Harmony in Red by Henri Matisse, 1908 Paris
Empirical examples to support the arguments will soon be provided (anthropological and ethnographic texts). Before that I have some brief further thoughts on theory.
Conflict and size in transition
We can now consider two linked reasons why Type 1 individualistic society with its spontaneous ‘on demand’ biologically-structured decision making might evolve into Type 2 communalistic society with planned but still informally structured decision making — a) conflict arising from individualistic differentiations, and b) increase in group size. I suggest additional reasons for the emergence of Type 3 coordinated society with its formal interpersonal divisions of responsibility, leadership, and the regularisation of decision making. There we find a few reasons other than group size, continuing conflict, time constraints, and complexity for deciding to create a ‘division of labour’ in governance, e.g. changes in family structure and modes of production.
There is probably an initial sequence 1-2-3. However, Type 2 and Type 3 are simultaneous alternatives. In this respect I follow a loyal reader of Social Science Files, Michael Mann — in his hugely influential The Sources of Social Power, Vol 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, published in 1986. My teachers at the Institute of Development Studies immediately added it to our class reading lists.
Regardless of how we conceptualise prehistoric governance—viz. egalitarian versus hierarchical—there was a long coexistence and back-and-forth between two types.
Conflicts driving the Type 1 to Type 2 transitions were in my view mainly the result of acutely disruptive contestation over the degrees of influence wielded by some individuals in decision making. Proxy-primitive ethnographic examples of intra-group conflict have been recorded since the late nineteenth century—documented in extensive ethnographic detail in Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology (1885).
Yesterday I read in Peter J. Wilson’s The Domestication of the Human Species (1988):
Living under such intense intimacy [of hunter-gatherer camp life] can conceivably be a strain: other people's idiosyncrasies grate more easily and trivialities become magnified … the indiscriminateness of intimacy can itself produce tension and conflict, which in turn may lead to an exaggerated fear of violence. Marjorie Shostak notes that the !Kung dread the prospect of tempers flaring out of control, and so, too, do the Inuit Eskimos.
We can also assume and theorise continual conflict on the basis of
a) universal motivational forces and incentives such as those associated with productive competition, or
b) biological endowments that predict ‘disruptive’ behaviour, or
c) resentments logically correlated with variably differentiated lifetime acquisitions such as family, property and special skills.
Increase in group size, which is also causal in Type 1 to Type 2 transitions, can stem from multiple pressures. I note that the material causes and social effects of group size have been recorded and theorised from various disciplinary angles. The pressures to decrease group size so as to preserve intra-group harmonisation were also strong.
However, my focus is the cause-and-effect of group enlargement insofar as it exerts pressures for changes in the modes of decision making. To state the obvious, the larger the group the more difficult it is to set agendas and reach agreements. In order to preserve intra-group harmony decisions were made to create decision-making rules.
So what ‘happened’?
In analytical terms two dispiriting facts are given: a) it is impossible for us to look inside the mind of prehistoric humans in order to know their motivations, and b) anthropological evaluations of the universal or contextualised motives of recent and contemporary human foragers in underdeveloped-marginal parts of the world are interpretative and necessarily unreliable mental proxies for prehistoric humans.
Given these realities, when attempting to understand the instincts and the calculations of prehistoric humans we are reduced to elementary assumptions of means-end rationality. This is not to assume that contemporary and proxy-primitive individuals think differently. They might indeed think the same as we do. However, the method of social science requires that our ‘epistemological’ foundations for the interpretation must draw on universally valid assumptions about relative rationality.
In the prehistoric context rationality does not and (in light of our ignorance of their prevailing motives) cannot refer to contestable ideals and ethics such as beliefs in the rightness of ‘equality’ or ‘hierarchic’ ranking. The latter are exceedingly ambiguous and they fluctuate in place and time. Instead I will refer only to the kind of rationality that is elemental and continuous, and purely formal. This ‘formality’ is constituted by mental and communicable calculations that are performed with varying degrees of automaticity and with direct reference to optimal alternatives, opportunity costs and available tradeoffs. The material and social circumstances are sufficiently known to us as a result of advances in physical, biological, neurological and archeological sciences.
The consequence of all this for the social scientist is the famous and well-theorised assumption of utility maximisation in political economy. I give it a sociological twist.
My claim is that—after subsistence and related survival imperatives—the second paramount prehistoric driving force of human behaviour was the pursuit of social order. Social order was utilitarian. Prehistoric people, though by no means averse to risk when pursuing their material subsistence utilities, were ‘order seeking’ and ‘safety-seeking’ in the social context. I call this the HAPPEN utility — the seeking for within-group Harmony, Agreement, Peace, and within-group displays of Penitence, Empathy, and Normativity as conditions of integration. I know it looks corny, but the HAPPEN utility is less corny than handwaving about vague morals or values.
Social order required governance, governance required structured decision making, and the viability of our Type 1 to Type 3 alternatives for structured decision making changed over time when subject to dilemmas of conflict and group size. This is how we must explain the alternatives. This is what drove and regulated decisions about rules for within-group ‘political’ influence — first after the period of Type 1 individualistic differentiation (age, sex, physique, personality and intelligence) and, then again during the back and forth transitions of Type 2 communalism and Type 3 coordination.
by Michael Heller
Note to readers: I hope to have rough draft outlines for Types 1-3 (begun June 2024) completed by the end of January 2025 or thereabouts. It depends how easy or tough it will be to select and slice the empirical snippets. Thanks to technologies generated by dynamically monopolistic American capitalist firms I have open sixteen simultaneous virtual desktops with nearly 100 half-read books and articles. Though I have become very engrossed in the prehistory I think the work may become a little easier (although less ‘imaginative’) once we switch over to recorded history with Mesopotamia and the technological transformations of Type 4. It will be nice to return to a world of facts.