WHERE THE BOYS ARE:

The Politics of the Gang (Lee Harris, 03/02/2004, Tech Central Station)

Perhaps the most startling thesis of my book is the decisive historical role that I assigned to the boys' gang in the origins of civilization. Most people, if they give any thought about boys' gang, tend to think about them as a social plight affecting our impoverished inner cities -- it is the result of poverty or a lack of education, and perhaps even a pathology of modern capitalism. Too many jobless teenage dropouts, and you will soon have trouble.
 
On my reading, the boys' gang is both the first form that political power takes and the form that political power again assumes whenever there has been a complete breakdown of established authority.
 
Mao-tse Tung, the father of the Chinese Revolution, wrote in his once famous little red book that all power comes from the barrel of a gun; and most people who have read this remark have been shocked and outraged by this brutal characterization of the origin of power. Sadly enough, Mao was displaying that typical naiveté of the Marxist intellectual, locating the ultimate source of power in a piece of technology -- in this case, the gun. But, as the NRA slogan reminds us, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people," in which case the true source of power is not in the gun, but in the trigger finger of the gunman. [...]
 
The willingness to take risks, to act ruthlessly, to obey unthinkingly the general will of the gang -- all of these make the boys' gang by far the most formidable source of power in a world in which anarchy is the rule; and the reason for this is not hard to see. [...]
 
Haiti should be a sobering lesson to those who entertain the fantasy of libertarianism. If the state is the ultimate source of evil, then what is turning all these boys into butchers? It should also be an equally sobering lesson to those intellectuals who urge us to pledge our allegiance to the community of all the men and women on the planet -- does this community include the roving teenage gangs of Haiti or of Liberia? And if not, what do you do with them? Do you force them to attend seminars on political ethics presided over by Martha Nussbaum and Noam Chomsky?
 
If you wish to grasp the origin of power, do not look to find it in the social contract so beloved of liberals, or in the rational self-interest of conservatives, or in the lullaby of natural rights or moral principles. It is over there, not very far from our shores, rioting and pillaging through the streets and shanties and isolated villages.
 
That is the world out of which our civilization somehow managed to emerge; and it is the harsh baseline to which all collapsing civilizations eventually return.

Mr. Harris's book is terrific and much of it is nearly inarguable, but the section on boys' gangs--if I've understood it correctly--seems rather troublesome, and this essay suggests the reason. If the initial premise is correct, that the creation of boys' gangs is a critical first step in organizing political power and, from there, establishing a coherent civilization, then shouldn't the descent into gang warfare in Haiti have been a hopeful sign? After all, whatever it is that existed in Haiti over the last few years was not civilization in any meaningful sense, so is it not a step forward for them to return to step one?

It seems unlikely though that we could arouse much support for that position, any more than for the idea that the warlordism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, etc., is advancing civilization. Better a hunter-gatherer culture than what these benighted places have endured.

Indeed, if a world of boys' gangs is the baseline to which we default when civilization collapses, then can we also say that the boys' gang stage is a step towards civilization? Can it be both the bottom of the pit and a step up?

Mr. Harris would appear to strike closer to truth when he begins his discussion of the Spartans (from whom he derives his theory) in the book, when he says:

To begin with, the Spartans claimed that their institutions were the conscious and deliberate creation of a single man, the lawgiver named Lycurgus. Whether or not such a person actually existed matters less than the fact that he was believed to have existed, for this meant that the Spartans, unlike the bulk of the human race, believed that their community was the product of human reflection and deliberation and not the result of the eternal cycle of nature.

We might note a number of things here: (1) as Lycurgus is supposed to have lived around 885 B.C., he would have come some 500 years after another great lawgiver, Moses; (2) there is some debate as to whether Lycurgus simply promulgated the laws by himself or received them from the oracle at Delphi; and, most importantly, what we would appear to end up with in any case is a kind of classic foundation myth in which the real first step towards civilization is the establishment of an external authority to which all must yield. Sparta with its Lycurgus, to some significant degree, takes on the appearance of Israel with its Moses. The boys' gang ends up being less important to the tale than the ordering of the gang towards some end and under some set of extra-human laws.

The import of this would be that the organizing principles of the gang-become-civilization and the limitations placed upon all members of that society would no longer be merely a function of who is running the gang, who happens to be the most brutal boy of the moment, but would be eternal and universal. One wonders if it may not be impossible to overstate the importance of this step in the creation and maintenance of at least Western Civilization. Certainly, its importance is dramatically underscored when we examine our own foundation myth and the manner in which our lawgiver anchored our society in just such divine authority:

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.

This is not a rational text but a revealed one. The question for Civilization is whether Reason can ever be the basis for a healthy state or whether Revelation is required.

At any rate, considering that the Haitian Revolution was based on nothing more than who got to lead the gang, while the American Revolution was explicitly driven by Judeo-Christian ideals, their respective fates were likely determined from the outset.

MORE:
PHYSICS AND POLITICS: CHAPTER II. - THE USE OF CONFLICT. (Walter Bagehot)

Man, being the strongest of all animals, differs from the rest; he was obliged to be his own domesticator; he had to tame himself. And the way in which it happened was, that the most obedient, the tamest tribes are, at the first stage in the real struggle of life, the strongest and the conquerors. All are very wild then; the animal vigour, the savage virtue of the race has died out in none, and all have enough of it. But what makes one tribe--one incipient tribe, one bit of a tribe--to differ from another is their relative faculty of coherence. The slightest symptom of legal development, the least indication of a military bond, is then enough to turn the scale. The compact tribes win, and the compact tribes are the tamest. Civilisation begins, because the beginning of civilisation is a military advantage.

Probably if we had historic records of the ante- historic ages--if some superhuman power had set down the thoughts and actions of men ages before they could set them down for themselves--we should know that this first step in civilisation was the hardest step. But when we come to history as it is, we are more struck with the difficulty of the next step. All the absolutely incoherent men--all the 'Cyclopes'--have been cleared away long before there was an authentic account of them. And the least coherent only remain in the 'protected' parts of the world, as we may call them. Ordinary civilisation begins near the Mediterranean Sea; the best, doubtless, of the ante-historic civilisations were not far off. From this centre the conquering SWARM--for such it is-- has grown and grown; has widened its subject territories steadily, though not equably, age by age. But geography long defied it. An Atlantic Ocean, a Pacific Ocean, an Australian Ocean, an unapproachable interior Africa, an inaccessible and undesirable hill India, were beyond its range. In such remote places there was no real competition, and on them inferior, half-combined men continued to exist. But in the regions of rivalry--the regions where the better man pressed upon the worse man--such half-made associations could not last. They died out and history did not begin till after they were gone. The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion I phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2004 2:22 PM