Dictators: A Field Guide

For most of human recorded history, it was a time of kings (and the occasional queen) and emperors.  Experiments with representative governments would creep onto stage gradually, providing a platform whereby an individual could attain king-like status within a representative-government format.  The twentieth century would see a number of these individuals arise who we have referred to as dictators.  Adam Gopnik, who always has something interesting to present, reviewed two recent books on the characteristics of these leaders.  His discussion is particularly relevant as the world is observing the resurgence of leaders who seem to be desirous of that appellation but are merely known as autocrats at the moment.  Gopnik’s article appeared online in The New Yorker as The Field Guide to Tyranny (as Tyrant Chic in the paper version).  The two books reviewed are How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century by Frank Dikötter, and The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy by Daniel Kalder.

Gopnik opens with this lede.

“Dictators tend to share the same ugly manner because all seek the same effect: not charm but intimidation.”

Dikötter’s book provides concise descriptions of the major dictators of the twentieth century.

“Dikötter—who, given his subject, has a wonderfully suggestive, Nabokovian name—is a Dutch-born professor of history at the University of Hong Kong; he has previously written about the history of China under Mao, debunking, at scholarly length and with a kind of testy impatience, the myth of Mao as an essentially benevolent leader. ‘How to Be a Dictator’ takes off from a conviction, no doubt born of his Mao studies, that a tragic amnesia about what ideologues in power are like has taken hold of too many minds amid the current ‘crisis of liberalism.’ And so he attempts a sort of anatomy of authoritarianism, large and small, from Mao to Papa Doc Duvalier.”

Not possessing “divine right” or any of trappings of monarchy, pre-dictators must demonstrate some level of competence to get their careers rolling.

“…Dikötter’s portrait of his dictators perhaps underemphasizes a key point about such men: that, horribly grotesque in most areas, they tend to be good in one, and their skill at the one thing makes their frightened followers overrate their skill at all things, like children of a drunken father who take a small act of Christmas charity as proof of enormous instinctive generosity.”

Gopnik tells us that a definite trend emerges in the lives of the dictators studied.

“The elements come together in almost every case to make one standard biography. There’s the rise, which is usually assisted by self-deluding opportunists who believe that they can restrain the ascendant authoritarian figure; old Bolsheviks like Grigory Zinoviev, countering Trotsky, played just as significant a role in Stalin’s ascent, largely through abstention, as the respectable conservative Franz von Papen did in Hitler’s. (‘We can control him’ is the perpetual motto of the soon-to-be-killed collaborator.) Next there is the attainment of power, and the increasingly frantic purging, followed by a cult of personality made all the more ludicrous by the passage of time, because it is capable only of inflation, not variation. Along with that comes some re-identification with figures from the national past. The exploitation of the imaginary Aryan history, bestrode by Valhallan gods, became central to the Hitler cult. In the same way, Dikötter shows, Duvalier took up the animism of Haitian vodou and presented himself as the avatar of the cemetery spirit Baron Samedi.”

“Then comes the isolation of the dictator within his palace—friendless and paranoid—and the pruning of his circle to an ever more sycophantic few. The dictator, rather than exulting in his triumph, withdraws into fearful seclusion. Finally, after all the death and brutality imposed, the dictator’s power, and often his life, ends with remarkable suddenness.”

This chronology of dictatorship imposes different behaviors at different stages.

“The difference between charismatic leadership and the cult of personality—different points in the trajectory of the dictator—is that the charismatic leader must show himself and the object of the cult of personality increasingly can’t show himself. The space between the truth and the image becomes too great to sustain. Mao, like God, could be credibly omniscient only by being unpredictably seen. Imposing an element of mystery is essential. And so most of the subjects here rarely made public appearances at the height of their cults. Stalin and Hitler both remained hidden for much of the war; to show themselves was to show less than their audiences wanted.”

This picture of dictatorship provides insights into the actions taken, but a more complete picture of the characters involved emerges from a consideration of their written and spoken words.  Kalder’s book provides more insights of interest.

“In many ways the literary companion to Dikötter’s book, ‘The Infernal Library’ is the work of a non-academic scholar with a staggering appetite for reading. The same dictators fill both books, but Kalder’s focus is on their words more than their acts. He has worked through a reading list that would leave most people heading desperately for an exit, and an easier subject.” 

“The worst dictators tend to be the most enthusiastic readers and writers. Hitler died with more than sixteen thousand books in his private libraries; Stalin wrote a book that was printed in the tens of millions, and though that is easier to do when you run the publisher, own all the bookstores, and edit all the book reviews (only Jeff Bezos could hope to do that now), still, he did his own writing. Mussolini co-authored three plays while ruling Italy and was the honorary president of the International Mark Twain Society, writing a greeting to the readers of his favorite author while installed as Duce. Lenin and Trotsky, whatever else they may have done, both wrote more vividly and at greater length than did, say, Clement Attlee or Tommy Douglas—social-democratic politicians who did great good in the world and left few catchy slogans behind. ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ and ‘The revolution is not a dinner party,’ Mao’s apologias for mass killing, may not be admirable sentiments, but they are memorable aphorisms—far more memorable than the contrasting truth that some political power grows out of the barrels of some guns some of the time, depending on what you mean by ‘power’ and ‘political,’ and whom you’re pointing the gun at.”

The ability to express oneself with words may be just as important for dictatorial success as the actions one takes.

“Kalder’s point is the disquieting one that the worst tyrants of the past century were hardly the brutal less-than-literates of our imagination. (Hitler, twenty and poor in Vienna, put down “writer” as his occupation on an official document. He wasn’t, but it was what he dreamed of being.) Their power did not grow out of the barrel of a gun. It grew out of their ability to form sentences saying that power grew out of the barrel of a gun, when in fact it was growing out of the pages of a book. Mao was even more effective as an advocate than as a general. The trouble with these tyrants’ language was what they used it for.”

Kalder’s efforts illuminate a critical difference between tyrants on the left and tyrants on the right.  Consider, for example, those ferocious enemies Stalin and Hitler.

“We may have heard that Stalin’s ‘Foundations of Leninism’ was printed in the millions, but Kalder has read it, and with a certain kind of devil’s-due respect: ‘He is clear and succinct, and good at summarizing complex ideas for a middlebrow audience: the Bill Bryson of dialectical materialism, minus the gags’.”

“Wanting the prestige of authorship but discovering that writing is hard work, Hitler dictated most of ‘Mein Kampf’ to the eager Rudolf Hess. Hitler was always unhappy with the slowness of reading and writing, compared with the vivid electricity of his rallies.”

“The Soviet Union, and left totalitarianism in general, is a culture of the written word; the Third Reich, and right authoritarianism in general, is a culture of the spoken word... Where the Marxist heritage, being theory-minded and principle-bound, involves the primacy of the text, right-wing despotism, being romantic and charismatic, is buoyed by the shared spell cast between an orator and his mob. One depends on a set of abstract rules; the other on a sequence of mutual bewitchments.”

What does this tour of the past tell us about what the future may hold?  It seems clear that the policy driven words from the left have been less successful than the bellowing from the right in generating emotion in their followers.  The left must sell its programs in such a way as to match the emotional intensity on the right.  The popularity of Twitter and its usage by Trump appears to suggest it is an effective mechanism for extending a formal rally with red-meat phrases for the attendees, to the regular shout-out of the same type phrases to an even larger audience.

Gopnik ends with the assessment he finds most troubling—one which we should find beyond troubling.

“Perhaps the most depressing reflection sparked by both books is on the supine nature of otherwise intelligent observers in the face of the coarse brutalities of dictatorships. Kalder writes, as many have before, about Mao’s successful courtship of Western writers and leaders, who kept the Maoist myth alive as his cult descended into barbaric absurdity…The capacity for self-delusion on the part of cosseted utopians about the actuality of utopia remains the most incomprehensible element of the story of the twentieth century, and its least welcome gift to the twenty-first.”

Elizabeth Warren: Having the Courage to Strive for Big Changes

Kevin Baker produced an extremely timely essay titled On Courage for the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine.  He expressed dismay at the process by which Democratic candidates for president were being evaluated in the so-called “debate” format.  It provided no time for actual debate, gave irrelevant candidates the opportunity to throw grenades at the front runners hoping to advance their own forlorn prospects to the detriment of the party and its eventual candidate.  Even those providing the questions seemed to be auditioning for some future gig.  Given all that, Baker was most disturbed that there was no process by which large, long-term issues could be discussed.

“Conspicuous by its absence is any sense of a bigger picture. How are we to remove the influence of money from a system in which members of Congress now routinely spend four or five hours a day making fund-­raising calls? Do we really need to maintain some eight hundred military bases, in eighty countries around the world? Never mind the costs and terms of this or that particular health-care plan; how is it that America doesn’t have a universal system of affordable care, as every other country in the developed world established decades ago?”

“Off the stage, the national media has been nearly as bad, mostly rushing to get the panicked reaction from Wall Street to all the frightening things Democrats are saying.”

Senator Warren held most interest for Baker because she seemed to be the one who actually struck fear in the high and the mighty.

“Billionaire Leon Cooperman—previously best known for his pompous 2011 open letter accusing President Obama of promoting ‘class warfare,’ and for shelling out nearly $5 million to settle an insider-trading suit from the S.E.C.—broke into tears on CNBC while contemplating Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plans for regulating Wall Street. ‘This is the fucking American dream she is shitting on,’ he later told Politico.”

“Steve Rattner, the financial adviser and New York Times opinion writer, agreed with Cooperman that ‘a Warren presidency is a terrifying prospect,’ to be entertained only ‘if you want to live in France.’ Rattner—a ‘lifelong Democrat’ who has spent the past forty years scooping up a great fortune while dancing merrily back and forth between major media outlets, the Street, and the White House (and, hey, ­whaddaya know, having to pay out millions to the S.E.C. for his own scandal, which involved kickbacks in exchange for gaining control over investing public pension funds)—­warned:

Left to her own devices, [Warren] would extend the reach and weight of the federal government far further into the economy than anything even President Franklin Roo­sevelt imagined.”

The economy, and the nation as a whole, worked rather well for decades after Roosevelt’s imagination was turned into action, at least until Republicans, assisted by weak-minded, and weak-willed Democrats set out to undo much of what had been accomplished.  So, being accused of having Rooseveltian ambitions and policy proposals should be a good thing for a Democratic candidate.  Instead, Warren is under constant attack from the financial high rollers who feel threatened, and the party mainstream who believe she has moved “too far to the left.”  How then does the Democratic Party elite believe one should counter a far, far right Republican Party—by moving right with them?

“Trying for a closer, saner look at the candidate who seems to frighten Big Money the most, I went to hear Warren speak at her September rally in New York’s Washington Square Park.”

Warren’s appearance was part of a series of visits to sites that provided landmarks in the nation’s struggle for economic justice.  The one Baker attended was focused on the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

“The Triangle fire killed 146 people—­almost all of them women or girls, many of them teenagers—in fewer than twenty minutes. They died when a blaze broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, located on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of what was then the Asch Building, in Greenwich Village. They died because the factory’s owners had failed to provide any firefighting equipment. They died because most of the doors were locked at the Triangle, so that their handbags could be inspected before they left, lest they walk off with a few pennies’ worth of cloth. They died after rushing out to a fire escape that quickly collapsed beneath them. They died falling through a glass roof, impaled on an iron fence, tumbling down an empty elevator shaft. They died plunging through the firemen’s nets—and even through the sidewalk.”

“’The tragic story of the Triangle factory fire is a story about power,’ Warren told the thousands jammed into the park that night. ‘A story of what happens when the rich and the powerful take control of government and use it to increase their own profits while they stick it to working people’.”

Warren invoked the name of Frances Perkins, best known as labor secretary under Franklin Roosevelt, as a “persistent” woman who wanted, as Warren did, to make big things happen.  Baker provides this perspective.

“Perkins was born in 1880 to an old but un­moneyed New En­gland family. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, she set out into the world—living and working in some of the harshest slums in America, becoming a friend, protégé, and student of reformers ranging from Florence Kelley to Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair to Teddy Roosevelt.”

“She was visiting a friend in the Village when the Triangle fire broke out, and she rushed to the site in time to see the women plunging to their deaths.”

“’One by one, the people would fall off,’ she later recalled. ‘They had gone to the window for air, and they jumped. It’s that awful choice people talk of—what kind of choice to make?’”

“It was, she later said, ‘the day the New Deal began’—mostly because it was the day that Perkins decided to throw herself fully into what used to be called ‘practical politics.’ In New York, she brought change by allying herself with the new emerging leaders of the corrupt old machine, men such as Al Smith, Robert F. Wagner, and ‘Big Tim’ Sullivan.”

“Franklin Roosevelt named her New York State’s first industrial commissioner, then asked her to come to Washington as his labor secretary. Perkins said she would do it if she could do big things—much like Warren’s repeated calls for ‘big, structural change’.”

Perkins would be too far left for that era, but, nevertheless…

“In Washington, Perkins charted a course for the New Deal. She initiated, wrote, and lobbied for legislation that abolished child labor; guaranteed workers the right to join a union; and established a minimum wage, the forty-hour work­week, overtime laws, workers’ compensation, and aid to families with dependent children. She also wrote most of the Social Security Act, transforming life for the aged and disabled in America to this day.”

“She did some of her most courageous work in the field of human rights. During the Depression, she ceased federal cooperation with the Mexican Repatriation, in which state and local authorities deported hundreds of thousands of workers to Mexico, many of them U.S. citizens. She refused to deport Harry Bridges, the radical West Coast labor leader accused of being a Communist. She declined to intervene against striking workers—as the federal government so often had before—which allowed for major labor victories on the San Francisco waterfront and at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. And almost alone in Washington, she recognized the threat that Adolf Hitler posed when he first came to ­power; she won a years-­long struggle with the State Department to let refugees stay in the United States, saving the lives of at least twelve thousand Jewish Germans and tens of thousands of other Europeans desperate for sanctuary.”

“For her efforts, Perkins’s enemies tried to impeach her. They floated a smear that she was really a secret Jewish Soviet agent named Matilda Watski—a charge Perkins was loath to deny, lest she appear anti-Semitic. ‘If I were a Jewess I would make no secret of it,’ she finally said in a public statement. ‘On the contrary, I would be proud to acknowledge it’.”

Baker was impressed by Warren’s performance that night, and by the moment it created.

“By the end of Warren’s speech there was a sense of excitement in the air, it seemed to me, at being connected to such a woman as Frances Perkins, and to a time when Americans did big, good things.”

Baker does not endorse Warren as the best candidate or his favorite candidate, but he does endorse her attitude.

“But I do think that the senator’s interest in connecting to the worthy struggles of the past…tells us where her heart lies, what her core values and principles are. I would also say that, whichever candidate you choose, choose her or him on the basis of the extent to which you can discern that core. Not on the fears of Steve Ratt­ner, or the tears and curses of Leon Cooperman, or anybody else who tells you the sky can still fall in a country that elected Donald Trump president.”

I, also, am not yet prepared to vote for Warren as the presidential candidate.  But, when your opponents treat every election as an existential threat to their hold on power, and never feel constrained by law, ethics, justice, or tradition—any means is justified by the end—one should look long and carefully at the candidate who has the courage to wave the biggest club in the face of the enemy.  And that is what Elizabeth Warren is doing.  May the force be with her!

Evolution, Economics, Patriarchy, and the Status of Women

Trying to understand ourselves, Homo Sapiens, as a species is an endlessly fascinating topic.  The first lesson to be learned from such an endeavor is that what history can tell us about ourselves is what can be learned over the last few thousands of years, a period when human evolution was mainly cultural, not physical.  If we try to look back tens of thousands of years, we merely know that humans emerged from Africa and spread throughout Eurasia and evolved changes in physical characteristics that are geographical in nature.  We have chosen to refer to these changes as racial characteristics as though they were fundamental in nature.  Over the past few centuries this geographical separation has broken down.  The cultural mixing of the “races” and modern genetic studies have led to the conclusion that we are all best described as simply being one species.  So, if perhaps the last hundred thousand years of evolution has not produced significant genetic diversification, one is justified in concluding that who we fundamentally are was determined over the millions of years of evolution that occurred during our development in Africa—a period about which we know almost nothing.

One must assume that we existed in small bands that survived as hunter-gatherers.  One can try to extrapolate back in time by evaluating what we know about such bands that were encountered before their existence was contaminated by modern cultures.  One can also attempt to extrapolate forward in time by assuming that we share common characteristics with the animals with which we coevolved.  Both approaches are fraught with uncertainties, partly because researchers are generally unable to dismiss current cultural biases from such evaluations.  For example, male anthropologists tend to create a history dominated by presumed male characteristics and activities, while female anthropologists tend to arrive at a different reading of human nature and the role of the genders in human development.  There is good news in this uncertainty.  If one is depressed by humanity’s current state, who we are today is not necessarily indicative of who we could be tomorrow.

Here the choice will be made to determine a few characteristics that seem to be fundamental from animal evolution combined with those that are consistent with what is know from studies of primitive hunter-gatherer societies.  Following that path, the basic characteristics at play in human development seem to be a need for social interaction, a preference for kin over non-kin, a desire for sexual autonomy, and a recognition that the gene pool must be continually enriched.

Living in groups of perhaps several dozen individuals requires a simple but strict social organization.  Individuals seeking food on their own would eventually hit a stretch of bad look and fail to accumulate enough food to support themselves.  Such individuals would survive by having access to surplus food acquired by others.  Sharing of necessary materials was obligatory and efficient.  There was little of lasting value that would tempt some to accumulate “wealth” superior to that of others.  Little is known about the details of interactions between the sexes, but one suspects that neither was inherently dominant.  While males were likely more physically powerful, the gathering of the females was likely more efficient than the hunting of the males at providing nourishment for the group.

Humans and animals—mammals at least—share the same body organs and body chemistry.  Consequently, one expects the intense maternal bond to infants to have always existed in human history.  Current human males only produce small amounts of the bonding chemicals so effective in females, leading them to exhibit varying degrees of paternal support for offspring.  This is probably an improvement over time given that the male kinship influence in our nearest neighbors, the chimpanzees, extends to merely being willing to practice infanticide only on other male chimps’ offspring.  Otherwise they play no role in raising infants.  Little is known about extended families, but females eventually developed lives that extended well past their childbearing periods.  This is unusual in the world of animals.  It is not clear whether natural selection truncated their childbearing time or extended their longevity (or both), but the kinship between an aged mother and daughter would provide the daughter with a dependable babysitter while she foraged for food, or for another to assist in the foraging.

There seems to be a universal desire on the part of females to have considerable say in which male they choose to mate with.  The attitude of males is generally to mate with any female, or, perhaps, every female.  Whether or not the female manages to protect her options will have a significant effect on the evolution of the species.  Chimpanzee males dominate the females and compete within themselves for access to the females.  This nonselective approach does little to enhance specific female characteristics, but it ensures a healthy component of the characteristics of dominant males in the gene pool.  For most bird species, the female has gained dominance in breeding.  Male birds no longer have a penis with which they could attempt to force copulation on an uninterested female, and the females select males on the basis of their aesthetic preferences.  Male characteristics are therefore highly dependent on those female choices.  It was the peahens who designed the peacock we have today.  And then there are a few species of duck who have yet to resolve this conflict between the sexes.  After many millions of years of evolution, male ducks are still developing bigger, more powerful, and more complex penises in order the penetrate unwilling females.  Meanwhile, the females are developing complex vaginal passages to prevent penetration except when she assumes a particular posture that she will only assume for her selected mate.  This can be a nasty business.  Humans seem to have arrived at a compromise in which both genders have participated in mate choice.  Breasts in mammals recede when they are not needed for breastfeeding.  Human female breasts are permanently on display, presumably a choice favored by males.  Males have developed large, prominently (and vulnerably) displayed genitalia, seemingly for the sole purpose of providing females something about which to speculate.  And then there is loss of a specific mating period in human females, allowing sex to go on when desired, with or without procreation.  It is not clear how mate selection managed that trick.

Our ape relatives know, one way or the other, that inbreeding is not a good idea.  Within a small group the hazards of inbreeding would develop eventually unless there were interchanges of males and/or females with other groups.  Humans had to develop means by which these interchanges could occur.  In very early times, the exchanges may have been relatively random with individuals wandering off looking for new opportunities.  At some point, as societies grew more complex, the benefits of kinship within a group would be extended to other groups.  This could be accomplished by exchange of gifts with members of other groups in order to establish good will that might prove advantageous at some future time.  A more effective approach to developing a broader-based support structure would be to provide a son or daughter to another group as a spouse to cement a relationship with another kin group.  This type of exchange likely evolved into our custom of marriage.

Until very recently, perhaps ten to fifteen thousand years ago, there was no reason to expect any deviation from this picture where both sexes contributed more or less equally to society.  That would begin to change as humans became more sedentary and began to cultivate crops, domesticate animals, and form states to control these activities.  James C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science and codirector of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University.  His book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States will serve as a guide to what will happen next.

Human population was growing.  Scott provides the population estimate of about two to four million worldwide in 10,000 BCE.  Small bands would become bigger bands over time, and regions could be found where relatively large numbers of humans could settle in and live off an abundance of plant and animal life.  Mesopotamia, unlike today, was one of those regions in that era.  The curious thing about the time was that people in that period understood the techniques for cultivating crops and herding animals, but they resisted doing so on a large scale.  Today one assumes that moving in that direction was the inevitable direction for the evolution of civilization, but it would be several thousand years before humans would consent to, or be coerced into, participating in an agricultural economy and the states that would run it.

“The first evidence of cultivated plants and of sedentary communities appears roughly 12,000 years ago.  Until then—that is to say for ninety-five percent of the human experience on earth—we lived in small, mobile, dispersed, relatively egalitarian, hunting and gathering bands.  Still more remarkable, for those interested in the state form, is the fact that the first small, stratified, tax-collecting walled states pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism.  This massive lag is a problem for those theorists who would naturalize the state form and assume that once crops and sedentism, the technological and demographic requirements, respectively, for state formation were established, states/empires would immediately arise as the logical and most efficient units of political order.”

Just as humans—and chimpanzees—were smart enough to realize that inbreeding was dangerous and should be avoided, they also appeared to realize that organizing into dense human and animal populations would lead to disease, discord, and suppression of their freedom.  They were correct in this assumption as the history presented by Scott shows.  In fact, the contrast between the good life they lived as hunter-gatherers compared to the horrors experienced in a state-dominated agricultural economy has been viewed as the origin of the Adam and Eve story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

When the food supply was plentiful, the life of the hunter-gatherer could involve plenty of time for relaxation and socializing.  They had a variety of food types available and enjoyed what we would view as a healthy diet.  An agricultural system based on the growing of grain and livestock rearing involved much more labor and a highly restricted diet.  Either declining environmental conditions or coercion would be required to capture them in such a system.

“’Domiciled’ sheep, for example, are generally smaller than their wild ancestors; they bear telltale signs of domesticate life: bone pathologies typical of crowding and a narrow diet with distinctive deficiencies.  The bones of ‘domiciled’ Homo Sapiens compared with those of hunter-gatherers are also distinctive: they are smaller; the bones and teeth often bear the signature of nutritional distress, in particular, an iron-deficiency anemia marked above all in women of reproductive age whose diets consist increasingly of grains.”

“Evidence for the relative restriction and impoverishment of early farmers’ diets comes largely from comparisons of skeletal remains of farmers with those of hunter-gatherers living nearby at the same time.  The hunter-gatherers were several inches taller on average.  This presumably reflected their more varied and abundant diet.”

Consider that we began with a picture of humans living in small bands where wealth was not accumulated, and individuals were more or less equal in status.  The dynamic of a small band demands that members look out for each other and share their individual bounties when appropriate.  Would anyone use those same words to describe life in one of the early states?  What the “expulsion from Eden” did was deliver humans into a hierarchical society where class mattered, and there were always elites who accumulated wealth through their control of the workforce.  We went from living in a world of relative equality to one of rampant inequality.  We started in a place where wealth was barely even a concept to one in which it is worth enslaving humans in order to acquire it.  What was appearing in this era were the realities of economics in a capitalist system.  The very early states being formed were more akin to corporations than kingdoms.  The state/corporation directed a captive workforce to produce a limited range of products for trading with others.  The goal was to increase the wealth of the elite (shareholders?).  The workforce was maintained by sending out raiding/recruiting parties to enslave those captured to replace workers who had either escaped or died in the frequent disease epidemics.  Humans would have to become a domesticated species.

“Over and above the drudgery of plough agriculture, the military, ceremonial, and urban needs of the new state centers required forms of labor in terms of both kind and scale that had no precedent.  Quarrying, mining, galley oaring, road building, logging, canal digging, and other menial tasks may have been, even in more contemporary times, the sort of work performed by convicts, indentured laborers, or a desperate proletariat.  It’s the sort of work away from the domus that ‘free’ men—including peasants—shun.  Yet such dangerous and heavy work was necessary to the very survival of the earliest states.”

It is not surprising that the role of women would change during this long imposition of civilization.  One could say that they became more valuable because they could produce offspring, therefore they had to be kept under control.

“Women and children were particularly prized as slaves.  Women were often taken into local households as wives, concubines, or servants, and children were likely to be quickly assimilated, though at an inferior status.  Within a generation or two they and their progeny were likely to be quickly assimilated, though at an inferior status.  Within a generation or two they and their progeny were likely to have been incorporated into the local society—perhaps with a new layer of recently captured slaves beneath them in the social order.”

“Women captives were at least as important for their reproductive services as for their labor…women slaves of reproductive age were prized in large part as breeders because of their contribution to the early state’s manpower machine.”

There are any number of explanations for why women could have lost their status relative to men.  Civilization introduced the concept of warfare into the human condition, something men would be better at.  Economic changes introduced wealth and the temptation to steal it, something men would be better at.  Massive amounts of manual labor were needed.  Men would do the work, therefore women must be focused on producing the men.  The list could go on and on.  What is clear is that at some point women became valuable commodities: they could be collateral for a loan, they could provide income when made available for marriage, they were valuable as concubines, servants or prostitutes.  This commoditization of females became explicitly expressed in marriage transactions.  Within the ranks of the wealthy, it became the tradition to give the bride plus a dowry to the groom’s family as both a means of indicating the wealth of her family and as a way of purchasing ties to the groom’s family.  For the poor and less wealthy the tradition of bridewealth was practiced.  In this case, the groom or his family paid the bride’s family to obtain their daughter as a wife.  This latter tradition seems suspiciously close to a purchase agreement.

Here we will consider David Graeber’s take on the rise of patriarchy in this period.  It is presented in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.  The economics of advancing “civilization” has been a persistent topic here and Graeber’s explanation fits well within that theme.  He provides this perspective drawn from the earliest of recorded history.

“In the very early Sumerian texts, particularly those from roughly 3000 to 2500 BC, women are everywhere.  Early histories not only record the names of numerous female rulers, but make clear that women where well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scribes, and public officials, and generally free to take part in all aspects of public life.  One cannot speak of full gender equality: men still outnumbered women in all aspects of public life.”

“Over the course of the next thousand years or so, all this changes.  The place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on chastity and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance of women’s role in government and the liberal professions, and the loss of women’s independent legal status, which renders them wards of their husbands.  By the end of the Bronze Age, about 1200 BC, we begin to see large numbers of women sequestered away in harems and (in some places at least) subjected to obligatory veiling.”

The practices of dowry and bridewealth were active in these Sumerian times, but they were tending to become more nearly an economic matter.

“…as time went on, this payment…often began to take on the qualities of a simple purchase.  It was referred to as ‘the price of a virgin’—not a mere metaphor, since the illegal deflowering of a virgin was considered a property crime against her father.  Marriage was referred to as ‘taking possession’ of a woman, the same word one would use for the seizure of goods.  In principle, a wife, once possessed, owed her husband strict obedience, and often could not seek a divorce even in cases of physical abuse.”

Economic inequality, as we might say today, was enormous, with most people falling into the category of “poor.”

“In Nuzi, for instance, ‘the brideprice was paid in domestic animals and silver amounting to a total value of 40 shekels of silver’—to which the author dryly adds, ‘there is some evidence that it was equal to the price of a slave girl.’  This must have been making things uncomfortably obvious.  It’s in Nuzi, too, where we happen to have unusually detailed records, that we find examples of rich men paying cut rate ‘brideprice’ to impoverished families to acquire a daughter who they would then adopt, but who would in fact be either kept as a concubine or nursemaid, or married to one of their slaves.”

It would be the existence of debt that would literally turn women into an economic commodity that could be bought and sold.

“A Mesopotamian husband couldn’t sell his wife either.  Or, normally he couldn’t.  Still, everything changed the moment he took out a loan.  Since if he did, it was perfectly legal…to use his wife and children as surety, and if he was unable to pay, they could then be taken away as debt pawns in exactly the same way that he could lose his slaves, sheep, and goats.  What this also meant was that honor and credit became, effectively, the same thing: at least for a poor man, one’s creditworthiness was precisely one’s command over one’s household, and (the flip side, as it were) relations of domestic authority, relations that in principle involved a responsibility for care and protection, became property rights that could indeed be bought and sold.”

What normally happens when women become commodities to be passed around is that many will find their best bet for economic survival is in prostitution.  Graeber quotes from the historian Gerda Lerner.

“Women might end up as prostitutes because their parents had to sell them into slavery or because their impoverished husbands might so use them.  Or they might become self-employed as a last alternative to enslavement.”

“By the middle of the second millennium B.C., prostitution was well established as a likely occupation for the daughters of the poor.  As the sexual regulation of women of the propertied class became more firmly entrenched, the virginity of respectable daughters became a financial asset for the family.  Thus, commercial prostitution came to be seen as a social necessity for meeting the needs of men.  What became problematic was how to distinguish clearly and permanently between respectable and non-respectable women.”

To establish why it would be critical to the honor—and creditworthiness—of a father that his daughter could not be mistaken for being one of the many non-respectables, Graeber includes a picture of the activities that were available in these ancient cities—Biblical-scale debauchery.

“From early times, Sumerian and Babylonian temple complexes were surrounded by far less glamorous providers of sexual services—indeed, by the time we know much about them, they were the center of veritable red-light districts full of taverns with dancing girls, men in drag (some of them slaves, some runaways), and an almost infinite variety of prostitutes.  There is an endlessly elaborate terminology of types of sex worker whose subtleties are long since lost to us.  Most seem to have doubled as entertainers: tavern-keepers doubled as musicians; male transvestites were not only singers and dancers, but often performed knife-throwing acts.  Many were slaves put to work by their masters, or women working off religious vows or debts, or debt bondswomen, or, for that matter, women escaping debt bondage with no place else to go.”

One means of separating the respectable women from those who were not, that is, separating women who could not be bought or sold from those who could, was to begin the practice of veiling women.

“The most dramatic known attempt to solve the problem, Lerner observes, can be found in a Middle Assyrian law code dating from somewhere between 1400 and 1100 BC, which is also the first known reference to veiling in the history of the Middle East—and also, Lerner emphasizes, first to make the policing of social boundaries the responsibility of the state.”

“The code carefully distinguishes among five classes of women.  Respectable women (either married ladies or concubines), widows, and daughters of free Assyrian men—‘must veil themselves’ when they go out on the street.  Prostitutes and slaves…are not allowed to wear veils.  The remarkable thing about the laws is that the punishments specified in the code are not directed at respectable women who do not wear veils, but at prostitutes and slaves who do.  The prostitute was to be publicly beaten fifty times with staves and have pitch poured on her head; the slave girl was to have her ears cut off.”

Thus, we have seen how patriarchy gradually developed over time as societies evolved, finally arriving at the most restrictive forms in the early Middle East.  A distaste for the corrupt and ungodly practices that could be found in the major cities of the time, and misogyny, would be imbedded in our cultural heritage via transmission in the scriptures of the major religions that emerged from this area: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

“The world’s Holy Books—the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, religious literature from the Middle Ages to this day—echo this voice of rebellion, combining contempt for the corrupt urban life, suspicion of the merchant, and often, intense misogyny.  One need only think of the image of Babylon itself, which has become permanently lodged in the collective imagination as not only the cradle of civilization, but also the Place of Whores.”

It seems that at around the same period in both India and China women’s freedoms were also gradually being restricted.  This implies that there was some grand universal mechanism at work that is, perhaps, masked by the particular details of the history of a given region.  Graeber provides this attempt at an explanation: “the growing scale and social importance of war.”

“Certainly, the more militaristic the state, the harsher its laws tended to be toward women.  But I would add another, complementary argument.  As I have emphasized, historically, war, states, and markets all tend to feed off one another.  Conquest leads to taxes.  Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators.  In the specific case of Mesopotamia, all of this took on a complicated relation to an explosion of debt that threatened to turn all human relations—and by extension, women’s bodies—into potential commodities.  At the same time, it created a horrified reaction on the part of the (male) winners of the economic game, who over time felt forced to go to greater and greater lengths to make clear that their women could in no sense be bought or sold.”

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

The Evolution of Beauty by Richard O. Prum

Mate Choice and Human Evolution

What if Ancient Humans Designed Themselves to Be Lovers—Not Warriors?

Early States, Capitalism, and the Domestication of Humans

Economics: Money, Markets, Debt, and the Barter Myth

Economics: Money, Markets, Debt, and the Barter Myth

It is important for us to realize that the basis for most economic discourse is just ideological thinking converted by repetition into “common knowledge,” or “common sense.”  The assumption of humans as “rational” actors in economic matters is only the most egregious error economists make.  It turns out they don’t know much about topics such as money, debt, and markets as well.  David Graeber uses his background as an anthropologist to elucidate humanity’s economic origins in order to address critical misconceptions in his wide-ranging book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. 

Economists generally adhere to a reading of history that assumes economic activity developed by stages from one dominated by barter, to one created by the existence of coinage/money, to one utilizing advanced credit systems.  Graeber claims that this view is incorrect.

“In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards.  We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems.  It happened precisely the other way around.  What we now call virtual money came first.  Coins came much later, and their use spread unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems.  Barter, in turn, appears to be largely a kind of accidental byproduct of the usage of coinage and paper money: historically, it has mainly been what people who are used to cash transactions do when for one reason or another they have no access to currency.”

The fact that credit systems came first implies something positive about human nature.  The historical nonexistence of barter economies implies the same thing.  The existence of credit requires the existence of debt.  Graeber requires a particular definition of debt: it is something that can be quantified.  Otherwise, it merely an obligation.  But obligations are apparently the path primitive societies chose to follow.  They recognized that trying to make equivalent the exchange of inherently nonequivalent goods and services was a dangerous path to follow.  Instead, if a neighbor needed a good or service it would normally be gifted under the assumption that the recipient would eventually gift a good or service of near equivalent value.  Peer pressure would help ensure fairness in this process.  Why was the alternative approach of bartering feared?  Humans understood their nature well enough to know that bartering would inevitably lead to each person in the exchange attempting to get the better of the deal, a distinctly antisocial approach that couldn’t work in tightly knit societies.  Graeber provides perspective on these issues.

“They seem inherent to the very nature of barter—which would explain the fact that in the century or two before [Adam] Smith’s time, the English words ‘truck and barter,’ like their equivalents in French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Portuguese, literally meant ‘to trick, bamboozle, or rip off.’  Swapping one thing directly for another while trying to get the best deal one can out of the transaction is, ordinarily, how one deals with people one doesn’t care about and doesn’t expect to see again.  What reason is there not to try to take advantage of such a person?  If, on the other hand, one cares enough about someone—a neighbor, a friend—to wish to deal with her fairly and honestly, one will inevitably also care about her enough to take her individual needs, desires, and situation into account.  Even if you do swap one thing for another, you are likely to frame the matter as a gift.”

Yet people continued to insist that barter was the natural means of exchange for primitive human societies.

“For centuries now, explorers have been trying to find this fabled land of barter—none with success…missionaries, adventurers, and colonial administrators were fanning out across the world, many bringing copies of [Adam] Smith’s book with them, expecting to find the land of barter.  None ever did.  They discovered an almost endless variety of economic systems.  But to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transaction between neighbors takes the form of ‘I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow’.”

“The definitive anthropological work on barter, by Caroline Humphrey of Cambridge, could not be more definitive in its conclusions: ‘No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

But barter would take place, but only with strangers unlikely to be encountered again.  And, as expected, it could be dangerous leading to violence if a deal was deemed sufficiently unsatisfactory.  This type of transaction would become the standard when groups grew to become large entities interacting with other large entities.  One should note that coinage, money, and markets as we know them awaited the formation of strong governments that could create these things.  In the meantime, various credit arrangements allowed commerce to grow and allowed for more complex interactions.

Graeber provides compelling arguments and data to illuminate the necessary role for government action in economic development.  Economists cling to their assumptions of the barter to money to credit transitions because it fits their ideology not the facts of history.

“The answer seems to be that the myth of barter cannot go away because it is central to the entire discourse of economics.”

“Recall here what [Adam] Smith was trying to do when he wrote The Wealth of Nations.  Above all, the book was an attempt to establish the newfound discipline of economics as a science.  This meant not only did economics have its own particular domain of study—what we now call ‘the economy,’ though the idea that there even was something called an ‘economy’ was very new in Smith’s day—but that this economy acted according to laws of much the same sort as Sir Isaac Newton had so recently identified as governing the physical world.  Newton had represented God as a cosmic watchmaker who had created the physical machinery of the universe in such a way that it would operate for the ultimate benefit of humans, and then let it run on its own.  Smith was trying to make a similar, Newtonian argument.  God—or Divine Providence, as he put it—had arranged matters in such a way that our pursuit of self-interest would, nonetheless, given an unfettered market, be guided ‘as if by an invisible hand’ to promote the general welfare.  Smith’s famous invisible hand was, as he says in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the agent of Divine Providence.  It was literally the hand of God.”

These theological ruminations are forgotten now, but economists continue to treat Smith’s hypothesis as revealed dogma.  Smith also had another goal in his theorizing: to resist the notion that government played any significant role in God’s creation of economics.

“Adam Smith…was determined to overturn the conventional wisdom that money was a creation of government.  In this, Smith was the intellectual heir of the Liberal tradition of philosophers like John Locke, who had argued that government begins in the need to protect private property and operated best when it tried to limit itself to that function.  Smith expanded on the argument, insisting that property, money, and markets not only existed before political institutions, but were the very foundations of human society.”

“In other words, Smith simply imagined away the role of consumer credit in his own day, just as he had his account of the origins of money.  This allowed him to ignore the role of both benevolence and malevolence in economic affairs, both the ethos of mutual aid that forms the necessary foundation of anything that would look like a free market (that is one which is not simply created and maintained by the state), and the violence and sheer vindictiveness that had actually gone into creating the competitive, self-interested markets that he was using as his model.”

Smith can be forgiven for his ignorance of history and human nature, but his current acolytes cannot.

As commercial interactions became more complex and arrangements between debtor and creditor became more formal, the demand for collateral grew, ushering in forms of debt peonage and ultimately slavery.  Daughters became an asset that could be useful in this kind of system.  Besides the sexual opportunities, they made the best servants.  These credit arrangements dominated commerce until governments grew large enough to contend with each other, waging war, pillaging resources, and collecting slaves.  Credit systems dominated in times of relative peace, while warfare, and the mercenary armies it required, demanded some form of currency to operate.

“If we look at Eurasian history over the course of the last five thousand years, what we see is a broad alternation between periods dominated by credit money and periods in which gold and silver come to dominate…”

“Why?  The single most important factor would appear to be war.  Bullion predominates, above all, in periods of generalized violence.  There’s a very simple reason for that.  Gold and silver coins are distinguished from credit arrangements by one spectacular feature: they can be stolen.  A debt is, by definition, a record, as well as a relation of trust.  Someone accepting gold or silver in exchange for merchandise, on the other hand, need trust nothing more than the accuracy of the scales, the quality of the metal, and the likelihood that someone else will be willing to accept it.”

Graeber provides an instructive example of how governments would necessarily have to move from a credit system to a coinage system and sponsor market development.  Consider a king who wishes to support a mercenary army of some size.  These soldiers must be paid, and they must be able to gain provisions from the local area.  They are inconsistent with a local credit system.  The king can create a coinage system and market by providing the soldiers with coins and, at the same time, demanding that local merchants pay taxes to the king in the form of those coins.  The merchants then must provide produce to the soldiers in exchange for coins to pay their taxes—and a market is born.  Also is born the need for a police force and laws that would impose severe penalties on anyone who did not play by the rules.  Markets need governments to create, regulate and police them.

“The economist’s barter scenario might be absurd when applied to transactions between neighbors in the same small rural community, but when dealing with a transaction between the resident of such a community and a passing mercenary, it suddenly begins to make a great deal of sense.”

The tale of capitalism and our economics is not God’s machinery at work, rather it is the work of states that grew powerful and aggressive.

“The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power of the market.  It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—and often vindictive—power of the state.  English villagers in Elizabethan or Stuart times did not like to appeal to the justice system, even when the law was in its favor—partly on the principle that neighbors should work things out with one another, but mainly because the law was so extraordinarily harsh.  Under Elizabeth, for example, the punishment for vagrancy (unemployment) was, for the first offense, to have one’s ears nailed to a pillory; for repeat offenders, death.”

“The same was true of debt law, especially since debts could often, if the creditor was sufficiently vindictive, be treated as a crime.”

The arc of economic history has taken us from a place where exchanges were made as a moral issue where both creditor and debtor had responsibilities and risks, to one where only money considerations matter and the full force of the state supports creditors, leaving debtor’s to bear all risk.

“What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal?  What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts?”

“From this perspective, the crucial factor,,,is money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.”

Progress, the evolution of civilization, always provides positive and negative contributions to our lives.  We should be aimed at providing “the good life” for as many people as possible.  Our problem is that we can no longer consider what “the good life” might be because we are caught up in this milieu where money and markets are the markers for value.  Graeber addresses this issue with an example of anthropological humor—a tale of a supposed interaction between a missionary and a Samoan lying in the beach.

“Missionary: Look at you!  You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that.

Samoan: Why?  What do you think I should be doing?

Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts around here.  Why not dry some copra and sell it?

Samoan: And why would I want to do that?

Missionary: You could make a lot of money.  And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and make even more money.

Samoan: Okay.  And why would I want to do that?

Missionary: Well, you’d be rich.  You could buy land, plant more trees, expand operations.  At that point, you wouldn’t even have to do the physical labor anymore, you could just hire a bunch of other people to do it for you.

Samoan: Okay.  And why would I want to do that?

Missionary: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines, employees, with all that money—you could retire a very rich man.  And you wouldn’t have to do anything.  You could just lie on the beach all day.”