@iconoclast,
God and Society.
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, “This is mine,” and found people na?ve enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” Jean Jacques Rousseau. (1754.)
It’s been recognized for a very long time that society requires explanation – why individuals should sacrifice some of the freedoms they might enjoy by the uninhibited exercise of free will, in order to live together. But it’s only in light of an evolutionary conception of man that this question can be set in its proper context. Foreshadowing the developmental theme of Darwin’s theory of evolution to explain inequality among men, Rousseau comes close, but it wasn’t ‘this is mine’ so much as ‘I made this.’
For the longest time, human beings were hunter-gatherers living a nomadic existence in tribes about 30 strong. On the basis of studies of troops of chimpanzees, it’s likely that human tribes had a hierarchy headed by an alpha male, his authority based on the threat and use of violence. A sexual division of labour allowed the alpha male to operate a food for sex dynamic between males and females, and food for allegiance dynamic among the males to his advantage – which is to say, maintaining control without using violence.
In order to maintain stability, this arrangement necessitates social fission – as in chimpanzee societies where young males are either killed or driven out, like stray electrons. They are not fusion societies – finding a place for all within. Thus, we need to explain the transition from fission to fusion societies, from hunter-gatherer tribes to multi-tribal and social arrangements.
Given these starting arrangements it’s not possible for human tribes to simply come together to form multi-tribal and social groups. And yet they did. This requires explanation. In order to explain this we need to identify the strategy tribes employed to enable them to reconcile the hierarchy of one tribe to the hierarchy of another. The two obvious explanations are war and peace.
The former strategy requires that one tribe killed the males and kidnapped the females of other tribes – and by these means built up a society. This is quite difficult to credit for a number of reasons. To begin with, any such endeavour must account for the authority and ability to do so. The alpha male’s authority is focused inward upon the tribe. Any exercise of power is a risk aimed at maintaining control – or at the very least his privileged access to sex and food. Requiring individual males to engage in a fight to the death against another tribe places his own authority in jeopardy – for it’s easier for them to gang up and kill him than engage the other tribe.
Even if we suppose that tribal identity could overcome this problem, (though it’s difficult to reconcile with the individual interest in a fission group) if this were the tactic, not only would the males have to hunt, and the females gather food to fill these extra mouths – but they would need to guard against counter attack, from within as well as from without. Because use of fire would make tribes relatively easy to locate – very soon they would reach exhaustion, and the tactic, and society would fail in its infancy.
The authority and ability both lacking, it couldn’t have happened that way. For the very reasons stated, the hunter gatherer way of life persisted unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, and then suddenly, relatively overnight, though actually within the space of a few thousand years, everything changed. However we look at it, this must be due to some form of agreement – people lived together because they wanted to. But how did it happen? What was the nature of this agreement?
Above, Shreeve remarks:
‘If human evolution were an epic, the Upper Paleolithic would be the chapter where the hero comes of age. Suddenly, after millennia of progress so slow that it hardly seems to progress at all, human culture appears to take off in what the writer John Pfeiffer has called a "creative explosion."’
Artifacts found after the ‘creative explosion’ around 30,000 years ago suggest a very different quality of understanding to typical remains dating from 1.9 million years ago, merely stone tools, butchered bones and the remains of hearths.
Shreeve continues:
‘At a German site called Vogelherd someone picked up a piece of ivory 32,000 years ago and carved an exquisite horse in miniature – mouth, flared nostrils, jowls, curved haunches, and swollen belly, all breathlessly realistic. Before Vogelherd, there were no representational horses. Before Vogelherd, all horses were horses.’
The sudden appearance of representational art suggests the sudden occurrence of an abstract conceptual thought process, such that would allow a human being to carve a horse, paint a picture on the wall of a cave. It seems obvious that man would need an abstract conceptual thought process to invent the concept of God, but contradicting Rousseau again, we propose that the idea of God came first.
‘Were we to suppose savage man as trained in the art of thinking as philosophers make him; were we, like them, to suppose him a very philosopher capable of investigating the sublimest truths, and of forming, by highly abstract chains of reasoning, maxims of reason and justice, deduced from the love of order in general, or the known will of his Creator; in a word, were we to suppose him as intelligent and enlightened, as he must have been, and is in fact found to have been, dull and stupid, what advantage would accrue to the species, from all such metaphysics, which could not be communicated by one to another, but must end with him who made them?’
Rather, the ‘creative explosion’ occurring in the Upper Paleolithic was the direct result of making the link between artifact and artificer, and subsequently exploring the abstract thinking inherent to the idea of God. On the basis of Ockham’s Razor, it’s the simplest adequate explanation to assume that the idea of God occurred in answer to the simple question: ‘If I made this hand axe – who made the world?’ for it requires of primitive man the minimum conceptual leap – and so requires of us the minimum of assumption.
While initially just the vaguest notion of God, an impression of an answer to the question, nonetheless, the arrangement of ideas contains within it the relation of artifact and artificer, and thus acted as an archetype of a new and exciting mode of thought; an archetype that could be re-invented easily from very basic conceptual steps that would thus be available for reference as the new mode of thought flickered into use.
Inferring the existence of an unseen, all-powerful artificer plunged man into a world of superstition as things took on meanings not apparent from their surface appearance, and quite possibly – as Rousseau, powerfully foreshadowing Nietzsche suggests, transformed functional conceptions of good and bad into moral concepts of good and evil.
‘It appears, at first view, that men in a state of nature, having no moral relations or determinate obligations one with another, could not be either good or bad, virtuous or vicious; unless we take these terms in a physical sense, and call, in an individual, those qualities vices which may be injurious to his preservation, and those virtues which contribute to it; in which case, he would have to be accounted most virtuous, who put least check on the pure impulses of nature.’
But neither Rousseau, nor Nietzsche truly appreciate that man is, and always has been a social animal. An archeological site near Dolni Vestonice in the Czech province of Moravia, estimated to be around 30,000 years old – is thought to be a place where hunter-gatherer tribes met because of artifacts found there and traced to the geology of widely separate regions.
Shreeve comments: ‘For acres around, the fine, fertile soil is seeded with carved and molded images of animals and women, strange engravings, personal ornamentations, and decorated graves. A few thousand years before, such fanciful objects did not exist. Representational art especially seems to blossom, fully refined, around the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, without a gallery of clumsy, childlike renderings from earlier periods to serve as precedents.’
This strongly suggests that the ability to create such artifacts was not lacking, but merely the mode of thought that would allow these behaviors to occur. Indeed, if we think of these ‘fanciful objects’ as primitive humans exploring the new way of thinking inherent to the idea of God, it does seem to explain the abrupt appearance of representational art, or abstract conceptual thought as evidenced in human artifacts.
Further though, on this site in Moravia there’s a grave containing three bodies, two adolescent males and one female about the same age. The bodies have been doused with red ochre, hence the name The Red Three. The female in the middle has an arrowhead placed between her legs – pointing at her genital area. She is facing one male, with whom her arm is linked while the male behind her is reaching for her pelvic area.
There are several possible interpretations, but the arrangement of the bodies clearly tells of a love triangle of some kind gone horribly wrong – and a crime of passion punished by the social group. It’s interesting that the bodies were arranged in order to tell the story. Clearly a representational thought process underlies the arrangement of the bodies – but to whom was the story being told?
More significantly however, because it’s inescapable that the social group (or groups) killed at least one person as a means of addressing the situation, it’s a clear indication of considered moral judgment. If we consider this in relation to the transition from a hunter-gatherer tribal way of life to multi-tribal and social organization, this suggests that the transition was not achieved through violence.
"Let us join," said he, "to guard the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambitious, and secure to every man the possession of what belongs to him: let us institute rules of justice and peace, to which all without exception may be obliged to conform; rules that may in some measure make amends for the caprices of fortune, by subjecting equally the powerful and the weak to the observance of reciprocal obligations. Let us, in a word, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, collect them in a supreme power which may govern us by wise laws, protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse their common enemies, and maintain eternal harmony among us."
Rousseau’s Adam had become beautifully eloquent wandering alone in the forest, but we do not have to suppose these primitive peoples were masters of the art of verbal persuasion – only that millions of years of social living had given them some basic language, sounds and gestures, facial expressions and an understanding of these. Nor do we have to suppose a universal and uniform evolutionary response in relation to the occurrence of this concept – only that it occurred to some, and that the benefits would demonstrate the advantages of cooperation between tribes.
Chimpanzees have strong social instincts within the troop, but the males particularly are violently xenophobic toward chimps of other troops, and it seems likely that similarly, hunter gatherers adopted cooperative behaviors within the tribe, but until conscious recognition of the artifact-artificer relationship – leading to superstition and morality, all tied together with the concept of God the Creator, they lacked the rationale that would enable multi-tribal living arrangements to occur.
Like chimpanzees, hunter-gatherer tribes likely had a shifting hierarchy headed by an alpha-male, his authority based on threat and use of violence, family relations and alliances maintained by bribery – and therefore, in the absence of some higher justification for social organization, any two tribes could at best achieve separate co-existence until conscious recognition of the artifact-artificer relationship changed their understanding of reality, and changed their conception of themselves.
Shared by the alpha-males of different tribes this new understanding of reality united them ideologically, enabling them to overcome an ingrained tribal xenophobia by providing some external reference point – a common ultimate truth as an agreed rationale.
The representational arrangement of the bodies at the gravesite in Moravia is strongly suggestive of a considered moral judgment justified in relation to external observation – as if observed by God. If the situation that resulted in the burial arose within a single tribe, at the very least it speaks of serious moral consideration – but if it occurred between tribes, dealing with such events this way, rather than plunging into conflict could have formed the basis of what would eventually lead to a truly social way of life.
Acting as lingua franca, as common conception of reality and absolute authority for law, a common rationale based on the will of the Creator would come to reconcile the privileged position of the alpha-males of one tribe with those of another, enabling multi-tribal and social living arrangements to occur where before they could not.
Thus, the concept of God is right there at the birth of society, and fulfilling that same role at the center of society for many years hence. As surely as man made ivory horses it seemed suddenly obvious someone made him and the world he found himself in – just as in making things he found the way forward to better living and better understanding.
Before this time, as Shreeve indicates, human development was incrementally slow – such that ‘it hardly seems like progress at all’ – but afterward ‘human culture appears to take off in…a ‘creative explosion.’
This is Conscious Evolution – the evolutionary development of humankind in relation to a shared, consciously acknowledged idea.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace