This series is sketching out a new way of looking at human history, not as some binary opposition in a materialist dialectic, which to my eye is at best a cartoonish simplification of complex historical and present-day realities, but as a messy process of technological development, where the technologies in question are aimed at solving the problem of getting people to work together toward common ends without slamming into each other too often.
This week I'm finally getting to the modern world, which I contend is distinct from what came before it because the default, dominant, technology of human organization is what I'm calling the amoral hierarchy, in which hierarchical position is nominally independent of any "moral warrant" like the divine right of kings or age or other birth-right aristocratic position.
A hierarchy is a more-or-less stable system of levels in which people at one level have the ability to command, and enforce their commands upon, people at lower levels. Pre-modern hierarchies were in general moral, which means only "the right sort" were allowed certain positions, and no one else.
Amoral hierarchy mode consists of hierarchies that anyone climb, and sometimes that anyone can create and grow, with social support (laws) that allow low-cost enforcement of hierarchical structure and command.
I want to first emphasize how insanely radical the idea of an amoral hierarchy is, which I think is so generally under-appreciated that it is almost invisible to us: we just take it for granted that of course just anyone can advance up the hierarchical ladders of the world, or in some cases create a hierarchical organization and run it for their own benefit. In Canada it's possible to incorporate a society (non-profit), a political party, or a business in your pajamas for a few hundred bucks, and while racial and other forms of discrimination are still present, they are fantastically small by historical standards. Formally, anyone is supposed to be able to hold any position in any of our amoral hierarchies, from government bureaucracies to non-profits to commercial enterprises.
A few hundred years ago simply suggesting that this might be a good thing could be considered treasonous. The idea that ordinary people might even have the right to get paid was treason: the first strike in the modern sense of the term was by sailors in England in the 1700s--the word "strike" may come from the act of "striking" (lowering) sails--and these strikes were put down by violence and the ring-leaders often executed.
Why?
Because they didn't have a moral warrant for taking leadership or power.
Note also that a labour union is as much an amoral hierarchy as a corporation or a socialist bureaucracy. If I wanted to wax all Hegelian I'd say this idea of amoral hierarchies was the synthesis of the capital/labour thesis and antithesis, but I'm not an idiot so I won't.
What follows here is a very European and Anglo-focused sketch of the transition from moral to amoral hierarchies, but since the amoral hierarchy was one of Europe's major exports over the past few hundred years hopefully that won't distort things too badly.
The primary sources of the new technology of organization were municipal corporations and urban guilds, neither of which were especially interested in moral warrants for office holding compared to aristocracies.
This is a badly understudied area of history--and I'm behind on my reading relative to where I'd hoped to be when I got around to writing this, particularly Sheilagh Ogilvie's "The European Guilds"--so this is even more hand-waving than some of the other things I'm saying, but it's clear that merchant leagues, guilds, and towns, were all struggling to find ways to organize themselves that didn't depend on anyone having the divine right to do anything. Guilds were hierarchical and difficult to get into if you weren't "the right sort"--particularly with regard to family--so they still look a lot like moral hierarchies, much as early horseless carriages looked a lot like, well... carriages without horses. Technological development is like that.
People who hadn't chosen their parents as well as they might wish were motivated to find solutions to the problem of getting large groups of people to work toward common goals--like keeping the city walls patrolled--without having any whiff of a moral warrant for their place in the local hierarchy.
And it's important to note that by this time almost any group of people larger than a village was apt to have a hierarchy, just as the average person today is apt to have a computer: hierarchies had long been the default technology of human organization. They are what people tried to create wherever possible. If you look at the development of post-Conquest England you see a process of hierarchy creation, which as much as possible followed the system of moral warrants given by birth or granted by someone higher up the food chain.
It didn't always work, though, and as the English ruling class became more culturally and linguistically distinct from their French fore-bearers, they were apt to invoke Anglo-Saxon models of kingship that depended at least in part on the consent of the governed, which pushed divine right aside now and then, resulting in the odd regicide and usurpation.
So the idea of "hierarchies without moral warrants" was available to anyone who thought they could make it work, much as the idea of "bird-like craft made of wood and canvas" was available to all the early aviators who died in crashes before the Wrights took flight.
Watt Tyler--leader of the Peasant's Revolt in 1381--was someone who attempted to put the idea into practice, and John Ball's famous verse captures the idea: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?". The revolt failed, but there were others, always tinkering away. And those guilds-men and -women and towns-people were experimenting too.
The transition from moral hierarchies to amoral hierarchies took centuries, and many failed experiments. One that did not fail is an idea from the towns or boroughs: the municipal corporation.
In Medieval England the economic and political organization were primarily manorial and feudal, respectively. These systems intertwined in complex ways I'm not going to go into here, but the gist of it is that a great deal of economic production happened on the (manorial) estates of feudal lords. "The feudal system", insofar as it existed as a coherent whole, describes a hierarchy of purely moral relations, starting with the king and working its way down to the peasantry. At each level the person higher up was supposed to provide protection to the people below them, and the people below them were supposed to provide resources to the people above them. As a practical matter, concrete relations coalesced around manor houses.
Urban developments didn't fit well into this system, and when they grew economically important enough they could be granted municipal charters that allowed them to act as legally recognized entities that were outside of the system of feudal relations: they were under the direct protection of the king.
This process was not simple, and resulted in chartered "corporations" that included universities, guilds, and "boroughs", some of which--Seigneurial boroughs--held charters from the local lord were part of the manorial system, others held charters directly from the Crown.
The Reformation probably played a role in the development of amoral hierarchies as well, as in England at least it unified the two major moral hierarchies under the Crown, and secularized many formally ecclesiastical functions.
One interesting step in this development was the Parliament's New Model Army which played an important role in the English Civil Wars, and was notably structured in such a way that aristocrats could not have roles in command due to the "Self-Denying Ordinance", which prohibited members of Parliament from commanding: a member of the Commons could resign their seat and retain their military position, a member of the Lords could not. It was still an army led (largely) by "the right sort", but the notion of "rightness" had become much more expansive, and it explicitly excluded the class who were the only people allowed to lead under the system of moral warrants that the Royalists were fighting for. Charles I was a firm believer in the divine right of kings.
Later in the 1600s (French historians claim an earlier date but I'm going with the standard Anglo-Dutch account here) this idea was extended to purely commercial enterprises, and chartered groups like the "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay" were created by the Crown for the purpose of extracting as much value from the rest of the world as humanly possible.
While the fully modern corporation didn't rear its head until the New York State corporations act of 1811 the basic idea of "a corporate entity like a guild, town, or commercial enterprise" was well-established over a century earlier, and over the past 200 years has become the overwhelmingly dominant technology of organization, so much so that we often forget what a radical departure it was from what came before.
We live in a world where hereditary privilege--which was the most common form of moral warrant in the moral hierarchies of pre-modern societies--is seen as anachronistic at best and a Very Bad Thing at worst, with the latter being more common. Attacks on "nepo[tism] babies" are routine and pretty much everyone except their targets agrees with the notion that "success by right of birth" is a not the ideal we are striving for.
As I said at the start, the idea that just anyone can rise up in, or create, an amoral hierarchical organization and that can grow to an arbitrarily large size is insanely novel, and this is the essence of the Modern world. It is what sets Modernity apart from everything that came before, and has created the conditions of prosperity, equality, and calamity that we are currently experiencing.
The world in the past fifty years has been more peaceful, more equal, more healthy, and more prosperous than it has been at any time in human history.
Furthermore, there is nothing inevitable about the replacement of the amoral hierarchy by something else, any more than it was inevitable that Dunbar mode would replace whatever came before, or that Moral Hierarchy mode would replace Dunbar. So far as we know Dunbar mode was dominant for at least forty thousand years, and Moral Hierarchy mode was dominant for at least ten thousand.
Anyone who suggests Amoral Hierarchy mode is doomed after a couple of centuries is probably wrong. But: thanks to Amoral Hierarchy mode we live in a time of conscious innovation unlike anything that has gone before, so who knows? But if Amoral Hierarchy mode is quickly replaced by something else it won't be because it has collapsed under the weight of its internal contradictions: every technology has compromises and contradictions, and balances them as well as its designers can manage. Collapses and catastrophes are almost always due to bad design, not inherent instability.
Next week I'll take a look at what I see as the strengths and weaknesses of Amoral Hierarchy mode, and consider what I think are the most likely alternatives, and why the traditional alternatives fail.