The Evolutionary Psychology of Lex Rex

                                    A Contemporary German Print of the Execution of Charles I

The evolutionary psychology of Lex Rex--that the law rules over the king--depends on two points.  First, we need to see how as opposed to regicide by assassination (murder), regicide by legal execution (as in the trial of Charles I) affirms the impersonal rules of law as superior to absolute monarchy's rule by personal threats.  This understanding of law as impersonal or impartial moral rules is unique to human beings because it arises from the natural evolution of the human capacity for the language of rational symbolization.

The second point is that the denial of the sacred authority of the king to rule with impunity was part of the cultural evolution of the rise of theocratic sacred monarchy (beginning in ancient Mesopotamia) and its decline (beginning in 17th century England) culminating in the Lockean liberalism of King Charles III's Christian monarchy.

Two Kinds of Regicide

In the first systematic and quantitative study of regicide in Europe, Manuel Eisner (2011) has collected data on the frequency of violent death and regicide among 1,513 monarchs in Europe between AD 600 and 1800.  He has distinguished four categories of violent death: accident, battle death, murder, and legal execution.  He found that in the seventh century, the frequency of regicide was 2,500 murders per 100,000 years in office.  There was a long decline in regicide.  So that by the eighteenth century, the frequency of regicide was about 200 per 100,000 years in office.  By comparison, the homicide rate in Western Europe today is around 0.6-1.5 per 100,000 person-years.  Clearly, then, European kingship before the Industrial Revolution was one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, comparable to that of soldiers in combat.

Eisner found that for most of this history, regicide by assassination was carried out within the noble elite in the competition for political rule.  But, then, by the seventeenth century, regicide became a matter of legal execution--the execution of Charles I in England in 1649 and the execution of Louis XVI in France in 1793.  In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, James II was deposed and defeated in war without being executed.

The decline in regicide seems to be part of the general historical decline in homicide (Eisner 2003; Pinker 2011).  This general pattern of declining violence seems to be associated with a Hobbesian pacification process, in which the state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and with a Lockean liberal culture of bourgeois virtues that arise in modern commercial societies, in which people learn to control their violent impulses for the sake of peaceful economic and social exchange.

Jane Goodall and other primatologists have presented evidence that chimpanzees are similar to human beings in the practice of political assassinations.  There is plenty of evidence of chimpanzees from one community killing individuals from another community, which looks like warfare.  Goodall's observations of chimpanzee intercommunity violence have now been confirmed by similar observations from many chimpanzee communities across Africa.  

What is most surprising about this is that lethal violence within chimpanzee communities is extremely rare (Newton-Fisher and Emery Thompson 2012).  Chimpanzees often become aggressive in conflicts with one another, but they usually resolve their conflicts without physical contact; and even if there is some physical violence, it is almost never lethal, even though chimpanzee canines are powerful weapons for wounding and killing victims.  Most aggression between adult males consists of bluffing attacks without physical contact--threatening gestures and vocalizations and charging displays.  (This is also true for human beings, who often engage in bluffing displays of aggression, but for whom homicide is rare, despite the publicity given to homicidal violence.)

After decades of observations of chimpanzee communities across Africa, there have been only four documented cases of lethal violence between adult males of the same community, in which a coalitional gang of adult males killed a lone victim.  Kaburu et al. (2013) point out that the individuals killed in these cases were either low-ranking males or they were previously deposed alpha males.

In the revised edition of his Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal reported that in the summer of 1980, Luit--the alpha male of the chimpanzee community in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands--was attacked brutally and killed by Nikkie and Yeroen, who had previously been alpha males (de Waal 1998, 211-214).  De Waal describes the bloody scene: "Apart from biting off fingers and toes and causing deep gashes everywhere, the two aggressors removed Luit's testicles, which were found on the cage floor."  This looks like a political assassination.  But it's hard to know whether this case of lethal violence among captive chimpanzees is an abnormal consequence of their captive conditions.  The killing of Luit occurred at night, when the chimps were confined in their night cages.

Kaburu et al. claim to report the first case of lethal violence among wild chimpanzees in which the victim was the incumbent alpha male.  PM was the alpha male of the M-group of chimpanzees in the Malale Mountains National Park in Tanzania when he was killed on October 2, 2011.  He had been the alpha male since 2007.  After a bloody fight between PM and PR, the beta male, PR left.  A weakened PM  was then attacked brutally by a coalition of four other adult males, including two former alpha males (AL and DE).  AL was the alpha male overthrown by PM in 2007.  After the killing, there was a period of social instability.  AL became the alpha male for a short time.  But by November, PR had become the alpha male and is now the alpha male of the M-group.

Kaburu et al. explain this as an opportunistic attempt by AL (the third ranking of 10 adult males) to seize the alpha position once he saw that PM was weakened by the fight with PR, although AL was unable to hold his alpha position for long against the challenge of PR.

When I asked Michael Wilson (a primatologist at the University of Minnesota) about whether there were any other cases of alpha males being killed, he mentioned two cases at Gombe.  Vincent was the alpha male of the Mitumba community at Gombe.  He fell from a tree and severely injured himself.  He lived for another three months before two adult males attacked and killed him.  Michael says he has not yet written a report of this case.

The second case was that of Goblin, another alpha male at Gombe.  He was severely attacked and would have died if a vet had not treated his wounds.  Kaburu et al. mention this case, but they claim that Goblin had been deposed from his alpha position before the attack.

Even if chimpanzees show a few cases of political assassination of an alpha male, which is comparable to the political assassination of a king among human beings, it is clear that chimps are incapable of the legal execution of a leader, because legal execution implies laws as impartial moral rules, which requires the uniquely human capacity for rational symbolization.

Previously, I have written about Peter DeScioli's argument that laws are moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action, which arose first in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation--or in what Locke called the "state of nature."  Laws as impartial rules require moral judgment, which is unique to human beings, because moral judgement depends on the human rational or symbolizing mind that can grasp and share the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just.  

Dominant chimps rule by personal threats: if you challenge my alpha male dominance, I will punish you.  Tyrannical humans sometimes rule by personal threats.  But humans can also formulate impartial laws for judging who has the right to rule:  in America, whoever is elected president by the proper constitutional procedures has the right to rule as president as long as he is constrained by the rule of law.

Charles I claimed to rule by the law of absolute monarchy--that "the king can do no wrong" and is thus above the law--but this was really a personal threat disguised as impartial law.  Because by impartial law, kings must follow the laws like anyone else.  And so, if the king commits murder by initiating a Civil War in which he kills his own people, then he is guilty of murder and should be punished for it as any other murderer would be.  The legal trial and legal execution of Charles I affirmed that principle--that Law is king over the king.

The Cultural Evolution of Sacred Monarchy from Hammurabi to King Charles III

This is a tracing of a rock drawing from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BCE.  Christopher Boehm used this rock drawing at Remigia to illustrate the importance of capital punishment in the evolution of morality and egalitarian hierarchy.  He observed that on the right we see ten men jubilantly holding their bows over their heads.  On the left, we see a man lying on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking in his body or on the ground.

It's hard to know for sure what has happened.  The victim could have been a prisoner of war who has been executed.  In fact, other drawings at Remigia show scenes of warfare.  But Boehm suggests that given what we know about hunter-gatherer foragers in the ethnographic record, it's more likely that the victim here was a deviant member of the band who had violated the moral rules of the band--perhaps by murdering someone--and he was becoming a bully who was trying to assert his dominance over the group.   

This also illustrated Boehm's "ambivalence model" of human nature in politics.  Human politics arises from the complex tension between three levels of our evolved political psychology: dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  Some human beings want to have dominance over others.  Most human beings are inclined to defer to the rule of the dominant ones.  But when that dominance becomes despotic and exploitative, people will resist that dominance and punish the bullies by shunning them, ostracizing them, or--in the most dangerous cases--killing them.  Previously, I have written about this as showing the evolution of equal liberty through capital punishment.

But then about seven thousand years ago, the first agricultural settlements appeared in the ancient Near East.  And about five thousand years ago, the first urban states appeared.  The city of Uruk emerged in ancient Mesopotamia around 3,200 BC.  These states were the first sacred monarchies, in which the king claimed the absolute power to rule by divine right.  This claim to rule by divine authority is evident in the black stone stela that present the Laws of Hammurabi that were compiled toward the end of the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), who was the sixth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon.

The Louvre stela is almost seven and a half feet tall.  The top one-third of the stela shows the sun-god Shamash, the god of justice, seated on his throne, with King Hammurabi standing before him.  It is not clear whether the god is dictating the laws to Hammurabi, or Hammurabi is presenting the laws to the god, or Hammurabi is accepting the rod and the ring that are the emblems of authority.  In any case, this conveys the clear message to the viewers--even the many illiterate people who cannot read the laws--that Hammurabi's laws are divinely authorized by the god of justice.

The evidence collected by anthropological archaeologists--that has been surveyed by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus in The Creation of Inequality--has shown that in the first monarchic states, the power of rulers over their subjects could not be legitimated by reason alone, and rulers had discovered that they needed to pretend that they ruled by divine right--that political rule was sanctified by a religious cosmology.  Originally, the first human beings had no rulers other than the gods, but eventually they were persuaded that some human beings could rule with divine authority.

Every society has some cosmological explanation for how human beings and their world came into existence, and this cosmological creation story provides moral sanction for their social order.  Typically, the world begins as a formless chaos, and then some supernatural spirits create order out of this chaos, including the creation of human beings.  This creation story constitutes the moral charter for a society because it provides a sacred origin for the moral rules of a society. And thus religious belief is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people together into social groups.

Originally, among nomadic hunter-gatherers, the cosmological creation story sanctioned a celestial dominance hierarchy: the invisible supernatural beings were the alphas, the invisible ancestors were the betas, and the living human beings were the gammas.  Therefore, originally, all living human beings were equal in their subordination to the invisible gods and ancestors.  Inequality of social ranking arose when some living human beings successfully claimed that they or their clans were divine or divinely sanctioned for rule over others, and thus there was a cosmological justification for inequality.

Here in ancient Mesopotamia is the first cosmic teleology of human law as rooted in divine law, which is developed in Plato's Timaeus and the Bible, and which becomes the theme of the Divine 
Cosmic Model of the universe that runs through human civilization for four thousand years.  

But even though this mysterious magic of a sacred monarchy could win the deferential submission of people, a tyrannical monarchy often provoked the resistance of the people.  As I have indicated in my posts on Hammurabi's Laws and the Mesopotamian kingships, whenever a king increased his exploitation of his people--through increased confiscation of grain, increased taxation, increased conscription of soldiers and laborers--this provoked flight or rebellion.  The records of the Mesopotamian states are full of evidence of people running away from their states--slaves running away from their enslavement, soldiers running away from their conscripted service in war, taxpayers running away from oppressive taxation, laborers running aways from coerced labor, and people generally running away from cities racked with famine and contagious diseases.  

There is also evidence that over 3,000 years of Mesopotamian life, there were hundreds of rebellions.  Historian of the Ancient Near East Seth Richardson (2010, 2016) has noted that rebels against the state were described by state authorities as "the violators of contracts (mitgurtu, rikistu)."  The Akkadian words mitgurtu and rikistu denote agreement, consent, contract, or treaty.  Richardson has observed:  "These motifs relating to violation-of-contract strike a familiar chord to us moderns, since they suggest the premise of a social contract between ruler and ruled, or at least the existence of legal treaties and loyalty oaths" (2010: 9).

Not only in ancient Mesopotamia, but also throughout the ancient Mediterranean world--the Near East, Greece, and Rome--one sees the same pattern of rebellions against the state in which rebels assert their natural freedom from oppression and thus confirm Locke's understanding of government as dependent on the consent of the governed (Howe and Brice 2016).

But this raises a question:  if there was so much popular resistance to the tyranny of sacred monarchy, then why was it the predominant form of government for five thousand years?  Throughout most of this history, the number of monarchies far exceeded the number of nonmonarchies.  

But then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies surpassed the number of monarchies.  Today, there are very few monarchies in the world, and most of the most prominent monarchies today--like Great Britain--have a purely ceremonial monarch who has no sovereign power to rule.  This raises a second question:  why has monarchy declined in the last few centuries?

As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are at least two kinds of answers to the question of why monarchy was the prevalent form of government for thousands of years.  The first answer is that historically monarchies have been limited in their exercise of sovereign power over their people, and thus they have been limited in their capacity for the sort of tyrannical exploitation that provokes popular resistance.  For example, the evidence from those first monarchic states in ancient Mesopotamia shows an odd contradiction between their claims of absolute sovereignty and the reality of their severely limited powers.  For example, in their written legal codes, one can see what Seth Richardson has identified as "the curious absence of the state in the text." In the prologue and epilogue to Hammurabi's Code, Hammurabi claims absolute divinely granted authority over Babylonia.  But in the hundreds of laws in his code, there is almost no reference to himself or to the central state as providing judgment or enforcement of the law.  Most of the laws seem to assume private enforcement: when something goes wrong, the wronged party must act on his own with the help of local people to investigate, try, convict, and punish the guilty parties. 

What we see here is what Richardson has called the "presumptive state": the early states in Mesopotamia were presumptive in claiming a sovereignty that they did not in fact possess. Their rhetorical claims for absolute sovereignty have been mistakenly interpreted as evidence for the reality of Oriental Despotism.

Over the past 5,000 years, some states have expanded their power to rule through autocratic bureaucracies--for instance, China under the Song dynasty (960-1279).  But even the most powerful states have had to rely to some degree on law enforcement by private individuals acting through customary laws of vengeance and compensation.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, some states began to extend their law enforcement power by inventing modern professional policing.  Previously, people had policed themselves.  Robert Peel founded the London police in 1829.  The English Reform Act of 1835 extended this system of policing to all municipal boroughs.  Boston established the first American police force in 1838.

As long as monarchic states could not fully enforce their laws directly on their people, and their people were free to police themselves, those monarchic states had little power to tyrannically exploit their people.

The second answer to why monarchic states predominated for thousands of years is that in large societies where people are disconnected, the king provides a readily available focal point for legitimating government.  As I have indicated in a previous post, John Gerring and his colleagues have argued that from the appearance of the first states in the ancient world to the beginning of the modern era about 250 years ago, monarchy was the most common political regime because it was the most efficient solution to the problem of selecting leaders to coordinate social order in large societies where people are isolated from one another.  In the modern era, however, improvements in the technology of communication--for example, the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet--made it easier for people in large societies to communicate with one another and thus to mobilize a mass public for social coordination, which allowed elites to develop new systems of rule that did not need a central locus of sovereignty in a monarch (Gerring et al. 2021).

But doesn't this beg an obvious question--Why can't kings use modern mass communication to glorify their monarchic rule over their people?

We can answer that question by considering again the causes of the English Civil War, which led to the first trial and execution of a king.  Thomas Hobbes (in Behemoth) indicated that disputes over the interpretation of the Bible were a primary cause of the English Civil War.  The translation of the Bible into English in the sixteenth century and the invention of the printing press made the Bible widely available to common people, who could then interpret the Bible for themselves rather than being dependent on the authority of their priests.  The printing press also facilitated the production of thousands of books and pamphlets debating theological and political questions.  This contributed to the Protestant Reformation in breaking from the authority of the Catholic Church.  As a consequence, all the parties in the English political controversies of the time found their ideas in the Bible (Hill 1993).  People like John Cooke could publish books arguing that the Bible did not support absolute monarchy.  And when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II had to order the burning of such books as the greatest threat to the monarchy.

The success of modern mass communication in popularizing ideas of religious and political liberty has made it ever harder to defend absolute monarchy with the coercive enforcement of one national church.  This was dramatically manifested in the coronation of King Charles III on May 6, 2023, which was broadcast around the globe.  In the Coronation Liturgy--as designed by Charles himself--we saw a subtle interweaving of Old Testament and New Testament traditions that reconciled the conflicts between them by favoring the liberal interpretation of the New Testament advanced by Roger Williams and John Locke.

Since Henry VIII, the English King has been "Defender of the Faith"--first the Catholic Church and then the Anglican Church, which meant that the King would enforce a theocracy.  But King Charles III has identified himself as the "Defender of Faith"--that is, all religious faiths.  And indeed the coronation procession into Westminster Abbey included "faith leaders" from a dozen or more religious traditions.  Moreover, the Coronation Oath included a pledge "to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely."  Notice that "beliefs"--as distinguished from "faiths"--suggest that even atheists "may live freely" under the rule of Charles III.

The coronation of Charles indicated how his kingship will follow the model of Christ's persuasive kingship rather than the theocratic kingship of ancient Israel.  At the beginning of the coronation, Charles was greeted by a Chapel Royal chorister: "Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings."  Charles responded: "In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve."

Here Charles echoed the words of Jesus when he warned his followers not to strive for authoritative rule over others:  "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.  Not so with you.  Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:25-28).

Charles thus intimated here that he is a king who has no coercive authority over his people, particularly in matters of religious belief.  At most, he can only exercise the sort of persuasive authority that comes through Christian preaching.

Unlike the Stuart dynasty, the King of the House of Windsor rules over Great Britain as a purely ceremonial head of state that exercises no sovereign power in what is really a liberal Parliamentary democracy where Law is King.

REFERENCES

Boehm, Christopher.  2017.  "Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects."  Center for Humans and Nature, June 12.

Cooke, John.  1649.  King Charles, His Case, or An Appeal to All Rational Men Concerning His Trial at the High Court of Justice.  London: Peter Cole.

DeScioli, Peter.  2023.  "On the Origin of Laws by Natural Selection."  Evolution and Human Behavior 44: 195-209.

Eisner,  Manuel. 2003.  "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime."  Crime and Justice 30: 83-142.

Eisner,  Manuel.  2011.  "Killing Kings: Patterns of Regicide in Europe, AD 600-1800."  British Journal of Criminology 51: 556-577.

Filmer, Robert.  1991.  Patriarcha and Other Writings.  Ed. Johann P. Sommerville.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flannery, Kent and Joyce Marcus.  2014.  The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.   

Gardiner, Samuel Rawson.  1906.  The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gerring, John, et al.  2021.  "Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type." Comparative Political Studies 54: 585-622.

Hill, Christopher.  1993.  The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Penguin Books.

Howe, Timothy, and Lee Brice, eds.  2016.  Brill's Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean.  Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Kaburu, Stefano S. K., Sana Inoue, and Nicholas E. Newton-Fisher. 2013. "Death of the Alpha: Within-Community Lethal Violence Among Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains National Park." American Journal of Primatology 75:789-797.

Locke, John.  1988.  Two Treatises of Government.  Ed. Peter Laslett.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Newton-Fisher, Nicholas E. and Melissa Emery Thompson. 2012. "Comparative Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence." In The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War, 41-60. Eds.Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pinker, Steven. 2011.  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  New York: Viking.

Richardson, Seth.  2010.  "Writing Rebellion Back Into the Record: A Methodologies Toolkit."  In Seth Richardson, ed., Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform World, 1-27.  New Haven, CN: American Oriental Society.

Richardson, Seth.  2016.  "Insurgency and Terror in Mesopotamia."  In Howe and Brice 2016, 31-61.

Robertson, Geoffrey.  2005.  The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold.  New York: Pantheon Books.

de Waal, Frans. 1998. Chimpanzee Politics. Revised edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.