Basic human social structure

Civilization will evolve infinitely. But it started somewhere.

There is a general rule in human evolutionary theory: Think long enough about something, and you will reach a conclusion that is politically incorrect.

In itself, cultural evolution sounds like a rather inoffensive theory. After all, it is not about genes. But take a closer look, and a politically difficult question comes up: What if some cultures faced stronger evolutionary pressures than others? Then different cultures are civilized to different degrees.

Cultural evolution happened when societies confronted each other. The more cooperative societies tended to win. For humans, organizing into groups beyond close kin is extremely difficult, because individuals have opposing interests. Some kind of extraordinary event that forces people to forego some of their personal interests is needed for cooperation to increase. A scary leader. A good idea. Whatever can make people cooperate against the neighbors instead of bickering with each other, can start a chain reaction. When one group of people starts to cooperate more effectively, neighboring groups are forced to follow suit or face extermination. 

That process goes on until an obstacle occurs: a mountain range, a desert, or simply sheer distance from the core where the cultural mutation occurred. Within the reach of the mutated society, a certain level of stability will emerge. That stability will only be broken when new cultural mutations occur in any corner. Either deleterious mutations that will allow social order to break down and neighbors to take over. Or beneficial mutations that will allow the societies where they occur to force other societies into higher degrees of coordination. 

The civilization differential

All this implies that different societies should be civilized to different degrees. Some societies were geographically vulnerable to new memes. Societies with numerous advanced neighbors faced much higher levels of outside pressure than societies with few and weak neighbors. As a result, the most hard-pressed societies underwent a rapid pace of cultural evolution. Others underwent an intermediate degree of social evolution. And a few isolated societies did not undergo any obvious social evolution since the paleolithic or the neolithic. 

Social evolution and genetic evolution go hand in hand. But the former is much faster than the latter. It would be strange if all human populations had exactly identical genes that regulate psychological dispositions. But empirically, substantial parts of human psychological nature are the same all over the world. And if humans have a shared psychological nature, we logically also must have a shared social nature. So logically, there should be a phenomenon called basic human social structure. 

If humans have certain drives and capacities, it shouldn't be entirely arbitrary what they do when they get together. Put a number of chimpanzees in an area and they will organize into groups with roughly equal numbers of males and females. The groups will then make war against each other. Put a number of gorillas in an area and the strongest males will monopolize a few females each. The other males will then lurk around and try to overwin the current males and kill their children.

In the same way, there are certain patterns in how humans organize themselves in the absence of civilization. Simple societies around the world are built around small, kin-based units of multiple males and females. Those units tend to consist of men defending their women and resources against other units. Warfare is typically carried out through raids, where every side tries to minimize its own losses. Nonetheless, a significant share of all men tend to die violent deaths.  

There is indeed a lot of variation in how simple human societies are organized. But the variation is not endless. There have been no human societies where people organize socially like gorillas, or chimpanzees, or orangutans. Just like chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons or elephants, we are a certain kind of animal, predisposed for a certain kind of social structure. The Dunbar Number is a simple, but clear example: Humans just are a certain kind of social animal that socializes in accordance with certain loose, but still ever-recurring principles. 

Basic human social structure is not only seen in places never touched by civilization. It is also seen beside civilization. I happened to read Yanomamö by Napoleon Chagnon and Gangleader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh at about the same time and couldn't help noticing the similarities: Both different Yanomamö groups and different gangs in Chicago were at constant war. Both preferred to assault their enemies in surprise raids: Among the Yanomamö, sneaking into an enemy village at dawn. Among the Chicago gangs, drive-by shootings or sneaking upon an unprepared adversary. Both among the Yanomamö and the Chicago gangsters, the attempts from both sides to avoid any losses caused a climate of fear and a high mortality rate from violence. In both places, men needed to uphold a reputation for fierceness in order to not be taken advantage of. And curiously, the gang leader in Chicago was openly bigamous, with two girlfriends with children in separate apartments, just like any proper Yanomamö chieftain. The main difference was that women couldn't make their own groceries in Chicago, so the gang leader needed to extort his co-residents for money to his two families. (In better welfare states than the US in the late 1980s this problem can be solved through gangster wives providing for themselves through transfers of public money.)

In his autobiography, Malcolm X gives a very  explicit account of a primitive honor culture through telling about a calculation he had to make as a teenage hustler. A very skilled informal lottery operator called West Indian Archie had given Malcolm 300 dollars as a win. Archie then claimed that Malcolm had cheated him. 

“It was a classic hustler-code impasse. The money wasn't the problem. I still had about two hundred dollars of it. Had money been the issue, Sammy could have made up the difference; if it wasn't in his pocket, his women could quickly have raised it. West Indian Archie himself, for that matter, would have loaned me three hundred dollars if I'd ever asked him, as many thousands of dollars of mine as he'd gotten ten percent of. Once, in fact, when he'd heard I was broke, he had looked me up and handed me some money and grunted, “Stick this in your pocket.” 

The issue was the position which his action had put us both into. For a hustler in our sidewalk jungle world, “face” and “honor” were important. No hustler could have it known that he'd been “hyped,” meaning outsmarted or made a fool of. And worse, a hustler could never afford to have it demonstrated that he could be bluffed, that he could be frightened by a threat, that he lacked nerve. 

West Indian Archie knew that some young hustlers rose in stature in our world when they somehow hoodwinked older hustlers, then put it on the wire for everyone to hear. He believed I was trying that. In turn, I knew he would be protecting his stature by broadcasting all over the wire his threat to me. 

Because of this code, in my time in Harlem I'd personally known a dozen hustlers who, threatened, left town, disgraced. Once the wire had it, any retreat by either of us was unthinkable. The wire would be awaiting the report of the showdown. I'd also known of at least another dozen showdowns in which one took the Dead On Arrival ride to the morgue, and the other went to prison for manslaughter or the electric chair for murder.”¹

Basic human social structure does not only appear among people who have never heard of civilization. It appears wherever civilization is too weak to suppress it.

Also a highly complex society like Japan houses more primitive subcultures. Yakuza gangsters showing off their tattoos and status at the Sanja Matsuri festival in Japan, 2007. Wikimedia Commons

 

A new structuralism? 

Strangely enough, I know of no comprehensive attempt to catalog basic human social structure. Peter Turchin catalogs complex human social structure. But who is the Peter Turchin of simple human societies? I don't know.

The closest I can think of is French structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who lived between 1908 and 2009. He analyzed primitive myths from all over the world and thought he saw patterns. From that, he made the conclusion that the human mind, the author of those myths, is structured in a certain way. 

But Claude Levi-Strauss didn't do exactly what I would like to do. To put it bluntly, he made himself an expert in human bullshit. He collected what bullshit he could find, even in societies rather low in bullshit, and focused on that. To me, that neatly misses the point. In complex societies, myths and grand narratives are utterly important. They are what makes people agree to cooperate on a larger scale. Without bombastic ideas like Islam, the Welfare state, free speech or the superiority of the Aryans, complex societies wouldn't be possible. 

But simple societies seem to be possible also without much ideology. In the Amazon rainforest, people with very little mythology have been encountered, for example the Pirahã people. Street gangs also tend to have very sparse founding myths - somehow they can cooperate a bit anyway. Humans are groupish animals that will identify with any marker of a group - it doesn't need to be that deep. If nothing else, the existence of football supporters clearly indicates that. Just because ideology is what determines the direction of complex societies, the same doesn't need to be true for simple societies. Lévi-Strauss' focus on mythology misses that point. 

One of Claude Lévi-Strauss' books is called La pensée sauvage (1962), a word game meaning The Wild Thinking/The Wild Pansy. His focus on the wild thinking took away focus from what wild people are feeling: The foremost reason why people in simple societies all over the world are acting quite similarly is probably not that they think the same, but that they feel the same. Like any animal, humans are governed by instinct. Culture is just a way to mitigate those instincts; to encourage some of them and repress others. 

Beyond good and evil

Those of us who are living in civilizations tend to have a sense of our own vulnerability. We know that without the rules of our civilization, we are in mortal danger. This makes us terrified of the dismantling of civilization, and rightly so. 

Unfortunately, most people are so terrified that they refuse to even look at the alternative to civilization. People call actions outside our own civilization “barbarian” or “inhuman”. Like if beyond civilization, there is just an unfathomable abyss. For that reason, people have to pretend that all human societies are equally civilized. “Primitive society” is considered an immoral expression, because it reveals a belief that all societies are not equally socially advanced. If non-civilization is inhuman, it follows that all human societies need to be considered civilizations.

For those of us who want to study the evolution of civilization, this is a slight disaster. If everything is civilization, then nothing is civilization. 

In order to handle this politically induced confusion, the term complex society has been launched. Logically, it is impeccable. Complex is the opposite of primitive or simple. A complex society is a society that is not a primitive society. So far, so good. 

Still, I find the term complex society too inflexible. It implies that some societies are complex in the same absolute sense that some societies are simple. And that is not the case. Simple societies are simple in an absolute sense, because they build on basic human social structure to a much higher degree than complex societies. Essentially, simple societies are not cultures to the same degree as complex societies, because they build more heavily on human nature. It is not that they completely lack culture. No human society does, and even groups of chimpanzees have culture. But culture plays a smaller role compared to in complex societies and human psychological nature plays a bigger role.

Also, there seems to be a clear limit to how simple societies humans can build. All groups of humans known today have a certain set of mental capacities. And individuals with certain mental capacities will always build societies with a certain level of complexity. The psychological similarity between all humans provides a bottom line for how simple a human society can be. Basic human social structure is the bottom line through which human societies just don't fall. At least as long as there is a certain number of humans in the same place.

Complex societies, on the other hand, are just complex in a relative sense. They are more complex than simple societies. But some of them are also more complex than other complex societies. There is an ongoing evolutionary process toward increasingly high levels of complexity. 

For that reason I'm feeling more comfortable talking about civilization than about complexity. More civilized sounds more intuitive than more complex. Maybe it is possible to get used to talking about social complexity instead of civilization: The social complexity process instead of the civilization process, higher levels of social complexity instead of higher levels of civilization. I'm just not there yet.

Civilization or social complexity is the same thing as a high level of social coordination. It is the arduous effort of one of the great apes (technically and logically, humans are one of the great apes) to organize in more ant-like structures. Civilization is the process through which humans strenuously depart from their nature in the service of the group as a whole.

This process is not necessarily good and not necessarily bad. It is just much more variable than basic human social structure. Basic human social structure builds on two fixed components: human psychology and the rules described by game theory. The former varies rather little between societies and the latter are fixed. This makes basic human social structure gravitate towards roughly the same mixture of love, loyalty, hostility, trickery and murder everywhere. (There have been exceptions, like pacifist small-scale societies. But given enough time, those societies were found and exterminated by normally belligerent societies. A story about such a case by Stone Age Herbalist here: The Maori Genocide of the Moiori)

Civilization builds on the same fixed components as basic human social structure; human nature and the rules of the game. But it also has an arbitrary and variable component: culture. 

That latter component is a great lever. Since it is arbitrary, it can make a society both better and worse on a number of metrics compared to basic human social structure. Civilizations can offer their citizens more comfortable and peaceful lives than basic human social structure. But they can also make people truly miserable. Just as they can safeguard human life, they can also waste it on an industrial level.

Take for example Nazi Germany. An entirely normal European country started a war and industrially exterminated millions of people. If we use the word civilization in the sense of social complexity, Germany from 1933 to 1945 was roughly as civilized as it was in 1921 or 1952: People were highly socially coordinated all along. They didn't kill each other because they individually felt like it, but because war, death penalties and euthanasia was part of the culture they had adopted. It was evil. But it wasn't uncivilized. 

Nazi Germany was a comparatively civilized society the same way as the Aztec empire was. The Aztecs built temples to ritually sacrifice hundreds of thousands of prisoners. They kept the lands around their empire thin in enemy warriors through capturing and ritually killing all enemies they could find. And that was more civilized than keeping together in small kin-based groups and raiding each other over women and resources. Not because it was better or nicer, but because it was more coordinated.

Work in progress

In the future, levels of human coordination are likely to increase. That is more or less the only thing that can be known about the future. Cultural evolution leads to higher levels of civilization and cultural evolution is a law of nature.

Civilizations evolve through intricate mechanisms that give incentives to individuals to work more in the service of the group as a whole. I'm certain that we are right now just in the middle of such a process of evolution. Our society is more civilized than the simple, small-scale societies of the past. And it is much less civilized compared to future societies. Mechanisms for coordinating human nature into a greater good are constantly evolving. Our current society is just a step on that path.

And, in evolutionary terms, the “greater good” only means what makes a society viable. Concern for human life and wellbeing is only a good move in cultural evolution as long as it makes citizens more loyal and efficient. Whatever system makes humans the most coordinated for the tasks of breeding, subsistence and war, will be the civilization of the future. That is a law of nature. 

1. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as Told to Alex Hailey, 31 percent of e-book