What We Think and How We Came to Think It, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Earliest scientific imaginings, order in nature, cave wall ideas, mana logic, knowledge power, sources of community, authority, political order, cosmic order, civic life, and leadership ...
Felipe Fernández-Armesto wrote:
Chapter 1 [extract]
Mind Out of Matter, The Mainspring of Ideas
THE POWER OF THOUGHT
… We now know that when we have ideas, or, more generally, whenever thoughts arise in our minds, physical and chemical process accompany them in the brain. The way we think, moreover, is trapped in the physical world. We cannot escape the constraints of our environments and the pressures and stresses from outside ourselves that encroach on our freedom to think. We are prisoners of evolution – limited to the capacities with which nature has endowed us. Material drives – such as hunger, lust, fear – have measurable effects on our metabolisms and invade and warp our thoughts.
I do not think, however, that human behaviour can be explained only in terms of response to material exigencies, first, because the stresses that arise from the physical framework of life also affect other animals, and so cannot be invoked to explain what is peculiarly human; and, second, because the rhythms of change in evolution and environment tend to be relatively slow or fitful, whereas the turnover of new behaviour in humans is bewilderingly fast.
Instead, or additionally, I propose mind — by which I simply mean the property of producing ideas – as the chief cause of change: the place where human diversity starts. Mind in this sense is not the same thing as the brain, nor a part or particle embedded in it. It more resembles, perhaps, a process of interaction between cerebral functions — the creative flash and crash you see and hear when memory and anticipation spark and scrape against each other. The claim that we make our own world is frightening to those of us who fear the terrible responsibilities that flow from freedom. … We have ideas because we think them up, not thanks to any force outside ourselves.
Our species’ most extraordinary facility, compared with the rest of creation, is our capacity for generating ideas so powerful and persistent that they make us seek ways of applying them, altering our environs, and generating further change. Put it like this: we re-envision our world — imagining a shelter more efficient than nature provides, or a weapon stronger than our arms, or a greater abundance of possessions, or a city, or a different mate, or a dead enemy, or an afterlife. When we get those ideas we strive to realize them, if they seem desirable, or to frustrate them, if they inspire us with dread. Either way, we ignite change. That is why ideas are important: they really are the sources of most of the other kinds of change that distinguish human experience.
Chapter 2 [extracts]
Gathering Thoughts, Thinking Before Agriculture”
PLACED IN NATURE: MANA, GOD, AND TOTEMISM
Mana – for those who believe in it – is what makes the perceived world real. A further, deeper question is, ‘Is it valid?’ Not, ‘Is the idea of mana the best way to understand nature?’ but, ‘Is it a way clever minds can reasonably have devised to match the facts?’ It might help if we compare it with a modern paradigm that we use to explain the same facts. While we distinguish fundamentally between organic and inorganic matter, we do think of all matter as characterized by essentially similar relationships between particles. Quantum charges, because they are dynamic and formative, resemble mana in as much as they are a source of ‘force’ (though not of a purposeful kind, such as mana seems to be in most versions). In any event, on the basis of this chapter so far, mana is fairly described as an intellectually impressive concept.
A further question arises: what, if anything, did thinking about mana contribute to the origins of an idea we shall have to consider in due course (as it is among the most intriguing and, apparently, most persuasive in the world): the idea of a single, universal God? Missionaries in nineteenth-century North America and Polynesia thought God and mana were identical. It is tempting, at least, to say that mana could have been the idea – or one of the ideas – from which that of God developed. A closer parallel, however, is with some of the odd or esoteric beliefs that still seem ineradicable from modern minds: ‘aura’, for example, which figures in alternative-health-speak; or the elusive ‘organic cosmic energy’ that proponents of the East Asian-influenced ‘new physics’ detect everywhere in matter; or vitalist philosophy, which intuits life as a quality inherent in living things.
These notions, which most people would probably class as broadly religious, and which are almost certainly false, are nevertheless also scientific, because they arise from real observations and reliable knowledge of the way things are in nature. Comparative anthropology discloses other equally or nearly equally ancient ideas that we can class as scientific in a slightly different sense, because they concern the relationship of humans to the rest of nature. Totemism, for instance, is the idea that an intimate relationship with plants or animals – usually expressed as common ancestry, sometimes as a form of incarnation – determines an individual human’s place in nature. The idea is obviously scientific. Evolutionary theory, after all, says something similar: that all of us descend from other biota. Loosely, people speak of totemism to denote almost any thinking that binds humans and other natural objects (especially animals) closely together; in its most powerful form – considered here – the totem is a device for reimagining human social relationships. Those who share a totem form a group bound by shared identity and mutual obligations, and distinguishable from the rest of the society to which it belongs. People of shared ancestry, suppositious or genuine, can keep track of one another. The totem generates common ritual life. Members observe peculiar taboos, especially by abstaining from eating their totem. They may be obliged to marry within the group; so the totem serves to identify the range of potential partners. Totemism also makes it possible for people unlinked by ties of blood to behave towards one another as if they were: one can join a totemic ‘clan’ regardless of the circumstances of one’s birth: in most totemic societies, dreams reveal (and recur to confirm) dreamers’ totems, though how the connections really start, and what, if anything, the choice of totemic objects means, are subjects of inconclusive scholarly debate. All theories share a common and commonsense feature: totemism spans the difference between two early categories of thought: ‘nature’, which the totemic animals and plants represent, and ‘culture’ – the relationships that bind members of the group. Totemism, in short, is an early and effective idea for forging society.
Despite animism, totemism, mana, and all the useful resources people have imagined for the practical conduct of life, distrust of sense perceptions carries dangers. It induces people to shift faith to sources of insight, such as visions, imaginings, and the delusions of madness and ecstasy, which seem convincing only because they cannot be tested. They often mislead, but they also always inspire. They open up possibilities that exceed experience and, therefore, paradoxical as it may seem, make progress possible. Even illusions can do good. They can help to launch notions that encourage endeavour in transcendence, magic, religion, and science. They nourish arts. They can help to make ideas unattainable by experience – such as eternity, infinity, and immortality – conceivable.
IMAGINING ORDER: ICE AGE POLITICAL THOUGHT
Visions also craft politics. The political thinking of the Ice Age is barely accessible, but it is possible to say something in turn about leadership, broader ideas of order, and what we might call Ice Age political economy.
Obviously, the societies of hominids, hominins, and early Homo sapiens had leaders. Presumably, by analogy with other apes, alpha males imposed rule by intimidation and violence. But political revolutions multiplied ways of assigning authority and selecting chiefs. Ice Age paintings and carvings disclose new political thinking – the emergence of new forms of leadership, in which visions empower visionaries and favour charisma over brute force, the spiritually gifted over the physically powerful.
The cave walls of Les Trois Frères in southern France are a good place to start reviewing the evidence. Priest-like figures in divine or animal disguises undertaking fantastic journeys or exerting menace as huntsmen are evidence of the rise of wielders of unprecedented power: that of getting in touch with the spirits, the gods, and the dead – the forces that are responsible for making the world the way it is. From another world in which ours is forged, shamans can get privileged access to inside information on what happens and will happen. They may even influence the gods and spirits to change their plans, inducing them to reorder the world to make it agreeable to humans: to cause rain, stop floods, or make the sun shine to ripen the harvest. The shamans of the cave walls exercised tremendous social influence. For the favour of an elite in touch with the spirits, people would pay with gifts, deference, service, and obedience.
The shaman’s talent can be an awesome source of authority: the hoist that elevates him above alpha males or gerontocratic patriarchs. When we scan the caves, we see a knowledge class, armed with the gift of communicating with spirits, emerging alongside a prowess class, challenging or replacing the strong with the seer and the sage. Enthronement of the gift of communicating with spirits was clearly an early alternative – perhaps the earliest – to submission to a Leviathan distinguished by no feature more morally potent than physical strength.
In consequence, special access to the divine or the dead has been an important part of powerful and enduring forms of political legitimacy: prophets have used it to claim power. On the same basis churches have pretended to temporal supremacy. Kings have affected sacrality by the same means. In Mesopotamia of the second millennium BCE, gods were the nominal rulers of the cities where they took up their abodes. To their human stewards civic deities confided visions that conveyed commands: to launch a war, erect a temple, promulgate a law. The most graphic examples – albeit rather late – appear in Mayan art and epigraphy of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries CE in what are now Guatemala and neighbouring lands. Rulers of eighth-century Yaxchilán, in what is now southern Mexico, can still be seen in carved reliefs, inhaling psychotropic smoke from bowls of drug-steeped, burning bark-paper, in which they gathered blood drawn from their tongues with spiked thongs (if they were queens) or by piercing their sexual organs with shell-knives or cactus spines. The rite induced visions of ancestral spirits typically issuing from a serpent’s maw, with a summons to war.
For the last millennium or so of the Ice Age, cognitive archaeology reveals the emergence of another new kind of leadership: heredity. All human societies face the problem of how to hand on power, wealth, and rank without stirring up strife. How do you stop every leadership contest from letting blood and unleashing civil war? More generally, how do you regulate inequalities at every level of society without class conflict or multiplying violent acts of individual resentment? Heredity, if a consensus in favour of it can be established, is a means of avoiding or limiting succession disputes. But there are no parallels in the animal kingdom, except as Disney represents it; and parental excellence is no guarantee of a person’s merit, whereas leadership won in competition is objectively justifiable. Yet for most societies, for most of the past – indeed, until well into the twentieth century – heredity was the normal route to high levels of command. How and when did it start?
Although we cannot be sure about the nature of the hereditary Ice Age power class, we know it existed, because of glaring inequalities in the way people were buried. In a cemetery at Sunghir, near Moscow, perhaps as much as twenty-eight thousand years old, an elderly man lies buried with prodigious gifts: a cap sewn with fox’s teeth, thousands of ivory beads formerly sewn onto his clothes, and about twenty ivory bracelets – rewards, perhaps, of an active life. Nearby, however, a boy and a girl, about eight or twelve years old, moulder alongside even more spectacular ornaments: animal carvings and beautifully wrought weapons, including spears of mammoth ivory, each over six feet long, as well as ivory bracelets, necklaces, and fox-tooth buttons. Over each child mourners sprinkled about 3,500 finely worked ivory beads. Such riches can hardly have been earned: the occupants of the grave were too young to accumulate trophies; at least one of them suffered from slight deformity of the lower limbs, which might have impeded her efficiency in physical tasks, or her general admirability as a physical specimen of her kind. The evidence is therefore of a society that distributed riches according to criteria unlinked to objective merit; a system that marked leaders for greatness from childhood, at least.
It looks, therefore, as if heredity were already playing a part in the selection of high-status individuals. Genetic theory now provides sophisticated explanations for a matter of common observation: many mental and physical attributes are heritable, including, perhaps, some of those that make good rulers. A system that favours the children of self-made leaders is therefore rational. The instinct to nurture may play a part: parents who want to pass their property, including position, status, or office, to offspring are likely to endorse the hereditary principle. By creating disparities of leisure between classes, specialization frees parents in specialized roles to train their children to succeed them. Above all, in political contexts, the hereditary principle conduces to peace by deterring competition. It removes elites from conflictive arenas and corrupting hustings. For the sake of such advantages, some states still have hereditary heads of state (and, in the case of the United Kingdom, a partly hereditary legislature). If we must have leaders, heredity is, by practical standards, no bad way to choose them.
In our attempt to understand where power lay in Ice Age societies, the final bits of evidence are crumbs from the tables of the rich. Though feasts can happen spontaneously when scavengers stumble on a carrion bonanza or hunters achieve a big kill, the usual focus is a political occasion, when a leader displays munificence to mediate power and forge allegiance. Because they involve a lot of effort and expense, feasts need justification: symbolic or magical, at one level, or practical at another. The earliest clear evidence is in the remains of deposits of plants and prey dropped by diners at Hallan Çemi Tepesi in Anatolia, about ten or eleven thousand years ago, among people who were beginning to produce food instead of relying wholly on hunting and gathering. But there are suggestive earlier concentrations of similar evidence at sites in northern Spain nearly twice as old as Hallan Çemi. At Altamira, for instance, archaeologists have found ashes from large-scale cooking and the calcified debris of food perhaps from as long as twenty-three thousand years ago, with records of what could be expenditure scratched on tally sticks. Analogies with modern hunting peoples suggest that alliances between communities may have been celebrated at such occasions. Male bonding was probably not the pretext: if it were the feasts would be served far from major dwelling sites to keep women and children at a distance. In early agrarian and pastoral societies, by contrast, chiefs used feasts to supervise the distribution of surplus production among the community, and so to enhance the feast-giver’s power or status or clientage network, or to create ties of reciprocity between feasters, or to concentrate labour where feast-givers wanted it. In some instances, at a later stage, privileged feasts, with limited access, defined elites and provided them with opportunities to forge bonds.
COSMIC ORDER: TIME AND TABOOS
Specialized, privileged elites, who enjoyed the continuity of power that heredity guaranteed, had time to devote to thinking. We can detect some thoughts that occurred to them, as they scoured the heavens for the data they needed in their jobs. In the absence of other books, the sky made compelling reading for early humans. In some eyes, stars are pinpricks in the veil of the sky through which we glimpse light from an otherwise unapproachable heaven. Among the discoveries early searchers made there was a revolutionary idea of time.
Time was one of the great breakthrough ideas in the history of thought. Most people share St Augustine’s despair at his inability to define it. (He knew what it was, he said, until someone asked him.) The best way to understand it is by thinking about change. No change, no time. You approach or reflect a sense of time whenever you calculate the possible effects of connected processes of change – when, for instance, you speed up to escape a pursuer or capture prey, or when you notice that a berry will be ripe for harvesting before a tuber. When you compare changes, you measure, in effect, their respective rates or pace. So we can define time as the rate at which one series of changes occurs, measured against another. A universal measure is not necessary. You can measure the passage of a raindrop across your windowpane against the movement of your clock – but in default of a clock you can do so by the drifting of a cloud or the crawling of a creature. As we shall see, Nuer tribespeople calculate the passage of time according to the rate of growth of their cattle, while other cultures deploy all sorts of irregular measures, including changes of dynasty or of ruler or ‘when Quirinius was governor of Syria’. The Lakota of North America traditionally used the occurrence of each year’s first snowfall to start a new ‘long count’.
Still, if you want an unfailingly regular standard of measurement, look to the heavens. Congruities between the cycles of the heavens and other natural rhythms – especially those of our own bodies and of the ecosystems to which we belong – made the first systems of universal timekeeping possible. ‘The sight of day and night’, Plato said, ‘and the months and the revolutions of the years have created number and have given us a conception of time.’ The cycle of the sun, for instance, suits the demands of sleep and wakefulness. The moon’s matches the intervals of menstruation. Kine fatten with the march of the seasons, which in turn the sun determines. Celestial standards are so predictable that they can serve to time everything else. Star-time – the cycle of Venus, for instance, which occupies 584 years – is valued in cultures that favour long-term record-keeping and big-number arithmetic. Some societies, like ours, attempt elaborate reconciliations of the cycles of sun and moon, while others keep both sets of calculations going in imperfect tandem. As far as we know, all peoples keep track of the solar day and year, and the lunar month.
When the idea of using celestial motion as a universal standard of measurement first occurred, it revolutionized the lives of people who applied it. Humans now had a unique way of organizing memory and anticipation, prioritizing tasks, and co-ordinating collaborative endeavours. Ever since, they have used it as the basis for organizing all action and recording all experience. It remained the basis of timekeeping – and therefore of the co-ordination of all collaborative enterprise – until our own times (when we have replaced celestial observations with caesium-atomic timekeeping). It arose, of course, from observation: from awareness that some changes – especially those of the relative positions of celestial bodies – are regular, cyclical, and therefore predictable. The realization that they can be used as a standard against which to measure other such changes transcends observation: it was an act of commonplace genius, which has occurred in all human societies so long ago that – ironically – we are unable to date it.
The earliest known calendar-like artefact is a flat bone inscribed with a pattern of crescents and circles – suggestive of phases of the moon – about thirty thousand years ago in the Dordogne. Objects with regular incisions have often turned up at Mesolithic sites: but they could be ‘doodles’ or the vestiges of games or rites or ad hoc tallies. Then comes further evidence of calendrical computations: the horizon-marking devices left among megaliths of the fifth millennium BCE when people started erecting stones against which the sun cast finger-like shadows, or between which it gleamed towards strange sanctuaries. By mediating with the heavens, rulers became keepers of time. Political ideas are not only about the nature and functions of leaders, but also about how they regulate their followers’ lives. How early can we detect the emergence of political thinking in this sense? The common life of early hominids presumably resembled primate bands, bound by kinship, force, and necessity. What were the first laws that turned them into new kinds of societies, regulated by ideas?
A working assumption is that a sense of cosmic order inspired early notions about how to organize society. Beneath or within the apparent chaos of nature, a bit of imagination can see an underpinning order. It may not require much thought to notice it. Even bugs, say, or bovines – creatures unpraised for their mental powers – can see connections between facts that are important to them: dead prey and available food, for instance, or the prospect of shelter at the approach of rain or cold.
Creatures endowed with sufficient memory can get further than bugs and bison. People connect the sporadic instances of order they notice in nature: the regularities, for instance, of the life cycle, the human metabolism, the seasons, and the revolutions of celestial spheres. The scaffolding on which early thinkers erected the idea of an orderly universe was composed of such observations. But awareness of orderly relationships is one thing. It takes a huge mental leap to get to the inference that order is universal. Most of the time, the world looks chaotic. Most events seem random. So imagination played a part in conjuring order. It takes a lively mind to see – as Einstein supposedly said – that ‘God does not play dice.’
The idea of order is too old to be dated but once it occurred it made the cosmos imaginable. It summoned minds to make efforts to picture the entirety of everything in a single system. The earliest surviving cosmic diagrams – artistic or religious or magical – capture the consequences. A cave face, for instance, in Jaora in Madhya Pradesh, India, shows what the world looked like to the painter: divided among seven regions and circled with evocations of water and air. A four-thousand-year-old Egyptian bowl provides an alternative vision of a zigzag-surrounded world that resembles two pyramids caught between sunrise and sunset. The ‘dreamtime’ of Australian aboriginals, in which the inseparable tissue of all the universe was spun, echoes early descriptions. So, in widespread locations, does rock painting or body art: the Caduveo of the Paraguay valley, for instance, whose image of the world is composed of four distinct and equipollent quarters, paint their faces with quarterings. A four-quartered world also appears on rocks that Dogon goatherds decorate in Mali. When potters in Kongo prepare rites of initiation in their craft, they paint vessels with their images of the cosmos. Without prior notions of cosmic order, arrayed in predictable and therefore perhaps manipulable sequences of cause and effect, it is hard to imagine how magic and oracular divination could have developed.
In politics, order can mean different things to different people. But at a minimum we can detect it in all efforts to regulate society – to make people’s behaviour conform to a model or pattern. It is possible to identify social regulations of great antiquity – so widespread that they probably predate the peopling of the world. The earliest are likely, from anthropological evidence, to have been of two kinds: food taboos and incest prohibitions.
Take food taboos first. Incontestably, they belong in the realm of ideas: humans are not likely to have been instinctively fastidious about food. It is obviously not natural to forgo nutrition. Yet all societies ban foods.
To help us understand why, the BaTlokwa, a pastoral people of Botswana, present the most instructive case. They forbid an incomparably vast and varied range of foods. No BaTlokwa is allowed aardvark or pork. Locally grown oranges are banned, but not those acquired by trade. Other foods are subject to restrictions according to the age and sex of potential eaters. Only the elderly can have honey, tortoise, and guinea fowl. Pregnancy disqualifies women from enjoying some kinds of beef offal. Some taboos only apply at certain seasons, others only in peculiar conditions, such as when sick children are present. In fieldwork-conversations, BaTlokwa give anthropologists unsystematic explanations, attributing variously to matters of health, hygiene, or taste prohibitions the complexity of which, though extreme, is representative of the range of food taboos worldwide. All efforts to rationalize them have failed.
The classic case is that of the scruples encoded in one of the most famous ancient texts, the Hebrew scriptures. They defy analysis. The creatures on the forbidden list have nothing in common (except, paradoxically, that they are anomalous, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas pointed out, in some methods of classification, including, presumably, those of the ancient Hebrews). The same apparent senselessness makes all other cases intractable to comprehensive analysis. The best-known theories fail: in most known cases the claims of economics and of hygiene – that taboos exist to conserve valuable food-sources or to proscribe harmful substances – simply do not work. Rational and material explanations fail because dietary restrictions are essentially suprarational. Meanings ascribed to food are, like all meanings, agreed conventions about usage. Food taboos bind those who respect them and brand those who break them. The rules are not meant to make sense. If they did, outsiders would follow them – but they exist precisely to exclude outsiders and give coherence to the group. Permitted foods feed identity; excluded foods help to define it.
In the search for the first social regulations, incest prohibitions are the most likely alternative to food taboos. Every known human society has them, in a variety of forms almost as astonishing as the BaTlokwas’ food-rules: in some cultures siblings can marry, but not cousins. Others allow marriages between cousins, but only across generations. Even where there are no blood ties, prohibitions sometimes apply, as in merely formal relationships between in-laws in canon law.
If we are to understand how incest prohibitions originated, we therefore have to take into account both their ubiquity and their variety. Mere revulsion – even if it were true that humans commonly feel it – would not, therefore, serve as an adequate explanation. …
… Like food taboos, sex taboos exist not because they make sense in themselves, but because they help build the group. By regulating incest societies became more collaborative, more united, bigger, and stronger. The reason why incest prohibitions are universal is, perhaps, that simple: without them societies would be poorly equipped for survival.
Chapter 3 [extracts]
Settled Minds, ‘Civilized’ Thinking
CIVIC LIFE
Agriculture imposed terrible problems but also ignited grand opportunities. The new leisured elites had more time than ever to devote to thinking. If agrarian societies suffered recurrent famines, the background was of routine abundance. Farming made cities possible. It could feed settlements big enough to encompass every form of specialized economic activity, where technologies could be refined and improved. ‘A social instinct’, Aristotle averred, ‘is implanted in all men by Nature and yet he who first founded the city was the greatest of benefactors.’
The city is the most radical means human minds have ever devised for altering the environment – smothering landscape with a new habitat, thoroughly reimagined, crafted for purposes only humans could devise. Of course, there was never a golden age of ecological innocence. As far as we know, people have always exploited their environment for what they can get. Ice Age hunters seem to have been willing to pursue to extinction the very species on which they depended. Farmers have always exhausted soils and dug dust bowls. Still, built environments represent to an extreme degree the idea of challenging nature – effectively, waging war on other species, reshaping the earth, remodelling the environment, re-crafting the ecosystem to suit human uses and match human imaginations. From as early as the tenth millennium BCE brick dwellings in Jericho seem to oppress the Earth with walls two feet thick and deep stone foundations. Early Jericho covered only ten acres. About three millennia later, Çatalhüyük, in what is now Turkey, was more than three times as big: a honeycomb of dwellings linked not by streets as we understand them but by walkways along the flat roofs. The houses were uniform, with standard shapes and sizes for panels, doorways, hearths, ovens, and even bricks of uniform scale and pattern. The painted streetscape of a similar city survives today on one of the walls.
Dwellers in such places may already have esteemed the city as the ideal setting for life. In the third millennium BCE, that was certainly the prevailing opinion in Mesopotamia, where received wisdom defined chaos as a time when ‘a brick had not been laid … a city had not been built’. Ninety per cent of the population of southern Mesopotamia lived in cities by about 2000 BCE. Only now is the rest of the world catching up. It has taken that long for us to get close to overcoming the problems of health, security, and viability that cities unleash on their people. We are becoming a city-dwelling species but we do not know whether we can avoid the disasters that have overcome all city-building civilizations so far and made them one with Nineveh and Tyre.
LEADERSHIP IN EMERGING STATES
As well as stimulating the city, agriculture solidified the state. The two effects were connected. To manage labour and police food stocks, communities strengthened rulers. The more food production increased, the more mouths there were to feed and more manpower to manage. Power and nutrition twisted like bindweed in a single upward spiral. Political scientists commonly distinguish ‘chieftaincy’ – the structure of political authority typical of foraging cultures – from ‘the state’, which herding and farming societies favour. In chieftaincies the functions of government are undivided: rulers discharge all of them, making laws, settling disputes, wielding justice, running lives. States, on the other hand, distribute the same functions among specialists. According to Aristotle, the state was a response to growing population: the first society was the family, then the tribe, then the village, then the state. The village represented a crucial phase: transition to sedentary life, the replacement of hunting and gathering by herding and agriculture. The state was the culmination: ‘the union of families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing life’. We still rely on this sort of narrative of the unknowably distant past. In sociologists’ and political scientists’ usual model, chieftains ruled roving ‘bands’, but when people settled down, bands became states and chiefdoms became kingdoms.
However that may be, rival ideas of the state are discernible in political imagery from the third and second millennia BCE. In ancient Egypt, for instance, the commonest image of the state was as a flock, which the king tended in the role of a herdsman, reflecting, perhaps, a real difference between the political ideas of herders and foragers. Farming increases competition for space and therefore strengthens institutions of rulership, as disputes and wars multiply; in conflicts, elective leaders qualified by prowess or sagacity tend to shift patriarchs and elders out of supreme command. In such circumstances, ‘primitive liberty’, if it ever existed, would yield to a strong executive. Mesopotamian texts of the period enjoin obedience to draconian enforcers: to the vizier in the fields, the father in the household, the king in everything. ‘The king’s word is right’, says a representative text, ‘his word, like a god’s, cannot be changed.’ The king towers over anyone else depicted in Mesopotamian reliefs, as he takes refreshment; he receives supplicants and tributaries, and hoists bricks to build cities and temples. It was the king’s prerogative to form the first brick from the mud for any public edifice. State kilns stamped bricks with royal names. Royally effected magic transformed mud into civilization. Yet autocracy was there to serve the citizens: to mediate with the gods; to co-ordinate tillage and irrigation; to warehouse food against hard times and dole it out for the common good.
Even the most benign state tyrannizes somebody, because good citizenship requires adherence – sometimes by assent but always by force – to what political scientists call the social contract: the renunciation to the community of some of the liberties that a solitary individual might expect to enjoy. But no one has yet found a fairer or more practical way of regulating relationships among large numbers of people.
The Source:
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It, Simon and Schuster Oneworld Publications 2019
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.