In the beginning years of this blog, I published a series of articles called “Meditations on Democracy and Dictatorship” which are still regularly read today, and have had some influence. They still elicit inquiries from remote corners of the globe. They are now buried in the back pages of the blog, so I’m moving them up the chronological counter so they can have another round of visibility, especially (I hope) with younger readers. I am re-posting them in their original sequence over part of 2018. Some references in these “meditations” will date them to 2007–2008, when they were written. But I will leave them un-retouched, though I may occasionally append some retrospective notes. Mostly, they deal with abstract issues that do not need updating.
For this Meditation on Democracy, the sixth in the series, I will undertake a critique of some currently dominant ideas about the role of democracy in human history, and attempt to provide a conceptual framework for looking at democracy in a different, more realistic way. This will mean that some of the ground covered in earlier meditations will be revisited. It will also draw on the collaborative work between myself and Prof. Steven Muhlberger, published in the Journal of World History, and on the World History of Democracy Website. I am exclusively responsible, however, for the views expressed in this series.
The critique will rest on these assertions:
Democracy is not a temporary or recent phenomenon, but a mode of human social behaviour that has existed since the earliest communities of “modern” humans appeared, somewhere between sixty and a hundred thousand years ago, and which is in turn based on our roots among proto-humans and our primate ancestors.
Democracy is an expression of fundamental elements in human social psychology, and hence, not “culture-specific” or “belonging” to any particular human culture, ethnic group, or locality.
Democracy is not an “ideology” co-equal and alternative to other “political systems”, but is in fact sui generis, a mode of human behaviour fundamentally different from ideologies of power and rule.
Democracy is not the product of any sequence of “stages” in history, nor is it more or less necessary or desirable in any time or place. It is neither the product of a pseudo-“evolution” of human societies, nor the product of particular modes of production, ecological niches, or configurations of population.
Democracy is a mode of human social interaction that can be practiced by any human group, of any size, with any type of technology, and at any time or place.
Democracy is a product of human intelligence and creative imagination, in the same way that technology, art, and music are. These fields of human creativity are the direct consequences of human faculties, not passively determined by environment. In other words, human sculpture in wood comes about because of a built-in need of humans, as conscious, thinking, and self-aware beings, to manipulate physical objects for representational and symbolic purposes. It is not merely a side-effect of the availability of wood. If wood is not available, then the impulse to carve will find another object, such as bone, stone, clay, or even the human body itself. Similarly, democracy is a product of the profoundest creativity in human nature, the ability to grasp that other human beings are not merely external objects, but conscious beings, similar and equal to oneself. Consequently, democracy cannot be explained as the result of temporary conditions, such as population density, climate, resource limits, birthrates, or modes of production, though these variables may influence its application.
The purpose of democracy is to promote and protect the well-being of humans, while its opponent principle, crime (warfare, caste systems, hereditary privilege, tyranny, aristocracy, dictatorship, theocracy, and totalitarian ideology) is pathological. Thus the relationship of democracy to the “political” concepts subsumed in crime is similar to that of the healthy organism to infectious disease. The relationship is one of constant strategy and counter-strategy, innovation and adaptation, with the predators on humanity exploiting every novel condition as an “opening” to establish their infection. Thus, political crime, embodied in caste, aristocracy, or kingship, is “normal” and “natural” to human societies, in the same sense that infectious disease is endemic to it. That “normalcy” does not mean that crime is either desirable, or that we should passively tolerate it. Democratic thought and action constitute the practical strategy for surviving the pathology of tyranny, just as understanding biology and practicing cleanliness are the practical strategy for surviving the ever-variant assaults from disease.
Within a human community, the pathology of crime is manifest in the tendency, desire, and ability of some human beings to manipulate, dominate and control others. This pathology only occurs in dangerous levels among a minority of human beings.
The strategies of this criminal minority are variants and combinations of violence, minion recruitment, intimidation, and deception. What distinguishes the behaviour of criminals from normal humans is their consistent use of these methods to achieve ends exclusively beneficial to themselves. The criminal minority display what psychologists identify as a “sociopathic” personality. They conceive of other human beings as objects, and take pleasure in manipulating them and disposing of them, but feel no empathy for them. They are aware that their victims are constrained by conscience, by empathy, and other social and ethical considerations, but they are not under any such constraints themselves. As Mao-Zedong, the quintessential example of the sociopath, once wrote: “Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.” The criminal minority thus regards the bulk of human beings as prey, and observes the weaknesses of that prey with cool detachment. They easily anticipate and predict the behaviour of their victims, while the victims have great difficulty in interpreting or anticipating theirs.
Democracy is dependent on the closely related values of honesty and fairness. These values are not easily achieved. They require meticulous and repeated effort on the part of human beings to discern truth, and judge what action is fair to a multitude of individuals in a multitude of situations. It is not something that can be done effectively alone, but requires collaborative and co-operative actions. Since it depends for its success on a close correspondence to reality, options for action are constrained. Criminals have no such constraints. They can employ any strategy they chose, from a wide selection, none of them dependent on truth, consistency, or fairness. Since reality is not the concern of the liar, any lie that serves the predatory goal can be employed, and there are infinite options in lying. Psychological manipulation and fraud are the most powerful tools employed. Physical force only supplements them, and is usually supplied by henchmen or other psychological dependents.
Dominance and tyrannical power are fundamentally the same on all scales. A small-time con-artist bilking elderly widows of their savings, and a President of the United States bilking 300,000,000 Americans out of their savings are the same type of personality, employing the same techniques, to the same ends. Jim Jones, manipulating a handful of followers into abject obedience and suicide, and Mao Zedong, manipulating hundreds of millions into abject obedience and suicide, are the same person, doing the same thing, with the same techniques, for the same purposes. There is no difference except the numbers of victims. This is true of all tyranny, from a single abusive husband tormenting a wife and children, to a dictator running a vast empire of hundreds of millions, the motives, means and ends are identical. They are one single phenomenon. Consequently, the democratic principle that opposes tyranny is a single phenomenon, potentially adjustable to any scale
“Ideologies” or “beliefs” proclaimed by criminals are mere empty noise. They are the “story” manufactured by the con-artist, strictly for the consumption of the credulous victim. Attempts by the victims to explain or predict the behaviour of criminals in terms of their “values” or on the basis of the abstract ideas and proclamations in their ideologies, are foolish. The more one does this, the more criminals will exploit this credulity strategically.
Crime, manifested in purported “social systems”, is easily modified in details, and transfered or inherited from one generation of criminals to another. Each such transfer contributes to the “endemic” nature of the crime. For example, consider one of the most common cases of manipulative fraud: the assertion that some humans are either destined or especially fit to rule others, by reason of their birth in a particular lineage or clan. It may take many generations of repetition and manipulation to gain acceptance for this lie. But once accepted, the lie acquires the tremendous power of perceived normalcy. Subsequent liars need only perform to a minimum level of competence to maintain the fraud. Societies that have experienced generations of aristocracy or kingship, no matter how debilitating or destructive, come to see the disease as inherent, inevitable, and preordained. They enter a psychological condition similar to that of abused spouses, who, trapped in misplaced loyalty, cannot see any alternative to submission to the abuser. Aristocracies that have gained acceptance in this way are sometimes dislodged by other clans or lineages, who simply usurp the same role. By this time, the concept of a “superior” lineage does not even need to be based on real continuity. A “super-lie” can ride piggy-back on the original lie, without straining the credulity of the victims. Democratic analysis seeks to identify and discredit the underlying lies, rather than just to combat particular liars and particular tyrants.
The careers of specific criminals are facilitated by the existence of a background of generally accepted lies. It is therefore in the interest of all criminals to encourage and perpetuate these general lies, as well as the specific lies that they tell in their course of manipulating specific victims. Among these general lies is the notion that what criminals do, in defrauding, manipulating, bullying, and exploiting their victims, is beneficial to human beings in some nebulous collective fashion. Throughout history, we have been bombarded by assertions that aristocracy, kingship, tyranny, and caste hierarchies exist for the purpose of promoting the well-being of the people subjected to them, or that they came into being because they produced beneficial results for a majority, or because they are necessary for human “progress”. There is absolutely no truth to these assertions. One might as readily proclaim that the Black Death came into being because the people of the Middle Ages needed it to improve their society, or that plague bacili were needed by our bodies to better direct and secure our health. But these general lies are widely believed, and form the basis of much of our historical literature and political discourse.
Now, let’s look at the first of these assertions in detail.
I — Democracy is not a temporary or recent phenomenon, but a mode of human social behaviour that has existed since the earliest communities of “modern” humans appeared, somewhere between sixty and a hundred thousand years ago, and which is in turn based on our roots among proto-humans and our primate ancestors.
There is now a considerable body of work on the social behaviour of primates and early humans. Behaviours that were once considered to be unique to modern humans, or the product of recent human cultures, have been observed among our primate relatives. Friendship, love, hate, jealousy, rage, co-operation, altruism, alliances, tactical deception, reciprocity, group solidarity, warfare, mourning, play — virtually the entire panoply of feelings and behaviour that we identify as “human” — have been unambiguously observed among our closest biological relatives. They have also been observed among some other animals, such as cetatians (orcas, dolphins and whales). We have been made aware of this by a half century of meticulous scientific investigation. The observers had to overcome conventional assumptions that non-human animals were mechanical automatons. It is now accepted that many elements of human behaviour and society came to us from our common ancestors. It is also clear that some elements have taken a distinctive course in our species.
Once they had absorbed the concept that our primate relatives have genuine cultures, scientists became puzzled by one significant contrast between primate societies and the societies of hunter-gatherers that we know constituted the human community for a period of tens of thousands of years before recorded history.
The range of behaviour of individuals in a troop of chimpanzees is perfectly recognizable to us. However, chimpanzee society is extremely hierarchical, with alpha-males ruling over others through intimidation. It is by no means a tranquil hierarchy. Ruling chimps climb to the top by scheming, bullying, and violence. Those at the acme of power are often deposed by conspiracies among lesser-ranked rivals. Murder, rape, violent beatings, exile, and ostracism are commonplace. Nor is there any evidence that the troop as a whole benefits from the extra privileges (largely sexual) that the dominant claim. Much energy that could have gone to efficient food gathering, or to common defense against rival troops or predators, is wasted in internal strife. Chimpanzee societies are often sapped, destabilized, and torn apart by the antics of dominance-seekers. As in human societies, violent dominance is sought by only a minority of individuals. The same societies abound in examples of equal collaboration, friendship, and conviviality. Chimpanzee societies attempt, as best they can, to limit the power of dominant individuals, by combining into temporary alliances to defy or depose them. Unfortunately, such alliances depend on carefully co-ordinated simultaneous disobedience, carried out at exactly the right moment. Such opportunities and co-ordination are rarely possible without advance planning, which Chimpanzees don’t seem to be able to manage. Consequently, most chimpanzees live under the shadow of tyranny. The psychological and physical cost on the average, low-status chimpanzee is no different from the costs inflicted on humans subjected to tyranny.
Over the last two million years, a number of hominid species appear in the fossil record. They are clearly descended from the same group of primates that is ancestral to chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, to whom we have a very close genetic and physiological resemblance. Their behaviour, however showed progressive divergence from their relatives. Chimpanzees occasionally use tools, for example, and occasionally fabricated them, but the ancient hominids started to use them much more often and much more deliberately. Chimps, bonobos and gorillas remained confined to a narrow range of environments in the tropical forests of Africa, while hominids moved into a variety of new environments. In fact, they spread out of Africa to cover a significant portion of the globe, albeit in very small numbers and density. Somehow, hominids lost the normal animal terror of fire, and at some point began to use it to their own ends.
At some time, roughly estimated at about 100,000 years ago, hominids appeared on the scene who can be described as modern humans. Physiologically, they were our species. Other varieties of hominids seem to have been rapidly replaced by them. As far as we can tell, our species has had the same basic capacities and proclivities from then until now. There is no reason to believe that a child plucked from a tribe of mammoth hunters of thirty thousand years ago could not successfully go through grade school, high school and university, and earn a degree in social anthropology. Our earliest evidence of this kind of “modern human” is accompanied by signs of symbolic and artistic activities. Some early human campsites, for example, contain large quantities of carefully worked necklace beads, very finely crafted and requiring a huge investment in labour and time, but without any discernible “survival” value. Caves and rock-faces in many locations are covered with painted art, dating from many thousands of years ago. Many, such as those at Alta Mira, in the Pyrenees, are breathtakingly beautiful. We know, from hunting-and-gathering peoples who have survived into historical times, that these paintings are replete with meaningful symbolism, and represent complex ideas. We also know, from the example of many such societies, that rock art must have been accompanied by other forms of aesthetic expression, in wood, bark, and animal bi-products, in dress, in body decoration, in music, in dance. It is a plausible inference that language, in roughly the way we know and use it, appeared sometime around the same time as these artistic creations, or at least it acquired a greater degree of refinement. It is hard to see how all this symbolic and artistic activity could exist without language, and the skeletal remains of modern humans have physiological features that look like they specifically facilitate language in various ways.
After modern humans appeared, and scattered across the Earth, it appears that we lived in small bands engaged in hunting animals and gathering wild foods. This lifestyle occupied about ninety percent of our history. Now, we have many examples of people who have maintained this lifestyle into recent times, or even into the present. Most of these societies have been studied in great detail, so we have some idea how they function politically. These societies differ from our ape relatives in one very dramatic way. They are not dominated by violent alpha males, they do not have rigid hierarchies, and they are not nearly as internally violent. They are not without violence. In fact, statistically, they have more cases of assault and murder, per capita, than we find in modern, urban societies. However, violence remains exceptional behaviour among them, while it is daily and commonplace among other primates. If the surviving hunter-gatherer societies that we are familiar with are anything like the societies that existed among humans since we became recognizable as a species, then it appears that, in becoming modern humans, something happened that made us considerably less violent, and something happened that made us less hierarchical.
Hunter-gatherer societies have consistently been described by anthropologists as “egalitarian”, and while this description can be misleading unless it is qualified in precise ways, it seems likely that tens of thousands of years of human history were characterized by small communities of human beings who managed their affairs by mutual consent, arbitration, consensus, or majority vote in deliberative councils. These techniques have been observed in hundreds of small societies, in every region of the world [see examples cited in Muhlberger & Paine, Democracy’s Place in World History]. They are all components of democratic organization, and many observers have noticed that the details of council-based politics in “primitive” societies are as sophisticated — and as practically effective — as the activities in the parliaments of advanced industrial nations. The same compromises, coalitions, quid-pro-quos and conflict-avoidance strategies are employed, whether in a hunting band deciding whether to move camp up the river to another bluff, or among Torontonians deciding whether or not to expand a subway system. The internal affairs of such prehistoric communities can be described as “proto-democratic”, because decisions were made by consensus or conciliar debate among people who treated each other, at least in some sense, as equals. If the surviving hunter-gatherer societies that we are familiar with are anything like the societies that existed among humans since we became recognizable as a species, then we have a history of tens of thousands of years of proto-democratic government as a common heritage.
The equality may have been more than in formal decision-making. Observers of a variety of such cultures have noted that an “egalitarian ethos” pervades such societies, far beyond the scope of political decision-making. Social customs are in place that firmly discourage the psychological dominance of one person over others. Boasting is discouraged, and habitually pugnacious or violent people are shunned. Claims to special privilege or prestige are routinely deflated by ridicule. This kind of “leveling” pressure is a notable element of groups that must survive extreme conditions, such as the high arctic or driest deserts, where the bossiness or tyranny of a dominant individual will quickly endanger the survival of the group.
Christopher Boehm is an anthropologist who has studied many aspects of egalitarian behaviour from an evolutionary standpoint. He notes that:
All nomadic foragers are egalitarian, a pattern that makes the adult males, and sometimes also the females, into equals as household heads. They are politically egalitarian to the degree that named leadership roles are lacking or devoid of authority, status differences among politically autonomous household heads are muted, and individuals who try to influence group decisions must do so very circumspectly. The guidance mechanism for this deliberate behavior is an egalitarian ethos that involves a set of indigenous attitudes that make for strong valuation of personal autonomy of adults.These values help generate group hostility toward any individual who even attempts to assume a serious role of authority in the band, let alone baldly tries to coerce other adults. Alpha-male types are not allowed to flourish, even though the tendency to engage in status rivalry and seek dominance persists and can still be expressed within carefully circumscribed limits. [1]
Since the pioneering studies of the Dobe !Kung of southern Africa, a considerable amount of effort has been made to study the dynamics of such egalitarian behaviour. In the beginning, the interpretations of these anthropological observations where unduly influenced by distorting “noise factors”. One such misleading idea was the Rousseau-an daydream of a utopian “natural man”, which needed little encouragement to get out of hand. Another was the influence of the pseudo-egalitarian pretensions of various totalitarian political philosophies. More than one anthropologist was inclined to twist the profoundly individualist societies of hunter-gatherers into the mould of the communes and collectives which totalitarian philosophers envisioned, in their pursuit of the exact opposite. The proper place and function of “sharing” was not understood by people to whom the word has always been a political or religious slogan, rather than a practical concept. There was also considerable confusion of “egalitarianism” with “uniformity”.
A subtler and more clear-headed examination of hunter-gatherer societies shows that they are not some kind of undifferentiated collective mush. Hunter-gatherer societies practice sharing of some things, for specific reasons, and individual ownership of other things, with both categories clearly distinguished. Sharing is invariably tied to risk-reduction in obtaining highly variable resources. It makes more sense to customarily share the meat of a hunted moose, since such a windfall may not predictably come your way, and you will soon enough be glad when another hunter shares with you. Cultural anthropologists now have a clearer grasp of these customs, and no longer attribute a state of mystical collectivism to such societies, but a ghost of this misunderstanding still haunts historians, economists, and sociologists. Less well understood, even by anthropologists, is that almost all human groups fall back on this pattern on an informal basis, among friends, relatives, or in small communities, whatever the structure of their larger political organizations.
Egalitarianism is unrelated to “collectivism”. In fact, it is its opposite. People in hunting bands remain profoundly individual. They maintain the clear understanding, lost on many modern intellectuals, that egalitarianism and individualism are correlative, complimentary, and tightly-linked concepts. The essence of the political arrangements of such an egalitarian group is that each person, or at least each adult, or each head of a household, is sovereign. Boastfulness and high-handed manners are derided and discouraged, because they are seen as inevitably leading to one person violating the sovereignty of another. This is why so many Europeans, encountering relatively egalitarian communities for the first time, were confused by what struck them as inordinate pride among individuals, and reported with astonishment that “they each seemed to think himself a king”, or similar observations. They were equally astonished by deliberative councils in which any tribesman spoke their mind with confidence, with councils in which women participated, or councils in which women alone exercised power. Such things were lost in the shadows of their own history, but they did not know this.
Close examination of egalitarian societies also reveals that they do not involve a uniformity of power, of prestige, of wealth, or of influence. Individual variations of character and circumstance generate many inequalities. An observer accustomed to thinking of wealth in terms of bank accounts and luxury cars may not immediately perceive an extra-nice gourd or a chicken as conspicuous wealth, but they may be so. Only someone who has grown up with them can see that one dog-sled team may be as different from another as a Lotus Elise 340R is different from a Hyundai Accent. Small communities, no matter how egalitarian, exhibit a maze of prestige conflicts based on family, reputation, access to ceremonial objects, experience, physical prowess, skills, or imagined access to magic. Power and dominance can be exercises just as effectively through supernatural beliefs as through visible wealth or physical strength. Even when decisions are strictly dependent on a council of equals, those who are clever or eloquent clearly have the advantage over those who are not, and may effectively propel decisions in the direction of their own interests.
I noticed this very distinctly, when I once attended a meeting of the local Green Party. The organizers of the meeting made a big deal about how their “consensus-based” organization was superior to “traditional confrontational democracy”. In place of Robert’s Rules of Order, it featured a capricious management of the meeting by an obvious alpha-dominant “facilitator” who was highly skilled at manipulating the discussion in such a way that contrary opinions were suppressed or ignored, and that his own agenda would be served. Instead of a secret ballot, or even voting by a show of hands, this “facilitator” got to arbitrarily decide what the “consensus” was. It just happened to be the same as his own viewpoint, and just happened to be the only viewpoint allowed much expression. I soon came to the conclusion that this particular organizer was hostile to “traditional confrontational democracy” because it possessed safeguards that protected the rights of individuals, and hampered the schemes of “leaders” and oligarchs.
Even when there is no such deception practiced, the quick-witted and glib are likely to get their way in an informal deliberative council, so every customary safeguard that levels the playing field can be crucial. It is these safeguards, both formal and informal, that give us the key to understanding the “egalitarian ethos” that probably characterized our long history as hunters and gatherers. It had nothing to do with cosmic harmony. The egalitarian ethos did not exist because people were undifferentiated, or equal in power. It existed because people were unequal in potential power. The purpose of the egalitarian ethos was to protect the autonomy of individuals from the potential threat from unavoidable advantages and inequalities.
For example, It is a good thing that someone is a skillful hunter, because it brings meat to the table for all, but everyone understands how easy it is for the skillful hunter to start lording it over others, eroding their effective political sovereignty. In the tight personal interactions and social proximity of a hunting band, the best way to deal with this potential danger is to nip boasting and swaggering behaviour in the bud, with ridicule. If it persists, more powerful social sanctions are employed. Egalitarian societies always face the possibility of succumbing to tyranny, but counter that possibility with prophylactic customs, which act to head off potential tyrants. If we characterize the political organization of the first eighty or ninety thousand years of our species’ existence as “proto-democratic”, then it is in recognition of the fact that tyranny and aristocracy were always possible in this period. We can deduce the presence of disease organisms from the presence of the appropriate antibodies. We can never know with what frequency those proto-democratic institutions broke down, or were simply circumvented by particularly clever criminals. My knowledge of some particular hunting cultures suggests to me that none were absolutely immune to the machinations of little Hitlers and little Lenins, and that they occasionally broke down into small tyrannical “states” serving the interests of a few. But I suspect that those proto-democratic institutions worked reasonably well, much of the time, until the transformation of human societies in the Bronze Age opened up opportunities for new criminal strategies.
When the egalitarian ethos of modern hunter-gatherers came to their attention, paleo-anthropologists began to wonder how it was that human beings came to behave this way, when their primate ancestors apparently did not. Primate societies exhibit many human characteristics, but they all appear to be firmly in the grip of dominance hierarchies, interrupted by rebellions and coup‑d’etats that merely bring different dominant alphas into power.[2] If human societies with an egalitarian ethos were the lineal descendants of primate societies with dominant hierarchies, how did this dramatic change come about?
A number of ethologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists are leaning toward the theory that Language is the key. Language, as we have seen, appears to be intimately connected with the suite of behaviours that particularly distinguish human communities from other primates. It would not be surprising if it was also instrumental in developing the feature of social organization that distinguishes humans from other primates. The argument goes as follows.
Primate communities are always vulnerable to being controlled by dominant individuals, who climb their way to power by conspiring together with other individuals to overthrow the existing tyrant, then either assume the top position and pay off their co-conspirators with privileges, or enter a struggle with them for the top position. When in power, they may consolidate it by taking on the role of “peace-maker”, diffusing quarrels among underlings, and disciplining whomever they choose, They back up their authority either with their own brutal violence, or proxy violence by henchmen. They take full advantage of their position to monopolize mating opportunities, or assign them to reward loyal followers. The majority of chimpanzees do not benefit from this arrangement in any discernible way, except that the relative calm when a tyrant is secure in his throne is better than the dangerous instability when he is acquiring or losing it. The tyrant does not produce anything. He is a position to expropriate what he wants from others, and his genetic heritage is favoured by enhanced breeding opportunities.
Primate communities can and do revolt against this kind of authority, but revolts are likely to be led by ambitious individuals who will simply replace the current tyranny with their own. This is a process very familiar to those of us humans who study history. Moreover, rebellions must be both spontaneous and well-timed, or they are easily foiled.
Language may have become a tool that allowed non-dominant hominids to collaborate much more affectively against violent alpha-male tyrants. The ability to talk about situations and plan actions meant that non-dominant individuals could set up confrontations, ambushes, and revolts at times when the dominant “king” did not expect it. In addition, hand-held weapons, appearing roughly at the same time as language, may have altered the balance of power. The effectiveness of such weapons was more determined by planning and cleverness than by brute strength. Dominant chimpanzees are usually physically bigger and stronger than the subjects they bully. Their dominance is enforced by physical beatings, or the threat of them. Even a group attack on a big dominant chimp, relying on fangs and powerful hands and feet, is a pretty dangerous gamble. But no matter how much bigger or stronger a modern human is, he is completely vulnerable to being dispatched by alliance of men wielding spears and clubs in a planned, co-ordinated attack. Even a child can dispatch a full-grown adult with a well-thrown rock. There is considerable archaeological evidence that rock-throwing was a distinctive skill for which hominids were physically adapted, and for which other primates are not.
From the standpoint of what evolutionary biologists call “selection pressure”, certain specific reconfigurations would have come about in response to the presence of spoken language and hand-held weapons. The most violent bullies that dominated early hominids would have been weeded out of the gene pool. The more extreme their behaviour, the less likely it would be for them to live long enough to pass on their genes. Females would become less likely to submit to rape and beatings from alpha-males. Hominids would begin to exhibit less dramatic differences in size between dominant and sub-dominant individuals, and between males and females. Among non-human primates, the size difference between males and females is dramatic. Among humans, it is fairly trivial. Hundreds of generations of “ambushes”, enabled by the detailed information exchanges, planning, and protracted alliances that language made easy, would effectively put an end to the tyrannical rule of the large, violent, alpha male, setting the stage for the egalitarian ethos.
The general ability to be violent would not be bred out, because any group that did so would easily fall pray to more vigorous tribal rivals, or fail to maintain hunting skills. But language would permit the development of social controls, which would act as prophylactic against in-group bullying, while maintaining the potential for violent action. The potential for violence is, in fact, necessary for the ultimate enforcement of the egalitarian ethos. It constitutes the fundamental circular puzzle that ethicists have long identified: we need laws to restrain the arbitrary use of force, and force to make law mean what it says, and who shall guard the guardians? We have committed ourselves to a protracted experiment to solve this puzzle, ever since we first came on the scene as a species.
This reconstruction of events in human evolution has come to be widely accepted among paleo-anthropologists, mostly because of its plausibility, and because nobody has come up with any substantial counter-arguments. It is not necessarily or indisputably what happened, and it is difficult to guess how it might be confirmed or disproved. It does create, for the historian of democracy, a viable theoretical basis for the origin of proto-democratic institutions, and evidence for the assertion that democracy is a universal human heritage.
The narrative implied by this speculation runs like this: All social animals have something describable as “politics”. The politics of our remote primate ancestors resembled the most destructive of our own modern politics: An early hominid Mao Zedong or Adolph Hitler, by the simple expedient of flying into rages, biting, kicking, raping, and weighing twenty kilos more than his rivals, was routinely able to rule over any primate society, to the detriment of its various members, but to his own reproductive success. Along comes language, great stuff for planning and conspiring rebellion, and weapons, which neutralize the advantage of fangs and muscles. Mao Ape is toppled from his throne, but he does not go away entirely. He is constantly being reborn among us. We ourselves always maintain the potential for violence and, to varying degrees, the temptation to rule over others.
For most of us, dominance is a muted desire. Normal human beings want to be admired and respected, and they want autonomous control over their own lives, but they don’t crave to have others crawling at their feet, nor do they get a big thrill from seeing others suffering or quaking in terror. Nevertheless, the genetic package that keeps us alive also allows for the recurrent reappearance of a psychological type similar to Mao Ape, who definitely does crave these things. In any group of humans, you will find a few, scattered among the variations in human character. Their influence can only be counteracted by the cultural package: social controls that nip arrogance in the bud, and demand strong and weak, big and small, rich and poor be respected alike.
Mao Ape, whenever he reappears, is not consistently contained by these social controls. His restraint requires constant effort and vigilance on the part of normal humans, whose defensive strategies have to be complex and in tune. But he, too, can play the culture game. He too, is equipped with language and symbols, can collaborate with fellow Mao-Apes, and devise counter-strategies to overcome social controls.
Thus came into being a perpetual arms race between us and Mao Ape, between democratic and aristocratic ideas.
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