Rational heroism, hereditary charisma, intelligence
Written by Michael Heller
In primate groups and simple human societies we find functional roles and decision making influence formed on the foundation of procreative sex differentiation which in consequence of inevitable differences in responsibilities for nurturing the young directly impacts time management and the division of labour. Social differentiation based on sex is then further refined by the determination of activity according to the individual’s age and experience. Alongside sex and age we also see that the physical differences between individuals in terms of factors such as strength, dexterity and agility are objectively important in the assumption of social roles. In addition, all these ‘natural’ role differentiations are modified by differences of personality and intelligence. In what follows I focus on the latter two. I introduce a combination of general intelligence with a type of personality (charisma) and a cultivated social role called ‘heroism’ which has traditionally been associated with group leadership.
Imagine, first, a plausible scenario unfolding on the threshold of a medium sized cave inhabited by a small hunter-gatherer group society in the mountains near Kamarband ca. 9000 BCE. Three ferocious armed and muscular strangers emerge stealthily from the bushes and demand to parley with the group’s leader. The women and elders who have been tending the fire and preparing food at the threshold hurriedly gather up the children and retreat inside. They shout to the people within the cave that there are ‘enemies’ at the door. The people experience emotions of fright. Some of them feel panic. They do not, however, direct their imploring eyes immediately toward their senior elder couple. The old man and old woman are their revered fonts of knowledge, wisdom and memory. They pass judgement and advise them on the conduct of a good life. But he is no longer a hunter and fighter. And she no longer bears children. Now the decisions must be made rapidly. This is not the occasion for a lengthy process of establishing ‘consensus’. The frightened people beckon instead toward the men who are resting after their recent hunting excursion. The eyes of everyone in the group instinctively come to rest upon their most outstanding personality — the ‘one’ who demonstrates quick-wittedness, energy, eloquence and physical agility; the ‘one’ who best controls his emotions; the ‘one’ who has habitus for consultation; the ‘one’ who freely and creatively influences, calculates, organises, and initiates group action; the ‘one’ who wins arguments but concedes with grace when he does not. This ‘one’ is the natural leading explorer of new territory, the natural leading hunter, the natural leading fighter of tribes. When faced with an imminent or momentous action or an existential threat the people of the prehistoric group society turn intuitively to the ‘one’ who has always demonstrated willingness and ability to selflessly, judiciously, and effectively speak and act decisively on behalf of the group. Their trust is based on attested ‘merit’ displayed many times over in deeds and words. I call this ideal-type person the ‘hero’.
We cannot of course expect every prehistoric group society to have a ‘hero’ of such universal stature endowed with every extraordinary strength of sociability, personality and intelligence, as suggested in this story. But we would find someone with some of these attributes, in degrees. Nor should we expect ‘heroism’ to appear only in the face of danger. Qualities of heroism can be put to use in more prosaic ways: finding new sources of plant food, searching for missing persons, surveilling rival group societies, inventing and testing new ways to cross a river. The ‘hero’ might take risks and step outside the Neolithic socio-technical equilibrium by modifying a tool or weapon, or testing a new skill which improves the welfare of the group. These are not unlike the kinds of qualities and gratifications which Joseph Schumpeter found among modern entrepreneurs: “the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others, to succeed for the sake, not of the fruits of success, but of success itself”, and “the joy of creating, of getting things done, or exercising one’s energy and ingenuity”.
The cave story illustrates age, sex and physique differentiations in the individualistic societies. Descendants of these people may later have participated in the formation of communalistic and coordinated societies further westwards in household settlements that emerged on the Mesopotamian alluvial plains. What I would suggest, however, is that the fitness for surviving and changing lifeways required individuals who could supply the two extra differentiations of innate personality and cleverness. There is a strong case for prioritising these more dynamic intra-societal sources of preservation and progression. Beyond the physical differentiations, we should especially be looking for out-of-ordinary intelligence and personality as individual endowments which are utilitarian for the continuing existence of group societies in adverse environments.
At the ‘animal’ level it is not at all surprising that every simple-small first society needed its heroes in order to survive and thrive. Individual bravery or self-sacrifice for the common good, and immediate unthinking altruistic impulses driving unselfish actions for the preservation of a species or close kin, seem to be wired into the brains of primates. Actions and reactions that suggest discrete acts of heroic bravery were regular events among the chimpanzees studied in Gombe by Jane Goodall. Chimps take calculated risks when hunting and patrolling their group’s territorial boundaries. Goodall interpreted some of the respectful and admiring behaviour of young chimps toward adult males as a form of “hero” worship. Frans de Waal has stories of heroism among dogs and whales, as well as among elephants that rapidly organise themselves to save calves that seem to be at risk of drowning in a river or a pool of mud. Such individualised and often life-risking lifesaving actions go beyond merely empathetic responses to distress, or the calling out of alarms about imminent dangers, or the calling in of third-party assistance, all of which are attested in the animal world. As for humans, Steve Stewart-Williams has recently marshalled a vast range of theory and evidence to argue that evolutionary “inclusive fitness” kin-selection instincts would have preprogrammed the impulses of the boy who sacrificed his own life by prioritising the safety of his younger brother. Systematic and non-discrete ingrained ‘altruism’ of this kind—like the pair-bonding between men and women which had the advantage of controlling ‘ultramasculinity’ and raising smaller numbers of children with safety and affection—results from the Darwinian imperative to propagate the genes.
In contrast, the ‘heroism’ that seems most relevant to early individualistic or communitarian and coordinated human societies is not the instantaneous or instinctive action on behalf of others whose lives are in immediate danger. Rather it is a routinised explicitly calculative human phenomenon for managing governance in traditional group societies before the introduction of stable rulership with authority and obligations to obey. In a traditional setting heroism is a feature of a special type of heritable human personality, called ‘charisma’. Charisma combines most effectively with the other differential biological endowment, that is the intelligence used in the routine rational calculations of means to ends which are prerequisites for survival.
At its simplest charisma is an exceptional magnetism, an ability to be charming and behave graciously in ways that are quite literally ‘attractive’. Charisma is associated with communicative public speaking. The charismatic person attracts admirers or followers through a power of personality. In that sense charisma is conceptually the purest personality trait, being virtually a personification of personality. In the context of traditional governance the correspondence of charisma with bravery and integrity is essential because the action of demonstrable deeds confirms the qualities that attract. The charismatic person does not just ‘talk the talk’, they also perform the feat.
In my view charismatic heroism is most relevant to analyses of traditional societies before the evolution of rulership. Here I am once again drawing a line between the provision of ‘leadership’ without authority and without dominance in individualistic and communalistic societies, and a parallel or subsequent emergence of leaders as rulers in what I have been referring to as the coordinated and administered societies.
By focusing on charisma I am setting aside other personality ‘traits’ or ‘gifts’ that in some degree establish a significant differentiation between individuals in society. I suspect, however, that charisma is probably the most important. We cannot forget that Max Weber considered charisma significant enough in itself to be one of only three types of ‘domination’ (or ‘rulership’ or ‘authority’ depending on how one chooses to translate the word ‘Herrschaft’) — 1. rational-legal, 2. traditional, 3. charismatic. I do not employ these distinctions. I see ‘tradition’ preceding rulership, and ‘charisma’ as a characteristic that is most relevant to ‘traditional’ governance. Charisma in my terms facilitates the social action of ‘leading’ before a ‘leader’ exists as such.
Although I distance my approach from Weber’s famous theory of charisma I value two of his insights. Weber identified an intrinsic functional connection between charisma and heroism. Relevant here is Weber’s explanation that “heroic qualities” of typical charismatics appear among “those who led bands of hunters” or “military heroes”.
Secondly, long before scientific evidence was available to show that personality is genetically determined (therefore relatively resistant to retraining—see below), Weber wrote:
‘traditional’ action and large areas of ‘charisma’ … are, in fact, very close to those phenomena conceivable only in biological terms”.
Weber later also emphasises the idea that charisma “is transmitted by blood”. Indeed, “hereditary charisma” eventually became a principle of lineage. Most importantly, charisma is thus resistant to “construed understanding and motivational explanation”. In other words, if charismatic action is really sprung from biological preconditioning we cannot easily ascribe it sociologically to instrumental interest motivations. Crucially:
Charisma can only be ‘aroused’ or ‘put to the test’, not ‘learned’ or ‘taught’.
How then is individualistically differentiated charisma combined with individualistically differentiated intelligence in traditional group societies?
In the recent past there was great debate about whether intelligence is transmitted genetically. This has changed. Today the best research begins with the assumption that intelligence is to a large extent heritable. Debate has refocused on how to define intelligence more accurately. One strand of that research concerns ‘rationality’ and is particularly relevant to the way I reimagine the evolution of traditional society.
Although recent research shows that tests of intelligence quotients do not and perhaps cannot accurately measure human rationality, it is nevertheless clear that intelligence is similar to rationality. Intelligence includes the inherently differential abilities among individuals to calculate optimal means to an end in multiple problem-solving. This is my starting point. In prehistoric societies ‘extraordinary’ charismatic individuals are more likely to supply ‘functional’ heroic leadership if they also possess extraordinary or at least above-average intelligence. Furthermore the hero will have needed the kind of intelligence that clearly does correlate with a capability of rational calculation. This presupposes that although there may be a number of persons in the prehistoric society with high levels of intelligence they will nevertheless not have a great impact on the calculations and actions of governance unless they also possess charismatic personality strengths. This difficulty only diminishes with administration and opportunities afforded by divisions of labour and rank which spread the burden.
What we find is that traditional societies do in fact practise the routines of rational governance. A theory of society needs to take for granted that consequential social action can be instrumentally rational. Rationality is a concept that describes action which is deliberately calculated to be the most effective means to an end. When observing or imagining societies it is as well to be explicit about what one considers to be the ‘end’, and rigorously question the viability and desirableness of the ‘end’. In my model I come up with a hideously broad and imprecise ‘end’ — the ‘common good welfare with a reliance on individualistic incentives’. In the ‘end’ there seems to be no choice but to leave the definition of the balanced ‘good’ to the agents of governance in whichever place and at whatever time in history we choose to focus on, in the certain knowledge that they will have been subject to the universal law of legitimacy. They will have juggled the legitimacy of means and ends in terms commensurate with the times and the environment. In evolutionary terms, there is little life available for a regime that cannot maintain its legitimacy. That is to say, whatever were the private motivations, long-lived governance will have been broadly ‘Satisficing’ to meet public thresholds of tolerance, effectiveness and engagement. Otherwise governors will have been thrown off their pedestals or will have lost their ability to control and sustain the productivity of their regime. That is their fate when the public will not cooperate.
Having for now sidestepped the problem of defining the ‘end’ at least insofar as it existed in the periods of history before written ideals and recorded philosophies we return to the relevance of intelligence for the definition and attainment of rationality in T1 individualistic, T2 communalistic and T3 coordinated group societies. Rational governance is the process of matching means to ends, and intelligence is the heritable ‘gift’ that enables the making of a better rational choice. At this stage what interests us is the threshold setting—a simple small individualistic society in an unpredictable adverse natural environment. The ‘means’ is the exceptional individual with the ‘gift’ of charisma, the ‘one’ who is a ‘hero’. If our heroic individual had the additional ‘gift’ of exceptional intelligence the chances of survival and progression were high.
In this context intelligence is only the quantum of mental processing power required to establish utilitarian goals that will have been most appropriate for the simple small pre-rulership society, and to choose or generate means for realising these goals with the given prehistoric constraints of limited knowledge, technique, and technology.
To sum up so far: Charisma is a personality trait that optimises intelligence in the simple archaic societies. Given changes in group size and environmental constraints these societies are in an inevitable evolutionary transition from pure individualism to participatory communalism or coordinated leadership. In different ways charisma will have been a tangible mode of group leadership (not rulership) in all three societies. Differentiations of sex, age, physique, personality and intelligence are positive and negative sources of inequality. The term ‘egalitarian’ is misplaced in anthropological and historical studies of these types of society. The point I have emphasised is that differences of age, sex and physical fitness, vital as they may be in determining an individual’s opportunities to shape or maintain a stable set of patterns for social interaction, are mere backdrops for two rarer and variable differentiations which are far more directly associated with forces of evolutionary change in the operations and definition of society, that is individual differences of charisma and intelligence.
Finally, we should not exaggerate heritability of intelligence and its impact on rationality. Clearly actionable intelligence can be improved through a training of mind within a human lifetime even in the simplest of societies. In particular, the more exceptional elders in the archaic setting improved their own intelligence and capacity for thoroughgoing rationality in judgement, memory, knowledge, and wisdom during the course of witnessing countless instructive examples of cause-and-effect in action. Repeat experiences and observation of the frustrating and nuanced processes of cause-and-effect in nature, work, social interaction and governance will have compelled the elders with ‘political’ responsibilities to tame their instincts, control their emotions, moderate their judgements, and hone their mental faculties for rational calculation. Having reached a certain age—60 to preside over some Greek assemblies—the ‘elders’ were valued if not indispensable decision makers participating in public judgements.
Nor is eldership the only variable of differentiation that fluctuates sociologically over time. In their necessarily continuous but negotiable interactions, males and females learn how to profit from or entirely escape the primeval primate moulds of inherent advantage and disadvantage associated with biologically given and tradition-bound socio-economic roles in gendered divisions of labour or governance. Not dissimilarly, physical fitness is also to a great extent degraded or enhanced by lifestyle and training.
Personality is different. Personality is more immutable or less susceptible to retraining. The endowment of charisma and its associated heroism relates to the inherent quickness and ease with which a person will adopt a positive constructive stance toward any given problem-solving dilemma. Of course this characteristic will be more in evidence in the simpler group societies where deliberative and consensual institutions have not yet been constructed to spread and mediate the individualistic impulses.
Further reading
Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe, Cambridge University Press 2019
Keith Stanovich, Richard West, and Maggie E. Toplak, The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking, MIT Press 2016
Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, Transaction Publishers 1983
Today’s illustration of a frightful charismatic drama on the threshold of a cave:
Pablo Picasso, Minotaure et jument morte devant une grotte face à une jeune fille au voile (Date: 1936)