Stephen Balch is a distinguished scholar and teacher. He has taught at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and at Texas Tech University, where he was the director of the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. He was also the founding president of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of numerous essays on history, politics, and social science. After a long and distinguished career, he has published his first book, which collects and organizes his thoughts and insights into human progress.
The book’s subtitle is A Biocultural Theory of Human Progress. It might better be called An Analysis of Human History, as that more accurately describes the book’s construction. I could find no overarching theory in the volume. This is not a negative comment, as Balch’s book is an exceptional collection of scholarship that presents an insightful depiction of how humans went from hunter-gatherers to space explorers.
It could also be titled Why Socialism is Impossible, though the word ‘socialism’ appears only twice in the text and once in a note. However, his presentation of how humans behave and how they respond to various forms of government and circumstances, as well as his dissection of the many utopian schemes that dot human history, makes it clear that it is an unworkable system and also explains why it resurfaces every few generations.
The book packs so much scholarship and erudition into its 358 pages, much of which is copious notes, that I will only hit on a few of its concepts that seem to me to be the most important. A large part of the volume is devoted to examining metaevolution. Balch defines it as those changes in life’s information technologies, energy accessing systems, and mechanical arrangements that have had major impacts on the power of evolutionary learning systems. He also applies it to similar types of human cultural innovations.
He also uses Urania and Gaia to illustrate two types of human ecology. Uranian ecology defines the individual roles played by humans in the operation of social, political, and economic institutions. The Gaian system is rooted in biology, starting with the development of the eukaryotic cell.
Balch distinguishes among the various characteristics of Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Greek, Roman, and, most importantly, Western civilizations. His eventual aim is to explain why both the industrial and scientific revolutions occurred in the West. Many of the most important tools needed to accomplish both revolutions were developed outside of the West, but which for a variety of reasons were not made effective use by these cultures. Balch’s descriptions of these tools and their discarding by all but the West are one of the book’s strengths.
His discussion of the development of governments from those headed by a local strong man to emperors, and to constitutional representative governments is full of analytical prowess. So, is the description of how wealth was first accumulated by predation, then to corporate prowess characterized by exchange rather than confiscation. He sees capitalism as no more greedy than any other human system – greed is pervasive under all circumstances. Capitalism makes giving the prerequisite for receiving. He realizes how difficult it is for many people to appreciate the unique worth of capitalism.
His chapter on ‘Cultural Evolution and the Common Good’ will hit home given the propensity of ‘free’ societies to descend into bureaucratic swamps. After America had defeated both Nazi and Soviet tyrannies and restored constitutional government to Europe, the European Union’s supernational bureaucracies began curtailing it. Balch has a lot more to say about the fragility of constitutional government among Americans who have never had to deal with its overthrow and who have romanticized the benefits of discarding it. He has a lot more to say about the precariousness of constitutional government.
There are similarly enlightening chapters about many of the dominant characteristics of modern life and how they came to be. Occasionally, he gets a little too deep in the details. The chapter on Monogamy and Constitutionalism gets enmeshed in the net of European dynastic history. It could have been shortened or eliminated.
Chapter 18 on phenocracy is one of the best in the book. Phenocracy, the word seems to have been coined by Balch, is the triumph of human desires over genetic fitness. Sex for sex’s sake, which when combined with modern birth control and successful treatment of diseases of uncontrolled sex, seems likely to result in the disappearance of many countries due to low birth rates. Obesity to the point of early death is the result of nearly limitless food in the developed world. This abundance gives the lie to those who would overthrow constitutional government because people are going hungry. No one in the USA goes hungry unless he does so intentionally.
Phenocracy is essentially utopianism. It says whatever we want, we should have. It appears to be the end stage of human progress. Can we escape from it? Or are we doomed to become the pets or animals in a zoo cared for by an artificial intelligence that has no other use for us? Religion was invoked in our founding document (remember ‘our creator’) as legitimizing the pursuit of happiness might save us. Though we seem to be able to be phenocratic with or without it.
The section on takers and makers is self-explanatory. If you don’t make stuff, there’s nothing for the taker to grab. You know who the takers are.
Balch thinks that the scientific revolution was due to Aristotle. The Greek philosopher’s authority was binding only in the West. And most of what he postulated was falsifiable. Hence, when the means of testing his hypotheses became available, it was in the West that his theories were disproved. Balch thinks that the rest of the world was not governed by Aristotelian thinking and thus felt no need or lacked the means to disprove the work.
There’s much more material about the evolution of human culture in this book. Almost all of it is interesting and well thought out. Who is it for? Anyone interested in how we got to where we are in the blink of an evolutionary eye. There’s a lot of information and analysis in the book that demands a lot of attention from the reader who wants to get out all that’s in it.
A few cavils. The index is weak and has numerous omissions and errors. Some terms are used before they are defined, like EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptiveness), WSM (world-safe-for-making), and phenocracy. They are used often and are likely to be unfamiliar terms, so the reader will likely spend a lot of time looking up their definitions multiple times. These, however, small fish are in a deep sea full of much larger piscine ideas – highly recommended.
