Looking Good: The Darwinian Ethics of Beauty in the Human Body as an Evolved Natural Desire

In Darwinian Natural Right, I said that if the good is the desirable, then human ethics is natural insofar as it satisfies natural human desires that naturally win social approval as useful or agreeable to oneself or to others.  There are at least twenty natural desires that are manifested in diverse ways in all human societies throughout history, because they belong to that universal human nature that evolved on Earth at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, from 250,000 to 11,000 years ago.

The satisfaction of these natural desires constitutes a natural standard for judging social and political life as either fulfilling or frustrating human nature, although prudence is required in judging what is best for particular people in particular social circumstances.  Insofar as a liberal social order allows for the fullest satisfaction of the natural human desires for most people, it can be recognized as the best regime.

One of the twenty natural desires is the desire for beauty.  Human beings generally desire beauty in the human body.  Everywhere human beings distinguish beauty and ugliness in bodily appearance.  They esteem the bodily signs of health and vigor.  They adorn their bodies for pleasing display.  Men tend to find women physically attractive when their physical appearance shows signs of youthful nubility. Women tend to find men physically attractive when their physical appearance show signs of formidibility, muscularity, and high status.  Almost all human beings spend a substantial amount of time every day of their lives engaging in activities that will enhance their bodily attractiveness.

Being a beautiful human being has many benefits.  Beautiful people are perceived to be desirable as sexual mates.  They tend to have more friends.  They are judged to be more trustworthy than people who are not so beautiful.  Beautiful people are more likely to be hired for a job.  And they are more likely to be elected to public office.

In Darwinian Natural Right, I surveyed some of the evidence and arguments supporting this understanding of the natural human desire for beauty.  But in the 25 years since the publication of that book, there has been a lot of new empirical and theoretical research that has deepened the evolutionary account of this natural desire for beauty.  

The latest issue of Evolution and Human Behavior has an article that surveys much of this research: Marta Kowal et al., "Predictors of Enhancing Human Physical Attractiveness: Data from 93 Countries," EHB 43 (2022): 455-474.  With over 200 references, it is a good bibliographic essay on the relevant research over the past 25 years, as well as a report of a new research project.  

THE HUMAN DESIRE TO ENHANCE ONE'S BEAUTY

This article reports online survey data (collected through the Qualtrics website) from 93,158 participants across 93 countries.  Participants were asked about their behaviors that might enhance their physical attractiveness--such as using cosmetics, grooming their hair, wearing clothing, caring for bodily hygiene, and exercising or following a diet that might improve their physical appearance.  Almost all of the participants (99%) reported spending over 10 minutes a day engaged in such activities.  Women spent on average almost 4 hours a day enhancing their beauty, while men spent on average about 3.6 hours a day.  Younger people (ages 18-30) and older people (over 50) spend more time in such beauty-enhancing activities than do middle-aged people (30-50).  People who are dating spend much more time in these activities than do people who are in a committed relationship, married, or single.

I have written about the pitfalls in online survey research, which can be seen in this article.  The most obvious problem is that survey research relies on the self-reporting of participants, which often is not completely accurate or honest.  But the survey for this article does avoid one of the common problems for online surveys in that most of the participants (about 95%) were not compensated for their participation.  Moreover, the participants were screened by an "attention check" to make sure they were careful in their reading and answering of the questions.  And unlike many other such survey research projects, this one is distinctive in two ways--the large scale of the cross-cultural data and the fact that it is not limited to just one theoretical framework.

Of course, the data for this research is historically limited to the contemporary world, but the article does begin with a one-paragraph survey of the deep historical and prehistorical evidence for the natural human desire for beauty and enhancement of one's bodily appearance.  There is archaeological evidence for the ornamental use of red ochre by Neanderthals and our hominid ancestors as early as 250,000 to 150,000 years ago.  There is evidence for marine shell bead ornaments from 120,000 years ago.  Later, burials from around 25,000 years ago show grave goods that were probably bodily ornaments--such as bone beads, bracelets, fox pendants, stone pendants, and shells.  Ancient Egyptian archaeology shows evidence for cosmetics, skin oils, and dyes for facial adornment.

Marta Kowal and her colleagues use their analysis of their survey data as a way of testing hypotheses about the desire for beauty suggested by five theoretical frameworks: the mating market perspective, the pathogen prevalence theory, the biosocial role theory, the cultural media perspective, and the individualism-collectivism continuum.  Although Kowal and her colleagues clearly favor the mating market perspective, they do indicate that these five frameworks are compatible with one another, and that there is some support in the data for all five.

The mating market perspective starts from the assumption that the desire for sexual mating is one of the primary drives of our evolved human nature.  (Sexual mating is on my list of the twenty natural desires.)  The desire for bodily beauty can then be explained as rooted in the desire for mating.  When people seek mates on the "mating market," physical attractiveness is one of the traits that is in high demand.  When David Buss and his colleagues surveyed the mating preferences of more than ten thousand people in thirty-seven countries on six continents and five islands, they found that, contrary to a common view that mating preferences vary arbitrarily across cultures, there was a universal pattern of mating desires that conforms to the Darwinian theory of human mating strategies.  And part of that universal pattern is that both men and women rank "good looks" as one of the top ten traits they value in a mating partner.  (Buss's research was prominent in my account of the mating desire in Darwinian Natural Right, 132-37.)

In all thirty-seven countries, Buss found that men prefer to mate with women who are young and physically attractive, while women prefer to mate with men who have economic resources and high social status.  Since the reproductive success of a man depends predominantly on the fertility of his mate, Darwinian theory correctly predicts that the physical cues to fertility in women--such as youth, smooth skin, regular facial features, and good body tone--are sexually attractive to men around the world.  Since the reproductive success of a woman depends predominantly on the ability and willingness of her mate to invest resources in her and her children, Darwinian theory correctly predicts that the social cues to such resources in men--such as wealth, status, older age, and ambition--are sexually attractive to women around the world; and women who appear young and physically attractive will be more successful in mating with men who have the most desirable traits.

The pathogen prevalence theory of the desire for beauty is also rooted in Darwinian theory.  Assuming that the need for protection from infectious diseases has been important in human evolution, as it has been for other mammals, we can imagine that natural selection has favored human preferences for cues of health and absence of pathogens; so that "good looks" or physical attractiveness could be a proxy or indicator of a healthy absence of pathogens.  And, indeed, some studies have shown that cues of pathogenic infection reduce attractiveness.  So, for example, this might explain why women with imperfections in their skin want to conceal them with cosmetics.

The biosocial role theory explains the desire for beauty as emerging from the interaction of the sexually dimorphic biological traits and the cultural norms for gender roles in a society.  Biological differences between women and men--such as women's childbearing and nursing of infants and men's greater strength and physical robustness--create a sexual division of labor.  But these biologically based gender differences can be either accentuated or moderated by culturally learned norms.  So that the more patriarchal cultures will promote stereotypical gender roles, while the more egalitarian cultures will soften the gender/sex differences.  So while the mating market perspective emphasizes the universality of the gender/sex differences, the biosocial role theory emphasizes the importance of culture in either promoting or downplaying those differences, although the differences can never be totally eliminated.

The cultural media perspective sees the desire for beauty as largely shaped by the influence of mass media.  Social media presents us with ideal images of male and female beauty, and we then try to conform to those feminine and masculine standards of beauty, even though they might be unattainable for most of us.

Finally, the individualism-collectivism continuum explains our conceptions of beauty as deeply influenced by whether our attitudes are more individualistic or more collectivist.  A collectivist attitude favors group interests over individual interests.  An individualist attitude elevates self-interest over group interests.  We might predict that individuals and countries with more individualist attitudes will promote the idea that individuals should spend a lot of time enhancing their beauty.

From these five intellectual frameworks, Kowal and her colleagues generated eleven hypotheses to be tested against the data from their survey.  Here is how they frame those hypotheses in Figure 1 of their article:

Mating Market Perspective:

H1:  Women spend more time enhancing their beauty than do men.

H2:  Individuals of reproductive age spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals not of a reproductive age.

H3:  Single individuals spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals in romantic relationships.

Pathogen Prevalence:

H4:  Individuals from countries with higher pathogen prevalence spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals from countries with lower pathogen prevalence.

H5:  Individuals with a more severe history of pathogenic diseases spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals with a less severe history of pathogens.

Biosocial Role Theory:

H6:  Women from countries with higher gender inequality spend more time enhancing their beauty than do women from countries with lower gender inequality.

H7:  Women conforming to traditional gender roles spend more time enhancing their beauty than do women who conform less to traditional gender roles.

Cultural Media Perspective:

H8:  Individuals who spend more time on social media spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals who spend less time on social media.

H9:  Individuals spend more time watching television spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals who spend less time watching television.

Individualism-Collectivism Continuum:

H10:  Individuals from more i8ndividualistic countries spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals from more collectivist countries.

H11:  Individuals with more individualistic attitudes spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals with more collectivist attitudes.

The survey data gathered by Kowal and her colleagues support Hypothesis 1, because on average women report that they do spend more time enhancing beauty than do men.  It's the difference between about 4 hours a day on average for women as compared with 3.6 hours a day for men.  Remarkably, however, the time is about equal on average for men and women at around age 30.

This data only partly confirms Hypothesis 2, because both the youngest and the oldest individuals spent more time enhancing their physical attractiveness than did middle-age individuals (30-50 years old), and because the oldest women spent more time enhancing their beauty than did the youngest women.  The most dramatic evidence here against the mating market perspective is that postmenopausal women engage in so much activity for enhancing their attractiveness, even though this cannot increase their reproductive fitness.  Could this be explained by the possibility that the average lifespan for women in the Pleistocene Epoch was so short that few women lived past menopause, and thus there was no evolutionary pressure for postmenopausal women to reduce their investment in beauty-enhancing behavior?  Moreover, we might think that older women have to work harder than do younger women in trying to preserve the appearance of youthful female beauty.

The data do not support Hypothesis 3--that single people spend more time enhancing beauty than do those who are not single--because people who were dating spent more time enhancing beauty than did single people (on average 24 minutes more a day), married people (26 minutes more), and people in committed relationships (29 minutes more).  This could be seen as consistent with the mating market perspective, if we say that some single individuals are people who are not pursuing a mate, and therefore they feel less need to look good for the sake of attracting a mate.

Thus, the survey by Kowal and her colleagues provides some confirmation for the mating market perspective. 

The survey data do not show that in countries with high pathogen stress, people spend more time enhancing beauty than do people in countries with low pathogen stress, which denies Hypothesis 4.  The survey data do show, however, that individuals with high pathogen stress spend more time enhancing beauty than individuals with low pathogen stress, which confirms Hypothesis 5.

In this way, this survey research provides only slight confirmation for the pathogen prevalence theory.

This research strongly confirms the biosocial role theory by showing that women in countries with higher gender inequality tend to spend more time enhancing their beauty than do women in countries with lower gender inequality (Hypothesis 6), and by also showing that women who conform to traditional gender roles tend to spend more time enhancing their beauty than do women less inclined to conform to traditional gender roles (Hypothesis 7).

This research also strongly confirms the cultural media perspective by showing that people who spend more time on social media and watching television tend to spend more time improving their appearance (Hypotheses 8 and 9).

By contrast, this research provides little support for the individualism-collectivism continuum, because highly individualistic countries do not show greater time spent on enhancing beauty than in highly collectivistic countries, and because highly individualistic individuals show only slightly more time spent on enhancing beauty than highly collectivist individuals.

THE DARWINIAN ETHICS OF BEAUTY: THE FALLACY OF THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY

I see this research by Kowal and her colleagues as supporting my project in Darwinian Natural Right by showing empirical evidence that the desire for beauty is indeed one of the twenty natural desires that constitute the ethical life of evolved human nature.  But as is often characteristic of the evolutionary psychologists who want to be "value-free" in their research, Kowal and her colleagues do not recognize the implications of their work for the sort of Darwinian ethics that I defend.  As I have indicated in various posts, the evolutionary psychologists have been slow to accept the idea of evolutionary ethics, although in recent years, evolutionary explanations of ethics have become a vibrant field of study.

Evolutionary scientists often object to the idea of evolutionary ethics by saying that it commits the naturalistic fallacy by falsely inferring a moral ought from a factual is.  So, Kowal and her colleagues might say that from the fact that human beings do desire beauty, we cannot rightly infer that they ought to desire beauty.

But this ignores the fact that human ethics is ultimately based on hypothetical imperatives that are open to scientific study.  In everything we do, we move from "is" to "ought" through some hypothetical imperative in which "ought" means a hypothetical relationship between desires and ends.  For example, "If you desire to be healthy, then you ought to eat nutritious food."  Or, "If you desire safe air travel, you ought to seek out airplanes that are engineered for flying without crashing."  Or, "If you desire the love of friends, you ought to cultivate personal relationships based on mutual respect and affection and shared interests."  Or, "if you desire to look beautiful, you ought to engage in those activities that will enhance your beauty."

Such hypothetical imperatives are based on two kinds of objective facts.  First, human desires are objective facts.  We can empirically discover--through common experience or through scientific investigation--that human beings generally desire self-preservation, health, friendship, and beauty.  Second, the causal connection between behavior and result is an objective fact about the world.  We can empirically discover that through eating good food, flying on safe airplanes, cultivating close personal relationships, and enhancing our beauty, we can achieve the ends that we desire.  For studying these objective facts, the natural sciences of medicine, engineering, and psychology can be instructive.  It is false, therefore, for to say that science cannot tell us anything about the way things ought to be.

Some scientists might respond by saying that even if science can tell us about the ought of a hypothetical imperative, it cannot tell us about the ought of a moral imperative, which must be categorical rather than hypothetical.  But this would ignore the fact that if a categorical imperative is to have any motivating truth, it must become a hypothetical imperative.  So when Kant or some other moral philosopher tells us that we ought to do something, we can always ask, Why?  And ultimately the only final answer to that question of motivation is that obeying this ought is what we most desire to do if we are rational and sufficiently informed.

Even Kant implicitly concedes this.  In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says that everyone desires to obey his categorical imperatives, because everyone--"even the most hardened scoundrel"--desires the "greater inner worth of his own person" [einen grosseren inneren Wert seiner Person] that comes only from obeying the moral law and thus becoming a "better person" (Ak 4.454).  In this way, Kant's categorical imperatives are reduced to a hypothetical imperative:  If you desire to be a better person with a sense of self-worth, then you ought to obey my categorical imperatives.  This, then, rests on two kinds of empirical claims--that human beings most desire personal self-worth and that obeying Kant's categorical imperatives will achieve that desired end.

Some of my previous posts on hypothetical imperatives and the fallacy of the is/ought dichotomy can be found here, here, here, here., and here.

The End of History (Again?). Trump, Putin, and the Triumph of Liberal Democracy

 

The New York Post has been Donald Trump's favorite newspaper.  I am sure this cover and the article by John Podhoretz has added to his outraged reaction to the midterm elections.  As Podhoretz points out, in every case where a Republican won a primary because of Trump's endorsement, that candidate lost.  

Two of the examples are in my home state of Michigan and in my third congressional district.  Tudor Dixon won the Republican primary for governor and John Gibbs won the Republican primary for the third congressional district because they got Trump's endorsement, and he endorsed them because they enthusiastically affirmed Trump's Big Lie about the stolen 2020 election and embraced the overturning of Roe v. Wade by Trump's Supreme Court.  Both lost.  Dixon lost to Gretchen Whitmer, who had become unpopular with many Michiganders, particularly because of her hard lockdown orders during the pandemic.  Gibbs lost to Hillary Scholten, even though Scholten had lost to Peter Meijer by 7% of the vote in 2020.  Trump wanted to punish Meijer for being one of the Republican congressmen who voted to impeach Trump.  This is the first time in 30 years that Grand Rapids has elected a Democrat as its congressional representative.  This is also the first time almost 40 years that all levels of the Michigan state government--the Governor, the top state executives, and both houses of the legislature--are controlled by the Democratic Party. 

The two primary reasons for these two candidates and other Trump-endorsed candidates losing are their denial of a woman's constitutional right to choose an abortion and their endorsement of Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election.  In Michigan and other states, voters have supported referendums in favor of abortion rights.  In all five of the states where there were referendums on abortion rights (Michigan, California, Kentucky, Montana, and Vermont), the voters favored the constitutional right to reproductive freedom.  Voters have also been disgusted by Trump's attack on electoral democracy.  As indicated in opinion polls, these were two of the top issues for many voters.

I had predicted that the overturning of Roe by Trump's Supreme Court would be a disaster for the Republican Party, because this was the first time in the history of the Court that it has overturned a long-settled constitutional liberty.  I had also predicted that American Lockean liberal democracy would prevail over Trump's illiberal populist demagoguery.

This confirms what I have said in support of Francis Fukuyama's announcement in 1989 of the "end of history"--that it has become clear that in the human search for the best social order, liberal democracy has prevailed over all the illiberal and undemocratic alternatives.  In recent years, it has been common for political commentators to say that the popularity of the illiberal nationalism of people like Trump and Vladimir Putin proves that Fukuyama was wrong, because it shows that people around the world are turning against liberal democracy.

Putin has attacked "the liberal idea," and he has praised Trump for turning America against liberalism.  Putin has also defended his invasion of Ukraine as part of his striving for a "Eurasian Empire" that will challenge the Western liberal order.  Eurasian nationalists like Alexander Dugin have provided the philosophic defense of Putin's invasion as part of the global expansion of illiberalism.  But I have argued that Ukraine's victory over the Russian invaders will vindicate the powerful appeal of liberal democracy in the battle against illiberal autocracy.

The events of the last few days have presented new evidence for this.  The Russian military commanders have announced that they are retreating from Kherson--another sign that Ukraine is winning the war.

At the same time, on Monday, some Russian oligarchs publicly bragged about how yes, of course, they have interfered in U.S. elections to help the Trump Republicans, and they have continued to do this in the midterm elections.  But then, yesterday, it was reported that Russian TV commentators are expressing their shock that the Trump Republican "red wave" has become hardly a ripple.

Fukuyama should publish a new article entitled "The End of History--Again."

Partisan Polarization and the Threat of Civil War in America's Most Dangerous Election: The Election of 1800

The partisan polarization in this American election was so intense that it became a political war.  Many people expected the country would fall into a violent civil war.  There were charges of voting irregularities that were part of a conspiracy to steal the election.  The party in control of the national government had used the force of the government to suppress freedom of speech by arresting their political opponents and charging them with sedition.  State legislatures controlled by one party claimed that they had the power to select their state's presidential electors without allowing a popular vote.  Those state legislatures that did allow the popular election of presidential electors found ways to rig the counting of the popular votes to favor the candidate preferred by the legislature.  

This was the election of 1800.  President John Adams was running for reelection as the leader of the Federalist Party.  Adams's opponent was Vice-President Thomas Jefferson, who was running as the leader of the Republican Party.  The election became a triumph for the Republicans, who took control of both the House and the Senate in the Congress.  Jefferson was elected President, but only after a deadlock in the Electoral College threw the outcome of the presidential election into the House of Representatives.  Oddly, Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr had received an equal number of votes for president in the Electoral College.  After taking 36 rounds of voting over a week's time, the House finally voted for Jefferson.  Later, Jefferson called this the "Revolution of 1800."  

Some historians have identified this as the first time in history that a popular election brought the peaceful transfer of power between parties who detested one another.  But even if it ultimately turned out to be peaceful, the election was turbulent, and it expressed enraged political passions that could easily have broken out into a bloody civil war.  And, of course, 60 years later, in the election of 1860, another turbulent election did lead to the American Civil War.

Now that Americans have once again been divided by vicious passions of political polarization, it is time to study the election of 1800 to see if it gives us any lessons about how to prevent political party competition from becoming a political civil war.  (Of the many scholarly studies of that election, one of the best is John Ferling's Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 [Oxford University Press, 2004].)

THE LOVE OF FAME AND PRESIDENTIAL AMBITION

The roots of the partisan split between the Federalists and the Republicans originated in the factional rivalry within George Washington's presidential administration (1789-1797).  Adams was the Vice-President.  Alexander Hamilton was the Secretary of the Treasury.  Jefferson was the Secretary of State.  All four of these men had a passion for fame, and thus all four wanted to be the President, because, as Hamilton had said in Federalist Number 72, the American presidency was designed to appeal to those moved by "the love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds."  All four saw the American Revolution and the American Founding as providing them the opportunity for becoming famous as statesmen founding a new form of government.  In 1777, Adams told Richard Henry Lee: "You and I, my dear friend, have been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live.  How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making election of government . . . for themselves or their children."

Although all four sought the fame of becoming great statesmen, they disagreed about what was the best form of statesmanship.  In a letter to Benjamin Rush in 1811, Jefferson related a story from the days of Washington's administration.  Jefferson had invited Hamilton and Adams to dine at his lodgings to discuss some matters that needed to be resolved.  After the discussion was over, they turned to casual conversation.  Hamilton asked Jefferson about the portraits hanging in Jefferson's room.  Jefferson told him that these were pictures of the three greatest men in the history of the world--Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke.  Hamilton paused for some time, and then said: "The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar."  Since Caesar had overthrown the Roman Republic, Jefferson took this as confirming his suspicion that Hamilton wanted to overturn the American Republic so that he could become a new Caesar ruling over an American Empire.

In that same conversation, according to Jefferson, Adams and Hamilton got into a discussion of the merits and defects of the British constitutional monarchy.  Adams thought that that if the defects were removed, this could become the best form of government.  But Hamilton thought that even with its defects, it was still the best form of government.  This indicated to Jefferson that they were both monarchists: Adams wanted a reformed monarchic republic that would balance the three orders of society (the one, the few, and the many), while Hamilton wanted a monarchic republic in which the president would be an elected monarch with a lifetime term in office.  Jefferson thought that Hamilton had revealed his monarchic plan of government in his speech at the Constitutional Convention on June 18, 1787.

Jefferson saw here a contrast between the Anglophilic attachment to the British monarchic form of government and his own attachment to the radically democratic and anti-monarchic politics of the French Revolution.  When war broke out between Great Britain and France, this provoked a division in Washington's administration between those Federalists who favored Great Britain and those like Jefferson who took the side of France.  This dispute continued under the presidential administration of Adams, who was elected president in 1796, with Jefferson as his Vice-President.

This political disagreement over what position the U.S. should take in the war between Great Britain and France led to an acrimonious debate in the party press, with Republican-supported newspapers attacking Adams and the Federalists as monarchists and Tories who wanted to overturn the American Revolution.  These attacks from the newspapers provoked the Ultra-Federalists in the Congress into passing the Alien and Sedition Acts in the summer of 1798.  The Sedition Act provided for fines up to $5,000 and jail terms of up to five years for those who uttered or published "any false, scandalous, and malicious" statement against the United States government or its officials.  This was a blatant violation of the First Amendment's declaration that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."  The Federalist newspapers demanded this.  For example, John Fenno of the Gazette of the United States declared: "It is patriotism to write in favor of government--it is sedition to write against it."  Sedition and seditious libel were criminal offenses under the English common law, but the Jeffersonian Republicans argued that such a law violated American Republican liberty.  This was one of the major issues in the election of 1800.  In 1799, Matthew Lyon, a Vermont Republican congressman, was reelected while serving jail time after being convicted under the Sedition Act.

BALANCING THREE SOCIAL ORDERS 

From his survey of political history and political philosophy, Adams had concluded that every society shows three social orders--the one, the few, and the many.  First, in every society, there must be a "first magistrate" or "principal personage."  Some one person of sufficient talent and ambition will rise to the top of society.  He might be a "great genius" or a "masterly spirit," who draws all eyes to himself.  Second, there must also be a small group of people whose influence elevates them to some aristocratic preeminence based on wealth, noble birth, or other abilities that make them the center of public attention.  Third, the great majority of people will generally defer to the rule of the dominant leader and the preeminent few unless they feel so oppressed that they resist or even overthrow their superiors.  These three social orders can be based on inherited positions as in the eighteenth-century British social class system of monarchs, nobles, and commoners.  But even in America, where there is no such hereditary order of classes, Adams observed, there can still be a constitutional arrangement of offices that reflects these three orders.  

Adams thought that these three social orders--one leader, an ambitious few who want to rule, and many others who defer to the ruling few but who don't want to be oppressed--could be seen not just in human societies but in the societies of other political animals.  I have written about this evolved political psychology of dominance, deference, and counter-dominance among political primates.

Adams thought that a constitutional republic like the United States could achieve a balance of the three social orders that would be free from violent disorder and despotic rule.  But achieving this would require constitutional procedures by which disputes over the positions of leadership could be settled in a peaceful and orderly way through popular elections.  The election of 1800 suggested, however, that the constitutional procedure for electing the president through the Electoral College was not an effective way to do this.

THE FAILURE OF THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

One of the most complicated and confusing debates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was over how to elect the President.  The delegates finally decided on having the President selected by an Electoral College.  But the first two contested presidential elections--in 1796 and 1800--exposed the flaws in the Electoral College procedures--flaws that have continued to create problems for presidential elections throughout American history.

Here's the text from Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution:

"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress . . . ."

"The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves.  And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the the United States, directed to the President of the Senate [who is the Vice President].  The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted.  The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President.  But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; A quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice.  In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President.  But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by ballot the Vice President."

For many years, I taught courses on American Government and American Constitutional Law for college students; and I regularly assigned my students to read this constitutional text in preparation for a class discussion of what it means.  Every time I did this, I found that almost all of the students found this text to be incomprehensible.  Moreover, I have found that most American citizens generally cannot understand this; and so they cannot understand how their presidents are elected.  Isn't that enough to justify amending the Constitution to strike out this section and replace it with a simple statement of how the President and Vice President should be elected by a national popular vote?

At the beginning, everyone assumed that George Washington would be the first President, and no one would dare to challenge him; and so it was easy for the Electoral College to select him for two terms.  But then by the end of Washington's second term, a two-party system had emerged, which had not been foreseen by the constitutional framers.  James Madison offered the first explanation of this new party system in an article ("A Candid State of Parties") for the Republican newspaper National Gazette on September 26, 1792.  He claimed that there had been three party systems in America.  First, during the American Revolution, one political party was comprised of those people who supported the Revolution, while the other party was comprised of the Loyalists or Tories who opposed the Revolution.  The second party system arose during the ratification debates over the Constitution of 1787--one party supporting ratification of the new Constitution (the Federalists) and another opposing it (the Anti-Federalists).

Finally, the third party system emerged during Washington's presidency; and this third division "being natural to most political societies, is likely to be of some duration in ours."  On the one side, are those people who favor the rule of those with wealth and high rank, because they think "mankind are incapable of governing themselves."  On the other side, are those who believe "that mankind are capable of governing themselves," and that hereditary power is an outrage to the rights of man.  It's the party of the few (the antirepublican party) against the party of the many (the Republican party).  Madison suggests that this is "natural to most political societies" because of the natural propensity of human beings to divide themselves into the privileged few and the common multitude.

Of course, Hamilton and Adams refused to be identified as "anti-republican."  One might say that the contest was between three kinds of republicanism.  The oligarchic republicanism of Hamilton, the balanced republicanism of Adams, and the democratic republicanism of Jefferson.

In any case, once Washington had announced his political retirement, the presidential elections of 1796 and 1800 became politically polarized elections contested by the Federalists led by Adams and Hamilton and the Republicans led by Jefferson and Madison.  In 1796, the Republicans in the Congress agreed to support Jefferson for President and Aaron Burr for Vice President; the Federalists in Congress endorsed Adams for President and Thomas Pinckney for Vice President.  In 9 of the 16 states, the electors in the Electoral College were chosen by the state legislature rather than popular vote.  There were 136 presidential electors in the 16 states.  Adams received 71 votes, which was just one vote over the 70 required for a majority.  Jefferson received 68 votes, so he became Vice President.  This strange outcome--a Federalist President and a Republican Vice President--resulted from the fact that the Constitution required the electors to cast two votes without distinguishing between a vote for President and a vote for Vice President.

In 1800, the Federalist Congressmen agreed to support Adams for President and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for Vice President; and the Republican Congressmen again supported Jefferson for President and Burr for Vice President.

One Republican newspaper (Aurora, October 14, 1800) listed the differences between the parties as viewed by the Republicans (Ferling, p. 148):

Federalist

1.   Condemned the principles of 1776

2.   Monarchist

3.   Bent on war with France

4.   Hatred of the people

5.   Had made victims of new immigrants

6.   Inaugurated an economic bonanza for the affluent

7.   Supporters of established churches

8.   Increased the public debt and taxes

9.   wished to meddle in Europe to preserve the balance of power

10. Used the Sedition Act to destroy a free press

11. Favored an established church and powerful priesthood

Republican

1.   Longed to restore the principles of the Revolutionary patriots

2.   Foes of monarchy

3.   Wished peace with the world

4.   Appealed through reason to the people

5.   Prefer equal laws for all citizens and would-be citizens

6.   Would call to account those who plunder the public

7.   Would separate church and state

8.   Favored a reduction of both taxes and the public debt

9.   With Washington, prefers not to meddle in Europe's affairs

10. Favored freedom of the press

11. Favored religious freedom

State legislatures chose the presidential electors in 11 of the 16 states.  In those 5 states with popular voting, the state legislatures could influence the outcome by altering how the popular votes were counted--for example, whether it was a winner-take-all system across the state, or whether the votes would be counted by congressional districts.

On election day--December 3--as required by the Constitution, the electors met in each state and cast two votes, one of which had to be for someone outside their state.  Although the slate of electors was chosen by the parties, the electors are not required by the Constitution to keep their pledge to support their party's nominees.  In 1796, about 40% of the electors departed from their party's recommendations.  In 1800, only one elector of 138 broke ranks.

With 138 electors, a majority would be 69.  When the electoral votes were counted, Jefferson and Burr tied at 73, while Adams had 65, and Pinckney had 64.  Consequently, according to the Constitution, the House of Representatives would have to decide whether Jefferson or Burr was the president, with each state congressional delegation casting one vote.  

The House met on February 11, 1801, with Inauguration Day, March 4, only three weeks away.  Of the 16 states, the Republicans controlled 8 delegations (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee), the Federalists controlled 6 (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, and South Carolina), and 2 were deadlocked (Maryland and Vermont).

There were secret machinations in which the Federalists negotiated with Jefferson and Burr to see which one would give them the best deal in exchange for their votes for president.  Jefferson and Burr were being asked to promise that the Federalists would have some control over policies or appointments in the new presidential administration.  After 33 ballots over four days, the deadlock was not broken.  There were rumored threats from Jeffersonian Republicans that they would use force if Jefferson was not selected, or that Virginia would secede from the Union.  At the same time, there were rumors that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Jefferson.  Later, Adams said that "a civil war was expected" during this time.

Finally, after 36 ballots over a week's time, Jefferson was elected.  Although Jefferson publicly denied it, it was generally believed that he had agreed to some kind of bargain with the Federalists for their votes.

At the Inauguration, March 4, Jefferson delivered an eloquent inaugural speech stating his principles and attempting to reconcile the party divisions--declaring "we are all republicans, we are all federalists."  Adams was not at the inauguration, because he had left Washington hours before to return to his home in Massachusetts.  Adams and Jefferson would never meet again for the next quarter century.  They would die on the same day--July 4, 1826.

THE CORRUPTION OF AMERICAN POLITICS BY SLAVERY

The elections of 1796 and 1800 showed a sectional split: the Federalists were stronger in the North, the Republicans stronger in the South.  This split was rooted in slavery.  Adams had never owned slaves, and he condemned slavery as a violation of the equal liberty affirmed by the Declaration of Independence.  Jefferson owned many slaves, and while he admitted that slavery was wrong, he made no effort to abolish slavery.  The Federalists--particularly Hamilton--scorned Jefferson for the hypocrisy of affirming equal natural rights while owning slaves.  Moreover, Jefferson would not have won the election of 1800 without the Constitutional provision that counted 3/5 of the slaves towards state representation in the Congress.

In 1798, Jefferson and Madison wrote the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions that affirmed the sovereignty of the states and the right of the states to nullify national laws, which would become the basis for the Southern nullification and secession movement to protect slavery in the South that would lead to the Civil War.

The moral corruption that comes from slavery was particularly evident in Jefferson's case because he took one of his slave women--Sally Hemings--as his concubine.  As I have indicated in a previous post, there is plenty of evidence that Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children, and that his sexual use of her began when she was 16 years old, and he was 46.  It is also clear that Hemings' father was Jefferson's father-in-law, and so she was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife Martha.

In the election of 1800, there were rumors of this.  Then, beginning in 1802, some Federalists openly condemned Jefferson for this.  Jefferson refused to say anything about it.

In some ways, the legacy of slavery in America continues to corrupt American politics through polarizing debates over Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, and the White Supremacist Movement.

CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM AND JEFFERSON'S ATHEISM

We can also see in the election of 1800 the political polarization over whether America should be seen as a Christian Nation.  In the election, some ministers preached sermons warning that Jefferson was an infidel or an atheist, and therefore Christians should not elect him President.  For example, John Mitchell Mason, regarded as one of the greatest pulpit orators of his day, delivered a sermon in 1800 with the title "The Voice of Warning to Christians, on the Ensuing Election of a President of the United States," and it was widely circulated as a pamphlet.  

From his reading of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Mason found four kinds of evidence for Jefferson's atheism.  First, Jefferson denied the truth of Noah's Flood by claiming that such a universal flood over the Earth was "out of the laws of nature."  Second, Jefferson's account of the differences in the human races seemed to deny the common origin of mankind in Adam and Eve.  Third, Jefferson implied that there was never a "chosen people" of God.  Fourth, he denied that religious belief was necessary for social order, because he said that "it does me no injury for my neighbors to say there are twenty Gods or no God.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."  This passage from the Notes on Virginia was often quoted by many Federalists as evidence that Jefferson was an "infidel" or atheist.

Mason admits that "the federal Constitution makes no acknowledgment of that God who gave us our national existence," but that means that "to wipe off the reproach of irreligion," Christians must be careful not to elect an atheist like Jefferson.  Mason conceded that Washington and Adams were hypocrites who vaguely professed some religious belief without being true Christians.  But still, he argued, it was better for Christians to vote for a hypocrite like Adams than an atheist like Jefferson, because at least hypocrisy does not directly challenge the identity of America as a Christian Nation.

The question of whether we should recognize America as a Christian Nation or should affirm the separation of church and state continues today to disrupt American political debate.  The Trump Republicans have insisted that the Democrats want to expunge America's Christian tradition.  As I have said in a previous post, some of the Republicans have claimed that Trump is "God's Chosen One."  And a few days ago, Ron DeSantis's campaign organization broadcast a video claiming that DeSantis had been specially created by God--on the eighth day of Creation!--to be the "fighter" for true Americans.

                                                      And God Created Ron DeSantis

THE PHILOSOPHIC FRIENDSHIP OF ADAMS AND JEFFERSON OVERCOMES POLITICAL POLARIZATION

As I have said, once Jefferson was inaugurated president in 1801, he and Adams never met again for the rest of their lives.  They did not even write letters to one another until 1812.  But in that year, they resumed their correspondence; and from 1812 to 1826, when they both died, they exchanged over 150 letters.  In my post on this correspondence, I have noted the deep philosophic topics that came up in this correspondence.  Adams and Jefferson had competed for political fame, and Adams left office resentful that Jefferson had become the more famous one, particularly in claiming to be the author of the Declaration of Independence.  But in this correspondence over the last 14 years of their life, having retired from politics, Adams and Jefferson could resume their philosophic friendship, and in doing that, rise above politics and the pursuit of political fame.

Amazingly, Jefferson and Adams both died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence--July 4, 1826.  As the news spread across America, this was seen as a remarkable, perhaps even providential, sign that these two men, who had been so long divided by their partisan political rivalry, were ultimately united in common death and immortal fame as Founding Statesmen of America.

Egalitarian Hierarchy in Locke's Hunting-Gathering State of Nature: A Response to David Graeber, David Wengrow, Manvir Singh, and Luke Glowacki

I have often argued that scientific studies of the hunting-gathering way of life as the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" (EEA) confirm John Locke's account of the state of nature as the original condition in which human beings were naturally free and equal, in that no adult was under the coercive authority of anyone else, although they consented to the leadership of some people in organizing their social life.  In particular, I have said that studies of the San !Kung people living in the Kalahari desert of southern Africa show that these hunter-gatherer people have lived in Locke's state of nature.

Recently, however, some evolutionary anthropologists have claimed that this is a false origin myth, because there is plenty of archaeological and ethnographic evidence against the assumption that the early human societies of hunter-gatherers were all mobile, small-scale, and egalitarian.  We have good reasons to believe that many of these earliest societies in the Pleistocene era (2.5 million to 12,000 years ago) were sedentary, large, and hierarchical, and that this happened long before human beings turned to farming and agrarian civilization near the beginning of the Holocene era (12,000 years ago).  Therefore, the San !Kung should not be taken as a model of what our human ancestors in the Pleistocene era looked like.

David Graeber and David Wengrow have argued for this in their big book--The Dawn of Everything.  A few years ago, they summarized their reasoning in an article.  A similar position has been recently developed by Manvir Singh and Luke Glowacki in an article published in Evolution and Human Behavior.  Singh has written about this in two essays for Aeon.  The appearance of the article in Evolution and Human Behavior is significant because this is the official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, which has been dominated by the evolutionary psychology of John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and others who identify the EEA with hunting-gathering societies in the Pleistocene that were small, nomadic, and egalitarian bands.  Singh and Glowacki are challenging this fundamental assumption of evolutionary psychology.

Now, of course, we might wonder why it should it matter to us what human societies in the Pleistocene looked like.  Well, it should matter a lot because since most of our evolutionary history was spent in the Pleistocene, those prehistoric societies shaped our evolved human nature, which constrains and enables, although it does not precisely determine, our cultural history and individual history.

Graeber, Wengrow, Singh, and Glowacki present both ethnographic and archaeological evidence for their claims.  They contend that the ethnographic studies of hunting-gathering societies show great social diversity: some of these foraging societies have been small, mobile, and egalitarian; but some have been large, sedentary, and hierarchical.  They don't all look like the San !Kung.  In fact, there are good reasons to consider the San !Kung to be atypical because for centuries the San were forced into the resource-scarce environment of the Kalahari desert by the Bantu agro-pastoralists who claimed the resource-rich land for themselves.  By contrast, when foragers have access to areas with a high concentration of plants and animals that can be a rich source of food, they can settle into sedentary or semi-sedentary societies with large populations in which complex social hierarchies can emerge.

Consider, for example, the Calusa, a fisher-hunter-gatherer society, with no farming, who were discovered by the Spanish explorers and conquistadors in Florida in the early 16th century.  The Calusa had as many as 20,000 people living in towns scattered across the west coast of Florida from Tampa Bay to the Keys.  They were ruled by a King in a capitol town, who demanded tribute from the chiefdoms in his territory.  He enforced his rule through military force and through his claim to sacred authority sanctioned by a priesthood.  Under the King was a nobility, and under them all other people were commoners.  

Anthropologists have often assumed that a monarchic state like this was impossible without agriculture to create the economic surplus that would allow the emergence of such a complex social structure.  But the Calusa produced a surplus of food primarily through fishing.  They lived around coastal estuaries where there was an abundance of fish that could be held in artificial ponds and caught with nets.  The fish could then be smoked or dried for storage.  The King and his nobles controlled the production and distribution of this food to support their coercive rule over the commoners.  William Marquardt and other archaeologists working in southwestern Florida have confirmed the accuracy of what the Spanish reported about the Calusa.

Graeber, Wengrow, Singh, and Glowacki see evidence like this for large societies of sedentary and hierarchical hunter-gatherers as refuting the "nomadic-egalitarian model" of anthropologists like Christopher Boehm and others who assume that hunter-gatherers must be egalitarian, and that our hunter-gatherer ancestors must all have been egalitarian.  Singh and Glowacki have proposed a new "diverse histories model" for explaining the EEA of our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Pleistocene.  Singh and Glowacki accept the "nomadic-egalitarian model" as only partially true--that is, true for those hunter-gatherer societies that were small-scale, mobile, and egalitarian.  But their "diverse histories model" would also recognize some of our ancestral hunter-gatherer societies were like the Calusa in being large-scale, sedentary, and hierarchical.

If this were correct, this would deny my claim that the evolutionary psychology of hunter-gatherers as shaped in an egalitarian EEA confirms the truth of Locke's account of the state of nature as a condition of equal liberty.  But I would suggest some arguments for why this is not correct.

First, we should notice that there is no clear archaeological evidence for coercive hierarchies in the hunter-gatherer societies in the Pleistocene--that is, before the Holocene era began about 12,000 years ago.  If you look carefully at Table 1 in the article by Singh and Glowacki, which presents 34 examples of sedentary or semi-sedentary foragers, you will notice that only two of the examples come before the Holocene, and only one of these two is said to show evidence of inequality.

Number 11 on the Table is located on the "Russian Plain" and dated at "18,000-12,000 BP," which would place it at the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene.  If you go to the Supplementary material for the article online, you will see that the reference for this case is the work of Olga Soffer (1985), who is famous for her work on archaeological sites in the area of what is now Ukraine, where she has uncovered artifacts dated to the "Upper Paleolithic"--18,000 to 12,000 BP.  She found evidence that the ancient people here lived by hunting large mammals--mammoths, bison, and horses.  She also found storage pits and dwellings made from mammoth bones.  Singh and Glowacki say there is evidence of inequality in this society, which they describe as "dwellings vary in size and number of storage pits and elaborate goods."  That looks dubious to me.

Singh and Glowacki define "inequality" as "substantial differences in material wealth, institutionalized status hierarchies, and/or coercive political authority."  Why is it "and/or"?  Does that mean that a society can have inequality in wealth and status without coercive political authority?  If so, that would be what Boehm calls "egalitarian hierarchy":  even when some people in a hunting-gathering society have a little more wealth and status than others, no one can coercively order people to do what they don't want to do.  Even if "dwellings vary in size and number of storage pits and elaborate goods," that's not necessarily evidence for "coercive political authority."

Number 12 on Singh and Glowacki's Table is the only other example from the late Pleistocene.  It's dated at 29,000-22,500 BP.  Here they are referring to the archaeological evidence for the Pavlovian culture, with sites in Moravia (in the east of the Czech Republic), northern Austria, and southern Poland.  The economy of these people was based on hunting mammoth on the tundra at the southern edge of the glacier covering northern Europe at the time.  They had a sophisticated stone age technology, which included weaving, elaborate dwellings, figurines carved from ivory, religious art, and ritualistic burials.  Notably, Singh and Glowacki see no evidence of inequality here.  There is some evidence, however, that some people took on the role of shaman, which presumably meant that they had a special status.  But there is no evidence here for anything like the coercive political authority of the king ruling over the Calusa.

So while Singh and Glowacki stress the importance of finding inequality in societies of "hunter-gatherers during the Pleistocene," because that was the long period of human evolution in which human nature was shaped, they actually present no evidence for despotic political authority in the Pleistocene.

Singh and Glowacki do see evidence for inequality in Pleistocene hunter-gatherer societies as suggested by elaborate burials:  "These burials, many of which are of juveniles, were accompanied by lavish grave goods, such as perforated deer canines and objects made of mammoth ivory.  Such goods were often rare or exotic and appeared to require time and mastery to produce--indications of wealth and inequality among ethnographically observed foragers. . . . Importantly, however, all of these sites appear at the very end of the Pleistocene and are subject to ongoing debates over their interpretation" (426).

As an illustration of the "ongoing debates over their interpretation," some archaeologists have suggested that this funerary evidence for Pleistocene social inequality could be interpreted as showing what Boehm has called "egalitarian hierarchy."  Singh and Glowacki assume a strict dichotomy between "equality" and "hierarchy," so that any evidence of hierarchy denies equality.  But as I have indicated in some previous posts, Locke and Boehm see that absolute equality of condition is impossible in any society.  But it is possible to have a society with an egalitarian ethos that allows for some moderate leadership and hierarchy while prohibiting coercive dominance of some over others.  Evolutionary anthropologists who study leadership across human societies have found that leadership is a human universal--it is found in some form in all societies--but that hunter-gatherers tend not to have leaders with coercive authority (Garfield, Syme, and Hagen 2020).

In one of the best articles on the question of whether Pleistocene burials show evidence of social inequality, Mircea Anghelinu (2012) concludes:

"For powerfully adaptive reasons, strong egalitarian practices (e.g. collective food sharing and redistribution, reciprocity), coupled with short-lived alliances among individuals (Runciman 2005) were probably at work quite early in the Lower Palaeolithic.  Strong kinship ties and group selection (Boehm 1999; Richerson and Boyd 2001) provided additional support for the emergence of cooperation and of an easy to monitor egalitarian social contract.  This collective social control was occasionally challenged in the Upper Palaeolithic, when both technological and demographical accretion and local affluence allowed several gifted individuals a more boastful behavior.  These changes, nothing more than opportunistic circumventions of egalitarian rules, were far from general and clearly reversible, but left behind some of the most spectacular prehistoric burials" (39).

Apparently, Anghelinu sees in the Pleistocene EEA what Boehm calls a "reverse dominance hierarchy": 

 "When the subordinates take charge to firmly suppress competition that leads to domination, it takes some effort to keep the political tables turned.  For the most part, the mere threat of sanctions (including ostracism and execution) keeps such power seekers in their place.  When upstartism does become active, so does the moral community: it unites against those who would usurp the egalitarian order, and usually does so preemptively and assertively.  This domination by the rank and file is so strong that useful leadership roles can develop without subverting the system.  The rank and file, watching leaders with special care, keep them from developing any serious degree of authority" (Boehm 1999: 10).

The Calusa failed to enforce this egalitarian hierarchy in their society.  But there is no clear evidence that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers failed to do this.

REFERENCES

Anghelinu, Mircea. 2012. "On Palaeolithic Social Inequality: The Funerary Evidence." In Raluca Kogalniceanu, Roxana-Gabriela Curca, Mihai Gligor, and Susan Stratton, eds., Homines, Funera, Astra: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Funerary Anthropology, 31-43.  Oxford, UK: Archaeopress.

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

Garfield, Zachery H., Kristen L. Syme, Edward H. Hagen. 2020. "Universal and Variable Leadership Dimensions Across Human Societies." Evolution and Human Behavior 41: 397-414.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2018. "How to Change the Course of Human History (At Least the Part That's Already Happened)." Eurozine (March 2).

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawin of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Marquardt, William H. 2014. "Tracking the Calusa: A Retrospective." Southeastern Anthropology 33: 1-24.

Singh, Manvir. 2021. "Beyond the !Kung." Aeon (February 8).

Singh, Manvir, and Luke Glowacki. 2022.  "Human Social Organization During the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the Nomadic-Egalitarian Model." Evolution and Human Behavior 43: 418-431.

Soffer, Olga. 1985. The Upper Paleolithic of the Central Russian Plain. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Stewart, Tamara Jager. 2020. "Investigating the Calusa." American Archaeology 24 (Fall): 1-10.

Against the Independent State Legislature Theory: How Judges Have Impeded the John Eastman/Claremont Institute Plot to Overturn the Constitution for Trump

In previous posts, I have written about how judges have frustrated the attempts by John Eastman and the Claremont Institute to overturn the Constitution in support of Trump.  In many cases, these judges were even appointed by Trump.  This vindicates the constitutional principle of rule of law in checking the ambition of potential dictators.  Recently, we have seen two more examples of this coming from retired federal appellate judge J. Michael Luttig and federal district court judge David Carter.

The House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol has sought to obtain emails sent or received by John Eastman on his Chapman University email account between November 3, 2020 and January 20, 2021.  Eastman filed a suit with the U.S. District Court in California arguing that many of these emails were protected by the attorney-client privilege, because he was acting as an attorney advising Trump as his client.  David Carter is the judge in this case.

Judge Carter began by examining 111 documents dated January 4-7, 2021, that were under dispute.  In a decision on March 28, Judge Carter ruled that while 10 documents were privileged, 101 were not; and Eastman was ordered to turn these over to the Committee.

The attorney-client privilege is subject to a "crime-fraud exception," which applies when "(1) a client consults an attorney for advice that will serve [them] in the commission of a fraud or crime, and (2) the communications are sufficiently related to and were made in furtherance of the crime" (p. 31 of Carter's decision).  Carter ruled that the Select Committee was correct in claiming that the crime-fraud exception applied in this case, because Eastman and Trump were acting illegally in attempting to obstruct Congress's proceeding to count the electoral votes on January 6, and in attempting to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process.

Carter surveyed the evidence for concluding that the "illegality of the plan was obvious" to both Eastman and Trump (36), and that "it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021" (40).

In a decision a few days ago, October 19, Judge Carter ruled on the claim of privilege over the documents from November 3, 2020, to January 20, 2021.  Once again, Carter ruled that "more likely than not" Eastman and Trump committed obstruction of an official proceeding and a conspiracy to defraud the United States (3).  His most shocking conclusion was that in some of these emails, Eastman said that in one of their lawsuits claiming voter fraud in Georgia, where they had counted fraudulent votes by "10,315 deceased people, 2,560 felons, and 2,423 unregistered voters," they had found that "some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate," and yet Trump had signed a verification swearing under oath that these numbers were correct" (16-17).  Thus, Eastman and Trump knew that they were lying under oath about their evidence for voter fraud.  This is a stunning piece of evidence for the guilt of Eastman and Trump.

Since Carter was appointed to the federal bench in 1998 by President Bill Clinton, Eastman and Trump can say that this just shows the political bias of a liberal Democrat judge.  But they can't say that about the Trump-appointed judges that have ruled against Eastman and Trump.  Moreover, they can't say this about J. Michael Luttig, who has long been known as one of the most conservative Republican judges in the country, and who has become one of the leading critics of the Eastman plot for overturning the Constitution in favor of Trump.

Luttig is one of the most prominent conservative jurists in America.  He worked with John Roberts as young lawyers in the Reagan Administration.  He was appointed by George H. W. Bush to lead Clarence Thomas through his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991.  He was then appointed by Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1991, serving until 2006, when he resigned to become general counsel for Boeing, until his retirement in 2019.

In the days before the January 6th certification of Biden's Electoral College victory, Eastman and Trump were pressuring Vice President Pence to accept Eastman's legal theory for overturning the election by having the Vice President refuse to certify the electoral votes in some of the states won by Biden, or having the Vice President ask the Republican-controlled legislatures in those states to consider selecting Trump electors and thus overturn the popular election of Biden.  Pence's legal team advised him that this was unconstitutional, because the Vice-President's role in certifying the Electoral College vote was only ceremonial, and that he did not have the constitutional power to overturn a presidential election.  On the evening of January 4th, Pence's legal team contacted Luttig to ask him to act as an outside legal expert, and he was emphatic in saying that there was not constitutional basis for Eastman's theory.  This was particularly remarkable because Eastman had been one of Luttig's former law clerks.

On the morning of January 5th, Pence's legal team contacted Luttig again and said that Pence needed help to support his resistance to Eastman's plot.  Luttig responded by writing a Twitter thread arguing that there was no constitutional support for Eastman's legal theory.  On January 6th, Pence quoted this in his public letter explaining why he was refusing to accept Eastman's proposal for overturning the election.  On January 7th, Pence personally called Luttig to thank him for his help.

Eastman's legal theory was based partly on what has been called the "independent-state-legislature" theory (ISL).  Luttig has said that "there is literally no support at all in the Constitution" for this theory, because it is "antithetical to the Framers' intent, the text, and the Constitution's fundamental design and architecture."

ISL is based on an unusual interpretation of two clauses in the Constitution.  Article I, Section 4, clause 1 reads: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators."  Article II, Section 1, clause 2 reads: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress."  

Proponents of ISL say that these provisions give the "Legislature" of each State absolute power over Federal elections to Congress and the Presidency, a power that is so absolute that it cannot be limited by anything in state law or even in the state constitution.  Consequently, Republican-controlled state legislatures in 2020 had the power to overturn Biden's popular vote win in their States by appointing Trump electors to the Electoral College.

Another consequence of the independent state legislature theory is that a state legislature has absolute power to engage in partisan gerrymandering in redistricting its congressional districts free from any limits by state constitutional law.  So, for example, in North Carolina, the Republican-controlled legislature drafted new congressional district maps in 2021 that gave an advantage to the Republican Party in ten seats and to the Democrats in four.  Multiple lawsuits were filed against the Republican leaders of the North Carolina legislature claiming that the maps were so partisan gerrymandered as to be unconstitutional.  The North Carolina Supreme Court has held that the maps are unconstitutional.  A special master team of outside experts were assigned to create new maps, which were accepted by the courts.  

The Republican leaders of the legislature have appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that under the independent state legislature theory, the North Carolina legislature has absolute power over congressional districting that cannot be constrained by the state constitution.  The U.S. Supreme Court has granted review, and oral arguments are scheduled for December 7, 2022 in the case of Moore v. Harper.  Many observers of the Court are expecting that the conservative Republican majority on the Court (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett) will rule in favor of the independent state legislature theory in this case.

Luttig has joined this case as a co-counsel with Neal Katyal as the counsel of record arguing the case against the North Carolina legislative leaders.  Luttig has said that Moore v. Harper is "without question the most significant case in the history of our nation for American democracy."  He has also said that this is part of the Republican move towards the independent state legislature theory as part of a plot for overturning the elections in 2024.

Predictably, Eastman and the Claremont Institute have filed an amicus curiae brief in Moore v. Harper supporting the independent state legislature theory.  They attempt to answer the criticisms of the  ISL theory coming from various constitutional scholars, such as Vikram David Amar and Akhil Reed Amar.

The Claremont Institute's brief states its core idea bluntly: "when performing federal functions [such as drawing congressional district maps], the legislatures of the several states are not operating pursuant to state authority, but rather pursuant to federal authority, and cannot be constrained by anything in state law or even a state constitution to the contrary" (2).

On the face of it, this makes no sense.  How does federal authority establish the identity of a state legislature?  Surely, what counts as a state legislature is defined by a state constitution and thus subject to the limits set down in that constitution.

If you read the brief, you will see that it nowhere cites any evidence for this theory in the American Founding.  On the contrary, as Amar and Amar point out, throughout the Founding period, it was assumed that the establishment and legitimacy of a state legislature depended on a state constitution as an expression of popular consent to government; and thus every state legislature was subject to constitutional limits.

You will also see that the Claremont brief would require the Supreme Court to overrule all of the previous decisions of the Court that deny the ISL theory.  If you compare the Claremont brief and the paper by Amar and Amar, you will notice that never in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court has a majority of the justices endorsed the ISL theory.  In Bush v. Gore (2000), three justices (Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas) did seem to endorse ISL in their concurrence with the majority.

You should also notice that the Claremont brief is totally silent about a previous Supreme Court decision about partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina--Rucho v. Common Cause (2019).  As Amar and Amar point out, the majority opinion in this case written by Chief Justice Roberts rejected the independent state legislature theory by arguing that voters in the states can approve constitutional amendments that prohibit partisan gerrymandering, and these constitutional limits can then be enforced by the State Supreme Court (see Amar and Amar, 35).  Remarkably, all five of the conservative Republican justices in 2019 signed onto this opinion!  The Claremont brief is careful to hide this.

I will be interested to see what happens at the oral arguments for Moore v. Harper on December 7th, and whether we see any hints that the Eastman/Claremont Institute position is going to win out.

Trump's Chimpanzee Politics in the Ohio Senate Race: Tim Ryan Emasculates J. D. Vance

 I have written about Donald Trump's chimpanzee politics.  Recently, we have had an excellent illustration of how to counter Trump's alpha male theatrics.  An alpha male cannot rule by himself, he needs the support of beta males.  But then beta males are vulnerable to the charge that they are . . . only beta males servile to the alpha male.

Tim Ryan is a Democrat running for the U. S. Senate from Ohio.  Normally, Ohio would seem to be Trump Country.  And once Trump endorsed J. D. Vance for the Senate, that would seem to be enough for Vance to defeat Ryan.  

But a few weeks ago, Trump held a rally in Ohio, where he bragged that while Vance had criticized him in 2016, he sought Trump's endorsement in 2022.  Now, he's "kissing my ass," Trump gloated.  Vance then walked onto the podium to praise Trump.  In a debate with Vance, Ryan reminded the audience of this.  What kind of a man would give up his dignity to win Trump's endorsement, he asked.  He observed that no one he knows from his high school class would have done this--to emasculate himself in becoming subservient to a higher ranked male.  What Ohio wants, Ryan proclaimed, is not an ass-kisser but an ass-kicker.

Notice that this has nothing to do with policy debates.  It's pure chimpanzee politics--who's the dominant male, who's the beta male.  Ryan simultaneously identified Vance as the beta male and himself as alpha--as an ass-kicker not an ass-kisser.

This is a dramatic illustration of the evolutionary psychology of the Democratic strategy for subverting Trump's rhetoric of chimpanzee politics.  A narcissistic alpha male like Trump cannot prevail without the support of submissive beta males, but the very submissiveness of these beta males exposes them to the humiliation of being toadies.

Indigenous Americans Introduced Slavery to America. European Liberalism Abolished Slavery.

The second Monday in October has long been celebrated as Columbus Day.  But in recent years, many people have insisted that this day should be celebrated as Indigenous Peoples Day or as Native Americans Day.  On Monday, even South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem recognized Native Americans Day.  The justification for this is that Columbus should be seen as the villain who initiated the European conquest of the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere, while the Native Americans should be seen as the heroic victims of colonial exploitation and enslavement.  A similar kind of rhetoric runs through the "1619 Project" of The New York Times, with the claim that American history began in August of 1619, when 20 African slaves were sold to the governor of the Virginia colony: American history is a history of slavery that exposes the fraudulent hypocrisy of the American principle of equality of rights in the Declaration of Independence.

This rhetorical argument of anticolonialism and antiracism is partly true and partly false.  It is partly true because the European settlers of the New World were indeed brutal oppressors of the Native Americans and the African slaves.  It is partly false, however, because it ignores two historical facts about slavery in the New World.  First, it ignores the fact that Indigenous Americans had enslaved one another before the Europeans arrived in the New World.  Second, it ignores the fact that Europeans debated the justice of slavery, and the European liberal principle of equal human liberty led eventually to the abolition of slavery.

In his book--The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)--Andres Resendez has shown how Indigenous slavery arose in every part of the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of the Europeans and before the establishment of African slavery.  For example, the Maya and the Aztecs enslaved captive people who could be used for human sacrifice.  The Iroquois waged war to enslave captives.  And the native Americans along the North Pacific Coast of North America enslaved people captured in war.  Resendez has written a short summary of his book for a Smithsonian Institute publication.  What this shows is that the natural human propensity to tribalistic xenophobic/us-against-them thinking has throughout human history supported the enslavement of those identified as out-group members.

But even if the history of slavery manifests a natural inclination to exploitation and social parasitism, the human resistance to slavery manifests a natural moral sense that opposes such exploitative parasitism.  Throughout the history of the debate over slavery--from Aristotle to Bartolome de Las Casas, to John Locke, to Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Darwin, to Abraham Lincoln--one can see the natural moral sentiments expressed as a joint product of emotional capacities for feeling moral passions like sympathy and anger and rational capacities for judging moral principles like kinship and reciprocity.  (I wrote about this in chapter 7 of Darwinian Natural Right.)

In this debate, we can see the fundamental incoherence in slavery, which requires treating some human beings as if they were not human, as if enslaved human beings do not feel the natural human resistance to exploitation.  Aristotle pointed to this incoherence in his account of natural slavery as distinguished from conventional slavery.  Any careful reader of Aristotle can see that slavery as actually practiced is purely conventional (based on force) rather than natural (based on justice).  Bartolome de Las Casas saw that, and it supported his argument that the native American Indians could not be natural slaves, and therefore their enslavement by the Spanish was naturally unjust.  The American Indians were equally entitled to their human rights because they were equal in their humanity as members of the human species.  He made this argument before the Spanish judges of the Royal Council convoked at Valladolid in 1550.  The Spanish Crown prohibited the enslavement of the Native American Indians.  But Spanish colonists were able to evade this prohibition through legal arrangements such as encomiendas, which was a disguised form of slavery.

As I have indicated in a series of posts, the Lockean liberal principle that all human beings were naturally equal in their liberty supported the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence that rendered human slavery unjust, which led finally to the abolition of slavery in America through Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Decline of Monarchy and the Evolutionary Symbolic Niche Construction of Bourgeois Culture

Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace After Her Coronation in Westminster Cathedral in 1953

THE DECLINE OF MONARCHY

On pages 16-17 of the paper by Gerring et al., you can see graphs for "Monarchies and Republics in Europe, 1100-2005" and "Monarchies and Republics in the World, 1700-2005."  Here "republic" means simply "nonmonarchy."  The primary alternatives to monarchy were "personal dictatorships" and "corporate forms of government" (with public assemblies that were either democratic or oligarchic).  What is striking in both graphs is how for most of this history, the number of monarchies far exceeds the number of nonmonarchies; but then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies surpasses the number of monarchies.  Why?

If King Charles III of Great Britain were to declare that he was going to reclaim all of the monarchic power once held by Charles I and Charles II in the seventeenth century, this would undoubtedly be rejected, and even ridiculed, by the British Parliament and the British people.  Why?

Here's the answer from Gerring et al.: "We have argued that monarchy solved the primordial coordination problem of politics in the premodern era.  Where societies are disconnected, a focal point is needed and monarchy was, for millennia, a readily available heuristic for establishing legitimate government.  In the modern era, as societies became more interconnected, monarchy's advantage disappeared.  With societies now highly mobilized and interconnected, monarchy's inability to integrate the masses into politics became a defect rather than an asset" (17).  According to Gerring et al., the primary reason why societies today are so "highly mobilized and interconnected" is the development of mass communications--the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet.  In particular, they show how the diffusion of radios beginning in the 1920s is associated with the decline of monarchy in the modern era (23-26).

But this raises some obvious questions that are not answered by Gerring and his colleagues.  What explains the development of mass communications?  And what was it about the content of mass communications that subverted monarchy?

Does it make any sense to say that "monarchy's inability to integrate the masses into politics became a defect rather than an asset"?  Why can't monarchy use modern mass communication to glorify monarchy among the masses?

Modern mass communication is a product of modern science and technology.  What is it about modern culture that has promoted science and technology?

Monarchy depends on a perception of society as a hierarchy.  Patricia Crone observes: "Pre-industrial society was commonly envisaged as a hierarchy (chain of command) in which everyone knew his proper place, enjoyed the appropriate rights and duties and obeyed his superiors, receiving obedience from his inferiors in his turn: all in the last resort obeyed the monarch, through whom human society was slotted in with the divine" (115).  This hierarchy was a very narrow pyramid--with a ruling elite at the top that was about 1-2% of the population and peasants at the bottom who were about 80-90% of the population.  What is it about modern culture that has undermined this premodern perception of society as a rigid hierarchy?

One possible answer to all of these questions is suggested by Crone's book, although Crone does not explicitly state it: modernity has dissolved the monarchic culture of hierarchy by promoting the evolutionary symbolic niche construction of the bourgeois culture of equal liberty.

THE EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY OF SYMBOLIC CULTURE

According to Crone, human beings are unique in their capacity and need for culture: "Human beings are distinguished from other animals by their inability to survive without culture, that is information which is not transmitted genetically and which thus has to be learnt afresh by every new generation.  (For example, the capacity to reproduce is genetically transmitted, but kinship systems, courtship etiquette and marriage rules are elements of culture; the capacity to utter noises is genetically transmitted, but languages have to be learnt; so do social and political institutions, agriculture, pottery-making, counting, writing and so on.)" (94).

The social organization of other animals is built into their genes, and thus every species of social animal has its own genetically determined social structure that does not change.  "The human animal is of course genetically programmed too.  However, its programme for social organization is deficient (and to some extent even counter-productive).  The programme does little but instruct its bearer to learn, or in other words to acquire culture with which to supplement (and in some cases even to suppress) such specific instructions as it retains.  Without doing so, the species simply could not survive; doing so, it can survive almost anywhere on earth and even, for limited periods, outside it.  Culture is thus the species-specific environment of Homo sapiens.  Living in accordance with nature is an attractive idea, but in the human case it actually means living with culture" (94-95).

Crone explains human culture as a construct of the human mind that can be imagined but not directly observed.  Through cultural constructions, human beings create world views--that is, theoretical constructions of the world in the mind.  World views can be prescriptive, in that they provide a valuation of the world--telling us what to do and not do.  These prescriptive world views can be religious, ideological, philosophical, or moral.  Religious world views differ from the others in that religion explains the world with reference to supernatural beings rather than abstract principles or impersonal laws.  Religions have been more popular in history than the other atheist or non-theist world views, because "supernatural beings endowed with human feelings are easier to understand, love and obey than abstract concepts."  

In contrast to these prescriptive world views, Crone argues, modern science provides a purely descriptive world view--a theoretical construction of the world that explains the world without telling us what to do (142-43).  She does not answer the obvious objection to this claim--that modern science must be prescriptive (in other words, ethical) because the practical commitment to the life of science implies that this is a good life.  The success of modern science and its promotion of modern mass communications would have been impossible without the modern ethical commitment to science as a human good.

Crone identifies two functions of culture that are best served by religious world views: the drawing of socio-political maps and providing meaning.  The first is important because since human beings are not genetically programmed for any specific kind of socio-political order, they need to culturally construct a conception of good social and political order as an invention of the human imagination.  Crone offers a simple, and comical, illustration:

"Nothing in my genetic equipment tells me that I should milk cows or be forbidden to do so; you may force me to milk them, but if that is all there is to it, I may beat you up or run away the moment you are busy drinking; and though you may be in league with others today, you may fall out with them tomorrow: common interests are highly unstable, as anyone familiar with the phenomenon of intrigue should know.  By contrast, if you devise a religion which says that the gods want my kind to milk and your kind to stick together in enjoyment of authority, on the grounds that my kind descend from a cow whereas you and yours descend from a god, then you may hope to create a society which remains stable not only during our lifetime, but also, and crucially, when social roles have to be transferred to the next generation: the religion would both justify and solidify the social order" (147).

The second function of culture--providing meaning--is served when a religious world view justifies the socio-political order by showing how it fits into God's plan for the world and for the human beings who obey His laws.  As Crone indicates, religion justified monarchy in pre-industrial societies by identifying the king as the link between the divine and the human worlds.  This justified the premodern hierarchical ranking from high to low: from God to King to peasants.

The Crown, Orb, and Sceptre of the Monarch on Queen Elizabeth's Coffin

At the funeral for Queen Elizabeth II, we saw the symbols of this link to the divine in the monarchy.  These are the same symbols displayed at Elizabeth's coronation in 1953.  The Sceptre and Orb were first created for Charles II's coronation in 1661, which was the restoration of the monarchy that had been overthrown in 1649 with the beheading of Charles I and later the establishment of a Republic.  The Sceptre represents the Crown's power and governance.  The Orb is a golden jeweled globe with a gem-encrusted cross symbolizing that the monarch's power is from God.  At the coronation of King Charles II next year, we will see him receiving this same Crown, Orb, and Sceptre from the Archbishop of Canterbury.  For Elizabeth's coronation in 1953, William Walton composed a march for orchestra entitled "Orb and Sceptre."

But now these seventeenth-century symbols of the divine right of monarchs have been reduced to a purely ceremonial role in a modern society that no longer believes that monarchs rule by divine right.  Most of us certainly don't believe that there is any divinely ordained monarchic hierarchy in which most human beings must live as peasants under the dominance of a tiny ruling elite.  We believe that all human beings are created equal and endowed by their Creator with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that governments are established by consent of the governed to secure those individual rights.  In other words, most of us believe in a social and political order of liberal democracy justified by a culture of bourgeois virtues, in which most human beings belong to a bourgeois middle class, and all human beings are regarded in principle as equally free.

Crone correctly sees the importance of the rise of bourgeois culture in explaining the transition from pre-industrial societies to modern industrial societies.  Pre-industrial societies were based on the fundamental idea that there is a natural, cosmic, or divine hierarchy by which one monarch and few members of a small elite group are born with the authority to rule over the great mass of human beings, mostly peasants, who must submit to being pushed around and exploited without complaint.  Bourgeois ethics denies that idea by asserting that all human beings are naturally equal in their liberty, and that they cannot rightly be ruled by anyone else without their consent. Crone is mistaken in thinking that this bourgeois culture--like all culture--transcends our evolved human nature as social and political animals, and thus cannot be explained by evolutionary biological science.

As I have argued in previous posts, human beings are not the only cultural animals, but they probably are the only animals with symbolic culture, who use language to create social institutions through symbolic niche construction.  Human beings do this through a Lockean social contract by which people consent to establish institutions by agreeing to constitute those institutions.  We do this through what John Searle calls a Declaration of Status Functions: Let X count as Y in the context of C.  

Let this twenty-dollar bill count as money in the U.S. currency system.  Or let Joe Biden count as president of the United States because he was elected through the electoral system established by the Constitution.  

Or let Prince Charles count as King Charles III because he is the oldest son of the dead queen?  But today the British understanding of the legitimacy of the monarchy differs from that which prevailed during the monarchy of Charles I and Charles II.  The British people no longer agree to see the monarch as the ruling sovereign by divine right at the top of a hierarchy with most people as obedient peasants at the bottom.  Now the British people agree that Parliament is supreme and that the Prime Minister will act as the chief executive, so that the monarch will be the ceremonial head of state but not the ruling sovereign.  And the British people see themselves not as obedient peasants but as human beings who are in principle naturally free and equal, who obey only that government to which they have consented.

THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES?

What we see here is what Patricia Crone and other historians call the "rise of the bourgeoisie"--the symbolic niche construction of bourgeois liberty and equality that constitutes the liberal culture of the modern world, as set against the illiberal culture of the pre-modern world (see Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, 21-24, 186-87, 195-97, 206).

This all began in the 18th century with Adam Smith's liberal idea--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice" (Wealth of Nations, Liberty Fund, 664, 687).  In previous posts, I have identified this as what Deirdre McCloskey calls the "Bourgeois Revaluation," which can be expressed as a Searlean status function: Let the bourgeois life count as honorable in a commercial society.  As McCloskey says, this bourgeois liberalism can be understood as "reinstating a pre-agricultural equality" by establishing an equal dignity and liberty for ordinary people--including an "equality of genuine comfort"--that restores the equal autonomy of individuals enjoyed in hunter-gatherer bands for hundreds of thousands of years until the establishment of rigid class hierarchies in agrarian state societies (Bourgeois Equality, 631-39).  This is a restatement of John Locke's argument for liberalism as the restoration of the natural liberty and equality of the state of nature.

McCloskey overstates her case, however, when she argues that the bourgeois virtues include all of the traditional seven virtues--four pagan virtues (prudence, temperance, courage, and justice) and three Christian virtues (faith, hope, and charity).  In Bourgeois Equality (xxi, 423) and Bourgeois Virtue (508), she says that the bourgeois virtues are "the seven virtues exercised in a commercial society," and "the seven principal virtues of pagan and Christian Europe were recycled as bourgeois."  But she cannot quote Adam Smith or anyone else saying this.

McCloskey can point to Smith's account in The Theory of Moral Sentiments of the virtues of prudence, temperance, courage, justice, and benevolence (part of Christian charity?).  But she cannot find any statement by Smith that these are the bourgeois virtues of a commercial society.

Moreover, she cannot explain why Smith identifies admiration of the rich as "the corruption of our moral sentiments."  In her one-paragraph comment on Smith's chapter against admiring the rich, she observes: "That the Waltons are rich does not make them admirable people, despite the undoubted commercial savvy of Sam and his brother Jim" (Bourgeois Equality, 564).  But this contradicts her claim that the rhetoric of the bourgeois virtues promotes "the admiration for and acceptance of trade-tested betterment" (564).  She also cannot explain why Smith in the Wealth of Nations never identifies businesspeople as virtuous, and why he refers only once to "virtues," and it's a lament that the "laboring poor" in a commercial society suffer a decline "in intellectual, social, and martial virtues" (WN, 782).

Recently, Daniel Klein has offered a much more modest--and more defensible--version of McCloskey's argument.  Using the Google Books Ngram Viewer, Klein shows that after about 1740 people for the first time started writing about "honest merchants" and "honest traders," terms that had almost never appeared before 1740.  For the first time, the profession of merchants and traders was regarded as "honest."  Klein traces this idea to the jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius and others who saw that those who made money through honest dealings--that is, voluntary transactions--had a property right to their wealth that should be protected by law.

But unlike McCloskey, Klein distinguishes honest dealings from virtuous conduct.  Being honest is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being virtuous.

Klein quotes from Alexis de Tocqueville's chapter in Democracy in America on "Why Americans Consider All Honest Callings Honorable" (part 2, chap. 18).  While in aristocracies, "it is not exactly work itself which is despised, but work with an eye to profit."  By contrast, in America, "equality makes not only work itself, but work specifically to gain money, honorable."  "In the United States professions are more or less unpleasant, more or less lucrative, but they are never high or low.  Every honest profession is honorable."

Thus, a bourgeois life in a modern liberal society is regarded as honest and honorable.  But it does not necessarily display all the virtues.  The modern adoption of this idea of bourgeois dignity is enough to explain the Great Enrichment of the past 200 years that has created the world in which most of us live today: the richest, healthiest, freest, and most populous world that human beings have ever experienced in their 200,000 years of evolutionary history.