The Rare Miracle of Order

We live in a world of daily miracles: Walk up to an automated teller machine almost anywhere in the world, insert a card, type four digits, and a small mechanism dispenses cash that you are entitled to draw against an account managed by a bank you have never visited, operating under a legal framework you have never read, denominated in a currency issued by a central authority you have never met. We are so used to such comforts that we simply regard them as background infrastructure that exists without ever really thinking about it. Personally, I consider every trip to the supermarket as a veritable miracle. No matter the time or season, I get fresh fruit and vegetables, and all of it for a comparably small fraction of my salary. Despite the justified worries regarding inflation, in most developed countries we have overcome the condition where 50 to 80 per cent of our income had to be spent on one or two basic foodstuffs, like bread, a condition that was, for example, the norm for the average French person in the 18th century.

But it is not just food: The same is true of the salary that arrives in the same account every month, the train ticket that an inspector validates against an electronic record, the hospital that admits a stranger on the strength of an insurance card. None of these arrangements is natural or automatic, but the consequence of a long and often tedious process of developing civilisation, and it took us long enough.

Homo sapiens has been here, in roughly modern anatomical form, for about 300,000 years. For roughly 290,000 of those, almost nothing happened. Cities, writing, organised states — what we mean when we say “civilisation” — are only about 5,500 years old, dating to Sumer in the fourth millennium BC. The ratio is the argument. If an alien had visited Earth every thousand years from the appearance of our species onward, the report would have been the same for 290 successive visits: Small tribal groups, fairly violent, walking around a lot. And then, in a geological blink, agriculture, then writing, then law, then medicine, then the cumulative achievement of which the cash machine is one small late artefact. Each of these achievements required and still requires layer upon layer of mutual trust between people who will never meet, and the cultivated assumption that they will all play by the rules whether or not anyone is watching.