How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained Their Egalitarian Ways
by Peter GrayThey would not tolerate anyone’s boasting, or putting on airs, or trying to lord it over others. Their first line of defense was ridicule.
One regular practice of the group that Lee studied was that of “insulting the meat.” Whenever a hunter brought back a fat antelope or other prized game item to be shared with the band, the hunter had to express proper humility by talking about how skinny and worthless it was. If he failed to do that (which happened rarely), others would do it for him and make fun of him in the process. When Lee asked one of the elders of the group about this practice, the response he received was the following: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
- In a standard dominance hierarchy–as can be seen in all of our ape relatives (yes, even in bonobos)–a few individuals dominate the many.
- In a system of reverse dominance, however, the many act in unison to deflate the ego of anyone who tries, even in an incipient way, to dominate them.
According to Boehm, hunter-gatherers are continuously vigilant to transgressions against the egalitarian ethos. Someone who boasts, or fails to share, or in any way seems to think that he (or she, but usually it’s a he) is better than others is put in his place through teasing, which stops once the person stops the offensive behavior. If teasing doesn’t work, the next step is shunning. The band acts as if the offending person doesn’t exist. That almost always works. Imagine what it is like to be completely ignored by the very people on whom your life depends. No human being can live for long alone.
The person either comes around, or he moves away and joins another band, where he’d better shape up or the same thing will happen again.
Inequality: Why Egalitarian Societies Died Out - Sharing & cooperation was the rule for millennia but instability of unequal societies caused them to spread - by Deborah Rogers
FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn’t always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organised ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.
Decision-making was decentralised and leadership ad hoc; there weren’t any chiefs. There were sporadic hot-blooded fights between individuals, of course, but there was no organised conflict between groups. Nor were there strong notions of private property and therefore any need for territorial defence. These social norms affected gender roles as well; women were important producers and relatively empowered, and marriages were typically monogamous.
Keeping the playing field level was a matter of survival. These small-scale, nomadic foraging groups didn’t stock up much surplus food, and given the high-risk nature of hunting – the fact that on any given day or week you may come back empty-handed – sharing and cooperation were required to ensure everyone got enough to eat. Anyone who made a bid for higher status or attempted to take more than their share would be ridiculed or ostracised for their audacity. Suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution, argues social anthropologist Christopher Boehm. It enhanced cooperation and lowered risk as small, isolated bands of humans spread into new habitats and regions across the world, and was likely crucial to our survival and success.
“Inequality did not spread because it is a better system for our survival”
How, then, did we arrive in the age of institutionalised inequality? That has been debated for centuries. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reasoned in 1754 that inequality was rooted in the introduction of private property. In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels focused on capitalism and its relation to class struggle. By the late 19th century, social Darwinists claimed that a society split along class lines reflected the natural order of things – as British philosopher Herbert Spencer put it, “the survival of the fittest”. (Even into the 1980s there were some anthropologists who held this to be true – arguing that dictators’ success was purely Darwinian, providing estimates of the large numbers of offspring sired by the rulers of various despotic societies as support.)
Birth of Hierarchy
But by the mid-20th century a new theory began to dominate. Anthropologists including Julian Steward, Leslie White and Robert Carneiro offered slightly different versions of the following story: population growth meant we needed more food, so we turned to agriculture, which led to surplus and the need for managers and specialised roles, which in turn led to corresponding social classes. Meanwhile, we began to use up natural resources and needed to venture ever further afield to seek them out. This expansion bred conflict and conquest, with the conquered becoming the underclass.
“The very wealthy extend the ruler by which we measure our success”
More recent explanations have expanded on these ideas. One line of reasoning suggests that self-aggrandising individuals who lived in lands of plenty ascended the social ranks by exploiting their surplus – first through feasts or gift-giving, and later by outright dominance. At the group level, argue anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, improved coordination and division of labour allowed more complex societies to outcompete the simpler, more equal societies. From a mechanistic perspective, others argued that once inequality took hold – as when uneven resource-distribution benefited one family more than others – it simply became ever more entrenched. The advent of agriculture and trade resulted in private property, inheritance, and larger trade networks, which perpetuated and compounded economic advantages.
It is not hard to imagine how stratification could arise, or that self-aggrandisers would succeed from time to time.
But none of these theories quite explain how those aiming to dominate would have overcome egalitarian norms of nearby communities, or why the earliest hierarchical societies would stop enforcing these norms in the first place.
Many theories about the spread of stratified society begin with the idea that inequality is somehow a beneficial cultural trait that imparts efficiencies, motivates innovation and increases the likelihood of survival. But what if the opposite were true?
In a demographic simulation that Omkar Deshpande, Marcus Feldman and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that,
rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal access to resources is inherently destabilising and greatly raises the chance of group extinction in stable environments.
This was true whether we modelled inequality as a multi-tiered class society, or as what economists call a Pareto wealth distribution (see “Inequality: The physics of our finances“) – in which, as with the 1 per cent, the rich get the lion’s share.
Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilising caused these societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow for migration to already-occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading to conquests of the more stable egalitarian societies – exactly what we see as we look back in history.
In other words,
inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural – or physical – extinction of egalitarian societies.*
Indeed, in our future research we aim to explore the very real possibility that natural selection itself operates differently under regimes of equality and inequality.
- Egalitarian societies may have fostered selection on a group level for cooperation, altruism and low fertility (which leads to a more stable population), while
- inequality might exacerbate selection on an individual level for high fertility, competition, aggression, social climbing and other selfish traits.*
So what can we learn from all this? Although dominance hierarchies may have had their origins in ancient primate social behaviour, we human primates are not stuck with an evolutionarily determined, survival-of-the-fittest social structure. We cannot assume that because inequality exists, it is somehow beneficial. Equality – or inequality – is a cultural choice.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22071-inequality-why-egalitarian-societies-died-out/
*(oddly this sounds like r/K Strategies Theory - stress vs stability)
https://immortalista.blogspot.com/2022/08/life-history-theory.html
From Chimpanzee Politics to Human Equality
In chimpanzee societies everyone knows their precise rank. There is a male hierarchy and below it a female hierarchy. The alpha male rules the male hierarchy and gets most of the mating opportunities, a common arrangement in primate societies. Probably because of chimpanzees’ unusual intelligence, the alpha male can rarely rule alone and has to share power by building coalitions with a few close allies who get cut in on the mating system.
Chimps, unlike humans, seem to have changed rather little in the last 5 million years, perhaps because they have always occupied the same forest and woodland habitat, whereas humans had to learn how to survive on the ground and in a range of different environments. Hence the joint ancestor of chimps and people was probably quite chimplike. If so, it would probably have had a chimplike social structure based on dominance by the alpha male.
Fast-forward from the joint ancestor to the first human hunter gatherers, and the social structure has changed completely;
- To judge by the living hunter gatherer societies studied by anthropologists, the social order would have been fiercely egalitarian.
- Hunter gatherers have no headmen or chiefs, and no one is willing to give or take orders.
- Men like power and will seize it if they can. But if they can't rule, their next preference is that no one rule over them.
The egalitarianism of hunter gatherers is not a passive preference but a system that is aggressively maintained because it is under constant challenge.
From time to time strong individuals emerge and try to dominate a group. But their efforts invariably provoke a coalition against them.
- Others in the group will mock them or ignore their orders.
- If they persist, they will be shunned or even evicted from the group.
- If they are too intimidating, they will be killed.
- To avoid blood feuds, the group that has decided to eliminate a domineering leader will often assign one of his own relatives to kill him.
A perennial threat to the egalitarianism of the hunter gatherer band was a skillful hunter who might try to dominate the band through his success. So
hunter gatherers impose a rule that all meat must be distributed. Bragging and stinginess are the two social errors that bring instant disapproval. The !Kung decree that an animal belongs to the owner of the arrow that brought it down, who is usually not the hunter. The owner then distributes the meat while the hunter makes light of his achievement.
Primitive farmers too will take steps to kill those who disrupt social harmony. Behavior judged as disruptive can consist of merely causing envy through success or just being hard to get along with. Among the Tsembaga, slash-and-burn farmers of central New Guinea, a man whose pigs and gardens do conspicuously better than those of his neighbors may be betrayed to the enemy so that through sorcery they will be able to kill him in the next battle.
Making too many enemies in one's own village is a bad idea if one is a Tsembaga. "Widespread antagonism toward a member of the group is likely to lead to general agreement that he is a witch," writes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport, "and when such agreement exists, betrayal to the enemy is unnecessary; a man's own clan brothers may kill him." Inquiring about the personalities of the people killed recently for witchcraft, Kappaport learned that the victims were "likely to be bad-tempered, argumentative, and assertive."
The egalitarian approach "appears to be universal for foragers who live in small bands that remain nomadic, suggesting considerable antiquity for political egalitarianism," writes the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who has studied the transition from hierarchy to a society of social equals.
A critical question in human evolution is how the hierarchy typical of ape societies was transformed into its opposite, the egalitarianism of hunter gatherers. Human brain size started to expand dramatically from the split with chimps. One consequence of this increased cognitive capacity was the invention of weapons such as wooden spears. Weapons were the great equalizers, and would have had the effect of flattening out the hierarchy of a still apelike society, Boehm suggests. Another leveler would have been the cognitive ability of the weak to form coalitions against tyrannical leaders.
But as egalitarianism slowly evolved in the human lineage, it would have exposed a critical weakness in the social structure: with the power of the alpha males eclipsed, how was order to be kept? If no one were willing to defer to anyone else, who would determine the interests of the group? Who would take the personal risk of punishing deviant and antisocial behavior?
The threat of freeloading and anarchy would have become increasingly serious as human cognitive abilities increased. Individuals would have figured out new and better ways to take advantage of the group's protection without contributing anything in return. Nothing is more corrosive to a group's cohesion than free riders. If they go unpunished, the advantage of social living quickly diminishes; others will contribute less, and the group will disintegrate or crumble under challenge from neighbors. Free riders would have gained new power with the advent of language, a perfect instrument with which to deceive, prevaricate and manipulate. Those who were not pulling their full weight had a new means of cloaking their selfishness.
Just as the emerging human societies were being undermined by the freeloaders within, they had to confront a pressing external threat, that of warfare. Like the ability to freeload, warfare became more sophisticated and deadly as cognitive capacity increased. People may not like warfare, but the point needs no belaboring that they are very proficient at it. The skill is an ancient one that reaches far back in the primate lineage, a fact that has come to light from close study of chimpanzees. Though at first thought to be peaceful, chimpanzees in fact occupy territories that are patrolled and defended by bands of males. Through raids and ambushes, they try to pick off the males of a neighboring group one by one until they are able to annex the group’s territory and females.
The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures
- Nicholas Wade
https://www.amazon.com/Faith-Instinct-Religion-Evolved-Endures/dp/0143118196
Early Men & Women Were Equal - Say Scientists
Our prehistoric forebears are often portrayed as spear-wielding savages, but the earliest human societies are likely to have been founded on enlightened egalitarian principles, according to scientists.
A study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, men and women tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting that it has been the norm for humans for most of our evolutionary history.
Mark Dyble, an anthropologist who led the study at University College London, said: “There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We’d argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.”
Dyble says the latest findings suggest that equality between the sexes may have been a survival advantage and played an important role in shaping human society and evolution. “Sexual equality is one of a important suite of changes to social organisation, including things like pair-bonding, our big, social brains, and language, that distinguishes humans,” he said. “It’s an important one that hasn’t really been highlighted before.”
The study, published in the journal Science, set out to investigate the apparent paradox that while people in hunter-gatherer societies show strong preferences for living with family members, in practice the groups they live in tend to comprise few closely related individuals.
The scientists collected genealogical data from two hunter-gatherer populations, one in the Congo and one in the Philippines, including kinship relations, movement between camps and residence patterns, through hundreds of interviews. In both cases, people tend to live in groups of around 20, moving roughly every 10 days and subsisting on hunted game, fish and gathered fruit, vegetables and honey.
The scientists constructed a computer model to simulate the process of camp assortment, based on the assumption that people would chose to populate an empty camp with their close kin: siblings, parents and children.
When only one sex had influence over the process, as is typically the case in male-dominated pastoral or horticultural societies, tight hubs of related individuals emerged. However, the average number of related individuals is predicted to be much lower when men and women have an equal influence – closely matching what was seen in the populations that were studied.
“When only men have influence over who they are living with, the core of any community is a dense network of closely related men with the spouses on the periphery,” said Dyble. “If men and women decide, you don’t get groups of four or five brothers living together.”
The authors argue that sexual equality may have proved an evolutionary advantage for early human societies, as it would have fostered wider-ranging social networks and closer cooperation between unrelated individuals. “It gives you a far more expansive social network with a wider choice of mates, so inbreeding would be less of an issue,” said Dyble. “And you come into contact with more people and you can share innovations, which is something that humans do par excellence.”
Dr Tamas David-Barrett, a behavioural scientist at the University of Oxford, agreed: “This is a very neat result,” he said. “If you’re able to track your kin further away, you’d be able to have a much broader network. All you’d need to do is get together every now and then for some kind of feast.”
The study suggests that it was only with the dawn of agriculture, when people were able to accumulate resources for the first time, that an imbalance emerged. “Men can start to have several wives and they can have more children than women,” said Dyble. “It pays more for men to start accumulating resources and becomes favourable to form alliances with male kin.”
Dyble said that egalitarianism may even have been one of the important factors that distinguished our ancestors from our primate cousins. “Chimpanzees live in quite aggressive, male-dominated societies with clear hierarchies,” he said. “As a result, they just don’t see enough adults in their lifetime for technologies to be sustained.”
The findings appear to be supported by qualitative observations of the hunter-gatherer groups in the study. In the Philippines population, women are involved in hunting and honey collecting and while there is still a division of labour, overall men and women contribute a similar number of calories to the camp. In both groups, monogamy is the norm and men are active in childcare.
Andrea Migliano, of University College London and the paper’s senior author, said: “Sex equality suggests a scenario where unique human traits, such as cooperation with unrelated individuals, could have emerged in our evolutionary past.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists
What Can Hunter-Gatherers Teach Us About Servant-Leadership?
Sharing Culture
Interestingly, the Hadzabe “sharing culture” with its leaderless structure is at odds with the power required to maintain control of their land rights in the face of increasing external pressures. With their strong cultural ethos that requires sharing for the common good, they find it difficult to find leaders among them who will lead publicly.
Perhaps, this is the conundrum of leadership, today. Progress requires power. Progress also requires sharing for the common good. How do we blend the two? Servant first, leader second may be the answer. And, the Hadzabe are a living example of that blend.
Robert Greenleaf, the father of servant-leadership, defined servant-leadership in this way, “The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The best test is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?”
The Hazdabe embody the notion that “the servant-leader is servant first.” In fact, they consider it bad for anyone to try to control others or to have more power or status than others do. Even though camps may be named after a well-known elder who is respected, this does not mean the individual has any more authority than anyone else who happens to be in that camp at any one time.
Ancient Wisdom
The hunter-gatherer is in all of us. For 90% of our human history we were almost exclusively hunter-gatherers. Living in our technology-dependent world does not mean that we have totally severed our hunter-gatherer roots—the wisdom learned from all those millennia of survival. One does not erase the souls of one’s ancestors. Even if we no longer actively use those skills for daily survival, the untapped wisdom remains within us. Could it be that we could reclaim the things we have forgotten and need to relearn today?
Hadzabe wisdom is grounded in a worldview that requires “sharing” as the essential path to surviving. The Hadzabe don’t recognize any leaders or any one person as having more power or influence than others have. And even though they have clearly defined gender roles, men and women in their society participate equally in decision-making. Their traditional “immediate return” economy supports this equality because all people from an early age have the skills and knowledge to get what they need each day. To be a Hadza means that if someone asks, they have no option but to share. It is considered bad to hoard or accumulate more than what one needs. Everyone shares. Everyone serves. Everyone leads. Everyone is a servant-leader.
https://wisconsinservantleadership.org/
https://wisconsinservantleadership.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/What-Can-Hunter-Gatherers-Teach-Us-About-Servant-Leadership-Leider-and-Spears-2013.pdf
Self Domestication
Social contracts are written into our biology. As is the justice they need. The arc of our evolution has long bent towards the justice of “laws” fittest for team survival. We bred ourselves, by artificial selection, to internalize and feel strongly about social rules.
Christopher Boehm in Moral Origins concludes, after intensive analysis of 50 representative hunter-gatherer cultures, that our ancestors likely experienced a “radical political change,” evolving from a hierarchic “apelike ‘might is right’...social order,” to become more egalitarian. About 250,000 years ago, their survival became a team sport because chasing big-game toward teammates was much more productive than solo hunting. But only if profit-sharing was sustainable. Even with fit teammates hunting needs luck (e.g. 4% success today). Then, as now, the logic of social insurance solved team problems by sharing profits and risks. Productivity gains in interdependent teams radically changed our evolution. Cooperators thrived. As did teams with the best adapted sharing rules, provided they were well enforced.
Boehm says all surviving hunter-gatherers enforce law-like social rules to prevent excessive egoism, nepotism, and cronyism. They use rebukes, ridicule, shame, shunning, exile and execution (typically delegated to close male kin of the condemned, to avoid inter-family feuding). For example, meat isn’t distributed by the successful hunter but by neutral stakeholders. Excessively dominant alpha-male behavior—like hogging more than a fair share of meat—is punished by “counterdominant coalitions.” If the strong abused their power they were eliminated, in a sort of inverted eugenics. Resisting injustice and tyranny are universal traits in today’s hunter-gatherers. They likely run 10,000 generations deep in our prehistory.
Social punishment created powerful selection pressures. Self-control becomes the lowest-cost strategy for avoiding social penalties. Shame and guilt likely evolved as mechanisms for internalizing the logic of team rules—a social contract written into our biology. We intuitively recognize what is considered punishable. And often punish ourselves. Cultures configure shame and guilt system triggers differently. But rules balancing short term individual selfish gain with longer-term or team interests are more evolutionarily productive. Thinking of our evolved urges as irresistible is a deep error, since self-control, especially relative to social rules, has long been needed for survival (see “evo-irresistible error”)
Our ancestors bred themselves to be team players. They used intelligently directed artificial selection of good cooperators as mates (“auto-domestication”). Bad cooperators were less likely to be selected for, or successful at, the hugely costly and highly collaborative business of raising long helpless offspring.
Justice, wrote Hesiod, poet of the ancient Greek masses and Homer’s rival, was “Zeus's greatest gift” to us. Greatest or not, without it human nature wouldn’t be what it is. And we wouldn’t exist.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/justice-is-in-our-nature/
Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects
Before five or six thousand years ago it is very doubtful that even the notion of incarceration existed, for that was when taxation-based states and civilizations came along to provide the necessary infrastructure. Before that, if a socially endangered group could neither cope with nor escape from a dangerous or oppressive group member, physical elimination was the only way to handle the situation.
Prehistorically, killing group members was morally condemned, for the belief that “thou shalt not kill” long preceded the writing of the Bible. However, this ancient and universal condemnation was subject to important exceptions. Mercy killing was tolerated, as was infanticide as a form of birth control, while capital punishment was legitimate as a group strategy to cope with extreme, intolerable, and otherwise inescapable acts by social deviants. Such killings were the result of community intentions, and to work they had to be strongly approved—or at least be morally countenanced—by the entire group.
https://www.humansandnature.org/prehistoric-capital-punishment-and-parallel-evolutionary-effects
Purposeful Evolution & Group Decisions | Evolution & Morality
One effective way to modify a genome is to start killing people. The egalitarianism of mobile hunter-gatherers is well-known; less well-known is the fact that to remain egalitarian, these groups must sometimes resort to capital punishment to prevent ambitious group members from becoming tyrants. In a sample of sixty-five Pleistocene-appropriate hunter-gatherers taken from all six world regions where hunter-gatherers have been studied, nearly half of the researchers cited instances of capital punishment of bullies in spite of spotty ethnographic reporting.
Over evolutionary time we may assume purposeful, well-strategized capital punishment to have been a widespread and consistent practice, and also that inevitably the human genome was affected. Every time another bully was dispatched in the here and now, the genes that supported bullying were being further diminished in the gene pool.
The predictable result would have been a lessening of bullying tendencies in the species—a profound effect that was at least partly shaped by human intentions. These collective intentions were immediate: to remain egalitarian, these groups had to kill serious bullies. It was an unintended long-term consequence that genetic tendencies to bully were being reduced in a similar fashion, and such parallel effects can be seen as introducing a rather immediate element of teleology into the natural selection process, from within.
Human preferences may also have shaped our evolution in “positive” ways. For instance, Richard D. Alexander’s potent theory of indirect reciprocity looks to selection-by-reputation as a basis for altruism: While altruistic acts taken by themselves are individually maladaptive, they can result in good social reputations that pay off in fitness and thereby more than compensate the altruistic losses. Here the selection process is subtler than with group capital punishment for it is not the entire group punishing antisocial dominators, but rather a pattern of individual decisions that favors altruists as partners.
The net result for natural selection is similar. Purposeful decisions enhanced altruistic tendencies, just as they reduced bullying and helped to domesticate us as a species. In effect, a highly-predictable pattern of immediate, effective, and purposeful decision-making was having parallel evolutionary effects, in a direction guided by evolved moral values. On this basis we may ask not only how evolution helps us to explain morality, but also how morality can help us to explain evolution.
Collective intentions to punish are easier to read than those of individuals choosing partners. To mobilize a small group to take such dire steps requires group agreement; otherwise there will be differences of opinion that lead to strife. For that reason, in Moral Origins I emphasized consensus seeking as being essential to moralistic social control by local groups. In A Natural History of Morality, psychologist Michael Tomasello has emphasized “shared intentionality” in moral evolution, a concept borrowed from philosopher John Searle. This dovetails nicely with the emphasis on consensus processes, but Tomasello has denied apes the capacity for such collective intentions.
Primatological sources indicate that both chimpanzees (at several field sites) and bonobos (at one so far) have engaged in concerted gang-attacks on ranking males, which are reminiscent of the human attacks against bullies covered above. One possible implication, which should add to the discussion, is that the impact of collective decisions on evolutionary process may not be totally exclusive to our own moral species.
https://www.humansandnature.org/was-moral-evolution-purposeful
https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf
Hierarchy in the Forest - Christopher Boehm
There are numerous types of societies, ranging from egalitarian (no bosses) to hierarchical (some have more power than others). Among hierarchical societies, some have many layers of rank and status, like wolf packs. At the extreme, despotic societies have a dominant alpha to whom all others must submit, like chimps or Nazis. Boehm presented theories on the evolution of politics and morality among chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and humans. Based on how the four species behave today, he imagined that the common ancestor of all four, who lived seven million years ago, was innately despotic — and that all four today remain near the despotic end of the political spectrum. Hierarchy in the Forest.
He believed that humans took a strange path. In the beginning, we were hierarchical. Later, for much of the hunter-gatherer phase, we were egalitarian. Then, around 12,000 years ago, with the domestication of plants and animals, hierarchy returned to ascendance, and grew to monstrous proportions over the centuries. This was not black and white, some early societies of herders or horticulturalists remained egalitarian, despite having private property and unequal wealth.
Oddly, egalitarian societies were also hierarchical. Civilized societies have pyramid-shaped hierarchies, with the powerful at the top, and the dominated masses spread out below. Egalitarian societies have an upside down pyramid, a “reverse dominance hierarchy.” When someone began behaving in an inappropriate manner, the entire group united to confront the misbehaving oddball.
Cooperation was fundamental to the success of hunter-gatherer societies, so conflict avoidance was imperative. Upstart males, exhibiting impulses to dominate others, were a serious threat to the stability and survival of the society. Nothing was more uncool. The antidote to disruptive upstarts was sanctions — criticism, ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, shunning. Sanctions often helped the upstart get the message, and return to conformity. If these failed, the upstart might move to a different group. If all else failed, he might be executed.
Hunter-gatherer cultures had time-proven methods for encouraging conformity, and discouraging the impulses of problem personalities. It was always uncool to be boastful, arrogant, or overbearing. When a hunter brought home excellent meat, he would apologize for the worthless crap that was unfit for dog food. Self-depreciation helped to level out differences, and discourage painful swellings of pride.
Once upon a time, Boehm had succeeded in earning the trust of Navajo elders, in his quest to learn about mental illness in the tribe. One day, he realized that he had left a watermelon in his car, which he had bought to be a gift. He ran out, got it, ran back, offered it to the elder — and immediately obliterated the trust he had carefully earned, terminating his research. His action had been too sudden, and was perceived as aggressive. The Navajo have a low opinion of white people, and are highly distrustful of them. In Indian country, people are expected to be calm, composed, dignified, and respectful.
One passage especially touched me. Jean Briggs was an anthropologist who spent more than a year with the Utku Eskimos of northern Canada. She apparently behaved like an ordinary American, who had moody days, and sometimes displayed a flash of anger when irritated. This freaked out the Eskimos, who sometimes ran out the cabin when she was crabby and hissing. In that society, folks were expected to smile, laugh, and joke — to behave like happy people. Nothing was more uncool than showing your emotions, because strong thoughts can kill or cause illness. Anger was dangerous juju, highly toxic.
The Eskimos tolerated a lot of extremely inappropriate behavior, because Briggs was a visitor from a tribe that was notoriously loony. They gave her hints for behaving more politely, but she missed their meaning. Eventually, they reached their limits, and Briggs became a nonperson. She simply could not learn how to conform.
Briggs was brought up in a hierarchical culture, where we all compete against one another to acquire, hoard, and display the most status trinkets. Self-centeredness is the expected norm. Most of us live amidst hordes of perfect strangers, and the sight of strangers must make our tropical primate brains squirm and sweat. When chimps see a strange male, they don’t welcome him with smiles and hugs; they kill him. Gorillas are also impolite unknown visitors. Of course, humans take great delight in savagely killing foreigners by the millions.
It’s hard for us to imagine spending our entire lives among a small group of people, where survival depends on cooperation, where competition and conflict were toxic. The Eskimos were not merely “acting” happy. They were raised in a culture where it was normal and healthy to mindfully maintain respectful relationships with all others. They had to spend long dark winters in close quarters, so it was impossible to tolerate selfish spoiled brats or infantile tyrants. Everyone’s highest responsibility was to maintain the stability of the group.
Boehm’s book was published in 1999. Most research on wild bonobos occurred after 2003. Early studies had to be abandoned, because of a civil war that raged between 1994 and 2003, claiming three million lives. Based on incomplete information, Boehm assumed that bonobos were at the despotic end of the spectrum, but later research revealed that they were remarkably egalitarian. Also, they were not egalitarian in the sense of “reverse dominance hierarchy.” For bonobos, egalitarian behavior was normal, natural, almost effortless. Humans are closely related to both despotic chimps and egalitarian bonobos.
Why are chimps and bonobos so different? Ecology may be the primary factor. Bonobos enjoy an ideal habitat, with abundant food, and no serious competitors in their niche. Chimps live in leaner lands, and compete for food with gorillas and baboons. Scarcity creates tensions, and territorial boundaries must be aggressively defended against trespassers. Crowding is the mother of conflict. Extreme crowding turns humans into bloodthirsty mass murdering maniacs.
What Is Sustainable: Boehm, Christopher, Hierarchy in the Forest, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1999.
http://wildancestors.blogspot.com/2016/04/hierarchy-in-forest.html
Hunter-Gatherers’ Egalitarianism
by Robert BellahThe earliest humans, hunter-gatherers, were often remarkably egalitarian. But our history as a species did not begin with this “Eden” (we will see how we need to qualify that analogy in a minute), but with primate ancestors who were anything but egalitarian: our nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzees, live in strongly hierarchal bands dominated by alpha males who attempt to maintain sole sexual access to the females of the group and keep both other males and females in subservience to them.
What accounts for the difference between primate bands and hunter-gatherer egalitarians? The absence of a disposition for dominance? Not likely. In Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, anthropologist Christopher Boehm argues that we share with chimpanzees and bonobos a tendency toward despotism. Yet nomadic hunter-gatherers have nevertheless been uniformly egalitarian, seemingly for thousands if not millions of years. Boehm explains this seeming contradiction with the claim that hunter-gatherers have “reverse dominance hierarchies”: the adult males in the society form a general coalition to prevent any one of their number, alone or with a few allies, from dominating the others. Male egalitarianism is not necessarily extended to females—the degree to which females are subject to male despotism varies, even among hunter-gatherers. But the reverse dominance hierarchy prevents the monopolization of females by dominant males. This makes possible the heterosexual nuclear family as we know it, based on (relatively) stable cross-gender pair bonding and mutual nurturance of children by parents, precisely what is missing in our closest primate relatives.
Egalitarianism is thus itself a form of dominance, the dominance of what Rousseau would have called the general will over the will of each. The hunter-gatherer band is not, then, the family enlarged; rather it is the precondition for the family as we know it.
Boehm identifies “moral community” and “the deliberate use of social sanctioning to enforce political equality among fully adult males” as the two components of egalitarian social control. I would add ritual as the common expression of the moral community without which the process of sanctioning would make no sense.
https://tikkun.org/nextgen/2012/07/02/religion-and-equality-in-human-evolution/
African Great Apes Are Notably Hierarchical - Christopher Boehm
As members of bands or tribes, humans can be quite egalitarian… Individuals who otherwise would be subordinated are clever enough to form a large and united political coalition. …Because the united subordinates are constantly putting down the more assertive alpha types in their midst, egalitarianism is in effect a bizarre type of political hierarchy: the weak combine forces to actively dominate the strong.… They must continue such domination if they are to remain autonomous and equal, and prehistorically we shall see that they appear to have done so very predictably as long as hunting bands remained mobile. …The egalitarian political lifestyle of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers could have profoundly affected our evolving social nature.
The three African great apes, with whom we share this rather recent Common Ancestor, are notably hierarchical. …Starting about five thousand years ago …people were beginning to live increasingly in chiefdoms, societies with highly privileged individuals …But before twelve thousand years ago, humans basically were egalitarian. They lived in what might be called societies of equals, with minimal political centralization and no social classes. Everyone participated in group decisions, and outside the family there were no dominators. For more than five millennia now, the human trend has been toward hierarchy rather than equality. But the past several centuries have witnessed sporadic but highly successful attempts to reverse this trend…
Overcoming Bias : Hail Christopher Boehm
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/05/hail-christopher-boehm.html
When Does Equality Flourish?
By Shamus KhanJune 5, 2016
Late one evening in the summer of 2012, a group of researchers stood outside a bar in Lawrence, Kansas. They worked for Laura Van Berkel, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Kansas who was interested in how drinking alcohol affects people’s thinking about equality. To that end, as people left the bar, the researchers asked them questions and measured their blood-alcohol levels. (For example, the drinkers were asked to rate, on a nine-point scale, the importance of “control or dominance over people or resources” as a “guiding principle in your life.”) The researchers’ hunch was that it takes mental effort to overcome hierarchical thinking—and that, as a result, drunk people, who are cognitively impaired, might have trouble thinking in egalitarian ways.
According to a 2009 review, conservatives tend to support hierarchy and authority more than liberals do. Van Berkel, working with Chris Crandall and other colleagues, found that, in terms of how the hundred and seven subjects interviewed outside the bar thought about hierarchy, drunk people gave more conservative responses while sober people gave more liberal ones. Over the next few years, she and her team ran five more experiments, exploring the relationship between mental effort and support for hierarchy. In each case, they found that cognitive impairments, such as being stressed or distracted, made people more likely to favor hierarchy. Even encouraging “low-effort thought”—by forcing respondents to think quickly, say—made people more respectful of those in charge.
Van Berkel’s research is part of a larger effort to understand how hierarchy fits into our mental lives. Her findings suggest that, in many situations, hierarchical thinking is the default; when we don’t have the time, energy, inclination, or capacity to think carefully, we fall back on the notion that we should honor those with more power and prestige. If she’s right, she’s identified a tendency with everyday consequences. For instance, when we’re under time pressure at work, we might be less likely to listen to all ideas equally, and more likely to align ourselves with the most powerful person present. On the flip side, Van Berkel’s work illuminates the mental conditions in which equality might flourish. When we can think clearly and at leisure, we are more likely to do so through the lens of equality.
These findings give us an interesting way to think about equality—as the product of a state of mind. But that’s only part of the picture. While psychologists tend to conceptualize people as individuals, we are also social beings, and the social environments in which we find ourselves shape our mental states. Think of how the same person may act very differently at a bar, in a job interview, and during a church sermon. The person in question doesn’t have a personality disorder; the social demands of the situation are different, and she acts accordingly. Another way, therefore, to investigate how people think about equality and hierarchy is to ask which social situations lead us to champion one over the other.
Christopher Boehm, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Southern California, has approached this question from a cross-species angle. Boehm, who directs the Jane Goodall Research Center, has spent his career studying human and primate communities. In 1999, he published a now classic book, “Hierarchy in the Forest,” which compares human hunter-gatherer and tribal societies to those of bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas. Boehm reports that our closest evolutionary relatives are far more hierarchical than we are: the dominance of the powerful in chimpanzee society, for example, is unlike anything we see among humans. Why, he asks, do tribal and hunter-gatherer human societies tend to be more equal?
One possible answer is that human beings are, at the level of personality, more egalitarian than apes. But Boehm doesn’t find much evidence for this idea: he points out that most people, like most chimpanzees, want power and dislike being dominated. It’s also not the case that tribal human societies are organized in some fundamentally different and more egalitarian fashion. At a basic level, the social structures of human and chimp societies are the same—they are pyramidal societies in which only one person (or a very small group of people) can occupy the top position.
All primate societies, Boehm notes, are governed by similar dynamics. If any one individual has the opportunity to climb the hierarchy, he or she is likely to seize it; unfortunately, as soon as power is gained, others resent it. In such a society, Boehm writes, there are three potential outcomes. One is conflict, in which newcomers continually and overtly challenge the powerful for a position at the top. Another is stable dominance, where the powerful relentlessly and permanently dominate the rest. And a third is an equally stable social structure which Boehm calls “reverse dominance hierarchy,” in which those on the bottom of the pyramid figure out a way to band together and “deliberately dominate their potential master.” In such a society, dominance is still exercised. It just comes, collectively and consistently, from below.
Chimps, bonobos, and gorillas struggle to achieve stable reverse-dominance hierarchy. They can occasionally flatten their pyramids, but only briefly. The problem is that the powerful are likely to be strong, intelligent, and socially connected. To topple them, and prevent them from taking over again, you need a powerful and persistent threat, which nonhuman primates don’t have. Boehm has discovered that, among the tribal and hunter-gatherer human societies he studies, the development of projectile weapons is a key step in the growth and maintenance of equality: it puts the strong at greater risk from the weak. Such weaponry is one reason that human societies are more equalized than those of other primates.
But weapons aren’t enough to make equality last. Boehm finds that, to really maintain the new social order, the dominated need to trust one another. They must have stable social bonds and anticipate a long future together. Most important, they must be able to communicate effectively. To Boehm, therefore, there is something distinctively human about sustained equality: only human beings communicate well enough to keep it going for long periods. Van Berkel, for her part, suggests that we default to hierarchical models for developmental reasons, since respect for authority is what we learn first. But it’s also possible to read her findings in a humanistic way: deferring to authority could be a tendency that honors our less deliberative, more animalistic selves.
Unfortunately, when it’s seen through the lens of Van Berkel and Boehm’s work, our contemporary society seems to encourage us to stick with the default setting of hierarchy. We now know that poor people experience cognitive exhaustion, because they are constantly preoccupied by money, food, housing, and other basics of survival; meanwhile, the well-off distract themselves with smartphones. To the extent that Van Berkel’s work suggests that we need calm and clear minds to think liberally about equality, it’s plausible that our fast-paced, distracting world is encouraging us to fall back on hierarchical thinking. Meanwhile, although Boehm’s work identifies trust, communication, and a collective belief that we have a future together as social factors on which long-term equality depends, the modern era has enabled increasingly polarized and individualistic behaviors for many of us.
In a broad sense, this research gives us a picture of how dominance, in the abstract, works to sustain itself. If you’re at the top of a very hierarchical society and are absolutely determined to stay there, then you want three things. First, you want people to fear your power, so that they’re unwilling to risk toppling you. Second, you want to occupy people’s minds—and potentially, their bodies—so thoroughly that they’re mentally exhausted and oriented more toward hierarchy and authority than toward equality and justice. Finally, you want to make sure that those you dominate are unable to meaningfully communicate—or that, if they can, they are loath to trust one another in the long run. Division is your ally. Power wants the powerless to be scared, thoughtless, and alone.
https://newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/when-does-equality-flourish
Dominance & Reverse-Dominance Hierarchies
Reverse Dominance and Authority/Dominance are conceived as an oppositional spectrum rather than weak to strong. I posit that people are not weak on Reverse Dominance but rather they either are Reverse Dominant or they are not. I believe that Reverse Dominance is moral foundation or at least valorized emotionally. I hope to in the blog adduce a mountain of evidence for this.
Similarly I believe Haidt’s conception of respect for Authority is a moral foundation but there is in Conservative politics a strong streak of social dominance and this is at least valorized.
Reverse Dominance has several names, sticking it to the boss, anti-authoritarianism, in Germany it is called anti-Fuehrer syndrome and in the former Soviet Union ironically, a state founded on the revolution against authority, its psychiatrists under pressure from KGB discovered an anti-state mentality and pathologised it in a cruel and criminal way.
In the famous political science paper Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition the several authors contend that social dominance based on an expectation of respect for authority is a feature of political thought. I hold here that Dominance and respect for Authority are moral foundations which like Reverse Dominance you either have or you don’t, you cannot be weakly reverse dominant and weakly dominant. These foundations are different from all the others in that they represent and oppositional spectrum.
Here is a view of the way in which I think reverse dominance and dominance plays out in political ideologies. The first thing to note is the huge unquantifiable centre ground in this picture, as above I think that people are on the oppositional spectrum but near the middle some place which only roughly correspondents to the political centre ground.
As you move left the reverse dominance component of the politics increases and intensifies displacing the Care/Harm and Fairness foundations until you reach the Anarchists whose politics appear bereft of any sense of social justice, being composed of a wholly anti-authoritarian narrative, one se strong that it famously undermines their organizational ability.
Moving right through Conservatives we meet the monarchists, and interesting group as they embody the notion dominate individuals acquire moral authority via high social rank. See Majesty Magazine for evidence of the continued valorization of Kings and Queens. Carrying on up the right hand side you arrive at the supreme expression of the notion that Authority carries moral purpose, one which usurps and transcends the normal commonsense meaning of the word morality. Hand in hand with that is the determination that authority ought to dominate everything.
Haidt added the Liberty/Oppression foundation under the influence of Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour as he describes in the Righteous Mind. Bhoem’s book argues that dominance hierarchies are a key component of our primate heritage but that all socially dominant primates faced a coalition of males wanting their overthrow, leading to a continual dominant/reverse dominate strain in human social life. I had long been convinced of the influence of Reverse Dominance as a major factor in left politics based on my observation of liberals over a long time; indeed I suspect the structure to possibly be that via Reverse Dominance we get to Care/Harm reduction and Fairness so salient is Reverse Dominance in left/liberal politics.
https://politicsismoralpsychology.com/dominance-and-reverse-dominance-2/
