Continuing our discussion of The Human Swarm by Mark Moffett.
So far we've been focusing mainly on band societies. Band societies sustain themselves via foraging—living off of wild food resources found dispersed throughout their territory. Band societies and foraging represent the oldest forms of human social organization and food procurement.
As we saw last time, although hunter-gatherers lived primarily off of the land, they often made substantial investments in their environment to enhance its productivity. This is called niche construction. Sometimes this causes a distinction to be made between immediate return hunter gatherers, who live of the fat of the land, and delayed return hunter-gatherers. Another distinction might be made between food collectors and food producers. The extent of investments to increase food production is ultimately limited by both the both population size and diffusion of band societies.
There are certain select regions in the world where food resources are especially concentrated and abundant. Such locations allowed various groups of people to abandon the nomadic way of life and settle down nearly full-time. In place of the patterns of aggregation and dispersal typical of band societies based on fission-fusion, these societies remained in one place for most or even all of the year, often living in villages of dozens, or even hundreds, of people.
In some cases bands developed practices that made their wild foods productive enough to approach the yields of agriculture. Even without sowing seed or domesticating the food, certain modes of extracting from the environment made staying put for a time easier. (125-126)
Many of these settled societies did not grow crops or keep domesticated animals. That is, they were effectively hunter-gatherers. Nonetheless, they had many of the same characteristics that we associate with agricultural civilizations including: sedentism; permanent structures; food processing and storage; political and religious elites; class distinctions; craft specialization; private property; trade networks; luxury goods; and so on. They key was having exploitable resources that were concentrated, abundant and reliable.
Anthropologists call these societies complex hunter-gatherers or complex foragers. Because they lived for long periods of time in the same place, this allowed certain social tendencies to develop that simply could not germinate in hunter-gatherer band societies.
Rather than using the term complex, Moffett refers to these societies as settled hunter-gatherers, preferring to focus on the settlement pattern of these societies rather than their perceived social complexity, or lack thereof. As he accurately points out, band societies were also quite complex in their own particular ways:
...even before societies took up farming, people had the option to reside in what I call a settled hunter-gatherer society...Settling down forced people to draw upon a set of implements from their mental toolkit distinct from the ones hunter-gatherers employed in bands.
Although conditions we take for granted—such as social inequality, job specialization, and acquiescence to leadership—were far from ubiquitous among settled hunter-gatherers, each passing generation spent at one place made those conditions more likely to come to the fore. Because of this elaboration, anthropologists generally describe settled hunter-gatherers as complex, in contrast to so-called simple hunter-gatherer societies.
But fission-fusion offered it own complications. These included the laboriousness of tracking down food that could be spread thinly, as well as in finding good campsites and the struggle to maintain social parity. For this reason I will avoid labeling either as simple or complex. Rather, I focus on the constancy and compactness of their living places as the ultimate cause of the complexity or simplicity of hunter-gatherer lives. (123)
Key to these societies was having some kind of storable surplus. This is what allowed settled hunter-gatherers to stay in one place for longer periods of time than if they were constantly on the move looking for the next day's meal. That surplus could be fish, nuts, seeds, tubers, dried meat and cheese—or really anything that could be preserved and stored for reasonably long lengths of time. As noted by archaeologists, "The wish and ability to store food certainly constitutes an important step in the transition of humans to societies characterized by more complex social organization." [1]
Moffett notes that a number of known band societies took tentative steps in this direction. For example, the Hadza of Tanzania dried meat, while the Inuit could store it on ice thanks to living in a "natural refrigerator." The Western Shoshone kept piñón nuts gathered in the autumn in baskets and came together during the winter to consume them communally. However, none of these resources or practices were sufficient to keep any of these cultures permanently anchored to one place, and so they remained scattered among small, mobile bands throughout most of the year. As the anthropologist Richard Lee noted of the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari: "The !Kung do not amass a surplus, because they conceive of the environment itself as their storehouse." (126)
To drop the itinerant way of life required bounty on an ongoing basis. That included any excess that could be stored to tide people over in times of dearth. Among the insect societies operating this way are harvester ants that jointly build well-protected underground pantries, where they keep seeds fresh for months. However, most vertebrate societies fail to show delayed gratification by means of a group effort. For instance, each pinyon jay caches its own seeds and attacks any member of its flock who steals from it. (126)
Once food could be reliably harvested and stored, however, there was no longer any need to move peripatetically across the landscape seeking food—you could remain in one place for longer periods of time. The "rainy day mentality” and the sedentism it engendered allowed settled hunter-gatherer societies to make much more extensive investments in their territories than could the members of nomadic band societies. These investments, in turn, increased productivity still further. In addition to opportunities, however, settling down permanently also involved its own set of risks and drawbacks:
Few environments offer the opportunity to accumulate food in bulk from nature year after year. Even when the resources are present, the risk of committing to a site is great since the option to move elsewhere should things go awry can vanish when neighbors also decide to settle down. (126-127)
A large number of settled hunter-gatherer cultures were based around fishing and other marine resources as their main source of food. Exploiting aquatic resources is different than exploiting terrestrial ones. In big-game hunting you have to follow the herds. In big-game fishing, by contrast, the prey comes to you—you only have to catch it.
This meant that coastal regions which were especially rich in aquatic resources could be occupied full-time, with plenty to go around. Many examples of settled hunter-gatherers were found in coastal regions all over the world, such as North America and Japan. The tribes of the Pacific Northwest Coast were able to settle down in fishing villages for most of the year, whereas further inland, the Native American tribes that did not practice any sort of cultivation continued to be nomadic or semi-nomadic, especially ones that followed herds of migratory animals like bison.
Other regions offered different sorts of bounty. Tree nuts, for example, can be harvested and stored, as many Native American tribes of Northern California did such as the Chumash, the Ohlone and the Tolowa; all of which occupied scattered hamlets. Acorns were gathered, processed and stored by these tribes in storage pits. Long before agriculture, many cultures were harvesting and storing both wild nuts and grass seeds. People in the ancient Levant were doing this as far back as 23,000 years ago, as demonstrated by the Ohalo 2 site in the Jordan River Valley. The earliest granaries in the Levant precede domestication by thousands of years, as do implements for shelling and grinding nuts and seeds. Starchy root crops such as taro, cassava (yucca), yams and potatoes could also be stored for long period of time, as they were in regions like New Guinea and South America.
With these changes came a very different set of social relations than those found in band societies. Anthropologists have increasingly recognized that it is not so much the cultivation of plants and animals that caused the social changes that we associate with civilization to occur, but the existence of a storable surplus. Thus, strictly speaking, the domestication of plants and animals was not a requirement for such changes to occur—they were a prelude to domestication rather than a result. Among these societal changes were the emergence of leadership roles, occupational specialization, class distinctions, and private property.
As societies became wealthier and capable of producing and storing surplus food resources, social complexity inevitably increased. Part of the reason is because concentrated food resources take more work and coordination to collect and process than foraging for diffuse resources in scattered parties. Another reason is that once you have made large investments in the landscape (such as the eel pools of Budj Bim), moving away to solve conflicts becomes less of an option because you would lose access to your primary food source. And once people start living cheek-to-jowl for longer periods of time than just a few weeks or a season, conflicts were unavoidable. Even sanitation would now become an issue, unlike with campsites.
Much of the intricacy of settled life bears on handling the personal discord and logistical issues that routinely broke up groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers. That this was a problem for the nomads is supported by the observation that individual hunter-gatherer bands around the world, across habitats as divergent in the resources on offer as tundra and rainforest, kept their size to a few dozen individuals. Social failure, not some inescapable issue around hunting and gathering, would explain this regularity. The bands of some Bushmen societies, for example, grew unwieldy and dysfunctional every two or three generations (128)
In hunter-gatherer bands everything from daily activities to long-term plans is a matter of discussion. When more than a few dozen people resided alongside each other for the long term, however, this egalitarian approach became untenable. In the first villages the easy nimbleness of moving away from pushy individuals or acting together to knock them down a peg was lost: at best one could walk to the far edge of town. (129)
In Moffett’s depiction, these changing social arrangements called forth an array of tools from the "cognitive toolkit" of Homo sapiens in order to deal with them. It's quite likely that many of these “cognitive tools” were not totally novel—as we discussed earlier, humans had been gathering together in large numbers regularly since at least the last Ice Age. We had also likely shifted back and forth between different ways of life and modes of subsistence over the millennia (perhaps based on a changing climate) which necessitated different sorts of flexible arrangements long before we started settling down full-time. Now this “cognitive toolkit” of Homo sapiens had to be upgraded and pressed into service on a much more durable and ongoing basis.
Just as chameleons change color as conditions demand, humans reconfigured their social lives—transitioning from equality and sharing to deference to authority and hoarding, and from roaming to settling down roots—as suited the situation...human cognition...remains adjustable across all the social options that had once been available to hunter-gatherers. (123-124)
One big change was the need for management and conflict resolution. Band societies were small and did not require much in the way of formal leadership or coordination. Decisions were made by consensus and leadership was on an informal, ad hoc basis. Leadership roles were constantly renegotiated and could not be passed down to one's descendants or anyone else.
With sedentism, however, people could no longer simply move away when conflicts occurred, because they were now dependent on concentrated resources and had made extensive investments in the landscape. Economists call this the sunk cost fallacy—it's hard to walk away from something once you have invested a large amount of time, resources, and effort into it, even when it would benefit you by doing so. This phenomenon can be observed on a societal—as well as an individual—level. Plus, in addition to policing conflicts, someone had to supervise and manage the work effort it took to do things like building long-term storage facilities, digging canals, constructing game fences, and coordinating defense, among other things.
Population also grew over time in settled societies, even if slowly, which presented its own set of sociopolitical and logistical challenges. Once people start to settle down, they have more children. It's difficult to have multiple young children tagging along when you need to be mobile. Plus, more calories lead to more children. Women in hunter-gatherer bands consumed less calories and weaned children much later, leading to lower overall birth rates. While not as high as later agricultural societies, small differences in the birth rate would have added up over time. This also would have caused increasing conflicts over resource distribution.
Thus we start to enter the world of elites. Big Men are a category of people known from ethnographic literature all over the world. Often this term is a literal translation of how they are referred to in their respective societies. However, unlike chiefs, this was an unofficial position that could not be passed down. Big Men were simply individuals (always men) who wielded outsized influence though their activities rather than through direct coercion or holding a formal office or title (hence the term “big”).
Early leaders were universally expected to act in the spirit of "open handed" generosity and magnanimity. No would-be leader could attain status by hoarding all of the tribe’s wealth and resources. Such anti-social behavior would quickly be punished by the rest of the tribe.
Instead, to attract followers and gain renown, incipient leaders would encourage their relatives and friends to work extra hard on their behalf to accumulate extra food and goods which they would then conspicuously give away in lavish feasts. To this end, they supervised and directed such work efforts, constantly exhorting their relatives and followers to work ever harder though carrot-and-stick methods, while planning and scheming behind the scenes. Because so much surplus wealth flowed through their household, Big Men were able to achieve a degree of control over the tribe's surplus wealth and resources, even if none of it "officially" belonged to them.
Because other members of the tribe were the ultimate beneficiaries of all this abundance, the efforts of the Big Men were not curtailed, but sometimes even encouraged. To satisfy their insatiable lust for power, aspiring Big Men continued to throw competitive feasts using the accumulated resources at their disposal, with each feast more lavish than the last. Whoever threw the biggest feast would gain the most renown—and subsequently the most followers (whose loyalty could then by parlayed into potentially even bigger feasts down the line). This made Big Men "rich for what they dispensed and not for what they hoarded," according to anthropologist Morton Fried. (135)
It was not just philanthropy or charity which drove their efforts, however. Big Men would strategically give away assets to lure people into reciprocal debt obligations and curry favor with other members of the tribe. At times it was understood that at least some of the items were loans, rather than simply gifts, with an implicit expectation of repayment in either goods or services at some point in the future. This, in turn, forced other members of the tribe to try to produce ever more in order to pay back the “gifts” from the Big Men, leading to a burgeoning spiral of overproduction and consumption.
Thus, the Big Man’s surpluses became the debts owed to him by other members of the tribe. In other words, the Big Men got richer and more powerful by loaning out their surplus wealth to the “99 percent." Their “savings” were other people’s liabilities, just like in today’s financial system, except less formalized and without the legal authority to back it up. Over time, however, the Big Man's influence became more formalized, especially once counting systems were developed and debts could more easily be quantified. Some Big Men were known to calculate profit and loss with the entrepreneurial zeal approaching that of today's capitalists.
The wealthier the society became, the more goods there were for Big Men to "invest" in the tribe, and the more power they acquired. They may have attained a degree of coercive power, too—it's thought that at least some of the feasts were thrown to recruit warriors for raiding nearby villages and enemy tribes. The Big Men would then dispense the booty to their followers, further securing their loyalty. Some anthropologists believe that such competitive feasting was merely a replacement for gaining renown in battle. Evidence for this is mainly through anecdote—by the time Big Men societies were formally studied by anthropologists, they had long ago been pacified by larger states.
Due to their managerial role in surplus production, as well as the disproportional influence in political decision-making that they wielded, Big Men are seen by many anthropologists as the forerunners of what would later become headmen, chiefs, lawgivers, warlords, generals, kings, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, and tycoons. Marvin Harris describes competitive feasting* as, "a nearly universal mechanism for assuring the production and distribution of wealth among peoples who have not yet acquired a ruing class." [2]
Sometimes these types of societies are referred to as transegalitarian societies. They are a transition phase between the "fierce egalitarianism" of hunter-gatherer bands and the more extreme hierarchy of later agrarian societies with hereditary chiefs and an aristocratic overclass.
Big Men could not become despots, however. That is, their ability to bully or issue binding commands to unrelated members of the tribe was strictly curtailed. This meant that—despite their elevated status—such Big Man leaders wielded influence mainly through the subtle art of persuasion. To this end, they had to be naturally charismatic and highly skilled in the art of public speaking, i.e. oratory:
[P]eople ensconced in one place had more patience for displays of authority than hunter-gatherers did in bands—yet often just a bit more patience; each village tended to have a headman, but his significance came to the fore during conflicts, and even then he spent most of his time convincing people rather than leading them. (278)
...many factors played a role in determining who became a leader. Magnetic personalities garnered support but would come along rarely in a band society or small settlement...Then as now, humans would have gravitated to those who made themselves the center of attention and responded to issues quickly. Part of that faculty, first honed in band societies, was public oratory, a skill vital to the incipient stages of leadership…chiefs often presented themselves as exemplary members while displaying some of the humility, integrity, and steadfastness that were expected of people in a band. These are still admired qualities in leaders today, perhaps a holdover from egalitarian times. Indeed, by convincing people to work together, chiefs ensured that elements of the egalitarian mind-set stayed intact...(129-130)
Although aspiring leaders couldn't compel other members of the tribe to work for them, there was one category of person they could command: slaves. Slaves were usually prisoners captured in warfare or raids. In time, slaves would also be comprised of those who fell into debt with other members of the tribe (i.e. debt slaves, or indentured labor).
Slavery makes no practical sense in small, mobile societies. For one thing, there would be no way for a population constantly on the move to hold someone captive on a permanent basis. Plus, having a potentially hostile outsider embedded in your midst was virtually suicidal—they might ambush you in your sleep! Besides, every member of the band was required to pitch in to keep the "factory" running, so having a slave would not provide much of a benefit. Any extra food or resources procured by a slave would just go into feeding and maintaining that slave. Not to mention the additional work having to constantly watch over and supervise a full-time prisoner.
But once you’ve settled down in one place and large amounts of labor became necessary for society's upkeep—processing food or growing crops, for instance—then forcing someone else to work for you would suddenly pay off. The value of a slave's labor would accrue to the slave's owner who could subsequently use that labor to enhance their own wealth and prestige. Being able to compel the work of others was yet another way aspiring Big Men produced the surpluses they used to acquire disproportionate amounts of political authority. To that end, slaves were highly prized—in ancient Ireland, slave girls—called cumals—were the basic form of wealth that all other values were measured against. [3]
Bondage grew in significance as settlements became organized to hold captives, although not all settled people kept slaves. Even the Northwest Indians had been living in settlements for centuries before taking to slavery with a vengeance. Often those tribes made sure slaves had little opportunity for escape by kidnapping them on expeditions to villages so remote that getting home was well-nigh impossible.
The payoff for having slaves was enormous. A hostage taken during a brief assault could yield a lifetime of labor at a cost to the captors no different from what they expended on beasts of burden—food and shelter—without the time and expense of raising him or her from birth. The fact is, North American Indians lacked work animals, so the slaves of Pacific Northwest tribes were as economically crucial as horses or oxen were for many Old World societies.
Indeed, history is rife with explicit comparisons of slave to beast. More than anything else, such comparisons starkly reveal the antiquity of the human penchant to consider one's own people fully human and to assign varying lesser degrees of humanity to outsiders...A slave's status as an animal, extreme as it might be, was a straightforward extension of the imbalances in prestige that often emerged between people in settled societies.
Seizing a foreigner and keeping him or her around permanently was seldom an obvious option for people in bands. Escape was too easy. Even so, raiding parties could take any surviving women, who had little alternative but to marry the winners. Slavery was regularly practiced by a few band and small tribal societies, such as among the Great Plains, who did not just take captives but traded them as commodities. Although such captives could run away, they may have found their former identity so defiled, they could never return home...
While members of the elite owned most slaves, their existence was a boon for low-status society members, too, who were freed from the view of themselves as occupying a society's bottom rung and from doing the degrading labor that came with it. This suggests another reason hunter-gatherer bands seldom took captives: bondage rarely made sense when everyone carried out equivalent tasks with leisure time to spare. Supervising slaves would have simply added to their workload...(285-286)
Leaders and slaves were at the opposite ends of a new social phenomenon: class distinctions, which was further exacerbated by the gradual emergence of private property.
Hunter-gatherer bands were mostly limited to what they could carry, making heavy and bulky items impractical. For hunter-gatherer bands based around fission-fusion, acquiring more stuff would only weigh them down. While there was indeed personal property in band societies, items were loaned out and freely shared, secure in the knowledge that what was lent out would eventually circle back around to the giver. Such "open handed" generosity helped cement social relations between band members. Meat, for example, was shared equally among all members of the band rather than hoarded by whoever made the kill, even if the meat "theoretically" belonged to them. The Bushmen of the Kalahari traded arrows among themselves to obscure who really made the kill. For them, “the best place to store excess meat was in your friend’s belly.”
By contrast, once people started settling down, they could accumulate stuff, with some people eventually accumulating more than others. Not only that, large, heavy objects were no longer impractical, meaning that there were simply more things available to own in a settled society. Think of the difference between the amount of stuff in your house or apartment compared with the amount of stuff you would take with you on a camping expedition or backpacking trip. Things like furniture and decor would probably not be high on the list. Some of that new stuff was food processing equipment. Mortars, pestles and querns are telltale objects found in archaeological sites indicating a higher degree of sedentism—mobile band societies would have had no use for such things.
In settled societies, a new class of private property known as prestige objects comes into existence, often created by highly skilled craftsmen. One avenue of acquiring power noted by anthropologists all over the world is ownership and control of such prestige objects. Leaders would invest some of their resources in the creation of such objects and display them conspicuously during events such as rituals and feasts. Because such prestige objects could be owned only by a select few, it further exacerbated status differences, with both the owners of such objects and their creators achieving a high degree of renown (think of the Crown Jewels, or trophies like the Stanley Cup).
Once property rights could be exclusively claimed by certain select individuals and families, disparities of wealth inevitably started to emerge. This was due to the Law of Cumulative Advantage, also known as the Matthew Effect, after a passage in the book of Matthew where Jesus proclaims: "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away." (Matthew 25:29, RSV)
Numerous simulations have been conducted over the years where players in a game start out equal and—though the workings of simple random chance (i.e. no skill involved)—some players will inevitably end up with far more than others by the end of the game, with early advantages compounding over time. Players subsequently tended to invent post-hoc rationalizations of why they won, such as superior skill or strategy (both of which were expressly precluded by the design of the game).
Once critical resources that require extensive processing can be stored—as they could be in a settled hunter-gatherer society—then an incipient political elite can potentially take control of those surplus resources and use them to acquire political and social power. This dynamic holds whether we're talking about land and grain in agrarian societies; tubers and cattle in horticultural/pastoral societies; or money and minerals in an industrial society. For example, in the Pacific Northwest, certain families acquired ownership claims over highly productive fishing rocks, enabling them to amass more dried fish during fishing season.
Such control over scarce resources was all but impossible in a band society where resources were freely available to all, sharing was enforced through cultural norms, and dispersal was always an option. There was simply no way for any one person, family, or group in a band society to control access to resources. However, once population increased beyond the natural carrying capacity of the land, and once certain essential resources could be hoarded by individuals and families, then this was no longer the case.
In a band society, every single member was tasked with procuring food on a daily basis. In the rich environments occupied by settled hunter-gatherers, by contrast, a few weeks of work could produce enough surplus food to last for much of the year. Now that only a small number of specialists (or slaves) could produce enough food for everyone, it was no longer necessary for each member of the society to be a "jack-of-all-trades." This opened up all sorts of new possibilities for specialization above and beyond the simple ones seen in bands like healer or storyteller. The proliferation of specialists meant that there were divisions within the society above and beyond the band (sometimes called sodalities in anthropological literature). This proliferation of subgroups had profound social implications, including the emergence of status differentiation.
The growing need for expertise meant the mechanics of every aspect of the society's overall functioning was no longer within anyone's grasp—which also meant that the sum total of the knowledge in the society was expanding. Just as staying on one place assured that social complexity stopped being limited by the physical baggage members could carry on their backs, settling meant social complexity was also set free from the cultural baggage all must carry in their heads. (132)
One newly emergent role was that of leadership, as we have seen. There is also evidence for an incipient class of religious specialists—priests—who claimed exclusive control over access to the divine. Eventually, warfare would become a specialized occupation as well. In due course, these groups would gain an inordinate amount of power and authority—something we'll discuss in more detail later on.
In a band society, each member usually carried a kit with him or her that allowed them to do everything they needed to survive on a daily basis—from starting fires to catching food. The entire band pitched in to perform tasks like building shelters or defense. The only major work divisions were based on gender.
But once people started settling down full-time, there was a greater need for specialization to accomplish the things required to catch and store surplus food and make substantial investments in the landscape. Building permanent storage facilities takes work. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, specialists did things like build canoes, weave fishing nets and carve prestige items like masks and totem poles.
As soon as no single person knew how to do everything they needed to do for themselves, members of the society became much more interdependent on one another. This is sometimes referred to as mechanical versus organic solidarity. Think of how dependent we all are on each other’s areas of expertise in our own hyper-complex society. Thus, relationships were based not only around kinship or shared tribal markers, but "what have you done for me lately?", transforming social relationships and altering the social fabric.
This led to the proliferation of various occupational specialties like hunter, fisher, weaver, woodcarver, tanner, builder and artisan, and many others. Making woven basketry and cloth was probably one area of early specialization. The creation of prestige objects, like jewelry, was another. The creation of pottery was almost certainly a practice done by highly specialized artisans, and the earliest writing may have been markings made on clay pots signifying "I made this." The skills used in firing clay acquired by potters was eventually transferred to working with metal, effectively ending the Stone Age. Such specialization was a quantum leap beyond the simple gendered division of labor found among band societies. In the Pacific Northwest, entire villages specialized in certain tasks.
It is inevitable that over time some of these groups would gain more power and prestige than others. As societies increasingly splintered into subgroups, it became easier for elites to play the various groups against each other, with one particular group rising to the top. This is impossible in a small, homogeneous society like a band or a village. In a larger society, by contrast, a small, determined minority could stealthily maneuver themselves into position of disproportionate power and control through deliberate manipulation of the social order. Meanwhile, the fractious majority could be permanently kept apart and prevented from forming any kind of concerted opposition to encroaching oligarchy. This approach is often referred to as "divide and rule." The dynamic works the same way in the Stone Age as it does today, because human social instincts are pretty much the same. Aspiring elites networked just as assuredly—and just as shrewdly—as they do today**.
Many of these specialist groups coalesced over time into secret societies or guilds, complete with exclusive membership and initiation rites. Often times the techniques practiced by these groups were kept secret from outsiders and membership was restricted to certain select families or lineages, such as blacksmithing among the Mande people of Guinea and Mali:
Politically and socially, [blacksmiths] were extremely powerful, offering invaluable counsel to the village chief concerning all major decisions. However, while revered and honored, the spiritual and ritual knowledge and activities of blacksmiths were also greatly feared. They were believed to control the natural forces intrinsic to all objects, a force the Mande call nyama, which is understood to be both energy and the explanation for the organization of the Mande world.
Blacksmithing among the Mande is endogamous, meaning that only those born into blacksmithing families are eligible for the long apprenticeship into the craft. It is during this period that a young trainee is taught the daliluw, the secret knowledge about the use and nature of nyama. The first important task of the apprentice is to learn the complicated pounding rhythms for which the master is renowned…[4]
Once wealth and status can effectively be passed down over time, differences in class invariably start to proliferate. Eventually, differences in class and status became justified, and then, in time, ossified.
Moffett speculates as to why inequality took off without pushback or open revolt. He gives three possible reasons. One was that, even as emerging elites seized ever more control over surplus production and distribution, the society became richer overall. People were still housed and fed, and so they acquiesced. We see a similar justification today with our own “superproductive” corporate elites. This Twitter comment illustrates the point:
The second reason is that, as elites continued to be allowed to engage their aggrandizing activities without resistance, they increasingly developed an ideological and coercive apparatus for justifying and maintaining the status quo. Anyone stepping out of line would be harshly dealt with on an individual basis, serving as an example to malcontents opposing the newly emergent social order***. Once this became the everyday state of affairs, the citizenry would police themselves due to the social nature of our species. Restricting the application of violence to sanctioned professionals would have also increased the possibilities for coercion—something not possible in band societies where everyone was armed. As Moffett notes, “[s]mart chiefs could draw on the blessings of hangers-on and toadies as well as other elites—a military officer and a priest backed the Calusa† chief .” (135)
The third reason is that we appear to have built-in psychological mechanisms designed to rationalize disparities in wealth and power. Moffett speculates that these tendencies may be a holdover from our remote primate ancestors who lived in highly ranked societies like today’s chimps and baboons. In other words, inequality, to an extent, is self-reinforcing and self-justifying. This is because we are socially programmed. We take the existing state of affairs as our baseline—a phenomenon known as the anchoring effect. Numerous experiments have shown that, as social creatures, our assessment of what's fair is based on lived experience, and not on some Platonic ideal of fairness. Extreme inequality entrenches itself over long periods of time due to creeping normality.
A number of these psychological mechanisms have been documented over the years. Perhaps most salient is the fact that our tolerance of inequality grows as inequality itself grows. As one researcher put it, "Public ideas of what constitutes fair income inequality are influenced by actual inequality: when inequality changes, opinions regarding what is acceptable change in the same direction." [5]
Another is the status quo bias, colloquially known under the maxim, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." We feel that any disturbance to the current state of affairs—even a dysfunctional state of affairs—might possibly make us worse off, and so we are predisposed to stick with the way things are rather than make changes, because that's what is comfortable and familiar to us. This is closely related to loss aversion, where we perceive losses far more acutely than we do gains. That's not surprising—for animals a loss of food is urgent, whereas gaining a bit more once you are fed is less critical.
Another is optimism bias, where we tend to overestimate our chances of success. While not the case in later caste-stratified societies, in early transegalitarian societies anyone (males, at least) could theoretically aspire to become a Big Man someday, and thus saw no reason to prevent the actions of others in trying to do so. As Chris Dillow notes, "people tolerate rising inequality, at least initially, because they expect to join the super-rich—an expectation exacerbated by over-confidence." [6] In the United States, poor people often see themselves not as poor, but as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”‡ (temporarily embarrassed Big Men?)
An inverse of this phenomenon is the resignation effect, whereby people simply become resigned to the current state of affairs—a societal form of learned helplessness. As Chris Dillow notes, "initially arbitrary inequality can become persistent, because it reduces the desire of the worst-off to compete." [7] This is a form of adaptive preference, whereby, "[w]e come to want what we think is within our grasp." [8] In other words, instead of getting what we want, we want what we get.
Yet another is the just world illusion: a noted psychological tendency to see those at the top of the social hierarchy as of deserving of their wealth and status, and those at the bottom as deserving their ignominy and squalor. Related is the halo effect, whereby we judge people based on certain positive traits, leading us to assign other positive traits to them that may not be warranted (e.g. a well-groomed person wearing a suit and tie must also be competent and intelligent). We tend to defer to signals of rank and status.
It also appears to be the case that people tend to be more concerned with maintaining their overall social position rather than the absolute level of inequality in a society, so long they are not on the very bottom. From this standpoint, the addition of a servile caste can be seen as permitting inequality within societies to grow, as people now had an element that they could look down on and see themselves as superior to. Psychological experiments which gave people the option of destroying a portion of anothers’ wealth under conditions of rising inequality just as often punished the people below them in the hierarchy as the people above them, and this was true even of the poorest participants. Chris Dillow notes that, “What’s going on here is a concern for relative status. People try to preserve their self-image by holding others down.” [9]
In sum, "Inequality sustains itself by generating an ideology which favours the rich." John Jost, a professor of psychology, calls the combination of these biases system justification theory, and argues that it explains why the most powerless people in any society are often the strongest defenders of the status quo, and why there is so little historical opposition to extremes of inequality and hierarchy.
Over time, this ideology is created and sustained by a specialist class of richly rewarded influencers. In ancient societies, this was a priesthood which promoted a supernatural divine order manifested on earth. In ancient Egypt this was known as Ma'at. In China it was the Mandate of Heaven. In Medieval Europe, it was the Catholic Church’s doctrine of divine right. In Protestant countries, it was Calvinism. Other societies developed additional supernatural justifications, such as descent from a revered ancestor, or access to spiritual energy. In our supposedly rational, secular society it’s the pseudoscience of economics, with economists serving as the priesthood.
Next time: examples of settled hunter-gatherer societies.
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* Prominent examples of competitive altruism include the moka exchange of highland New Guinea, the izikhothane dances of South Africa, koha ceremonies among the Maori of New Zealand, and the potlatches of the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest.
** Assortative mating is highly correlated with rising levels of inequality, then as now.
*** Human sacrifice is also tightly correlated with emergent inequality.
† A hunter-gatherer-fisher culture who lived in modern-day Florida.
‡ A quote often attributed to John Steinbeck, but seems to have been actually coined by author Robert Wright.
All quotes in parentheses from The Human Swarm by Mark W. Moffett; Basic Books, New York. Emphasis mine.
[1] The connection between an unusual pottery vessel and the development of the elites (Science Daily)
[2] Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture; p. 116
[3] Slavery and Hostages in Early Medieval Ireland (Irish Folklore)
[4] The Age of Iron in West Africa (Metropolitan Museum)
[5] Tolerating inequality (Stumbling and Mumbling)
[6] How inequality persists (Stumbling and Mumbling)
[7] Entrenching inequality (Stumbling and Mumbling)
[8] Adaptive Preference (Edge.org)
[9] Cognitive biases, ideology and control (Stumbling and Mumbling)
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