Right Reason

Our Kleptocratic Civilization

 

 

To the radical egalitarian, the civilization that we live in is horribly unjust. The power laws that manifest themselves in the distribution of wealth lead to the very few owning the vast majority. Worse than that inequality of ownership is the inequality of opportunity that accompanies it, with the vast majority chained to menial labor lest they fall into grinding poverty. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau lamented in The Social Contract: “Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains.” A powerful, stirring accusation no doubt, and one that cuts to the heart of the radical egalitarian uneasiness with, really, all political order. 

In the book that followed, Rousseau argued that the only way for human beings to live freely, or even as proper human beings since man was free by definition for Rousseau, was for each person to freely give themselves to the general will: “each, by giving himself to all, gives himself to no one, and since there is no associate over whom one does not acquire the same right as one grants over oneself, one gains the equivalent of all one loses, and more force to preserve what one has” (Rousseau 1997: 50). Rousseau’s condemnation of the hierarchies of 18^th century Europe helped to motivate a trend of political thinking that fought against such institutions in the centuries to follow, beyond the feudal ancien régime to the liberal commercial society.  

 

One of the essential features of the radical egalitarian outlook that Rousseau helped to promote is  that each person in a society should relate and sympathize with the fellow members of her society as an equal. In such a society, everybody is united with each other in cooperation encompassing the entire community. Rousseau wrote of such a society in The Social Contract, “As soon as this multitude is united in one body, one cannot injure on of the members without attacking the body, and still less can one injure the body without the members being affected” (Ibid: 52).  The egalitarian society is, therefore, one in which everybody within it pulls together for the common good.

Only through that act of encompassing cooperation could people interact with each other as equals. Much like hoplites in formation, their total dedication to the community ensured that no one person could stake out a position above his fellow citizens. However, once people began to look after their own interests, the solidarity of primordial society decayed, which Rousseau recognizes in his Second Discourse: “This is how natural inequality imperceptibly unfolds together with unequal associations, and the differences between men, developed by their different circumstances, become more perceptible, more permanent in their effects, and begin to exercise a corresponding influence on the fate of individuals” (Rousseau 1997: 170). 

 

It’s a tempting vision that appeals to the innate human yearning for encompassing cooperation and meaning through such cooperation. But it’s one  that’s irreconcilable with the hierarchical nature of a complex society. The reason is that egalitarianism stems from our innate yearning for an egalitarian society that was selected for over the hundreds of thousands of years that our distant ancestors once lived in.

Radical egalitarianism has become apart of social democracy’s civil religion. To speak against it is an act of heresy, yet radical egalitarianism is a very dangerous doctrine that stands juxtaposed to the demands of the civilization whose fruits we enjoy. When a radical egalitarian sees a world in chains, a more sober perspective recognizes the necessary hierarchy to sustain that has sustained civilization across the millennia. Put into practice, in its indiscriminate leveling of hierarchy, radical egalitarianism seeks to destroy the social complexity that has made social existence possible in complex societies. 

It isn’t an accident that radical egalitarianism is an advocate for a type of society resembling the ancestral bands that Homo sapiens evolved within. At its heart, radical egalitarianism is an expression of humanity’s yearning for such a society. Human beings aren’t simply souls in machines; rather, they are animals whose social aptitudes have evolved over a vast natural history that should be the subject of greater appreciation in the study of human society. To understand man as a political animal, one has to understand man as a band animal; in the words of Daniel Klein, one has to understand band-man and his legacy around us. Apart of the legacy of the band is a desire for an egalitarian community and cooperation that encompasses across that entire community. 

 

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, one of Jared Diamond’s general argument is that civilization put to an end the egalitarian status that people had once enjoyed in their ancestors’ bands. The sympathy that motivates people’s desire for a fair society and the moral sentiments that lead us to approve of the leveling of hierarchy evolved in the unique context of the ancestral bands our Paleolithic ancestors resided in. In those bands, people generally relate and sympathize with each others as equals. However, as complex society emerged, people could no longer relate to each others as equals as hierarchies dissolved the primordial solidarity of the ancestral band. 

With the mutation of the first chiefdoms, human societies across the world began an unstoppable evolution towards ever more unequal and ever more kleptocratic societies:

By now, it should be obvious that chiefdoms introduced the dilemma fundamental to all centrally governed, nonegalitarian societies. At best, they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis. At worst, they function unabashedly as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes. These noble and selfish functions are inextricably linked, although some governments emphasize much more of than function that of the other. (Diamond 2005: 276)

With civilization, wealth and political power was now inequality distributed across the population, often with a very high correlation between the two. Moreover, that unequal distribution was a feature, not a bug. 

After all, any complex system is going to be hierarchical to some degree. As Herbert Simon argued in “The Architecture of Complexity,” hierarchy is to some degree a measurement of complexity. Although Diamond is woefully ignorant about the role that commerce has played in the rise of civilization—a quick perusal through the index of Guns, Germs, and Steel reveals that neither ‘commerce,’ ‘property’ nor ‘trade’ make an appearance there—his broad strokes demonstrate how civilization has become progressively ever less egalitarian. Whatever one may think about Diamond’s larger argument about civilization, his diagnosis of all complex societies as kleptocracies to one degree or another should be heeded. Whether its Babylon, the Egypt of the Middle Kingdom, Antonine Rome, Plantagenet England, or Imperial Germany, few will hold mastery over others. In complex systems, power laws are everywhere and they manifest themselves in civilization.  

So the civilization that we live in is deeply kleptocratic, yet it has to be to function. The fact that power laws manifest themselves in civilization isn’t a challenge to reformers; rather, it’s a fact that has to be accepted to live in it. Medieval clerics may have preached that God authorized the kleptocracies around them—and right enough they may have been on that count—but we needn’t have recourse to such rhetoric today, not with our understanding of social evolution. Our civilization, after all, is neither the product of divine command nor a social contract; rather, it has taken the form it has thanks to generations of cultural selection, dependent on a whole menagerie of causes that are historical contingent. Those historical contingencies become crystalized into civilization. To describe the manner in which contingent chance events become integral parts of a functional whole, Stuart A. Kauffman likens the products of evolution to a Rube-Goldberg machine in The Origins of Order:

Beyond the charm of his style, Goldberg’s ad hoc machinery demonstrates a basic principle. Once the components are assembled and once the system works, the system is an integrated whole. Removing or sharply changing any component will probably lead to failure. That is, solutions, once found, are more or less locked in. (Kauffman 1993: 13)

The hierarchies and institutions we have are very much a product of frozen randomness, yet they have become integral to the greater whole of the civilization they are embedded within. To level those hierarchies and institutions in a desire to create a more equal society would be strike at the functional whole that is civilization. 

 

The response to the kleptocracy around us isn’t to return to a simpler society, it’s to reduce the impact of coercion in society and to allow people to carve out their own private spheres of their own making. Abstract rules of conduct, rather than solidarity and encompassing cooperation, are what enable human beings to flourish in a complex society, despite its strongly kleptocratic elements. Commutative justice is foremost among those abstract rules of conduct. Commutative justice enables us to protect ourselves from that kleptocratic world and to follow the path that we desire for ourselves. We have to recognize that virtue begins at home and that our desire to find fulfillment through our wider society is ultimately an impulse that has little role in social existence in a civilization.

 

 

Bibliography

Diamond, Jared. 2005. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: WW. Norton & Company. 

Kauffman, Stuart. 1993. The Origins of Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. The Discourses and other early political writings. Trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. The Social Contract and other later political writings. Trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Explaining the Roman Fixation

 

Over the past 13,000 years the predominant trend in human society has been the replacement of smaller, less complex units by larger, more complex ones.

-Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel

 

 

Even since Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (an probably even before that) the death throes and final end of the Roman state have been an obsession of thinkers of all persuasions and perspectives. Ever since Gibbon's magnum opus hit the market, new theories explaining the Roman Empire's collapse and theories explaining why the contemporary world resembles that trajectory of events have been widespread. Today is no different.

What is the cause, though, of this Roman fixation? Why have scholars and commentators always found the need to find either explanations or inspiration from these events? This is clearly something to ponder about since there are certainly many other historical episodes of interest.

To pick other examples from ancient well removed from any modern loyalties, the history of the Diadochi in the Near East following Alexander the Great's amazing feat of conquest certainly has both drama and political lessons as does the collapse of the Roman empire. Not only do the Diadochi inherit the aftermath of one of the largest swings in power seen in history, but they also rule during one of the most culturally creative stretches of human history, when Alexander's empire served as a κρατήρ for all of the political channels it opened for the spread of culture across the remnants of Alexander's empire. So for that matter does the history of the Delian League, which one could easily imagine a commentator using in order to shed light on NATO and the expression of American power across the world. Yet neither of those have gathered either the academic or public interest as the fall of Rome has had; indeed, nowhere near as much.

 

Why Rome, then? There is certainly the point that all of European history has been shaped by Rome's end, but hasn't it also been affected by the Diadochi and the Delian League? Certainly, but neither or those two have left such a mark on European law, language, and architecture as Rome had. With Rome and her culture having such an impact upon the evolution of our own, it is thus of no surprise that our imagination focuses on Rome so much.

Another factor is that is the Fall of Rome is a clear and distinct counterexample against what has seemed to be the trend of human history towards ever more complexity. Unlike the quarreling Diadochi and the relatively short-lived Delian League, the Roman Empire was a stable order for well over two centuries. This history of stability lends to its ultimate collapse a much more shocking and apocalyptic elements to it that arouses the imagination like almost no event before or since. The image of Alaric's sack of Rome in 410 B.C., or Genseric's sack in 455, almost immediately leads to the question of how could the Visigoths manage to overwhelm such a powerful state. The Roman Empire actually maintained order, and continued to increase the complexity of that order, within its borders. It projected power from Scotland to the Zagros Mountains, and managed to have smooth transitions between generations of decision-makers that maintained that order for so long. And yet, that order was torn asunder by the end, not to be followed by more complex social networks, but less as much of Westerm Europe was divided into fiefdoms by the victorious Germanic tribes.

 

There are two general patterns within the world that make the case of Rome so interesting, and these are patterns we are often only half conscious of pulling our interest. First is something that was mentioned above: the general trend in human history, whether it is in the form of Manifest Destiny or the development of linguistic states out of Romantic nationalism, in societies becoming both larger in terms of population, and more complex in their organization. Second is the Lindy effect, which is that anything that can replicate itself within the world becomes more likely to replicate itself over time as it exists each unit of time further.

The first shocks us because out of the dust of the Western Roman Empire came a handful of Germanic kingdoms, none of which, not even Charlemagne’s, could claim to have the complexity of the Roman Empire. Complexity was there, and then it vanished for centuries. A clear explicandum for explanation and food for thought. The second shocks us because the Roman Empire survived for so long as a stable political order only not to seemingly into something else, something distinctly Roman, but it collapsed into a political order, at least in the West, that was clearly not Roman. 

One could almost be forgiven to think that human history is a history of the emergence of ever-more complex institutions and modes of social cooperation. Human events have seem to have an autocatalytic property to themselves by which the association of human beings, especially within competitive relationships, is sufficient to bring about an avalanche of creativity generating ever larger institutions with ever more interactions within them. Bands have yielded to tribes, tribes to chiefdoms, chiefdoms to simple states, and simple states to more complex ones. It seems the natural order of things that human societies increase in complexity as time passes.

Against this, the history of Rome provides us with a spectator's perspective, sometimes impartial sometimes nakedly biased, on the unraveling of a society far more complex than any of its succeeding orders for centuries. That lack of complexity across the Middle Ages is really one of the reasons it is called the Dark Ages, and why the Middle Ages seem to lack the glory that Rome had. The often petty squabbling between and within dynasties over tracks of land that were small potatoes compared to the territorial stakes of the Roman Empire just doesn't seem like a proper act to follow the Roman hegemony. This is all on top of the destructive fantasies that the Fall of Rome satisfies within us. 

When Huayna met Francisco: Jared Diamond on Group Selection

 

"Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru" by John Everett Millais

 

The greatest argument for group selection has to be that the set of strategies each human being may choose between and the pay-offs that those strategies yield are greatly conditioned by the social ecology that they find themselves in. Every human being is born into a society with institutions and culture already in place. These constrain the scope of action that each human being may take.

Group selection also helps to explain why some human societies have been overwhelmed by other societies in the course of human history. The most classic example of this is the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and the Inca.

 

The most famous attempt to explain this moment in history has been provided by Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel. In it, he argues that the course of events that followed with this meeting of cultures was geographically determined. This is a form of group selection. It was not individual Spanish conquistadors that had developed firearms, deadly diseases or steel weapons, but rather each was a factor that each individual within their history had only a negligible control over. 

Moctezuma II and Huayna Capac did not have the option of using the horses, guns and steel that provided a relatively small army of Spanish conquistadors the ability to subjugate entire populations. Nor did they have the good luck of having their enemies decimated by germs that they have no immunity of while coming into contact with no similarly dangerous strains. Moctezuma and Huayna Capac were both doomed once the conquistadors arrived on the soil of America. Both the Aztec and the Incan cultures could not equip their members with strategies that could have countered what the Spanish culture brought to the table.

 

This is also where Diamond's thesis about geography determining the dominance of Western cultures errs: it fails to consider how different cultures can vastly change the possibilities and scope of human action occurring within it. Though Guns, Germs and Steel, does provide a strong case for different environments leading to the group selection of Spanish culture against that of the Aztecs, it does not explain why Western culture has been chosen for over the past three hundred years across the world and especially in Asia. Asian cultures. India and China both had the advantages that Diamond attributes to being so crucial to the ascendency of the West and both even enjoyed eras of greater technical progress that European countries throughout their history. Diamond simply cannot explain why it was Warren Hastings who the English Governor-General of India who defeated Shah Alam II, the Mughal emperor of Delhi, rather than the other way around. He cannot explain why it was the European great powers who divided Chinese coastal cities among themselves rather than the other way around.

Though Diamond is correct to note the emphasize the importance of group selection in determining the course of the evolution of human societies, he vastly underestimates the importance of culture. It was Western culture that provided institutions of human beings within it to cooperate in ways that were far more efficient and provided far more wealth than social cooperation within other cultures. That is what group selection means in the present world. Not the victory of certain groups over others due to merely geographical factors, but rather the selection of cultures within which social cooperation yields the most wealth.