Ok, going to try to write this long post again. Not sure I remember it all or that itll come out right a second time, but here goes(has actually turned out longer... damn Im wordy :P ). So, I read this piece from Films for Action, and I think its good as far as it goes. I especially like the stuff about child-rearing, and think it deserves as much amplification as possible, as it seems important and cuts hard against the grain of current conventional wisdom on the topic. The parts about playfulness are really interesting, and not something Id given much thought to before. Worth digging into. And of course the reverse-domination theory laid about by Richard Lee from his study of the !Kung Bushmen(and other groups) is a goldmine for social thinkers. Id question the degree of universality that the piece claims for these traits, just because claims of universality in general can be problematic. But I dont know of any specific counter-examples(no, the Yanomami dont count, and this article spells out well why), and all the groups I -have- read about seem to bear up the notion, so its at least a strong -generality-. Overall, its a great piece, and wonderful at debunking the current trend of ideas that looks at modern -cultural- traits and tries to imagine that they have a direct genetic basis, and constructs post hoc reasoning for how they were evolutionarily advantageous on an imagined ancient savanna, without taking into account that our ancestors probably didnt share many of those traits at all. Many of the things we imagine as hold-overs from our pre-civilization days are traits that we actually have much more of than our hunter-gatherer cousins. Particularly in terms of violence, dominance behavior, competitiveness, acquisitiveness, and of all things what we often refer to as -tribalism-(reflexive distrust of others not like ourselves). So where I start to question the piece is the over-arching message it tries to draw from this about the lessons we can learn from these hunter-gatherer societies, in terms of how to make our society better. See, the thing the author fails to really address is the fact that although these traits are fairly universal for non-agricultural societies, the lack of them is fairly universal for agricultural societies. To one degree or another but generally -much- mores than hunter-gatherer societies. And this isnt a coincidence. Whats needed here is an understanding of the idea that there is a process of selection much akin to the evolutionary process that affects culture and cultural norms. Cultures are in flux. In the short term, they change in pseudo-random ways(not actually random, but with causes that are so localized, circumstantial and complex that they function pseudo-randomly, somewhat like genetic mutation). But in the long term, there is something of a selection process that selects for cultural traits that are well adapted to the circumstance the culture finds itself in. The process by which humans became so much more communal, collaborative and egalitarian as compared to other primates(other mammals in general) was certainly one that involved both genetic/physical and cultural adaptations. Those traits served us remarkably well as hunter-gatherers, and were a big part of our explosive growth and expansion across the planet. Groups that couldnt work together just didnt fare as well. We can see the cultural components well illustrated by this piece, and many of the genetics ones become clear if you look for them. Pro-social behavior is built into our genes, in a big way, comparative to other primates. So, biology points to many instances of convergent evolution. Bees and hummingbirds, for an example. I think this trend is even stronger in the case of a singular species with largely shared genetic traits, in terms of cultural evolution. This goes a long way to explain why hunter-gatherer bands all over the world seem to share many similar traits. It also goes a long way to explain the very strange fact that in numerous places around the world, in a pretty short timeframe in terms of our overall history as a species(a couple thousand years vs 100,000+), a series of events seems to largely repeat itself: population pressures lead to humans, who already clearly were in the habit of saving seed and engaging in small scale horticulture, to suddenly start practicing systematic agriculture, this being followed by sudden shifts toward more hierarchical societies, with increasing out-group conflict, conquest, exploitation, the creation of the class divide, and systematic subjugation of women. The work of Marija Gimbutas aside, or rather in focus but expanded upon, this didnt just happen in one place and expand through the process of conquest and cultural contagion, but rather had multiple points of origin that do not appear to have had direct interaction, or at least not on the level required by a singular cause theory. At the very least, agricultural societies of the Americas, some of which appear to have been quite intensely hierarchical and have strong class delineations, cannot reasonable be rolled into the theory. Rather, the change must have been one that was adaptive to a changing circumstance, likely over-population, and that it was a successful cultural adaptation, at least in terms of dominating the culture-pool. It could still easily have spread from multiple places via conquest and contagion, ala Gimbutas, just from multiple points of origin. I tend to subscribe to this theory, as it seems to fit quite well, but alternate ideas do exist. Anyway, my point here is that as the circumstances changed, so did the social/cultural traits that were well adapted to the circumstance. Larger societies made reverse-domination strategies ineffective, made group censure of anti-social behavior in general much harder. And though we had the genetic disposition toward cooperation, we also still had much of the old primate dominance behavior kicking around. So the ego-psych folks are -part- right in pointing to evolutionary basis of some of these things, just not so much in terms of ancient humans and more in terms of our pre-human ancestors. Ideas about how we change culture to to once again favor the traits of our hunter-gatherer cousins must contend with the current circumstances. The cultural norms that supported this pro-social behavior generally failed to survive the environmental change brought on by agriculture, the production of food surplus, and massive population increase. They were ill-adapted for an environment where we were no longer absolutely reliant on every one of our neighbors for survival, where shunning of those who exhibit anti-social behavior was no longer powerful, and where simply avoiding those who threatened violence as a dominance tactic was no longer an easy option. Now, it should be stressed that evolution, cultural or biological, is not a moral process, nor is it meaningfully progressive, it doesnt move from worse to better. Early anthropologists tended to view the change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, and from there to more complex social arrangements, as advancement, but thats a poor lens. This is not only to say we arent better than our hunter-gatherer cousins(that is sort of how that framing tends to come across), but its also important to point out that just because a cultural norm was successful in terms of that process doesnt mean that its superior. It just happened to be successful in that environment. And its worth noting that the environment(speaking here not about the ecological circumstance but rather the total space in which a culture operates, including its relation to other cultures, its population level, technological knowledge, and many other things) has changed a lot since these traits initially gained an advantage. The fact that they were advantageous to the groups that implemented them doesnt mean they are necessarily still advantageous now. It also doesnt mean they were advantageous to the -species-, just that they out-competed others. Whew. Feel like I may be repeating myself/belaboring things some here. Really need to do some more formal training in terms of my scholarly-type writing. Just had a couple points I wanted to be clear on. What Im getting at is that I feel its important that any project that aims to utilize what weve learned from hunter-gatherers in order to try to move society back toward an egalitarian and peaceful society needs to take into account the current environment. Simply engaging in small scale reverse dominance, encouraging play, and utilizing non-directive child-rearing probably isnt going to be enough, though these are probably of real value. What we need is to work out ways to utilize these sorts of things on a much larger scale. Creating strong cultural threads of anti-narcissism/anti-fame/anti-dominance is a decent start, but a hard project to even imagine how to implement, given the circumstance. What may be needed is a real means of social censure against anti-social behavior... something that runs hard against the current social norm of hyper-individualism, and that is extremely frightening for groups unjustly marginalized by the majority(myself decidedly included, along several vectors!). We may, in the end, have to give up some degree of personal autonomy in order to regain egalitarianism. But its not like most of us have anything like real personal autonomy within this dominance-heavy, hierarchical society. Even the fear of being marginalized unjustly itself arises largely from the implicit hierarchies of our culture, which I feel largely arise out of the nature of our anti-social, competitive, status-driven society, where defense of individuality is largely a defense against hierarchical oppressions that I think would be largely incoherent in a more egalitarian society. But the process of getting there... that remains very murky to me, and fraught with pitfalls and potential for harm and abuse. If we were to somehow initiate broad, decentralized mechanisms of social censure based on the opinions and ideas of people -now-, in the culture as it stands, the results would be dreadful for those currently marginalized. It will have to be a slow process, with a very strong ideal growing in society of communalism, mutual trust and understanding, and a main focus on censure of specifically abusive behaviors, not just ones that are hard to understand. Traits which -do- seem to have gained some foothold in the world over the past few centuries, though haltingly and with much backsliding. 3 steps forward, to steps back is still progress(and yes, I speak of progress here, because I do have a moral/ideological preference, unlike the evolutionary process). So in short, we have a long, long road ahead of us, if this is our aim. I think it a worthy one, and possible.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 18:22:18 +0000
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