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Graphic of the Haymarket Riot from Harpers Weekly

Evolution And Individuals

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Posts in this series

The Individual In Contemporary Society
Evolution And Individuals
Maturing In US Society

The first post in this series took up the question of the nature of the individual in contemporary US society.  I think answering this question is necessary if we are to create a theory of government for our time.

An evolutionary tale

Let’s start with a story. I can’t remember where I found the story I’m about to tell. Maybe it was The Evolution of Agency by Michael Tomasello, or The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, or maybe Eve by Cat Bohannon, or maybe something I ran across while writing about those books, or a combination of these.

Of course we will never know the “truth” about evolution, and there’s always a danger of falling for just-so stories. But this tale seems plausible and I’ll point out some circumstantial evidence.

As our ancestors evolved, they moved around in loose groups. The change began about 6 million years ago. Perhaps a group of primates got cut off from the rest by a rising river or an earthquake, or maybe they just wandered too far to be reunited. Conditions changed in the new area, resulting in less food. This led to smaller and weaker creatures. They were easy prey for other larger, stronger creatures with sharper ears, eyes and noses.

Their survival came to depend on their ability to cooperate. One form of cooperation might have been scavenging. After one of the big predators made a kill and gorged, the scavengers appear: jackals, hyenas, vultures. Our ancestors may have worked together. One or more scare off the other scavengers while others rip at the carcass. They run away and share the prize. Or it might have been cooperative hunting, where the victory is, again, shared.

Chimpanzees and other primates in and near our line of evolution do not cooperate in hunting. They may work side by side, but if they succeed, there is no sharing. Every chimp grabs what it can, whether or not it participated in the hunt.

In either case, or otherwise, about two million years ago, they began to use tools. Maybe they started with sticks and rocks. Eventually they learned how shape tools. This is a learned and teachable behavior.

Social cooperation requires the ability to recognize the existence of others as similar to oneself. When I feel a certain way, my body does X. If I see a creature doing X, I assume they feel like I would if I exhibited that behavior. From there, more and more complex social interactions can develop. Hunting can proceed by explicit agreement. Simple hand signals and noises can be used to indicate planning and the means of cooperation.

Over the next 1.6 million years, brains gradually grow larger. From the shape of fossil skulls we can guess that the parts of the head that grew are those necessary to accommodate the parts of the brain used in social interactions. The larger heads change the way the female body was shaped and the way they gave birth. The difficulty of birth required increased social cooperation, probably centered on the females.

The infants were dependent far longer than their primate ancestors. This was another force leading to increased social cooperation. Bohannon speculates that the primary source of language was the interaction of mother and infant, because they spent so much time together. Eventually we became Human, and as Graeber and Wengrow put it: we began doing human things.

Some evidence

There are a number o papers showing that there are regions in primate brains that are specific to facial recognition. There other papers  showing that primates make and recognize some facial expressions. Another group says that the parts of the brain responsible for speech are separate from the parts that perform thinking operations.

1. Facial-recognition regions. In this article from Scientific American, Doris Y. Tsao, a professor at Berkeley, explains how she and her colleagues discovered specific regions in the brain whose function is to recognize faces.  She performed fMRI studies on monkeys, creatures with whom we share a common ancestor. When fellow scientists objected that fMRI is inconclusive, she and her colleagues tested individual neurons in the patches, and found that all but a tiny number of cells in those patches responded solely to faces.

2. Primates recognize individual faces of conspecifics (members of their species) and some recpgmize human faces. They also read at least a few emotions from the facial expressions of conspecifics. A example is the teeth-bared grimace, which has different meanings in different species. It is common among chimpanzees, monkeys of many species, and in some canids. The teeth-bared grimace can look somewhat like the human smile. It is used in several papers I read as an example of the evolutionary roots of human facial expressions. Here’s one example from 2001. From the introduction:

One of the central questions in human evolution is the origin of human sociality and ultimately, human culture. In the search for the origin of social intelligence in humans, much attention is focused on the evolution of the brain and consciousness. Many aspects of human cognition and behavior are best explained with reference to millions of years of evolution in a social context Human brainpower can thus be explained, in part, by increasing social demands over the course of human prehistory. Cites omitted.

3. We do not need words to think. This was news to me, because I have a bare acquaintance with the fundamental ideas of Noam Chomsky. But this article in Scientific American asserts that the regions of the brain used in problem-solving are separate from the centers used in language.  The paper surveys dozens of studies. It finds several kinds of evidence.

First, there are studies of thinking in aphasic people. These are people who cannot use language, but nevertheless are able to solve problems, make plans, read faces and perform other tasks requiring mental processing.

Second, there are many fMRI studies showing that when people are solving problems, like doing Sudoku, the speech centers are not active.

Third, language is optimized for communication, not for thinking. There are ambiguities in words and sentence structures that would make problems solving fuzzy.

The areas of the brain that do language are late developments. We didn’t need complex language to survive. We could learn the techniques for knapping rocks into tools by watching and practicing. But the more we learn, the more we need language to share knowledge. If we think of knowledge as an internal state of mind, we can see language as a way to communicate that knowledge, that internal state, to others.

It seems me that each of these supports the idea that human evolution is oriented towards social cooperation. Our survival as a species has been built around our ability to work together to survive together. For us, evolution isn’t driven by the survival of an individual, but by the survival of our group. Our genes aren’t just ours, we share many of them with others in our kinship group. For most of our evolutionary history, kinship was at the root of our social groups. At least I think that’s probably so. Thus, if our cousins survive, many of our genes go with them.

But cooperation isn’t the only mode of interaction. All of our abilities can be used for more than one purpose. For example, our social skills can be used to deceive others. That’s always been true, and some of our primate relatives can do it too. We should assume that our earliest ancestors could and did take advantage of those skills and use them for individual gain. And we should assume that societies develop systems for coping with those non-cooperative behaviors. I think deception developed side by side with our social skills, and may have driven our social evolution to some extent.

But I think that at bottom, cooperation is a fundamental aspect of our selves, and that the capacity to deceive is a variant of cooperation skills. I think our first social control systems developed out of cooperation in reaction to those who refused to cooperate. Is that too optimistic?

Implications

This story is the opposite of the dominant theory of our times, neoliberalism. Our society tells us that we are nothing more than isolated individuals competing in a fiercely competitive arena for the resources we need to survive. Neoliberalism is at the heart of US capitalism, the economic system established by the rich and powerful. Many of our own ancestors fought back against aggressive capitalists, but were crushed again and again by a combination of state and federal armed forces, and private armies.

Of course, we don’t teach that history any more, but you can get a start reading A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn. We occasionally remember that Black people resisted, sometimes violently, but we never talk about the coal miners, the factory workers, and small farmers resisting the grotesque demands of the filthy rich. These men and women fought together. I mean literal fighting, with guns and pitchforks. Eventually they won minimal legal protection.

Then their children threw it away. They bought into a story about Lone Rangers and Honest Sheriffs and Invisible Hands.

These are people who don’t know their own history. Maybe we need to teach them their about their ancestors. All of their ancestors.

 

 

Conclusion To Series On The Dawn Of Everything

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The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow has 525 pages of text. I’ve discussed 10 of the 12 chapters in the last 14 months, and it’s time to move on. I’ll conclude this series with a few ideas triggered by the book.

1. The authors show that human societies didn’t follow any particular pattern of change. We didn’t move from foraging to agriculture to industrialization along a single track. We didn’t grow from bands to tribes to clans to small hamlets to towns to cities to nation-states. We didn’t move from one form of social organization to another in any particular order. Instead, the crucial factor is human agency. Agency is the antithesis of the mindlessness of Darwin-style evolution. People make choices. Genes don’t.

2. Greaber and Wengrow are clear about their biases. Among other things they think the current state of society is based on social inequality, and that this is bad. One of the principle themes of the book is laid out as a section heading at p. 111: Why The Real Question Is Not “What Are The Origins Of Social Inequality’ But ‘How Did We Get Stuck?’ They don’t answer the question directly, but it’s likely they think one of the central problems is domination.

In Chapter 10 they say that societies are held together by domination, which can take three forms, sovereignty (control of violence), control of knowledge, and charisma, which operates through virtues approved by the group, such as strength or rhetoric. Each of these can be used to achieve and perpetuate social inequality.

3. The authors think that societies have a shared mental component that links members and separates them from other groups. In ancient societies people shared creation myths or other cosmogonies, rituals, cultic practices, totems, and social practices. We moderns do too. In this post I suggested that

… we Americans share a sort of secular religion based on the founding myths of our country and a weak allegiance to what Jefferson called “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. The latter is a formulation that originally meant Natural Law but I think now includes a science-based mental stance and values based on a vaguely Christian moral sense. The founding myths include our commitment to freedom, as “all men are created equal”; a government of laws, not of men; a form of capitalism; and representative democracy.

By “vaguely Christian moral sense”, I meant something like the Golden Rule, and that this Rule was given to us from something greater than our mortal selves. Each of us has many more beliefs, some fully supported by fact and reason, many less so, and some perfectly arbitrary, such as a preference between forks and chopsticks, or certainty that the end times are upon us.

One important mental component that holds citizens of the US together is a shared commitment to the idea that this is a nation of laws, not of men. We had a general agreement that we would select our leaders, and adhere to the laws and rules they enacted. There’s still some truth there even in these days of Republican treachery.

4. Control of knowledge is a powerful tool. In Chapter 10 the authors describe an ongoing problem in pre-dynastic Egypt, around 3500 BCE: whether the dead require food and drink, and if so, what. The answer turns out to be they need leavened bread and wheat beer. There is no known explanation for this. Skeptics might suggest the priests who gave this answer really liked leavened bread and wheat beer. In any event, this answer required a vast increase in the amount of wheat to satisfy the needs of all of the dead people. That led to vast increases in agriculture, away from the fertile floodplains of the Nile, increased need for irrigation, additional labor, accounting bureaucracies, and debt peonage. The baseless idea of feeding the dead changed the course of human history.

Many of the societies described in the book believed that their gods demand sacrifices of animals, food, or even human beings. We see this among the Aztecs, and in Gen. 4:3 and Gen. 22:2, for example. These ideas don’t ever really disappear. For example, the idea of helping one’s dead ancestors shows up in Chinese use of joss paper.

These ideas seem strange to me, even for the ancients. That’s because they are perfectly abstract. There is no way to verify them, or to justify them other than stories. And yet human beings have always acted on stories, and those actions shape whole societies.

5. At present, it seems to me that our mutual commitment to the rule of law is threatened by a drive to dominate and control knowledge. In most advanced societies knowledge was largely generated and vetted in and through an academic culture. Because of this commitment, no one cared that I read existentialist and surreal texts in college in the 60s, and no one cared that my history class was heavy on criticism of Gilded Age capitalism. Everyone assumed that it was important that as we got older we replace our child’s version of philosophy and of our history with a more adult ideas. Universities were thought to be the training grounds for leadership. Why would you want ignorant leaders, trained on a bunch of Young Adult stories?

But now intellectual pursuits, such fields of study as Critical Race Theory, deconstruction, the history of Reconstruction in the US, and gender studies are the subject of political hostility. For at least the last 50 years private interests have been trying to take control of information. Think of tobacco companies and their scientists lying about their cancer-causing products. Exxon and its scientists concealed the dangers of climate breakdown while fighting changes in energy policy. Someone found a bunch of doctors to attack vaccines. The right-wing media dumps lies into the minds of its audience. Now politicians are reaching directly into the intellectual formation of college students, hoping to hide people and histories they don’t like and that don’t fit the Potemkin World they’ve created.

That Potemkin World is the endpoint sought by the reactionaries who have dumped billions into the project of knowledge control. They’re motivated by their desire to protect and extend their wealth, and defuse any opposition to their control. I see an obvious analogy to the priests of Egypt who divined that the dead needed wheat beer.

Graeber and Wengrow say “As soon as we were human we started doing human things.” P. 82. And apparently we keep doing them even when they make as little sense as feeding the dead with expensive wheat products or risking the future of the earth to make a few bucks.

The Search For The Origins Of The State

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Related posts

Posts on The Dawn Of Everything: Link
Posts on Pierre Bourdieu and Symbolic Violence: link
Posts trying to cope with the absurd state of political discourse: link
Posts on Freedom and Equality. link

In Chapter 10 of The Dawn Of Everything the authors, David Graeber and David Wengrow, take up the search for the origins of the state. They discuss current theories of the nature of the state. They provide a different framework for understanding the term in ancient times, and even suggest that the earliest versions of these organizational structures were part-time, just as agriculture was part-time. Then they give examples of how their theory works.

Theories of the State

Today almost everyone lives under the governance of a nation-state. The generally accepted definition was suggested by Rudolph von Ihering in the late 1800s and is now associated with Max Weber: “… any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory….” P. 359. But that’s not the way things worked in the earliest large groups.

Marxists suggested that states emerged to protect the power of an emerging ruling class, but the authors reject this theory.

A third theory is quite common: as the population in any area increases, you need top-down authority to coordinate and plan. But, as we’ve seen, this isn’t right, because a large number of ancient polities operated quite well without an autocratic leader endowed with the power of violence.

The authors suggest that at least for ancient societies we should consider three factors:

  • Sovereignty, meaning the control of violence directed at members of the group and the right to authorize other to inflict violence;
  • Administration, meaning control over information. This can be of two kinds. Frequently it means factual information necessary to keep things operating, for example taxes due and collected, or corvée obligations. Particularly in early societies it means esoteric or cultic knowledge, for example, explanations of the cosmos and the roles of people in it.
  • Charisma, meaning a personal power of persuasion that enables one to dominate others.

Each of these factors is a form of dominance, which the authors see as the basis of the state. The authors rephrase the search for the origins of the state from their perspective:

How did large-scale forms of domination first emerge, and what did they actually look like? What, if anything, do they have to do with arrangements that endure to this day? P. 370.

Dominance in early societies

This material takes up most of the chapter. The authors give examples of societies organized under one form of dominance, which they call First-Order Societies, then societies with two of the forms of dominance, Second-Order Societies. The material is fascinating, and the examples support the use of their categories. I’m only going to discuss one illustration, the Chavin Culture, a pre-Inca group located on the western slopes of the Andes down to the sea near what is now Lima Peru.

This culture seems to have arisen around 3000 BCE, and flowered around 1200 BCE. It lasted another 800 years before disappearing. The authors say there is little evidence of the use of violence, no evidence of a formal bureaucracy, and no evidence of a monarch with sovereign or political power.

The archaeological record is dominated by imagery, primarily carved stone. Here’s a description.

Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament; human faces grow snake-like fangs, or contort into a feline grimace. No doubt other figures escape our attention altogether. Only after some study do even the most elementary forms reveal themselves to the untrained eye. With due attention, we can eventually begin to tease out recurrent images of tropical forest animals – jaguars, snakes, caimans – but just as the eye attunes to them they slip back from our field of vision, winding in and out of each other’s bodies or merging into complex patterns. P. 388.

The authors characterize these as “shamanic journeys to the world of chthonic spirits and animal familiars.” The society was held together by rituals and cultic knowledge. The people seem to have enjoyed rituals oriented to hallucinogenic substances made from local plants.

This is an example of a First-Order Society.

Discussion

1. I do like the idea of a stoner kingdom.

2. The authors possibly think that societies are held together through domination. Like power, this is a term they don’t discuss. I did a digression on power, link above. I’ve discussed Pierre Bourdieu’s work on domination, link above. And I’ve discussed some current ideas about freedom, which is the complement to the idea of both, link above.

But they give plenty of examples where that isn’t so. In fact, they seem to think we’d be better off if we lived without domination, or at least in a society where decisions are made in a more democratic system. That contradiction is confusing.

3.

Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads. P. 276.

Large social units may exist in the imagination, but they have roots in reality. I live in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. I only know a few of my neighbors, but we are bound together by a number of links. We care about local schools, local traffic, local businesses and our parks in a particular way. If these are threatened, say by a local developer trying to replace a park or increase the traffic burden, we cooperate to deal with it.

I’m bound to other Chicagoans by crucial ties: they staff my doctor’s office, my dry cleaner, and my grocery store, and everything else I need. My life is smooth and pleasant because of them. I care that they are safe and healthy. I care that they have paved streets so they can get to work, and so I care about the people who pave those streets, clear off the snow, fill the potholes, and replace the bulbs in the stoplights. I want everybody’s kids to have good schools, just like I want good schools for my grandkids.

We have other ties. We like brats and argue about pizza. We ride public transport and we talk about the best way to get around in our miserable traffic. We go to movies, theater, concerts, and restaurants together. We can always talk about something here that affects us all, the latest corruption story, property taxes, who the Bears should draft, and the weather.

As I read it, the authors think those ties are strong enough to pull us together as a group without a dominating force.

4. Each of the societies described in the book has a mental component that goes deeper than just being neighbors. They share rituals, cosmologies, stories about themselves as a people, cultic practices, and there’s a shared understanding of themselves as a group. These are taught to children and reinforced by ritual and practice throughout the lives of members. They are at least as important to the maintenance of the group as any of the forms of dominance.

The Founders rejected the idea of a state religion, and we’ve mostly abandoned cultic practices. I think we Americans share a sort of secular religion based on the founding myths of our country and a weak allegiance to what Jefferson called “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence. The latter is a formulation that originally meant Natural Law but I think now includes a science-based mental stance and values based on a vaguely Christian moral sense. The founding myths include our commitment to freedom, as “all men are created equal”; a government of laws, not of men; a form of capitalism; and representative democracy.

This, roughly, is the mental component that up til now has bound us into a nation. I think the authors miss this point.
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Photo credit: Cbrescia.

Egalitarian Cities In Early Central America

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Befor I read Chapter 9 of The Dawn Of Everything I thought all the Pre-Columbian Central American societies were monarchies, and that they all practiced violent rituals, including lethal ball games and ritual human sacrifices. David Graeber and David Wengrow describe a city, Teotihuacan, and a city-state,Tlaxcala, that were not.

Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan was founded around 100 BCE in the Valley of Mexico, where Mexico City is today. It grew into a city aided by an influx of people fleeing an earthquake and a volcanic eruption. It seems to have started with a traditional top-down authoritarian regime. There were huge constructions including the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and other public buidings. Around 250-350 CE there was a dramatic change in the organization of the city.

A key piece of evidence is the desecration of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and the construction of a new center of organization along the Avenue of the Dead. At the same time, they built stone apartment complexes to house the population, which is estimated at 125,000. The authors cite the work of an early excavator who thought these apartments were a form of social housing, designed to bring order to the growing population. The authors paint an idyllic picture of a communal commercial life.

We don’t know exactly how the city was organized or governed in the later period, but the authors say we an probably rule out a top-down form of government. The city lasted for about 250 years in this form, and then it collapsed, perhaps under the strain of rising class inequalities, perhaps exacerbated by a long period of drought.

By around AD 550, the social fabric of the city had begun to come apart at the seams. There is no compelling evidence of foreign invasion. Things seems to have disintegrated from within. Almost as suddenly as it had once coalesced some five centuries previously, the city’s population dispersed again.… P. 345.

This history is broadly similar to that in Wikipedia.

Tlaxcala

Tlaxcala was an independent group of four small kingdoms formed in the 14th Century to stand against their Aztec neighbors, the Triple Alliance. The authors say it was a democratic entity that governed itself by consensus. The primary evidence for this is records of their decision to ally with the army of Hernan Cortés in 1519. The description of the decision-making process given by the authors sounds a lot like that of the Native Americans of the Great Lakes region discussed in earlier chapters. Of course, once the Spanish destroyed the Aztecs, they subjugated and evangelized the peoples of Tlaxcala.

Here’s the relevant part of a brief Wiki entry, which gives a somewhat different history, and ignores the organization issue. Both accounts discus the Flower Wars. The Wiki entry says the Flower Wars were ritual combat intended to demonstrate the machismo of the participants, and were less lethal than the wars of conquest. The authors say these were real wars, and that the Aztecs made up this story about the Flower Wars to cover up their inability to conquer the Tlaxcall people; “But this was braggadocio.” P. 348.

Discussion

1. Mesoamerican art of this era is remarkable, as the authors note. Here’s an article describing some of it. There’s a Nova episode on the archaeology of the Maya people. This and other material got me to thinking about the role of religious beliefs in the ancient cultures described by the authors. One of the central factors is the role of religion in the power structure of cultures like the Aztecs and Maya, and many others, including our own.

2. The book does not discuss of the origins of religion in ancient societies. Instead of religion, we are told that our ancestors participated in rituals, in the case of Teotihuacan, “calendrical rituals”. All of the cultures discussed in The Dawn of Everything had rituals, fertility rituals for humans and agriculture, rituals for the beginning of the new year, rituals for rain, and so on. We might think of them as precursors of organized religion.

Decades ago I read Mircea Eliade’s book, The Myth Of The Eternal Return, which I stole from my mother’s bookshelves. Eliade offers a framework for understanding the mindset that adheres to ritual. It starts with the differentiation of the sacred and the profane. This is from Wikipedia:

According to Eliade, traditional man distinguishes two levels of existence: (1) the Sacred, and (2) the profane world. (Here “the Sacred” can be God, gods, mythical ancestors, or any other beings who established the world’s structure.) To traditional man, things “acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality”. Something in our world is only “real” to the extent that it conforms to the Sacred or the patterns established by the Sacred. Fn. omitted.

The entire Wiki entry is worth reading, and for those interested the book is full of valuable material and fascinating speculation. Fun fact: I first heard of the Epic Of Gilgamesh from this book, and I recall spending a long afternoon at the library of the University of North Carolina reading it in 1970.

I can’t find my copy of the book so I don’t know if Eliade discusses Mesoamerican beliefs. But we can find hints that these people believed that they were participating in the divine through human and animal sacrifice and human bloodletting. See this and this.

3. In many ancient societies the monarch, ostensibly an earthly power, became a deity. In Eliade’s terms, this is a melding the Sacred and profane. We see this in some of the Mesoamerican societies, and in Egypt, for example. A weak version of the idea continues into the 17th Century under the concept of the Divine Right of Kings, one of the ideas rejected by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence (“All men are created equal”.) We can see echoes of it today in the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity, which arises from the idea that the king holds power under the aegis of the Almighty. Therefore the king can do no wrong and cannot be sued. This bizarre notion was imported from English Common Law into US law without much thought, and despite Jefferson’s principle. Now there’s a zombie idea.

4. The effort to link religion and political power exists today in the US and other nations. You might get the impression that some religious leaders see their religion as a stepping-stone to earthly power.

The Rise Of Cities In Eurasia

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Chapter 7 of The Dawn Of Everything shows that the rise of agriculture around the world shows a pattern similar to that of the Fertile Crescent, discussed here. To be sure, the mechanisms vary, the staple foods vary and the mix of foraging and farming vary, but in each case, people slowly domesticate plants and farm animals, and switch between hunting and gathering and agriculture, and work out methods for sharing resources. There is not a single linear story, just a general increase in the amount of farming and a reduction in foraging over a span of several thousand years.

Chapter 8 takes up the rise of cities. The standard story is that when people live in large groups they need a hierarchical organization, like monarchy. One of the main points Graeber and Wengrow make is that merely living together in large numbers doesn’t imply any particular form of political organization, or that there is anything we would recognize as political organization. In Chapters 8 and 9, we get a look at the various ways people lived together in the earliest large groups we have uncovered so far.

The earliest large settlements, tens of thousands of people, seem to date back about six or seven thousand years. These early settlements have some things in common. They seem to be laid out in an orderly way, in grids or circles, and smaller subdivisions. Where we have written records, there are grand statements of civic unity, and often the residents refer to themselves in terms like The Sons And Daughters Of the City. We see evidence of infrastructure, like roads, market places, meeting spaces, and ritual spaces. We also see some cities with more advanced infrastructure, storage facilities, drainage and sewer systems, and open spaces.

There is evidence that people came from all over to live in these cities. The standard story says for most of human history people lived in groups based on kinship, so members lived mostly with an extended family. Gradually these groups accreted into cities. The authors have a different theory.

There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much. And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else. Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them. P. 279-80

These escapees would naturally look for pleasant places to live, places with abundant foraging and hunting, and most important, other people.

Rather than replicate the authors’ description of these early cities, I will give links to sites describing them. These have good descriptions, with maps and photographs of the sites and objects found there. Here I give only limited discussion focused on political arrangements as described by the authors.

Megasites

The earliest large settlements we know about now are in Ukraine, founded 6-7,000 years ago and occupied for hundreds of years. Here’s a description of one called Nebelivka.

This article agrees with Graber and Wengrow that there is no evidence of a central authority, or rulers or large wealth or class disparities. The settlement seems to have some form of self-government, possibly through communal meetings at the assembly houses. The article also notes that other excavators think the sites were not occupied year round. Instead they think it was used part of the year, or regularly by groups of pilgrims.

Uruk

Uruk is thought to be the first large city in Mesopotamia. There are settlements there dating back to at least 5000 BCE, and the city emerges around 3500 BCE. The city and the kingdoms associated with it, Assyria and Babylonia, are mentioned in the Bible, a fact that led 19th Century archaeologists to search for them. Here’s a long Wikipedia entry on Uruk, worth reviewing just for the pictures.

Graeber and Wengrow claim that the earliest incarnations of Uruk were not monarchies. They base that assertion on the lack of the visible signs of monarchies: “palaces, aristocratic burials and royal inscriptions, along with defensive walls for cities and organized militia to guard them.” P. 298. These do begin to appear later, around 2800 BCE. This seems to conflict with the Wiki entry, which is based on a Sumerian document dated around 2800, the Sumerian King List. It may be that a lot of the early history of this area mixes myth and fact. Some of it reminds me of The Epic of Gilgamesh, and it may be that the early histories are attempts to justify the monarchy.

We know a lot about Uruk because they developed cuneiform script around 3500 BCE. Excavators have found vast amounts of written material, enough to form a good idea of the social organization of the city. It appears that there were local councils and councils of elders and other groups, so that everyone had some kind of representation. These councils continued in different forms long after kings took over the primary role of rulers.

Mohenjo-daro

Mohenjo-daro is a city on the Indus River in Pakistan. It dates back to about 2600 BCE, and was abandoned about 800 years later. There are pictures and description in this Wikipedia entry. There are two levels in the city. The most striking building here is a gigantic pool located on raised brick structure in the upper part of the city. You can see it in this short National Geograpphic video.

There isn’t much evidence of wealth inequality in the early part of the city’s history. Graeber and Wengrow tell us that there is no evidence of wealth or power in the upper city. In the lower city we find jewelry and other signs of wealth everywhere, and not concentrated in a few sites. There are also tools and craft equipment all over the lower town, but not in the upper town.

The upper town seems to be focused on the baths and other public buildings. The authors speculate that the people who lived the residents sought purity rather than wealth or power. They suggest that residents of the upper town constituted a proto-caste, a precursor to the Brahmin caste, and that the residents of the lower town were grouped into other castes. They say there is no evidence for kings or other charismatic leaders in this town or in the other towns in the area. They speculate that these cities had some form of communal governance.

Eventually the townspeople moved to the higher level. Apparently a few people began to accumulate great wealth, as the later residences on the upper level are grander, and have craft spaces attached. And then the city was abandoned.

Taosi

The first three cities seem to have begun without kings or powerful figures like priests. The fourth city, Taosi, in northern China, seems to have been formed under a hierarchical system. Taosi dates back to about 2200 BCE, a millennium before the first named dynasty, the Shang. Here’s a fascinating report from Chinese authorities, tying Taosi to the Emperor Yao, previously thought to be fictional.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry. The article says that Chinese archaeologists believe that the city collapsed after a rebellion against the ruling class. Graeber and Wengrow acknowledge this possibility. They agree that there was a rebellion, as evidenced by pits with human remains showing torture and murder. But then the city walls were razed, and the city expanded and remained for another 200 years. They suggest that the overthrow of the elites was followed by a prosperous and more egalitarian period.

Next we look at some Mesoamerican cities.

Pastoral Power

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Index to posts in this series

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In his paper The Subject And Power, Foucault moves from a focus on individual resistance to power to a focus on the power of the state. There is no transition, but we can draw an inference. The examples he uses are personal and individual, women resisting male oppression, children struggling against the authority of their parents, and sick people struggling against the medical profession. For centuries, oppressed people looked to religion for surcease from their earthly misery. Now, both the dominant and oppressed people appeal to the State to support their positions. Foucault thinks the state can respond to the demands of the oppressed because it has assumed what he calls “pastoral power”.

We first saw the concept of pastoral power in one of my early posts on Foucault, a discussion of a series of his lectures published as Security, Territory and Population. The first part of that post gives a good picture of the pastoral power, and some of its implications.

In his lecture of February 8, 1978, Foucault takes up the issue of “pastoral power”. He says that the idea that one could govern men has its origins in the Mediterranean East, Assyria, Egypt, the Levant, and Israel, where it applies both to the government of souls by religious leaders and to the government of societies by secular rulers, both claiming the authority of the Almighty. The model for pastoral power is the New Testament figure of the Good Shepherd. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.” John 10:11.

Most people are familiar with this set of ideas about governance, as it is common in religious groups, and in secular governments as well. It is fundamentally beneficent .…

In the paper, Foucault points out that the pastoral power is directed at the individual, specifically at the spiritual salvation of the individual. The pastor will do anything to insure salvation for each member of the flock, including self-sacrifice. Foucault says that the pastor can only succeed by knowing everything about the individual. Thus, the power is individualizing, as well as totalizing.

The ecclesiastical form of pastorate doesn’t have the same power it did 300 years ago, but the form has shifted to the secular power. In theory, at least, the goal of the secular pastorate is to insure human flourishing, in the language we use today. The state may not be willing or able to sacrifice itself to secure human flourishing, but it does demand the right to total knowledge, or something close in practice.

Foucault thinks the modern state should be seen from its birth in the late 1700s

… as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.

Over time, all of the institutions of society are reorganized to include the forms of pastoral power, the police, private institutions (professional associations, corporations, foundations, universities), the family, and even to some extent the economy. At least in theory, they all take responsibility for creating conditions suitable for individual flourishing. Foucault writes

…the multiplication of the aims and agents of pastoral power focused the development of knowledge of man around two roles: one, globalizing and quantitative, concerning the population; the other, analytical, concerning the individual.

Foucault’s concern is that the totalizing State has the power to tie people to specific identities, which bind and limit people, and which can be used to restrict fundamental freedoms. Foucault asks what kind of human develops in this setting. What are we? Not what am I, as Descartes asks, but what is the nature of humans in this setting. This is the conclusion of this section of the paper:

The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state’s institutions but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.

Discussion

1. The concluding statement takes us back to the project laid out in The Dawn Of Everything: how did we get stuck in this place? What other forms of society have existed in the past that might shed light on new possibilities? As we will see there is a connection between the priestly/pastoral power and the mammoth increase in organized wheat cultivation in the Nile Delta beginning around 4500 BCE. See p. 404 et seq. The connection also extends to the origins of a kind of state power.

Roughly the story is that the priests started teaching that dead kings required offerings of wheat beer and leavened bread in order to cross over to the afterlife. Gradually everyone wanted the same food and drink for the journey of their own beloved dead. The increased demand for wheat led to more intensive agricultural practices and to the cultivation of less arable land. That required different social organization. Poorer people went into debt to get these essentials, and that led to a more complex economy.

All this was in furtherance of a religious belief, a belief that was only, if vividly, imaginary. I’ll come back to this in discussing Chapter 10.

2. Foucault doesn’t use the term “human flourishing”, but that’s what we call it now. One question we might ask is are there ranges of human flourishing that we can’t perceive because we are so wrapped up in the totalizing power of the pastorate as instated in our contemporary capitalist society? To start with an easier form of this question, consider the movies. Currently we are swamped with superheroes, and our screens are dominated by chiseled bodies and preposterous plots. I’m a bit worried that this does affect our collective imagination.

3. Not everyone loves the idea of a pastoral government, Some people don’t want to help others. Some really hate the idea that, in Lincoln’s formulation (not Jefferson’s), all men are created equal. Some believe government should not take care of people because that’s the role of religion and charity as it was in some early Christian societies. All of these people resist the current vision of the pastoral power of the state.

These and others have worked assiduously to persuade people that state exercise of pastoral power is illegitimate. That’s one way to read the political history of the US since the Reagan Administration. The pendulum has been swinging away from pastoral power to power based on strict market discipline. Maybe some of the other events we’ve seen lately are signs of people pushing back against what they perceive as illegitimate state exercise of pastoral power.

  • Chinese anger over zero-Covid policies
  • The uprising against the morality police in Iran
  • The rise of authoritarians like Victor Orban supported by the very rich
  • Our barely functioning politics coupled with judicial overreach working together to limit the power of the federal government to help people flourish

Women Led The Move To Farming

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In Chapter 6 of The Dawn Of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow describe the gradual move of Neolithic people to farming, and explore its relation to egalitarianism. The usual story is that our ancestors were roughly egalitarian from the beginning to the Neolithic era 10 to 12,000 years ago. Then we discovered farming, took it up wholesale in what is called the Agricultural Revolution, and almost immediately men took over and excluded women from significant participation in governance. The story has a ring of the Garden of Eden story, in which the sudden possession of knowledge is the end of a golden age.

This story is wrong in almost every detail. Obviously it’s wrong because we have practically no information about social organization among people before the Neolithic. The authors think it’s likely that there were many different forms of social organization, including those which operated differently in different seasons and for specific purposes.

Another issue lies in the definition of farming. We have a single word for this, but all the evidence is that there are gradations of cultivation of plants and animals for human purposes. Foragers certainly observed the plants that kept them alive. It’s easy to imagine that they protected plants that produced fruits and vegetables they liked, and took steps to help them grow. They may have cleared out space for them, pruned them back, and maybe even carried water to them in dry periods. Simple observation and a bit of work would improve the yield and made their lives easier.

In the early Neolithic, beginning perhaps 10-12000 years ago a more organized way of farming developed in the Fertile Crescent. Here’s a useful map identifying some of the sites mentioned by the authors. The authors divide this area into the lowlands towards the South and the uplands and high steppes towards the North and East.

By GFDL, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org

The Lowlands

The Lowlands include a lot of marshy muddy areas near rivers and lakes and artesian springs. Lowlands People used mud and clay for building. This created a use for straw, which comes from the stalks of various wild grasses, including wheat, barley and rye. These grew wild in the Uplands. The Lowlands peoples traded shells and other goods from the South for the wild grasses. This gave them both straw and a new source of food, from the seeds.

Lowlands people foraged and hunted, and kept domesticated sheep and goats. They were adept at flood retreat farming. In the spring the rivers, lakes and marshes overflow, and lay down layers of fertile and wet alluvial soil. People just threw seeds on the new soils and crops would grow quickly with minimal labor. There’s no need to till, weed, or water.

Flood retreat farming doesn’t rely on ownership of property, because the fertile areas change from year to year. It also doesn’t require a lot of centralized organization, merely some rules for sharing the crops. Then, over time, people gradually figured out how to domesticate the grasses to produce more of the edible seeds.

The authors point out the gendered assumptions behind the standard story: the idea that it was men who led the move to farming, because farming is hard work, too hard for the ladies. There are other weird reasons based on Genesis and endemic patriarchy.

Consciously or not, it is the contributions of women that get written out of such accounts. Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity, and may be gendered female even when practised by men. This is not quite an anthropological universal, but it’s about as close to one as you are ever likely to get. P. 237.

In the Lowlands, women were deeply involved with flood retreat farming and other aspects of economic life, and these contributions were recognized in the artifiacts discovered in recent escavation. One example is Çatalhöyük, a town on the above map. It was founded around 7400 BCE and was occupied for about 1500 years, with a population of about 5000. There are no monumental structures or other buildings typical of hierarchical societies. There are a whole lot of small clay figurines of women. These used to be interpreted as goddesses, but that was mostly because of weird projections of Victorian scientists. The authors think they honor the role of women, including old women, in the society.

The authors think that Lowlands men hunted wild beasts particularly in the colder months, and the women ran the forager/planting economy which ran most of the year. This is similar to other societies in which seasonal changes brought social change. The visual arts support the idea that women played a central, if separate, role in economic matters as well as leadership. The authors call it as ‘gynarchy’, or ‘gynaecocracy’. P. 218.

The Uplands

The people of the Uplands, mostly in what is now Central and Southeastern Turkey, relied on foraging and some management of wild crops, and the same domesticated animals as the Lowlands people. But the overall culture was very different. They used stone, not mud and clay, and built monumental structures with violent images carved in relief. Here is a description of the imagery at Göbekli Tepe, which is on the map.

Carved on these stone pillars is an imagery dominated by wild and venomous animals; scavengers and predators, almost exclusively sexed male. On a limestone pillar a lion rears up in high relief, teeth gnashing, claws outstretched, penis and scrotum on show. Elsewhere lurks a malevolent boar, its male sex also displayed. The most often repeated images depict raptors taking human heads. One remarkable sculpture, resembling a totem pole, comprises superimposed pairings of victims and predators: disembodied skulls and sharp-eyed birds of prey. Elsewhere, flesh-eating birds and other carnivores are shown grasping, tossing about or otherwise playing with their catch of human crania …. P. 242.

There is a lengthy discussion of the treatment of human skulls, a practice followed in the Lowlands as well, but very differently. This site shows some of the materials excavated in this region, including the characteristic T-shaped carved megaliths. Wikipedia has several interesting pics here.

There is no reason to think Uplands women did any less work, including foraging, farming, textile-weaving and basketry, than Lowlands women. But the visual culture ignores them almost completely, and the authors seem to think Uplands women were excluded from governance entirely.

Schismatogenesis

The people of these two regions, Uplands and Lowlands, were trading partners, so they knew about each other’s cultures. They had roughly the same kinds of foraging, cultivation, and herding techniques. But their visual culture shows vast difference. The Uplands were as the authors put it “predatory male” and the Lowlands were roughly egalitarian, treating women’s concerns equivalent to men’s. The authors think these cultural differences are the result of schismatogenesis, discussed in the previous post.

The differences between Uplands and Lowlands cultures show that the rise of farming didn’t lead to creation of gender differences, or hierarchical structures. This is another way the the traditional story is wrong.

Marija Gimbutas

This brings us to the work of Marija Gimbutas, an expert on the pre-history of Eastern Europe starting in the 1960s.

Gimbutas was largely concerned with trying to understand the broad contours of a cultural tradition she referred to as ‘Old Europe’, a world of settled Neolithic villages centring on the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean (but also extending further north), in which, as Gimbutas saw it, men and women were equally valued, and differences of wealth and status were sharply circumscribed. Old Europe, by her estimation, endured from roughly 7000 BC to 3500 BC – which is, again, quite a respectable period of time. She believed these societies to be essentially peaceful, and argued that they shared a common pantheon under the tutelage of a supreme goddess, whose cult is attested in many hundreds of female figurines – some depicted with masks – found in Neolithic settlements, from the Middle East to the Balkans. P. 216, fn omitted.

Old Europe was destroyed by cattle-herding invaders from the East. By the 1990s Gimbutas’ ideas had fallen into disrepute because they were adopted by Wiccans, pagans and other disfavored groups. The criticism came from men, not from women anthropologists or feminist scholars. Recent studies in population genetic supports Gimbutas’ theory. The treatment of Gimbutas parallels the erasure of the work done by Neolithic farming women.

A Slight Change of Subject

I’ll be taking up a side reading for this series, an essay by Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4. (Summer, 1982), pp. 777-795. It’s 20 pages long, not too difficult, but it will help flesh out some of Graeber and Wengrow’s ideas about group decision-making by our ancestors. There’s a discussion of the key ideas in a series of short podcasts by Greg Sadler on Apple Podcasts .

Cultural Differentiation In Non-Agricultural Societies

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Chapter 5 of The Dawn Of Everything By David Graeber and David Wengrow examines cultural differentiation between the peoples of Northern California and the peoples of the Pacific Northwest (the “PNW”) in the centuries before the arrival of White people. They argue that societies define themselves by opposition to other nearby societies. This they call schismatogenesis, a term I discuss here. They use the term culture areas to describe areas where inhabitants share a similar culture.

Cultural differentiation is the process by which the culture of a group of people evolves over time to be less like their neighbors. For example, the people of Northern California did not adopt agriculture, even though they were aware of the practice through contacts with nearby people who grew maize, squash and beans. They themselves grew tobacco and a few other crops, and the lands they occupied would easily have supported the practice. Similarly, they did not adopt a fishing life, as their neighbors to the north did. This process extends to things that have obvious utility. One group of Alaskans refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, while the Inuit refused to adopt their neighbor’s snowshoe technology.

The authors do not offer an explicit definition of culture, but generally it means such things as “… characteristic customs, aesthetic styles, ways of obtaining and preparing food, and forms of social organization.” P. 171. It also includes concepts of the sacred, and moral structures including ideas about how humans should live.

The dividing line between the Northern Californians and the PNW is approximately at the Klamath River which flows from southern Oregon through northern California out to the Pacific. The authors prefer to think of the Californians nearest to this border as living in a shatter zone, where the two main culture areas meet. This area evolved its own culture, radically different from its neighbors to the North and somewhat different from its neighbors to the South and East.

The cultural differences between these two groups are profound, perhaps in part because they evolved over several thousand years. The PNWs lived on salmon and other fish. They were experts at wood carving; their totem poles and war canoes are magnificent. They were boastful and status-hungry. The staple foods of Northern Californians were tree products, nuts and acorns. They were hard-working, self-reliant and abstemious. They were obsessed with money. Their decorations were primarily textiles and basketry. The differences go on and on.

One central difference is that the PNW raided other tribes for slaves who were put to work so that chiefs and nobles were able to live indolently. The Northern Californians rejected slavery, presumably because they believed in self-sufficiency, and living off the sweat of other people would be an affront to their honor.

The authors attribute this to intentional choices by each group. We are not people who keep slaves says one group. We are not people who work like dogs to make porridge says the other.

The authors say that cultural differentiation is a dominant theme in the history of human societies:

Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbours. P. 166.

The authors believe that we do this differentiation intentionally; that we think about the ways we are not like others, and that we emphasize and expand on those differences. Over time this leads to vastly different cultures. The effects are both significant, as slave-holding, and seemingly trivial, as the use of chopsticks instead of forks.

The last section of Chapter 5 lays out three conclusions.

a) The authors recognize that there isn’t just one cause for cultural differentiation. Economic constraints encourage or even necessitate certain choices. Language structures might play a role. But also, human agency (“the preferred term, currently, for what used to be called ‘free will’” p. 206) plays a part. In a book primarily about human freedom, it seems reasonable to give human agency a bigger role than others might suggest.

b)

Slavery, we’ve argued, became commonplace on the Northwest Coast largely because an ambitious aristocracy found itself unable to reduce its free subjects to a dependable workforce. The ensuing violence seems to have spread until those in what we’ve been calling the ‘shatter zone’ of northern California gradually found themselves obliged to create institutions capable of insulating them from it, or at least its worst extremes. A schismogenetic process ensued, whereby coastal peoples came to define themselves increasingly against each other. P. 207.

Then they draw the broader conclusion that slavery is a perversion of domestic life, the opposite of care, nurture and love that characterizes the home.

c) They say that hierarchy and equality emerge simultaneously. The Northern Californians practiced a form of equality where status was solely the outcome of living in a certain way. The PNW had a hierarchy based on treasures and hereditary titles. The two groupings emerged together.

Discussion

It does seem that people want to find markers to distinguish themselves from other people and at the same time connect themselves to their group more tightly. This is a plausible explanation for the Alaskan groups who refused to adopt kayaks and snowshoes despite their utility. Maybe we can see it in the anti-vaxxers who risk a sickening disease and even death rather than separate themselves in any way from their political comrades. The need for connection overwhelms the rational consideration of the evidence, maybe?

Maybe we can see it in the Protestant Reformation. In Northern Europe the religious revolution begun by Martin Luther was a way for people to separate themselves from the corruption and greed of the institutional Catholic Church which was increasingly obvious and oppressive. The schismatics claimed to be returning to true Christianity.

At the same time, elites saw the utility in using the fervor of rejection of the Temporal Power of the Vatican as a way to strengthen their own positions as the leaders of rising nation-states.

The authors use language that suggests something like town meetings to make decisions about adopting cultural changes. But it seems likely to me that a good bit of this kind of separation is driven by the preferences of elites. For example, Northern Californian elites show themselves through their accumulation of wealth by individuals. At death, wealth was destroyed, not passed to the next generation. These elites argue against slavery, and encourage others to work hard themselves, to be self-sufficient like the elites. This would provide a psychological boost to these elites and justify their choices.

On the other side, the PNW elites are identified by their hereditary wealth and titles, their prowess at war, and their their largesse in the potlatch. They use their own status and the glory of war to encourage the behaviors that benefit them materially.

I’m surprised that the authors don’t identify the elites as a major driver in this kind of differentiation. We’ll see this more clearly in future chapters.

The Sophistication Of Forager Societies

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Chapter 4 of The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow dispels myths about hunter-gatherer societies, the normal state for humans until the last few thousand years. The standard image is that these were small bands who roamed about looking for nuts and berries and killing small game. They were egalitarian in the sense that wealth and power were shared among all the mature members of the group. Then they discovered farming and began to develop civilization, hierarchies and bureaucracies.

Evidence of Sophistication

The authors have a more interesting story. For most of human history humans were foragers, hunter-gatherers. But they weren’t all roaming around. They lived in coastal plains, along rivers, and in fertile woodlands, mostly settled, but moving about from time to time. We don’t have any direct evidence of their lives or social structures, but we can speculate based on tools and other archaeological evidence.

We do know that they were travelers. There is evidence that some of them covered great distances at least once in a while to gather stones, shells, different foods. We also know they gathered together in relatively large numbers once or twice a year to build immense structures for unknown reasons. They transported huge stones over great distances,and moved enormous amounts of dirt in what had to be a coordinated effort That implies a lot more organization and planning than the simple-minded myth suggests.

One example I’ve actually seen is the Carnac Alignments, near Carnac in Brittany. Large stones were transported from far away and arranged in neat lines in increasing heights over about two kilometers from North to South. At the South end there is a circle of stones about 50 feet in diameter, each about 20 feet high, close together. Here’s a blog post by my fellow traveler with lots of pictures and description. There are similar sites all across Europe. No one has a clue why our ancestors thought doing this was a good idea.

Forager societies built enormous earthworks at sites around the world. One of the largest is at Poverty Point, Louisiana. There are a number of very large mounds, the significance of which is unclear. The authors think the construction relied on sophisticated geometrical knowledge. There are somewhat similar mound sites in Ohio.

Hunter-Gatherer Egalitarianism

The authors think we can gain insight into these early cultures by looking at ethnographic studies dating back to the earliest European newcomers, as well as studies of African, Australian and other forager societies that persisted into the 20th C.

The usual story about forager societies is that they are egalitarian in most respects. One theory is the simple idea that there is no property so everyone is equal. This ties neatly into the rest of the standard story of the evolution that Brought human beings to the present. Before farming was invented, it was very difficult to create the kinds of surpluses of material goods and food considered necessary for a complex society.

That doesn’t explain how our ancestors journeyed across the US Southeast to build those enormous mounds at Poverty Point. They must have been able to feed themselves, even without organized farming. Similarly, how did the Carnac culture get the food and shelter needed for the transport and construction of their site? Obviously there was enough food and material for shelter during travel and construction and return travel.

There was also some kind of organization sufficient to keep the construction going. It may not have been run by authoritarians. Perhaps it was consensual, or short-term hierarchies were created. We don’t know. But it’s a lot more than we attribute to forager societies in the usual telling.

Another idea about egalitarianism is that people insisted on personal autonomy.

What matters to Montagnais-Naskapi women, for instance, is not so much whether men and women are seen to be of equal status but whether women are, individually or collectively, able to live their lives and make their own decisions without male interference. P. 130.

This is egalitarian in the sense of personal liberty, personal freedom. It begins with the freedom from other people bossing one around.

Most people today also believe they live in free societies (indeed, they often insist that, politically at least, this is what is most important about their societies), but the freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely, formal freedoms. American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like – provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors – unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. P. 130-1; fn omitted.

The Origin Of Property Rights

At the end of Chapter 4, the authors offer a theory to explain the origin of private property. They say that our ancestors as far back as we know had only one type of property not shared in common: sacred objects and knowledge. These things are set apart from all others. In European culture private property is held against the whole world. No one is allowed to interfere with one’s ownership of private property. In that sense, the authors see a connection to the sacred.

…[W]e take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. ,,, Just as every man’s home is his castle, so your right not to be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on. P. 159; fn omitted.

Discussion

1. I shortened the discussion of the sacred on the ground that ethnographic data won’t translate back to our distant ancestors. The fact is that I don’t think much of the connection between the sacred and private property.

2. The idea of autonomy seems fairly close to Elizabeth Anderson’s ideas of freedom, which I have discussed in several posts in this series; see also links above.

3. The authors are looking for an explanation of how we got stuck in the present set of hierarchical arrangements dominated by a small number of people.

Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements. P. 128.

They also observe that a strong sense of personal freedom, of personal autonomy, seems to be the dominant trait of most hunter-gatherer societies. So, another way of defining the “stuck” problem might be ask how we acquiesced to our loss of personal freedom.

I don’t think we can find an answer to the author’s question in their book. I think we need a broader look. I wrote several posts at FireDogLake about Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: here and here. I think these help us get at the problem.

Maybe we’re stuck beause the ruling classes benefit are focused on preventing change that might inconvenience them and have arranged social structures that make that easy for them.