Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:47:29 -0400
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23358497-27702,00.htm l
Hard-wired for the ups and downs
Hierarchies, writes Denis Dutton, are intrinsic to human society, and
resentment of elites can be traced back to prehistory | March 12, 2008
I'M here not to praise elitism but to understand it, not so much through
a history of elites but by talking about elites in prehistory.
Human beings are naturally hierarchical and they like arranging
themselves into hierarchies of skill, age, wealth, competence,
experience, whatever. We can deny it if we want, but we all know that
when the chips are down and the anarchists have formed the anarchists'
association, the first thing they do is elect a governing committee.
The Pleistocene is the period from 1.6million years ago to 10,000 years
ago, when cities began to be built and agriculture and writing were
invented. Following it is the modern period, the Holocene. But it's in
that earlier, much longer period, the Pleistocene, when the human
personality and human sociality were formed; and that's what is so
important for evolutionary psychology.
Based on what we know about hunter-gatherer societies from the
Pleistocene to the present, we can say a little bit about how
hierarchies form in human groups. It's worth considering our Pleistocene
inheritance in this context because although hierarchies are conditioned
for every society by local cultural conditions, the will to form
hierarchies in human associations is as hard-wired as blood clotting or
the liking for sweet and fat.
Some general sense of fairness is intrinsic to hunter-gatherer
hierarchies. Pure self-interest or the interest of your family is not
all that counts. There is also fairness in, say, food distribution: the
obligation of individuals to divide, rather than keep for themselves or
their family, the kill from some successful hunting expedition. As far
as status and opportunity are concerned, I think we'd learn a lot by
looking at how hierarchies tend to be found in typical Pleistocene
hunting bands.
These bands seem to be adjusted to create maximal success in terms of
mobility, flexibility, skill specialisation and stealth. They required
co-operation. They were male units. Bands of brothers is perhaps going
too far, but the standard hunter-gatherer societies were anywhere from
25 to 150 people in size and certainly included a lot of cousins and
brothers. It's interesting to note that the size of the hunter-gatherer
hunting band drawn from these societies was about 10 to 12 men, which
happens to be the size of the basic platoon in the British army, the
squad in the US army and the basic unit in almost every army since the
Romans.
It is also close to the default size -- nine to 12 or so -- of teams in
many sports and boards of directors of corporations.
This is a contingent fact about human nature. We could have evolved so
that the most comfortable operating group was 50 people, or 100, or
three. Then we'd have a different memory as a species for names and
faces, and we'd have a different way of forming associations in
societies. But as things evolved for Homo sapiens, we came to this
number of 12 as a default size of these types of co-operative groups
worldwide.
These bands, as well as the larger hunter-gatherer groups that they fed
and protected, were involved not only in hunting but in running raiding
parties and defences against other human raiding parties.
They were governed by what are called reverse dominance hierarchies. A
pure dominance hierarchy is one in which the individual at the top of
the heap dominates all those underneath him: likely a him, by the way,
rather than a her. Such arrangements became practical on a large scale
only in the modern age; that is to say, during the past 10,000 years,
with the invention of agriculture and cities, which allow food to be
stored and police forces and armies to be fed.
We do have pure dominance hierarchies in the modern world, and we have
had them for the past 10,000 years. Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was a
pretty good example of a modern pure dominance hierarchy, from the boss
on down. It makes me think of wolf hierarchies. I once observed a wolf
hierarchy in a zoo and it was unbelievably brutal if you looked at the
one or two animals at the very bottom of the pecking order. The final
wolf, who's the weakest of the group, is tormented night and day,
attacked, howling, constantly in pain and terror. Dominance hierarchies
are brutal.
Of course, I say that because I evolved as a member of a reverse
dominance hierarchy. We all did. Maybe if we'd evolved differently,
which is the contingent part of this, we'd admire wolf hierarchies. But
a human reverse dominance hierarchy is something that is led by an
individual at the top who by dint of skill, talent or knowledge, or
maybe just force of personality, becomes the corporal, the staff
sergeant, the team captain, the platoon leader or the chairman, and the
rest of the guys go along with it.
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