Social Contract

Abstract

Civilization as a process over time that people subjected themselves to. The process of extinction of the hunter-gatherer way of life has examples in written history. Advantages used by settled groups such as superior numbers of those in cities against those of hunter-gatherers led to their conquest. The rise of the state: irrigation for crops likely the cause of the rise of government. In the economic arena, there was the rise of crafts
There was a corresponding change in religion from Shamans to priests and the end of equality and the rise of class. The beginnings of war came thereafter.
The other end of civilization: Collapse and rebuilding, invasions by non-settled peoples. Civilization collapses and settled people are invariably conquered by non-settled people.
Is there a Social contract? Was the social contract ever presented? Is it a valid contract between equal parties?
The basis of every society is the Social Contract, which is entirely fictional and no more real than Rawl's Veil of Ignorance.

    The Social Contract is a concept used in political philosophy whereby a contract  binds together the ruled and rulers. It usually states that humanity subjects itself into society via willful choice. Abuses will bring punishment, and that law will rule over all and there will be some common good. There are two proponents of this: Rousseau and Hobbes. But has this ever been an event or is it only a concept used by philosophers to justify the existence of the state superstructure overlaying the modern social body? When one  views the history of the transition form the 'natural state' into settled people, there occurs something different from any compact between the governors and the governed. The change happened slowly, in a gradualistic process more akin to geologic time than anything we associate with history. The small roving bands became chiefdoms, and these chiefdoms morphed into monarchies as the transition from horticulture to intensive agriculture took place. The process was a total transformation of what it meant to be human. By the time society came into being in cities, there was nothing like a party to a compact, but merely a subjected populace and the rulers these de facto slaves supported.
    Thus, one of the obvious problems of the social contract is the idea of when it began. An additional one where different individuals with different social standing came to cut a deal to divide their rights and whether anything like this ever occurred. The formation and dissolution of society are so historically common that to pick any of the occasions of this would necessitate a book. Instead, if one is to be honest, one  must go back to the original transition between the 'natural man' as a hunter-gather to Homo Civilis, the being that today inhabits the earth. .
    Hobbes: 'The equality of ability arises from the equality of hope. Therefore if any two people desire the same thing which they cannot have they become enemies and try to destroy each other. Hence it is manifest that during which time men live without common power ….life is nasty, brutish and short.'’
    Rousseau: 'Although in this state he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his soul so uplifted, that, had not the abuses of his new condition often downgrade him below that which he left.....'
    On the one hand, Hobbes claims the state of nature to be entirely undesirable. On the other Rousseau thinks that it has advantages but that so does the state of nature. The first idea of the social contract theory is that there exists man, 'in a state of nature'. What does this mean really? This state usually goes undefined. Beyond philosophers, what can one  find out about the state of nature? Aristotle says that man is a 'social animal'. But there are other social animals, so an examination of them will help. We clearly cannot compare ourselves to insects, despite our current numbers we are still mammals. To take an obvious example, Wolves also have a social structure. Lone wolves are wolves who live outside this social structure. Chimpanzee society resembles human society the closest: chimps have complex dominance structures and engage in conflict. So humanity, in its basic hunter-gatherer structure resembles a combination of a wolf-pack and a chimpanzee troupe. So this is the 'natural man' that the philosophers speak about without proper definition. His/her state of nature is an egalitarian extended family moving about surviving by hunting and gathering naturally occurring plants-the transition to society came later, and took many generations.
    The rise of the state is not something that can be easily tied down in a matter of fact. The rise of agriculture after many generations of horticulture and modifications of crops into  a form of wheat that could be cultivated en masse required an irrigation system which itself required administrators to oversee it. The hunter-gatherers thus would be slowly absorbed and driven off the richest land, and into the hinterlands. The rise of the Scythians in Asia would be an example and all of the nomadic groups that followed them. In the historical record, there have been many instances of non-settled people converting their way of life under a monarchy or another imposition. Norse Pagans would be an example. On another extreme are the extermination of Siberian peoples by Russian Cossacks and the settlement of North America to the detriment of its native peoples, that is, the act of genocide by settled peoples against non-settled ones.
The process of civilization was as follows: Acculturation of the values of the settled community. In the adaptation to the environment that they created, so was ascribed status, that is, a noble class which fed off of the work of others. At some point between the transitions from chiefdom to full monarchy, hereditary nobility took charge; social stratification then took hold, and deculturation of the skills and norms of the hunter-gatherers followed. They lost the ability to hunt and find food on their own, and became tied to the land even in times of drought and starvation. The birth of peasantry was the final result from the process; that is a group of people who were one harvest from starvation. Therefore, by the time the society rose, there was nothing like equal parties present to a contract. Instead, there was a king ruling over craftsman and then peasants with the point of the sword. Health and sanitation were horrible in ancient cities. Though it is not universally so, we know that the Indus Valley Civilization had clear streets and public bath facilities as well as indoor plumbing. Clearly infectious diseases followed these cramped conditions with otherwise would not have been in play. So the move to cities led to a loss of quality of diet. It is also a fact that most causes of infant mortality are diseases that found their breeding ground in ancient cities. So it is clear that the first mass of people to become dwellers did not benefit from it. It may have taken some time for them to lose the skills that allowed them to live on the land. Or it may not have taken much time at all: Families that supported themselves in the Great Depression via gardens and hunting have lost those skills only a few generations later.
    The spiritual values changed with the physical. The change in religion was one where the language of ritual and spiritual hierarchy took the place of Shamanic practices. People enjoyed ritual drugs, an example of which would be Soma in the Rig Veda. In contrast to a society which consumed beer in large quantities and whose priests held a monopoly on contact with the spiritual. The rise of the state meant the rise of crafts and with a division of labor came a class system, and these artificers had the task of making weapons for the army of the god-king. The monopoly on violence and the army itself gave them and edge in warfare. The difference in combat would have been of numbers and severity. War would have been just as brutal as hunter-gatherers, but now it was possible to raise thousands in an army where hundreds would have been the upper-limit in a tribal setting. The evidence of animism is everywhere in cave art. The transition to theism clearly came with settlement. The idea of a powerful deity, usually a paramount solar one as the king of the gods meant that the celestial/astral realms followed their earthly counterparts. The social order was divine. Thus, the change in economics meant a change in spiritual values. Language requires an explanation for dominance. Therefore, most ancient cultures merely said that the gods had written the social order in the sky.  The Bible acknowledges that writing was so powerful that literacy never spread outside of a scribe class. Therefore, the audience for the written tale would be small, though no doubt priests would pass it verbally to the common citizens. The idea that the social order was divine was, therefore, also a justification for the 'master-class' in treating its social inferiors as lower beings. Writing overtook verbal storytelling as a transmitter of culture for the elite. The people who were not literate did not have this. Literacy is one clear demarcation between humanity and its closest cousins and made the sort of varied multi-generational societies which have popped up all over the world as possible. It became possible to leave a legacy other than the biological. The written word enhanced the capacity for cultural evolution. Deification of the sun followed the transition to intensive agriculture. Celestial objects had always been venerated by now with the shift from a nomadic society to a settled one; the power of the sun to bring crops was seen as paramount. Time was always something humans had been aware. Winter would surely bring a shifting of the migratory patterns and types of game, but now knowing the very time of year in which one resided gained much importance. The very concept of a year would come from this. The proliferation of mega-scale architecture using stone monoliths as giant calendars came in this period.
    The repeated collapse of complex societies and their constant wars with nomadic tribes suggest that it is not a simple interaction. Thus, the social contract appears to have never been torn up, because with each collapse there is a rebuilding of the same type of society. Modern societies in the West are either democratic-leaning or republics. Both of these societies pay lip service to the concept of a social contract. What significance does the social contract have if it is nothing but a foundation myth for the modern west? If everyone born today was never presented with the contract, and their ancestors never were, then how would one register the displeasure towards the system? There are two schools of thought on this: to engage in political participation or to revolt.
    Democratic societies are in reality variations of representative republics, with only the Swiss Cantons practicing a true democracy. The myths of the state even extend into the realm of national founders. The national myth is a uniquely American behavior in today's world, in fact, the mythic nature of the explanation of national origins goes back to the stories of Solon and Lycurgus. They were both semi-mythical figures who founded two city-states that would bequeath the world a democratic/republican tradition which has planted itself in New Delhi, Tokyo, Seoul, Moscow, and Pretoria. Globalism has a political edge. Revolution seems to be an event where people clearly repudiate the social contract by overthrowing the political system. Revolutions are clearly a redefining of the social contract. But in reality many revolutions fall short, but why? Why did the Communist revolution in Russia, run by syndicalist 'soviets', lead to a totalitarian state? Why did the American Revolution lead to a country that was the last to ban slavery and whose presidents have power that King George could not dream about? Because shedding blood is the language of violent repression in the state and once formed, the state will only replicate itself. By accepting this language and its blood-sacrifice lexicon, you are inevitably leading to the very institution that a revolutionary society  worked to overthrow. Simply put the state was established by violence, and anyone seeking to overthrow it with the same will only perpetuate the same pattern.
    So if these 'wages of civilization' are so negative then what type of changes need to come about to address this? Firstly, a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not desirable or practicable.  Ancestors made the choice to settle in cities and had a reason for doing so. Barring a near-extinction of the human race the global population would not be capable of surviving and the damage to most of the biosphere has been severe and would not make for ideal living conditions.
    You must question all the idea that is as absurd as the proposition of 'original sin' would be to an atheist. The myth of the social contract is positive in that it at least suggests that society have a consensual basis. The same idea is dangerous in that it misconstrues legitimacy of authority as based on some social contract which happened in the past, and binds future generations to it. The common alternatives are a 'love it or leave it' approach. If one does not accept the existence of the state one should just 'move to Somalia' or some other randomly chosen undeveloped nation. This is problematic in that it suggests that the globalized world has political diversification that it does not. It also binds each generation to the mythic events of the past.
    The social contract was an 'event' that never occurred. It is a concept used for political legitimacy. The actual process of transitioning from a 'state of nature' into civilized life involved slow and painful change over time. The change encompassed spirituality, technology, daily habits, and even the very perception of time itself. It culminated in a dominance hierarchy which was self-perpetuating and whose main method of keeping control was force. In the age of globalization the system of representative democracy has become common, as well as its foundational cornerstone the social contract.