The development of polities

With the kinds of problems now facing the international community, we may be forced to return to a conception of political life more like Aristotle's.

In ancient eras, the formation of political organizations was something of a necessity for survival. A family might be able to produce sufficient food to live, but only by working toward that as a common goal. However, since production was largely a mechanical task that took labor and land as essentially its only inputs, slaves could perform the same functions for greater profits. As families and tribes grew, it became easier for them to subjugate other families and tribes.

Military power also had increasing returns to scale, up to a point. As a community grew larger, it wasn't just able to produce more soldiers but was actually able to field a more effective army per person, due to the technology of the time. Two hoplites were more than twice as effective as an individual hoplite, because they could maneuver, attack from multiple angles, and outflank the enemy; bigger armies usually won, and so empires that could field them grew rapidly. Survival, then, depended on being allied with the right group and focused on maintaining the existence of that group (including being willing to fight for it).

After the fall of the Roman Empire, technology began to dominate on the battlefield. The improved lethality of horsemen (with the invention and adoption of the stirrup) and the development of increasingly easy-to-use distance weapons such as the crossbow meant that armies now had to field higher levels of technology per person rather than simply putting as many swords as possible in a line.

This change in the nature of warfare may have had a hand in the changing political situation. The dominant political units after the Roman Empire were no longer vast territory-holding dominions but usually lordships bound loosely together in times of great need. Peasants had little ability to choose their polity, and there were fewer major empire-empire wars, so there was comparatively little feeling of national or political unity. Survival no longer depended on whether each individual committed him- or herself to the common project.

I'd suggest that this has reversed again in modern society. Many of the problems we now face--global warming is a signal example, but more broadly the collapse of the financial system or the potential of epidemics--require massive joint efforts to attack. We may not be worried about survival because we can make plenty of food. But perhaps we should be worried about the potential effect of these other disasters, many of which are man-made.

Are we willing to throw ourselves into the common project of humanity?