APPLYING THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DISCUSSION TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION

We have so far addressed the violence issue, as social scientists do, by asking, what are the levels violence in stateless societies? How do they compare with the levels of violence in state societies? We now apply the fi ndings above directly to the questions at hand, addressing the weak hypothesis in 4A, the strong hypothesis in 4B, and another way of reframing the strong hypothesis with reference to the precautionary principle in 4C.

A. The Weak Violence Hypothesis

The complexity of the data reveals how simplifi ed our defi nition of the weak violence hypothesis is: violence is lower under the state than in stateless society. Consider fi ve examples of what this might mean.

First, the average of the violence rates of all state societies is lower

than the average of all stateless societies. Second, the average of all contemporary state societies is lower than the average of all state-less societies. Third, the average violence rate in the one state being justifi ed is lower than the average of all stateless societies. Fourth, the violence rates for every recognizable population within the state being justifi ed are lower than the average of all state societies. Fifth, the violence rates for every recognizable population within the state being justifi ed are lower than the lowest violence rate recorded for any stateless society.

We suspect that contractarians would initially gravitate to the sec-ond or third formulation, and in this formulation the weak violence hypothesis is likely to be true. But a fairer comparison, more consis-tent with contractarian logic, would seem to be the fi rst, fourth, or perhaps even the fi fth formulation. The fourth formulation might be true for most states, but the fi rst and fi fth formulations are much less likely to be true. In light of the evidence presented above showing a trend of increasing violence along with increasing scale from the Pleistocene to the formation of states and showing how long violence remained high after the formulation of states, the average state can-not claim lower violence than the average stateless society. The fi fth formulation is probably the most consistent with the idea of justifying the state to every rational, reasonable individual, but this is one that perhaps no states can pass, not even Japan (see above).

We have seen that current murder rates in the United States and other Western nations are very low by historical standards and that some observed hunter-gatherer societies have extremely high violent death rates. Even when all of the catastrophic wars and genocides of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries are considered and included in the calculation of violent death rates, the average person in a modern nation-state is probably considerably less likely to die a vio-lent death than the average person in a small-scale stateless society.

Although not conclusively proven, this statement is supported by the preponderance of the archaeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence reviewed above. This is an important advantage of contem-porary states on average, but to ignore that it doesn’t apply to all stateless societies or all states is to employ the fallacy of composition.

And even taken at face value, this claim can’t play the decisive role that Hobbesian claims about violence usually do in the justifi cation of the state.

B. The Strong Violence Hypothesis

It’s important to remember that the strong violence is the violence hypothesis, certainly in Hobbes and Kant and also in many contem-porary contractarian theories (see Chapters 3–7), and it’s important to remember how strong that hypothesis is. In Hobbes’s (1962 [1651]: 100) version, it has to be strong enough to give “continual fear [of] the danger of violent death.” In Wellman’s (2001: 742) version (350 years later),

“a stateless environment is a perilous environment devoid of security.”

It is so high that other benefi ts of social cooperation are impossible and the relief from that fear is enough to justify the state even to someone who is otherwise very disadvantaged. The strong version requires not only that violence in stateless societies is higher or even a lot higher, but also that it is beyond some threshold of intolerability. We can rephrase this hypothesis in terms of the state: only a sovereign government can prevent confl icts from escalating to intolerable violence.

This claim is so strong that despite the limitation of the data, the strong violence hypothesis is clearly disproven. One might be tempted to say that in most observed stateless societies violence is not only higher, but substantially higher, but even if this is true, a simple differ-ence—even a substantial difference—in homicide rates is insuffi cient to ensure stateless societies have the intolerable violence the hypothe-sis supposes. Consider the following comparison. In 2011, the murder rate in the United States (4.7/100,000) (Federal Bureau of Investiga-tion 2013) was more than fi fteen times as high as the murder rate for Japan (0.3/100,000) (UNODC 2013). That’s an enormous and inscrutably documented disparity. In relative terms, it is greater than the difference between the United States and the Ju/’hoansi. However, this disparity is certainly not enough to say that everyone in Japan, no matter how poor or underprivileged, is better off than everyone in the United States, no matter how wealthy or privileged. It is certainly not enough to say that every rational or reasonable person prefers life in any position in Japanese society to life in any position in U.S.

society. Over 300 million people live in the United States. Very few, if any, Americans would be willing to give up everything that they have in the United States to become—say—a day laborer in Japan just to escape the relative danger of America. Even a fi fteen-fold difference in homicide rates is just one factor among many. It would be an enor-mous bait-and-switch to put forward a Hobbesian argument in which

the choice is inherently between the state and a war of all-against-all, and then accept a simple difference in homicide rates as confi rmation.

Our objection is not the existence of a threshold of intolerability, but we argue that the difference in violence—even taking observed levels at face value—is nowhere near the intolerable levels needed to sustain the claim that stateless societies are beyond it.

The fi rst problem is that if most stateless societies are beyond the threshold of intolerable violence, so are many subpopulations in pros-perous states today. It would be extremely diffi cult to argue that all contemporary states and all recognizable subgroups within contem-porary states are above it and that all or most observed small-scale stateless societies are below it. Few states have low violence for every conceivable population so that they could pass this test. For example, in 2013, the murder rate for East St. Louis was around 86/100,000 (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2013). Therefore, residents of East St. Louis, citizens of one of the most affl uent state societies in human history, actually have a much greater probability of violent death than the Ju/’hoansi, the Hadza, and several other observed hunter-gatherer societies. No serious political theorists argue that every resident of East St. Louis is necessarily worse off than every resident of some lower-crime community in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area, or that all remaining people in St. Louis are irrational for not fl eeing to one of those communities.

There are also many modern states with national murder rates that exceed those known among the lesser violent non-state societies. For example, in 2012, the national murder rate for Honduras exceeded 90/100,000 (UNODC 2013). San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-largest city, has the ignominious distinction of having the world’s highest murder rate of around 169/100,000 (UNODC 2013), a rate higher than six of the fourteen stateless societies in Table 9.1 above.

Raw murder rates for whole nations like Honduras, or even for spe-cifi c cities like East St. Louis and San Pedro Sula, obscure particularly violent contexts within those areas. In other words, we suspect that the specifi c violent death rates for the residents of the worst slums of San Pedro Sula may indeed approach those of even the most violent modern hunter-gatherer societies.

According to Knauft (1987), the homicide rate among the Yanomamö was 165.9/100,000 in the period 1970–4. The overall U.S. rate in 1970 was 7.9/100,000. With a violent death rate more

than twenty times the U.S. average, Chagnon’s (1968) “fi erce people”

were held up as an example of Hobbesian state of nature. A contrac-tarian might argue that there was some threshold between the U.S.

and Yanomamö levels of violence such that whatever other problems the United States had, its greater safety justifi ed the state even to its least advantaged individuals. Knauft (1987: 464), however, included a statistic that devastates any such argument: the homicide rate among black males in Cleveland during the same approximate period (1969–

74) was 142.1/100,000, just a little less than the Yanomamö. The Yanomamö could not be sent to jail or to Vietnam (as many black males in Cleveland were during this period), and they would be much less likely to commit suicide. If the Yanomamö were over the thresh-old, black males in Cleveland were too. In fact, given the risks other than homicide, the black male might fi nd Cleveland more dangerous than the Yanomamö—to say nothing of the more peaceful Batek, the Paliyan, the Ju/’hoansi, or the Hadza.

The second problem with the strong violence hypothesis is that people in stateless societies don’t act the way one would expect people to behave in conditions of intolerable violence. Hobbes argued that people facing such violence would be unable to develop knowledge of the earth, arts, or even “society.” As Chapter 10 will show, people in stateless societies—even those with the highest rates of violence—have a deep understanding of the land they live on and rich social lives with deep cultures involving art, storytelling, music, dance, and so on.

According to Hill and Hurtado (1996: xii), even among the relatively violent Ache, “Joking and happy-go-lucky demeanor were universal.”

Either they were all irrational, or the level of violence in their society was well within tolerable limits. In the racist climate that existed in the colonial era, Hobbes, Kant, and other political theorists might have been ready to believe that whole races of people were irrational, but no reasonable researcher would today.

A similar piece of evidence comes from the behavior of ethnogra-phers. If violence rates in stateless societies were truly intolerable, eth-nography would be impossible. Ethnographers do not work in death camps or inside cities under siege. When violence reaches intolerable levels, they fl ee if they can. They would be irrational to do otherwise.

The large amount of ethnographic studies of stateless societies attests that rational people with experience of state society can and do choose to live in stateless societies.

The Agta, the Ju/’Hoansi, the Hadza, the hunter-gatherer groups of the Malay Peninsula, the Bakairi, G/wi, the Polar Inuit, and several other societies mentioned above have done what 350 years of a priori political theory says is impossible: they have kept violence within tol-erable limits without a sovereign authority to mediate disputes and enforce rules. Therefore, there is a fundamental fl aw in Hobbesian reasoning. There is no inherent need for a sovereign government to keep the peace. A sovereign is not necessary to keep the peace at all times and in all places, as Hobbes’s behavioral model was supposed to show. The strong violence hypothesis is simply false. The following section considers saving it by revising it to include a precautionary principle.

C. The Violence Hypotheses and the Precautionary Principle One might try to soften the strong hypothesis without resorting to the weak hypothesis by changing only the following claim from

“a stateless environment is a perilous environment devoid of security”

to “a stateless environment can be a perilous environment devoid of security.” One could point to the most violent stateless societies, such as the Piegan and the Hiwi (with homicide rates of 1,000/100,000), and argue that a precautionary principle prohibits risking the possibil-ity of ending up like them by accepting life in any stateless society. In other words, life is unacceptable in stateless society not because vio-lence always spirals out of control, but because without a sovereign, there is always the chance it might.

This use of these societies is diffi cult on the face of it, because as mentioned above, the stateless societies with the highest homicide rates tend to be in close proximity to states; many of their homicides occur in the context of attacks by people from the state; and they don’t act as if their environments are intolerable. But even accepting them as a horrifi c worst-case scenario among band-level stateless societies and ignoring any normative problems with this condescending application of the precautionary principle, the comparison does not hold up when weighed against the dangers of state society.

As Section 1 mentioned, state societies present dangers, such as large-scale warfare and genocide, which do not exist in small-large-scale state-less societies. A contractarian might point out that, although violent catastrophes are associated with states, they are often associated with

the formation and breakup of states. The essential idea of Hobbesian theory was the advice to avoid civil wars by obeying the sovereign.

There are two problems with this argument. First, there are many cases in which massive disobedience to the sovereign does not lead to a spike in violence. Many actual instances of civil unrest ultimately lead to posi-tive change without a concomitant descent into a war of all-against-all.

Second, many of the worst wars, genocides, and famines began not with any signifi cant disobedience on the part of subjects but with the actions of fully sovereign governments. Consider the three examples of high state death rates from Section 1. In France during the First World War, the death rate for the nation as a whole was comparable to that of the most violent observed stateless societies, the Piegan or the Hiwi, and for fi ghting-age males it must have been many times higher. The death rate for Jews during the holocaust was roughly ten times that for the Hiwi. The death rate among the Rwandan popula-tion as a whole was twenty times the Hiwi death rate, and the death rate among the Tutsi population was seventy times the Hiwi death rate (see above). Many genocides happened at a time when the sover-eign government was at war or under a perceived threat, but in these three cases, as in many cases, the sovereign was fi rmly in control over the victim population. Hobbes’s advice to obey the sovereign brought the opposite of the peace and safety he claimed it would bring.

Again these new dangers do not reverse the trend toward decreas-ing average violence, but they have created a new risk that never existed before. Most likely no individual in the Pleistocene had to live through years of sustained fear and violence, as did someone who lived in Aleppo during the Syrian Civil War. Perhaps the precaution-ary principle favors stateless society. States with their monopoly on the sanctioned use of force are themselves capable of killing at an otherwise unimaginable scale. If you want to create a climate of the continual fear of violent death, as Hobbes imagined, you might need the power of the state to do it.