I have
been emphasizing that we are as humans hard-wired to be egalitarian. Let me explain my reasoning for this, which
should also explain why I am so positive about humanity’s future if we make the
choices we need to make for sustainable living.
Evolutionary Biologists, Psychologists, Sociologists, and also
Anthropologists have shown that this unique trait of humanity is part of our
evolutionary growth. Physically, modern
Homo Sapiens Sapiens (the thinking human that is aware of itself) shows up
about 200,000 year ago and hasn’t really evolved physically since that
time. However, a co-evolutionary process
does seem to have been occurring that affects our sociocultural way of
interacting and how we live together.
Writers like Christopher Ryan and Jonathan Haidt cover this egalitarianism in much more detail, but for this specific post I am using a lot of the ideas from Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind. We humans like to think of ourselves as rational thinking creatures but the reality is that we use our rational brains to support our emotional conditioning, which is where our moral center (i.e. belief structures) is to be found. In other words, we go with our conditioning and then find justification and reasons for why we believe and act like we do. We know from anthropology that we are love to exist in groups, and indeed, can become quite zealously committed to our support of groups – think of sports teams, political parties, or religions. Our tribal ancestors most probably, and still existing indigenous cultures, readily show this commitment to their cultures in which cohesiveness of the group is primary. We find that success of the group is paramount within their actions, yet they retain personal autonomy. You would think that such personal autonomy would create a selfish attitude, but an altruistic attitude prevails because support of the group creates support of the individual. It is the group’s ability of everyone to see each other’s actions that creates this moralistic benefit. Altruism has apparently been occurring for so many millennia that it is now hardwired into our genes. It seems that our preoccupation with people pleasing is linked to this trait (wanting to be liked by the group).
It used to be that as long as the group was not too large then we could see within the public view how everyone else was behaving. Once the groups started to get to large to observe, the connectedness through relationships that described such cultures started to break down. Haidt cites that as groups became W.E.I.R.D (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic) they became more separated from both each other and also from the environments in which they lived. The Weirder they became the less they relied on group relationships to support themselves. Taken to an extreme I think this would explain the rabid social moralistic codes of groups like the pilgrim societies or harsh Victorian purity where moralistic codes of judgment kept people publicly in check, but where debauchery was common, and what happened out of public sight lacked integrity. A High Weird society is characterized by personal autonomy where individuals regularly cheat, harm or feel justified to oppress others. A Low Weird society is characterized by the ethics of altruism and community. Strangely, both types tend to groupishness, with the high being more hierarchical and the low more egalitarian.
Why these polarized groups exist (as part of a continuum of course) is part of our more recent social evolutionary process (within last 50,000 years?). Human societies developed in order to promote high levels of cooperation, shared labor, and altruism that would not allow ‘free riders’ (those individuals that don’t contribute to the group but extract benefit from it). The big change for humanity seems to have occurred very recently within the last 12,000 years with hierarchical systems that have become the norm today. We became weirder and reached a peak where we are today! Haidt states that humanity seems to have a conditional evolutionary ‘hive’ switch that when triggered makes us bond together in a mass group that transcends self-interest. Oxytocin and mirror neurons (see earlier posts Reality 2 – A Spiritual perspective – How your thinking affects your reality; The role of Limiting Beliefs and Empowering Beliefs 2 – Breaking away from Consumerism; and, PERSONAL SOVEREIGNTY – Breaking Past the Control) are the controllers of this switch that promote our desire for belonging to something larger than ourselves. Only evolutionary groups that elicited commitment to the group and suppressed free-riders grow and survive. Whether that means through a hierarchy or an egalitarian system is the question, for both are ‘team-building’ systems. I have discussed the problems with hierarchies in previous posts (see How the control Happens). The extremes of political hierarchies seem to be Communism or fascism and as we know, neither of them, or any image of them, work only for the top of the hierarchy in a totalitarian way and never for the rest of us. Yes, people become indoctrinated into a hive-like fanaticism of membership but ultimately, they always fail – hierarchies are not the way we really evolved socially.
OK, at this point you’re probably wondering how humanity is going to socially evolve from here. The consumer and economic hierarchy we currently live within does not seem to be destined to last too many more decades (if that) – you cannot continue a endless growth system in a finite environment and ecological failures are becoming apparent Are we destined for a feudal hierarchy or a sustainable society build from egalitarianism? That’s the choice we face, and it is a choice. We choose or the hierarchy chooses for us. And as Daniel Quinn says, ‘we have come too far to go back, we can only go forward now’ – beyond this hierarchy known as civilization to a new kind of society. I am no big fan of a feudal future, so for me it is a vision of egalitarianism with individual autonomy. What might this new kind of society look like? In my next post, I envision a quite likely option.
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