The effects of these technological conditions on the general culture of a pastoral people are such as are set forth in their most favourable light in the early historical books of the Old Testament, or such conditions as may be found today on the great cattle ranges of west and north-central Asia.
The community falls necessarily into a patriarchal régime; with considerable concentration of wealth in individual hands; great disparity in wealth and social standing, commonly involving both chattel slavery and serfdom; a fighting organisation under patriarchal-despotic leadership, which serves both for civil, political and religious purposes; domestic institutions of the same cast, involving a degree of subjection of women and children and commonly polygamy for the patriarchal upper or ruling class; a religious system of a monotheistic or monarchical complexion and drawn on lines of patriarchal despotism; with the priestly office vested in the patriarchal head of the community (the eldest male of the eldest male line) if the group is small enough to admit the administration of both the temporal and spiritual power at the hands of one man - as Israel at the time of the earlier sojourn in Canaan - or vested in a specialised priesthood if the group is of great size - as Israel on their return to Palestine.
Such a culture is manifestly fit to succeed both in avowedly predatory enterprise and in pecuniary enterprise of a more peaceable sort, so long as range lands are at its disposal or so long as it can find a sufficiently large and compact agricultural community to reduce to servitude, or so long as it can find ways and means of commercial enterprise while still occupying a position defensible against all comers. Its population is organised for offence and defence and trained in the habits of subordination necessary to any successful war, and the patriarchal authority and pecuniary ideals inbred in them give them facility in cooperation against aliens, as well as the due temper for successful bargaining. Such a culture has the elements of national strength and solidarity, given only some adequate means of subsistence while still retaining its militant patriarchal organisation. Not least among its elements of national strength is its religion, which fosters the national pride of a people chosen by the Most High, at the same time that it trains the population in habits of subordination and loyalty, as well as in patient submission to exactions. But it is essentially a parasitic culture, despotic, and, with due training, highly superstitious or religious.
What a people of these antecedents is capable of is shown by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, the Hindu invaders of India, the Hyksos invaders of Egypt, and in another line by Israel and the Phoenicians, and in a lesser degree by the Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Arabs and Turks.
It is from peoples of this culture that the great religions of the old world have come, near or remote, but it is not easy to find any substantial contribution to human culture drawn indubitably from this source apart from religious creed, cult and poetry. The domestication of animals, for instance, is not due to them; with the possible exception of the horse and the dog, that work had to be done in peaceable, sedentary communities, from whom the pastoral nomads will have taken over the stock and the industry and carried it out on a scale and with cultural consequences which do not follow from cattle-breeding under sedentary conditions. Their religion, on the other hand, seems in no case to have been carried up to the consummate stage of despotic monotheism during the nomadic-pastoral phase of their experience, but to have been worked out to a finished product presently after they had engaged on a career of conquest and had some protracted experience of warfare and despotism on a relatively large scale. The history of these great civilisations with pastoral antecedents appears to run somewhat uniformly to the effect that they collapsed as soon as they had eaten their host into a collapse. The incidents along the way between their beginning in conquest and their collapse in exhaustion are commonly no more edifying and of no more lasting significance to human culture than those which have singularly marked the course of the Turk. These great monarchies were organised by and for an intrusive dynasty and ruling class, of pastoral antecedents, and they drew their subsistence and their means of oppression from a subjugated agricultural population. In the course of this further elaboration of a predatory civilisation, the institutions proper to a large scale and to a powerful despotism and nobility resting on a servile people, were developed into a finished system; in which the final arbiter is always irresponsible force and in which the all-pervading social relation is personal subservience and personal authority. The mechanic arts make little if any progress under such a discipline of personalities, even the arts of war, and there is little if any evidence of sensible gain in any branch of husbandry. There were great palaces and cities built by slave labour and corvée, embodying untold misery in conspicuously wasteful and tasteless show, and great monarchs whose boast it was that they were each and several the best friend or nearest relative of some irresponsible and supreme god, and whose dearest claim to preeminence was that they “walked on the faces of the black-head race.” Seen in perspective and rated in any terms that have a workmanlike significance, these stupendous dynastic fabrics are as insignificant as they are large, and none of them is worth the least of the fussy little communities that came in time to make up the Hellenic world and its petty squabbles.
In their general traits these various civilisations founded (in conquest) by the pastoral peoples are of the same character as is the pecuniary culture as found elsewhere, but they have certain special features which set them off somewhat in a class by themselves. They are predatory in a peculiarly overt and accentuated degree, so that their institutions foster the invidious sentiments, the self-regarding animus of servility and of arrogance, beyond what commonly happens in the pecuniary culture at large; and they carry a large content of peculiarly high-wrought religious superstitions and fear of the supernatural, which likewise works out from and into an animus of servility and arrogance. In these cultures it is true, even beyond the great significance which the proposition has in the barbarian culture elsewhere, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. The discipline of life in such a culture, therefore, is consistently unfavourable to any technological gain; the instinct of workmanship is constantly dominated by prevalent habits of thought that are worse than useless for any technological purpose.
Much the same, of course, is true for any civilisation founded on personal government of the coercive kind, whatever may be the remoter antecedents of the dynastic and ruling classes; but these other cultures have not the same secure and ancient patriarchal foundation, ready to hand, and so they are constrained to build their institutions of coercion, domestic, civil, political and military, more slowly and with a more doubtful outcome; nor does their religious system so readily work out in a monarchical theology with an omnipotent sovereign and in all-pervading fear of God. A home-bred despotism in an agricultural community that has set out with maternal descent, a matriarchal clan system, and mother goddesses, is hampered both on the temporal and the spiritual side by ancient and inbred usage and preconceptions that can be effectually overcome only in the long course of time. The civilisations of Asia-Minor and the Aegean region, and even of Egypt and Rome, however much of pastoral and patriarchal elements may have been infused into them in the course of time, show their shortcomings in this respect to the last; perhaps in their religions more than in any other one cultural trait, since religion is after all an epigenetic feature and follows rather than leads in the unfolding of the cultural scheme.
But these great civilisations dominated by pastoral antecedents have no grave significance for the modern culture, except as drawbacks, and none at all for modern technology or for that matter-of-fact knowledge on which modern technology runs. The Western peoples, whose cultural past is of more immediate interest, have also had their warlike experience, late and early, but it seems never to have reached the consummate outcome to be seen in the East. Neither as regards the scale on which dynastic organisation has been carried out nor as regards the thoroughness with which their institutions have been permeated by predatory preconceptions have the Western peoples in their earlier history approached the standard of the oriental despotisms.
Even now, it may be remarked, advocates of war and armaments commonly speak (doubtless disingenuously) for the predatory régime as being a necessity of defence rather than something to be desired on its own merits. Not that the predatory régime has not been a sufficiently grave fact in the history of occidental civilisation; to take such a view of history one would have to overlook the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions,