Frankly, I’d hoped to have a full review written by this time, or was that a month ago? But...things...you know. I’ve got a lot on my plate, on the one hand, and, on the other, this is an interesting book, very interesting. So I can’t just read it though and get on with a review. I find myself take notes as I go along, some of which have made it into these posts, and transcribing bits and pieces of the book into these notes. And thinking about it.
Anyhow, I thought I’d write a “where I’m at now” post. Most concretely I’m on page 296 in a book with 362 pages of text, plus pile of endnotes and bibliography. That’s a couple pages into chapter 23, “Building and Breaking of Nations” out of a total of 26 chapter. I’ve also read the conclusion, “Identities Shift and Societies Shatter (pp. 355-362); in fact that’s where I started reading. After all, this isn’t a mystery novel where figuring out how it ends is 3/4s of the fun. In sweeping nonfiction books like The Human Swarm I find it useful to know where the argument leads before I begin; that helps me sift and weigh things as I read through the text.
I’ve got one thing in mind for this post: a list of propositions or ideas I’ve ‘extracted’ from the text as I’ve read through it. At the moment the list has nine items on it, as follows.
* * * * *
The list is subject to revision, of course. I’m likely to add an item or two before I finish the book and perhaps revise the items currently on the list.
1. Scale: Taken one by one, handful by handful, humans and ants are very different. Taken by the million, we are alike. Moffett, as you know, is an expert on insects, ants in particular. They’re so very different from us that one can reasonably wonder what they have to teach us. Moffet’s point is that, yes, individual humans are very different from individual ants, but when the numbers grow, to thousands, tens of thousands or millions or more, large groups of humans face problems similar to those faced by large groups of ants, and arrive at similar solutions: specialization and division of labor, even the use of slaves.
When I put my philosopher’s hat on – and when you read this book, you’re a philosopher willy-nilly – I’d think about the structure of the world at large. Whatever the spatial spread of an ant society, which can be miles and miles, their world is limited in scope, thus, for example, the proximal sense of smell is HUGE. The world of even the smallest hunter gatherer band is, by contrast, much wider and more differentiated, with the distance senses of sight and hearing being very important.
And so on.
Scale will come into play as human societies become larger and larger, necessitating social invention of various kinds.
2. Group vs. Society: Group members recognize one another as individuals. Mammals live in such groups; ants do not. But ants do recognize society, which divides the world in to US and THEM, as do all animals and humans. Ants demark social boundaries by scent: do you smell like us or not? Humans develop various ways of distinguishing between us and them. As societies grow in size, the variety of markers (see below) increases.
3. Fission/fusion: This is a big one. Many animal societies, including humans societies, are of a fission fusion type. Individuals spend most of their time living in groups where each individual recognizes each other individual. The groups in a society, in both animals and humans, will however gather together on a occasion for whatever reason – hang out, find makes, a collective hunt. There is relatively little aggression between members of different groups within the same society. Where individuals are in different societies, that’s a different and more dangerous matter.
Moffett has various remarks indicating that fission/fusion dynamics are likely very important in the emergence of societies of proto humans from societies of very clever apes. We know that apes, and other animals as well, have some form of culture. The idea is that fission/fusion dynamics pushes cultural invention over a tipping point so that apes become human, more or less. What’s being invented are markers.
4. Markers delimit societies: Markers delimit societies. Each society has it own marker or set of markers. Markers are almost exclusively human, though Moffet argues that certain pant-hoot cries among chimpanzees seem to serve this sort of function, as does some bird song. Humans, on the other hand, develop a wide variety of markers, not the least of which is language. Tattoos, hair styles, clothing, all can assume marker status. Among hunter gatherers the markers may be society-wide. In larger and more complex human societies one set of markers delimit sub-societies and groups within the larger society while another set of markers delimits the larger society from other such societies.
5. Drift: As societies become larger, the relative scope of individual contacts becomes smaller and smaller. This makes cohesion among groups within a society more and more difficult. Factions develop. At first they’re amicable, but as the society grows...
6. Othering: At some point in the growth of a society factions drift too far apart. Conflicts multiply and factions will no longer consider one another as part of the same society. They have become Othered. At this point the society will fission into two (or more) separate societies. This can be a violent process.
Perhaps 5 and 6 should be subordinated to a more comprehensive concept. Later.
7. No merging of societies: In both animals and humans it is not at all unusual for growing societies to splinter, giving birth to new societies (in the sense of the term that Moffett had developed). But it is very rare for separate societies in the same species to merge into a larger society. For the most part we’re concerned with human societies here.
On the one hand, this seems obvious. For separate societies to merge on equal terms they have to negotiate a common language and a common set of values, attitudes, etc. That’s very very difficult. It’s much easier for a more powerful society to annex a less powerful one (conquest) in a subordinate role. Thus empires are born. Etc.
This needs to be explicated at the neural level. This is not the place for me to even sketch it out. I note that Beethoven’s Anvil, my book on music, has conceptual equipment that would be useful here, and that his matter is closely related to the evolution of humans that I alluded to in my remarks about fission/fusion societies in 3 above.
8. Chiefdoms and conquest: We’re now exclusively focused on human societies. The issue concerns the governance of ever larger societies. The emergence of chiefdoms, where particularly powerful individuals have influence over several villages within a society, allows for conquest. It’s one thing to engage in war with another society which you then obliterate. It’s another thing to conquer a society and assimilate it’s people into your own society. The emergence of chiefdoms allows for this.
9. Delegation: For a society to expand beyond the scope afforded by chiefdoms requires means of delegating authority. In a chiefdom the paramount chief has direct authority over the chiefs that rule other villages. It is very difficult to extend that authority beyond the distance one can travel in a day or so. To do so requires means of delegation: laws, hierarchy, taxes, bureaucracy, long distance communication, and so forth.
I’m thinking that perhaps eight and nine should be subordinate to more comprehensive concept, following from it as specific theorems in a mathematical system.
More later.
* * * * *
But, you know, I probably need some explicit statement about identity at this level of conceptualization. And it probably needs to be stated in neural terms.
Next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment