When Civilization Violates the Social Contract: The Evolution of Consciousness, Part 5

The Savage State by Thomas Cole. (1834)

Sigmund Freud probably got it right when he proposed that “civilization… serve[s] two purposes—namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations.”[i] He suggested that, “We are threatened from suffering from three directions: from our own body…; from the external world…; and from our relations to other men.”[ii]  It is civilization, according to Freud, that has been established to elevate each person’s chances above those of our “animal ancestors” in dealing with these threats. Or, as the anthropologist Ernest Becker noted in his masterpiece The Denial of Death, “‘Civilized’ society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods makes man count for more than any other animal.”[iii] All societies are religious, he contended, in that they serve to help alleviate the mostly unconscious terror generated by our certain death. And the classist scholar Norman O. Brown suggested that the whole of “civilization is an attempt to overcome death.”[iv] Although an analysis of history would hardly suggest that humanity trod the path of civilization conscious of such motives, most of us, when we contemplate it for just a moment, will easily admit of them for banding together, whether congregated in cities or outside of them in our brightly-lit, well-insulated homes. One night alone in a summertime forest is enough to convince most of us. Or a walk through a tropical swamp, where each year somewhere between twenty and almost one thousand people die from snakebite, alone.[v]

The Arcadian or Pastoral State by Thomas Cole (1834)

The fear of death and of all that is nature, is why—according to Freud—we readily accept the many limitations placed by civilization on our selfish biological desires, and it is why, according to the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseau, that we accept our constrained predicament. He proclaimed that, “Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”[vi] That is, in being part of civilization we have given up the freedoms of the “natural man.” In the process, it has become part of our cultural worldview to accept some notion of the Social Contract, in which we each give up our personal sovereignty to the general sovereignty (the various levels of society) in return for society providing a safe and secure environment in which we can pursue our interests. And so, our biology and culture have trodden a co-evolutionary path. For our survival, we have relied increasingly on cooperative interdependence at the expense of individual instinct.[vii] Indeed, Civilization is a state of obligatory interdependence.[viii]

The Consummation of Empire by Thomas Cole (1836)

Humans are simultaneously both individualist and highly social. Most pre-agricultural societies survived by being able to balance these two often-opposing natural tendencies. Decorum and rules of social engagement are principally designed to peacefully accommodate their complex interests. Social inequity distorts the expression of both tendencies as it also disturbs the harmony between them. According to Francis Fukuyama, human history—and by this he is referring to post-Enlightenment Western civilization—has promoted individualism to be “a solid core of our economic and political behavior…” by developing “… institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.”[ix] This closely parallels Jeremy Rifkin’s argument in The Empathic Civilization that, “The development of the natural law theory of private property relations has marched side by side with the emergence of the autonomous individual in Western history.”[x] Inequality has also marched in lockstep, and so Civilization has been destructive to both the environment and to the human psyche.

Destruction by Thomas Cole (1836).

In this way, Civilization has violated the Social Contract in at least two fundamental ways. One, it has failed to provide even the basic necessities of nourishment and security to a substantial portion of the human family. Somewhere between 800 million and a billion people worldwide suffer chronic hunger; about 85 million people are experiencing acute hunger, starving slowly, wasting away; 9-14 million people, mostly women and children, starve to death each year or die of diseases their malnourished bodies cannot fight; about ten percent of the world population lives in extreme poverty; there are 27 million people in slavery—eight million of whom are children; many millions spend years in prisons; one hundred million people are homeless and 1.6 billion lack adequate housing.[xi] This short list hardly addresses the full extent of human misery. But then, it is less the conditions of extensive poverty and excruciating pain, themselves, that accuses Civilization of its grand welsh as much as it is the outrageous inequality of conditions and the time, effort, and wealth spent to sustain that inequality.

Desolation by Thomas Cole (836)

The second way in which Civilization has reneged on the social contract is far more dangerous than the first, for it threatens extinction of our species. In a slow-motion blowback that has been centuries in the making, the very civilization that we depend on to protect us from the vagaries of nature has so adjusted Freud’s “mutual relations” that it threatens our security by threatening nature itself.

These violations of the social contract are ultimately dangerous to the “haves” for another important reason. Blowback from the “have nots” can be expected, eventually. As the geo-archaeologist Fekri Hassan has put forth, “A policy that ignores the call of the weak and downtrodden, that is blind to misery and disease, and which lives on borrowed time must sooner or later suffer from internal moral callousness and duplicity as well as from desperate resistance by those who have no hope for a better future and whose lives are no longer worth living.  It may be that the dignity they gain in desperate actions is perhaps their only salvation in a world that has turned a deaf ear to their suffering or those with whom they identify.”[xii] In this century, we have already witnessed desperate actions in many parts of the world—whether in the form of violent revolution, of random violence (in the U.S., particularly) from those suffering from a kind of dissociation disorder, or mass migrations of refugees due to climate change and persecution, or the election and adulation of dangerous autocrats.

Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix (1830)

Historically, the “haves” have not responded well to the dissention. Again, Fekri Hassan: “The current world situation is not sustainable. Poverty and inequality breed resistance and resentment. The powerful elite, as in the past, have to recourse to the use of an ideology of order, peace and prosperity and/or to the use of military force. Both are costly endeavors and without a real payoff in the long run; the rhetoric of order, peace, and prosperity will not withstand the reality of poverty, hunger, and disease, which are the real “terrors” that we must fight. Military occupation and control can never be a long-term solution because of its cost and deleterious ecological effects.”[xiii]

Refugees by Wery Pollier

Migrations, alone, have already significantly changed the political climate in the U.S. and Europe, helping to elect Trump in one and being largely responsible for the turmoil of Brexit in the other. Russia and Eastern Europe quietly closed their borders, and China now spends about as much on internal security and quashing dissent as it does on its military.[xiv]

It would seem that we—as individuals and as a society—have no peaceful, healthy recourse to our predicament, no legitimate way to change Civilization’s perilous course. For as the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said: “Economies are like large ships: they cannot be turned around quickly. Moreover, they change so slowly that cause and effect are not always clear.”[xv] Substitute civilization for economies and you now find yourself carried by an even larger ship. It takes the full labor of many to amend even one law or to change the practices of just one business; or to change even one person’s mind about one simple subject. And how difficult is it for even one person, once they have determined to do so, to make significant changes, to lose weight, to stop eating meat, to downsize their lifestyle, unless they are forced by life’s circumstances to do so. So, how much more will it take to make the changes necessary to steer Civilization onto a sustainable, equitable path? We do indeed seem to be captives to a huge powerful system with millennia of momentum.

The Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563)

ENDNOTES

[i] Freud, S. (1929/1961:45) Civilization and its Discontents, translated and edited by James Strachey. W.W. Norton and Company, New York.

[ii] Freud, S. (1929/1961:26).

[iii] Becker, E. (1973:5) The Denial of Death, Simon and Schuster, New York.

[iv] Brown, N.O. (1959:341) Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, Wesleyan U.P., Middleton, CN.

[v] Kasturiratne, A., Wickremasinghe, A.R., de Silva, N., Gunawardena, N.K.,  Pathmeswaran, A., et al. (2008) The Global Burden of Snakebite: A Literature Analysis and Modeling Based on Regional Estimates of Envenoming and Deaths. PLoS Med,5(11): e218.

[vi] First sentence in Chapter 1 of Rousseau, J.J. (1761) The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Pocket Books, New York, edited by L.G. Crocker (1977).

[vii] Brewer, M.B. (1999) The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate? Journal of Social Issues, v. 55, pp. 429-444.

[viii] ibid.

[ix] Fukuyama, F. (2011:27-37) The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

[x] Rifkin, J. (2009:536) The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Jermey P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York.

[xi] Chronic hunger—FAO (2018) Food Security and Nutrition in the World.

Acute hunger—Sanchez, P.A. and Swaminathan, M.S. (2005) Cutting World Hunger in Half, Science, v. 307, p. 357-359.

Starvation-- Serageldin, I. (2002) World Poverty and Hunger—the Challenge for Science, Science, v. 296, pp. 54-58).

WWPA (2003) The 1st U.N. World Water Development Report: Water for People, Water for Life, UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme.

FAO (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) (2006) The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2006: Eradicating world hunger—taking stock ten years after the World Food Summit,

Extreme poverty—World Bank (2018, September 19). Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues but has Slowed: Press Release.

Slavery— Cockburn, A. (2003) 21st Century Slaves, National Geographic, September, pp. 2-25.

Bales K., Trodd, Z., and Williamson, A.K. (2009) Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People, Oneworld Pub., Oxford, UK.

ILO (International Labour Office) (2002) A Future Without Child Labour, Geneva. 

Prisons—Pew Center on the States (2009) One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections, Washington, DC: The Pew Charitable Trusts, March.

Homelessness— as of 2005, the last time the United Nations attempted a global survey. Homeless World Cup Foundation (2018) World Homeless Statistics.

[xii] Hassan, F.A. (2007) The Lie of History: Nation-States and the Contradictions of Complex Societies, pp. 169-196, in Constanza, R., Graumlich, L.J., and Steffen, W. (Editors), Sustainability or Collapse: An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

[xiii] ibid.

[xiv] Russia—for example, Mariya Petkova (2018, January 17) Why Russia refuses to give refugee status to Syrians. Aljazeera.

Eastern Europe—Patrick Wintour (2017, June 13) EU takes action against eastern states for refusing to take refugees. The Guardian.

China—Page, J. (2011, March 5) Internal Security Tops Military in China Spending. The Wall Street Journal.

Shi, T., and Zhai, K. (2015, March 5) China to Boost Security Spending as Xi Fights Dissent, Terrorism. Bloomberg.com.

[xv] Stiglitz, J. (2002, October) The Roaring Nineties, The Atlantic, pp. 75-89.