11. Lost victory
No one tells the story of human evolution like Chris Boehm. He says our ancestors were not passive primitives helplessly swept along by the mindless force of evolution—they were rebels and revolutionaries.
Boehm’s books Hierarchy in the Forest and Moral Originsare not light reads but they’re great reads. He picks up our story during the period 5 to 7 million years ago when a creature he calls Ancestral Pan was alive. Pan, in this case, does not refer to the Greek god with the hairy legs and the enchanting flute, but to Pan troglodytes, the chimpanzees, and Pan paniscus, the newer version of chimps which we call bonobos. Ancestral Pan was their ancestor and ours. Not gorillas, though, because they had just split off to follow a separate evolutionary path.
It’s likely A-Pan lived in might-makes-right troops where an alpha male dominated everyone else in the social hierarchy through his physical strength and aggressive determination. Holding the top position gave these alphas special benefits. They got more and better food. They had more sex and more of it with higher-ranking females, so they had more and better progeny and put more of their genetic makeup into the next generation, which is what evolution loves best. This is a lot like how chimps live today.
Domination was the accepted way of life—yet no one liked being dominated. And this is where rebellion enters the picture. The further down the hierarchy you were, the fewer benefits you got, the more bowing and scraping you had to do, and the more stress you were under, which was not good for your health. The higher-ups were doing well at the expense of the lower-downs and doesn’t this sound very much like exploitation?
Everyone kept looking for their chance to move up a notch and improve their situation. It’s not like there was always an open struggle going on, though. You’d bide your time. You couldn’t afford to be fighting those above you all day every day because you’d get beaten down too much. But there was an atmosphere of watchful waiting. The pressure was always on.
This meant the alpha males couldn’t just kick back and scarf up benefits. They had to stay vigilant. Being alpha was not like a Supreme Court appointment, a lifetime sinecure. An alpha kept his position only as long as he could hold on to it by force. And he knew the minute he weakened, others were ready to jump him and take his place.
Sometimes an alpha might put social prowess to work along with his physical prowess. He might make an alliance with another top-ranking male. If a challenger made his move and went on the attack, the ally would wade into the fight on the side of the alpha. So the alpha might then stay in power even as he aged and his physical abilities declined. In return the ally would share in alpha benefits like more food and more reproduction. And this would be another example of cooperating in order to compete.
But the ally strategy could work the other way around. An ambitious male might recruit a buddy to help him replace a vulnerable alpha, with the buddy understanding that he would get a share of the spoils.
There was yet one more kind of alliance which sometimes happened. If you were the alpha, along with your privileges came duties. You were expected to keep the peace and provide stability by enforcing good behavior, which contributed significantly to the welfare of the troop. When a less-than-competent alpha was in charge, more fights would break out, they’d last longer, there’d be more injuries, and the injuries would be worse.
So what happened when a powerful but incompetent alpha ruled the roost? Did everyone just suffer in silence? I guess that happened sometimes, but observers have seen rebellions in troops of modern chimps, where the majority gangs up to replace the alpha with someone who will do a much better job. And then once the coup is completed everyone submits to the new alpha. They’re not changing the domination way of life. They’re only replacing a particular alpha. The social system under which they live continues as it was before the revolt.
Sometimes though, the system itself gets amended and stays amended. Bonobos are famous for being sex-crazed party animals. Their standard way of settling conflicts is for the two individuals who were just fighting to engage in sexual contact or copulation. Because of this, some humans who believe in reincarnation are praying to come back as bonobos in their next lifetime.
Bonobos are also famous because the females dominate the males, and I wondered how they pulled that off until I read Boehm. He explains that for some unknown reason, male bonobos don’t form alliances—but the females do. And that’s why they’re in charge. One-on-one, any male bonobo could overpower even the top-ranking female. But the females don’t let that one-on-one meetup happen. They always have each other’s backs. They dominate the troop, so domination is still taking place, but they’ve amended the ancient alpha-male system and created a way of life that’s better for more individuals, especially the females, but also, it seems to me, for the males.
Boehm gives another example of amending the system. Chimp females in the wild do not bond like bonobos do. Two things work against them on this score. Food is not easy to come by so they spend a lot of their foraging time on their own, which means they spend less time together. And females, when they become sexually mature, often leave their home troop to join a new troop, which is good because this prevents inbreeding. But it’s a problem for female bonding because the males stay home where they’re among brothers and other males they’ve known for their whole lives. So their relationships, while competitive, are also longer term and more deeply rooted in cooperative bonding than is true for the females.
However, when chimps live in captivity, like in a reserve or a research center where there’s plenty of food, the females don’t go out foraging and thus they spend much more time at home with other females and they have the chance to engage in much better bonding. There have been cases where the females ganged up to replace an alpha because they didn’t like him. And a case where they replaced two alphas in a row until they got the one they wanted. And even then they didn’t return to total submission. They kept limits on the power of their chosen alpha. He had to pay attention to them to make sure he kept their support.
When the system gets amended like this, more individuals do better as a result. And I guess we could call that social progress, and maybe we could call situations where females take charge of their fate, protofeminism.
But these examples presage something even more portentous among humans. During the course of our evolution a confluence of developments happened that had a major consequence for our social structure. We began to walk upright, which left our hands free to do other things besides drag our knuckles. We developed powerful throwing arms and could hit something we aimed at with pretty good accuracy. For example, we could throw a rock. Today, a major league baseball pitcher can fire a hardball straight into the catcher’s glove at ninety miles per hour. No chimp can do anything like that.
We also began to make tools for cutting, scraping, and digging. Then we developed hunting tools, like simple, sharp-pointed wooden spears we could use for hunting animals. And we discovered we could use these tools as weapons against other people. Hunters who became experienced at killing dangerous animals could kill humans, too.
All of this was bad news for alphas. Now a low-ranking male could take out a much more powerfully muscled alpha with a rock to the head or a spear thrust to the belly.
This was a significant power shift. And it was intensified by the development of language, which allowed people the opportunity to make plans and agreements. Language, as it developed, allowed us to organize coordinated group action. For example, a group could agree to ignore the orders of an abusive alpha. And if no one would acknowledge his authority, he was done. No weapons needed.
I wish the first invention our ancestors made, back when we were just becoming human, had been the video camera. I wish they’d filmed their transition from domination to their new way of life, maybe capturing interviews with the most articulate of the change agents. It would be wonderful to see the process take place and get our questions answered directly, instead of having to make educated guesses. Did the transition happen quickly or gradually? Did it happen with one precocious group first and then other bands copied them and spread the good news farther and farther afield? Or did equality naturally emerge in many bands independently over the same general period? The case can apparently be argued either way. I don’t see how we will ever be able to find a decisive answer to these questions. But for all the things we don’t know, we do know that our ancestors created a way of life that we now call egalitarian. And it became global and it sustained us for tens of thousands of years.
But anthropologists like Boehm don’t just call this way of life egalitarianism, they call it fierce egalitarianism. Because in hunter-gatherer bands which practiced it, there was nothing casual about it. It was so important for survival that to keep it working well was a matter of life and death. And people did so much better under the new system that they were serious about not backsliding.
What does the fierce version of equality look like? People don’t tolerate anyone lording it over them. One of the worst sins is to get a “big head.” Or act like a “big man.” And bragging is out. If a hunter has a great day and kills an antelope, when it’s brought back to the village, people say, “Oh, that little thing.” This is to keep egos in check because what matters is group unity.
Cheating is next to impossible. If you’re living in a small band of about thirty, or at the most up to forty or fifty, you watch each other’s behavior all day long. Talk about accountability. Any cheating gets nipped in the bud.
Sharing within a band is taken for granted. The meat from a large kill is divided out among everyone with impeccable equity. And people are happy with this system because if today you have good fortune in the hunt, you share with everyone else. If tomorrow another hunter has the luck, then he shares with everyone else, too, you included. This is a much more secure food system than every individual family going it alone.
The ethic of sharing means there’s no hoarding. No one accumulates wealth at the expense of the others. There’s no exploitation. The band would not put up with it.
And there was no need for charity. There were no philanthropists “giving something back.” That’s a complicated phrase. In our day, some people who have gotten knocked down by life, once they get back on their feet, use that phrase to talk about helping others once they’re able to do so, like when a recovering drug addict sponsors a newbie in a Twelve Step program.
But what about a wealthy person who exploits society to make big money and then gives back a penny on the dollar? And they do that specifically to enhance their reputation and position in society, perhaps using their philanthropy to gain even more influence and power. They’re technically giving something back, but wouldn’t it be better not to take so much in the first place?
And small bands didn’t practice the kind of charity we have today where aid is given to the poor but the political system that keeps people poor grinds along unchanged. Which makes me think of Dom Hélder Câmara, archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil, who said, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why so many people are poor, they call me a communist.”
Fierce egalitarianism is a way of life rooted in contribution. Everyone contributes to the well-being of everyone else. You don’t act out to get attention. You don’t try to be the most bizarre or vulgar person, causing an uproar to get noticed. You aren’t desperate to get on reality TV so you can become a household name. You get attention by contributing to the success of the community and you’re honored for that.
Childcare figures in, too. In her book Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes the case that cooperative child-rearing has been an essential part of our success as a species. Chimp mothers don’t let anyone else take care of their babies. Maybe an older daughter gets involved. But mostly it’s mother-only work. Chimps wouldn’t dream of setting up a day-care center. But among humans, we trust others to watch over our children. We’re the only primates who do that, apart from the family of New World monkeys called Callitrichidae, which includes tamarins and marmosets. There you find remarkable participation in child-rearing by fathers, brothers, and other males.
So hunter-gatherer babies imbibed the ethic of cooperative sociality from the first days of their lives. This gives new meaning to the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It’s not just that there’s too much work for a mom or a set of parents. The village wants to be deeply involved in raising every child so every child will grow up to be deeply involved in contributing to the life of the village.
And let’s add that it takes the children of a village to raise a child, too, because, as Hrdy argues, once a child was weaned at about age three, she’d be incorporated into the community of children within the band, and much of what she learned came from playing and working with other children during the day, especially those just a bit older than herself, just a step or two ahead in their development.
I know I’m saying lots of happy things about these small, fiercely cooperative bands. But let’s look again at that word fierce, because this way of life was fierce. It wasn’t a walk in the park. Humans were still selfish at their core. Our ancestors did not replace the unitary system of competition-cooperation. But they did pull it more in the direction of cooperation. They made a highly-disciplined system to support their way of life because they knew how self-centered individuals still were. They knew that without vigilance, the native selfishness of people could drag the band back into a hierarchical society.
Once alpha behavior had been effectively suppressed, that did not mean there was a happy free-for-all. It wasn’t hippie time. The group became the alpha. The group became the authority. And this was necessary because supercooperation takes superauthority.
Our ancestors were able to get really good at cooperative living because they got really good at living under a social discipline, one which was deeply trusted because it had been deeply tested.
What does it take to make social discipline work? The secret sauce is enforcement. Reading Boehm’s explanation of this, I converted. I became a fan of capital punishment. Not today, not in our country, because the people we execute are disproportionately poor and people of color. And maybe we kill them for committing a single murder, while politicians who lie us into a needless war where thousands of our troops lose their lives and hundreds of thousands of people are killed in the country we invaded, suffer no consequences at all. Which is reminiscent of Aesop, the Greek slave, who, six hundred years before the birth of Christ, said: “We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”
But small hunter-gatherer bands didn’t have police, courts, lawyers, judges, or jails. They had to handle bad behavior on their own. And they had to handle it. If an out-of-control person killed one of your best hunters, that would have very serious consequences in a band where you might have only five or six experienced hunters. But what if that person killed two hunters? Now you’re putting the very life of the band in jeopardy.
Our ancestors developed an effective, incremental system of enforcement. If you were out of line, if your behavior was threatening the welfare of the group, the first step would be teasing, shaming, and ridicule. You would be put on notice that your behavior was not going to be tolerated. And it was no idle threat because your good reputation mattered to you. It was your life’s blood in the group. Chances are you would shape up.
But if you didn’t, there’d be an escalation and you’d be ostracized. No one would talk to you. It would be solitary confinement, except you were locked out instead of locked in. You’d become socially invisible. In our society that might not sound like much. We can just go find new friends or move to a new city and start over. But for our ancestors, those in your band were your life. To be cut off unanimously by all of them would be painful in the extreme. All around you people would be talking, laughing, playing, working, singing, dancing, while you’re pointedly left out.
Boehm cites the example of the anthropologist, Jean Briggs, who was ostracized by the small band she was studying, a group of Utlik people along the Back River in Canada, about 150 miles south of Churchill. It sounded so intriguing I ran right out and got a copy of her book Never in Anger, because I wanted to read the story in her own words. It started with a group of white hunters who came to Back River and asked to borrow a canoe, and being very hospitable, the Utlik agreed. The next day the hunters returned with the canoe damaged and asked to borrow the only other canoe. As I was reading, I got angry. These canoes were precious. And here were these crass white guys as thoughtless as could be.
Well, Briggs had a reaction, too. She described herself as a naturally difficult, even abrasive person, and here she was studying a superpolite people. Oh boy. And now, witnessing this bad behavior by these entitled outsiders, she went off on them, but in a way that for her was mild, holding her real anger in check. And I cheered for her and would have wanted to say much worse. But these were not her canoes and this was not her band and it was not her place to chastise visitors and the Utlik people reacted.
For three months she was pushed to the periphery of community life. People started bringing her tea right to her tent. At first she thought it was a special courtesy then realized they were doing that to keep her from joining the rest of the group. Contacts with her were minimized and conversation dried up. This was a sobering experience for an anthropologist who needed the cooperation of the group to get her work done. Still, at some point she would be flying back to her home far away. But how hard would this ostracism be if this was the only home you knew and there were no other options?
For minor offenses, our ancestors had effective, low-level responses, but if you crossed the line into wounding people, or maiming them, or, heaven help you, killing someone, enforcement would cross the line into a new and very serious territory. You might be expelled from the band. In those days, it was very difficult to survive solo. Most people would not be able to do it. Maybe an outcast could find his way into another group. But if another band came across you out wandering the wilderness on your own, that might raise red flags. How come you weren’t with your group? What did you do to get kicked out? And if they kicked you out, why should we risk taking you in? Maybe if the new group needed an additional hunter, they would accept you. But what if you couldn’t find anyone to take you in? Then expulsion could turn into a death sentence.
Beyond expulsion was execution. In extreme cases, as with a murderer, expulsion might not be enough. What if the guy were to return in the night to kill again in revenge? There were times when the band made a consensus decision to kill an offender. They would likely choose one or two of the people most closely related to him to do the deed so as not to start a blood feud within the band. An execution must have been a hateful job to have to carry out, but when the band was in peril they couldn’t afford to be nice guys.
And maybe to our ears this sounds cold. But remember there was no criminal justice system. Enforcement was a DIY business. Without the death sentence backing them up, lesser strategies of enforcement would not have worked. Without capital punishment our species might not have survived into the present and knowing this, I’ve become a fan of capital punishment—but only for back then.
Fierce egalitarianism was a profound shift in the power structure of human society, so profound that Boehm calls it revolutionary. And then he notes something fascinating about it. He says, “…egalitarianism involves a very special type of hierarchy, a curious type that is based on antihierarchical feelings.” And he adds, “Because the united subordinates are constantly putting down the more assertive alpha types in their midst, egalitarianism is in effect a bizarre type of political hierarchy; the weak combine forces to actively dominate the strong.” The meek inheriting.
Our ancestors refused to live at the mercy of the operating system evolution had given them. They essentially said, “Screw you, OS,” without even knowing what an OS was or that they had one. They figured out how to make a more loving society and how to upgrade their lives by putting fight into the heart of their communities. It was moral fight, because the new decisions they were making were decisions about how they wanted to treat each other better.
The revolution our ancestors started remained an unfinished revolution. Equality was not perfected. Women still had less power than men. Boehm says they were very much a part creating moral consensus but did not have the same political authority as the men. Still, life was better for women under fierce egalitarianism than the old system of domination.
Our hunter-gatherer way of life made it possible for us to spread throughout the world and survive in all kinds of environments, including extreme ones like deserts or the Arctic. But our success was perverse. As our numbers exploded, we outgrew our small bands and began to live in city-states, then nation-states, then empires, and finally here we are, a global flood of population. The supercooperation we created and mastered works for groups of thirty, not thirty million. We manage to live together in huge numbers in modern mass society, but administrative coordination is not the same thing as egalitarian cooperation. And the mass coordination we live under comes with mass exploitation. We don’t know how to make mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy run a megasociety.
And the consequence? We find ourselves dragged back into the kind of hierarchical structure we once transcended. Our forebears would be horrified to see how we live now: The biggest egos getting the biggest attention. Political leaders serving themselves and neglecting the needs of their fellow citizens. Pockets of extreme wealth amid expanses of permanent poverty. Endless war. Stunning passivity in the face of our impending extinction.
There’s so much I love about the fiercely cooperative bands of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and so many of their values I share, and I would not want to live in one of those small bands.
I can’t imagine being born into a tiny group in a remote patch of steaming jungle or out on the frozen tundra without so many of the things that matter to me in my life now—millions of books to choose from, an unending cornucopia of music and movies, so many different kinds of people to get to know. I think sometimes about what it would have been like if I’d had to spend my whole life within my community of origin, limited to my family and my church, and the word that comes to mind is suffocation.
I’m so thankful for my freedom to find my own kindred spirits and make my own network of relationships. It’s not that I don’t enjoy being part of a committed, cooperative team doing something important together. I really do love that. But I want to be able to go home at the end of the day and have my own personal life.
Still, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for these ancestors of ours. I’ve stopped calling them “primitive” because, when it comes to making cooperation work, they were so much more sophisticated than we are.
Some religious people call them heathens, but look at how they lived. What Jesus preached they actually practiced. I think if he had known about them he would have loved them and would have delivered sermons holding them up to us as role models. So much of the communal life that the early Christians were struggling to create was right in line with what our hunter-gatherer predecessors had mastered.
One day after rereading a chapter of Boehm, I heard a popular politician trash-talk community organizers, and it struck me that our long-ago ancestors were allcommunity organizers. They organized not only their own communities but community itself, meaning moral community, and did it for the first time in history and from scratch. And they never stopped organizing. They were always working to keep the community true to the principles of supercooperation. So I wanted to tell that politician, “Drop the scorn. Show a little respect. If it weren’t for community organizers, you wouldn’t even be here.”
Boehm says this fierce egalitarianism lasted long enough for it to actually have a permanent effect on our genome, making us more altruistic. The way I see it, our hunter-gatherer ancestors pulled off the biggest victory in human history. What they accomplished was so much more challenging and important than sending a couple guys to the moon in a tin can spaceship. They opposed the limitations of our operating system and created a new way of life. They definitely knew their way around the twist of grace. Theirs is such an honorable story, I wonder why it isn’t told more widely and more often. Maybe we keep ourselves in the dark because it’s too painful to feel just how much we’ve lost.
But even though their revolution got swept away, and even though we don’t have the time left to have a revolution of our own to match theirs, still I like to think that we’re invoking their spirit whenever we engage in progressive social activism and fight against the current worldwide deluge of despair.
