and grow. Familial and tribal ties served as a social glue that held early societies together and gave meaning to their individual and communal lives. Members of each tribe behaved as if they were members of one family whose survival dictates cooperation and strict adherence to tribal traditions, customs, and norms. This means that the roots of civilization came into existence probably 20,000 years before the dawn of the agricultural age. However, it was a primitive civilization based on a food economy that depended primarily on hunting animals and collecting wild fruits and vegetables.

Nevertheless, about one thousand years before the development of agriculture, man was able to domesticate many animals and use them as means of transportation and sources of meat; man also used the skin, hair, and bones of some animals for other purposes. On the other hand, due to its nomadic life, the tribal society did not know the kind of injustice or alienation associated with social classes, which succeeding civilizations witnessed and endured until today and because the private property institution did not and could not exist in the tribal age due to its way of life, the tribal society was classless; it was made of only one social class. However, tribes fought each other for a reason and often for no reason at all. As a consequence, the tribal man fought to live and lived to fight, making his life starts and ends with fighting.

With the development of agriculture some 12,000 years ago, the economic base of society began to change fundamentally, causing the culture and social and economic structures of the tribal society to change in ways that made them different from the older ones. “Plant and animal domestication meant much more food and hence much denser human populations. The resulting food surpluses and the animal-based means of transporting the surpluses, were a prerequisite for the development of settled, politically centralized, socially stratified, economically complex, technologically innovative societies.”³ The development of agriculture changed the way societies and economies were organized and transformed peoples’ cultures and their relationships to each other and to their environment. Agriculture brought about a new civilization having its own society, culture, economy, production relations, and social and political organization. “The change from hunting and gathering to agriculture involved more than a mere change in subsistence pattern; it represented a complete change in the social and cultural fabric of life; it meant also a mental change.”⁴

As farming the land became indispensable to the survival of agricultural society, the private property institution emerged as a powerful force playing a transformational role in the social and economic relations in society. In the meantime, the appearance of scattered agricultural hamlets and villages necessitated the development of a superstructure, or a state to regulate the ownership of agricultural land and the sharing of water resources and to protect hamlets and villages from roaming tribesmen looking for people to victimize. Consequently, politically centralized, economically complex, and technologically innovative societies appeared slowly; causing the agricultural society to be divided into two social classes: landlords who were rich; and farmers and farm workers and slaves who were poor. Since wealth is a major source of power, landlords were able to forge alliances with the forces of the political process or the state and gain more power and influence at the expense of the small farmers, farm workers, and slaves.

The food surplus that the agricultural society produced enabled some people, particularly the rich, to have enough time to think and speculate about the past and future and life in general. This gave rise to religion and the sacred, causing human relations to change and tie believers to each other in addition to their families and clans. So before the state appeared as a superstructure, religion appeared as a social system and a source of knowledge that comforted the poor and the slaves and urged the rich to help the poor and the powerful to assist the weak. Since farming the land was the only productive activity that occupied the farmer, agricultural man ate to live and lived to eat, making life start and end with food.

However, after agriculture was established and its culture and economy were developed, the pace of social change slowed, causing life conditions to become steady and seem perpetual. Most forces of change were at the time either dormant or yet to be born or resistant to change like religion. Nevertheless, the later centuries of the agricultural age witnessed important developments that included the transformation of religion into an institution with authority, the development of writing and reading, the formation of states, the invention of the wheel, the expansion of trade, and the incorporation of money and merchant life into the life of society, which caused the pace of change to accelerate. Around the middle of the fifteenth century, the agricultural society entered a transitional period leading to the industrial age.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, the production of manufactured goods emerged in England as the most important economic activity. This development heralded the coming of a new era, the industrial age with its own civilization, and the dawn of rapid change in all aspects of life. The coming together of major social, cultural, political institutions, new ideas, technological inventions, scientific discoveries, geographical discoveries, and the sociocultural transformation caused by the religious wars is what is called the Industrial Revolution. It was a revolution that changed the mode of production and production relations, forcing all aspects of life to change drastically, profoundly, and irreversibly. The Industrial Revolution emerged as a continuous process of change that seemed to have no end in sight. “Our fathers started the revolution, and we are still living it. We could not stop it even if we wanted to.”⁵ In fact, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a wave of comprehensive change that transformed all aspects of life in every industrial state.

For example, workers were no longer free to determine their working hours and how to perform their work; tasks were assigned, working hours were imposed, and hierarchical relationships within the workplace were enforced. Income was tied to work, making survival a function of work availability and worker’s capacity to work long hours and endure the pain of performing repetitious, often boring tasks. For the first time in history, the new worker could own neither the place of work, the means of production, nor the end products he produced. His only source of income was his labor and time, and labor and time were the only commodities he could trade. Industrial man, as a result, was transformed through manufacturing into a machine, causing work to become the focal point of life. Industrial man works to live and lives to work, causing life to start and end with work, even for the majority of the rich capitalists.

As the Industrial Revolution advanced, it expanded and diversified economic and financial activities, causing new jobs to be created and more people to be involved in manufacturing. This in turn created a need for people to perform related tasks such as plant supervisors, accountants, transportation and trade managers, banking and investment officers, technicians, innovators, and engineers to develop new products. Consequently, a new class of largely urban dwellers was born; it was neither rich nor poor but in between. Because of its unique social position and functions, the new class shared neither interests nor traditions with the rich or the poor; it had to develop its own way of life and claim its place in society as a middle class.

The evolution of the industrial age strengthened the economic forces and institutions of society, giving capital and the capitalist system prominent roles in the industrial society’s life and its people. The capacity of the forces of the economic process to contribute to every human activity has enabled the economic process to grow stronger and become more visible and eventually replace the political process as the most dominant process in society. As a consequence, the representatives of this process were able to claim special rights and privileges not available to the rest of the population.

In the 1990s, industrial society in general and American society in particular began to experience a new wave of fundamental change or revolution. This revolution was driven by knowledge, particularly the information and communications revolutions and the Internet, which caused the economy to shift fast from the production of manufactured goods to the production of tradable services. In the middle of the 1990s, the Knowledge age began to impose its logic on the prevailing ways of living and states of living, causing all aspects of life to undergo fundamental and irreversible change. In the United States, “service employment accounted for 80% of employment in 2000. More people were at the time working in doctors’ offices than in auto plants and more in laundries and dry cleaners than in steel mills.”⁶ In 2017, the employment in the service sector was growing, while employment in agriculture was down to 1.66% of the labor force. Due to this development, the knowledge man is being transformed into a thinking machine, he learns to live and lives to learn, causing his life to start and end with learning. Consequently, whoever fails to continue learning will lose his source of livelihood, and with it, his social existence.

At the time of writing this book in 2022, I feel that the transitional period leading to the knowledge age is still incomplete; it needs about 3 more years to reach its end. However, many far-reaching changes have already occurred and can be seen at all levels of individual and societal life. Values, traditions, and convictions that provided the social glue that kept families and communities tied together throughout the agricultural and industrial ages have begun to fracture. Basic assumptions that helped historians, economists, sociologists, political, and strategic thinkers to define and analyze social, political, and economic units such as the nation state, national economy, culture, and class have been partially or totally invalidated.

The first transitional period from the tribal to the agricultural age lasted about 3000 years. The second transitional period separating the agricultural from the industrial age lasted about 300 years, from the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. The current transitional period separating the industrial from the knowledge age is expected to last about 30 years. This suggests that the length of each successive transitional period is about 10% of the preceding one. If this observation could be used as a rule of thumb, the knowledge age should become a reality around 2025. This simply means that we are entering a never-experienced age of continuous change and transformation that no one can manage or predict what it will bring tomorrow.

In concluding this chapter, it is important to reiterate that each stage of development represents a unique civilization with its particular society, economy, and culture. Since each civilization comes after a difficult transitional period, every transitional period, viewed from a wide angle, represents a historical discontinuity that causes the history of the passing era to come to an end. As one history ends, its logic becomes irrelevant, and the wisdom of the past becomes of little or no value to people of the new age. Transitional periods are battlegrounds where war is waged between old and new values and ideas, between forces of stability and continuity, and others of innovation and change. Such periods are workshops for destructive creativity, where creativity is a tool of destruction and destruction is a condition for further creativity. As the third decade of the twenty-first century begins, almost all nations of the world seem to be, as Matthew Arnold once remarked, “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other unable to be born.”⁷

In the tribal age, the tribe represented the unit of society and the entire society, in fact until the eighteenth century; no tribe recognized a state or respected political borders. In the agricultural age, the tribe could not survive because the need for it disappeared, causing the clan or the extended family to take its place. Due to the appearance of the state, the clan became the unit of the agricultural society. In the industrial age, the clan had to disappear because there was no place for it or need for its services; it was replaced by the nucleus family. As the knowledge age advances, it becomes clear that the individual is fast becoming the unit of the new age, replacing the family of the industrial age which replaced the clan of the agricultural age which replaced the tribe of the tribal age.

FormalPara Notes

• 1. Mohamed Rabie, Global Economic and Cultural Transformation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 21–42.

• 2. Ibid, p 11.

• 3. Jared Diamond, Gun, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, W.W. Norton, 1999, 92.

• 4. Jack Weatherford, Savages and Civilization, 49.

• 5. Charles Van Doren, A History of Knowledge, 1991, 263.

• 6. Joel Rogers and Ruy Teixeira, “America’s Forgotten Majority,” The Atlantic, June 2000, 69.

• 7. Lenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State, 1994, 10.