HUMAN BEING

 

Bob's Convivial Tool Making Kit

The following excerpts are adapted from the “Conclusion” of  ZOON POLITIKON:  THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIO-POLITICAL SYSTEMS, A June 2015  Journal of Current Anthropology Article by  Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm. 

It is tempting to focus on the past several thousand years of human cultural history in modeling human sociopolitical organization because the changes that occurred in this period so radically and rapidly transformed the character of human society.  However, the basic genetic predispositions of humans underlying sociopolitical structure were forged over a much longer period of time, whence the million plus year perspective offered in this paper. 

Our primate ancestors evolved a complex sociopolitical order based on a social dominance hierarchy in multimale/multifemale groups. Enabled by bipedalism, environmental changes made a diet of meat from large animal’s fitness enhancing in the hominin line. This—together with cultural innovation in the domestication of fire, the practices of cooking, and collective childrearing—created a niche for hominins in which there was a high return to coordinated, cooperative, and competitive scavenging as well as technology-based extractive foraging. This development was accompanied by the likely use of clubs, spears, and long-range projectiles as lethal weapons and also led to the spread of specialized bipedalism and the reorganization of the upper torso, shoulders, arms, and hands to maximize the effectiveness of these weapons. There was also a growth of new neural circuitry, allowing the rapid sequencing of bodily movements required for accurate weapon deployment.

[…], two successful sociopolitical structures arose to enhance the flexibility and efficiency of social cooperation in humans and likely their hominin ancestors. The first was the reverse dominance hierarchy, which required a brain large enough to enable a band’s rank and file to create effective coalitions that could definitively put an end to alpha male hegemony and replace this with a lasting egalitarian order. Leaders were kept weak, and their reproductive success depended on an ability to persuade and motivate, coupled with the rank-and-file ability to reach a consensus with such leadership. The second was cooperative childrearing and hunting, which provided a strong psychological predisposition toward prosociality and favored internalized norms of fairness. This system persisted until cultural changes in the later Holocene fostered material wealth accumulation, through which it became once again possible to sustain a social dominance hierarchy based on coercion.

[…] there is no inevitable triumph of liberal democratic over despotic political hierarchies. The open society will always be threatened by the forces of despotism, and a technology could easily arise that irremediably places democracy on the defensive. The future of politics in our species, in the absence of concerted emancipatory collective action, could well be something akin to George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. […] humans appear constitutionally indisposed to accept a social dominance hierarchy based on coercion unless the coercive mechanism and its associated social processes can be culturally legitimated. […] such legitimation is difficult except in a few well-known ways based on patriarchy, popular religion, or principles of liberal democracy.