Desert Journey by Maynard Dixon, 1935 Utah
“A society is a combination of people living as one in bordered physical spaces, bonded by their knowledge of belonging together, and bound by common rules of social action. The society is perceived by people who live within it as being the only real forceful influence on their social actions.” Michael G Heller
Nature and rules
By ‘second decision’ I mean the decisions made for ‘social order’, which, in the first society’s priority sequence will have been tackled after the ‘subsistence’ decisions. A crude but practical illustration is that decisions about acquiring meat (how and where to hunt, etc.) preceded decisions about how to share the meat (how much, which cuts, for whom, etc.). Sociobiological determinants compel humans to fill their stomachs and nourish their brains before making social ordering decisions. Nevertheless, the second decision—of establishing and maintaining social order—is neither a dessert nor an afterthought. Rather the second decision is fundamental for the longer run preservation of whole societies. It consists in making rules, of which the procedural rules for sharing out food resources are only a derivative part of the larger process.
Four categorisable reasons for rules were discussed as matters of priority in the ‘first societies’. These ‘reasons for rules’ are conceptual umbrellas, overlapping in respects, but separable — violence (justified and unjustified), possession (property, theft, damage), truth (honesty, promises), responsibility (divisions of labour, childcare, shirking).
The first rules were decided upon in the ‘state of nature’. We may call these rules natural laws or laws of nature in the sense that the eminent legal scholar H.L.A. Hart attributed to the philosopher David Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739).
It will be rightly observed that what makes sense of this mode of thought and expression is something entirely obvious: it is the tacit assumption that the proper end of human activity is survival, and this rests on the simple contingent fact that most men most of the time wish to continue in existence. The actions which we speak of as those which are naturally good to do, are those which are required for survival … Certainly if we stop here, we shall have only a very attenuated version of Natural Law: for the classical exponents of this outlook conceived of survival as merely the lowest stratum in a much more complex and far more debatable concept of the human end or good for man. Aristotle included in it the disinterested cultivation of the human intellect, and Aquinas the knowledge of God, and both these represent values which may be and have been challenged. Yet other thinkers, Hobbes and Hume among them, have been willing to lower their sights: they have seen in the modest aim of survival the central indisputable element which gives empirical good sense to the terminology of Natural Law. [H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law 1961]
The rules are ‘natural’ if they are requisite for a society’s survival in prehistoric times. There is a critical distinction here. The rules Hume referred to as “fundamental laws of nature” were created for regulating behaviour in “the wild uncultivated state” of nature. Hume emphasised that the rules introduced by the first societies were human “artifices”. Artificial rules are not themselves natural, and nor do they reflect human nature. Human nature includes negative and positive “appetites”. Negative appetites like lust, self-love, anger, malice or greed may be antithetical to social order. Hence, for the purpose of survival societies invented the general rules to serve the public good.
These rules do not serve the personal interest. They serve only the impersonal interest.
Without rules it was impossible to hold a society together for any length of time. There will probably have been a correlation between group size and the demand for rules and enforcement. Larger groups are harder to govern because it becomes more difficult to reach agreement and make decisions. The dangers of free riding and non-compliance increase in larger groups and either limit group size or proliferate rules.
Given mixed motives of human nature, argued Hume, the original foundational rules, what he called “the laws of nature”, were of necessity inflexible. For humans to survive the adversities of prehistory, only two perceptions or motives must have ruled over all others known to human psychology and sociology: firstly, the sheer impossibility of living long and well without society, and, secondly, the knowledge or perception of “disorders” that eventuate when humans are entirely free to express their natures.
When men have found by experience, that ’tis impossible to subsist without society, and that ’tis impossible to maintain society while they give free course to their appetites; so urgent an interest quickly restrains their actions, and imposes an obligation to observe those rules, which we call the laws of justice. [David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature 1739]
There are two extremely important if somewhat torturous paragraphs in Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (fittingly they directly precede his famous political science section ‘Of the Origin of Government’) where he concludes that “morals” are “a very improper foundation for such rigid inflexible rules as the laws of nature; and ’tis evident [the] laws can only be deriv’d from human conventions, when men have perceiv’d the disorders that result from following their natural and variable principles”.
The gist of Hume’s argument is that “the sense of morality in the observance of these rules follows naturally” from the “new artifice” of “inflexible” rules.
Objective artificial rules come first. In the afterglow of empirical rules are born the subjective, indefinite, contestable and wholly unscientific and unverifiable objects that philosophers call ‘morals’ and ‘values’. This insight is not recognised in the bulk of influential studies dealing with the prehistoric emergence of post-chimp societies.
As Hume argues, the motivator of society’s natural first rules is “self-interest, when men observe, that ’tis impossible to live in society without restraining themselves by certain rules”. Only then does “morality” appear as a self-congratulatory afterthought,
when this interest is once observ’d to be common to all mankind, and men receive a pleasure from the view of such actions as tend to the peace of society … After that interest is once establish’d and acknowledg’d, the sense of morality in the observance of these rules follows naturally. [ibid.].
The moral of the story? Get the “rigid rules” right first. Then gloat in moral glory.
Moralising reality
We can imagine a group of motivated prehistoric people impelled into instrumental-rule action. I encountered their ‘proxies’ during a year of anthropological fieldwork in remote areas of the Peruvian Andes during 1982. They come to mind now when I try to visualise a ‘first society’ sitting altogether in the gloaming as dusk falls, after their day’s work of hunting, gathering, constructing, and reconnoitring (subsistence-shelter-safety), after a deal of chatter, banter, and childcare, after their main daily meal. It is an ordinary evening of an ordinary day. There has been no emergency. Nobody was badly injured or killed while foraging or exploring. No new or unusual dangers have been detected on the horizon. Nor is it a special evening set aside for recreation or acts of celebration. Everyone is more or less pleasantly tired. Before sleep—time budgets allowing—they will sing or hum together, or someone will tell or perform a story.
There are, however, important matters to discuss, some issues to be resolved, one or two problems to solve. I therefore also imagine they have already finished discussing a priority matter concerning subsistence (food poisoning), shelter (a better thatched hut design), or safety (wolves can be heard in the valley). What is next on the agenda?
I believe the logical order of priority in prehistoric discussion and decision making will have been the subsistence-shelter-safety package first, then the ‘social order’.
As we saw earlier, there are opportunity costs in the making of decisions [TH12]. The efficient group societies will have known how to prioritise and sequence the content matter (agendas) of decision making processes. Some decisions of short run survival were urgent and could not be put off to another day. Longer run survival decisions could wait. Discussions of rules might have required a distribution of attention spans over time, being, in the greater scheme of things, the vital future-survival orientation.
We must also take into account the fact that decision making then was constrained (as ours is today, but in more consequential forms) by inherent inescapable limitations on the existing knowledge of and vocabulary for expressing knowledge and intentions.
I refer once again to the universal and timeless ‘black box’ impossibilities of seeing or knowing another’s ‘true’ thoughts. This bears directly on the obstacles experienced in ‘contingent intentionality’, characterised by incomplete information about means and motives [TH13]. Constraints on fully knowing true intentions — as encountered when resolving or observing exchanges between two people — are multiplied many times over in the layered processes of group decision making. Arguably, the presence of many more individuals made it easier to evaluate the intentions. Even so, contingent intentionality remained an obstacle to harmonious rule-making insofar as it impeded establishment of trust through a) the understanding of rule making, b) the motives of those who proposed rules, and c) the likelihood of agreed rules being followed.
We will later see in ‘The 3rd Decision’ how such problems were dealt with by choices groups eventually were compelled to make regarding the socially optimal mechanisms (broadly communalistic versus coordinated) for the making of decisions. In meantime a chicken-and-egg conundrum prevails. Decisions about ‘first rules’ which I prioritise analytically as ‘The 2nd Decision’ (violence-property-honesty-responsibility) did to an extent double up as rules for the acceptable conduct of decision making. This suggests that the initial decisions about behaviour rules are to a certain extent preconditions for reaching decisions. In the 2nd Decision we thus already take into account the three main modes of prehistoric regulation of interaction, i.e. preexisting or implicit rules, third-party surrogates, and systems [TH13]. I therefore assume a role for personal-impersonal π code, i.e. the primordial preference for society over individual [TH16].
On the other hand, the initial topics of social order were not complexly nuanced. People confronted with discrete acts of violence, theft, unfairness, disloyalty, or innocent confusion about which goods or objects were deemed to ‘belong’ to the group or to a single person could be dealt with in an assembly of members without formality or sensitivity about the communal vs coordinated procedures of decision making. Some ‘rules’ of productive and sustainable human interaction are so obvious that although there may eventually be common cause to elaborate and ratify them, they were initially intuitive or learned as lessons from childhood and upbringing.
Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote,
Most of the actions discussed in moral philosophy textbooks—promise-keeping, truth-telling and the like—are in practice carried out without any sort of conscious reference to maxims. … We know what to do. We tell the truth and keep promises most of the time because it does not occur to us to do otherwise. [Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy, 1971]
This may have been as true for prehistory. Young chimpanzees learn it is unacceptable to steal. They receive a sharp smack from an adult. Or their Machiavellian instincts tell them that stealing is acceptable if one is not caught out, and punishment might be avoided without ostracism if one runs fast enough or becomes dominant enough to deter punishment. However, chimps cannot communicate about explicit rules.
Indeed David Hume might have retorted to Alasdair MacIntyre that here was an example of philosophers benefitting with hindsight from the pleasures of moral complacency long after communicable rules were hard-won and internalised.
Such observations should not blind the historian to legitimate self-interested motives and the subtleties of deceit and self-deceit, or the logical rightfulness of withholding information that puts one at a clear disadvantage in the negotiation of a prehistoric transaction of services and goods or less tangible exchanges that depend on reaching agreement about mutualised intentions. Furthermore, parents well know that a child seeks to test how far he or she may be allowed to go. Similarly in any group it would have been natural from a ‘survival’ perspective to clarify, repeat, or underscore limits and definitions of what was or was not tolerable within broad categories of violence, possession, honesty, and responsibility, and to say to a deviant ‘if you wish to continue benefitting from your membership of this society you must adhere to these rules’.
What is known, what is not
Even for basic survival, processes of making, understanding, internalising and predicting decisions required a minimum level of cognitive capacity. There were costs and benefits to be processed in evasion and compliance with rules. In treating the topic of rule-creation in prehistory—for which there is no archeological or written record—we work initially with data from branches of neuroscience that inform us, roughly but sufficiently, what early humans were ‘capable of’ in adult brain function when they deciphered environmental, economic and social phenomena.
We know the biological trajectory of human evolution. We know the modern human child-to-adult developmental stages of social perception and social skill. We know what differentiates humans cognitively and physically from chimpanzees, and the fitness advantages of hominid anatomy and psychology. We know that though there are no ‘new’ human emotions (they draw from the same palette as chimp emotions) humans did learn to control emotions and to combine emotions with complex evolved cognition for memory storage, intelligence, and rationality, enabling better and faster decisions. We know many ‘first rules’ were invented to deal with emotional feelings or behaviours that ‘get out of hand’ and result in violence, sexual deviance, or dishonesty.
Since we also know early human material subsistence requirements we can estimate the probable corresponding methods and skills that would have developed to meet those needs. Similarly, since we also have a general understanding of the basic social needs of prehistoric humans we can estimate stepwise increases in the stresses of group life relative to group size, and may be able to theorise how divisions of labour, sexual relations, parenting, and ageing would have been ‘managed’. Most importantly of all, there is now a considerable body of good knowledge about probable mechanisms and stages for acquisition of language. Language revolutionised decision making.
Nonetheless, for any quantum of knowledge about human capability in responding to imperatives there are multiple ways of imagining how early humans actually responded.
My focus is on responses that produced the rules for regulating human interactions. It is a primary condition of prehistoric decisions about rules that they be agreed upon by methods that predate the invention of ‘the organisation’ and ‘government’. The recent claim by John Wallis in The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy (2024) that “All agreed upon rules are deliberately created within organizations” is plainly wrong.
Cactus in Bloom by Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1915 Texas
“In California 70% of voters backed Prop. 36 to stiffen penalties for theft and drug offenses. The initiative rolls back parts of a George Soros-backed ballot measure, which effectively eliminated penalties for drug possession and theft of less than $950 … The initiative restores penalties as a crime deterrent ... Voters in every county backed Prop. 36. This underlines the pervasive discontent with surging crime and public disorder, as well as how detached [the ‘Democrat’ government has been] from the concerns of citizens.” WSJ Editorial Nov 8, 2024
Decisional capabilities
I remind readers that we are not yet discussing ‘decisions about decision making’. Remarkably little attention is given to prehistoric decisions about rules, though they logically precede decisions about the mechanisms of decision making. The neglect of decisions about rules is surprising given that in the best scientific studies of prehistory, ‘decisions’ and ‘decision making’ do crop up in other human choice-action domains.
In this section I briefly refer to relevant contexts in which decision making is revealed to be feasible, frequent, and consequential. I underscore the certitude that prehistoric individuals could think and act rationally. It will be easier to examine rule-making if we can be sure that routine and effective collaborative decision making was feasible. Therefore I repeat the observation that the prerequisite human brain potential did exist. Prehistoric people had to make rapid and rational decisions alone and in consultation in the context of changing conditions. Under demands for managing complications in adversity, and through natural selection and the variation between individuals, human brains became evolved for high intelligence, good memory, and complex cognition.
Probably the most important evolutionary ‘decision’ at the individual level was the formation of stable bonded families which eventually structured group societies from the bottom up. This process fundamentally modified the patterning of individualistic differentiations of sex, age, physique, personality, and intelligence in Type 1 societies.
Pair bonding was a ‘decision’. One couple somewhere were the first to decide for monogamy. One group society somewhere was the first to prescribe monogamy as a ‘rule’. The consequence of pair bonding was that decision making became paired in one perpetual ‘unit’, if not in the sense of ‘joint action’ then at least in regard to familial routines of calculating ‘joint’ presence and ‘joint’ need, and regimes of ‘joint’ rules for their offspring. Change driven by everyday pair-bonded decisional dynamics clearly had consequences for assembly-based decision making. The bilateral bond offered pre-training in discursion and the possibility for ‘units’ of pre-formed ideas and attitudes. The family forum would become the main ‘unit’ of ‘representation’ in Types 2 and 3.
Various primordial rules are concerned with sexual relations. It was for good reason that “You shall not commit adultery” and “You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife” both made the ‘top ten’ rules of Judaeo-Christian religion. Adultery often ranks higher than the wrong of theft. But other dimensions of kinship appear in another light.
Many first rules of first societies cultivated an artificial predictability in social interaction functionally equivalent to trust-creation. Forms of trust that emerged naturally in repeat exchange under the constraints of contingent intentionality are equivalent to the effect of explicit rules about ‘possession’ and ‘truth’. The cultivation of family bonds to an extent generates a parallel zone of artificial predictability and trust exempt from society’s explicit rules, so that some decisions are (automatically) easier.
[It is possible] that kinship is a short cut that allows us to deal with the complexities of relationships without having to waste a lot of time when making decisions on how to behave towards someone. We only need to know one thing about kin — that they are related to us (and maybe exactly how closely they are related) — whereas with a friend we have to track back through all the past interactions to decide how they actually behaved on different occasions. Because less processing has to be done, decisions about kin should be done faster and at less cognitive cost than decisions about unrelated individuals. This would imply that, psychologically, kinship is an implicit process (i.e. it is automated), whereas friendship is an explicit process (we have to think about it). In a context where everyone in a community is related to everyone else, as they are in small-scale communities, kinship naming helps to identify members of your community in an efficient ‘fast-and-frugal’ way. [Robin Dunbar, Human Evolution, 2014]
Most studies of prehistoric decisions and decision making have been modelled in ‘games’ that reveal the cognitive capacities for effective foraging. The focus has been on exploring the ecological optimality of food acquisition decisions and the agentive rationality of collaborative decision making specified mainly for hunting scenarios.
These studies serve to confirm our essential initial proposition that early humans certainly did communicate instrumentally about shared goals. They regulated their internal reasoning and individual actions in reference to group expectations, and continually made complex chess-like cost-benefit choices and compromises.
Robert Kelly in his book The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers (1995) begins by rejecting the dominant culturalist paradigm which portrays foragers as populations contained and constrained by their particular holistic “cultures”. He argued that all meaningful “decision making capacity” resides with individuals. The proper gauge of foraging performance is the “mean fitness of different behavioural choices”. Thus Kelly showed why foraging and mobility decisions rely mainly on calculations of cost-benefit ratios, trade-offs and opportunity costs. Individuals collaborate in decisions about how most efficiently to process information, obtain food, and move locations. They thereby form and maintain an instrumental group consensus for action “without overt competition”.
In a recent analysis which supports similar positive assumptions about rationality and agency — The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans (2022) — Michael Tomasello clearly shows that prehistoric individuals could cooperate in making decisions. Whereas great apes are not capable of joint attention, joint decision, and joint action, early humans manifestly were able to plan ahead, make collaborative decisions, and conform to group norms despite the constraints on communication.
Empirically grounded assumptions based on research with human and chimpanzee ‘proxies’ about prevalent maximising behaviour for fitness and reproduction, and the socio-utilitarian function of self-interest and rational agency in human interaction and collaboration, set the scene for my discussion of how and why prehistoric ‘rule decisions’ may have been made, and how agreements and consensus were reached.
My argument so far has been that early humans in Type 1-3 societies used innate and learned faculties in non-episodic ways to hone their skills for routines of governance, building deliberatively on the perpetual mechanism of group meetings and exploiting primal differential qualities of age, sex, intelligence, charisma, and physique for the explicit purposes of discussion, disputation, conflict management and consensus.
Defining the rules
Let us be sure what we mean when we speak of ‘rules’.
A societal rule is a preagreed communicable obligation to behave in a predefined manner in the context of predefined actions, to which conformity is a precondition of full (and ‘equal’) integration in society. Any prehistoric society could have devised any number of rules, from trivial to profound. Rules that matter from perspective of the natural preconditions for the survival and flourishment (prosperity) of society fall within the four categories offered earlier: violence, possession, truth, and responsibility.
When we look at examples of such rules in ‘proxy’ societies studied by anthropologists we see they could be enforceable and contravention could be punishable. Yet even if rules had been agreed upon by the whole group in an assembly—in direct response to undesirable actions—it is highly unlikely that the initial decision would incorporate a corresponding sanction. A specification of punishment for violation is necessary only if unwanted actions are repeated, and once the awareness grows that repetitions of bad behaviour have to be deterred. Deterrence is then also a topic raised for group decision making. Nevertheless, in the earliest small group societies in prehistory sanctions might never have reached the ‘agenda’ stage. Ideally rules, once decided, could rapidly have been internalised as acceptable standards and expectations of group conformity.
Hart’s concision in The Concept of Law (1961) is indispensable for defining rules. He wrote that “compulsion” and “obligation” correspond to terms such as “ought, must, should”. I agree, and it would be most economical here just to quote key passages.
What is necessary is that there should be a critical reflective attitude to certain patterns of behaviour as a common standard, and that this should display itself in criticism, demands for conformity, and in acknowledgements that such criticism and demands are justified, all of which find their characteristic expression in the normative terminology of ‘ought’, ‘must’, and ‘should’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. These are the crucial features which distinguish social rules from mere group habits …
Rules are conceived and spoken of as imposing obligations when the general demand for conformity is insistent and the social pressure brought to bear upon those who deviate or threaten to deviate is great. … What is important is that the insistence on importance or seriousness of social pressure behind the rules is the primary factor determining whether they are thought of as giving rise to obligations. … The rules supported by this serious pressure are thought important because they are believed to be necessary to the maintenance of social life or some highly prized feature of it. Characteristically, rules so obviously essential as those which restrict the free use of violence are thought of in terms of obligation. So too rules which require honesty or truth or require the keeping of promises …
There are both general obligations which all normal adults are conceived as having throughout life (e.g. to abstain from violence) and special obligations which any such member may incur by entering into special relations with others (e.g. obligations to keep promises or return services rendered).
Because Hart is defining rules as a lead-in to discussion of law he does not need to separate explicit from implicit rules. He sees a degree of social pressure to conform to clearly specifiable types of rules, but the mechanism of their appearance is left loose.
In my approach, in contrast, there is a distinction between explicit rules that will have required group discussion and agreement, and the nebulous or implicit rules that are built into abstract systems of interaction. Rules about honesty or truth can, as Hart does show, be defined and made explicit. But they are far more difficult to specify than the wrong of theft or violence. An important example is ‘the promise’, which Hart refers to above in the category of honesty or truth. I think it would have been complicated and time absorbing for a prehistoric society to regulate promises at the group level.
A promise is an undertaking of commitment, a pledge and a declaration of intent. In some societies a person ‘loses face’ if their promise is not honoured, so it is a matter of honour that the promise be kept. Promises are more concretely conceptualised as a mechanism for tracking reputations, equivalent to the fulfilment of a contract. System theorists (Parsons and Luhmann) regularly use words like ‘commitment’, ‘obligation’, and ‘binding’ when emphasising the importance of trust in promises. Trust is earned or assumed as a precondition of transparency and exchange when the intentions are contingent and uncertain. In addition, I identified the possible functional equivalence of a mythic supernatural rule-producing or rule-policing third party. If individuals believe in the same godly overseer and fear punishment by the invisible overseer if they renege on their promise, they will keep the promise. However, notwithstanding these caveats I think it unlikely that prehistoric people will have seen fit to devote much assembly time to ‘promises’. In so far as they discussed honesty and truth it would have been in general terms as an encouraged behaviour to be internalised by each for the good of society. Transgressions would be ‘punished’ by disapproval.
Of the four categories ‘truth’ is the one least likely to be an explicit rule. Dishonesty and the breaking of promises is the category most likely to be dealt within the system context by individuals making an exchange transaction for services, goods or favours.
Breaking promises between individuals would terminate the exchanges and damage reputations. Yet in the context of foraging societies, dishonesty that breaks the bonds of collaborative trust between two individuals in everyday interactions are not going to break the bonds that hold society together, whereas violence or shirking might.
Hume, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, considered “the promise” to be one of
three fundamental laws of nature, that of the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises … which are necessary to the support of society. [ref. above]
This calls attention to Hume’s restricted vision of rules, which he reduces to the single category of ‘possession’. In his day this was excusable. Property rights were the foundation and dynamic incentive upon which the Industrial Revolution could occur. The principles of rule of law were already taken for granted in England. Hume was correct in believing that “property is perfectly unintelligible without first supposing justice and injustice”. Yet for our prehistoric group societies the scope of rule-making was necessarily much broader. The ‘property’ of a tool, an animal hide, or a basket of food was considerable. Yet it was not until the Neolithic that property rights as now conceived were associated with ownership of a ‘household’. For most of prehistory the ‘fundamental laws of nature’ primarily related to violence and group responsibilities.
Even Hart’s summation of ‘the rules’ is not quite as comprehensive as it should be, although, like Hume’s, it rightly underscores that no society could exist without them.
… certain obligations and duties [require] the sacrifice of private inclination or interest which is essential to the survival of any society, so long as men and the world in which they live retain some of their most familiar and obvious characteristics. Among such rules obviously required for social life are those forbidding, or at least restricting, the free use of violence, rules requiring certain forms of honesty and truthfulness in dealings with others, and rules forbidding the destruction of tangible things or their seizure from others. If conformity with these most elementary rules were not thought a matter of course among any group of individuals, living in close proximity to each other, we should be doubtful of the description of the group as a society, and certain that it could not endure for long.
Bluebonnet Scene, by Robert Julian Onderdonk, 1921 Texas
“The doors are open and they are open in a way, from my point of view, that is very, very disorganized,” said Niurka Melendez, a Venezuelan who directs Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid, a New York group. She understands the frustration in the U.S. about the border. “I put myself in the shoes of an American, and I say, ‘Wow, what is this?’ This isn’t about whether I’m for or against migrants. It’s about having some rules.” WSJ’s Ryan Dubé Nov 2, 2024
Proxy-Pleistocene rules
Today’s hunter-gatherers act as entire groups to kill, ostracise, shame, or otherwise socially pressure deviants … If today’s foragers can be used as models for our more recent hunting ancestors, then for thousands of generations social deviants have been losing out on useful social contacts when they were ostracised or expelled from the band … [Christopher Boehm, The Evolution of Social Control, in Handbook on Evolution and Society, eds. Jonathan H. Turner, et al., 2015]
Thanks to Boehm’s empirical hunter-gatherer data base, upon which he based the arguments proposed in his influential though theoretically flawed book Moral Origins (2012) we have a good idea about the kinds of rules that the contemporary proxies for prehistoric ‘Late-Pleistocene appropriate’ peoples do value and enforce. His examples can be integrated in my rule categories of violence (justified, unjustified), possession (property, theft, damage), truth (honesty, promises), responsibility (divisions of labour).
Boehm provides easy tabulated summaries of the relevant rules. The most dramatic table outlines the reasons cited for “capital punishment” (execution) of offenders in 24 multi-region “societies”. The execution is said to be approved by the group but often carried out by a relative of the perpetrator. The “deviances” punished by execution are listed in order of reported frequency under headings: a) intimidations by malicious sorcery, repeated murders, tyrannical action, or mentally deranged aggression; b) deviance in the form of theft or cheating; c) sexual offences of incest, premarital sex or adultery; and d) any other acts that seriously shock, endanger, or betray the group.
Another table separates “predators” (rule-breakers) into two types: “intimidators” (violence) and “deceivers” (mainly theft and dishonesty, summed up as ‘free riding’). Boehm also clarifies the “types” of punishable deviance in ten groups: Andaman, Greenlander Inuit, Alaskan Inuit, Polar Inuit, Murngin, Netsilik, Yumans, Tiwi, !Ko, and Yahgan. Types of deviance are tabulated by the likelihood of punishment: murder (100%), sorcery (100%), stealing (100%), beating (80%), failing to share (80%), bullying (70%), lying (60%), cheating persons or the group (50%), and failing to cooperate (40%).
Finally, one table lists “methods” of sanctioning which can be read as a ranking of how many of the ten societies are likely to employ this punishment method: public opinion (100%), spatial distancing away from culprit (100%), nonlethal physical punishment, including beatings (90%), ridicule or negative gossip (90%), direct criticism by the group or a spokesperson (80%), entire group kills culprit (70%), group ostracism or social aloofness (70%), group member selected to assassinate the culprit (60%), group shaming (60%), group shunning (50%), temporary or permanent expulsion (40%).
Rule-breakers include group leaders. If a chief is a bully, all or some of the group might move elsewhere. Capital punishment is “underreported” for obvious reasons. Boehm believes these sanctioning trends are widespread or universal among foragers.
The only category in my schema that requires some extra explanation is the one I call “responsibility”. This refers primarily to shirking of shared group responsibilities that correspond to subsistence-shelter-safety. Boehm includes “laziness” under his general category of “free-riding”. Laziness is punished “harshly”. And, if a hunter is injured he will be better cared for if he is seen as a “productive” member of the group rather than as a “conspicuously lazy man”. Secondly, I include under ‘responsibility’ the frowned-upon neglect of child care/control and other valued familial or social activities such as relaxation, entertainment, spirituality, superstition, or just depriving others of sleep.
The most important ‘responsibility’ is contribution to material welfare, i.e. doing a fair share of the work in proportion to the individual’s capacity to work. There is no point focusing only on the ceremonies and explicit rules about the sharing of food if this leads to the neglect of rules about sharing in the enterprise of obtaining food.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers is a useful general source. Tim Ingold, for example, writes that “if hunting and gathering is not just an assemblage of subsistence techniques—if it is a mode of production—then it must entail certain rules for the division of labor, access to productive means, and distribution of produce which together make up the social relations of hunter-gatherer production”.
Among the many examples offered in this large book are strict rules of kinship and etiquette, such as confining jokes and comedy to close family only, rules for personal names, rules about inheritance, marriage, and residence. All such rules have positive or negative consequences for the bonding and binding of societies. There is also the question of the ‘border” in border-bond-bind. Some African societies are distributed over large territories and have rules to regulate the interaction between settlements, such as during drought or famine. There are also explicit rules relating to land rights.
I think that’s enough for today. The conclusions will be obvious — decisions about rules matter. And in evolutionary and governance terms the objective rules precede the subjective feel-good moralities. We will look at rules again soonish under the headings of ‘Religion Robs the Rules’ and ‘The Third Decision: How to Make the Decisions’.
Almost forgot the 2nd punchline, which this week has to be … The ‘Democrats’ lost because did not heed the majority demands for rules (see under the paintings above).
“All societies have certain things in common. The three simultaneous and indispensable forces that bind societies internally and thus ensure every society’s continuity (bordering, bonding, binding) will be identified and explored over a period of 40,000 years. I aim to demonstrate how societies lose their potential dynamism when one or more of these BBB forces weakens.” Michael G Heller