HOW AGRICULTURE PUT THE FINISHING TOUCHES ON OUR PSYCHOLOGY
Agriculture emerged about twelve thousand years ago in the Middle East, soon thereafter in China and the Americas, and over the next few thousand years in many other places. For ten to twenty thousand years prior to the advent of agriculture, people in Europe, the Middle East, and China gathered wild cereals and ground them to make flour. To accommodate their increasing reliance on plant foods and associated agricultural implements, our hunter-gatherer ancestors slowly shifted away from their nomadic lifestyle. This transition involved numerous changes to their way of life: a house instead of a tent, clay pottery instead of gourds, and stoneware such as the mortar and pestle, which was handy for grinding wheat but a nuisance for nomads.
Once our ancestors started farming, they didn’t immediately put aside their spears and bows; hunting continued alongside farming just as it did alongside gathering (and just as it does in many farming communities today). From our vantage point, the invention of agriculture was a watershed event, but it probably wasn’t such a big deal to our great-great-. . .-grandmother when she decided to plant some of the seeds she had gathered. Rather, it likely struck her as a convenience to know where her preferred plant would grow the following season, and seemed worth a try. Indeed, I suspect she knew not the seed she’d sown.
Although farming provided our ancestors with somewhat greater food predictability and stability, numerous costs emerged in the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the stationary life of a farmer. Let’s start with the one that would bother me the most: lack of proper plumbing. Twelve thousand years ago everyone defecated outdoors, but hunter-gatherers had the advantage of moving on before they suffered the consequences. Farmers weren’t going anywhere, so over time they completely fouled their drinking water with their own feces. This process of fecal poisoning was disastrous for their health.
We have a modern analogue to this situation in the high rate of outdoor defecation that exists in some parts of India, where it is a major cause of gastrointestinal illness and malnourished children. The situation faced by early farmers was equally dire, as their sedentary lifestyle exposed them to this new disease vector. Indeed, some scientists believe that agriculture led us to evolve a tolerance for alcohol rather than a distaste for it, because alcohol killed many of the bacteria that farmers were unintentionally introducing into their own drinking water. Beer was safer than water. In addition to the diseases farmers caught from their own feces, the animals they kept also proved to be a major source of illness, as human epidemics often have their origins in domesticated animals (e.g., swine and avian flu).
Moving on from the toileting and illness situation, the next major problem faced by farmers concerned the quality of their agricultural diet. Although most people in modern industrialized societies access a wide variety of foods year-round, this is unprecedented. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors generally achieved a well-balanced diet, but they achieved it over long periods of time. When berries, fruits, or nuts were in season, they gorged themselves on those, and moved on when they had fully exploited the local resources. Early farmers, in contrast, had far more restricted diets, with less seasonal variety and starchier foods from the cereals they grew. As a consequence, farming reduced the nutritional quality and variety of our ancestors’ food.
In the process, farming also radically changed the balance of our various oral bacteria, with the unfortunate result that nastier bacteria flourished in our newly sugar-laden mouths. Despite never owning a toothbrush or floss, hunter-gatherers rarely got cavities or gum disease. In contrast, the teeth of early farmers were typically half-rotten, and by medieval times they were utterly foul. Their high-starch, low-variety diet not only resulted in poor oral health, but also led to a decrease in their stature and shorter life spans than were enjoyed by earlier hunter-gatherers. Indeed, it is only in the last few generations that we have surpassed the height of hunter-gatherers, and it was only with the advent of modern medicine that we began to live longer (excluding violent deaths).
Finally, farming was a seasonal catastrophe when it came to working hours. Hunter-gatherers in “immediate-return societies” (meaning those who eat today what they catch today) typically spend about six hours per day hunting, gathering, preparing meals, and mending tools. The rest of their time is spent socializing and relaxing until it gets dark, at which point storytelling and dancing by the firelight are common activities. While it is true that traditional farmers often work only an hour or two each day during quiet times, during the busy planting and harvest seasons they spend every daylight hour working and relax only after dark. Depending on the availability of water, the number of planting seasons per year, and various other factors, traditional farmers may or may not work more hours than hunter-gatherers, but they certainly work much harder for sustained periods of time.
When we weigh up the costs and benefits, we see that farming afforded our ancestors some assurances against starvation, but at the cost of various new illnesses, reduced stature and longevity, excruciating halitosis, and often a far longer working day. The end result was that early farmers worked harder to achieve a worse life than their ancestors had.*
Farming may have been a disaster for individual farmers, but it was a success story at the population level: it allowed large numbers of people to live on land that would have supported only a small group of hunter-gatherers, and it increased people’s reproductive rate. This increase in reproduction and population density caused farming groups to outgrow and eventually displace hunter-gatherer groups. The numerous migrations of farmers across Europe and Asia and back into Africa over the last ten thousand years are a testament to the fact that farming communities can dominate hunter-gatherer communities, even though any individual hunter-gatherer was typically a healthier specimen than any individual farmer.
Domination by farming didn’t take place overnight, and weather patterns, drought, and other disasters often favored hunter-gatherers, who could more easily move on when their immediate environment became uninhabitable. As a result, farmers and hunter-gatherers coexisted in Europe, often cheek by jowl, for at least two thousand years.
The Psychology of a Farmer
Farming requires mental capacities that first emerged in Homo erectus: division of labor, effortful preparation of tools, and planning for the future. But the psychological changes required to shift from a hunter-gatherer to a farmer demanded more than just these capabilities, which had been in place for many millennia prior to agriculture. Farming also required a change in attitudes and values to match new demands and opportunities. Consider the lifestyle of a tropical hunter-gatherer versus that of a farmer:
Tropical hunter-gatherers typically live in immediate-return societies. Because it is nearly impossible to store meat in the tropics, and because even the best hunters often come home empty-handed, immediate-return hunter-gatherers share everything they catch with the rest of their group. This practice of universal sharing creates an insurance policy that serves everyone’s interest by smoothing out the rough patches that might otherwise lead to lean times or starvation.
Tropical hunter-gatherers follow game movements and opportunities for gathering plant foods (e.g., ripening berries and fruits), so they own no more than they can carry. By virtue of their nomadic lifestyle, hunter-gatherer societies are formed of interlocking groups that split apart and re-form in new ways whenever people decide to break camp and try their luck elsewhere. If you don’t like someone in your group, it’s pretty easy to decide to go west with your family when that person decides to go east with his. Everyone connects with members of their overarching group when they re-form into new camps, and hence they spend their lives surrounded by people they know well, but the subgroups that form any individual camp are fluid.
In contrast to hunter-gatherers, who live each day as it comes, farmers focus on tomorrow. Their labor centers primarily on preparation for the harvest, which is a hugely important and high-effort event. Farmers often own a large number of agricultural implements, as farming is greatly facilitated by devices that enable them to prepare the fields, bring in the crops, and turn the crops into edible products (such as the grindstones that long preceded agriculture itself). Farmers are stationary for the obvious reason that you can’t bring land with you, and once you’ve acquired the tools, cleared the land, and planted your crops, there is a substantial cost in leaving it behind. If you don’t like someone in your farming community, chances are pretty good that neither of you is going anywhere.
Although farmers around the world have differing rules about sharing the fruits of their labor, it is very rare for crops to be shared beyond family and those responsible for helping with the harvest. Karl Marx suggested that people should produce according to their abilities but share according to their needs, and this maxim describes hunter-gatherers reasonably well. But the history of communism suggests that agricultural people don’t share very well outside their family.
The problem with the Marxist utopia is that people can free-ride on the efforts of others. If you are required to share with me, then I’m tempted to put in a little less effort because I know your hard work will leave me well fed. Once you see me slacking off, you don’t want to be a sucker, so you slack off a bit yourself, and pretty soon everyone is barely working. The free-rider problem is a vicious circle and can quickly destroy a productive community if there is no way to police everyone’s contribution.
Recall that our ancestors first encountered this free-rider problem when their fellow Australopithecines ran away from predators rather than contribute to their collective stoning. Such free riding was easily witnessed, and threatened ostracism or punishment brought slackers into line. Our Homo erectus and sapiens hunter-gatherer ancestors also solved the free-rider problem relatively easily, because daily catches became daily dinners, and it’s pretty easy to see who’s contributing and who isn’t. Hunters who never brought home the bacon often found themselves in a group of one if they couldn’t find a way to make themselves useful. But farming is a long game, and it’s not immediately obvious on any given day how hard everyone else is working. When I end up with a smaller crop at the end of the season, maybe I was a slacker and am undeserving of your generosity, but maybe my soil is poor or my plot was attacked by pests.
This problem of detecting free-riding farmers was compounded by the fact that farming inevitably led to an increase in the size of communities. Because hunter-gatherers could move house in a matter of hours, and because they shifted their communities numerous times each year, people spent their entire lives in small groups of family and friends (or at least nonenemies). Whenever groups got too large and people started to bicker, hunter-gatherers broke into smaller groups that went their own ways.
Because some types of land are more suitable for farming than others, farming communities grow in areas where the land is particularly productive. Within just a few generations, agricultural communities grew much larger than the hunter-gatherer communities of their ancestors. This increase in size meant that, although early farming communities were small by today’s standards and connected by a network of interdependent relationships, people no longer knew everyone well in their community. In such large groups it is difficult to discern who works hard and who is a slacker, so people simply stopped sharing as much.
These problems among farmers were magnified by the fact that traditional sharing goes beyond the end result to include the means of production. Hunter-gatherers share not only meat, but also weapons and tools. If they own more than one knife, bow, or gourd, their friends and family will often ask for it. This approach to life is unsuitable for farmers, as minimum levels of livestock, land, and equipment are necessary to make farming viable.
This incompatibility can be seen today among communities that are moving from hunting and gathering to a market economy. For example, some members of !Kung San hunter-gatherer groups have become involved in trade, herding, and day labor with nearby farming communities, and are often paid in livestock. The sensible long-term strategy for such individuals is to breed their new animals, using them for milk or eggs, but they immediately face demands from family and friends to share their newfound wealth. If they refuse these requests they are branded as stingy, which is a social disaster. If they acquiesce, their hard-earned gains disappear in front of their eyes. The possession of livestock often makes their lives worse rather than better, because private ownership is inconsistent with their communal culture.
Ultimately, these demands of farming shifted our psychology from one of communal sharing to one of private property. Such a shift probably didn’t require new psychological adaptations, but it did demand something of a cultural upheaval. I witnessed the challenges of this shift myself when I worked with a remote Aboriginal community in northern Australia. The manager in charge of one of the environmental monitoring and clean-up teams was impressed by their productivity and hard work, and at the end of their first contract he offered them a raise. He was mystified by their indifference to his offer, and the fact that some of them declined it outright.
When he probed for the underlying reasons, he discovered that when members of the team go home to their extended families at the end of the workweek, everyone asks them for whatever money they’ve earned. There was no benefit to getting a raise; if anything, it was frustrating to watch even more money disappear. The manager solved this particular problem by offering high-quality meals onsite rather than a raise, and the employees were delighted with the opportunity to benefit from their hard work without being seen as stingy by their family and community.
Private Property
Private property has a lot of pluses, but in a world in which people achieve their own outcomes, inherent differences in ability, effort, and opportunity eventually result in inequality. Some people are smart, talented, hardworking, or lucky, or choose their parents wisely, and they end up with a lot of stuff. Other people, not so much. This fact is blazingly obvious in today’s world, but it required a seismic shift in our hunter-gatherer psychology to accommodate this emerging reality.
Adapting to inequality was one of the most difficult challenges our hunter-gatherer ancestors faced as they transitioned to life on the farm, but it was necessary. Inequality inevitably follows from the demands and opportunities of ownership and stockpiling associated with agriculture. In today’s world, we see the first signs of inequality when we move from immediate-return hunter-gatherers, who rarely have a paramount leader, to hunter-gatherers who also tend their own gardens (known as hunter-horticulturalists) and often have hereditary chiefs. Similarly, in the ancient world we see the roots of inequality among those hunter-gatherers who started to make the transition to farming. Even before our ancestors domesticated plants, some had large houses while others had small ones. Some people were buried in elaborate garments and jewelry while others were placed into the ground unadorned.
The emergence of inequality in some places but not others led scientists to wonder how and why inequality arises. It turns out that the literature in ecology and biology, particularly research on animal territories, is helpful for addressing these questions. Territories are the animal version of inequality. Among territorial animals, males can’t attract a mate unless they have a territory, and the better their territory, the more mating opportunities they have. But only some animal species maintain territories. Some animals have territories they vigorously defend from other members of their species (and sometimes other species, as in Disney’s The Lion King, with the ongoing conflict between lions and hyenas), and some animals don’t.
Biologists have found that the best predictors of whether a territory will be defended are its resource density and reliability. Only concentrated and predictable resources provide enough benefits to offset the costs of a territory’s defense. Because grass is so common, of low yield, and widely spread, it’s typically not worth the effort for herbivores to defend their bit of savannah from other herbivores.* In contrast, the herbivores themselves represent high-density food packages, and hence lions will defend their patch of savannah from other lions.
Given this sensible decision making on the part of our furry, feathered, and scaly cousins, it’s no surprise that humans follow the lead of other animals when deciding whether to accrue and defend resources. Immediate-return hunter-gatherers rarely attempt to defend territory, as the resources are often unpredictable and low in density. When some hunting grounds are better than others, hunter-gatherer groups do come into conflict with other groups over these locations. Even in such cases, however, one person or even one family could never defend such a large and low-density resource from another family. For this reason, variability in hunting grounds leads to inequality between groups, but not within them.
In contrast to life in the tropics, some hunter-gatherers live in ecologies that enable food storage and also have highly dense, predictable resources. For example, Native Americans who fished for salmon in the Pacific Northwest caught far more than they could eat during seasonal salmon runs, so they dried their catch for later consumption over the winter. This sort of ecology promoted the development of inequality, as families attempted to dominate and defend the best fishing spots during the salmon run. Such families incorporated others by offering some of the fish in exchange for help with the harvest, defense, preparation, and storage of the catch. Arrangements such as these were slow to emerge, but they eventually led to social customs that shifted from strict egalitarianism to institutionalized inequality.
Similar arrangements cropped up every time resources became predictable and sufficiently dense. For example, hunter-horticulturalists rarely defend the wild plants they gather if intruders enter the local forests, but they always defend the crops they plant in their own gardens. By the time societies move to full-scale agriculture, norms develop around the notion of property ownership and rights. These norms are so important that even modern societies fail to function properly when there is poor rule of law and people cannot count on the state to defend their property rights. Under such circumstances, people are unwilling to invest the necessary effort to maintain and improve their property, as they have no confidence that their efforts will be rewarded over the long term. In contrast, when people live in a society that protects the rights of property ownership, there is clear utility in investing in their own future by improving their equipment, lands, and homes.
In the case of our early agricultural forebears, the ten- to twenty-thousand-year period of pre-agriculture and comparatively stationary living likely played an important role in laying the groundwork for the psychological changes that support private property and inequality. Discomfort with inequality, conflicts about property rights, and many other societal norms probably shifted slowly over generations as people began to transition from communally sharing nomads with virtually no possessions to stationary farmers who owned the sources of production.
Private Property and Gender Inequality
With the advent of private property, the rules for provisioning the household changed dramatically. Hunter-gatherers require the combined efforts of Mom and Dad to feed the children. Dads typically hunted for large game and the higher-calorie but lower-probability proteins and fats, and moms typically gathered the lower-calorie and higher-probability plant foods. Because the product of the hunt was shared by the whole community, most people’s needs were met most of the time. The wives and children of the best hunters were not much better off than the wives and children of the worst hunters, although they had the comfort of knowing that whatever group they were in, there would be at least one good hunter.
Once people began to accumulate private property, those who had stuff were in a much better position to provision a family than those who did not. Wealth and ownership were easily discerned by others, and these assets would rapidly have become attractive in a potential partner. Perhaps not surprisingly, the impact of wealth on reproductive success is clearer for men than it is for women. Particularly in communities that allow polygyny, but also in communities where men have informal mistresses (i.e., everywhere), wealthy men have the potential to have many more children than poor men. Hunter-gatherers in immediate-return societies simply cannot support more than one family of children, but private property enables wealthy men to support huge numbers of children.
Numerous princes and kings throughout history have had hundreds of children, with the rapacious Genghis Khan quite possibly holding the world record (with 8 percent of Asia potentially his descendants).* Women’s reproductive potential, in contrast, is not influenced by the number of partners they can attract; a man with twenty wives can have two hundred children, but a woman with twenty husbands cannot. Wealth was important to women because it helped their children survive, but beyond the moderate wealth required for survival, additional resources do not enable women to have more children (although great wealth does give women more grandchildren, through the increased capacity of their sons to attract more partners).
Due to these sex differences, wealth was less important for reproductive success for women than it was for men, so men were typically much more motivated than women in their pursuit of wealth. All else being equal, mothers and fathers were also more motivated to pass their wealth on to their sons than to their daughters, again because the reproductive benefits that accrue to wealthy sons are greater than the benefits that accrue to wealthy daughters. Partially because of these sex differences, gender inequality spread across the globe along with private property.
Men typically have more power than women in immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies, but women are more equal to men in such societies than they are in other types of foraging or agricultural societies. Agriculture also disrupted gender equity by virtue of the activities involved in preparing the fields and harvesting them. Plow-based agriculture in particular demands greater musculature to work the fields, and hence created a sex-based division of labor, with men working the fields and women preparing the food inside the home.
Consistent with the cultural “stickiness” of such habits, societies that practiced plow-based agriculture continue to have less female participation in the workforce outside the home than societies that practiced other forms of agriculture (e.g., hoe-based agriculture, in which women can effectively work the fields alongside men) or no agriculture at all (e.g., in which men hunt and women gather). In this way, agriculture destroyed the imperfect (yet pervasive) gender equity that existed in immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies.
Agriculture Created Government, but Also Hierarchy, Exploitation, and Enslavement
Once we decided that private property and inequality were acceptable, we started down a slippery slope to all sorts of misery. If it’s okay for me to own more stuff than you do, then it follows that it’s also okay for me to survive and even thrive while you starve. After all, if I share with you today when I can easily afford to do so, I might find myself in a difficult situation tomorrow because my generosity has left me without sufficient reserves. Our hunter-gatherer psychology did not support this logic given that today was paramount and tomorrow was a bridge to be crossed later, but this logic fits well in an agricultural psychology that emphasizes ownership and long-term plans. Nonetheless, watching fellow group members suffer from a position of relative comfort was inconsistent with numerous psychological changes brought about by our increased cooperativeness and interdependence over the last six million years. As a consequence, new patterns of thinking were required to mitigate the dissonance that this disparity aroused.
First and foremost in these psychological changes was the idea that some humans are better and/or more deserving than others. Although hunter-gatherers vary in traits such as strength and cunning, they tend to be fiercely egalitarian and strongly resent anyone who acts superior. Indeed, the most successful hunters tend to self-deprecate the most, so that others don’t envy their apparent superiority or get the sense they are lording it over them. As Christopher Boehm describes in his fascinating book Hierarchy in the Forest, this psychology leads to interesting patterns of communication—the bigger the catch, the more the hunter downplays it, along the lines of the following:
SID: How’d you do today?
RICHARD: Not much luck, although perhaps I could use a little help dragging the tiny carcass back home.
SID: Hmm, sounds like he got something big. . . . Should I get a few others to come along, or can you and I carry it together?
RICHARD: I’d hate to have you bug anyone else; it’s so little and sickly that we’ll probably leave it there anyway.
SID: Holy crap, he’s killed a giraffe! Time to call in the whole camp . . .
As our ancestors moved away from their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, the talented and hardworking accumulated nicer homes and more stuff. From there, people naturally concluded that property ownership is earned and that better people have better stuff. The passage of time and intergenerational inheritance would have eroded the strength of such a relationship, as lazy and dimwitted people could benefit from the generosity of their parents, but that problem was solved psychologically by our deciding that some bloodlines are better than others (a concept that is still evident in our fascination with erstwhile royalty).
Thus, the first psychological step away from our hunter-gatherer lifestyle was the willingness to agree that some people are better than others and that inequality is an acceptable outcome. Once you accept that “fact of nature,” why stop at rich and poor? Why not king and peasants, or master and slaves? Of course, that’s exactly what happened. Worldwide, egalitarianism was kicked to the curb, and newfound beliefs in innate superiority led to all sorts of human suffering. We know little of how this process initially unfolded, but records of European imperialism allow us to track the underlying psychology via parliamentary debates, newspapers, and other sources of public discussion as inequality spread to new people and places.
Such records show that opportunities for European exploitation and enslavement were rapidly followed by justifications based on differential qualities of “us” and “them,” or even differential humanness. Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” and the Manifest Destiny of the American settlers are both examples of how colonialists were able to recast their exploitation or slaughter of indigenous populations in positive and even moralistic terms. Of course, not everyone bought into this line of reasoning, and these arguments were often the topic of fierce debate. However, history shows that those in favor of exploitation and slaughter almost always carried the day, at least if we judge colonial powers by their actions and not their words.
Just as illuminating, exploration and exploitation of Africa and the Americas reveal European efforts to force inequality upon local populations. Such enforcement proved to be much easier when the locals were already agriculturalists, and accustomed to the psychology of inequality, than when they were hunter-gatherers and found inequality highly aversive. When Europeans attempted to conquer agricultural communities, such communities often quickly acquiesced to their new masters. The peasants in such societies were already heavily taxed and poorly treated by their own aristocracy; what difference did it make to them who took the reins? In contrast, hunter-gatherer societies typically fought against the colonialists, sometimes for generations, before finally being conquered by the larger and better-armed European forces.
In their illuminating book Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson provide numerous historical examples of this effect. For instance, when the Spanish began their conquest of South America, one of their earliest settlements was at the site of modern Buenos Aires. The settlement was a colonial failure and soon abandoned because the local hunter-gatherers refused to work for the Spanish, even under extreme duress. When the Spanish ventured farther inland and encountered agriculturalists in Paraguay, they easily subjugated the local people by conquering and replacing the aristocracy, while maintaining their system of forced labor.
Agriculture and inequality demanded complex societal organization, as people who could store food learned to band together against outside invaders and thieves within their own community, creating rules of ownership and commerce. Such rules could have been applied equally, but early governments were typically power struggles among competing factions that resulted in fiefdoms designed for exploitation. Only a few governments prior to the American Revolution were intended to serve their constituents. The Enlightenment and rediscovery of individual rights (a concept that is strong among hunter-gatherers) clearly played a major role in the improvement of government, but one need only look at the flawed state of most democracies to see the temptation on the part of the elite to exploit their position for personal advantage.
Chapter 7 provides a more thorough discussion of this topic, but for now the point is that the psychology that enables a state to shift from an oligarchy to a representative democracy is complicated. Perhaps the single most important factor is heterogeneity of interests. When the elite all benefit from the same set of rules (e.g., high import taxes to prevent foreign competition), there is a real risk that the interests of the elite will take precedence over the interests of the masses. But when society is highly heterogeneous and the interests of the elite contradict one another (as occurs when some are agriculturalists, some are manufacturers, some are merchants, and some provide services), the most likely compromise is a system of rules that is basically fair.
We see this same psychology in the emergence of preferences for fairness among children. When children are very young, they prefer to receive more than others. As they enter middle childhood, they start to realize that today’s advantage could easily become tomorrow’s disadvantage. Because other people outnumber the self, it doesn’t take children long to realize that unfairness is more likely to favor others than it is to favor the self, so they start to prefer outcomes that are relatively even between self and other. The safest psychological bet is equitable distribution, as this serves the self most reliably in the long run.
To this day, my two children believe that the older one cares more about fairness than the younger one, but in reality, he just figured out the odds before she did. When my daughter was still asking to draw another card in Candy Land or Monopoly, my son was old enough to realize that this approach was a bad idea, and he protested strongly. What seemed rather remarkable was that he was equally adamant when we offered to bend the rules in his favor. I was foolish enough to take pride in his strong sense of justice, but in fact, experience had taught him that fairness was in his own interest in the long run.
When people feel that they cannot dominate their group and guarantee long-term advantage for themselves, the same psychology emerges, and preference for fair rules predominates. We may not realize that self-interest is the source of our preference for fairness, but Lord Acton’s famous aphorism that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is testament to the fact that in our hearts we know that no one can be trusted.
From Villages to Cities
Homo erectus invented division of labor and benefited greatly from it. But the true potential of division of labor can be realized only when people become specialists, spending a lifetime pursuing a particular interest or talent. Such specialization was impossible until large enough groups crowded into small enough spaces that people could focus on their own interests without worrying that the crops wouldn’t be brought in or the laundry wouldn’t get done. Cities made that possible. If you live in a small village, maybe no one is interested in being a blacksmith, or maybe the only blacksmith falls in love with a girl from another village and leaves, so you’d better be able to shoe your own horse. But if you live in a city, numbers alone guarantee there will always be someone who can generate the goods and services you need yet are unable to produce for yourself.
Michelangelo could never have existed in a world of small villages; nor could Newton or Shakespeare. Although my favorite barista wouldn’t call herself an artist (a point on which I disagree), her glorious caffè macchiato could never have existed in a world of villages, either. In short, without cities, people couldn’t afford to focus their energies on a single skill to the exclusion of all others, so almost no one could develop the expertise to create something new and wonderful.*
With the advent of cities and true expertise, the world finally moved from the low-yield or even zero-sum game* it had always been, in which fortunes could be made only at the cost of others’ misfortunes. Expertise allowed the overall size of the pie to grow, as new things could be created that benefited everyone. Uruk, in eastern Iraq, might be the very spot where, six thousand years ago, the pie started expanding. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Uruk, but by five thousand years ago, it housed tens of thousands of people, and writing, pottery, and trade goods from ancient Uruk spread across the Middle East. Once we had Uruk, and all the other cities that followed, the world started to become a much richer and better place.
Change rarely comes without cost, and the move to cities was no exception. For the first time in history, our ancestors faced a life filled with acquaintances and strangers. This might not seem like a big deal if you live in a city and see strangers every day, but it’s bizarre for those who aren’t accustomed to it. I remember experiencing my own version of this discombobulation when I visited Shanghai about twenty years ago. There was a well-known market I wanted to see, and when I got there, I discovered that it was basically a human sardine can. So many people were crowded into such a small space that everyone was physically pressed on by everyone else. I thought it looked like a market mosh pit, and an experience I should sample, so I put my arms to my sides and waded in. Within just a few minutes I felt as if I were going to have a psychotic break, as strangers’ faces, armpits, and various other body parts pressed on me from all sides, and there was nothing I could do by way of escape. I wormed my way out of there as best I could, and my memories of Shanghai have never really recovered from that experience. For hunter-gatherers and early farmers, the crush of strangers they encountered in the first cities must have seemed equally disconcerting.
In small villages, everyone knows everyone else, at least by reputation. People know who can be trusted and who can’t, who has a hot temper and who is easygoing, who is competent and who is hopeless. Cities are full of strangers, so city-dwellers do not know what to expect when they encounter each other in a shop or a bar. We have responded to this development with two important changes in our psychology.
First, the safest strategy when dealing with unknown strangers is politeness, and indeed cultures that have high levels of violence often have high levels of politeness. For example, the American South is famous for its politeness and friendliness. But Southerners are also much more likely to react with violence, particularly when they have been treated dishonorably. Greater politeness and friendliness may seem inconsistent with greater violence, but in fact they are opposite sides of the same coin. When you’re among people who take offense violently, the most sensible strategy is to be polite to everyone, particularly people you don’t know.
With the move to cities, we shifted to a strategy of automatic politeness to strangers. Among hunter-gatherers these conventions don’t exist, as people respond to each other in keeping with their relationships. But among strangers in cities, we expect a certain level of decorum and respect on their part, and in turn we offer the same. If we slip and fall, we expect strangers to walk around rather than over us, and not to laugh at our clumsiness. If we drop our groceries on the ground, we expect strangers to help us pick them up, or at least not grab them and run away.
Cities have also caused us to rely much more heavily on outward appearances. The aphorism “don’t judge a book by its cover” would never have been used in hunter-gatherer societies, because there was no reason to do so. Everyone you interacted with was known to you.* Why judge a book by its cover when you’ve read every page? In contrast, we know very little of the capabilities and proclivities of the people we encounter in cities, so we rely much more heavily on outward displays.
For example, talking a big game is more impressive from a stranger, whose stories might be true, than a close associate whom you know to be exaggerating. Similarly, overconfidence on the part of a stranger is typically interpreted as a sign of competence, even though we might roll our eyes when our friends and neighbors show inflated self-views. As is discussed more thoroughly in chapter 7, this excessive reliance on outward appearances created by city living can be problematic, simply because we can’t calibrate people’s claims against their known behaviors.
This is not to say that we are incapable of judging people by their appearance. To the contrary, we are surprisingly good at it. But “surprisingly good” just means that we are a fair bit better than chance at judging who is friendly, who is competent, and who is malevolent. Lots of unfriendly people seem friendly when you first meet them, lots of incompetent people maintain an air of competence, and a fair number of sociopaths wheedle their way into our hearts and wallets (and even high office) before we discover their true nature.
Fortunately, there is a lot of seemingly trivial information we can use to judge others accurately. For example, a glance at people’s music playlists, college dorm rooms, or apartments provides reliable information about their personalities. Personal appearances are equally informative: your clothes, hairstyle, and many other aspects of your personal grooming reveal your personality and temperament.
In my own case, prior to my first date with my wife (and hence prior to her consoling me about being bested by the prepubescent twerp at the Ohio State Fair), I was already thinking that maybe she and I were a match. That thought didn’t occur to me with regard to the other women I was seeing around that time, and I suspect that there was something about my future wife’s appearance or way of speaking that communicated to me that we were fundamentally compatible. Research shows that such thin slices of behavior can be surprisingly revealing, and also that seemingly irrelevant factors such as scent can be very important, although we know little about how these processes work.
How the Internet Brought Us Full Circle
Perhaps the most significant cost that has emerged in our move to cities is the greater scope they provide for the dark side of human nature to predominate. In a small community there are no strangers, so it’s hard to lie, cheat, steal, or otherwise take advantage of others. When our hunter-gatherer ancestors misbehaved, there was really no way to escape the consequences: gossip ensured that their reputation would catch up with them. In a city, by contrast, it’s easy to exploit friendly and trusting people and then move on before your duplicity is discovered. Modern levels of residential and occupational mobility allow sociopaths to outpace gossip their entire lives.
This challenge is now being met head-on by social media, which is returning us to the close-knit, intertwined lives of our ancestors. Many websites are explicitly designed to communicate reputation. TripAdvisor not only lets me know whether a hotelier maintains a clean establishment but also gives me the opportunity to air my grievances or delight after my visit. Such websites give otherwise powerless consumers a great deal more ammunition in their fight with Goliath corporations.
Other websites have proliferated to provide private individuals access to the reputations of strangers. Searching someone’s police record is a clear example, but Uber, Airbnb, and eBay are all business models that rely on the reciprocal transmission of reputation. If I don’t know you, I might be nervous about letting you ride in my car or stay in my house. But if I know how you have been rated by lots of other people who let you ride in their cars and stay in their houses, I have a pretty good sense of what sort of person you are.
By transmitting reputation, these websites minimize the risk of exploitation. Because every interaction is rated by both parties, buyer and seller are both motivated to deal with each other fairly and honestly. I might be tempted to treat your car or house like a trash can, but I know I’ll pay a steep price for that behavior the next time I try to call a car or book a vacation rental. Just as our ancestors were inclined to deal with each other fairly and honestly because the social costs were too high if they did otherwise, the social (and hence financial) costs are too great for users of these platforms to cheat one another.
Along with these formalized methods for sharing reputations, platforms such as Facebook have also allowed private citizens to let the world know when they have been exploited. Consider the Australian con artist Brett Joseph, who repeatedly charmed his way into women’s hearts with the goal of accessing their wallets. Although he successfully ripped off one of his first victims, she was determined to prevent it from happening to other women, so she set up a webpage that provided his photo, name, and modus operandi. Despite numerous attempts to repeat his swindles, judicious googling by his potential victims stymied him time and again. He even moved to the United States in an effort to escape his reputation, only to be caught out when he applied for a marriage license and admitted to his fiancée that he hadn’t been using his real name. That admission struck her as odd, and it didn’t take long before she discovered his true identity. As was the case with our hunter-gatherer ancestors, Brett Joseph’s reputation now precedes him no matter where he goes.
In this sense, social media and all the reputation buttons we have at our disposal are an important weapon against the sociopaths, slobs, cheats, and freeloaders who would otherwise take advantage of the kindness of strangers. As is nearly always the case, however, these benefits come with costs. The most notable cost is the manner in which social media can crush people through relentless attacks by those who don’t know the perpetrator and hence aren’t inclined to temper their reactions with sympathy. Overreactions to bad behavior are a repeated occurrence, with people’s lives disrupted for what were objectively minor infractions. People tweet stupid and insensitive jokes to their friends, or make what they thought were private comments, and within hours they find themselves unemployed.
Consider the story of Walter Palmer, the Minneapolis dentist who shot Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe. Unbeknownst to Palmer, Cecil was a beloved lion who lived in Hwange National Park and was being observed by Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. Palmer had paid $54,000 for the opportunity to bow-hunt a lion and must have been thrilled when such a magnificent animal wandered off the National Park and onto the farm where he was hunting. He failed to kill Cecil with his bow and arrow, but eleven hours later his team tracked down the wounded lion and shot him. It was only then that they found the monitoring device around the animal’s neck.
Some good came of this tragedy: many countries banned the import of trophy lions; more than forty airlines announced they would no longer carry them; lion conservation rules were strengthened in several African countries; and donations increased to wildlife conservation organizations. In contrast, the reactions to Palmer himself were vicious. Many people are appalled by trophy hunting, but Palmer had broken no laws and had not intentionally killed a lion under observation. His actions were really no different from those of thousands of other hunters who legally kill animals for the thrill of it. Nonetheless, he was met with international condemnation, his dental practice was protested, his property was vandalized, and he received death threats from animal rights activists when he returned home, prompting him and his wife to go into hiding and hire personal security. One year later, there were still attacks against him in the media, and some news outlets posted photos of him and his whereabouts.
Many people probably think Palmer got what he deserves, and maybe they’re right. But my guess is that if they knew him personally, their anger and disgust might be moderated by other information about him. Through the internet we have regained the ancestral benefits of reputation broadcasting, but we pay an enormous cost in the overreactions of strangers who know the perpetrators only through a singular misdeed and are unaware of their positive qualities. Social media has given us some of the benefits of the small communities in which we evolved, but it may prove to be the case that ancestral living was a package deal, and the benefits of modern forms of reputation broadcasting are outweighed by the overreactions of strangers.
Our journey from the East African rainforests of seven million years ago to the cities of today has been extraordinary, as we survived and thrived in environments that could easily have killed us off many times over. Our proclivities and capabilities evolved throughout this period, as we changed slowly from chimplike beings to the people we are today. But surviving and thriving are not the whole story, as evolution depends primarily on reproduction. We turn now to the last part of our prehistory: the impact of our ancestor’s mating habits on our modern psychology.