"Makers" and "Takers" in the Paleolithic

Libertarians and classical liberals have long argued for defending the makers who produce wealth from the takers who expropriate it (Contoski 1997; D'Amato 2018).  The makers need protection because for most of recorded human history over the past 5,000 years, most societies have been ruled by a few takers (kings, princes, nobles, and high priests) who coercively exploited the great multitude of people who were the makers of wealth that was stolen from them by the takers.  In these societies, there was little incentive for the makers to produce more than they could consume since most of what they produced would be taken from them, and consequently the general standard of living was low.  

But then, beginning about 300 years ago in northwestern Europe and North America, there was a shift in social conditions that made the life strategy of making--producing wealth for use and exchange--more successful than the life strategy of taking--extracting wealth from others.  That shift in favor of making over taking came with the establishment of modern liberal constitutionalism and free-market capitalism.  Over the past 100 years those institutions of liberal democratic capitalism have spread around the world.  As a consequence of that, most of the 8.3 billion people alive today live longer, healthier, safer, richer, and freer lives than human beings have ever lived previously.  Previously, I have written about this as the "evolution of human progress through the liberal enlightenment.

So how do we explain this pattern in human history--5,000 years of oppression by the ruling elites of takers and then the sudden emancipation of makers that has promoted unprecedented material and moral progress recently for most of humanity?  And if we can explain the causes of that modern progress, how might that help us to prevent any weakening or even reversal of that progress that would allow the takers to regain their dominance over the makers?  Does the recent rise of the "illiberal state"--like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example--show the return of the illiberal "taker state"?

One of the best attempts to answer those questions is in the work of Stephen Balch (a scholar at Texas Tech University).  In an article (Balch 2014) and in a book that is soon to be published, he puts the history of the struggle between takers and makers within a Darwinian "big history" that integrates the history of life and the history of humanity into a universal evolutionary history of all life.  It is an exhilarating display of expansive multidisciplinary scholarship that weaves insights from the life sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities into a dazzling intellectual tapestry that will forever change the way you think about life.

I have not yet fully thought through everything he has written about what he calls his "naturalist interpretation of history."   But I understand enough of it to say that I find almost all of his arguments persuasive.  I do disagree with him, however, about four points. 

First, Balch fails to see that most of what he says about the universal history of politics--from Paleolithic stateless societies to Neolithic agrarian states to modern liberal constitutional states--confirms John Locke's account of the universal "history of mankind." 

Second, Balch also fails to see that the struggle between takers and makers arose first among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, although he is certainly right in saying that that struggle was dramatically intensified by the invention of agriculture, which created an economic surplus that allowed takers to accumulate great wealth in the form of expropriated crops.  

Third, in his account of the first agrarian states, such as those in Mesopotamia, Balch tends to exaggerate the invincible dominance of the ruling takers, while minimizing the power of the makers to resist or evade exploitative dominance.

Fourth, I don't agree with Balch's claim that classical liberals like Locke have been mistaken in understanding property rights as an outgrowth of the personal rights of self-owning individuals.  Balch wants to separate economic freedom from personal freedom because he worries that personal freedom can include maladaptive behavior such as pursuing sexual pleasure in ways that do not lead to reproduction, which lowers reproductive fitness.  But here he fails to see that a low birth rate can be an adaptive reproductive strategy for people in wealthy societies who want to make a large parental investment in a few children, so that those children will be more likely to succeed in a modern bourgeois society.

Here I will elaborate my second point of disagreement.  In my next post, I will take up the fourth point.

PALEOLITHIC MAKERS AND TAKERS

Among hunter-gatherers, the takers are people who take without giving.  They take what they want from the social resources of their group without contributing anything to those resources: they are free riders or social parasites.  The takers are either cheaters who take what they want by deception, or bullies who take what they want by force.  

The makers respond to this by consenting to moral rules against taking and enforcing those rules with reputational and forcible punishments of those who violate the rules.  Reputational punishment includes ridicule, ostracism, and shunning.  Forcible punishment--including execution--is directed against the worst bullies, particularly murderers (Boehm 2012, 64-74).

Balch does not see this conflict between makers and takers among hunter-gatherers because he thinks that conflict arose only after the invention of agriculture.

"Taking" only came fully into its own when there was some real "take" to be had, when there was a redistributable surplus over and above what was required for individual survival.  The invention of agriculture set the stage.  Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived egalitarian lives.  There was marginal advantage to be had through superior hunting/gathering/fighting/nurturing/negotiating and seduction skills, but--with only so much to go around--rarely big genetic jackpots.  Once, however, there was a possibility of massive wealth accumulations in the form of expropriated crops, all this changed (2014, 12).

"Genetic jackpots" are important for Balch because he believes that the evolution of human nature by kin selection favors what biological theorists call "inclusive fitness": we are naturally inclined to behaviors that advance the reproductive fitness of ourselves, our offspring, and our collateral relatives.  Although we experience some genetic conflicts of interest with our relatives because they are not genetically identical to us, our conflicts of interest with non-kin are much deeper.  We fight with non-kin over scarce resources as we try to take as much as we can for ourselves and our relatives.  But prior to the invention of agriculture, there wasn't much to fight over, and so it was impossible for the takers to accumulate great wealth that they had taken from the makers.  Consequently, Balch argues, Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands were egalitarian in that there was no dominant elite of a few takers ruling over a multitude of exploited makers.

But this ignores the fact that while hunter-gatherers have always been egalitarian, their societies have achieved not an absolute equality but rather--to use Christopher Boehm's term--an "egalitarian hierarchy."  As that term suggests, hunter-gatherers see that human beings are not naturally equal in all respects, because no two human beings are the same in all respects.  By virtue of being separate individuals, human beings are naturally unequal, in any number of respects.  But they are naturally equal in their natural desire for equal liberty--their natural freedom from being ruled by others without their consent.  

A few human beings have a natural desire for dominance--to be the alpha male who rules over others--and these are those whom Balch identifies as the takers.  And while human beings in subordinate positions are naturally inclined to defer to the dominant few, the subordinates are also naturally inclined to resist being exploited by those dominant few.  Thus, Boehm observes, the political nature of human beings is ambivalent in showing the tension between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  The natural desire for dominance can be checked by the natural desire of subordinates not to be dominated.

In an egalitarian hierarchy, the subordinates use sanctions--such as ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, or even execution--to restrain politically ambitious individuals, those with special innate or learned propensities to dominate.  In every society, there will be leaders in some form.  But an egalitarian hierarchical society will allow only a moderate degree of leadership.  Here the power of the takers is checked by the resistance of the makers.

In a few passages of his book, Balch seems to recognize this.  In speaking about how Boehm and Richard Wrangham describe the hunter-gatherer "environment of evolutionary adaptation" (EEA), Balch sees “a strain of oligarchy” and “targeted conspiratorial killing," which points to egalitarian hierarchy and the conditions for some taker/maker conflict.  He suggests that when he says that the worst bullies had to be eliminated (59, 126-27), and “the tension between hierarchical power and leveling morality has been a constant of human history” (129).

Moreover, what Balch calls “primal morality” in the EEA corresponds to what Locke calls the “law of nature” in the hunter-gatherer state of nature (60, 126-29, 218-19).  Locke’s law of nature is enforced by the “executive power of the law of nature”—the right of everyone to punish transgressors through reputational and forcible punishment, which would be supported by Boehm and Wrangham.  What Boehm and Wrangham say about killing bullies in the EEA confirms Paul Bingham’s argument about the importance of “killing from a distance” in enforcing cooperation.

REFERENCES

Balch, Stephen H. 2014. "On the Fragility of the Western Achievement." Society 51:8-21.

Balch, Stephen H.  Naturalizing History: A Biocultural Theory of Progress.  Book manuscript.

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

Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Contoski, Edmund. 1997. Makers and Takers: How Wealth and Progress Are Made and How They Are Taken or Prevented. Minneapolis, MN: American Liberty Publishers.

D'Amato, David. 2018. "'Makers' and 'Takers' in Libertarian Thought."  https://www.libertarianism.org.

Did It All Start with the Big Bang? And What Difference Does That Make for the Meaning and Purpose of Our Lives?

I have written about "The Big Bang Theory"--the popular television show that ran on CBS from 2007 to 2019.  Every episode began with a clever theme song that ended with the line: "It all started with the Big Bang."

Is that true?  The brief answer is: We don't know.  

We don't know because the earliest history of the universe is beyond what we can observe.  Whatever is beyond any possible observation cannot be known to exist or not to exist.  Asserting its existence is a matter of belief or faith, not a matter of scientific knowledge.  It's an assertion of religion (or revelation) not of science (or reason).  Here I agree with physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's insistence that scientific models of reality must always be tested against observational evidence because otherwise they are just speculative stories that are more like religion than science (Hossenfelder 2022).

What difference (if any) does this make for how we think about the purpose of our lives?  The brief answer is that we must choose between at least two alternatives.  We can believe in a divinely caused Big Bang that can support a moral cosmology that gives our lives a divinely appointed purpose that might include eternal life after death.  Or we can recognize a moral anthropology that gives our lives a human purpose in satisfying our natural desires--such as the desire to understand the universe, which can be expressed either as a desire for religious understanding through Revelation or a desire for intellectual understanding through Reason.

If human beings are to be free to pursue these alternative ways of life and to debate their relative merits, people must have the religious and intellectual liberty secured in a Lockean liberal open society that allows for freedom of thought and expression.  The kind of freedom that is manifest even in some popular culture such as the "Big Bang Theory" television show.

THE BIG BANG?

Human beings wonder about their origins.  They want to know where they came from.  They ask about not only their ancestral and social origins but even about the origin of everything.  That's why every human society has stories about how all things came to be as they are.  Commonly, they are religious stories about how divine beings brought the world into existence.  "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."  So declares the first verse of the King James Bible.

But what exactly does that mean?  And is it true?  Some theologians have said that God created everything ex nihilo (from nothing).  But others have said He created everything ex materia (from some preexisting material).  Some have said God created only one universe--the one that we live in.  But others have said that He might have created other universes, perhaps even an infinite number of them.

Some philosophers and scientists (like Aristotle) have said that there was no need for divine creators because the world was eternal as composed of eternal matter and thus had no beginning and no end.  But others (like Lucretius) have argued that the world has arisen spontaneously from the random motion of atoms without any need for divine intervention, and that atomic flux would eventually dissolve every world and create a new one.

Thomas Aquinas defended the orthodox Christian doctrine that God did indeed create everything from nothing.  But he admitted that this could not be scientifically demonstrated.  "It is by faith alone do we hold and not by any demonstration that can be proved, that the world did not always exist. . . that the world began to exist is an object of faith, but not of demonstration or science" (ST, I, q. 46, a. 2).

But then when Georges Lemaitre (a cosmologist who was also a Jesuit priest) first proposed a Big Bang theory of the universe, Pope Pius XIII pointed to this as a scientific demonstration of the divine creation of the universe from nothing.  Lemaitre himself, however, criticized the Pope for failing to see how this scientific theory had nothing to do with the Christian doctrine of creation, which could be believed by faith but not known by demonstration.

As I have indicated in my essays on the Big Bang, the scientific theory of the Big Bang has been invoked by some people (like William Lane Craig) to prove that God exists and by other people (like Stephen Hawking) to prove that God does not exist.  I have argued that both are mistaken.  

Craig states his argument as a syllogism:

 1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

There are good reasons to doubt that those two premises are really scientific statements rather than affirmations of religious faith.

The first premise is not "obviously true," as Craig says, because while we all have experience of how natural causes work within the universe to bring things into existence, we do not have experience with how transcendent causes work outside the universe to bring the universe itself into existence. 

Consequently, while the "principle of sufficient reason"--that for everything there must be a causal explanation--might hold true for our ordinary experience of how things work within the universe, this principle does not necessarily apply to what things are like outside the universe, because none of us has ever stood "outside the universe" to see if the principle of sufficient reason holds true there.  Standing "outside the universe"--experiencing the transcendent or the supernatural--is a matter of religious imagination that is beyond our empirical experience of the world and thus beyond empirical science.

Therefore, the first premise of Craig's syllogism might be a statement of religious faith, but it is not a statement of scientific truth.

The same can be said about the second premise.  "The universe began to exist."  What exactly is being stated here?  There are two possibilities.  The universe began to exist out of nothing.  Or the universe began to exist out of something. 

Craig's argument requires that he equivocate between these two different statements.  The universe began to exist out of nothing is the Christian theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo.  But, then, this would deny Craig's claim that this premise is "religiously neutral."  In fact, that the universe began to exist out of nothing is not a scientific statement at all, because there is no human observational experience of absolute "nothing" that would make the study of "nothing" part of empirical science.  I even doubt that any of us really understands what we're saying when we talk about absolute "nothing," because it's beyond ordinary human experience.

And yet scientists like Stephen Hawking do speak about how the Big Bang could have come from "nothing" without any need for God.  His explanation is that "the laws of nature we call quantum mechanics" tell us "that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang.  Nothing" (Hawking 2018, 34-35).  Far from the Big Bang proving God's existence, as Craig claimed, Hawking claimed to have shown that since nothing caused the Big Bang, God does not exist.

Hawking appeared five times on the "Big Bang Theory" show as the one scientist that Sheldon most admired.  He playfully mocked Sheldon, but he also recognized his brilliance.  Nothing was said about Hawking's atheism.

Notice that in his argument for atheism, Hawking had to assume at the origin of the universe the reality of the laws of quantum mechanics and of quantum vacuum states.  That's not nothing!  That's something!  Notice also that Hawking had no explanation for where those laws of physics came from.

Moreover, Hawking's model for the origin of the Big Bang is only one of many Big Bang models that scientists have proposed over the past 30 years.  By some counts, there are over two dozen such models (Afshordi and Halper 2025).  Some physicists say our universe is one of infinitely many universes, and each one is a bubble in a rapidly expanding quantum fuzz.  Others say the Big Bang started from the hot gas of tiny, vibrating strings.  Others say the Big Bang was a bounce of a collapsing universe into an expanding one.  Others say the universe is always in a state of eternal inflation.  In this video, Phil Harper gives the top ten answers to the question of what happened before the Big Bang:

Remarkably, in the end, it doesn't matter which model you choose because you end up with the same outcome--the universe that we live in today.  That it doesn't matter which story you believe points to a fundamental problem: there is no data to tell us which model is right.  The reason for that is that the fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

Below is a sketch of the limits on the scale of human observational experience of nature.  At the small scale, microscopes have extended our experience beyond our visual reach, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has extended our reach even deeper.  We have gone from scales of centimeters to millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter.  But we have reasons to believe that the fundamental constituents of nature that string theory attempts to describe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC.  At the cosmic scale, telescopes have extended our experience of the astronomical universe; but no telescope will ever look beyond our universe's cosmic horizon and see the other universes assumed by the multiverse hypothesis.  The white area is the range of scales within human experience.  The grey area is outside that range.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Notice that the limit of the observable universe at the right end of this scale is the cosmic microwave background.

The oldest light we can see is the cosmic microwave background, emitted nearly four hundred thousand years after the hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago.  It is almost perfectly uniform, with tiny variations in temperature at 1 part in 100,000, which are shown as red (hot) and blue (cold) spots.  This is the most important store of data for early-universe cosmology.  Multiple satellites with telescopes have studied these fluctuations.  Shown here is the most recent map produced by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite probe.

This illustrates how we can make and use technical instruments (such as telescopes) to extend the range of our observational experience of nature.  But it also illustrates the limits on how far that extension can go. 

When Aristotle explained his theological cosmology of a geocentric universe in De Caelo ("On the Heavens"), he admitted that it was hard to study the heavenly bodies--the stars, the sun, the planets, and the Moon--because "we have very little to go on, and we are placed at a great distance from the phenomena that we are trying to investigate," and "very few of their attributes are perceptible by sense experience" (286a7, 292a15-b25).  

So when Galileo defended his Copernican heliocentric system, he argued that Aristotle would have been persuaded by the evidence that Galileo had gathered from his telescope because Aristotle would have welcomed the use of the telescope to extend the range of human observational experience of distant planets and stars.

In the 400 years since Galileo, telescopes have become more powerful; and sending telescopes into space has expanded the depth of their observational power.  So that now we have stunning images of deep space from the James Webb Telescope and images of the cosmic microwave background that take us back over 13 billion years into the history of the universe.  But notice that the image of the cosmic microwave background is dated at four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.  It's not clear that we will ever get any closer than that to the Big Bang, or to whatever there might have been before the Big Bang, which might forever be beyond our range of observational experience.  

Consequently, it will be impossible to test our models of the Big Bang against observational data, which will mean that our models will be little more than speculative origin myths that rest on belief or faith rather than scientific knowledge.

COSMIC PURPOSE?  HUMAN PURPOSE?

Asking about the origins of the Cosmos might seem like a very abstract kind of questioning that doesn't have much to do with ordinary human life.  But in fact it's one of the fundamental questions that we must ask as we try to make sense of our lives.

Must we believe that in the beginning God created the Universe and created man in His image if we want to give some cosmic meaning to our lives?  If this Divine Creator cares about us and for us, and if He endowed us with a knowledge of His moral law as an eternal standard of right and wrong to guide our moral life, and if He promises to help us live according to that moral law, or to save us from our sinful flaws, and then to reward those who love Him with eternal life, doesn't that give us a cosmic purpose to our lives?

But if we believe that in the beginning the universe arose through some impersonal process of natural evolution of matter and energy, and if eventually we somehow emerged as but blips of complexity in that uncaring universe, then how can we believe that our life has any meaning if there's no purpose to it?

Or should we see that even if there is no cosmic purposefulness in our lives grounded in the moral cosmology of a divinely created universe, there is a natural purposefulness in our lives grounded in the moral anthropology of our natural human desires?  Even if we live in an uncaring universe, we care for ourselves, and we strive to satisfy our natural desires.  Perhaps that is what makes our lives meaningful.

And so, for example, all human beings have some natural desire to understand the universe and their place in it.  This began when natural selection favored species that made correct predictions about their environment, and then organisms became increasingly better at understanding nature, until the evolution of the human cerebral cortex reached a point where human beings could understand their world by probing deeply into nature through intelligence, symbolism, and observation.

But then this natural human desire for understanding could be expressed either as a desire for religious understanding or a desire for intellectual understanding.  Human beings moved by the desire for religious understanding could imagine that they and their universe were created by a supernatural Mind analogous to the human mind.  Human beings moved by the desire for intellectual understanding could imagine that they and their universe were created by natural laws of evolution.  Some human beings can be theistic evolutionists who believe that God originally created the laws of nature and then allowed the universe to evolve naturally according to those laws, while occasionally intervening miraculously in that natural history to reveal Himself to human beings.

The tension between the natural desire for religious understanding and the natural desire for intellectual understanding is manifest in the Reason/Revelation Debate.

THE REASON/REVELATION DEBATE IN "THE YOUNG SHELDON"

Much of "The Big Bang Theory" revolves around Sheldon and his life story.  He grew up in East Texas in a Southern Baptist family that struggled to understand him because he was a child prodigy with an IQ of 187, who used his intelligence to make scientific arguments against religious belief.

From 2017 to 2024, CBS broadcasted a spin-off prequel--"Young Sheldon"--about Sheldon's childhood in the 1980s and 1990s.  The theme of scientific cosmology as supporting atheism against religious belief continued in this show.  

Pastor Jeff is the minister of the Southern Baptist church where the Cooper family goes every Sunday.  The young Sheldon is determined to show everyone that he can use science to refute Pastor Jeff's religious beliefs by arguing that the Bible's story of Creation is denied by the evidence for the natural evolution of the universe and human life.

One example of this conflict between science and religion is the third episode of the second season (airing on October 4, 2018) entitled "A Crisis of Faith and Octopus Aliens."  This episode begins with the Cooper family attending church on a Sunday.  Pastor Jeff is delivering his sermon, and suddenly Sheldon raises his hand to ask a question.  He challenges Pastor Jeff to tell him what God would look like in an alien planet inhabited by octopuses.  Would God look like an octopus?  Jeff struggles to answer.

Then, that Sunday afternoon, Sheldon's mother Mary receives a phone call and is told that the 17-year-old daughter of her friend Stephanie Hanson had died in an accident.  Mary and her husband George go to the funeral.  Throughout the week, Mary is troubled by the question of why an all-good God would torture a good Christian like Stephanie by killing her innocent child.  She talks with Pastor Jeff, but he cannot give her a satisfactory answer.

On Saturday night, Mary takes her mother to a bar named "Lucky's Place," where they drink and play billiards.  She tells her mother about her religious struggle and how this has depressed her mood.  She is drunk, and she is driven home by her mother.  Her husband George takes her to bed.

The next day, Sunday, she does not go to church, and she does not say a prayer at the family dinner.  Her husband and children are shocked to see these signs that she is doubting her faith in God.

Later, in the evening, Sheldon comes out to the front porch of their house to talk with her and attempt to comfort her.  Here's the scene:

Notice that even though Sheldon is an atheist, he makes a scientific argument for the existence of God based on the "fine-tuning" of the universe.  The strength of gravity must be mathematically precise--neither too strong nor too weak--to make it possible for the universe to exist as a place where human life can emerge.  Isn't it unlikely that that could be just an accident?  Doesn't this logically suggest the need for God to design the precise conditions that make the universe and life possible?  Sheldon indicates that he is still an atheist, but he does see this as a scientifically logical argument for religious belief.

Mary responds by saying that her problem with God is not a matter of logic in her head but what she feels in her heart.  Sheldon then makes another argument that might appeal to her heart.  In a world of over five billion people, how likely is it that I would have the one woman who is a perfect mom for me?  Mary is moved by this, and she thanks God for giving her Sheldon as her child.  In the voice-over, the adult Sheldon tells the viewers that he didn't tell his mom that he shouldn't have to share credit with God for making the argument that comforted her.

One of the YouTube clips of this scene has a comment from "B Sharp" about Sheldon's first argument:  "I love Young Sheldon, and this is a sweet moment.  However, Sheldon is using the fine-tuning apologetics argument, which is fallacious.  The universe wasn't created for humans.  Humans evolved to exist in this universe."

One could also respond in a similar way to Sheldon's second argument.  That a son loves his mother is not an unlikely event that requires some supernatural intervention, because parent-child bonding is an evolutionary adaptation of human nature.

But then what if evolved human nature includes a natural desire for religious understanding--for transcendence and transcendent meaning?  This emotional desire is not based on pure logic, and therefore it cannot be refuted by logical argument.  And, therefore, as Rebecca Goldstein has shown, the emotional longing for religious transcendence prevails over scientific reasoning, particularly when science faces fundamental mysteries in the universe that cannot ever be explained by reason alone; and thus Revelation cannot be refuted by Reason.  Perhaps this is what Mary Cooper meant when she pointed to what she felt in her heart.

Nevertheless, the fine-tuning argument is one of the best scientific arguments for God as the Intelligent Designer of the universe.  Christian astrophysicists like Owen Gingerich and Deborah Haarsma like to invoke this argument.  And yet, I have written some posts indicating the flaws in this line of reasoning.

It is not really clear, for example, that scientific cosmology shows that the universe is precisely fine-tuned for life, and particularly human life.  Most cosmologists agree that the universe will come to an end, and that all life will be extinguished.  Consider one line in the theme song for "The Big Bang Theory":

"It's expanding ever outward, but one day it will pause and start to go the other way, collapsing ever inward, we won't be here, it won't be heard.  Our best and brightest future that it'll make an even bigger bang!"

Does the end of the universe in a Big Collapse mean that far from being fine-tuned for life, the universe has been fine-tuned for death?  Or should we have faith in those eschatological religions that promise us eternal life after death?

In a liberal open society, we are free to openly debate such questions--even in popular television shows--without fear of persecution.

And in that debate, one of the big questions for us will be:  Did it all start with a Big Bang?

REFERENCES

Afshordi, Niayesh, and Phil Halper. 2025. Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hossenfelder, Sabine. 2022. Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions. New York: Viking.

The Chimpanzee Politics of Joe Biden's Betrayal of America

Like many people I have been trying to understand why and how the Democratic Party threw the presidential election of 2024 to Donald Trump.  I now think the answer to that question will come from reading two books--Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, It's Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again and Frans de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics.  

When Joe Biden announced in 2023 that he would run for a second term, most American voters thought he was too old to serve out a second term.  He was already the oldest man to be President of the United States, and by the end of a second term, he would have been 86 years old.  Moreover, throughout 2023 and 2024, the voters saw his drastic physical and cognitive decline.  At the same time, after inflation peaked at 9.1% in the summer of 2022, the highest in 40 years, many voters thought Biden's economic policies had failed, and they continued to believe that even when inflation rates came down slightly by 2024.  Consequently, by early 2024, the polls indicated that Biden was going to lose to Trump.  But it was also clear, that most voters were unhappy with the choice between Trump and Biden, and that if the Democrats had nominated a moderate Democrat not identified with Biden and his economic policies, the Democrats would have won because Trump was not the first choice for the majority of voters.

So why did the Democrats allow Biden to run for a second term?  Why did they not organize an open presidential primary to identify a good alternative to both Biden and Trump?  Why did they wait until the end of July in 2024 to force Biden to withdraw from the race?  And why did they then allow Kamala Harris to become the nominee, even though she was even more unpopular than Biden, and she ran as a proponent of "Bidenomics" despite the unpopularity of Biden's inflation?

The answer is that it was all chimpanzee politics.  Once Joe Biden and Jill Biden had won political dominance as the alpha male and alpha female ("First Lady"), they didn't want to give it up, even though they had lost their minimum winning coalition by 2024.  Other Democrat politicians who could have defeated Trump refused to enter the race because they thought they could not risk being disloyal to the Bidens.  Even after Harris replaced Biden as the nominee, she refused to show disloyalty by renouncing Biden's unpopular policies (particularly on inflation).  This allowed Trump to win even though he was not the first choice of the voters.  Now he's the dominant chimp, who proudly announces his dictatorial rule: "I run the country and the world."

I have written many posts about the chimpanzee politics of dominance hierarchies.  People often assume that among animals the dominance hierarchy must be determined by fighting in which the biggest and strongest animal wins and becomes the alpha.  But primatologists like de Waal and Jane Goodall have shown that this is false.  Among chimpanzees and other animals, physical strength is only one of many traits required for becoming the dominant alpha leader.  To become the alpha, one needs supporters.  One must form coalitions with partners, and to win the support of the females and the children, one needs to act as a mediator in intervening in disputes to enforce peace and unity either through impartial intervention or by supporting the weaker party against the stronger.  One must know how to reconcile after disputes.  And one must know how to achieve mutual cooperation through reciprocity by returning favors and by punishing those who are not cooperative.

Males tend to reach their peak in the hierarchy between age twenty and twenty-six years.  Goodall explains: "Factors other than age, which determine the position of a male in the dominance hierarchy include physical fitness, aggressiveness, skill at fighting, ability to form coalitions, intelligence, and a number of personality factors such as boldness and determination. . . . At Gombe some males strive with much energy to better their social status over a period of years; others work hard for a short while, but give up if they encounter a serious setback; a few seem remarkably unconcerned about their social rank."

Chimp male canine teeth are powerful weapons for killing.  But remarkably, chimp fighting almost never leads to killing, except when male chimps are attacking chimps outside their community.  Fighting for dominance within a community is carried out through the bluffing of spectacular, charging displays of intimidation.

Goodall and De Waal have seen among chimpanzees what some political scientists have called government by the "minimal winning coalition."  No one individual can rule without supporters, and so there must always be a ruling coalition supporting the leader, who must satisfy his supporters.  A dictatorship is rule by a small coalition.  Democracy is rule by a large coalition.  The leader must serve the interests of his coalition, and so the larger the coalition, the closer this approximates to serving the common interests of society.

One can also see among chimpanzees confirmation for Machiavelli's political psychology of the one, the few, and the many.  In every society, there are a few people who are ambitious to rule over others, and out of these ambitious few, one individual will emerge as the dominant ruler over all.  Most people do not want to rule, and they will defer to the rule of the few, but the many do not want to be exploited by those ruling few.  To avoid an exploitative despotic rule, there needs to be a balance between the one, the few, and the many.  The hope of the American founders--perhaps most clearly expressed by John Adams--was that American government would separate and balance these three powers: 

Adams believed that human nature is such that every human society must decide the question, Who is the first man?  "It is a question that must be decided, in every species of gregarious animals, as well as men."  Even in the most civilized societies, "the same nature remains," and the contest for first rank must be decided, whether by peaceful or by violent rivalry.  The balance of powers answers this question by providing for a supreme executive office to be filled by one person with sufficient ambition to strive for it, while still checking the power of this executive officer with the powers of other offices--the legislative and judicial offices--filled by the ambitious few, with the ultimate check on power coming from the great multitude of people who defer to their rulers while also resisting exploitative dominance by their rulers.

Consider how this explains the history of American presidential politics over the past two years.  Joe Biden has been driven by a life-long ambition to be President of the United States.  In 1972, he was elected Senator from Delaware at age 30, which is the minimum age for a Senator set by the Constitution.  He failed in his first two runs for the presidency in 1988 and 2008.  But he did become Vice-President in 2008 after being selected by Barack Obama as his running mate.  In 2016, Biden wanted to run again for the presidency, but Obama supported Hillary Clinton, which created a deep resentment in Biden.  He ran again in 2020--without Obama's support in the primaries--and this time he finally won in defeating Trump.

Since his inauguration as President in 2021--the oldest president at 79--fulfilled a lifetime of striving to be Number One, it is not surprising that in the summer of 2023, he announced he would run for reelection, despite the fact that most Americans saw the physical and mental decline that came with his advanced age.  It is hard for a man like Biden to give up the power and fame of being President of the United States.  As Tapper and Thompson report, four-time California Governor Jerry Brown understood why Biden stubbornly refused to drop out of the race for a second term: "Politics is addictive.  It's exciting.  It's kind of psychic cocaine.  People just don't want to just go back to their former boring lives" (50).

But then why didn't Biden follow the example of Lyndon Johnson in 1968?  Johnson was elected to his first full term in a landslide victory in 1964, after becoming president in the wake of JFK's assassination.  In 1968, Johnson chose to run for reelection even though he was very unpopular because of his prosecution of the Vietnam War.  It was widely assumed that a sitting president could not be denied renomination by his party for a second term if he ran.  But after running in some early primaries, and being challenged by the candidacies of Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy--part of a "Dump Johnson" movement--Johnson announced on March 31, 1968, that he would no longer run for the nomination.  This allowed his Vice President--Hubert Humphrey--to run as the Democrat candidate, although he was defeated by Richard Nixon in the election.

LBJ was similar to Biden in many ways.  Like Biden, LBJ had a life-long ambition to achieve political dominance.  In 1937, at age 29, he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives.  In 1948, was elected to the U.S. Senate.  In 1954, he became Senate Majority Leader.  In 1960, he ran for President.  But when Kennedy won the party's nomination, he selected Johnson as his Vice-President.  Becoming President fulfilled his driving ambition for power.  And so he did not want to give up that power in 1968, even though he was unpopular.  But unlike Biden, he ended his campaign early--almost four months earlier than did Biden.  What explains this difference?

One difference is that Biden was surrounded by a small inner circle of advisors that controlled the information he received and that insulated him from public view.  The most important member of this inner circle was Jill Biden who protected Biden from bad news (such as unfavorable polls) and thus protected her own power as First Lady.  The rest of the inner circle was known in the White House as "the Politburo": long-time Biden aides Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Ron Klain, and Bruce Reed.  These five people supported Biden's run for reelection because their powerful prominence in government depended on extending Biden's presidency.  David Axelrod saw "that Donilon was so blinded by his emotional attachment to Joe Biden--his fate and life inextricably bound up with the president's--that he just couldn't let go" (207).  As Democrat congressman Peter Aguilar observed, "folks like Ricchetti and Donilon--they're living the first line of their obituaries right now.  People don't give that up" (253).

Another difference from Johnson is that Biden did not face anything like the "Dump Johnson" movement--popular candidates challenging him in the presidential primaries.  Beginning as early as 2022, Congressman Dean Phillips, a member of the House Democratic leadership team, began warning that Biden's evident cognitive decline would make it impossible for him to communicate clearly to voters, and so the party would need to find someone else to run for president in 2024.  He suggested that the best candidates would be one of the Democrat governors in the Midwest--such as Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.  Phillips had tried to speak directly with Pritzker and Whitmer, but they refused to even take his calls.  Although he admitted that he was not the best candidate, Phillips announced his presidential campaign on October 27, 2023.  He said his aim was to force Biden into a debate, in which Biden would show that he lacked the cognitive ability to win another presidential campaign.  The Democratic Party obstructed Phillips' efforts.  He suspended his campaign after a bad showing on Super Tuesday (March 6, 2024), and he endorsed Joe Biden.

So, for two years, from the summer of 2022 to the summer of 2024, the elite politicians of the Democratic Party refused to challenge Biden's decision to run for a second term because having loyally supported him in 2020, they were afraid to show disloyalty to Biden as their party leader.  Thus, they lacked the political shrewdness of chimpanzees who understand that politics is all about shifting coalitions, so that the loyal supporters of the dominant chimp will withdraw their support as soon as he manifests any signs of weakness, and then a new coalition forms to support a new alpha male.

For example, when de Waal began studying the chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands in 1975, he saw that Yeroen was dominant over the group, with the support of Luit and Nikkie.  The political hierarchy among chimps is indicated by a special form of greeting.  Chimpanzees show a submissive greeting that is a sequence of short panting grunts by the subordinate individual as he looks up at the superior individual, which is usually accompanied by a series of deep bobbing bows by the subordinate.  Sometimes the subordinate will stretch out a hand to the superior or kiss the superior's feet, neck, or chest.  The superior reacts to this by rising up and making his hair stand on end, so that he looks very large in contrast to the groveling subordinate.  The alpha male is the male who is "greeted" by the other males.  Generally, the alpha male is also "greeted" by the females and the children in a group.

The male on the left is dominant.  The male on the right is subordinate.  Although they are actually the same size, the dominant male makes himself look bigger.

In 1976, de Waal saw the first of two power take-overs, which he understood with the help of Machiavelli, and this is what became the central focus of his book Chimpanzee Politics.  In the spring of 1976, Luit stopped "greeting" Yeroen, which initiated months of tense conflict between them as they fought over which would be dominant.  Luit formed a coalition with Nikkie, so that Nikkie would help Luit against Yeroen. On June 21st, Yeroen bared his teeth for the first time, which is a sign of fear in chimps.  On September 1, Yeroen "greeted" Luit for the first time.  Luit began to take on the control role of the alpha male in mediating fights to restore peace in the group.  On October 31, Yeroen "greeted" Nikkie for the first time.  So, now, Luit was the alpha male, Nikkie was second in command, and Yeroen was ranked third.  But then, in the spring of 1977, Nikkie formed a coalition with Yeroen to challenge Luit, and by December of 1977, Luit was "greeting" Nikkie as his superior. Nikkie had become the alpha male, with Yeroen second in command. 

Congressman Phillips saw that there was a similar opportunity for a power take-over among Democratic politicians once Biden showed his vulnerability in 2023 and 2024. But it's hard to understand why ambitious Democratic politicians like Whitmer, Pritzker, Shapiro, and Newsom did not see that this was the time to betray their party leader and put together a new coalition to support a new person in the position of dominance.

It was not until Biden's disastrous debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, that everyone saw what Phillips and a few others had seen much earlier--that Biden's cognitive decline would make it impossible for him to be a competent campaigner for reelection.  Even then, however, it took three weeks for party leaders to persuade Biden to withdraw.  When that finally happened, they then allowed Kamala Harris to lock up her nomination in only two days of phone calls (July 21-22).  They refused to take seriously the suggestion of Obama and others that there should be a short "mini-primary" or an open convention that would allow a few candidates to compete for the nomination.

Strangely, as Harris campaigned she refused the advice of her campaign people to separate herself from Biden and the unpopular policies of the Biden administration (particularly in connection with inflation).  Tapper and Thompson report that in one meeting with her campaign staff, Harris asked: "If I were to really distinguish myself, how would that make me look?"  She then answered her own question: "Disloyal."

On October 8, Harris went on The View.  At one point in the interview, Sunny Hostin asked: "Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?"  Harris answered: "There is not a thing that comes to mind."  The Trump campaign people were happy to use this footage in a new Trump TV ad (298).

Because of her fear of being disloyal to Biden, she did not say what she should have said to distance herself from Biden and his unpopular policies: As a Vice-President, I have had to defend my boss.  But now I am running my own campaign for president, and I can say that Biden has made many mistakes--such as economic policies that promoted high inflation--and I pledge to avoid those mistakes.

Although Trump won the popular vote by over 2 million.  The election was actually very close.  If Harris had beat the margins of 1.44 percent in Michigan, 1.73 percent in Pennsylvania, and 0.87 percent in Wisconsin, she would have been elected president.  She could have done that by radically separating herself from Biden's policies.

Alternatively, since Harris began the campaign as even less popular than Biden, the Democratic Party could have won the presidential election by a large margin by selecting a moderate Democratic candidate--perhaps one of those Midwestern governors.

That did not happen because the Democratic leaders did not understand how to play the game of chimpanzee politics.

Ten Principles of Darwinian Lockean Liberalism, Part Two

NATURAL PUNISHMENT

3.  The natural rights to life, liberty, and property are enforced in the state of nature by every individual having the natural right to punish offenders of the natural law--either through forcible punishment or through reputational punishment.

Locke thought that in the state of nature, everyone had the "executive power of the law of nature" to punish those who violated the natural law that no one was to harm another.   Locke claimed that in the state of nature, there is a law of nature "that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions" (ST, sec. 6).  But then he immediately qualified this no-harm principle by saying that one may rightly harm another in punishing someone for an offense against the law of nature.  This must be so because the law of nature could not be a true law if it were not enforced by punishment of those who violate it.  Enforcing the no-harm principle requires harming those who would harm us.

In the state of nature, Locke explained:

"The Execution of the Law of Nature is in that State, put into every Mans hands, whereby everyone has a right to punish the transgressors of that Law to such a Degree, as may hinder its Violation.  For the Law of Nature would, as all other Laws that concern Men in this World, be in vain, if there were no body that in the State of Nature, had a Power to Execute that Law, and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders, and if any one in the State of Nature may punish another, for any evil he has done, every one may do so.  For in that State of perfect Equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one, over another, what any may do in Prosecution of that Law, every one must needs have a Right to do" (sec. 7).

Notice that Locke did not rely on divine punishment to enforce the law of nature.  The law of nature, like all the other laws that concern "Men in this World" would be in "vain" if individual human beings did not punish the offenders of that law.  This punishment has two distinct purposes: restraint and reparation (secs. 8, 10-11).  Punishing for restraint is to prevent or deter misconduct, and everyone has the right to punish for this purpose.  Punishing for reparation belongs only to the injured party, who seeks some recompense for the damages he has suffered.

Locke indicated that this human punishment of offenders in the state of nature works at three levels.  Through first-party punishment, individuals punish themselves through conscience and guilt (secs. 8, 21, 122, 209).  Through second-party punishment, individuals punish their tormentor through retaliation and revenge (secs. 8, 10-11, 18-19).  Through third-party punishment, individuals can join with those who have been injured unjustly for a collective punishment of the offender (sec. 10).

Locke also distinguished two general kinds of punishment.  In the Second Treatise, Locke stressed forcible punishment as punishing with physical force those who have inflicted physical harm on their victims, which included capital punishment of thieves and murderers (ST, 11, 17).  In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke identified reputational punishment as a second form of natural punishment: by the "law of reputation," established by a "tacit consent" in "the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world," social opinion calls whatever is socially praised virtuous and whatever is socially blamed vicious; and those who disobey this law are punished with a bad reputation (II.28.10).  In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke advised parents that they should use this law of reputation--social praise and blame--as the most powerful means for shaping the moral character of their children: this was "the great secret of education" for cultivating the moral and intellectual virtues in children and particularly for instilling "civility"--a "respect and good will to all people" (secs. 56-65).

Since the moral standards of this law of reputation vary across cultures, Locke was criticized for being a moral relativist who denied the eternal natural law.  But he responded to this criticism by insisting that despite the cultural relativity, there was some universal regularity in the reputational standards of morality--so that "as to the main, they for the most part kept the same everywhere" (ECHU, II.28.110).

Darwin agreed with Locke.  In his Descent of Man, Darwin explained the evolution of the natural moral sense as rooted in the evolved social instincts of human nature that make human beings intensely attentive to the approbation or disapprobation of people in their social groups, so that they want to have the good reputation for displaying praiseworthy virtues and avoiding blameworthy vices (2004, 120-151).  

Evolutionary anthropologists studying the ethnographic record have confirmed this by finding that there are universal social norms of moral good and evil enforced in societies around the world and throughout history by reputational punishment--norms of social cooperation that include helping kin, loyalty to one's group, bravery, generosity, fairness in social exchange, and respecting property rights (Curry, Mullins, and Whitehouse 2019; Westermarck 1906).

These ethnographies of foraging bands show that they form moral communities through agreement on moral rules and then enforce those rules through the forcible and reputational punishment of deviants (Boehm 2012).  Through gossip, ridicule, and shunning, those who violate the rules are punished with bad reputations, and people will refuse to cooperate with them.  The most pervasive means of reputational punishment, deeply rooted in our evolutionary history beginning with our hunter-gatherer ancestors, is gossip (Boehm 2012; Feinberg et al. 2012; Feiberg et al. 2014; Hoebel 1955; Raihani and Bshary 2019; Wiessner 2005; Wu et al. 2016a, 2016b).  Through gossip, we ridicule, shame, or denigrate people for their bad behavior and thus punish them by giving them a bad reputation that imposes social costs on them.  Empirical studies have shown that most human speaking time--perhaps 65% across cultures--is devoted to gossip (Dunbar 2004).

If reputational punishment is not enough to enforce obedience to the rules, then the community can use coercive force, such as expelling deviants from the group, or, in the worst cases, killing them.  Nevertheless, foragers resort to capital punishment only rarely, and usually it's to punish a murderer.

Forcible punishment creates two possible problems.  The group can be torn apart by conflict.  Or an angry relative of a person killed can take vengeance on the executioner.  To avoid these problems, the group must reach a consensus on the punishment and even persuade the close relatives of the victim to cooperate.  In rare cases, the entire community might participate in the execution.  Or, more commonly, the group will delegate a close relative of the victim to do the killing.

Executing a bully is often dangerous for the executioner, however, because bullies are often formidable and aggressive enough to fight back and harm the executioner.  The solution to this problem, is killing at a distance.  There is plenty of evidence that human beings evolved for throwing and shooting projectiles--rocks, spears, arrows, and bullets--that can kill even the strongest opponent from a safe distance (Bingham 1999, 2000; Bingham and Souza 2009).

Some ancient cave drawings provide evidence for this.  For example, rock drawings from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BC, show this.  In one drawing, we see that on the right there are 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.  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 (Boehm 2017).   One study of the ancient rock drawings in the inland regions of the Iberian Mediterranean basin identified forty-nine scenes of violent content (such as battles, ambushes, and fights), which included eight scenes of "execution squads" (Lopez-Montalvo 2015).

CONSENT TO GOVERNMENT

4.  To overcome the insecurity of natural rights in the state of nature, where every individual is judge in his own case, and his judgment is often distorted by his personal bias, human beings have consented to formal governments to secure their natural rights through formal laws and institutions for making, enforcing, and adjudicating impartial laws.

Locke recognized that there are at least three problems with relying on the individual right to punish to enforce the law of nature in the state of nature (secs. 123-126).

First, there's the problem of knowledge:  many individuals do not have a clear and unbiased knowledge of the law of nature.  In the Letter Concerning Toleration (43), Locke says that the American Indians are "strict Observers of the Rules of Equity and the Law of Nature."  But in the Second Treatise (sec. 123), he says that in the state of nature "the greater part" of men are "no strict Observers of Equity and Justice."  In fact, some men are so "degenerate" that they have no knowledge of the law of nature, and they become like wild animals in their violent attacks on others (ST, secs. 10-11, 128).

Second, there's the problem of partiality: individuals being partial to themselves often cannot render impartial judgment in their own cases, and they are often negligent or unconcerned in judging the cases of others.

Third, there's the problem of cost:  punishment can be too costly to execute, because the offender will fight back and inflict injury on those who try to punish him.

To solve these three problems, people will give up their powers in the state of nature for legislating, judging, and executing the law of nature (secs. 128-131).  They will consent to enter a political society with governmental institutions for legislating, judging, and executing positive laws for the whole community that conform to the law of nature.  This can solve the problem of knowledge, because the legislative power will publicly promulgate the laws.  This can solve the problem of partiality, because the judicial power will decide legal cases through impartial and fair judges.  This can solve the problem of cost, because the executive power will employ the collective force of the community to punish lawbreakers in ways that minimize the costs of punishment for individuals.  All of this should serve the common good of the whole community--in securing the natural rights of all individuals to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

So while Locke disagreed with Hobbes' claim that the state of nature was always a state of war, Locke agreed that there was such a propensity for the state of nature to become a state of war that people would consent to government to secure a more peaceful life.  Some anthropologists have objected that hunter-gatherer societies have been generally peaceful, even calling them the "harmless people" who have never known war (Fry and Soderberg 2013).  

But Darwinian anthropologists have argued that if hunter-gatherers appear to be peaceful, this is because usually by the time anthropologists have contact with them, the foragers have come under state control, which has had a pacifying effect, just as Hobbes and Locke said: because the state of nature easily becomes a state of war, people will benefit from having governments to enforce laws collectively that dampen their tendency to violent conflict.  Once anthropologists probe into the distant history of foragers, they discover a history of extreme violence that was reduced once they came under governmental authority (Boehm 2012; Lee 1979, 370-400; Wrangham and Glowacki 2012).  

For example, the most violent society ever studied by anthropologists are the Waorani, living in the remote Ecuadorian rainforest, among whom for some time about 60% of all deaths were homicides.  The Waorani themselves wanted to end the killing, and they were happy when they came under a governmental authority that reduced the killing (Robarchek and Robarchek 2008).

Of course, even if people have consented to government to secure their peaceful enjoyment of their natural rights to life, liberty, and property, that government can itself become the greatest threat to their rights.  The inevitable conflicts of interest that arise in every community will incline those with political power to use that power to favor their own interests over the interests of others, and thus government will often fail to promote the public good in securing the natural rights of all.  If government becomes utterly tyrannical, then the rights of those being exploited are less secure under government than they would have been in the state of nature, because in a tyrannical government, the rulers can use the collective force of government to exploit the ruled (secs. 91-93).

Although Locke spoke of individuals "wholly giving up" their right to punish offenders against the law of nature in consenting to government, he made it clear that individuals could reclaim this right whenever they were thrown back into the state of nature (ST, 99, 127-130).  So, for example, we have the natural right to kill a thief who threatens our life and property if there is no officer of government available to protect us, because when the thief exercises force without right against us, and there is no common judge with authority to protect us, we are in a state of war with that thief (18-19).

Similarly, if a tyrannical government exercises force without right in threatening our life, liberty, and property, we can rightly defend ourselves against that government that has put us into a state of war (199-204).

Moreover, even if in consenting to government, we have partially given up our natural power of forcible punishment of those who threaten us, we still retain our natural power of reputational punishment of people through our power of approving or disapproving their conduct, and thus enforcing by popular opinion our social standards of virtue and vice (ECHU, II.28.10-11).

What Locke calls the law of reputation is what evolutionary theorists of cooperation--beginning with Richard Alexander (1987)--have called "indirect reciprocity."  In direct reciprocity, we reciprocate the cooperation or defection of others: if you scratch my back, I will scratch yours (Trivers 1971).  In indirect reciprocity, we reciprocate someone's reputation for cooperation or defection:  if you have the reputation for scratching other people's backs, I will scratch yours.  In large societies, where we need to interact with many people who are not our kin, and with whom we have not had any previous interactions, we rely on their reputations to decide whether we can trust them; and our social happiness depends on our maintaining our own good reputations for being virtuous people.

Insofar as Locke saw this moral law of reputation as compatible with individual liberty, he would have agreed with Friedrich Hayek's criticism of John Stuart Mill's "no-harm principle" in On Liberty.  Mill wrote:

"The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion.  That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any f their number is self-protection.  That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.  His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. . . . The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others.  In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.  Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign" (1956, 13).

Following this principle, Mill condemned "social tyranny" as "tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling" and the "despotism of custom." 

Hayek disagreed: "the fact that conduct within the private sphere is not a proper object for coercive action by the state does not necessarily mean that in a free society such conduct should also be exempt from the pressure of opinion or disapproval. . . . John Stuart Mill directed his heaviest attack against such 'moral coercion.' . . . it probably makes for greater clarity not to represent as coercion the pressure that public approval or disapproval exerts to secure obedience to moral rules and conventions" (1960, 146).  In a free society, Hayek believed, society but not the state enforces moral virtue.  The enforcement of moral rules through the social pressure of public approval or disapproval should not be seen as coercion (1960, 62-63, 402, 451).

When Patrick Deneen (in Why Liberalism Failed) scorns Locke's liberalism for its "atomistic individualism" and its failure to cultivate the moral virtues of social life, he says nothing about this--about how Locke insisted on the importance of promoting social virtue through social praise and blame.

Locke thought he could understand the history of government by studying the history of the American Indians.  From his reading of Jose de Acosta and Gabriel Sagard, Locke learned that there were at least three stages in the evolutionary history of government in indigenous America.  

First, among the pure hunter-gatherer Indians, there were no formal governmental institutions, but there were informal leaders selected by the people of each band to mediate disputes and to lead them in war.  Second, among the horticultural tribes, there was a government by councils, in which leaders would have to win the consent of the council members for any decision.  In these first two stages, people enjoyed the freedom that came from government by popular consent that looked like a kind of democracy.

Acosta's third stage was that of autocratic monarchy or empire--like that of the Incan Empire or the rule of Montezuma in Mexico.  Originally, this was a "moderate rule" that is the best, in which the kings and nobles acknowledged that their subjects were "equal by nature and inferior only in the sense that they have less obligation to care for the public good."  But later this monarchic rule became tyrannical as the rulers treated their subjects as slaves and treated themselves as gods (Acosta, 346, 359, 402).

Today, political anthropologists and paleo archaeologists who study the evolutionary history of government have seen a roughly fourfold evolution--from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states--that resembles Acosta's three levels.  For example, in the political history of Indigenous North America, there seems to have been a movement from democratic bands and tribes to autocratic chiefdoms and then back to democratic bands and tribes (DuVal 2024; Hamalainen 2022).

For thousands of years, the first American Indian settlers in North America lived as egalitarian hunter-gatherer-fishers in bands with informal leaders whose power depended on persuasion rather than coercion.

Then, between 1500 BC and 500 AD, there is evidence for the systematic cultivation of corn, beans, and squash, which allowed some tribal peoples to settle into horticultural villages that were probably governed by tribal councils and leaders with popular consent.

Around 900 AD, a climate shift (the Medieval Warm Period) brought rising global temperatures, which lengthened growing seasons and supported more intensive and systematic farming.  This eventually allowed for the emergence of cities with centralized power structures.  The best known of these cities are Hohokam (Arizona), Cahokia (Illinois), and Moundville (Alabama).  At the peak of their power, these cities were ruled by elite chiefs and priests exercising religious, political, and economic dominance over the commoners.

But then there was another climate shift around 1300 towards colder, drier, and more unstable weather (the Little Ice Age).  Harvests began to fail, and famines became more common.  By 1400, the cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and Hohokam were abandoned.  People no longer wanted to live in centralized hierarchical cities ruled by elites who exploited the people under them.  Trade, religion, and politics became more democratized in that people chose to live in small foraging bands and horticultural tribal communities where decisions were made by popular consensus.

This popular rebellion against exploitative elite rule illustrates the fifth principle of Locke's political philosophy.

To be continued . . .