The Myth of the West: Democracy and the State

Map of Southwest Asia showing the main archaeological sites of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, BCE c. 7500, in the “Fertile Crescent” (source). None of these sites had kings, which wouldn’t emerge for another 4500 years.

By Thomas Neuburger

I’ve been writing a lot about the political organization called “the state” lately, offering comments on its nature, formation and goals. These have been spread among pieces as diverse as our Book Club discussions of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything and James Scott’s Against the Grain.

The story in simple is this. In one of those pieces, I wrote:

Humans, for millions of years, lived in tribal communities. These groups, like all human groups, had structure, but nothing dramatic, nothing like masters and slaves or workers and kings. Nothing systemically coercive. This hierarchy was mostly benign because people could walk away, take family and cousins and leave. Social life depended more on agreement than force. There were no coercive states with their monopolies on violence.

For thousands of years, humans lived with agriculture and without kings and a state. States only emerged when certain narrow circumstances offered conditions for the emergence of states, circumstances that allowed a few (we’ll call them “the Few” for now) to control the work of the Many for their personal benefit.

The History of States

This is a story of human governance, how humans organize themselves socially. Note that governance is not the same as government. The timeline looks roughly like this:

• Two million years ago — Homo habilis and especially Homo erectus lived tribal lives with a variety of governance structures derived from the social lives of various great-ape primates, but with the addition, in the case of Homo erectus, of much greater intelligence. Homo erectus, for example, was a master of fire and used it to remake the world to better himself. You could argue that the Anthropocene starts with Homo erectus and fire.

(Source: Britannica.com)

• 300-200,000 years ago — Homo sapiens emerges alongside other hominins. Life in tribes and similar communities continues. Anthropologists like David Graeber discuss life in those tribes (see The Dawn of Everything), much of it deduced from a) life in the tribe groups that remain today, and b) descriptions of non-European life encountered by European “explorers.”

• 12,000 years ago — Groups of humans in unique and favorable regions (primarily near wetlands formed by large river deltas) begin to find that they can sustain themselves through a kind of natural agriculture, not fixed-field agriculture per se, but by settling near areas where food naturally reproduces itself. The lifestyle includes some hunting, some gathering, but not much moving around. This settled lifestyle occurs at various times in various parts of the world. In Mesopotamia, settlements like these begin to appear around 10,000 BCE.

Pre-state life — artist’s rendering (source)

• For the next few thousands of years, small villages or towns emerged in these settled areas, governed without rulers or kings; no states, no dynasties, no conquest of land.

• 3,000 BCE (5,000 years ago) and later — Finally, dynastic regions appear in Egypt, Sumeria, India, America and China. That is, in a few of these settled regions — not all, just a few — states and kings emerged. It took special conditions, detailed in Against the Grain, for the egalitarian power of tribal and small-village life to be converted to rule by the Few, to the power balance we know today as the State.

Post-state life: Peasants harvesting the Pharaoh’s grain in Ancient Egypt (source)

Conclusions:

• States do not represent inevitable and forward progress due to agriculture. They emerged only when conditions were ripe for the Few to take control of the Many, often by controlling the food that the Many depended on. A king can take over a town, for example, if the town depends on grain, an easily stored and hoarded food source. You can’t do the same if the primary food is yams, which resist storage and hoarding.

• States and kings aren’t the only way to organize large groups. The Iroquois Federation, for example, never had kings.

• Non-state societies don’t exist to enrich the Few, but to benefit the Many to the extent circumstances allow. States do the opposite.

• The natural state of humans is not life in states. Including Homo erectus, we humans have lived in states for just one-eighth of one percent (0.125%) of our whole time on earth.

Democracy: Gift of the State or the Way We Began?

These thoughts lead in several directions. One is the nature of “democracy” as we know it today. Is “democracy” a structure like that which emerged in Athens, an Empire State? Or is “democracy” not a structure at all — not some kind of state — but a style, a way for groups to decide together? These aren’t the same thing.

Here’s David Graeber in his provocative essay, “There Never Was a West”:

I began this essay by suggesting that one can write the history of democracy in two very different ways. Either one can write a history of the word “democracy,” beginning with ancient Athens, or one can write a history of the sort of egalitarian decision-making procedures that in Athens came to be referred to as “democratic.” Normally, we tend to assume the two are effectively identical ... [T]his seems an odd assertion. Egalitarian communities have existed throughout human history—many of them far more egalitarian than fifth-century Athens—and they each had some kind of procedure for coming to decisions in matters of collective importance.

Which society is actually democratic, a group within the Iroquois Federation, where people decide together how resources are used — or a state where millions experience very low food security and the choices for king are a wealth-backed Democrat or a wealth-backed Republican?

Which group would you rather live in if you found yourself starving and outside the protected Few?

Rubio’s March of the ‘Free’ and ‘Dominant’ West

Another direction this line of thinking takes us is Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent speech at the Munich “security conference,” where he touted “freedom” and “liberal democracy” as Europe’s gift to the world:

It was here in Europe where the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born.

But is the mission of “the West” really to bring freedom to all?

For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.

Missionaries, soldiers, vast empires, extending across the globe. A good thing according to Rubio, until things started to change.

But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, [the West] was contracting. … Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past.

The “West’s age of dominance” indeed. See how “democracy” in that State-sanctioned, Ancient Greek sense gets confused for actual freedom?

Not Libertarian Freedom, But Freedom Itself

A final note: This, what I write, is not a libertarian screed. Every “libertarian” I know wants authoritarian rule the first minute she or he can lay hands on it. Freedom is code for power to people like these.

Instead I write in defense of community life — communist, socialist life, but without the State. No kings. No gods. No masters. Just people in self-loving groups deciding their lives.

Can we have this and still have a State? Many say yes, but I agree with Graeber; I don’t think we can.