The code was also a huge economic advance. A lot of it deals with commerce. Roughly a third of the 282 edicts pertain to trading practices, credit, and property in one way or another. For instance: “If a merchant give an agent corn, wool, oil, or any other goods to transport, the agent shall give a receipt for the amount, and compensate the merchant therefor. Then he shall obtain a receipt from the merchant for the money that he gives the merchant.”28 Such “best practices” were essential to a sprawling agricultural empire.
Last, the code also put in writing the social hierarchy of the Babylonian Empire. Hammurabi, naturally, was the keystone. Beneath him were the military and the priests, then the citizens, and, finally, the slaves. There was also a more recognizable class system. The Amelu were the elite, comprising the priests, the military, government officials, landowners, and merchants. Below the amelu were the mushkinu: craftsmen, artisans, farmers, teachers, and other workers. And beneath them were the ardu, the slaves. Even the slaves had a hierarchy as spelled out in the code. Slaves could own slaves and run their own businesses in certain circumstances, which sometimes allowed them to buy their freedom.29
Part of the genius of the code—and why the people embraced it—was that it took informal rules and unwritten customs and universalized them. Hammurabi was no democrat, but he was deferential to the traditions of his subjects. Indeed, laws are often lagging rather than leading indicators, formalizing what had been an informal rule for a very long time.
This underscores an important point: Written law—which was both civil and religious—reflected existing cultural and psychological norms at least as much as it replaced them. The most obvious example is the principle of “an eye for an eye.” The idea of retributive justice is no doubt far older than the code. Indeed, there’s overwhelming evidence to support the claim that a desire for retributive justice isn’t even an “idea” at all but an instinct we describe as an idea.30 Regardless, it’s important to recognize that rule givers can only work within the confines of human nature. More importantly, we should respect the fact that many of our most important institutions are embedded with deep reservoirs of knowledge. They are evolved problem-solving devices that emerge through a process of discovery and trial and error.
There’s a story—possibly apocryphal—about Dwight Eisenhower when he was the president of Columbia University. As the campus was expanding, the school needed to lay down some new sidewalks. One group of planners and architects insisted that the sidewalks be laid out this way. Another group said they must go that way. Both camps believed reason was on their side of the dispute. “Legend has it,” writes my National Review colleague Kevin D. Williamson, “that Eisenhower solved the problem by ordering that the sidewalks not be laid down at all for a year: The students would trample paths in the grass, and the builders would then pave over where the students were actually walking. Neither of the plans that had been advocated matched what the students actually did when left to their own devices.
“There are two radically different ways of looking at the world embedded in that story,” Williamson writes. “Are our institutions here to tell us where to go, or are they here to help smooth the way for us as we pursue our own ends, going our own ways?”31
This is an entirely valid, even vital question to ask about our contemporary society. But looking backward at the evolution of the state and other institutions, the best answer one can come up with is “both.” The stationary bandit didn’t establish himself as a ruler in order to maximize the liberties or opportunities of his victims-subjects-clients. And the state did not emerge for the betterment of the people but for the betterment and security of the rulers. Hammurabi may indeed have had the best interests of his people in mind when he issued his rules for when and how wives should be murdered, slaves mutilated, and children drowned. But I think a reasonable person can also suspect that Hammurabi’s motivations were also self-interested.
So when I write that these societies “need” aristocracies, ideologies, etc., I do not mean that anyone set out to build these institutions for any other reason than self-interest. These are naturally occurring phenomena, human universals on mass scale. Just as slime molds spontaneously self-generate out of disparate single-celled organisms under the right conditions, humans self-organize into hierarchical communities under some kind of state.
One fascinating example of this natural human tendency can be found in American prisons. Prison gangs emerged into virtual states within the penal ecosystem. Some even have written constitutions. These de facto governments running American prisons, described by David Skarbek, were a response to the chaos that overtook prison systems in California and Texas. The old code of conduct that dictated how inmates behaved broke down in the 1970s, and the gangs filled the vacuum with a new code enforced by them.32 These new stationary bandits returned order to the prisons, not the guards. But it’s worth keeping in mind that the gang leaders did not intend to impose some new penal social order. The social order emerged from their pursuit of their narrow interests. “This bottom-up process of institutional emergence,” Skarbek writes, “was the result of inmate actions, but not the execution of any inmate design.”33
For most of human history, self-interest came before ideology. The arguments for aristocracy and monarchy—whether in feudal Japan, ancient Rome, or anywhere else before the Enlightenment—were justifications for the authority of the rulers. The Enlightenment changed the formula. Rather than appealing to myth and mystery, the architects of the Enlightenment appealed to reason.
But one thing did not change: The state remains a myth agreed upon. We tell ourselves that the state is a thing, and our belief in it makes it real (just as belief in a nation is the ultimate author of its reality). After all, you can’t touch or see the state. You can see buildings and bureaucrats and soldiers, but all of these things are tools or servants of the state, not the state itself. There’s no Great and Powerful Oz behind the curtain. There isn’t even a rumpled professor. The state exists because people say it does.
When the state disappears, as in the old Soviet Union, what is the only tangible evidence that it’s gone? The tanks are still there. The buildings too. The only real proof the state has disappeared is that people stop acting as if it exists. They stop following its orders, which means they refuse to cooperate with each other under the invisible banner of the state.
Yuval Harari argues that virtually all of civilization—religion, corporations, money, ethics, morality, etc.—should really be seen as nothing more than a collection of stories we tell ourselves.
These fictions or social constructions often serve as the software for civilization. Stories allow huge populations to cooperate across vast territories. We tell ourselves the story that paper money has value, and because everyone agrees to respect the story, the money is accepted in lieu of things of intrinsic value. In times of crisis, when we revert back to something closer to the state of nature, the illusion of money’s value becomes clear. In the post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested—excuse me, “walker”-infested—state-of-nature world of The Walking Dead, money has no value save as kindling or toilet paper.
The funny part is that, in modern-day America, people who come to realize or fear that paper money is not a reliable storehouse of value feel the need to buy gold. But the value of gold is a social construction too. Within the socially constructed world of modern economics, buying gold may be a smart strategy in some circumstances. A Berliner in 1923 would certainly rather have had his money in gold than in German marks. But a Berliner in 1945 might have traded all his gold for food or guns.
Money, of course, is just one of innumerable fictions that define our conception of reality and right and wrong. We tell ourselves that humans have natural or God-given rights. Where is the proof—the physical, tangible, visible proof? Don’t tell me a story; show me the evidence. The fact is we have rights because some believe they are in fact God-given, but far
more people believe we should act as if they are God-given or are in some other way “real.”
Economists and other scholars of development don’t like to call such things stories. They prefer the term “institution,” which is fine by me. At the most basic level, an institution isn’t a building or an organization; it’s a rule. But before it was a rule, it was a story. And religion—the mother of so many of our stories—is the most important of them all.
Put all issues of theology aside, and just look at religion as a way to get humans who are not related to each other and who do not even know each other to cooperate. Religion provides humans with meaning, for a reason to behave a certain way and to treat others a certain way. A Sunni Muslim who encounters another Sunni Muslim has a story in common, and that shared story leads them to cooperate rather than fight.
It seems silly even to bother to demonstrate that religion has enormous power over how humans conduct themselves, given that it is the one assertion both defenders and critics of religion agree upon. But just to illustrate the point, consider the story of Henry IV in the snows of Canossa.
In 1073, Pope Gregory VII set out to reform investiture in the Holy Roman Empire. Gregory believed the pope, not the Holy Roman emperor, should have the power to appoint bishops and the like. The Holy Roman emperor at the time, Henry IV, liked the power to make such appointments, and he resisted the reforms and denounced Gregory. The pope responded by excommunicating Henry in 1076. This created a crisis for Henry—and the empire. No doubt Henry was worried about his eternal soul, but even if he were a secret atheist, he would have understood that the rest of society believed in the story. One could not remain a king in eleventh-century Europe and be cut off from the Holy Mother Church. Gregory allowed Henry to repent. So arguably the most powerful man in the world walked hundreds of miles over the Alps from Speyer in what is today Germany to the Canossa Castle in the region of Emilia-Romagna in Italy. He then spent three days kneeling, barefoot, in the snow outside the castle, during a blizzard, wearing a hair shirt, fasting, and awaiting forgiveness from the pope.34
There is reason to believe that religion itself is an evolutionary adaptation. Group cooperation is the key to human survival, and religion can be an incredibly powerful source of social cohesion, fostering sacrifice for the greater good of the community.
We all pay taxes, obey traffic rules, work at jobs, and do a thousand other things every day in compliance with the intangible rules that emanate from countless fictions agreed upon. It is no great exaggeration to say: “Tell me your stories and I will tell you who you are.”
The agricultural revolution created a social landscape as alien to our genetic programming as a colony on Mars. The first city-states had tens or hundreds of thousands of inhabitants living cheek by jowl, competing for resources, mates, and status. Humans adapted to this new environment the only way any animal adapts to any new environment: by applying their nature to it as best they could. The Big Man was replaced by the stationary bandit, who was replaced by a king (or emperor or czar or pharaoh). To be sure, the king used force to keep the people in line. But force was not enough. Humans have an innate need to know their place in society. We have an instinctual hunger for meaning and order.
In short, large populations needed a story. The stories varied in countless details, but the plot and themes were well-nigh universal. That’s because the stories that worked were those that tracked with our innate desire for a father figure, a head man, or an alpha ape who cared for us. Scour the anthropological and archaeological record; it’s the same story, over and over, for thousands of years. The king is anointed or otherwise chosen by some divine authority to rule over his people, like a father.
If you take the time line of humanity from the first city-states around 4000 B.C. until today, monarchy, broadly defined, has been the default arrangement for human affairs for roughly 99 percent of the period. Monarchy—or, if you prefer, some kind of aristocracy with a solitary paternal figure at the top—defined nearly all human societies until around 1800. There is a reason why Catholic priests are called fathers and the pope is il Papa.
And what about after 1800? We will be spending a lot of time on this question in later chapters, but it’s worth noting here that the introduction of democracy didn’t suddenly erase our natural desire and tendencies to look to father figures. The Soviet Union, allegedly the antidote to all the superstitions that came before it, spared little effort to cast Joseph Stalin as the father of the Motherland.35 Adolf Hitler, who also rejected the ancient customs of monarchy as well as the modern innovation of democracy, styled himself as the nation’s father. Napoleon Bonaparte, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Mao Tse-tung, Mobutu Sese Seko, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, and virtually every other ostensibly secular authoritarian ruler of the last two centuries has worked assiduously to play the role of father to his children-subjects. George Washington himself was dubbed “the father of his country” for all time before he even left office. His comrades are still remembered as the “Founding Fathers.”
In other words, even when we remove the dogmas that elevate monarchy over democracy, the pattern holds more often than not. “Patriotism” comes from the Latin patria, meaning fatherland, itself a derivative of pater, or “father.” This points to why it’s not sufficient to say that strongmen imposed this role on their respective populations. The people asked for it. They celebrated it. Virtually every cult leader in human memory claimed to be the group’s father (or mother) and it was because of this claim—not despite it—that the worshipful formed their flocks. And this yearning has not vanished in the twenty-first century. Recall comedian Chris Rock insisting that we have to do what President Obama wants because “he’s the Dad of our country.”36
Given the thousands of natural experiments across Eurasia, North and South America, and all the other corners of the globe, there’s no avoiding the conclusion that this basic idea satisfies some deep innate needs of human beings. If monarchy were unnatural in some profound way, it would not have provided such a stable form of government for thousands of years. If a desire for a fatherly leader to do what’s in our best interests weren’t hardwired into us, it would not be a staple of political cultures around the globe.
If you emptied a jar of ants onto the surface of some distant habitable planet, they will do exactly what they do here on Earth: start building colonies. Similarly, left to their own devices in an unnatural environment, humans “naturally” organize around a centralized authority. The fact that monarchies of a fashion predate the agricultural revolution only amplifies the point.
And here we need to revisit my argument about corruption. When democracies fall apart, we often say they are “falling” or “slipping backward” into authoritarianism. The breakdown of Venezuela fits this familiar model. This is one form of social entropy. But our language fails us when societies reject democracy and the market in favor of supposedly “future-oriented” models of social organization. When the Bolsheviks took over Russia, Western intellectuals hailed it as a great advance in human affairs. Castro’s takeover of Cuba was likewise celebrated as an exciting improvement, a more humane and rational way of organizing politics and economics. What this misses is that all efforts to escape the Miracle of liberal democratic capitalism lead to the same destination.
The categories of left and right tend to mislead us, and so do terms like “forward” and “backward.” Thomas More coined the word “Utopia” to mean no place. He contrasted it with the term “eutopia,” which means good place. How many millions have died in a quest to find a perfect society that does not and cannot exist? Meanwhile, how many billions have benefited from our discovery of a good place—the oasis that is the Miracle? The point is that there’s no direction—left, right, forward, backward—out of the oasis that won’t take us back to the desert.
In other words, every effort to do away with liberal democratic capitalism is react
ionary, because they all attempt to restore the unity of purpose that defines the premodern or tribal mind. Socialism, nationalism, communism, fascism, and authoritarianisms of every stripe are forms of tribalism. The tribal mind despises division. It despises the division of labor and the inequality it inevitably fosters. It despises the division between the religious and the secular, between the individual and the group, between civil society and the state. Whether it takes the form of religious orthodoxy, communist dogma, the divine right of kings, or some variant of “social justice” theory, the same underlying impulse rules: We must all be in it together. The genius of the Miracle lies in the division of labor, not just in manufacturing or science, but in our own minds. Save in times of war or some other existential crisis, meaning cannot be a mass, collective enterprise without crushing the rich ecosystem of institutions that actually give us meaning and ensure liberty and prosperity.
4
THE BIRTH OF CAPITALISM
A Glorious Accident
Where does the Miracle come from? Oddly enough, given how much it’s been studied and how recent it is, no one really knows. Or, to be more accurate, no one can really agree. There is no shortage of theories, but consensus remains remarkably elusive. And often, when scholars try to synthesize all the scholarship, they throw their hands up in consternation. Joel Mokyr begins his daunting A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy recounting the sudden explosion of prosperity that began in Europe in the 1700s and has been spreading, in fits and starts, around the globe ever since. “The results were inescapable: nearly everywhere on the planet men and women lived longer, ate better, enjoyed more leisure, and had access to resources and delights that previously had been reserved for the very rich and powerful, or more commonly, had been utterly unknown.”1
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