Let me start by discussing war, a situation in which leaders of states often try to impose their will by wreaking havoc and unleashing forces of disorder, all the while thinking they can keep matters under control. Anthropologists, working with archaeologists and other pre-historians, now have strong evidence that the average level of violent killing (typically, over a generation or so) is lower when states are in power, even during the 20th century with its huge wars, than it is in small-group, pre-civilizational human societies. Tribes and still smaller groups kill members of other human groups, sometimes members of their own group, at surprisingly high rates, though small numbers obscured this from careless observers, such as Margaret Mead, who lived with tribal peoples for short periods of time. The standard reference on this topic, which I haven’t yet read, is: War Before Civilization by Lawrence H Keeley. (I have read books which summarized Keeley’s findings and relied upon them.)
As a speculation, I’ll claim that the violent attitudes of the historical books of the Bible show us tribal jingoism evolving into a sort of early state jingoism, far from ideal but a major way down the path toward a greater order, one more clearly moral in a global sense and one which, even in the near-term, allows ordinary human beings to make a living and maybe even seek prosperity for themselves and their children. By `global’, I refer to the development of a sense of moral order which extends to human groups other than our own; this isn’t a once and for all leap to a Christ-like sense of responsibility for all human beings—such is nice as a prophetic statement but any effort to practice such a global morality under current circumstances, and maybe any circumstances which could ever be in this mortal realm, is merely a deluded form of messianism.
Consistent with the above discussion, some commentators, including some I read regularly on the Internet, maintain that the most basic concepts of just-war theory, including that of criminal war, make only limited sense in the real world, and are unenforceable—perhaps just because of the practical difficulties in setting up strong moral constraints on the behavior of states and other holders of great power. There are other arguments, including those involving knowledge in complex, evolving situations. I won’t even try to complete a catalog of practical arguments.
A good book for putting things in perspective is one about Catholic and Protestant just-war theory written by a Mennonite theologian who was an advocate of radical nonviolence and definitely didn’t believe in just-war theory: When War is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-war Thinking by John Howard Yoder. He came to the conclusion that just-war theory is intellectually coherent but he thought inconsistent with the example set by Jesus Christ and, in practical terms, isn’t possible given the politics of the modern world.
Before going on, I’ll note that none of this implies that pre-civilization tribal peoples are nasty, confederated tribal peoples a little less so, vassal-based kingdoms less than that, and so on up to the liberal, kind of meritocratic, certainly bureaucratic, welfare-warfare states of the modern West. We modern peoples are raised so that we are gentler than our tribal ancestors but that can also mean our virtues are softer. By confederated tribal peoples, I refer to such large and partially organized masses such as the larger groups of Celts or Germans as they entered central or western Europe in historical times—the Franks are one good example for which solid facts are known. This part of the process is important for a deeper understanding. The German peoples were not somehow born as members of well-defined tribes, let along as members of a greater nation of Germany. The great tribes, Franks and various `-goths’ and Vandals and others, were coalitions which gathered around successful small tribes. This is a process which worked well when it was gradual and slow and not so well when various ambitious men tried to force the process to keep moving toward ever larger `nations’.
What Keeley and other anthropologists or pre-historians see and some others don’t is the evolutionary and developmental nature of the human social world. More exactly, they see that sort of progress and regress as being of a more substantial, and less formal, sort than have mainstream modern thinkers from at least the time of Thomas Hobbes. This mistake largely resulted from a mistaken view that all `true’ human beings were pretty much the same but for God granting better opportunities to some, and—at the same time—giving them the duty to convert, say, Southern Asians into Englishmen. This sort of attitude, is a failure to see the depths of human being and the consequent depth of environmental (including cultural) shaping. It might well be due to the misunderstanding of the book of Genesis as a transparent revelation, thus a book susceptible to literalistic readings. The founders of modern liberalism shared a basic understanding of the origin and nature of man with Biblical fundamentalists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Man is a special creation. Our parents were fully modern human beings at the time of that creation and we are the same, members of a never-changing race.
Man was always man. Nigerian man is no different from Norwegian. Adam, in his Nigerian and Norwegian nature, was little different from Hobbes and Rousseau and the mathematically-inclined Philosophes. When we seem different, it is because our flawed wills or perhaps our environments keep us from being Adam. It is a fixable problem when a tribesman from Australia or Kenya or Siberia fails to be pretty much the same as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or at least his man-servant. Thus it was that modern liberalism is founded upon the Biblical literalism which is so viciously attacked by most modern liberals.
Modern liberals most certainly underestimate the sheer bulk of the heritage of both good and bad thoughts they have from their ancestors, the efforts and sacrifices of those ancestors in building the modern West, and the similar efforts and sacrifices necessary for any primitive people to adopt some sort of civilized life.
As a result of this shallow understanding of human being, many modern humans hold, if only implicitly, a view that some call the magic-dirt theory. Select an arbitrary group of human beings, a dozen from a tribe in Africa and a dozen from a primitive farming village in the interior of China and a dozen Brahmins from Myanmar and a few dozen from other random spots. Put them in Danbury, Connecticut and pretty soon they’ll all be good Yankees feasting on New England pot roasts, rooting for the Red Sox, and arguing about the relative merits of the political wisdom of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
This is a very particular universe in a Creation still more particular. The particularity becomes downright peculiar when we take a look at complex, concrete entities in this universe. Human beings are most certainly complex, concrete, and peculiar. The ways human beings have traveled were most certainly complex, concrete, and peculiar. And “ways”, plural, is the right term. About 50,000 years ago, there were only a few tens of thousands modern human beings, with perhaps some scattered outlier groups but most seemingly resident in northeastern Africa. They split into two groups, some staying in Africa or even turning to move back into tropical jungles or savannas or forestlands or mountainous regions or even deserts. Others left Africa.
One subgroup of those who left Africa are called the Ancient Northern Eurasians (ANEs) by anthropologists. Those ancestors of ANEs stopped for a short break in the Near East where they mated with Neanderthals—or perhaps some of their females were raped by our all-too human cousins who were quite robust and all too inclined to kill mammoths and wild cattle at short-range with thrusting spears. Tough guys, though there is no reason to believe they were inherently more brutal than we are.
In any case, our ancestors continued into Eurasian regions, bearing problems and advantages gained from their Neanderthal genes—both included changes to our already inadequate immune systems. Those human beings earned their designation as ANEs by moving north into the great steppes of Asia, perhaps moving south again as glaciers advanced, moving north and south until the glaciers left for then and now but likely not for ever. Some moved east, apparently picking up women from the proto-Han, and moved across the Bering Strait land-bridge to become the major of perhaps 3 groups of founders of the American Indians. Other ANEs moved into northeast Asia to become Siberians or Mongols. Some moved west to the regions north and mostly west of the Black Sea, herding animals including horses, domesticating a single stallion (DNA evidence says one stallion was ancestor of all domesticated horses), developing metal technology and wheeled vehicles, developing a patronage-based chieftain system, and moving into more western parts of Europe over a couple thousand years or more to become Celts, Gaels (apparently a separate variety of `Celt’), Italic-speaking peoples including Romans (close cousins of the Celts they came to hate and fear), Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs, and perhaps others. These were the western branch of the Indo-European peoples and that Western branch used their chieftain-centered political system to great advantage in conquering vast regions—as their cousins, the Aryans or Sanskrit people, did in conquering major parts of modern-day India.
This ends a near comic-book summarization of the early history of some Indo-European peoples. Their history was, as the saying goes, particular and peculiar and became more so as the western movement led to mating and other less attractive forms of interaction with the `aboriginal’ peoples of Europe, usually called hunter-gatherers with some geographical descriptor of east or west. Even the mating was often in the form of rape, or at least incorporation into the harem of a warrior, after the aboriginal men had been killed. Nasty, and the same probably was true of those ancestors of many American Indians when those ANEs made off with women from the ancestral population of Han Chinese.
The kinder, gentler social systems of the modern West—which systems are decaying rapidly—are the result of specific streams of events which involved peculiar peoples responding to particular opportunities and problems in their specific, peculiar, particular environments. Some of the Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman, and mixed-British kings were more brutal than Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Some were as sadistic, perhaps as paranoid, as Stalin. Yet, they played major roles in the narrative that led to the British Parliament and the American Constitution. And their role was often positive if only in their suppression of other brutal, raping, looting warlords. There is some goodness, however limited, in the basic order established by a brutal warlord. Despite the bloody wars waged by the Romans, it’s likely that they left the world with more healthy and reasonably prosperous human beings by way of the suppression of non-state forms of violence.
After some unknowable point in time, the order of what would become the Anglo-American regions of the West had clearly changed (if only temporarily) into a recognizably moral order. We in the West are falling into disorder, even as we support strange forms of alleged human rights which involve behaviors which become prominent in periods of decadence. We in the West then condemn those, such as the Russians and Chinese, who are rising into greater forms of order not so different from the past which led to the liberties and wealth of our past few centuries; we condemn those peoples because they don’t celebrate forms of disordered behavior.
It’s strange that we might be entering a period when it will be possible to deal with issues of the order proper to a particular complex entity—mathematicians and scientists have developed powerful tools of thought which have risen to levels of abstraction which can be labeled as `qualitative’. My obsession: to lay at least a part of a foundation for ways of discussing human being or even the entirety of Creation so as to properly respect qualitative aspects and parts as well as quantitative aspects and parts, that is—to properly respect both abstract and concrete forms of being.
See my book. Human Rights: An Evolutionary and Christian Perspective, for a different and more detailed discussion of this issue.