Some ancient wisdom for modern society

The online magazine Vice is terribly excited by some archaeological news:

The Secret to This Ancient City’s Success Was Collectivism, Study Says

Well, there are collectivisms and collectivisms:

Archaeologists Linda Nicholas and Gary Feinman suggest that the secret of Monte Albán’s success and longevity was a collectivist governing approach and relatively low levels of social inequality, an argument that is supported by multiple lines of evidence from its ruins, according to a study published on Tuesday in Frontiers in Political Science. In this way, Monte Albán rose to power with a “bottom-up” political structure, in contrast to its more autocratic contemporaries, which makes it a useful case study, even for modern societies.

Well, OK, we’re listening:

“When we say this was a relatively collective governance, we're not saying this was utopian or entirely egalitarian, and everyone was equal in a commune,” he noted. “There were clearly people who were somewhat better off than others and there were clearly people who were office holders or leaders or coordinators even from the outset, because he could not you could not have that many people making a decision without some kind of leadership. But our view is that the power was not concentrated in one individual or even one family; it was more what we would call distributed power.”

OK

“We know, based on this dense settlement pattern, that these adjacent households were like a neighborhood where they were mutually interdependent,” Feinman said. “We also know from excavations of those households that they were economically interdependent, because different households tended to engage in different craft activities.”

“There must have been some economic interdependence that bound together the houses at Monte Albán, and even houses in the region around Monte Albán, because the city may have had a hard time feeding itself in very dry agricultural years, which are not that rare in the Valley of Oaxaca,” he continued. “Whether you look at the bottom up or the top down, the picture on governance suggests that it was relatively cooperative and collective.”

These days we call that the division and specialisation of labour and trade in the resultant higher production. It’s the pin factory all over again, with that basic human economic unit, the household, as the economic and market participant.

So, what is being said is that an economy based on mutual interdependence, that itself being the result of the division and specialisation of labour, the trade that follows it, leads to a flatter power structure and a more egalitarian society? As opposed to the more authoritarian type of society where an aristocracy or clerisy tells everyone what to do?

Hunh. Colour us surprised there.

The lesson for our modern society of course being obvious. Get rid of the clerisy telling us what sort of houses we may live in, where, the size of our gardens, how we may heat them, cook in them, and we’ll be freer, that’s obvious. But more of just this voluntary cooperation, rather than enforced, also produces a more egalitarian society with a flatter power structure? Free markets produce a free society?

Who would have thought it? Well, everyone except that clerisy that rules us perhaps although perhaps they do know and just don’t want to give up that power, eh? After all, what’s the point of being High Priest of a religion that no one cares about any more?