Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley

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СКАЧАТЬ had been even earlier species of genus homo, some of whom developed the use of tools and fire, and the oldest of which may have first appeared some 2 or 3 million years ago. The homo sapiens brain, however, was twice as large as that of the earliest hominin species, and what set it apart was a process characterised by Harari (2011) as a ‘Cognitive Revolution’, which began to unfold somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago as our species, in small foraging bands, began to colonise pockets of the world, hunting with bows and arrows and sometimes, for example, travelling in boats. While doing so, they began to evolve more elaborate forms of language and communication, and to develop artistic and symbolic modes of representation. Importantly, it appears that the small, generally nomadic hunter-gatherer communities in which they lived were able adaptively to develop methods of social cooperation well in advance of those of other species (Dunbar & Shultz, 2007; Sahlins, 1974; and see Wilkinson & Pickett, 2018).

      Some 12,000 years ago, the Cognitive Revolution was followed by the beginnings of an Agricultural Revolution. Human beings started in some parts of the world to settle and cultivate the land; to domesticate both plants and animals. The sedentary societies that emerged began to generate increasingly sophisticated technologies, including eventually the use of metals. And by the time recorded history began some 4–5,000 years ago, some human societies in certain parts of the world had expanded in size, establishing various forms of government, religion and formalised ‘civilisations’ (Elias, 1978). Such societies became possible, in part because productive technologies made it practicable to feed, shelter and clothe larger groups of people, but also because shared (or sometimes imposed) systems of belief and understanding made it possible to coordinate such processes. The medium of language had made it possible to classify and name, to communicate about and plan access to the palpable or concrete things that people needed for survival. But it also made it possible for human beings to unify themselves around imaginary or abstract things; to create and share legends and myths; to invent and promote shared beliefs in spirits and gods; to define and agree cultural practices, customs, rules and laws. Whereas the elaborately evolved behaviours and habits of their primate ancestors were driven primarily by genetically instituted instincts, homo sapiens had generated and internalised intersubjective understandings of their world, so constructing what might be regarded as ‘artificial instincts’ (Harari, 2011: 181). As this process accelerated, human beings found new ways to exchange information and produce and exchange the goods they needed. Language could be expressed through written script. Produce could be traded with people from beyond the immediate group or community that produced it, not by barter, but using money; a medium of exchange requiring a shared conceptualisation of comparative value symbolised through tokens or coinage.

      To what extent did these changes constitute human progress? Partial insights into the prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies of the early Stone Age can be obtained from anthropological studies of surviving aboriginal, indigenous and nomadic tribal peoples, findings from which suggest that the daily existence of prehistoric foragers may have been frugal by contemporary standards, but their ‘wants were scarce and [their] means (in relation) plentiful’ (Sahlins, 1974: 13). Theirs, perhaps, was the original ‘Affluent Society’, in which rules and rights of exchange were governed, it has been suggested, by ‘The Spirit of the Gift’. Though we should not romanticise the quality of life of prehistoric foragers, the evidence suggests that in supposedly more ‘developed’ agricultural societies, by contrast, most people had to work longer and harder than the foragers in order to achieve their means of subsistence, their diets were less varied and less nourishing, and their livelihoods were not necessarily any more secure. Certainly, the societies that emerged were more hierarchical. Ruling elites could enslave, exploit or oppress parts of the populations over which they ruled. Kingdoms and empires sought to expand or compete for domination across ever greater portions of the global human population. Whereas human beings had once existed in small self-sufficient groups, largely isolated from each other, they evolved into a species that was on the one hand uniquely interconnected through language and trade, yet on the other divided by conflicting religious beliefs and/or territorial allegiances and by socially constructed relations of class, caste or ‘race’.¹

      As human civilisations of various shapes and sizes evolved, so did human cognition and culturally distinctive but systematic forms of inquiry, learning and reflection as to the nature of the world and the place of our species within it. Classical ‘Western’ philosophy and science evolved in Europe during the Greco-Roman era (from around two and a half to one and a half thousand years ago), while a more eclectic range of parallel and intersecting ‘Eastern’ philosophical traditions developed across different parts of Asia (for example, Flew, 1989; Harrison, 2013). Significant advances in science and mathematics were made in the Middle East during the Islamic ‘Golden Age’ (between the 8th and the 14th centuries ce). And back in Europe, between the 14th and the middle of the 17th centuries ce, there was a ‘Renaissance’ of scholarly interest in classical philosophical thinking. From this there emerged in the late 17th and 18th centuries ce a hegemonic intellectual movement: the so-called European ‘Enlightenment’. This movement was associated not only with rapid shifts in political thinking and scientific discovery, but also the invention of an international world order premised on the idea of the sovereign nation state. It paved the way for the birth of ‘modern’ capitalism and, in the 19th century ce, the Industrial Revolution (Hobsbawm, 1962): a revolution that entailed an explosion of new technologies, that afforded global economic and cultural dominance to the nations at its forefront; and which heralded an era of rapid, but uneven, economic development. The concept of economic development has been synonymous with the process of capitalist industrialisation and the creation of unequally distributed wealth (Picketty, 2013), for which the sine qua non is continual growth in the human production of goods and services. Human beings have now established a global market system, driven by finance capital and facilitated by new information technologies, albeit that there are stark contrasts in living standards and the extent to which human needs may be met in different parts of the world (see Chapter 7).

      To what extent, therefore, is inexorable economic growth good for humanity? Is it perhaps inimical to human needs (Gough, 2018)? The total human population on planet Earth some 2,000 years ago would probably have been no more than 0.03 billion, though by the 1800s ce it would have expanded to around 1 billion. But then in just 200 years it rocketed to around 7 billion and is projected to rise to somewhere between 10 and 13 billion by 2100 ce (Bacci, 2012; United Nations Population Division (UNPD), 2017). It is in the context of historical development that matters of social policy and social development come into focus. The dramatic increase has resulted from effects associated with industrialisation, medical and technological advances, increased longevity and rising living standards. It may in time be tempered by declining fertility, but the demands the human population is already placing on the Earth’s natural resources and the environmental degradation, pollution and fundamental changes to the planet’s climate associated with human activity can’t be sustainable without policy intervention (Brundtland, 1987; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2018). We may already have entered a new era, the Anthropocene era, in which the Earth’s geology and eco-systems have been fundamentally altered by the human species (see http://www.anthropocene.info/).

      The immanent imperative СКАЧАТЬ