On Robin Hanson's recommendation, I've been reading Hierarchy in the Forest by Christopher Boehm. Basically, it's a discussion of hierarchy and egalitarianism in primates and primitive humans.
Short take:
Primates occasionally exhibit reverse dominance strategies, where the lower-ranking members band together to conquer the alphas. On the other hand, mobile hunter-gatherer societies apparently universally exhibit this behavior. It is apparently fairly standard for the crime of "giving orders to others" to be punishable by death, and implemented by the whole tribe. Until a would-be leader can afford to pay soldiers to do as he orders...there is only equality.
In sum...of the last ~100,000+ years, at most the last 10,000 have been characterized by units larger than the family allowing hierarchy at all...and the times we've seen it imposed, it's almost exclusively unwillingly. Autonomy and egalitarianism seem to be among human males' primary concerns.
The ability to not be ordered about seems to be very deep in the human psyche...with Braveheart, the American rebels, or the Egyptian protesters being the standard model marred by occasional aberrations like kings.
And this furthermore supports the libertarian model. Life was pleasant-ish in clans, until thugs with clubs killed anyone who didn't do what they were told. Governments are morally equivalent to mafias...but with better propaganda.
The book ain't easy reading, but it's quite worthwhile.
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6 comments:
There seems to be a distinction between formal authority (titles, offices) and informal authority (based on inequality of social status and dominance - and, these days, in fame.) I see the culture largely moving away from the former, but rewarding and valorizing the latter. This trend is accentuated by the decline of social conservatism, which I see as a way to restrict informal power by preaching humility (preventing social aggression from being a winning strategy) and having more explicit understanding of acceptable behavior (so it's more obvious when we hold socially weak people to standards that popular smooth talkers can flout.)
In the ancestral environment I expect the two forms of power to be more closely aligned - there isn't an org chart, so popular support, not a shiny resume, is what gets you to the top. The recent and continuing divergence seems odd in comparison.
CS Lewis had some insights on the psychology of implicit vs. explicit hierarchy here: http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php
CF,
It was stronger than that, according to what I'm reading. Getting to "the top" meant that as moral leader, you get to go out and start sweeping the camp, because you see it needs done, and it's absolutely forbidden to tell others what to do. Inequality in hunting skill result in folks commenting loudly and negatively on the successful hunters.
The rule was: There was no top to get to.
Interesting! That's very much orthogonal to the kind of movement we've been calling "egalitarianism" - where formal authority is diminished and social hierarchy steps into its place. How would the incentives for being a better hunter work out? And what would be the effect of a strong group of friends or a large supportive family? Mating inequalities? We seem to be really optimized for all sorts of status seeking behavior - to the point where lots of it is unconscious. Does Boehm have an explanation of where that would have come in handy in the ancestral environment?
CF,
The line is that in a tribe, the two are less separable. If someone becomes too "respected", that transitions naturally into them getting full of themselves, and moves towards them thinking they have pride of place. Because this is effectively automatic, the action is to suppress social status as a driver of formal authority.
Suppose we say evolutionarily that we've got a boatload of pro-dominance behavior inherited from our common ancestor with gorillas...but that the stable model in the pre-ag era was to use that dominance machinery to prevent dominance by others first instead of using it to attempt to gain dominance ourselves.
One hypothesis advanced is that the advent of weaponry made it so the winner and loser of a fight are more random. Once you have weapons (club, spear, arrow) in place, the leader can be struck down easily by someone who isn't as strong...and once that's true, the EV for everyone works out better to promote equality than a dominance that they might lose.
Hm, that's a possiblity; so our social instincts were trained even earlier than hunter-gatherer societies. Of course that would imply that the radical egalitarianism of HG societies was every bit as "un-natural" and due to technology/culture constraints as our modern hierarchal system. In a totally unconstrained but peaceful society, we might revert to HG egalitarianism...or we might go all the way back to ancient gorilla behavior. It weakens the case for HG being our natural state, even though it does indicate that we could *tolerate* a wide range of social arrangements.
Without actually transcribing the book, could you summarize the kind of evidence he has for ancient HG social arrangements?
Short version is: ALL known/studied modern HG societies without food storage have the same egalitarian structure... from Eskimo to !Kung. Furthermore, the structure persists into agricultural nomadic societies as well. Food storage technology seems to be the economic feature that kills egalitarianism.
I think it's safe to say that for human males in general...there is an effectively universal preference scale:
1. I get to be the boss
2. No one gets to be a boss.
85. Someone else gets to be my boss.
Not too shocking from a game-theory point of view given the reality of risk that 2/2 is a game-theoretic preferred solution for everyone, unless someone can amass enough force (Gorilla--being stronger, Human--enough $ to pay guards) to unilaterally break the preference-system.
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