Theory & History
4Rs, emotional intelligence, assembly, rationality, honour, competition, individualism ... and some charisma..
Rationality in Three Group Societies
Written by Michael Heller
1. Recap and reintroduction to theory
Apart from the interpretations of archeological findings and the discoveries of biological science which greatly help to explain the evolution of human anatomy and cognitive capacities we nevertheless have no firm empirical knowledge of prehistoric human society. I fill the empirical blank spaces with the concepts of rationality, rules, reckoning, and rightness, which can be defined and operationalised as social science.
rationality (reason, utility, logic),
rules (judgement, custom, adjudication),
reckoning (coded calculation of the social return, legitimacy), and
rightness (fact finding, experimentation, beliefs of collective truth).
The four ‘R’ actions are connected to the upgrading of individual skill, true or functional knowledge, cognition or comprehension, and social ordering. For what is loosely called ‘culture’ in many significant recent studies of early human evolution we should substitute identifiable knowledge, beliefs, customs, skills, or artefactual-cum-artistic creation, according to context. For good unselfish individualised thoughts and actions so often called ‘morals’ we should refer to socially-utilitarian beliefs or customs that can be manifested as rules. ‘Norms’ are rules and regulations wherever they can be specified. ‘Values’ are sociologically useful only insofar as they describe evaluation and approval of the acceptability or legitimacy of courses of action — again on the basis of custom, convention, knowledge, belief, etc.. Using the ‘4R’ categories we can more fully explain perceptible long run continuums through to the modern society, as in custom-to-convention-to-law. I provide examples of such distinctions when there is sufficient information to do so. However, since prehistoric information is not usually available we may justifiably embark on flights of imagination provided only that these winged suppositions are solidly grounded in basic theory.
Closer to the point at hand in this section, I take a nuanced approach to ‘emotion’. It is incorrect to regard the development of emotions as a vector and marker of human social evolution. It is not uncommon in recent scholarship to encounter the assertion that human evolution required “new emotions”. Examples of the ‘new’ are of course never offered. In truth there not a single category of emotion among humans that is not also encountered in chimpanzees. Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal (1890): “That the chief expressive actions, exhibited by man and by the lower animals, are now innate or inherited—that is, have not been learnt by the individual—is admitted by every one.” Even if we concede that the subtlety or variety of expressions and sensations of an emotion have evolved to ‘higher’ levels in humans, there really exist no ‘new’ emotions. What changed was the cognitive capacity to control emotions. Among the methods of control I look for are those that are ‘social’ in regard to the four ‘R’ mechanisms. I will explain below how emotions are potentially both a negation and expression of rationality.
The human acquisition of speech was the critical evolutionary advance. With speech emotions could then be discussed, argued over, punished, forgiven, and exploited. Emotion only becomes relevant and interesting to the account of early human social progression when it is rationally employed. Before offering examples of combined rationality and emotion in the assemblies of our splendidly informative Homeric factual-fiction proxy society ca. 800 BCE (sections 4 to 6), I will emphasise the role of language (section 2) and the theoretical meaning of rationality (section 3).
2. Speech language versus body language
The existence of society presupposes joined-up communication among and between the people who are bordered, bonded and bound (BBB). This assumes the capacity to commune (Type 2) and coordinate (Type 3) through language. Sociation—a word used here to refer to continuities of interaction that depend on premeditated, deliberated, and communicable conventions of interaction—is the prerequisite for the formation of a society. It requires an evolutionary advance far beyond the ability of humans with evolved large brains to collaborate in calculable actions which may be—clumsily and slowly—organised only by vocal sounds and gestural expressions or movements of body parts that signal preferences for acting-out or imitating an action.
Early human groups survived and evolved without language. They could collaborate to make tools and weapons, and to hunt, gather, store, prepare and distribute food, create sheltered places, and jointly to defend or attack as needs arose. They had natural notions of a border that demarcated their habitable space. Certainly they could intuit, identify and celebrate whatever common bond set them apart from others. They created distinctive cultural expression in artefacts, music and customs.
Early humans also had transmissible learned ‘rules’, though these would have been of a universal rather than particularistic nature, such as property, respect for elders, non-disruptive behaviour, and food sharing. The young ones quickly and simply learned what was right and wrong on receipt of an immediate and unpremeditated deprivation or punishment. Wherever we detect stable and consistent patterns of disciplining and punishment (as mild as smacks and confiscations, or as extreme as exclusion or expulsion) for actions that disrupt life among any pre-language primates we may also assume real ‘rules’ and a real ‘Machiavellian intelligence’ to circumvent those ‘rules’.
Thus the upper limit of early human evolution was therefore set by the absence of language. Pre-language ‘rules’ of sociation could be energetically disdained or challenged with bodily gestures, but they were, by definition, non-negotiable. They could not be discussed because there was no communicative technique for doing so with reasonable accuracy. Without language there was no secure basis for the transmission of collective knowledge. For these reasons early humans could not strategise and deliberate. And if they could not rationalise their thoughts about the creation of mechanisms and objectives for governance they could not then be genuinely engaged in a process of ‘sociation’. The absence of language left them like animals unable to reason and rationalise collaboratively through speech interactions.
Evolutionary psychologists and biologists have identified long chains of incremental physical anatomical and cognitive change, and group dynamics, which were the precursory selections for language. My focus is on a sociopolitical transformation reliant on language which was indispensable for the constitution of each of the three ‘group societies’ — the ‘assembly’. Even small assemblages of Neolithic cave dwellers discussed how to optimise the day-to-day fulfilment of their common good objectives. Since assemblies represent the organisational-interactional-representational locus of sociation, a study of society is in large part focused on the evolution of assemblies.
3. The meaning of rationality
In the Weberian terms which I favour the meaning of rationality emerges from the study of ‘understanding’ and ‘motivation’ that is characteristic of the social science approach referred to as ‘methodological individualism’. Only the individual can understand the meaning he gave to an action in terms of its intended outcome. Before speech humans could only give expression to these meanings in demonstrable action or vocal sounds, facial expressions and movements of body parts such as eyes and limbs. After the acquisition of speech an individual could explain the reasons for their anger or delight, and argue with others about its cause, outcome and justification. The often encountered idea that one individual learns and evolves to ‘read the mind’ of another is nonsensical. He can only estimate ‘meaning’ with knowledge of an individual’s past actions and prior conformity between declared intentions and actual outcomes.
The reason given for action is the motivation, and motive can only be individual. When we study the individual sociations that generate societies we naturally focus on the motivations. But these are necessarily the aggregate of average motivated actions repeated over and over again. Without knowledge of all the individuals—such as may be adduced only in small societies and on the basis of known individual differentiations of age, sex, intelligence, personality and physique—the only evidence of motivation is the outcome of aggregated actions. A partial exception to this methodological rule is given only when there is recorded evidence of the process of society-level decision making among collections of individuals who have revealed or explained their real motives. Evidence is only available where the governance of a society is in the process of being actually ‘actioned’ for the purposes of politics, war, and social or economic policy. If each participant has to utter his true, uncertain, feigned or deceitful reason there is a process of ‘reasoning’ by which aggregate motivation may be estimated. This is the justification for needing to focus on the ‘assemblies’ of early society.
Weber distinguished between instrumental action that is rational because the chosen method achieves its intended purpose, and legitimate action which is rational because the chosen method is acceptable to society. The first type of rational action is taken by calculating the methods likely to effect (cause) the maximal intended utility of the outcome. The second type of rational action is undertaken through evaluations of the behavioural effect on society of the methods of action. In principle, instrumentally rational action will compromise to minimal legitimacy of means, and legitimately rational action will compromise to minimal standards of goal attainment.
Not surprisingly there is confusion about what is ‘rational’ when in each case something essential (the behaviour or the consequence) appears not to be taken sufficiently into consideration. Weber sees confusion arising if the ends-rationalist meets the means-rationalist and then can no longer be certain on which side he is really on.
“There are many ways in which the value rational orientation of action can relate to purposive rationality. From the perspective of purposive rationality, however, value rationality must always be irrational, the more so when action is governed by absolute values. For the more that action elevates such absolute values, the less it reflects on the consequence of such action, and the more unconditional do considerations of inner disposition, beauty, the absolute good, and absolute duty become. Absolutely purposive rational action is for the most part a marginal case, however.” [Max Weber (1922/2019) Economy & Society]
One way around the problem might be to regard rationality as the calculated pursuit of an ‘end’ regardless of whether this ‘end’ is the ‘method’ or the ‘purpose’. Yet the ‘purpose’ might itself also be the ‘method’. Weber rightly admits sotto voce that pure instrumental action is rare. Excepting sociopaths, action is normally conditioned by the individual’s inner mixture of attention to a) acceptability or legitimacy and b) purposeful attainment. I have a preference for putting aside the imprecise concept of ‘value’ used by Weber, focusing instead on identifiable beliefs, knowledge, or customs that functionally reconcile legitimate ends with the essential utility of means. Each of these are context-specific to the society that will be impacted by rational action.
The passage below precedes the one above. It contains all the various elements that may be re-conceptualised to encompass both the ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ objectives of rational action routines. Weber explicitly viewed emotion and tradition or custom as separate from the action of calculating rationality. I will suggest they can be integral to it.
“Whoever acts in a purposively rational manner orients their action to the purpose, means, and associated consequences of an act, and so rationally weighs the relation of means to ends, that of the ends to the associated consequences, and that of the various possible ends to each other; hence, action that is neither affective (especially not emotional) nor traditional. The decision between competing and conflicting aims and consequences can in this way be oriented value rationally; in this case, only the means are selected by purposively rational criteria. Alternatively, the individual can deal with competing and conflicting aims without resorting to value rationality, taking ‘dictates’ and ‘demands’ simply as given subjective feelings of need arranged on a scale that is consciously balanced according to their urgency, orienting action so that they will, as far as is possible, be satisfied in this sequence.” [Max Weber (1922/2019) Economy & Society]
If one is trying retrospectively to analyse the reasons for a stock exchange panic it makes sense firstly to separate the emotional factors from the rational calculations that either went wrong or had unintended consequences. But if one is engaged in a collaborative process of calculating rational means for preventing social panic or social disintegration in the face of a destabilisation on a ‘border threshold’, or for securing a victory and restoring stability when the very integrity and cohesion of a society may be under threat—emotions can rationally be an integral element of the action. Similarly it is ‘irrational’ to exclude traditional customary codes of behaviour from the calculation. [Over the past 2 weeks I was reminded of the “rivers of blood”.]
I believe rationality is simultaneously the attainment of optimal ends by optimal means. Weber restricted himself by leaning toward an either-or formulation. Social action, he suggested, is “either” instrumental (hard rationality), “or” valuated (softened by social purpose), “or” emotional (thus irrational), “or” a result of custom (pre-determined). In the examples that follow we see that emotional expression and customary legitimation may be rationally selected. If we accept that rationality and intelligence overlap or are indistinguishable, we then can take seriously the utility of emotional intelligence.
These consideration are merely elements within the larger perspective that informs an analysis of society: there are universal factors that identify the existence of ‘society’ and define social action everywhere and always. There are also particularistic factors that distinguish one society from another in a) an identifiable long run evolutionary continuum, and b) the functional equivalencies of apparently diverse actions.
4. Intelligent Rationality in Homeric Society
The pre-rulership assembly of the earliest group societies was the pristine setting for working out the mechanics of sociation. The assembly was the place for exchange of new knowledge. The assembly was the place for rationalising-by-argument the desired means and ends of social order and material subsistence for the purpose of ensuring the survival and thriving of individuals (or households) in-common within and among the sociated groups. The assembly was in one form or another also the place for passing judgement, establishing and communicating rules, and exchanging opinions about the nature— i.e. acceptable outer shape, inner content and felt expression—of legitimate plans, actions, and outcomes. Though of lesser importance, we should recognise that the assemblies of the pre-secular pre-scientific ages were also regular opportunities for rhetorical affirmations of joint beliefs in gods or other collective truths which were a source of comfort and simply the symbol of the known unknowns of nature that appeared to be far beyond human control. In functional terms, named Homeric gods served to identify sociated groups and set them apart from others. Most importantly however, and in the most general sociological terms, the actions of all prehistoric and Homeric assemblies could visibly and functionally enact calculations of common good.
We will furthermore see that assemblies were places where intelligent rationality joined forces with personality and eldership, so that the forces of personality and the experience of long life could separately or in unison influence the means and ends of sociated decisional action. Although I phrase these assertions about the political, socioeconomic, and cognitive functions of assemblies in rather idealistic terms, they are really ‘ideal type’ observations about the probable and intended forms of sociated action in three—individualistic, communalistic, coordinated—group societies.
When discussing the relative rationality of the Homeric assembly, the historian’s attention must be focused on the effectiveness of both the chosen means and the chosen ends in bringing about a desired outcome. Uppermost among the factors to look for is the degree of intelligence that appears to have been applied in deciding what the combination of means and ends consists in. Also uppermost is the requirement to contextualise the processes and outcomes of a Homeric assembly. They can only be deemed objectively ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to the extent that the rational combinations were constrained or permitted by particular Homeric contexts and circumstances that will have limited the available means and the available ends. Context matters critically to all evaluation of the relative rationality of social action. The analyst cannot reasonably expect to estimate the rationality in a Homeric process of decision making against the yardstick of a Stone Age assembly, a kingship assembly, or a parliamentary assembly. To obtain a rounded picture the historian has also to separate the objective process from aspects of ‘judgement’ that fall outside a narrow purview of ‘pure’ rationality.
By this I mean that some mental processing and decisional action in an assembly could be better evaluated within categories other than ‘rationality’, such as those I abbreviated earlier as ‘rules’, ‘reckoning’, and ‘rightness’. The evaluation of the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of action’s motivation and outcome, while it overlaps with the evaluation of rationality, could properly belongs in a category apart from rationality. Prevailing rules or customs, the style or mode of socialised calculation that is favoured in one society but not in another, or the existence (or not) of knowledge and skills can reasonably be brought to bear on a decision that limits what will be ‘feasible’ in terms corresponding to an evolutionary appraisal of society’s perpetual survival and thriving.
In The World of Odysseus (1954) Moses Finley set the cat among the pigeons by asserting that the Homeric assembly was not “rational”. Among the reasons he gave some are more convincing than others. He was wrong to claim that in the Homeric assemblies just one man had “the power of authority”, and therefore the reasons or explanations given for assembly decisions were of little or no importance to the eventual making of the decision. Critics—Malcolm Schofield below—are right to argue that Finley underestimated the fullness and the impact of assembly discussion. Moreover, although Finley identified what he meant by ‘rational’ only in the negative—by referring to actions that in his opinion were “not rational”—he nevertheless included factors that might in fact have been perceived as entirely rational in the pre-rulership and pre-parliamentary context. We can examine a few egregious examples.
Finley was struck by the competitiveness of Homeric society. The assembly, he seems to suggest, was too competitive to be rational. During a momentous decision making it descended into highly emotional argument between “two men wrangling”. When others intervene they do not address themselves to the issue but rather “urge peace” between the two men. Finley says this is not the kind of behaviour encountered in a “parliamentary” setting. “Rational discussion” must be a “disciplined consideration of circumstances and their implications, of possible courses of action, their advantages and disadvantages”. “Lengthy quarrels” where “each side seeks to overpower the other by threats, and to win over the assembled multitude by emotional appeal, by harangue, and by warning” are never rational. If a man “lied cleverly” and employed “purposeful deception” as the means to the end that cannot be regarded as “controlled rational behaviour” or “rational analysis, judgement”. [all quotes from Finley]
In response to Finley a distinction can be made when theorising about rationality, especially in the prehistoric context. The bottom line is that sociationally-relevant action has to display its sociational utility and sociational legitimacy. The means and the ends of an action that will impact the whole society are determined to be socially legitimate and acceptable as well as socially purposeful and attainable. However, this ‘rationality’ is confined to the application, implementation, and outcome of action.
We seen then that there is no equivalent necessity for pure rationality during the planning stage. There is no obligation for pure rationality during the exploratory preliminary process of innovating and then selecting among the actionable methods and purpose. Thus we can relax the rationality imperative to allow room for emotional outbursts and for simultaneous judgements that really reflect adjacent 4R categories — knowledge of the world, long-existing customs and behavioural codes, and the tolerated criteria and expressions for passing judgement on one’s counterparts.
I agree that “clever deception” and emotional undisciplined arguments are not the best conditions for well-reasoned consensual decision making. Ideally deliberation about whole society action will draw on holistic knowledge, expertise, skills and customs and ensure that respect is given to the right of every relevant participant to contribute. Yet, it is hard to say that emotion or lying, or a noisy squaring off between two very argumentative individuals with contrary points of view will themselves make it impossible for the assembly to arrive at a rational decision. If not taken to extremes, deceptions, personal rivalry, and outbursts of emotion are not intrinsically counter-productive or definitionally opposed to rational decisions. Homer’s context asserts itself. The Homeric assembly participants were accustomed to having absolute power over their households and passed much of their lives in the tough rough and tumble of war and animal herding. When one is sure that one is right and the other is sure that one is wrong each gets hot under collar, loses control of the tongue, and disgorges a lot of nonsense alongside the common sense. Yet consensus may still be reached.
Finley wanted to find calm, dispassionate and collaborative discussion and judgement as evidence of rationality. I myself suggest that assembly proceedings in a prehistoric individualistic, communalistic, or coordinated ‘group society’ would of necessity have been far more cautious, inclusive, and less confrontational. It is often said of hunter gatherer societies that they consciously choose to be ‘egalitarian’ after experiencing destructive quarrelling between chiefs or between aspirant chiefs. In primitive Stone Age conditions of fluid voice-and-exit the keeping of social order and the integrity of the group structure would have been jeopardised by the kind of loud self-centred and quasi-prepotent behaviour apparently witnessed among quarrelsome warrior heroes of equal rank who regularly went to war on behalf of Homeric society. It is important to keep the original social context and prehistoric trajectory at the forefront in the search for rational action rather than relying by analogy on later institutional forms.
In fact, let us reverse the earlier dictum and say the process of making the decision must be as rational as the outcome of the decision. What could be more rational as a means to an end than controlled passion in support of the position, and controlled emotional persuasion to sway the minds of reluctant others of one’s rightness and one’s commitment and sincerity. This would hold true for the Stone Age societies. There can be but few circumstances where competition is absent from rational group decisions. In any assembly, it is probable that each actively participating individual has a different view of what the ‘rational’ course of action will look like in terms of purpose and method. Indeed it might be argued that the best decision will always be one that wins out in competition, so competition is itself in many cases the rational method for deciding ultimate ends. Thus the fiercer the competition the more optimal is the outcome. Nevertheless, the competitive rationalisation of means and ends is going to be limited locally by the extent to which a society is already individualistically competitive in political or economic terms, or with respect to the ranks of prestige among leaders. For the Stone Age societies, and especially among the hunters and gatherers, I have assumed that leadership in assemblies was not overtly competitive, but leadership and heroism in hunting and war could have been fiercely competitive.
How competition among leading individuals influences decision making about governance depends on what these particular people were competing for. Objectively it seems ‘irrational’ to compete over individual rank or honour rather than knowledge or skill. Yet rank and honour might already have been allocated socially by convention on the basis of prior knowledge and skill. Then we ask: knowledge of what, skill for what? To answer in context we should consider what Homeric scholars have called the ‘heroic code’. We will see why what seemed ‘irrational’ action from a general perspective begins to look reasonably reasoned from a local perspective, because well-coded customary rules, limited knowledge, limited means, ample skills and bountiful rational emotion have combined with established notions of the social legitimacy.
5. A rational code of honour
The code of the hero refers to the “code of honour” gained by displays of “prowess”. Finley restricted the heroic code to the honouring of prowess in battlefield, writing that “‘warrior’ and ‘hero’ are synonyms”. He is unequivocal about this. Having denied that assemblies were capable of rationality, he consigns mechanisms of community governance, including administration of justice, to differentiations of absolutist settlement power between family households (necessarily headed by “kings”). In Finley’s opinion heroism is associated only with the “passion” and the “competition” for “glory” in battle. Thus he says “social obligation is fundamentally non-heroic”.
The code is so unambiguous, so imbued in the social structure, that neither Homer nor the heroes ever have need to discuss its meaning. Yet, Finley write, they “obeyed the code of the hero without flinching and questioning”, honouring an obligation to go bravely into battle when called upon (by “kings”), and accepting “honourable death by combat”, because “the honour of the hero was purely individual, something he lived and fought for only for its sake and his own sake”. This observation on Homeric individualism leads Finley usefully and directly to a communalistic interpretation of subsequent Greek history — “the community could grow only by taming the hero … When everyone attains equal honour, then there is no honour for anyone”.
As always with Finley there is much to take on board and much to reject. A solid criticism that could be supported with evidence of transitional communalistic and (then) emergent coordinative rationality in the assemblies is hampered by the lack of evidence. Thirty years after Finley’s Odysseus, however, Malcolm Schofield (1986/1999 Eubolia in the Iliad) looked again at the fictional facts presented in Homeric assembly debates. On the basis of his alternative textual analysis he argued that Finley was wrong—the heroic code of honour gained through prowess is to be seen both in the skills for war and in the skills for sound reasoning in assemblies. In the assemblies prowess is evidently displayed and approved in the oratorical performances.
Schofield also provides reasons for recognising that competitive and emotionally-charged deliberations were also rationally conducted and concluded. This counter-argument is intuitively convincing even though Schofield, like Finley, does not define rationality and relies heavily on dialogues that take place in battlefield rather than settlement assemblies. Schofield simply takes rationality to be more or less equivalent to the process of forming a “sound judgement” (euboulia). Here I will only highlight Schofield’s most relevant claims contra Finley in support of Homeric rationality.
In a crisis-induced Homeric assembly Schofield finds “explicit reasoning” with ample “rationality and effectiveness of solutions” as well as a “disciplined … sustained and single-minded concentration on the rational solution of a problem” which depicts the major Homeric “leaders … thoroughly in character”. He concludes that “the rationality of the discussion is not compromised by the emotion the heroes evince”. An exception to this is given in an example of one leader who “is too close to panic”. Then, in a more general sense — “Rational discussion … is a heroic ideal in an epic about the heroic ideal”. In Schofield’s analysis we also find an emphasis on the importance in Homeric contexts of combining rationality and oratory through emotional appeals:
“A good counsellor must be able to work both on the reason and on the emotions, if only because all deliberative oratory must appeal directly or indirectly to passions and desires, but in all except the crudest cases by presenting considerations—that is, reasons—of one sort or another to the audience. … In Odysseus’ oratory there is not so much of the rational analysis … But what he says is always reasoned and reasonable, although it exploits emotion, too.” [Malcolm Schofield (1986/1999) Eubolia in the Iliad]
If Schofield is correct in his interpretation then the process of rationality is not always as calm and dispassionate as Finley wanted it to be. There are two perspectives which complement Schofield’s criticism of Finley, and which Schofield says influenced him.
In several books Geoffrey Lloyd has argued that in Greek assemblies good oratory and sound argument combined productively with intense competition among the leading individuals of society for the ‘honours’ to be gained from convincingly marshalling provable facts and collective truths. This combination seemed to be ideal for political and intellectual development, and could be a characteristic of societies which may be said to be comparatively more exemplary in long run historical terms. As Lloyd wrote, the benefit lay in “the value and importance of the ability to persuade your fellow men by argument, whether in political debate in assemblies or on embassies, or in the various kinds of law-courts [which ultimately depended on the skills of] reasoning”.
This skill of reasoning combined with a further characteristic—also attributed to the successful Homeric leaders—which ancient Greeks called ‘metis’ or intelligence and cunning. They believed, apparently, that each emotion originated in a different organ of the anatomy. Metis is viewed as a vehicle for anchoring the mind and readying the fragmented emotions for the decisive moment when means to ends are calculated.
“There is no doubt that metis is a type of intelligence and of thought, a way of knowing; it implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years. … The man of metis is always ready to pounce. He acts faster than lightning. This is not to say that he gives way to a sudden impulse … On the contrary his metis knows how to wait patiently for the calculated moment to arrive. Even when it originates from a sudden burst of action, the operation of metis is diametrically opposed to that of impulsiveness. Metis is swift, as prompt as the opportunity that it must seize on the wing, not allowing it to pass. But in no way does it act lightly. With all the weight of acquired experience that it carries, it involves thought that is dense, rich and compressed. Instead of floating hither and thither, at the whim of circumstance, it anchors the mind securely in the project which it has devised in advance thanks to its ability to look beyond the immediate present and foresee a more or less wide slice of the future.” [Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (1978) Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society]
6. Rationalism with personality
We can end this discussion of Homeric social rationality by commenting briefly on its direct counterpart—individual intelligence—and a logical analytic expectation that rational emotion or emotional intelligence may coincide fortuitously with charismatic personality. The reader will recall that the first society was ‘individualistic’ — its governance and the terms of its border-bond-bind cohesion depended entirely on differentiations of age, sex, intelligence, personality, and physical prowess. All the evidence suggests that for much of the time, during its—probably daily—informal assemblies, an elder man with wisdom and experience will have given counsel. But I have imagined that a moment of crisis, or when there is a clear necessity for swift simultaneous calculation and action, the ‘upper hand’ will be gained by a younger man, one who has already demonstrated his physical and cognitive prowess, and who also possesses charisma. Such men appear in abundance among the heroes of the Homeric society. There is an important ‘crisis scene’ in Book 9 of Iliad when Homer writes in praise of an inexperienced young warrior, Diomedes—a horse trainer by profession—who, having eloquently reasoned for his right to speak, then settles a difficult issue and demonstrates his prowess by putting forward the most intelligently rational counsel. For this he is sagely commended by Nestor, the stereotype elder.
We also observed in the textual analyses of Homer’s verse that these men were highly individualistic and competitive in rhetoric and reasoning. Arguably charisma can only be achieved through competitive processes that reveal the relative superiority of one performer over another. This presents a paradox of sorts. Our imagined hero in the original and small individualistic society is not among many competitive peers, or at least his peers do not constitute an elite leadership group within the whole group. His actions upon being confronted with the destabilising presence of enemies—and the emotions of panic among his own people—seem to us genuinely heroic because they are more clearly performed selflessly on behalf of the whole group. His individualism is not necessarily competitive. His charisma is more directly a social utility. And his skill in public speaking might only be called upon in dialogues with enemies.
Given the intra- and inter-settlement political dynamics of Homeric society, and the absolutist powers of householders, it is more difficult to attribute a broad social utility to the charisma of the Homeric hero. These considerations are not serious enough to reverse our comparative evaluation of rationality in Stone Age and Bronze-Iron Age, but they do draw attention to the astuteness of Finley’s observation that “the honour of the hero was purely individual, something he lived and fought for only for its sake and his own sake” — contradictory as this may seem in light of Finley’s wish to define Homeric society as one of kingship, with its demands for devotion to the king.
In both Stone Age and Bronze-Iron Age settings the individual differentiations of intelligence, charismatic personality, and physical prowess are complementary, self-evident, and mutually reinforcing, and can be expected to help pave the road to true rulership. The inexplicit ‘code of honour’ is regulated by custom. The code is tolerant of emotion if emotion is controlled in service of intelligent means and purposes. It is also tolerant of inclusive assembly procedures (halfway between being communalistic and cooperative) by means of which knowledge and skills may be socially distributed and contrary opinions aired. Above all, the social customs we see associated with the code of honour appear also to have been compatible with calculated rational action.
For source material I reference the following authors:
Christopher Boehm, Marcel Detienne, Robin Dunbar*, Vincent Farenga*, Moses Finley, Jane Goodall, Michael G. Heller*, G. E. R. Lloyd, Malcolm Schofield, Michael Tomasello*, Jonathan H. Turner*, Max Weber [*subscribers]
Illustrations:
Peter Paul Rubens, The death of Hector, 1635
Paul Cézanne, Aeneas Meeting Dido at Carthage, 1875