How did we get from the world of the hunter-gatherers to the state? A host of thinkers talk of something called “the social contract” as the beginning of modern society. These theories date back to antiquity, but their glory days came around the time of the Enlightenment, when Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and others put forth one version or another of the same basic idea: Men in a state of nature agree to sacrifice some personal freedoms in exchange for security. There are important differences, however, between different notions of the social contract. For example, Hobbes’s social contract gave license to an all-powerful state—the Leviathan—to protect humanity from life in a state of nature, which he described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”1 Locke’s social contract was much better, insofar as he saw the state as a servant of the people rather than a master of them.
What unites pretty much all of the classical understandings of the social contract is that they are wrong. There never was any such thing as a real, existing, social contract. Prior to the Enlightenment, there’s no record of any large group of people, primitive or otherwise, voluntarily coming together to write down or agree to the kind of social contract the philosophers describe.2 It’s a useful myth, a vital lie; the social contract is, to borrow a term, a social construct.
To the extent there ever was one, the first social contract was—to borrow a phrase from The Godfather—an offer the signatories couldn’t refuse. And the Godfather in this analogy was a gangster of sorts. He was what Macur Olson, one of the great economists of the last half century, called “the stationary bandit.” Before the stationary bandit, there were only roving bandits.
Roving bandits are exactly what they sound like. They are raiders, warlords, and marauders who sweep into a community and take everything they can: crops, tools, weapons, money, women, children, etc. It should go without saying that the roving bandit was a staple figure of the state of nature. The archaeological record is clear about that.
In the early days of the agricultural revolution, the threat of roving bandits was far greater than in the days of hunter-gatherers. First off, nomadic tribes are moving targets. Agricultural communities are easier prey because they stay in one place. Moreover, when humans settled down to grow crops, they lost their ability to feed themselves sustainably in any other way. Hence, being plundered of their food stores and equipment and having their able-bodied males slaughtered was often a catastrophic event. Because the roving bandits had no intention of returning anytime soon, they also had no interest in leaving anything of value behind.
The consequences of roving bandits were long-lasting for their victims. If you know you are likely to fall prey to whichever band of thieves might come your way, you are unlikely to make many long-term investments. Why toil in the fields or restore your granaries if you know that the Huns or the Cimmerians or whoever will just come back and take it all again? “In a world of roving banditry there is little or no incentive for anyone to produce or accumulate anything that may be stolen and, thus, little for bandits to steal,” Olson writes.3
Hence, this dynamic becomes a problem for the marauders as well. Just as good hunting grounds or fisheries can be depleted by overuse, you can only raid and plunder the same village so many times before there’s not much left to steal, particularly when the victims refuse to make futile long-term investments. It’s a vicious cycle that leaves both thief and victim poorer in the long run.
Thus, the stationary bandit is a solution to a very serious problem. Olson first stumbled on this idea while reading Edward C. Banfield’s classic work The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958). Banfield conducted meticulous interviews with residents of a poor village in southern Italy. In one of these interviews he talked to a monarchist who proclaimed that “monarchy is the best kind of government because the King is then owner of the country. Like the owner of a house, when the wiring is wrong, he fixes it.”4
Later, Olson stumbled on the story of White Wolf, a marauder in 1920s China. The quintessential roving bandit, White Wolf led a small army of raiders around the countryside, terrorizing villages. He was defeated and crushed by an even stronger warlord, Feng Yu-hsiang. The interesting thing is that the villagers welcomed Feng Yu-hsiang as a kind of savior, even though he taxed—i.e., extorted—the local population heavily. Why welcome one warlord over another? Because Feng Yu-hsiang settled down, providing protection from all the other bandits. This protection introduced stability and predictability to the peasants’ lives. They may have had to pay too much in taxes, but they also knew they’d be left enough to live on. And so long as they paid, their lives would be spared. The order and predictability of the stationary bandit is, according to Olson, “the first blessing of the invisible hand.”5
“The invisible hand,” a term coined by Adam Smith, has come to describe the social benefits that accrue when individuals are empowered to pursue their own self-interests and specialize economically. By allowing individuals to work to their own ends, the whole of society grows richer, as if guided by an invisible hand. That “as if” is crucial. Smith’s detractors often mischaracterize the invisible hand, insinuating that supporters of the free market think there is something guiding coordination, but the whole point is that the coordination simply emerges.
Olson explains how the stationary-bandit model is an improvement over what came before. It’s really just math. A stationary bandit has a longer time horizon. He realizes that taking 100 percent of a village’s wealth will make him richer right now. But what will he get next year? Nothing. If he takes half this year, he knows there will be something to take next year. He also realizes that if he lets the villagers plant more crops, there will be more for him to tax in the years ahead. This gives the stationary bandit an incentive not just to fend off the roving bandits but to make investments in public goods other than security. He might build roads or lend resources for the digging of new irrigation canals or the clearing of forests to plow new fields. How much he taxes becomes a simple question of return on investment. “The starting point” for Olson’s theory of development “is that no society can work satisfactorily if it does not have a peaceful order and usually other public goods as well.”6 The stationary bandit is the first real provider of a peaceful order, without which the invisible hand can never appear.
Today, the state has an important role in all of this. The state regulates the use of violence and protects the right of the citizens to use their property. Absent the confidence that the police will stop people from plundering the bakeries, the bakers will not bake bread. The stationary bandit was the first entity to serve this function.
Of course, this does not mean that the stationary bandit is a good person. Odds are strong that, more often than not, he was awful from the perspective of the very high moral perch we sit on today and probably from the view of some much lower perches as well (and his hand in the economy was almost surely far from invisible). Thus the classic libertarian indictment of government as a criminal enterprise—most famously stated by Albert Jay Nock, author of Our Enemy, the State (1935)—has some merit.7
The Mafia works on the same principle of long-term exploitation. They sell protection to businesses, both legal and illegal, in return for “a piece of the action.” The don understands that if they rob their “clients” of everything they have all at once, their clients will go out of business.8
But what Nock and others failed to appreciate is that there are social benefits to the state’s monopoly on violence. For starters, we would not have property rights without the state. Prior to the order and security of the stationary bandit, if a stronger man or army took what was yours, it became his or theirs. Possession is ten-tenths of the law under the laws of nature: The weaker lion cannot sue when the stronger one claims the larger share of the kill.9
Because a stationary bandit has an interest in letting his subjects get richer—his slice of the pie gets bigger when the whole pie gets bigger—he must protect the lives and property of his “clients” if they are to keep working for him. He may say everything in his territory belongs to him, and that is true in the sense that, if he wants to take it, he can. But he understands that, in practice, people need a high level of confidence that they will be left a “fair” share of what they make or grow.
To accomplish this in a large society, where the ruler cannot keep a watchful eye on everything under his dominion, requires clearly stated rules. These rules begin as arbitrary edicts from the boss or king, but in short order they become binding—and the introduction of writing gave these rules a kind of universal and fearful authority and, eventually, sacredness. The king always has the right to change his mind, of course. But when petitioners come to court to settle a disagreement, the peasant who most persuasively claims he was following the recognized rules is the one most likely to win. If the king sides with the rule breaker—as he no doubt often did—there’s a social and political cost for the king in the sense that he is sowing doubt and instability.
This dynamic probably defined the earliest days of the agricultural revolution, when the first bands and tribes settled down to grow crops. From there, it was almost inevitable that the state as we understand it today would emerge.
How, exactly, did we go from the stationary bandit to the state?
There’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg problem here. A self-starting state, one that just springs up from a voluntary collaboration of individuals and institutions—what scholars call a “pristine state”—is for anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists a bit like the lost city of Atlantis. They think it probably existed. They just haven’t found it. What they have found are numerous examples of “competitive states.”10 These are states that come into existence when loosely associated or less developed neighboring societies recognize the need to combat already existing states. Since the state-governed societies are usually larger, more organized, and more advanced, they tend to prey successfully on non-state societies, repeating the same cycle of the stationary bandit versus the roving bandit on a larger scale. In response, the prey organize themselves to defend against the predators. (Game of Thrones fans might think of Lord Stark calling in his bannermen.) This almost reflexive self-organization into a kind of permanent battle formation happens again and again in human history. As Charles Tilly famously said, “War made the state and the state made war.”11
This is not to say that there was no first state. Surely someplace deserves that title. But the important point is that states evolved—emerged, really—from what came before them as a problem-solving response to external aggression. (One of the only ways we could get anything like a real world government—at least in our lifetimes—would be if our planet faced an invasion from outer space. It might not happen, but you can see how it might.)
When the conditions are right, we form states. War—i.e., an external threat—is clearly one of those conditions. But an equally important one is population size. When societies are provided with security and order, a number of secondary patterns emerge. Labor becomes more specialized, which produces more wealth. Another outgrowth of large populations and state-provided security is that property rights become ever more secure, at least for the wealthy holders of property. Property holding is itself a kind of division of labor. When you own land, you can extract more productivity or wealth from it. More wealth and security from external foes means more population, and more population means more wealth and security. It’s a virtuous cycle. And when societies get bigger, they need even more formal rules to govern them. “Growth will simply not occur unless the existing economic organization is efficient,” write economists Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas.12 And this “entails the establishment of institutional arrangements and property rights.”13
The agricultural revolution made mass societies possible, and mass societies could only be maintained through force, both physical and psychological. Hunter-gatherer tribes were largely voluntary associations insofar as the group was held together by strong blood ties and mutual dependence. You could leave if you wanted, and some families did when the band got too large.
The philosopher Ernest Gellner argues that, in a state of nature, mankind lived in universal propertylessness. “Hunter/gatherers are defined by the fact that they possess little or no means for producing, accumulating and storing wealth. They are dependent on what they find or kill. Their societies are small, and are characterized by a low degree of division of labour.” However, Gellner notes: “Agrarian societies produce food, store it, and acquire other forms of storable wealth.”14 That storable wealth not only creates classes of people; it also serves as a means of social control. Stored food is an insurance plan against crop failures and other calamities.
But storable wealth isn’t just food. It also includes the tools for producing more food, and the weapons necessary to protect—or seize—it. Money as a storehouse of value is a relatively recent invention. Before currency, a man was wealthy if he owned livestock, shovels, swords, and slaves, among other means of production. But before the agricultural revolution, there was little use for much of that. Some hunter-gatherers might have carried gold or some other trinkets—seashells are among the first baubles in the archaeological record—but when you have no permanent residence and must stay on the move, wealth was largely restricted to what you could carry and use.
Settled communities are communities of specialized laborers. To understand the power of the division of labor, consider the case of the humble sandwich. In 2015, a man inspired by the canonical libertarian essay by Leonard E. Read, “I, Pencil,” set out to make a sandwich from scratch—i.e., with no products he didn’t make himself. He grew his own vegetables, distilled salt from seawater, milked a cow, and used the milk to cultivate cheese. He pickled a cucumber in a jar, grew his own wheat, and ground it into flour for bread. He collected his own honey, and killed a chicken himself for the meat. The whole process took him six months and cost him $1,500. At the end of the project, he issued his verdict on his sandwich: “It’s not bad. That’s about it. It’s not bad.” Even here, he took shortcuts. He didn’t buy the cow or scour the countryside for the seeds, etc.15
The specialization inherent to the agricultural revolution creates classes of people in ways never imagined in small bands of hunters. Crops need to be tended to and protected. That means some people will be farmhands, others soldiers. Still others are better suited to work the mills or bake the bread. When you think about what is required to maintain a large agriculture-based society, the number of specialized jobs gets long very quickly: soldiers, farmers, butchers, cobblers, blacksmiths, masons, carpenters, and, of course, slaves and overseers. How do you keep all of these specialists in their assigned roles? Dependence on the state’s insurance function is one method. Another is coercion.
Coercion, of course, implies violence, and all societies, including our own, depend on violence to maintain social order to one extent or another. Academics get the shakes when you try to offer a universal definition of the state, but one component is essential and pretty much universally agreed upon: force.
Max Weber famously defined the state as a “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”16 Weber would be the first to note that there’s a bit more to it than that. States have laws (and the means to enforce them), bureaucracies, and systems of taxation. But for a state to be a state, it must be able to enforce its rules, i.e., its will.
But whether it’s the arbitrary whim of a third-century warlord or official guidelines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, if there is any lesson to be learned from history it is that, ultimately, laws have to be enforced through violence or the threat of violence.17 Indeed, the very word “enforce” literally means to use force.18
But coercion doesn’t only take the form of physical force, and not all compulsion is violence. No society can last long if held together solely by violence, or even the threat of violence. Ideology—by which I mean an internally coherent worldview that tells us how to behave and cooperate—is essential. If violence is the only measure of right and wrong, then the peasant has every incentive to kill his lord if he can get away with it. Large-scale societies need a theology and metaphysics to help everyone “know their place” in the social pecking order. Societies differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence by that standard. Even contemporary North Korea, which uses violence and fear more than almost any other state imaginable, still devotes massive resources to the propagation of an ideology for its people. Yes, many people obey the Dear Leader out of fear, but one need only read interviews with defectors or see footage of women openly weeping with joy at the sight of Kim Jong-un to understand that some besotted souls obey their Dear Leader out of love.
“Agrarian societies tend to develop complex social differentiation, an elaborate division of labour,” Gellner writes. “Two specialisms in particular become of paramount importance: the emergence of a specialized ruling class, and of a specialized clerisy (specialists in cognition, legitimation, salvation, ritual).”19 In other words, you need an aristocracy, starting with a monarch, and you need a priesthood of some kind to explain to people why the monarch deserves obedience. As the saying goes in Game of Thrones, “The Faith and the Crown. These are the two pillars of the realm. If one should fall, so will the other.”20
The aristocracy rules primarily through force. The priests use words, specifically, texts. Indeed, the development of writing was arguably the greatest leap forward in the history of human coercion—and cooperation.
The ability to write words probably began with the need to write numbers. Taxing and trade required record keeping. Not only was human memory unequal to the task of reliably storing data about all those bushels of wheat and shipments of rice, but the character of the memorizers also wasn’t altogether trustworthy.
“The first to overcome the problem were the ancient Sumerians, who lived in southern Mesopotamia,” Yuval Noah Harari writes:
“There, a scorching sun beating upon rich muddy plains produced plentiful harvests and prosperous towns. As the number of inhabitants grew, so did the amount of information required to coordinate their affairs. Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data. The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing.’ ”21
It didn’t take long for this system of bookkeeping to evolve into a system for law giving. Even discounting my vanity for my own profession, it is impossible to overstate the revolutionary nature of the written word. Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”22 That was surely the case with the first books and scrolls. From scratchings on a page, wise men and priests could learn things they did not know and tell tales about places far away and events long ago. (Amidst all the talk about how “the cloud” of data storage is some grand new thing under the sun, people seem to forget that The Cloud 1.0 was invented in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago.)
The written word did not merely accelerate the diffusion of information in radical and profound ways; it also made sanctity portable. As Ernest Gellner observed, writing permits solemnity and authority to be decoupled from a verbal context. Prior to writing, sanctity required verbal, face-to-face ritual. Now it could be transported across vast distances as well as stored for future generations.23
One of the first lines of Hammurabi’s code reads: “Then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land…” Hammurabi’s job was “to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers, so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.” The epilogue of the code established Hammurabi’s status as the father of the people, as commanded by the gods. “Hammurabi is a ruler, who is as a father to his subjects, who holds the words of Marduk in reverence, who has achieved conquest for Marduk over the north and south, who rejoices the heart of Marduk, his lord, who has bestowed benefits for ever and ever on his subjects, and has established order in the land.”24
Babylon, the largest city in the world at the time, was the capital of the Babylonian Empire, which stretched through much of modern-day Iraq and Syria. Hammurabi issued his famous code as a way to unify disparate kingdoms, streamline rules across his diverse imperial subjects, and elevate his status as the divine father of his people. It was also a bit of a legacy project. He wanted a permanent record of his supposed wisdom and fairness.
There’s debate about how the code’s 282 laws were actually incorporated into daily life. But, for our purposes, the most important thing about the Code of Hammurabi was that it, and laws like it, served as the operating software for a vast cooperation network. It did this by establishing clear rules about violence, commerce, and social status.
A citizen living on the coast of the Persian Gulf and a citizen living hundreds of miles up the Euphrates were now bound by the same rules, even though they might never meet each other or lay eyes on their ruler.
Schoolchildren are taught that the Code of Hammurabi is a great moment in human progress, but that does not mean it was what most people today would consider to be a “progressive” document. For instance, law number 15 declares: “If any one take a male or female slave of the court, or a male or female slave of a freed man, outside the city gates, he shall be put to death.”25
Probably the most famous of Hammurabi’s laws were numbers 196 to 199, which established the principle of lex talionis, or “an eye for an eye”:
196. If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out. [An eye for an eye ]
197. If he break another man’s bone, his bone shall be broken.
198. If he put out the eye of a freed man, or break the bone of a freed man, he shall pay one gold mina.
199. If he put out the eye of a man’s slave, or break the bone of a man’s slave, he shall pay one-half of its value.26
The code also says that if a son strikes his father, the son’s hand must be cut off.27 It’s easy to see all of this as barbaric from our vantage point; I certainly do. But it’s important to recognize that regulating violence is a huge boon to humans seeking security and order. The whole reason the stationary bandit is welcomed by the peasants is that his predictable use of violence is preferable to the arbitrary violence of the roving bandit. That desire and need for order and security did not vanish with the rise of the state; the nature of the threat did. Military protection from dangers without evolved into police protection from dangers within.
The code was also a huge economic advance. A lot of it deals with commerce. Roughly a third of the 282 edicts pertain to trading practices, credit, and property in one way or another. For instance: “If a merchant give an agent corn, wool, oil, or any other goods to transport, the agent shall give a receipt for the amount, and compensate the merchant therefor. Then he shall obtain a receipt from the merchant for the money that he gives the merchant.”28 Such “best practices” were essential to a sprawling agricultural empire.
Last, the code also put in writing the social hierarchy of the Babylonian Empire. Hammurabi, naturally, was the keystone. Beneath him were the military and the priests, then the citizens, and, finally, the slaves. There was also a more recognizable class system. The Amelu were the elite, comprising the priests, the military, government officials, landowners, and merchants. Below the amelu were the mushkinu: craftsmen, artisans, farmers, teachers, and other workers. And beneath them were the ardu, the slaves. Even the slaves had a hierarchy as spelled out in the code. Slaves could own slaves and run their own businesses in certain circumstances, which sometimes allowed them to buy their freedom.29
Part of the genius of the code—and why the people embraced it—was that it took informal rules and unwritten customs and universalized them. Hammurabi was no democrat, but he was deferential to the traditions of his subjects. Indeed, laws are often lagging rather than leading indicators, formalizing what had been an informal rule for a very long time.
This underscores an important point: Written law—which was both civil and religious—reflected existing cultural and psychological norms at least as much as it replaced them. The most obvious example is the principle of “an eye for an eye.” The idea of retributive justice is no doubt far older than the code. Indeed, there’s overwhelming evidence to support the claim that a desire for retributive justice isn’t even an “idea” at all but an instinct we describe as an idea.30 Regardless, it’s important to recognize that rule givers can only work within the confines of human nature. More importantly, we should respect the fact that many of our most important institutions are embedded with deep reservoirs of knowledge. They are evolved problem-solving devices that emerge through a process of discovery and trial and error.
There’s a story—possibly apocryphal—about Dwight Eisenhower when he was the president of Columbia University. As the campus was expanding, the school needed to lay down some new sidewalks. One group of planners and architects insisted that the sidewalks be laid out this way. Another group said they must go that way. Both camps believed reason was on their side of the dispute. “Legend has it,” writes my National Review colleague Kevin D. Williamson, “that Eisenhower solved the problem by ordering that the sidewalks not be laid down at all for a year: The students would trample paths in the grass, and the builders would then pave over where the students were actually walking. Neither of the plans that had been advocated matched what the students actually did when left to their own devices.
“There are two radically different ways of looking at the world embedded in that story,” Williamson writes. “Are our institutions here to tell us where to go, or are they here to help smooth the way for us as we pursue our own ends, going our own ways?”31
This is an entirely valid, even vital question to ask about our contemporary society. But looking backward at the evolution of the state and other institutions, the best answer one can come up with is “both.” The stationary bandit didn’t establish himself as a ruler in order to maximize the liberties or opportunities of his victims-subjects-clients. And the state did not emerge for the betterment of the people but for the betterment and security of the rulers. Hammurabi may indeed have had the best interests of his people in mind when he issued his rules for when and how wives should be murdered, slaves mutilated, and children drowned. But I think a reasonable person can also suspect that Hammurabi’s motivations were also self-interested.
So when I write that these societies “need” aristocracies, ideologies, etc., I do not mean that anyone set out to build these institutions for any other reason than self-interest. These are naturally occurring phenomena, human universals on mass scale. Just as slime molds spontaneously self-generate out of disparate single-celled organisms under the right conditions, humans self-organize into hierarchical communities under some kind of state.
One fascinating example of this natural human tendency can be found in American prisons. Prison gangs emerged into virtual states within the penal ecosystem. Some even have written constitutions. These de facto governments running American prisons, described by David Skarbek, were a response to the chaos that overtook prison systems in California and Texas. The old code of conduct that dictated how inmates behaved broke down in the 1970s, and the gangs filled the vacuum with a new code enforced by them.32 These new stationary bandits returned order to the prisons, not the guards. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the gang leaders did not intend to impose some new penal social order. The social order emerged from their pursuit of their narrow interests. “This bottom-up process of institutional emergence,” Skarbek writes, “was the result of inmate actions, but not the execution of any inmate design.”33
For most of human history, self-interest came before ideology. The arguments for aristocracy and monarchy—whether in feudal Japan, ancient Rome, or anywhere else before the Enlightenment—were justifications for the authority of the rulers. The Enlightenment changed the formula. Rather than appealing to myth and mystery, the architects of the Enlightenment appealed to reason.
But one thing did not change: The state remains a myth agreed upon. We tell ourselves that the state is a thing, and our belief in it makes it real (just as belief in a nation is the ultimate author of its reality). After all, you can’t touch or see the state. You can see buildings and bureaucrats and soldiers, but all of these things are tools or servants of the state, not the state itself. There’s no Great and Powerful Oz behind the curtain. There isn’t even a rumpled professor. The state exists because people say it does.
When the state disappears, as in the old Soviet Union, what is the only tangible evidence that it’s gone? The tanks are still there. The buildings too. The only real proof the state has disappeared is that people stop acting as if it exists. They stop following its orders, which means they refuse to cooperate with each other under the invisible banner of the state.
Yuval Harari argues that virtually all of civilization—religion, corporations, money, ethics, morality, etc.—should really be seen as nothing more than a collection of stories we tell ourselves.
These fictions or social constructions often serve as the software for civilization. Stories allow huge populations to cooperate across vast territories. We tell ourselves the story that paper money has value, and because everyone agrees to respect the story, the money is accepted in lieu of things of intrinsic value. In times of crisis, when we revert back to something closer to the state of nature, the illusion of money’s value becomes clear. In the post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested—excuse me, “walker”-infested—state-of-nature world of The Walking Dead, money has no value save as kindling or toilet paper.
The funny part is that, in modern-day America, people who come to realize or fear that paper money is not a reliable storehouse of value feel the need to buy gold. But the value of gold is a social construction too. Within the socially constructed world of modern economics, buying gold may be a smart strategy in some circumstances. A Berliner in 1923 would certainly rather have had his money in gold than in German marks. But a Berliner in 1945 might have traded all his gold for food or guns.
Money, of course, is just one of innumerable fictions that define our conception of reality and right and wrong. We tell ourselves that humans have natural or God-given rights. Where is the proof—the physical, tangible, visible proof? Don’t tell me a story; show me the evidence. The fact is we have rights because some believe they are in fact God-given, but far more people believe we should act as if they are God-given or are in some other way “real.”
Economists and other scholars of development don’t like to call such things stories. They prefer the term “institution,” which is fine by me. At the most basic level, an institution isn’t a building or an organization; it’s a rule. But before it was a rule, it was a story. And religion—the mother of so many of our stories—is the most important of them all.
Put all issues of theology aside, and just look at religion as a way to get humans who are not related to each other and who do not even know each other to cooperate. Religion provides humans with meaning, for a reason to behave a certain way and to treat others a certain way. A Sunni Muslim who encounters another Sunni Muslim has a story in common, and that shared story leads them to cooperate rather than fight.
It seems silly even to bother to demonstrate that religion has enormous power over how humans conduct themselves, given that it is the one assertion both defenders and critics of religion agree upon. But just to illustrate the point, consider the story of Henry IV in the snows of Canossa.
In 1073, Pope Gregory VII set out to reform investiture in the Holy Roman Empire. Gregory believed the pope, not the Holy Roman emperor, should have the power to appoint bishops and the like. The Holy Roman emperor at the time, Henry IV, liked the power to make such appointments, and he resisted the reforms and denounced Gregory. The pope responded by excommunicating Henry in 1076. This created a crisis for Henry—and the empire. No doubt Henry was worried about his eternal soul, but even if he were a secret atheist, he would have understood that the rest of society believed in the story. One could not remain a king in eleventh-century Europe and be cut off from the Holy Mother Church. Gregory allowed Henry to repent. So arguably the most powerful man in the world walked hundreds of miles over the Alps from Speyer in what is today Germany to the Canossa Castle in the region of Emilia-Romagna in Italy. He then spent three days kneeling, barefoot, in the snow outside the castle, during a blizzard, wearing a hair shirt, fasting, and awaiting forgiveness from the pope.34
There is reason to believe that religion itself is an evolutionary adaptation. Group cooperation is the key to human survival, and religion can be an incredibly powerful source of social cohesion, fostering sacrifice for the greater good of the community.
We all pay taxes, obey traffic rules, work at jobs, and do a thousand other things every day in compliance with the intangible rules that emanate from countless fictions agreed upon. It is no great exaggeration to say: “Tell me your stories and I will tell you who you are.”
The agricultural revolution created a social landscape as alien to our genetic programming as a colony on Mars. The first city-states had tens or hundreds of thousands of inhabitants living cheek by jowl, competing for resources, mates, and status. Humans adapted to this new environment the only way any animal adapts to any new environment: by applying their nature to it as best they could. The Big Man was replaced by the stationary bandit, who was replaced by a king (or emperor or czar or pharaoh). To be sure, the king used force to keep the people in line. But force was not enough. Humans have an innate need to know their place in society. We have an instinctual hunger for meaning and order.
In short, large populations needed a story. The stories varied in countless details, but the plot and themes were well-nigh universal. That’s because the stories that worked were those that tracked with our innate desire for a father figure, a head man, or an alpha ape who cared for us. Scour the anthropological and archaeological record; it’s the same story, over and over, for thousands of years. The king is anointed or otherwise chosen by some divine authority to rule over his people, like a father.
If you take the time line of humanity from the first city-states around 4000 B.C. until today, monarchy, broadly defined, has been the default arrangement for human affairs for roughly 99 percent of the period. Monarchy—or, if you prefer, some kind of aristocracy with a solitary paternal figure at the top—defined nearly all human societies until around 1800. There is a reason why Catholic priests are called fathers and the pope is il Papa.
And what about after 1800? We will be spending a lot of time on this question in later chapters, but it’s worth noting here that the introduction of democracy didn’t suddenly erase our natural desire and tendencies to look to father figures. The Soviet Union, allegedly the antidote to all the superstitions that came before it, spared little effort to cast Joseph Stalin as the father of the Motherland.35 Adolf Hitler, who also rejected the ancient customs of monarchy as well as the modern innovation of democracy, styled himself as the nation’s father. Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Mao Tse-tung, Mobutu Sese Seko, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, and virtually every other ostensibly secular authoritarian ruler of the last two centuries has worked assiduously to play the role of father to his children-subjects. George Washington himself was dubbed “the father of his country” for all time before he even left office. His comrades are still remembered as the “Founding Fathers.”
In other words, even when we remove the dogmas that elevate monarchy over democracy, the pattern holds more often than not. “Patriotism” comes from the Latin patria, meaning fatherland, itself a derivative of pater, or “father.” This points to why it’s not sufficient to say that strongmen imposed this role on their respective populations. The people asked for it. They celebrated it. Virtually every cult leader in human memory claimed to be the group’s father (or mother) and it was because of this claim—not despite it—that the worshipful formed their flocks. And this yearning has not vanished in the twenty-first century. Recall comedian Chris Rock insisting that we have to do what President Obama wants because “he’s the Dad of our country.”36
Given the thousands of natural experiments across Eurasia, North and South America, and all the other corners of the globe, there’s no avoiding the conclusion that this basic idea satisfies some deep innate needs of human beings. If monarchy were unnatural in some profound way, it would not have provided such a stable form of government for thousands of years. If a desire for a fatherly leader to do what’s in our best interests weren’t hardwired into us, it would not be a staple of political cultures around the globe.
If you emptied a jar of ants onto the surface of some distant habitable planet, they will do exactly what they do here on Earth: start building colonies. Similarly, left to their own devices in an unnatural environment, humans “naturally” organize around a centralized authority. The fact that monarchies of a fashion predate the agricultural revolution only amplifies the point.
And here we need to revisit my argument about corruption. When democracies fall apart, we often say they are “falling” or “slipping backward” into authoritarianism. The breakdown of Venezuela fits this familiar model. This is one form of social entropy. But our language fails us when societies reject democracy and the market in favor of supposedly “future-oriented” models of social organization. When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, Western intellectuals hailed it as a great advance in human affairs. Castro’s takeover of Cuba was likewise celebrated as an exciting improvement, a more humane and rational way of organizing politics and economics. What this misses is that all efforts to escape the Miracle of liberal democratic capitalism lead to the same destination.
The categories of left and right tend to mislead us, and so do terms like “forward” and “backward.” Thomas More coined the word “Utopia” to mean no place. He contrasted it with the term “eutopia,” which means good place. How many millions have died in a quest to find a perfect society that does not and cannot exist? Meanwhile, how many billions have benefited from our discovery of a good place—the oasis that is the Miracle? The point is that there’s no direction—left, right, forward, backward—out of the oasis that won’t take us back to the desert.
In other words, every effort to do away with liberal democratic capitalism is reactionary, because they all attempt to restore the unity of purpose that defines the premodern or tribal mind. Socialism, nationalism, communism, fascism, and authoritarianisms of every stripe are forms of tribalism. The tribal mind despises division. It despises the division of labor and the inequality it inevitably fosters. It despises the division between the religious and the secular, between the individual and the group, between civil society and the state. Whether it takes the form of religious orthodoxy, communist dogma, the divine right of kings, or some variant of “social justice” theory, the same underlying impulse rules: We must all be in it together. The genius of the Miracle lies in the division of labor, not just in manufacturing or science, but in our own minds. Save in times of war or some other existential crisis, meaning cannot be a mass, collective enterprise without crushing the rich ecosystem of institutions that actually give us meaning and ensure liberty and prosperity.