4

Democracy: default-mode politics

Dear Mr Willmett,

Many thanks for your letter. You ask whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade and instance the fact that they are not apparently growing in this country and the USA.

I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle … With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted …

Private letter from George Orwell to an admirer, May 19441

It was three weeks before the D-Day landings, V-1 flying bombs were landing on London every day, and George Orwell would not write Nineteen Eighty-Four for another three years, but his letter of May 1944 certainly has some resonance with the fears of our own time. The pessimism about the future of democracy is there, and Orwell is already worried about the ‘tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth’. But his vision of the future as ‘a boot stamping on a human face — forever’ did not come to pass, and our own worst fears about the future of democracy in an era of resurgent populism are unlikely to be fulfilled either.

This concern for the vulnerability of democracy is quite understandable, because it appeared quite late in human history and has been successfully repressed at various times and places. Because the standard historical account for the invention of democratic institutions traces only one cultural sequence, from the Greek and Roman city-states via 17th-century England and the American and French Revolutions, we also regard democracy as native to Western civilisation and transplanted (and therefore more vulnerable) elsewhere. Indeed, during the Cold War it was commonplace to see even Russia — Christian for a thousand years and a European great power for the past three hundred — as somehow outside the charmed circle of countries that had the right cultural ingredients for building a lasting democracy.

I must confess that I still held that view myself when I first went to the Soviet Union on a lengthy film shoot in 1982. It was the ‘era of stagnation’: most people had become privately cynical about the system, but they almost never hinted at the extent of their disaffection except to the closest and most trusted friends, and then only in the relative security of their own kitchens. In public, and especially in the company of foreigners, Soviet citizens never dared to criticise or question the Orwellian misrepresentations of reality that surrounded them, so I left the country still convinced that the communist regime, however ugly, was all-powerful and would never change. In fact, it had only seven years to go.

Five years later, after three Soviet leaders — Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko, and Yuri Andropov — had died in rapid succession, I went back to speak at an international conference, landed in Moscow, and realised that things really had changed under Mikhail Gorbachev. As a ‘one-month expert’ on Russia, I simply had not believed that all the talk of glasnost and perestroika could be genuine, but people I had known before were now speaking freely about the past, the present, and even (with some apprehension) the future.

In a couple of days, I was convinced that huge change was coming (and it felt like it might be positive change), so I decided to go back to the Soviet Union and the satellite countries for a couple of weeks every few months, get to know all the players, and interview them regularly. I didn’t know it yet, but I was watching a non-violent revolution take shape in the world capital of tyranny.

Non-violent revolutions seemed like a contradiction in terms then. Mahatma Gandhi could shame exhausted imperialists into going home, and Martin Luther King could wring concessions out of elected administrations that knew they were in the wrong, no matter how furiously they denied it, but nobody had ever taken on a real dictator and forced him out of power without violence. Then, in 1986, the Filipinos did exactly that (while the whole world watched, because Manila had just got a live satellite uplink). A few other Asian countries followed their example in the next couple of years — South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan successfully, although Burma’s attempt was a bloody failure — but it still seemed inconceivable that this kind of soft power could overcome a real totalitarian autocracy. The massacre that ended the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in May–June 1989 just confirmed that pessimistic assessment.

So I went to the first anti-communist demonstration in Moscow the following month with grave misgivings. The rendezvous was outside the ‘Stalin Gingerbread’ skyscraper that housed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The ten-lane Garden Ring road was already jammed full of people when I got there, but I stayed close to the side of the street, not too far from a doorway of some sort, in case the shooting started. Then I realised that there were army officers in full uniform in the crowd, and they were protesting, too — so I got out in the middle of the street with everybody else.

I spent the rest of that summer in the Baltic republics, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, where parallel administrations run by local nationalists were already jostling the communists aside. On the way home from the Soviet Union in September, I stopped off in Budapest — to find the streets littered with Trabant cars abandoned by East Germans who were using Hungary as an escape route to the West because the Hungarian government, though still technically communist, had opened the border with Austria. Most of the East German ‘refugees’ were young and well educated, and when I interviewed them in the Young Pioneer camp in the hills behind Buda where they waited for the hourly coaches to arrive and take them to West Germany, they were all confident that it wouldn’t be long before the inter-German border would be open, too. As soon as I got home, I booked a flight back to Berlin, and got there just as the Wall was coming down.

What was happening was occasionally scary, but mostly it was exhilarating — and entirely counter-intuitive. It sounds almost trite now, but at the time it was a revelation to learn that people can and will act together spontaneously to resist domination, and that so long as they stay united and avoid violence, it is very hard for the ‘authorities’ to use violence against them. And the non-violent democratic revolutions kept coming. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union itself had been dismantled by non-violent action (though Russia still struggles with democratisation), and the Cold War was over. Then it was the turn of apartheid South Africa, where the African National Congress never even exercised its option of flooding the streets of Johannesburg with hundreds of thousands of non-violent protesters. Had it done so, the white-minority government would have had only two choices: to surrender unconditionally without any negotiations or guarantees, or to clear the streets by gunfire and start the race war that would destroy the whole country. Instead, the ANC just held that threat in reserve while the negotiations continued for a peaceful transfer of power by means of a one-person-one-vote democratic election, which finally came in 1994.

I spent some of that year in South Africa making a film about it, but I still wasn’t sure how and why non-violence worked. Clearly, it depended on media exposure to be safe: that’s why it is a relatively recent phenomenon. Round-the-clock global television coverage was what emboldened the Filipinos to stand up to the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, and when the Chinese regime decided to slaughter the students on the square in 1989, believing (probably accurately) that its own political survival was at stake, it waited until after dark to send the army in so the television cameras could not record it.

Clearly, too, both the desire for equality and the instinctive knowledge that collective non-violent action will probably deter even the powerful and well-armed from resorting to violence themselves are human qualities, not the exclusive inheritance of some specific cultural group: Czechs and Thais and Basotho share these values and this knowledge in equal measure. If all these things didn’t make you question your assumptions about the cultural roots of democracy, you really weren’t paying attention.

The past is not dead. It’s not even past.

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951

In all the written history of mankind, steep hierarchies of power and privilege are the default mode of human politics, with only brief outbreaks, mostly quite recent, of a different kind of politics based of egalitarian values. On the other hand, there was already wide agreement in anthropological circles that the earliest human societies, the little bands of hunter-gatherers, rarely more than a hundred in number, in which all human beings lived for several hundred thousand years, were intensely egalitarian. They had no formal leaders, no permanent hierarchies, and made their decisions by a process of discussion, debate, and consensus. So something very large must have happened five or ten thousand years ago to force almost all civilised societies into the tyrannies that fill our history — and something else very large must be happening now to allow egalitarian values to re-emerge as the political norm in contemporary mass societies.

A great many people were speculating on these questions in the late 20th century, and being a trained historian gave me no advantage at all. The answers clearly lay further back in the past, with the anthropologists, or maybe even with the primatologists, so I got in touch with Frans de Waal, whose book Chimpanzee Politics: power and sex among apes made a big impression on me when it was first published in 1982. He’s Dutch by birth, but by 1995 he was the director of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, so I just phoned him, the way journalists do, and asked if I could come and interview him.

Not now, de Waal said: he was involved in organising a closed inter-disciplinary conference to be held at Emory. What’s it about? I asked. Well, it’s about the ‘U-Shaped Curve’, he said: the puzzling fact that most non-human primate species live in extremely hierarchical groups (a vertical line), whereas early human beings lived in remarkably egalitarian mini-societies (a horizontal line) — and civilised human beings, for the most part, have reverted to extreme hierarchies (another vertical line, and thus a U-shaped curve). The conference was closed, because all sorts of disciplines would be present, from evolutionary biologists to cultural anthropologists, and none of the participants wanted to risk their reputations by being involved in this speculation on a large new topic until they were certain that the conference had produced academically respectable results. Oh, please, can I come, I said. I promise I’ll only interview people who are willing to go on the record, and I won’t record or repeat anything that is said in the public sessions. And, amazingly, he let me come.

The conference went well, and some very interesting ideas were aired. Although I had no professional standing at the conference, by the end of it I could barely contain myself from pointing out that the puzzle was not just a U-shaped curve. It was more like the cross-section of a saucepan, and the (horizontal) saucepan handle was what had happened over the past two-and-a-half centuries in the West and was happening all around the planet right now: the re-emergence of egalitarian values in politics and the spread of democratic systems in modern mass societies.

All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule they prefer to remain equal.

Harold Schneider, economic anthropologist, 19792

By my definition, egalitarian society is the product of a large, well-united coalition of subordinates who assertively deny political power to the would-be alphas in their group.

Christopher Boehm, evolutionary anthropologist, director, Jane Goodall Research Center, University of Southern California, 19993

When we talk about democracy, what we really mean is a society of equals — which is pretty rare both in human history and among primates in general. But such societies did exist, probably for at least one hundred thousand years, and maybe much longer, in human prehistory. In fact, they were almost certainly the norm. It wasn’t democracy in the modern sense, with elections and elected leaders: the little bands of hunter-gatherers could settle everything directly, just by talking things over until a consensus was reached and a decision emerged. It took a long time, because everybody had an equal right to speak, and they weren’t usually in a hurry. But these were societies where all the adults were genuinely equal and there were no leaders giving orders.

Anthropologists don’t have time machines, of course, so they had to make do with studying the few dozen hunter-gatherer societies that had survived into the 20th century relatively intact (although almost all of them had had some contact by then with the big civilisations that surrounded them). And the fact that they were practically all egalitarian, in polar environments and tropical ones, in deserts or forests, in every continent, emboldened the anthropologists to speculate that all the hunter-gatherer bands of the distant past — everybody’s ancestors, in other words — had also been egalitarian. Or democratic, to use the modern word for the kind of politics that egalitarianism enables.

This idea was already gaining ground in anthropological circles in the late 1960s, when most people outside the trade still assumed that our distant ancestors, long before civilisation, had been nasty, brutish, and quite short. (Think of the opening scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a space odyssey, released in 1968.) By the late 1980s, most anthropologists accepted that their hunter-gatherer ancestors had actually been quite nice to one another, at least within their own band. (They did fight wars against neighbouring bands.) But even before the general public had caught up with the new thinking, the anthropologists were developing grave doubts about the idea that human beings might be innately egalitarian.

The three African great apes, with whom we share this rather recent Common Ancestor, are notably hierarchical … The same can be said of most human political societies in the world today, starting about five thousand years ago … From certain well-developed chiefdoms came the six early civilizations, with their powerful and often despotic leaders. But before twelve thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian.

Bruce Knauft, cultural anthropologist4

The problem for anthropologists with this business of egalitarian hunter-gatherers was the fact that all our closest relatives, the other great apes, are clearly quite nasty. Sorry, I mean hierarchical. Young male chimpanzees setting out to climb the status ladder start by beating up on adult females before they dare to take on rival young males. ‘Silverback’ gorillas keep harems of females; some of their young sons are allowed to remain, but not to breed. Bonobos are less violent, but both males and females live in clearly defined dominance hierarchies. And most human societies for the past five thousand years have had kings at the top and slaves at the bottom.

So the notion that ‘Anatomically Modern Humans’, during their two-hundred-thousand-year tenure on this planet, have lived in egalitarian societies for at least half the time, if not more, poses a problem. By the 1980s most anthropologists did believe that this was the fact of the matter — the evidence from extant hunter-gatherer bands was so strong — but it was a fact that begged for an explanation. If they were the egalitarian exception in a sea of primate despotism, how did they get there?

Maybe they became egalitarians only one hundred thousand years ago, or maybe the switch goes further back — the archaeological record gives us little direct evidence about our ancestors’ social arrangements — but at some point in the distant past there must have been a revolution that overthrew the traditional primate hierarchy. And then, between five and ten thousand years ago, there must have been a counter-revolution that drove all the newly ‘civilised’ peoples back into steeply hierarchical societies — which 99 per cent of human beings lived in until the first democratic revolutions in America and Europe less than ten generations ago.

Anthropologists don’t get involved in debates about where the modern revolutions came from, although they are well aware of the relevance of their own work for understanding that. It is the first two big changes, the egalitarian revolution and the hierarchical counter-revolution, that concern them. The first man to call a puzzle that they created the ‘U-shaped curve’ was Bruce Knauft, a colleague of Frans de Waal’s in the anthropology department at Emory University, in an article in 1991. Two years later, Christopher Boehm of the University of Southern California published a paper in Current Anthropology, suggesting how egalitarian behaviour might first have arisen in human beings,5 and by 1995 there they all were at Emory with a couple of dozen other experts in various fields to take a good long look at the evidence.6

The symposium didn’t shake the foundations of anthropology, but it did mark a major shift in the way that anthropologists and allied trades address the political dimension of human nature. Four years later, Boehm published his book Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, with a proposed explanation for how egalitarianism had happened in the first place, and then been suppressed again at the dawn of civilisation, that actually makes sense. It’s not the last word on the subject — there’s never a last word in science, and especially in the social sciences — but it’s a very persuasive working hypothesis, and I will be working with it for the rest of this chapter.

Boehm’s key insight is that human beings, as one of the great apes and part of the broader primate family, inevitably have a strong tendency to seek domination over their fellows: you can’t escape from your own heredity. However, being more intelligent than their primate relatives, human beings can also foresee where this tendency is likely to lead, and it’s nowhere good. An individual’s personal chance of emerging as ‘top dog’ is very small: every player except one is going to lose this game. Ending up at the bottom of the pecking order is very undesirable, but much more likely. So for most people, just abolishing the pecking order and enforcing equality across the entire group you live in becomes a most attractive option. As Boehm explained:

The hypothesis was straightforward: such people are guided by a love of personal freedom. For that reason they manage to make egalitarianism happen, and do so … in spite of innate human tendencies to dominance and submission that easily lead to the formation of social dominance hierarchies. People can arrest this process by reacting collectively, often pre-emptively, to curb individuals who show signs of wanting to dominate their fellows … This hypothesis provided a curious answer to Knauft’s riddle, for I was arguing that the same quite definite and ‘hierarchical’ human political nature could [support not only the] despotic societies of recent humans and ancestral apes, but also the egalitarian societies of [early] humans. In despotic social dominance hierarchies the pyramid of power [has] one or a few individuals (usually male) at the top exerting authority over a submissive rank and file. In egalitarian hierarchies the pyramid of power is turned upside down, with a politically united rank and file decisively dominating the alpha-male types.7

Boehm’s hypothesis had the great advantage that it did not require us to re-invent humans as a species without ambition or envy in order to explain the triumph of egalitarianism. All it requires is a broad coalition of people who do not want to lose out in the dominance game — and know they are unlikely to win it — to band together and use their numbers to create a political environment in the band that deters the alpha-males from seizing control. As Harold Schneider said, ‘All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule they prefer to remain equal.’

Why did only humans, of all the primates, do this? A very clever chimpanzee might dimly apprehend this principle, but he has no language to formulate it clearly even for himself, let alone to communicate it to the other chimpanzees who are also intimidated and oppressed by the highest-ranking member of the band. Lower-status chimpanzees do engage in quite sophisticated politics, including forming coalitions to overthrow the band’s current despot, but it always ends up with a new tyrant taking his place. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Whereas a human coalition — remember, we’re only talking about a dozen or so adult men in the band, most of whom have known one another since childhood — might manage to stick together, prevent new tyrants from emerging, and shut the whole dominance game down. Boehm calls the technique by which they accomplished that a ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’.

Not only might this have happened early on in human prehistory; it must have happened, and not once but many times. There is no other way that a primate species such as our own could have ended up living with almost perfect equality among adults in each of its tens of thousands of scattered bands for thousands of generations. We have no evidence for when this revolution happened, but it must have been long ago, for the mechanisms by which the potentially dominant members of a band are prevented from taking over are deeply embedded in the culture of almost all hunter-gatherer groups that survived long enough for anthropologists to get to them. Indeed, even most ‘tribal’ groups — that is, groups that have begun to domesticate plants and/or animals, live in villages of up to several hundred people that only move infrequently if at all, and may number into the thousands or even more in total — also remain egalitarian, and have the same levelling customs to ensure that no individual or group of individuals comes to dominate the rest.

This is most striking when dealing with leaders. There aren’t any, in the conventionally understood sense of the word. Some individuals are more respected and influential on account of their wisdom, experience, or prowess as warriors, but they have no permanent mandate to take charge of the group and give orders, even in times of crisis. Indeed, when important decisions are taken they tend to be among the last to speak, summing up the discussion when the outlines of a consensus have already become clear. And even among the tribal peoples who stay put long enough to accumulate a certain amount of material wealth, greater generosity in sharing is expected from those who attain social prominence than from others. Indeed, the ideal characteristics of a person who might be considered for a leadership role, however temporary and conditional, would include generosity, modesty, and an even disposition, whereas a tendency to anger, arrogance, boastfulness, or even aloofness are all strongly disapproved of. As Richard Lee says of the San (‘Bushman’) group of hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari desert of southern Africa with whom he lived for several years: ‘In !Kung terms these traits absolutely disqualify a person as a leader and may engender even stronger forms of ostracism.’

Say that a man has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all … maybe just a tiny one.’ Then I smile to myself because I now know he has killed something big.

A proud hunter’s heavy use of denial and euphemism demonstrates the degree to which the group is able to intimidate its more prominent achievers. And even after his show of modesty, other band members pre-emptively take pains to put down the hunter. When they go to carry in the kill, they express their ‘disappointment’ boisterously:

You mean to say you have dragged us all the way out here to make us cart home your pile of bones? Oh, if I had known it was this thin I wouldn’t have come. People, to think I gave up a nice day in the shade for this. At home we may be hungry but at least we have nice cool water to drink.

The actual feelings of the critics, who simultaneously are joking and deadly serious, is revealed in the words of a culture member:

When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.

A !Kung informant explaining how the social controls work8

Hunter-gatherer bands put an enormous amount of effort into ensuring that nobody gets too big for his boots. This includes ‘randomising’ the credit for major achievements that might otherwise enhance a talented individual’s status and power. Killing a large animal is such an achievement, especially since the person who killed the beast then presides over the sharing out of the meat to all the heads of households in the band. (It would be unthinkable for the killer to keep all the meat for himself; big animals are always shared out more or less evenly.) The rule is that credit for the kill goes to the person whose arrow first hits the game, which seems fair enough — but that person may not even have been present on the hunt. The hunters all regularly exchange arrows, and keep track of who actually owns them. As Boehm explains: ‘In effect, it is a way of removing the temptation to dominate. The fact that the best hunters speak so modestly, and frequently swap arrows to avoid envy, is a monument to the efficacy of ridicule as an instrument of social control. But as we shall see, if they are faced with serious upstartism, people like the !Kung will go far beyond ridicule.’

‘Upstarts’ is what Boehm calls people who challenge the egalitarian order: people whose accomplishments or just their force of personality allow them to aspire to a prominent position in the band, even to give orders to other adults (which is a shocking breach of hunter-gatherer etiquette). If the normal social controls fail to deter them, the upstarts will face ostracism, perhaps expulsion from the band, and maybe even execution. Hunter-gatherers are not sweet, gentle, ineffective people. The men amongst them are all heavily armed and proficient in the use of weapons, they have a very high murder rate, and they frequently wage war against hostile neighbouring bands. But they are dedicated to maintaining their personal autonomy, which depends on preserving their equality against all challengers and ‘upstarts’. They will kill, if necessary, to ‘defend the revolution’ (as they would certainly not put it), but they rarely have to go so far.

We are into pure speculation here, but it is very unlikely that the ‘reverse-dominance hierarchy’ was imposed by killing off all the alpha types in the band. Small hunter-gatherer groups cannot afford to lose too many people, and in any case it shouldn’t be necessary. From what we know now about the human dynamics of such confrontations, a united front of people demanding equality will generally overawe the despots and would-be despots. (You might even say that modern democracies are simply the way that reverse-dominance hierarchies manifest themselves in mass societies.)

The original revolution, by the way, did not include feminism. Absolute equality pertained only between the heads of households, who were generally men, and gender relations within individual families could range from equality to downright despotism. However, adult women were definitely part of the ‘moral community’ that maintained the egalitarian rules and judged offenders against them, and their collective power in the public domain was certainly much greater than it was in the big, intensely hierarchical societies that supplanted the hunter-gatherers starting five to ten thousand years ago.

Which brings us, of course, to the second question: why did egalitarianism collapse between five and ten thousand years ago in the Nile Valley, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, and the Yellow River Valley, and between two and three thousand years ago in Central America and the Andes as well? These were all places where agriculture was becoming more systematic and intensive, and that may have been facilitated by the warming climate (the last major glaciation ended about eleven thousand seven hundred years ago), but why would more widespread and productive farming bring the whole system of reverse dominance hierarchy crashing down? The answer is probably just numbers.

All these cradles of early civilisation saw population explosions, because food production expanded hugely. Suddenly there were groups of fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, even half a million people living in the same area. This disabled most of the social customs that kept ambitious individuals in check, since they relied on people living in small groups and knowing one another intimately. Inequality soared, too, as the domestication of oxen around 6,000 years ago enabled some farmers to plough far more land and reap far more grain than others: those who owned the oxen were the first wealthy class, and it shows in the size of their houses. At the same time, the size and complexity of these new societies created a need for strong, centralised leadership that had previously been absent. And there were, of course, lots of people who would be more than happy to act as leaders. The rest, quite literally, is history.

Men neither bought nor sold; there were no poor and no rich; there was no need to labour, because all that men required was obtained by the power of will; the chief virtue was the abandonment of all worldly desires. The Krita Yuga was without disease; there was no lessening with the years; there was no hatred or vanity, or evil thought; no sorrow, no fear.

Mahabharata, ca. 200 AD9

In the age when life on earth was full, no one paid any special attention to worthy men, nor did they single out the man of ability … They loved each other and did not know that this was ‘love of their neighbour.’ They deceived no one, yet did not know that they were ‘men to be trusted’. They were reliable and did not know that this was ‘good faith.’ They lived freely together, giving and taking, and did not know that they were generous.

Chuang Tzu, 369–286 BC10

We don’t know what happened in detail, because it happened in a period before there was writing to preserve the evidence, but it seems likely that the transition from little egalitarian societies to large centralised monarchies with god-kings and slaves may have taken less than a thousand years (and a great deal of violence, of course). However, there must have been a widespread folk nostalgia for the lost egalitarian past, as there are myths of a lost Golden Age in all of the Old World’s dawn civilisations — the Perfect Age (Krita Yuga) in India, the Age of Perfect Virtue in China, the Garden of Eden in Middle Eastern cultures — even though all of them were first written down thousands of years after the actual change came about in their respective societies. Chuang Tzu even writes that ‘in the Age of Perfect Virtue men lived … on terms of equality with all creatures, as forming one family; how could they know among themselves the distinctions of superior men and small men?’

Nothing remained in the material world by then to suggest that equality had ever been a human value, but a strong personal preference for the old egalitarian values survived even in the new civilisations. It has been argued that the reign of reverse dominance hierarchies lasted long enough — one or two thousand generations — for egalitarian values to be incorporated into the human genetic heritage, and that is theoretically possible, but we need not insist upon it. It suffices to point out that midway between the rise of mass civilisations and the present, around two millennia ago, new universalist religions arose — Buddhism, Christianity, Islam — that all declared the absolute spiritual equality of all believers.

Why would we be surprised by this? In the everyday life of ordinary human beings, functional egalitarianism never went away. Today, the average person knows about the same number of people as friends and acquaintances as they would have in a hunter-gatherer band. The big difference is that back in the prehistoric days, that would have included pretty much everybody they ever met; now, it is a smaller selection of people whom they choose to include in their personal circle of friends and acquaintances. But among these overlapping circles of friends and acquaintances, the operational assumption is and always has been a rough degree of equality. Just as hunter-gatherer societies had an egalitarian ethos but struggled constantly to suppress dominance-seeking behaviours, so the hierarchical mass societies have always had to contend with a rival set of egalitarian values held in private by their own subjects.

Nevertheless, the daily reality of the new mass civilisations was universal hierarchy, militarisation, and oppression. For most people, the agricultural revolution — or perhaps we should say counter-revolution — was a disaster. They lost their freedom, they had poorer diets, they died younger, and they were even physically stunted compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors. But they multiplied like rabbits, and in only a few thousand years they pushed the hunter-gatherers and the tribal peoples out of all the good lands. Egalitarian values resurfaced briefly a few times in the classical period, notably in Athenian democracy and the Roman republic, but none of these experiments included more than a fraction of the local population. Ninety-nine per cent of the human race lived under kings, emperors, and dictators — and the tyrannies lasted for five thousand years, give or take a few centuries.

Then, around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg introduced the printing press and moveable type to Europe.

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Moveable type had been invented in China four centuries before Gutenberg, but it did not flourish in a language that used thousands of different ideographs: it was too costly to keep a set of type that contained 100,000 or more blocks, including dozens or hundreds of copies of the more common characters, so printers mostly stuck with woodblocks instead. European languages written in alphabetic scripts needed only fifty or sixty different pieces of type, and publishing immediately became a profitable and growing industry: around 10 million books were printed in Europe in the 15th century, 200 million in the 16th, and half a billion in the 17th. Tom Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, advocating the establishment of an independent, democratic republic in what would become the United States, sold 120,000 copies in the first three months in the Thirteen Colonies, and may have been read by half the population (then about 2.4 million).

It was no coincidence that the first modern democratic revolution happened in the Thirteen Colonies. Most of the colonists were of English descent, and were therefore heirs to the English Civil War of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had established the principle that the king ruled only with the consent of parliament. Equally importantly, about 85 per cent of men in New England could read, and although literacy was lower in the southern colonies and among women, it is probable that around half the total adult population was literate. This was even higher than in England, and indeed was probably the highest literacy rate in the world in the 1770s.

Printing and literacy mattered so much because they restored to populations numbering in the millions the ability to discuss means and ends and to come to collective decisions that had been lost with the rise of the mass civilisations. The first mass medium, the printing press, removed the roadblock that had made democracy — the political expression of the principle of equality in a mass society — virtually impossible for so long. Given the suppressed longing for equality that had never been extinguished in the mass societies, despite thousands of years of repression, people were bound to take advantage of the new circumstances to take it back.

Conducting the debate through newspapers, pamphlets, books, and large public meetings was obviously a more cumbersome and less satisfactory process than the old hunter-gatherer decision-making tradition of a few dozen adults debating decisions around a campfire until a consensus emerged, but it could be made to work. In an astonishingly short time, the mechanisms of a representative democracy were designed and put into place in the United States, including the constitutional ‘checks and balances’ that would serve as a modern and less oppressive substitute for the obsessive levelling customs of the hunter-gatherers. The constitution that incorporated the revived egalitarian values and the new rules and devices needed to make a mass democracy work was signed in 1787, and still works today — even though the American population has increased a hundredfold.

In 1789, thirteen years after the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1776, the revolution reached France, at the time the biggest and most powerful country in Europe, and the avalanche really got underway. It is still not over today, but a majority of the world’s people now live in countries that call themselves democratic. Quite a lot of them really are.

Good, but it’s a bit early to rejoice. It probably always will be. When asked what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had achieved, Benjamin Franklin allegedly replied: ‘A republic … if you can keep it,’ and that conditionality still applies today. Even the best-run, most experienced democracies still have to contain the ambitions of those who would dominate them without crushing the freedom of everybody else, and the balance is always hard to maintain.

The first two centuries of the democratic revolution were turbulent and bloody — France is now working on its fifth republic — and progress was slow. The old order defended itself ferociously, and even at the end of the First World War less than half the population of the West lived in genuinely democratic countries, and almost nobody outside the West. (Most non-Westerners, of course, lived under the heel of one European empire or another.) Moreover, the early 20th century saw the emergence of two extreme forms of politics that threatened to subvert or divert the drive for democracy.

One was fascism, which destroyed the existing hierarchies but substituted its own monolithic power structure and subordinated every member of the society to the goal of subjugating rival societies and establishing its own dominance. Chimpanzee politics writ very large, you might say. The other, communism, was a far greater challenge to the egalitarian ideal, for it simply took it to an extreme. It proposed that people should again live in the same circumstances of absolute material equality that our hunter-gatherer ancestors did (though its founders, of course, were not aware of that analogy). Marx even suggested that the state would eventually wither away, presumably leaving people to organise their lives in the same informal and consensus-seeking way that the ancestors did.

It was a sweet idea, but it failed to recognise that the degree of external political control that would be required to make people accept the goal of absolute material equality, in the absence of the kind of internalised social controls that the hunter-gatherers used, meant that communist societies had to be totalitarian tyrannies. And those tyrannies, of course, generated their own status hierarchies, and so led to levels of corruption that were significantly higher than those in capitalist societies. (But give Marx some credit: we do use ‘capitalist’, the word he popularised, to describe our own societies.)

The fascists were defeated in twenty years, at the cost of the worst war in history. The communists didn’t go under for another forty-odd years, during which we all lived with the threat of a far greater war that could even have triggered a ‘nuclear winter’, but in the end they left the stage quite peacefully. (There are still a few countries in Asia and one in Latin America that call themselves communist, but most of them seem to have lost the faith.) Apart from the Muslim world, which is fighting a string of vicious international and civil wars over the whole question of modernisation (which includes democratisation), the wars in defence of democracy are largely over, at least for the moment.

Thanks to the techniques of non-violent revolution, the past thirty years have seen a rapid spread of democracy in the post-colonial world. Despite some backsliding (in, for example, Turkey, Thailand and the Philippines) about half the world’s population now lives in democratic countries. To the extent that is possible in complex and inter-connected societies that are the heirs to five thousand years of civilisation, we have got our old equality and freedom back — and we get to keep the manifold benefits of that civilisation, too.

Yes, seven billion people (heading for eleven billion) is too many. Yes, climate change. Yes, the Sixth Mass Extinction. Yes, I know that we are running very close to the wind, but given how much worse we could have screwed up, I think we are actually doing pretty well at this point.

I also know that human ingenuity is capable of subverting any institution that human beings have created, and that we have no guarantee that egalitarian values will still prevail in the latter half of the 21st century. But I don’t think that a man as ignorant and self-indulgent as Donald Trump is going to destroy American democracy, let alone that populism is going to do it worldwide.