The Search for a Fair Society: Gospel of the Need for a Stratified Society with Growing Complexity Disproven
December 2. It’s Monday. No better time to grab a coffee and talk about what we want society to be and what it takes to get there – from each one of us.
This post was sparked by a paper documenting the work of an international team of researchers led by Pere Gelabert and Ron Pinhasi of the University of Vienna and David Reich of Havard University. Studying early Neolithic genetic markers they proved that Central Europe’s first farmers lived in equality. This disproves the longstanding gospel that yes, small bands of hunter-gathers could live in equality, but as soon as life got more complex due to the introduction of agriculture what threw up questions of land ownership and the distribution of what was now produced in surplus someone had to be in charge.
How longstanding is it? Well, it stems from the time of Enlightenment. And no, it wasn’t ever based on any empirical data. It was a response to the indigenous critique; a critique that, not very surprisingly, found a lot of willing ears in the saloons and on the streets of Europe. Offering a much needed outside perspective, it took aim of the unfree state of the population, the way people were forced into the unnatural state of predictability what endangered their survival but benefited the upper class.
In indigenous societies, with the power of one’s tongue everyone could change everything, as long as they could convince the others including the least advantaged. What created a natural limit of the possible change in the group/ cooperation. With just the power of your tongue, even when you have grown up in a society depending solely on an oral tradition, you will hardly be able to convince others to accept them to fight for their survival so you can sit on and waste resources for your entertainment. Not least because everyone else too, was trained in rhetoric and how to take an argument apart to test its veracity and logic.
As what was promoted by the indigenous critique was so attractive and attractively delivered while it endangered the only way Europe’s rich and powerful remained rich and powerful – there’s a straight line from the critique to the French and US revolutions – it needed to be slapped down, quickly and viciously. The defenders of the European system couldn’t say that the presented model would never work because the presented model worked and had worked for a long time for many indigenous nations of particularly but not exclusively North America. So, the defenders played the superiority card, claiming that the system only worked for those in the New World because they were less developed. In particular, they didn’t work the land in the way Europeans did with their style of agriculture. Agriculture – and by which they meant European style agriculture as Indigenous people did grow crops and worked with the landscape – was the activity that lifted Europeans above the rest and that as complex as it made all things required a stratification of society with people in charge and other people acting according to their orders.
But here we now have data proving this claim wrong. Even European style agriculture and egalitarian societies worked out perfectly well together. Not just that, they were the norm. And they probably looked like many of the societies encountered by the Europeans when they colonized the Americas with changes in the replacement dataset to align the individual realities to fit the shared motivations to seek cooperation in different tasks, hence constantly changing power structures. The stratified society is not a sign of a more advanced society. So, what is it a sign for? Well, come back here for the next post and I’ll tell you.
Do you have any thoughts you want to share so far? Leave a comment.
To watch this post as a video go here.
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