Page 52 - The Drucker Lectures

The First Technological Revolution and Its Lessons [ 33

that is, into a permanent territorial unit always to be found in the
same place, unlike the migrating herds of pastoral people or the
hunting grounds of primitive tribes. This alone made obsolete
the tribe and demanded a permanent, impersonal, and rather
powerful government.
But the irrigation civilizations can teach us also that the new
objective reality determines only the gross parameters of the so-
lutions. It determines where, and in respect to what, new insti-
tutions are needed. It does not make anything “inevitable.” It
leaves wide open how the new problems are being tackled, what
the purpose and values of the new institutions are to be. Even
within the Old World, where one irrigation civilization could
learn from the others, there were very great differences. They
were far from homogeneous, even though all had similar tasks to
accomplish and developed similar institutions for these tasks.
Impersonal bureaucratic government had to arise in all these
civilizations; without it they could not have functioned. But in
the Near East it was seen at a very early stage that such a gov-
ernment could serve equally to exploit and hold down the com-
mon man and to establish justice for all and protection for the
weak. From the beginning, the Near East saw an ethical deci-
sion as crucial to government. In Egypt, however, this decision
was never seen. The question of the purpose of government was
never asked. And the central quest of government in China was
not justice but harmony.
It was in Egypt that the individual first emerged, as witness
the many statues, portraits, and writings of professional men,
such as scribes and administrators, that have come down to us—
most of them superbly aware of the uniqueness of the individ-
ual and clearly asserting his primacy. But Egypt suppressed the
individual after a fairly short period during which he flowered
(perhaps as part of the reaction against the dangerous heresies of
Ikhnaton [a pharaoh who had abandoned traditional polytheis-