The Meeting That Never Happened

Sometime in the seventh century BC, an Egyptian king ran what may be the first controlled experiment in recorded history.

His name was Psammetichus, and his question sounds like a bar bet: which people on earth is the oldest? The Egyptians had always assumed the answer was Egypt. But Psammetichus wanted proof, and he reasoned his way to a test. Whatever language children speak when nobody teaches them anything must be the original language of mankind. Find that language, and you have found the first people.

So, as Herodotus tells it, the king took two newborns from ordinary families and handed them to a herdsman with strict instructions. Raise them in an isolated hut. Let goats in to nurse them. And let no one ever speak a word in their presence. Then wait, and listen.

For two years the herdsman heard nothing but babbling. Then one day he opened the door and, Herodotus says, “the children both ran up to him with outstretched arms, and distinctly said ‘Becos.’” The king made inquiries and “learnt that ‘becos’ was the Phrygian name for bread.” That settled it. The children, untaught, had spoken Phrygian. So Phrygians must be the oldest people in the world. Herodotus reports the conclusion with a straight face: “In consideration of this circumstance the Egyptians yielded their claims, and admitted the greater antiquity of the Phrygians.”

Herodotus heard this story from priests at Memphis, more than a century after the fact, and he knew rival versions were circulating. The Greeks, he sniffs, “among other foolish tales, relate that Psammetichus had the children brought up by women whose tongues he had previously cut out.” Modern historians doubt the whole episode. It may be a legend, dressed up in the costume of an experiment.

But keep your eye on the assumption underneath it, because the assumption is not a legend. It is alive and well, and you probably hold it yourself. Psammetichus believed that if you strip away everything taught, everything customary, everything merely agreed upon, you will hit bottom, and the bottom will be nature: a first language, a first people, an original way of being human that all our conventions merely cover up. Peel the artificial and find the natural underneath, the way you peel paint and find wood.

That picture of how conventions work, and where they came from, is one of the oldest and most comfortable beliefs in the world. This essay is about the strange thing that happens when you actually go looking for the bottom.

The Picture in Your Head Already

Start with a distinction the Greeks made, because it is a genuinely great distinction and you already use it every day.

Some things are the same everywhere and do not care what anyone thinks. Aristotle’s example is perfect: “fire burns both here and in Persia.” Drop a stone in Athens or in Babylon and it falls. This is nature. Other things vary from place to place and time to time. The laws of Persia are not the laws of Greece. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines this second category precisely: the conventional is “that which is originally indifferent, but when it has been laid down is not indifferent.” Before the rule existed, nothing required it to go one way rather than another. A prisoner’s ransom could have been two minas instead of one. Traffic could have kept left. The sounds “d-o-g” could have meant cat. But once the rule is laid down, it binds.

The test is variability. Whatever varies across cultures was made by people, and whatever was made by people could have been made differently. Augustine drew exactly this conclusion about customs: “If they were not devices of men, they would not be different in different nations, and could not be changed among particular nations.”

Now notice what this picture quietly implies about origins. Made things get made. A watch has a watchmaker and a day it was assembled. So if language and law and the state are human devices, then somewhere back there, behind each one, there should be a making: a moment when people who did not yet have the convention got together and set it up. That is what the word says. A convention is, literally, a convening. People came together and agreed.

And the great books seem to hand you exactly the scenes you’d expect. Plato’s dialogue Cratylus stages a debate on whether names are natural or conventional, and the conventionalist in it, Hermogenes, talks exactly like a man describing a contract. He can find, he says, no “principle of correctness in names other than convention and agreement”: any name you give a thing is its right name, and if you swap it out tomorrow, the replacement is just as correct as the original. Locke says the same about words in his Essay: sounds signify ideas “not by any natural connexion,” for then all men would share one language, “but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea.” A voluntary imposition. Someone imposed it. Someone chose.

The state gets the same treatment on a grander scale. Hobbes says men escaped the war of all against all, that condition where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” by a covenant of every man with every man. Locke says political society begins when free men consent to unite into one body. Rousseau gave the deal its famous name, the social contract. However the three of them disagree about terms, they share the form: first there were people without a state, then there was an agreement, then there was a state. It is the Psammetichus picture applied to politics. Underneath the artificial arrangement sits a natural condition, the state of nature, and a founding act connects the two.

Be honest about how deep this picture goes in your own head. When you say “words mean what we agree they mean,” when a schoolbook says government rests on the consent of the governed, when someone in an argument about marriage or money or borders says “that’s just a social construct,” meaning somebody built it and somebody could tear it down, you are running the same model: convention equals agreement, and agreement implies a meeting. There must have been a moment when they decided.

It is a clean, sane, almost obviously true belief. Now watch it break.

The Meeting That Never Happened

The demolition comes from inside the contract tradition, from Rousseau himself, and he performs it with a candor that is almost alarming.

In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau tries to do the history honestly. He walks his solitary savages forward, step by step, toward society, and runs straight into a wall. Language, he realizes, could only have been set up by agreement. And then he looks at what an agreement actually requires:

Such an institution could only be made by common consent… It is also in itself still more difficult to conceive, since such a common agreement must have had motives, and speech seems to have been highly necessary to establish the use of it.

That is a bootstrap failing in real time. To agree on the first words, the founders would need to discuss and settle what each sound will mean. Discussing and settling is done in words. The meeting that invents language cannot be called to order without the thing it is supposed to invent. Rousseau twists the knife further: “if men need speech to learn to think, they must have stood in much greater need of the art of thinking, to be able to invent that of speaking.” In the end he throws up his hands in one of the great shrugs in philosophy. He leaves, he says, “to any one who will undertake it, the discussion of the difficult problem, which was most necessary, the existence of society to the invention of language, or the invention of language to the establishment of society.”

The same trap waits at the founding of the state, and again Rousseau springs it on himself. In The Social Contract he pauses to examine the theorist Grotius, who had claimed a people may give itself to a king. Rousseau’s reply:

A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king. Then, according to Grotius, a people is a people before it gives itself. The gift is itself a civil act, and implies public deliberation… The law of majority voting is itself something established by convention, and presupposes unanimity, on one occasion at least.

Every clause is a trapdoor. A crowd of pre-political individuals cannot make a collective decision, because collective decision-making is exactly the machinery a political society exists to provide. Suppose they vote. Why should the losers be bound by the winners? Majority rule is not a law of physics; it is itself a convention, so it cannot be the instrument of the very first convention. Push behind it and you need a prior unanimous agreement to count heads at all, and an agreement is a promise, and promising is itself an institution, a practice with rules about what counts as giving your word and what happens when you break it. The contract that founds all conventions turns out to require several conventions already up and running: a shared language, a procedure for deciding, and the practice of binding yourself with words. The origin story eats itself.

So here is the claim this essay stands on, and it needs to be stated carefully, because a sloppy version of it is false. People really do convene and agree on conventions. Zamenhof published Esperanto in 1887. In 1582 Pope Gregory’s astronomers deleted ten days from October by decree, and delegates in Philadelphia in 1787 argued a constitution into existence clause by clause. Explicit founding moments happen; some conventions are exactly as convened as their name suggests. But look at what every one of those meetings ran on. The delegates in Philadelphia deliberated in English, followed parliamentary procedure, and bound themselves by an already ancient practice of ratifying and swearing. The calendar commission could reschedule Easter only because dates, months, and decrees were institutions nobody present had invented. Agreement, wherever you actually find it, is a late tool. It works only on top of a thick floor of conventions that were never agreed to by anyone. You can convene on the tenth floor, and on the hundredth. What you cannot do is convene on the ground, because convening is itself made of conventions. Agreement is never at the bottom.

Then what is? If the deepest conventions were not set up, where did they come from? The great authors did not just notice the hole. Reading them again, you find they left the answer lying in plain sight, and it is stranger than the contract story. Take the two halves of the subtopic in turn, words first, then the state.

What the Word Debate Actually Settled

The Cratylus is the West’s founding argument about where words get their meanings, and it is usually remembered as a victory for team convention. That memory is correct as far as it goes. Socrates spends page after page testing the rival theory, Cratylus’s claim that names are naturally correct, that the right name imitates the nature of its object the way a portrait imitates a face. He chases the theory through wild etymologies and down to the level of individual letters, the rolled R imitating motion, the liquid L imitating slipperiness. And then he breaks it with a single word. The Greek word for hardness, he observes, contains an L, the softest, most slippery sound in the language. By the imitation theory the word is defective, half its letters voting for the wrong meaning. Yet every Greek understands it perfectly. Cratylus, cornered, explains: “the explanation of that is custom.” Socrates closes the trap in five words: “And what is custom but convention?” If a word can mean hardness while sounding soft, then likeness never was the engine, and Socrates draws the conclusion:

custom and convention must be supposed to contribute to the indication of our thoughts; for suppose we take the instance of number, how can you ever imagine, my good friend, that you will find names resembling every individual number, unless you allow that which you term convention and agreement to have authority in determining the correctness of names?

There is no sound that resembles the number forty-seven. Only convention could attach a name to it. Eight centuries later Augustine, in On Christian Doctrine, states the mature doctrine in a sentence that still reads as modern: “men did not agree upon them as signs because they were already significant, but on the contrary they are now significant because men have agreed upon them.” Meaning does not flow from things into words. It flows from users onto words. That, near enough, is what a linguist will tell you today; Saussure made the arbitrariness of the sign the first axiom of the field.

But now run the Psammetichus test on the winning theory. Convention beat nature. Fine. Where, then, is the agreement? Augustine says signs are significant “because men have agreed upon them.” Which men? When? English has hundreds of thousands of words. Not one of them, outside recent coinages and technical terms, can be traced to anyone’s decision. No council fixed the meaning of “bread.” No assembly voted “stone” onto stones. You agreed to none of it either: you were immersed in English before you could possibly have consented to anything, and by the time you could object, the language was already the inside of your own mind. The word “agreement” is doing a job here that no actual agreement ever performed. The conventionalists won the debate and paid for the victory with an IOU: meaning rests on an agreement that, as history, never took place.

Even the arbitrariness is less clean than the slogan suggests. The anthropologist Lévi-Strauss put it exactly: “the linguistic sign is arbitrary a priori, but ceases to be arbitrary a posteriori.” Before French settled on a word for potato, nothing forced any choice; afterward, pomme de terre sits in a web of older pommes, and the choice looks half-made in advance. Each word was free until the language happened to it. No one chose, and yet, once grown, the result binds exactly as if everyone had.

A binding arrangement, agreed by no one. The state’s biography, it turns out, reads the same way.

The Contract Nobody Signed

Say this for the contract theorists: the sharpest criticism of the social contract as history comes from the contract theorists.

Locke faces the obvious objection head-on: “It is often asked as a mighty objection, where are, or ever were, there any men in such a state of Nature?” Where is a commonwealth that actually began with free men voting to associate? His first answer is that the records are missing, and his reason is a quiet catastrophe for the whole picture: “Government is everywhere antecedent to records.” Commonwealths, he admits, “are commonly ignorant of their own births and infancies.” Writing is an artifact of settled, governed life, so no founding could ever have been written down. The contract is not just undocumented; it is the kind of event that could not leave documents.

And when Locke actually reconstructs how governments arose, the contract quietly leaves the stage. His real history runs through the family. The father judged disputes among his grown children because he always had; they deferred because they always had; and so, in Locke’s own words, “the natural fathers of families, by an insensible change, became the politic monarchs of them too.” An insensible change. No moment, no meeting, no signature. Habit thickening into authority so gradually that nobody could say when the household ended and the kingdom began. Pressed on where consent fits, Locke reaches for “tacit consent”: stay in the country, use the roads, and you have as good as agreed. David Hume, a generation later, needed one image to show what that concession was worth. Telling a poor man he tacitly consents to his government because he remains in the country, Hume said, is like telling a man he freely consents to the rule of a ship’s captain because he stays aboard, when he was carried on while asleep and the alternative is the open sea. Hume’s essay “Of the Original Contract” pressed the historical point too: go look at actual governments, and you find founding after founding in conquest, usurpation, and slow accretion, and nowhere the primal committee.

To be fair to Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the best reading of all three is that they mostly knew this. Rousseau says outright that the clauses of the contract “have perhaps never been formally set forth,” and modern heirs of the tradition, Rawls above all, treat the contract frankly as a thought experiment: not “this happened” but “ask what terms free people could have agreed to, and use the answer to judge the states we actually have.” As a tool for judging, the contract is alive and useful. But notice what had to be given up. The contract survives by retreating from the nursery story everyone absorbs, the story where consent explains where states came from. On origins, the tradition’s own verdict is Locke’s insensible change: authority that was never founded, only grown into. Hegel, no friend of the contract, simply said the quiet part: “we are already citizens of the state by birth,” and “the state does not rest on contract, for contract presupposes arbitrariness.” A contract needs parties who stand outside the deal and choose it. Toward our language and our laws, there is no outside to stand in.

And here the oldest text in the file turns out to have been the most honest all along. Aristotle calls the state natural, “man is by nature a political animal,” and in the same breath praises “he who first founded the state” as “the greatest of benefactors.” Readers have treated that as a contradiction for two thousand years: which is it, natural growth or founded artifact? But Aristotle’s double answer is just an accurate description of the thing. A social impulse “is implanted in all men by nature,” and yet constitutions are contrived, differ, and can be reformed by named individuals on purpose. The state is a grown thing that can be pruned. So is a language. The founding meeting is a myth; the tenth-floor meetings are real; and underneath every reform sits something nobody made.

Which forces the next question. The distinction we started with sorted the world into nature, which is the same everywhere and just happens, and convention, which varies because people set it up. We have now lost the setting-up. What exactly is a convention that nobody convened?

Things That Grow

Go back to the definition. For Aristotle, a thing is natural when it has an internal principle of growth and change, when it develops the way an acorn becomes an oak, not the way boards become a bench. Nobody assembles an oak. Carpentry is imposed from outside; nature unfolds from within.

Now describe, in those terms, how English actually came to exist. Nobody assembled it. It developed continuously out of earlier speech, generation by generation, each child absorbing and slightly bending what it heard, no architect, no blueprint, no moment of assembly, the whole thing unfolding from the inside of a community’s life. On Aristotle’s own test, that is the biography of an organism, not of a bench. The same is true of the common law, of table manners, of money, of the “insensible change” that made Locke’s fathers into kings. Our deepest conventions fail the definition of artifact. They were not made; they grew. Mill, writing about constitutions, noted that one whole school of political thought had adopted precisely this language: governments “are not made, but grow.” His sensible correction, that grown things can still be worked on, “we cannot make the river run backwards; but we do not therefore say that watermills ‘are not made, but grow,’” concedes the ground that matters here. The mill is engineered. The river is not. And under every political mill runs a river.

The variability argument was supposed to block this move. Conventions vary, nature is constant, so conventions cannot be natural. But look at what stays constant beneath the variation. Languages differ in everything except that every human society has one, of comparable and enormous complexity, acquired by every normal child on roughly the same schedule without instruction. Customs differ; no society lacks customs. Marriage rules, property rules, greeting rules vary without limit; the presence of such rules varies not at all. Hume, no mystic about human sameness, thought it “universally acknowledged that human nature remains still the same” beneath the diversity of manners. Darwin, surveying mankind for the Descent, was struck that stone arrowheads “brought from the most distant parts of the world” are “almost identical,” which he could explain only “by the various races having similar inventive or mental powers.” The twentieth century sharpened the point into a research program: whatever you think of Chomsky’s specific claims about universal grammar, no one on any side of that fight believes English is in the genes, and nobody denies that human children bring something to the task that goats do not. The philosopher John Dewey compressed the whole resolution into two sentences that deserve to be famous: “The particular form a convention takes has nothing fixed and absolute about it. But the existence of some form of convention is not itself a convention.”

There is even a respectable modern account of the growth mechanism, of how binding arrangements arise with no agreement anywhere in the causal chain. Hume sketched it first: two men rowing a boat fall into stroke “by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other.” Each pulls in time because the other does, and because each expects the other to continue. In 1969 the philosopher David Lewis worked this into a full theory in his book Convention. A convention, Lewis showed, is a stable solution to a coordination problem: a situation where what matters is not which rule wins but that everyone lands on the same one. Which side of the road, which sounds for which meanings, which metal counts as money. Nobody needs to agree. Someone acts; others find it advantageous to match; precedent snowballs; expectation locks in; and soon deviation costs so much that the pattern binds like law. Arbitrary in form, unplanned in origin, and self-enforcing once grown. That is what a convention is, and agreement never appears in the recipe. The economists have a name for this whole class of things, spontaneous order, and the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson gave it its motto back in 1767: institutions of this kind are “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

So the tidy Greek sorting has come apart, and something better has come into focus. Nature versus convention is not a line between institutions, with fire on one side and Persia’s laws on the other. It is a line through every institution: a constant, species-wide, unchosen capacity underneath, and a variable, local, grown expression on top. Aristotle, it turns out, hedged in exactly this direction. Political justice, he says in the Ethics, is part natural and part legal, and then, startlingly: “with us there is something that is just even by nature, yet all of it is changeable.” His example is the body itself: “by nature the right hand is stronger, yet it is possible that all men should come to be ambidextrous.” Even our nature is the kind of thing training rewrites; even our training runs on natures. Montaigne, the great collector of customs, drew the moral from the other side: “Habit is a second nature, and no less powerful.” He knew from experience. When the Gregorian reform deleted ten days, Montaigne confessed that “the recent eclipsing of ten days by the Pope has so taken me aback that I cannot feel comfortable with it… I belong to the years in which we reckoned differently.” A pure convention, changed by explicit decree with full public knowledge, and a grown man’s mind could not follow it. The convention had become his nature.

One refuge remains for the original picture, and it is a strong one. Concede everything about origins. Grant that no first meeting ever happened, that languages and states grew. Still, you might say, agreement rules the present. Meaning is maintained by our ongoing consensus; we could re-convene at any time; the current speakers of English are the standing committee that keeps “bread” meaning bread. The origin was growth, but the operation is agreement. That refuge is where the twentieth century’s strangest argument was waiting.

The Rule Under the Rules

Ludwig Wittgenstein spent the last decades of his life circling a question that sounds too small to matter: what is it, exactly, to follow a rule? Take the humblest case in his Philosophical Investigations, a signpost by a road. The arrow points. You go the way it points. Why that way? Nothing in the painted shape compels a direction; a Martian might walk toward the arrow’s tail, or perpendicular, or take the sign as a warning. You could add an explanation, a rule for reading the sign. But the explanation is more signs, and the same question reopens for them. His summary is quietly devastating: “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.”

If following a rule really rested on interpreting it, and every interpretation needed interpreting, nothing would ever guide anyone. Yet people follow signposts all day without a flicker of doubt. So the ground, whatever it is, is not interpretation, and here is Wittgenstein’s answer: “a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom.” And then the sentence that lands squarely on our subject: “To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).” What grounds a rule is not a deeper rule and not a standing agreement. It is a practice: the brute, regular, trained behavior of a community that goes on this way and corrects those who don’t. That is why, he argues, “it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.” A lone mind can always bless its own performance. Only a practice, a regular use that stands outside any single mind, can make the difference between following a rule and merely feeling that you are.

Now the refuge collapses, and it collapses at the only load-bearing point. The fallback position was that agreement sustains meaning now, whatever happened at the origin. But agreeing is itself a rule-governed performance. To agree, two parties must mean the same thing by the same words, take yes to commit them, and stand ready to be corrected by the terms later, and every one of those is a practice of exactly the kind Wittgenstein describes. Agreement cannot be what holds up the customs, because agreement is one of the customs. The Greeks defined convention as what exists “by people’s thinking this or that.” The truth is closer to the reverse: shared thinking runs on convention. The floor under the meetings, all the meetings, first and latest, is not a decision and could not be one. It is trained common practice, custom, the humblest word in the philosopher’s toolbox, holding up all the grand ones.

Set this beside an older pair of ideas, the necessary and the contingent, and the full shape appears. Take any particular convention and it is contingent to the bone: originally indifferent, in Aristotle’s phrase, laid down this way here and that way there, wine measures “larger in wholesale and smaller in retail markets,” changeable by a pope’s decree or a generation’s drift. Nothing about any of it had to be. But that there is some convention is not contingent at all. Dewey’s line was exact: the existence of some form of convention “is not itself a convention.” It is, he said, “a uniform attendant of all social relationships.” No human group exists without language, custom, and rule, because the coordination they solve is the price of there being a group. This is the inversion at the bottom of the whole subject. We started with necessity and contingency neatly assigned: nature necessary, convention contingent, and nature holding everything up. It ends the other way around. The necessity at the base of human life, the thing that could not be otherwise, is administered entirely through things that could. Every particular is optional; the pattern is compulsory. What is natural about man is that conventions grow wherever he is, the way webs grow where there are spiders, except that no two of our webs are alike, and we live inside them together, and correct each other’s threads.

Becos

Now go back to the hut, the herdsman, and the two children, and ask what Psammetichus could actually have discovered.

His experiment assumed that convention is a layer and nature is a floor, that a child kept clear of all custom would sink through to original humanity and speak its language. Strip the taught, find the given. But there is no stratum of given language under the learned kind, and no first people to whom words point back. Language does not survive the removal of community, because it never was a possession of single souls; it is a web spun between them. What two isolated children would produce is not the speech of the first men. It is whatever they grow between the two of them. Even in the legend, you can see this happening if you squint. Skeptical readers have long noticed that “becos” is a decent imitation of the only voices those children ever heard: the bleating of the goats that nursed them. Sealed off from every human convention, the children did the human thing anyway. They took a sound from their world and made it carry meaning between two minds. The experiment could never find nature under convention. Run honestly, it could only demonstrate where conventions come from.

We know that is what it demonstrates, because the experiment has been run again, at scale, by accident, with the cameras on. Before the late 1970s, deaf children in Nicaragua grew up scattered, mostly without any sign language at all, each improvising a few home gestures with family. Then new schools in Managua brought hundreds of them together for the first time. The teachers’ curriculum, lip-reading and spoken Spanish, failed almost totally. The playground did not. Within a few years the children had pooled their scraps of home gesture into a shared system, and then something remarkable happened: the next waves of younger children, arriving into that rough system, did not just learn it. They regularized it, gave it grammar, verb agreement, a way of marking who did what to whom, structures no one had put in and no adult had modeled. Linguists who studied it, Judy Kegl and Ann Senghas among the first, watched a full human language, now called Nicaraguan Sign Language, come into existence in under two decades. There was no committee. There was no moment. No one proposed the grammar, and no one voted. Give human children each other, and a language grows in the space between them, with all the marks the tradition taught us to sort into opposite bins: arbitrary in every particular, inevitable as a whole, made by no one, binding on everyone.

That is the answer to the question the Egyptian king thought he was asking. He wanted to know which people came first, on the theory that language trails back to an original naming, the way the contract theorists’ state trails back to an original meeting. Both trails were always cold, because neither event ever happened. At the bottom of the words you are reading, and of the law that will fine you tomorrow and the money in your pocket and the manners you’ll use at dinner, there is no signature, no covenant, no legislator of names. There is only this: humans, put near each other, growing the agreements they never made.

Nothing was ever signed. All of it is still binding.