The Darwinian Evolution of Russell Kirk's Permanent Things

In 2010, The Intercollegiate Review published my article on "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism."  I argued that while metaphysical conservatism views human social order as grounded in a transcendent realm of cosmic design, evolutionary conservatism is empiricist in viewing human social order as grounded in common human experience as shaped by human nature, human custom, and human judgment.  I explained how that conflict had arisen in the history of conservative thought beginning with Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, in which one could see the tension between Burke's metaphysical conservatism and his evolutionary conservatism.  I indicated what was at stake between those two positions, and I defended the evolutionary side of this dispute.  I concluded with a practical illustration of the moral implications of this debate as applied to the American moral controversy over slavery.

In some previous posts, I have defended my argument in that article against some critics.  But I now see that I was mistaken about one point.  I thought that Russell Kirk had adopted the metaphysical side of Burke's conservatism and ignored the evolutionary side that would support a Darwinian conservatism.  Now I see that Kirk's writings actually show the same tension between the metaphysical and the evolutionary that first arose in Burke's Reflections.  This thought came to me as I pondered the presentations at the Kirk Center conference on Kirk and Scruton.

KIRK AND THE PERMANENT THINGS

Kirk stated the metaphysical and religious version of conservatism in 1953 in The Conservative Mind.  The first canon of conservative thought, he declared, was "belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead."  Consequently, "politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature."  In later formulations of this first canon, Kirk spoke of the conservative belief in "a transcendent moral order."  In all of his formulations, he connected this principle to "Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence, a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn," and he spoke of Burke's view of history as "the unfolding of Design."  Opposed to such conservative thinking were "those scientific doctrines, Darwinism chief among them, which have done so much to undermine the first principles of conservative order" (Kirk 1985: 8-11; 1982: xv).  Here in the early Kirk, we see the common fear of many conservatives that Darwinian science denies a conservative order by denying the religious belief in a transcendent metaphysical order.

But then, in Enemies of the Permanent Things, first published in 1969, Kirk showed how enduring norms for human life, which he called "the permanent things," could be grounded empirically in human experience--human nature, human custom, and human judgment--without any necessary appeal to a metaphysical moral cosmology.  Previously, I had thought that Kirk understood the "permanent things" to be eternal things that therefore depended on a transcendent eternal order in which human nature was an unchanging eternal essence created by God.  Against this, I argued that an evolved human nature that is enduring but not eternal is enough to support an evolutionary conservatism rooted in an evolutionary moral anthropology of natural desires, customary traditions, and individual judgments.  I had not noticed that in the Enemies of the Permanent Things, Kirk had identified the permanent things as "enduring standards" set by an enduring human nature as the ground for "a law of nature."  The permanent things are "patterns or rules which recognize the enduring nature of certain moral and social qualities." Moreover, the norms vary for each species of life: "the norm for the wasp or the snake is not the norm for man" (Kirk 2016: 1, 3, 151).

That this allows for an evolutionary conservatism is particularly clear in one section of the Enemies of the Permanent Things with the title "The Doors of Normative Perception" (2016: 23-29).  The reader of this section should notice the crucial influence on Kirk of two authors C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man) and David Hume ("Of the Standard of Taste" and The Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding).  Kirk cites Hume three times in this short section.  This is remarkable because Kirk identifies Hume as the "most formidable of skeptics" (6), and therefore Kirk's reasoning here is compatible with a Humean skepticism that denies religious metaphysics and affirms an evolutionary conception of human nature and the world.  Similarly, in Lewis's Abolition of Man, Lewis is clear that his argument for a natural moral law should be persuasive with skeptics because it does not require any belief in the supernatural.

Kirk says there are "three doors of normative perception: revelation, custom or common sense, and the insights of the seer" (23).  But while Kirk himself "embraces the transcendent truth of revelation," he chooses not to appeal to revelation in this book because he addresses himself "to doubters, as well as to the converted."  Moreover, Kirk observes that revelation is not a reliable source of knowledge for most human beings because "direct revelation" has been "extremely rare."  Most of the time what is presented as "divine wisdom" has come through "very human prophets" or seers who have not had a direct revelation.  Apparently, Moses had a direct revelation when God spoke to him through the burning bush.  But Moses was the only one who heard the words.  When people who claim to have had a direct revelation try to express what God told them, most of what they say is "inexpressible in language, and almost unthinkable in thought" (24).  So revelation is a source for understanding the permanent things that is incomprehensible to skeptics or unbelievers.

Custom is a better source.  To understand custom, Kirk relies on Hume.  He paraphrases a passage from Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" (Hume 1985: 241):

In morals and taste, says Hume, we govern ourselves by custom--that is, by the habits of the human race.  The standards of morality are shown to us by study of the story of mankind, and the arbiters of those standards are men of strong sense and delicate sentiments, whose impressions force themselves upon the wills of their fellowmen (24).

He also quotes from Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume 1902: 5.1.36) about how custom is "the great guide of life."  Custom constitutes "an immemorial empiricism" (26).

But how did this "folk wisdom" embodied in custom come into being?  Kirk suggests:

The answer may be that at the beginnings of civil social order, some individuals--men whose names have perished--discovered the truths that we now call custom and common sense.  Hume's men of strong sense and delicate sentiment, or their primitive forerunners, presumably existed when man was becoming true man, and their insights were impressed upon their primitive fellows. . . . So it may be with the practices and beliefs which we call custom and common sense: originally these may have been the intuitions or the empirical conclusions of gifted individuals, who were emulated by the common man" (26-27).

Notice that Kirk suggests that human nature had to evolve from a primitive state "when man was becoming true man."  Notice also that customary norms arose as "empirical conclusions of gifted individuals."  Kirk goes on to explain that these are "empirical conclusions" about human nature.  "By definition, human nature is constant.  Because of that constancy, men of vision are able to describe the norms, the rules, for mankind" (29).

This suggests human evolution at three levels--human nature, human custom, and human judgment.  Human nature evolves from a prehuman condition.  Then human custom evolves as "gifted individuals" judge the norms or rules that best conform to that evolved human nature.  This three-leveled evolutionary analysis is even clearer in Lewis's Abolition of Man.

LEWIS AND THE TAO

Here I borrow some material from some previous posts.

Lewis sees the Tao as manifested in three levels of social order--human nature, human traditions, and human judgments. At the first level, the Tao is "Natural Law" (56, 95). "Nature" has many senses, and if we define it in opposition to "the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural" (81), then the Tao is not natural. But it is natural in the sense that it belongs to "the very nature of man," because it provides "a common human law of action" (31, 84). The Tao is "the Tao of Man," it is the "only known reality of conscience" that distinguishes human nature from the rest of nature (62, 90).

The nature of Lewis's natural law is not cosmic nature as a whole, but human nature in particular. Cosmic nature cannot provide values for human life, Lewis suggests, because "nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe" (50).

Although natural law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:

Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with (61).

At the second level of social order, the Tao corresponds to human cultural traditions--"the human tradition of value," "traditional values," "traditional morality," or "traditional humanity" (54-55, 76, 78, 85). In the Appendix to his book, Lewis provides "Illustrations of the Tao" that consist of short quotations from some ancient texts of moral teaching from Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, China, Scandinavia, and Anglo-Saxon England, and a few texts from early modern England. Lewis's Appendix shows great cultural variability in the moral traditions of human history. But it also shows recurrent themes that reflect how universal human nature constrains these moral traditions--as manifested in Lewis's eight categories of classification: the law of general beneficence, the law of special beneficence, duties to parents, elders, and ancestors, duties to children and posterity, the law of justice, the law of good faith and veracity, the law of mercy, and the law of magnanimity.

At the third level of social order, the Tao allows for individual judgments of value, but only within the broad constraints of human nature and human tradition. Lewis admits that traditional moralities show many contradictions and some absurdities, which invite criticism and improvement. Although the Tao does not permit criticisms and changes coming from outside the Tao--because there are no standards of value outside it--the Tao does permit development from within. So, for example, we can recognize that the Christian version of the Golden Rule--"Do as you would be done by"--is a real improvement over the Confucian version--"Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you"--because we can see that the new positive statement of the rule is an extension of the old negative statement (57-58). Individuals have authority to modify the Tao only insofar as their modifications are within the "spirit of the Tao" (59).

If you lay this alongside what Kirk says about "The Doors of Normative Perception," you'll see a coincidence of thought that shows Kirk was following the same line of reasoning.

THE DARWINIAN EVOLUTION OF THE PERMANENT THINGS

The three-leveled evolutionary analysis of norms presented by Kirk and Lewis corresponds to what I have argued for on this blog--and in various articles and books--the Darwinian evolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment.

Moral norms are rooted in the twenty natural desires of our genetically evolved human nature:  a complete life, parental care, sexual identity, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship, social status, justice as reciprocity, political rule, freedom from oppressive domination, courage in war, health, beauty, property, language and storytelling, practical reasoning, practical arts, aesthetic pleasure, religious transcendence, and intellectual understanding.  And if the good is the desirable, the best social order can be judged to be the one that secures the widest satisfaction of those natural desires.  When Kirk gives examples of norms--"a norm of charity; a norm of justice; a norm of freedom; a norm of duty; a norm of fortitude" (7)--they correspond to some of the natural desires.

The full expression of these moral norms has come through the human cultural evolution of moral tradition.  To understand this, we need an evolutionary science of cultural group selection.  This is what Kirk identifies as the cultural history of custom or tradition.

But then that cultural evolution ultimately depends on the evolution of human individuality because culture is driven by the agency of individuals who formulate the social norms for their cultural groups.  We need to understand the evolved personality and life history of those individuals who are agents of cultural change acting through coercion or persuasion.  Consider, for instance, how the cultural history of the United States was altered by the dominant individuals in the American Continental Congress that drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence, or those in the Constitutional Convention who drafted and promoted the Constitution of 1787.  What we need here is an agent-based evolutionary theory of how individual agents create, maintain, and modify group functional culture.  We need to understand how, as Kirk says, culture is "the creation of a talented little minority, over centuries" (51).

We need what I have called "Darwinian liberal education" that would develop an interdisciplinary science that would explain the evolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment as part of a comprehensive science of nature as a whole.

That would give us a science of the permanent things.

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry.  2010. "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism." The Intercollegiate Review 45: 22-32.

Hume, David.  1985.  Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary.  Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Hume, David. 1902. Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kirk, Russell, ed. 1982. The Portable Conservative Reader. New York: Penguin Books.

Kirk, Russell.  1985.  The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot. Seventh Revised Edition. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.

Kirk, Russell.  2016. Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormality in Literature and Politics. With an Introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd. Providence, RI: Cluny Media.

Lewis, C. S.  1947. The Abolition of Man.  New York: Macmillan.

Conservatives (Still) Need Charles Darwin. Responding to the Kirk Center's Conference on Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton

Conservatives need Charles Darwin.

That was the first sentence of my article in the November 2000 issue of First Things.  I argued that conservatives need Darwin because a Darwinian science of human nature supports conservatives in their realist view of human imperfectability and their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in nature, custom, and prudence.  In his response to my article in the same issue of the journal, Michael Behe (a biologist known for his advocacy of "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian science) complained: "I'm sorry to be blunt, but the notion that Darwinism supports conservatism is absurd."

I elaborated my argument in my book Darwinian Conservatism (2005), and in a second edition of that book with eight critical responses and my replies (2009).  In the fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review, I wrote about "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism."  I have defended that article against three critics in a post (here).

Over this weekend, I have been thinking about this debate as I pondered the presentations at a conference in Grand Rapids sponsored by the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal: "Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism in the Tradition of Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton."  Although neither Kirk nor Scruton ever moved toward anything like Darwinian conservatism, I see nothing in their defense of traditionalist conservatism that would refute my argument for Darwinian conservatism.  Previously, I have written about some of my points of agreement and disagreement with Kirk and Scruton.  Here I will respond to some of the presentations at the conference.

THE METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM OF CHRISTIAN PLATONISM

James Matthew Wilson (University of St. Thomas, Houston) spoke about "The Conservative Defense of Christian Platonism" in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and in the writings of Roger Scruton.  He saw both Burke and Scruton as trying to preserve the Christian-Platonic tradition of Christendom that had dominated Western Civilization until it was overturned by the French Revolution.  While praising both of them for what they tried to do, Wilson thought their undertakings were weakened by their drawing on modern thought that subverted Christian-Platonist thought.  Burke appealed to the sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment when he invoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the foundation of moral experience.  Scruton appealed to Immanuel Kant's Idealism as teaching that while the Ideas of Reason, God, Freedom, and Immortality cannot be proven true by pure reason, we must act "as if" they were true as a necessity of practical reason: these are conscious fictions of the mind.

I believe that Wilson was drawing material from his book The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017).  But since I have not read that book, I might not have rightly understood his presentation.

As I have argued in some previous posts, Plato's moral cosmology--particularly in the Republic, the Timaeus, the Parmenides, and The Laws--is so implausible as to be ridiculous, and it's not even clear that Plato or Plato's Socrates meant us to take this seriously.  I have suggested that while Plato might have thought that a teleological cosmology of divinely intelligent design could be a salutary belief for many people, it could not be a rational account of the cosmos for natural philosophers.  Aristotle suggested this in observing that such cosmic myths were little more than traditional folk tales (On the Heavens, 270b1-25, 283b26-284b5, 291b24-292a20, 298b6-299a2; The Movement of Animals, 699b12-31; Metaphysics, 1050b20-25, 1074b1-14).  But perhaps Wilson in his book has answered my objections.

Although much of Burke's Reflections seems to defend a Christian Platonic metaphysics, Wilson observed, this is in tension with Burke's empiricist ethics of moral sentiments that shows the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment.  As I indicated in my Intercollegiate Review article, I agree with this reading of Burke's Reflections, because I see there a tension between the metaphysical conservatism of Burke's moral cosmology of eternal right and wrong and the evolutionary conservatism of his moral anthropology of the moral sentiments.

But unlike Wilson, I don't see Burke's sentimentalism as weakening his argument for Christian Platonism.  In fact, Burke wrote his Reflections as a refutation of Reverend Richard Price's Christian Platonism.  Price contended that moral knowledge was a purely rational activity of the mind in grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God's mind, and that the French Revolution was the historical fulfillment of those eternal truths.  Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke rightly appealed to the natural moral sentiments as the empirical foundation of moral experience.  Later, Darwin adopted this moral sentimentalism as part of his evolutionary account of morality, which was then elaborated by evolutionary psychologists like Edward Westermarck and Darwinian conservatives like James Q. Wilson.

By contrast, James Matthew Wilson scorned moral sentimentalism as mere emotionalism, in which morality is reduced to emotive expressions without any rational apprehension of the human good.  But this ignores the fact that the moral sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment--particularly in the work of Hume and Smith--was a reflective sentimentalism.   As I have indicated, the Scottish sentimentalists did not argue for enslaving reason to emotion, because they actually argued for moral autonomy as the activity of the whole human mind (reason and emotion), in which the mind can reflect rationally on itself and thus refine its emotional responses to the world by judging those responses as reasonable or unreasonable.  We can reflect on whether our moral sentiments are contradictory or consistent, whether they rest on true or false judgments about the world, and whether they promote or impede our happiness. 

SCRUTON'S CONSERVATISM OF RELIGIOUS ATHEISM

Wilson also criticized Scruton for embracing Kant's Idealism because this modern Idealism contradicts the premodern Idealism of Christian Platonism.  While Kant's ideas are fictional creations of the human mind that do not correspond to any objective reality in the world, Plato's ideas are meant to be intellectual perceptions of what exists in objective reality independently of the human mind.  

As I said earlier, I am not persuaded that Plato believed his Eternal Ideas to be anything more than a noble lie.  After all, in Plato's Parmenides, Plato has Parmenides refute Socrates' theory of the Forms, and Socrates cannot defend his theory against the criticisms; and in fact, nowhere in the Platonic dialogues does anyone satisfactorily reply to the criticisms.

I do agree with Wilson, however, that Scruton does not really affirm the objective truth of Christian Platonist metaphysics, because for Scruton this religious metaphysics is only a fictional creation of the human mind to satisfy a human longing for the divine.  As I have said previously, Scruton makes this clear in his praise for the atheistic religiosity of Richard Wagner's operatic art in the Ring cycle.  Scruton thinks that Wagner saw the "bleak truth" that "we are here on earth without an explanation and that if there is meaning, we ourselves must supply it." "The core religious phenomenon, Wagner believed, is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. . . . religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols.  Religion conceals its legacy of truth within a doctrine.  Art reveals that truth through symbols."  In other words, "Wagner sees his art as expressing and completing our religious emotions.  Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics."  Religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology.  Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning.  And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption. 

The incoherent self-deception of such atheistic religiosity is ultimately self-defeating.  How can a fake religiosity satisfy our religious longings when we know it's fake?

Darwinian conservatism offers a better account of the religious longings of the human animal.  As I have argued previously, Darwin was a zetetic philosophic scientist who recognized that the natural desire for religious transcendence was part of evolved human nature; and while Darwin himself took the side of reason in the reason/revelation debate, he knew that reason could not refute revelation.  He knew that the "mystery of the origin of all things is insoluble by us."  In the search for ultimate explanation, the philosophic scientist must assume that nature is the uncaused cause of everything; and yet he cannot refute the claim of the religious believer that God is the uncaused cause of nature.  Darwin conceded this in accepting the principle of dual causality, which recognizes natural evolution as the "secondary cause" of everything, while admitting that behind or above nature there might be a Divine First Cause.  Thus, Darwin saw that he had to remain open to the possibility of theistic evolution:  God does not have to miraculously intervene in nature to specially create every species, because God can choose to act through natural evolution to carry out his creative plan.

This supports a conservative view of religion.  The Darwinian scientist respects religious belief in revelation as satisfying the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence.  But the Darwinian scientist must also insist that since neither side in the reason/revelation debate can refute the other, and since the disagreement among believers in their interpretations of revelation make it impossible to identify the one true religion, the best regime must secure the freedom of thought and speech that promotes the reason/revelation debate and respects religious pluralism.

To be continued . . .

The War with Iran and the Geopolitical Struggle between Liberalism and Illiberalism that Began 45 Years Ago (or 5,000 years ago?)

The bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities by Israel and the U.S. raises at least two questions.  Will the bombing stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb?  And what is really going on in this war?

My answer to the first question is No.

My answer to the second question is that this war is part of a bigger global struggle between liberalism (or democracy) and illiberalism (or autocracy) that is traceable to some crucial events in 1979, although its deeper historical roots go back as far as 3,000 BC with the emergence of the first states in the Ancient Near East.

BOMBING WILL NOT STOP IRAN'S NUCLEAR BOMB PROGRAM

After dropping some American bunker-busting bombs on some of Iran's nuclear facilities buried inside some mountains, Trump announced that Iran's nuclear program was "completely and totally obliterated."  That was a lie.  Only one day after Trump said that, some senior officials began to admit that Iran probably still has a stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium that can be turned into operative weapons in a few months or more.

At the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, Henry Sokolski and Greg Jones have explained (here) why this is so.  First, bombing Iran's centrifuge enrichment plants can only temporarily shut them down.  Most of the centrifuges will be undamaged, and the damaged ones can be repaired.  Within four to six months, the plants can be close to full production.

Second, the 440 kgs. of 60 percent enriched uranium that Iran already has is enough to build 12 bombs, and this is stored in metal containers that are very hard to destroy by bombing.  Iran could produce sufficient 90% enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon every two and one half weeks by using the 60% enriched uranium as feed.  Moreover, this has probably been moved by trucks to remote locations before the bombing started.  We also know that Iran has all of the nonnuclear components for building a nuclear weapon.

There are only two ways to stop this from happening.  The military way would be for Israel and the U.S. to invade and conquer Iran with ground forces.  That's unlikely to happen.  The diplomatic way would be to persuade Iran to give up its stockpile of enriched uranium and eliminate its centrifuge enrichment program.  It seems doubtful that Iran would do that.

IRAN IN THE GLOBAL STRUGGLE BETWEEN LIBERALISM AND ILLIBERALISM

The war with Iran is part of a geopolitical conflict that stretches beyond the Middle East and that has deep roots in world history.

Thomas Friedman has written a series of articles (Friedman 2024, 2025) that explains this as a struggle between two networks of nations that arose from four events in the Middle East in 1979.  What Friedman calls the "Resistance Network" arose from two events.  The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran and established the Iranian Islamic Republic that would propagate its theocratic ideology across the Muslim world.  Also in 1979, the Grand Mosque in Mecca was taken over by jihadists who wanted to overthrow the Saudi ruling family because they had promoted the liberal secularization of Saudi society.  Although the Saudi government defeated the jihadists and reclaimed the Grand Mosque after two weeks of fighting, Saudi king Khalid bin Abdulazziz began to support Islamic fundamentalism over the next ten years.  He gave more power to the ulama and the religious police, and he allowed a stricter enforcement of sharia.  Islamic fundamentalism spread outward from Iran and Saudi Arabia and became an Islamic movement of resistance to liberal modernity and globalization as identified with America and Israel.

But in 1979, there were also two events that prompted the formation of a Middle Eastern "Inclusion Network."  The signing of the Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt fostered for the first time Arab-Israeli collaboration.  In that same year, the Jebel Ali Port in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates opened and became one of the largest ports in the world and the largest man-made port.  Dubai then emerged as a global hub connecting the Arab East with the rest of the world and thus promoted the globalization of the Arab world.

In recent years, the Inclusion Network has expanded through Israel's normalization of relations with Arab nations such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain through the Abraham Accords of 2020.  Israel has also tried to normalize its relationship with Saudi Arabia, which was helped when Mohammed bin Salman was appointed Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 2017.  Although Mohammed has been politically authoritarian, he has been a liberal reformer economically, socially, and religiously.  He has reduced the influence of the Wahhabi fundamentalists by restricting the powers of the religious police.  He has also opened Saudia Arabia to global trade and investment.

Friedman has explained: "On one side is the Resistance Network, dedicated to preserving closed, autocratic systems where the past buries the future.  On the other side is the Inclusion Network, trying to forge more open, connected, pluralizing systems where the future buries the past."

For me, a better terminology would be to identify the Inclusion Network with liberalism (or democracy) and the Resistance Network with illiberalism (or autocracy).  It's the liberalism of open and pluralistic societies against the illiberalism of closed and repressive societies.  It's the difference between societies that (mostly) secure natural human rights and those that deny those rights.  It's the difference between liberty and tyranny.

Here's one anecdotal illustration.  Persuasion has recently published "A Letter from an Iranian."  The author is a man whose family is in Tehran.  Once the bombing started, he called his aunt.  He was surprised that she seemed calm.  He asked her how she could be so calm.  Wasn't she afraid that she or her children would be hurt?  She answered: "We don't want war.  But tonight, knowing that the men who've held us hostage for forty-six years, who've ransacked our country, raped and killed our daughters and executed our men for asking for their basic human rights, are finally getting what they deserve--that brings me peace."

In recent years, this conflict between liberalism and illiberalism has been manifested in wars in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe.  In the Middle East, Iran has acted through its proxies (Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen) to make war on Israel.  In Eastern Europe, Putin's Russia invaded the Ukraine to keep it from joining the European Union and thus becoming part of the Western liberal world.  Russia and Iran are close allies because of their common fight against the liberalism of America, Europe, and Israel.

Recognizing this makes clear the strange incoherence of Trump's foreign policy.  Trump refuses to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, but he supports Israel in its war with Iran, even though Ukraine and Israel are fighting for the same liberal cause against the illiberalism of Russia and Iran.  As Friedman argues, it's all the same war.

One way to identify the opponents in this global war is to consider how they rank on the "Human Freedom Index".  Israel and Ukraine are nearer the top.  Iran and Russia are nearer the bottom.

Ultimately, this is a conflict that began not in 1979 but as early as 3000 BC in Sumer and Mesopotamia.  Originally, human beings lived in hunter-gatherer bands where all adults were equally free and autonomous.  Their earliest forms of government were council democracies based on popular consent and individual liberty.  But with the emergence of monarchic states ruled by kings and priests claiming divine right, autocracy emerged as the alternative to democracy.  For most of subsequent world history, human beings have been torn between these two poles of government and social order.

Then, with the defeat of autocracy in the Second World War and in the collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared that human beings had reached what Francis Fukuyama called "the end of history", so that liberal democracy had triumphed over illiberal autocracy.

But even so, Fukuyama recognized that the Nietzschean nihilist scorn for the liberal open society could prompt movements towards new forms of illiberal closed society--like Islamic theocracy.  Now, we see in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere in the world, that the struggle between liberalism and illiberalism continues.

REFERENCES

Friedman, Thomas. 2024. "A Titanic Geopolitical Struggle Is Underway." The New York Times. January 25.

Friedman, Thomas. 2025. "How the Attacks on Iran Are Part of a Much Bigger Global Struggle." The New York Times. June 22.

Does the Skull of the "Dragon Man" Denisovan Support the Human Self-Domestication Hypothesis?

 

A Video on the "Dragon Man" Skull That Has Been Recently Identified by DNA Evidence as Denisovan

Four years ago, I wrote about the "Dragon Man" fossil skull found in the Dragon River region of northeastern China.  This week new studies of this skull have been published in Cell (Qiaomei Fu et al. 2025) and Science (Qiaomei Fu et al. 2025b) showing that the DNA in this fossilized skull identifies it as one of the Denisovans, a group of humans that split from the Neanderthal line and survived for hundreds of thousands of years before going extinct.  Carl Zimmer (2025) has written a good article on this research.

Denisovan fossils were first discovered in 2010 in the Denisova Cave in Siberia.  Since then, other Denisovan fossils have been found in a high-altitude cave in Tibet, in a cave in Laos, and in both the highlands and lowlands of New Guinea, which indicates that these people were flexible enough to live in a wide range of environments.

Billions of people today carry Denisovan DNA, inherited from human interbreeding with Denisovans hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Until now the Denisovan fossils have been a few small fragments--half a broken jaw, a finger bone, a small fragment of a skull, three loose teeth, and four chips of bone.  But now the identification of the Dragon Man skull as Denisovan allows us for the first time to see what a Denisovan face looked like.

The Dragon Man skull's cranial capacity is around 1,420 cubic centimeters, which puts it within the range of modern humans.  But there are some differences in the fossil skulls that point to ways that Homo sapiens surpasses other Homo species.  One of the most evident differences is in the brow ridges.  Notice how far the brow ridge of Dragon Man projects from the face, much farther out than for a typical Homo sapiens skull.  A similar difference can be seen even within the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.  The older human skulls show a more prominent brow ridge than the younger human skulls.  Men tend to have thicker, more overhanging brow ridges than women, which is caused by men having higher levels of testosterone than women during their development, particularly during puberty.  So we can say that the skulls of Homo sapiens are more "feminized" than the skulls of other Homo species like Dragon Man, just as younger human skulls are more "feminized" than older human skulls.  You can see this craniofacial feminization in these human skulls:

On the left, you see a 110,000 to 90,000 years-old human male in lateral (top) and frontal (bottom) views, compared to that of a recent African male (right).  The older skull on the left shows the large brow ridges and long and narrow, masculinized face characteristic of Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic-associated humans, as compared to the more feminized face of recent humans.

As I indicated in my previous post, this can be seen as evidence for the Human Self-Domestication Hypothesis: just as some wild animals have evolved through domestication to become tame animals living around human beings, so have human beings domesticated themselves in that ancient human ancestors were selected for being less aggressive and more socially tolerant individuals; and thus human beings have evolved by self-domestication through what Brian Hare has called "survival of the friendliest."  Some of the evidence for this is found in our anatomy, particularly in our faces.

The neurotransmitters and hormones that mediate aggressiveness have effects on skeletal development, particularly in craniofacial growth and development.  So if there has been evolutionary selection for social tolerance--for survival of the friendliest--we can expect to see changes in skeletal morphology, so that in human evolution younger human skulls are more "feminized" than older human skulls.

This could explain why Homo sapiens has survived to the present, while the other Homo species--like the Denisovans--have gone extinct.  Through self-domestication, human ancestors were selected for being less aggressive and more socially cooperative individuals.  Because of this increase in social tolerance, people in densely populated groups could cooperate with one another rather than fall into conflict.  This would allow for increasing human populations with dense social networks, so that more people interacting with one another promoted the generation, retention, and diffusion of cultural innovations, which would stimulate complex symbolic and cultural behavior as indicated by language, art, ornamentation, hunting and fishing technology, music, and long-distance trade.

The Denisovans like Dragon Man failed to achieve this, and consequently they went extinct except for some of their DNA that survives today in Homo sapiens because of ancient interbreeding between the different hominid species.

REFERENCES

Qiaomei Fu et al. 2025a. "Denisovan Mitochondrial DNA from Dental Calculus of the >146,000-year-old Harbin Cranium." Cell 188: 1-8.

Qiaomei Fu et al.  2025b. "The Proteome of the Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin Individual." Science (June 19).

Zimmer, Carl. 2025. "Mysterious Ancient Humans Now Have a Face." The New York Times (June 18).

"No Kings!" Is the Waa-Bark of America's Chimpanzee Politics of Resistance to Trump

Last Saturday, we saw a massive display of chimpanzee political rhetoric.  Subordinate chimpanzees utter pant-grunts to signal their fear and submission before a dominant chimp.  But subordinates can also utter waa-barks to signal their defiance of a dominant chimp.  If enough subordinates scream their waa-barks, and if the dominant chimp does not have a sufficiently strong coalition of supporters, he can be overthrown.  The five million people in the "No Kings" protests against Trump were shouting their waa-barks.  The people at Trump's military parade celebrating his birthday were pant-grunting their submission to Trump.  But reporters noticed that the number of spectators at the parade was small, and many of them were looking at their phones to see images of the massive crowds at the "No Kings" protests.  The waa-barks were louder than the pant-grunts.

Although chimpanzees do not have language, they do communicate with one another through sounds, postures, and facial expressions that convey information.  Often that information is about social rank.  An alpha male might engage in a loud display of intimidation that asserts his dominance over the group.  Other chimps might respond to this by signaling their submission to him.  Or they might respond with signs of resistance and defiance.  And some might even signal that they want to overthrow him.  Thus chimps engage in political rhetoric, because they try to persuade one another as to how their social order should be organized.  

We could also identify this chimpanzee political rhetoric as Lockean insofar as subordinate chimpanzees can protest against despotic dominance by the alpha male and thus limit his power, which moves towards the egalitarian social arrangement seen in human hunter-gatherer bands with an egalitarian style of hierarchy in which the leader is only primus inter pares ("first among equals").  This is what Locke saw in the state of nature in which all men are by nature equally free.  Not that all are absolutely equal, because some will have higher status than others, and some will become leaders of their social groups.  But that all adults have the natural right to be free from being unduly subordinated to anyone else without their consent, and that they have the natural right to punish those who threaten their life, liberty, or property (Second Treatise, pars. 4-10, 54, 94, 105).  

To explain the Darwinian evolution of this human state of nature, we should expect to find precursors of this human egalitarianism in our pre-human primate ancestors.  And if we assume that the common ancestor of humans and the African great apes was similar to a chimpanzee, then we might expect to see evolutionary preadaptations for an egalitarian style of dominance in chimpanzee groups.  In fact, as Christopher Boehm has argued, we can see in chimpanzees similarities to the ambivalent political nature of human hunter-gatherers that shows a tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance (Boehm 1993, 1999).  

Dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a group.  The political life of primates is organized around dominance hierarchies in which the old tend to have dominance over the young and males tend to have dominance over females, although females can also have a dominance hierarchy, and sometimes coalitions of females can resist male dominance.  This is a political universal for chimpanzees, both in the wild and in captivity; and for human beings throughout history.  Winning or losing dominance is determined by patterns of coalition formation that depend on shifting circumstances and individual decisions.

Deference is the natural propensity of individuals to submit to those who are dominant.  As political universals, deference is the correlative of dominance.  Among the various species of political primates, there are distinctive behavioral cues, both verbal and nonverbal, by which subordinates defer to dominants.

Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of individuals to resist being dominated.  Among some primates, subordinate individuals can resist excessive dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy.

The variation in this behavior creates differences in dominance style across species.  As Frans de Waal has observed, rhesus monkeys show a "despotic dominance style" in which subordinates cannot challenge dominants; but chimpanzees show an "egalitarian dominance style" in which subordinates can restrain dominants (de Waal 1996).  Dominant chimpanzees are expected to mediate conflicts within the group and to lead the group in conflicts with other groups.  Dominant chimpanzees can be challenged or even deposed if they do not properly carry out their conflict-mediation role.

Like chimpanzee politics, human politics shows a dominance hierarchy that can be egalitarian in style, based on the principle that leaders are only first among equals.  This egalitarianism is most evident among human hunter-gatherers who use various kinds of sanctions (from ridicule and disobedience to ostracism and execution) to punish leaders who become too despotic in their dominance.  This resistance to dominance was probably a crucial part of human evolutionary history in the Paleolithic era (from about two million years ago to 10,000 years ago).  But with the establishment of large bureaucratic states based on agricultural production, which began more than 5,000 years ago, many states have been more despotic than egalitarian.  The emergence and spread of Lockean liberal democracies over the past three centuries is in some ways a return to the egalitarian dominance of the foraging way of life in which subordinates limit the power of dominants.

To the old question in political philosophy as to whether human beings are naturally hierarchical or naturally egalitarian, the answer from biopolitical science is that human beings are both.  Niccolo Machiavelli was right to see that human political nature is torn by the tension between the propensity of the few to dominance and the propensity of the many to submit to dominance while also resisting oppressive dominance.  The history of political practice and political thought turns on this natural ambivalence interacting over time with particular political circumstances and decisions.

As an illustration of this political ambivalence among chimpanzees, here is Jane Goodall's description of an incident she observed in July of 1964 in Gombe:

"Mike, the new alpha, rests in the shade of a tree.  A sudden crashing in the undergrowth heralds the arrival of Goliath, recently deposed from the top position.  Mike does not move as Goliath charges flat out toward him, dragging a huge branch.  At the last moment Goliath turns aside, swings into a nearby tree, and sits motionless.  Only now does Mike begin to display, swaying the vegetation, hurling a few rocks, then climbing into Goliath's tree and swaying branches there.  When he stops, Goliath displays again, leaping ever closer to his adversary until Mike responds.  For a few moments both are wildly swaying foliage within 2 meters of each other; but there is no fight.  They swing to the ground and charge off through the undergrowth, running parallel, then sit staring at each other.  Goliath stands upright and rocks a sapling; Mike hurtles past, throwing a large rock.  For the next twenty-three minutes the performance continues, and during the whole episode the only physical contact between them is when one is hit by the end of a bough swayed by the other.  Finally, after a three-minute pause, Goliath moves rapidly toward Mike, crouches beside him with loud, submissive pant-grunts, and begins to groom him vigorously.  For half a minute, Mike ignores him, then turns and grooms his vanquished rival with equal intensity.  For more than an hour, they groom until both are relaxed and peaceful" (Goodall 1986, 409).

Notice the ambivalent political rhetoric in this incident.  The male dominance hierarchy is determined by the directionality of displays and pant-grunting among the adult males.  Goodall has kept a quantitative record of this for many years so that she can track the ever-changing history of the dominance hierarchy. If an alpha male is secure in his dominance, he displays towards the others in the group, and he receives pant-grunts from the others; but he never pant-grunts toward any of them.  When Goliath displays towards Mike, Goliath is challenging him, attempting to take the alpha position.  Both are feeling aggressive and fearful at the same time.  Each is trying to bluff down the other.  But while Goliath wants dominance, his fear of Mike finally drives him to signal his submission through pant-grunting; and Mike accepts his submission by reconciling with him.

Displays are more common than physical attacks, because chimps would rather avoid the danger of serious physical injuries that come from attacks.  Charging displays are threats that serve to maintain or challenge the existing order of dominance.  But reversals in rank among the males are usually the result of physical fights.  And while size and strength are important for success in displays and fights, psychological traits--such as intelligence, ingenuity, boldness, persistence, and shrewdness in forming coalitions--are crucial for success.  Mike was actually one of the smaller adult males when he overthrew Goliath, but he figured out how to use empty kerosene cans in his noisy charging displays to shock the other males and throw them into confusion until they submitted to him.  As I indicated in a previous post, Boehm and Goodall have compared Donald Trump's bombastic rhetoric to Mike's displays.

The vocal rhetoric of chimpanzees is complex.  Goodall and other primatologists have identified at least 32 distinct calls that convey particular emotions or feelings (Goodall 1986, 127; Arcadi 2018, 116-23).  One of them is the pant-grunt that Goliath uttered to signal a feeling of social apprehension and submission.  Another is the waa-bark that signals anger and defiance.  Dominant individuals can use waas as a warning to subordinates.  But from his careful study of chimp videotaped vocalizations, Boehm has concluded that most waas are used by subordinates to express their defiance of dominants (Boehm 1999, 164-69).

Boehm has seen this illustrated by what de Waal reports in his studies of the chimps in the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Georgia.  When new adult males were introduced into the community, the Yerkes females acted as a power coalition that rejected males seeking the alpha male position.  Finally, they accepted Jimoh as the alpha male.  But when he acted as a bully, the females punished him.  

For example, one day Jimoh saw that Socko, an adolescent male, was mating with one of Jomoh's favorite females.  Jimoh chased Socko around the enclosure and refused to stop.  Socko was screaming and defecating in fear.

Several females nearby began to waa bark.  They looked around to see the reaction of others.  When others began to join in the waa barking, the intensity of their protests became deafening.  Finally, Jimoh got the message.  He broke off his attack to avoid any further attacks from the females.  It was as though the chimps were taking a vote, and Jimoh had lost the vote.  If Jimoh had not stopped his attack, he might have been overthrown and even killed.

Here are the evolved primate roots of Lockean political rhetoric, in which we see the political ambivalence in the tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.

Last Saturday, we saw a great debate between the deference to Trump at his military parade and the counter-dominance of resistance to Trump at the "No Kings" protests.

Steven Cheung, the communications director for Trump, has said: "The so-called No Kings protests have been a complete and utter failure with minuscule attendance."  Of course, that is what he has to say--he has to tell those of us who attended one of the protests that we must not believe what we saw with our own eyes.

Like I say, that's chimpanzee politics.

(Some of the material in this post comes from a previous post.)

REFERENCES

Arcadi, Adam. 2018. Wild Chimpanzees: Social Behavior of an Endangered Species. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 1993. "Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy." Current Anthropology 34:227-254.

Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goodall, Jane. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

de Waal, Frans. 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

June 14, 2025: The Day Donald Trump Lost the Consent of the People

 As I have thought more about the "No Kings" protests on June 14, and what I saw in the Grand Rapids protest, the more I am inclined to think that was a turning point for the resistance to Trump's dictatorship.

As many as five million Americans participated in the "No Kings" protests across America in over 1,500 communities.  This was possibly the single biggest mass protest in American history.  At the same time, the military parade for Trump's birthday in Washington was a pathetic flop.  If you don't think so, just Google the images of the "No Trumps" protests and the military parade.  Look at Trump and Melania.  Do they look enthusiastic about the parade?  Decide for yourself.  Look at the images of people scattered over the grass and the stands.  Does that look like a big turnout for Trump?  Why were there no Trump supporters at the Grand Rapids "No Kings" demonstrations--or at other "No Kings" gatherings as far as I can tell?

Why didn't my wife and I see Trump supporters at the Grand Rapids rally?  Were they all in Washington for the military parade?  Well, apparently not.  Because the parade was not well attended.

Now, I understand that most of us might assume that overturning a monarchic dictator like Trump might require that a great majority of people would have to rebel against his rule.  But as Chenoweth has indicated, as few as 3.5 percent of the people actively involved in a resistance movement might be enough  to overturn a dictatorial regime.

Most human beings are passively deferential to whatever regime rules over them.  A smaller group are actively supportive of the regime--like Trump's fervent supporters.  But that leaves an active third or so of the people who might actively resist--by protesting--like the "No Kings" protesters.

Donald Trump is aware of that.  That's why he's so visibly disturbed by the fact that his people did not turn out on June 14--either to  support his military parade or to harass the "No Kings" protests.

Popular Lockeans at the "No Kings" Protests Against Trump

 

On February 19, 2025, this picture was posted on the official White House "X" account.  Trump had posted: "CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD.  Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED.  LONG LIVE THE KING!"

My wife and I participated in the "No Kings" protest in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  This was one of over 2,000 protest gatherings across the United States attracting millions of participants.  We were surprised by the size of the crowd.  There appeared to be something over 20,000 people, which is about ten percent of the population of the city of Grand Rapids.  The first rally was in the park on the Grand River in front of the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum.  When we arrived, the park was so packed with people that it was impossible for us to get in, which was also true for thousands of other people milling around the area.

We were also surprised that there were no police anywhere, as if the Grand Rapids police had decided that there was no reason to expect any disruptions from the protest crowds.  Moreover, there were no "Proud Boys" or "Michigan militia" types carrying guns who might have caused trouble.  Later in the afternoon, we heard about the political assassination in Minnesota that reportedly caused some of the "No Kings" protests in Minnesota to be cancelled.

These protests were scheduled for June 14 to counter Trump's military parade in Washington to celebrate his birthday and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army.  I watched the parade on CSPAN.  The CSPAN cameras showed remarkably small crowds in the bleachers and on the grass.  Of course, the White House claimed that over 250,000 people attended.  But if that were true, the Mall would have been completely covered with people, which was not the case.

To me, Trump's military parade was really dull and lifeless.  Many of the spectators at the parade showed the same reaction.  Here's a picture of some of them:

The "No Kings" protests raise at least two kinds of questions.  First, what motivates millions of people to turn out for these mass protests?  What do they expect to achieve?  And how likely are they to succeed?  

Secondly, what's wrong with monarchy?  Why do most Americans--and perhaps most people around the world today--assume that monarchy is bad?  Should we take seriously the argument of some intellectuals supporting Trump (such as Curtis Yarvin) that monarchy is a better form of government than democracy, and therefore Americans should be happy to have Donald Trump as their king?

NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE AS LOCKEAN NATURAL PUNISHMENT OF DICTATORS

The people participating in these mass protests can be identified as "popular Lockeans."  I have written about that term as used by historian T. H. Breen to describe the ordinary Americans who supported the American Revolution in acting according to the principles of John Locke even though most of them had never read Locke.  In the state of nature, Locke thought, everyone has the "executive power of the law of nature," which is the natural right to punish those who violate the law of nature; and this can be expressed in both violent and nonviolent resistance to tyranny.  The American Revolution began with American nonviolent resistance from 1761 to 1775, followed by the violent resistance in the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783.  June 14, 1775 was the day that George Washington was formally appointed Commander of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress.  In July of that year, the "Appeal to Heaven" Flag was adopted as a battle flag for the American Army, which explicitly invoked Locke's term for revolutionary violence.

Erica Chenoweth and her colleagues see the "No Kings" protests as part of the growing nonviolent resistance to Trump.  As indicated in some previous posts, Chenoweth has compiled an impressive data set (from 1900 to the present) for violent and nonviolent resistance movements that shows that every campaign of nonviolent protest that achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population was successful.  As indicated on the "No Kings" website, the organizers are inspired by the "3.5 principle"--believing that mobilizing only a small proportion of the people in mass protests can overturn a dictatorial ruler.

Over the past 40 years, scholars like Chenoweth and Gene Sharp have developed practical rules for organizing successful nonviolent resistance movements.  One of the most important features of this is avoiding violence by having well-trained "marshals" at every protest whose job is to manage the crowd to suppress any disturbance that might become violent.  We saw those marshals at work at the Grand Rapids protest.

The political theory of nonviolent resistance is Lockean in being founded on the fundamental principle that all governmental authority depends on the consent of the governed, and therefore governments fall when the people withdraw their consent through nonviolent or violent resistance.

As Chenoweth has indicated, protest movements succeed when they gain momentum.  And momentum can be measured through a simple law of physics:  momentum equals mass times velocity (p = mv).  The momentum of dissent is a product of participation (mass) and the number of protest events in a week (velocity).  So as the number of participants in the "No Kings" movement increases, and as the number of protests per week increase, the movement gains momentum, and thus becomes more successful.

The test will come when law enforcement and military people are ordered to shoot the protestors.  Will they obey their orders?  If they disobey, then the protestors have won.  Even if they obey, this will provoke a moral revulsion in the country that will draw more people into the protests.

Another test will come in the mid-term elections in November of 2026.  If opponents of Trump take control of the two Houses of Congress, then the Congress can impeach him.  If Trump's Republicans cancel the elections, then the popular movement to overturn Trump's rule becomes stronger.

THE RISE AND DECLINE OF MONARCHY

But why "No Kings"?  Why are so many Americans not persuaded by Yarvin's argument that Robert Filmer's defense of divine-right monarchy was superior to Locke's theory of government by popular consent?

As I have indicated in previous posts, monarchy was the most common form of government for over 5,000 years, but then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies began to surpass the number of monarchies.  There are two possible reasons for this.  First, monarchy has always depended on perceiving society as a rigid hierarchy in the chain of command, in which everyone knew his place.  At the top was a ruling elite--the monarch and one or two percent of the people who were nobles and priests.  At the bottom, about 80-90% of the population were peasants.  One possible answer as to why this premodern conception of natural and divine hierarchy has been undermined in modern culture is that modernity has adopted the Lockean evolutionary symbolic niche construction of the bourgeois culture of equal liberty.  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . ."

Consequently, as I have written previously, the few monarchic governments that survive today--like the British monarchy of King Charles III--are not real monarchies because the king is only a ceremonial head of state without any absolute power.

A second reason for the decline of monarchy is that the development of mass communications has made monarchy unnecessary.  In the past, democratic or republican forms of government were possible only in small societies where the people or their representatives could meet all together at one public assembly--Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic, for example.  Larger societies were so disconnected that they needed monarchy as a focal point to which everyone could look as the central authority.  But then with the growth of communications technology--the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and finally the internet--large societies have become so highly mobilized and interconnected that there is less need for a monarch as a focal point for authority.  

The internet has made it easy for popular mass movements like the "No Kings" protests to form across large societies and even around the globe.  And that's why it's so hard to preserve autocratic rule in the modern world without shutting down or at least censoring the internet.