Really well researched and written. One assertion I have trouble with is that we are well-equipped to accept and rationalize disparities in wealth and power. My reading of the literature strongly suggests the opposite is true, as does the near-universality of "fierce egalitarianism" among immediate-return h/g societies. If you haven't read it, you may find "Hierarchy in the Forest" by Christopher Boehm an interesting rebuttal to this assertion.
In the paragraph below, you seem to be arguing both sides by asserting that we have "built-in mechanisms" but that we also need to become accustomed to disparities over time. It can't be both, can it? Either we have these mechanisms already OR we need to get used to these conditions.
"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."
Thanks for the reply! I haven't actually read HITF, just summaries of it, so I'll have to check it out directly. My understanding of the thesis (which may be incomplete) is that it takes deliberate efforts to maintain parity--the so-called "reverse dominance hierarchy" practiced by hunter-gatherers. This, in turn, implies that inequality manifests itself not by that *addition* of any new behaviors, but rather by the *removal* of them. That is, it was the relaxing of certain behaviors which let inequality off the leash, not just the addition of new ones.
If that's the case, and tamping down inequality and hierarchy takes effort, then there must be some sort of psychological tendency toward those behaviors, don't you think? Otherwise, why then do you have to take active steps to suppress it? After all, we do not have to take active measures to suppress social behaviors that *don't* come naturally to us to some degree--only those which do. Cultural suppression of a behavior implies some sort of inherent tendency towards that behavior--as we see with sex. People must have learned the hard way what happens when you don't put constraints on aggrandizing behavior even before "history" began (social breakdown).
Of course, the reverse is also true--we also have psychological mechanisms designed to *resist* inequality, and that cause us discomfort and anguish when it becomes very acute. If inequality were somehow truly "natural" (as some imply), then we wouldn't be bothered by it. After all, we don't have political movements that are critical of too much love or too much generosity, do we? Clearly not. James Suzman notes that envy is one of these mechanisms, and that envy is not always a bad thing! Like all our emotions, it's there for a reason, and can be beneficial if harnessed appropriately.
And yet we still tolerate extreme inequality (well, some of us more than others). Why? There has to be some reason, doesn't there? We need to explain this phenomenon somehow. I also suspect there was a degree of self-selection going on. People who were okay with hierarchy and willing to work in early farming communities stuck around, while those who weren't GTFO. This selected for those psychological tendencies over time.
The Just World Ideology I'm sure is a factor--perhaps *the* central factor--in rationalizing inequality. For example, people I know who lean right/conservative subscribe to what I call "folk beliefs" about inequality--e.g. Bezos earned his billions by "working harder" than everyone else, and Amazon makes all our lives so much better anyway, so how can you complain? You and I know it's bullshit (nobody is a billion times smarter and harder working than anyone else, and there are only 24 hours in a day--his riches come from stocks and having a monopoly), but these people really, truly believe it! And you can't convince them otherwise. If you want to see these rationalizing behaviors in action, you can just turn on FOX News at any time.
In any case, there always needs to be a sustaining ideology that legitimates differences in wealth & status--it can't be done through force alone. No one can achieve that much coercive control--certainly not back then, and not even now. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that there are certain unfortunate elements of human psychology that can he "hacked" by ambitious, unscrupulous people. I know Thomas Piketty has written a new book about this--Capital and Ideology--which I hope to check out.
And it's always fascinated me that the more religious a culture, the more unequal it tends to be, and the more despotic the power structure. We see this within out own country--the Bible Belt versus New England, for example. It holds just as well internationally--look at Northern Europe versus the United States or SubSaharan Africa. So there must be some psychological mechanism at work that ties together authoritarianism, hierarchy, and supernatural beliefs.
But then again, as I noted, there are several potential reasons, and some of them may be more accurate than others. Here's an interesting tweet by David Wengrow on the subject:
Really well researched and written. One assertion I have trouble with is that we are well-equipped to accept and rationalize disparities in wealth and power. My reading of the literature strongly suggests the opposite is true, as does the near-universality of "fierce egalitarianism" among immediate-return h/g societies. If you haven't read it, you may find "Hierarchy in the Forest" by Christopher Boehm an interesting rebuttal to this assertion.
In the paragraph below, you seem to be arguing both sides by asserting that we have "built-in mechanisms" but that we also need to become accustomed to disparities over time. It can't be both, can it? Either we have these mechanisms already OR we need to get used to these conditions.
"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."
Thanks for the reply! I haven't actually read HITF, just summaries of it, so I'll have to check it out directly. My understanding of the thesis (which may be incomplete) is that it takes deliberate efforts to maintain parity--the so-called "reverse dominance hierarchy" practiced by hunter-gatherers. This, in turn, implies that inequality manifests itself not by that *addition* of any new behaviors, but rather by the *removal* of them. That is, it was the relaxing of certain behaviors which let inequality off the leash, not just the addition of new ones.
If that's the case, and tamping down inequality and hierarchy takes effort, then there must be some sort of psychological tendency toward those behaviors, don't you think? Otherwise, why then do you have to take active steps to suppress it? After all, we do not have to take active measures to suppress social behaviors that *don't* come naturally to us to some degree--only those which do. Cultural suppression of a behavior implies some sort of inherent tendency towards that behavior--as we see with sex. People must have learned the hard way what happens when you don't put constraints on aggrandizing behavior even before "history" began (social breakdown).
Of course, the reverse is also true--we also have psychological mechanisms designed to *resist* inequality, and that cause us discomfort and anguish when it becomes very acute. If inequality were somehow truly "natural" (as some imply), then we wouldn't be bothered by it. After all, we don't have political movements that are critical of too much love or too much generosity, do we? Clearly not. James Suzman notes that envy is one of these mechanisms, and that envy is not always a bad thing! Like all our emotions, it's there for a reason, and can be beneficial if harnessed appropriately.
And yet we still tolerate extreme inequality (well, some of us more than others). Why? There has to be some reason, doesn't there? We need to explain this phenomenon somehow. I also suspect there was a degree of self-selection going on. People who were okay with hierarchy and willing to work in early farming communities stuck around, while those who weren't GTFO. This selected for those psychological tendencies over time.
The Just World Ideology I'm sure is a factor--perhaps *the* central factor--in rationalizing inequality. For example, people I know who lean right/conservative subscribe to what I call "folk beliefs" about inequality--e.g. Bezos earned his billions by "working harder" than everyone else, and Amazon makes all our lives so much better anyway, so how can you complain? You and I know it's bullshit (nobody is a billion times smarter and harder working than anyone else, and there are only 24 hours in a day--his riches come from stocks and having a monopoly), but these people really, truly believe it! And you can't convince them otherwise. If you want to see these rationalizing behaviors in action, you can just turn on FOX News at any time.
In any case, there always needs to be a sustaining ideology that legitimates differences in wealth & status--it can't be done through force alone. No one can achieve that much coercive control--certainly not back then, and not even now. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that there are certain unfortunate elements of human psychology that can he "hacked" by ambitious, unscrupulous people. I know Thomas Piketty has written a new book about this--Capital and Ideology--which I hope to check out.
And it's always fascinated me that the more religious a culture, the more unequal it tends to be, and the more despotic the power structure. We see this within out own country--the Bible Belt versus New England, for example. It holds just as well internationally--look at Northern Europe versus the United States or SubSaharan Africa. So there must be some psychological mechanism at work that ties together authoritarianism, hierarchy, and supernatural beliefs.
But then again, as I noted, there are several potential reasons, and some of them may be more accurate than others. Here's an interesting tweet by David Wengrow on the subject:
https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1335542066898669572
Increadibly interesting and detailed. I really enjoyed how deep it dwells into the subject and the various connection with more recent societies.