Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.
Former Principal.A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments. Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
George Washington
Man is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world. If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes’ death with taxes, and yearns for the government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbour needs them; privately he is an un-philosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
Primitive Anarchism
The common belief behind the word primitive is that it exists at the bottom of a hierarchy and applies to everything that is simple: “primitive stone tools” as opposed to iron tools; “ “primitive people” as opposed to civilized ones; etc. Again, this is a common misconception – and its very wrong. The word “primitive” is derived from the word “prime” which essentially means the first – so, technically using the word “primitive” means that something is the first – not that it is more simple than this or that. In this context, applying the word “primitive” to human beings simply means they were the first, or more fitting – they are exhibiting the primary human pathways.
In the simplest societies there is hardly any government. Primitive hunters tend to accept regulation only when they join the hunting pack and prepare for action. The Bushmen usually live in solitary families; the Pygmies of Africa and the simplest natives of Australia admit only temporarily of political organization, and then scatter away to their family groups; the Tasmanians had no chiefs, no laws, no regular government; and Veddahs of Ceylon formed small circles according to family relationship, but had no government, the Kubus of Sumatra “live without men in authority” every family governing itself; the Fuegians are seldom more than twelve together; the Tungus associate sparingly in groups of ten tents or so; the Australian ”horde” is seldom larger than sixty souls.(1) In such cases association and cooperation are for special purposes, like hunting; they do not rise to any permanent political order.
The Clan and the Tribe
A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship and descent. Even if lineage details are unknown, clan members may be organized around a founding member or apical ancestor. The kinship-based bonds may be symbolical, whereby the clan shares a “stipulated” common ancestor that is a symbol of the clan’s unity. When this “ancestor” is non-human, it is referred to as a totem, which is frequently an animal. Clans can be most easily described as tribes or sub-groups of tribes. A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture who have the same language, customs, and beliefs and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.
The earliest form of continuous social organization was the clan-a group of related families occupying a common tract of land, having the same totem, and governed by the same customs or laws. When a group of clans united under the same chief the tribe was formed, and became the second step on the way to the state. But this was a slow development; many groups have no chiefs at all,(2) and many more seem to have tolerated them only in time of war.(3) Instead of democracy being a wilted feather in the cap of our own age, it appers as its best in several primitive groups where such government as exists is merely the rule of the family-heads of the clan, and no arbitrary authority is allowed.(4) The Omaha Indians were ruled by a Council of Seven, who deliberated until they came to a unanimous agreement; add this to the famous League of the Iroquois, by which many tribes bound themselves- and honoured their pledge- to keep the peace, and one sees no great gap between these “savages” and the modern states that bind themselves revocable to peace in the League of Nations.
The King-War
It is war that makes the chief, the king and the state, just as it is these that make war. In Samoa the chief had power during war, but at other times no one paid much attention to him. The Dyaks had no other government than that of each family by its head; in case of strife they chose their bravest warrior to lead them, and obeyed him strictly; but once the conflict was ended they literally sent him about his business.(5) In the interval of peace it was the priest, or head magician, who had most authority and influence; and when at last a permanent kinship developed as the usual mode of government among a majority of tribes, it combined- and derived from- the offices of warrior, father and priest. Societies are ruled by two powers: in peace of the word, in crises by the sword; force is used only when indoctrination fails. Law and myth have gone hand in hand throughout the centuries, cooperating or taking turns in the management of mankind; until our own day no state dared separate them, and perhaps tomorrow they will be united again.
How did war lead to the state? It is not that men were naturally inclined to war. Some lowly peoples are quite peaceful and the Eskimos could not understand why Europeans of the same pacific faith should hunt one another like seals and steal one another’s hand “How well it is”- they apostrophized their soil-“that you are covered with ice and snow. How well it is that if in your rocks there are gold and silver, for which the Christians are so greedy, it is covered with so much snow that they can not get at it. Your unfruitfulness makes us happy, and saves us from molestation”(6) Nevertheless, primitive life was incarnadined with intermittent war. Hunters fought for happy hunting grounds still rich in prey, herders fought for new pastures for their flocks, tillers fought for virgin soil; all of them, at times, fought to avenge a murder, or to harden and discipline their youth, or to interrupt the monotony of life, or for simple plunder and rape; very rarely for religion. There were institutions and customs for the limitation of slaughter, as among ourselves- certain hours, days, weeks or months during which no gentleman savage would kill; certain functionaries who were inviolable, certain roads neutralized, certain markets and asylums set aside for peace; and the League of the Iroquois maintained the “Great Peace” for three hundred years.(7) But for the most part war was the favourite instrument of natural selection among primitive nations and groups.
Its results were endless. It acted as a ruthless eliminator of weak peoples, and raised the level of the race in courage, violence, cruelty, intelligence and skill. It stimulated invention, made weapons that became useful tools, and arts of war that became arts of peace. Above all, war dissolved primitive communism and anarchism, introduced organization and discipline, and led to the enslavement of prisoners, the subordination of classes, and the growth of government. Property was the mother; war was the father of the state.
The State- As the Organization of Force
State commonly refers to either the present condition of a system or entity, or to a governed entity (such as a country) or sub-entity (such as an autonomous territory of a country).
“A herd of blonde beasts of prey,” says Nietzsche, “a race of conquerors and masters, which with all its warlike organization and all its organizing power pounces with its terrible claws upon a population, in numbers possibly tremendously superior, but as yet formless,…such is the origin of state.”(8) “The state as distinct from tribal organization,” says Lester Ward, “begins with the conquest of one race by another.”(9) “Everywhere,” says Oppenheimer, “we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state.”(10)”Violence” says Ratzenhofer, “is the agent which has created the state.”(11) The state, says Gumplowicz, is the result of conquest, the establishment of the victors as a ruling caste over the vanquished.(12) “The state,” says Sumner, “is the product of force, and exists by force.”(13)
The Village Community
This violent subjection is usually agricultural group by a tribe of hunters and herders.(14) For agriculture teaches men pacific ways ,inures them to prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day’s toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of the chase, and hardly more perilous; when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modern ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.
It is a law that holds only for early societies since under more complex conditions a variety of other factors- greater wealth, better weapons, higher intelligence- contribute to determine the issue. So Egypt was conquered not only by Hykose, Ethiopian, Arab and Turkish nomads, but also by the settled civilizations of Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome and England – though not until these nations had become hunters and nomads on imperialistic scale.
The state is a late development, and hardly appears before the time of written history. For it presupposes a change in the very principle of social organization- from kinship to domination; and in primitive societies the former is the rule. Domination succeeds best where it binds diverse natural groups into an advantageous unity of order and trade. Even such conquest is seldom lasting except where the progress of invention has strengthened the strong by putting into their hands new tools and weapons for suppressing revolt. In permanent conquest the principle of domination tends to become concealed and almost unconscious; the French who rebelled in 1789 hardly realized, until Camille Desmoulins reminded them, that the aristocracy that had ruled them for a thousand years had come from Germany and had subjugated them by force. Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft, in the hands of the robber’s grandchildren, becomes sacred and inviolable property. Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag.
The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order. As trade unites clans and tribes, relations spring up that depends not on kinship but on contiguity, and therefore requires an artificial principle of regulation. The village community may serve as an example; it displaced tribe and clan as the mode of local organization, and achieved a simple, almost democratic government of small areas through a concourse of family-heads; but the very existence and number of such communities created a need for some external force that could regulate their interrelations and weave them into a larger economic web. The state ogre though it was in its origin, supplied this need; it became not merely an organized force, but an instrument for adjusting the interests of thousands conflicting groups that constitute a complex society. It spread the tentacles of its power and law over wider and wider areas, and though it made external war more destructive than before, it extended and maintained internal peace; the state may be defined as internal peace for external war. Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all. What an interregnum meant to a society accustomed to government may be judged from the behaviour of the Baganda, among whom, when the king died, every man had to arm himself; for the lawless ran riot, killing and plundering everywhere.(15) “Without autocratic rule,” as Spencer said, “ the evolution of society could not have commenced.”(16)
The Psychological Aides of the State
A state which should rely upon force alone would soon fall, for though men are naturally gullible they are also naturally obstinate, and power, like taxes, succeeds best when it is invisible and indirect. Hence the state, in order to maintain itself, used and forged many instruments of indoctrination- the family, the church, the school- to build in the soul of the citizen a habit of patriotic loyalty and pride. This saved a thousand policemen, and prepared the public mind for the docile coherence which is indispensable in war. Above all, the ruling minority sought more and more to transform its forcible mastery into a body of law which, while consolidating that mastery, would afford a welcome security and order to the people, and would recognize the rights of the subject sufficiently to win his acceptance of the law and his adherence to the state.
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this:
You cannot post ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal,’ ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,’ and ‘Thou Shall Not Lie’ in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians…It creates a hostile work environment
- Uncle Bob
The Present Indian Government (JUST FOR FUN)
References
1-Sumner and Keller. I 16, 418,461;Westermarck, Moral Ideas, i, 195-8
2- Sumner and Keller. I ,461
3- Rivers,W.H.R.,Social Organization, 166
4- Briffault,ii, 364, 494; Ratzel,; 133 Sumner and Keller, 470-3
5- Ibid.,463, 473
6-Ibid., 316
7- Sumner and Keller. I ,132
8-Roth, H. L., in Thomas, W.I., Source book for Social Origins,111
9- Ibid.;Mason, O.T.,190; Lippert,165.
10-Renard,123
11-Briffault, The Mothers,ii.460
12- Renard,35
13- Sutherland,G.A.,ed., A System of Diet and Dietetics,45.
16- Ibid, 86