Morality from hunter-gatherers to cities
Precis of primary readings:
Jared Diamond: From egalitarianism to kleptocracy (chapter 14 of Guns, Germs and
Steel. Much of this chapter is available online from Google Books)
Diamond discusses a major problem for traditional hunter-gatherer and small-scale
agricultural societies: personal disputes spiral out of control and lead to violence. Many
romantics among us like to imagine that early human societies were egalitarian peaceable
paradises. Equal our ancestors were, but peaceful they were not. Men frequently get into
fights over a woman, for example if a woman leaves one for the other, and such disputes
are the most common cause of murder among the !Kung, who had a murder rate over 100
per 100,000 per year. Compare England and Holland with murder rates of 30 per 100,000
per year during the 17th century, and 1 or 2 per year now.
Diamond describes several stages of increasing social organization and stratification
beyond the hunter-gatherer band: a tribe, a chiefdom, and a nation-state. The more
organized societies have more specialization of labor and institutions for organizing labor
and distributing surplus to those who don’t produce (but often do useful craft specialties).
These societies also have mechanisms for adjudicating disputes. Finally the largest and
most organized societies often have ideologies that justify and explain their practices.
See also Diamond’s article in the April 21, 2008 New Yorker (available online).
Jacques Maquet: The civilization of the bow (chapter 2 of Civilizations of Black Africa)
Modern hunter gatherers are heirs to a long tradition of technological development but
have also been pushed onto the most marginal land by the waves of encroaching
agriculturalists. So they are both richer in some ways and poorer in others than our
common ancestors. However they do share some common social characteristics. The
typical band size ranges from a few dozen to about one hundred. The bands are highly
egalitarian – without chiefs or hierarchy - unlike the primate troops from which they
evolved. Co-operation is essential for survival by primitive hunting/gathering (without
steel, matches and other western camping equipment). People care deeply about social
harmony in the band; conflicts between individuals that threaten the ability of people to
work together get the attention of everybody in the band. Solutions are found that keep
the peace rather than uphold principles of ownership or justice. Both gathering and
hunting are highly skilled activities and these societies hold such skills in high regard.
Other books worth reading for this discussion
Richand Lee, The Dobe !Kung (esp. ch. 7 & 8)
Colin Turnbull, The Forest People (esp. ch. 5 & 6)
Marvin Harris, Our Kind
Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation
Ideas to start discussion
When we read about so-called ‘primitive’ people, we may not easily recognize the issues
that they feel are ‘moral’. We can easily recognize sexual taboos, since we have so many
ourselves, but we often miss the moral issues that really engage people of another society.
Much of ‘primitive’ morality has to do with arrangements about food, and much of this
has to do with traditional obligations that are enforced strongly by the community even
without an apparatus of courts and police. We might make an analogy with ‘business
ethics’ in our society. For example among the !Kung or the Mbuti, many men hunt each
day but few men are successful on any given day. There are elaborate traditions that
dictate which parts of the animal go to which relative of the successful hunter, and which
parts he may distribute as he sees fit. Not to distribute meat is regarded as a heinous
offence. In the long run everybody gets enough to eat, although the skilled hunter’s close
relatives do better. However in practice the traditional distribution obligations can never
be exactly satisfied because of the varied and fluid composition of hunter-gatherer bands.
The hunter has considerable latitude in adapting conventions to the reality on the ground
and so of course the recipients can find fault with his adherence to traditional norms.
Similar traditional obligations hold in other spheres of life, however they also cannot be
fulfilled exactly in any situation. Lee reports a constant background of ‘lawyer-like’
complaining among the !Kung people about how others have failed to fulfill obligations
of various sorts.
Justice among primitive people seems to be a matter of community censure. There are no
courts, although disputes between individuals usually lead to group discussion. The group
officially makes a stern face about transgressions, but in practice relatives often mitigate
a punishment and the community turns a blind eye. Turnbull reports that the most serious
punishment among the Pygmies is ostracism. In principle that is equivalent to a death
sentence or exile because most people can’t survive on their own in the bush. However
the ostracism rarely lasts for more than a few days, and even during ostracism a person’s
relatives may feed him (or her) secretly. Similarly Briggs reports that the Eskimos
distance themselves discretely from an individual who has threatened the peacefulness of
their societies (although other reports indicate that a serious and repeat offender may be
pushed off an ice-floe when nobody is looking).
One of the fascinations of primitive people to Westerners is their apparently more relaxed
attitude to sexuality. Although there are institutions such as marriage, with an obligation
of sexual fidelity, nobody is particularly surprised when people enter into other liaisons.
The band with whom the offenders live usually makes a big fuss over such breaches of
expectation, but if a new arrangement is contracted then over the course of a few weeks
most people adjust to the new reality. The kinship relations provided by marriage are
important for defining the network of obligations, but from the band’s point of view, it is
more important that there be a network of obligations than that a particular network last a
lifetime. However from an individual’s point of view these reversals can be quite
disturbing and provoke violence.
The invention of agriculture brought new pressures to bear on human behavior. The most
noticeable change was settlements. This was accompanied by an increased birth rate and
larger families, usually accompanied by much stricter controls on sexuality. Primitive
agriculturalists differ from hunter-gatherers in having a great deal more fixed property
and tracts of fertile worked land. These properties require much investment of effort and
are therefore valuable inheritances. Hence agricultural people are much less tolerant of
interlopers in the chain of succession than are the hunter-gatherers. Harris points out that
generally the hard-earth agricultural societies, where years of intense labor are required to
build up a productive plot of land, have the strictest sexual mores.
Another social change brought by agriculture was that people found it harder to avoid
others with whom they couldn’t get along, so that fights become more common and often
murderous. Murders in turn spawned the waves of revenge killings that plague many of
these societies even more than in conflict-prone hunter-gatherer societies. These
problems of spiraling conflict were addressed somewhat by the re-emergence of
dominant males (chiefs) in human groups, reversing the egalitarian trend of huntergatherer societies. Although the chiefs expropriated much of the wealth of the
community, they also provided an effective police function, as did their primate forbears.
This imposition of order and resolution of disputes by a chief made it possible for groups
of human beings to settle permanently in one place.
As people gathered into small towns (city-states) their chiefs evolved into kings. The idea
of law in the west seems to have originated in the writs of kings in the Near East
sometime before the second millennium BC. The first great law code in the west is
attributed to Hammurabi (c. 1850 BC) although he had earlier models. In China the idea
of law seems to have evolved differently, with the older ideas of obligation and privileges
within the family evolving into ideas about the obligations and rights of particular
stations in society during the Zhou dynasty.
The stories of the early agriculturalists took on a profoundly political tone and became
myths. The hunter-gatherers’ stories of indifferent creator gods evolved into stories of
powerful gods who backed and justified the present king. Although the hunter-gatherers
had gods who played tricks, the early empires had gods who went to war among
themselves and whose dominion was established by wars, as was the practice among
men. The powerful gods also took an interest in the daily behavior of human beings and
demanded conduct that served the state, such as obedience to the king and sacrifice. The
stories of the gods were adapted to justify restrictions on sexual and political behavior.
Religion as we know it came into being.
These religions were radical in their time in the sense of being unlike the long-standing
religious cultures of humanity but ‘conservative’ in the modern sense of that word, in that
they reinforced the social order – in particular family relations – and justified the
privileges of the upper class. In Karen Armstrong’s portrayal, the religious reformers of
the first millennium BC spoke out against religion in the service of the rich and the state;
they proclaimed instead that religion should benefit the poor and should guide a more just
and compassionate society. The gods of Homer are capricious but the gods of Hesiod,
three centuries later, care about compassionate behavior as much as about upholding
social norms. The Hebrew god of the Pentateuch cared a great deal about observances
and ritual, while the god of the prophets and later of Jesus, cared much more about justice
and compassion. In the east the philosophy of Confucius (Kong-fu-dze) asserted that
consideration of others, rather than birth lineage, was the fundamental characteristic of a
noble person.
The reformers themselves came to be major figures in religions that incorporated a few of
their ideas but adapted them to maintaining the now-traditional forms of the family and
religious hierarchy. In the process the apologists for religion have staked an implicit and
widely accepted claim to ethics. The strongest version of this claim is that religion causes
ethical behavior.
Some Questions for discussion
How do egalitarian principles promote the success of hunter gatherer bands? Is this
relevant to today’s societies?
How do hunter-gatherers resolve disputes in practice? Where does this and can this work
today?
How did the shift in food production change the fundamental social issues that people
faced? Which of those issues are still with us?
How did religion come to play a role in morality? How did religion help? How did
religion pervert ethics?