پنجشنبه ۲۲ شهریور ۰۳ | ۲۱:۴۲ ۹ بازديد
cities, all of them joined together by new kingdoms and commercial
networks.
Yet in order to take advantage of these new opportunities, food
surpluses and improved transportation were not enough. The mere fact
that one can feed a thousand people in the same town or a million
people in the same kingdom does not guarantee that they can agree how
to divide the land and water, how to settle disputes and conflicts, and
how to act in times of drought or war. And if no agreement can be
reached, strife spreads, even if the storehouses are bulging. It was not
food shortages that caused most of history’s wars and revolutions. The
French Revolution was spearheaded by affluent lawyers, not by famished
peasants. The Roman Republic reached the height of its power in the
first century BC, when treasure fleets from throughout the Mediterranean
enriched the Romans beyond their ancestors’ wildest dreams. Yet it was
at that moment of maximum affluence that the Roman political order
collapsed into a series of deadly civil wars. Yugoslavia in 1991 had more
than enough resources to feed all its inhabitants, and still disintegrated
into a terrible bloodbath.
The problem at the root of such calamities is that humans evolved for
millions of years in small bands of a few dozen individuals. The handful
of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance
of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct
for mass cooperation to evolve.
Despite the lack of such biological instincts, during the foraging era,
hundreds of strangers were able to cooperate thanks to their shared
myths. However, this cooperation was loose and limited. Every Sapiens
band continued to run its life independently and to provide for most of
its own needs. An archaic sociologist living 20,000 years ago, who had
no knowledge of events following the Agricultural Revolution, might
well have concluded that mythology had a fairly limited scope. Stories
about ancestral spirits and tribal totems were strong enough to enable
500 people to trade seashells, celebrate the odd festival, and join forces
to wipe out a Neanderthal band, but no more than that. Mythology, the
ancient sociologist would have thought, could not possibly enable
millions of strangers to cooperate on a daily basis.
But that turned out to be wrong. Myths, it transpired, are stronger
opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty
empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint
stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human
evolution was crawling at its usual snail’s pace, the human imagination
was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other
ever seen on earth.
Around 8500 BC the largest settlements in the world were villages such
as Jericho, which contained a few hundred individuals. By 7000 BC the
town of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia numbered between 5,000 and 10,000
individuals. It may well have been the world’s biggest settlement at the
time. During the fifth and fourth millennia BC, cities with tens of
thousands of inhabitants sprouted in the Fertile Crescent, and each of
these held sway over many nearby villages. In 3100 BC the entire lower
Nile Valley was united into the first Egyptian kingdom. Its pharaohs
ruled thousands of square kilometres and hundreds of thousands of
people. Around 2250 BC Sargon the Great forged the first empire, the
Akkadian. It boasted over a million subjects and a standing army of
5,400 soldiers. Between 1000 BC and 500 BC, the first mega-empires
appeared in the Middle East: the Late Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian
Empire, and the Persian Empire. They ruled over many millions of
subjects and commanded tens of thousands of soldiers.
In 221 BC the Qin dynasty united China, and shortly afterwards Rome
united the Mediterranean basin. Taxes levied on 40 million Qin subjects
paid for a standing army of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and a
complex bureaucracy that employed more than 100,000 officials. The
Roman Empire at its zenith collected taxes from up to 100 million
subjects. This revenue financed a standing army of 250,000–500,000
soldiers, a road network still in use 1,500 years later, and theatres and
amphitheatres that host spectacles to this day.
Impressive, no doubt, but we mustn’t harbour rosy illusions about
‘mass cooperation networks’ operating in pharaonic Egypt or the Roman
Empire. ‘Cooperation’ sounds very altruistic, but is not always voluntary
and seldom egalitarian. Most human cooperation networks have been
geared towards oppression and exploitation. The peasants paid for the
burgeoning cooperation networks with their precious food surpluses,
despairing when the tax collector wiped out an entire year of hard
labour with a single stroke of his imperial pen. The famed Roman
amphitheatres were often built by slaves so that wealthy and idle
Romans could watch other slaves engage in vicious gladiatorial combat.
Even prisons and concentration camps are cooperation networks, and
coordinate their actions.
17. The Declaration of Independence of the United States, signed 4 July 1776.
All these cooperation networks – from the cities of ancient Mesopotamia
to the Qin and Roman empires – were ‘imagined orders’. The social
norms that sustained them were based neither on ingrained instincts nor
on personal acquaintances, but rather on belief in shared myths.
How can myths sustain entire empires? We have already discussed one
such example: Peugeot. Now let’s examine two of the best-known myths
of history: the Code of Hammurabi of c.1776 BC, which served as a
cooperation manual for hundreds of thousands of ancient Babylonians;
still serves as a cooperation manual for hundreds of millions of modern
Americans.
In 1776 BC Babylon was the world’s biggest city. The Babylonian
Empire was probably the world’s largest, with more than a million
subjects. It ruled most of Mesopotamia, including the bulk of modern
Iraq and parts of present-day Syria and Iran. The Babylonian king most
famous today was Hammurabi. His fame is due primarily to the text that
bears his name, the Code of Hammurabi. This was a collection of laws
and judicial decisions whose aim was to present Hammurabi as a role
model of a just king, serve as a basis for a more uniform legal system
across the Babylonian Empire, and teach future generations what justice
is and how a just king acts.
Future generations took notice. The intellectual and bureaucratic elite
of ancient Mesopotamia canonised the text, and apprentice scribes
continued to copy it long after Hammurabi died and his empire lay in
ruins. Hammurabi’s Code is therefore a good source for understanding
the ancient Mesopotamians’ ideal of social order.3
The text begins by saying that the gods Anu, Enlil and Marduk – the
leading deities of the Mesopotamian pantheon – appointed Hammurabi
‘to make justice prevail in the land, to abolish the wicked and the evil, to
prevent the strong from oppressing the weak’.4 It then lists about 300
judgements, given in the set formula ‘If such and such a thing happens,
such is the judgment.’ For example, judgements 196–9 and 209–14 read:
196. If a superior man should blind the eye of another superior man,
they shall blind his eye.
197. If he should break the bone of another superior man, they shall
break his bone.
198. If he should blind the eye of a commoner or break the bone of a
commoner, he shall weigh and deliver 60 shekels of silver.
199.
If he should blind the eye of a slave of a superior man or break
the bone of a slave of a superior man, he shall weigh and deliver
209.
If a superior man strikes a woman of superior class and thereby
causes her to miscarry her fetus, he shall weigh and deliver ten
shekels of silver for her fetus.
210. If that woman should die, they shall kill his daughter.
211.
If he should cause a woman of commoner class to miscarry her
fetus by the beating, he shall weigh and deliver five shekels of
silver.
212. If that woman should die, he shall weigh and deliver thirty
shekels of silver.
213.
If he strikes a slave-woman of a superior man and thereby causes
her to miscarry her fetus, he shall weigh and deliver two shekels
of silver.
214.
If that slave-woman should die, he shall weigh and deliver
twenty shekels of silver.6
After listing his judgements, Hammurabi again declares that
These are the just decisions which Hammurabi, the able king, has established and thereby has
directed the land along the course of truth and the correct way of life … I am Hammurabi, noble
king. I have not been careless or negligent toward humankind, granted to my care by the god
Enlil, and with whose shepherding the god Marduk charged me.7
Hammurabi’s Code asserts that Babylonian social order is rooted in
universal and eternal principles of justice, dictated by the gods. The
principle of hierarchy is of paramount importance. According to the
code, people are divided into two genders and three classes: superior
people, commoners and slaves. Members of each gender and class have
different values. The life of a female commoner is worth thirty silver
of a male commoner is worth sixty silver shekels.
The code also establishes a strict hierarchy within families, according
to which children are not independent persons, but rather the property
of their parents. Hence, if one superior man kills the daughter of another
superior man, the killer’s daughter is executed in punishment. To us it
may seem strange that the killer remains unharmed whereas his
innocent daughter is killed, but to Hammurabi and the Babylonians this
seemed perfectly just. Hammurabi’s Code was based on the premise that
if the king’s subjects all accepted their positions in the hierarchy and
acted accordingly, the empire’s million inhabitants would be able to
cooperate effectively. Their society could then produce enough food for
its members, distribute it efficiently, protect itself against its enemies,
and expand its territory so as to acquire more wealth and better security.
About 3,500 years after Hammurabi’s death, the inhabitants of
thirteen British colonies in North America felt that the king of England
was treating them unjustly. Their representatives gathered in the city of
Philadelphia, and on 4 July 1776 the colonies declared that their
inhabitants were no longer subjects of the British Crown. Their
Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal and eternal principles
of justice, which, like those of Hammurabi, were inspired by a divine
power. However, the most important principle dictated by the American
god was somewhat different from the principle dictated by the gods of
Babylon. The American Declaration of Independence asserts that:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.
Like Hammurabi’s Code, the American founding document promises that
if humans act according to its sacred principles, millions of them would
be able to cooperate effectively, living safely and peacefully in a just and
prosperous society. Like the Code of Hammurabi, the American
Declaration of Independence was not just a document of its time and
place – it was accepted by future generations as well. For more than 200
years, American schoolchildren have been copying and learning it by
The two texts present us with an obvious dilemma. Both the Code of
Hammurabi and the American Declaration of Independence claim to
outline universal and eternal principles of justice, but according to the
Americans all people are equal, whereas according to the Babylonians
people are decidedly unequal. The Americans would, of course, say that
they are right, and that Hammurabi is wrong. Hammurabi, naturally,
would retort that he is right, and that the Americans are wrong. In fact,
they are both wrong. Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers
alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles
of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such
universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in
the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no
objective validity.
It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’
and commoners’ is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all
humans are equal is also a myth. In what sense do all humans equal one
another? Is there any objective reality, outside the human imagination,
in which we are truly equal? Are all humans equal to one another
biologically? Let us try to translate the most famous line of the American
Declaration of Independence into biological terms:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.
According to the science of biology, people were not created’. They have
evolved. And they certainly did not evolve to be ‘equal’. The idea of
equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The
Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that
every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal
before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about
God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’?
Evolution is based on difference, not on equality. Every person carries a
somewhat different genetic code, and is exposed from birth to different
environmental influences. This leads to the development of different
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