How Egalitarian Societies Rein In Potential Despots

WSNers,

I've lurking of late, swamped with pressing duties...

However, this article from the Chronical of Higher Ed was forwarded to me,
and it seems to bear some relation to several recent topics.

I do not have a strong opinion at this point, since all I have read is the
review.

tom hall

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This story from The Chronicle of Higher Education 
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from: jp126@cornell.edu



  From the issue dated December 17, 1999



  How Egalitarian Societies Rein In Potential Despots

  By VINCENT KIERNAN
  
     Despots are all too common in human history: Hitler,
  Napoleon, Saddam Hussein, and their ilk have popped up time
  and again. But increasingly common, too, are democratic
  societies in which powerful individuals are on a tight leash. 
  
  
  Anthropologists and other social scientists have struggled to
  understand the development of such "egalitarian" behavior, in
  which a society protects the weak from the strong. Now
  Christopher H. Boehm, a professor of anthropology at the
  University of Southern California, has set forth a new theory
  of human social evolution that links the egalitarian behavior
  of primitive societies, such as hunter-gatherers, with
  democratic political institutions.  
  
  In his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of
  Egalitarian Behavior (Harvard University Press), published
  this month, Mr. Boehm rejects the either-or arguments that
  have raged over egalitarianism, in which some have insisted
  that human society is fundamentally hierarchical, or
  susceptible to control by powerful individuals, and others
  have argued that it will naturally evolve to become
  increasingly egalitarian.  
  
  Mr. Boehm stakes out a middle position, contending that the
  development of egalitarianism in a particular human society
  depends on the specific conditions found there.  
  
  Although that position may sound to an outsider like little
  more than splitting hairs, scholars say that Mr. Boehm has
  marshaled an impressive array of evidence to support his
  contention, and that the book will fundamentally alter the
  shape of scientific discourse in the field.  
  
  "It's the most important work on human social evolution to be
  published in many years," says Bruce Knauft, a professor of
  anthropology at Emory University.  
  
  Barbara Smuts, a primatologist and professor of psychology at
  the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, calls the book "very
  convincing." A key virtue of the book is the "integrative
  approach" that Mr. Boehm has taken, drawing on both
  primatology and anthropology, she says.  
  
  That approach is a product of the twists and turns of Mr.
  Boehm's own academic career, he says. He was trained, and did
  his initial academic research, as a cultural anthropologist.
  In the 1980s, he did fieldwork in Montenegro, where he studied
  conflict resolution among the various ethnic factions in the
  Balkan republic. 
  
  But in 1984, with an interest in studying the political
  behavior of wild chimpanzees, Mr. Boehm decided to become a
  primatologist. He studied under Jane Goodall and traveled with
  her to Tanzania to conduct fieldwork. Since then, he has
  expanded his research to include gorillas and bonobos, a
  chimp-like species. In his book, he draws on those field
  observations, as well as anthropological research by others
  into early human societies.  
  
  "The fact that he combines research in anthropology with
  direct observational research in primatology suggests that
  [the book] has a more impressive empirical basis than some
  other works," says Larry Arnhart, a professor of political
  science at Northern Illinois University. 
  
  Mr. Boehm argues that egalitarianism amounts to the overthrow
  of "alpha males" -- powerful, dominant men -- by rank-and-file
  members of a society who individually have little power but
  who, by cooperating with one another, can impose their
  collective will on the alphas.  
  
  As a group, the powerless members of the society foster
  egalitarianism by creating a taboo on the exercise of power by
  the alphas, Mr. Boehm concludes. The society must be ready to
  suppress upstart alphas who would seek to supplant the
  egalitarian arrangement, he says. As a modern example, Mr.
  Boehm cites the decline of former Rep. Newt Gingrich, a
  Georgia Republican, from his heyday as Speaker of the House of
  Representatives. "As Gingrich began to wield some serious
  power, he exuded a certain air of dominance and his peers in
  Congress found ways to cut him down to size," Mr. Boehm
  writes.  
  
  "Egalitarian societies constitute a very special type of
  hierarchy, one in which the rank and file avoid being
  subordinated by vigilantly keeping alpha-type group members
  under their collective thumbs," he writes.  
  
  But Mr. Boehm goes further, by proposing a "political
  portrait" of the Common Ancestor, the primate from which both
  humans and African apes theoretically evolved. Based on
  behaviors that are shared by the Common Ancestor's
  descendants, Mr. Boehm proposes that Common Ancestor societies
  were organized hierarchically, headed by one or more dominant
  individuals. Small groups probably formed political
  coalitions, and larger groups of the Common Ancestor's
  descendants would band together to defend their food and other
  resources against enemies, he concludes.  
  
  Such behavioral characteristics, says Mr. Boehm, served as the
  basis for the formation of both hierarchical and egalitarian
  human societies. Egalitarian societies, he says, probably
  emerged no later than 100,000 years ago. One possibility, he
  says, is that societies found the collective power to control
  alpha males once their members developed the ability to
  classify certain behaviors as deviant, such as murder and
  incest -- and dominance. Another possibility, he says, is that
  a successful uprising against alphas in a human society helped
  lead to the creation of moral norms that forbade dominance.  
  
  "In all probability, the first law of morality that humans
  came up with was the outlawing of alpha-male behavior," he
  says.  
  
  In fact, Mr. Boehm says his next book probably will deal with
  the evolution of morality. In a further project, Mr. Boehm is
  collaborating with the evolutionary biologist David Sloan
  Wilson, a professor at the State University of New York at
  Binghamton, to study the evolution of conflict resolution.
  Both topics, he says, are intricately linked to egalitarianism
  in society.  
  
  "In an egalitarian society, you have to have morality to keep
  egalitarianism in place, and you need ways to resolve conflict
  if you don't have a strong leader," says Mr. Boehm.  
  
  Egalitarianism has even had effects on international
  relations, according to Mr. Boehm. "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," he says.  
  
  He says further that the United Nations, in some respects,
  resembles a hunter-gatherer band, with its aversion to a
  strong, central leader. For example, he notes that the
  Security Council operates by consensus; no one member can call
  the shots. In addition, as with bands and tribes, "the control
  of serious conflicts is tenuous, at best," he writes.  
  
  This last line of analysis is "much too speculative," says Mr.
  Arnhart, the Northern Illinois political scientist. Despite
  the similarities that Mr. Boehm notes between humans and other
  primates, "human beings are of course unique," says Mr.
  Arnhart. 
  
  Another weakness, says Michigan's Ms. Smuts, is that Mr. Boehm
  generates hypotheses about human social evolution from his
  past fieldwork, but does not take the further step of testing
  those hypotheses by conducting new field observations.  
  
  Mr. Arnhart and Ms. Smuts say, however, that such objections
  are minor and do not dampen their enthusiasm for the book.  
  
  "Even if he turns out to be wrong, he has made a very
  important contribution to this field," says Ms. Smuts. "This
  book is likely to set the terms of discussion for the
  foreseeable future." 
  
  
  

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