So did Hobbes get it right? In part, he did. In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel: gain (predatory raids), safety (preemptive raids), and reputation (retaliatory raids). And the numbers confirm that relatively speaking, "during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war," and that in such condition they live in "continual fear, and danger of violent death."
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But from his armchair in 17th-century England, Hobbes could not help but get a lot of it wrong. People in nonstate societies cooperate extensively with their kin and allies, so life for them is far from "solitary," and only intermittently is it nasty and brutish. Even if they are drawn into raids and battles every few years, that leaves a lot of time for foraging, feasting, singing, storytelling, childrearing, tending to the sick, and the other necessities and pleasures of life. In a draft of a previous book, I casually referred to the Yanomamö as "the fierce people," alluding to the title of the famous book by the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. An anthropologist colleague wrote in the margin: "Are the babies fierce? Are the old women fierce? Do they eat fiercely?"
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As for their lives being "poor," the story is mixed. Certainly societies without an organized state enjoy "no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, [and] no letters," since it's hard to develop these things if the warriors from the next village keep waking you up with poisoned arrows, abducting the women, and burning your huts. But the first peoples who gave up hunting and gathering for settled agriculture struck a hard bargain for themselves. Spending your days behind a plow, subsisting on starchy cereal grains, and living cheek by jowl with livestock and thousands of other people can be hazardous to your health. Studies of skeletons by Steckel and his colleagues show that compared to hunter-gatherers, the first city dwellers were anemic, infected, tooth-decayed, and almost two and a half inches shorter. Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."
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So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared.
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The improved odds of a natural death came with another price, captured by the Roman historian Tacitus: "Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws." The Bible stories we examined in chapter 1 suggest that the first kings kept their subjects in awe with totalistic ideologies and brutal punishments. Just think of the wrathful deity watching people's every move, the regulation of daily life by arbitrary laws, the stonings for blasphemy and nonconformity, the kings with the power to expropriate a woman into their harem or cut a baby in half, the crucifixions of thieves and cult leaders. In these respects the Bible was accurate. Social scientists who study the emergence of states have noted that they began as stratified theocracies in which elites secured their economic privileges by enforcing a brutal peace on their underlings.
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Three scholars have analyzed large samples of cultures to quantify the correlation between the political complexity of early societies and their reliance on absolutism and cruelty. The archaeologist Keith Otterbein has shown that societies with more centralized leadership were more likely to kill women in battles (as opposed to abducting them), to keep slaves, and to engage in human sacrifice. The sociologist Steven Spitzer has shown that complex societies are more likely to criminalize victimless activities like sacrilege, sexual deviance, disloyalty, and witchcraft, and to punish offenders by torture, mutilation, enslavement, and execution. And the historian and anthropologist Laura Betzig has shown that complex societies tend to fall under the control of despots: leaders who are guaranteed to get their way in conflicts, who can kill with impunity, and who have large harems of women at their disposal. She found that despotism in this sense emerged among the Babylonians, Israelites, Romans, Samoans, Fijians, Khmer, Aztecs, Incas, Natchez (of the lower Mississippi), Ashanti, and other kingdoms throughout Africa.
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When it came to violence, then, the first Leviathans solved one problem but created another. People were less likely to become victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics, and kleptocrats. This gives us the more sinister sense of the word pacification: not just the bringing about of peace but the imposition of absolute control by a coercive government. Solving this second problem would have to wait another few millennia, and in much of the world it remains unsolved to this day.
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