Human ignorance, then, is grounded
in the temporal, intellectual, and spiritual infancy of humankind.
Once civilizations became a
reality of human existence, society featured social stratification in which
elite groups of governors, militarists, and scribes used their high positions
in the hierarchy to wield authoritarian power.
They also used this power to
subject those lower in the hierarchy to economic exploitation.
During the years 4,000 BCE through
the early centuries of the Common Era leading to approximately 500 CE, economic
exploitation was frequently of the governmentally direct sort, through heavy
taxation and other extractive devices. Pharoahs,
emperors, and monarchs heavily taxed the majority agrarian population and also
levied taxes on urbanities of the craft and mercantile classes, and on traders
operating across land and sea. Forms of
feudalism did exist during the millennia preceding the Common Era and the first
centuries of the latter, whereby favored elites were given land that bore tax
obligations that were passed on to peasants who labored on the land; sometimes these remained taxes in the formal
sense, while in other cases they took the form of rents, shares of the crop
perceived to be due to the aristocratic lord as owner of the fields. Either way, the peasant paid heavily and the
aristocratic classes, including the top aristocrat, the emperor or monarch,
extracted bountifully.
During the medieval era of Europe of
500-1500 CE, the feudal type of economic exploitation became more
dominant. Monarchs of this era were
typically just the top aristocrats to whom other aristocrats pledged military
service and economic sustenance.
Peasants in what we today know as France and Germany were serfs,
generally secure on the land but bound to it, without the option of moving to
another place or serving another lord;
this sort of economic arrangement was also witnessed in other realms
throughout continental Europe and the British Isles. As Russia became a more developed political
entity under Ivan III and Ivan IV during the 14th century and 15th
centuries, serfdom became common; under
the Romanovs, from the 16th century forward, serfdom became a
fixture of Russian society and persisted longer than anywhere else in Europe
(remembering that the political fulcrum in Russia has been west of the Ural
Mountains and thus in European Russia, whereas the much greater portion of
Russian territory lies in Asia).
The peculiar economic arrangement
of serfdom was not the common form of peasant exploitation across the globe
from 500 CE forward, but the broader defining elements of aristocracy had many
parallels. The Chinese empires of Sui,
Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing commanded great centralized resources but
frequently depended on local landowning gentry to take their cut via high rents
and then pass a suitable amount on to the central government. An interesting variant of the
feudal style prevailed in Japan
during the blend of imperial and shogunate governments of the Ashikaga (14th
through 16th century) and Tokugawa (early 17th century
through mid-19th century) periods.
The Toltecs, Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas in Mesoamerica and South America
featured systems of hierarchical elites who controlled great expanses of land
worked by peasant masses and forwarded generous portions of wealth extracted
from the agrarian laborers to those living in imperial style in Tenochtitlan,
Cuzco, and the like. And this feudal
mode of ascending economic obligation existed, too, in the great Ghana, Mali,
and Songhai empires of West Africa.
Not until the 19th
century, in the nation-states of Europe, did the aristocratic pattern with many
of the general features of feudalism undergo significant change. Technological innovation and machine
invention of the Industrial Revolution, the growth of the mercantile and
trading classes, and the factory system induced and produced those economic
arrangements that define capitalism.
Aristocrats hung on stubbornly but the owners and managers of the
bourgeoisie accumulated the greatest fortures;
and even as agriculture and peasant labor continued to dominate most
economies, the greatest fortunes were made in the cities by exploiting the
working, proletarian masses who toiled in urban factories.
This arrangement continues to
dominate in many nations across the globe in the 21st century, but
in especially the United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Canada,
and the nations of western Europe, plutocrats are the new aristocrats, building
their fortunes by exploiting the labor of free contractors and specialists as
well as the conventional working classes, escaping taxation on much of the
wealth that they amass, and leaving the greater share of taxes to the various
gradations of the middle class. The
economic measure known as the gini coefficient places the economic distance of
the wealthiest and the poorest as shorter in Taiwan and Japan by comparison
especially with the distance that abides in the United States. But the highly technological capitalist
economy as a new form evidences ever more ingenious forms of economic
exploitation and dominance by economic elites.
Spiritual and ethical matters
count little in the schemes of existence that dominate life in the most
advanced economies of the early 21st century. Older forms of economic exploitation prevail
in the many other quarters of the globe.
At this juncture in human infancy,
humanity has been ingenious in developing ever more powerful forms of military,
governmental, and economic exploitation but woefully ignorant as to the
psychological underpinnings of human behavior and unimaginative in
contemplating more satisfying ethical and spiritual lives.
Again, the hope is that women and
the formerly dispossessed who surged forward during the 1964-1973 period and
are in the year 2019 asserting power vigorously will be less psychologically
ignorant and more ethically and spiritually advanced than the white male who
formerly dominated military, political, economic, and institutional life during
the earlier phases of human infancy.
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