Over on Hipcrime Vocab, a new awesome summary of the trip from egalitarian tribes to civ.
I have a few comments. We need a better understanding than Harris offered regarding the move from a society committed to leveling, and the rise of the Big Men. As escapefromWisconsin puts it, “in such societies, aggrandizing members … encourage the production of surpluses by which they throw lavish feasts to enhance their prestige and status.” Yes, but a society based on the values of ‘vigilant sharing’ would not allow striving for prestige and status in the first place.
I disagree that slavery emerged because the agrarian lifestyle is backbreaking. There is plenty of evidence that foragers/horticulturists lived very well; they had some surplus, they still had the leisure. Slavery turned into a necessity only after top-heavy elites made mincemeat out of the economic patterns linked to sharing. It’s the overhead, stupid! 🙂
And finally, the progression from egalitarian band to despotism already happened within the egalitarian bands themselves. There is a creepy account of a Greenland Inuit group that fell prey to a despotic shaman who murdered people and stole women. The band became so terrified they were unable, at the time this early account was written, to strike back. We don’t know if they finally managed to assassinate him, or whether they all snuck off in the middle of the night. In other words, it is possible to hoard power and become a despot without first taking the entrepreneurial path of Big Men.
Welcome, commenters!
Leaving Babylon 
October 23, 2015 at 8:46 am
Thanks for this link and the commentary. It’s a lot to think about.
For me the big question is how do we unwind this process (becoming egalitarian and tribal/communal again) and–even more important, preventing this process from happening again? (ie, if we create ecovillages and some type of collapse happens, how do we stop some type-A guys from deciding to come in and take over?) I think social defense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_defence – what I know of as nonviolent civil defense) is part of the answer (similar to if the Inuit group snuck off in the night) but this requires a shared belief that we can do this and this needs to happen, something that’s hard to organize when the takeover is already in process.
October 23, 2015 at 10:14 am
That is indeed the question, MoonRaven. I have been wanting to get to writing about it, but my life has been “overtaken by events.” Here’s a few thoughts. Social defense does work… I am thinking of Rainbow Gatherings, and Burning Man. But once you have the triple-As in control, this is very hard. Because they hoard the power and the wealth. Can you deal with the issues post-facto without violence? I doubt it. People with scruples lose against those without, unless… unless we find other ways to buttress the “scruples” position. So… I think we can relegate violence to last resort and still win. In fact, must relegate it to last resort, otherwise, we’d be them.
The other issues I keep going back to… have to do with our vulnerability to manipulation. I really need to get my thoughts together on this. It has to start person-to-person, in the grassroots, building the new culture sheltered from the machinators. If we can’t do it person to person, then how could we possibly do it “us vs the elites”? And if we can’t do it person to person, then all the new structures, communities, will be infected. We’ll bring domination in ourselves…
October 25, 2015 at 4:44 pm
I think that this question is THE question, meaning that the struggle to find a way to fend off aggressive neighbors without becoming like them has never been satisfactorily answered…so the aggressive groups kept expanding, sometimes fighting wars, occasionally being defeated but rarely by a group less aggressive. So the people who didn’t want to fight and knew they couldn’t win against the well-armed, well-trained tribe with a high birthrate and no scruples may have temporarily solved the problem by moving elsewhere…but then the aggressors took over their former space. Between that high birthrate and the damage to the soil that led to migration, the aggressive groups kept expanding until they took over the whole world (with a major leap in about 1500, as they crossed onto a new hemisphere that had been by groups who kept their aggressions to limited, ritualized warfare to the most part). I’m sure there were once a variety of different expanding, aggressive cultures–now we’ve essentially got one, holding virtually the entire Earth in its sway. Even if we somehow defeated it–we who are its children–and set up a gentler, more cooperative culture in its place, I can’t see any means for protecting against the eventual incursion of those memes again (which may or may not have much to do with certain genes, those of the sociopaths). It’s certainly true about the “manipulation”–the reality is that the dominant 1% live in ease, not having to go to a lot of trouble to keep the 99% supplying them with every luxury and “knowing our place”–because our own sons (and occasionally daughters) will put on uniforms and do the job of using violence to put down resistance. Why? And why are parents PROUD when a son joins the Marines or a special unit of the police? Because of successful propaganda, that’s why.
October 25, 2015 at 9:36 pm
I haven’t read the blog post at your link. Much as I appreciate me some first-class analysis, I just don’t have patience for long-winded analyses that cross and mix cosmological, geological, or evolutionary time spans. The shorter span in question ranges up to about 3,500 years, which is roughly the time at which nation-states emerge in our prehistory. Modern civilization, OTOH, is far more recent, coalescing around a combination of the Enlightenment, scientific era, Industrial Revolution, and fossil fuels era. That means a style of human social organization that got into full swing in Europe around 200 years ago and has since spread across the rest of the world. It is characterized by, among other things, extremely hierarchical and unequal enjoyment of power, prestige, and wealth. Those with more egalitarian instincts chafe at our current regime.
Reverse engineering the road traveled to get us to this point in history, with the hope of avoid wrong turns we took the first time, makes two fundamental framing mistakes: mixing time spans and presuming that society does, can, or should develop and unfold according to design, wizened or otherwise. Social organization instead develops without guidance according to a variety of structural incentives that are part of our deep culture, not some manifest plan.
If your objective is more chaste — merely to avoid being vulnerable to vultures out there — well, that doesn’t require a full anthropological analysis and understanding. It’s really much simpler: avoid participation in schemes and environments where others possess disproportionate influence. Regrettably, that typically means being poor and powerless.
October 26, 2015 at 2:56 pm
Re: “building the new culture” (comment 2):
From an article by psychologist Peter Gray, examining some commonalities among “fiercely egalitarian” cultures, and recommending that we find ways to take similar approaches.
——————–
“How Hunter-Gatherers Maintained their Egalitarian Ways”
by Peter Gray
Here are the three theories, which I think are complementary to one another and all correct.
Theory 1: Hunter-gatherers practiced a system of “reverse dominance” that prevented anyone from assuming power over others.
The writings of anthropologists make it clear that hunter-gatherers were not passively egalitarian; they were actively so. Indeed, in the words of anthropologist Richard Lee, they were fiercely egalitarian. They would not tolerate anyone’s boasting, or putting on airs, or trying to lord it over others. Their first line of defense was ridicule. If anyone–especially if some young man–attempted to act better than others or failed to show proper humility in daily life, the rest of the group, especially the elders, would make fun of that person until proper humility was shown… the many act in unison to deflate the ego of anyone who tries, even in an incipient way, to dominate them… If teasing doesn’t work, the next step is shunning…
Theory 2: Hunter-gathers maintained equality by nurturing the playful side of their human nature, and play promotes equality.
…hunter-gatherers suppressed the tendency to dominate and promoted egalitarian sharing and cooperation by deliberately fostering a playful attitude in essentially all of their social activities. Our capacity for play, which we inherited from our mammalian ancestors, is the natural, evolved capacity that best counters our capacity to dominate, which we also inherited from our mammalian ancestors…
Theory 3: Hunter-gatherers maintained their ethos of equality through their childrearing practices, which engendered feelings of trust and acceptance in each new generation.
…They trusted infants’ and children’s instincts, and so they allowed infants to decide, for example, when to nurse or not nurse and allowed children to educate themselves through their own self-directed play and exploration. They did not physically punish children and rarely criticized them… It makes sense that infants and children who are themselves trusted and treated well from the beginning would grow up to trust others and treat them well and would feel little or no need to dominate others in order to get their needs met…
In sum, my argument here is that the lessons we have to learn from hunter-gatherers are not about our genes but about our culture. Our species clearly has the genetic potential to be peaceful and egalitarian, on the one hand, or to be warlike and despotic, on the other, or anything in between. If the three theories I’ve described here are correct, and if we truly believe in the values of equality and peace and want them to reign once again as the norm for human beings, then we need to (a) find ways to deflate the egos, rather than support the egos, of the despots, bullies, and braggarts among us; (b) make our ways of life more playful; and (c) raise our children in kindly, trusting ways.
–Quoted from
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways
October 28, 2015 at 4:20 pm
Mary, it’s a pickle. I tend to think, in my good moments, that the solution to the Parable is an alliance. But that just moves the problem into the next square. How do you make an alliance when the cards are stacked against you? But still, us peons have the numbers. If we ever united, the elites would be in trouble. And that’s why the “divide and rule” schemes proliferate. So we go round and round…
What I call the first egalitarian revolution put in place a system where the sociopaths were kept low in the gene pool. Now they get all the advantages, and so their genes proliferate. And the numbers of psychopath enablers grows.
October 28, 2015 at 4:23 pm
Right, Brutus, another way to put the problem of power. Avoiding participation has in the past meant marginalization. Can it be somehow different?
October 28, 2015 at 4:29 pm
SteveL, thank you for the links. Will have to go read it. A neat summary I have not seen before, tying in play. Maybe play is one of the “leveling strategies” anthropologists talk about? Those three prescriptions makes utter sense. I recently saw a pre-school named “Little Sharks” and though it eventually turned out to be related to the area high school team rather than raising sharky humans, many parents do just that, in order for those kids be “successful” — another sick concept. And liberal feminists are trying to stuff women into that success straightjacket.
November 29, 2015 at 10:46 am
I think part of the answer comes by way of analogy from animal husbandry: you should never raise a bull by itself. As soon as it is weaned, put it in with a group of adult steers. Being castrated, they won’t harass the bull, but when the bull starts wanting to be dominant, they will not tolerate it, and they will put him in his place. And as long as you start the bull young, the steers will have a large size advantage to begin with, so by the time the bull is full grown, he won’t be dangerous.
December 2, 2015 at 5:50 pm
Dependence on animals in ways that are needed with other options available is not really a good direction. Egalitarian society can exist with horticulture being practiced in a community, and just about all nutritional needs be met from that. Privileged elite coming about with the beginnings of what would be civilization put greater demands on others in it, it would be desirable to never have that happen, but this could only be with general agreement continually held among any people to avoid it, for that.