Chapter V. The Society of Status and the Society of Contracts

CHAPTER V The Society of Status and the Society of Contract The sense of the past, which is a composite of memories, is not evenly continuous. Thinking back, there is a break where first-hand knowledge pieces onto the secondary stuff of hearsay, and at a third remove belief is spun from written record. The latter falls into two main divisions, concerned severally with people much like ourselves j and with people who might almost be of another species, their motives having become either undecipherable or incomprehensible. Of these alien folk, certain nations from widely separated ages and places appear to be of one type; the stiff hieratic figures of the Egyptians, of the Byzantine period, and of the Incas, bear a resemblance. The Dark Ages are puzzling, not in being obscure, since immense tracts of human history have receded from view, but because they occur between lighted intervals, as if they had passed while we were asleep. These gulfs of time cannot be measured by the square of the distance. They lie between two antithetic concepts of humanity, of the relation of the individual to the group, two methods of association. The distinction was drawn clearly by Sir Henry Maine, with the designation of the Society of Contract and the Society of Status.

The axiom of the Declaration of Independence that all men are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to life is now probably read by many Americans as a truism which never could have been denied. On the contrary, in that statement it was laid down for the first time as the political principle of a nation. It is the primary postulate of the Society of Contract.

42 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE In the Society of Contract man is born free, and comes into his inheritance with maturity. By this concept all rights belong to the individual. Society consists of individuals in voluntary association. The rights of any person are limited only by the equal rights of another person. In the Society of Status nobody has any rights. The individual is not recognized; a man is defined by his relation to the group, and is presumed to exist only by permission. The system of status is privilege and subjection. By the ultimate logic of the Society of Status, a member of the group who has not committed even a minor offense might be put to death for "the good of society." * Japan is a Society of Status} until the middle of the nineteenth century it offered a complete and unique exhibit of this social order, down to the least detail. In the Society of Status everyone is under obedience from the cradle to the grave; except, by the same logic, a ruler whose will may be supreme, and who is therefore exempt from all obligations. He can do no wrong.

The logic of status ignores physical fact. The vital functions of a living creature do not wait upon permission 5 and unless a person is already able to act of his own motion, he cannot obey a command. The Society of Status claims the power of life and death} but in fact only persons have the gift of life. The claim of the Society of Status is actually based on the group power to inflict death. Hence the extreme and characteristic expressions of two notable examples of the Society of Status were mortuary: human sacrifice as the ritual of the Aztecs; and the pyramids of Egypt, which were tombs. However, in formally organized societies, there may be a mixture of status and contract. (The reason why it was possible to imagine that the power of death should or might •With this belief, the Carthaginians threw young children into the brazen furnace of Moloch.

SOCIETY OF STATUS AND SOCIETY OF CONTRACT 43 determine the principle of association is important, and will be discussed later.) The Roman republic was remarkable for an almost even apportionment of contract and status, about half and half. Politically, it included more of the contract basis than any previous or contemporary state 5 much more than the Greek democracies, since it limited the scope of the political power. In the empire, the administration of law by a central authority, and the prerogative ceded to the emperor, tended toward status. The citizen ceased to participate actively in political thought. Men do not quite understand what they have no part in making or doing. When savages acquired rifles, they used them, but without comprehension of the mechanical principles and industrial background which the most ignorant white man at least took for granted. If the supply of rifles from the white men had stopped, the savages could not have manufactured any 5 and meantime their skill in making bows deteriorated. With the law handed down, the subject nations were unlikely to learn self-government.

As the Roman empire slowly collapsed, since there was no successor nation able to take over by solving the timespace equation, political responsibility devolved on the disjoined communities. Makeshift combinations and variations occurred. The empire split in two. The empire of the East reverted to the ancient regional habit of despotism tempered by anarchy, but still with the shadow of Roman law. Europe, the empire of the West, meantime evolved a general pattern of status with partial exceptions, but with the most civilized and humane structure possible in status, for it was built on the monogamous family under the moral aegis of Christianity. The Society of Status is geared to a lower potential of energy than the Society of Contract, and therefore tends to smaller political divisions j but the family unit has great endurance and stability when the formal political framework is shaken or decayed. It can survive repeated disasters, such as sporadic invasion, because the family tie persistently re44 THE G0D OF THE MACHINE sumes in the order of nature. In terms of energy, not as a figure of speech but literally, the family is a small dynamo completely equipped with its own appropriate circuit, generating and using energy, including maintenance. Since this book is a study of the flow of energy and the nature of government as mechanism, the relevant aspect of Christianity here is the temporal organization of the church.

The Dark Ages are almost a blank to us because any potential of energy in use has a timespace equation translatable into terms of our physical senses. With a high potential, we can "see" or "hear" through distance and time, by speedy communication and permanent notation. The low potential which is all that the Society of Status will accommodate restricts the view to a short radius; and since the Society of Status resists change, its records are apt to be scanty, with a curious effect of being undated. It uses a different chronology from that of the Society of Contract, a local chronology dating by generations or by the year of a reign, instead of from a point in sidereal time, marked by a unique event. Hence even the highest cultures of status, such as that of Egypt, give an impression of arrested time. But the church used sidereal time. Because of its historic context, the church is now regarded as having been identical with medieval society in its organization. It was not. Rather it was the non-status element in the Dark and Middle Ages, being essentially a system of contract. Perhaps it is not readily recognized as such because its form of contract was generally indissoluble; an agreement made voluntarily was binding for life. Nevertheless, it was contract, and it determined the temporal function of the church as the channel of surplus energy for the secular society of status known as feudalism.

Production under feudalism was comparable to dipping water from a well in a courtyard. Nearly everything produced was consumed on the spot and nearly everything consumed had to be produced on the spot. Yet it is difficult to keep the springs of human energy so sealed that there will SOCIETY OF STATUS AND SOCIETY OF CONTRACT 45 be no overflow, no surplus. Nothing can do that except the absolute state, a slab of stone. Energy flowed into and through the church because the church afforded the only means of emancipation from status, and therefore a release of individual talent. In secular society, the son was held to his father's calling, regardless of ability. In the church, the son of a peasant could become a scholar, a soldier in the militant orders, or even a prince of the church; he might manage an abbey if he had an executive bent, or become a diplomatic legate, or merely work at a craft he liked. The son of a noble could, if he wished, choose the contemplative life, or be a gardener or a builder, without derogation. But above all, in the church a man might move and act beyond the narrow domain on which he was born.

In secular life, a peasant walking on the public road, if out of bounds, was liable to arrest for being away from home without leave; the charge against him was going about as "a masterless man." (Arrest for "vagrancy" in modern times is a grossly unjust anachronism, a survival of feudalism; vagrancy means nothing but traveling.) Certainly in the church a man was also under obedience, besides being debarred from marriage; but he was not fixed in one place or task by his birth; he had an initial choice; and the affairs of the church were world-wide, calling for travel and allowing promotion. The form of secular society is visible in one use to which the church put surplus energy; the upward direction of the great cathedrals. But the size and magnificence of the cathedrals resulted from the lateral mechanism of the church, by which it could accumulate liquid capital for large undertakings; and its continuity in time as a corporate body, to carry them to completion. It was the only longcircuit heavy-road system for the transmission of energy. For this reason also the great wars of Christian Europe were fought under the banner of the church, in the Crusades.

As an extra-territorial organization wielding centralized authority, the church operated by precisely the same mecha4-6 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE nism as the secular empire. The attraction o£ the particles was effected by affiliating the family units in "the household of the faith." With this, the church was able to find the resistance for the necessary reciprocating action. The separatist outward pull was now exerted by the rising monarchies, in place of the former provinces. The church recreated a countercheck by withdrawing the clergy from secular jurisdiction, and allowing the laity an appeal to canon law in various cases which might arise between the secular authority and individuals, even serfs. (Holidays, for example, were declared by the church.) The church, centered in Rome, was thus able to hold Europe together by keeping the feudal lords in line, just as the empire had done, by enabling the individual (in his character of Christian or citizen) to stand against his secular government. To secure him a base, the church recognized private property as a God-given right, making it an article of faith in Christian doctrine. If a duke or king became recalcitrant, the church could excommunicate him, thus exempting his subjects from their duty to him; and if this was not enough to bring him to reason, in the last resort the church could lay an interdict on his realm.

What it amounted to was that the church could cause a negative revolt, passive disobedience to the secular authority, which had precisely the same effect in ensuring the reciprocating action of the administrative mechanism as the possibility of spontaneous rebellion of the provinces had in the imperial set-up. Now it may not be perceived on the surface that this was the same principle that had been worked out by the republic in a definite political agency. As a proposition in physics, it consists in the relation of energy to mass. The property of mass is inertia. In politics, inertia is the veto. A function or factor'can only be found where it is. No plan or edict can establish it where it is not. The limited size and direct hook-up of the mechanism of the republic made it possible for the tribunes of the people to be invested with the formal SOCIETY OF STATUS AND SOCIETY OF CONTRACT 47 veto power. When it was the only specific political instrument the plebs had, the tribunes of the people successfully maintained it against the Senate. At one time, the tribunes of the people "stopped the whole machine of government" for a number of years, refusing to approve and thus permit any act of government whatever, even the appointment of curule magistrates or the regular military muster, until their grievances were redressed. They were able to do so because the power they exercised did inhere in the body they represented.

It was there. If the people will not move the government cannot. Though laws are passed and orders given, if mass inertia is found opposed, the laws and orders will not be carried out. In the empire, it was impossible, because of the enlarged timespace conditions, to continue direct representation of the people's veto power j but it was utilized no less, as indicated. So it was in Christian Europe by the church. And the three successive phases of Rome in government spanned two thousand years, an unparalleled record of stability. It was possible because the function of mass, which is taken for granted by mechanical engineers, and usually ignored by political theorists, was understood by the Romans. They used it where it belongs for stability, by attaching to it directly that part of the mechanism proper to the factor of inertia, the device to "cut" the motor when necessary. The same function has been rightly expressed in modern government by placing with the representatives elected by the people on short tenure the power of the purse, public finances, the grant of supplies. The effective veto was thus exercised, as it should be, by negation, withholding supplies.

When unlimited supplies are voted automatically in unapportioned lump sums, it is obvious that the function of mass, the stabilizing element, is no longer included in government 5 the connection has broken somewhere. The citizens as such, the people, have no representatives at all. Their presumed delegates actually represent the spenders of supplies, as must be the case when the elections are carried by such 48 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE expenditure. Then the inherent veto power can register its weight only by informal devices, indicating imminent danger that the overcharged motor, being out of control, will tear loose from the base and be smashed. It is interesting to observe this true veto power reasserting itself spontaneously today by "polls of public opinion." This is the first warning, but gravely ominous -y for the final expression of the intrinsic massinertia veto when it is deprived of legitimate represent tation consists of men quitting their tools and throwing down their arms. The crowning folly of governments is to suppress the signal.

Because Rome mastered the problem of the function of mass, it endured through successive phases until the transmission part of the mechanism failed. In the third phase, the church enabled feudalism to survive, with gradual modifications, for centuries, not by unqualified approval, but by drawing off the surplus energy from local production, which must otherwise have burst bounds, and using it in lateral channels. The defense of the borders was continued by the church, with an expansive tendency, by missions to Chris^ tianize the barbarians. In both culture and organization, the striking feature of the Roman civilization throughout its course is that the "unity of Europe" consisted of dualism, opposition, and diversity. The Society of Status is obliged to restrict production to the energy potential it can accommodate. It does so by collectivism. Group ownership as the norm of property requires the denial of liberty to persons. Collective land tenure makes for inferior agriculture; and prevents the improvement of tools.* Medieval farming gave a miserably low • Group ownership experiments tried out by communities within a contract nation, as in the United States, have no bearing on the conditions of a genuine collective or status society. Such communities hold their land by private title, with what is called an undivided interest which is nevertheless individually divisible and open to suit for division. Further, members enter voluntarily and can leave unhindered j while the group admits only selected candidates and may SOCIETY OF STATUS AND SOCIETY OF CONTRACT 49 yield. The resultant poor standard of living ensues famine and plague, thus reducing the vigor and numbers of the population and making it amenable to control. Only the most meager economy—coarse diet, manual labor, the minimum of comfort, convenience, and pleasure—can be adjusted to a planned economy; for a planned economy cannot even be imagined except under political subjection. A complex economy necessitates the political simplicity of free contract.

The imposition of political power over production instantly begins to reduce the economy to primitive methods, and correspondingly to lower the optimum population. On the other hand, a high production society emerges from the regulated Society of Status by proclaiming liberty, which requires the abolition of political control over economic activities. As the level of energy in Europe rose again, its first product being the church edifices, sometimes several in one small town, the overflow once more sought the outlet of trade. This is usually described as the emergence of the middle class. The term is grossly inaccurate. The three estates of feudalism were the nobles, the clergy, and the people; two secular classes and another class co-extensive with them, or if it must be ranked, rather above them, which would make the nobles the middle class. What is now called the middle class was not and is not a class j it is a different form of society, a classless society, the free society, the Society of Contract. The merchants and independent craftsmen had none of the characteristics of class. They did not render feudal service, having paid a quit-claim. They supported the body politic with money in the way of taxes, and with their own militia. They established civic sovereignty so unequivocally that if a serf could escape to a town and reside expel members; whereas In an authentic collective society the members are born Into it, are not free to quit it, and must be either assigned and forced to accept a place or exterminated.

SO THE GOD OF THE MACHINE there for a year he gained freedom by virtue of standing on free soil. Every reference made by the members of this resurgent Society of Contract to their own condition stressed the fact that they were free men. And they had their own judiciary. In England the queer name of the Court of Pie Powder is a memorial of the real, physical difference between the two types of society j for it was the Court of Pied Poudre, of the Dusty Feet, which adjudicated the Law Merchant. The men of the dusty feet were the men who traveled, the traders, as distinguished from the members of a static society who were fixed in one spot. The traders necessarily formed a Society of Contract, and lived by contract law. Whenever and wherever it is made a crime to move about or to buy and sell, the type of society there has defined itself; it is a static society. But the concept of the free man, though imperfectly glimpsed, had never been quite effaced in Europe. An English magistrate, Justice Herle, in 1309 laid down this rule: "In the beginning every man in the world was free, and the law is so favorable to liberty that he who is once found free and of free estate in a court of record, shall be free forever, unless it be that some later act of his own shall make him villein." It was the voice of Roman law that spoke; and the verdict in its full implication set aside a thousand years of status.

Trade and money, which go together in the stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status. They seep below the foundations and penetrate every crevice. In Europe the infiltration, being gradual, had many fantastic and apparently contradictory effects, which can be discerned in long perspective. At first it seemed to fortify the regime of status; and the phrase may be read literally, as when Richard Coeur de Lion erected the massive bulk of Castle Gaillard with borrowed money for which he pawned his kingdom. Gaillard was designed to be impregnable according to the technique of medieval warfare; and SOCIETY OF STATUS AND SOCIETY OF CONTRACT 51 it was an anachronism from its inception, serving no purpose except to complete the bankruptcy of Richard, piled on the debt he had already incurred for his share in the Crusades. From the tenth to the fourteenth centuries the external changes in the social aspect of Europe were curiously comparable to the effect of a great flood that lifts buildings from their foundations to deposit them on distant and unpredictable sites. The Norman-style fortresses set down by reflux along the Mediterranean route, in Malta and Cyprus and as far as Palestine, were so conveyed, with the outpour of energy from Europe in the Crusades. So the rising tide was welcomed and facilitated by those in authority who had no prevision that it must undermine their order.

Trade would commend itself to a noble by bringing him luxuries or paying him rent in cash instead of in kind when a village grew to a market town. Money would buy a serf his blood. Trade could furnish ships to embark a seigneur for the Holy War 5 money was available for a lien on his domain to equip him for fighting. Money was to empower kings to subdue the nobles; and kings could not have been convinced that trade must presently enable parliaments to execute kings. The stream of energy flowed again from continent to continent. The Arab empire came into being, occupying much the same terrain as Carthage and with many other points of resemblance, especially in lacking stability and a fixed center. It recaptured Spain and thrust into Europe beyond the borders of France, to meet repulse. But the impact loosened the European status system instead of consolidating it. Nothing but money could furnish, pay, transport, and subsist a sufficient defense j nothing but trade could supply the money.

Trade went on in the midst of war. Politically, the Arab empire had no structure, and constantly tended to fall apart with success. The Roman heritage of Europe was reasserted, and under adversity it tended to cohesion. The advent of the Turks was a peculiar phenomenon; for the Turks as con52 THE GOD OF THE MACHINE querors absorbed into military use the energy of the East and hurled it against Europe. Apparently they were irresistible -y in fact, they were a declining power from the moment they blocked the great trade routes, both overland and by water, and thus cut the line of the energy which supplied their armies. They imposed a static society, of a singular kind, on the East, just as Europe was emerging from status. Asia sank into desuetude once more. And with the trade routes to the East barred, Europe at last caught up with Pytheas and looked across the Atlantic.