Modern scholars have devoted much thought to the subject of human nature, and there are many ways of defining and dealing with this nebulous entity. Some, following the lead of certain traditional philosophers (see Masters 1989), continue to make tabula rasa assumptions that deny human nature. Others conceive it as a series of powerful drives, needs, or dispositions—behavioral tendencies that usually are considered piecemeal (for example, Ruyle 1973). Still others try to explain how innate dispositions such as selfishness and nepotism fit with the entire web of social life. Three prominent examples of this last approach are Edward O. Wilson’s On Human Nature (1978) and Richard D. Alexander’s The Biology of Morals (1987), both classics in sociobiology, and James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense (1993).
A few thinkers, beginning with William James, have considered human nature as being inherently contradictory or “ambivalent” (James 1890; see also Campbell 1965; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971, 1989; Tiger and Fox 1971; Briggs 1982; Boehm 1984a, 1989, 1997b; Masters 1989; Erdal and Whiten 1994; Knauft 1994a, 1994b; Sober and Wilson 1998), an approach that warrants further development. Before we discuss some of the theories, however, a philosophical digression is in order.
Rousseau, Hobbes, and the Endless Debate
Cross-cutting many of these approaches is a pair of well-known scholarly biases. Hobbes and Rousseau, who basically appear to have advocated the tabula rasa (see Masters 1989), nevertheless continue to inspire contradictory philosophical folk traditions that color our speculations about human nature. One tradition is hawkish and the other dovelike, and they lead many scholars to view humans as either essentially nice or essentially nasty. “Nice” includes social harmony in the group, freedom, cooperation, and absence of warfare, whereas “nasty” encompasses dominant competitiveness, oppression, and prevalence of conflict and homicide both within the group and vis-à-vis other groups.
Even anthropologists who have no avowed interest in human nature become profoundly involved with these biases. Indeed, most of the better-known ethnographic differences of opinion are polarized along these philosophical dimensions (Heider 1988; Moody-Adams 1997). Redfield and Lewis’s famous Mexican controversy was a nice-versus-nasty dispute. Human groups in other culture areas have been subject to similar ethnographic vagaries; for example, in the Pacific, Mead and Fortune disagreed about matters of cooperation versus conflict, while similar problems cropped up in the American Southwest with the Zuni and the Hopi. Biases that emerged in Africa indirectly colored our views of human evolution, for earlier and later ethnographic interpretations of Kalahari hunting life are quite disparate. Pointed examples are Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ Harmless People (1959), followed by Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s “Myth of Aggression-Free Hunter-Gatherer Society” (1974). The overall pattern seems to be that an original description moves in a Rousseauian direction, then a correction follows in favor of Hobbes.
Paleoanthropology has been infected with a similarly bifurcate political virus, but in this case “nasty” preceded “nice” as early hominids moved from the status of putative killer apes (Dart 1959) to being unwarlike victims of predation (Brain 1981). On the other hand, archaeologists dealing with Neolithic warfare possibilities have followed the usual ethnographic progression from Rousseauian “denial” to Hobbesian “realism.” In this context, Keeley (1996) suggests that definitive evidence of Neolithic defensive ramparts and genocidal slaughters was long ignored by a number of his colleagues, including those who made the excavations.
Because hunter-gatherer societies are so germane to interpreting the earlier archaeological record, differing interpretations such as those of Thomas and Eibl-Eibesfeldt had far-reaching implications. After certain early interpretations of extant hunter-gatherers went somewhat overboard in the direction of peaceful cooperation (Thomas 1959) or “anarchy” (Sharp 1958)—or otherwise went in the direction of underplaying competition, hierarchy, and violence—there came a whole series of realistic factual corrections (see Fried 1967; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1974, 1979; Lee 1979; Boehm 1982a, 1993; Knauft 1987, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1994b; see also Daly and Wilson 1988; Flanagan 1989; Knauft 1994a).
My “reverse dominance hierarchy” interpretations (Boehm 1982a, 1984a, 1993, 1997a, 1999a) are oriented to conflict, and many will take them to be distinctly Hobbesian. Others will see them as realistic. Others may even think that I am underplaying the conflict component. As an admirer of both Hobbes and Rousseau, I hope that my approach has been in accordance with the facts rather than overwhelmed by ideology.
On the “nasty” side of the equation, we have seen that hunter-gatherers live in intentionally reversed dominance orders, and that these muted hierarchies involve political tensions so strong that they sometimes require capital punishment to maintain them. The assumption is that competition and domination are learned very naturally by our species, and that if competitive tendencies leading to individual dominance are to be routinely suppressed, both vigilance and occasional harsh sanctioning are necessary.
There is a “nice” assumption, as well. I have suggested that the typical societal blueprint of egalitarians, which calls for strict, punitive social controls, is oriented also to the promotion of essentially willing cooperation. Hunter-gatherers preach in favor of generalized cooperation and good will toward nonrelatives in the group—whether this be a band (Service 1962) or a small nexus (Heintz 1972) of friendly, cooperating bands. They also are responsive to such preaching. So in a sense I have tried to straddle the polarized debate, and Knauft (1991, 1994a) has done the same. As he points out, foragers do have very high homicide rates, but they also exhibit a relatively low level of lesser conflict, and are heavily preoccupied with the maintenance of social harmony.
Theories of Human Nature
Probably no more difficult area of inquiry exists than human nature (see Sussman 1995), nor any more fascinating. In combination with the tentativeness of our methodologies, it is the multifaceted and structurally contradictory composition of human nature that feeds the differences of opinion referred to above. To engage briefly in meta analysis, I believe that the divergent scholarly views themselves reflect innately structured psychological ambivalences harbored by each one of us. Potentially we are all both doves and hawks, and the prudent course is to realize that our own contradictory nature predisposes us to draw caricatures. The next step is to try and be evenhanded, looking dispassionately for specific combinations of nice and nasty in order to see how the two work together.
In the interest of developing methodology in productive directions, I shall examine in some detail the innate forces—and counterforces—that can be identified as underlying hierarchical political behavior and human social life more generally. This base will assist in developing a preliminary ambivalence-and-compromise approach, and in testing its potential. To understand the possibilities and the obstacles, we must scrutinize the relevant theories that prevail today, along with some of their antecedents.
Elsewhere I have reviewed a broad spectrum of recent approaches to studying human nature (Boehm 1989). Even though many psychologists are loosening their commitment to rampant environmentalism, tabula rasa viewpoints of the type criticized by Campbell (1965) still prevail in many quarters, as do a variety of essentially dismissive viewpoints that hold human nature to be unknowable because we cannot study behavior genes directly. Some evolutionary approaches emphasize behavioral lability as a general-purpose, problem-solving device that is based on learning; Pulliam and Dunford (1980) have outlined such a program (see also Lumsden and Wilson 1981). A number of modular approaches isolate specific functional domains such as language, mate choice, coalition behavior, or social exchange, and suggest that the human brain was evolved for specialized problem-solving in these areas (Cosmides and Tooby 1992; see also Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992). The result is a useful “evolutionary map” of cognitive and emotional functioning in human beings, even though the human brain, in its structure, may not be compartmentalized as neatly as is implied (Mithen 1996; Lieberman 1998; see also Potts 1996).
Several ontogenetic models examine responses in human infants for clues about adults. One such response is attachment (Wilson 1993); another is babbling as a genetic preparation for language acquisition (Pinker 1994). There are also models of basic emotions, based on hard-wired facial expressions and inspired by Darwin, that are well grounded in empirical data (Ekman, Sorensen, and Friesen 1969; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989; Masters 1989; Brown 1991). Brain-reward models use evidence from psychophysiology and brain chemistry to support arguments about various tendencies that are likely to be genotypically based, a pioneer in this area being Konner (1982; see also Hoebel 1983). More diffuse, satisfaction-quest models (Malinowski 1939; Ruyle 1973) complement brain-reward approaches. Many other models have been proposed, including one which suggests that human political tendencies are derived from a genotypic “deep structure” (Tiger and Fox 1971), and the potentially very useful “human universals” approach pioneered by Kluckhohn (1953) and Brown (1991). Earlier “aggression” models of human nature add to the list well-known names such as Lorenz (1963), Ardrey (1966), and Morris (1967). Furthermore, a number of evolutionary psychologists, biocultural anthropologists, and sociobiologists have tried to explain a wide variety of discrete behaviors that might qualify for inclusion in “human nature” (Stent 1981; Daly and Wilson 1988; Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992; Betzig 1997).
The usual procedure has been a simplifying one. Scholars focus on one area of behavior at a time, in an attempt to explain its selection by means of inclusive fitness theory. Recently, Sober and Wilson’s (1998) multilevel selection theory (see also Wilson and Sober 1994) has broadened the explanatory possibilities because it makes the explanation of altruism mechanically more plausible. I applied this type of theory to Paleolithic humans in the previous chapter (see also Boehm 1997a, 1997b, 1999a,), and also have suggested tentatively that pleiotropic subsidies may be entering into the equation (Boehm 1999b).
A number of the proposals focus specifically on the moral aspect of human nature. Darwin was the evolutionary pioneer in this respect, and some scholars have followed up on his work or have introduced variant evolutionary approaches (Westermarck 1894; Campbell 1965, 1972, 1975; Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1971, 1989; E. O. Wilson 1975, 1978; Boehm 1979, 1982b, 1997b; Alexander 1987; Fox 1989; J. Q. Wilson 1993; Wright 1994; Wilson and Sober 1994; Ridley 1996; Arnhart 1998; Sober and Wilson 1998). This book continues that tradition.
The spectrum of “human natures” implicit in these and other approaches is broad, indeed. Human nature could be blank or relatively specific. If specific, it could be nice or nasty. As Ruyle (1973) suggests, human nature could be a primary determinant of culture. It also seems to be a prime major target for decisive cultural manipulation (Campbell 1972, 1975; Boyd and Richerson 1992), insofar as our moral codes regularly work to suppress the hedonistic or aggressive behavior tendencies that generate social problems.
These behavior tendencies are becoming better defined. Masters criticizes the behaviorist psychologists who spoke of undifferentiated drives, and instead credits Lorenz (1963) and his approach, by which “animal behavior can be described in terms of a ‘parliament of instincts’ in which conflicts between competing impulses are resolved” (Masters 1989, p. 31). He also credits Tiger and Fox (1971) for thinking similarly when they introduced the idea that humans have a generative “biogrammar.” He suggests that such approaches are highly preferable to the “animal-drive” theories that were espoused by some of the ancients and by modern behaviorists as well.
Generally academicians today take care not to speak of “drives,” as Fried did in 1967. They do talk in terms of what might be called innate propensities. These come in many semantic shades, and the terminology could be confusing to cultural anthropologists and others who have not covered the burgeoning literature of evolutionary biology. In the search for increasing sophistication, the creation of technical-sounding nomenclatures abounds. These terms, to sample a few that are in the public domain and are used more or less synonymously, include predilection, disposition, predisposition, learning disposition, behavior tendency, behavior trait, behavioral predisposition, genetic disposition, innate disposition, and innate tendency. Sussman (1995) has pointed out difficulties that can arise when such notions are incorporated into cultural analysis, but I believe we can vastly improve our record in this respect.
E. O. Wilson (1975, 1978) has employed the term “genetic preparation” to emphasize that what often was called an instinct merely amounts to a genetic readiness that makes a behavior easy to learn in the type of environment in which it evolved. Even small-brained turkey hens need learning experiences to make their compulsive-seeming behaviors reproductively effective, and with humans most of our genetic preparations are far less specific. As a species with prolonged nurturance, our social development is far more dependent on learning experiences—experiences that not only shape our behaviors but are needed to stimulate them in the first place. However, we must not forget that our nature is reasonably definite, sufficiently so that genetic tendencies tend to constrain us at every turn.
In social biology heroic attempts have been made to describe human life in terms of these innate behavior tendencies, and to do so in a way that takes account of what is generally seen to be a selfish yet cooperative pattern of social intercourse (E. O. Wilson 1978; Alexander 1987; Daly and Wilson 1988; Cosmides and Tooby 1992; J. Q. Wilson 1993; Wright 1994; Ridley 1996). Nonetheless, as a matter of methodology these studies tend to examine one trait or behavioral area at a time; for example, selfishness, or nepotism, or attachment, or aggression, or cooperation, or everyone’s favorite—altruism. While what Sussman (1995) calls a laundry-list approach obviously is useful, it would be helpful to combine such elements dynamically and thereby gain a more holistic perspective.
The Study of Innately Structured Ambivalences
Masters (1989:31), writing as a biologically oriented political scientist, says: “The demonstration that human nature is a compound of contradictory impulses has important theoretical consequences. Ethological studies of social life show us that human societies and governments cannot be adequately explained by supposedly invariant natural traits or instincts like altruism or selfishness.”
The key word here is “contradictory.” In suggesting that it could be useful to dissect psychological ambivalences that stem from human nature, Campbell (1965) was influenced not only by William James but by Freud (1930). Campbell’s focus was on the tensions between egoism and altruism (see also Sober and Wilson 1998), which are directly relevant to our discussion in the previous chapter; here, in conclusion, I shall examine these tensions further.
When I titled this final chapter “Ambivalence and Compromise in Human Nature,” I wanted to emphasize that structural contradictions in our nature tend to produce profound ambivalences in humans, psychological tugs of war that are reasonably predictable because they are anchored in human nature (Boehm 1989, 1997b). Before I proceed further, let me elaborate on the difference between structural contradictions in human nature and psychological ambivalences that are experienced at the level of phenotype.
With present knowledge, an innate structural contradiction cannot be identified by analyzing the structure of the human genome; rather, one must look at actual behavior and make appropriate inferences about probable genes that work in opposition at the level of phenotype. For example, when we observe another species whose typical behavior pattern includes frequent acts of dominance and submission, we assume that these behaviorally opposed tendencies have coevolved genetically (Lorenz 1963), and that in situations of competition individuals are genetically prepared to choose one or the other as they learn their political repertoires. Such assumptions underlay Vehrencamp’s (1983) ethological assessment of egalitarianism and despotism as these relate to animals living in groups, and they underlie the behavioral treatments of primatologists in general. As my analyses in the previous chapters indicate, I believe that such an approach is applicable to humans in the spheres of politics and sociality.
Let me briefly illustrate a political application of ambivalence theory, before I make some suggestions about its relevance to anthropology and then proceed to a more detailed analysis of political ambivalences that could illuminate ethnographic analysis. If an individual in a group is caught psychologically in a two-way pull between his (or her) tendency to submit or dominate, we can readily hypothesize a link between an innate structural contradiction and the individual’s immediate psychological state. When caught in such an ambivalence, a man can decide on either a strategy of domination or a strategy of appeasement or flight; but if the species is behaviorally labile, he also may blend the two responses. For instance, he runs to an ally and simultaneously solicits support for a counterattack.
This reaction bears some similarity to what human egalitarians are doing when they arrive at a primus inter pares way of life, but the overall blend of responses is more complicated. As members of a moral community, egalitarians may submit individually to dangerous upstarts in their midst, yet as a community they may become collectively and unambivalently dominant over such individuals, and even kill them. The use of an ambivalence approach does not end there. Because their society is intentional, as contributors to it egalitarians are involved in a perpetual meta-compromise: in effect, they are giving up on personal domination possibilities, which human nature tends to make attractive—so as to avoid having to submit to other individuals—which human nature tends to make unattractive. It was this unique behavioral compromise that transformed human political and social life.
An Ethologically Sophisticated Anthropology
For several reasons, I think a human-nature based “ambivalence” approach could be useful to an anthropology which, as the century turns, may be coming apart at the seams. One is the reduction of personal and theoretical biases, something that all anthropologists espouse. Another is the development of more nearly holistic approaches in ethnography and ethnology. Finally, there is the need for clarification of the human behavioral lability that we talk about so frequently, yet deal with so imprecisely.
Reduction of Bias
Anthropologists are prone to bias in interpreting cultures in terms of their sociality and their aggressiveness. Some of us tend to beautify the people we study, others prefer to be realistic, and still others may try to compensate for previous beautification—or for too much “realism.” One has only to read the nice-versus-nasty ethnographies discussed above to realize that the web of biases is complicated and that the underlying feelings can be powerful and influential.
One way to make the study of human behavior less biased is to split some of these differences—not as an expedient compromise, but as a matter of seeking better biocultural explanations of the human condition. For example, I have analyzed blood revenge killings in the Balkans to demonstrate that typical feuding behavior can involve far more than just the strong human tendency to retaliate (Daly and Wilson 1988). Many acts of tribal revenge involve men having to kill men who formerly were friends, and there is evidence in the Balkans that these social bonds breed an ambivalence so powerful that charms must be used to keep the killer from losing consciousness (Boehm 1989).
As a more complicated empirical domain, hunter-gatherer egalitarianism has involved many biases in its interpretation. These preferential approaches reflect implicit or unstated assumptions about human nature, and they range from assumptions of anarchism or of spontaneously benevolent cooperation, to theories based on endemic competitive power plays or even tolerated theft. Some interpretations appear to see equality everywhere, whereas others emphasize the existence of competition and hierarchy. My suggestion is that we could profit from carefully examining the indigenous ambivalences that help to shape such multifaceted societies. This would aid us in shedding some of our biases as we try to understand behavior in its own right. It also would assist us in understanding the underlying human political nature, and how it articulates with human values and human behavior.
Ethnography is the cornerstone of anthropology, but many types of ethnography have been so static (as with most of the symbolic, structural, or functional approaches) that it is difficult to tie them to human nature. Doing so is important, for human nature provides a special kind of anchor that links cultural patterns with natural history. A better opening is provided by processual approaches, particularly dynamic ethnographic analyses that take decisions into account. Decisions provide an arena in which human nature affects cultural values, and values help first to define decision alternatives and then to inform choices made among such alternatives. Much of human behavior is determined by decisions, in which individuals or groups define their dilemmas, consider their options, and then move to a course of action.
Many anthropologists shy away from the direct study of decisions, for often our informants are no better than we are at sorting out ex post facto rationalizations from the “intuitions” (or consciously calculated reckonings) that actually guide decision processes. Even if they are able to respond to our queries about why they made a particular decision, they may not choose to do so. However, the basis for individual decisions can emerge in autobiographical accounts, while in collective decisions that are publicly discussed values, alternatives, and sharp dilemmas become quite apparent (Boehm 1996).
At the level of phenotype, the psychological ambivalences involved in typical human decision dilemmas are structured by “values,” as defined by Kluckhohn (1952). It is the possibility of tracing the often very close relationship between widespread cultural values and human nature (see Bidney 1947) that offers a potentially fruitful focus for improving anthropological research and explanation.
Let us consider some specifics. In this book I have concentrated on the political ethos, which in egalitarian societies is largely describable in terms of social and political values that define leadership roles. Causally, I have connected positive values, which espouse a combination of unaggressiveness, generosity, and friendly emotions in leaders, to a disposition to dislike domination—an innate tendency that egalitarians express decisively as they try to make everyday life conform to their largely implicit blueprint for a society of equals. I also have connected the aggressive social control people use collectively to reinforce their ethos with dispositions to dominance. To complete the picture, I must emphasize something I have all but taken for granted: it is the submissive dispositions in human nature that make most of the would-be upstarts desist, before they have to be vigorously manipulated (or eliminated) by their groups. A united moral community is a fearsome adversary indeed.
These three innate propensities underlie the predictable psychological ambivalences that are experienced by individual decision-makers in a variety of political contexts. When human societies take on a despotic form, hierarchies become orthodox instead of reversed because the predictable ambivalences of both subordinates and would-be dominators are resolved in a different direction. It may be raw fear that swings the pendulum for those who are less powerful individually, but the attractions of being cared for, protected, and governed may also be salient, and all of these competing dispositions can be linked to human nature.
To me, the most interesting aspect of human egalitarian societies is that the main political actors—innately ambivalent individuals who know they are likely to be subordinated by bullies—manage to conquer their fears and move, collectively, in the direction of domination. It is the strong who must submit, and their ambivalences also are predictable. The continuing inclination to dominate is expressed in the fact that that these alpha types sometimes try to turn the tables and engage strongly in upstartism, something that apparently takes place with all egalitarians, everywhere, given enough time. That, too, is consistent with the contradictory human political nature I have defined.
Conceived more broadly, human nature includes a wide array of dispositions of which we can be reasonably certain. One must include even the need for sleep and creature comfort, along with thirst, hunger, and sexual appetite. Nepotistic and altruistic capacities for giving nurturance and protection are salient, as well as the capacity for attachment, and sociality more generally. We are disposed to communicate, and we may well be disposed to detect cheaters or form political coalitions. Our definition of human nature should be inclusive, yet reasonably specific.
I have emphasized dominance, submission, and the resentment of domination because of my topic. These underlying dispositions may work in concert, but they are likely to clash. When they work against one another, the phenotypic result is psychological ambivalence—and a type of concrete decision dilemma that involves conflict of values as egalitarians weigh their needs for personal security and their fears of being attacked against their attraction to personal autonomy. This type of dilemma should be special grist for our ethnological mill, as we try not only to understand local patterns of behavior, but also to define the human condition in general.
Behavioral Lability and Its Limits
The facultative flexibility of humans is great (Sober and Wilson 1998), and it requires far better explanation. Also called plasticity, human behavioral lability is so extensive that if one moves beyond “needs” to eat or copulate, and beyond genetically demarcated developmental windows (during which, for example, language is very easy to learn), it is easy to come to the conclusion that in many areas human nature is not very specific at all. Cultural anthropologists note, pointedly, that cultural behavior seems to be all over the map. Given our neglect of human nature, such conclusions have seemed reasonable.
At first blush, our political past gives precisely such an impression. Knauft (1991) identified the problem in a groundbreaking discussion of human political evolution, and I have discussed his “U-shaped curve” in an earlier chapter. The problem was, first, an enormous political discrepancy between the despotic ancestors of our human lineage and the egalitarian foragers in whose bands our genes were evolved, and, second, the equally large discrepancy between those same egalitarians and the despotic human societies that followed them after the Neolithic. Knauft ruled out the possibility that modern despotism evolved very rapidly after the Paleolithic, for there was inadequate time for such genetic change to take place. We were left with a political nature apparently so labile as to be indecipherable.
Subsequently I proposed that egalitarian society was little more than a highly unusual type of social dominance hierarchy, one taken over, in effect, by rebellious subordinates (Boehm 1993). It came into being because the rank and file began to act on their antiauthoritarian tendencies, rather than on competing submissive tendencies. If one accepts this ambivalence-based hypothesis, then Knauft’s paradox is resolved. A perplexingly indefinite image of human political nature can be replaced by an image that involves definite (but contradictory) innate dispositions that can prepare radically different behavioral outcomes at the level of phenotype. That is, our polities can be either reasonably egalitarian or seriously despotic.
We saw in Chapter 6 that the forms human hierarchies take are quite varied. We also saw that all human societies involve some kind of political hierarchy, whether reversed or orthodox, and that if leaders get seriously out of line resolution of the ensuing political crisis can involve coercive force—with either the rank and file or the despot in question winning out. We are left with something far different from a political tabula rasa. While humans may strike one as being unusually flexible in their political behavior when compared with other higher primates, our political nature nevertheless makes certain aspects of human political life quite predictable. We always live with some type of hierarchy, which suggests that our behavior is constrained by human nature. Contributing to the flexibility are the psychological ambivalences discussed above: we can combine our competing innate tendencies in a number of ways.
The basic ambivalences involve tendencies to dominance, resentment of domination, and submission, and in groups people sometimes resolve them by going to extremes of either despotism or egalitarianism. They also may arrive at compromises, as seen in egalitarian Big-Man societies and egalitarian tribal republics, or in moderately despotic chiefdoms like the Tikopia, where authoritative leaders are heavily constrained by public opinion. Other noteworthy types of political-compromise societies include ancient and modern democracies, for they maximize personal freedom yet centralize power in ways that are compatible with governing very large populations.
Analytically, it is difficult to imagine the political societies we might create if we had a substantially different nature, for human nature tends to configure our very imagination. I suggest that our realistic possibilities are simultaneously flexible, as illustrated above, and constrained by a nature that channels our political life along fairly specific tracks. Human imagination does sometimes try to outrun these constraints. Marxian communism will be treated later, as an innovative and hopefully practical political agenda that was formed with a flawed understanding of human political nature, and for that reason failed.
Ambivalence in Political Affairs
Chimpanzee Evidence
A major theme of this book has been that human political nature includes not only dominance and submission dispositions, widely recognized in primates, but also a disposition to resent being dominated. The resentment in question could be construed to be merely an occasional side effect of dominance tendencies. I have no quarrel with that theoretical stance, as long as it is acknowledged that in the subordinate role chimpanzees and humans often may be biding their time rather than submitting wholeheartedly. It is difficult to document this third disposition, even in subhuman species whose political patterns are simpler and more predictable than our own. Submission often becomes so highly routinized that resentment of domination is not apparent.
In the interest of clarifying the nature of subordinate intransigence I shall briefly reexamine all three basic dispositions, first with chimpanzees and then with humans. There is no doubt that Pan troglodytes is exceptionally given to status rivalry (Nishida 1979; de Waal 1982; Goodall 1986), and Wrangham and Peterson (1996) emphasize that this feature applies especially to the males. Nor is there any doubt that chimpanzees are genetically well prepared for submissive behavior. We have detailed the rich array of readily learned (and sometimes hard-wired) behaviors that help to make them adept at playing a subordinate role. However, field reports tend to “streamline” the description of chimpanzee social behavior patterns, and thereby portray dominance versus submission as something like a binary choice.
This representation gives little structural emphasis to the resentment of domination, a third component I have added on the basis of my own work with wild chimpanzees and my reading of field reports. In early chapters I emphasized that chimpanzees, particularly the males, can be obsessively persistent in their status rivalry. Indeed, in descriptively adequate field reports, sporadic but sometimes very protracted dominance instabilities arise between contenders for rank (Goodall 1971, 1990, 1992; de Waal 1982; Uehara et al. 1994; Nishida and Hosaka 1996). It is subordinate resentment of being dominated that creates such instabilities, and I propose that such resentment also is operative at times when ambitious subordinates are submissively biding their time.
The collective power of resentful subordinates is at the base of human egalitarian society, and we can see important traces of this group approach in chimpanzee behavior. Witness de Waal’s account of how the Yerkes females intervened against their own alpha male when he was harassing a lesser male who had dared to court a favored female. Even though we cannot interview chimpanzees, we can speculate on the specific ambivalences involved. The females were used to submitting to the alpha, but they dared to protest individually (indeed, for chimpanzees everywhere the defiant or indignant waa vocalization seems to be dedicated to such protest). As new females added their voices, all became emboldened. The hostile chorus signaled an impending physical intervention—an aggressive act of collective dominance—and Jimoh desisted. I believe this to have been an instance of shifting ambivalence on both sides.
This adventurous excursion into the chimpanzee mind is at least grounded in realistic assessments of chimpanzees’ behavioral tendencies, emotions, and intentions, and I hope it does not seem far-fetched. In its simplicity, this anecdote brings into relief the fact that, for humans, the analysis of innately structured ambivalences could enhance our explanations of political behavior. The advantage of studying ambivalences of humans is that there can be a far more robust connection between behavioral facts and our assumptions about psychological orientations that may be operative. We the analysts have the advantage of also being human, and once in a while our subjects can articulate to us their feelings and their strategies.
Human Egalitarian Ambivalence
Perhaps the best ethnographic data on human ambivalence come from public decision meetings, in which open debate brings out the ambivalences felt by different individuals as the group struggles to find a consensus (Boehm 1996). A useful account was published by Turton (1977) on East African pastoralists, who were deliberating whether or not to go to war. The tension between fear and self-assertion was quite apparent as the group worked toward a common policy. The enemy was external, of course, not a dangerous internal upstart, but the emotions that underlay the perceived dilemma were similar to those experienced by egalitarians who want to resist a threatening dominator.
I am aware of no comparably detailed ethnographic account of a debate in which an egalitarian rank and file are trying to decide what to do about a dangerous upstart. A warfare debate can be public because the enemy is absent; in deciding what to do about a group member of whom you are seriously afraid, it is prudent to keep the discussion clandestine. This fact is useful to the principals, but not to ethnographers. When the upstart is less dangerous, however, people are likely to engage in spontaneous direct criticism as a way of keeping him in line. At that point, the overall process becomes similar to what we saw with the female chimpanzees at Yerkes. Direct criticism portends decisive intervention by the group, and usually the upstart desists.
In teasing apart the emotive and cognitive elements that are operative when people define and try to resolve a dilemma that involves upstartism, we do not actually need verbatim transcripts of the public decision meetings or private gossip sessions that shape public opinion. Fortunately, other kinds of ethnographic information enable us to triangulate to the underlying emotions, values, and strategies. The ethos provides a general guide to overall concerns, and when earlier we examined a series of ethnographic summaries and anecdotes that revealed egalitarian values, the quite predictable lists of attributes for good and bad leaders provided ample clues to what was going on politically.
There are other ways of enhancing one’s understanding of the political decision process. In the field, one can ask for descriptions of past political crises that are retained in memory, and one can elicit statements about values in general and then ask for exemplification. One also can use hypothetical situations as an eliciting device. All can be used inferentially, to understand typical decision dilemmas and the ambivalences involved. One also can get lucky, as it were, and be privy to a crisis in which an upstart is put down. A number of such direct observations were discussed in earlier chapters.
At the time a hunter-gatherer political domination episode is beginning, it is likely that the main political actors are caught in a psychological ambivalence rather similar to that experienced initially by the female chimpanzees at Yerkes. At the same time, at the individual level fear of taking action is definitely present because serious human upstarts and alpha male chimpanzees are threatening. They may counterattack immediately or become vindictive later on. There are obvious differences in how the collective responses are derived. With humans, subordinate resentment is culturally catalyzed by an egalitarian ethos. Furthermore, we can consult privately, and in great detail, as we seek agreement in assessing facts and options. Yet the raw political dynamics are similar to those of chimpanzees.
When assertive action is to be taken, the human and chimpanzee paths diverge in political methodology. Essentially, the chimpanzee sanctioning tool is blunt: having clearly signaled their disapproval, the Yerkes females were poised to “mob” the culprit, and in doing so they could have moved from bluffing to actual physical attack. Jimoh sensed this and desisted. The human array of manipulative tools is far more varied. For one thing, we can go beyond a generalized expression of disapproval, analogous to the chimpanzee chorus of waa vocalizations, to add details about what is rousing our ire. We can add the sting of ridicule as a special facet of our ability to use symbols. Malevolent humor, used aggressively by the entire group, is extremely hurtful. Chimpanzees have no analogous behavior. Humans can inflict the social pain of ostracism, thereby taking a longer-term, collective approach to social control and the manipulation of deviant behavior. Also, humans bent on social distancing can expel someone from the group. The Gombe chimpanzees did this once, when they ganged up on ex-alpha male Goblin. (After he “reformed” and became submissive to the new reigning alpha he was able to reenter the group.) Chimpanzees do not, however, appear to collectively decide on assassination as the solution for an extreme problem of despotism.
It is obvious that symbolic communication and possession of an ethos make a very large difference for humans. Yet it would appear that the underlying emotions and behavioral orientations are similar to those of chimpanzees, as are group intimidation strategies that have the effect of terminating resented behaviors of aggressors. I believe that an ethological approach that looks to innate behavior dispositions enables the psychological ambivalences that underlie egalitarian society to be incorporated into ethnographic analysis, and into ethnology more generally.
One key to identifying such ambivalences is the ethos, with its lists of desirable and undesirable qualities and behaviors. Consider now the fact that the egalitarian ethos of nomadic hunter-gatherers is very similar to that of tribesmen, who gain their living very differently and dwell in larger groups. An ambivalent (yet far from amorphous) human nature could perhaps be structuring human political possibilities in a similar direction for both types of relatively small societies.
We need not limit our analysis to egalitarians who live in bands or tribes, for we have seen that a universal political dilemma is abuse of power. Egalitarians may define it on a hair-trigger basis, whereas in a hierarchical chiefdom people expect their leader to throw his weight around to a moderate degree. Even in a highly despotic primitive kingdom, where the leader rules by coercive force, the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate use of power continues to be defined by public opinion. There, however, psychological ambivalences about abuse of power may remain permanently unresolved: the rank and file may quietly complain about a tyrant’s behavior even as fear of his loyal soldiers keeps them from active rebellion. Likewise, in a modern democracy the power of a Senator Joe McCarthy can become so intimidating that the people’s representatives, including their president and the press, simply dare not speak out for a time. In spite of having an egalitarian ethos they are cowed, just as hunter-gatherers may be initially intimidated when a domination episode begins.
With President Richard Nixon’s use of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service to gain unlawful political advantage, the “fact-finding” was done not by all the main political actors gossiping, as in a foraging band, but by a special committee of elected representatives who served as decision leaders. These very special political actors were ready to impeach Nixon when he resigned, and his removal from office was not that different from the deposition of a band leader or a tribal chieftain.
Humans are resentful of power abuse in a wide variety of political circumstances, and this resentment stems rather directly from human nature. But as human political groups become larger and more hierarchical, the psychological ambivalences of individual actors become more complicated. In addition to the triadic pull between dominance, resentment of domination, and submission, other factors enter the picture: for example, tendencies to resent control from above may be heavily tempered by appreciation of what a benevolent dominating leader does for one, as in chiefdoms or primitive kingdoms or modern democracies where largesse is redistributed from the political center. Or one may identify with a powerful leader on a chauvinistic basis, as he (or she) tries to advance the political advantage of one’s nation. Or one may simply be captivated by a leader with powerful charisma.
I have used some simplified examples here to point in the direction of a more holistic approach to dynamic ethnographic analysis of political behavior. I do not restrict this ambivalence approach to politics: next, I discuss some of the dilemmas that derive from our social nature, which I also construct as tripartite.
Ambivalence in Social Affairs
Political life and sociality are sometimes difficult to disentangle. I have argued that our social nature should reflect the levels of selection that acted on human gene pools over the many millennia of egalitarian forager life (Boehm 1997b), and in the previous chapter I suggested that in the Late Paleolithic there was a solid basis for selection at the between-group level, with the free-rider problem seriously curtailed. As a result, what I believe to be moderately strong altruistic dispositions are pitted today against what obviously are strong dispositions to nepotism and extremely powerful dispositions to egoism.
When Campbell (1965) suggested that an ambivalence approach might be useful to evolutionary analysis, what he had in mind was explaining the fundamental tension between egoism and altruism. It is logical to make the ambivalence tripartite: at the level of human nature, egoism, nepotism, and altruism are structured to work against one another. If we move from genotype to phenotype to consider psychological motives, human interactions in groups are likely to see individualistic prerogatives competing directly with familial ones, while altruistic motives that favor unrelated individuals or the entire multifamily group compete against both.
The interplay of these three dispositions can be exemplified ethnographically. When Netsilik Eskimos must either undergo a long migration or starve, the number of dogs they can feed limits what they can carry on their sleds and how fast they can travel. If there are old people too infirm to carry their own weight, they cannot be put on a sled at the expense of equipment that is necessary to a family’s survival. Generous feelings based on nepotism or altruism must be set aside; these unfortunates are sadly allowed to freeze to death (Balikci 1970).
Despite strong ambivalence about abandoning these incapacitated people, the “winner” (motivationally speaking) is the fear of individual or familial starvation if the migration is not completed in a timely fashion. Cost-benefit analysis works against their survival and, if the incapacitated have close relatives who must make such a decision, the ambivalence can be rather complicated. Egoistic and nepotistic motives that favor the welfare of healthy family members will oppose nepotistic motives that dispose people to care for any close relative. If the incapacitated are dependent on a group in which they have no close relatives, the ambivalence will pit generous tendencies based on altruistic genes against both nepotistic family interests and personal interests. The only behavioral compromise allowed is to make the victims as comfortable as possible, which in warmer environments such as South America may include granting them a speedy death to prevent molestation by natural predators (Kim Hill, personal communication).
In the Arctic, the conflict between individual and familial prerogatives can come into stark focus if families are undergoing a severe famine. Starving parents have been known regretfully to consume their own dead children, and even to kill offspring in order to eat them (Mirsky 1937; Balikci 1970). Where offspring are actively dispatched, the interplay between human nature and human decision-making starkly pits egoism against nepotism. The psychological ambivalence is bound to be devastating.
I have chosen to discuss dilemmas of triage because they highlight powerful, raw ambivalences that stem from our structurally tripartite social nature. These dilemmas, and others that are more routine, involve more than human nature interacting on a one-time basis with a particular situational context. As highly cultural animals, humans tend to automatically conform to prior decision patterns (see Boyd and Richerson 1985). We tend also to make such conformity normative, and therefore in many cases we think strategically about why conformity is needed (Boehm 1978, 1996). We set up rules that assist people in resolving their ambivalences in a certain direction, whether the decision is highly routinized or an emergency situation of triage. Such is the nature of morally based behavioral traditions.
From the standpoint of biocultural evolutionary theory, this intersection between human nature and cultural tradition is important. The two interact in recurrent situational dilemmas, and underlying “natural contradictions” structure the culturally defined predicaments. These practical dilemmas provide a situational context in which ambivalent minds are made up, and both specific group precedents and commonly held values help to structure these recurrent social quandaries for us. Usually human nature, in spite of its internally contradictory aspects, has a steadying effect on cultural traditions. The range of dilemmas likely to arise in a given environment is curtailed in part by the limited range of emotions and behavioral dispositions that help to define them.
Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1865), took the lead in studying emotions in an evolutionary context. Some basic emotions, like fear and anger, are linked to culturally invariant facial expressions. Submissive fear and angry domination play a large role in human social and political life. At the same time, cultural traditions have their own strong effect. They are free to reinforce certain aspects of human nature, and to suppress others. We have already noted that human groups regularly favor innate behavioral tendencies such as generosity in sharing food or cooperativeness that is useful to the group; at the same time, they try to damp undue selfishness, indiscriminate lust, and group-disruptive fighting. We are used to thinking of culture mainly as a regulator of the bad in human nature, a position emphasized in an evolutionary context by Campbell (1975). I believe that culture also reinforces the innate tendencies of humans to do good for others (Boehm 1999b)—which is fortunate, for in all probability such tendencies are not all that powerful.
Value Systems That Favor Altruism
The negative, punitive side of moral behavior is easy enough to account for on an ultimate basis. Egoism, nepotism, and the human capacity to become aggressive readily explain the fact that everywhere hunter-gatherers arrive at lists of self-defensive proscriptions—prohibitions which head off deviant behaviors that could directly damage their personal interests or sully their quality of social life with internecine conflict (see Boehm 1982b). Their assertive willingness to punish deviants collectively prevents their being personally victimized by cheaters, liars, rapists, and other individuals who are prone to behave as bullies outside the family. The pattern of punishment goes well beyond suppressing disruptive behaviors such as rape and murder, however, for punishment also is aimed at securing cooperation (Boyd and Richerson 1992) and convincing people that generosity toward other group members is desirable. Because punishment is such a powerful all-purpose tool, we must ask, at the level of ultimate causality, why moral reinforcement also appears to have a very strong positive component (Boehm 1999b; see also Campbell 1972, 1975).
One place to look would be in Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior, a book edited by Hinde and Groebel (1991) that examines group-beneficial behaviors from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. The ultimate provenance of human prosociality is not really addressed, but perhaps acceptance of narrowly sociobiological assumptions about an exclusively selfish-nepotistic human nature was responsible. Ethnographers may be partly responsible, as well. Unfortunately, in our descriptive reports the positive side of moral reinforcement tends to be inadequately emphasized because we borrow our approaches to deviance and social control from sociology. Edgerton (1975) makes it clear that the dominant emphasis in sociology has been on social control in its negative, punitive mode (for example, Black 1984). It also appears that modern law, with its accent on proscription and punishment, influences our perceptions in a negative direction (Barnsley 1972). Furthermore, the negative side of social sanctioning is basically far more dramatic than the positive side. When it comes to carrots and sticks, it is the sticks that arrest our attention when we are in the field, and deviance and negative types of social sanctioning also seem to dominate the attention of natives. This is all too apparent when they are “working over” their neighbors in a gossip session (see Haviland 1977). Furthermore, when I listed sanctions that ethnographers identified, most were negative.
In spite of this descriptive hiatus, when anthropologists sum up the social life of small groups, often they do emphasize social harmony (see Sober and Wilson 1998); Durkheim’s (1933) influence is partly responsible. Today it is widely held that this sociologist was too quick to take note of the harmonious ideologies of small nonliterate groups. Despite some problems with functional beautification, I believe that Durkheim was accurate in pointing to their significance. Praise and desire for respect may be far less obvious and dramatic than ostracism or execution, but they play a prominent role in regulating the behavior of people living in small-scale egalitarian societies (see Alexander 1987). For instance, every moral code has a substantial positive side, with long lists of prescriptions that call for prosocial behaviors of various types. Every moral community deals heavily in rewards as well as punishment, although the rewarding phase is far less obvious. And even though a few individuals are likely to be seriously deviant in any community, and will require decisive punitive manipulation, desire for group esteem also is a powerful motivation for the majority, who basically behave themselves. Personal reputations are a universal concern of human beings.
That the positive side of moral manipulation is substantial is borne out by the patterns that appeared when I surveyed desired and undesired leadership qualities in the chapters on hunter-gatherers and tribesmen. We saw that these egalitarians heavily emphasized positive role features, notably generosity and even temper, and appeared to think of them at least as frequently as negative features such as stinginess or overbearingness. It was clear that, in a typical ethos, altruistic generosity oriented to the entire group was an extremely important attribute.
If in theory we are preponderantly given to selfishness and nepotism, why are we so predictably motivated to manipulate human behavior in the direction of cooperative altruism, rather than merely protecting ourselves from deviant aggression? Common sense would suggest that groups who harbor some limited yet socially significant altruistic tendencies are more likely to come up with persuasive calls for altruism, and with positive types of sanctions, than are the selfish nepotists posited by sociobiology. In turn, as individuals these partial altruists will be far more responsive personally to prosocial messages. The hypothesis is that it takes a significantly altruistic species to come up with a strongly positive blueprint for group (as opposed to family) social life, and to be responsive to such expectations. This hypothesis needs more work, but it is consistent with the tripartite human nature delineated in the last chapter.
Political and Social Universals
Anthropologists have always been concerned with universals of behavior, for given the cultural variety to which we are exposed, they permit us to ask a fascinating question: Could we create an effective theoretical link that would directly couple cultural analysis to human nature, and ultimately to natural selection? Unfortunately, for almost a century our discipline has exhibited a schizophrenic combination of attitudes toward evolutionism. Today one can detect a major undercurrent of fear and near-contempt with respect to “biological considerations,” even though the majority of us believe, in theory, that humans must be studied in a context of natural history. Paradoxically, this rampant ambivalence has coexisted with the fact that we have basically made our livings as hybrid scientist-humanists, scholars whose mission it is to document and explain the natural history of Homo sapiens.
Many anthropologists resolve such ambivalence unidirectionally. At the one extreme are dedicated “culturologists” such as White (1959), Benedict (1934), the earlier Mead (1928), Kroeber (1948), Herskovits (1952), and Geertz (1965), who to varying degrees have proclaimed the autonomy of culture from biology. Today’s so-called postmodernist school (a movement easy to label but difficult to define) can be included here. In the middle are a few leaders such as Boyd and Richerson (1985) and Durham (1991), who provide us with formalized coevolutionary paradigms. At the other (biological) pole are many contemporary physical anthropologists, archaeologists, and paleontologists, along with anthropological sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and human behavioral ecologists—and also earlier scholars who paid attention to human nature: for example, Wissler (1923), Murdock (1945), Malinowski (1939, 1944), Kluckhohn (1953, 1959), Greenberg, (1963, 1966, 1975), Tiger (1969), Tiger and Fox (1971), and Ruyle (1973). These scholars have compiled lists of cultural behaviors, or lists of societal or psychological functions, that they believe might be universal. Usually what they have on their minds is the possibility of an underlying biological impetus.
Universal People
To this last list must be added Donald Brown (1991), whose ambitious Human Universals contains what might be called the master list. Brown is aggressive in looking for human universals, and some of the risks of undertaking such a comprehensive search are identified by Sussman (1995). Many of the “regularities” Brown identifies strike me as unexceptional, others as dubious; but he does tackle head on the problem of political and social universals. As an imaginative descriptive device, Brown creates a Universal People (UP) and devotes ten pages to describing them.
In terms of social stratification he specifies that “prestige is differentially distributed among the UP, and the members of UP society are not all economically equal. They acknowledge inequalities of various sorts, but we cannot specify whether they approve or disapprove” (Brown 1991:137). Brown is speaking of all human groups, but I shall evaluate his generalizations only in terms of egalitarians, notably the nomadic hunter-gatherers who have been my principal focus. The above description fits them quite well. We can specify further that egalitarians accept or even promote some kinds of inequality, but in general they are disapproving of competition that creates political domination outside the family or provokes conflict in the group.
With respect to the relative powers of men and women, Brown says: “Men and women and adults and children are seen by the UP as having different natures. Their men are in fact on the average more physically aggressive than women and are more likely to commit lethal violence than women are.” He adds: “In the public political sphere men form the dominant element among the UP. Women and children are correspondingly submissive or acquiescent” (Brown 1991:137). These statements seem to jibe generally with what I have said about hunter-gatherers, and even more with respect to tribesmen. However, Agta female hunters in the Philippines appear to be a thought-provoking exception.
In the quoted passage Brown at least implies that males and females have different political natures. Whereas males usually do appear to have the dominant role, it is possible that this is accomplished through differences of socialization combined with differences of reproductive function, body size, and muscularity—and not actually by behavior genes. I sidestep this question because the task of describing just a single human nature for both males and females is sufficiently daunting. However, Smuts (1992, 1995) and Wrangham and Peterson (1996) provide us with food for thought about the possibility of there being two human natures.
Speaking of group political life, Brown says: “The UP have leaders, though they may be ephemeral or situational. The UP admire, or profess to admire, generosity, and this is particularly desired in a leader. No leader of the UP ever has complete power lodged in himself alone…. Since the UP never have complete democracy, and never have complete autocracy, they always have a de facto oligarchy” (Brown 1991:138). Here Brown and I seem to disagree—at least terminologically. One tends to think of oligarchies as involving either governance by a few or governance by a small group exercising control in a way that is selfish or even corrupt. Generally, it would appear that in bands all the main political actors have an important and basically equalized role in decision-making, even though permanent or functional leaders may play the role of catalyst. Certain Australian Aborigines may give the appearance of having gerontocracies that amount to oligarchies, but an alternative way of viewing them is that their “gerontocracy” simply has to do with control of oral tradition and mythological prerogatives.
In any event, the real political power in a hunter-gatherer band lies with all of its adults as members of a moralistically aggressive social community—a group that respects its responsible citizens and collectively manipulates, polices, or eliminates its deviants. This is the closest that these people are likely to come to “government,” and having a few older men firmly in charge of mythology does not change this fundamental power base, which may well be gender blind. I judge this significant moral phase of political decision making to be universally “democratic” among nomadic hunter-gatherers, and fundamentally egalitarian with respect to gender.
Brown’s Universal People most definitely are moral:
The UP have law, at least in the sense of rules of membership in perpetual social units and in the sense of rights and obligations attached to persons or other statuses. Among the UP’s laws are those that in certain situations proscribe violence and rape. Their laws also proscribe murder—unjustified taking of human life (though they may justify taking lives in some contexts). They have sanctions for infractions, and these sanctions include removal of offenders from the social unit—whether by expulsion, incarceration, ostracism, or execution. They punish (or otherwise censure or condemn) certain acts that threaten the group or are alleged to do so….
The UP distinguish right from wrong, and at least implicitly … recognize responsibility and intentionality. They recognize and employ promises. Reciprocity, also mentioned earlier, is a key element in their morality. So, too, is their ability to empathize. Envy is ubiquitous among the UP, and they have symbolic means for coping with its unfortunate consequences…. Etiquette and hospitality are among UP ideals. (Brown 1991:138–139)
Brown’s characterization reflects the negative bias I discussed earlier, but the description fits foragers very well with respect to proscriptions and sanctioning.
The Universal People cooperate:
In addition to their division of labor, whereby different kinds of people do different things, the UP have customs of cooperative labor, in which people jointly undertake essentially similar tasks. They use reciprocal exchanges, whether of labor, or goods, or services, in a variety of settings. Reciprocity—including its negative or retaliatory forms—is an important element in the conduct of their lives. The UP also engage in trade, that is, in nonreciprocal exchanges of goods and services (i.e., one kind of good or service for another). Whether reciprocally or not, they give gifts to one another too. In certain contexts they share food. (Brown 1991:137–138)
Again, the Universal People nicely subsume what is done in nomadic bands, whose members might be called the Original Universal People. But in describing the cooperative phase of human life, Brown concentrates more on economics than on the normative forces that support cooperation.
In effect, Brown has compiled yet another laundry list. His is comprehensive, however, a descriptive master list that focuses far more on phenotype than on genotype. He takes some risks as he includes features that would be difficult to establish empirically on a sound basis, such as phobias against snakes (see Sussman 1995), but his list goes further than any other in the direction of specificity. Brown realizes that it is not enough, saying, “A fuller and truer account of the UP would in various ways show the relationships between the universals” (Brown 1991:141). I obviously agree.
Brown also, discussing the universality of decisions, touches tangentially on the ambivalence theme I have emphasized: “The UP have a concept of the person in the psychological sense. They distinguish self from others, and they can see the self both as subject and object…. They distinguish actions that are under control from those that are not. They understand the concept of intention. They know that people have a private inner life, have memories, make plans, choose between alternatives, and otherwise make decisions (not without ambivalent feeling sometimes)” (Brown 1991:141).
I have suggested that such ambivalences provide a key to making the study of human nature more relevant to ethnographic analysis, and vice versa. Situational dilemmas can be both moral and practical. The effect of human intentions becomes obvious and direct when adults join together as moral communities to socially condition other adults in favored directions, or when entire groups arrive at strategic decisions in subsistence or politics. I return to a theme emphasized earlier in this chapter: that one way to join the study of human nature with ethnography is to examine the typical dilemmas that human groups face and try to resolve, and to consider the possible effects of human nature on the values that inform this process. This approach provides a method by which ethnologists can bring human nature into anthropological theory, and by which we can subject evolutionary theories to testing at the local level.
Political Domination as a Biocultural Universal
The innate tendency to dominate underlies a universal that Brown did not identify, as does the innate tendency to resent being dominated. Every human group arrives at a political ethos that legitimates whatever degree of governance is deemed acceptable, and in doing so the group defines the abuse of power, as it was discussed in Chapter 6. These universals operate at the level of normative ideology, but they affect behavior profoundly. There is always a point, variable in its expression, at which desperate subordinates may rise to remedy a situation that has become intolerable by local standards of political legitimacy. It is powerful dispositions to dominance and submission that oblige us to live always in hierarchies of one type or another, and it is our antiauthoritarian tendencies that lead us to limit the power of leaders or other dominants, and that make politically illegitimate despots wary of popular rebellion. This dynamic appears to be universal.
Some of our societies may be seen as “cultures of rebellion,” insofar as the limits of authority or domination are circumscribed on a vigilant, decisive, all but rigid basis. Other societies amount to true “cultures of dominance,” insofar as people not only accept but identify with a strong political authority that rules them. Of course, a culture of dominance can quickly become a culture of rebellion if a despot begins seriously to abuse his legitimately great power. The rebellion may not change the basic political order, however. By no means do all national revolutions end in democracy of the type de Tocqueville extolled.
The political dispositions in human nature are powerful, but at the same time they are highly susceptible to cultural conditioning. One agency of conditioning I have emphasized is human design, whether the strategy of an individual or of a group. Others are the external environment, accidents of history, and self-organizing dynamics of cultural systems that lie beyond human control. The underlying political dispositions are susceptible to such conditioning precisely because they are merely genetic preparations, albeit fairly strong and definite ones. They provide obvious flexibility, yet human beings always live in some kind of hierarchy and all humans are sensitive to the abuse of power. These are formidable political universals.
We humans will never be able to live in relaxed egalitarian societies, in the way that squirrel monkeys do much of the time. These monkeys’ innate dispositions appear to be substantially different from our own apelike dispositions, which are ethologically despotic. It is our capacity for morality, a most important cultural universal, that enables us to create egalitarianism out of what would otherwise be despotism.
Hierarchy in the Forest
This book tells a political story, one that began with a Common Ancestor who was innately despotic in the ethological sense. The story moved on to a more chimpanzee-like mutual ancestor, one equally given to forming social dominance hierarchies but who probably had a greater potential to form large coalitions for the purpose of undermining the power of leading despots. I say this because humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos all form small subordinate coalitions that can significantly rearrange the internal balance of power within their groups, and because humans and chimpanzees form much larger temporary coalitions that can clamp down decisively on powerful individuals.
After the mutual ancestor gave birth to the human lineage, at some point humans (conceivably even hominids) were poised on the threshold of inventing not only morality, but egalitarianism. Innately they were still despotic, for they were given to dominance, subordination, and the formation of power pyramids with just a few dominators at the top. But with help from morality, an insubordinate rank and file learned to combine their power in a politically focused, durable way and managed to turn such pyramids upside down. This political invention proved attractive to other groups whose subordinates resented being dominated, and it spread. People lived in dominance hierarchies that were decisively reversed for at least several thousand generations.
Gradually, many millennia of egalitarianism modified our basic social dispositions; I have discussed at length the unusual human balance between egoism, nepotism, and altruism. All those generations under the egalitarian syndrome were likely to have affected our basic political dispositions as well. Even though the invention of efficient hunting or scavenging weapons probably started the process, egalitarianism could have contributed strongly to our loss of bristling displays.
Other behaviors changed. Flagrant individual competition, strongly disapproved by egalitarian moral communities, was severely punished. As a result, as members of politically vigilant moral communities we became adept at controlling our desires for power and at political dissembling—as Innutiaq did in his Utku band. With these presumptive evolved propensities for political self-control, most of us became able to fill prominent roles such as “great hunter” or “influential group leader” without giving our peers the idea that we were serious upstarts.
As we have seen with extant foragers, the adult males are still far from being perfect in this respect. Because, fairly frequently, severe punishment is leveled at those who become active intimidators, it is possible that over time dominance dispositions were gradually weakened or somehow were changed qualitatively. Within groups, any obvious engagement in antisocially aggressive behavior is seriously punishable and therefore is individually maladaptive. With the reduced reproductive success of extreme upstart types, natural selection seems likely to have changed our political dispositions considerably—in addition to having eliminated stereotyped displays and long, full-body, erectile hair. This could have taken place through debilitation of aggressive responses, strengthening of inhibitory controls, or both.
I suspect that the most radical effect of the egalitarian syndrome on human behavioral dispositions came in the social field, because of robust selection of genes for altruism. That evolutionary saga ends with a species altruistic enough to cooperate quite efficiently in large or small groups, but at the same time prone to competition and conflict. This cooperation is possible because human groups invariably act as moral communities that implement prosocial blueprints even as they suppress the aggressive egoism and dedicated nepotism that are so powerful in our nature.
In this respect, our most amazing accomplishments are complex societies that verge on being antlike in their division of labor and organic cooperation—and also their unusual capacity to go to war. I believe that the potential for intensive, genocidal warfare would not have arisen had we not invented both morality and the egalitarian syndrome. It is morality that enables us to shame our males into putting their lives on the line for the group, while it is innate altruistic propensities that help to motivate those males to suffer and die in the interest of the rest of the group.
We continue to live in a forest that is hierarchical. Aside from going to war and creating complex cooperative societies, another political outcome derives from our extended egalitarian phase of hierarchical living. That is the glorification and empowerment of the ordinary individual, a cultural habit that preoccupied foragers the world over for scores of millennia, and stayed with most of the tribesmen who followed. This peculiar and wonderful means of doing political business was continued by egalitarian Iroquois tribesmen who lived in a large, segmentary, matrilineal “nation,” and we have seen that they in turn transmitted it to the framers of the American Constitution. As we enter a new century, one must wonder if this tradition can flourish in a troubled, divided, and politically very tentative “world order” that is composed predominantly of nonegalitarian nation-states.
Since its prehistoric invention and diffusion, “egalitarian society” has constituted a remarkable and unbroken cultural tradition. As I write, modern democracies are becoming its only powerful representatives. The surviving Iroquois tribes are living on reservations, their politically independent Confederation gone but not forgotten. Most of the world’s egalitarian hunter-gatherers are either annihilated, living at missions, or acculturating rapidly as their political and cultural environments change. A few egalitarian tribesmen still exist (quite a few on certain continents) and a few of them wield some real political power on the world stage. We may yet hear again from the Kurds and the Afghanis, but they and others are no longer the standard-bearers of egalitarianism and freedom. It is mainly North Americans, Europeans, and the people of India who have taken over the job.
The present forest we face is as dominated by issues of hierarchy as the past one, for human nature changes but slowly. The political future of democratic egalitarianism is uncertain, but as a century turns, the economic and military strength of the world’s democracies make them a strong and politically significant minority force in world politics.
This book has chronicled some major surprises in human political and social evolution. One is the loss of long, bristling hair and flagrant intimidation displays. Another is symbolic language and its transformation of group traditions. The moral community was a profound development indeed, and it empowered large subordinate coalitions as they outlawed domination by stronger individuals in their bands. This was the egalitarian surprise. After the Neolithic, another unexpected occurrence was the larger-scale, tribal egalitarian society, a segmentary type of reverse hierarchy that permitted individual autonomy and freedom to combine (ephemerally) with some centralized governance and large-scale military operations. Eventually that society led to the development of a few tribal republics, which consolidated themselves politically on a durable basis yet remained egalitarian—a special (and rare) innovation in the tribal field. Given our apelike despotic nature, the advent of chiefdoms was no political surprise. Indeed, I have likened chimpanzee alpha males to the leaders of human chiefdoms because both have some limited means of controlling the destiny of their group. By contrast, the degree of centralized political control in primitive kingdoms and early civilizations was phenomenal by primate standards.
As a relatively recent surprise, national political democracies provide a workable compromise between individual liberty and centralized governance for the benefit of all, a compromise that seems to be in tune with human political and social nature as I have described it. Underlying assumptions are that the rank and file are committed to keeping their autonomy, and that those entrusted with authority may try to aggrandize their power—even if they are working for the common good. De Tocqueville was quick to notice this, as he scrutinized the goals of American democracy and the checks and balances created by our founding fathers.
On the world scene, another major surprise (had it worked as advertised) would have been the communal society conceived by Marx and Engels. Communism presented a competing, and to many a compelling, blueprint; it seemed to take the idea of democracy to a new level that placed economic equality on a par with political equality. The utopian prediction was that economic exploitation would end, that competition would thereby become unnecessary, and that state power would naturally wither away because humans were basically “good.”
Had this blueprint taken shape as envisaged, a truly remarkable surprise would have appeared in human social evolution. Entire nations would have behaved much like cooperative hunter-gatherers in their bands, with the same economic egalitarianism and the same freedom from personal domination. The rapid spread of communism, on the basis of an ideology that glorified the political empowerment of the rank and file, provides us with a possible model for how the egalitarian syndrome diffused from band to band in the Late Paleolithic (or whenever it occurred). We humans are attracted to political “deals” that free us from domination and exploitation, precisely because we are innately prone to resent authority. However, in practice, the Paleolithic “deal” was a far better one than Marxism.
Marx and Engels were sincere altruists and political reformers, but as visionary democrats they were unrealistic. Unfortunately for the modern world, they subscribed to a strongly “Rousseauian” position on human nature: remove the cancer of exploitative capitalism, and human social systems would all but automatically become egalitarian, noncompetitive, and noncoercive. Had these political visionaries understood human nature as it has been described in this book—and understood, therefore, the depth of the need for political vigilance and formal checks and balances—the world might have been spared a long and costly Cold War that fortunately was won by realistic democrats.
Marx and Engels were not alone. In their anthropological naiveté, visionary communists everywhere failed to see that human hierarchical tendencies are simply too strong to allow dominant competition to evaporate and the state to wither away on its own. The image was compelling, and it captured the hearts of resentful underdogs everywhere. But the social engineering was inept: the blueprint was not laid out with an accurate view of human political nature.
Hunter-gatherers maintain similar blueprints, but they are utter realists about human nature. Intuitively they comprehend the need for eternal political vigilance, and the need for force in the hands of the rank and file as means of controlling the self-aggrandizing tendencies of their own leading citizens. Similarly, the Iroquois understood the need for formal checks and balances in their very large version of tribal government. From them, the equally realistic American revolutionaries borrowed wisely, having recently been dominated by a foreign king. A belated communist response was to declare a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but this ideological Band-Aid solved none of the problems of poorly controlled despotism.
Anthropology is not generally a predictive science, but I believe we can foretell certain directions that human political life is likely to take in the future. Indeed, the political dynamics I have described constrain us to a limited variety of options with respect to nations. There will be democracies. There will be types of government, both secular and sacred, that are far more autocratic. There may be societies in between. These national types will continue to compete at the level of political ideology, even as they compete culturally, economically, and militarily as nations. I would like to predict an eventual sweep for realistic, effective democracy at the levels of both national and world government, but here I may be indulging in wishful thinking.
The creation of the United Nations was yet another major surprise in world political history. It combines principles of egalitarianism (the General Assembly) with principles of oligarchy (the Security Council), but in many ways it behaves very much like a hunter-gatherer band. For one thing, no serious policy step can be taken unless everyone in the Security Council agrees. For another, as with bands and tribes, the control of serious conflicts is tenuous, at best. Today, as an incredibly violent twentieth century fades and disappears, we face the invention and diffusion of increasingly effective (and increasingly long-distance) means of mass destruction, and there is no way for nations at odds with one another to practice avoidance in the way that mobile hunter-gatherers do when lethal conflict invades one of their small communities. The further development of “world government,” as a political organization that could create trustworthy and effectively controlled yet potent power at the political center, may well be the most daunting challenge we face.
In designing future political systems, we must take into careful account the flexible specificity of human political nature and the constraints it places on our behavior. At the same time, we must try to envisage new possibilities and new—but anthropologically realistic—political blueprints. Sober realism is called for, yet we must not make predictions that are unduly limiting. Indeed, the next political experiments that humans undertake may bring further surprises, for better or for worse.
I close by wishing democratic egalitarianism well, as it prepares for a new century—and, let us hope, for a new millennium.