The Domus Mindset
The Origins of Civilization, the Ruling Class, and Why It's So Hard to Think About Freedom
Archaeology seems to show that the first settled agricultural societies took the form of increasingly permanent prison camps. Canny ancient generals learned to capture enemies rather than killing them, and the vanquished became the first enslaved people. The victors became an upper class that extracted wealth from them. History as we know it began with the crime of enslavement.
I'm thinking here of James C. Scott's book Against the Grain, which summarizes a lot of discoveries from recent years. Societies founded on slavery weren’t the first to practice agriculture, but they were the first to leave written and monumental records—and so we reckon them as the founders of what we now call civilization.
Civilization in its early forms was a horror. Scott and others have proposed that hunter-gatherers and ungoverned low-intensity agriculturalists enjoyed better, more varied food and more leisure time. They were almost certainly healthier than their civilized contemporaries; we know they grew taller, and they left denser bones and fewer parasites in the archaeological record. We might not call them free—it’s hard to tell—but compulsion and slavery were very likely smaller parts of their social landscape. We don’t find heaps of fetters among their artifacts; those we only find among the “civilized.”1
This isn’t a strike against agriculture in particular; agriculture doesn’t enslave on its own. It just opens up certain possibilities. Forced sedentism was—and remains—one of them. As Scott notes, “the very first small, stratified, tax-collecting, walled states pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first crop domestications and sedentism.”
The work in these proto-civilizational camps was harder, longer, more dangerous, and less nutritious than the work of hunting and gathering. But forced agriculture could produce a caloric surplus, and—crucially—that surplus took the form of cereal grains, which were extractable and storable. That meant that a proto-state could feed a much bigger army, and the army could travel farther from home. One of the many downsides of this setup was that the combination of forced sedentism and forced caloric extraction led to a previously unknown type of disaster—famine. Hunter-gatherers just go elsewhere when the food runs short. Sedentary agriculturalists have become dependent on the fields, which must not fail. But failure could come from many sources, both environmental and social.
Still, other things being equal, a bigger army meant more victories, and more victories brought more slaves, and more slaves fed more warriors. Cities grew into empires. Ancient empires usually died from overextension; the armies outran their supply lines, and the subjugated couldn’t feed them anymore. The provinces sloughed off, the center didn’t hold, and the whole terrible cycle began again.
The political theory of these societies was heavily mythologized, but it revolved around the fertility of the land supporting the safety of the proto-state: the upper classes owned and extracted from the land; the lower classes worked on it. For the upper classes, the myths promised that if priests (and later kings) played their roles properly, the gods would bring plentiful crops and military strength. That sweetened the deal for them: Enlil, the chief Sumerian deity, presided over both war and agriculture, and there’s possibly a lesson there for us.
The lower classes may have felt their bondage keenly, but they also grew accustomed to it—especially given how invaders could always treat them worse. The forced resettlement camp became their home, and socioeconomic class was born. It endured not because of the naturalness of social station, and certainly not because the rulers had found Enlil’s favor. It endured because the alternatives were usually much more terrible. Even the lowest ranking members of most societies weren’t able to improve their position by deviating. Disturbances proved temporary, and the grim equilibrium always returned.
There is a world of cultural change between Sumer and medieval Europe, but both had recognizable lords, serfs, prohibitions on most forms of migration, and institutions of extraction. In both, extraction supported a military that kept the peasants in the fields and the invaders at arms’ length. Scott calls this pattern the domus complex, from the Roman word for a household. Roman households were composed of a lord, his family members, his slaves, his land, and the domesticated plants and animals that made the whole system workable. Rome was exceptional in some ways, but its political economy certainly had all the important parts of this cruel and durable system. The management of a domus was simultaneously political, agricultural, sexual, economic, and moral. It combined them all in ways that can be difficult for us to untangle today, accustomed as we are to delegating these functions to separate though still interrelated institutions.
Societies built around the domus complex have existed for a lot longer than those that we call liberal. The domus complex endured because it has the form of a prisoner’s dilemma: All else equal, it’s clearly best if nobody has an army based on extracting calories from slave labor. But if even one such army exists, then everyone nearby faces a choice: either take up arms or be enslaved. Once every town has an army, you’d best pick a side and stick with it. Given that the means of production are immovable, you’ll do best to remain exactly where you are. In Mancur Olson’s famous phrase, the roving bandits became stationary bandits, the better to protect their status and income. That’s also why, for most of recorded history, most humans have lived and died in grinding poverty, never venturing very far from their places of birth. Hard labor as a serf on a manor at least gets you bread—and for a lot of people, in a lot of places, no other option could do that.
I’d add that these early societies gave us a lot of our ideas about what eventually became the state, work, religion, and the family. The domus complex has an intellectual dimension, and it’s still with us in more ways than we generally realize. Indeed, the domus mindset still shapes how we think about the world today, our relative mobility and industrialization notwithstanding.
The first theories of politics sought to explain and justify the domus complex with reference to something more grandiose, and purportedly more enduring, than an empty belly or a military threat. Such theories deified the system’s lords—so much so that even today, we pray to the Lord. Baal, the Semitic word for lord, could mean a god, a landlord, or both; it could be hard to tell. As above, so below: There are lords in the heavens, and there are lords on the earth. In each case, the lords are kind of like you, only better. And they’re here to make you a deal.
Even Christian lords liken themselves to the Lord up above, and they want you to know that they’re on His side, and He’s on theirs. The covenant with your earthly lords has a counterpart in the covenant you make with your heavenly Lord, and the two covenants are essentially compatible: For centuries, Jesus’s saying “Render unto Caesar…” was not understood as a grant of temporal power coupled with a grant of religious freedom, as we might like to read it today. No, it was a power sharing agreement between coercive temporal and coercive spiritual institutions, in which the Church would take its due share of power over you, and it would work in harmony with the earthly lords to manage your life.
From its very beginnings, political thought has personified and en-lorded the ecological and social phenomena that might have been more productively studied with an impersonal paradigm—that is, in a way that seeks explanations beyond an individual’s intent or agency as the causative force of history. Impersonalism, though, is hard. We want stories, not statistical regularities, and stories have individuals who exercise personal agency. We would rather be dominated by a person, and not by a game-theoretical equilibrium that existed owing to the ecological and technological constraints that prevailed for much of human history. The former is just easier to understand. And this may be why we still often reach for explanations that rely on the conscious decisions of individual agents—even to explain phenomena, like inflation, that arise without conscious intent.
Explanations that rely on person-like entities are always relatively accessible to audiences made up of person-like entities, particularly when compared to the strange and impersonal origins of familiar phenomena that quantitative social science tends to reveal: It is simply easier to believe that inflation comes from greedy executives, and not from a rapid growth in the supply of money. Love comes from the love goddess, and not from a complex, nearly undetectable dance of hormones orchestrated partially by oxytocin. Society’s ills come from a conspiracy of the powerful, and surely never from unintended consequences, ignorance, or our still-imperfect control over merely natural phenomena. Personal stories tend to feel plausible even if they aren’t really accurate. It’s how conspiracy theories propagate, and it’s also how the earliest recorded societies gave us tons of memorable religion and folklore, but not so much in the way of useful economics.
One practical teaching of the domus mindset is that nearly everyone must remain in their geographic, social, and intellectual places for the whole thing to work. The crops must be tended and guarded, and likewise the slaves. The army may go abroad, but it must return. The domus mindset valorizes and tends strongly toward stasis. Plato said it in unison with the whole ancient world: the good polity would aim to endure, unchanged in all matters of any importance, for as long as possible. I’ll suggest here, though I can’t prove, that the heritage of the domus is why we are still much more inclined toward cultural stasis, and away from cultural dynamism, than we ought to be.
The ideologies of the earliest historical social systems can be read in the world’s earliest literature. Gilgamesh domesticated Enkidu and brought him to the city prison camp that he ruled. The city had food—and beer and prostitutes—and Enkidu enjoyed himself; Civilization did have some advantages over the wilderness. Enkidu became a warrior, and as such he contributed materially to preserving the social order. In time, Gilgamesh came to call Enkidu a friend. Enkidu even corrected some of the abuses that Gilgamesh had been perpetrating: Whereas preserving the domus requires fecundity and a relative absence of conflict about marriage, kinship, and paternity among thousands of individuals, Gilgamesh, it seems, had been claiming the right of prima nocta—by which he could have sex with any newlywed woman before her husband did. Not, in other words, so compatible with social stability.
Prima nocta may have been a survival from prehistoric social systems, but whatever the case, the myth says Enkidu put an end to it. By the time the Sumerian forced labor camp had become the Greek oikos—usually translated as “household”—everyone knew that wife-keeping was just as important as wheat-keeping, and that each man should have his own if the system were to keep making warriors. Monogamy became essential to the improved system’s political economy. The Iliad and the Odyssey, when taken together, form a cautionary tale about the importance of allocating women properly, and of wives remaining faithful, even while husbands might stray.
Enkidu’s protest against prima nocta, and the many others we find in history and legend, are ultimately about the formation of obedient subjects and the proper arrangements thereof. Stories about prima nocta remained psychically important to us long after any trace of the actual practice had vanished. Western folklore at least is full of tales of the bad king claiming wives on their wedding nights, even in cultural contexts where prima nocta was certainly never practiced. We appear to want such stories far in excess of their reality, and perhaps it’s because they reassure us in the face of all else that we surrender for civilization: Peasant men, at least you may aspire to have a wife, and when you have one, the ruler will approve.
In a word, Enkidu’s suppression of prima nocta is about pacification. Being pacified, being loyal to the existing order, gives men their wives. Sexual access is a privilege gifted by the kindly ruler, and it’s the goal of our society that each man should get a wife, to have and to hold: Go forth and multiply, says the lord, as long as you play by the rules.
Since the birth of the domus, the great task of political thought has been the pacification of the unruly individual. Not the formation of princes in particular, which post-Greek European political theory tends to prize—though that’s handy too. Political thought is usually about supplying the reasons why we should obey our masters and remain loyal to the social contract that inevitably puts them on top. It’s only secondarily about fitting our masters to the task of ruling us. Rarest of all is the political theory that asks whether any of that is necessary, or how we might conduct ourselves differently.
The forms of the domus have a durability that almost suggest they’re a part of what Martin Heidegger called our forestructure of understanding. As one commentator put it, “all individuals come to a situation with practical familiarity or background practices from their own world that make interpretation possible.”
When we try to make sense of the social world that confronts each of us individually, we are apt to respond with familiar stories, strategies, and idioms. Among the familiar we will find the domus. It’s a part of our mental furniture, whether genetically (as a lot of trads and conservatives would seem to prefer) or culturally (which is somewhat more hopeful, as it suggests we can choose otherwise without the whole house of cards falling down). As you can probably guess, I'm of the second view.
The domus mindset underwrites a lot of the things that we moderns both believe and yet struggle to explain: Suicide has commonly been a crime. Against whom? We’ve nearly forgotten, but legally speaking it’s against the lord—and, of course, it’s also against the Lord. Homosexuality? Again, it’s a horrible crime, and again, it’s oddly without any violation of consent. The real victim is the lord, who always needs more babies. Your actions may deprive him of the conscripts/field hands that he needs. Birth control? Abortion? Same deal; the domus mindset explains the close connection that politics has to nearly every aspect of family life. Immigration? Good lord above, don’t let that happen, not ever. A serf gone mobile can only be an invader, a criminal, or at best another mouth to feed. The domus mindset taught us so.
One theme of this newsletter has been a concern with how we model, and talk about, human freedom. My claim has been that we’re bad at it; that when we go to model freedom, we use the things we’ve got lying around, and those things frequently don’t point to freedom at all. The forestructure that we bring to understanding freedom is quite often just the leftovers from less-free social situations. They’re renamed and repurposed, but they’re not necessarily any more liberating. We tell ourselves stories of freedom, and our stories have real chains in them.
This isn’t due to any particular evil. It’s a failure of cognition. When human minds try to model something new, they usually do it with the broken-up, repurposed parts of old things that they already knew how to model. That first effort at truth usually fails, but we can seldom do better on a first try. Another way to say this is that the relatively obvious parts of Hegel are true: The first idea of anything is just about always hopelessly inadequate, and experience just about always helps. The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. And freedom takes practical wisdom to understand.
Yet the myths that underwrite our culture are still commonly about lordship and serfdom, directly or indirectly, and they still quite often point us at the stasis of working on a manor, paying our dues, and obeying. It’s startling to me, and it might be a part of the phenomenon that I’m discussing, how we always teach our youngest children what’s what on a pre-industrial farm, no matter how urbanized we become. The farmer in the dell, now and forever. (Terry Pratchett absolutely nailed this when he observed that in the city, the only sound most animals ever make is “sizzle.”)
Indeed, the grandparent of almost all myths might look something like this: The man was born on the farm of the lord. He grew up and worked. The lord rewarded him with his daily bread—and maybe a woman. For various reasons, the man strayed. He went to the wilderness, or maybe to the corrupt and decadent city. He learned that things were dangerous and bad there, and he may have done some fighting. Then he returned to the farm of the lord. The lord took him back, and all was well again. There is stasis, the stasis is broken, and the stasis is restored. A happily ever after lets us know that the story is over—even while, in the modern world, life is always in flux, and change isn’t necessarily our enemy. Real experience doesn’t follow tidy narrative arcs, but we want the story, and the stasis at the end, all the same.
The point here isn’t to assert or seek out a specific historical origin for storytelling. It’s to encourage you to observe how often our stories take place down on the domus. Man against nature: That’s man leaving the domus, and why did he do that, and how did it go? Man against man: The fight of one domus with another is obviously worth our attention. Man meets woman: Let’s see them united—but only on the terms agreeable to our domus, which supply the dramatic tension.
There are echoes of the domus mindset in so many familiar tales: The prodigal son. The Homeric cycle. Jack and the Beanstalk. Make the hero a girl, and it’s nearly The Wizard of Oz: There’s no place like home. Sure, lots of stories point elsewhere, but the oldest, the most revered… they usually point us back to the domus, its defense, its maintenance, and our proper place within it. No farms, no food.
Christians are correct to pride their religion in making genuine conceptual innovations over the other religions of antiquity. For one thing, I don’t believe I’m aware of any god, in any ancient religion, whose proper social role was understood to be that of a suffering servant. Lords are lords, don’t you know, and that’s the opposite of a servant. But it’s certainly possible to frame the Christian story in such a way that anyone can see its roots in the domus mindset: The hero of the story, Jesus, comes from another domus—the City of God, where he serves the Lord. He descends to the corrupt City of Man to redeem us and reconcile us to His Lord instead. We will be forgiven and rewarded. In the next life, we’ll be serfs on His manor, which is exceedingly nice. How should we pray? Give us this day, our daily bread. And deliver us from evil, for we have been captured by Satan, the worldly, the false gods of Babylon, et cetera. They’ve put us to work on a bad farm, which is mortal existence. We should care less about mortal existence, because the next life will be a life of plenty—and of stability.
That, anyway, is one way of putting the Christian story, and an especially conservative one. Or look at Pure Land Buddhism. It’s become a standard observation that Pure Land has a lot in common with Christianity, and that’s not wrong at all, their real differences notwithstanding. Both have
a long-dead, euhemerized founder
a prophecy that he (or someone functionally identical) will return
a claim that down here on earth, our moral/spiritual life has been tainted
a Heaven/Pure Land that stands in contrast
a promise we’ll see the lord face to face when we go there
a need to be reborn in a better place
a set of devotions to get you there
Christians want to use these similarities to promote Christianity; Pure Land Buddhists would use them to promote Pure Land Buddhism. Someone trained only in the verbal humanities—what Aldous Huxley called “learned foolery about who influenced whom to say what when”—might think that centuries ago there’d been some cribbing going on. I don’t agree. I think the domus mindset worked about as well in the east as in the west. Its tropes are woven in and out of religion all around the world in parallel, not in series. The lord-savior who takes us from a bad realm to a good one also shows up in New Ageism, by way of Christianity to be sure, but in any case, let’s not stray far from the lords of the land, who may save at least some of us from our bondage, if we’re good.
Why? Why this same tired old story, over and over again? Because we’re also bad at modeling spiritual freedom, and when we’re bad at modeling things, we reach for old models, full of people and narratives. When needed, we break them up and rearrange the pieces. As above, so below.
Yes, it's certainly possible to use the Christian story toward actually liberatory ends; just read Tolstoy. (On the other hand, do consider how lonely he was.) The traditional setup, that of working on a manor, of working for a lord, can be turned into a colorable story of freedom. That’s a possible reading, but it's not the one we’ve usually chosen, and it sits badly with (for example) Romans 13: “The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.” It can be hard to talk around that one.
Here’s a variant on the tale of the domus: In a democracy, the people take the place of the lord. Vox populi, vox dei. No, that doesn’t mean that the lord is dead. The lord is alive and well. He’s us—all of us, forever—so now he’s an unkillable legal fiction. It’s understandable why someone would want an immortal lord—the domus mindset demands stasis—but a lord is a lord, in any system at all, even a democracy. As Robert Nozick aptly demonstrated in his “Tale of the Slave” from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, democracy isn’t clearly or necessarily an antidote to tyranny.
That leads to a kind of conservatism, to be found within democratic and property owning societies, that’s easily compatible with Christianity, but also potentially with other worldviews: Those of us who hold wealth, especially real estate, are the real lords of our age. We’ve earned it, we property owners, and so we each rightly enjoy our own (tiny, suburban) manors. Yes, we’ve compromised a lot on the extent of our domus, and yes, we vote on all kinds of things. But we still think ourselves fit to assert a lordly dominion over the morals and habits of our neighbors; that's just what a lord should do. In the collective psyche, the domain of the lord has never retreated an inch. When democracy turns tyrannical, it’s commonly making us act more like regularized, idealized peasants.
This democratization of lordship came hand in hand with a crucial shift in what government purportedly does: It went from exercising the power of life and death, as in ancient times; to managing the extraction of resources, as in the early modern era; to the scientific regulation of the body and the mind—as Foucault noted—which was aimed at managing populations. To which patterns should the docile subject be fit? To those of remaining in place, paying taxes, supporting the lords…. And we’ll call the whole setup freedom.
We moderns still slouch back to the institutional forms of lord, serf, and manor, not just in our stories and habits of thought, but in our social practice. In American history, the Old South added several especially cruel refinements to the domus mindset, but at heart the plantation was an old system indeed, and the masters were not wrong to liken themselves to the patricians of ancient Rome, which they loved to do. From the age of European exploration to the nineteenth century, the European powers reenacted history’s original evil on a strangely magnified scale as they raced to colonize Africa and other parts of the globe. The project was larger than it had ever been, but the goal was the same: they sought to conquer the populations whose pacification would make them lords.
Americans like to say that we rehabilitate our prisoners through forced labor; the very constitutional amendment that forbids slavery for most people also prescribes slavery, specifically for them. That’s a perverse state of affairs for a purportedly free people to tolerate, and one that likens the prison to yet another domus: Stay put, and work for a pittance under compulsion, so that you may experience what freedom is, and how to properly use it. That, anyway, is the story that we appear to tell ourselves about these places, and for the most part it appears to satisfy us.
I won’t get into details here—maybe in the future—but I don’t think it’s right to say that capitalism depends on this form of forced labor. Many capitalist countries do much better than the United States at minimizing crime while confining many fewer people per capita, and the conditions are better, too. American prisons are outliers when compared to almost any other jurisdiction in the world. They’re demographically vast, but they’re economically inefficient. Forced labor usually is. Our capitalism doesn’t depend on revenue from prisons, and it could likely do better without it, both economically and from a public relations standpoint, to say nothing of the moral issues. But is it so wrong to say that governance, at least as we’ve known it, usually does rest on forced labor?
Compelling others to labor would appear to be what governance does, if not as a matter of definition, then certainly as an observed regularity: Even those governance systems that sought to do away with the compulsion supposedly endemic to capitalism have turned, promptly and ironically, to compelling prisoners to work. There is no clearer example of Marx’s alienated labor than the gulag; within it, labor and its product are alienated from the laborer, but also from the accumulator, and from any notion of social good at all. Gulag labor served mainly to demonstrate that the police force was fulfilling its quota.
Throughout the transformations of the modern world, the domus mindset has introduced contradictions and paradoxes. The domus began by forcibly agglomerating people who didn’t want to be there. But when it’s a question of a modern city—one whose residents aren’t held there in fetters—the domus mindset balks. Especially to be feared are the big cities, with their mobility, anonymity, and luxury. Although aggregating many people in a single smallish place might be a way of controlling them, cities nowadays have purposes well beyond re-inscribing the domus, and they are condemned accordingly. Received wisdom has generally damned sophisticated city life, even as the cities grew and grew. The modern world-culture has become the first in all of history to be overwhelmingly urban—a development I applaud—yet we still talk about large cities as places of moral danger and decadence. Why? Because people are relatively untethered there from social obligation, and that brings fearsome possibilities. Cities are the destinations of runaways, and to the domus mindset, running away is one of the worst things a serf can possibly do.
That may be why governments maintain and keep tabs on our official places of residence, and why they make it difficult to move. The runaway might not pay taxes, and paying taxes is the mark of a civilized person. So we closely monitor any relocations, and our institutions—and our neighbors—look askance at them. I recently moved from the east coast to Hawaii, and I can tell you that the two most common questions I’ve gotten have been some shocked variant on “Why???”—and a demand, usually but not always from a government official, that I prove my honest intentions.
As far as I can tell, the narrative of running away and then thriving is the only narrative set on the domus that even potentially points at genuine freedom. By all means, overthrow the domus if you can, but doing so will probably start with an escape. Neil Roberts’s Freedom as Marronage is incisive for just this reason; it contrasts the early modern resistance to slavery with the comparatively empty liberatory rhetoric of the same era in a challenge to all societies that subsist half-slave and half-free. Lincoln notwithstanding, there remain way too many of them.
Those of us who have never been enslaved may never fully appreciate it, but marronage can still be a template for lesser modes of escape, from other and more mitigated forms of oppression. A liberal society should regard itself as having escaped a state of domination, founded on extractive agriculture, that has persisted with varying intensity throughout most of human history, and it should never seek to obscure that fact. Rather than disavowing slavery—saying, for example, that, while real, it was incidental, a barbarous survival, an aberration, unworthy of political thought or attention—a society with this founding narrative should instead see historically enslaved people, and particularly escapees, as its progenitors: We are because you were.
Let’s take a good look, again, at the condition of slavery’s descendants today, and whether we’ve done right by them. And we might also ask ourselves: shouldn’t we serve as a refuge from tyranny right now? What better purpose could a society have when it claims to be founded on freedom? (Yes, yes, my right-libertarian friends: Societies don’t really have purposes. That’s never stopped anyone else from supposing their existence, and usually to much worse ends. If we must have delusions of collective identity, then let’s set up this one and hope that it wards off the others.)
Modern ideas about freedom should begin by holding the practice of modern slavery as both informative and cautionary. Slavery is ancient, to be sure, but a highly commercialized slavery entangled with a thriving, bourgeois, commercial culture that was for centuries not even all that troubled by its admixture—that’s a monstrous hybrid that could only exist in modernity. What brought us to it? The temptations of the domus mindset.
Embarrassingly for its detractors, and possibly for its friends, capitalism gave us all so much excess wealth that it ends up being put to old purposes: If it’s not for the sake of ruling over someone else’s work, comportment, or psyche, what else could it possibly be for? Quite a few of us seem to have exhausted the material demands that our technology can supply. We’re waaay up on Maslow’s pyramid now. Being busybodies. One of the great challenges of humanity in the capitalist era is in figuring out just what the hell to do with our surplus of capacities, and in turning those surplus capacities toward some other end than fitting our neighbor to a domus. A system whose values, it would seem, we keep finding ourselves maintaining for no good reason.
Eight billion people can’t survive on hunting and gathering. Eight billion can’t even survive on low-tech subsistence agriculture. But eight billion most certainly can survive, and accumulate wealth, with industrial agriculture, underwritten by relatively sound knowledge of organic chemistry, with specialization and trade—and taken together, that whole apparatus means that we need not all work down on the farm. It’s okay to live in cities now. Whereas the domus mindset would make the city a place of corruption and wasted living—and perhaps see it as just a pile of extracted wealth—today’s cities can be, and usually are, productive rather than extractive. Individuals in cities can cooperate with one another freely, choosing other trading partners when better terms arise. They can do likewise with people in the hinterlands, and with other cities, always in the pursuit of mutual advantage.
That’s a feature of commercial society that the domus mindset has never fully reckoned with, and that it can’t easily model. The relatively free and productive interdependence of the modern city doesn’t seem able to assimilate to itself to any aspect of the domus mindset through deformation or metaphor. Modernity’s altered political economy thus calls for a new moral landscape as well. Our stories have been slow to catch up, and our mindset is still more informed by our stories than by any other intervention. We should resolve to better them.
Steven Pinker may be right that these societies had very high levels of interpersonal violence relative to any now in existence, but whatever their other faults, they don’t seem to have practiced slavery.
