I have been watching a series on the History Channel called The Barbarians. This subject gets very little play in our education system other than the name, so I was interested in having the tribes named and a short history of their exploits. There is a prejudice regarding them that characterizes them as dirty, violent, and generally uncivilized. This is apparently an inheritance from Rome. Many of these tribes attacked Rome and the prejudice is their opinion of the nature of these tribes as compared to them. The names of the tribes I have seen covered in this series are the Visigoths, the Saxons, the Vandals, the Huns, and the Mongols. In the middle of this series was an episode describing Chinese invented war making technology.

As those who have read my writing before know, I divide modern humanity into two groups, those who traditionally have worshipped the sun or masculinists and those who revere the Earth, feminists. As a result of thinking about humanity from this perspective I have settled on three attributes I associate with the masculine as a general concept not to be confused with individuals. These attributes are aggression, creativity, and order. In my view the general concept feminine is in all respects opposite to masculine.

Because of this definition I am inclined to the view that masculine cultures can be expected to be more aggressive and creative and that accounts for the development of civilization. I have had some trouble making a convincing argument for this perspective. Some consider it to be ethnocentric.

The History Channel made some interesting points in this regard. The barbarian tribes made their greatest gains when controlled by a brilliant leader but fractured into unfriendly groups when that leader died. This was especially noticeable with Attila, Genghis Khan and others which leads to questions regarding why this period ended.

The rise of civilization seems to have three main periods: the transition from hunter/gatherers to farmers which leads to a tribal conflict intensive stage and then to the modern nation state. The period of interest here is the transition from warring tribes to a nation state. Some generalizations about this transition are evident. Farming has become the main activity of working people and they generally produce more than is needed making possible a leisure class. The idea of taxation arises to fund infrastructure and the ruling class and this results in rulers wishing to tax neighboring tribes and therefor the need to establish ruling hierarchies. This is the warring tribes phase.

I would contend that the problem needing solution during this phase is a way to establish a leadership that survives the death of individuals. The first solution to this problem is the establishment of favored bloodlines but this isn’t effective due to the varying qualities of the rulers. What is needed is a god who is represented by the ruler. This has two obvious advantages if the god is generally accepted by the tribe. First, he is immortal and therefor the tribe loses its identification with the current ruler. Second, rules of life within the community can be recognized as coming from him. Thus the transition from one ruler to another is more secure and the subscribers to the religion and its rules are less likely to have conflicts.

Looking back over western history confirms this. The Babylonians didn’t have a well developed religion and didn’t get beyond tribal warfare. The Egyptians had a well developed religion and were able to create a nation state based on it. The Greeks and Romans did the same. The Barbarian cultures were never able to survive their king.

The next step arose when a religion and god arose that was monotheistic and could command the allegiance of a region, as happened with Europe and Christianity or the Middle East and Islam.

H/G -> Farming, over production, population increase, need for organization, king -> taxation, dominant king, tribal conflict -> succession problem -> royal endorsement of religion

China was as inventive as Europe until the advent of precision engineering or the invention of the steam engine, at which point they fell rapidly behind. China imported the main features of civilization with the exception of the Sun God. The Sun God allowed the transition to a centralized government able to transition from ruler to ruler. Only with the importation of communist ideology was China able to submit to a central government. Korea and Japan also had to adopt western philosophy to succeed in the transition to a nation state.

The reason for this is submission to a monotheistic god. This allows for the imposition of an orderly society, all accepting this god’s values as their own. His values are those of masculinity: aggression (most clear in the Biblical story of the entry of the Jews into Palestine), creativity (Moses invention of Judaism), and order (Ten Commandments). The lack of this ordering principle in the east caused a faltering of technology once it became a multi person enterprise rather than the result of individual innovation.

This leads to the conclusion that civilization is the gift of the masculine god and one wonders if it first appeared in Babylon and Egypt. It may have been brought to the middle east by the Zoroastrians, who consider themselves to be Aryans and perhaps the people who invaded India with their Brahman ideology. This leads to the question regarding where they got it. According to their mythology, they migrated to Persia from the far north.