Our modern lives are full of the gadgets and artificial creations of the mind of man, but there is one artifact of human intelligence that makes all the rest possible - the civilization in which we live. With nearly all of our accumulated knowledge acquired during man's relatively brief period of civilization, we tend to take for granted that civilization has always existed and is somehow an inevitable state for mankind.
Outside of a few primitive cave paintings, all of our recorded history is the record of human civilizations since mankind only gained the ability to record history after the dawn of its first civilization. We tend to forget that all of recorded history only represents a tiny percentage of the time modern man has roamed the Earth. Statistically, civilized life is an aberration in the human condition while living rough as small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers is the norm by a wide margin.
Assuming that civilization is a desirable condition, and the default state of humanity is the absence of civilization, it would seem appropriate to put some effort into understanding how we got to this stage. It would also seem reasonable that a clear understanding of how we got where we are now is also a necessary step in building a desirable future.
Where does civilization come from? Is it the result of a natural progression, or an entirely artificial condition that has evolved out of modern man's unique ability to expand his abstract consciousness beyond the details of his physical world? Perhaps more importantly, our modern industrial civilization functions primarily according to basic principles often referred to as secular ethics, but humans are the only animals on earth that recognize secular ethics. Where did we get the core concepts on which we've erected this magnificent edifice?
While modern industrial civilization claims to embrace the principle of mutual respect for life and property (often called the Golden Rule), past civilizations have been based on far different philosophical foundations. There are some who hold that civilizations arise spontaneously as a result of a concept called "natural law". Ancient Greek philosophers postulated that there is a body of universal principles they called natural law that are self-evident and obvious to reason, and which are revealed whenever mankind allows himself to consider his world rationally. The proponents of natural law have proposed that there are certain natural human rights that exist outside of the rule of custom, manmade law, or the commands of rulers. The concept of natural law has at times been the dominant political philosophy.
The concept of natural law has been used at various times in history to counter the claims of the divine right of kings and other appeals to higher authority. It is claimed that beliefs in natural law empowered the French Revolution and were the basis for the assertion of "certain inalienable rights" in the founding documents of America. The proponents of natural law hold that natural law provides the basis for positive law - manmade laws that attempt to implement the principles of natural law. In theory, the universality of natural law mandates that it will encourage the creation of fair and just societies whenever mankind allows itself to rationally consider its world.
The proponents of natural law have long claimed that their concept is a solution to the age old problem of claims to artificial authority such as the divine right of kings. However, in practice natural law nearly always becomes itself an appeal to the illusion of authority, providing a unfounded means to subvert true logic and block the evolution and refinement of secular ethics. After all, it is the very definition of natural law that by being the result of entirely self-evident and obvious universal truths, the concepts of natural law are intrinsic aspects of reality and must therefore be superior to any concepts that are solely the product of man's intellect. Any concept that can be assigned to natural law gains a significant advantage over any competing ideas.
The core problem with the theory of natural law is that it devolves into an appeal to the obvious - that its principles are so self-evident that they need no further validation. However, because man evolved as a generalist, his perspectives are always heavily influenced by context - what is self-evident and obvious to us is critically dependent on the context in which we frame our own peculiar world view. This is the flaw in the concept that has allowed natural law to be such a slippery philosophy down through the ages. By claiming "obvious truths" from vastly different contexts, natural law has been used to defend a wide variety of social structures ranging from America - which although still flawed has aggressively embraced the broadest application of the golden rule of any major society in history - to the murderous evil of the Nazis and Communists.
Even the ancient Greeks who originally postulated the universality of natural law found the concept to be exceptionally flexible. Consider the conflicting perspectives on natural law of the ancient Athenians and the citizens of Melos. Melos was a small relatively sparsely populated island that, in spite of being a former Spartan colony, had maintained its neutrality during the Peloponnesian war. The Melians believed that since they had done the Athenians no wrong and sought only peaceful relations with their neighbors, natural law required that their neighbors should similarly respect their right to live in peace. Bolstering the Melian perspective was the admitted fact that the Athenians had no real interest in the Melian people or their small island. The only issue in question was the existence of a Melos that was not under the rule of the Athenians.
The Athenians, being overwhelmingly more powerful militarily, approached the problem of a peaceful independent Melos from an entirely different context, but one which seemed valid from their perspective. Within the concept of natural law embraced by the Athenians, the existence of military power required the use of that power. Any failure to do what came "naturally" to a military power would signal to the rest of the ancient world that there was something wrong with the Athenians and their ability to maintain their empire.
Things would have been different if the Melians had been a major military power equal to the Athenians, since then the Athenians could have treated them with the respect of equals and left them alone. The Athenians believed they were obliged to attack the far weaker Melians since a failure to do so would encourage the other conquered peoples in their empire to question their ability to maintain control. The Athenians viewed their attack on the militarily insignificant Melians not as a desire to conquer Melos, but rather as a natural function of defending the rest of their empire. To not attack would have been a violation of their concept of natural law. In essence, from the Athenian perspective natural law required them to mount an attack the Melians even though they had no interest in the island or its people, and would much rather have spent their efforts on more profitable pursuits.
After failing to find any convergence in their very different perspectives on natural law, the Melians refused to surrender their freedom and the Athenians laid siege to their island. In the end the Athenians triumphed, and as punishment for resisting the Athenian perspective on natural law, the Athenian Generals put every male Melian citizen to death and carted off all the women and children as slaves.
Consider that outside of possibly ant and termite colonies, civilization is an entirely alien concept in the natural world. Only within the mind of man does the concept of the social contract exist. Of all the species on earth, only mankind has attempted to leverage the foundation of the social contract into the massive wholly artificial artifact of modern civilization.
In the prehistoric world, the operative laws of nature were reduced down to two main categories - physical and behavioral. The physical laws are the unavoidable aspects of the physical world such as what we commonly refer to as the laws of physics. Science is our attempt to define these laws, but they are enforced by reality regardless of our ability and/or willingness to understand and accept them.
The law of the jungle is the only truly natural behavioral law, and it defines the basic default form of interaction for all species. No part of what humans call ethics exist within the behavioral laws of nature. Not even the principle of reciprocity (the "golden rule") is sufficiently consistent, reliable, and pervasive in the natural world to be considered a behavioral law. Mutual dependency is not the same as the principle of mutual respect. Those minority of species that practice some form of reciprocity or cooperation with other members of their species only do so imperfectly and revert back to the basic default law of the jungle when under stress.
So if natural law requires an existing context and secular ethics aren't found in nature, where did we get the fundamental philosophical building blocks on which to build our civilization? The short answer is the same way we've gained most of our knowledge - simple trial and error, with acquired wisdom being largely the ability to remember what happened the last time.
Early civilizations were simply expanded versions of the basic group dynamics of the small hunter-gatherer band. They handled issues such as property rights in much the same way as children approach possession of toys on the playground - belligerence and might makes right. When that didn't work they fell back on appealing to a higher authority. The ancients imagined whole panoplies of gods who served as higher authorities to restrain some of the abuses of the powerful and take the place of parental referees on the playground.
While the ancients may have played with the advanced ideas that eventually became modern ethics, they lived in a world very much dominated by the default natural law of the jungle. Property ownership tended to be far more a function of the ability to defend that possession with physical force than any abstract concepts like intellectual property rights. Those with power largely controlled the lives of those without.
Even after establishing the concept of civilization, humanity insisted on trying every wrong way to go about it before finally ending up with the "enlightened" understanding we take so much for granted today. Far from the universal truth imagined by the ancient Greeks and their natural law, our modern recognition of the value of mutual respect for each other's lives and property is the result of looking back over thousands of years of trial and error, and trying to learn something from all those hard lessons.
Only after the early industrial revolution set in motion the ascendancy of the individual through providing the means by which an individual could effectively defend his life and productivity from exploitation, was it possible to implement modern secular ethics in the real world. Without the evolution of effective self-defense in the form of the personal firearm, the "universal" truths suggested by the ancient Greeks would have remained nothing more than the thought experiments and mind games of philosophers.
I submit that the abstract principles we today refer to as secular ethics are the result of what trial and error has shown to work best, and are more a recognition of the flaws in human nature than the pure abstraction of ultimate truth we would like them to be. As the sole dominate intelligent species within our limited store of knowledge, we tend to adopt a very human-centric world view. From that perspective, our concepts of ethics take on the appearance of ultimate truths that transcend the human condition. But in our desire to believe we are the pinnacle of evolutionary development, we fail to consider just how much of our concepts of ethics are simply hard learned accommodations of human nature. If human nature was free of contradictions and self-destructive faults, our concepts of ethics would have evolved far differently.
The liberty and freedom we enjoy today are the result of the empowered individual's ability to reject false claims of higher authority, and to recognize and act on his own enlightened self interest. Concepts like the natural law postulated by the ancient Greeks may have appeared useful when fighting the false claims of higher authority by the British Crown, but today such ideas threaten the basis of our free society by attempting to offer a false higher authority that appears superior to the principles of secular ethics.
The secular ethics that define the rules of our modern world are the entirely artificial means by which we hold the default natural law of the jungle at bay. These artificial principles and the civilization they define can only function as long as the participants appreciate their real purpose and willingly abide by them. Civilization breaks down when people forget that the core purpose of the social contract is to displace the default natural law of the jungle and constrain the contrary aspects of human nature.
The truths that were so self-evident to the founding fathers of America were only obvious to them within the context of their world view. If we allow that context to be lost or destroyed, the truths we fail to properly value today may never appear self-evident again.
Source: http://www.kortexplores.com/node/104
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