The Ambiguous Group, by Conroy Maddox, 1959 England
Ever since Herbert Spencer social scientists have struggled to understand the world’s multitudinous, multifaceted, primitive or prehistoric, pre-agricultural, pre-industrial societies in terms of a simultaneity, or alternation, or progression between equality and hierarchy, or egalitarianism and power-authority. This dichotomy is generally assumed to be universal right across prehistoric or proxy-primitive societies. Nowadays it is often explained as a function or expression of evolved morals and values. Yet it is possible that this base-level dichotomy is misconceived, and that a simpler explanation can be found by beginning with an assumption of instrumentally rational thinking in regard to socio-economic obligations, subsistence, rules, and exigencies of decision making.
I suggested previously that individual and group rationality from the perspective of prehistoric social action is dualistic — attainment of optimal ends by optimal means. Instrumental social action is ‘rational’ if the method chosen can achieve its intended purpose and simultaneously be compatible with the common good of society. Rational action is a deliberate mental computation on both these dimensions whenever actors are selecting methods likely to achieve maximal intentional utilitarian outcomes. Every viable and effective social action demands an evaluation of what will be the probable behavioural response of society to the method of action. In effect, instrumental action compromises with legitimacy, and legitimacy compromises with goal-attainment. The dualism refers to a distinction between the purpose and acceptability of an action.
But there is a further dualism in rationality which may not be fully applicable in prehistory — the separation of formal criteria from substantive criteria. [Here, again, I am adapting and building upon Max Weber’s famous theory and concepts.] When the prehistoric society ‘decides’ about subsistence or social order or optimal methods for making decisions, its active adult members seek—insofar as their limited knowledge permits—to ‘formalise’ their choices and solutions by ‘calculating’ the relevant trade-offs and opportunity costs. In their own minds they weighed up gains and losses for themselves and for the group for every proposed objective. When it was beneficial or appropriate to do so, they ‘joined’ their minds in discussion of the pros and cons.
This ‘formalisation’ was a viable means for structuring decisions so that technical problems and solutions could be identified and the feasibility and potentiality of corresponding and alternative actions could be evaluated through consultation with stakeholders and specialists — for example, hunters-gatherers vis-à-vis the eaters, perpetrators vis-à-vis the victims, agenda proposers vis-à-vis the agenda discussants.
In other words, instrumental formal rationality aimed to measure with relative precision the cost–benefit of actionable alternatives. Our twenty-first century calculative skill is supported by science, mathematics, hypotheses, and machine computing. Yet the historic people who possessed knowledge, experience and high intelligence had rudimentary equivalents in language and logic that enabled them to organise thoughts and communications for the purpose of estimating the costs and benefits of alternative actions. There were three ‘measures’ of formal rationality — the proposal is ‘economical’ in terms of time, effort, resources, and other costs; it conforms to established ‘rules’ of action and intention, and it employs a standard of known facts.
The conceptual counterpart of ‘formal’ rationality is ‘substantive’ rationality. The latter concerns a group-level ethical evaluation of action alternatives founded on complex and contestable perceptions of motives and intended outcomes concerning, for example, ideal distributions of decision making influence or of goods and services, and philosophic, esthetic, ascetic, or religious idealised purposes and methods of social action. This is where we encounter the ‘morals’ which reinforce enacted ‘rules’. It is where we also find the notion of egalitarianism. And it is where we find collective beliefs about the rightness—as distinct from the utility—of social rank. A defining characteristic of substantively rational choice is that it is open to more than one interpretation, which, at the level of whole societies, renders it ‘political’. It may further be assumed that substantive rationality presupposes political philosophy.
A realistic social science of prehistoric governance will be inclined to regard formal rationality as the material for evolutionary survival in conditions of adversity, and to treat matters of substantive rationality as secondary cosmetic material which societies may or may not include in assembly discussions when conditions of relative stability and prosperity are secured and there are fewer time constraints and urgencies.
In these practical terms we obtain a first glimpse of some reasons why the egalitarian-hierarchy dichotomy may turn out to be built on false premises (though I have not yet fully explained why the term ‘hierarchy’ is largely a redundant concept prior to T4).
Prehistoric societies probably did not exercise much ‘substantive’ rationality. As individuals it is likely that members of these societies thought about and discussed instances of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour when two or more individuals were settling agreements about acceptable behaviours for exchange of goods and services that were to be conducted independently of group oversight and group rules.
But in practical consequential terms group agreements on such issues were formulated as rules, not creeds or ethics. Even in today’s proxy-primitive societies—upon which claims about the egalitarianism-hierarchy contrasts are founded—we do not see much evidence of philosophical discussion about universal ethics. When a group decides to kill a habitual rule-breaker they do not discuss the transgressor’s motivations.