Big Steps in the Story of Big History – Part 7

The origins of government.

Continuing our essay series on Brian Villmoare’s “Big History” book The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History, this essay will explore how, as human populations grew, governments came into being.

As Villmoare writes:

In various locations around the globe, when local population densities increased enough so that there was no “new” land onto which growing populations could expand, people made a major transition. Instead of moving into new, unoccupied lands, people started controlling the local resources. Some plants were encouraged to grow, and others pulled out to make way. Certain animals were found to be easy to control. Over time, these people settled on land where the plants or animals grew well and became, in essence, farmers or herders. The development of advanced technologies over the last 250,000 years was once presented as being the result of a transformation of brain anatomy somewhere between 150,000 and 100,000 years ago. However, the apparently discrete shift in technology at this time was more likely the result of the poor resolution of the archaeological record. A better way to model the increase in technology is to map it onto the increase in population density over the last 250,000 years. As populations increase, a given individual can access learning from a wider network of individuals, and better ideas can more easily spread and remain in the population … The domestication of plants and animals made food resources much more reliable, which made several important transitions possible. Positive changes included: 1. Greater population densities … 2. Food can be stored. This means the society can accumulate resources for various purposes – consuming them over the winter, for example, but also trading them for other things they need … 3. Surplus resources mean that certain people can be released from the need to accumulate wealth, and can do other, more specialized jobs for society … After the Neolithic, the population of the world started its exponential growth pattern. Only 10,000 years ago there were perhaps 20 million people in the whole world. Today, there are cities with that many people, and the overall world population is approaching 8 billion … [B]ut before 10,000 years ago the worldwide human population was likely to have been between 1 million and 10 million … Population growth was slow, over most of the 250,000 year span of our species. But between 6,000 and 5,000 years ago (4000–3000 BCE), agricultural development had spread around much of the globe and populations started to substantially increase. This is when we see the appearance of chiefdoms and states, and the growth of urban centers … Having the ability to understand the political relationships among fewer than 200 individuals would be adequate for a leader in a foraging “big man” society. However, once the population starts to grow, there is no way to keep track of the relationships. This is similar to the problem with having a larger number of neurons in the brain – the number of connections among them grows far faster than the neurons. The same math problem applies to human relationships. Among 100 people there are about 5,000 relationships, but among 1,000 there are roughly half a million. So, when populations get large, no leader can possibly understand and process the relationships among their group. The way to handle such a problem is with hierarchies. In a hierarchy, each person at their level on the hierarchy only has to know the people directly above and below them on the hierarchy. Information flows up and down the hierarchy, and at each level information is processed and passed to the relevant individuals. Imagine, for example, the leader wants a bridge built. That leader simply has to know the head of the construction group, and that head will pass information down to the bridge-building head, who then passes the information to the foremen, and from there to the workers. The leader never even has to meet the bridge-building workers.

When hierarchies became too oppressive or controlling, some segments of society made moves toward creating rules to protect individual rights:

[A]s you may have guessed, there is a problem with hierarchies. In any hierarchy, the people at the top necessarily have greater power than those below. Power, once acquired, is typically retained if at all possible (as also is the case for chimpanzees and other species). Because the people at the top have the power, it can be very difficult for other people lower in the hierarchy to remove the leader … In any given state, there is a finite amount of power. The more power that the government retains, the less there is available for the members of the society. Leaders throughout history have tended to try to maximize their power. The members of society have naturally tried to reign in the central authority and retain their own power and rights. One famous example of the struggle between central authority and the society is the Magna Carta, an English document written and signed in 1215 by King John of England and a group of lesser English nobles. Although it is most often called the Magna Carta, the actual name is Magna Carta Libertatum, which means the “Greater Charter of Freedoms.” The goal of this document was to explicitly limit the powers of the king. The modern notion of habeas corpus comes from this document, which prevents arbitrary imprisonment of citizens. Other rights were specifically enumerated in this document – protection of private property, guarantee of legal process, protection from excessive taxation, and others. It was a direct rejection of the notion of absolute and complete authority of the king, which King John had previously accepted as his natural right. John did not willingly sign it, but political circumstances had weakened him to the point where he had no choice. The struggle over power between citizens and the government has been a central part of history. In most of the ancient world, the power of the ruler was absolute (authoritarian), but ancient Athens famously had a participatory democracy in which free male citizens could vote on decisions to be taken by the government (note that women were not allowed to participate, nor were slaves, which Athens had in abundance). In Athens, the free male citizens directly voted on the laws and policies. This is known as direct democracy. However, when populations get large, and the administrative bureaucracy gets complex, it is not possible for every citizen to have the time to vote on every law. In ancient Rome, under the Republic, citizens instead elected senators to represent them in the law-making process (this is known as republican democracy, named after the Roman Republic where it was developed). This republican democracy lasted roughly 500 years, until it was lost when Rome acquired its first emperor in 27 BCE. There was no true democratic government worldwide for almost 2,000 years afterwards – until the founding of the United States in 1789 … Authoritarian governments, such as those in North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and China, afford relatively few formal rights to their citizens. More libertarian countries, such as Switzerland, the USA, Sweden, Norway, and Canada make specific legal provisions to maximize government accountability and individual freedoms. In the USA, the US Constitution was specifically written to constrain the government and specified its limitations on power … In some countries, especially those with written constitutions, there are explicit limits on the power of the government in order to ensure the relative freedom of its citizens … The freedom to express thoughts is closely linked with democratic institutions, and is less prevalent in authoritarian regimes. In many countries (China, North Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkmenistan, and Eretria, to name but a few), the publication of outlawed material can result in fines, imprisonment, or even death (sometimes by assassination, sometimes by execution), and publications that challenge or criticize the government are especially sanctioned … The ability of the government to take money or property from individuals is necessary for the government to function. Funds have to be available for militaries, as well as infrastructure such as roads, public buildings, salaries for government workers, and general maintenance of the physical structures of government. However, taxation can impose a considerable burden on individuals, so the amount of taxation imposed on individual citizens, and which citizens, is a source of constant debate. The size of the government, and the tax burden it imposes, fluctuates in countries around the world.

An intellectual movement called “the Enlightenment” kick-started social reforms:

[S]tarting in the fifteenth century, in Europe, a fairly unique transition occurred that still has an enormous effect on most people’s lives today … For the vast majority of world prehistory and history, Europe was a backwater. The great empires of antiquity and the medieval era tended to form at a geographic nexus. It is no accident that the Akkadian, neo-Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek (under Alexander), Roman, and Muslim empires all occurred in roughly the same geographic region. The Mediterranean region lies at the intersection of three continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe) and the Mediterranean Sea allows access to both the Black Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, as well as a short overland route to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean (before the construction of the Suez Canal). Other great civilizations had similar geographic advantages: India has land routes to China and the Mediterranean (the famous Silk Road), and is a short ocean-voyage from North Africa. In ancient China, the population density and advantageous natural resources (especially the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers), along with the large coastline, made China a cultural hub, with many large urbanized areas even in antiquity (by 2000–1500 BCE). In comparison, Europe was relatively sparsely populated by small tribes and chiefdoms up until its conquest by the Roman Empire. Europe resisted Roman imperialism, and even after submission was never part of the core of the empire. England and the Germanic areas, for example, never adopted a Latin language. Europe was sparsely populated, without any of the great cities of antiquity … Upon the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, Europe, which had been loosely governed by Rome, broke into dozens of small principalities, with innumerable linguistic, cultural, and political divisions among them. The Catholic Church, which had been the official state religion of the Roman Empire at its collapse, however, retained a grip on power even after the fall. The church had its own army, and using the doctrine of “rule by divine right,” provided the moral justification for the reign of the various monarchs of the Middle Ages. During this time, most intellectual activity in Europe, including art, architecture, and writing, centered on the church … One important development that occurs with the appearance of chiefdoms and states is that, frequently, the leadership in a lineage is closely tied to the religion of that group. This is where we first see the concept of “rule by divine right.” One way to justify the legitimacy of a particular lineage is by arguing that the leader is literally “chosen by God.” … The first country to explicitly reject rule by divine right was the United States. In addition to dismissing the divinity of King George III of England, the First Amendment of the US Constitution instituted independence, by law, of the government from any particular religion. Over the next two centuries, countries across much of the world slowly followed suit, to varying degrees, but even today the effect of religious authority is strong in many countries … Throughout history, philosophers and other writers had put ideas down (on paper, papyrus, or clay tablets), and for most of history those ideas were little read and the majority are now lost. During the Enlightenment, the explosion of literacy ensured that there were many copies of the important philosophical or scientific works, and that these ideas were read and absorbed by the general population. Several factors led to the relative expansion of literacy. One was technical – the invention of the printing press with moveable type by Johannes Guttenberg in the fifteenth century. Although printing with woodblocks or ceramic had been available for hundreds of years (starting in China), each image for each page had to be individually carved. The invention of Guttenberg’s moveable type (with a different block for each letter) meant that the costs of printing dramatically decreased. As the costs of books and newspapers dropped, it became practical for people with lower incomes to learn to read. Also, European languages are relatively easy to learn as written languages, since they are phonetic. To learn to read European languages only twenty-six to thirty-five letters need be learned. In contrast, Mandarin letters are partly conceptual, and to be literate in written Mandarin requires learning, at a minimum, hundreds of characters if not thousands. Additionally, there is a cultural tradition of written scholarship in Europe, as the Catholic Church produced voluminous scholarly works that had to be read across Christendom. In ancient India, traditional scholarly learning was by rote memorization of ancient poems and stories rather than reading ancient texts … The literacy of these populations had positive effects on their economies, as these societies were able to become part of the Industrial Revolution. As we know today, educated people were able to contribute to their country’s economies in ways other than simply providing labor or growing food, by creating new ideas, art, innovations, and inventions. As the Industrial Revolution created export markets, societies with educated citizens grew wealthy … For the entire reach of history – some 10,000 years – humans had been engaging in these acts. The empires of antiquity and the Middle Ages across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas enslaved other peoples and took what they wanted. The right of the strong over the weak was universal, and moral arguments held no sway. It was not until the Enlightenment that these ideas were seriously challenged … While slave revolts had occurred many times throughout history, it was only in the United States that a country willingly went to war to free another group of people due of principles alone.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore the origins of free economies.

We’ll take a break on New Year’s Day, and post again on January 4, 2024.