Even Pharaoh Built Temples

Pharaoh built temples.

Hold that for a second, because it is stranger than it sounds. Here is a man the Quran uses as the archetype of tyranny, who said I am your lord, most high, who enslaved a people and drowned pursuing them. And he built temples. He made offerings. He maintained an entire priesthood whose job was to mediate between him and something above him.

So did Caesar. So did the Mongol khans, who kept their shamans through conquests that killed perhaps forty million people. So did every European monarch who ever claimed divine right, which is a claim that only works if there is a divine to claim it from.

Every one of those men was a monster by the standards of the people they ruled over. And every one of them operated inside a frame where something outranked him.

We do not.

This is the thing I cannot get past about the age we are actually in, as opposed to the one we tell ourselves we are in.

The story we inherited runs Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and it is not a map of human political experience. It is a self-portrait. It was drawn in Europe, by Europeans, with Europe at the end of the line looking pleased with itself, and everyone else arranged behind it at varying distances from the light.

Draw the map honestly and you get something else: a sequence of experiments, each answering the same question, which is how you organise collective life without it becoming predation. Prophets. Tribes. City-states. Empires. Kingdoms. Nation-states. Ideologies. Each one reveals something true about us. Each one fails in a way the next one tries to correct.

And then there is the one we are in now, which is not like the others.

Since roughly 1991, authority has not sat with a person, a dynasty, a city, a nation, or even an ideology. It sits with systems, and nobody is driving them.

The derivatives market alone carries a notional value somewhere around eight times the entire world's annual output. Central banks conjure money from nothing. The IMF hands indebted countries a programme that always, without exception, requires selling public assets and cutting services, which is a polite way of moving sovereignty from people who were elected to creditors who were not.

Algorithms decide what several billion people read and want. Artificial intelligence is being built with no agreed ethical frame, no democratic oversight and nobody to answer for it. Five countries hold permanent veto power on the Security Council, an arrangement that guarantees the winners of 1945 can never be formally displaced.

Now try the test that every previous age would pass. Name the person responsible.

You cannot. That is not a failure of your research. There is no name. Decisions that reshape billions of lives are produced by something with no face, no capital city, no ruler and no accountability, and that is genuinely without precedent. Anonymous power is new.

What I want to draw out is narrower than "modernity is bad", which is a bar-stool position and not worth anyone's time.

It is this. A restraint you do not believe in still restrains you.

Pharaoh's temples did not make Pharaoh good. Obviously not. But they meant there existed a category of act that was forbidden rather than merely expensive, and a class of people whose job was to say so, and a story in which he could lose. The restraint was weak, hypocritical, routinely ignored. It was also real, in the sense that it was a thing he had to work around rather than a thing that did not exist.

Take that away and you have not removed a superstition. You have removed the only category the system had for "this is not permitted regardless of what it earns". What replaces it is compliance: an act is fine if it is legal in the jurisdiction where it happens, and jurisdictions can be selected.

Watch the vocabulary. Global finance is not immoral, it is amoral by design, which its defenders say as though it settles the matter. Move fast and break things was a slogan a technology industry printed on its walls. Try to imagine any previous civilisation adopting that as a public motto. Rome would not have. The Abbasids would not have. It would have read as a confession.

Even the language we reach for when we want to say something is wrong, human rights, development, the rules-based order, has nothing underneath it but the circular authority of the people asserting it. Ask why a human being has rights and the honest answer available inside the system is that we have agreed to say so. That is not nothing. It is also not bedrock, and it will hold exactly as long as the agreement is convenient.

Which is why the current pile-up feels total rather than cyclical, and why "we just need better policy" keeps sounding thin.

Previous ages failed in ordinary ways. They overreached. They were conquered. They rotted from luxury and lost the thing that built them. Those are failures inside a structure. Ours is the first that has no structure to fail inside.

The Quran puts the whole sequence under one heading: And these are the days, We alternate them among people. Not a poetic flourish. A claim about how history behaves. The days turn, power moves, and the mechanism is moral rather than material. Civilisations are weighed, and what they are weighed on is whether they held anything in trust or simply held it.

Every age in the list is a version of the same examination. The reason this one is different is not that it is crueller than Assyria. It is not. It is that Assyria knew it could be judged.

We have built the first civilisation in recorded history that has no answer to the question and who are you accountable to, and we treat that as an achievement rather than the thing most likely to be our undoing.

Pharaoh would not have understood it. He was a tyrant, not a fool.