Traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports Burkean conservatives and Lockean liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.
Curtis Yarvin praises Sir Robert Filmer as "the baddest-ass reactionary who ever lived," and he identifies Filmer's Patriarcha as the best defense of absolutism and divine-right monarchy. Although Filmer died in 1653, Patriarcha was not published until 1680, when it was recognized as a defense of the Stuart restored monarchy against its Whig critics. John Locke's Two Treatises of Government were published in 1689 as a theoretical justification of the overthrow of King James II and the Stuart monarchy in the Revolution of 1688. Locke's First Treatise was a fervent critique of Filmer's Patriarcha. His Second Treatise laid out the political thought of Whig liberalism.
Yarvin sees 1688 as the critical turning point in history--the turn from feudal monarchy to modern liberalism. If you want to be a true reactionary, Yarvin insists, you need to be a Jacobite arguing for the restoration of the Stuart monarchy.
That's exactly what Yarvin proposes. Today, the legitimate heir to the Stuart throne of England is the 27-year-old Prince Joseph Wenzel of the Royal House of Liechtenstein. The solution to England's problems would be to put King Joseph I on the throne and allow him to rule with the absolute power once held by the Stuart monarchs. There are two ways to do this. Either persuade a majority of the English people that this is what needs to be done. Or persuade the British Army to stage a military coup to bring this about.
Yarvin indicates that the persuasive argument for doing this is simple. It's a choice between order and disorder: absolutist monarchy promotes order, while liberal democracy promotes disorder. In Great Britain, the only way to restore order is to restore the Stuart monarchy.
But to make this persuasive, wouldn't we have to offer some empirical evidence to back it up--evidence that while absolutist monarchies have generally secured social order, liberal democracies have generally inclined to social disorder? Yarvin almost never considers the empirical evidence.
The one possible exception is that at least twice in his writings, Yarvin refers briefly to some data about the crime rate in Great Britain. Obviously, one measure of order or disorder in society is the rate of crime, particularly violent crime. If Yarvin is correct, we would predict that feudal illiberal societies have low rates of violent crime, while modern liberal societies have high rates.
Here's the one short passage where Yarvin claims the empirical evidence is on his side:
"According to official statistics, between 1900 and 1992 the crime rate in Great Britain, indictable offenses per capita known to the police, increased by a favor of 46. That's not 46%. Oh, no. That's 4,600%. Many of the offenders having been imported specially, to make England brighter and more colorful. This isn't a government. It's a crime syndicate."
Unfortunately, Yarvin's internet link to his source is broken, so I can't see exactly what he's citing, but it's some kind of British government website with crime statistics.
His selection of data is a bit odd. Why does he start in 1900 and stop in 1992? It is widely known that crime rates in Western Europe and North America rose dramatically from the 1960s to the early 1990s. But then, in the mid-1990s, crime rates dropped dramatically and reached historically low levels around 2010.
Did Yarvin stop in 1992 so that he could ignore the drop in crime rates over the past three decades?
And if he wants to find data for low crime rates under the rule of premodern absolutist monarchies, shouldn't he be looking at the historical data long before 1900?
I suspect that Yarvin doesn't do this because he doesn't want his readers to see the quantitative evidence presented by many scholars (Eisner 2003, 2014; Muchembled 2012; Pinker 2011; Sharpe 2016) that from high rates of violence and homicide in the Middle Ages, there has been a long decline in modern liberal societies, which shows that liberalism promotes moral self-command, and that people in pre-modern illiberal societies suffered from a lack of self-control.
Some of this historical evidence is neatly presented in a graph by Max Rosser. As you can see, the homicide rate was about 23 per 100,000 population in 1300 (King Edward I), 4.0 in 1675 (the restored Stuart monarchy), 2.0 in 1725 (the Hanoverian monarchy with Parliamentary supremacy), and 0.5 in 2015. So the homicide rate under the Stuarts was 8 times as great as the rate today. Does this mean that the Stuart monarchy was not a government but a crime syndicate?
I have written about this evidence here, here, and here.
Manuel Eisner (2003, 2014) is a criminologist who has assembled the History of Homicide Database, which is the most comprehensive collection of quantitative estimates of homicidal levels from 1200 to the present. His data show that the average estimates of homicide rates across Europe from 1200 to about 1450 converge at a rate of about 27 per 100,000 inhabitants. This average rate then begins to decline: 20.1 (1500-1549), 12.0 (1600-1649), 5.5 (1700-1749), 3.5 (1800-1825), 2.0 (1900-1924), and 1.0 (2000-2012). Over a period of 500 years, the peacetime criminal homicide rate in Europe fell by half every century.
Eisner's data also show that most of this decline in homicide rates was due to a fall in lethal male-to-male fighting of about 99%!
Eisner provides evidence that the best explanation for this dramatic drop in homicidal violence in Europe over the past 500 years is that there was what Norbert Elias called a "civilizing process" (Elias 2000; Linklater and Mennell 2010). European societies went through a change by which average levels of self-control, standards of decency, and disgust for open displays of cruelty tended to increase, which arose from the move away from the incivility of the Middle Ages to the civility of European modernity. Locke spoke about his in his book on the education of children when he advised parents to use the "law of reputation" to teach the virtues of "civility."
So why is Yarvin silent about all of this empirical evidence that premodern illiberal societies tended to promote violent disorder? Is it because this kind of evidence would work against persuading the British people or the British Army to restore the Stuart monarchy?
REFERENCES
Eisner, Manuel. 2003. "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime." Crime and Justice 30:83-142.
Eisner, Manuel. 2014. "From Swords to Words: Does Macro-Level Change in Self-Control Predict Long-Term Variation in Levels of Homicide?" Crime and Justice 43:65-134.
Linklater, Andrew, and Stephen Mennell. 2010. "Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations--An Overview and Assessment." History and Theory 49 (October): 384-411.
Muchembled, Robert. 2012. A History of Violence: From the End of the Middle Ages to the Present. Cambridge, MA: Polity.
Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking.
Sharpe, James. 2016. A Fiery and Furious People: A History of Violence in England. London: Random House Books.
Recently, many of us have been fascinated by the stately ceremonies surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the succession of King Charles III. This should stir us to think about the history of monarchy.
Why is it that for at least 5,000 years, beginning with the first state-like polities in Mesopotamia, monarchy was the predominant form of government around the world? And why is it that over the past 250 years, there has been a dramatic decline in the number of monarchies? Today, there are few monarchical governments in the world--Bahrain, Bhutan, Brunei, Jordan, Kuwait, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Swaziland, and United Arab Emirates.
The British monarchy is not truly monarchical because the authority of the monarch and the royal family has become purely symbolic, with very little effective power for ruling. Charles I and Charles II were real monarchs with ruling sovereign powers. Charles III is the ceremonial head of state, but the executive and legislative powers of British government belong to Parliament and the Prime Minister. Strictly speaking, the United Kingdom is not a monarchy but a parliamentary democracy. What explains this remarkable rise and decline of monarchy in the political history of the world?
To answer these questions, we need a historical dataset that reaches far back in the deep history of states around the world, and we need a plausible theory that can suggest testable hypotheses to be judged by how well they are confirmed by the data. One place to look for this is the work of John Gerring and his colleagues (Tore Wig, Wouter Veenendaal, Daniel Weitzel, Jan Teorell, and Kyosuke Kikuta) in their paper on "Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type." A short version of the paper has been published in Comparative Political Studies (54 [2021]: 585-622). A long version is available online.
Gerring and his colleagues argue that from the appearance of the first states in the ancient world to the beginning of the modern era about 250 years ago, monarchy was the most common political regime because it was the most efficient solution to the problem of selecting leaders to coordinate social order in large societies where people are isolated from one another. In the modern era, however, improvements in the technology of communication--for example, the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet--made it easier for people in large societies to communicate with one another and thus to mobilize a mass public for social coordination, which allowed elites to develop new systems of rule that did not need a central locus of sovereignty in a monarch.
Gerring et al. have been influenced by their reading of Patricia Cone's Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (London: Oneworld Publications, 2015). Crone uses the word "pre-industrial" as shorthand for "pre-industrial of the civilized kind" (2-11). "Pre-industrial" means prior to the Industrial Revolution that began sometime early in the 19th century in northwest Europe. The "civilized kind" means a society that is based mostly on agricultural production rather than hunting and gathering, which also has the formal governmental institutions of a "state." Consequently, the history of the pre-industrial societies of the civilized kind stretches from the first agrarian states in ancient Mesopotamia (from around 3,500 BCE) to the modern industrialized states that emerged around 1800.
This excludes the stateless societies of this period--such as the nomadic tribal societies. And it's notable that as you look at the global maps in the Gerring paper, that up to 1700, most of the world was stateless, where people lived as "barbarians" without state-like governments. Crone points out that even within states there were often rugged areas where the state rulers could not penetrate, and people lived in stateless societies. And, of course, through most of human evolutionary history, human beings lived in hunter-gatherer bands without states. Today, however, every piece of land around the world is under state rule, with the exception of Antartica, which is defined as an international territory by a treaty between states.
The pre-industrial world not only lacked modern industrial production, it also lacked the modern means of communication and transportation. People, goods, and news travelled slowly. Consequently, in large societies, it was impossible to achieve much economic, cultural, or political integration. Crone observes that "the vast majority of people continued to live in more or less self-sufficient villages with more or less autonomous cultures of their own, a fact that rendered the political unity of pre-industrial states precarious" (47).
As a result, forms of government like democracy that required mass participation were possible only in small societies (like the Greek and Roman city-states). In large societies, the coordination of activity by the state required the concentration of authority in the hands of a few, and ultimately in a monarchic ruler. This explains the argument of political philosophers like Montesquieu that popular government was possible only in small republics.
"Typically, then," Crone explains, "pre-industrial states were monarchies in which power was exercised through a small ruling elite. They were monarchies as opposed to oligarchies, partly because the elite could not function without an ultimate arbiter (and was bound to produce one through its competition for power where none existed), partly because one man elevated above all others was a potent symbol of the community over which he presided: its members often regarded him as a common link with the divine" (49-50).
To test this theory, Gerring and his colleagues begin with a strict definition of monarchy as a regime with an executive office that is (1) hereditary, (2) held by a single individual, (3) endowed with life tenure and (4) has sovereign power in ruling the affairs of state. (The British monarchy satisfies the first three criteria but not the fourth.) In their historical dataset, state-like governments that satisfy all four criteria are coded as "monarchies," while all the others are coded as "republics."
They can then show from their historical dataset that most of the state-like governments in the premodern era were monarchies, while in the modern era, most are republics. They can also show evidence for improving technologies of communication in the modern era. For example, they point to the spread of radio in the early part of the twentieth century as one way that leaders in large societies could communicate directly with people who otherwise would be isolated from one another.
But while I find all of this persuasive, it seems to me that Gerring et al. have not properly identified the ultimate evolutionary causes of liberal modernity, which brought about the decline of monarchy and the rise of modern liberal democracy. As important as improving technologies of communication might be, they can be understood as the effect of a deeper cause--the evolution of modern bourgeois culture as Lockean liberal symbolic niche construction. I will explain that in my next post.
On February 19, 2025, this picture was posted on the official White House "X" account. Trump had posted: "CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!"
My wife and I participated in the "No Kings" protest in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This was one of over 2,000 protest gatherings across the United States attracting millions of participants. We were surprised by the size of the crowd. There appeared to be something over 20,000 people, which is about ten percent of the population of the city of Grand Rapids. The first rally was in the park on the Grand River in front of the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum. When we arrived, the park was so packed with people that it was impossible for us to get in, which was also true for thousands of other people milling around the area.
We were also surprised that there were no police anywhere, as if the Grand Rapids police had decided that there was no reason to expect any disruptions from the protest crowds. Moreover, there were no "Proud Boys" or "Michigan militia" types carrying guns who might have caused trouble. Later in the afternoon, we heard about the political assassination in Minnesota that reportedly caused some of the "No Kings" protests in Minnesota to be cancelled.
These protests were scheduled for June 14 to counter Trump's military parade in Washington to celebrate his birthday and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. I watched the parade on CSPAN. The CSPAN cameras showed remarkably small crowds in the bleachers and on the grass. Of course, the White House claimed that over 250,000 people attended. But if that were true, the Mall would have been completely covered with people, which was not the case.
To me, Trump's military parade was really dull and lifeless. Many of the spectators at the parade showed the same reaction. Here's a picture of some of them:
The "No Kings" protests raise at least two kinds of questions. First, what motivates millions of people to turn out for these mass protests? What do they expect to achieve? And how likely are they to succeed?
Secondly, what's wrong with monarchy? Why do most Americans--and perhaps most people around the world today--assume that monarchy is bad? Should we take seriously the argument of some intellectuals supporting Trump (such as Curtis Yarvin) that monarchy is a better form of government than democracy, and therefore Americans should be happy to have Donald Trump as their king?
NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE AS LOCKEAN NATURAL PUNISHMENT OF DICTATORS
The people participating in these mass protests can be identified as "popular Lockeans." I have written about that term as used by historian T. H. Breen to describe the ordinary Americans who supported the American Revolution in acting according to the principles of John Locke even though most of them had never read Locke. In the state of nature, Locke thought, everyone has the "executive power of the law of nature," which is the natural right to punish those who violate the law of nature; and this can be expressed in both violent and nonviolent resistance to tyranny. The American Revolution began with American nonviolent resistance from 1761 to 1775, followed by the violent resistance in the Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783. June 14, 1775 was the day that George Washington was formally appointed Commander of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress. In July of that year, the "Appeal to Heaven" Flag was adopted as a battle flag for the American Army, which explicitly invoked Locke's term for revolutionary violence.
Erica Chenoweth and her colleagues see the "No Kings" protests as part of the growing nonviolent resistance to Trump. As indicated in some previous posts, Chenoweth has compiled an impressive data set (from 1900 to the present) for violent and nonviolent resistance movements that shows that every campaign of nonviolent protest that achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population was successful. As indicated on the "No Kings" website, the organizers are inspired by the "3.5 principle"--believing that mobilizing only a small proportion of the people in mass protests can overturn a dictatorial ruler.
Over the past 40 years, scholars like Chenoweth and Gene Sharp have developed practical rules for organizing successful nonviolent resistance movements. One of the most important features of this is avoiding violence by having well-trained "marshals" at every protest whose job is to manage the crowd to suppress any disturbance that might become violent. We saw those marshals at work at the Grand Rapids protest.
The political theory of nonviolent resistance is Lockean in being founded on the fundamental principle that all governmental authority depends on the consent of the governed, and therefore governments fall when the people withdraw their consent through nonviolent or violent resistance.
As Chenoweth has indicated, protest movements succeed when they gain momentum. And momentum can be measured through a simple law of physics: momentum equals mass times velocity (p = mv). The momentum of dissent is a product of participation (mass) and the number of protest events in a week (velocity). So as the number of participants in the "No Kings" movement increases, and as the number of protests per week increase, the movement gains momentum, and thus becomes more successful.
The test will come when law enforcement and military people are ordered to shoot the protestors. Will they obey their orders? If they disobey, then the protestors have won. Even if they obey, this will provoke a moral revulsion in the country that will draw more people into the protests.
Another test will come in the mid-term elections in November of 2026. If opponents of Trump take control of the two Houses of Congress, then the Congress can impeach him. If Trump's Republicans cancel the elections, then the popular movement to overturn Trump's rule becomes stronger.
THE RISE AND DECLINE OF MONARCHY
But why "No Kings"? Why are so many Americans not persuaded by Yarvin's argument that Robert Filmer's defense of divine-right monarchy was superior to Locke's theory of government by popular consent?
As I have indicated in previous posts, monarchy was the most common form of government for over 5,000 years, but then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies began to surpass the number of monarchies. There are two possible reasons for this. First, monarchy has always depended on perceiving society as a rigid hierarchy in the chain of command, in which everyone knew his place. At the top was a ruling elite--the monarch and one or two percent of the people who were nobles and priests. At the bottom, about 80-90% of the population were peasants. One possible answer as to why this premodern conception of natural and divine hierarchy has been undermined in modern culture is that modernity has adopted the Lockean evolutionary symbolic niche construction of the bourgeois culture of equal liberty. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . ."
Consequently, as I have written previously, the few monarchic governments that survive today--like the British monarchy of King Charles III--are not real monarchies because the king is only a ceremonial head of state without any absolute power.
A second reason for the decline of monarchy is that the development of mass communications has made monarchy unnecessary. In the past, democratic or republican forms of government were possible only in small societies where the people or their representatives could meet all together at one public assembly--Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic, for example. Larger societies were so disconnected that they needed monarchy as a focal point to which everyone could look as the central authority. But then with the growth of communications technology--the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and finally the internet--large societies have become so highly mobilized and interconnected that there is less need for a monarch as a focal point for authority.
The internet has made it easy for popular mass movements like the "No Kings" protests to form across large societies and even around the globe. And that's why it's so hard to preserve autocratic rule in the modern world without shutting down or at least censoring the internet.
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.
The St. Edward's Crown of the British monarch was made for the coronation of Charles II in 1661, after the previous crown was melted down in 1649, following the execution of Charles I. It is made of solid gold and set with precious stones. It is surmounted with the Cross of Jesus.
The coronation of Charles III and his wife, Camilla, as king and queen of the United Kingdom will take place Saturday, May 6, at Westminster Abbey. It will begin at 11:00 am London time and 6:00 am Eastern time in the U.S. This will be the 40th royal coronation at Westminster Abbey since that of William the Conqueror in 1066.
That Charles has chosen the name Charles III evokes the unsettled history of the monarchy under Charles I, who was beheaded by English revolutionaries, and Charles II, who restored the monarchy in 1660, after the interregnum (1649-1660), and tried to restore a Filmerian divine right absolute monarchy. This name might also suggest that King Charles III will correct the mistakes made by Charles I and Charles II by moving away from the absolutist Christian monarchy of the Stuart dynasty to the classical liberal Christian monarchy of the House of Windsor. That will be made clear by the coronation designed by Charles, which combines traditional symbols of the coronation that go back as far as the Coronation Rite of King Edgar in 973 with the new symbolism of monarchy in a liberal social order.
The best source of information about the coronation is the official website. The "Authorised Coronation Liturgy with Commentary" is particularly helpful, and I will be citing that document.
Ian Bradley has an essay on the religious significance of the coronation. Bradley is the author of the newly published book God Save the King: The Sacred Nature of Monarchy.
I have written about the evolutionary rise and fall of monarchy by symbolic cultural group selection, and about the silly arguments from Alt-Right theorists like Curtis Yarvin for restoring a Filmerian absolute monarchy as the best regime. I have also argued that the New Testament teaches Lockean classical liberalism. Now we will see in this coronation the ritual symbolism of a New Testament Christian monarchy.
The most striking feature of the coronation ceremony is how it manifests the sacred nature of monarchic authority as invested with the sanctity of Biblical religion. But there's an inherent tension in this appeal to Biblical religion for political authority, because the Old Testament and the New Testament offer contradictory teachings about the divine authority of political rule. The Old Testament in its account of how God chose the rulers of the people of Israel to enforce obedience to the Mosaic law favors theocracy, in which religious authorities coercively enforce Judaism and punish those outside the Jewish faith. This has allowed many Christians to invoke the Old Testament as supporting a Christian theocracy, in which Christian kings rule by divine right to coercively enforce the Christian faith and punish heretics, infidels, and atheists. By contrast, the New Testament suggests a separation of church and state, so that those in the church cannot coercively enforce their faith, and there is no legal establishment of religion. This has allowed some Christians to invoke the New Testament as supporting religious liberty and toleration, so that churches become voluntary associations that cannot use legal coercion to enforce their faith.
In the debate over the divine right of kings in 17th century England, Christians like Robert Filmer embraced the theocratic tradition of the Old Testament to justify the absolute power of the Stuart monarchs as the "defenders of the faith"--that is, the faith of the Church of England--against those who did not share that faith. On the other side of the debate, Christians like Roger Williams and John Locke interpreted the New Testament as denying this theocratic denial of religious liberty. That's what I mean when I say that the New Testament teaches Lockean liberalism.
Now, in the Coronation Liturgy for King Charles III--as designed by Charles himself--we can see a subtle interweaving of Old Testament and New Testament traditions that reconciles the conflicts between them by favoring the Lockean liberalism of the New Testament.
Let's start at the beginning of the planned coronation. At the head of the coronation procession into Westminster Abbey will be "faith leaders and representatives from the Jewish, Sunni and Shia Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Bahai and Zoroastrian communities" (2). They will be followed by the procession of ecumenical leaders of the Christian faith, which will include not just the Anglican Church, but also the Greek Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, and other Christian churches in Great Britain. This has never happened in any previous coronation of the British monarch.
A crucial part of every coronation has been identifying the monarch as the "Defender of the Faith," which means defender of the Church of England as opposed to all other faiths, whether Christian or non-Christian. In the 16th century, "Defender of the Faith" was the title given by Pope Leo X to King Henry VIII for his defense of Catholicism. But then when Henry broke with Rome to form his own English Church, he held onto the title with the idea that he would be defending the Anglicanism of the Church of England against Catholics and Christian dissenters.
Charles has had a life-long fascination with all faiths. And in 1994, he said that as heir to the throne, he saw himself as less "defender of the faith" and more as "defender of faith"--of all the religious faiths. He said, "People have fought to the death over these things, which seems to me a peculiar waste of people's energy, when we're all actually aiming for the same ultimate goal." Although Charles' mother--Elizabeth II--was a devout Anglican Christian, she agreed with him about this. She once said, "The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly underappreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country." She also said that "gently and assuredly, the Church of England hs created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely" (7). In a reception at Buckingham Palace days after his mother's funeral, Charles said that his mother was right about this, and that his Anglican faith committed him to "the common good of freedom." That's what I mean by the Lockean liberalism of his New Testament Christian monarchy. Actually, Charles has gone beyond Locke in arguing for defending the freedom of Catholics and atheists.
Early in the coronation as planned by Charles, he will be presented with the Bible as the guide for his rule (6). Then, the Archbishop of Canterbury will administer the Coronation Oath by declaring: "Your Majesty, the Church established by law, whose settlement you will swear to maintain, is committed to the true profession of the Gospel, and, in so doing, will seek to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely. The Coronation Oath has stood for centuries and is enshrined in law" (7). (Here "beliefs" seem to include atheism.)
Notice that he invokes the Gospel of the New Testament and interprets it as ensuring that "people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely," which departs from the Mosaic theocracy of the Old Testament.
After taking the Oath, Charles will recite a private prayer, which concludes: "Grant that I may be a blessing to all they children, of every faith and conviction, that together we may discover the ways of gentleness and be led into the paths of peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen" (9). To keep religious peace, Charles will secure freedom for "every faith and conviction." (Here "conviction"--as distinguished from "faith"--suggests atheism.)
Not long after this, the Prime Minister--Rishi Sunak--will read from the New Testament book of Colossians (11). This is remarkable because Sunak is Hindu, and yet he can be comfortable reading a New Testament passage.
Later in the coronation, there will be a thanksgiving for the Holy Coronation Oil and then the anointing of Charles with that oil. Here we can see the Archbishop of Canterbury invoking a subtle combination of Old Testament and New Testament ideas in the anointing of the king with oil: "Blessed art thou, Sovereign God, upholding with thy grace all who are called to thy service. Thy prophets of old anointed priests and kings to serve in thy name, and in the fullness of time thine only Son was anointed by the Holy Spirit to be the Christ, the Savior and Servant of all. By the power of the same Spirit, bless and sanctify this oil" (15).
The Archbishop's prayer recalls how the kings of Israel (like Saul and Solomon) were anointed with consecrated olive oil in the Old Testament (1 Kings 1:32, 38-40; 1 Samuel 2:10, 10:1). But then he immediately reminds us that Jesus in the New Testament was anointed by the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:38). In Greek, the word Christ means "anointed," and the Hebrew word for this is "Messiah."
As John Locke pointed out in his Letter Concerning Toleration, while the kings of Israel were anointed to rule over an "absolute theocracy," Jesus was anointed to rule over his followers by the persuasiveness of his preaching, and he never attempted to establish a Christian theocracy. Moreover, the New Testament makes clear that the first Christian churches were voluntary associations that exercised no theocratic rule. Locke explained:
"The Commonwealth of the Jews, different in that from all others, was an absolute Theocracy; nor was there, or could there be, any difference between that Commonwealth and the Church. . . . But there is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a Christian Commonwealth. There are, indeed, many Cities and Kingdoms thaqt have embraced the Faith of Christ; but they have retained their ancient Form of Government; with which the Law of Christ hath not at all meddled. He, indeed, hath taught men how, by Faith and good Works, they may attain Eternal Life. But he instituted no Commonwealth. He prescribed unto his Followers no new and peculiar Form of Government; Nor put he the Sword into any Magistrate's Hand, with Commission to make use of it in forcing men to forsake their former Religion, and receive his" (Hackett edition, 44-45; Liberty Fund edition, 42).
The coronation of Charles will indicate how his kingship will follow the model of Christ's persuasive kingship rather than the theocratic kingship of ancient Israel. At the beginning of the coronation, Charles will be greeted by a Chapel Royal chorister: "Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings." Charles will respond: "In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve" (3).
Here Charles will echo the words of Jesus when he warned his followers not to strive for authoritative rule over others: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:25-28).
It seems that Charles will be intimating here that he is a king who has no coercive authority over his people, particularly in matters of religious belief. At most, he can only exercise the sort of persuasive authority that comes through Christian preaching, and for that he needs the persuasive symbolism of being anointed with Coronation Holy Oil.
Rendering that oil holy required a special preparation (15). It was from olives from groves on the Mount of Olives at the Russian Orthodox Monastery of Mary Magdalene, which is the burial place of Charles' paternal grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, who was a Greek Orthodox believer. The Mount of Olives, outside Jerusalem, is a holy place for Jews, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Protestants. The olives were pressed just outside Bethlehem. The oil was then perfumed with essential oils--sesame, rose, jasmine, cinnamon, neroli, benzoin, amber, and orange blossom. The oil was then consecrated by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, His Beatitude Patriarch Theophilos III, and the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, the Most Reverend Dr. Hosam Naoum. Thus, this oil has an ecumenical holiness that comes from symbolic links to all the major Biblical religious traditions.
The actual anointing of Charles will be the only part of the coronation that will be hidden from both the audience in Westminster Abbey and the television cameras. An Anointing Screen, specially designed and woven for this purpose will be arranged around the Coronation Chair. Behind the screen, the Archbishop of Canterbury will anoint the King's hands, breast, and head (16). Hiding this from view gives an air of mystery to this most sacred moment of the coronation.
As the King is being anointed, the Choir of Westminister Abbey will sing Georg Frederick Handel's "Zadok the Priest" anthem. The text of this anthem has always been part of the English Coronation Rite. But it was made famous when Handel set it to music for the coronation of George II in 1727. Here's the text, which is based on the anointing of King Solomon in 1 Kings 1:32-35:
"Zadok the priest
"and Nathan the prophet
"anointed Solomon king.
"And all the people rejoiced and said:
"God save the King!
"Long live the King!
"May the King live forever!
"Alleluia! Amen!"
Handel's "Zadok the Priest"
I have written about how Handel used his Biblical music (like the Messiah) to refute Deism and defend religious orthodoxy. Does this anthem serve the same purpose by using the power of his music to support the Biblical teaching about the divine authority of rulers?
The anointing of King Charles is followed by the presentation of the regalia--the Spurs, the Sword, the Bracelets, the Robe Royal, the Stole Royal, the Orb, the Ring, the Glove, the Sceptre, and the Rod--each of which has some distinctive symbolic meaning.
Finally, the King will be crowned with the Crown of St. Edward, and all in the Abbey will shout "God save the King!" There will be a musical fanfare, a Gun Salute, and the Abbey bells will ring for two minutes (25).
Then, for the first time in the history of coronations, the Blessing of the King will come not just from the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, but also from a Catholic archbishop, a Greek Orthodox archbishop, and from representatives of other Christian churches in Great Britain. Such an ecumenical affirmation would have been impossible in previous coronations, even as late as the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth (26).
After the King has been enthroned, there will be oaths of allegiance. The first will be from the "Homage of the Church of England" expressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The second will be the "Homage of Royal Blood" coming from William, the Prince of Wales: "I, William, Prince of Wales, pledge my loyalty to you and faith and truth I will bear unto you, as your liege man of life and limb. So help me God." This will be the most painful moment for Prince Harry--a reminder that he is far down the line of succession, and that William is most likely to be the next King.
Remarkably, this will be followed by "The Homage of the People," which is another novel move that has never been done in a coronation:
"Archbishop of Canterbury:
"I call upon all persons of goodwill of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of the other Realms and the Territories to make their homage, in heart and voice, to their undoubted King, defender of all."
"All who so desire, in the Abbey, and elsewhere, say together:
"All:
"I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors acording to law. So help me God.
"A fanfare is played (28)."
In all previous coronations, the Homage has been pledged by the hereditary peerage in order of degree. But now the Homage of Peers has been replaced by the Homage of the People. Notice that this is voluntary--"all who so desire." So, here the King explicitly recognizes that whatever persuasive authority he has over the people must come from their voluntary consent. And to win that consent, he must convince them that he really is God's Anointed One.
Next, the King's wife--Camilla--will be crowned as the Queen Consort, and she will be anointed by the Archbishop, but without a screen, suggesting that the anointing of a consort is not as sacred as the anointing of the King (29).
Following this, there will be other ceremonies, songs, and prayers.
After the singing of the national anthem ("God Save the King"), the King will march in procession out of the Abbey. At the end of the procession, he will be greeted by representatives of five non-Christian faith communities: Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, and Buddhist. They will deliver their greeting in unison: "Your Majesty, as neighbors in faith, we acknowledge the value of public service. We unite with people of all faiths and beliefs in thanksgiving, and in service with you for the common good" (41).
As with so much else in this coronation, this has never been done in any previous coronation. This ending matches the beginning with the procession of faith leaders and representatives of faith communities (2).
Finally, the King goes to the Gold State Coach, which will take him back to Buckingham Palace.
The Gold State Coach
Will it work?
When the people are asked for their homage, will millions of people across Great Britain and the Commonwealth swear their allegiance "in heart and voice" to the King? Will they willingly accept a monarchy that claims only a persuasive authority and not a coercive theocratic authority, and therefore a monarchy that poses no threat to the personal, political, or religious liberty of the people? Or will they laugh or smirk as they think about how foolish Charles is to think all this religious mumbo-jumbo will persuade them that Charles is their divinely anointed King?
Great Britain is one of the most secularized societies in the world. Some surveys report that most people identify themselves as having no religious belief. Only a small minority of the people participate at least once a week in some kind of religious worship service. So, we have to wonder whether the King truly believes that his appeal to the sacred character of the British monarchy will work.
A Contemporary German Print of the Execution of Charles I
The evolutionary psychology of Lex Rex--that the law rules over the king--depends on two points. First, we need to see how as opposed to regicide by assassination (murder), regicide by legal execution (as in the trial of Charles I) affirms the impersonal rules of law as superior to absolute monarchy's rule by personal threats. This understanding of law as impersonal or impartial moral rules is unique to human beings because it arises from the natural evolution of the human capacity for the language of rational symbolization.
The second point is that the denial of the sacred authority of the king to rule with impunity was part of the cultural evolution of the rise of theocratic sacred monarchy (beginning in ancient Mesopotamia) and its decline (beginning in 17th century England) culminating in the Lockean liberalism of King Charles III's Christian monarchy.
Two Kinds of Regicide
In the first systematic and quantitative study of regicide in Europe, Manuel Eisner (2011) has collected data on the frequency of violent death and regicide among 1,513 monarchs in Europe between AD 600 and 1800. He has distinguished four categories of violent death: accident, battle death, murder, and legal execution. He found that in the seventh century, the frequency of regicide was 2,500 murders per 100,000 years in office. There was a long decline in regicide. So that by the eighteenth century, the frequency of regicide was about 200 per 100,000 years in office. By comparison, the homicide rate in Western Europe today is around 0.6-1.5 per 100,000 person-years. Clearly, then, European kingship before the Industrial Revolution was one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, comparable to that of soldiers in combat.
Eisner found that for most of this history, regicide by assassination was carried out within the noble elite in the competition for political rule. But, then, by the seventeenth century, regicide became a matter of legal execution--the execution of Charles I in England in 1649 and the execution of Louis XVI in France in 1793. In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, James II was deposed and defeated in war without being executed.
The decline in regicide seems to be part of the general historical decline in homicide (Eisner 2003; Pinker 2011). This general pattern of declining violence seems to be associated with a Hobbesian pacification process, in which the state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and with a Lockean liberal culture of bourgeois virtues that arise in modern commercial societies, in which people learn to control their violent impulses for the sake of peaceful economic and social exchange.
Jane Goodall and other primatologists have presented evidence that chimpanzees are similar to human beings in the practice of political assassinations. There is plenty of evidence of chimpanzees from one community killing individuals from another community, which looks like warfare. Goodall's observations of chimpanzee intercommunity violence have now been confirmed by similar observations from many chimpanzee communities across Africa.
What is most surprising about this is that lethal violence within chimpanzee communities is extremely rare (Newton-Fisher and Emery Thompson 2012). Chimpanzees often become aggressive in conflicts with one another, but they usually resolve their conflicts without physical contact; and even if there is some physical violence, it is almost never lethal, even though chimpanzee canines are powerful weapons for wounding and killing victims. Most aggression between adult males consists of bluffing attacks without physical contact--threatening gestures and vocalizations and charging displays. (This is also true for human beings, who often engage in bluffing displays of aggression, but for whom homicide is rare, despite the publicity given to homicidal violence.)
After decades of observations of chimpanzee communities across Africa, there have been only four documented cases of lethal violence between adult males of the same community, in which a coalitional gang of adult males killed a lone victim. Kaburu et al. (2013) point out that the individuals killed in these cases were either low-ranking males or they were previously deposed alpha males.
In the revised edition of his Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal reported that in the summer of 1980, Luit--the alpha male of the chimpanzee community in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands--was attacked brutally and killed by Nikkie and Yeroen, who had previously been alpha males (de Waal 1998, 211-214). De Waal describes the bloody scene: "Apart from biting off fingers and toes and causing deep gashes everywhere, the two aggressors removed Luit's testicles, which were found on the cage floor." This looks like a political assassination. But it's hard to know whether this case of lethal violence among captive chimpanzees is an abnormal consequence of their captive conditions. The killing of Luit occurred at night, when the chimps were confined in their night cages.
Kaburu et al. claim to report the first case of lethal violence among wild chimpanzees in which the victim was the incumbent alpha male. PM was the alpha male of the M-group of chimpanzees in the Malale Mountains National Park in Tanzania when he was killed on October 2, 2011. He had been the alpha male since 2007. After a bloody fight between PM and PR, the beta male, PR left. A weakened PM was then attacked brutally by a coalition of four other adult males, including two former alpha males (AL and DE). AL was the alpha male overthrown by PM in 2007. After the killing, there was a period of social instability. AL became the alpha male for a short time. But by November, PR had become the alpha male and is now the alpha male of the M-group.
Kaburu et al. explain this as an opportunistic attempt by AL (the third ranking of 10 adult males) to seize the alpha position once he saw that PM was weakened by the fight with PR, although AL was unable to hold his alpha position for long against the challenge of PR.
When I asked Michael Wilson (a primatologist at the University of Minnesota) about whether there were any other cases of alpha males being killed, he mentioned two cases at Gombe. Vincent was the alpha male of the Mitumba community at Gombe. He fell from a tree and severely injured himself. He lived for another three months before two adult males attacked and killed him. Michael says he has not yet written a report of this case.
The second case was that of Goblin, another alpha male at Gombe. He was severely attacked and would have died if a vet had not treated his wounds. Kaburu et al. mention this case, but they claim that Goblin had been deposed from his alpha position before the attack.
Even if chimpanzees show a few cases of political assassination of an alpha male, which is comparable to the political assassination of a king among human beings, it is clear that chimps are incapable of the legal execution of a leader, because legal execution implies laws as impartial moral rules, which requires the uniquely human capacity for rational symbolization.
Previously, I have written about Peter DeScioli's argument that laws are moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action, which arose first in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation--or in what Locke called the "state of nature." Laws as impartial rules require moral judgment, which is unique to human beings, because moral judgement depends on the human rational or symbolizing mind that can grasp and share the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just.
Dominant chimps rule by personal threats: if you challenge my alpha male dominance, I will punish you. Tyrannical humans sometimes rule by personal threats. But humans can also formulate impartial laws for judging who has the right to rule: in America, whoever is elected president by the proper constitutional procedures has the right to rule as president as long as he is constrained by the rule of law.
Charles I claimed to rule by the law of absolute monarchy--that "the king can do no wrong" and is thus above the law--but this was really a personal threat disguised as impartial law. Because by impartial law, kings must follow the laws like anyone else. And so, if the king commits murder by initiating a Civil War in which he kills his own people, then he is guilty of murder and should be punished for it as any other murderer would be. The legal trial and legal execution of Charles I affirmed that principle--that Law is king over the king.
The Cultural Evolution of Sacred Monarchy from Hammurabi to King Charles III
This is a tracing of a rock drawing from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BCE. Christopher Boehm used this rock drawing at Remigia to illustrate the importance of capital punishment in the evolution of morality and egalitarian hierarchy. He observed that on the right we see ten men jubilantly holding their bows over their heads. On the left, we see a man lying on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking in his body or on the ground.
It's hard to know for sure what has happened. The victim could have been a prisoner of war who has been executed. In fact, other drawings at Remigia show scenes of warfare. But Boehm suggests that given what we know about hunter-gatherer foragers in the ethnographic record, it's more likely that the victim here was a deviant member of the band who had violated the moral rules of the band--perhaps by murdering someone--and he was becoming a bully who was trying to assert his dominance over the group.
This also illustrated Boehm's "ambivalence model" of human nature in politics. Human politics arises from the complex tension between three levels of our evolved political psychology: dominance, deference, and counter-dominance. Some human beings want to have dominance over others. Most human beings are inclined to defer to the rule of the dominant ones. But when that dominance becomes despotic and exploitative, people will resist that dominance and punish the bullies by shunning them, ostracizing them, or--in the most dangerous cases--killing them. Previously, I have written about this as showing the evolution of equal liberty through capital punishment.
But then about seven thousand years ago, the first agricultural settlements appeared in the ancient Near East. And about five thousand years ago, the first urban states appeared. The city of Uruk emerged in ancient Mesopotamia around 3,200 BC. These states were the first sacred monarchies, in which the king claimed the absolute power to rule by divine right. This claim to rule by divine authority is evident in the black stone stela that present the Laws of Hammurabi that were compiled toward the end of the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), who was the sixth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon.
The Louvre stela is almost seven and a half feet tall. The top one-third of the stela shows the sun-god Shamash, the god of justice, seated on his throne, with King Hammurabi standing before him. It is not clear whether the god is dictating the laws to Hammurabi, or Hammurabi is presenting the laws to the god, or Hammurabi is accepting the rod and the ring that are the emblems of authority. In any case, this conveys the clear message to the viewers--even the many illiterate people who cannot read the laws--that Hammurabi's laws are divinely authorized by the god of justice.
The evidence collected by anthropological archaeologists--that has been surveyed by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus in The Creation of Inequality--has shown that in the first monarchic states, the power of rulers over their subjects could not be legitimated by reason alone, and rulers had discovered that they needed to pretend that they ruled by divine right--that political rule was sanctified by a religious cosmology. Originally, the first human beings had no rulers other than the gods, but eventually they were persuaded that some human beings could rule with divine authority.
Every society has some cosmological explanation for how human beings and their world came into existence, and this cosmological creation story provides moral sanction for their social order. Typically, the world begins as a formless chaos, and then some supernatural spirits create order out of this chaos, including the creation of human beings. This creation story constitutes the moral charter for a society because it provides a sacred origin for the moral rules of a society. And thus religious belief is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people together into social groups.
Originally, among nomadic hunter-gatherers, the cosmological creation story sanctioned a celestial dominance hierarchy: the invisible supernatural beings were the alphas, the invisible ancestors were the betas, and the living human beings were the gammas. Therefore, originally, all living human beings were equal in their subordination to the invisible gods and ancestors. Inequality of social ranking arose when some living human beings successfully claimed that they or their clans were divine or divinely sanctioned for rule over others, and thus there was a cosmological justification for inequality.
Here in ancient Mesopotamia is the first cosmic teleology of human law as rooted in divine law, which is developed in Plato's Timaeus and the Bible, and which becomes the theme of the Divine Cosmic Model of the universe that runs through human civilization for four thousand years.
But even though this mysterious magic of a sacred monarchy could win the deferential submission of people, a tyrannical monarchy often provoked the resistance of the people. As I have indicated in my posts on Hammurabi's Laws and the Mesopotamian kingships, whenever a king increased his exploitation of his people--through increased confiscation of grain, increased taxation, increased conscription of soldiers and laborers--this provoked flight or rebellion. The records of the Mesopotamian states are full of evidence of people running away from their states--slaves running away from their enslavement, soldiers running away from their conscripted service in war, taxpayers running away from oppressive taxation, laborers running aways from coerced labor, and people generally running away from cities racked with famine and contagious diseases.
There is also evidence that over 3,000 years of Mesopotamian life, there were hundreds of rebellions. Historian of the Ancient Near East Seth Richardson (2010, 2016) has noted that rebels against the state were described by state authorities as "the violators of contracts (mitgurtu, rikistu)." The Akkadian words mitgurtu and rikistu denote agreement, consent, contract, or treaty. Richardson has observed: "These motifs relating to violation-of-contract strike a familiar chord to us moderns, since they suggest the premise of a social contract between ruler and ruled, or at least the existence of legal treaties and loyalty oaths" (2010: 9).
Not only in ancient Mesopotamia, but also throughout the ancient Mediterranean world--the Near East, Greece, and Rome--one sees the same pattern of rebellions against the state in which rebels assert their natural freedom from oppression and thus confirm Locke's understanding of government as dependent on the consent of the governed (Howe and Brice 2016).
But this raises a question: if there was so much popular resistance to the tyranny of sacred monarchy, then why was it the predominant form of government for five thousand years? Throughout most of this history, the number of monarchies far exceeded the number of nonmonarchies.
But then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies surpassed the number of monarchies. Today, there are very few monarchies in the world, and most of the most prominent monarchies today--like Great Britain--have a purely ceremonial monarch who has no sovereign power to rule. This raises a second question: why has monarchy declined in the last few centuries?
As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are at least two kinds of answers to the question of why monarchy was the prevalent form of government for thousands of years. The first answer is that historically monarchies have been limited in their exercise of sovereign power over their people, and thus they have been limited in their capacity for the sort of tyrannical exploitation that provokes popular resistance. For example, the evidence from those first monarchic states in ancient Mesopotamia shows an odd contradiction between their claims of absolute sovereignty and the reality of their severely limited powers. For example, in their written legal codes, one can see what Seth Richardson has identified as "the curious absence of the state in the text." In the prologue and epilogue to Hammurabi's Code, Hammurabi claims absolute divinely granted authority over Babylonia. But in the hundreds of laws in his code, there is almost no reference to himself or to the central state as providing judgment or enforcement of the law. Most of the laws seem to assume private enforcement: when something goes wrong, the wronged party must act on his own with the help of local people to investigate, try, convict, and punish the guilty parties.
What we see here is what Richardson has called the "presumptive state": the early states in Mesopotamia were presumptive in claiming a sovereignty that they did not in fact possess. Their rhetorical claims for absolute sovereignty have been mistakenly interpreted as evidence for the reality of Oriental Despotism.
Over the past 5,000 years, some states have expanded their power to rule through autocratic bureaucracies--for instance, China under the Song dynasty (960-1279). But even the most powerful states have had to rely to some degree on law enforcement by private individuals acting through customary laws of vengeance and compensation.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, some states began to extend their law enforcement power by inventing modern professional policing. Previously, people had policed themselves. Robert Peel founded the London police in 1829. The English Reform Act of 1835 extended this system of policing to all municipal boroughs. Boston established the first American police force in 1838.
As long as monarchic states could not fully enforce their laws directly on their people, and their people were free to police themselves, those monarchic states had little power to tyrannically exploit their people.
The second answer to why monarchic states predominated for thousands of years is that in large societies where people are disconnected, the king provides a readily available focal point for legitimating government. As I have indicated in a previous post, John Gerring and his colleagues have argued that from the appearance of the first states in the ancient world to the beginning of the modern era about 250 years ago, monarchy was the most common political regime because it was the most efficient solution to the problem of selecting leaders to coordinate social order in large societies where people are isolated from one another. In the modern era, however, improvements in the technology of communication--for example, the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet--made it easier for people in large societies to communicate with one another and thus to mobilize a mass public for social coordination, which allowed elites to develop new systems of rule that did not need a central locus of sovereignty in a monarch (Gerring et al. 2021).
But doesn't this beg an obvious question--Why can't kings use modern mass communication to glorify their monarchic rule over their people?
We can answer that question by considering again the causes of the English Civil War, which led to the first trial and execution of a king. Thomas Hobbes (in Behemoth) indicated that disputes over the interpretation of the Bible were a primary cause of the English Civil War. The translation of the Bible into English in the sixteenth century and the invention of the printing press made the Bible widely available to common people, who could then interpret the Bible for themselves rather than being dependent on the authority of their priests. The printing press also facilitated the production of thousands of books and pamphlets debating theological and political questions. This contributed to the Protestant Reformation in breaking from the authority of the Catholic Church. As a consequence, all the parties in the English political controversies of the time found their ideas in the Bible (Hill 1993). People like John Cooke could publish books arguing that the Bible did not support absolute monarchy. And when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II had to order the burning of such books as the greatest threat to the monarchy.
The success of modern mass communication in popularizing ideas of religious and political liberty has made it ever harder to defend absolute monarchy with the coercive enforcement of one national church. This was dramatically manifested in the coronation of King Charles III on May 6, 2023, which was broadcast around the globe. In the Coronation Liturgy--as designed by Charles himself--we saw a subtle interweaving of Old Testament and New Testament traditions that reconciled the conflicts between them by favoring the liberal interpretation of the New Testament advanced by Roger Williams and John Locke.
Since Henry VIII, the English King has been "Defender of the Faith"--first the Catholic Church and then the Anglican Church, which meant that the King would enforce a theocracy. But King Charles III has identified himself as the "Defender of Faith"--that is, all religious faiths. And indeed the coronation procession into Westminster Abbey included "faith leaders" from a dozen or more religious traditions. Moreover, the Coronation Oath included a pledge "to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely." Notice that "beliefs"--as distinguished from "faiths"--suggest that even atheists "may live freely" under the rule of Charles III.
The coronation of Charles indicated how his kingship will follow the model of Christ's persuasive kingship rather than the theocratic kingship of ancient Israel. At the beginning of the coronation, Charles was greeted by a Chapel Royal chorister: "Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings." Charles responded: "In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve."
Here Charles echoed the words of Jesus when he warned his followers not to strive for authoritative rule over others: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:25-28).
Charles thus intimated here that he is a king who has no coercive authority over his people, particularly in matters of religious belief. At most, he can only exercise the sort of persuasive authority that comes through Christian preaching.
Unlike the Stuart dynasty, the King of the House of Windsor rules over Great Britain as a purely ceremonial head of state that exercises no sovereign power in what is really a liberal Parliamentary democracy where Law is King.
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