This was a conceptual breakthrough in the history of humanity. In traditional societies—and modern authoritarian ones as well—the only check on power is power. A king might refrain from crushing a powerful but troublesome nobleman, but not because the law prevents him. The only thing truly preventing rulers from destroying rival elites is a Game of Thrones-style cost-benefit analysis. Will attacking this lord be too expensive in terms of military resources or gold? Will doing so encourage even more dissent? Will I get in trouble with the Church? And in primitive societies, such calculations were far simpler: Can we take them by surprise? Do we have enough spears? And so on.
Institutional pluralism not only imposed constraints on elites but also constrained what elites could do with the state. In societies where the state picks sides—punishes dissidents, crushes minority faiths, etc.—control of the state becomes everything. In societies where there are a multitude of institutions, a cognitive switch is flipped, and people suddenly understand that everyone has a vested interest in keeping the rules of the game fair for everyone. As we shall see, this was the central insight of the Founders.
And while my use of the term “pluralism” includes all of this, it also includes something even larger. Modernity both requires and creates a plurality of meaning and identity, not simply among the population, but within each and every person. This is in stark contrast to primitive society, where identity and meaning were bound up and inseparable from the tribe. For most of human history, meaning was confined to a very small zone: “us.” Us could be a tribe, a faith, a city-state, or denizens of a specific class. The rules for us were different from the rules for them, and there was nothing wrong with using force or the state—the same thing, ultimately—to arbitrarily enforce the rules in your favor.
Tribalism is natural, but it can also be manufactured. Manufactured tribalism is the very essence of identity politics, the heart of aristocracy, and the soul of nationalism. “Identity politics” may be a modern term, but it is an ancient idea. Embracing it is not a step forward but a retreat to the past.
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When all of your identity is bound up in a single group or cause, your concern for institutions and people outside of your group diminishes or vanishes. The Praetorian who only cares for the Guard, as a matter of logic, does not care about his family, his country, his faith, or anything else. The Mafioso who concerns himself solely with La Cosa Nostra (literally “our thing”) will not concern himself with the law, the country, or conventional notions of morality. An open society is one where we have many allegiances—to family and society, to work and faith, etc. When you have competing or simply multiple allegiances, you open yourself up to the idea that opponents are not enemies. Pluralism creates social and psychological spaces where others are free to pursue their interests too. The religious freedom that emerges from the Treaty of Westphalia allowed for different faiths to operate freely, so long as everyone obeyed certain more or less neutral rules of behavior.
In an open society, a Catholic soldier may have Protestant brothers-in-arms. A Jewish doctor has gentile patients. The African-American policeman counts white officers as fellow brothers of the badge. This may mean we have weaker attachments to any specific identity, but that is the price we pay for peace and freedom. It can also mean that our attachments are stronger, because they came from an informed choice or a leap of faith. Regardless, pluralism requires tolerance and forces us to open ourselves up to the possibility that our identity is not the only true or right one.
This mental division of labor makes modernity possible. The most important division is between what the German sociologists called gesellschaft and gemeinschaft. The easiest way to remember the difference is the word “sell” in gesellschaft. Modern society’s most important divide is between the external, impersonal, order of contracts, commerce, and law, and the personal order of family, friends, and community. We all live in both realms simultaneously, even though the rules for these realms could not be more different.
Humans were not designed to live in the market order of contracts, money, or impersonal rules, never mind huge societies governed by a centralized state. We were designed to live in bands, or what most people think of as tribes. The human brain is designed so that we can manage stable social relationships with roughly 150 people. This is called Dunbar’s number, after the anthropologist Robin Dunbar.38 Others have proposed slightly different numbers,39 but the point remains: We were designed by evolution to be part of a group, but that group was very limited in size. These groups took on a variety of structures, but the basic anatomy was generally the same. There was a Big Man or some other form of chieftain or “alpha.” There was little division of labor beyond that which separated men and women, the very young and the very old. In the most basic sense, these bands were socialist or communist in that resources were generally shared. But the genetic programming clearly emphasized us over me.
We still hold on to that programming and it rubs up against modernity constantly.
My father always used to tell me that the most corrupting thing in business wasn’t money but friendship. If a total stranger called my father and offered him a cash payment to hire the stranger’s totally unqualified kid, my dad would reply, “Get the hell out of here.” But if a lifelong friend called and said that his unqualified son or daughter really needed a break, the answer might still be no, but it would be a much more difficult decision. That’s because we are wired to help our friends and family in ways we are not when it comes to strangers.
People who think money is a corrupting force in life fail to appreciate that we simply cannot treat everyone as friends or family. The glory of money—and the rule of law—is that it empowers us to cooperate with strangers. One needn’t know, never mind be related to, the butcher one buys a rasher of bacon from. A rich man and a poor man have the right to buy whatever product they wish, so long as they have the required funds to make the purchase. The democratizing power of money is one of the great forgotten advances of humanity.
Family, however, does not operate according to the rules of the market order. Indeed, in my family, we are Communists in the sense that we operate under the maxim “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” I do not charge my daughter for food, and my wife and I do not present anyone with a bill for the household chores we do. If a friend or relative needs to sleep in my house or borrow my car, that falls under the natural, tribal economy of reciprocity or, more simply, favors. But if a stranger wants to use my car or sleep in my house, the rules are very different.
The problem is that the market order is unnatural. It is a human invention, no less artificial because it was developed over countless generations. And because it doesn’t feel natural, it leaves many people cold, particularly those who are impoverished in the currency of gemeinschaft—community, friendship, family. The greatest force in the corruption of modernity is the organized political effort—active in every generation—to impose the rules of gemeinschaft on the gesellschaft. Every anti-capitalist political ideology is a variant of the idea that society should operate like a family, a tribe, a small community where everyone knows each other. Identity politics in all its forms is just a subset of this worldview. It says “My tribe deserves more than your tribe.”
It’s interesting: What we call corruption in developing or “backward” countries today—tribalism, favoritism, nepotism, self-dealing, patronage, graft, etc.—went by a different word for most of human history: politics. Similarly, Tammany Hall and other political machines of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are considered pristine examples of corruption, even though most humans who are alive today, or who ever lived, would see that model of politics as so much more authentic and natural than the ideal of “clean government” today.
Spend a few minutes actually studying what activists mean by “social justice” and you will discover that it is ofte
n a reactionary effort. It claims the rule of law is a rigged system designed to protect the interests of the patriarchy or white privilege or the “one percent.” Social justice holds that abstract rules or timeless principles are inadequate if they do not lead to “redistributive” or “economic” justice. In other words, as Friedrich Hayek famously observed, social justice is about the subjective will to power of a tribal coalition, not universal principles.40
Today’s identity politics, likewise, holds that objective standards of merit or notions of free speech are invalid, even racist, if they perpetuate the amorphously defined evil of “white privilege.” Christian organizations must adopt secular values, because deviation from social justice principles or priorities is a new form of heresy. Recently resurgent white supremacists and various “nationalists” share the same categorical thinking, arguing that the system is rigged toward minorities. All that matters is “winning” for my team or race or coalition. Following the rules or tolerating expression you disagree with has been redefined as surrender. Your enemies’ misfortune is your victory, and vice versa.
Again, this is the natural way for humans to think about the world. It is consistent with our basic programming. During Hurricane Harvey, legions of partisans took to Twitter to cheer the fact that Texas was being punished for being a “red state” or for voting for Trump or simply for being Texas. Put the asininity of such expressions to one side. There could be no more human response than to think a terrible storm was sent to punish your enemies. All that was missing was an offering to Baal or Thor of a hundred oxen.
And it is all a corruption of the Miracle.
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Entropy is the natural process of decay, which is just another word for corruption, and as any homeowner who has labored to fend off rust, rot, or mold understands, keeping nature at bay requires effort. Well, the Miracle is our home, and our home requires upkeep.
Humanity did not get an exemption from the second law of thermodynamics. Everything under the sun, and the sun itself, dies, dissipates, and decays. The best we can do is hold entropy at bay, fighting the rust that consumes every alloy and the termites and bacteria that consume every living thing. Without effort, civilization dies, because that is what civilization is: effort. Humanity has been taking off like a rocket since the 1700s, but we have not achieved a stable orbit in the heavens. And even if we did, no orbit is stable over the long run. Eventually gravity claims what is hers.
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Complacency is a recipe for slow-motion suicide. The very first civilizations succeeded by “conquering” nature. Swamps were drained and forests cleared for crops. Animals were tamed and domesticated for food. Shelters were erected to fend off the elements. But the more important effort was keeping human nature under control, at first by regulating the violence that comes so naturally to us. Over the millennia, this effort became more refined, but it was still marked—everywhere—by oppression and exploitation to one extent or another. That truly began to change once, and only once, in human history. That effort required work, not simply by states—or even especially by states—but also by the people themselves. That task is not over, the work is not done—and it will never be. As a species, we are in an endless sea, and we must keep paddling or sink back into the depths. Poverty is natural; wealth takes effort.
Under the best of circumstances, every important endeavor requires work. Every person who has ever been married understands that marriage requires effort. Every athlete understands the importance of practice and training. Every general knows that troops lose their edge unless it is carefully maintained. The Miracle of liberal democratic capitalism is not self-sustaining. Turn your back on its maintenance and it will fall apart. Take it for granted and people will start reverting to their natural impulses of tribalism. The best will lack all conviction and the worst will be full of passionate intensity. Things will fall apart.41
In the next chapter I look at how that work began.
PART II
3
THE STATE
A Myth Agreed Upon
How did we get from the world of the hunter-gatherers to the state? A host of thinkers talk of something called “the social contract” as the beginning of modern society. These theories date back to antiquity, but their glory days came around the time of the Enlightenment, when Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and others put forth one version or another of the same basic idea: Men in a state of nature agree to sacrifice some personal freedoms in exchange for security. There are important differences, however, between different notions of the social contract. For example, Hobbes’s social contract gave license to an all-powerful state—the Leviathan—to protect humanity from life in a state of nature, which he described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”1 Locke’s social contract was much better, insofar as he saw the state as a servant of the people rather than a master of them.
What unites pretty much all of the classical understandings of the social contract is that they are wrong. There never was any such thing as a real, existing, social contract. Prior to the Enlightenment, there’s no record of any large group of people, primitive or otherwise, voluntarily coming together to write down or agree to the kind of social contract the philosophers describe.2 It’s a useful myth, a vital lie; the social contract is, to borrow a term, a social construct.
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To the extent there ever was one, the first social contract was—to borrow a phrase from The Godfather—an offer the signatories couldn’t refuse. And the Godfather in this analogy was a gangster of sorts. He was what Macur Olson, one of the great economists of the last half century, called “the stationary bandit.” Before the stationary bandit, there were only roving bandits.
Roving bandits are exactly what they sound like. They are raiders, warlords, and marauders who sweep into a community and take everything they can: crops, tools, weapons, money, women, children, etc. It should go without saying that the roving bandit was a staple figure of the state of nature. The archaeological record is clear about that.
In the early days of the agricultural revolution, the threat of roving bandits was far greater than in the days of hunter-gatherers. First off, nomadic tribes are moving targets. Agricultural communities are easier prey because they stay in one place. Moreover, when humans settled down to grow crops, they lost their ability to feed themselves sustainably in any other way. Hence, being plundered of their food stores and equipment and having their able-bodied males slaughtered was often a catastrophic event. Because the roving bandits had no intention of returning anytime soon, they also had no interest in leaving anything of value behind.
The consequences of roving bandits were long-lasting for their victims. If you know you are likely to fall prey to whichever band of thieves might come your way, you are unlikely to make many long-term investments. Why toil in the fields or restore your granaries if you know that the Huns or the Cimmerians or whoever will just come back and take it all again? “In a world of roving banditry there is little or no incentive for anyone to produce or accumulate anything that may be stolen and, thus, little for bandits to steal,” Olson writes.3
Hence, this dynamic becomes a problem for the marauders as well. Just as good hunting grounds or fisheries can be depleted by overuse, you can only raid and plunder the same village so many times before there’s not much left to steal, particularly when the victims refuse to make futile long-term investments. It’s a vicious cycle that leaves both thief and victim poorer in the long run.
Thus, the stationary bandit is a solution to a very serious problem. Olson first stumbled on this idea while reading Edward C. Banfield’s classic work The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (1958). Banfield conducted meticulous interviews with residents of a poor village in southern Italy. In one of these interviews he talked to a monarchist who
proclaimed that “monarchy is the best kind of government because the King is then owner of the country. Like the owner of a house, when the wiring is wrong, he fixes it.”4
Later, Olson stumbled on the story of White Wolf, a marauder in 1920s China. The quintessential roving bandit, White Wolf led a small army of raiders around the countryside, terrorizing villages. He was defeated and crushed by an even stronger warlord, Feng Yu-hsiang. The interesting thing is that the villagers welcomed Feng Yu-hsiang as a kind of savior, even though he taxed—i.e., extorted—the local population heavily. Why welcome one warlord over another? Because Feng Yu-hsiang settled down, providing protection from all the other bandits. This protection introduced stability and predictability to the peasants’ lives. They may have had to pay too much in taxes, but they also knew they’d be left enough to live on. And so long as they paid, their lives would be spared. The order and predictability of the stationary bandit is, according to Olson, “the first blessing of the invisible hand.”5
“The invisible hand,” a term coined by Adam Smith, has come to describe the social benefits that accrue when individuals are empowered to pursue their own self-interests and specialize economically. By allowing individuals to work to their own ends, the whole of society grows richer, as if guided by an invisible hand. That “as if” is crucial. Smith’s detractors often mischaracterize the invisible hand, insinuating that supporters of the free market think there is something guiding coordination, but the whole point is that the coordination simply emerges.
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