Human Dodos, Communist Man, Draka Serfs

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A couple of years ago I wrote some posts reviewing Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order". From the Wikipedia article:

"From chimpanzee hunting groups to tribes

In his quest for the origins of political order, he first looks at the social order among chimpanzees, notes that the war-like hunting group, rather than the family, was the primary social group, and claims the same for humans. Humans went further: to survive they formed tribes, whose armies were superior to hunting groups by their sheer size.

He uses recent work in sociobiology and other sources to show that sociability built on kin selection and reciprocal altruism is the original default social state of man and not any isolated, presocial human as suggested by Hobbes and Rousseau. He suggests that Hobbes and Locke present a fallacy when they argue humans developed cooperative ability only as a result of the invention of the state.

This is because chimps, the genetic ancestors to humans, engage in kin relations based on cooperation, and so Hobbes and Locke must be mistaken suggesting humans were once sociable, lost this instinct and then regained it due to the state.

Challenge of tribes on the road towards the state

The next step was to escape beyond tribalism and the "tyranny of cousins", to join tribes into larger coalitions towards states, again due to the advantage of larger armies. This was done with the aid of religion. This was because as groups grew in size, maintaining cooperation became more difficult as face-to-face interactions with much of society became difficult. Religion offered a way of providing a combining social force to hold society together.

For example, Fukuyama cites Mohammed as an example of what Weber labels a "charismatic leader" because he used the idea of an 'umma' (community of believers) to bind together the territory that he ruled over. This challenge to transcend tribalism partly remains today in many parts of the world outside Western civilization, for example in Afghanistan and in Somalia.

Restrictions on marriage and inheritance as a strategy against corruption

Loyalty to the tribe or the family, rather than to the state, leads to corruption and weakening of the state. Various strategies were used to overcome the corruption. One such strategy was restrictions against marriage among the ruling official class to make sure that loyalties would not lie with family or tribe.

• Mandarins or Scholar-officials, who were the ruling class of China, were not allowed to pass on the lands given to them by the emperor to their own children and were restricted as to whom they were allowed to marry.


• Mamluk slaves, the ruling class of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, were told which slaves to marry while their children could not inherit from them. Janissaries were originally forced into celibacy or prohibited from having a family.


• Pope Gregory VII forced Catholic priests in Europe to become celibate and they were prohibited from having a family for the same reason.


• Spanish administrators in South America were restricted from marrying local women and from establishing family ties in the territories they were sent to."

It should be added that the elites of empires of archaic despotism used extreme violence to break the powers of the clans. People do not take kindly to having a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

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The three articles I wrote were:

1. 'The natural state of humanity is clannishness'
2. Human Dodos
3. Human Dodos: the FAQs

which should be read in that order. I compared Jonathan Haidt's liberals (Myers-Briggs NFs) to dodos. Their naive optimism, their overarching (albeit abstract) compassion and their gullible belief in generalised human 'goodness' makes them easy meat for predators. Social liberalism is very much a northern european psychological trait, while most of the world's population (to its own economic detriment) continues to organise itself clannishly. Fukuyama's taming process has a way to go - and is not making any progress.

It's generally observed that extreme liberalism is required in a population to make Communism work. No more state, no more police, no more armies, no more war. We'd better believe in general niceness.

Just as Marx suggested that the historic role of capitalism was to develop the productive forces to enable the communist transition, perhaps it also has the historic task of breeding humans nice enough to make communism work at all. Then recall that a society of doves is unstable in the presence of predators. And then there is always the way of the Draka, which always seemed to me more likely.

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It's worth noting that western societies - so apparently liberal in appearance - are capable of extreme and non-liberal violence whenever push comes to shove. In America only about 20% of the population self-declare as liberals. Despite much sjw noise and fury, social liberalism is more a convenient facade for the imperial west.

I recall that fateful phrase: "Notice how the liberals all leave the room, wringing their hands, once the bullets start flying."

'The natural state of humanity is clannishness'

This note is a lemma to another post, 'Human Dodos', but you need to read this first.

Francis Fukuyama did a great service by reminding us that in the beginning, humankind was necessarily clannish. We are social creatures surviving only in groups, but there is no celestial police force guarding each one of us. If we don't stick with our kin, some other group will make us toast (in the baleful meaning of that phrase).

This argument was developed in the excellent "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" - I quote from this review (my emphasis):

"The Origins begins at the beginning with human evolution. This is no mere prolegomena. Fukuyama deserves credit for emphasizing that we are political animals and that evolved human nature is a basic influence on politics. Gathering evidence from a variety of sources – studies of chimpanzees as well as reports from the political life of hunting and gathering bands – Fukuyama proposes that humans have four key natural dispositions most relevant to politics. We evolved to be nepotistic, most inclined to cooperate with kin. We evolved to be religious; we evolved to be norm-followers; and we evolved to seek status or recognition.

"A particularly illuminating element of the book is how these evolved dispositions have continued to be influential. Nepotism, or kin selection, as expressed in strong tribal or clan lineages, is a continuing theme in the book as the nemesis of the modern state. If tribalism is strong, as today in Afghanistan or the Sunni Triangle of Iraq, modern states cannot flourish.

"The importance of religion as an influence on political development is another theme throughout. It was from religion, Fukuyama argues, that the rule of law arose.

"The key role of norms and institutions provides the subject-matter of the book: political institutions. Fukuyama regards the desire for status or recognition as the main source of change in history, and he engages in a running dispute through the book with rationalist or rational-choice explanations. Though Fukuyama uses a bio-historical and bio-political approach, he is by no means a ‘biological determinist’. Biology he treats as probability not determination.

"After briefly describing the transition from foraging to agriculture and then the development from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states, Fukuyama turns to his main concerns: (i) the origins of the modern state – in ancient China; (ii) the origins of the rule of law in the realms of powerful religions: India, Islam, and Christendom, but not China; and (iii) the origins of accountability in the assemblies of medieval Europe, especially the English parliament.

...

"Fukuyama makes the useful point that state-building requires overcoming the strong bonds of kin. States were recurrently prone to being colonized by their officials’ nepotism (favouring their relations), dynasticism (seeking to have their offspring inherit their office), tribalism, and clannishness.

"One method of bypassing kinship was to recruit military slaves. This was a common ploy in Islam and resulted in such bodies as the Ottoman Janissaries. Another was to rely on eunuchs, who were biologically prevented from founding their own mini-dynasties within the apparatus of the state. A third was to recruit officials on the basis of competence or merit. This, Fukuyama argues, was China’s main innovation.

"Europe was unusual: before state-building got underway, the Church had already weakened extended lineages (except in peripheral areas, such as Highland Scotland with its clans) with its ban on cousin-marriage. The bonds of extended lineages had already diminished prior to European state-building."

In the west we are so socialised into an atomised mode of life, mediated only by the nuclear family, that we see kin-groups (clans and gangs) as profoundly primitive and 'other'. But our way of life depends upon the integrity of a strong state exerting 'just power' through depersonalised laws. And a lot of conscious inhibition of retributive impulses.

Erode that state, or let it collapse, and the only individualists left will be dead individualists.

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Now continue to Human Dodos.

Want to understand our world?

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. By Francis Fukuyama.

Forty three years ago I discovered Marxism, and a world which had seemed baffling, messy and arbitrary suddenly made sense. Instead of a mass of shapeless events - kings and queens and wars - there was theory: theory stretching from the dawn of mankind in 'primitive communism' through the slavery of the Roman Empire to mediaeval feudalism and the rise of capitalism. The motor of history was class struggle, classes emergent from new modes of production. My own late-teenage angst was now explicable - we hadn't reached the destination yet, the final struggle for communism was yet to accomplish. I was a signed-up member of the Fourth International for almost a decade.

The generations of Marxist intellectuals were some of the smartest people on the planet and it took me years to absorb and integrate Marxist theory, and then to learn how to use it to create a 'political line'. In my late twenties conviction left me. It was only later I encountered E. O. Wilson's famous put-down ("Wonderful theory, wrong species") and finally realised that the Marxist theory of human nature required that we should all be very close kin, or ideally clones (like the ants).

Fukuyama has a similar project to explain world history in an overarching theoretical framework and use it to understand the dynamics and latent opportunities of the present day. He has a century and half of extra research to leverage over Marx, and a much more accurate view of human nature. I read "The Origins of Political Order" with increasing admiration as a largely successful attempt to account for how the world came to modernity in the strange form which exists today (the second volume, due this autumn, is already on my list). The Economist wrote a comprehensive review which I'm pleased to share with you here.

The Economist review (quoted in full).

WHY did the Catholic church's insistence on priestly celibacy in the late 11th century give Europeans an early advantage over other societies in establishing the rule of law? The answer in Francis Fukuyama's stimulating new book is that celibacy was one of several important reforms, instituted by Pope Gregory VII, which resulted in the development of canon law and the notion that even kings were subject to it. Gregory won everlasting fame by bending Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, to his will, forcing the most powerful man in Europe to do penance before him at Canossa.

Celibacy was vital in the battle against corruption and rent-seeking within the church, both of which were the typical consequences of patrimony. The reforms gave the church the moral stature to evolve into what Mr Fukuyama describes as “a modern, hierarchical, bureaucratic and law-governed institution” that established its authority for spiritual affairs—and by so doing set the ground rules for the subsequent rise of the secular state.

Mr Fukuyama (a pupil of Samuel Huntington who wrote a seminal work on political order 40 years ago) begins his own search for the origins of political order with the shift from small hunting bands to tribes. This eventually brought about the “coming of the Leviathan” or the coercive state. It was a development driven partly by the increasing complexity of societies founded on agriculture but much more by the organisational challenges of conducting warfare on an ever-greater scale.

With impressive erudition, the author travels across China, India, the Islamic world and different regions of Europe looking for the main components of good political order and at how and why these emerged (or failed to) in each place. The three critical ingredients, he argues, are a strong state, the application of the rule of law to all parts of society and a means of holding rulers to account for their actions.

The first unambiguously modern state, Mr Fukuyama believes, was the Qin dynasty in China, founded in 221 BC. Many of the control mechanisms perfected by the Qin had developed during the preceding 500 years or so of the Eastern Zhou dynasty when a host of small warring states across China began to coalesce. Such elements included a merit-based (non-aristocratic) military leadership combined with mass conscription, sophisticated taxation systems and a bureaucracy recruited from a permanent administrative cadre selected on the basis of ability rather than family connection. The Qin simply went much further, assaulting every section of society in its remorseless attempt to establish a form of proto-totalitarian dictatorship.

The Qin's extremism was also its undoing and it was soon replaced by the more enduring Han dynasty, which sought compromise with aristocratic elites and legitimation through a revived Confucianism. The Han state lasted for more than 400 years. But it was always vulnerable to what Mr Fukuyama calls “the bad emperor problem” as well as to the hardwired human tendency to make ties of kinship the primary criterion for conferring wealth, power and status. As Mr Fukuyama observes: “There is an inverse correlation between the strength of the centralised state and the strength of patrimonial groups. Tribalism…remains a default form of political organisation, even after a modern state has been created.”

Much of the book is concerned with the struggle between rulers in different parts of the world trying to forge powerful states (usually with the aim of military domination in times when conquest rather than technological progress was the main route to enrichment) while battling the astonishing ability of patrimonialism to undermine their efforts no matter what measures were used to break its grip. Chinese emperors favoured employing eunuchs in senior positions. Muslim rulers, from the Abbasids in the eighth century to the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and the Ottomans, developed the institution of military slavery to lessen nepotism and the internal conflicts created by tribal loyalties.

The Mamluks were meant to be a kind of one-generation nobility owing loyalty only to the sultan. Similarly, the Janissaries, the elite slave troops of the Ottoman emperors, were not allowed to marry. But in the end both systems decayed as first the Mamluks and then the Janissaries became interest groups powerful enough to subvert the centralised states they had been created to defend. Once again, patrimonialism reasserted itself.

Mr Fukuyama makes an interesting comparison between 17th-century France, where royal absolutism was rather less absolute than it appeared and England, which, after the upheavals of the civil war and the 1688 revolution, became the first place (Denmark was probably next) to combine all three of the ingredients for a virtuous political order: a strong state, the rule of law and accountability. The problem in France was that the king did not feel strong enough to challenge the legal rights of the aristocracy, but both were happy to deny the rule of law to the peasantry and the rising commercial classes who bore the full brunt of meeting the king's need for money to fight wars, through taxation. England at the time could in no sense be described as a democracy, but the idea of accountability was entrenched at all levels of society by centuries of the common law, creating the political conditions for a constitutional monarchy and a dynamic economy.

Though this first volume concludes with the French revolution (a second, charting developments up to the present day, is in the works) its insights are relevant to our understanding of modern states and how they became what they are. For example, there is China with its incredibly smart centralised bureaucracy, weak rule of law and absence of accountability (Mao, argues Mr Fukuyama, shows that China has not yet escaped the “bad emperor” problem). Or there is India with its weak state, but much greater accountability and almost pedantic attachment to the law.

He also provides us with a yardstick for measuring the chances that the Arab awakening this spring will meet his three tests of political order (not high, at least not yet). Mr Fukuyama is still the big-picture man who gave us “The End of History”, but he has an unerring eye for illuminating detail. Books on political theory are not often page-turners; this one is.