Sunday, September 28, 2008

The Birth of Autocracy

This Blog is progressive. Start at the bottom and read up or it may make no sense.

Now that I have explained the basic components of the model I will apply them to history. Even though the theory was intended to apply to the Nation-States that would be starting millennium too late. The problem of how to manage a Nation-State may have only come about a few hundred years ago but the knowledge base that was used to solve the problem of government would have been amassed beginning around the time human beings started to have a consistent excess of their survival requirements, in particular, food. That would be the first time that humans would have encountered the problems associated with governing.

What Governments Do. A governmental system is a social construct designed to take a portion of the excess goods or services its population produces and use them to provide for the needs, desires, and concerns of its population[i]. The more efficiently the government does this the more likely it is that the government will remain stable. Governments do not provide equally for their population. In fact it would probably produce a very inefficient system. What the government will do is use this excess to accomplish tasks that no individual alone could accomplish.

Anthropologists will tell you that the first humans societies were small Bands of Hunter-Gatherers that lived a simple, egalitarian life. For the most part, other than biological distinctions, all people were equal. There were no governments, no externally enforced regulations. There was no need for them. At this point in history there was no stratification of society beyond that established by gender and age. All the people were engaged in basic survival activities. There may have been excess food after a good hunt or during the autumn season but it was not a continual condition. Basic Survival Needs overrode all other concerns. People lived in as close to a “natural state” for a human society as was likely to exist. For our purposed think of a group of egalitarian Hunter-Gatherers as the “default position” for humans.

These purely egalitarian societies were the tabula rasa of politics. But nothing lasts forever. It is now about 10,000 B.C. Things change and people form a new group. Humans start to remain in one place rather than wander. Agriculture takes root (no pun intended). There was time to do things other than forage for food. Sometimes referred to as “Tribes”, these extended family groups began have to deal with more complex problems than killing and eating their food. This causes a number of changes. First, the success of humans presented them with both the excess resources, both physical and temporal. They had time to gather together to fulfill their Social Needs. They satisfied this need by forming interfamily groups. Second, the excess resources created a de facto inequity. This in turn created a new problem and the necessity for a new Cultural Truth; how to equitably distribute excess resources. Third, at least some societies floundered at coming up with solutions for this problem. They attempted ceremonial solutions. [ii]These solutions as well as others may become the tribe’s Cultural Truth and solved the problem for some time.

The next rung up society’s evolutionary ladder will preordain the type of government societies will have when they become city-states or empires until the time of the Greeks. Because of the monumental affect this change will have on the world of political science I feel if wise to explore it further. To do that we will take a detour from the world of anthropology into the world of evolutionary psychology.

Things are changing. As a species, humans are becoming fantastically successful. With that success will come the exacerbation of a problem that developed with the tribe; the inequities created by excess. Somehow the group had to decide how to distribute these assets. A solution was needed. A solution that could be adopted and accepted by all members of the group. The eventual solution was to vest that power in one person, and the autocracy was born. This solution was so powerful, so innately natural, and so “instinctual” that it would come to be accepted nearly universally. Why?

There are two theories for why this choice would have been natural. The first is that socially humans are prone to certain behavioral habits. Discovered during his work with the Moose of Burkina Faso, Alan P. Fiske described them as “Incommensurable Models for Social Relationships” (Fiske, 1990). They are “communal sharing, characterized by solidarity, common identity, and commensality; authority ranking, involving precedence, asymmetrical power, and deference; equality matching, entailing quid pro quo, in-kind reciprocity, turn taking, and egalitarian distributive justice; and market pricing, oriented toward commodity values or some kind of calculation of cost-benefit ratios” (Fiske, 1990). The inference from his work is that these behavior patterns are “hardwired” into the human animal and are at least partially responsible for our social success. If true, then authority ranking and the idea that one person somehow has predominance over others would be natural. The second theory is more generic and basically identified the family unit as the origin of the “singe person” solution. Almost everyone starts out a in this world as a child completely dependant on an adult, usually their mother. This single person becomes the provider for everything. In either case, what became the solution for the first inequity was to give a single person the excess. The autocracy is still with us.[i]

If one goes back in history (or goes to certain isolated tribal societies) you will see a transition that occurs at the point that a social group begins to have excess food (or excess resources in general). They tend to give the excess to two separated people, the shaman or religious leader and the “head man” or whomever they see as the “political” leader. This allows those two separate individuals to not have to spend their entire day finding food themselves. Over time this tendency becomes institutionalized into the government and the church. Earle, T. (2002). Bronze Age Economics. Boulder, Westview Press.

In a purely economic sense nothing has changed. When the clan began to give their excess to the shaman and headman this allowed the shaman and headman not to have to find the food themselves. They no longer added directly to the resources of the groups but did so indirectly through advice and direction on the affairs of men and God. Today both the church and the government provide for the people in their own way. However neither of these two entities adds directly to the GNP of a country and in that sense what we do today is exactly the same as what those early societies did

[ii] Flannery, Kent V. “The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations”, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, Vol. 3. (1972), pp. 399-426, 402-3.

1 comment:

Marc Tyrrell said...

Interesting arguments. If we look at the archaeological record from, say, 7500 bce to 6000 bce or so, one of the things that is really apparent is the shift in burial practices. Certainly in Sumeria at least (and most of the Fertile Crescent barring Egypt), the change towards an autarchy seems to happen over about a 200 year period, and to be tied in with a formalization of social accounting for agricultural labour. In effect, accountants become the rulers - not too different from today (LOLOL). For the arguments on this, take a look at Before Writing by Denise Schmandt-Besserat.