From the perspective of the modern middle class, the move from power and oppression to rule and reason starts with Protestantism.  But for those with a really expansive world-view, the move from power to law did not begin with the Reformation nor yet with Christianity.  According to Karl Jaspers, it began about 500 BC during the Axial Age.  It was a period from 600 BCE to 200 BCE during which Socrates, Isaiah, Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Confucius all flourished.

These men, who lived in the most advanced societies of the time, were not doing religion and philosophy as recreation.  They were doing it because they felt deeply that their societies were in crisis.  They were trying to solve a problem, to heal a sickness that seemed to afflict the body politic.

The problem was the breakdown of traditional face-to-face society.  Some people had ceased to conceive of themselves as members of a group and had begun to experience themselves as individuals.  As Huston Smith put it: “Reason was replacing social conventions, and self-interest outpacing the expectations of the group.”  And it was causing chaos. (Smith 1991 p162)

In traditional society people had accepted the teachings of unreflective tradition.  Since their entire identity was focused on the group, it did not occur to them that they could conceive a thought that went against tradition.  But now people walked abroad who thought of themselves as individuals, and could ask the question: “what’s in it for me?” 

This birth of the ego raised an insuperable problem for the tradition-driven society. A people that unreflectingly lived by the Way of the ancestors, “doing what is right,” was helpless before the unbridled ego and its regime of power.  The old ways collapsed as great egos arose and founded great empires.  The names of the egos endured, the ways of the ancestors did not.  We still know the king lists of Mesopotamia, and the names of most of the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt.  Those who had power amassed it and used it.  Those who lacked power surrendered themselves to the protection of those who did. 

These military egos ruled by virtue of the defining characteristic of agricultural life.  Though the farmer makes a living by planting, waiting, and reaping, he actually lives day to day on the grain stored at the previous harvest.  This need for storage makes the farmer vulnerable to plunder.

The situation of agricultural England in the tenth century provides a good example.  Every year in October after the harvest had been brought home and stored away, all of England quailed, wondering if the Vikings would appear that year.  Sailing in fleets of longboats the Vikings would appear in the autumn for booty, rape, pillage, and slaving, and the English, with weak kings, were unable to resist them.  If you were a farmer and somebody stole your grain right after the harvest and a full year before you could grow another crop, you would starve.  In order to avoid this fate, the farmer needed protection, and protection he got, from the military egos, the emperors, the kings, the warlords, and the lesser landowners who ran the arable world until the industrial revolution.

Unfortunately, kings and emperors do not merely fight against raiders who threaten their farmers.  They also fight one another, and that hurts the farmers.  It is not just the raping and pillaging that hurts the farmers, but something more basic.  For armies do not just fight battles.  They need to be fed, and up until the First World War, armies fed themselves mainly by living off the countryside.  They marched through the countryside, and as they marched, they “requisitioned” food from the farmers on their line of march.  Some military leaders paid for their food with coin, some with receipts.  Some just took the food by force.  If warfare between the military leaders extended for any period, the entire countryside would be completely stripped of food, as happened in the Thirty Years War in Germany from 1618-1648 when the rural population was reduced by one third.  When the military protectors go to war, the benefits of military protection for the farmer evaporate, and the difference between protector and raider blurs into irrelevance.

It was the genius of Confucius to formulate an answer to this problem for the people who lived in the valley of the Yellow River.  Confucius was a man from Lu located in modern Shantung province near the estuary of the Yellow River.  His father died when he was very young, so he was raised by his impoverished mother.  Able to acquire an education, he worked for a while as a minor government official before finding his vocation as a tutor.

Confucius lived during the Warring States period, the “time of troubles” that lasted for centuries before the consolidation of China by Qin Shi Huang Di, founder of the Qin dynasty, in 221 BCE.  The Warring States period was, it appears, an almost continuous warfare between rival warlords and chieftains.  What had started in the eighth century BCE in relatively chivalrous conflict had degenerated by Confucius’ time into mass slaughters and executions.

As military egos crossed and recrossed the fertile river valleys of China, destroying the livelihood of millions of peasants, men like Confucius tried to understand how to solve the problem of the unbridled ego that had broken free of traditional social restraint and threatened to destroy everything.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill