A new pro-state canard that has been trotted out lately has been to contrast levels of violence in pre-state versus state societies. It is pointed out that even the bloodiest of “state society” centuries (the twentieth) was an improvement on tribal society. Steven Pinker is often enlisted in this cause, particularly this passage from his “A History of Violence“:
If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.
To draw an endorsement of the state from such statistics is entirely vacuous.
Primitive (“tribal”) societies are primitive not because they don’t have states, but because they don’t have a developed tradition of private property. This necessarily results in economic autarky and extreme poverty. Autarky and poverty in turn result in both inter-tribal biological competition (constant warfare) and the fact that there is not enough wealth to support a parasitic state. It is private property and the division of labor that led both to a decline in inter-tribal warfare and enough wealth in societies for parasitic states to feed off.
The state owes its existence to civilization, not vice versa. And the wars that interrupt the process of civilization have been made more frequent and more bloody by the encroachment of the state on market-and-civil society.
Follow Circle Bastiat
Pinker completely ignores the monopolization of violence which is the fundamental characteristic of the state. Hundreds of millions of deaths in wars and democide are simply ignored. He also ignores the fact that the purpose of the state is theft and control.
The state did not reduce violence; it just nationalized it.
“Hundreds of millions of deaths in wars and democide are simply ignored.”
Genuinly curious here David, how did you reach that conclusion?
I don’t know anthropological literature on the origins of the state very well, but I don’t think it’s that important. What you touch on here, I think, is most important: what allows violence to decrease in society are improvements in institutions. And to think that the only institution that can be developed is the state and its governing apparatus suggests of hubris. It’s just that the state, for much of human history, has existed along side private spontaneous order, and many people are unable to distinguish between the two — so, the state erroneously gets credit.
the source of these numbers, and what about time-schedule?
if tribe is 100 people – and they kill on Sunday 5 people, so it ,,,, need calculator ,,,,,, – so it ,,, – aaa- 350 mln .are dead, yes.
it’s so funny!
A substantial re-examination of the literature of pre-agrarian societies (specifically the nomadic, pre-horticultural tribese) suggest that very little inter-tribal violence occurred, and most violence was, essentially, personal, and infrequent. The few existing nomadic tribes simply don’t have the kinds of violence that Pinkerton claims. And re-examination of evidence old and new from study of chimps and bonobos (our nearest and only social primate cousins) has begun to debunk previous claims about our (and their) presumptive violent nature. In short, we read our modern violent and hierarchical tendencies into much of the primatological evidence.
Societies that do seem to all be post-horticulture, post-settlement (enclosure movement) cultures. From these cultures nearly all of modern civilization descends.
Why did violence and hierarchy (and the state) emerge from a post-enclosure situation? Lots of reasons, but my suspicion is the Dunbar number – when we clustered together and stopped travelling nomadically, we reached densities of population where an individual could be forced into daily contact with more people than he could create one-to-one trust relationships with – a huge anxiety on the individual. As nomads, a band could dissolve – a stationary population could not. I believe we, as a species, had a scale problem.
We seemed to have solved it in two ways – hierarchy (which seems likely to have come first) and anarchic secondary exchange. We had lots of experience with anarchic direct exchange. Pre-horticultural nomadic cultures don’t have use for private property – only personal (portable) property. If you weren’t using it, it wasn’t “yours” in the sense we mean now. But we exchanged personal property, tools, favours, grooming, affection, etc. However, when clustered, we struggled for a need to resolve these tensions and we began to have access to caches of resources previously useless to us – stored resources – in short, the fodder of property. Property evolved out of that need for a safe scope of action and a way to stop the tension and aggression that caches of resources seem to evoke in social primates (several experiments show this, notably Goodall’s). Property (exclusive control over a resource) was governed in these two aforementioned ways.
Hierarchy is easier. You simply have to trust those above and below you – you trust that your superiors will take care of those outside your hierarchy, and your inferiors will take care of those further below. ANd it’s very effective – but centralizes knowledge and therefore suffers from Mises critique of socialism – the need for sufficient knowledge – when scaled sufficiently largely. Anarchic secondary exchange is more complex, more subtle, and I suspect came later. It required a move past direct exchange because direct property value isn’t granular enough to store and divide. Mises covers this nicely in Human Action – how money emerges. But it couldn’t happen, I suspect, until notions of property were more established. But while it is more complex in some ways, its essence is simpler, and it is parallel – doesn’t require centralized knowledge. It is, therefore, more efficient at large scales.
I believe these two processes – hierarchy and anarchic secondary exchange (money and trade) have been competing ever since, with hierarchy ultimately competing by co-opting money, or seeking to control its mechanisms.
The above is a synthesis of a lot of different ideas, but certainly I think its plausible and fits the facts as we know them as well as any other theory. Certainly Pinkerton’s theory does not – it relies on a Hobbesian vision of pre-history that life was nasty, brutish, and short, something which is being increasingly invalidated by newer primatological and ethnological evidence.
More importantly, I don’t believe that primitive tribes poverty and autarky resulted in the kinds of violence claimed – the evidence suggests that it wasn’t until after the enclosure movement occurred that we start to see this sort of Hobbesian reality. I believe that primitive societies are primitive because they haven’t evolved secondary exchange. I think that the phase between our evolutionary beginnings, namely, a sort of anarcho-communism, if you will, and the market-anarchism that is to be our future if we want to succeed as a species reflects the rocky-road of moving past our evolutionary origins and using culture to transition and handle the new situation – stable population centers and scale. It comes from choosing (for whatever reason) the expedient of coercive hierarchy and its attendent costs.
And that’s the point Pinkerton overlooks – the rise of the state doesn’t correlate with civilization any better than the rise of money (in the misesian sense).
I wouldn’t sell our far ancestors short – they knew better than our near ancestors. They just hadn’t developed markets yet – until they settled, they didn’t need them. And it took a few thousand years to figure it out, and in the mean time, some bad decisions along the way screwed us up for a while. But we do anarchism well – we did it for 190,000 of the 200,000 years as modern humans, and 40,000 out of 50,000 years as speaking humans. We’ve started to get the hang of doing it with secondary exchange. We’re just having trouble kicking the hierarchy habit.
Edit of my previous comment: “of the literature about pre-agrarian societies” not “of the literature of pre-agrarian societies”. Pre agrarian societies didnt’ have literature.
Ahhhh. Pinker. Not Pinkerton. I wish I could edit my comment – I have a co-worker named Pinkerton that was stuck in my mind.