#20 The Human Relations Area Files, not so ‘fuddy-duddy’ after all [Part 1]
Ian Morris on Herbert Spencer’s legacy
Spencer spent forty years bundling geology, biology, psychology, sociology, politics, and ethics into a single evolutionary theory. He succeeded so well that by 1870 he was probably the most influential philosopher writing in English, and when Japanese and Chinese intellectuals decided they needed to understand the West’s achievements, he was the first author they translated. The great minds of the age bowed to his ideas. The first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, did not contain the word “evolution”; nor did the second or third, nor even the fourth or fifth. But in the sixth imprint, in 1872, Darwin felt compelled to borrow the term that Spencer had by now popularized.
When Spencer started writing about progress in the 1850s, archaeology was still more adventure than science, bursting with real-life Indiana Joneses. It was only in the 1870s that archaeologists began applying the geological principle of stratigraphy (the commonsense insight that since the uppermost layers of earth on a site must have got there after the lower layers, we can use the sequence of deposits to reconstruct the order of events) to their digs, and stratigraphic analysis became mainstream only in the 1920s. Archaeologists still depended on linking their sites with events mentioned in ancient literature to date what they excavated, and so until the 1940s finds in most parts of the world floated in a haze of conjecture and guesswork. That ended when nuclear physicists discovered radiocarbon dating, using the decay of unstable carbon isotopes in bone, charcoal, and other organic finds to tell how old objects were. Archaeologists began imposing order on prehistory, and by the 1970s a global framework was taking shape.
Museum storerooms were overflowing with artifacts and library shelves groaning under the weight of technical monographs, but some archaeologists worried that the fundamental question — what does it all mean? — was going unanswered. The situation in the 1950s was the mirror image of the 1850s: where once grand theory sought data, now data cried out for theory. Armed with their hard-won results, mid-twentieth-century social scientists, particularly in the United States, felt ready for another crack at theorizing.
Calling themselves neo-evolutionists to show that they were more advanced than fuddy-duddy “classical” evolutionists like Spencer, some social scientists began suggesting that while it was wonderful to have so many facts to work with, the mass of evidence had itself become part of the problem. The important information was buried in messy narrative accounts by anthropologists and archaeologists or in historical documents: in short, it was not scientific enough. To get beyond the forest of nineteenth-century typologies and create a unifying theory of society, the neo-evolutionists felt, they needed to convert these stories into numbers. By measuring differentiation and assigning scores they could rank societies and then search for correlations between the scores and possible explanations. Finally, they could turn to questions that might make all the time and money spent on archaeology worthwhile — whether there is just one way for societies to evolve, or multiple ways; whether societies cluster in discrete evolutionary stages (and if so, how they move from one stage to another); or whether a single trait, such as population or technology (or, for that matter, geography), explains everything.
In 1955 Raoul Naroll, an anthropologist working on a vast multi-university data-gathering project called the Human Relations Area Files, took the first serious stab at what he described as an index of social development. Randomly choosing thirty preindustrial societies from around the world (some contemporary, others historical), he trawled the files to find out how differentiated they were, which, he thought, would be reflected in how big their largest settlements were, how specialized their craftworkers were, and how many subgroups they had. Converting the results to a standard format, Naroll handed out scores. At the bottom were the Yahgan people of Tierra del Fuego, who had impressed Darwin in 1832 as “exist[ing] in a lower state of improvement than [those] in any other part of the world.” They scored just twelve out of a possible sixty-three points. At the top were the pre-Spanish-conquest Aztecs, with fifty-eight points.
Over the next twenty years other anthropologists tried their hands at the game. Despite the fact that each used different categories, data sets, mathematical models, and scoring techniques, they agreed on the results between 87 and 94 percent of the time, which is pretty good for social science. Fifty years after Spencer’s death, a hundred after his essay on progress, neo-evolutionists looked poised to prove the laws of social evolution.
Ian Morris, Why the West Rules — for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, Profile Books 2010