Once aggrandizers are given an inch of leeway under favorable resource conditions, they quickly stretch that inch into a mile and keep on going.
— Brian Hayden
Once upon a time, there lived the ancestral apes that gave rise to humans, chimpanzees and bonobos.
In all likelihood, they lived in bands dominated by the strongest, most aggressive individuals — the male alphas. This tends to produce a rather disagreeable state of affairs where anyone can be humiliated or brutalized at any moment, and the best food and most mates go to just a few. Even baboons would rather opt out when the opportunity arises! In addition, our growing brains demanded the fats found only in scarce meat which the alphas commandeered.
Evolution snaked forward. The chimps pretty much put up with the true and tried. Bonobos evolved out of this unpleasant arrangement into an alliance of females, cemented by mutual sexual pleasuring. Humans likewise evolved out and into an alliance of betas, cemented by unprecedented, increasingly more subtle communication abilities, eventually including laughter and speech.
In conjunction with weapons-at-a-distance that equalized brawn and brains, power came to be shared, and so was the meat. The resulting egalitarian bands, a durable and satisfying arrangement, saw humans through the harshness of repeated ice ages and other natural calamities. During this time, humans became survivors par excellence on the planetary stage. The egalitarian strategy of “vigilant sharing” had proven itself a winner.
When did our first egalitarian revolution occur? Nobody knows, as yet. Some experts posit it could be as far back as when we came down from the trees, others place it into our sapiens timeline. The oldest known wooden, fire-hardened spears come from about 300-400,000 years ago.
This agreeable social arrangement began to slightly unravel in areas of plenty in the late European Paleolithic, and gradually wound down among the so-called “complex hunter-gatherers” after 15,000 years ago. Complex or transegalitarian foragers were people who forged new pathways into competition, accumulation, increasingly violent conflict, and ratcheting economic growth. Individuals known in the literature as Big Men or aggrandizers led this “elitist revolution,” becoming quite the experts on getting people to crank out work and surpluses, by hook or by crook.
In the beginning, these hardworking, enterprising, and generous leaders couched their projects in the language of altruism and community. But being “triple-A” (aggressive, acquisitive, ambitious) personalities, they were also surreptitiously looking out for number one. As more and more wealth of the tribe flowed through their hands, they learned to skim a little, then a bit more, for themselves. They finessed a plethora of strategies that created social imbalances among the people of the tribe. At first, only a few families were left behind, and most did well in the aftermath of Big Men’s projects. But in time, poverty spread apace with increasing social stratification. And after a few millennia of these increasingly manipulative and coercive tactics, the very individuals who early on worked the hardest and kept the least became those who worked the least and kept the most.
As the ratchet picked up speed, wealth and power inequalities grew to such an extent that a genetic bottleneck shows up around 8,000 years ago [reports just off the press, here and here] in various communities of the mid to late Neolithic. Just like in the days of our apish ancestors, the most aggressive alphas grabbed the best food and most of the mates. H. sapiens went baboon.
More work meant more food meant more people. Aggressive, accumulative, highly competitive societies gained a short-term advantage and were pushing out those who stayed with the old relaxed, egalitarian lifestyle. The needs of power came to trump the needs of life on the “Parable of the Tribes” planet. Elite-run societies are very good at producing goods; they nevertheless have a variety of disadvantages. The key one being this: aggrandizers have a problem with brakes. In the long run, they drive their societies off a cliff.
And here we are. Time, once again, for a crash. Except, this time, it’s global. Except, this time, it’s affecting the entire web of life our own lives depend on. The planetary ecosystems are devastated; some are dying. Our fellow creatures are disappearing forever. The soils that feed us are blowing away and turning into desert. There are invisible poisons everywhere, in the air we breathe, in the food we eat, in mothers’ milk. Clean water has become a rare commodity. Oceans are chock-full of garbage. Pathetically enough, the aggrandizers are losing their touch: jobs are vanishing at a time when people depend on them for their entire livelihoods. A stain of misery seeps across the anguished blue planet.
Our leading aggrandizers, of course, are not paying attention. It is one of elite privileges, not having to listen to the peons. Not having to listen to bad news. Not having to face feedback that is simply inconvenient to their plans and schemes, inconvenient to getting even richer and more powerful. One of the cherished perks of being rich and powerful is ignoring anyone who isn’t. Why not continue to live in a bubble and pretend that the bubble that’s lasted so long is permanently impervious to reality?
The Earth is running out — out of minerals, out of peoples and places to exploit, out of space for waste, out of patience. And the teetering tower of complexity, having reached the point of diminishing returns, stirs deep memories of quite another lifeway. Our species knows how to handle hardship and austerity — this knowledge is part of our genetic endowment. When resource conditions worsen to the point that aggrandizing behaviors again pose a threat to community and survival, humans set down tight limits on greed and narrow self-interest. I reckon we are about there. Time for the second egalitarian revolution, don’t you think?
Leaving Babylon 
March 26, 2015 at 11:38 am
Reblogged this on Theory T and commented:
Interesting thoughts here reposted from leavergirl on the subject of our primate beginnings.
March 27, 2015 at 11:01 am
A great short video on the baboon egalitarian revolution — and all the good effects it had on their health
March 30, 2015 at 6:15 pm
[…] Ready for the revolution? […]
March 31, 2015 at 1:11 am
The baboon evolution happened because the baboons North of the Congo River were separated from the gorillas south of the river. With the absence of Gorillas they become “hippies”.
You might call the big farmer guys after the agricultural revolution for our “gorillas”.
March 31, 2015 at 10:02 am
Øyvind, I do not know of the baboon that were separated by a river. Can you give a link? These baboons’ social structure was altered by their alphas suddenly dying of meat poisoning.
March 31, 2015 at 11:36 am
I’m sorry, it was hippie chimpanzees, or the Bonobos I meant. I learned about this in a documentary on the Congo River, that the river separated the chimpanzees, and those north of the river developed to peaceful hippie chimpanzees because they were separated from the gorillas. While those south of the river remained aggressive because of the co-existence with the gorillas.
The Congo River was created rather suddenly I think to remember, when a great water pool bursted a long time ago. I don’t remember if the documentary was from BBC, Discovery or National Geographic?
March 31, 2015 at 1:52 pm
I also heard it as the bonobos were separated from the chimpanzees (not baboons or gorillas which they are only distantly related to) by the river. The theory is that the bonobo side of the river had abundant fruit and food and these were scarce on the chimp side of the river–which is used to explain the behavior of the two species. The peaceful, egalitarian, matriarchal, polyamorous bonobos developed from a situation where they had to figure out how to share the abundance (ie, cooperation), and the violent, hierarchical, patriarchal, polygynous chimpanzees had to figure out how to manage in a scarcity situation (ie, competition).
March 31, 2015 at 2:02 pm
Overall, a very useful post. I totally agree with the ending–it is definitely time for another egalitarian ‘revolution’. I think strategy needs to be worked out, but definitely in the direction that you’ve been mapping out, LeaverGirl: opting out of the system and building something completely different.
I’d love to use our relatives, the bonobos as models but the one thing they lack is resilience. (During the firebombing in WW2 of a German city with an extensive zoo, all the chimps were agitated and traumatized, but survived. All the bonobos apparently died of fear. It turns out that a life of abundance doesn’t prepare you to deal with extremely scary situations.)
As you point out: “Our species knows how to handle hardship and austerity…” Let’s hope we can do this before it’s too late.
March 31, 2015 at 3:34 pm
I then think it was a long time ago since the water pool bursted creating the Congo River, as I’m sure the documentary said they evolved from the same species of chimpanzees.
Why there is more fruit north of the river is probably because there are no gorillas there, so they don’t have to compete with the gorillas for the same resources, fruits and other stuff.
I saw this documentary this winter.
March 31, 2015 at 3:44 pm
I’ll drink to that. But don’t knock bonobos lack of resilience. The same can be said for egalitarian tribes. Yet, they have powerful lessons to teach us.
Re sharing abundance: I know this is counter-intuitive, but domination societies emerged in areas of abundance, whether NW Indians who had abundant salmon, or Near East, loess China et al who had abundance of wild grain, nuts, fruits and so on. The evidence is utterly persuasive: when times are tough, people crack down on freeriders. When times are plentiful, they give them leeway. Even among Eskimos.
When there is plenty of everything, no need to share. When the opposite is true, sharing is carefully promoted. How this applies to bonobos and chimps, I don’t know — it would be interesting to dig into it.
April 1, 2015 at 8:21 am
I’m less worried about a few freeriders, and more worried about the ones who become dominators (and I’m aware that it’s probably freeriders who find out what they can get away with who become dominators).
In the case of the bonobos, the main issue was managing conflicts, ie how to share the abundance, and they developed the interesting strategy of using sex to manage conflict. (Which is why they’re often labeled the ‘make love, not war’ species–doing it millennia before the hippies.)
While I would love to figure out how we can learn to share abundance, this may well be a moot point. I think we’re clearly moving into a period of scarcity (having done such a poor job so far of managing abundance) and the real issue for our lifetime is how to manage the little resources that we haven’t ruined.
April 1, 2015 at 11:33 am
It’s possible that with abundance their numbers grew, and then they had to deal with intergroup conflict. But it would be instructive to see how their system got established intra-troop. I saw somewhere that in chimp territory, moms and babies are often alone foraging, and make a good target. If the bonobo females banded together to forage, and ganged up on and beat up any male that tried to harm any of their number… that would explain a lot. Then there is the puzzle of why the males became solitary wanderers.
April 1, 2015 at 7:22 pm
In fact, that’s my understanding of exactly what female bonobos do and why I say they are matriarchal as well as egalitarian. The females do band together to keep the males (often referred to as ‘mama’s boys’) in line.
An interesting model–maybe if enough of us banded together, particularly in a way that supported women leaders, we could keep the alpha males from taking over.
April 2, 2015 at 3:43 pm
Interesting observations about other species. Ever the pessimist, however, I doubt we have the ability to restructure human society in its many guises before we’re taken out of the game. Even with more and more people glimpsing apocalypse looming over the horizon, we’re still firmly entrenched in BAU and even accelerating toward disaster. Numerous writers have observed that we humans won’t do anything in sufficient numbers to matter before it’s too late to matter anymore. Opinions differ, but I assert that the decade we crossed the Rubicon was the 1970s.
None of this should be understood as a recommendation to do nothing different. I think we should, in fact, and for lots of reasons, but I don’t expect anything we do will change the eventual outcome.
April 2, 2015 at 3:58 pm
I know, I know… 😦
Is it pleasant, useful, or motivating to think in these terms, Brutus? And if it isn’t then why in the world?
I lost two communitarian allies to suicide in the last several weeks. I am mentioning it to put my query into perspective.
April 2, 2015 at 5:16 pm
It’s no more useful or useless than pretending something else, but it does have one unassailable attribute: honesty. I don’t know that my perspective rises to the level of truth, so I won’t argue that.
I read an article in Harper’s this week that describes “rotten ice” in the Arctic (Greenland specifically) and the Inuit response, which is marred by increasing incidence of suicide. Considering that their entire way of life, based on hunting, is literally melting before their eyes, it’s hard to condemn them for opting for suicide over famine. In First World temperate zones, most of us don’t live close to subsistence and haven’t yet faced difficult outcomes. Even knowing what I know, I can’t say I’m braced for it. But I for one don’t want to skip over the bad parts to the good parts. The bad parts will be with us for a very long time — if we survive them.
April 2, 2015 at 9:30 pm
Brutus, what is happening is not what I was referring to. I was referring to pessimism that you cling to so tenaciously. There is no “truth value” in pessimism. It’s an attitude to life. Why choose it? What value could it possibly impart? Since I can think of a number of downsides, but see no pluses, I am turning to you whether you have an answer I don’t see.
April 8, 2015 at 1:18 pm
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