Chapter 3: The Political Elements of Civilization
– The Origins of Government
– The State
– Law
– The Family
If the average man had had his way, there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
SoC, p. 21
In primitive societies, all governance was local: the province of the family patriarch; ad-hoc councils of elders in larger groups when specific events demanded such organization. If war was waged between tribes, a war-time Chief might emerge. In peace, he usually went back to the role of patriarch of his own family; the tribe needed little central leadership.
War acted as Darwin’s agent of natural selection, raising the level of competition and selecting for those who excelled in “courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence, and skill.” As in our time, it was a driver of innovation, and introduced new concepts of organization. Insofar as agriculture created property, war (frequently over property rights) created the state. As agriculture led to trade, and trade to writing, the state barely precedes the written word. In its creation, we mark the transition from kinship to domination.
Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.
SoC, p. 24
Wouldn’t it be interesting to ask Will Durant about these words during these interesting times, when so many (or at least so few, loudly) are decrying as unjust the very land upon which many of our monuments stand, and when so many attack those very monuments. Is this a natural part of the ebb and flow of history, the result of too long a time spent in affluence and peace? Whither the end of the unrolling of rights of conquest, as every piece of land on our globe has changed hands untold times amongst cultures extinct, revived, decaying, or thriving?
The state grows to consume authority over more and more of life, as men decide that they’d rather one unjust authority than many. The insatiable appetite of the state, in its early form almost universally authoritarian and autocratic, soon creates the need for law.
Law, which arises from property, trade, marriage, and government, grows out of the primitive concept of vengeance that each person was entitled to exact whatever revenge they could enforce through their personal power and influence. Early legal systems, such as the Code of Hammurabi, gave structure to, and by so doing, preserved the right of retribution, which can still be found in our modern legal systems. As the law grew, it substituted compensatory damages for retribution for lesser crimes. Some societies instituted ordeals between the aggrieved parties, less for determination of guilt perhaps than in the hope that the contest would end the dispute in such as way as to stop the chain of revenge. The growth of law led next to courts, originally elders tasked with hearing disputes and determining the justice required. From here, it was another short step to the concept of law and court as a means to prevent wrongs first, and to punish when necessary. Paradoxically, Durant concludes that laws increased our freedom:
Rights do not come to us from nature, which knows no rights except cunning and strength; they are privileges assured to individuals by the community as advantageous to the common good. Liberty is a luxury or security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.
SoC, P. 29
If this sounds strange to modern ears (and it assuredly did to mine), we must recall that in primitive society, the individual existed only as a member of clan. Few individual rights were recognized, rather the individual was governed strictly by environment and custom. Expected to contribute freely to the clan; expecting to draw freely from it as well. Survival was a team sport. Few rugged individualists survived long enough to express their freedom.
As family groups appear to have been too small for success in the harsh environment of our past, we believe that the clan was the normal group. Upon the emergence of the state, the clan was superceded from above by the government, from below by the family. While the family could hardly be called matriarchal, as that implies female rule, it was usually organized around the mother, her children, frequently her brother, with the males as only passing companions. As men had always to be ready for battle or the hunt, women did most of the work in the clan, most likely including the invention of pottery, sewing, weaving, domestication of animals, and horticulture. As agriculture grew, only with the attendant security of the primitive state did men begin to take up more of the work. As the concept of property grew, the desire to pass that property to the next generation drove a shift to a fully patriarchal society.
Chapter 4: The Moral Elements of Civilization
– Marriage
Marriage as we know it is a very recent concept, indeed in some parts of the world it is perhaps less than a century old, and in others retains much of its more normal historical purpose. Durant traces the concept of marriage with some difficulty through pre-history and into early history, during which time, every conceivable approach has been tried, has served well for a time, and has ultimately transformed as environment and the development of civilization itself steered it.
Durant holds marriage as the first step in the moral development of civilization. Early primitive societies seem to have lacked much concept of marriage altogether; as with land rights, all was communal, in some cultures to the extent that marriage, sex, and procreation were not believed to be connected. When men were primarily hunters and warriors, they tended to die early, leaving a surplus of women, and as a result monogamy was not yet seen as practical alternative to celibacy. As agriculture created the need for cheep labor (slaves), and simultaneously led to the patriarchal inheritance of land and property, marriage to one, or frequently several women allowed a man to have children to work and inherit the land. Universal also was the concept of exogamy – of marrying from outside the clan. Today we understand the genetic advantages of exogamy; primative people’s motivations are unclear. Over time, exogamy evolved from capture, to capture with later payment, to purchase and parental arrangement, which survive in some cultures to this day. Curiously, this evolution seems to parallel in concept (if unsure in time) with the evolution of law from revenge to compensatory damages.
The concept of romantic love as part of the marriage institution is even more recent. Over most of our history, marriage has existed as an economic arrangement. The distance and longing of adolescence that lead to courtship and romance having not existed in the freer communal societies over the vast majority of our history. As Durant closes, “Wherever, in the history of civilization, woman has ceased to be an economic asset in marriage, marriage has decayed; and sometimes civilization has decayed with it.” I can imagine the outrage if Durant were to post that sentence to Twitter in 2020. And I wonder if the outrage we would see is, in the broader historical context, evidence in support of his conclusion.