Macroparasitism
Description
Arran Gare:
"One of the most important tasks of a grand narrative of re-embodiments is to identify, comprehend, encompass and then supersede the grand narrative of disembodiment. It should be clear from the present state of culture that the quest for disembodiment is intimately related to what the American historian William McNeill called ‘macroparasitism’, people living off the produce and services of others. The quest for disembodiment by macroparasites appears to have been a recurring, although not universal, feature of civilizations since they began, and it is through this quest that they have defined their superiority, legitimated their rule and justified their exploitation and oppression of those who they have exploited.
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McNeill showed how microparasitism in the form of plagues has played a major role in history, then argued that macroparasitism has played a similar role. The Bronze Age civilizations initially were associated with population growth, but collapsed some three thousand years ago as macroparasites over-exploited workers, peasants and the land. Subsequently, this process has been repeated on larger scales. For instance, towards the end of the ninth century, the Abbasid Caliphate of Mesopotamia, which up until then was one of the greatest civilizations the world had known, collapsed. Increasing taxes on farmers and neglect of their conditions by the ruling elite oriented towards higher ends destroyed agriculture, leaving a region of empty desolation, tangled dunes and rubble strewn mounds of former settlements. Allen, Tainter and Hoekstra wrote of this: ‘The occupied area had shrunk by 94 percent by the eleventh century. Population dropped to the lowest level in five millennia. Urban life in 10,000 square kilometers of the Mesopotamian heartland was eliminated for centuries.’ The same tendency operated in Europe. The decline of the Western Roman Empire was largely due to environmental destruction. In the context of this decline the emperor Constantine embraced a form of Christianity which, synthesizing Neo-Platonic and Hebraic thought, denied significance to embodied life and extolled a life devoted to the eternal. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, this Neo-Platonic Christian narrative provided the foundation for medieval feudalism. The church, which had been supported by emperors to facilitate their control over their empires, later succeeded in subordinating the emperors to the church through the church’s promotion of the narrative of disembodiment. Peasants were treated as the lowest form of humanity, scarcely above beasts in the hierarchy of being. From the twelfth century onwards Europe was almost continually at war, most of it directed to domination and blessed by the church. This involved increasingly large segments of the population, and became ever more burdensome. Another major collapse of this civilization would almost certainly have occurred if Europeans had not developed empires. Europeans used the wealth from the New World to sustain their competition, further developing their sea power and empires in the process."