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This introductory chapter attempts to chart the key psychological
and social mechanisms that have allowed early humans to transform
themselves from hunter-gatherer groups into the highly sophisticated
network of societies that now dominates the globe. Well, we think
they are highly sophisticated; but of course they are just a stage.
Hopefully a platform from which we may reach much greater levels
of 'humanity' and self-awareness. Hopefully we won't fall off.
Early parts of the
book as a whole are devoted to an analysis of the trends which are
tending to unite the populations and cultures of disparate nation
states into a more unified whole, a process which can loosely be
termed 'globalization'. This chapter will explain how the uniquely
inter-personal skills that evolved in early human group environments
have contributed to forming the culture we now inhabit, and how,
after a period in which the nation state has subverted our ancient,
collective wisdom, these same skills will operate through globalization
and the Internet to re-create a group-centred way of life while
allowing full rein to the individuality we have so painfully developed.
The
Role Of Consciousness In Society
Let us begin with consciousness,
which among its other qualities, allows us to see ourselves, both
as individuals and as groups of people, with a degree of self-detachment.
Without self-awareness (part of consciousness), we would presumably
be unable to speculate about ourselves and our future. No-one has
a satisfactory theory of the origins and evolutionary purposes of
consciousness, but nonetheless it is possible to make some statements
about it.
Although a primitive
form of consciousness may have originated way back in animal evolution,
there's no doubt that cognitive power, and presumably consciousness
as part of that, expanded greatly with the arrival of social
groups. And as these groups became larger among early humans, the
human brain also became larger, allowing the development of conceptual
language, the ability to store a lexicon, the capacity to store
information about multiple relationships, and the emergence of 'social'
emotions such as empathy, including the grandly-titled Theory
of Mind, that is, the ability to impute intentionality to other
humans, something which is the sine qua non of a human social group.
It is certainly not
a recent idea that awareness of self is a by-product, albeit a necessary
one, of the process of social development in humans. Many 19th century
writers, of whom Durkheim is just the most prominent,
believed that to be the case. In 1934 G H Mead1
wrote: 'the self, as that which can be an object to itself, ie essentially
a social structure, and it arises in social experience . . . . it
is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience'.
Mead's formulation has often been criticized, along with other 'social
performance' theorizing; but it holds true as an example of the
importance attached by successive waves of theorists to the role
of social development in enlarging or creating aspects of consciousness.
Early
advances in social skills developed in the group environment were
already enough for humans to compete successfully against the competition,
both animal and environmental. Nature was not tamed, but could be
lived with.
Inter-group
trade, by the way, seems to have been a pronounced
feature of human society long before settlements appeared. Although
in the modern mind trading is essentially an activity carried out
by individuals, and the joint stock company is a recent innovation,
trading by an early human kin-group was almost certainly thought
of as a group activity, and as an important part of life. Much later,
the mediaeval guild is an expression of the
groupishness of trading as an activity. The city-states themselves
seem to have evolved from the 'market-place', which had a special
protected status quite similar to that of consecrated ground (and
maybe even stemming from the same mythic roots).
With the
development of the human social group came
the emergence of morality as we now understand
it. It's not clear, however, how far consciousness is implicated
in (or necessary for) human morality. Darwin
believed that morality was capable of being created by evolution
(ie, could be selected for), as he makes clear in The Descent
of Man. In the mid-20th century, conventional thought went
more in the direction of a cultural, non-genetic basis for morality
(part of the great tabula rasa heresy) but by the end of the century
the neo-Darwinists had re-established an evolutionary explanation
of a basic set of human morals.
It's likely
indeed that the set of moral precepts that developed along with
the basic groupishness of humans is housed and delivered unconsciously.
Michael
Ruse2 echoes Immanuel Kant's view
that true morality occurs only when one is a totally disinterested
participant: 'Evolutionists . . . argue that the evolved sense of
morality in humans indeed does not necessarily involve conscious
manipulation or calculation of possible return.'
The feelings
that demand fairness in relationships, that drive gossiping behaviour
(gossip is an important component of groupedness),
and that make grooming important both to the giver and the receiver
(grooming both in the physical sense but even more in the verbal
sense), just to pick a few of the many dozens or probably hundreds
of components of group behaviour, are not habitually experienced
consciously. On the other hand, sets of external moral precepts
such as the 10 Commandments, which seem to have appeared in all
or most early organized societies, are clearly intended to operate
primarily through consciousness, and must have played a part in
enlarging it.
It is
evident that the typical individual's understanding of her position
in society has evolved substantially in the last few hundred years.
You could say that consciousness has enlarged
to take in many more dimensions of a social being. At a stretch,
you could say that whereas 500 years ago, for most people morality
in inter-personal relationships was largely unseen and unfelt at
a conscious level, with behaviour being driven by unconscious structures,
now a far larger proportion of people would be able to give a coherent
account of their ethical positions. This has resulted partly from
the emergence of moral structures out of the unconscious into the
conscious, and partly from the internalization of external moral
controls. However, you would have to say that the moral structure
which has emerged into consciousness, or perhaps has been adopted
by it from external sources, is much weaker than its original unconscious
forbear, and that people on the whole are much less inclined to
accept external moral controls (even though the State
is far more able to enforce them).
Emile
Durkheim3 takes the pre-historical human being to be
almost devoid of conscious individuality: "If the individual
is not distinct from the group, it is because the individual consciousness
is almost indistinct from the collective consciousness". He
criticizes Spencer and his followers for
imputing a modern kind of inviduality to early humans which was
then crushed by the developing power of leaders and (eventually)
the State. For Durkheim, the chief of the group, by taking onto
himself the collective consciousness, was the first one who displayed
individuality. Be that as it may, it is Durkheim's view which has
become orthodox: the early human had little if any conscious idea
of himself as a separate actor.
Many commentators
have been tempted to suggest that the need for consciousness results
from the need to incorporate external inputs or content with internal
states and content. It's even possible that given the history of
development of the brain, there wasn't an
elegant way other than the invention of consciousness to create
a decision forum in which external inputs could be married to internal
inputs on a dynamic basis. As will be seen in later chapters, this
idea does not sit well with developing understanding of neural timescales
in the brain, but if it were true, then how much more true it would
become when those external inputs began to include the information
in other people's brains, libraries and the media.
It's certain
at least that the use of external cognitive input such as library
or Internet content in a decision process
is moderated by consciousness, especially if it involves other people,
and arguable that it has to be so. If a person sitting at breakfast
and trying to decide whether to rob a bank at lunchtime needs to
go to a library to look up the type of security precautions employed
by banks, it would be a peculiar thing for him to suddenly say to
his wife, 'I'm going to the library' without conscious awareness
of why he was going to do it. It's logical for him to go to the
library, and if his wife wasn't there, perhaps it wouldn't be necessary
for him to be aware of the reason; but once more, it seems that
consciousness may be part of evolution's solution
to the problem of mixing internal and external inputs in social
situations.
Humans
in social settings are continually confronted with similar situations
in which complex behavioural decisions have to be made involving
other people. The origin of self-awareness as a dimension of consciousness
is likely on these arguments to have been at the time when individuals
needed to start being aware of themselves as separate actors within
social groups.
Evolution
Of Human Groups Into Settled Communities
Early
human social groups developed cognitive resources and behavioural
skills which allowed group size to increase from the maximum 30
or so individuals typical of primate groups
to a limit of about 150 by the time of the arrival of homo
sapiens, about 250,000 - 400,000 years ago. Or it may have been
the other way around, that larger groups demanded greater skills;
or a bit of both.
Robin
Dunbar4 charts the growth in group size as primates gave
way to early hominids, and calculates the percentage of time that
would have been required to maintain social contacts through grooming
until the point comes when language would have
been required, and optimum social group size
reached its expected modern level of about 150. 'Language' here
means something close to modern speech; Dunbar describes a succession
of intermediate phases between physical grooming and spoken language.
Barkow,
Cosmides and Tooby5 describe the advantages that can
be gained within the group through the ability to share information
gained over the lifetime of individuals: 'there is an obvious advantage
in being able to acquire such information about the world second-hand'.
The human
way of life remained largely nomadic and based on hunter-gatherer
groups until the invention of farming allowed permanent human settlements
to form, and these eventually came to be substantially larger than
150 individuals.
The adoption
of a settled way of life may or may not have been an adaptation
driven by competition to survive. It may have been forced by climatic
or population pressures, or adopted voluntarily, or was perhaps
a result of competition between different human
groups. Whatever the reasons for the origin of settlements, the
adaptations needed for these larger groups to be successful included
initially the development of a more sophisticated hierarchy, greater
division of labour, and the strengthening of social structures such
as marriage.
At some
point during the transition from nomadic to settled existence, mythic
cultural influences (controls, if you will) gave way to religion.
The State and religion don't seem to have
been adaptations driven by competition to survive against other
species; instead, the competition was by now presumably between
different human groups, at a cultural level.
The adaptations needed for these now larger groups to be successful
included the communication of information between generations (writing,
books, schools) and the use of texts (the 10 Commandments again)
to control large groups. This stage occupies the early parts of
recorded history (it wouldn't exist for us if recording hadn't been
possible!) including the Chinese, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and
Roman civilizations.
This took
of the order of 250,000 years to happen, and can loosely be characterized
as 'cultural' change, contrasted with the preceding 'genetic'
evolution of groupish social skills including the facility for language,
moral structures, emotional complexity and expanded consciousness.
There
is something to be learned from surviving Stone-Age tribal cultures
as to how things might have been 10-30,000 years ago, although there
are obvious dangers in generalizing from what happens to be true
today to what may have been the case that long ago. On the other
hand, all known primitive societies show a high degree of underlying
cultural similarity.
Among
primitive societies, division of labour seems
to take place to a marked degree even within an area in which groups
are in constant touch with one another, and even in the absence
of environmental features to drive it. Groups which develop and
practise different skills will inevitably need to trade with each
other. The suggestion here is that the propensity to trade may be
the cause rather than the result of division of labour, with the
benefit being a more harmonious, or at least less bloodthirsty system
of communal inter-group alliances.
Chagnon6
describes a system of villages in the Venezuelan rain forest which
display highly developed division of labour between villages, based,
he believes, on the need to maintain a stable pattern of political
alliances between communities. Here we may see a modern reflection
of the first origins of the modern city-state,
and eventually of the nation-state; and it is based on the genetically
hard-wired propensity of individuals to trade as members of their
group.
Highly
organized, settled communities clearly existed by 10,000 years ago
based on archeological evidence, although we are limited as to how
much we know about their cultures because writing was not invented
until about 6,000 years ago. However, trade
seems to have played a central role in their development.
It's clear
that the use of pictorial symbols was a feature
of trade in the pre-historic period. Clay tokens were used in Mesopotamia
c. 8,500 BC as a means of describing and recording the contents
of a shipment; and were gradually replaced by lists impressed on
clay, using symbols which were a mixture of direct pictorial images
(ten pictures of a stylized chicken = 10 chickens) and derivative
(abbreviated?) symbols which can be viewed as the precursors of
symbolic writing as such.
It is
likely that the growing sophistication of the counting and recording
systems used primarily in trade is linked to the emergence of major
centres of population requiring large scale imports of food and
other commodities. The need for accurate recording can also be tied
to the emergence of a governing elite which needed and was able
to tax the production and movements of goods.
Schmandt-Besserat7
describes the use of counters in recording economic data, and links
the growing sophistication of the symbols used to the parallel development
of social institutions, supposing that accounting
may be related to the rise of an elite, when communities had grown
beyond the possibility of egalitarian governance: 'The place of
the complex tokens in the state
bureaucracy, suggest that, from the beginning, accounting was the
privilege of an elite and that the more the system became efficient
and precise, the more power it wielded.' Dr Schmandt-Besserat also
points to the occurrence of tokens among burial goods from 6,000
BC onwards.
Merlin
Donald8 sees the development of the list (4th millennium
BC) as a key feature in the development of the State: 'List arrangement
can facilitate the sorting, summarizing and classifying of items
and can reveal patterns otherwise not discernable. With the invention
of visual lists, the newly created state could acquire, analyze
and digest the information it needed to function.'
NB The
use of the work 'state' to describe societies at such a period needs
to be highly circumscribed. These societies may have employed slave
labour and may have been repressive in religious terms; but the
prevailing, collective, even egalitarian way
of life inherited from history was not about to change for millennia
to come. The State at that time had neither the desire nor the means
to control the minutiae of human life.
By 2,000
BC, we begin to be able to describe the workings of nations such
as Rome with greater confidence, and it is
clear both that commercial life had a central role in the life of
cities and that the state as such played little or no role in the
supervision of daily human life, which was left to the ancient 'folkways'
to administer.
Bertrand
de Jouvenel9 insistently describes Rome, Greece, Sparta
and other early civilisations as being ruled by councils of elders,
being the heads of the aristocratic families (nothing democratic
about it in a modern sense!), at least when they were not under
the sway of an absolutist monarch, such as Alexander, or the early
Roman kings. But even when there was a king, the council of elders
(nobles, fathers, barons or the equivalent)
held a balance, and maintained the traditional law.
There is no sense in which the king was a law-giver during that
period. 'The republic of old had no state apparatus. It needed no
machinery for imposing the public will on all the citizens, who
would have had none of such a thing.'
'How was
a regime of this kind able to function at all?' asks de Jouvenel.
'Only by great moral cohesion and the inter-availability
of private citizens for public office.' He stresses the importance
of education in maintaining a cohesive
body of citizens, but then says: 'The government of societies like
this was, as has truly been said, the work of the folkways'.
Collective
Institutions Preceded The Nation State
Durkheim3
traces the course of 'corporations', meaning professional associations,
which under the Romans imposed considerable moral structures on
their members, until the State sapped their life under the later
Republic; they rose again in mediaeval times as the Guilds,
which provided moral frameworks for their members for more than
500 years until in the 18th century they gave way in the face of
the Industrial Revolution and the encroaching nation state.
The city-states
of Europe provided a settled environment in which trade could flourish,
and they were certainly not the expression of feudal power; on the
contrary, they were created on the basis of the guilds, associations
of traders of various types, and commercial law
was developed by the guilds in the form of codes of conduct. This
was even more true internationally (so far as that term has a meaning
before nation states existed). The Hansa is
the supreme expression in Europe of the pre-eminence of private
commercial law; it is nowadays hardly remembered,
but in its day the Hanseatic League, uniting the traders of modern
Germany and the Baltic States was the strongest and longest-lived
institution in Northern Europe. For hundreds of years it provided
a legal and social framework within which commercial activity could
take place.
Matt
Ridley10 points out that the groupish virtue of reputation
lay at the heart of successful international trade
in the 12th century in Europe: 'Merchants travelling abroad had
substantial protection in disputes with local merchants under the
merchants law. The only and final sanction against a transgressor
was ostracism, but . . . ostracism can be a powerful force.'
The Hansa and the European
city-states were straightforward expressions of groupish behaviour
among traders and craftsmen, confronting the State (still quite
weak) rather than within it.
Kropotkin11
emphasizes that while the mediaeval city-state had the trappings
and the sovereign powers of a State, its essential 'folkish' and
democratic workings were not affected by its political
form. 'The secret of this seeming anomaly lies in the fact that
a mediaeval city was not a centralized state. During the first centuries
of its existence, the city could hardly be named a State as regards
its interior organization.' Kropotkin gives examples of the (fragmented,
and often craft-based) administrative apparatus of German, Italian
and Russian city-states in mediaeval times, which effectively protected
the citizens against the growth of any centralized power.
The pattern
of 'the flag follows trade' applied also in early Aztec civilizations.
In the Aztec Empire (AD 1200 - 1500), the state had perhaps more
power than was the case in Europe, but international or long-distance
trade was still organized around a structure of merchant guilds
which seems to have been remarkably similar to the European model,
operating with a quasi-independent legal structure, and making much
use of privately sponsored marketplaces.
Frances
F Berdan12 describes guild-like Aztec artisanal and trading
structures, which tended to cluster in their own city districts,
and remained within particular families. There were strong systems
of quality control as well as social differentiation within each
'guild'.
Aztec
merchants who conducted long distance foreign trade were similarly
organized into guilds, residing in separate districts, controlling
membership, operating an apprenticeship system and collectively
worshipping a patron deity. Merchants who travelled long distances
were safeguarded in foreign markets by the organisers of those markets.
This structure is extremely similar to that of the European Hansa.
Says Berdan:
'These professional merchants acted both as state agents and as
private entrepreneurs. They travelled . . . to trading enclaves
in areas beyond direct Aztec control. On these expeditions they
carried expensive goods belonging to the Mexican ruler.'
Berdan
supposes that Hansa-like organisations may have existed from as
early as the 3rd millennium BC in the Near East and were designed
to protect merchants and their interests in both domestic and foreign
commercial arenas. Trading centres with a large degree of economic
and even political independence are well-documented from quite early
on, and may have existed as long ago as 3,500 BC.
The
Invention Of Printing And The Development Of The 'ESS'
It was
the invention of printing (of the mass media,
if you like) that began modern social and political history.
Contemporary
psycho-social researchers see the invention of printing and later
expansions of the media as in some way an
extension of human consciousness.
It's obvious that a dictionary, or a thesaurus, or even a grammar,
can be used by humans to underpin their linguistic resources, and
that libraries and other stores of content are in some sense supplementary
to the internal cognitive resources of the human brain.
Merlin
Donald8 calls the totality of such external content the
'External Symbolic Storage System' or ESS,
and distinguishes it from the preceding 'External Memory Field'
or EXMF, which is made up of early, external stores of symbolic
content and the possibility of manipulating them, often graphically.
Donald lists external uses of symbolism in addition to language
as such, including musical notation, geographic maps, military plans,
geometric concepts, astronomical lists, calendars and clocks, architectural
drawings, and a number of more recent types of symbolic storage
(eg choreography).
Although
the existence of the ESS as a major component of human cognition
may perhaps be dated to the time of the Ancient Greeks, the invention
of printing in the late Middle Ages can be seen as the moment that
the ESS started to become culturally dominant in human society.
Donald: 'The number of items stored in collective human experience
has grown exponentially with the development of the ESS, both because
the encoded knowledge of the past can be better preserved and because
the the process of producing ESS entries has resulted in a huge
industry for generating, inventing and mass-producing exograms.'
Donald's
eventual point is that human cognitive faculties have had to adapt
away from controlling and sourcing the stored contents of the brain
to become a management facility for the enormous ESS. This is of
course reflected in changes in the education
process: children nowadays are decreasingly taught knowledge as
such; instead, they are taught how to source and use knowledge.
Or at least, they should be - in practice education has lagged behind
the growth of the ESS.
Physical
means of extending linguistic consciousness have been supplemented
by other types of recording technique, including video, DVD, movies,
and computer storage. All these add to the reach of consciousness.
It's not unreasonable to see the expanded reach of consciousness
as an evolutionary adaptation that adds to the fitness of individuals,
the groups they belong to, and eventually society as a whole.
Alongside
the development of storage media has come an expansion in the means
of communication that are available to humans. The telephone, television,
radio, the humble fax and mobile phones can all be seen as extensions
of the basic senses with which biological evolution had equipped
humans. With these expanded senses we can
explore the growing external content universe at will.
The coping-stone
of this pyramid of extra awareness is of course the Internet.
A normally well-educated human can use the Internet to access large
portions of the accumulated knowledge of humanity, and to apply
it to life situations. And unlike other inventions that have increased
human consciousness, the Internet plays to the strength of groupishness.
Long before
the Internet, however, the invention of mass media led to the age
of the Nation State.
Emergence
Of The Nation State
The years
1400 - 1600 saw, at least in Europe, the emergence of powerful monarchs
and princes in what later came to be nation-states.
De
Jouvenel says that 'sovereignty', in the sense of the over-arching
power of the sovereign, was a 17th century construction, and that
all previous societies regarded themselves as being assemblages
of individuals subject to a common law,
which applied to the sovereign (if there was one) as much as to
any other citizen. He adds that the State became personified only
in the 19th century: where we now say 'France', and give it personality,
Romans used to say, according to the date
of the speaker, either 'the people and commons of Rome', or 'the
Senate and people of Rome'.
Tracing
the growth of the power of the monarch and then the State,
de Jouvenel points out that in mediaeval times such power was severely
tramelled by the 'Lex Terrae', the customs of the country,
'which was thought of as a thing immutable'. 'And when the English
Barons uttered their Nolumus leges Angliae mutari (We object
to changes in the laws of England), they were only giving vent to
the general feeling of the time.'
Prior
to the 16th century, the consciousness of all
individuals other than very well educated ones was unaffected by
direct delivery of printed ideas, although the parson in his pulpit
and the school-teacher of course could and did deliver ideas and
morals in the vernacular. Benedict Anderson13
points to the invention of printing,
and the consequent spread of demotic national 'print languages'
which replaced Latin as being the source of nationalism and the
concomitant emergence of national group feelings in the individual
psyche. The language of print in Europe, until the arrival of Martin
Luther in the 16th century, had been exclusively Latin. After that,
printing in the vernacular spread rapidly as a way of educating,
informing, controlling masses of people who would have been beyond
the reach of copyists. The combination of Protestantism and print-capitalism
led to the establishment in the 17th century of Europe's first significant
non-dynastic 'nation' states in the Dutch Republic and the English
Commonwealth.
Whatever
the exact mechanism, the expansion of individual consciousness to
embrace 'national' feelings is evident, and it had many unpleasant
consequences, alongside a few good ones. It's not unreasonable to
date the decay of group-driven society from the fact of the emergence
of the nation state. And without the development of patriotism
that resulted from the emergence of national consciousness, the
financing and bloodshed of the national wars
of the 18th to 20th centuries would hardly have been possible.
This is
not to say that nations as such had not existed prior to the 15th
century. Kropotkin points to Merovingian
France and 12th century Russia as being national in character, but:
'These nations . . . were nevertheless kept together by nothing
else but a community of language, and a tacit agreement of the small
republics to take their dukes from none but one special family.'
Anderson
points out that nation states in South America (and later in Africa)
largely followed the contours of the colonial administrative districts
which had preceded them. It's easy to see that 'national print languages'
and accompanying cultural ideas would have developed within those
boundaries; Anderson describes how the administrators created what
amounted to nationalistic 'meaning' in their areas. That was necessary,
of course; as Anderson says: 'In themselves, market-zones, 'natural'-geographic
or politico-administratives, do not create attachments. Who would
willingly die for Comecon or the EEC?'
In Europe,
the boundaries of nation states as they emerged in the 18th and
19th centuries have got very little to do with the historical inter-play
of noble families, and everything to do with the vernacular print-languages
(it's almost possible to use the expression, 'cultures') which gained
dominance, although this wasn't always along ethnic boundaries.
In Ireland, for instance, (part of Britain at the time) English
elbowed out Gaelic, and it was only much later that the Irish independence
movement (like all such movements, closely associated with its own
language) was able to hit back. Plenty more examples spring to mind,
and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (which, amazingly,
continued to use Latin as a state language until 1840) offers many
of them.
With the
exception only of some remaining 'primitive' societies, many of
them in Africa, we all nowadays live in a nation state, which has
a local monopoly of power and doesn't hesitate to use it to maintain
its control over its citizens.
The growth
of states and their powers on such a scale is a very recent phenomenon
and owes much to technological development. It has taken place in
the last 500 years, which is a bare 15% of recorded history, and
a tiny fraction of the 50,000 or so years during which modern humans
are thought to have occupied permanent settlements, requiring some
type of hierarchical and/or administrative organization.
Moral
Provisioning Under The Nation State
As the
broadest possible generalisation, it's possible to say that, once
human communities became too large to be governed by direct exercise
of morality within the group,
religion evolved as the mechanism by which a moral infrastructure
was maintained, and often enforced. Religions
themselves are groups, hence their appeal to 'groupish' individuals,
although they are so much larger than the ancestral human group
of up to 150 people, that it is easy for the leaders of religious
groups to abuse the morality that underlies them and that they overtly
preach. However, throughout the period in which religion had the
lead role in moral provisioning, many communities were not that
far away from the original kin-group level (guilds, villages etc)
able to maintain a local moral structure based on the shared knowledge
of their members, which supplemented the church's morality. This
sharing of moral provisioning between religion and the local community
(not forgetting the trade-based groups as well) was the situation
until the Nation State began to interest itself in the morality
of its citizens.
Broadly
speaking, the emergence of the nation
state has gone hand in hand with the suppression or outright destruction
of the collective way of life which had evolved among human groups
over hundreds of thousands of years. Law, trade,
kin-group society and morality have changed out of all recognition
as the State has gradually taken over control of all these aspects
of human life.
Jouvenel
describes the breakdown of collective belief
structures, to be replaced by the all-powerful State, during the
16th to 18th centuries: 'the great period of rationalism was also
that of enlightened and free-thinking despots . . . all persuaded
that they both could and should overturn the customs of their peoples
to make them conformable to reason, all extending prodigiously their
bureaucracies for the furtherance of their designs, and their police
in order to smash all opposition.'
Benedict
Anderson points out that: 'all profound changes in consciousness,
by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias'.
In this way the group consciousness that was so strong in humans
up to the late Middle Ages was overwhelmed by the power of 'national'
consciousness.
Throughout
Europe, the State used the power it had gained
by the 18th century to demolish the remnants of collective life,
by arrogating to itself the supervision and conduct of the law,
of education, of social provision, and of many other areas of life.
In England, for example, the enforced enclosures of the 18th century
converted the commonly-held majority of English land into the estates
of the nobility. 'And sheep do drive out men'. It probably wasn't
done out of any animus towards the people, simply out of greed;
but the effect was just as deadly to communal life.
19th century
thinkers were very exercised about the moral dimension of the state.
There was a major debate in the late 19th century between 'individualists',
inheritors of 18th century rationalism, and 'collectivists', often
socialists. Individualists believed that humans had taken on board
the moral structures necessary for society to function, and that
the State could therefore be minimalist. Herbert
Spencer14 was one of the most prominent champions of
the Individualists. Collectivists addressed a different agenda,
believing that only the State could be relied upon to ensure the
provision of moral and material goods to the majority of the population.
In terms
of the academic argument, by the end of the 20th century, individualism
had won out over collectivism, but individualists had thrown the
groupish baby out with the collectivist bathwater, helped along
by the discrediting of group selection
as a primary evolutionary mechanism.
In terms
of real-politik, however, the State had won, since between approximately
1600 and 1900 it comprehensively took over the legal systems which
traders and other collectively-based social institutions had developed,
as it would later take over education and the provision of other
social goods. And the Bolsheviks were still to come.
Marriage,
itself a culturally evolved mechanism that forms part of the moral
structure of a social group, is another (collective) human institution
whose control was in due time taken over by the State (via a period
in which the Church regulated it) but for most of our social existence
it was a matter between two kin-groups. Thus Radcliffe-Brown15
: 'In Anglo-Saxon England a marriage, the legal union of man and
wife, was a compact entered into by two bodies of kin. As the Church
steadily increased in power and in control of social life, marriage
became the concern of the Church and was regulated by canon law.
. . . At the end of the Middle Ages there came the struggle for
power between the Church and State in which the State was, in Protestant
countries, victorious. Marriage then came under State control.'
State
control of social mechanisms eventually proved unsuccessful from
any moral perspective, but its takeover of commercial law
had particularly immediate and adverse results: by the 19th century,
traders, especially international ones, were so dissatisfied with
State legal systems that they re-invented their own legal systems
through the arbitration process. In the 20th
century the State was busy once again trying to nationalize arbitration
(States after all are run by lawyers!). However, globalization
has given a new lease of life to independent (private) commercial
law; and the WTO, despite the fact that it is
a compact between nation states, is nothing but the Hansa writ large.
Although
the State has pretty well extinguished the private sector in moral
provisioning, even in the 21st century there are still groupish
organizations which maintain the ancient, collective virtues as
a way of life in defiance of 'modern' life, such as the Amish in
the US and the Hutterites in Europe. For David
Sloan Wilson16, the Hutterites are a testament to the
success of groupish, anti-individualistic living: 'By fostering
a selfless attitude towards others and minimizing the potential
for exploitation within groups, they are spectacularly successful
at the group level.'
The most
important consequence of the effective ethical monopoly of the Nation
State is that its model of top-down moral suasion (the 'Nanny State')
is unsuited to the way in which the human mind works, leaving individuals
without an effective internalised moral structure.
Litter, suicide, rape, violence, thuggery and the rest are the all
too obvious result. Humans, though, won't be stopped from associating
with each other (even hoodies are being groupish) and it is not
surprising that the growth in power of the State - denying individuality
on the one hand - is matched on the other hand by an explosion of
interest in association. People's individuality
is reinforced, even perhaps created, on the basis of associative
building blocks, and what the major institutions of society no longer
provide for them they will always seek to provide for themselves.
Many associations
(groups, clubs, call them what you will) play an ethical role in
addition to their 'groupish' contribution. Lots of them exist for
charitable purposes, or have such purposes in addition to their
basic role ('friends' organisations at schools, for instance). Many
more have sets of internal rules which control the behaviour of
members during group activities, or even in some cases beyond. A
London gentlemens' club will be quick to censure or expel a member
whose public conduct is thought unacceptable, and the member of
a tennis club who persistently cheats will quickly find that this
reputation dogs him both inside
and outside the gates of the club.
The
Failure of the State
At first
sight, the nation state continued to be a successful form in the
20th century - the number of nation states blossomed
from about 60 to more than 150. This is a result of various factors:
de-colonialisation is obviously a major one; the striving for ethnic
identity is another; and there are others.
But in a bigger sense they are all throw-offs from the paralysis
of big-state nationalism that resulted from the World
Wars. Many of the new, smaller countries have done better than their
larger peers.
Nation
states nowadays exist at various stages of development. Parts of
Africa resemble early mediaeval Europe, while at the other extreme
today's European nations have perforce largely abandoned aggressive
nationalism and rely on the international rule of law to guarantee
their integrity.
Although
they have done some good, and can be seen as an inevitable stage
in the evolution of human governance, nation states have been responsible
for some very negative events and trends in the last few hundred
years. With the Nation State came anomie, anti-social behaviour,
the 'working class', the -isms, and above all, modern warfare, especially
the global wars of the 20th century.
It is
difficult to see how such problems can be solved within the confines
of a governance structure based on atomized, independent nation
states. Although there has always been a strand in philosophical
thought that advocated the minimally intrusive State, and there
have even been individual politicians who paid lip service to the
idea of 'rolling back' the State, in reality these remain just pious
sentiments. On the contrary, as we have seen, the State has enthusiastically
intruded into almost all dimensions of society over the last 200
years.
It is
not to governments that we should look for salvation from the clammy
embrace of the nation state; instead, it will be delivered by globalisation,
much helped along by the Internet, and the empowered individual.
As the next section of the book will show, tendencies are already
at work which will undermine the power of the nation state. Robert
Cooper17 is one of many authors who portray the 'post-modern',
particularly European nation state as in decline. In addition, 'tribalism'
(which here we would like to call groupishness) sees regions and
ethnic groupings with their own identities contesting (within post-modern
states or elsewhere) for their right to exist. The Basques and the
Scottish are two obvious examples.
Globalization
Globalization
began in the commercial sector, as described above, with international
dispute resolution through arbitration, and it has spread to most
economic sectors. International - and often global - conventions,
ruling bodies, courts, treaties etc etc now cover shipping, airlines,
banking, insurance, telecommunications, investment, intellectual
property, and even the environment, to pick just some of the most
obvious examples. Governments have no power to intervene once they
have signed up to such international instruments. Largely but not
entirely because of the fight against money laundering and terrorism,
international co-operation is now also beginning to impact on taxation
and some aspects of criminal law.
It really
is only a matter of time before the legislative
canvas of a national government will be limited to a few, minor
domestic fields, and what is important is that the power which is
seeping away from nations is not seeping towards a mighty international
ruler (pace the European Union), but into the
hands of consultative, rule-based, quasi-democratic, international
bodies, of which the WTO is the most obvious example.
So far,
at any rate, globalisation has been a success: the WTO,
the OECD, the UN, the IMF, Greenpeace, Medecins Sans Frontieres,
WIPO appear mostly to be beneficial monopolies.
It's an
open question whether the WTO is more groupish than a nation state,
but its procedures (and those of any other multinational body) are
a good deal more transparent and democratic than those of any State,
which is a major step in the right direction. What will definitely
reintroduce 'groupish' law into the affairs of individuals is however
the Internet.
The Internet
provides an arena both for the formation of global policies and
for 'anti-globalizers' to attack them. Says
Joseph Stiglitz18: 'Globalization
has reduced the sense of isolation felt in much of the developing
world and has given many people in the developing countries access
to knowledge well beyond the reach of even the wealthiest in any
country a century ago. The antiglobalization protests themselves
are a result of this connectedness. Links between activists in different
parts of the world, particularly those links forged through Internet
communication, brought about the pressure that resulted in the international
landmines treaty - despite the opposition of many powerful govenrments.'
At first,
the Internet could be seen as anarchic. By empowering the individual,
libertarians hoped, the Internet would eat away the fabric of the
State from the inside. In fact, the Internet can be used (or abused)
by the State just as readily as by the individual. So far, it's
difficult to say who is ahead!
Long term,
though, the libertarians were probably right, in the sense that
the Internet is ideally suited to the development of new models
of cooperation between people, whereas its uses for the State are
limited to the collection and dissemination of data, and interactions
with citizens (financial and otherwise). It doesn't seem likely
that the Internet will change the nature of the State
(itself an expression of groupishness taken to a pathological extreme);
however it will allow the State to become more effective in the
exercise of its power over individuals, through electronic information
collection systems such as that already operated by the US, and
data retention laws.
After
The Nation State
The question
of what will follow the Nation State will be the subject of the
latter chapters in this book; but this introduction has sketched
out some of the main component strands of the discussion, which
can be summarized as follows:
An essential
premise of the ideas presented here is that, despite the growing
role in social and cultural development of institutions above the
level of the basic human group, humans retain their groupish natures
because they developed before external, over-arching social institutions
became the focus of evolution. Genetically speaking, humans don't
appear to have changed significantly in the last 30,000 years.
Globalisation,
which is the hate object of so many 'anti-corporatist' protesters
is, on the contrary, seen in this book as a process which will subvert
the corporatist tendencies of the nation state and will construct
a model of governance far closer to the needs of the 'groupish'
individual.
A key
plank of the discussion is that technology,
which allowed the State to develop in the first place, will now
're-empower' the individual, and will encourage a return to more
collective ways of living, to which human nature is suited better
than it is to the remote and impersonal State. There have always
been individuals who were strong and clear-seeing enough to have
their own moral structures, but they were a tiny minority. Increasing
economic wealth, better education (sort of!), more leisure, and
better access to information have created very large numbers of
people with some independence of action; but there are no structures
to accommodate them. The Internet
will be a major force in supplying such structures, and is seen
as a crucial player in the process because of its highly affiliative
nature.
Footnotes:
1.
Mead, G H (1934) Mind, Self and Society, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago
2.
Ruse, M (1989) The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History,
Philosophy and Religious Implications, Routledge, London
3.
Durkheim, E (1984) The Division of Labour In Society, tr
W D Halls, Simon & Schuster, New York (originally published
in French in 1893)
4.
Dunbar, R I M (1996) Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language,
Faber & Faber, London
5.
Barkow, J H, Cosmides, L, and Tooby, J, (1992) The Adapted Mind:
Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, OUP,
New York
6.
Chagnon, N (1983) Yanomamo, The Fierce People, Holt, Rinehart
& Winston, New York
7.
Schmandt-Besserat, D (1997) How Writing Came About, University
of Texas Press, Austin
8.
Donald, M (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind, Harvard University
Press, USA
9.
De Jouvenel, B (1948) On Power, tr J F Huntingdon, Hutchinson, London
(originally published in French in 1945)
10.
Ridley, M (1996) The Origins of Virtue, Viking, New York,
referencing B Benson, The spontaneous evolution of commercial law,
Southern Economic Journal, 55, pp644-61
11.
Kropotkin, P (1902) Mutual Aid, Heinemann, London
12.
Berdan, F F (1989) Trade and Markets in Precapitalist States, in
Economic Anthropology, ed Stuart Plattner, Stanford University
Press, California
13.
Anderson, B (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (2nd ed, first published
1983), Verso, London
14.
Spencer, H (1884) The Man Versus The State, Liberty Classics,
Indianapolis 1981
15.
Radcliffe-Brown, A R (1950) Introduction to African Systems
of Kinship and Marriage, ed Radliffe-Brown, A R and Foorde,
D, OUP for The International African Institute
16.
Wilson, D S (2002) Reintroducing Group Selection to the Human
Behavioural Sciences Biological and Brain Sciences, 2002
17.
Cooper, R (1997) The Post-Modern State and the World Order,
Demos, London
18.
Stiglitz, J (2002) Globalization and its Discontents, W
W Norton & Co, New York
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