Human societies were markedly egalitarian during hunter-gatherer times, but bit-by-bit surrendered precious parts of their equality to new social organizations that emerged with the onset of agriculture and settled life.  The authors’ extensive anthropologic and archeologic review documents this progressive loss of equality around the globe as human societies relentlessly evolved to larger and more complex organizations.  At all levels, these groups had a cosmology and a social logic that provided myths of origin, links to ancestors, and sources of authority.

For millennia, hunter-gatherer societies were limited to the size of extended families.  These groups enjoyed remarkable equality, mostly enforced by group pressure.  No one amassed surpluses, owned land, or controlled community tools, like traps and nets.  Food was shared during famines and divided according to rule after successful hunts.  Gift-giving for alliances was reciprocal and symmetrical to avoid humiliation.  Head men had no coercive authority and accepted no privileges.  Today, the remnants of these groups are found only in the most inhospitable places, like the Kalahari Desert, Amazon rain forest, and frozen north, because they lacked the size to resist evolving larger groups.

Some foraging groups moved beyond extended families to lineages, subclans, and clans, often reckoning descent from real or imagined ancestors and incorporating support from music, dance, and ritual.  Thus, by the late Ice Age, the first step had been taken toward “us versus them” mentality, increased group violence, intergroup competition, and greater social inequality.  Within these groups and with the shift to agriculture, the consolidation of power began that would lead to “big men”, chiefs, kings, and emperors.

Initially, the drive of some men to have enhanced social status was accommodated by allowing “achievement based” leadership, which was limited, nonhereditary, and generally harmless.  Eventually, some of these men increased their power by demonstrating greater “life force”, linkage of ancestry to the creation myth, and prowess as warriors.  Next, they consolidated their control over all group resources and made their positions hereditary, with adjustment of social logic and cosmology, if necessary.  Inevitably, these men looked to extend their power to neighboring societies.  They began by raiding adjacent villages to get heads, slaves, and loot.  Next they began conquering them to expand their territory.  Finally they began many generations of perpetual warfare during the various stages of consolidation of ever larger territories to form chiefdoms, kingdoms, and empires

This consolidation of power relationships simultaneously propagated downward within all social units.  Rank order societies emerged as dominant individuals increasingly gained hereditary control over a group’s resources.  Eventually, these societies progressed to a high level of unequal stratification that included aristocracy, religious leaders, warriors, merchants, peasants, and slaves.  In even more extreme cases, these levels solidified into castes that did not permit movement from one level to another.

Eventually, consolidation of power at the top was so complete that the terror, cruelty, and arbitrary demands imposed by rulers knew no bounds.  Often, the few subjects allowed to approach a ruler did so only after ritual purification and then prostrate with averted gaze to avoid punishment or even death at his whim.  Shaka, ruler of the Zulus, imposed a year of mourning at the death of his mother during which no crops would be planted, no cows would be milked, and no married couples would engage in sex.  He subsequently executed 7,000 of his own subjects for insufficient mourning.  

For much of the book, findings from thousands of archeological sites throughout all continents and the Pacific Islands are analyzed together with modern anthropologic correlation.  Initially, simple villages were organized for mutual protection, cooperative activity, and shared grain storage.  These villages gradually evolved into much larger cities with defensive walls, large central ritual areas, large temples, large private storage areas controlled by elites, monuments glorifying rulers, royal tombs with many sacrificed companions, and huge palatial structures for rulers, their many associates, and hundreds of concubines.

The authors argue that the progression to inequality is not the result of genetically transmitted human nature, but rather the result of culturally transmitted and altered “social logic”.  Initially, the transition to agriculture led to achievement-based societies that excelled at providing ambitious individuals with acceptable ways to increase their prestige without a hereditary component.  Eventually, the rise of debt-slavery, weaponized gift giving to humiliate rivals, cooption of religious narrative and ritual, and demonstrated prowess by warriors overcame the resistance to hereditary rank-based rule and led to increasing inequality.

Finally, the authors humorously speculate about putting egalitarian hunter-gatherers in charge to remedy inequality.  A certain degree of sexism, ageism, and ethnocentrism would remain.  Nevertheless, many positive changes would follow.  Harsh drug laws would be unlikely, given their use of psychoactive substances in their rituals.  Abortion would be legal, since some of their societies even practiced infanticide when resources were scarce.  Religious proselytizing would cease because other groups were believed to have their own cosmology for origins and religion.  Flexibility in marriage would be tolerated because their societies had various arrangements depending upon circumstances, including same-sex marriage, polygamy, polyandry, and other combinations.  With respect to inequality, sharing and achievement-based villagers would never allow CEOs to earn hundreds of times more than assembly-line workers and would insist on a safety net for the less fortunate.   

This book is a follow up to Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, the 1000+ page definitive economic documentation and review of global inequality.  Capital and Ideology is also 1000+ pages and provides a comprehensive review of the historic sequence of global economic systems that resulted in and claimed to justify the inequality described in the first book.  Piketty defines ideology as a set of plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured.  He adds two interesting descriptions of ideology:  1. an idea in service of a particular interest, and 2. the justification for inequality by a system’s beneficiaries.

Piketty describes a progression of economic ideologies, with special emphasis on trifunctional (clerical, aristocratic, and commoner), slaveist, colonialist, proprietarianist (ownership), social-democratic, and communist ideologies.  This sequence progresses to revived proprietarnianism together with hyper-capitalism that has led to rapidly increasing inequality since 1980.  The details of these systems are extensively discussed. 

One remarkably twisted mindset of 19^th Century exploitive proprietarianism is worthy of note.  In 1833, England outlawed slavery and compensated former slaveholders with 5% of GDP (paid by taxpayers) but gave no compensation to ex-slaves.  In the early 1800s, the French blockaded Haiti after its successful slave revolt and forced it to pay three years of national income to compensate former slaveholders.  When Haiti could not pay, France severely undermined its future development by forcing it to pay 15% of its GDP annually indefinitely (until WW I) to service French bank loans for the compensation.  Even Lincoln offered compensation to slaveholders before the Civil War. In the final chapter Piketty offers his views of many possible remedies to the social injustice of economic inequality.  His discussion ranges widely from better concepts of ownership to equality of access to education to international cooperation to prevent races to the bottom to progressive property, income, inheritance, and wealth tax, and more. 

(Review Michael Shermer in The American Scholar—considerably abridged).

Market Morality: The divine underpinnings of Western prosperity

Over the years, some religious conservatives have strained to attenuate Christianity’s doctrinal role in some of history’s darker moments—the Crusades, the Inquisition, the European witch hunts, pogroms against Jews, and the slave trade.  Some have gone so far as to credit Christianity for the core institutions of modern industrialized democracies, including and especially capitalism.

Max Weber’s highly influential work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)…argued that Calvinism’s doctrine of predestination helped fuel the secular institution of capitalism.  [Weber’s contemporary, R. H. Tawney,] countered that it was the spirit of individualism and the ethic of self-help and frugality that drove early capitalism, not Calvinist theology.

A century on, the author of this book develops Tawney’s thesis to its fullest, arguing that It was human potential in this world, not predestinarian beliefs about the next world, that drove capitalism.  Religious doctrines, promulgated by preachers from the pulpit, from which the faithful derived ideas that undergird capitalism, fueled its eventual development–for example, emphasis on human agency… and belief in the efficacy of markets to bring about personal and social goods….

In shaping this compelling narrative, the author has marshaled considerable historical evidence in its favor.  But why, to consider counterexamples, did not all societies in which Christianity is or was the dominant religion show Western forms of capitalism and democracy?  Obviously other factors were at work, such as geography and chance, that allowed capitalism to develop where and when it did in Europe.

Clearly, different peoples inculcated different forms of Christian beliefs, even within one denomination.  Consider the current divide between “prosperity gospel” Protestants, who believe that financial blessings come from God and hard work, and for whom conspicuous wealth is acceptable, and “social gospel” Protestants, who emphasize the obligation to reduce poverty, income inequality, crime, racism, and child labor, and for whom great wealth, if earned, should not be on public display.

Either way, the link between religious belief in individual agency and resultant economic success is what energizes most American Protestants today.  As the author notes, whereas 30 percent of Americans believe that luck plays a substantial role in determining one’s income, 54 percent of comparatively nonreligious European hold that view….Also, only 26 percent of Europeans agree that poor people are poor because they are lazy, compared with 60 percent of Americans.  Finally, and to the author’s point about agency and prosperity, 71 percent of Americans think that the poor can lift themselves out of poverty through hard work, compared with only 40 percent of Europeans.

Those numbers reflect what is called the “Just World” Theory of how lives turn out: if you are rich and successful, it is because you are hardworking, intelligent, creative, and willing to take risks, and you have been justly rewarded for your discipline and self-control; if you are poor and unsuccessful, it is because you are lazy, unintelligent, unimaginative, and risk averse, and you have been duly punished for your lack of will power and self-persuasion.  Thanks to the author, I can now see that this belief has its origin in the 18^th century.  Of the many factors that went into the construction of the modern economic worldview undergirding capitalism, he has successfully added religion back into the causal equation.

Conservatives are hostile to the goals of the left, particularly the empowerment of society’s lower castes and classes…

…Hierarchy, with its twin requirements of submission and domination.

For that is what the capitalist is: not a Midas of riches but a ruler of men.

He (Scalia) tells the power elite exactly what they want to hear, that they are superior and that they have a seat at the table because they are superior.

Reaction…begins from a position of principle that…some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.

Conservatism adapts and adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.

**********
Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension.

…Conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom. It threatens the submission of the subordinate to the superior.

David Cole theorized a dual justice system in America: Granting maximal rights to all citizens would have a high cost in terms of safety, he observed, while denying those rights would have a high cost in terms of freedom. So what does America do? It does both: It formally grants rights to all, but systematically denies them to blacks and the poor.

More than the reforms themselves, it is the assertion of agency by the subject class that vexes their superiors.

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.

Making privilege palatable to the masses is a permanent project of conservatism.

That is the task of right wing populism: to appeal to the mass without disrupting the power of elites or, more precisely, to harness the energy of the mass in order to reinforce or restore the power of elites.

As long as there are social movements demanding greater freedom and equality, there will be a right to counter them.

**********
…Conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.

Loss—real social loss, of power and position, privilege and prestige—is the mustard seed of conservative innovation. What the right suffers from today is not loss but success, and until a significant dominant group in society is forced to suffer loss—of the kind experienced by employers during the 1930s, white supremacists during the 1960s, or husbands in the 1970s—it will remain a philosophically flabby movement. Politically powerful, but intellectually moribund.

Conservatism is about power besieged and power protected. It waxes in response to movement from below and wanes in response to their disappearance…”

…Conservatism invariably arises in response to a threat to the old regime or after the old regime has been destroyed.

That is what conservatism is: a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

Far from being an invention of the politically correct, victimhood has been a talking point of the right ever since Burke decried the mob’s treatment of Marie Antoinette. The conservative, to be sure, speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth (who have almost nothing of value).

What is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood.

**********Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism have much in common. Both exhibit scant sympathy for the casualties of economic progress. (John Gray)

…We’re still left with a puzzle about (Ayn) Rand: How could such a mediocrity, not just a second-hander but a second-rater, exert such a continuing influence on the culture at large?

I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency—love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes. (Edward Luttwak)

“The real object” of the French Revolution, Burke told Parliament is “to break all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination.”