Ask a political science professor why governments exist and you’re likely to hear a restatement of Enlightenment Era theories of the social contract. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and others reasoned that the first governments arose from a more or less explicit agreement between the sovereign and the governed. Each philosopher interpreted the terms of mankind’s original governing agreement slightly differently, but the aim of their work was not to explore history. Their interpretation of government’s origins were a weapon in the fight to limit royal power in an age of absolutism.
Historians describe the origins of government in different terms, as an institution that evolved to solve collective action problems created by the rise of settled agriculture. We did not always have governments, just as humans did not always have saddles, books or smart phones. An evolutionary adaptation successful one environment may not be retained in the next.
There is evidence that our ancestors were engaged in small-scale agriculture for thousands of years before the first civilizations emerged. Cultivating seeds in meadows then returning to harvest the grain appears to have been a common practice of our nomadic forbears. In time they discovered significant differences in yields on certain patches of land. These particularly fertile lands became valuable enough to protect and rich enough to support people in numbers too large to be organized in extended family groups.
Left untended, these more productive fields would not develop their potential. Left unprotected, they could be easily destroyed by rival humans, or by animals. To realize the power of organized agriculture our ancestors needed to abandon a nomadic lifestyle and settle in large groups. Living together in large numbers required more sophisticated social organizations, systems that would allow them to cooperate on a scale beyond their clans.
Settling on a patch of land in numbers in the hundreds or even thousands created collective action problems humans had never previously encountered. Research on remaining groups of pre-civilized humans suggests that our nomadic ancestors lived by consensus rather than by authority. Collective action problems among nomads were solved by direct communication, with some deference granted to elders or accomplished members. They had no need for mass communication, no need to coordinate activities with people they had never met and did not implicitly trust. Anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, has theorized a cognitive limit to the size of our stable relationships at about 150. This has come to be called Dunbar’s number, and it is also the rough average size of hunter-gather bands (148). Governments evolved to solve the problem of collective action among groups larger than Dunbar’s number.
Those earliest collective action problems had two dimensions, organization and communication. What should each of us do to accomplish our common objectives, and how we should we communicate these plans? Earlier, smaller bands of humans could solve collective action problems in a discussion around a fire. Primitive Northern European civilizations were still trying to leverage these simple techniques as late as the Dark Ages, gathering in “moots” to retain some collective decision-making. Successful early civilizations developed hierarchies, placing decision-making authority in relatively few hands. It’s no accident that the invention of written language coincides with the emergence of the first civilizations. Writing helped address the problem of communication among groups larger than Dunbar’s number, though that communication was limited to elites. Leveraging the power of an agricultural society meant replacing the consensus model of our nomadic ancestors with hierarchical structures only possible with a government.
We are not ants. We are not evolved for mass collective action or mass cooperation, and have always chafed under the demands of civilization and government. Many of history’s most successful governments adapted means to spread power very broadly, either in the manner of the Roman Republics, or through the pyramid style of feudal societies. But we never fully shed our lingering discomfort with the sovereignty lost from settled life.
A few humans have evolved in more or less continuous civilizations for perhaps as much as 8000 years. However, it was not until roughly 1500 years ago that even a majority of humans were civilized. Agriculture has been a part of our existence for less than 1% of our evolutionary history. Governments have been a feature of lives for an even smaller portion of our development.
Evidence of our ancestors’ frustrations with civilized life survive in some of our earliest literature. The Epic of Gilgamesh celebrates an uncivilized hero, Enkidu, sent by the gods to relieve the oppression of a king. The Old Testament describes the origin of kingship as a punishment on a sinful people who failed the challenge of collective action and abdicated their God-given authority. Joining together in a well-formed, intelligently organized government provides human societies with spectacular power, but the challenges of communicating and channeling public will in government action have always rendered these structures unstable. Government is an unstoppably successful innovation that is also an entirely unnatural human experience.
We might seek at different times to escape the reach of government, but its greatest, most irreplaceable power extends to the further corners of the world. The most vital collective action problem governments solve is organizing defense and warfare. In an environment in which power and wealth rise from control of land, war is the skill that trumps all others. Throughout our history, governments could successfully neglect many if not most of their potential so long as they retained their skill for violence. Government was forged in war, and war remains its most irreplaceable function. When land ceases to be the primary form of wealth, war loses much of its utility.
The relevance of war to human success was shaken by the development of capitalism and industrialization, creating a rival to land as a source of wealth and power. Monarchies fell like dominoes as their relative power in land was dwarfed by those who embraced the power of machines. With absolutism constrained by rule of law, a true private sector began to emerge around commerce. Commercial power grew into a rival to government power, providing a means of organization that in many ways (as demonstrated by the Soviet experiment) often solved collective action problems better than governments.
Governments continued to wage wars, but those wars steadily ceased to yield either power or prosperity. Thanks to the declining relative value of land as a source of wealth, capturing territory was like grasping water with a fist. If there was a benefit to the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries it was the ways those wars weakened and often destroyed archaic governments.
Is government still necessary? Yes, but we are living through the most exciting and perhaps frightening challenge to the relevance of government since we first settled into villages.
Governments evolved to address collective action problems caused by our difficulty in mass communication and the challenge of mass decision-making. A thriving private sector, driven (today) by commerce, offers a primitive model for mass organization with potential to challenge hierarchical governments. The Internet now opens new possibilities for mass communication.
A communication technology that, for the first time, allows a single human being to communicate in real time across the entire span of humanity knocks down a crucial pillar of government. This blog post is available to roughly 3 billion people. Everyone with access to a cell phone is now a broadcaster. Yet Dunbar’s number still frustrates our efforts to forge broader bonds.
A strange thing is happening as the technical boundaries to mass organization fall. Boundaries in our biology remain. I may be able to broadcast to 3 billion people, but we can each only hear and process a few voices. Through Facebook, this blog, Twitter, LinkedIn and other communication and organization platforms I’ve forged links to thousands of people, but I still interact with relatively few. Something strange is evolving in this new environment. We are using hyper-modern communication technologies to recreate our comfy pre-civilized tribes, but this time those tribes stretch across vast geographies and even borders. Our reach has extended, but our ability to forge mass, peer to peer collaboration beyond Dunbar’s number remains constrained.
The Arab Spring demonstrated the promise and persistent limits of our use of technology to organize ourselves. Crowd-sourced revolutions were successful in toppling autocratic regimes, but they have almost universally failed to replace them. So far, the advent of powerful new capabilities for resolving collective action problems has brought more chaos than progress. We have weakened not just government, but every form of hierarchical social power, without forging any replacement.
It seems likely for the near term that the most prosperous human societies will be the ones capable of retaining strong central governments rather than the ones that shed them. However, challengers to this assumption may already be nascent. We take for granted the inevitable necessity of formal government, but across much of Africa, Central Asia and Latin America, governments are notional institutions, their authority largely constrained to a capital and one or two cities. They consist of a security service protecting a class of kleptocrats and do nothing for the public interest. Out of some of these chaotic places new forms of social organization are emerging, and out of these new arrangements is coming a strange new economics. There is a chance that a post-governmental path to stability is being blazed in Lagos and Dhaka and Karachi, where a dynamic order built on commerce and cheap communications technology is emerging in the absence of government planning or services.
Today these places are a mad warren of chaos and insecurity, yet a promising future might be emerging from this tangle. If anyone is going to leverage our cheap new communications tools to break the limits of Dunbar’s number, it will most likely occur in these ungoverned corners. They may be the unlikely birthplace of a new, happier human order.
In 17th century Europe, England looked like a basket case. While France’s Louis XIV demonstrated the glory of absolute monarchy and the Spanish crown conquered the globe, England murdered its king, placed power in the hands of a parliament, then tottered from crisis to crisis with no stability in sight. A few decades later, French absolutism would die at the guillotine. Spain would smother and stagnate under religious rule. Meanwhile an increasingly decentralized Britain became the world’s greatest empire. Great transformations don’t arrive with blueprints.
Government remains necessary not because it is irreplaceable, but because we haven’t replaced it. Like civilization itself, it has existed for a brief slice of our evolution. Like organized religion, forced labor, and monarchy, it will be essential for human survival until it isn’t.
This post is part of a series exploring what’s next after liberal democracy and what we should do to prepare. Much of this material was covered in The Politics of Crazy, though from the perspective of a more optimistic era. The work fits better as a whole, but reading through a 6000+ word piece on a computer seems impractical. When these are complete I’ll gather them into a series of links on a single page.