Reading Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm

Another working paper. Title above, abstract, contents, and introduction below. Download at: Academica.edu: https://www.academia.edu/41576252/Reading_Mark_Moffett_s_The_Human_Swarm

Abstract: Moffett surveys a wide literature on human and non-human society and produces a useful synthesis of the literature. While written for general readers, this book will repay academic specialists of various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Moffett is interested in what constitutes society: how do we differentiate between insiders and outsiders? He surveys the animal world and the follows the insider/outsider distinction in the evolution of human societies from hunter-gatherer groups to the current day.

Contents

I could go on and on about The Human Swarm, but I won’t. Time to move on. 3

Of ants and humans: Some principles of social organization 5

Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap 10

The importance of scale in social structure 16

A digression about an image with an application to human cultural evolution 21

Summer camp and beyond – another digression [F2F group & society] 24

Night-time action and brain-to-brain coupling [Shazam!!] 26

The Great Chain of Being 28

The book so far – Nine things that are important 30

What about the USA? 33

Some notes about neural foundations 36

 

I could go on and on about The Human Swarm, but I won’t. Time to move on.

In review:

Mark W. Moffett. The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. Basic Books 2019.

Back in the days when I was an undergraduate, when I was first learning how to think with some rigor, I sometimes found that it was only after I had finished a term paper that I realized what I was after. That is, I treated my initial idea, not as a conclusion to be justified by the paper, but as the starting point of an exploration. And so things have gone ever since.

Yes, it is nice to put things in order in the course of writing a paper. But you also want to go somewhere And so it is.

When I had originally planned this series of notes about Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm I intended to conclude the exercise with a formal review of the book in 3 Quarks Daily. I could then wrap the posts and review into a single document and post it as a working paper.

The review is done and posted, but shortly after I had posted the review I was struck by after thoughts: Kaboom! I made plans to write one more post – after the review – and then wrap it up. Monday, then Tuesday, and Wednesday passed and I’d still not written that post. It’s now Thursday and I’ve decided not to write it after all. Could I write one? Sure. But then if one, why not a second, and a third? The book IS that rich. I could continue posting about to for awhile.

No, it’s time to move on. I’ve got other interests, other projects, I must nurture. For the record, the impulse that prompted this delay is simple: What of economics? That is, in my review I had listed ten principles operative in, ten propositions about, social organization, but none of them said anything about economics. That seemed a bit bothersome. But only a bit. Biology is inherently about economics and economic issues are central to society. But that wasn’t Moffett’s topic, though you can see in on the page if you look for it – especially in discussions of fission-fusion societies. Rather, he was interested in the issue of identity, how that defines our social structures. So let’s leave things there.

What’s in the rest of this document? First comes my review and then we have the nine blog posts I wrote during the two months it took me to read the book. Looking over them I realize that a number of these posts serve as bridges from Moffett’s book to other things:

Of ants and humans: Some principles of social organization: This is the formal review. It reprises some material from the posts, especially the “nine things” post, but frames things a bit differently.

Hunter-Gatherers and the Plant Trap: I started the book at the very end and then moved to the middle, as I often do. I use many short quote here. If you’re looking for economics, this is the place to find it.

The importance of scale in social structure: We start with ants, bonobos, and chimps to introduce the notion of scale. Ants live in societies numbering millions of individuals. Humans have come to do so as well. Bonobos and chimps, our close biological relatives, never have and never will life in such societies. And then I reprise some material about the size of musical groups that I’d developed in Beethoven’s Anvil (2001).

A digression about an image with an application to human cultural evolution: And here we take an excursion into the evolution of 19th century Anglophone literary culture with a diagram that could be a map of the nest of a large ant colony...but isn’t.

Summer camp and beyond – another digression [F2F group & society]: In which I suggest that the practice of sending children away to summer camp is a way of helping them live in a society that is necessarily much larger than any face-to-face group they live with.

Night-time action and brain-to-brain coupling [Shazam!!]: I ride a pair current hobby horses, one is about sleep habits the other is about intersubjectivity and patterns of neural activity.

The Great Chain of Being: Another hobby horse, this one is about conceptual organization, which, Moffett shows, maps on to social structure.

The book so far – Nine things that are important: By this time I’d read most, but not all, of the book. I realized that certain themes kept coming up time and again. So I listed them here, with a bit of commentary. I added one to the list and made at the central section of my review.

What about the USA? Using concepts from the book I take a quick look at the evolution of social structure and identity in the United States. Is the nation falling apart?

Some notes about neural foundations: Here I derive some of Moffett’s core observations and assertions from some basic properties of the brain.