Young Spartans Exercising by Edgar Degas, 1860 Paris
Time
The focus of this new theory of society now moves to competition and contestation between individuals who exercised persuasive influence in the group decision making discussions that sharply define the nature of emergent prehistoric societies. I draw on philosophy and political economy to offer observations about the role of ‘competition’ in human evolution. The ‘classics’ (below) form the backcloth for the discussion of the individual potential for competitive leadership (to follow). It is very probable that this leadership was energetically exercised in the prehistoric theatres of governance, and was manifested in differentiations of personality, intelligence, physique, sex and age.
Evolutionary sciences have over recent years revealed these ubiquitous and timeless classical human traits in technical survey data on male-female personality, in studies of the impact of physical differentiations of body size and voice pitch on sociopolitical interactions, and in more or less clear correlations and causations between hormones and competitive behaviour. This science provides proofs of what we might logically have known already. Competition between individuals drives human progress.
The new insights reinforce aspects of nineteenth century evolutionary theory. It now seems reasonable to argue more clearly that the utilitarian mechanism of ‘society’ for early humans was a culmination of the gradual supersedence of natural selection over sexual selection. Darwin distinguished between ‘sexual selection’ that acted on males when they competed with rivals for possession of a female, and the ‘natural selection’ which resulted from cognitively self-aware “success in the general struggle for life”.1
As Darwin conceived it, natural selection for survival and conscious deliberative avoidance of extinction was primarily the competitive struggle for resources and, in particular, “severe competition for food”. Like Spencer, Darwin generally illustrated natural selections for survival against extinction in terms of contests between species and “competition between tribe and tribe”. Spencer, who was more attentive than Darwin to intra-group dynamics, also examined competition among individuals for (coercive) group leadership. In either case, the protagonists were usually the males, and the process was intrinsically competitive. My argument is that the competition for natural selection went beyond subsistence. It included governance for social order. Moreover, initially this governance was deliberately and deliberatively non-coercive.
Contra Hobbes — who viewed all kinds of ‘competition’ as the source of all violence and disorder — the true state of nature, which we can see exemplified in the earliest prehistoric societies, was governance that required competition. Competition became the source of social order. Society finally triumphed over the primate order, which for millions of years had been determined by dominance resulting from the struggle for sexual selection. During early human sociation the source of this new progressive competition lay in evolutionary imperatives to rationally discuss the options for survival. Competition was the means of pooling and processing knowledge.
Stimulus
There is an understandable reluctance to elevate the role of competition too high in studies of society. Kant struggled with it, and quite brilliantly.2 He was scornful of the unsociable motivations that drive people to compete with others in their own society — their “spiteful competitive vanity”, their hypocrisies, selfish pretensions, greed, tyranny, and their “insatiable desire to possess or even to dominate!”. Kant deplored the duplicity of the man who is “driven by ambition to obtain for himself a rank among his fellows, whom he cannot stand, but also cannot leave alone”. Such a man competes against the people he interacts with, yet he could not exist without them.
Kant called this the paradoxical “unsociable sociability of human beings”. It becomes manifest in an instinctive resistance to having to belong in a society, combined with a fatal attraction toward that society. The main point of Kant’s somewhat belaboured musings on this subject is his reluctant recognition that, in the final analysis, these unsociable compulsions to be competitive are what give sustenance to society — the impetus to bring out talents that differentiate humans from their animals, which prove that humans were no longer competitors with animals but rather were their masters, and, finally, for humans simply to pursue “their end as rational nature”.
The last step that reason took in elevating the human being entirely above the society with animals was that he comprehended (however obscurely) that he was the genuine end of nature, and that in this nothing that lives on earth can supply a competitor to him. The first time he said to the sheep: ‘Nature has given you the skin you wear not for you but for me’, then took it off the sheep and put it on himself, he became aware of a prerogative that he had by his nature over all animals, which he now no longer regarded as his fellow creatures, but rather as means and instruments given over to his will for the attainment of his discretionary aims.3
The human being wills concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species: it wills discord. … And nature therefore really is playing with the human being and spurring him to its ends; while he stands convinced that he has set his own end. These inclinations of delusion … are apt to become passionate in the highest degree, especially when they are applied to competition among human beings. The games of the boy in hitting a ball, wrestling, running, playing soldier; later on the games of the man in playing chess and cards … [and] finally, the games of the citizen, who tries his luck in public gatherings … they are unknowingly the spurs of a wiser nature to daring deeds, to test human beings’ powers in competition with others; actually so that their vital force in general is preserved from weakening and kept active. … The well-being they feel while stimulated in this way … is for this very reason the cause of a propensity to … long-lasting passion.4
All this explains why humans competed with each other. They sought to be esteemed. There would never have been progress if life were just “concord” and “contentment”.
Kant’s argument seems to me entirely convincing. There can be little doubt that competition drove human advances throughout history. Certainly, there has often been a very low tolerance for competition. When competition was stifled, reversal became more likely than progression. Nevertheless, over the long run in every field — whether in governance, economics, science and philosophy — competition has been the impetus for the discovery of new opportunities, and the primary reason for the acquisition of useful knowledge and skills. Competition provides individual rewards for the struggle to understand the given circumstances and their causes and effects.
Often, the rewards were in terms of material wealth and political power. More routinely, however, as was the case during the formation of the earliest societies, the rewards came in the form of the status and prestige acquired by those who succeeded in contests for decision making influence, and in their creations of new objects and services that proved to be of benefit to the whole community. Competition penalised those who did not succeed by reducing their relative influence. In general terms, humans, unlike other animals, have determined the validity and utility of their truths only through the competition of their ideas and their applications of ideas, which by experience are found to be most effective, and can be communicated and emulated. When contests for knowledge are a public affair, knowledge becomes transferable.
Furthermore, wherever open competition is actively present, one finds a greater number of people becoming more rational in behaviour. More inquiring minds will be dedicated to tasks of deciding which are optimal objectives of human endeavour, and, then, which are the optimal means of pursuing those ends. When evolving rationality gains momentum, the acquisition of knowledge through competition becomes almost a coercive force, which cannot be ignored by those who make up society.
These insights were presented concisely and elegantly by Hayek.5 They offer a useful conceptual base upon which to explain the role of competition in prehistoric society.
In a society in which rational behaviour confers an advantage on the individual, rational methods will progressively be developed and be spread by imitation. It is no use being more rational than the rest if one is not allowed to derive benefits from being so. And it is therefore in general not rationality which is required to make competition work, but competition, or traditions which allow competition, which will produce rational behaviour. The endeavour to do better than can be done in the customary manner is the process in which that capacity for thinking is developed which will later manifest itself in argument and criticism. … The intellectual growth of a community rests on the views of a few gradually spreading, even to the disadvantage those who are reluctant to accept them; and though nobody should have the power to force upon them new views because he thinks they are better, if success proves that they are more effective, those who stick to their old ways must not be protected against a relative or even absolute decline in their position. Competition is, after all, always a process in which a small number makes it necessary for larger numbers to do what they do not like, be it to work harder, to change habits, or to devote a degree of attention, continuous application, or regularity to their work which without competition would not be needed.6
Emergent societies (deterministically) required this mechanism of competition in order to pull themselves out of the cul-de-sac of primate ignorance and alpha male domination. For this evolutionary purpose they created the indispensable mechanism of regular group discussion. The most gifted entrepreneurial individuals bantered and exchanged views under the watchful eyes of the whole group. These individuals tried and tested their comparative advantages in exceptional inherited endowments against each other. Some were especially impressive in speech because of their extraversion and volubility, or the deep pitch of their voice, or their fearsome facial features and large muscular body. The content of what they said may have been far less impressive than the style of their discourse. Others, though they may have been physically puny, relied instead on higher intelligence, wit, and the depth or breadth of their knowledge.
Even while relatively passive or easily swayed by style rather than by substance, the rest of the group gradually learned to understand and value the complex nature of the topics discussed by the more entrepreneurial and influential members, because every thing that was said was rooted in the everyday realities they were familiar with, such as the tradeoffs between several alternative subsistence strategies, the relative values of various proposed tools, techniques, and shelters, the timing and direction of the next journey, the degrees and immediacy of dangers posed by different predators, and their group’s distinctive expectations for common welfare and acceptable behaviours.
It is also important to note that in these conditions the presence of all the group’s members would have been desirable in order to make the initial transition (to society). Everyone had to be persuaded of the validity of the exercise of open discussion and the value of oftentimes fierce competition between the ideas and counter proposals. Even during the process of discovery, criticism and argumentation were essential.
Birth
I suggested in previous sections that humans who developed and experimented with participatory governance in the first societies may have initially become familiar with the competitive arts of negotiation during the formation of male-female coupling as proto-sociational micro-units of governance and labour. Further justification for the emphasis on the importance of coupling can be found in Kant’s rather extraordinary socially scientific depiction of the most elemental partnership known to humankind.
Through their experiences of coupling the pioneers of the first (successful) societies might have postponed the necessities of war, prevented the threats of predation, and avoided the wastage of (scarce) time entailed in the cultivation of religious devotion.
In Kant’s words, couples took the ‘mighty steps’ beyond a ‘crude state of nature’ and toward acquisition of skills of ‘communication’ and ‘discourse’. Unlike intelligence, personality, sex and physique, those ‘skills’ are not heritable. In his explicitly secular idealistic depiction of the emergence of sociable thinking among communicative individuals in prehistory, Kant presented the practical ‘contrivance’ of coupling.
The beginning must be made from that which is capable of no derivation by human reason from previous natural causes: thus with the existence of the human being, and indeed in his fully formed state because he must do without maternal assistance; in a couple, so that he can propagate his kind; and as only in one single couple, so that war will not arise right away, when human beings would be so near and yet so alien to one another, and also so that nature should not be blamed for depriving them, by the difference of ancestry, of the most suitable arrangement for sociability as the greatest end of the human vocation; for the unity of that family from which all human beings were to descend was without doubt the best contrivance for this. I set this couple in a place secured against the attack of predators and richly provisioned by nature with all means of nourishment, thus in a garden, as it were, in a zone that is always temperate.
And what is still more, I consider this couple only after it has already taken a mighty step in the skill of making use of its powers; thus I do not begin with the completely crude state of its nature; for if I undertook to fill up that gap, which presumably comprises a long duration, the conjectures would become too many for the reader, but their probabilities too few. The first human being could, therefore, stand and walk; he could speak, even discourse, i.e. speak according to connected words and concepts, hence think.
These are all skills which he had to acquire for himself (for if they were innate, then they would also be inherited, which, however, experience contradicts) … The drive to communicate must have been what first moved him, even when he was still alone, to make his existence known toward living beings outside him, especially to those that utter a sound, which he could imitate and afterward use as a name. One sees a similar effect of this drive also in children and thoughtless people who disturb the thinking part of the commonwealth with humming, shouting, whistling, singing, and other noisy entertainments, often also by the like religious devotions. For I see no other motive for this than that they want to make their existence known far and wide.7
Negation
The realistic ‘state of nature’, which reveals humankind’s decisive separation from the animal kingdom 20,000 to 200,000 years ago, was evident in the (deliberate) conscious rejections of primate sexual selection by dominant alpha males, and the transitions to natural selections of coupling and society, which were rationally negotiated responses to dangers of predation, resource scarcity and public disorder.
The view of competition presented thus far in Darwin, Spencer, Kant and Hayek is very different from the one proposed by Hobbes. His mind was steeped in knowledge of devastating European religious wars, the English constitutional revolution of 1641 — which generated competition among the various bodies of English sovereign power — and the resulting English civil war. Hobbes began from a fundamentally mistaken impression of the ‘state of nature’. He saw it, simply, as competition in war.
Hobbes presented his pre-Enlightenment view of competition as a threat to civilisation and public order. Kant saw what Hobbes did not, that the unintended consequence of competition was the formation of society. The primal condition of humanity, as Hobbes perceived it, was the competition for scarce resources. Rather than leading to better ideas and fitter persons and societies, competition equalised everyone in a savage state where each possessed equal rights to invade and resist.
In conditions of “competition”, i.e. perpetual war, there is no knowledge, no record of time, no safety, and “no society” — “the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”.8 Men must inevitably become enemies to one another. They seek only to destroy, deprive and subdue. They find pleasure in conquest and subjection. Rather than harness their energy, intelligence and personality by putting forward competing proposals for cooperation in divisions of labour that achieve a better exploitation of resources, Hobbes sees men as stupidly or illogically bent upon zero-sum conflict.
Competition of Riches, Honour, Command, or other power, enclineth to Contention, Enmity, and War: Because the way of one Competitor, to the attaining of his desire, is to kill, subdue, supplant, or repell the other. … So that in the nature of man, we find three principall causes of quarrell. First, Competition; Secondly, Defence; Thirdly, Glory. The first, maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation. The first use Violence, to make themselves Masters of other mens persons, wives, children, and cattell; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other signe of undervalue, either direct in their Persons, or by reflexion in their Kindred, their Friends, their Nation, their Profession, or their Name. Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.9
It is true, of course, that many groups throughout history acted in this manner. There were continual conflicts between tribes and nations, and societies were destroyed by empires. To be fair to Hobbes, his legitimate purpose was to explain the establishment of sovereign power. He usually conceived it as a man’s “power able to over-awe them all” or “a common Power to keep them all in awe”. Skinner argues that Hobbes had a broader perspective on political change in seventeenth century Europe. He really put forward a theory of authority as ‘representation’ with obligations to create peace and security in a common interest. From this perspective, the state may simultaneously be the individual head or body of state (as an ‘artificial person’) and perhaps even all the people of the society, who have agreed to give up their right to govern themselves.10
A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular.11
Yet in the longer and broader perspective, and in light of the tremendous influence Hobbes still exerts over philosophy and political theory, we should not ignore the fact that Hobbes was remarkably wrong both about the detriments of ‘competition’ and ‘the state of nature’ in which representation by a sovereign power is the only possible escape. The people of the first society — our true ‘state of nature’ — were represented by outstanding individuals who competed to be heard and understood among them, in group assemblies. Hobbes was also remarkably wrong about the nature of competition itself. He does not, as far as I can see, ever acknowledge that the representative person or institution he so favoured could only have emerged dynamically after a competitive process had already weeded out all relatively less competent persons and institutions.
Finally, we can note how imperceptive Hobbes was about the future of governance in the most advanced polities. The ultimate cause of the English civil war was resistance by Hobbes’s token sovereign against men who between 1620 and 1641 tried peacefully to introduce competition between powers of representation (Separation of Powers). If his contemporaries had followed Hobbes’s bad advice, capitalism and democracy could not have emerged, since the essential condition of both is free competition.
Pleasure
Much of what Hobbes formulated about man’s ‘natural’ inclination to competitive and violent conflict and coercion was, according to Skinner, a criticism of Aristotle’s claim in a 1598 translation that “man is naturally a sociable and civil creature”. As we have seen, Kant must also have disagreed with Aristotle on this point. However, by way of conclusion, let us look directly at how Aristotle viewed competition. Translations are a problem in the pursuit of answers to this sort of question, but it is plain to see from the most authoritative translation of his Complete Works that Aristotle articulated a very favourable view of “competition’, as both a pleasurable debate and intellectual stimulation, but also as the most rational method for the selection of the best ideas. Competition is not a major theme in Aristotle, but his mentions of it are serious.
The pleasure of competition lies in the victory.
Victory is pleasant, and not merely to the competitive but to everyone; the winner sees himself in the light of a champion, and everybody has a more or less keen appetite for being that. The pleasantness of victory implies of course that combative sports and intellectual contests are pleasant (since in these it often happens that someone wins) and also games like knucklebones, ball, dice, and draughts. And similarly with the serious sports; some of these become pleasant when one is accustomed to them; while others are pleasant from the first, like hunting with hounds, or indeed any kind of hunting. For where there is competition, there is victory. That is why forensic pleading and debating contests are pleasant to those who are accustomed to them and have the capacity for them.12
Competition is a source of esteem. It occurs among peers whom we admire or envy. ‘We compete with our equals’.
The people before whom we feel shame are those whose opinion of us matters to us. Such persons are: those who admire us, those whom we admire, those by whom we wish to be admired, those with whom we are competing, and those whose opinion of us we respect. We admire those, and wish those to admire us, who possess any good thing that is highly esteemed; or from whom we are very anxious to get something that they are able to give us—as a lover feels. We compete with our equals.13
We envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation … our fellow-competitors … we do not compete with … those whom, in our opinion or that of others, we take to be far below us or far above us. So too we compete with those who follow the same ends as ourselves: we compete with our rivals in sport or in beyond all others. Hence the saying, Potter against potter.14
Goodwill is felt towards one’s fellow competitors.
Friendly feeling implies intimacy while goodwill may arise of a sudden, as it does towards competitors in a contest … In general, goodwill arises on account of some excellence and worth, when one man seems to another beautiful or brave or something of the sort, as in the case of competitors in a contest.15
The results of competition in wisdom cannot be safely judged even by one’s peers, and wisdom is itself the only possible prize in an intellectual competition.
Why did the men of old institute prizes for physical contests but none for wisdom? Is it because in all fairness the judges should in the intellectual sphere be either the superiors or at any rate not the inferiors of the competitors? Now if those who were pre-eminent in wisdom had to compete and a prize had been offered, they would have no one to act as judges. In athletic contests, however, anyone can judge by merely using his eyes. Further, the original institutor of the games did not wish to propose to the Greeks such a contest as would be likely to produce violent disputes and enmity; for when one is rejected or accepted in a contest of bodily strength, men do not altogether harbour any grievance nor feel sentiments of enmity towards the judges, but they feel great wrath and indignation against those who decide their relative wisdom or worthlessness; and this is a quarrelsome and bad state of affairs. Furthermore, the prize ought to be better than the contest; for in athletic games the prize is more desirable than, and superior to, the contest. But what prize could be found superior to wisdom?16
The contest is won on grounds of rationality and correct speech, and the loser is betrayed by his babbling:
First we must grasp the number of aims entertained by those who argue as competitors and rivals. These are five in number: refutation, falsity, paradox, solecism, and fifthly to reduce the opponent in the discussion to babbling, i.e. to constrain him to repeat himself a number of times.17
Reflection
Aristotle’s praise of competition no doubt reflected his social and political milieu in ancient Athens where competition was both highly regulated and highly regarded as the principal political expression of the united demos. Yet, Aristotle was an insightful intellectual with a uniquely broad grasp of prehistory and recorded history, and of the inherently competitive nature of the emerging sciences and philosophies. I take these observations as a serious account of advances in competitive attitudes among ancient peoples that bear on evolutionary functions of competition in earlier societies. It may be assumed that similar attitudes and pleasures would be found in communicative large-brained men and women ever since the dawn of the first human societies.