In the previous post I started discussing the technology tree in the Civilization games from the point of view of an archaeologist. In this post I want to point out that the Civilization tech tree is basically Marxist. Yes, you heard me right. And no, I don’t really consider this a pejorative – and not because I carry a warm and fuzzy for Marx. It gets lost in the 20th century politics surrounding communism and socialism, but Marx has been very influential to the popular and scholarly understanding of the development of “civilization.” His thoughts are strikingly echoed in the Meier’s tech tree that almost all strategy gamers take for granted. The why of this makes for a good story, so gather ’round.
The Dark Marx
Marx of course is famous for being the political theorist who wrote the Communist Manifesto way back in 1848. At the heart of his philosophy is a sense that the story of history is a story of evolution through a series of stages. He is most famous for predicting that the next stage of development would be communism, but aside from that he was one of the first historians to tackle the telling of world history in a broad and comprehensive way from the dawn of man to the present. He and his contemporaries were limited, in retrospect, for not having much information to work with about the ancient past or the variation in world culture. All they had were a handful of antiquarian sources, the Bible, some travellers reports from across the globe, and the bare beginnings of archaeology.
What is important for our tale is that in Marx’s view of history (1) the economy (and the way the economy is organized) is the central engine of change and (2) human societies are assumed to go through regular stages of development. Both of these aspects of history were discussed most clearly by Frederich Engels, who was Robin to Marx’s Batman. In 1884, working from notes Marx left behind, Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Among other things this book presented an orderly progression of culture through set stages called Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization. Each of these can be distinguished from each other by a series of technological developments. You can read an excerpt of these stages online, and here you can see something really, really similar in design to the Civ tech tree.
Engels and Marx actually relied a great deal on the earlier work of the American Louis Henry Morgan. In 1877 Morgan had published the book Ancient Society which provided one of the first accounts of human history that used this idea of evolution. Morgan, even more than Engels and Marx, saw a connection between technological development and social development. Here you can read Morgan’s take on Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization and see how much their definition is intertwined with the notion of technological progress. For example
Boy Wonder Engles
In like manner, the great period of barbarism was signalized by four events of pre-eminent importance: namely, the domestication of animals, the discovery of the cereals, the use of stone in architecture, and the invention of the process of smelting iron ore.
It is important to realize that this story of history is not inevitable. Marx, Engels, and Morgan had so little information to work with that they could have constructed many different narratives to fit the facts. They simply assumed that all societies underwent regular, orderly, predictable, and universal stages of development and they saw technological change as central to these transformations. Of course they were not the only ones at the time writing big historical treatises. Some of these others are still influential today, such as some European attempts to make sense of the first archaeological artifacts being found which gave rise to the system of dividing European prehistory into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc. Most of the other contemporaries writing big histories s were doing so from a Biblical point-of-view and from antiquarian sources and have little influence on modern thinking.
Not all scholars of history have been advocates of the evolutionary approach. Those that disagree say there is no such thing as a universal set of stages and each society has to be studied on its own. These scholars advocate “particularism.” In my own field of anthropology in the U.S. the grandfather of this position is Franz Boas who explicitly rejected the evolutionary schemes of Marx, Engels, and Morgan.
So how did the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Morgan win out over the alternatives and end up being embodied in Meier’s Civ tech tree? Well, influential archaeologists of the early 20th century like V. Gordon Childe were explicitly influenced by Marx, Engels, and Morgan and wrote the big, sweeping books of prehistory that influenced 20th century textbook writers and the 20th century popular imagination in the English speaking world. Further, anthropologists in the U.S. in the 1950’s and 1960’s re-embraced a new form of cultural evolution that was rooted in Marx, Engels, and Morgan. Archaeologists in the 1970’s and 1980’s took up these concepts at just the time that the tech trees of the original board games were written that eventually influenced Meier.
In the next post I will talk about how and why archaeologists think about prehistory a little differently now and why we hate the term ‘civilization.’