Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy
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Again, this is only a partial list.
One of the most interesting taboos in American life is the taboo against discussing human nature. This is an entirely modern prohibition. The ancient Greeks and Romans, not to mention every major world religion, considered human nature not only real but an essential subject for study and contemplation. I think there are multiple overlapping reasons—many of them laudable—for our aversion to the subject. Our civilization has struggled to live up to the ideals of universal equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and similar canons. Discussion of human nature inevitably bleeds into debates about genetic differences between groups or claims that certain behaviors or choices are “unnatural.” Discussion of human nature also grinds against the idea that the individual is unconstrained by external—or internal!—restraints, a nearly unique dogma of the West. Another reason why “human nature” sounds like fighting words is that it is at loggerheads with the French Enlightenment tradition that believes in the “perfectibility of man.”
But while some of these concerns are valid, the fact is the human universals identified by Brown apply to blacks and whites, Asians and aborigines. I am agnostic about the issue of racial differences, in part because I’m not clear on why they should matter even if they exist. Most of the good work on the subject—there’s a great deal of awful work as well—focuses on large aggregate and statistical differences between populations. Whatever may or may not explain these differences has no bearing whatsoever on how we should treat individuals as a matter of law, manners, or morality.
But one of the sources of the taboo against discussions of human nature does need addressing: the idea of the noble savage.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often credited with coining the phrase “noble savage,” though that honor belongs to John Dryden, who wrote in The Conquest of Granada (1670):
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.7
“The concept of the noble savage was inspired by European colonists’ discovery of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and (later) Oceania,” Steven Pinker writes. “It captures the belief that humans in their natural state are selfless, peaceable, and untroubled, and that blights such as greed, anxiety, and violence are the products of civilization.”8
Again, Rousseau didn’t coin the term, but he was the great popularizer of this myth. He wrote in 1755:
So many writers have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel, and requires requires civil institutions to make him more mild; whereas nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state, as he is placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes, and the fatal ingenuity of civilised man.9
“Rousseau reversed the poles of civilization and barbarism,” writes Arthur Herman. “His paeans of praise for primitive man, the ‘noble savage’…who lives in effortless harmony with nature and his fellow human beings, were meant as a reproach against his refined Parisian contemporaries. But they were also a reproach against the idea of history as progress.”10 For Rousseau, the advent of private property, the development of the arts, and the general advancement of human health and prosperity were actually giant steps backward.
Rousseau is considered by many to be the father of romanticism. And for a seminar on intellectual history, that is a fine way to describe him. But it is my argument that romanticism shouldn’t be understood as a school of art, literature, or philosophy but as a school of rebellion against the unnatural nature of the Enlightenment and all of the Enlightenment’s offspring: capitalism, democracy, natural rights, and science. The romantic spirit rebels against the iron cage of modernity, demanding a return to an imagined authenticity in harmony with nature. Romantic rebellion is less an argument and more of a primal yawp. It is a feeling that the world around us is dehumanizing, fake, artificial, and oppressive. “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling,” explained the French poet Charles Baudelaire (the man who coined the term “modernity,” as it happens).11
I will be returning to this point throughout the chapters that follow, but for now the important point is that this idea, this feeling, that modern man is corrupt and unnatural—or, more specifically, has been corrupted by modern society—suffuses vast swaths of our culture. It fuels a host of ideological and religious assumptions about past “golden ages” and nostalgic nostrums about how things used to be better in previous generations.
Romanticism is neither right nor left, because it is a pre-rational passion written into the human heart. It manifests itself in different ways and at different times across the ideological spectrum. It has been the fuel behind nationalism, populism, radicalism, and various forms of “reactionary” politics. It is also the wellspring of most of the great art of the last three hundred years, speaking to, and for, the parts of the soul that cannot speak through reason and science alone.
In short, it is a rebellion against the unnatural constraints of modern civilization. It shouts “I am not a number!” or “I am not a machine!” or “The man can’t keep me down!”
A common thread between various forms of left-wing romanticism, including assorted flavors of Marxism, and right-wing libertarianism and anarchism is that they make much of the fact that the state—or even civilization itself—is a form of institutionalized violence. As we will see, this is largely true. Where this insight goes off the rails is when it is assumed the past was less violent, that humans lived in peace and harmony in some golden age before the enslaving force of the state imposed itself.
“The idea that violence is rooted in human nature is difficult for many people to accept,” writes Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. “Many anthropologists, in particular, are committed, like Rousseau, to the view that violence is an invention of later civilizations, just as many people would like to believe that early societies understood how to live in balance with their local environments. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to support either view.”12 Deirdre McCloskey rightly observes that “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder—briefly, force—has characterized the sad annals of humankind since Cain and Abel.”13
According to Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, if similar proportions of people died from violence in the twentieth century as did in most prehistoric societies, the death count of the twentieth century—allegedly the “bloodiest century”—would not be 100 million but two billion, or twenty times greater.14 This is because roughly one-third of primitive humans in small-scale societies died from raids and fights alone (though this is somewhat misleading, since the death rate for males is twice that of females).15
“To minimize risk, primitive societies chose tactics like the ambush and the dawn raid,” writes Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. “Even so, their casualty rates were enormous, not least because they did not take prisoners. That policy was compatible with their usual strategic goal: to exterminate the opponent’s society. Captured warriors were killed on the spot, except in the case of the Iroquois, who took captives home to torture them before death, and certain tribes in Colombia, who liked to fatten prisoners before eating them.”16 For generation after generation, day in and day out, warfare was normal.
This is no longer a debated point among most serious scholars. People who think we once lived in glorious harmony with each other—and the environment—aren’t scientists, they’re poets and propagandists. The evidence for mankind’s blood-soaked past can be found in the archaeological record, DNA analysis, the writings of ancient commentators and historians, and the firsthand reports of those remaining societies that have so far resisted modernity.
Napoleon Chagnon, the
famous—and famously controversial—anthropologist, lived among the Yanomamö people in the Amazon for long stints starting in the 1960s and ending in the 1990s. He found that killing was a central institution of life.17 Roughly 44 percent of men over the age of twenty-five had participated in killing someone. One-third of adult male deaths were from violence and more than two-thirds of men over the age of forty had lost at least one close relative to violence.18
Chagnon found that the Yanomamö culture lived in a state of “chronic warfare.” The most common motives for raids and battles revolved around efforts to steal women, recover stolen women, or seek revenge for past abductions of women. Of course, men went to war for other reasons: blood feuds were particularly popular. But Chagnon did not find much evidence to confirm the prevailing orthodoxy of the day that warfare was “modern” and that to the extent primitive societies resorted to war it was because of scarce resources, specifically “protein scarcity.” This is a version of a very common assumption: that scarcity of resources is the chief cause of war. Obviously, this is not outlandish. But it is exaggerated. Wars are very often the by-product of pride, honor, and a desire for status.19
The barbarity of the past is hardly defined solely by the prevalence of war. Consider just two of the most obvious examples of what we today consider barbaric behavior: torture and slavery.
Torture, the deliberate infliction of pain or agony for punishment, fun, or profit, is the international pastime of premodern man (and it hardly died out suddenly in the 1700s either). In ancient societies many forms of torture were the preliminary rituals of human sacrifice. The Aztecs routinely burned victims alive, removed them from the flames, and then cut out their still-beating hearts.20 The Mayans skipped the burning for the most part and simply pinned their live victims to an altar and cut out their hearts.21
The Assyrians deserve their status in the torture hall of fame. Flaying—by which the skin is removed while the victim is still alive—was particularly popular. Staking was even more revered. The best torturers were able to do it in a way that left the staked alive and suffering for days.22 The Persians were inventive as well. One method involved simply forcing a person to stand in a room full of very fine ash for as long as he could. When he collapsed from fatigue, he would inhale the ashes and slowly suffocate.
That seems preferable, however, to “sitting in the tub.” In this practice, the victim was placed in a wooden tub with only their head sticking out. The executioner would then paint the victim’s face with milk and honey. Flies would begin to swarm around the victim’s nose and eyelids. The victim was also fed regularly and fairly soon they would virtually be swimming in their own excrement. At which stage maggots and worms would devour their body. One victim apparently survived for seventeen days. He decayed alive.23 (Scaphism, a variant of this technique, involved more or less the same thing, but with the victim tied to boats or logs.)
If you’re the sort of person who enjoys this sort of thing, the Internet is a smorgasbord of lists of torture methods, from sewing animals into living victims so they would have to eat their way out, to using fire to force rats to eat their way in. The ancient Greeks would not even consider confessions unless elicited by torture. The Romans had the same practice.24 They also perfected crucifixion, from which we get the word “excruciating.” The Chinese had lingchi, or death by a thousand cuts.
The centrality of torture as a tool of statecraft around the world cannot be exaggerated. But few societies put more time, energy, and ingenuity into the practice than medieval Europeans.25
Diehard members of the cult of the Noble Savage may want to say all of the cultures and civilizations were subsequent to man’s fall from grace. But there is simply nothing in the archaeological record to support that. “We need to recognize and accept the idea of nonpeaceful past for the entire time of human existence,” writes Stephen A. LeBlanc, co-author with Katherine E. Register of Constant Battles: Why We Fight. “Though there were certainly times and places during which peace prevailed, overall, such interludes seem to have been short-lived and infrequent….To understand much of today’s war, we must see it as a common and almost universal human behavior that has been with us as we went from ape to human.”26
Then there’s slavery.
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It is surely true that slavery was less common among primitive man than among the societies that arose after the agricultural revolution. That is not because primitive man was more moral; it is because primitive man was so much poorer. Slaves are a very large expense for nomadic bands. Guarding an enemy who doesn’t want to be part of the group is costly and dangerous. Children can be taken in as assets—a common practice in many primitive societies, notably among American Indians—and women can be forced into marriage, very often a kind of slavery. But captured warriors from another tribe are a liability. Better to kill them, often theatrically, for the amusement of the victors.
After the agricultural revolution roughly 11,000 years ago, slavery emerges almost everywhere. The most ancient texts make reference to it. The Bible takes it as a given in human affairs. The Code of Hammurabi says that freeing a slave is a crime punishable by death.27 There are records of slavery in China going back to 1800 B.C.28
For understandable reasons, America’s shameful experience with slavery informs the way we talk about the institution. That’s right and proper. But it also distorts our understanding of it. As Thomas Sowell has chronicled, Americans tend to believe—because it is what they are taught—that slavery is an inherently racist institution.29 Some even seem to believe that slavery is a uniquely American sin. America certainly must take ownership of its use of slaves and the central role racism played in it. But the conventional understanding gets the causality backward. American racism stems from slavery, not the other way around.
Historically speaking, there are two remarkable aspects of American slavery. The first is the hypocrisy. Other societies relied on slavery more than we did, and some were arguably crueler to their slaves (though American slavery was plenty cruel). But none of those societies were founded on principles of universal human rights and dignity. The Romans, Greeks, Chinese, and Egyptians were not hypocrites for keeping humans in bondage; they sincerely believed that it was natural (even Aristotle said so).30 But America was born with the Declaration of Independence and the words “All men are created equal.” That is irreconcilable with slavery, no matter the rationalization.31
Which brings us to the second remarkable thing about American slavery. Against the backdrop of the last 10,000 years, the amazing thing about American slavery is not that it existed but that we put an end to it. In the context of the last thousand years, there were many efforts to abolish slavery. Many failed and many more were only half measures, establishing various forms of de facto slavery, such as serfdom. Over the next century, slavery was outlawed across much of Europe and in most northern colonies and states in America. England abolished the slave trade in 1807. The Dutch followed in 1814.32 The Congress of Vienna, which determined the fate of post-Napoleonic Europe, condemned slavery.33 Britain would abolish slavery in all of its colonies in 1834, though the Dutch would not follow suit until 1863.34
America, meanwhile, though it banned the slave trade in 1808,35 was otherwise tardy, and the effort was bloody and painful. But we officially ended the practice in 1865, with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
The timing was not coincidental. “The fact is that slavery disappeared only as industrial capitalism emerged,” writes economist Don Boudreaux. “And it disappeared first where industrial capitalism appeared first: Great Britain. This was no coincidence. Slavery was destroyed by capitalism.”36 Adam Smith not only opposed slavery on moral grounds* but also considered it incompatible with the free market. “It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by free men comes cheaper in the end than the work performed by slaves
.”37 He also wrote that “whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.”38
The fact that we needed a war to end the institution demonstrates that not everybody saw the light all at once. Nor is it altogether accurate to say that the war was launched to end slavery, though the war would never have started absent slavery. But what is true is that a liberal democratic order—and by extension a modern economy—cannot last while tolerating slavery. An array of internal contradictions led to the Civil War. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” And, famously invoking Jesus’s admonition, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”39
Take the Declaration of Independence out of it, and American slavery was normal. MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and Alexander Wolitzky write:
Standard economic models of the labor market, regardless of whether they incorporate imperfections, assume that transactions in the labor market are “free.” For most of human history, however, the bulk of labor transactions have been “coercive,” meaning that the threat of force was essential in convincing workers to take part in the employment relationship, and thus in determining compensation. Slavery and forced labor were the most common forms of labor transactions in most ancient civilizations, including Greece, Egypt, Rome, several Islamic and Asian Empires, and most known pre-Colombian civilizations…40
In other words, the very notion that humans can sell their services or labor in a free market is a remarkably recent idea. Conversely, while almost all socialist and communist doctrine claims to oppose slavery—including so-called wage slavery in the case of the Marxists—the reality of socialism taken to its logical conclusion has often led to slavery in the form of forced labor. Command economies are just that: command economies. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, communist China, and North Korea have all widely used forced labor. China’s laogai system was set up in the 1950s and modeled on the Soviet Union’s gulag. “Laogai” means reform through labor, and the ostensible idea was to create committed Communists by forcing them to be indoctrinated to communism with the aid of backbreaking labor. The system became a profit center for party leaders and exists to this day, though the government has ditched the name “laogai” in favor of jianyu, or “prison.” But the practice endures. In the 2000s, it was revealed that administrators continued to profit from prisoners even after they worked them to death, by selling the organs of slaves.41