I agree that Christian churches can provide a powerful sense of community and have been vectors for social safety nets in the past, but it's both erroneous and unhelpful to say they were the first to provide a social safety net to society.
Caring for other humans when those humans can't care for themselves is a big part of what makes us fundamentally human and arguably the entire point of these civilization and society things we've got going.
When a studen asked early academic feminist and anthropologist Margaret Mead what the first sign of civilization was, she famously replied that the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 years old fractured femur indicative of a break that had then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, you cannot drink or hunt for food. Wounded in this way, you are meat for your predators. No creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. You are eaten first.A set femur is evidence that another person has taken time to stay with the fallen, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped a fellow human, rather than abandoning them to save their own life.
If you mean an institutionalised social safety net, in Sumerian Ur, the oldest city we've ever found and anarcho-primitivism's original sin, they had a system called Bala Taxation. The beaurucrats of Ur kept meticulous records, and they kept their records on clay so 6000 years later we have a very good idea of how it worked. It evolved alot over time, but in its longest running form Bala taxation meant that every citizen of Ur owed half of their labour to the state, which for farmers was payed in barley or labour on state fields and for other tradesmen or labourers could be payed in commodities or labour. The state in turn, provided a ration of barley to everyone who was not a farmer. It is often argued, although the issue is by no means settled that the reason the city of Ur was founded as a means of translating communal abundance into a social safety net. That the city grew around grain silos and that the point of those silos was a means to store and pool grain so canals could be maintained and droughts weathered without anyone having to worry about going hungry if it was their field was flooded or plagued by locusts.
Mutual aid without expectation of immediate or even eventual repayment is an inherently human quality and the purpose of society and civilisation is to enhance and take better advantage of it. The Christian church has been (among other things) a vector of this mutual aid but it is by no means the only vector and it was not the first. To claim it is or was is to do non-christian societies and humanity as a whole a grave disservice.
A Seminal text on the evolution of Ur and how human society maybe got started is Gordon Childe, the first marxist archeologist's Man Makes Himself first published in 1936 and last revised in 1951. Some of the text is a little dated as new archeological evidence has came to light but it's an excellent starting place for reading on the topic as most following texts reference it and I have not found another on the same topic with such a focus on the genesis and evolution of institutional exploitation.
It can be read for free here: https://archive.org/details/ManMakesHimself/page/n121/mode/2up
Good points all around, great comments. Mine was a quick comment from the hip but does indeed betray a somewhat eurocentric worldview on my part. Thank you for educating and providing sources.
I agree that Christian churches can provide a powerful sense of community and have been vectors for social safety nets in the past, but it's both erroneous and unhelpful to say they were the first to provide a social safety net to society.
Caring for other humans when those humans can't care for themselves is a big part of what makes us fundamentally human and arguably the entire point of these civilization and society things we've got going.
When a studen asked early academic feminist and anthropologist Margaret Mead what the first sign of civilization was, she famously replied that the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 years old fractured femur indicative of a break that had then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, you cannot drink or hunt for food. Wounded in this way, you are meat for your predators. No creature survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. You are eaten first.A set femur is evidence that another person has taken time to stay with the fallen, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped a fellow human, rather than abandoning them to save their own life.
If you mean an institutionalised social safety net, in Sumerian Ur, the oldest city we've ever found and anarcho-primitivism's original sin, they had a system called Bala Taxation. The beaurucrats of Ur kept meticulous records, and they kept their records on clay so 6000 years later we have a very good idea of how it worked. It evolved alot over time, but in its longest running form Bala taxation meant that every citizen of Ur owed half of their labour to the state, which for farmers was payed in barley or labour on state fields and for other tradesmen or labourers could be payed in commodities or labour. The state in turn, provided a ration of barley to everyone who was not a farmer. It is often argued, although the issue is by no means settled that the reason the city of Ur was founded as a means of translating communal abundance into a social safety net. That the city grew around grain silos and that the point of those silos was a means to store and pool grain so canals could be maintained and droughts weathered without anyone having to worry about going hungry if it was their field was flooded or plagued by locusts.
Mutual aid without expectation of immediate or even eventual repayment is an inherently human quality and the purpose of society and civilisation is to enhance and take better advantage of it. The Christian church has been (among other things) a vector of this mutual aid but it is by no means the only vector and it was not the first. To claim it is or was is to do non-christian societies and humanity as a whole a grave disservice.
A Seminal text on the evolution of Ur and how human society maybe got started is Gordon Childe, the first marxist archeologist's Man Makes Himself first published in 1936 and last revised in 1951. Some of the text is a little dated as new archeological evidence has came to light but it's an excellent starting place for reading on the topic as most following texts reference it and I have not found another on the same topic with such a focus on the genesis and evolution of institutional exploitation.
It can be read for free here: https://archive.org/details/ManMakesHimself/page/n121/mode/2up
Good points all around, great comments. Mine was a quick comment from the hip but does indeed betray a somewhat eurocentric worldview on my part. Thank you for educating and providing sources.
❤️