For 97 per cent of human history, all people had about the same power and resources. How did we get to inequality?

From the Nation, by Tim Robinson

Part of the politics of the Alternative UK is about looking at contemporary issues in deeper, broader contexts. What if there’s a more elemental argument about human nature, culture and society that sits beneath this or that policy? What if we talk in thousands of years rather than decades or eras?

We discovered this piece, from philosopher Kim Sterelny, which goes back to archaeology and asks: why did we turn towards social inequality 10,000 years ago, when most of our evolved existence was as self-regulation, egalitarian hunter-gatherer nomads? What were the transition steps?

It’s a long and rich essay, but Sterelny helpful identifies four interlocking explanations at the end:

“Inequality depends on a prior establishment of an economy of storage and an expansion in social scale”

Hunter gatherers have to share what they secure - the food supplies are not constant and regular, and compel collective pooling, otherwise there could be collective disaster. Yet when farming on land begins, and the grind of labour begins to produce yields that are regularly in excess of need, then grain or livestock starts to be stored. That amassing of property from labour starts to be defended, and then traded.

The increase of types of labour required to produce this extra yield compels a hierarchical organisation - there is less trust around than in the forager communities.

As Sterelny says: “It would simply be a bad idea for people to commit to these efforts without something like property rights. Likewise, it would be maladaptive for children to remain with their parents working their land unless these rights included a right of transfer. So storage, especially storage based on crops, will tend to produce a community of independent family economies.”

“Transegalitarian communities emerge from forager communities with clan-based organisation”

By “transegalitarian”, Sterelny means a kind of transition space between the leaderless communities of the hunter-gatherers, and the full institutions and centralisations that we might recognise in growing towns, cities and enterprises. These transition communities are dominated by “Big Man” figures, who assume the authority to define who is within and without the “clan”. A clan uses ritual and symbolism to forge people’s identities.

“Transegalitarian communities emerge from forager communities where the normative and ritual life is in the hands of a small group of initiates”

Sterelny: “When social information flows just from parents to children [in forager societies], maladaptive instructions have an automatic tendency to fade away. But the centralised transmission of the norms, rituals and ideology of a community can easily favour one group at the expense of others”. So note the rise of religious elders, shamen and teachers - those who keep the codes and practices that enable consistent farming and making.

As Sterelny concludes:

Recognition of property rights and inheritance allows wealth inequalities to establish and even grow. These can provide a surplus used for internal politics, and an ambitious, persuasive individual can add to their own stores through calling in debts and mobilising support from his clan.

These accumulated stores can then be spent in prestige-enhancing displays such as feasts or other expensive rituals, and sometimes by sponsoring the building of ritual structures.

These displays are partly to impress their own community, but also, and very importantly, they’re targeted at their opposite numbers in other communities, others who equally combine ambition with access to wealth.

All too familiar these days (see our space-moguls competitively racing to the moon, as outlined in this week’s post). Having shown that specific shifts and adaptations lead to thoroughly unequal structures, over ten millennia, Sterelny closes with a burst of optimism:

Bottom line: egalitarian, cooperative human communities are possible. Widespread sharing and consensus decision-making aren’t contrary to ‘human nature’ (whatever that is). Indeed, for most of human history we lived in such societies.

But such societies are not inherently stable. These social practices depend on active defence. That active defence failed, given the social technologies available, as societies increased in scale and economic complexity.

There’s no going back to Pleistocene equality, and I for one wouldn’t embrace the social intimacy and material simplicity of such lives. But we do have new social technologies.

China (especially) is showing how those can be used to enhance elite surveillance. Let’s hope they can be reconfigured to support more bottom-up social action, to mitigate some of the effects of imbalances of wealth and power.

More here. We are equally interested in how “social technologies” can “support more bottom-up social action”. Yet there might be more imagination than defence involved in this.