As described below, the Western world remains the only culture area characterized by all of the markers of individualism. Taken together, these tendencies are unique to the Western European culture area and the argument here is that they have an ethnic basis. I do not suppose that Western Europeans have any unique biological adaptations, only that we differ in degree in adaptations characteristic of all humans and that the differences are sufficient to enable the evolution of a unique human culture. By analogy, all humans have the distinctively human mental abilities of symbolic representation and language, but the races still display quantitative differences in IQ sufficient to produce major differences between their cultures.
Egalitarianism as a Distinguishable Component
of Western Culture
As noted in Chapter 2, there were already strong strands of individualism in Indo-European-derived cultures. Thus the argument here is not that northern h-gs are the only basis of Western individualism, but that Indo-European individualism dovetailed significantly with that of h-gs they encountered in northwest Europe. The major difference between these two strands is that I-E-derived cultures are strongly hierarchical and relatively egalitarian only within aristocratic peer groups (aristocratic individualism), while the h-g’s were strongly egalitarian without qualification. The burden of this chapter is to make the case for this. The contrast and conflict between aristocratic (hierarchical) individualism and egalitarian individualism is of fundamental importance for my later argument.
Egalitarianism is a notable trait of hunter-gatherer groups around the world. Such groups have mechanisms that prevent despotism and ensure reciprocity, with punishment ranging from physical harm to shunning and ostracism.[208] Christopher Boehm describes hunter-gatherer societies as moral communities in which women have a major role,[209] and the idea that Western cultures, particularly since the seventeenth century, are moral communities based on a hunter-gatherer egalitarian ethic will play a major role here, particularly in Chapters 6-8. In such societies people are closely scrutinized to note deviations from social norms; violators are shunned, ridiculed, and ostracized. Decisions, including decisions to sanction a person, are by consensus. Adult males treat each other as equals.
The Ecological Argument for the Individualism
of Northern Hunter-Gatherers
The idea that h-gs have had a major influence on European culture dates from a proposal by biologist Fritz Lenz, a German biologist writing in the 1920s and ‘30s. Lenz argued that northern Europeans—Nordics—have been less subjected to between-group natural selection than other groups, particularly Middle Eastern populations. He proposed that this resulted from the harsh evolutionary pressures of the Ice Age, resulting in the Nordic peoples living in small groups and having a tendency toward social isolation.[210] The intellectual abilities of these peoples are proposed to be due to the need to master the natural environment, resulting in selection for traits related to spatial and mechanical ability, structural design, and inventiveness, what psychologists label performance IQ as opposed to verbal IQ which is important for social influence and would be expected in a people who evolved in large groups. Modern Scandinavians are indeed high on spatial abilities.[211]
Such a perspective would not imply that northern Europeans lack collectivist mechanisms for group competition, but only that these mechanisms are relatively less elaborated and/or require a higher level of group conflict to trigger their expression.
This perspective is consistent with ecological theory. Under ecologically adverse circumstances, adaptations are directed more at coping with the physical environment than at competing with other groups. In such an environment, there would be less pressure for selection for extended kinship networks and collectivist groups.[212] The evolutionary interpretation of ethnocentrism emphasizes its utility in between-group competition. Ethnocentrism is of no importance in combating the physical environment, and in any case, a harsh physical environment does not support large competing groups.
Northern European groups are part of the North Eurasian and Circumpolar culture area.[213] This culture area derives from h-gs adapted to cold, ecologically adverse climates. In such climates there is pressure for male provisioning of the family and a tendency toward monogamy because the ecology did not support either polygyny or large groups for an evolutionarily significant period. These cultures are characterized by bilateral kinship relationships which recognize both the male and female lines and quite unlike the patrilineal system of the I-Es (Chapter 2). This suggests relative gender equality compared to I-E culture. There is also less emphasis on extended kinship relationships, and marriage tends to be exogamous, i.e., outside the kinship group. All of these characteristics are opposite those found in the Middle Old-World culture area, comprising the lower part of Eurasia and, to a lesser extent, southern Europe (see Table 1 and Chapter 4).
Northwestern
European H-G
Cultural Origins
Middle Old-World
Cultural Origins
* * *
Evolutionary
History
Hunting, gathering
Pastoralism, agriculture
Kinship
System
Bilateral;
weakly patricentric
Unilineal;
strongly patricentric
Family System
Nuclear family;
simple household
Extended family;
joint household
Marriage
Exogamous;
monogamous
Endogamous,
consanguineous;
polygynous
Marriage
Psychology
Individual choice based on personal characteristics of spouse
Utilitarian; based on
family strategizing within kinship group
Position of
Women
Relatively high
Relatively low
Ethnocentrism
Relatively low
Relatively high
Social Status
Mainly influenced by reputation
Mainly influenced by kinship group
Trust
Trust based on individual’s reputation
Trust based mainly on kinship distance
* * *
Contrasts between European and Middle Old-World
Cultural Forms.
This scenario implies that northwest European peoples are more prone to individualism because they existed for a very long period in an ecological context that did not support large tribal groups based on extended kinship relations; there were no resources such as fertile river valleys that might be controlled on a year-round basis by a single kinship group.
These populations were hunters and gatherers, not agriculturalists. Because of the relatively low level of economic production, hunting favors male provision of females.[214] This is because the energetic requirements of the human brain can only be met with a high-quality diet. The human brain makes up only 2 percent of body mass but requires 20 percent of all energy, 70 percent in the fetal period.
The energetic requirements of the human brain led to pair bonding—the psychological basis of monogamy—in which there is cooperation between nurturing females and provisioning males beginning around 500,000 years ago. Hunting also required “considerable experience, quality education, and years of intensive practice”[215]—in other words, high-investment parenting. It also favors intelligence because hunting for humans relies on cognitive abilities more than running ability or even strength.[216] The hunting scenario is complex and ever-changing: every animal species demonstrates unique behavioral characteristics depending on intrinsic characteristics such as sex and age, and extrinsic conditions such as season, weather, topography, etc. And it calls for cooperation and maintaining a trustworthy reputation within the group—traits that will loom large in the discussion of psychological mechanisms of White dispossession
in Chapter 8. All of these trends are intensified in northern areas because there is less energy available per unit area.
The Social Complexity of Northern European
Hunter-Gatherers
Importantly, the h-g groups in northern Europe during the Mesolithic (15000–5000 years ago)—well before the conquests of the Indo-Europeans—were not the simple band-type groups typical of most h-gs. They were quite large and complex.
The societies of the last hunters (and fishers and gatherers) of northern Europe appear to have evolved quickly toward increasing complexity in the period prior to the spread of agriculture. Complexity is defined by greater diversity (more things) and integration (more connections). Advances in technology, settlement, and subsistence are preserved in the archaeological record. During this period technology developed toward greater efficiency in transport, tools, and food procurement. Settlements were generally larger, more enduring, and more differentiated in the Mesolithic than in the preceding Paleolithic. Food procurement was both more specialized and more diversified—specialized in terms of the technology and organization of foraging activities, and diversified in terms of the numbers and kinds of species and habitats exploited.[217]
These complex h-g societies flourished around 8500 years ago. Their population density and social complexity enabled them to delay the advance of farming by 2000–3000 years—likely as a result of warfare.[218]
After a rapid spread across Central Europe, [...] farming communities came to a halt in the North European Plain, leaving the coastal areas of the North Sea occupied by hunter-gatherers... .
This could not have been due to ecological conditions. The frontier extends across a uniform geographical area, and the soils of southern Scandinavia are, in many places, light, fertile, and favorable for cultivation... . The reason for the delay must be sought in the late Mesolithic communities of the region. Hunter-gatherers in the southern Baltic region are likely to have had a greater population density than central European foragers ... , larger and more permanent settlements... , and a complex economic pattern involving specialized extraction camps, seasonal scheduling, and seasonally intensive use of specific resources.[219]
Critically, in most areas, residency was seasonal, not permanent.
In certain areas such as the seaboard of central West Norway, particularly resource-rich marine and terrestrial environments may have made it possible to stay within restricted parts of the region all the year round on a diffuse sedentary basis.” But most areas had “a permanent or semi-permanent base camp on the coast, a certain number of extended extraction sites for seasonal hunting, gathering and fishing activities, a larger amount of transitory sites, and an almost indefinite number of special purpose sites or single-activity loci. … Transitory sites form links of paramount importance in the chain.[220]
Thus, there was social complexity in a non-agricultural context characterized by transitory residence, with small, face-to-face groups dispersing on a seasonal basis and thus preserving the h-g social organization. This contrasts sharply with the classical agricultural civilizations of the ancient world as well as many other complex h-g societies that were strongly hierarchical and territorial, with elites able to control a stationary resource.[221] The complex h-g societies of northern Europe did not have any stable resource capable of being controlled by a lineage group or military elite on a year-round basis; extended kinship relationships therefore assumed less importance. Indeed, all the original ancient agricultural societies developed around defensible, stable land areas, typically around fertile river basins—the Euphrates, Nile, Indus, Yangtze rivers. However, in northern Europe, despite their complexity, these h-g groups were not able to remain in one area for the entire year, thus maintaining relatively small, family-based, face-to-face groupings for part of the year. It was in these small groupings that egalitarian individualism survived in a world that was becoming dominated by agriculture.
Egalitarianism as a Fundamental Trait of
Northern Hunter-Gatherers
I suggest that this social complexity involving large populations of non-kin inhabiting resource-rich areas that could not be controlled by any one large kinship group on a year-round basis resulted in a continuation of the egalitarian tendencies seen in small h-g groups around the world. Northern European groups were periodically forced to split up into smaller, more family-based groups in which despotism was strongly controlled; when interacting within the larger social setting on a seasonal basis, no one group could control the area; the context did not allow any departure from egalitarian social structure. On the other hand, in many other complex h-g societies, whole villages would sometimes move between summer and winter territories if the resource was seasonal, with the result that chiefdoms were able to exert control over particular territories.[222] Status competition in such societies was intense. For example:
The territories of Northwest Coast hunter-gatherers were not simply a series of resource nodes over which intricate competitions took place. It was the right to utilize (and to ensure the productivity of) the places themselves that was the focus of intense ritual competition among lineage groups and elites.[223]
The complex h-gs of the northwest coast of North America were thus not at all egalitarian; patrilineal extended kinship relationships were important and cousin marriage common, including first cousin marriage in some groups.[224]
In Northern Europe, on the other hand, h-g groups were forced to interact extensively with non-kin and strangers for much of the year, which led to an emphasis on trust and maintaining a good reputation within the larger non-kinship-based group.[225] Yet since such groups dispersed into smaller groups for part of the year, there was no selection against egalitarianism.
In such large but seasonally migrating groups, the ecological conditions favored not only egalitarianism but also monogamy, since one man would not be able to control enough resources on a prolonged basis to enable polygyny. In Europe, the tendency toward monogamy was thus far more genetically and culturally fixed. As in h-g groups generally, lower-status males would be keen to lessen the reproductive any advantage held by others in the group.[226]
Thus an important thrust of Western culture has been to regulate behavior in order to create a relatively more egalitarian social structure—in other words, to recreate the conditions of h-g culture. As discussed in Chapter 5, this tendency was reinforced by the Church during the Middle Ages for its own reasons.
Such egalitarian social practices are common in h-g groups around the world[227] and support the general view that this important strand of European culture, especially apparent after it came to power beginning in the seventeenth century (Chapter 6), reflects the culture of northern h-gs. Of particular interest is the extreme egalitarianism of contemporary Scandinavian societies discussed in Chapter 8.
Exogamy as Characteristic of Western Marriage
Whereas kinship-based cultures tend toward marrying relatives, often first cousins, marriage in individualist societies is based more on personal attraction. One can speculate about marriages occurring to partners in the larger groups that gathered together on a seasonal basis described above. Within such a context, marriage would likely be more based on personal attraction—the physical traits (physical attractiveness, strength, health) and personality (e.g., warmth and affection, Conscientiousness, honesty, courage) of a prospective partner than they would in a kinship-based society where the all-important goal is to strengthen the descent group.
This proposed emphasis on personal attraction is compatible with the finding that there are around 19 genetic mutations related to physical appearance in European populations, notably blond hair and blue eyes.[228] There is far more diversity in hair color in European populations than any other. This means that Europeans have been under sexual selection for these traits, i.e., the traits are attractive to mates but have no functional significance. The classic example of a sexually selected trait is the peacock’s elaborate tail; it makes him a poor fly
er, but persists because it is attractive to females. Traits seen as sexually attractive by the opposite sex spread in the population even when not otherwise beneficial.
These findings are also compatible with Frank Salter’s hypothesis that recessive genes, such as those for blond hair and blue eyes, are part of an individualist mating pattern because males who invest in their children have more confidence in paternity if their children look like them.[229] Recessive features would make it easier to discover the offspring of unfaithful females. Males who invest in their children must be vitally concerned about paternity, and individualist societies tend to lack the strong external social controls common in collectivist cultures (e.g., purdah in many South Asian Hindu and Muslim cultures) in which women of reproductive age are sequestered or constantly supervised.
Marriage for Europeans was thus based more on individual choice than on cementing kinship relationships by, e.g., marrying first cousins and other kin whatever their traits (which is the pattern in much of the rest of the world). Again, as a result of individualism, Western relationships, including marriage, are more market-oriented (predisposing to capitalism as an economic system): those with relatively attractive traits do better on the marriage market.
Love as Central to Western Marriage
Love—another aspect of individual choice—has been valued far more in the West than in the other cultures of the world. Marriage in collectivist societies (i.e., the vast majority of human societies; see Chapter 4) is based on marrying relatives fairly independently of their personal characteristics.[230] In European societies dating as far back as records can be found, spouses were chosen based on a variety of personal characteristics, including the personality trait of Love/Nurturance underlying close relationships of affection and intimacy.[231] This tendency toward warmth and affection can even be seen in mother-infant interactions: while African mothers are sensitive and responsive to babies’ needs, mother-child interactions in prototypical African cultures are devoid of the warmth and affection that are typical in European cultures.[232]
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition Page 9