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March 15 - May 27, 2014
It takes only a couple of hours to fly from Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s capital, to Cairns or Brisbane in Australia, but in that flight one is in some sense traversing several thousand years of political development.
it was perhaps a conceit to think that modern societies had progressed so far beyond Melanesia, since Big Men—that is, politicians who distribute resources to their relatives and supporters—are ubiquitous in the contemporary world, including the U.S. Congress.
the problem with Melanesia
Freedom House noted that 2009 marked the fourth consecutive year in which freedom had declined around the world, the first time this had happened since it established its measures of freedom in 1973.5
Liberal democracy is more than majority voting in elections; it is a complex set of institutions that restrain and regularize the exercise of power through law and a system of checks and balances.
the period following the oil crises of the 1970s, the size of the world economy almost quadrupled,
Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions.
The fact is, however, that rates of intergenerational social mobility are far lower in the United States than many Americans believe them to be, and lower than in many other developed countries that traditionally have been regarded as rigid and stratified.
It is quite legitimate to argue that modern governments have grown excessively large, and that they thereby limit economic growth and individual freedom. People are right to complain about unresponsive bureaucracy, corrupt politicians, and the unprincipled nature of politics. But in the developed world, we take the existence of government so much for granted that we sometimes forget how important it is, and how difficult it was to create, and what the world would look like without certain basic political institutions.
Political institutions are necessary and cannot be taken for granted. A market economy and high levels of wealth don’t magically appear when you “get government out of the way”; they rest on a hidden institutional foundation of property rights, rule of law, and basic political order.
Monarchy as a form of government proved superior in its ability to govern large empires and was the political system under which Rome achieved its greatest power and geographical extent.
2 THE STATE OF NATURE Philosophical discussions of the state of nature; how the contemporary life sciences shed light on human nature and hence on the biological foundations of politics; politics among chimpanzees and other primates; what aspects of human nature undergird politics; when different parts of the world were first settled
It is always risky to think one understands the true intentions of great thinkers. But given the foundational importance of the accounts of the state of nature offered by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to Western political self-understanding, it is not unfair to contrast them with what we actually know today about human origins as a result of recent advances in a range of life sciences.
But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.
The ability to create mental models and to attribute causality to invisible abstractions is in turn the basis for the emergence of religion.
development of religion in humans
(The Christian principle of returning a favor for a harm in this respect is highly unusual and, one might note, more often than not unimplemented in Christian societies. No society I know of approves returning a harm for a favor as a general moral rule within the group.)
religious beliefs are never held by their adherents to be simple theories that can be discarded if proved wrong; they are held to be unconditionally true, and there are usually heavy social and psychological penalties attached to asserting their falsehood.
the desire for recognition ensures that politics will never be reducible to simple economic self-interest.
Mitochondrial DNA, by contrast, is the vestige of bacteria that were trapped within human cells, which were put to work millions of years ago providing, among other things, energy to power the cell’s activities.
The biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which God scatters a unified human race and makes them speak different languages, is thus metaphorically true.
As we will see in the following chapters, the first complex forms of social organization continued to be based on kinship, but they could emerge only with the assistance provided by religious ideas.
development theory in the immediate post-Darwin period succeeded in justifying the existing colonial world order, with northern Europeans occupying a place at the top of a global hierarchy that stretched through various shades of yellow and brown down to black Africans at the bottom.
There is considerable speculation on the part of evolutionary psychologists that the almost universal contemporary practice of meal sharing (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Passover) is derived from the millennia-long practice of sharing the proceeds of hunts.
Matrilineal societies are not the same as matriarchal ones, in which women hold power and dominate men; there does not seem to be any evidence that a true matriarchal society has ever existed.
The possibility of multilevel segmentation is seen in many different tribal societies and is reflected in the Arab saying, “Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the stranger.”
why you should want to cooperate with a cousin four times removed rather than a familiar nonrelative just because you share one sixty-fourth of your genes with your cousin. No animal species behaves in this manner, nor do human beings in band-level societies. The reason that this form of social organization took hold across human societies was due to religious belief, that is, the worship of dead ancestors.
Garrett Hardin argued that the tragedy of the commons exists with respect to many global resources, such as clean air, fisheries, and the like, and that in the absence of private ownership or strong regulation they would be overexploited and made useless.3
it is hard to find documented cases of the tragedy of the commons unfolding in well-functioning tribal societies with communal property.
Mahmood Mamdani argues that the Europeans deliberately empowered a class of rapacious African Big Men, who could tyrannize their fellow tribesmen in a totally nontraditional way as a consequence of the Europeans’ desire to create a system of modern property rights.
The propensity for violence would seem to be one of the important points of continuity between ancestral apes and human beings.
Human beings’ highly developed social skills and ability to cooperate are not contradicted by the prevalence of violence in both chimp and human societies; rather, they are the precondition for it.
The skills that human beings developed hunting large animals explains why paleoarchaeologists often date the arrival of human beings in a particular territory to the extinction of that region’s megafauna. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, the giant flightless emu, giant sloths—all of these species appear to have been wiped out by well-organized bands of primitive human hunters.
It was only with the rise of a bourgeois class in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe that the warrior ethic was replaced by an ethic that placed gain and economic calculation above honor as the mark of a virtuous individual.
States, by contrast, are coercive, domineering, and hierarchical, which is why Friedrich Nietzsche called the state the “coldest of all cold monsters.”
While the founding of the first Arab state is a particularly striking illustration of the political power of religious ideas, virtually every other state has relied on religion to legitimate itself.
Political power in early states cannot be understood apart from the religious rituals that the ruler controlled and used to legitimate his power.
as many as ten thousand sacrificial victims have been uncovered in burial pits in Yinxu, along with large numbers of horses, chariots, tripods, and other valuable artifacts. Appeasing dead ancestors thus deprived the living of huge amounts of resources, human, animal, and material.
succession and inheritance pass only through males. A woman is not considered a permanent part of her own lineage but is rather a resource to be used by the family in arranging alliances with other important families.
particularly hated enemies were turned into a meat sauce to be consumed by members of the court or army.
Confucianists engaged in bitter intellectual debates with other schools of thought, such as Legalism—a
Confucianism can in many ways be seen as an ideology that builds a broad moral doctrine of the state outward from a model based on the family.
The Legalists were proposing to treat subjects not as moral beings to be cultivated through education and learning but as Homo economicus, self-interested individuals who would respond to positive and negative incentives—especially punishments. The Legalist state therefore sought to undermine tradition, break the bonds of family moral obligation, and rebind citizens to the state on a new basis.
anti-Confucian campaign sought to delegitimize familistic morality; party, state, and commune were the new structures that would henceforth bind Chinese citizens to one another. It is not surprising, therefore, that the legacy of Shang Yang and Legalism was revived during the Maoist period and seen by many Communist scholars as a precedent for modern China.
Social modernization is the breakdown of kin-based relationships and their replacement with more voluntary, individualistic forms of association.
120,000 families were forcibly removed from around the country and relocated to a district close to the capital, where they could be kept under tight surveillance.1 At this early period in human history, it is hard to find many precedents for this kind of use of concentrated political power, which shows how far China had evolved from a tribal society.
The Qin emperor agreed and ordered the burning of the classical books, and then was reported to have ordered that four hundred resisting Confucian scholars be buried alive. These acts understandably earned his regime the undying hatred of later Confucians.
stamping out ideas, ouch
In a patrimonial system, whether of Zhou China or a contemporary African or Central Asian state, government officials are appointed on the basis not of qualifications but due to their kinship or personal ties with the ruler. Authority resides not in the office but in the officeholder. As political systems modernized, bureaucracy replaced the patrimonial system.
One of the most remarkable features of government, which has been consistent from the earliest periods of Chinese history, is the strong control that civilian authorities have exercised over the military. In this respect China differed substantially from Rome, where ambitious generals like Pompey and Julius Caesar were constantly making bids for political power, or from contemporary developing countries with their frequent military coups.
China and civilian control of the military
economic life in Han Dynasty China resembled the world described by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population much more than the world that has existed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years.
(Even in today’s mobile, entrepreneurial capitalist economy, rigid defenders of property rights often forget that the existing distribution of wealth doesn’t always reflect the superior virtue of the wealthy and that markets aren’t always efficient.)
The interdynastic periods in Chinese history are particularly revealing in this regard, because during them a free-for-all broke out in which complete outsiders to political power—sons of peasants, foreigners with suspect ethnic backgrounds, and uneducated military men with no Confucian training—had the opportunity to rise to the very top of the system.
