World History and Civilization 6: The Beginning of the Tech Tree

Hello everyone, I am a math teacher who was forced into business, a first-class chef of poisonous chicken soup, a gravedigger of young mentors, a wallfacer of Internacional, and the remaining one of the remaining ones.

Civilization 6 is a game that has swept the world with its grand architecture and rich playability, and when I play it, I can't help but wonder: how much does this game simulate real civilization?

Or maybe we should ask: Is civilization 6 a good game, or is civilization's arena inherently fascinating?

The beginning of the tech tree

One

What was the starting point of civilization? Is it writing, wheels, or bronzes? The answer given by Civilization 6 is the following three juxtaposed technologies: pottery, animal husbandry, and mining.

Why these three technologies? We might as well focus on the earlier human race.

The first important node of human beings is the transformation of animals into humans.

Humans evolved into "people" during the Paleolithic Age by learning how to speak, make tools, and use fire. These abilities made them far superior to the other animals around them, but in another fundamental respect they were still very similar to other animals: they still lived by hunting prey like the beasts that preyed on other animals, and they still made a living by gathering food like countless creatures who were completely dependent on the handouts of nature. And because human beings were dependent on nature at that time, they were also dominated by nature. In order to hunt animals, find wild fruits or fishing and hunting grounds, they have to live a mobile life on a regular basis; And because the food available in a place is also limited, they have to act in small groups. 【1】

The second important node of humanity is the agricultural revolution.

The Agricultural Revolution allowed human beings to transform nature according to their own will, and human beings changed from food collectors to food producers, greatly reducing the degree of relying on the sky to eat.

Most or all of their food sources are obtained by cultivating plants and animals, rather than by hunting or gathering.

A new world was also revealed to them – they bid farewell to the Paleolithic age and crossed the Neolithic age. 【2】

The transformation of humans from collectors to producers has gone through a long period of time, and the Paleolithic Age (that is, the era of human beings as collectors) began 3 million years ago and continued to about 10,000 years ago. The big reason for forcing them to make a shift is demographic pressure.

Paleolithic humans did not normally live a life of starvation, and they never allowed their population to grow beyond what their food sources allowed. As a nomadic group, they are often in the process of migration, so they cannot form a thriving family. Since there are no animals to provide milk, mothers can only feed each child with their own breast milk. Since mothers cannot breastfeed two children at the same time or move them from camp to camp at the same time, when a child is born soon after birth, the mother usually lets the child born later die. However, in general, mothers can avoid this kind of infanticide tragedy, because breastfeeding inhibits ovulation, so they generally do not get pregnant during the years of feeding a child. If this natural form of family planning fails, our ancestors will reduce their population by killing newborn babies, abortions, and stopping breastfeeding to survive the months of the year when food is scarce. In this way, the hunter-gatherer society is able to comfortably live thousands of years in a state of balance between supply and demand without producing a driving force for radical change. 【3】

But tens of thousands of years ago, along with migration, humans have inhabited continents other than Antarctica. As the population grew slowly but continuously, primitive people who made a living from hunting had to supplement the lack of food they collected with the food they grew themselves. Because in terms of the population that can feed every square mile, agriculture far exceeds food gathering.

Thus the new way of life of settlement arose. Humans have had to do this in order to take care of the newly domesticated plants and animals. Neolithic villages also replaced the Wandering Groups of the Paleolithic Age as the most basic economic and cultural units of mankind.

Humans during the Neolithic period (10,000 to 4,000 years ago) were already able to make tools to distinguish themselves from animals; Agriculture was developed to make itself a food producer rather than a gatherer. They are just one step away from what we call "civilization.".

What's missing?

Let's first look at human life in primitive tribal villages:

A Western observer recorded in September 1933 the work of the people of the Baimba tribe living in Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia).

On September 1, 1933, two gourd beers were prepared, one of which was for the elderly and the other for the young. Someone had a child. Women from other villages also came to congratulate and stayed in the village for two or three days. During this period, the women's work of growing vegetables was postponed.

On September 2, the old man went out to clean up the bushes. Young people stay home and drink leftover, slightly sour beer. More women from neighboring villages came to see newborn children. Very few women go out to serve the vegetable patch.

On September 3, young men and women went to neighboring villages to participate by one. A visiting church doctor presided over a religious event. No one grows vegetables.

On September 6, the older and younger men started work at 6:30 a.m. and worked until 2 p.m. In the evening, the elderly and the young people each drink a gourd beer. The women do the work of growing vegetables as usual.

On September 7, the observer's hunting group killed a buck. The men were responsible for getting the venison back. The women grind excess flour and eat it with venison. Two gourd beers were prepared again, and people began drinking from two o'clock in the afternoon. By 4 o'clock, the young men began to shake around the village drunk, making trouble everywhere, and finally quarreling. Dancing in the evening. The elderly women were also elated, while their daughters accused them of rude dancing in the village square. There was not enough beer for the younger women, who remained sober and complained about the misdeeds of others. Except for the old man's farm work, the work of the others was not completed.

On September 8, at 8 a.m., everyone was in a high mood and went to work. At 12 noon, people returned home. The young man sat in the hut, drank leftover beer for two hours, and sang hymns in the holophone of Scottish missionaryism. The young girl went out and engaged in a little poisonous fish campaign, but Caught nothing.

On September 15, three men reclaimed a dry season vegetable field by the river. The little boy is learning to trap birds. The young women had all gone to the capital and had not yet returned. No extra meals are available. No one makes decent meals.

September 17th, it was hot. Young men spend their days soaking in the house, combing each other's hair, shaving their faces, and catching lice from each other. No extra meals. The women were too tired to cook. 【4】

From the current point of view, these tribal villagers are all losers, making big messes, playing for three days a day, and not learning well. A little bit of food and drink is enough, and I don't work hard, I know how to play! Play all day long!

Of course, these villagers will also feel that modern people have some serious diseases: obviously enough to eat and drink enough to live, why are they still working so hard to produce? What's the fuss about? To whom do you earn it? Playing with life?

In short, primitive people have little surplus of labor, and they do not want to have it.

Two

Now that we're back at the beginning of the Civilization VI tech tree, and reading the bonuses of pottery, livestock, and mining, it's not hard to see why they qualify to rank ahead of the crowd.

Pottery: allows the construction of granaries to harvest farm resources;

Livestock: pastures and camps are allowed to be built to harvest cattle, sheep and deer;

Mining: Mines and quarries are allowed to be built, trees can be cut down and copper can be developed.

In short, pottery can store temporarily uneaten grain, livestock can keep livestock that are temporarily uneaten, and mining allows people to mine ore in large quantities, so that they can hoard temporarily unusable building materials and weapons raw materials.

These are all surpluses of labor!

The surplus of labour is the cornerstone of the formation of classes.

In fact, before the emergence of civilization, human beings had classes, but this class was not solid and did not have a scale.

The priest is responsible for appeasing people's hearts, for example, this year's drought is not rainy, some farmers feel that planting the field may not be able to receive grain, determined to rot and wait for death, the priest can say, I asked the rain god, the second half of the rainfall is stable and good, you hurry to plant the field well; The army provides violent machines, there is a way is "neighbors hoard grain I hoard guns, neighbors are my granary", there are always people who do not work well all day thinking about robbing other people's things, as long as there is an army, enter, can rob others, retreat, can defend themselves; Officials are responsible for public services, because some work is very necessary to do, but it is not a few households that can do a good job, such as building a, which requires courageous and capable people to organize everyone together - to concentrate on doing big things, then these leaders will naturally become officials.

Priests, armies, and officials could collectively be called the rentier class, who did not produce, and the people took out the surplus of their labor to feed them.

In the beginning, people have less surplus of labor, and even less surplus of labor can be allowed to be crossed. A peasant who grows his own land and eats it himself, sharpens his own gun for his own use, and whoever comes to grab the grain will come up to him and give him a guy, and this peasant is essentially the king of his own land. Therefore, at this time, the gap between the rentier class and the bottom laborers was not large, and the primitive tribes presented an equal social atmosphere.

As the productive forces become higher and higher, the population increases, and the surplus of labor ceded per capita becomes greater and stronger, the rentier class becomes stronger and weaker. At the same time, some people became rich first by hard work, or by deception, or by robbery, or by relying on ancestral military merits, while some people buried their heads in work but were still so poor, and the uneasy people's hearts were more, and the priestly contingent had to expand; The granaries have become more abundant than ever, the number of people guarding the granaries has increased accordingly, and the army has expanded; There is more grain, more people, more major things to do, and an expansion of the ranks of officials.

In any case, people have more surplus of labor, and it is not that they cannot afford to support them, but they must first suffer the people.

In this way, it is not difficult for us to understand why Dayu San passed through the door and did not enter.

So Kyushu Youtong, Si'ao juju, Jiushan Magazine Brigade, Jiuchuan Diyuan, Jiuze Jipi, and the four seas will meet. The six houses are very cultivated, the land is correct, and the prudent wealth is endowed, and the salty is endowed with three soils. The Chinese gave the earth surname: "Only Tai Dexian, not far from the fallen line." ”

Translation: At this time, Kyushu was unified, and all four realms could be inhabited, the mountains of Kyushu were rectified, the rivers in Kyushu had been dredged, embankments were built near the lakes of Kyushu, and princes from all over the world came to pay tribute. The materials of the six provinces were properly managed, and the land in each place could be correctly surveyed, and taxes were carefully levied according to the local conditions, all of which were collected according to different grades of soil. The central government gave the princes land and surnames: "Respect the central government and put morality first, and do not go against my consistent style." ”【5】

Dayu is not just about controlling water, he is playing a game of thrones (version 1.0): Dayu has completed a great public service project, has a large number of followers in the implementation process, and after success, shares with them huge benefits and power, forming a large and stable bureaucratic group headed by himself. So much so that after his death, the influence of this interest group did not diminish in the slightest, and the foreign family that succeeded Dayu, Yi, could not grasp the actual power at all, and had to give way to Yu's son Qi.

So China had its first dynasty.

What's so fun about Dayu going home? Can this be fun?

Therefore, after the formation of classes, we have what is called "civilization."

In Civilization 6, we direct the pioneers to sit in the city, let the warriors fight with the barbarians, and arrange for the people to work on the plots, just because we play the role of the top of the class.

The gifts of civilization have greatly enriched human materiality, so that people are no longer completely dominated by nature, but at the same time civilization brings the heaviest shackles:

Human beings have lost their composure to resign themselves to fate, farmers do not know whether they will starve to death next year, they will work hard and hoard grain this year, employees do not know whether they will be fired next month, so they work overtime and earn money, an antelope does not know whether it will be hunted tomorrow but can still play freely today.

More importantly, human beings elevate their internal competition to hellish mode, and if a person does not think of a way to rob others of their labor surpluses, they become slaves; When a slave is not willing to contribute his labor surplus, he will be marginalized and executed. If a group does not think of a way to rob others of their surplus labor, it will be slaughtered and enslaved.

Therefore, if you want to win this game, you must try to expand externally, at least to curb the expansion of others; Internally, we must mobilize everyone's productive forces as much as possible, and take away as much of the labor surpluses of the people at the bottom as possible.

Cruel? This is just the beginning.

painted eggshell

In fact, infanticide has always existed. Zhang Fakui, a senior Kuomintang general, wrote in his autobiography:

Our old family preferred sons to daughters. For example, old families are indifferent to newborn baby girls. If three baby girls are born in a row, the third baby girl will be drowned... After drowning the third baby girl, they expect the next baby girl to be a baby boy, because the baby girl will be afraid of difficulties. 【6】

On the land beneath our feet, just a few decades ago, these things really happened. This article does not focus on the issue of men and women, although the phenomenon mentioned by Zhang is aimed at baby girls, it is not difficult for us to glimpse: death and sacrifice are the norm of civilization, and living– although ordinary people do not necessarily live happily – is a rare gift.

cite

[1] L. S. Stavrianos. A General History of the World

[2] L. S. Stavrianos. A General History of the World

[3] L. S. Stavrianos. A General History of the World

[4] L. S. Stavrianos. A General History of the World

[5] Sima Qian. Historia Natsumotoki

[6] Xia Lianying. HU Zhiwei. Zhang Fakui's Oral Autobiography