Christian
Michel
End Of The
Warriors
Priests, warriors, producers
Primitive societies have no experience of the state.[1] They have no
use for it. This absence does not mean, as naïve propagandists for democracy
would have it, that these societies live under the thumb of a despot, an all-powerful
chief who could well proclaim, following the French king Louis XIV, “The state
is me”. From
the Inuits of the far North to the Aborigines of Australia, primitive societies
generally do not appoint a chief, according to anthropologists. When they do,
the chief reigns but does not govern. He only symbolizes the group’s unity and
its independence from other communities. The chief does not even exercise power
in hunting and war. A primitive society’s army is not made up of orders and
counter orders; it is a group of irregulars. Insubordination is characteristic
of such societies. If the chief wants to play chief, he is ostracized. If he
persists, he is killed.[2]
Primitives are fiercely attached to the idea of political and economic
equality, according to anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who has devoted a great
deal of his work to this subject. Every individual has special qualities – one
is a skilled hunter, another a fearsome fighter – but no type of prowess, even
if it bestows prestige, can ever confer power. Primitive society rejects the
rift between dominant and dominated, governing and governed, master and
subject. The state is the instrument of this fracture. It is the locus of power
par excellence. All societies structured by the state find themselves
irreparably and deeply divided between those who control its apparatus and
those who are its subjects. Primitives want nothing to do with such division.[3]
How then did the state come about? How did we move from the political
equality of primitive societies to relationships characterized by class and
dominance? The best known theory attributes the state’s origins to economic
factors, a theory that was evidently popularised by Marxists.[4] The development of agriculture required
deforestation, irrigation and the construction of lofts to store the harvest.
In order to protect their investments from pillage, agricultural societies used
part of their surplus production to maintain a corps of professional warriors.
Such an approach never fails to be dangerous: those guarding against external
aggression eventually came to guard an imprisoned, servile population.
Another theory views politics, rather than economics, as the founder of
the state.[5] Within certain societies, a group of priests
developed what would be called an “ideology” in modern language. This ideology
no longer identified the group solely as a descendant of a mythic ancestor or
in terms of totemic membership. Such a group could then subjugate others, not
for the purpose of reducing them to slavery, but to assimilate them – given
that filiation was no longer a criterion for belonging to the group.[6] This acquisition-based, rather than
endogenous, growth conferred a decisive numerical advantage both in war and the
construction of infrastructure. The same ideology served not only to determine
the society’s “foreign policy,” but also to justify the power of its creators –
the priests and warriors – in their dominant caste positions.
The three orders
Whatever their relevance, these theories focus on three categories of
players:
§
Priests, vested with spiritual duties, whether they
are magicians, shamans or prophets.
§
Warriors
§
Producers of wealth, i.e. all those who do not belong
to the two previous classes and who carry out the work required by society.
Since George Dumézil published his works, we now know that this
classification existed in all Indo-European societies. [7] From Ossetians in the Caucasus to Vikings,
from Greeks and Romans to Irish Celts and the many societies in India, Iran and
the Slavic lands, all these societies were based on this tripartite model:
priests, warriors and producers. Dumézil explains that this model does not
claim to describe each society’s reality, but the way in which the society
represents its own reality through myths, legends and epics. This fact only
strengthens the central paradox: Why would producers place themselves at the
bottom of the social ladder when representing their world? After all, they are
far greater in number than the other orders, especially if women are counted.
Women rarely serve as priests and almost never as warriors. And they symbolize
fertility, which by definition characterizes producers. In terms of what is
useful for society, the occupations of farmer, carpenter, sailor or banker are
essential. Shouldn’t those who practice these occupations be honoured in
literature and art? We know that not to be the case. Heroes are usually
warriors and sometimes saints and artists. Villains are in business. What could
explain such disrepute?
Free-market proponents, even less so than others, do not have the
answer. They believe that all human behaviour is motivated by self-interest.
While they are not wrong in principle, they have the tendency to measure
self-interest only in terms of monetary profit and loss. Very few people,
however, make their decisions solely on the basis of this one criterion.[8] Many other considerations are at play. The
following flowery lines, which come from a book published in the United States
in 1995, Ethics and Public Service, effectively illustrate the
bankruptcy of the Homo oeconomicus model when it attempts to explain
human behaviour:
“Man's feet may wallow in the
bog of self-interest, but his eyes and ears are strangely attuned to the call
of the mountaintop. There is a distinction between “I want this because it is
in my self-interest" and "I want this because it is right."
Man's self-respect is in large part determined by his capacity to make himself
and others believe that self is an inadequate referent for decisional morality.
This capacity of man to transcend, to sublimate and to transform narrowly
vested compulsions is at the heart of all civilized morality”.[9]
The author contrasts taking action “because it’s the right thing to do”
with acting out of self-interest. It is commonly agreed that personal gain
motivates producers, merchants and capitalists, while doing what is right is the
raison d’être of public service. And the heart of public service is the army,
the warrior class.
Death and the warrior
At the core of the power relationship is the debt relationship.
Producers get paid. They get paid, in money, the
full cost of their work; if that were not the case, they would find other work.
That is the basic premise of free-market economic theory. Once service is
rendered and payment made, the legal relationship ends and no one has the right
to demand anything from the other party. But how do we pay the warrior? Here is
a man willing to sacrifice his own life to save yours, save the lives of your
loved ones and protect your property from plunder and destruction. Should you
pay for his services in dollars or ounces of gold? How can one ever completely
repay him for such sacrifice? Homo oeconomicus goes bust. The debt never ends. What we owe the warrior
can only be expressed in the intangible currency of prestige and power.
Their relationship to death, therefore, seals the respective social
status of the warrior and producer. The producer walks on the riverbank of
life, on the side of nature and biology. Like all creatures, he is driven by
“the force through which things persevere in their being”, as Spinoza said.[10] The warrior, however, strides on the other
side, that of culture. He has chosen the riverbank of death. Biology programs us to beget children and live old enough to see them
reproduce in turn. But culture can replace this instruction by convincing some
of us that it is glorious to be killed in battle at the peak of youth.[11] Thus opens the fracture separating the
warrior from the rest of society. The warrior will always scorn the producer,
the bourgeois, because the bourgeois fears death.[12]
The producer and the bourgeois are on the side of biology, which the
warrior has apparently left behind. But isn’t it precisely biology that
dictates certain altruistic behaviours and sacrifices? Sociobiologists believe
so; they argue that giving up one’s life is sometimes the only way to ensure
the survival of one’s descendents and the perpetuation of one’s genetic
heritage.[13] This theory, however, only applies to
warriors from clans and from tribes related by blood. It cannot explain the accepted deaths of those defending the diverse
populations of historical empires and modern states.
Nor does it seem credible to reduce soldiering to an expression of the
aggressiveness that males apparently carry in their genes. War is not a series
of fistfights. When projectiles (throwing sticks, blowguns, bows and arrows)
made their appearance very early in prehistoric times, the hasty rage that made
the hand tremble became a handicap. Those who felt such rage in combat did not
live long. Modern warfare, which mobilizes all the resources of advanced
technology, is even more dependent on cool heads and methodical and deliberate
action. It is difficult to imagine an activity that is more cultural and
socialized than war.
We all die, of course, both producers and warriors, but we do not die
the same death.[14]
Peasants, the bourgeoisie, women, you and I all die from something; we
die from old age, from accidents, from illness. But the
warrior dies for something; he dies for his king, for the
fatherland, for the revolution. Bourgeois death is a simple link in the
chain of events caused by biology and the whims of nature. It is history.
It is history’s shapeless, monochromatic pattern. The warrior’s death, however,
makes history. It offers history the adventurous and unexpected. Francis
Fukuyama could thus write that the disappearance of warlike empires would bring
about the end of history.[15] The military function, which defies nature,
reflects the human conscience’s deliberate stand against biological evolution –
which, in the final analysis, is the gist of history. For that reason, the
death of warriors always takes on a grandiose and tragic dimension.
The warrior’s curse
From the beginning of history, the warrior class had special status in
society. Plato demanded it, and chivalry exemplified it.[16]
The isolation of the warrior class from
the rest of society was so strict that not only was access restricted – it was
hereditary in most cases – but the warriors themselves could not assume any
other role. Such a prohibition should surprise us. It is consistent that
a privileged caste, living entirely off levies on the country’s economic
activity, would restrict membership. But why should they have been forbidden
from lowering themselves by choosing another occupation if they had been insane
enough to do so? Graduates of prestigious universities generally do not aspire
to be refuse collectors and doctors typically have no desire to become nurses,
but no law forbids them. In fact, if more college graduates were to work at
jobs below their skill level, competition at the top would be less intense.
Historians offer many reasons for this segregation of the warrior class.
One such reason, which may seem obvious, appears not to have been sufficiently
publicized: The moral values of warriors differ from those of producers.
Physical courage brings honour to the warrior, but should be completely useless
to a producer in a well-ordered society. The
audacity to kill without remorse is required of the warrior, but obviously
forbidden to the producer. Warriors are loyalists; producers are loyal.
Soldiers are praised for using the types of ruses and traps for which
capitalists are so reproached. All the great generals have won their laurels
and gained respect and admiration for their ability to kill, abuse and deceive.[17]
Of course, they always claim a good cause, which results in the
warrior’s curse. To be good, he must be bad. To accomplish his mission of
defending society, he must resort to all the methods society condemns. We can
therefore contrast, item by item, the morality of warriors with the morality of
producers. Producers act out of self-interest; there are no higher values for
them than biology and nature (their life and the lives of their offspring).
However, the time-tested method to achieve these values is cooperation with
others, and cooperation’s golden rule is, “Do unto others as you would have
others do unto you”. [18]
Warriors, however, do not defend their own interests (what type of
self-interest could possibly motivate a person who has accepted death?). They
expect no cooperation from others, “others” being whoever happens to be the
enemy of the day. They do not gain what they want through negotiation and
cooperation, but through conquest. And they especially do not want the enemy to
do to them what they are doing to the enemy.
This complete reversal of values within a society would be impossible
without the construct, however cultural and artificial it may be, that we call
the State. It is solely the raison d’État that makes existence possible
according to the warrior’s moral code.[19] If this reverse morality were to spread
beyond their closed caste, if murder, trickery and deception were to become the
values of producers, who represent the vast majority of society, the very
process of civilization would fail. Historically, the isolation of such
unnatural behaviours was thus necessary to the community as a whole. Limiting
them to a specific group, a closed caste like the hereditary nobility, was in
the interest of the producers themselves. So the caste system did not function
solely by restricting access to the ranks of the military aristocracy, but also
by prohibiting these same nobles from doing productive work – literally making
work ig-noble. [20] Their “criminal” morality ran too great a
risk of corrupting the entire social fabric.
But the reverse is also true. The warrior’s existence is so contrary to
biology that he is always at risk of life-affirming values taking the upper
hand. Nothing in our genes compels us to leave our home and family and go off
to kill other members of our species.[21] On the contrary, our genetic programming
instructs us to flee danger. The soldier therefore must be subjected to
constant discipline and kept apart from the rest of society to switch off these
biological instructions. Let’s not forget that throughout history, the
soldier’s daily lot was not war, with its rushes of adrenaline, but preparation
for war. As a result, the endlessly repeated military exercises, the
routine manoeuvres, the marches in quick time, the shared meals, the chants,
the drills, the hard discipline of the barracks were nothing other than
interminable training – similar to what an animal must be subjected to when
made to act in unnatural ways.
Isn’t it the same for the other dominant caste, the priests? In a
completely different setting, but for the same reasons, priests accept
discipline that restrains, if not breaks, their natural impulses. With its
rules and rituals, the convent is not that different from the barracks. Their
common stated goal is to distance themselves from the world’s temptations. And
what is more corrupting than bourgeois life – sex, family, comfort, money…? Any
abbot is well aware of it, and any conqueror knows that the “delights of Capua”
represent the greatest danger on the path to his goals.
The intellectuals
A society in which warriors attempt to maintain the power of their caste
and their ability to monopolize wealth must limit the influence of producers
and women. That is the task traditionally given to intellectuals, formerly the
clergy and today the masses of teachers, scientists, artists and journalists
that receive salaries from the State.[22] With the influence conferred on them by a
microphone or university chair, they make every effort to discredit the
bourgeois values of productive cooperation and glorify predation. They believe
that living off taxes is more honest then being paid by satisfied customers; if
the cause is just, all means must be made available to ensure its victory.
As long as the entire society is measured against these perverse values,
the warrior takes pride of place. He does “what is right” while others drag
their feet “in the mud of self-interest”. Such acknowledged moral superiority
leads to the exploitation of discredited producers while saving the dominant
class from constant and costly recourse to violence. If society’s values should
change and society lets itself be guided by the values of production, the
warrior will lose the image of saintliness, of one who has “renounced
self-interest”. How could he then justify continuing to exploit producers?
The warriors’ usurped heritage
This might be all very interesting – at least, the author hopes it is –
but how does it concern us? The greatest source of our concern should be that modern
governments and their bureaucracy base their moral superiority on the prestigious heritage of the military class.[23]
Gradually, in the 1930s, with the New Deal in the United States, the
Beveridge plan in Great Britain and the rise of social democracies throughout
Europe, governments succeeded in portraying
their image as that of protector. According to their slogans, they would
save us from the scourges of unemployment and social inequality, the rapacity
of multinational corporations and mafias, and the encroachment of foreign
cultures. But isn’t protection the soldier’s duty par excellence? Now that the
threat of military invasion has disappeared in the West, the soldier has
permanently yielded the function of Great Protector to the bureaucracy. It is
fascinating to observe how State employees cloak themselves in the
quasi-religious mantle of prestige and respect that society has always
conferred on its soldiers.
What official ceremony would do without a military parade, a band
leading the way? The inauguration of heads of State, the unveiling of
monuments, the celebration of national holidays and visits by foreign
dignitaries all take place in front of an honour guard. Flags and national
anthems irresistibly evoke the military history of the country.[24]
Every State institution, crowned with the glory of its heroes, hijacks the debt
owed by society for the blood shed by its soldiers. As repayment, government
employees demand the right to act according to inverted military values. They
show no reluctance to use armed violence, breaking their public commitments
(electoral or other), stealing money through taxes, spying, cheating, censoring
– aggressions directed not at a foreign enemy but their fellow citizens.
Producers are part of a web of cooperation; their peers forcefully call
them to order as soon as they stray. But government employees do what producers
dare not do, giving themselves permission in the name of cultural values:
“public service”, the state, “social justice”, etc. After all, the bureaucrat
reasons, I’m not acting out of self-interest (right?); the means are just
because I’m serving a just cause. How can petty considerations like individual
rights and respect for privacy and property be raised against this state that I
represent and for which people have faced death?
Government has grown to manage all aspects of our existence. As a
result, humanity faces the danger of seeing the inverse morality of the
military infect society as a whole. It was precisely this danger that the caste
division, present throughout history, was designed to prevent. Our government
officials forget that the warrior was being consistent in his refusal of
life-affirming values. To him, the test of devotion to “public service” was the
supreme sacrifice. His heroic death, he thought, would atone for his violations
of common morality. While claiming their right to be predators, state
bureaucrats and pen pushers take no risks – not even the risk of losing their
cushy jobs. They are valets dressed up in the
clothes of their masters.
A society in which a corps of soldiers holds the legal monopoly on
violence, and is financially maintained by the masses of producers, is the
social organization that we call “civilization”, or “political society”. The
two words derive from the same root – the concept of “citizen”: civis in
Latin and polites in Greek. Societies that reject politics and the
division it creates between dominant and dominated, in which each man is a
warrior and no man a chief, are called “savage” and primitive”.[25] We have erected a deplorable epistemological
barrier, as if civilization’s benefits, which distinguish us from “savages”,
would be unimaginable without this social fracture. It is as if exploitation
were a prerequisite for prosperity, extortion for justice, police power for
establishing peace and letting art flourish.
At the core of the power relationship is the debt relationship, as we
have noted in reference to Pierre Clastres. But the nature of society changes
as the “direction” of debt changes. If the debt relationship trends toward
society and away from the chief, as in primitive societies, society remains
undivided. Those who enjoy the prestige gained from chieftainship – including
the regalia of office, distinctive tattoos, special finery, not to mention
women’s esteem expressed in sexual favours – must pay. This reciprocity does
not shatter society’s homogeneity, nor does it involve any submission or
breakdown into classes. “You want prestige? How much are you willing to pay us
for our show of respect?” Political power, on the other hand, is established
when the debt relationship is reversed, when payment originates in society and
moves upward towards government. At first, political power was exercised over
those who were outside society, those who had been conquered.
Subjugating the alien meant imposing tribute. Then the state emerged. And the
first act of the state was to raise taxes. Raising taxes is a bizarre
philosophical transmutation in which armed robbery is no longer considered a
crime but an act of civic virtue.[26] The alien, subjugated and subject to taxes,
is now located within society. The reverse morality of the warrior
infects the social fabric itself, now split between dominant and dominated,
exploiters and exploited. The state institution opens the type of social rift
that was so fiercely rejected by primitive peoples and turns power against
society itself.
The strict egalitarianism valued by primitive societies prevented any
type of progress.[27]
Weakened by this immobility, most such societies died out. Progress involves
continually adapting to evolution. If there is such a thing as evolution – and
this does seem to be an accepted fact – humans have two ways to respond. They
can decide to continually reform their collective organization or determine that
it is the best possible and that nothing must change. If they choose the
latter, their society will gradually clash with its environment until it calls
its immobility into question, belatedly and at high cost. Without change, the
society will disappear, which was the fate of the Primitives and the Soviet
Union, among others.[28]
When human beings give each other the right to innovate, each person may
consider the various ways of living in the world both individually and
collectively. Each is free to cut a new path or to follow those who seem to be
moving in the direction of his or her goals. Philosophy, science, economics and
spirituality are nothing but various disciplines whose value lies in leading us
to more just relations with others and nature.
In the political organization of the world, however, this relationship
to nature is not built individually, but society by society. Each society
imagines an overall way of functioning and its citizens must comply. Within
each state, detailed laws regulate how to live, marry, raise children and care
for oneself, what to produce, consume, read and view, what rules should apply
to business, under what conditions people should work, how much to save, etc.
The models, therefore, do not differ within each state, but only between
states. The distressing result is that instead of having tens or hundreds of
thousands of ways of living together, developed by people who have come
together voluntarily in a community based on affinity, ethnicity, culture or
interests, we have been reduced to comparing life in a handful of political
societies, i.e. organized according to military values.[29]
The competition between political societies during the historical
process of humanity’s evolution has thus hinged on one single criterion for
success – the power of the state, projected both internally and externally. In
other words, our societies chose an organizational model that was based not on
the producer’s values (the most appealing, the least expensive) but on the
warrior’s values (the most powerful). And it was at the cost of horrifying and
bloody power conflicts that today’s dominant political model, social democracy,
was imposed (first, colonization to eliminate primitive societies, then two
centuries of all-out war over rival political systems – monarchy, fascism and
popular democracies).
A multitude of social organizations would allow more people to find one
that fit their values. If one such way of life harms nature, the effects would
be limited by other less damaging practices. The social democratic monopoly,
however, only affords us one single chance: it’s make or break. And if it works
this time, it has to work the next time and the next time. The more power is
centralized (a fortiori under a world government), the more serious the
consequences for humanity if one bad decision is taken. The first results do
not seem to indicate, to say the least, that the emerging global political
model is satisfying all human aspirations or blending in harmoniously with
nature.[30]
This begs the historically novel question: How can we pursue the
evolutionary process within a social organization that is the only type
authorized? The way we live in society and our adaptation to the environment
are not hardwired in our genes. Like other kinds of knowledge, they must be
discovered through trial and error. If governments forbid such experimentation,
if they do not step aside for communities offering other ways to live, aren’t
we just repeating the lethal immobility of primitive societies?
The end of political societies
An ideology cannot be refuted. A political view of the world, handed
down by warriors and taken up by the entire state apparatus, gets too deeply
rooted in the culture and the collective unconscious. Those who have the
ability to discredit it – the intellectuals – are its direct beneficiaries. An
ideology goes out of fashion. It is gradually abandoned by a growing number of
people when it proves unable to make sense of reality.
Aren’t we today witnessing an historic failure of the state?[31] The increase in the number of states should
not foster any illusions; it does not demonstrate their greater value, but
rather the loss of their individual importance. The break-up of European and
Russian colonial empires over the last half-century has brought the number of
states to nearly 200, and who could tell who is more of a puppet, thief,
beggar, killer or simply laughingstock than the others? As we have noted, the
legitimacy of governments derives from their supposed protection
of citizens. As the warriors’ heirs, they need enemies just as the doctor needs
patients.[32] In a desperate attempt to hide the fact that
they themselves are the major danger citizens face, they must invent
even greater dangers. Their imagination, however, is no longer up to the task.
Drugs, mafias, terrorism, ecological and economic crises – sometimes the
threat is imaginary and sometimes it is caused by the governments themselves.
And when the outside threat is real, they are powerless to avert it. The modern
avatar of the state, social democracy, has carved out an almost limitless
market for itself – the legalization of theft, sold under the name “social
justice”. What could be more appealing than a political agenda that promises:
“If you vote for us, we will make sure other people pay for benefits that will
not cost you any contribution, work, or worry”? Alas, Ponzi schemes do not last
forever.[33] Welfare states, like obsolete firms with
saturated markets and rising costs, merge or join together in cartels, such as
the European Union and NAFTA.
Such mergers, however, do not delay evolution, even though they are
promoted as harbingers of a new world order. They do not protect us from
reality. Human societies evolved very slowly during primitive times, when
change was measured in millennia. It has now accelerated. All it took was a few
decades to abolish the warrior’s ideology of the line: the “line” as a
boundary between exploiters and exploited, public and private, national and
foreign, as a social rift tearing apart all societies that are not “primitive”.
Today technology surges up in unforeseen ways, upsetting hierarchies – the
military organizations’ characteristic feature – and forcing the
decentralization of power. Our transnational world is no longer based on “us
and them”, the only structure that makes sense to the warrior. Instead, it
favours mixed relations – cooperation in some areas and competition in others.
For that reason, the new order no longer depends on the “line”, but on networks,
which now organize societies of producers rather than warrior societies. That
is why the time has come for “peaceful societies” to overtake “political
societies”.
The peaceful society
Throughout our life, we come to create relationships with a few hundred
people, and often far fewer. These are family members, friends, neighbours and
colleagues. In a peaceful society, they are the only people we wish to know,
based on love and shared interests. We buy products from the rest of the world,
we hear about in the media. If we have a reason to meet one or another of the
world’s six billion individuals, we initiate contact. Many of us will willingly
demonstrate solidarity with strangers when necessary. Most of the time,
however, all we expect is non-interference; we want others to let us live in
peace with the people we have chosen and in compliance with property rights.
Politics consists of prohibiting us from choosing our relationships.
Governments superimpose another dimension onto the ties of friendship and
common interest – that of citizenship. Relationships between citizens are not
voluntary; they are forced upon them by the authorities. Citizens in a
democracy do not engage in dialogues like friends or in negotiations like
producers, that leave each party free to agree or to break the talks. The
democratic way of interaction between citizens is through elections. Voting
means adopting a method of resolving conflict that, like war, subjects losers
to the will of winners. (The non-political solution consists of letting
individuals do as they wish as long as they do not physically harm others).[34]
Power therefore corrupts not only those who exercise it, but the entire
social fabric. Obedience precludes trust amongst subjects. Each person is
required to become an accomplice of the Master, an informer on his neighbour.[35] That is called civic duty. As citizens we
have no other counterpart than the government. Citizens qua citizens
have no reason to engage in social intercourse other than to establish whether
they are for or against the government. They support and strengthen it, in the
hope of gaining individual benefit by imposing their own political choices.[36] If this strategy of conquest fails, if the
other party wins, the victims do not have the innocence of slaves or serfs.
Dominated and exploited, they are treated as they wanted to treat others. There
is no innocent citizen.
Reconciliation
And what if citizens freed themselves? If society decided to reject
domination and rid itself of the resulting financial and human cost, what a new
“breakaway” this society would enjoy! What an example it would set for others –
an example that would no longer be measured in terms of military power, but in
terms of creativity, the range of opportunities offered to everyone, and
adaptability to the environment.[37]
The three “orders” described by Dumézil are not imaginary. We cannot
conceive of a society without an openness to spirituality, without systems of
defence and without production. But this tripartite structure is more
constituent of the individual than of society. Each of us needs to be a priest,
warrior and producer all at the same time. There is no need to divide
society into classes, as was done at the dawn of civilization in the way
described by anthropologists and historians. There is even less reason to
organize these classes into a hierarchy of powers.
Human beings belong to nature, spring from it, and assess nature’s
constraints as they act upon it. They transform nature with their work. But
this very ability to transform nature makes us unique and results in something
that is no longer nature in its pure form. Thus arise the two great functions –
producer in the realm of nature and priest in the realm of the supernatural.
Only the warrior is artifice.
But just as the warrior is tempted to return to nature, as we have seen above,
the priest is tempted to turn away from it. Nature is dethroned, becoming a
source of affliction and corruption of the soul. As for the producer, the
temptation is materialistic: the thing produced acquires greater importance
than those for whom it is intended. This materialistic temptation is greatest
amongst producers whose activity is pre-capitalist, like farmers and craftsmen,
who lose sight of the fact that the real goal is serving others rather than
producing things. Production is only the means for providing this service.[38]
In human evolution, the purpose of the capitalist market is to integrate
warrior values while reversing their goal – no longer protecting some, but
serving all. The producer’s world is divided between those who buy his products
and those who have yet to buy them. That
is the producer’s only boundary. No “raison d’État” exists for him; as a
result, there is no reason to invent an enemy. One does not make the supreme
sacrifice for the sake of turnover.[39]
The way of the warrior becomes the way
of business when the total devotion demanded of him is no longer related to his
role as citizen, when he stops being loyal to a state in order to meet the
needs of all human beings. Unifying rather than dividing humanity now becomes
his calling. A new kind of warrior with no weapons other than imagination and
the will to persuade, he rejects war and political artifice to embrace the
values of reciprocity and life. A new kind of priest, he does not turn away
from nature, but knows that his work as a producer can serve to humanize him.
As a result, his eyes and ears are forever in harmony with high ideals.
The emergence of the state has exacerbated the conflicts amongst
societies and divided them internally into antagonistic classes. This division
reflects the three functions that each of us can and should exercise ourselves:
spirituality; service to others (the warrior’s true function); and the
transformation of matter. When they are reconciled in the economy, these three
functions can no longer cause the division of the social sphere. Humanity, reaching
a more advanced stage of evolution,could then achieve the primitives’ anarchist
ideal.
Geneva, December 2000
cmichel@cmichel.com www.liberalia.com
I wish to thank Brian Micklethwait, who invited me to
present the first draft of this paper during a meeting of friends of the
Libertarian Alliance in London. I found the comments and constructive
criticisms by Brian and other participants a great help when writing the
current version.
[1] Pierre Clastres (La
Société contre l’État, Paris, Plon, 1974; English trans. Society Against
the State, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977), even believes this can serve as
a definition: The “primitive” society is one that has no experience with the
state. “Primitive” can refer to groups of humans that died out during
prehistoric times as well as those that lead the same existence today as they
did 30,000 years ago.
[2] Pierre Clastres,
“Liberté, Malencontre, Innommable” in Recherches d’anthropologie politique,
Paris, le Seuil, 1980.
[3] If I were to
offer my own explanation for this refusal, I would start with the small size of
the Primitive’s societies. While an ethnic group may easily number in the tens
of thousands, the social organization of primitive peoples is characterized by
clans numbering 200 to 300 members, sometimes only a few dozen. However, envy
is no different among primitives than among our contemporaries. The existence
of wealthy people in Malibu or Monte Carlo is an abstract fact, we can rationalize
the resentment we feel about it with “social justice” concepts. But if our
cousin or co-worker gets rich, we have a much stronger emotional reaction. It
is only when societies become large enough to create impersonal social
relations that individual situations can become differentiated. Certain people
institutionalise their power and accumulate wealth without encountering too
much hostility. Many theoreticians of the state, such as Aristotle and
Rousseau, view small societies as the ideal political unit. That notion,
however, ignores the fact that conformism and resentment are often the natural
complement to warm, personal relationships. “Keeping up with the Joneses”
refers to the Joneses living down the street. We do not identify as well with
the other Joneses. They become statistics that do not arouse the same feelings
of envy and resentment. The obvious reference here is to René Girard’s work, devoted
to “mimetic rivalry,” particularly Mensonge romantique et Vérité romanesque,
Paris, Pluriel,1978, and La Violence et le sacré, Paris, Grasset, 1972;
English trans. Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979.
[4] Friedrich Engels, Origins Of The Family,
Private Property And State, International Publishers Company, 1990,
available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884-fam/index.htm.
For examples of Marxist anthropology, see also V. Gordon Childe, Man Makes
Himself, written after his enthusiastic trip
to the Soviet Union in 1936 and Morton Herbert Fried , The Evolution Of
Political Society, New York, McGraw Hill Higher Education, 1967.
[5] Fustel de
Coulanges, La Cité antique, Paris, Champs Flammarion, 1998, Volume 3,
chapter 3. English trans. The Ancient City, Trans. William Small, Garden
City, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1964. Elman R. Service, Origin of the State
and Civilization, NewYork, W.W. Norton, 1975. See also Elman R. Service, Political
Power and the Origin of Social Complexity, in Configurations of Power,
edited by John S. Henderson and Patricia J. Netherly, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca and London, 1993.
[6] This required a
true paradigm shift. Totemism is as universal among primitive peoples as the
absence of the state. Claude Lévi-Strauss explained its significance: “Saying
that clan A ‘descends’ from bears and that clan B ‘descends’ from eagles is
nothing more than a concrete and abbreviated way of viewing the relationship
between A and B as analogous to the relationship between species”. (Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, Paris, PUF, 1962). Agreeing to
assimilate individuals from another clan thus marks the emergence of a new,
broader conception of the human being, which would continue to expand in waves
up until the universalism of today.
[7] George Dumézil, Heur
et malheur du guerrier, Paris, Flammarion, 1985 (English trans. Destiny
Of Warrior, Chicago University Press, 1971) and Mythes et dieux
indo-européens, Paris, Flammarion, 1992.
For an introduction to the work of Georges Dumézil, see Wouter W.
Belier, Decayed Gods, Origin And Development Of Georges Dumézil’s “Idéologie
Tripartite”, Brill Academic Publishers, 1991.
[8] “Intelligent
beings never base their goals mainly on economic factors. In the proper sense
of the term, our actions are not ruled by ‘economic motives’. There are simply
economic factors that influence our efforts to satisfy other goals”. Friedrich
Hayek, The Road To Serfdom, University of Chicago Press, 1994; chap. VII
(with an introduction by Milton Friedman).
[9] Stephen Bailey, Ethics
and Public Service. The quotation is found in James H. Tower, Truth,
Faith and Allegiance, University Press of Kentucky, 1995.
[10] “Life is the
force through which things persevere in their being”. Spinoza, Descartes’
Principles of Philosophy, in Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1,
collected and translated by E. Curley, Princeton University Press, 1985.
[11] The Romans
taught: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”. The barbarian is the man
who boasts about killing. He crows about piercing his enemies with his spear
and carries their scalp on his belt. (Our modern pilots paint a roundel on the
cabin of their airplane, but they do so to display the planes they have
brought down, not the enemies they have killed. This distancing is not mere
hypocrisy because the enemy pilot could have escaped by parachuting out). In
societies civilized by Christianity, the soldier embodies the sacrificial
victim giving up his life for the king, the fatherland or a cause rather than
an idealization of the killer. The paradoxical result is that our civilized
commanders did not hesitate to send far more men to a certain death than the
barbarian chieftains would ever have dared.
This conception of the sacrificial soldier peaked during the period
between the Napoleonic wars and the Korean War with the butchery of the
American Civil War and the two world wars. (We are less accepting of sacrifice
today; what cause could be important enough to die for?). As it becomes more
individualistic, more liberal and more capitalistic, our society becomes that
of Eros gradually triumphing over Thanatos.
[12] See my essay, How
Should We Think About Economics Today?,
www.liberalia.com
[13] R. Dawkins, The
Selfish Gene, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976.
[14] Oswald Spengler, Decline
Of The West, Oxford University Press, 1990.
[15] Francis Fukuyama,
The End Of History And The Last Man, London, Penguin Books, 1992.
[16] Plato, The
Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, London, Penguin, 1976 and The Laws,
trans. Trevor Saunders, London, Penguin 1972.
[17] Mo Ti, a Chinese
man of letters who wrote the following around 400 B.C., condemned this inverted
warrior morality: “If a man kills an innocent person and steals his clothes,
spear and sword, he commits a more serious crime than if he entered a stable to
steal an ox or horse. The wrong is greater, the offence more serious and the
crime blacker… But we see nothing wrong with committing a murder when attacking
a country; we applaud and speak of justice… When a man kills another, he is
guilty and sentenced to death. Therefore, according to the same criterion …, he
who kills 100 men should suffer far greater punishment … Similarly, if a simple
homicide is considered a crime, but multiple homicide, such as occurs when
another country is attacked, is praised as good, can that be called knowing
good from bad?” (quoted by S.B. Griffiths in his introduction to Sun Tzu, The
Art Of War, Oxford University Press, 1972).
[18] In a seminal book
that has been justly acclaimed, Robert Axelrod, (The Evolution of
Cooperation, Basic Books, New York, 1984) demonstrates that the most
beneficial long-term behavioural model consists of treating others as they
treat us; he bases his argument on game theory and the famous prisoner’s
dilemma. If it seems judicious to apply this model to everyday circumstances,
it can be contrasted with René Girard’s analyses in situations of serious
conflict. (op. cit. and Des Choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde,
Paris, Grasset, 1978, English trans. Things Hidden Since The Foundation Of
The World, Stanford University Press, 1987).
[19] There were
warriors well before the appearance of the state. Primitive societies are the
most warlike of all. But the very basis of my argument throughout this text is the
following: In primitive societies, all the men are warriors and
producers in turn. Violence and predation are committed against the outside
enemy, not the members of the tribe. In modern societies, however, the dominant
class of soldiers and civil servants exploits its fellow citizens rather than
foreigners.
[20] Philippe du Puy
de Clinchamps, La Noblesse, Paris, Que Sais-Je?, 1962. The occupations
not considered suitable for French nobles included all the mechanical trades,
even at the management level; farming leased land (except for land belonging to
the king and royal princes); all types of trade;
and low-level offices like notary, bailiff and prosecutor. After Colbert, the
temptations of wealth began to corrupt the nobility and sea trading and the
growing foundry industry were exempted from these restrictions. But it was only
after World War I that the nobility finally felt free to embrace any type of
profession.
[21] Killing members
of the same species is a very rare occurrence in nature.
[22] Ludwig von Mises,
The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Princeton, New Jersey, D. van Nostrand
Company, 1956. See also in Robert Nozick, Socratic Puzzles, Harvard
University Press, 1997, the chapter entitled Why Do Intellectuals Oppose
Capitalism? How many brilliant minds of that time challenged the divine
right of kings, aristocratic privilege and serfdom? How many dare today to attack
the privileges of the state bureaucracy, who will seem as abusive to our
descendents as Ancien Régime class structure does to us? Intellectuals do not
care much for freedom; they traditionally align themselves with whoever is in
power, whoever pampers them or from whom they expect even greater favours.
[23] Saying “my
country” brings to mind the memory of landscapes and the sounds of a language,
but if this country is a state or aspires to be one, we also recall the piously
learned names of bloodied fields where young men who fought for it lie buried.
A modern state is an institution of living pseudo-soldiers governing in the
name of real dead soldiers.
[24] Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, Origins And History Of The Passions Of War,
Metropolitan Books, 1997
[25] This is the essence
of the entire gun control debate, which so
captivates Americans.
[26] When I was a high
school student in Paris, during the Algerian war of independence, I knew a
National Liberation Front (FLN) militant whose mission was to impose a
“revolutionary tax” on Algerian students and merchants in the neighbourhood.
The French police arrested him for extortion. After the Evian accords, this
zealous militant raised taxes for the new Algerian state from neighbourhood
students and merchants, but now the French police supported him. His extortion
scheme was exactly the same, but this time it was for a recognized state.
Murder, coercion and theft are not forbidden in society, but they are reserved
for the class of state employees.
[27] The law of primitive peoples was the law of
their ancestors, and therefore immutable (the dead do not change their minds).
Progress began when the chief’s desires became law, and his successor then felt
free to want something else.
[28] Primitive peoples
strived to create an autarky within their clan. Only goods considered
essential, in terms of usefulness and prestige, would be traded. The Soviet
Union had the same policy and for the same reasons: the “open society” of
producers is incompatible with the hierarchical order of the military. Europe
broke away from other societies during the Renaissance, leaving them far
behind; this can be explained by its ability to absorb foreign ideas and
methods, which demonstrated its enormous self-confidence. Lévi-Strauss recalls
in Tristes Tropiques that during the first encounters between the
Spanish and Carib Indians, the Indians wondered whether the Europeans were gods
or men and the Spaniards wondered whether these “savages” were humans or
animals. The reverse would have been unthinkable. Thomas Sowell, in his book Conquests
and Culture (New York, Basic Books, 1998), subtly notes that the great
American empires were not conquered by a handful of Spaniards, but by all the
technologies that the entire Old World had developed and traded at the time:
Italian ships, Arab compasses, steel from Toledo, Chinese gunpowder, English
cannons. The Aztecs cannot be reproached for not participating in this wave of
innovation. However, opponents of globalisation might usefully ponder the cause
of the Aztecs’ collapse.
[29] It would be more
accurate to emphasize that throughout history, societies that were the most
effective at waging war were those that gave the greatest respect to producers.
This is only a superficial paradox. There is no doubt that danger and war
taught human beings cooperation. Those who knew how to cooperate through good
communications, advanced language and the acceptance of responsibility
physically eliminated or at least drove out less developed tribes from lands
well-stocked with game. During this historical period, societies in which
confidence inspired investment, respect for other people’s word favoured trade,
and the state’s predation did not totally destroy wealth, were able to equip
the most fearsome armies. The more producers’ values are respected within
society, the better warriors’ values can be expressed on the outside.
[30] In the absence of
rival models, the caste of state employees has the wherewithal to hide its
mistakes for a very long time. It suppresses the incriminating information,
including by use of taxation and subsidies, which are nothing more than a form
of censorship applied to the market.
[31] The states have done a great deal of killing,
but they have also played a positive role in the evolutionary process, as
impenetrable and shocking as this may be. They helped integrate and pacify
their territories, and served as vehicles for education and culture. We realize
today that these same benefits could have been obtained without government
oppression, but were human beings ready to skip the state stage as evolution
progressed? As Marx demonstrated, it is technological progress that brings
about a maturing of individuals’ consciences, and not the reverse. We can assert
at the beginning of the 21st century that technological advances
have made it impractical to manage societies according to the political models
of the 18th and 19th centuries. We should soon expect a
new awareness of the exploitation of producers by the state bureaucracy and its
protégés.
[32] Humans have not
always been at the top of the food chain. When faced with danger, they tend to
follow the herd instinct. Danger brings together the herd, leaving the most
vulnerable on the sidelines (for example, those who do not enjoy a privileged
status, job and retirement security, etc.). “War is the health of the
state,” wrote the American poet Randolph Bourne in 1917. “It
automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for
uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into
obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd
sense.” R. Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918
(New York, Urizen Books, 1977). And R.L. Mencken added, demonstrating that
politics is the continuation of war by other means: “The whole aim of
practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and thus clamorous to be
led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of
them imaginary.”
[33] Charles Ponzi was
an infamous American con man who managed to wipe out the savings of 40,000
investors in less than eight months in 1928. He promised them spectacular
returns, which were, of course, paid to the first depositors with the money
contributed by later investors. Others have imitated Ponzi (especially in
Russia in the early 1990s), but none could reach the scale of the European
states’ social “security” and pension schemes.
[34] The Nambikwara, like all non-political societies, have a good solution for preventing exploitation by the powerful: “If the chief appears too demanding, if he claims too many women for himself or if he is incapable of providing a satisfactory solution to the food problem in times of scarcity, discontent becomes manifest. Individuals or whole families will leave the group and go off to join some other with a better reputation” (Claude Lévi Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, London, Jonathan Cape, 1973). Another relevant observation, valid for primitive societies in general but specifically referring to the Nuer of Kenya, is the following: “This lack of centralized, coercive power allowed people in primitive society to move on and move out when they found themselves unhappy with their circumstances. In our present state system, citizenship is not voluntary; one may leave the state one lives in, but only with the compliance of another state. Among the Nuer, if a whole community fought with its neighbour an