Thomas Hobbes, writing in the seventeenth century, thought that as we all have the same basic needs, life without a strong government to keep the peace would degenerate into a conflict of ‘each against all’: ‘if any two men desire the same thing, which … they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and … endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another’.211 His view of human beings as natural rivals – no doubt coloured by his experience of the English Civil War – meant that he saw the central problem of politics as one of maintaining a sovereign government capable of keeping the peace between opposed individuals. However, Hobbes largely failed to recognize the depth of our social nature: that as well as the ability to be each other’s worst rivals, we also, as a species, have the almost unique capacity to provide support for each other and share the essentials of life. We shall see in the next section that this is not only true of relationships between individuals, but was the prevailing form of social organization among our prehistoric ancestors.
We are so highly sensitized to whether our relationships are friendly or antagonistic because this has been fundamental to individual human well-being throughout our evolution. Whether people share and trust each other, or whether they stand as adversaries in access to necessities, determined the success and survival of our ancestors, shaped our evolutionary journey and the nature and importance of our relationships with others. That is why, even today, friendship and involvement in community life are, as we saw in the first chapter, such powerful determinants of health and happiness, and difficult or antagonistic relationships so damaging.
EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY
To understand the psychological and behavioural effects which equality and inequality have on us, we need only look briefly at some of the main features of social organization during the course of human evolution. At the broadest level, there have been three main periods of social organization in human development: pre-human dominance hierarchies; the egalitarian hunting and gathering societies of human prehistory; and, more recently, the hierarchical agricultural and industrial societies.
Dominance hierarchies are common among animals – baboons, macaque monkeys, chimpanzees, wolves, hyenas, to name but a few. Systems of ranking, from a dominant male at the top to the weakest subordinates at the bottom, determine which members of a group gain access to scarce resources and, as dominant males try to monopolize the females, also to reproductive opportunities. Though there are few clues to social organization in the pre-human fossil record, it is thought that the apes from which we are descended must also have lived in dominance hierarchies, as chimps and many other non-human primates still do. Much later burial evidence – from the Egyptian pyramids to European Bronze Age barrows – leaves no doubt that some people in those societies were of greater importance than others, but evidence about our pre-human ancestors is less plentiful. One of the few important clues as to how these pre-humans lived is the relative size of males and females. Where dominance hierarchies are the norm, the dominant males tend to be the larger and stronger animals. Because dominant males gain more access to females and females tend to prefer them as sexual partners, this selective breeding usually results in males becoming larger than females – so much so that the size differential is reliable evidence that dominance ranking has been a common form of social organization in a species. (The increase in the size of males resulting from male competition for mates doesn’t also increase female size because, like horns and canine teeth in animals, their larger size develops as a sex-linked characteristic.) Where males and females are the same size, that usually means something more like pair bonding has been the norm. Enough fossils have been found of at least one of the precursor species of modern humans (Australopithecus afarensis) to provide evidence of a size differential between the sexes indicating that ‘a strictly monogamous social structure would have been highly unlikely’.212, 213 Larger males than females indicates that larger males bred disproportionately, and implies that our predecessors probably lived, like chimps and gorillas, with a hierarchical rank ordering within their troops.
The implications for social anxiety of living in a dominance hierarchy are obvious: subordinates have to be careful of more dominant members of the group. As primatologists point out, subordinates who incur the displeasure of higher-ranking animals end up with numerous bite marks to show for it. As a result, most subordinates are constantly vigilant, apprehensive and nervous.214 But, in contrast to the evidence that our pre-human ancestors lived in dominance hierarchies which are likely to have left some psychological legacy in us, it is clear that throughout most of our specifically human prehistory, we lived in extraordinarily egalitarian hunting and gathering societies, in which food was shared and goods were passed between people, not through barter but through systems of reciprocal gift exchange.210, 215 In such societies social fears would no longer have been about dominance and subordination.
One of the most important but largely unrecognized features of human social organization is that, for about 95 per cent of the last 200,000–250,000 years of human existence, with brains their current size, human societies have been assertively egalitarian. Although generations of anthropologists have recognized, studied and written about the equality of hunter-gatherer societies, our egalitarian past remains virtually unknown to the public at large, and many people imagine that human nature is irredeemably competitive and self-serving.
A study which reviewed over a hundred anthropological accounts of twenty-four relatively recent hunter-gatherer societies from four different continents concludes:
There is no dominance hierarchy among hunter-gatherers. No individual has priority of access to food which … is shared. In spite of the marginal female preference for the more successful hunters as lovers, access to sexual partners is not a right which correlates with rank. In fact, rank is simply not discernible among hunter-gatherers. This is a cross cultural universal, which rings out unmistakably from the ethnographic literature, sometimes in the strongest terms.216
People in these societies ‘share food, not simply with kin or even just with those who reciprocate, but according to need, even when food is scarce’.216 This picture of our prehistoric past should be part of general education and taught in all basic courses in economics, politics and the social sciences. The evidence from hunting and gathering societies contains no suggestion of anything like the pattern seen among many other primates – where the dominant individuals eat first and monopolize access to females, and the subordinates eat only if there is enough left over after others have had their fill.
When people are first told of the highly egalitarian nature of prehistoric human societies, there is a widespread tendency to imagine that such statements must be based on a combination of very scant evidence strung together with guesswork and misplaced wishful thinking. Perhaps the most important reason why people find the evidence of an egalitarian human past so hard to accept is that they wrongly assume that it is a denial of a competitive human desire for status and dominance. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of how these societies worked.44, 217 The argument is not that people were – or human nature is – naturally egalitarian. The level of equality and co-operation found in these societies did not depend on some set of genetic characteristics which we have now lost. There is growing agreement among anthropologists that inequality was held in check because of what have been called ‘counter-’ or ‘reverse-dominance strategies’. Any single individual’s desire for dominance was effectively opposed by the other members of the group acting together to safeguard their personal autonomy and protect themselves from being dominated. Rather like the way alliances form among two or three high-ranking baboons or macaques to depose the alpha male, these early human societies seem to have worked as alliances consisting of everyone uniting against anyone who became too domineering.
This is the conclusion reached by Professor Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist who put together the most comprehensive collection of accounts of hunter-gatherer socie
ties ever assembled. It contains all the historical and contemporary accounts he could find, including those from early explorers, missionaries, colonial administrators and anthropologists. It now forms an electronically searchable database with details of social and political behaviour in some 150 such societies all over the world – ranging from Bushmen in the Kalahari and indigenous Australians, to the Inuit in the Arctic and Native American societies.
Before this project was completed, Boehm examined data from forty-eight egalitarian societies to analyse how they maintained their equality.217 In all these societies, he found examples of intentional strategies to prevent anyone from becoming too domineering. He concluded that the equality of these societies arose from a basic dislike of being dominated and the desire to preserve individual autonomy. People acted together against any attempt to be domineering.217
The change that made egalitarianism possible was not therefore in human nature itself, but in the effectiveness of social constraints on domineering and selfish alpha-male tendencies. Whenever individuals became too domineering or tried to gain more than their share, these tendencies were strongly opposed. ‘Counter-dominance’ or ‘reverse-dominance’ strategies included every method of curbing antisocial behaviour – from criticism, ridicule and public expressions of disapproval at the milder end, to ostracism, exclusion and death at the other.
In his survey of how equality was maintained among hunter-gatherer societies, Boehm found numerous accounts of situations in which communities went as far as killing a persistent aggressor or individual who became too domineering or unwilling to share. In some cases, a close relative of the bully would be required to carry out the fatal act, but in several cave paintings there are scenes that look like executions by bow-and-arrow firing squads. In assessing the evidence, Boehm suggests that death rates among hunter-gatherers from these quasi-judicial killings may sometimes have been comparable to homicide rates in modern Chicago – enough to act as a powerful selective force favouring those with more prosocial dispositions.218
Anthropologists who have studied recent and surviving hunter-gatherer societies say that rather than just displaying an awareness that if people acted together they could face down any domineering individual, they were consciously and assertively egalitarian.215 Rather than there being just a neutral absence of inequality, people in these societies regarded equality as a moral principle. James Woodburn, who is a social anthropologist and one of the world’s leading theorists of hunter-gatherer societies, wrote:
People are well aware of the possibility that individuals or groups within their own egalitarian societies may try to acquire more wealth, to assert more power or to claim more status than other people, and are vigilant in seeking to prevent or to limit this. The verbal rhetoric of equality may or may not be elaborated but actions speak loudly: equality is repeatedly acted out, publicly demonstrated, in opposition to possible inequality.215
And, because people in these societies consciously subscribed to the idea that all were equal, they tended to make decisions by consensus.
If more helpful and unselfish individuals were, as Boehm suggests, chosen as sexual partners or valued more in co-operative activities, while the more antisocial were shunned, this would have led gradually to the selection of people who were genetically disposed to be more public spirited, less selfish and better at mutual support. Recent research on child development may reflect this process. In a series of experiments, the behavioural and neuro-economist Ernst Fehr and his colleagues have demonstrated that, although the majority of children of around three to four years old tend to behave rather selfishly, an aversion to inequality usually develops in the five years after that. When children reach seven or eight years of age, experiments show that most prefer things to be allocated in ways which reduce inequality – even when that is to their personal disadvantage.219
Boehm goes a step further. He regards the systematic use of strategies to oppose dominance and maintain equality in prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies as the precursor of modern historical struggles against arbitrary power, including the fight for the rule of law and the search for democratic structures capable of protecting us from tyranny and dictatorship.
Although there is not yet agreement as to how early egalitarian societies replaced the dominance hierarchies of our pre-human forebears, the most convincing explanation is that equality probably started to become widespread when humans developed methods of big game hunting, around 250,000 years ago. Replacing the earlier human reliance on smaller animals for meat probably contributed to egalitarianism in two ways. Most obviously, in societies where people have the know-how and weapons for killing large game, any individual is then also capable of threatening the life of any other – whether dominant or subordinate. Hunting technology dramatically reduced the importance of individual differences in physical strength which, in so many animal species, are the basis of ranking systems and dominance. When anyone can be stabbed in the back or hit over the head in their sleep by almost any other member of the group, the strong can no longer risk incurring the hatred of the weak. The problem for would-be alpha males was not simply whether they could meet challenges from individuals; it was the impossibility of facing down an alliance of well-armed group members. When sheer muscle power was no longer enough to enable an individual to behave with impunity, humanity had reached a fundamental turning point in the nature of social relations.220
The second key contribution which big game hunting is thought to have made to this shift in the structure of small-scale societies was that when a large animal was killed, it provided more meat than one person or family could eat before putrefaction made it inedible. Almost inevitably, the result was that it was shared. But rather than the hunter who made the kill dividing up the meat as if it was his property, with all the dangers of favouritism, the practice in many societies was to allocate the task to someone else. The process has been described as ‘vigilant sharing’: people kept an eye on the distribution to ensure fair play.221
Using first-hand anthropological accounts, Boehm describes the effect which sharing big game has on a group. He says that, apart from occasional superficial squabbling, when meat is shared ‘there’s obvious community joy in participation – because meat is so deeply appreciated, because no one is left out, and because eating meat together is a splendid way to socialize’. This is in stark contrast to chimps, which kill smaller animals and may for that reason only share with a favoured few – perhaps only enough to ensure that together they can keep the carcass out of the hands of the other chimps standing round begging for pieces. The resulting atmosphere among chimps is described, unsurprisingly, as ‘extremely tense’.218
There is now a high degree of agreement among anthropologists that the level of inequality we see around us today, which is often – but mistakenly – assumed to be a permanent feature of human social organization, was instead a product of the agricultural way of life. In evolutionary terms, the advent of cultivation is very recent: it dates back around 10,000–12,000 years in places such as the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, where it started earliest, but it developed independently in other regions as recently as the last 5,000 years.
Most early agriculturalists lived in small communities which practised ‘shifting agriculture’: an area of forest would be burned off and the ground cultivated for a few years until soil fertility declined, when it would be abandoned and allowed to reforest while a new area would be burned off and cultivated. While these early agricultural communities were often headed by a ‘big man’, they were still remarkably egalitarian, and, as recent and modern anthropological studies have shown, counter-dominance strategies – including ridicule, ostracism and exclusion – continued to be used.44 There is less agreement as to why agriculture led to the growth of inequality than that it did so. A number of detailed studies have linked agricultural development and the growth of inequality, some by comparing societies and others by studying the process of change through the a
rchaeological and historical evidence.222-225 Theories range from the more individual nature of agricultural work and the need to store food, to the establishment of permanent settlements. Societies with fully developed social class hierarchies arose much more recently, and are clearly linked to the development of settled agriculture and much denser populations. Perhaps the most convincing recent explanation for the growth of inequality is that it was linked – as the archaeological evidence suggests – specifically to the cultivation of cereal crops because they facilitated the introduction of systems of taxation in ways which other crops did not.43
PSYCHOLOGICAL LEGACIES
Our capacity for social anxiety is likely to be the psychological legacy of the social organization of pre-human and prehistoric human societies. The main features of relationships between animals with hierarchical ranking systems are clear. Subordinate baboons, for example, like subordinates of almost any species, have to avoid incurring the wrath – or usually even the mild displeasure – of the more dominant animals. They must know where they stand in the dominance hierarchy and be constantly aware of where the alpha male is, while at the same time avoiding the perceived challenge of direct eye contact. They need to signal with submission responses that they recognize their own inferiority, that they will surrender anything a more dominant animal might want, and avoid competitive challenges of any kind. Failure to follow these rules could result in serious injury, or even death.
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