Inclusive fitness, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism are default modes of sociability. All human beings gravitate toward the favoring of kin and friends with whom they have exchanged favors unless strongly incentivized to do otherwise.19
Without “strong countervailing incentives,” Fukuyama argues, “the natural human propensity to favor family and friends—something I refer to as patrimonialism—constantly reasserts itself.”
He adds that “organized groups—most often the rich and powerful—entrench themselves over time and begin demanding privileges from the state. Particularly when a prolonged period of peace and stability gives way to financial and/or military crisis, these entrenched patrimonial groups extend their sway, or else prevent the state from responding adequately.”20 The details vary, but the themes remain constant. Elites succumb to the temptations of human nature, and, in their corruption, the civilization loses the integrity that made greatness possible in the first place.
This observation, offered in the language of social science, can be found in the poetry of Shakespeare (particularly the Roman plays), countless cautionary tales from the Bible, and nearly every history of every fallen empire. Mancur Olson writes:
Many have been puzzled by the mysterious decline or collapse of great empires or civilizations and by the remarkable rise to wealth, power, or cultural achievement of previously peripheral or obscure peoples. The collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and its defeat by scattered tribes that would otherwise have been of no account is only one of many puzzling examples. On repeated occasions the imposing empires of China have decayed to the point where they could fall prey to far less numerous or sophisticated peoples like the Mongols or to uprisings by poor peasants in remote provinces. The Middle East provides several examples of such collapsed empires, and so do the Indian civilizations of MesoAmerica; even before the Aztec empire was destroyed by a small contingent of Spaniards there had been a succession of empires or cultures, each of which seems to have been supplanted by a previously obscure tribe, its grand pyramids or cities abandoned to the wilderness. The pattern was not greatly different in the Andes, or at Angkor Wat, or in still other places.21
This pattern, he notes, was well known when Herodotus put pen to papyrus. “The cities that were formerly great, have most of them become insignificant; and such as are at present powerful, were weak in olden time. I shall therefore discourse equally on both, convinced that human happiness never continues long in one stay.”22
Historians and political scientists focus on elites for wholly understandable reasons: By definition, that’s where the power is. If one robs banks because that is where the money is, one who studies power studies those who wield it. (Also, elites tend to leave written records of their doings, which makes it possible to study them. Even “social histories” of marginal groups depend heavily on the evidence left behind by their masters, employers, and rulers.)
But this emphasis can distort our understanding of things. If one understands the history of decaying civilizations as purely the history of corrupted elites, it’s only natural to believe that the problem lies with elites themselves. This leads to a lot of populist fantasies that “people-powered movements” are immune to the sins and temptations that define the rich and powerful. But elites are humans, and so it follows that the problems of elites are problems with humans themselves. Civilizations can also die when the masses are corrupted too.
Today, there’s a low-simmering Jacobin fever aimed at the so-called one percent. This bland description of economic elites is logically ludicrous, given that it is a fact of math that there will always be a top one percent. A Bernie Sanders of a Stalinist bent could, in theory, liquidate the ranks of the top one percent and, in that very act, create an entirely new top one percent. Remove the top floor of a building and the next floor down becomes the top floor. The only way to ensure there is no top is to tear down the whole structure to the foundation.
One could replace the top economic echelon with a random sampling from the broader cadres of the bottom hundredth percentile. Is there any compelling testimony, other than that of campus Marxists and folk song lyricists, that would convince a reasonable person that the same problems that bedevil the current one percent would not, in short order, infect the new one percent? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Neighborhood grocers give jobs to sons and nephews with just as much certitude about the rightness of what they are doing as hedge fund managers and New York real estate moguls. In fact, they probably feel more justified, as mom-and-pop shops do not have teams of lawyers and compliance officers charged with the task of fending off the corruptions of nepotism. Employing your children to work for the family concern—a farm, a store, whatever—is seen as wholly natural, because it is.
Indeed, nepotism is a good illustration of the eternal struggle between civilization and human nature. The word itself is instructive. It’s derived from the Italian nepotismo, drawn from the Latin nepos for “grandchild” and the root of “nephew.”23
The Catholic Church’s struggle with nepotism lasted centuries. As best they could, priests were expected to follow the biblical admonition not to become “friends with this world” so that they could better serve it. Jesus led a chaste life and never married. Paul instructed followers to be celibate if at all possible.24 And Christians, never mind leaders of the Church, were instructed to be as Christlike as possible. Nonetheless, there was no enforced, uniform rule on priestly celibacy in the Western Church for a thousand years25 (and male priests can marry in the Eastern rite churches, but only before becoming priests). As humans are wont to do, priests often put their own desires, or the needs of their families, ahead of the Church. Various councils advised priests to be celibate and not have children as a measure to combat the image of priestly self-indulgence and corruption, but they didn’t take hold for the most part.
Over time, the clergy became a parallel aristocracy. Priests left property to their children and built coalitions and dynasties within the Church. In response, Pope Benedict VIII banned the children of priests from inheriting property in the early eleventh century.26 It wasn’t until the Second Lateran Council in 1139 when the Church fully barred priests from marriage.27
While such rules proved relatively effective for the rank and file of the priesthood, the age-old story of the elites at the top exempting themselves from the rules they applied to others reasserted itself. Cardinals gave in to their carnal desires. Bishops built up their wealth and land holdings. And even the popes themselves tended toward creating their own “papal dynasties.” This is how the term “nepotism,” or “nephew-ism,” was born. So-called cardinal-nephews were often, in fact, actual nephews, and sometimes “nephew” was a euphemism for the cardinal’s own offspring. One of the most important power centers of the Church was the curial office of the superintendent of the ecclesiastical state. From 1566 until 1692—126 years!—that office was held by a cardinal-nephew.
The Borgia pope Callixtus III installed two of his nephews as cardinals. One of them, Rodrigo, eventually became pope himself, as Alexander VI. He, in turn, made his mistress’s brother a cardinal, who later became Pope Paul III. He went on to make two of his nephews cardinals.28 This practice continued until 1692, when Pope Innocent XII issued a papal bull, Romanum decet Pontificem, limiting the pope’s ability to bestow estates or privileges on any relatives.29
More than any other major institution of Western civilization, the Catholic Church was dedicated to rejecting the natural temptations of human nature. Or, if you prefer, it was—and is—dedicated to channeling human nature in productive and virtuous directions. When the Church fell short of these principles, it opened itself up to charges of the purest form of hypocrisy. Martin Luther’s disgust with nepotism was one of his four central indictments of the Catholic Church. But what exactly was the heart of Luther’s complaint? That the Church had become too worldly, a e
uphemism for the broader understanding of corruption.
Hypocrisy is often a terrible failing but it is more often a misunderstood one. Hypocrisy is the act of violating an ideal or principle you admonish others to follow. Too many people believe that hypocrisy is an indictment of the ideal as much as it is the hypocrite. This is folly. A world without hypocrisy is a world without ideals. A glutton may be a hypocrite by counseling others not to be gluttonous, but that doesn’t mean the advice is wrong. Hence La Rochefoucauld’s famous line that “hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” And what is vice? Well, definitions vary. But a generic one might be: inappropriately giving in to our natural instincts and desires—the opposite of virtue.
The corruption that beset the Church can best be understood as nature reasserting itself—in this case, human nature. The Church responded by implementing new rules that made it more difficult for officials of the Church to give in to the whispered temptations emanating from their own genes. That is what civilizing institutions do, and the world would be worse off if, in a desire to avoid the charge of hypocrisy, they lifted all restraints on natural behavior.
Every human institution has faced similar trials. Again, the first tool of political power is not money or force or law; it is family. Every primitive society was governed first and foremost through an intricate web of family alliances. Social scientists call this “familism.” Every monarchy and empire was similarly held in place by a network of relations by blood and marriage. Indeed, marriage—particularly polygamous marriage—was a tool of statecraft on every populated continent for millennia. A king who took many wives was rewarded with many children he could in turn marry off to cement alliances. The first Ch’in emperor is said to have had over 3,000 wives and concubines.30
This practice had enormous political advantages for the emperor, but it came with equally massive administrative problems. The Chinese response was to create a legendarily merit-based civil bureaucracy. Entrance exams were seen as an antidote to nepotistic patronage. And compared to what came before, the Chinese bureaucracy was an impressive advance. But, again, you can chase nature out with a pitchfork—or, in this case, a civil service test—but nature invariably returns. The bureaucrats used their positions of power much the same way priests in the Catholic Church did. They built up personal dynasties—coalitions of common interest—rewarded their friends and family, and enriched themselves at the public’s expense.31
One famous reform to keep the bureaucrats on the straight and narrow was to take the principle of priestly celibacy one step further: castration. Many empires used eunuchs as trusted aides and servants on the assumption that a man with no children would not be tempted to enrich his own family (and a man without fully functioning male equipment would not be seduced by other temptations). The practice certainly had some merit, hence its ubiquity and endurance across many civilizations and centuries. But, again, you can separate a man from his genitals, yet you cannot separate him from his nature. Even eunuchs have relatives. Indeed, some families would deliberately geld one of their sons solely for the purpose of having one of their own in a position of power. (In Europe, many second or third sons were similarly encouraged to become figurative eunuchs in service to the Church for similar reasons.) A Chinese saying captures the problem well: “When a man becomes an official, his wife, children, dogs, cats, and even chickens fly up to heaven.”32
The Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire offer a similar example of the difficulty in banishing human nature. Sultan Murad I created the Janissaries, or “new soldiers,” in 1383.33 They served as a kind of Praetorian Guard, loyal only to the emperor. In theory, this loyalty was derived from the fact that the Janissaries had no other family to speak of. The Janissaries were Christian children stolen from their families, usually in the Balkans, at a young age and transported to the capital and other major cities. Scouts would scour the provinces for the most promising Christian youth—Muslims couldn’t be slaves—and would tear them from their families. The children were then raised in Turkish families, constantly supervised by eunuchs, and groomed to have no allegiances other than to their master, the sultan. This idea should be familiar to anyone who read Plato’s Republic, where the guardians are plucked from their natural parents to avoid nepotism in all its forms. (Socrates even suggests that the guardians should not be informed that they have human parents.)34
The Janissaries were slaves, but they were richly rewarded ones, thanks to the remarkably merit-based system they were conscripted into. Trained not only for war but for administration, they studied numerous languages, mathematics, and, of course, the Koran. Janissaries literally ran the Ottoman Empire as generals, ministers, provincial governors, and bureaucrats. Some, such as Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, even rose to the rank of grand vizier; Sokollu served three different sultans and was, effectively, the prime minister of the Ottoman Empire. Because the civil service was only open to foreigners, the Ottoman Empire was a true historical oddity: a slave empire ruled by the slaves.35
But it didn’t last. Once again, this brilliant system for contradicting or at least compensating for human nature was undone by human nature. Over time, as with all groups where a strong collective identity is formed, coalitional self-interest is soon to follow. The key ingredients to this transformation everywhere in human history seem to be power and time. The longer a cohesive group collectively has the former, it is only a matter of the latter before the group takes advantage of it.
The Janissaries eventually became a predatory or parasitic class, in effect holding the state hostage to their interests. In 1826, Mahmud II decided it was time to finally amputate the once healthy but now corrupted and putrefied limb from the body politic. The Janissaries rebelled, and the uprising was crushed. Thousands of Janissaries died in the ensuing massacre, in what has been called “the Auspicious Incident.”36
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The lesson of the Chinese eunuchs, Ottoman Janissaries, and countless other groups is the same.37 Given time and incentives, any group of humans will start to see themselves as a cohesive group, a caste or aristocratic class. Just as any random group of dogs—strays and purebreds alike—will, if put together, quickly form a pack with a collective identity, humans will do the same thing given time and the right inducements. The children in Lord of the Flies, contestants on Survivor, college students in the Stanford prison experiments, members of the Seattle Seahawks, police, firemen, marines, Copts, Sunnis, teachers’ unions, street gangs, college professors—the list is as endless as the subdivision of labor and identity in any society. This natural human tendency is neither bad nor good. It’s simply a fact. The capacity to trick our coalitional and tribal instincts to self-organize around identities other than race and kin can be the source of both wonderful things and horrible ones. Unity is a neutral value. Unity’s moral status is derived entirely from what the group does. Whatever label you ascribe to the group—class, faction, sect, etc.—the only time self-interested groups or coalitions become a real threat to the larger society is when they claim the power of the state for their own agenda.
As I will discuss at length shortly, America’s Founders and other Enlightenment intellectuals understood this implicitly. The remedies for this problem are myriad, but two are worth mentioning here: virtue and pluralism. We have already discussed virtue. Inculcating a profound commitment to certain higher principles is a bulwark against corruption.
The second notion, pluralism, is less obvious but no less important.
In political science and institutional economics, pluralism implies the idea that power should be distributed widely in a society. Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass C. North and his coauthors argue in Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History that nearly all of the things we associate with healthy, modern societies are directly attributable to the multiplication of institutions. When you only have a handful of “stakeholders” in
a society—usually the priests, the landholding aristocrats, the military, maybe some guilds and bureaucrats, and, of course, the monarch—power is defined by the personal relationships between a tiny handful of elites. They in effect form a ruling coalition against the masses and they design the system for their own benefit. But, at some point, if you have enough different institutions, relationships between elites become “impersonal” for the simple reason that there are too many elites, and too many power centers, to conduct politics through personal relationships. In ideal cases, society hits a tipping point, and elites agree to general rules that bind everyone, including the elites themselves. (They also recognize that the most successful institutions will be open institutions that attract talent from as broad a base as feasible.) Ultimately, this gives birth to the rule of law, which holds that winners are bound by the same rules as losers, and that no one can wield arbitrary power.
The role played by institutions is older and larger than mere party politics, but looking at how party politics operate in developed democratic societies helps illustrate the point. As we’ve seen countless times over the last century, any country can hold an election. In many parts of the world, the running joke about elections was “One man, one vote, one time.” In other words, once a “democratic” candidate got into power, he no longer had any use for democracy. The real test is when there’s a transfer of power from one party to another. In healthy democratic countries, the party—or parties—out of power still have rights and prerogatives and the ability to make life difficult for the party in power. The parties have bought into a system—i.e., the Constitution—that takes all sorts of options off the table, from using violence against your opponents, to holding on to power after your defined term, to disrespecting the rights of the opposition and the people generally.
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy Page 7