How the Neonomads will save the world
Alter-globalism edition
Daniyar Z Baidaralin
© Daniyar Z Baidaralin, 2020
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
ALTER-GLOBALISM EDITION
Many thanks to
The Spirit of the Great Steppe,
My dear wife Asylgul,
My loved brother Bakhtiyar,
Mr. Areke,
And those who influenced me!
INTRODUCTION
Why I wrote this book
The main massage that I am trying to bring across in this book consists of the following elements:
The heritage and global impact of my ancestral Eurasian Nomadic Civilization is greatly underestimated, ignored, silenced, and even concealed from the modern humanity; and this is one of the most serious deficiencies of the modern world.
Moreover, this unfair treatment of the Nomadic Civilization is preventing the humanity from solving the myriad problems we face today: ecological, societal, economic, moral, and technological.
Only the Nomadic Civilization has the answers to all of these vast problems in the future. I proclaim that for the last four thousands years the majority of human civilization was moving in the wrong direction and that we must completely revise everything we know in order to survive and thrive as the species on planet Earth and in our Universe.
These are my strong life-long convictions, and I will try to defend my case in the following chapters.
I write these lines as I seat in a lockdown city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, hiding from the COVID-19 pandemic. The city is completely sealed by the joint forces of police, SOBR1, and National Guard. This is the second week of the quarantine caused by the virus that shook the world. The world as we know it seems to be less certain than ever, and the grim future scenarios that have been around in the mass culture of the past decades appears to be unfolding right before our eyes.
We are not allowed to walk outside except for to buy food and medicine; while the schools, offices, malls everything is shut down. Only the essential government services and food retailers are allowed to work, and the workers wear mask at all times. All of the work that could be performed from home has been switched to a distant online mode, otherwise the workers are on unpaid vacations or are being laid off.
Limited to my four walls and only short runs to a local minimarket, I have no longer an excuse to postpone writing this book, the ideas for which were brewing in my mind for a while. The gloomy occasion is suitable, for I am aiming at nothing less than to offer a path to save the world from self-destruction, and the pandemic is the exact manifestation of the sickness that I want all of us to cure.
Who am I and what are my qualifications? For more information about me read the Appendixes at the end of this book, but here I just want to give a brief.
I come from a few major historical and cultural backgrounds. Underneath it all is my favorite, original, native, Eurasian Nomadic heritage, for I am a Kazakh man born and raised in Kazakhstan, the Heartland of the Nomadic Civilization that existed here for at least three millennia starting from the 2nd millennium BC.
On top of that, as a later addition that came about in the Middle Ages, I marginally represent the Central Asian Islamic realm. Skip forward, and my background is strongly influenced by the Russian Empire in the Modern Age and consequently the Soviet Empire in the 20th century.
Now, in the early 21st century I spent almost ten years living in the United States of America, and this added one more dimension to my mentality. As of 2020 I reside in my native city of Almaty, the former capital of the now-independent state of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and where the COVID-2019 pandemic has caged me in my apartment.
My educational background is in Fine Arts, Art History, and Architecture; all with a strong bias towards Eurasian Nomadic history, traditions and culture. My knowledge and skills are split between academic and practical. Most of my life I worked in a private sector of real economy: television, interior design, architecture, and construction.
At the same time I wrote a book on traditional Kazakh horseback archery, and I am now self-employed as a practical historical reconstructor focusing on nomadic military and civil technologies. Today I spend my days researching about how the Eurasian Nomads made their armors, weapons, bows, arrows, clothes, shoes, horse equipment, and yurts; and then I build replicas and test them in field conditions to learn how it all worked back in the day.
So why do I dare to write a book with such a loud and presumptuous name? I will make many bold statements in this book that might irritate, amuse, or raise eyebrows of my readers, but I ask you to bear with me. Thought I am not an accomplished academic or some guru, in my life I met many interesting, intelligent people of different backgrounds, and we had deep, wonderful, meaningful conversations that taught me a lot about the world we live in. We also partnered in some unique projects that helped me to advance my research and develop understanding of history, culture, religions, technology, and societies.
I am not as well-read as I wanted to be, for I dont have much time to read and my reading list is three-miles long and I am way behind. But I possess a unique combination of educational background, specific knowledge, unique hobbies, and life and work experience that is not too common even in todays interesting world.
Therefore, despite all of my shortages, I feel that I still have something to say to the world, and the time has come for it. Hence I wrote this book.
What is in this book and how to read it
This book consists of a few chapters, each of them devoted to a section of my overall statement, and the entire book is structured to be read as easily as possible, to my best abilities.
In chapter The Concept: Eurasian Nomadic Civilization I try to explain what the nomadic civilization was from the point of view of the native carrier of this culture to an outsider observer, because this is the biggest and most misunderstood chunk of human history.
In chapter The Concept: Nomadism vs Sartism I will explain the major conceptual differences between the nomadic civilization and the settled/industrial/post-industrial civilizations as they appears from my Post-Nomadic perspective.
In chapter The Concept: Future NeoNomadism I try to describe the alter-globalism model that I envisioned in my many years of research, observations, thinking, contemplating, and designing.
In chapter The Concept: Future NeoSartism I share my view on how the current post-industrial mode of our civilization must transform in order to become sustainable and stop destroying our planet.
In chapter The Concept: Big Picture I try to combine the two previous chapters and give the overall, universal picture of the future human society, its goal, purpose, and further development in the foreseeable future.
In chapter The Concept: Long-Term Future I outline my vision for the big steps that the humanity must undertake in the next few centuries.
In chapter The Concept: How to Get There I hint as to where we can start implementing the NeoNomadic theory and about the need of a pilot project.
In chapter Conclusion I try to express all of my thoughts in a brief format and finalize this book.
In Appendixes I put all of the information that I thought might make the reading of the main chapters less smooth, but which a reader might find interesting after reading the chapters first. In contains information about me, my influences and sources, the controversy of the terms «NeoNomadism», quick facts about the Eurasian Nomads, and etc.
Read first, criticize later
I understand that many of the ideas in this book are so new and wild that they most likely will be met with some resistance and distrust, to say the least. Perhaps, many will simply dismiss it as a nonsense. However, if one will find it interesting, but not convincing, I urge you to read the whole book first and criticize later, because I tried to foresee the most common questions and doubts, and answer them in advance to my best ability.
Free PDF presentation
Also, if you e-mail me at dbaidaralin@gmail.com, I will send you a free PDF presentation that provides a visual aid for this book.
THE CONCEPT: EURASIAN NOMADIC CIVILIZATION
Concept
Nomadic pastoralism
There is an enormous amount of misunderstanding about the nomadic civilization of the past few millennia. Moreover, the general view on the Eurasian Nomadism is the single biggest misconception known to me within the entire body of human knowledge. It is a complete 180 degree opposite of what it really was historically.
In order to understand the depth and breadth of this misconception, I will have to give a brief crush course on traditional nomadic lifestyle. This is not a history textbook, but it would be impossible for me to explain my theory without diving into the past and giving a clear picture of what the nomadic civilization was like in reality. I will try to paint it with a broad paintbrush in the chapters, and get into more details in Appendixes.
The traditional understanding shared by all cultures in the West and East, paints the historical Eurasian Nomads as vicious, wild, blood-thirsty barbarians, barely humans at all; the orc-like creatures that come and burn, plunder, loot, pillage, rape, and destroy the hand-made miracles of the hard-working settled nations. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam associated the nomads with Gog and Magog, the mythical wild beasty people who will attack the humanity and bring the world to the brink of extinction.
Nobody likes the Eurasian Nomads (EN). They are the classical «bad guys» in human history, who only bring blood spillage, tears, grief, and despair. The Scythians who plundered the Middle East and Egypt in the BC, the Huns who destroyed the Western Roman Empire in AD, the Turkic tribes that terrorized the world in the early Middle Ages, the so-called Mongols who crushed everybody and created the biggest land empire of all times. Most people know of the «maniac» Attila the Hun, or the «bloody-eyed genocidist» Genghis-Khan.
And the humanity have tried to ignore or forget them, just like a victim of violence tries to forget the violator. But in doing so, we made a big, fundamental mistake that is haunting and hurting us ever since. And we will never be able to fix our problems, unless we right the wrong.
The truth is: the Eurasian Nomadic Civilization (ENC) is one of the two parents of the modern human civilization; the other being the Settled Civilization (SC). The ENC was buried a few centuries ago and we prefer to either never remember about it, or at least to never speak of it other than of a monster. In the meantime, the nomads gave the world many important things, such as governments, statehood, metallurgy, horses, saddles, stirrups, high boots, trousers (pants), topwear dresses, horseback archery, cavalry, wheels, chariots, yurts, felt, rugs, and many more things. I describe this impact more in detail in Appendixes.
The real role of the EN global influence is exactly opposite of what is perceived by most in the modern world. My ancestors were the balancers of the nature, their lifestyle was ideal for ecosystems. I fact, they were the integral part of the Great Eurasian Plains called the Great Steppe, that stretched from the flats near the Altai Mountains to Eastern European Plains. The nomadic model of economy appeared in these lands only because no other type of economy with pre-industrial technology was possible in these barely habitable lands.
The nomads lived in constant migration cycles, following their herds and chasing the seasonal grasses on pastures. They move in a certain way year after year, decade after decade, century after century, and millennium after millennium. Their ethnic composition, the anthropology, language, faiths has changed over the millennia, but the lifestyle remained practically the same. The EN societies closely mimicked each other in their economic and technical aspects, because they were built-in within the nature and were limited to only one possible way of survival: the nomadic pastoralism.
The EN peoples were never as numerous as the SC peoples. The harsh lifestyle, lack of infrastructure, limited technologies and economic powers, and scarce resources never allowed the EN states to flourish to the same extent as their settled neighbors. But this lead to a lifestyle and mentality of valuing only the essential, vital things in life. Even the SC neighbors who severely disliked the nomads admitted that they were the most noble and honest people, albeit brutal and cruel out of necessity.
The main wealth and the economic engine of the ENC was their cattle. The cattle-breeding was the one single most important feature that dominated all aspects of the nomadic life in the times of peace; and in reality peace was the most common state of affairs. Usually the nomads only succumbed to war in extraordinary turns of circumstances, but a vast majority of time they were peaceful and friendly herdsmen. Cattle was the gold of the nomads: they never sold their sheep, camels, or horses for money in order to keep their wealth in coffins. Quite the opposite: they let the beasts roam free in the open fields, only protecting them from the packs of wolves and cattle-thieves. The wealth of the nomadic nations was in their herds: the bigger, the better.
Nomadic hunter-gatherers, Settled Civilization, and the Eurasian Nomads
In order to differentiate the Eurasian Nomads and other nomads, we need to look at some popular misconceptions regarding the phenomenon of nomadism in general.
The most common understanding of the nomads in history is that they were a mistake, a historical evolutional dead-end, an annoyance that must be dismissed and forgotten as soon as possible. At this, many dont make an important distinction between the nomadic hunter-gatherers, African nomads, Middle-Eastern nomads, modern stateless nomads such as Romani (Gypsies), and the Eurasian Nomads.
The common scholarly view in terms of the human societys evolution suggests that the first humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers, then these peoples discovered agriculture which led to the Agrarian Revolution and the Agrarian Era, which then led to Industrial Revolution and the Industrial Era, and now we live in the Post-Industrial Era.
The Eurasian Nomads are simply not included into this linear process, as if they never existed, nor they ever created any significant states. At the same time, there are plenty of history books on nomadic empires from Scythian and Hun to Turkic and so-called Mongol. I write more about the history of the nomadic states and empires in Appendixes.