Miles' Tribes of Britain (2006) sets out to persuade the reader that pre-Roman British society is as impressive as that which followed them, and in this he is successful, but not, I think, in quite the way that he expects, for while the society he describes is organised to a degree that is genuinely surprising, it is also far from sophisticated; indeed it is barely complex. The distinctions that arise in relation to these three terms are not without power, and we might say, provocatively, that our own time is highly sophisticated, extremely complex, but verging on the disorganised. Whether we accept that diagnosis, we should labour to avoid the trap of mistaking the virtues of any one of these conditions for the strengths of the others. To be organised is good, but to be so without complexity and sophistication is brutal. Our own condition, assuming that it is as I have described, is perhaps just weak, or at any rate a transitory stage en route to a more stable equilibrium of these characteristics.