A song for the fallen warriors

Thinking about the evolution of violence through the social orders

Tomorrow in the United States we will celebrate Memorial Day, a day to officially remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. The holiday had its origins in 1869, following the Civil War. The tragedy of the human condition is we will likely always have wars and we will therefore always have heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice. 

Human history is defined by violence, and the evolution of society is largely the story of the gradual process of getting violence under control. Human beings cannot survive alone. We must live in groups. Once we are in groups, we have a natural tendency to compete, often violently. One of the best books on this topic is Violence and Social Orders by North, Wallace, and Weingast. NWW argue in VSO that there have been three types of social order since the beginning of human society: the foraging order, the limited access order (or natural state), and the open access order. Each is characterized by diminishing violence and greater human flourishing. 

It is a popular myth that pre-historic humans living in the foraging state - hunting and gathering - were less violent. This myth was popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau during the Romantic period. Rousseau imagines a humanity living isolated, and only when humans come into society are they oppressed. Anthropological evidence, both based on archeology, as well as the study of modern foraging tribes, finds that primitive humans were often exposed to violence. The violence was often driven by access to reproductive opportunity for males. Napoleon Chagnon documented this violence among the modern Yanomamo, a tribe living in the Amazon, in his book Noble Savages. The social benefit of the violence served to keep the population at a sustainable level, but it meant that most men were at risk of violent death. After all, a society only needs a modest ratio of men to women to keep a population from collapsing. Life in the foraging order relied on the weather and other natural conditions because hunter-gatherers did not retain stores and did not make investments in long-term infrastructre. Shortfalls likely triggered greater rounds of violence and populations competed for limited resources. Planning for the future would not have been possible because no capital of any significance was accumulated. Violence would have been distributed throughout society - any member might commit violence at almost any time, often driven by resource scarcity. Hobbs’s description of life during the prehistoric, pre-state condition as nasty, brutish, and short seems to be born out by the data.

The second order, the limited access order, occurs in what NWW call the “Natural State”. This is not a state of being, but a governmental state. The characteristic shift is the beginning of the concentration of the use of violence for social organization into fewer hands. NWW call these people violence specialists. Through being the biggest, meanest, most ruthless, certain people emerge as especially good at violence. They use their special talent to whip the rest of the would-be thugs into line and begin to organize society so that there is actually less violence and more order. This enables settled agriculture. The violence specialists keep other would-be thieves and raiders at bay which enables the less violent individuals to start farming and trading. The violence specialist doesn’t do this because he’s a nice guy - rather he extracts rents from the protected individuals. The result during this phase of social evolution is an explosion in the population because agriculture can support a much larger number of humans than foraging. Let’s not romanticize this order too much - it’s still pretty nasty. It’s just less likely that you will be randomly killed (and maybe eaten) by some male from another tribe for your wife and daughters. 

NWW refer to the second order as the “limited access order” because the violence specialists sit at the top of the social hierarchy. The violence specialists constantly threaten each other, but arrive at a balance of power where they co-exist, but only so long as they do not believe that they can take the other violence specialist’s people and stuff through the use of violence. Think petty kingdoms of medieval Europe, or the Five Families in the Godfather. It’s a tenuous balance, always at risk of collapsing into conquest.

In the limited access order, everyone in society pledges allegiance to one of the violence specialists in their community. Everything flows down from the violence specialist through a structure of patrimony. This is what NWW mean by “limited access order”. Rights are limited to the top of the hierarchy, and rights are based only on the power of your lord. NWW also refer to this as the “natural state” because it was and is the norm for human cultures. Countries like Russia, China, most of the Middle East (less Israel), and most other countries, even today, are natural states. They are operated as fiefdoms by violence specialists who keep the peace through threat of violence and the distribution of goods through patrimony. The exceptions, which have existed for only a little more than 200 years since the transition to the limited access order 12,000 years ago, are the Western liberal democracies. 

One of the problems for citizens of a natural state is that if for any reason their violence specialist loses his ability to fight, his people will be victims of the other violence specialists, possibly murdered or enslaved. The classic tale Beowulf is the story of the rise and fall of a great violence specialist operating in the natural state in the primitive kingdoms of Europe. It was written down in about 1000 CE, but the events it chronicled were supposed to have happened about 300 years before, probably in modern Sweden. At the beginning of the story, a small community is being plagued by a monster called Grendel. Their king (aka, violence specialist) was unable to prevent Grendel’s wanton violence, and thus chaos and fear reigned: 

All were endangered; young and old

Were hunted down by that dark death-shadow

Who lurked and swooped in the long nights

On the misty moors; nobody knows

where these reavers from hell roam on their errands. (p.13)

Then the hero Beowulf arrives, and to make a long story short, he rips off Grendel’s arm and shoulder. Beowulf has some other adventures, but the community is made safe and Beowulf becomes king. Eventually he dies fighting a dragon (the likely inspiration for Smaug). At the end of the story, we are told everyone is sad, but the passage that stands out to me for our purpose today is one of self-interest:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;

With hair bound up, she unburdened herself

Of her worst fears, a wild litany 

Of nightmare and ament: her nation invaded,

Enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,

Slavery and debasement. (p. 211)

What you can see expressed here is the knowledge that now that their violence specialist has been taken out, they won’t have any protection from violence, whether by other violence specialists or just predatory men. 

The emergence of the Open Access Order requires the centralized control of legitimate violence to a unitary state. The rights of individual citizens are not the result of their affiliation with a particular violence specialist, but as a result of citizenship. The violence specialists are subordinated to political control. In the United States, this is a central principle. The military is subordinate to the civilian political structure. Importantly, military members do not pledge allegiance to an individual, but to the Constitution. This is vitally different from the Natural State, where all political structures are personal, and violence specialists pledge loyalty to an apex violence specialist. Even in the Open Access Order, politicians face incentives to make political structures personal through the promise of patrimony, but the structures of the Open Access Order prevent that (when they are working properly). In Open Access Orders, patrimony is regarded as corruption; in Natural States, patrimony is the mechanism for keeping order. 

The Open Access Order warrior is a hero for the entirety of society. One does not gain legitimate fortune and power through violence in the Open Access Order. The Open Access Warrior is a servant of the whole, rather than an oppressor. Like in the Natural State, she and he protect the vulnerable, but unlike the Natural State, without extracting wealth. As the poem said of Beowulf after his death:

In days gone by,

He kept our coffers and our kingdom safe.

He worked for the people, but as well as that

He behaved like a hero. (p. 203)

We are much more safe and much more prosperous than we once were, in part thanks to our warriors. When one of them falls, our society does not collapse into internal strife as it does in the Natural State. We remember them on Memorial Day, even as another warrior steps into their place.

Violence will always be with us, and we will always need the protection of warriors. What we have seen since February of 2022 is that there are still Grendels “in dark death-shadow”, who swoop “in the long nights” and steal children and enslave the weak.  As enlightened as we have become, we still need the violence specialists to go out and meet the monsters. And when the warriors fall, we should sing for them.