The Golden Rule, yesterday..
Written by Michael Heller
The Elder as dependent and leader
From the very beginning of systematic purposive human interaction the simple bordered, bonded, and bound society required stable rational governance if it was to survive in extremely adverse environments. The earliest form of governance we know of is ‘eldership’. Eldership in its simplest universal form was leadership by a male elder who distinguished himself and won the confidence of self-defined groups by virtue of his comparative advantages over others, in strength, personality, intelligence, known experience, and demonstrated knowledge of the world. Forms of ‘eldership’ endured and were incorporated in much more advanced governance structures of Mesopotamian agricultural villages, councils of the Athenian Areopagus, the Roman senate, and the assemblies of lordly señores and seigneurs of medieval Europe. Even within contemporary societies eldership is an incorporated feature of governance in marginal groups of hunter-gatherers and tribal chiefdoms throughout the world. We can trace eldership historically as an ‘elemental’ characteristic of governance.
The initial focus on elders is natural given that the first society was individualistic, and the elder was normally the foremost individual. It also has a broader purpose. In the study of society an exploration of role of the elder forces us straight away to lift the lid off the underlying social imperatives that place the group over the individual.
The imperatives occur in three dimensions:
the eventual inevitable dependence of an elder on social care;
the point at which the infirm become a burden, and consequences that follow;
and the leadership which an elder has previously given when participating in the estimation of measures of welfare required for maintaining group cohesion.
From the point of view of governance attention must mainly be given to the third, namely the reasons why elders dominated the decision making process. But the first and second dimensions offer a focus point through which to view the nature of the decisions. I will deal with the first two today (TH9), and leave the third for a later post.
Two discoveries of the remains of Neanderthal male elders — the Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France and another at Shanidar Cave in Iraq — have been interpreted as early evidence of social care for the elderly. In both cases the men lived to a then-classifiable old age (around 40 years) despite serious long-existing physical pathologies, including blindness, total tooth loss, multiple fractures, severe arthritis. David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (2018) and Tom Higham’s The World Before Us: How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins (2021) indicate the reasons why neither of the elders could have survived to such an old age without intensive and extensive social support.
There is now evidence of how capable Neanderthals may have been for the purposes of social care. Most importantly, as Steven Mithen recently explained in The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age (2024), Neanderthals had human-like anatomical (vocalising, breathing) and mental (brain structure) capacities for rudimentary speech. It is likely they relied on single and easy to learn words—in particular those with onomatopoeic and metaphoric resonance—rather than complex explanatory sentences. When simple language is combined with facial gestures, body movements, mentalising, and ‘acting out’ meaning this may have been sufficient for persuasive communication about needs and methods for organising action to provide the means to satisfy the ends. Neanderthals rested inside and outside caves, and it is speculated they may have improved their communicative skills by learning to sing in an echo chamber. In his Human Evolution (2015), Robin Dunbar further suggests that Neanderthal language capability reached the third level of intentionality: “I intend that you understand that I want you to spear the prey from the other side”. In The Evolution of Agency: Behavioural Organization from Lizards to Humans (2022), Michael Tomasello demonstrates the interaction in imaginative hunting scenarios. Therefore, Neanderthals were mentally equipped to undertake basic collaborative activities.
Although Neanderthals had a more varied diet than previously supposed, they relied on a confrontational style of spear hunting for meat which is likely to have resulted in frequent injury. In relation to the relief of pain it seems likely—on the basis of dental residue analysis—that Neanderthals used medicinal plant and tree extracts, including Salicylic acid which is the precursor of aspirin. They were very adept with fire, and are known to have heated balls of bitumen. In addition to making diverse stone, bone, and wood hafted tools and weapons, Neanderthals mastered techniques for processing animal hide and for decorating or symbolising objects with a large range of materials. Such skills and technologies are evidence of behavioural and cognitive complexity.
An elderly Neanderthal in life and death
The lifeway of Neanderthals was depicted with (prescient in 1955) scientific accuracy and sociological and psychological subtlety in Nobel laureate William Golding’s novel The Inheritors (1955). It tells the story of a small migratory cave-dwelling group which initially comprised eight persons: an elder male and female, a middle-aged male and female, a young male and female, a female child, and a baby. They may have broken away from a larger group after a quarrel among leaders, or because of the stresses of group size, or environmental pressures. Among all three group societies it is in fact commonplace for leadership structures to change quite radically during seasonal subsistence-related migrations. The group that migrates away from a communalistic society to hunt animals might be coordinated by a chieftain for the duration of the hunting season. This was not the case in Golding’s novel. We simply encounter our Neanderthal group in the final stage of their trek from their winter cave by the sea to their summer cave in the mountains. And even in the opening pages, Golding enables the reader to identify all of the society’s principal individualistic differentiations. We see also the effects on the group of the leadership and infirmity of their coordinating elder. Here I only recount two sequences where leadership is coupled with welfare.
The young male whose “feet were clever” has run nimbly ahead with the female child clinging to his back and delighting in the ride. She holds to a small deity symbol that hangs on his neck. He discovers that a fallen tree over which they had crossed the river the previous year has disappeared. When the resourceful serious young female arrives carrying the middle-aged female’s baby on her back she at first frowns and thinks the young male removed the log as a joke. The middle-aged male, “the man for an emergency”, arrives and checks the surroundings for “safety” and evidence before calculating that the tree floated away — “One day. Perhaps two days. Not three.”.
In the interim the young male and child are playing and laughing. The middle-aged lactating female arrives. She checks that her baby does not need feeding. Gathered they contemplate their difficulty — “there were feelings between them”. The middle-aged male is calculating the extra day that will be needed to complete the journey by another route, and the “danger” and “discomfort” of having to skirt around a swamp.
The oldest female arrives bent over with tiredness, dragging her feet and breathing heavily as she carefully carries the heavy embers (hot bitumen balls?) of the previous night’s fire. Keeping the fire alive is a vital function for which she alone is responsible. She is humble and mystic. The somber silence is interrupted by the young charismatic male trying in vain to make the group relax and laugh. The mother of the baby moans.
Finally the frail elder arrives “slowly, coughing” and “the people said nothing while he coughed but waited, still as deer at gaze…”.
For the observer of this minor crisis drama the punchline is the calm sagacity of the sick elder whose experience and knowledge comes into play, with the constraint of having to share a vision of a solution while lacking enough language to convey the idea — “A man is wise. He makes men take a tree that has fallen”. But the male earlier referred to as “the man for an emergency” says he cannot understand this idea. So, “the old man sighed and took his hand away from his head. ‘Find a tree that has fallen.’” This order is understood, and ‘the people’ set out “obediently” to search. A semi-adequate rotten, slippery log is found. The action of moving it is delayed because the younger ones are distracted by berries and edible fungi growing on the bark. The branches had also to be removed. The elder signals and gestures to keep the momentum from flagging.
With great difficulty and delicate manoeuvring by the powerful middle-aged male (hero, warrior) they eventually slide and float the tree into position. ‘The people’ slap their thighs in applause when the last stage is completed by their hero. However, the crossing is perilous. There is much screaming, fright, and theatrical bravado as each experiments with methods for maintaining balance. The elder first sends the careful young female carrying the baby. The heavy lactating mother stumbles and falls in the water. The female elder crosses swiftly, barely stirs the water, and keeps the fire dry. The child holds tightly to the deity symbol as her bearer, the young male, “prances” and leaps across, “jeering at the defeated water”. The elder male, their leader, goes last. He falls in the freezing water and is rescued by the middle-aged male (hero).
“He coughed a little and grimaced wryly at them … He ran at the trunk, his old feet gripping and loosing … He did not get up enough speed to cross in safety. They saw the anguish growing in his face, saw his bared teeth … Then his back foot pushed a piece of bark off the trunk … The other foot slid and he fell forward. He bounced sideways and disappeared in a dirty flurry of water. … Now [the hero] had [the elder] by the wrist and they were falling about, seeming to wrestle with each other. [The elder] disengaged himself and began to crawl on all fours up the firmer ground. He got a beech tree between himself and the water and lay curled up and shuddering. The people gathered round in a tight little group. They crouched and rubbed their bodies against him, they wound their arms into a lattice of protection and comfort. The water streamed off him and left his hair in points. [The child] wormed her way into the group and pressed her belly against his calves.
Only the old woman still waited without moving. The group of people crouched round Mai and shared his shivers. … This shivering was not a surface movement of skin and hair but deep so that the very thorn bush [his stick] shook with him. ‘Come!’ He led the way along the trail … lifted his legs like a man pulling them out of mud and his feet were no longer clever. They chose places of their own unskilfully, but as though something were pulling them sideways so that he reeled on his stick. The people behind him followed each of his actions easily out of the fullness of their health. Focused on his struggle they became an affectionate and unconscious parody. As he leaned and reached for his breath they gaped too, they reeled, their feet were deliberately unclever. They wound up through a litter of grey boulders and knees of stone until the trees fell away and they were out in the open. Here [the elder] stopped and coughed and they understood that now they must wait for him. … [He] was leading them onward. … [but still] coughed till his shoulders were wrenched.” [The Inheritors, 1955]
Led by their debilitated elder ‘the people’ reach their summer cave, set up camp with fire, and find food. However, the snow and ice has not melted yet. The elder had made a mistake. He had “taken them into the mountains too early”. He remains in pain (no aspirin?), and dies soon after, though not before imparting more knowledge, wisdom, and sage advice, speaking also of the group’s icon goddess in his fevered visions.
The middle-aged man (hero, warrior) soon disappears in mysterious circumstances. Perhaps he was killed while hunting. When he cannot be found, the agile, charismatic, and clever young man, who is the son of the elder, must now assume responsibilities.
In the case just outlined the elder has not become a significant ‘burden’ to the group. The journey was completed. They reached the summer cave. The elder dies in the comfort of a cave, with food and fire blazing, surrounded by caring attentive people.
Brutality and the Golden Rule
But, as Jared Diamond has shown in his The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? (2012), societies have their limits. He has found common-good reasons for justifying the “jettisoning” of elders among traditional tribal groups still or recently prevalent in contemporary underdeveloped regions of the world. We have no reason to suppose that equivalent limits did not apply historically wherever and whenever we find the three types of ‘group society’ prior to formal rulership.
This is the point at which society brutally prioritises its own continuity at the expense of weaker individuals. Diamond helpfully goes into gruesome detail, but the message is clear enough if we only categorise the methods in broad outline. He finds “five methods … of increasingly direct action”. First, is the method of neglect: “ignore them, give them little food, let them starve, let them wander off, or let them die in their own filth” (the Inuit, the Hopi, the Witoto, and Australia’s aboriginals). Second, “abandon an old or sick person when the rest of the group shifts camp” (the Aché do this to old men but kill the old women outright, and the method is also found among Bolivia’s Siriono people). Third, encourage the old “to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, going out to sea, or seeking death in battle” (the Chukchi and Yakut of Siberia, the Crow Indians of North America, the Inuit, the Norse). Fourth, “killing with the victim’s cooperation, e.g., by strangling, stabbing, or burying alive” (the Chukchi, the Kaulong, the Banks Islanders). Fifth, “kill the victim violently without the victim’s cooperation or consent, by strangling or burying alive, or else by suffocating, stabbing, delivering an ax blow to the head, or breaking the neck or back” (Aché).
The evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm makes the same observation at lesser length in Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (2012)
“Although hunter-gatherer generosity is sometimes depicted as being all but boundless, the generous feelings that help to motivate band-level systems of indirect reciprocity in response to individual needs are not without limits, and the same is true within families. For instance, considerable bean-counting takes place with respect to the tradeoffs that attend supporting the elderly. Old people may at times be quite useful, in providing wisdom or helping with childcare, but at other times they become a serious liability to the immediate family members who primarily support them. Hunter-gatherers set limits as to how much they’ll invest in family members who are becoming so infirm they can no longer walk effectively, as this is a serious problem for nomads who must carry small children and needed paraphernalia with them when they frequently change campsites. Most readers will be familiar with Inuit family practices of putting old people out on the ice and letting them painlessly freeze to death, and the logistics are obvious enough. An adult who cannot keep up will be a substantial or impossible burden trekking across snow and ice, and when it’s time for triage, everyone in the band understands the situation, which is faced with sorrow.”
It goes without saying that these practises are found only in places out of reach of modern governance and rule of law. Moreover, elders are far more likely to become a burden in mobile societies that are either permanently or seasonally on the move. But even in the settlement context of a society of households that subsist by cultivation and animal husbandry, which lacks the means of wealth accumulation, and regularly experiences constraints on consumption, it is common to find limitations on care for the elderly. Boehm offers an example from his own village fieldwork in Serbia — an elderly tribal woman effectively vagrant without family or residence who was never offered more than one day’s food or one night’s lodging in any household of her own tribe in her own village for fear that the woman would become a ‘dependent’.
It also stands to reason that brutal calculations of tradeoffs between the focused individual needs of elders and the broader general needs will have been even more sharply exercised in the governance of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic societies which faced far more intense adversity and were continually on the precipice of extinction.
Neither Diamond nor Boehm pass moral judgement on the seemingly widespread brutal treatment of elders among contemporary hunter gatherer societies. But nor does either scholar make any attempt whatsoever to think through the staggering theoretical implications of this potentially common and archaically characteristic behaviour found within the oldest surviving communalistic type of society.
Although Boehm’s treatise is focused on the evolution of “morals”, he (agreeably) defines these as ‘rules’ for all practical purposes. And his general approach strongly suggests that the classical and intuitive “Golden Rule” should, in theory, apply in all cases. This well known dictum is expressed equivalently in many religions old and new: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you’. I will quote Boehm [same source] at length in order to try to reveal the distinction between individualistic and sociational aspects of such a ‘rule’, and also to offer my contrasting theoretical slant.
“When individuals in a nomadic, egalitarian hunting band seek to promote generosity, they recognize that self and family will always come first and that therefore people will need some special “persuasion” to contribute robustly to the group as a whole. In short, band members understand that if they are to better reap the benefits of group cooperation, they’ll need to apply their local version of the Golden Rule manipulatively, as a refined type of social pressure designed to bring out the best in human nature.”
“If bad luck arrives, band members will, within limits, help others in the band according to need—but even though any person of good or acceptable moral standing is automatically eligible for these indirect reciprocity benefits, a few very large beans will, in fact, be counted. In general, individuals whose track records are unusually generous may receive more help than those who have been stingy. And as for people who have a long record of being outlandishly and immorally selfish or lazy, help from unrelated group members may simply be denied. When personal trouble strikes, and with only their close kin likely to support them, such individuals may wish they had followed the Golden Rule.”
“The Golden Rule … seems to be expounded in all human cultures be they recent and complex or ancient and Palaeolithic. … Even though most people are quite unlikely to have read [Immanuel] Kant, they intuitively appreciate the Golden Rule.”
“Hunter-gatherers universally think in terms of golden rules that are designed to reinforce people’s tendencies to be sympathetically responsive to the needs of others.”
“The same golden rule thinking that inspires some individuals to be far more generous than others also influences how band members perceive these individuals, and this is part of how reputations are built.”
“The Golden Rule has been a human universal for at least 45,000 years, and this continues today.”
Putting society before the individual
The problem as I see it is that Boehm interprets the Golden Rule as a form of bean-counting reciprocity between individuals rather than as an underlying sociologically systemic imperative for maintaining the cohesion of group societies. Indeed ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’ is, as phrased, expressly individualistic. It is not an holistic exhortation to actions that preserve and advance society. It is not rule-equivalent to lawful injunctions such as ‘thou shalt not steal’. As a customary ‘rule’, bean-counting might well explain communalistic methods of sharing meat rations equally and according to differential socially-defined needs among hunter-gatherers. Meat rationing, it can certainly be argued, was one of several interlinked precepts for encouraging or facilitating collaboration. It is a reasonable explanation for the hominin communalistic departure from the earlier primate traits of alpha male dominance and group hierarchies, and for the evolution of forms of governance in which the assembly (rather than dominant individuals) imposes society’s rules.
I do not, however, see how a bean-counting approach offers us an understanding of what occurs when elders are abandoned, expelled, starved, or murdered. When Boehm admits that the Golden Rule which combines altruism with personal self-interest “might be seen as an implicit invitation for free riders to take advantage” he dismisses the doubt only with a nebulous reference to evolutionary “natural selection” which favours the “moral” human species in the long run. Yet we have simpler utilitarian alternatives, which become evident when analysing the evolution of societies.
Free riders (and rent seekers) have been most effectively dealt with by behavioural consequences of ‘governance’ — firstly by assemblies, then administered rulership, and finally by enforcement of rule of law. Early elders had less choice of alternative behaviour and action if they were physically or mentally impaired. Boehm noticeably mutes the Golden Rule dictum when he describes the hunter gatherer decisions to sacrifice the elderly. Or, rather, he expresses the jettisoning of the elderly as marking unusual i.e. exceptional “limits” to regular and generalised empathy and altruism. The following paragraph directly precedes the paragraph on the elderly quoted earlier.
“Altruism, sympathy, and empathy aside, I believe that non-literate foragers in their bands also have good intuitive understandings of their systems of indirect reciprocity and how they work. My overall impression is that even though these systems seem to be free of any compulsive long-term bean-counting, in the distribution of large game some specific types of reckoning do occur, in several special contexts. For instance, larger families are routinely given larger shares because their needs are greater, and, as we’ve seen, when generously participating individuals fall on temporary hard times (be this through injuries such as broken bones or snakebite, or illness), reasonable adjustments will be made for them even though generally their close kin will be the primary source of aid. In addition, rather often the hunter who made the kill gets a somewhat larger share, perhaps as an incentive to keep him at this arduous task.” [Christopher Boehm]
The phrase ‘intuitive understandings of systems of reciprocity’ should indeed be of vital relevance for the social scientist’s understanding of early human group evolution. But, rather than skirting around such fundamental theoretical issues, social scientists should more realistically incorporate or at least explicitly acknowledge the potentially brutal communal and leadership decisions which are consistent with common good.
Where the bald and bitter choice for Neanderthal or hunter gatherer decision makers is simply — We must rapidly reach the next place of subsistence, shelter and safety, otherwise children and able adults are likely to perish — the goal of maintaining the society surely should take precedence over the interests of the individual. How, in the absence of remedies, can a group tolerate a person who paralyses the group? There is no moral or rational counterargument against leaving behind the elder whose invalidity prevents the survival of the group. Furthermore, if in these exceptional circumstances there can exist justifiable reason for expelling insider persons (i.e. elders) there should logically also be an equivalent but reverse justification for refusing refuge to outsiders when the quantities or types of persons to be admitted appears to guarantee the inevitable degrading of a society’s capacity for ‘public’ welfare provision, group-bond unity, and common good bottom-lines of subsistence, shelter, and safety. Some sympathetic emotions may make rationality possible. But others make it impossible. It is only too easy to conceive circumstances where lightweight decisions based on sympathetic emotions will counteract weightier decisions for the maintenance of social order.
Conclusion
In a direct and tangible way the figure of the ‘elder’ exemplified the ever-present positive-negative tension between individual and group in the earliest societies. A more realistic Golden Rule dictum for archaic and modern social order could be this one: ‘Do unto others and unto thyself as society would have others do unto you’.
In respect to the topic—leadership and social care as they relate to elders—we need to acknowledge that among Neanderthals and communalistic and coordinated societies the ‘brutal’ decisions of intent concerning elders who have become a ‘burden’ will have been taken or sanctioned by leaders who were themselves elders. This fact does not easily square with the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. The real tradeoff and calculation concerned the integrity of society. Even in the smallest society the individualistic payoffs of behaviour were of lesser importance.
Soon I will examine further the probable nature of early decision making by elders.
The organic illustrations are:
My Parents by David Hockney, 1977
Winter Timber by David Hockney, 2009