Lacking a better term for it, I mentally think of my deep suspicion regarding civilization as “anti-social” because it is, literally, a distrust of society verging on the belief that maybe civilization will turn out to be a bad idea in the long run. In my darker moments I think that civilization may be a great big hack that was perpetrated by the power-hungry, and those seeking luxurious lives. It’s as if they invented the idea of “lets be a ‘people’ so that they could be king of ‘a people’ instead of just layabout greedy thugs.
Mark Twain is often mis-attributed as saying “Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool” but whoever said it neatly summarizes my attitude about civilization. Some ancient guy invented “government” when he suggested “you guys do what I tell you, and I’ll sit under this shady tree and watch you work” and someone asked “aren’t you going to help?” and the guy replied “how would you like a good ass kicking?”* The invention of government and authoritarianism would have been comorbid: secular humanists often argue that civilization is necessary for the protection of the weak, but … protection against who but other civilizations?
Any system built on authoritarianism or capture capitalism or force is going to attract the most rapacious of its members to positions of power – it’s just this great big opportunity to grift. Of course the reality is that civilization co-evolved with humans; they shaped it and it shaped them – but that doesn’t change my main point because it shaped them in some nasty ways and vice versa.
All of this is in my mind when I think about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and, well, the Washington set. Here’s a bunch of goobers who collectively would have trouble changing a tire, and they’re setting the direction of the greatest superpower that has ever existed. It seems like a stupid idea.
But what’s worse is that the system that co-evolved to manage that vast power has had trapdoors embedded in it, to allow the powerful to enrich themselves. It’s not called “corruption” but it absolutely is. I began to figure that out when I was just a kid and wondered “if this is a democracy, why is it ‘news’ how much money this or that political candidate has managed to fund-raise?” It doesn’t take a philosopher-king to realize that it’s systemic corruption. And, I recall wondering why there were so many politicians named “Kennedy” – it’s as if ‘nepotism’ doesn’t matter, either, once you have enough money to buy your worthless frog-spawn child a political office. In theory, nepotism would disqualify someone for a leadership role but instead we have Joe Biden’s kid selling paintings for $2mn a pop not because of any talent but because of who his dad is. And don’t get me started on anyone named “Cheney.”
This sums up one aspect of the corruption pretty well:
Now, let’s go back to expecting such a systemically corrupt system to respond effectively to the climate crisis.
Just how is it that a small number of people managed to convince 98% of the rest of humanity to work for them, while they, uh, “manage” their efforts and skim off the cream? [Hint: the system is also inherently violent]
“maybe civilization will turn out to be a bad idea in the long run” – when you read UNABOM Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto and it makes sense you’re probably getting a bit anti-social. [wp] (It sounds like a long blog-comment by Gerrardian; i.e.: it mostly makes sense but it’s so over the top it’s painful to read)
* I think of the inventor of authoritarian rule as King Thag. Thag was the first guy who realized that he didn’t need to ask people to do his work, he could just threaten them with an ass-kicking. Thag would almost certainly have been a proto-human and the inventor of “the tribe.” I mean, the idea had to come from somewhere, right?
Hunger, childhood and old age, disease, injury, attacks from wild animals, all sorts of inclement weather and natural disasters…. You asked about “who” is dangerous/threatening, from which we need protection, but the point is that there doesn’t need to be anybody who is doing something wrong.*
I mean, obviously, there are also people who harm others, which is a big concern too. But there are plenty of primordial, pre-civilization examples to consider, in which nobody was doing that and yet people had good reasons to help each other out. I guess it’s also worth pointing out that all people are simply vulnerable to various forms of suffering throughout their lives, so this is not only about protection of “the weak.”
And to be clear, the things mentioned above don’t argue in favor of “authoritarianism” but for cooperative, collective action among people living together in some kind of social arrangement. That stuff at the top provides more than enough reason to do so. But nobody is to blame for it, and it certainly wasn’t part of some plot to get others to submit or whatever. It just describes the often terrible circumstances people are in, with or without anything like a government or civilization, where the whole idea is (in theory, not so much in practice) that we can live and work together in ways that are mutually beneficial.
But of course that raises a question: if a government isn’t helping people deal with that sort of stuff, then what’s the fucking point of having it?
*For theists, those examples of “natural evil” are also reasons why free will couldn’t be a satisfactory response to the problem of evil. If there were a god who allows tornadoes, famines, malaria and whatnot, then there would always be a “who” (just not a human being) which is responsible for any suffering associated with those things. If not, then not.
I always, perhaps somewhat optimistically, thought it was equally likely to be exactly the opposite.
“Thag keeps calling himself King and threatening to beat me up if I don’t do work for him, but he’s like twice my size.”
“Well let’s all go talk to him then, he can’t beat all of us up.”
The only problem is that collapses (once you have threats more complex than “That Thag asshole”) to the same modern situation of too-large tribes that have been co-opted by the power hungry.
Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel makes IMHO a good case that when the population gets large and dense enough, interactions between people who are strangers to one another are frequent enough that you need some kind of formal system to regulate them and prevent them from turning violent. The alternative to a single kleptocracy, which you can adjust to and which has an interest in keeping things running, is essentially gang warfare, in which the population is the battlefield. A kleptocracy has to be pretty awful for the population to decide that no government is preferable — usually when the system is so oppressive that life becomes impossible. Even when the police may be corrupt and oppressive, it’s still better than letting any random person who thinks they know what’s right enforcing it at the point of a gun. (I was in a conversation about “defunding the police,” and the one Black person in the conversation was saying that he’d rather have the police as they are now, since at least they protect him from the rest of the racists.)
There’s also the fact that a large, dense population requires systems and services that require some institution to build and maintain. If you think of a large, dense population like NYC, things like clean water, sewage and waste disposal, etc., require infrastructure, and infrastructure requires institutions to build and maintain them. The anarchist ideal that people will self-organize projects like that is unrealistic. You have too many different groups with conflicting views and desires. I live in a county of something like 1 million people, with lots of towns and villages and neighborhoods, and they’re always squabbling about things like land use, services, roads, etc. The only reason things work is that most people just pay their taxes and let those in charge make the decisions; they grumble, but they go along.
The alternative to a civilised realm is an uncivilised realm.
No, the alternative to a civilized realm is being a slave in someone else’s civilized realm.
For the first few millenia of human existence, whenever a society with a king at the top met an anarchic society without a well-developed centralized government, the society with a king would become a bit bigger, and the anarchic society would become a footnote in an ethnography book. After this went on long enough, eventually everyone had a king — because everyone who had been getting along just fine without one had either been wiped out or enslaved. Societal evolution favored larger, militaristic societies for the same reason biological evolution favored larger creatures with tough hides and lots of pointy bits — because those who lacked such things were prey.
In most ancient battles, whoever showed up with the most people, and enough food to feed them all, tended to win. And you need King Thag and his generals and nobles and tax collectors and priests (to explain to everyone why Thag should be obeyed) in order to field the biggest army.
So I disagree with Marcus. We don’t follow King Thag because we’re afraid of him. We follow him because we hope he’ll lead us into battle to conquer the people in the next valley, so we can take all their stuff. And also, we support his army so that he can stop King Thorck from the next valley from leading his army over here, killing US, and taking OUR stuff.
Josh Sholes@#3:
“Well let’s all go talk to him then, he can’t beat all of us up.”
That’s basically Estienne DeBoetie’s point: the ruler cannot be a tyrant because everyone outnumbers them. Except there are still tyrants – how does this work? The answer is that the first person who stands up to Thag has his intestines pulled out and his head stuck on a stick to symbolize Thag’s authority. After that, people tend to be more careful around Thag. Political power often depends on over the top performative violence, because legitimacy via consensus is harder to achieve than terror via force.
brucegee1962@#6:
Societal evolution favored larger, militaristic societies for the same reason biological evolution favored larger creatures with tough hides and lots of pointy bits — because those who lacked such things were prey.
It also favored societies that invested in military tech and innovations. That trend has continued, notably, to the point where some civilizations were willing to invest 3-10% of their huge gross national production to build nuclear weapons and delivery systems – now, everyone who isn’t willing or capable of spending at that level are just Melians.
So I disagree with Marcus. We don’t follow King Thag because we’re afraid of him. We follow him because we hope he’ll lead us into battle to conquer the people in the next valley, so we can take all their stuff.
That’s a grimmer world-view than mine. I’d like to imagine that a significant amount of most populations are not war-freaks. Although, it looks like at this time around 58% of Americans are war freaks who would cheerfully destroy anyone that King Thag says is a commie pinko, without bothering to learn or care what commie pinkos are.
And also, we support his army so that he can stop King Thorck from the next valley from leading his army over here, killing US, and taking OUR stuff.
Right – as the enlightenment philosophers say: government is for the mutual defense. They don’t add, “against over enlightened governments just like us.” Remember the Good Old Days(tm) when assholes would confidently say that “democracies don’t go to war with eachother”? Yeah, that turned out to be some pretty flimsy window-dressing.
This is why I opened with the idea that this posting was anti-social. Civilization is just great, but only because it has arranged things so that the alternatives are worse.
Allison@#4:
A kleptocracy has to be pretty awful for the population to decide that no government is preferable — usually when the system is so oppressive that life becomes impossible. Even when the police may be corrupt and oppressive, it’s still better than letting any random person who thinks they know what’s right enforcing it at the point of a gun. (I was in a conversation about “defunding the police,” and the one Black person in the conversation was saying that he’d rather have the police as they are now, since at least they protect him from the rest of the racists.)
Exactly. The way the system is arranged, it is not possible to not have a government and cops and armies, because the system is arranged so that people will suffer worse in the “war of all against all” in Hobbes’ playground.
I always thought Rousseau was being a complete ass when he argued that man, in a state of nature, lived in the woods and foraged happily and cooperated with each other. Voltaire’s reply was: “I am too old and cranky to go about on all fours, and have given up that practice.” The things commenters are raising in this thread appear to explain to me that civilization and humanity co-evolved and King Thag co-evolved right along with us. In a sense, part of what defines us as human is that we create and fit ourselves into civilizations that we cannot get out of. Try to break free, you’re the UNABOMBer.
For most of human history, I think that if you were to survey people as to their greatest fears, “those terrible people over there coming to take over our country and kill or enslave us” would have ranked very high. People would put up with a lot of inconvenience to prevent that, and they developed all sorts of morals and customs to maximize their odds of winning the kinds of battles that have been fought for hundreds of years.
Except that, just in the last sixty or seventy years, everything has changed from how it was pre-WW2. On the positive side, war has become so destructive and expensive that the oligarchs tend to shun it, and due to institutions like the UN, fear of invasion is a lot less pervasive among common people than it used to be. Also, unless you’re practicing asymmetric warfare like the Taliban, sheer numbers don’t decide battles anymore, so a lot of the old morality that was focused on pumping out as many babies as possible suddenly became obsolete. (In the sixties, everyone realized that two guys sitting in a bunker with a red button were the only ones actually defending the country, and nobody was going to invade us, so how about some womens’ lib?)
Our problem is that we still have a lot of vestigial morality that was fine and dandy for a bunch of European states struggling for dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries, but does nothing for our current situation. For the first time in human history, the greatest threats to everyones’ safety come not from their neighboring nations, but from threats to the entire species — mainly nuclear war and environmental catastrophe.
Liberals are the ones who realize this, and are trying to adjust our morality to fit the current reality. Conservatives are still relying on beliefs that may have worked just fine a hundred years ago, but are now as obsolete as the horse and buggy. And that’s my TED talk.
@brucegee1962:
Have you ever seen The Last Valley? Basically, yeah: armed men show up and take over and nothing makes sense.
I would hazard that you’ve got the order reversed, King Thag predates civilization.
Social animals have a social hierarchy. I noticed this in the chickens we had while I was growing up, but it really struck home to me when studying primate behavior. I’m no expert in primatology, but when I got to the behavior of troops of baboons I was gobsmacked at how similar their social behavior is to humanity’s. We talk about how the closest genetic relative to humans is the chimpanzee, with bonobos (previously known as pigmy chimpanzees) not far behind. But socially, the baboons, who developed their social cultures in a similar environment as humanity (savanna dwelling) seem to have similar societal structures.
Every baboon troop has a King Thag. Who uses threats and occasionally force to remain on the top of the heap. King Thag will expel males who are seen as a threat to his rule, or kill them if they don’t leave. King Thag will lead the troop to fight against other troops to get more resources, or to protect their troop from incursions from other troops.
Like early humans, baboons live in an environment where resources are not abundant. The resources are not exactly scare, but if the populations grows too large in a area, conflicts develop, battles and death occurs. Not just death through starvation, but death because troops will fight each other for those scare resources.
And King Thag lives both with the knowledge and fear that someday he will be deposed from his position of ruler.
Human civilization occurred in spite of King Thag. There was, and still is, no reason for King Thag to invent new tools. King Thag didn’t need the plow, agriculture, more food, permanent dwellings, numbers, writing, metallurgy, religion, or philosophy. King Thag was at the top of the heap and had plenty of food, wives, etc., more than any other member of his tribe. But once those inventions occurred, it was King Thag who appropriated them for himself. King Thag had to have the most food, the best house, the strongest sword, the most money. And he got those things the same way the baboon King Thag still does. Through threats, force if necessary, exceling or killing dissidents. All King Thag needs is subjects who are loyal to him, and it doesn’t matter if that loyalty is bought if King Thag controls all the resources.
Every attempt I know of throughout history to organize a society without oligarchs of some sort has, to the best of my knowledge failed. Frankly, there hasn’t been many attempts. Within a generation new oligarchs form. The stratification of human society, to me at least, seems to be built into our genes. Just as the stratification of baboon society, or chicken society, is built into theirs.
If we see the problem as one of eliminating the oligarchs, we are doomed to failure. In today’s human society there are a number of ways to become one of the many King Thag’s, but it’s still all about resource control. A King Thag today can command armies, can control nuclear weapons, can direct monies, can lead popular movements, can head a religion. And in all these cases, those King Thag can threaten, use force, and if necessary exile or kill threats to their power. Maybe extra-legally, but they control enough resources to make it happen should they desire it.
Those of us who are not King Thag, if we want to protect ourselves against the horrors of oligarchy, need to reach a consensus within society as to the limits society is willing to tolerate authoritarianism in the oligarchs. For there will always be oligarchy. But if there are clear bounds, which society as a whole will enforce, where if crossed society will strip an oligarch of their power, some level of security against tyranny can be found.
The history of civilization has been the history of defining those boundaries. But they are fluid and are being continually re-negotiated between the oligarchs and the rest of society. But it’s now a race between setting clear boundaries and the extinction of the human species, as well as many thousands of other species. The people who do not control the resources need to find a way to convince those who do, the oligarchs, that without massive re-direction of those resources in a way which will reduce the control of those resources by the oligarchs, the human species is likely suffer untold misery, suffering, death, and possible extinction. But it’s a hard sell to the oligarchs because King Thag will be the last to die.
Interesting post @ 12, flex. I think that social evolution worked exactly the same for humans and baboons. There was variation between cultural temperaments, just as there was variation between individuals in a species. Some were more peaceful and some were more aggressive. But since aggression is pretty much a survival trait for cultures, the peaceful ones got absorbed by the aggressive ones, and eventually everyone was aggressive.
I disagree with you about this:
King Thag isn’t just in danger from his subjects — he’s also in danger from his neighbor King Thorck. If Thag lets Thorck get ahead of him with agriculture so Thorck’s army is better fed, or metallurgy to provide his soldiers with weapons and armor, or religion so all Thag’s subjects get converted to Thorckism, or numbers so Thorck has more efficient bureaucrats to manage everything, then Thag is going to end up with his head on a stick in front of Thorck’s palace. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that competition and its subset of warfare have always been the main driver of technology — if war had never been invented, we might still be hunter-gatherers, just like if biology had never come up with predators we might all still be single-celled organisms.
But I don’t think aggression is innate, in a biological sense. It takes a while, but cultures can shed behaviors once they stop contributing to survival. I mentioned womens’ lib deriving from nuclear weapons — I also think gunpowder helped lead directly to the anti-nobility movements of the late 18th-early 19th centuries, once smaller, highly-trained professional armies made the feudal system that had depended on nobles become obsolete.
Societies adopt behaviors that help them survive. When technological progress makes certain behaviors more harmful than helpful, societies can change — but the process is painful and takes a few generations, and that’s what we’re in the middle of now.
I haven’t seen it, but if I get a chance I’ll check it out. But I’m not convinced that pacifism in the midst of a war-torn society makes sense either.
I had a long answer to this worked out when I read it, but only my phone to type it on. By the time I’ve got to a keyboard I don’t need my closeup glasses to see, consciousness razor@2 has responded much as I would have but more concisely. Even in the event you have a pretty horrible current King
TrumpThag, you’ve still got benefits like treatments for cancer, paracetamol, Viagra, Marvel movies, Doritos and a thousand other things people clearly don’t mind trading some ideal of freedom for.@12 flex
Is it? You identify a lot of interesting points, but I’m not sure I follow you when you venture an evo-psych explanation. Check with anthropologists to see if your idea of oligarchy is universal in human social groups (it’s part of their area of expertise), and identify the mechanism of the genes in question. Otherwise I’m not convinced.
If I had to give a good faith, best-case defense of statism as opposed to anarchy, I would point out that populations of humans can be well-intentioned, but they don’t always consider the consequences of their actions, or, in other situations, it doesn’t take very many troublemakers to ruin things for everyone else. These problems get worse as human populations get larger and put a higher strain on our surrounding environment.
These problems are ideally solved by rules that are enforced somehow, but I can’t give an endorsement of our current setup when the largest governments and transnational corporations also happen to be troublemakers who ruin things for everyone else, and don’t seem particularly concerned with the consequences of wrecking the environment.
@13 brucegee1962,
I guess my point is that King Thag may require, push, threaten, and force as much as possible for there to be improvements in agriculture, metallurgy, religious conversions, or bureaucracy, but King Thag relies on his subjects to make those improvements either to get ahead of King Thorck, or to at least stay on par with King Thorck. It really is rare for a member of the oligarchy to make a contribution to improving the welfare of everyone in their kingdom. Their primary goal is to remain on top so they will encourage innovation, so as to allow them to not be conquered or conquer others. Some societies have invested more, or less, resources in innovation, and more recent oligarchs have seen how innovation will increase their power. So they fund it, and own the results.
@16 beholder,
Fair enough, and I admit to engaging in hyperbole with that claim. I don’t have that evidence and you are right to be skeptical. But since all social animals seem to develop a hierarchical society, I think there is support for my idea that genetics plays some role. It is certainly possible that there is some underlying feature in the nature of the development of a society (in any social creatures) which contributes to generating a hierarchical structure. That is, there may be a requirement for any social structure to form at all, a hierarchy must occur. It is possible that this requirement is completely independent of genetics. I have my doubts about that too, but if there is evidence for it I’m willing to look at it. What I do know is that in every social animal I’ve looked at some hierarchy exists.
I do not believe that there will be a single gene, or even a group of genes, which creates the need for a hierarchical system. I can, and do, believe that there is a myriad of genes, selected for through evolutionary pressure, which pre-disposition human beings to form social networks. I further believe that forming those social networks also leads to hierarchies. Individual human beings can ignore that pressure to form hierarchies. But, I have serious doubts whether human beings, as a species, can create a society without hierarchies. I could certainly be wrong.
For the moment, I’ll live with the idea that this behavior probably has some elements of both genetics and environment. Not the single gene type of genetics which the evo-psycho people seem to look for, but a more subtle type of genetics where the genetic expression of brain development toward social behaviors leads to societies larger than a single person.
I will mention that I don’t think I’ve ever read this idea as one considered by evo-psych; too subtle I guess. The evo-psych studies I’ve read seem to want to find correlations in big data and claim they found a genetic trait. They either start with a pre-conceived notion of what they are looking for, and search until they find it. Or they have no idea what they are looking for, and report all correlations as proof. They are finding a straw in a haystack and either claiming it’s a needle or act surprised that it is a straw.
It seems to me that both Thag and Thag’s army are an extension of the desire of the inhabitants of Thaglandia not to be subjugated by Thorckville. Of course, Thorck might be a more benevolent ruler than Thag. But they might have to give up their culture, and people get very attached to the culture they grew up with.
I suppose it’s also worth saying that Thag is constrained in their actions as well.
As brucegee1962 alludes to in comment #20, Thag must conform to their culture’s expectation of them. As I previously wrote about the nature of success, the cultural landscape all people exist in generates boundaries of acceptable behavior within that culture. Thag may be able to push those cultural boundaries more than other members of his group, and should no punishment be inflicted on Thag for doing so, the culture may change. Members of a society which are lower in the hierarchy than Thag will have a harder time pushing those cultural boundaries, and do so at a higher risk. But even Thag can be deposed should he push those boundaries too far.
In response to brucemgee1962 comment @13,
I had to think about this for a bit, but I think I agree with you. With the understanding that you are not referring to aggressive actions performed by an individual, but a cultural adoption of a stance that aggression is abhorrent. I suspect that individual aggressive actions will still occur, tempers will rise on occasion. But that a culture would expect and reward aggressive behavior does not seem to be a foregone conclusion. A culture which would discourage and punish excessive aggression does seem possible to me, although the examples I can think of are few and mainly deal with in-group aggression while aggression toward an out-group is not necessarily discouraged. The trick would be to get everyone to agree that all humanity is part of their in-group. Not impossible, and more likely now than any previous time in history, but still difficult.
Regarding cultural behaviors and violence, here’s a case of a really nasty baboon troop in which all the violent, dominant males happened to die in a tuberculosis outbreak. After that, it became a remarkably peaceful troop: https://www.science.org/content/article/kinder-gentler-baboon
ahcuah@#23:
Regarding cultural behaviors and violence, here’s a case of a really nasty baboon troop in which all the violent, dominant males happened to die in a tuberculosis outbreak. After that, it became a remarkably peaceful troop:
Whoah, Baboon King Thag’s mandate from heaven expired!
I was thinking about that famous troop of peaceful baboons as well.
Since male baboons in the wild tend to be pretty aggressive, it suggests that aggression is a positive survival trait for baboon societies (the best fighters get access to the best garbage pits).
But of course, it also suggests that if baboons can change their behavior, then so can we, if the reward structure changes.
War has always carried a cost with it. If the resources that get destroyed by the warfare exceed the resources that can be won by victory, then inter-cultural violence ought to go down — and that’s exactly what we see happening today.
” Baboon King Thag’s mandate from heaven expired!”
I am firmly convinced “Monkey Magic” is a documentry, and you can’t make me change my mind.
(/s)
And today:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/19/unfreezing-the-ice-age-the-truth-about-humanitys-deep-past