We have just watched yet another episode of the Time Team, one of our all time favourite TV shows. They were excavating a hilltop bronze age community with heavy defence works surrounding it, north of Belfast. Laying in the sofa watching the dark clouds travelling the stormy skies afterwards, waiting for the young one to fall asleep, I cannot help thinking of the disturbing question raised in the programme, and the shadows it throws over the last ten thousand years of human history. Why was such defence works necessary? Thomas Hobbes grins at me through the growing darkness of the falling summer night’s hurling rain. Just how peculiar are our present times at this particular spot on earth? The fact that I do not need to live behind bars, that my children can go to the park and play without guards or even adult company, that friends look a bit questioning at me when I say I don’t let my children go to the baths alone... For how long will this actually still be possible, for how long has it not even been a faint possible fantasy?
I am completely and absolutely convinced that the human being is basically peaceful, but similarly convinced that she was utterly corrupted by the wealth made possible through agricultural accumulation. So corrupted, in-fact, that she needed to build defence works to protect her goods, both produced by her own sweat and tears and the sweat and tears taken by structural or direct violence from others—family, friends or enemies alike.
I look at my children, and I see the vulnerability and sensitivity in them, I see the soft curves of their selves slowly and quite carefully being attempted formed by J and myself—into sensible, wise men choosing talk over knives. I wonder whether that would have been possible in more violent times and places. Have we ever seen less violent societies than those of Scandinavia today—despite the very real structural and direct violence actually happening here—since the Neolithic age? What would you tell me Thomas, would you say: ’Just you wait and see!’ Or would you scratch your beard wondering what you got wrong?
