Common Myths about Human History
Or, What Sid Meier's Civilization taught me about the allure of linear thinking
When I was a kid, video games weren’t allowed in my household—not until an uncle bought a GameBoy for my youngest sibling, the only male child of four, who was thereafter the sole exception to this rule.
But the rest of us had workarounds, and one of them was PC gaming, so long as it could be viewed as “educational”. Somehow Sid Meier’s Civilization series passed that sniff test, so Civ II and Civ III were part of my childhood. Civ IV came out when I was in university and easily became my favourite of the franchise, while Civ V had a lot to be praised in its expansion of board mechanics and pathways to victory. I missed the release of Civ VI, but Civ VII is expected to be out next year.
The premise of this game is simple: you start in 4,000 B.C., as the leader of one of an array of loosely historical civilizations, and by learning key skills (e.g., writing, pottery, archery, iron-working, sailing) position yourself to develop a dominant empire over the next 6,000 years or so. Variations in your world-map, the behaviour and advantages of surrounding civilizations (again, only loosely based on the real world, so prepare for war from Gandhi a lot), and your own territory- and resource-management strategies will inform your outcomes. Another factor will be the “win” condition you pursue—because while some love nothing more than to slaughter other civilizations, some prefer to win through the space race (a science victory), dominance in artistic/religious creation (a cultural win), United Nations leadership (a diplomatic success), or by racking up the most points from overall wealth, growth, tech, and adopted social policies (a time-based triumph).
To the surprise of absolutely no one here, I loved culture, science, and diplomacy victories. This made me easy prey in multiplayer games when Civ IV launched, though, because of course other humans wanted to win by military dominance instead. With other humans, to try to balance my preferences with their brutal predilections, it was almost always best to try for a science victory while keeping up a strong military routinely knocking out secondary civilizations. That way, I could always entertain the delusion of winning “peacefully” until the end, when I’d have to go for my human opponent’s capital anyway. But for single-player? Culture was my happy place.
While idling in this universe as a kid, though, a few obvious limitations to the game’s design became readily apparent. Through them, I quickly realized that Civilization had some significant gaps as a teaching tool—at least, unless game-play was always matched with a proper discussion about the history around it.
Take, for instance, the game’s “technology tree”: a flow chart between research choices that are critical for success no matter what victory one seeks. A military-minded player needs to reveal key war resources on the map and develop an array of siege and defence units: all of which requires material sciences, beneficial social policies, and improvements to city production metrics. Conversely, someone striving for a culture win needs to gain spiritual and artistic advancements that will unlock the ability to build important buildings and wonders, to boost creativity in their cities.
Players are immediately set in the position of gods, because we can see the whole flow chart when making our choices. This is not how humanity developed, but a game like this one can easily acclimate children to the idea of seeing history as teleological: as a series of coherent, progressive steps made in pursuit of a very specific end result.
For simplicity’s sake, too, Civilization never has the option of losing knowledge, even though humans have most certainly abandoned, destroyed, and regained skill-sets over our 200,000 or so years as a modern species. Ceramics had different regional waves of uptake and intricacy going back at least 30,000 years, and farming was loosely adopted and set aside in many regions, rather than existing as a “self-evident” next step that all tribes would eagerly adopt for good. Mathematics and natural philosophy also suffered in some eras of state and religious oppression, while arts and literature underwent major, often devastating purges during war.
Granted, there is still a kernel of educational value in tech trees for children. To unlock “Code of Laws” in Civ IV, for instance, a player first needs to research “Writing” and either “Priesthood” or “Currency”. This causal link teaches that either a religious or financial motivation, plus written language, is what brings a civilization to the point where it can develop a formal code of conduct. And this idea matches some of the legal histories my generation was taught: for instance, I grew up learning that the Code of Hammurabi, from around 1750 BCE, was our earliest comprehensive legal text, and a clear referent for the later development of Mosaic Law.
But that wasn’t an accurate representation of the state of archaeological knowledge even when I was a kid, and I would have loved for a little more early education into historiography, instead of the absolute dates given to us by many history texts.
Yes, the Code of Hammurabi was, for a few decades, the oldest known preserved legal text—but that status would be replaced by the Code of Ur-Nammu, from a kingdom back in 2112 to 2095 BCE. And even that wasn’t the first record of a legal mandate: we now know that the Mesopotamian ruler Urukagina, from the 24th century BCE, employed a doctrine of sweeping state reforms to limit priestly powers and exploitation by large landowners, in favour of more equality and freedom for all.
We have reference to Urukagina’s rule and legal actions on artifacts amusingly called “Liberty Cones”, or sometimes “Foundation Cones”. See for yourself what I mean by these terms, in this example preserved behind the scenes at the Louvre (the display version is a duplicate with linguistic features enhanced to improve overall clarity):
(And please note that I am trying my very best not to make any immature remarks about what an object of state reform like this—something meant to “stick it” to usurers and other abusers of the people’s trust—could also be called.)
What the non-noble “usurper” Urukagina was trying to do might seem uncanny in its similarity to political struggles we face today. According to scholars like Katherine Wright, who names him as “Uru-inimgina” in her research, this ruler’s mandate even broadened the holdings of women, by placing land and resources confiscated from a corrupt class of preceding elites under the direct oversight of his wife, to expand “The Household of Women” as a place of worship and work dedicated to the Goddess Baú.
That was around 2375 BCE.
The more things change, etc.
But the real lesson from Urukagina’s legal mandate runs even deeper; it should remind us that just because we might not have material records of every attempt to establish a “Code” doesn’t mean humans in every generation haven’t sought to develop general operating principles for how to conduct themselves in groups.
A game like Civilization can give the same impression about the history of knowledge that many misguided Young Earth Creationists (YECs) have about biological evolution. Just as YECs sometimes think that evolution by natural selection means modern humans had to wait around half-finished, with incomplete eyes and organs, for tens of thousands of years until all their body parts eventually popped into being, so too can a linear treatment of human knowledge give the impression that human beings were hanging around in half-finished societies, enduring massive gaps in key everyday functions for generations, until certain institutions showed up overnight.
The difference is, it’s super easy to identify the error that many YECs make, but a great many people who think themselves empiricists and rationalists still cleave to misguided and outdated notions of linear progress in human history, in part due to common misrepresentations of our learning process in secular games like this one.
The other danger of such linear thinking also struck me while playing Civilization as a kid: I hated that I couldn’t bypass certain tech pathways, despite having an omniscient overview of where environmentally harmful research would lead. It was very difficult to win the game without at some point replacing the direct slaughter of human life with the slow slaughter of human health and well-being to industrial processes that rely on toxic coal and oil, and later nuclear disasters.
Yes, yes, the game eventually gives you environmental policies and technologies to clean up that mess, but players have no choice but to be complicit in it first. We’re railed into a rigid developmental pathway that refuses us the ability to run on solar, wind, and hydroelectric processes all along, without as much intermediate suffering.
There were also hard limits at the end of the technology tree. Although some versions offer highly specific future-tech (including a Giant Death Robot, later on), one generally reaches a point in the technology tree where the game simply spits out “Future Tech”, which boosts overall city health and happiness without specific details.
This lack of inventiveness means that players are again being trained to think of history as inevitably running a certain way, to a certain hard end. There are limits on our ability to imagine human civilization with anywhere near the same flexibility that actual anthropology and ethnology offers—either in the past, or going forward.
Now this week, for Rewind Wednesday, we’re going to return to this theme with a reflection on a mid-20th-century school of social policy that similarly “gamified” our thinking about governance (and which continues to inform a great deal of urban planning today). First, though, I thought it might be useful to remember that we absorb a lot of background assumptions about How Things Are, How Things Came To Be, and How Things Must Be from the most innocuous of places.
(Media culture routinely precedes and supercedes formal education in this way.)
And yes, again, Sid Meier’s Civilization did have some excellent educational uses—as do a great many video games, stigmatized as they were in my childhood home—but it also advanced common myths about human history that my dear fellow atheists sometimes blithely repeat while resting smugly on the conviction that they’re leagues ahead of theists who don’t understand the theory of evolution by natural selection.
(NB: This is a symptom of many secular folk failing to include human behaviouralism, anthropology, and related subfields in their notions of relevant empirical data.)
Humanity has always been active and creative. We have made and lost knowledge many times before. We have tried out certain ways of living, only to abandon them, come back to them, and abandon them anew. We have gone through wave after wave of political upheaval, as every generation fights for rights in its own way, and all our extant written records pale in comparison to the vast landscape of human experience felt by most every person who survived infanthood over 200,000 years of species time.
To understand “progress” properly—and more importantly, how to apply it to our development of “civilization” today—we need to do away with thinking about ourselves as if we’re players looming like gods over modern technology trees.
There are certainly many steps our cultures need to take to get from where we are today to the more proactive social contracts in which many of us would like to live.
But these steps are not all linear, and some might not ever be accessible, because of the competing desires of other humans with whom we share this fragile world.
Developing a more “advanced” society might therefore require an entirely different way of thinking about to achieve victory for ourselves, and our communities.
Are we at the “end of history”, as we’ve long been taught to talk about it?
Or just at the start of our next uncertain turn?
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
Very much looking forward to Civ VII. VI is very pretty and an improvement on V, but I still prefer the gameplay of IV to either.
I remember getting hardcore into Civ V, and then I haven't really played much since then. I tried VI for a little bit, but I think I got burned out.
I will say having started David Graeber's Dawn of Everything, it's really changed my view of late prehistory and what are considered 'necessary' conditions for a civilization to 'rise' and how through human history there have been so many different ways people have organized and thrived as cultures.