FREE ESSAY ON PREMODERN TO POST MODERN SOCIETY

PREMODERN TO POST MODERN SOCIETY

Western liberal scholars have divided human history into three phases: the premodern, the
modern and the post modern. Each phase has no definite end, rather they layer on top of
each. For example, a thoroughly post modern society has elements of premodern and modern
in it. There is no one exact time when the premodern ended and the modern began: each
society reached them differently. Western Europe entered the modern era in the sixteen
hundreds while the rest of the world was still premodern. Even now, most industrialized
countries are post modern, yet most of the Third World is modern or even premodern. 
The premodern phase spans a huge amount of time, from prehistory until the rise of modern
institutions. The premodern can further be divided into two periods, before and after
settled agriculture. Before a society adopts settled agriculture, they live of the land,
hunting and gathering. The political organization of such groups is roughly like a wolf
pack: there is a dominate leader figure (not necessarily male) that leads a more or less
egalitarian community. An excellent example of hunter-gatherers is the Kung bushmen of
the Kalahari dessert. The Kung live in small family groups in an extremely hostile
environment yet they have adapted. Since they do not cultivate plants for food there is
no point in owning a parcel of land. Each small tribe can support itself on it's
surrounding land with resources to spare. Private ownership of land is unherad of. Since
the technology of the Kung is rudimentary, everyone in the tribe has the same skills at
manufacturing as everyone else. If one member of the tribe wishes to make a loincloth, he
simply makes it himself, every member of the tribe can exactly this. There is no way to
differentiate status, everyone has exactly the same skills. The division of labor between
man and women is slight. Both take an active role in feeding the family; the man hunts
while the woman gathers. Women and men are treated equally.
Serious crime like murder or robbery are unheard of among the Kung. There is no reason to
steal when every product can be made easily with the resources at hand. The only thing
stealing would accomplish is isolation from the rest of the tribe. Also, there was very
little in the way to steal. The Kung live in tune with nature, they use only a few simple
tools such as digging sticks and spears. As the Kung all live in a close knit tribe
stealing from one another is like stealing from a close friend. There is no faceless
anonymity of the victim for the perpetrator. The thief knows and lives with the person
who he is stealing from. Even if one individual committed a minor offense among the Kung,
they themselves are not directly punished. Instead, there is a ritual to banish the demon
who enter the perpetrators body and willed him to misbehave. There is no forced
confinement or resentment.
Societies such as the Kung were very small. Each person must forage or hunt for their
food. To sustain a population of even a small amount of people the surrounding wilderness
must be big enough to continually regenerate itself in the following years. This did not
lead to a large population density as it takes large tracts of land to support people
without going barren. This is why hunter gatherer groups are so small; the land cannot
support many people in its present state. The Kung continue to survive by adapting to the
land, instead of adapting the land to better suit their needs. If it suited them and they
had the technology, the Kung could plow fields and build irrigation system to bring water
into the dessert. The cost of this is huge labor output, yet the benefit is increased
food production. With increased food production comes larger and larger populations. A
small population is not the only disadvantage of hunter gatherers. Science and technology
suffer in a tribal system such as the Kung. Gathering food and caring for children
occupied the entire time. There were no dedicated scholars or scientists. Only with food
surpluses reaped by settled agriculture could people devote their time solely to
research. The Kung could either have a small, intimate and egalitarian tribe or a large,
growing, technologically advanced settlement.
Settled agriculture first was implemented in the Fertile Crescent, a stretch of land
between the Tigris and Europhrates rivers. Agriculture changed many things. Communities
were forced to settle down and claim land. This is were the social classes formed. Since
each family must harvest enough crop to survive the winter, competition for land was
fierce. Land was snatched up as it was directly linked with survival. Land was also
wealth; a person who can raise enough food to support themselves could then barter the
excess at the market. The people who originally snatched up the land were rich, while
other had only enough land to get by. 
Agriculture changed the role women played in society. Before, both women and men had
taken part in the gathering of food. Agriculture was extremely labor intensive and was
considered a man's job. Women were pushed into the role of raising children and staying
at home while the men worked. This created a stigma against women that last until this
day.
Agriculture produced a huge excess. In hunter gathering societies, many square miles of
land was required to support one person while that same land could support a village if
the land was cultivated. Populations became urbanized. Some of the excess was used to
support specialists whose sole function was not to produce food. Specialists included
scribes, clerks, and metalworkers. People could not satisfy their needs with what they
reaped directly from the land so they bartered, with food, with specialists for goods and
services. Money was implemented to make the barter system more efficient. 
Another change from hunting and gathering to settle agriculture was the formalization of
leadership. Agriculture required a massive amount of infrastructure to support it. Roads
were needed to convey goods to market and irrigation canals were needed to bring water.
Such undertakings could not be done by single individuals or even entire families. The
entire community must band together and construct these public works. Thus arose a need
for individuals who would organize and plan the entire endeavor. These people allocated
resources and dictated how many hours each person contributed to the project. Eventually
these organizers' authority spread beyond public works and they became the first rulers.
Belief system became implemented into organized religion. One dominate cult gained the
favor of the rulers and was adopted as the state cult. The state cult would try to
explain everything with its own creation myth. It sought to make it deities all powerful.
If something was encountered that could not be explained by the state cult, it made the
cult that much less powerful. Scientific theories that challenge and run contrary to the
cult's creation myth are suppressed. The Catholic church of the middle ages condemned to
hell all people who went against the theory that God created the world, which was the
center of the universe. Copernicus and Galieo are two famous examples of people
excommunicated for their theories that threatened the church. Science suffered at the
hands of organized religion. Often, the ruler used organized religion to strengthen their
rule. An example of this is the Pharaoh of Egypt. The Pharaoh was recognized as a living
god on earth. Any act against the Pharaoh was considered both treason and heresy. This
doubly reinforced the rule of the Pharaoh.
The most common individual on the planet was the lowly peasant. They represented the
majority in the premodern era. The average peasant grew their own food and made a
miserable existence selling what little excess that remained. Most peasants lived in a
hut they themselves built. The average peasant family was huge as children were
considered assets. The more children a family had, the more hands they had to work the
fields. Also, children were expected to take care of their parents when the parents were
old and feeble. Thus, the more children a father and mother had, the more care they would
receive in their dotage. Class mobility was almost nonexistent for peasants. The only
hope for a better future was to buy an apprenticeship for the offspring. The apprentices
would then have a chance to become skilled craftsmen. Most peasants had almost exactly
the same skills. There was no formal education and thus no difference in skills. The only
way one peasant could out produce another peasant was to invest in machinery that
increased productivity. If a peasant should break the laws, he was put in the stockade or
beaten. The punishment for a crime was usually corporal.
Premodren societies were often extremely prejudice and ethnocentric towards other
societies. The Greeks, for example, believed that their society was the pinnacle of
civilization. Their successors, the Romans, shared these same beliefs. The Romans
refereed to anyone who was not Roman as barbarians. The Romans conquered vast stretches
of barbarian lands and brought Roman civilization to them. The Romans forced their way of
living onto the newly conquered people. The most notable example is when the Romans
conquered the Celtic tribes of northern Britain. The Romans slaughtered all the clerics
of the native religion, the druids, and converted the people forcibly to the Roman
pantheon of gods. Other competing religions were crushed. The Romans oppressed people
pagan, Christian and Jewish faith. All was done in the name of progress. The native
people were to stupid to become civilized by their own so the Roman took it upon
themselves to do it for them. Romans paved roads through the conquered lands, set up
Roman- style cities, and imposed beaurocracy on the native population. The result was the
native culture being reluctantly propelled into civilization. 
The beginnings of modern societies have roots in the Greek and Roman period. The first
beginnings of modern democracy were the ancient Greek republic. The beaurocracy that is
so prevalent in modern institutions began in Rome. It was only until the Renaissance, a
thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire classical Greek and Roman ideas were
rediscovered. Democracy was not instituted until the late eighteenth century in America
and France. Even this was not a true democracy as women and slaves could not vote. An
important part of these new democracies was the separation of church and state. Americans
and French, bitter at the Protestant and Catholic churches involvement in politics, made
the church powerless in matters of state. Gone was the state sponsored cult. No longer
could the religious persuasion of the ruling party be brought to bear against
nonbelievers. The church's diminishing power let new ideas flourish that would have been
thought heresy before. Science was no longer held back by the doctrines of organized
religion.
One hallmark of the modern age is rapid technological change. Science, free of religious
scrutiny, made leaps and bounds. Science was applied to everyday life to save time and
energy. All sectors of industry mechanized to increase output. Medicine made huge
advances, drastically cutting the infant death rate. Medical advances were responsible
for extending the average lifetime. Now there were more people surviving to adulthood and
living longer lives. Scientific theories made modern societies understand the universe
more.
In the modern age, the focus is on consumption. The average person rents their talents
out to an employer in exchange for income. The consumer exchanges this income for goods
and services. The consumer is completely dependent on the market for his/her basic needs.
Compare this to the premodern peasant, who was basically self-sufficient in food
production and shelter. Thus, people living in modern societies are more specialized;
they get paid for their skills and buy all other goods and services. The price of this
specialization is greater efficiency yet at the price of being dependent on the
producer.
With mechanization brought on by rapid technical advance, relatively few workers could
produce huge excesses. Now longer would huge sectors of the population be required to
work in food production. With fertilizers, machinery, hybrid plants and pesticides less
than five percent of the population could feed the society. This freed workers for the
growing manufacturing and service sectors. The manufacturing sector increased its output
to meet the need of the growing population. The market economy absorbed this new output,
setting the lowest possible price for the best possible product. However, the economy was
more and more driven by the pursuit of profit. Whoever owned the means of production,
land and machinery, got rich while others were forced to rent themselves out as workers.
The first capitalists worked their employees as much as they wanted to. The capitalists
had all the cards; the workers were desperate for money to spend in the new market driven
economy. The result was the capitalists growing incredibly rich while the workers lived
below poverty line. This rich-poor gap became one of the main argument in the modern age.

Changes in the social institutions marked the modern age. Democracy made all people
equal, in theory. The United States of America instituted a revolutionary program of
mandatory education in the mid-ninetenth century. Education, once reserved for the upper
class, now was universal. Almost everyone could read and write. Ideas of the great
thinkers of the ages were open to the most humble. In theory, the poorest immigrant child
could educate themselves and become rich, filling a niche in the new capitalist market. 
While the birth rate climbed by the beginning of the modern age, it eventually began to
decline. Children were now though of as an economic burden rather than free labor. Each
child required more money spent for clothes, food and education. The size of the family
declined rapidly. The older generation were moved out into retirement homes after they
could not work. The family consisted of just the parents and children. 
Despite the modern age's advances, it had many critics. Karl Marx is on of the most
famous. He directly confronted the capitalist market economy as exploitive. Marx believed
that while it was human nature to work, it must be for a higher goal that simply to fuel
consumption. One of Marx's contemporaries was Emile Durkheim. It was Durkheim who first
coined the word anomie. Anomie is used to describe the feeling of disenchantment with the
modern world. Traditional belief systems, such as the Catholic church, of the past
provided a meaning to life. However, modern society has largely discredited most tenets
of organized religion. People no longer can easily answer what the meaning of life is.
Life in a modern society has become increasingly shallow. Religion has been replaced by
consumerism and greed as the sole purpose of living. Disgust with the capitalist market
economy gave rise to an alternative: socialism.
Socialism was a social experiment that started in Imperial Tsarist Russia. The
Bolsheviks, guided by Marx's works, seized the power from the Russian provisional
government after the collapse of the Imperial monarchy. They instituted the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, a huge socialist empire in the early twentieth century. The
doctrine of the Soviet Union was to supply each citizen with a job, free health care, and
a social safety net. Machinery and land was all owned by the state, so workers were all
employees of the government. Each worker in a field was paid exactly the same as the
other workers. The state provided for everything. However, the Soviet Union was
fanatically protective of its borders, having been invaded three times in one hundred
fifty years. The Soviet Unions spent roughly fifteen percent of their output on the
military while other sector of the economy were neglected. The Red Army of the Soviets
was numerically superior to any force that the Western Europe and the United States could
raise. The only thing that kept the balance was that modern, mechanized, nuclear war
would mutually destroy both sides. Each side had enough firepower to destroy the Earth
twelve times over. The benefits of winning a war was off set by the disadvantage of
waging the war. The world was chose which side to affiliate to, while being poised for
thermonuclear war.
The post modern period began on an exact year: 1992. In 1992, the Soviet Union crumbled
from internal and external pressure. Western capitalism had proved more effective than
Soviet style socialism. Huge sectors of the globe were opened to trade that had
previously been denied by ideological differences. Eastern Europe, parts of Africa and
Asia, and Russia were all opened to western corporations. Companies rushed in to exploit
the mineral wealth of the fallen Soviet empire. Quicker to exploit were the vast three
hundred fifty million people living in Eastern Europe and Russia. Decades of shortages
from an inefficient state run economy made the people hungry for material things.
In Western societies, manufacturing jobs move overseas, while the service sector grows.
It is far cheaper to make something in a developing country that to produce it at home.
America , for example, is the most technologically advanced society in the world. It has
put a man on the moon and to the depth of the ocean, yet it does not produce a calculator
or a television domestically. America dominates in high tech industries such as software
design and biotechnology. As American workers become more and more involved in their
jobs, they have little time for other things. They must pay people to change their oil,
upgrade their computer or paint their house. Thus the service sector has increased. The
post modern is also referred to as the post industrial age due to the decline of
manufacturing.
Ideology in the post modern is irrelevant. China, the last bastion of socialism, is one
of the United States' greatest trading partner. In theory, they should mutually hate each
other, yet there is to much money to be had. Western companies see the one billion people
in China as a huge market ready to be exploited. Chinese workers can turn out products at
a lower cost than their American counterparts. The ideology is less important than the
money.
The Internet is a huge part of the post modern world. Using the Internet, everyone can
access the aggregate sum of knowledge that is stockpiled on the Internet. It is fairly
cheap, yet it crosses borders. The Internet is a medium for the free exchange of ideas.
It can reach every corner of the globe. Villages in Siberia that are inaccessible by cars
can set up a satellite link and be connected just as well as a user in New York. 
Worldwide trade and the Internet are killing the unique cultures that exits on Earth.
Just as China trades with its ideological enemy, other cultures are shedding their
uniqueness in the name of easier communication. Cultural idiosyncrasies hinder trade.
Traditional folk dress look peculiar among business suits. For example, the traditional
drink of Russia was kvass, a dark bread beer. After the Soviet Union and the
normalization of trade, Coke and Pepsi was introduced by Western business. Now, it is
impossible to buy kvass in Moscow, as it was displaced by the distribution muscle of Coke
and Pepsi. Children also are the weak link to keeping cultural tradition alive. The
traditional folk customs are associated with the parents and the children strive to break
away from this tradition. Given forty years time, the entire world will look exactly the
same; one can travel from the US to the most remote location possible and it will be
impossible to tell the difference once one got there.
An excellent example of post modern society is Los Angeles. LA is a superficial
hyper-comsuer culture. Each individual has the notion that they are the center of the
universe. Everyone is a manipulative user who only cares about themselves. Each person
strives for material wealth at the expense of each other. People are defined by the
cloths that they wear. If one wears Ralph Laren, the people that he/she meets will check
the label to make sure it is real. Appearance is everything. Los Angeles is the cosmetic
surgery capital of the world. Many of the women have had breast implants, and even some
of the men have surgically improved their features. Breast implants actually deaden the
sensation of the breast, so they actually decrease sexual pleasure in the user. However
people continue to get implants, sacrificing sensation for improved appearance.
The post modern is by no means the final stage of human development. Hopefully, humans
will move past the greed of material possessions. Eventually, a balance will be found
between ethnic identity and global monoculture. Rampant consumerism comes at a high
price. The material wealth that America enjoys is at the cost of a huge amount of
resources. If other countries try to join in on the prosperity, severe damage to the
ecology could result. Imagine one billion Chinese, all driving cars. The world can only
support a certain amount of people at the prosperity of Americans. The continual
expansion of the world economy at the end of the twentieth century is pushing all nations
to wealth yet there is no way for all to enjoy such prosperity, something must give.