how can I make communal societies stable in the long term and advance technologically?

nyalathotep said:

This setting takes place on a super continent that never broke up. The landmass is covered in mega fauna and is very lush, with a warm to hot climate. There are fewer predators than in our world, with planimals being more numerous. Resources and land are plentiful. Most societies began along the coastline and slowly moved inwards. This has led to cultures and religions being more homogeneous and connected. Society is broken down by communal clans, with property and wealth being shared and decisions being made among groups.

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Two things occurred to me. First, if the above premise is law, then it seems like you've painted yourself into a corner. Conflict moves stories, and it sounds like you've effectively neutered that. Am I misinterpreting?
The second thing is that even in times of plenty and harmony, people are still people. People misbehave, and its my opinion that societal strife is just the cumulative outworking of that. If people really got along like your premise seems to suggest, we wouldn't have a whole lot of stories to tell.
But then again, we come to writing to build the world we want to build, so, maybe alien manipulation? Unified techo-religion?

Who is the protagonist and what is the main problem in the story?

Is there a reward in this society for distinguishing one's self from the norm? Wealth, prestige, and greed tend to motivate a lot of conflict.

Is there some inherent problem with this seemly utopian society where there are no wars or strife? Surely everyone isn't happy?

Are there dragons threatening to take over the land and no more knowledge of magic to defend against them?

The centre of a continent is very different from the coastal region. It experiences extremes of temperatures and often low rainfall. What effect would that have on the populations in the interior?

People are people. There's the 'grass is always greener conflict' - both parties have access to exactly the same resources, but one side decides that what the other has is better. So they fight.
Or, all that lush living has increased the population, and one group or another wants more land.
Or, the place with the lovely beaches and the great fishing doesn't have gold mines. Or polar bears.
Or a resource is migratory - and someone along the way feels deprived.
Or, just sheer interpersonal beefs: We don't like the way they're looking at/talking about us.
Or, the ever-popular 'their ways are not ours' - exacerbated by religious issues, or forms of government.

If you've got humanity, someone will find something to fight about.

This is why books about utopias are generally classed as 'fantasy'.

To go in other directions, maybe the continent is changing? Period of global cooling? Series of major storms drives populations inland?

Or, people also being people, there are the occasional geniuses. One commune has Leonardo. He invents stuff, which encourages the neigbouring Edison to experiment a little. They are successful enough that other communes decide to encourage their own people to experiment and explore new ideas. This gives peaceable progress and development - right up 'til someone invents something wonderful, and the neighbouring smart-dude invents the gun and takes Wonderful for his own.

As someone who thinks genius is overrated, there's something to be said for the Great Person theory, the Mongols would have been an unhappy subsidiary of the Tartars if Genghis Khan hadn't been a tactical genius pissed at his family's shoddy treatment. Otherwise, things like development of a new crop (like grain, which requires a more sedentary lifestyle and a hierarchy to administer & defend it) or domestication of a new type of animal (like horses) can lead to huge changes. Things like that don't happen overnight, but there's got to be a tipping point.

So, first of all, story conflict does not mean there have to be fights/wars in order for the story to be interesting. Story conflict means there's a problem to be solved and obstacles in the way of that solution.

For example, the sky begins to fall and something must be done to protect the chickens living on the planet. One group decides to build an airship to go up and make repairs to the sky. Another group decides to design better homes or protective gear so they aren't injured by the falling bits of sky. Each group faces obstacles while pursuing their solution, but there doesn't have to be a political standoff between the housebuilders and the airship designers. Nor does there have to be a war fought over resources. The story can be interesting without "chickens being chickens." It just means that you have to work harder to avoid shortcuts and tropes.

Aggy B. said:

So, first of all, story conflict does not mean there have to be fights/wars in order for the story to be interesting. Story conflict means there's a problem to be solved and obstacles in the way of that solution.

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Yet the agents in stories are individuals, whether they are unified in purpose or not. Fight, war, or facing a common threat or obstacle, deciding how to meet the challenge falls to the individual hero, the like-minded or conflicted duo, or the jury. For all conflict, reaching consensus across the board is directly related to the agency of the individual, and how they make their choices both alone, and in relation to others.

I want to say you have a flawed understanding of human prehistory, but I'm no archaeologist. Still, something seems off in your conclusion that warfare over resources is what eventually led to our current world. Maybe you have a better understanding than what you've written here.

Here's my take on what drove humanity forward: Our ability to communicate with each other, understand the world around us, and plan for the future based on that understanding. Our brains drove humanity forward, but those brains only came about for very specific reasons. Fire, and cooking meat, and getting more calories out of our hunts because we cooked our hunts, was one such reason. Then people learned to take a seed and plant it, and stay in one spot long enough to eat that plant (and communicate this revelation to their neighbors). This second event revolutionized everything, because suddenly we had more resources at hand to grow and survive the world.

But in your world, you say there are 'plentiful resources everywhere'. I say that humanity would never have developed in such an environment. If cheeseburgers grew from trees then there would be no need to change the game and evolve differently.

Take a look at sharks. They live in a plentiful (for them) environment. They haven't changed forms in millions of years. There are hundreds of other examples, too, from mosquitoes to turtles. (But dinos turned into birds to survive, since their conductive environment no longer existed.)

It is precisely because we lacked resources that humanity evolved at all. We had to be smarter to eek out our livings among the rest of life on Earth.

So, back to your question. What would spur humanity to develop nations in your world?

I don't think they would.

So to solve this problems, you're gonna have to get rid of some resources of some kind. If everyone is living on the coast, including farming both plants and animals, then you're gonna have some rampant disease. Plagues of biblical proportion.

Which is probably the easiest solution to your problem: Diseases from your central jungle killing off HUGE swaths of humanity at a time would give rise to a vastly different culture than what we have today. I'm taking smallpox landing in the Americas every fifty years kinda bad. Sure, there are resources everywhere, but are you gonna go into the jungle to get them? No way! Who's gonna go visit Aunt Edna who went to live three cities over when a case of Blue Spot was reported to the magistrate one town over? Not me.

Here's a fantastic little video about plagues and what it takes to make one that I think you should watch if you choose to write about plagues at all. Plagues require certain things to start, and I think your world is exceedingly ripe for some massive die offs that might just propel your cultures into highly advanced (and probably horribly, horribly pragmatic) nations.

jmurray2112 said:

Yet the agents in stories are individuals, whether they are unified in purpose or not. Fight, war, or facing a common threat or obstacle, deciding how to meet the challenge falls to the individual hero, the like-minded or conflicted duo, or the jury. For all conflict, reaching consensus across the board is directly related to the agency of the individual, and how they make their choices both alone, and in relation to others.

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And yet, individual agency and how people choose still doesn't mean there has to be a war/fight/physical conflict to make a story interesting. You don't have to have a greedy or murderous character. You don't have to have outside antagonists or villains or stark disagreement between characters to have conflict or tell an interesting story.

Telling the OP that avoiding war as a driver for technology seems too-far-fetched is... well, lacking in imagination, I think. Speculative fiction is about the "what if?" and writing about a civilization that doesn't follow our own historical patterns of violence is one of the biggest what-if's you can put out there. Offering suggestions as to how that might happen is helpful. Insisting that it's so unlikely "Because humans" that it will be boring is not helpful.

I have the same reaction and concerns expressed by jmurray and monster tamer. What you seem to be postulating is a background of peaceful stasis and progress with little reason for dispute or conflict. In other words, a boring essay, rather than a story.

caw

Are there no extreme weather events/natural disasters?

Are there no religious schisms developing over time?

Are there no illnesses, famines, locusts, pests, or other threats that periodically knock them back and require new thinking and new ways to live?

Has there been no overexploitation of a resource, with a population that seems to have no limits on expansion?

Are there no class divisions that lead to discontent and occasional revolt/revolution?

There are challenges beyond "how can I best kill my neighbor" that drives the development of technology. For example, technology can be driven by "how can I keep myself and my neighbors warm/cool when we expand in this territory with that kind of climate?," "How can I better cure diseases?," "how can I trade more efficiently?," and "how can I produce more food for the growing population?" You don't necessarily need war.

You know, things like looms, and printing presses, and figuring out how to tan leather, or make a fishing boat that can get to the next island, or how to build a temple that doesn't fall over didn't happen because of wars.

Humans innovate because they have a problem to solve.

The problem can be, "I'm getting wet because there's no trees here to build a house with, just a lot of rock." It can be, "It'd be really nice if I could preserve this glut of salmon so I don't starve next winter after the plants die off." It can be, "Weaving cloth by hand is boring as hell and takes fucking forever." It can be, "I hate doing dishes/hauling water/baling hay/having to walk to the TV to change the channel." It can be, "Contaminated water is why we're all getting sick, and we just figured out what's causing the contamination."

I really think it's wrong-headed to claim that innovation happens due to humans making war. It happens because there's a problem to solve. War is just something that makes problems, but it's not the only (or even the main) mother of invention. Progress happens faster when people are stressed, but it happens even when they're happy and comfortable. Humans like to think, and they think about how to make life better. This is definitely still going to be true in a communal society.

nyalathotep said:

In early human history, we started out as a hunter - gatherer society. As time went on, we began developing tribes and fighting each other for territory and resources in order to survive the harsh environment. Warfare and competition pushed innovation and improvements to technology. This set the ground for nations to form, which led to the creation of empires.

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I'm going to echo some other people on this thread, and say that this is a fairly simplistic view of human development. Even so, while conflict between groups has had a role, conflict isn't borne out of only external pressure, it's also borne out of internal pressure. From Western history good examples are splits within the Church, or fighting for power among the noble families of pre-modern Europe. From the Arabian peninsula the history of Iran and the change from Zorothrianism to Islam is another. The spread of Islam and Christianity (via crusades) are others - there are no actual resource based reasons for these, they were mostly about greed/power. It's easy to see this kind of conflict in a society like yours. There are a gazillion other examples that are mostly based on the greed/power aspect. Conflict also takes different forms, and human pre-history is full of examples of ritualistic combat between tribes, that had nothing to do with resources, and which rarely saw more than one person injured or dead.

This setting takes place on a super continent that never broke up. The landmass is covered in mega fauna and is very lush, with a warm to hot climate. There are fewer predators than in our world, with planimals being more numerous. Resources and land are plentiful. Most societies began along the coastline and slowly moved inwards.

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This is just a side note: From an ecological point of view this would not happen without active management from a species with "higher" intelligence. Predator numbers always follow the number of prey - the more plentiful the food source, the more predators the system can handle. As it is today with predator-prey pairs that are not actively managed by humans (like owls and mice for example).

This has led to cultures and religions being more homogeneous and connected. Society is broken down by communal clans, with property and wealth being shared and decisions being made among groups.

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Abrahamic religions are very homogeneous and connected. They are monotheistic, share the same idea of a god, share plenty of doctrinal texts etc. and they developed over time within a hundred miles of each other. Yet they are used as the basis for rallying up people to kill other people. If you compare them to animistic or the larger eastern religions, they look like three peas in a pod.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to bash your project. I'm really enthusiastic about it, and I wish a lot more people wrote speculative fiction from this sort of sociological point of view - however, I think that the settings you are describing aren't actually that different from what our Earth has, and I believe the actual factors that brought your society to where it is now haven't been described in your post.

That all said, Ursula K. Le Guin has written a lot of good speculative fiction detailing species, environments, and such, that have developed differently to ours for a myriad of reasons. I suggest reading her work.

Also RE your landmass:

I think you should do some research into the palaeoclimatology and palaeoecology of our real-world supercontinents. While you might have lush coastal regions in a supercontinent, you're very likely to have extreme seasonal weather patterns in the interior due to how the landmass affects the global ocean currents and wind patterns. IE Pangea is believed to have been very dry and arid most of the year, with severe wet seasons that experienced catastrophic flash flooding. A climate like the one you're suggesting, as TSJohnson suggests, would almost require some form of active management.

Arcs said:

I want to say you have a flawed understanding of human prehistory, but I'm no archaeologist. Still, something seems off in your conclusion that warfare over resources is what eventually led to our current world. Maybe you have a better understanding than what you've written here.

Here's my take on what drove humanity forward: Our ability to communicate with each other, understand the world around us, and plan for the future based on that understanding. Our brains drove humanity forward, but those brains only came about for very specific reasons. Fire, and cooking meat, and getting more calories out of our hunts because we cooked our hunts, was one such reason. Then people learned to take a seed and plant it, and stay in one spot long enough to eat that plant (and communicate this revelation to their neighbors). This second event revolutionized everything, because suddenly we had more resources at hand to grow and survive the world.

...

It is precisely because we lacked resources that humanity evolved at all. We had to be smarter to eek out our livings among the rest of life on Earth.

So, back to your question. What would spur humanity to develop nations in your world?

I don't think they would.

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I agree with Arcs here. The greatest advances in our technology took place before civilization came along. I expect a lot of people will doubt me about that, but hear me out: fire and the control of it changed everything. As Arcs pointed out, it allowed for easier digestion of meat which made our brains grow, and it brought us together and facilitated communication. Check out a book called, "How Cooking Made Us Human" (sorry, don't remember the author's name). Advances in stone tool technology emerged when resources were plenty but we faced a lot of competition and predation from other species. The atlatl and later the bow and arrow were perhaps the greatest technological advancements besides fire, yet few today see it as such.



I agree too that technological advancement may not happen very fast or at all w/o the Mother of Invention (necessity).

Brightdreamer said:

Are there no extreme weather events/natural disasters?

Are there no religious schisms developing over time?

Are there no illnesses, famines, locusts, pests, or other threats that periodically knock them back and require new thinking and new ways to live?

Has there been no overexploitation of a resource, with a population that seems to have no limits on expansion?

Are there no class divisions that lead to discontent and occasional revolt/revolution?

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As Brightdreamer probably intended - all that seems really unlikely to me. Also, the extreme weather associated with a super continent should be considered.

But there's something else as well.
I recently read Homo Deus (A brief history of tomorrow) by Yuval Noah Harari. It was strongly recommended by my English Phd cousin... but I wouldn't suggest reading it unless you have trouble sleeping.
Anyway - the author postulates that consciousness - that thing that makes us self aware - evolves through suffering. That self awareness and consciousness in any creature can be detected by that beings ability to suffer.

So, in this utopia where there is no strife, would consciousness evolve? Evolution, I believe, requires struggle; something to push against and overcome. To me, it doesn't sound as if you have that in the world of your creation.

The problem with humans, and all animals really, is that they grow in numbers when food is plentiful. If you have less predators then you have lots and lots of humans expanding to exploit all available resources and battle for control of resources and territory is inevitable. A famine or disease in one area means they will be forced to move into another, and that will cause war. Population increase means hunter-gathering is not sustainable/causes conflict, which leads to farming, which leads to innovation and the development of civilization to cope with larger numbers in an area. After that it's about exploiting natural resources, money, etc.