This wasn’t so for the Tiv. The power of Tiv society emanated from their norms directed against any type of political hierarchy. Such norms are a powerful way of preserving the stateless status quo because they help solve the collective action problem and induce people to organize in order to cut down to size individuals attempting to become dominant and excessively powerful. They are not, however, that good for organizing collective action for other purposes, such as shackling a Leviathan once it gets going. This is partly because the Tiv, like many other stateless societies, were organized into a series of family lineages grouped together into larger clans. Though the Athenians did have phratries, these were more fluid and less based on powerful genealogical ties, and Cleisthenes severely undercut their role in politics. In contrast, the lowest level of aggregation of Tiv society was an extended family community known as a tar, and if anyone had authority in a tar, it was male elders. This was a society organized vertically through the kinship system where people’s roles in life were closely regulated and prescribed. There was little chance for people to freely form and join any sort of association that could help them mobilize and monitor political power. In addition, beliefs that any inequality had its roots in witchcraft would start crumbling as soon as hierarchy emerged and gained respect. Kin relations would not provide a platform on which society could deliberate and participate in collective decisions.
What’s worse, in a kin-based society political hierarchy is most likely to take the form of one clan’s dominance over the others, paving the way for a type of Leviathan that would ultimately crush all opposition. A slippery slope indeed. Better to keep the Leviathan absent.
Staying Illegible
Many historical and a few surviving stateless societies look like the Tiv. Not only do they live without a state or much political hierarchy, but they diligently guard against the emergence of hierarchy using whatever tools they have available. Often these are norms and beliefs, just like witchcraft, that have evolved over many generations. But does this have any relevance to modern nations? All 195 countries that exist today have states and laws, and courts and security forces enforcing those laws. Could the Absent Leviathan of stateless societies have any relevance to them? The answer turns out to be yes. Though states do exist, they can be extremely weak, leaving large swaths of their countries in the same situation as stateless societies, governed by their norms like the Tiv, or frequently plunging into violence like the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea. More strikingly, despite their modern façade, some states may refrain from setting up basic institutions, acting like the Absent Leviathan in all but name, and for the same reason as the Tiv—because they fear the slippery slope. The modern state of Lebanon is one example.
The U.S. Constitution specifies that the representation in the House of Representatives should be proportional to the population of each state. To determine these populations, within three years of the ratification of the Constitution a census had to be held and it had to be updated every ten years. The first census was launched in 1790 and has since been repeated assiduously every decade. There are many reasons why censuses are a good idea, apart from being the basis for a fair distribution of representation in the legislature. They help the government know where its people are, where they come from, how they are living, how educated they are, and perhaps what their income or wealth is. This is important for the state to provide services and raise revenues and taxes. In the words of the political scientist James Scott, censuses help make society “legible” to the state—they provide the information to understand, regulate, tax, and if necessary coerce society. These activities seem so essential to the existence and function of a state that every state should want to make society legible. The people should also want some degree of legibility, since otherwise they won’t receive any services or be properly represented. You can by now see the flaws in this argument. What if society doesn’t trust the state? What if it is worried about legibility being misused? What if it fears the slippery slope? This is exactly what the Lebanese are concerned about.
Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire until World War I and then briefly a French colony until it became independent in 1943. Since independence Lebanon has never held a census. There was one in 1932, which became the basis for a National Pact agreed in 1943, but nothing since then. The 1932 census found that Christians made up 51 percent of the population with a slight edge over the Shia, Sunni, and Druze Muslim communities in Lebanon (which are shown in Map 3). The pact recognized this configuration by dividing power between the various groups. For example, the president always had to be a Maronite Christian, while the prime minister would be a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. The division didn’t stop there. The deputy speaker and the deputy prime minister always had to be Greek Orthodox Christians, while the chief of the general staff of the armed forces would be a Druze Muslim. Representation in parliament was frozen in a ratio of six to five in favor of Christians to Muslims; within this ratio the different communities were represented according to their population share in the 1932 census.
Map 3. The Communities of Lebanon
Predictably, this pact resulted in an incredibly weak state. Power in the country resides not in the state, but in the individual communities, just as you would expect under the Absent Leviathan. The state does not provide public services such as healthcare or electricity, but the communities do. The state does not control violence or law enforcement either. Hezbollah, a Shia Muslim group, has its own private army, as do the many armed clans in the Bekaa Valley. Each community has its own television station and football team. In Beirut, for example, Al-Ahed is a Shia team, while Al-Ansar is Sunni. The Safa Sporting Club is Druze, while Racing Beirut is Orthodox Christian and Hikmeh is Maronite Christian.
The intense power sharing in the Lebanese state allows every community to monitor what the others are doing. This gives each group a veto over anything anybody else wants, and leads to terrible gridlock in the government. The gridlock has obvious consequences, such as an inability to make decisions. This matters for public services. In July 2015 the main landfill in the country at Naameh shut down. The government didn’t have an alternative and the trash began to mount in Beirut. Rather than spring into action, the government did nothing. The trash continued to pile up. A picture of the mounting trash in Beirut is included in the photography section.
In fact, doing nothing was the government’s normal state. Parliament has not voted on a budget for almost ten years, letting the cabinet write its own. After the prime minister Najib Mikati resigned in 2013, it took politicians a year to agree on a new government. No big rush, since between the parliamentary election of June 2009 and 2014, as the landfill filled up, the 128 members of parliament met twenty-one times, about four times a year. In 2013, lawmakers met only twice and passed two laws. One of the laws was to extend their mandate for another eighteen months so they could stay in power. This strategy was used year after year and new elections were held only in May 2018. In the meantime, Lebanon was facing one of its most existential threats, as one million refugees from the civil war in neighboring Syria, equivalent to almost 20 percent of Lebanon’s population, poured into the country. Thus a parliament, elected for four years and refraining from taking any action on vital problems facing the country, ended up “sitting” for nine years. Sitting is all relative, of course. After parliamentarians managed to pass a law to plan the 2018 elections, a competition was held by a media outlet for the best tweets to commemorate the event. One of the submissions was “WELL DONE GENTLEMEN, YOU’VE COMPLETED YOUR ONE HOUR OF WORK. You can now return to your permanent vacations.” No big rush to deal with the trash.