Zoon Politicon: The evolutionary roots of human sociopolitical systems

Our primate ancestors evolved a complex sociopolitical order based on a social dominance hierarchy in multi-male/multi-female groups. The emergence of bipedalism and cooperative breeding in the hominin line, together with environmental developments which made a diet of meat from large animals fi tness enhancing, as well as cultural innovation in the form of fi re and cooking, created a niche for hominins in which there was a high return to coordinated, cooperative scavenging or hunting of large mammals. This, in turn, led to the use of stones and spears as lethal weapons. The availability of lethal weapons in early hominin society undermined the standard social dominance hierarchy of multi-male/multi-female primates. The successful sociopolitical structure that replaced the ancestral social dominance hierarchy was a political system in which success depended on the ability of leaders to persuade and motivate. This system persisted until cultural changes in the Holocene fostered the accumulation of material wealth, through which it became possible once again to sustain a social dominance hierarchy, because elites could now surround themselves with male relatives and paid protectors. This scenario suggests that humans are predisposed to seek dominance when this is not excessively costly, but also to form coalitions to depose pretenders to power. Much of human political history is the working out of these oppositional forces. Self-Interest and Cultural Hegemony Models of Political Power For half a century following the end of World War II, the behavioral sciences were dominated by two highly contrasting models of human political behavior. In biology, political science, and economics, a self-interest model held sway, wherein individuals are rational self-regarding maximizers. In sociology, social psychology, and anthropology, by contrast, a cultural hegemony model 26 H. Gintis and C. van Schaik was generally accepted. In this model, individuals are the passive internalizers of the culture in which they operate. The dominant culture, in turn, supplies the norms and values associated with role-performance, so individual behavior meets the requirements of the various roles individuals are called upon to play in daily life (Durkheim 1933/1902; Parsons 1967; Mead 1963). Contemporary research has been kind to neither model. There has always been an undercurrent of objection to the cultural hegemony model, which Dennis Wrong (1961) aptly called the “oversocialized conception of man.” Behavioral ecology alternatives were offered by Konrad Lorenz (1963), Robert Ardrey (1966/1997) and Desmond Morris (1999/1967), a line of thought that culminated in Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), the resurrection of human nature in Donald Brown’s Human Universals (1991), and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby’s withering attack in The Adapted Mind on the so-called “standard social science model” of cultural hegemony (Barkow et al. 1992). Meanwhile, the analytical foundations of an alternative model, that of gene–culture coevolution (see below), were laid by C. J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson (1981), Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman (1973, 1981), and Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (1985). In opposition to cultural hegemony theory, daily life provides countless examples of the fragility of dominant cultures. African-Americans in the era of the civil rights movement, for instance, rejected a powerful ideology that justifyied segregation, American women in the 1960s rejected a deep-rooted patriarchal culture, and gay Americans rejected traditional Judeo-Christian treatments of homosexuality. In succeeding years, each of these minority countercultures was largely accepted by the American public. In the Soviet Union, Communist leaders attempted to forge a dominant culture of socialist morality by subjecting two generations of citizens to rigid and intensive indoctrination. This failed to take hold and, following the fall of the USSR, was rejected whole cloth, without the need for extensive counter-indoctrination. Similar examples could be given from the political experience of many other countries, possibly all. Undermining the self-interest model began with the ultimatum game experiments of Güth et al. (1982), Roth et al. (1991), and many others. These experiments showed that human subjects may reject positive offers in an anonymous one-shot money-sharing situation if they fi nd the split to be unfair. The experiments of Fehr and Gächter (2000, 2002) showed that cooperation could be sustained in a fi nitely repeated public goods game if the punishing of free riders is permitted, despite the fact that the self-interest model predicts no cooperation. These and related fi ndings have led in recent years to a revision of the received wisdom in biology and economics toward the appreciation of the central importance of other-regarding preferences and character virtues in biological and economic theory (Gintis et al. 2005; Henrich et al. 2005; Okasha and Binmore 2012) Zoon Politicon: Roots of Human Sociopolitical Systems 27 The untenability of the self-interest model of human action is also clear from everyday experience. Political activity in modern societies provides unambiguous evidence. In large democratic elections, the rational self-regarding agent will not vote because the costs of voting are positive and signifi cant, but the probability that one vote will alter the outcome of the election is vanishingly small. Thus the personal gain from voting is vanishingly small. For similar reasons, if one chooses to vote, there is no plausible reason to vote on the basis of the impact of the outcome of the election on one’s self-regarding gains. It follows also that the voter, if rational, self-regarding, and incapable of personally infl uencing the opinions of more than a few others, will not bother to form opinions on political issues, because these opinions cannot affect the outcome of elections. Yet people do vote, and many do expend time and energy in forming political opinions. This behavior does not conform to the selfinterest model. It is a short step from the irrefutable logic of self-regarding political behavior that rational self-regarding individuals will not participate in the sort of collective actions that are responsible for growth in the world of representative and democratic governance, the respect for civil liberties, the rights of minorities and women in public life, and the like. In the self-interest model, only small groups of individuals aspiring to social dominance will act politically. Yet modern egalitarian political institutions are the result of such collective actions (Bowles and Gintis 1986; Giugni et al. 1998). This behavior cannot be explained by the self-interest model. Apart from professional politicians and socially infl uential individuals, electoral politics is a vast morality play in which models of the rational selfregarding actor are not only a poor fi t, but are conceptually bizarre. It took Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action (1965) to make this clear to many behavioral scientists, because virtually all students of social life had assumed, without refl ection, the faulty logic that rational self-regarding individuals will vote, and will “vote their interests” (Downs 1957). Defenders of the self-interest model may respond that voters believe their votes make a difference, however untenable this belief might be under logical scrutiny. Indeed, when asked why they vote, voters’ common response is that they are trying to help get one or another party elected to offi ce. When apprised of the illogical character of that response, the common reply is that there are in fact close elections, where the balance is tipped in one direction or another by only a few hundred votes. When confronted with the fact that one vote will not affect even such close elections, the common repost is that “Well, if everyone thought like that, we couldn’t run a democracy.” Politically active and informed citizens appear to operate on the principle that voting is both a duty and prerogative of citizenship, an altruistic act that is justifi ed by the categorical imperative: act in conformance with the morally correct behavior for individuals in one’s position, without regard to personal costs and benefi ts. Such mental reasoning, which has been called “shared 28 H. Gintis and C. van Schaik intentionality,” is implicated in many uniquely human cognitive characteristics, including cumulative culture and language (Sugden 2003; Bacharach 2006). Shared intentionality rests on a fundamentally prosocial disposition (Gilbert 1987; Bratman 1993; Tomasello and Carpenter 2007; Hrdy 2009). Human beings acting in the public sphere are, then, neither docile internalizers of dominant culture nor sociopathic personal gain maximizers. Rather, they are generally what Aristotle called zoon politikon—political beings (Aristotle 350 BC/2002). In this chapter we lay out a rather general framework for understanding this deep property of the human psyche, drawing in various ways on all the behavioral sciences. This framework will be used to elucidate the role of basic human political predispositions in creating and transforming sociopolitical structures. The Political and Economic Structure of Primate Societies Humans are one of more than two hundred extant species belonging to the Primate order. All primates have sociopolitical systems for regulating social life within their communities. Understanding human sociopolitical organization involves specifying how and why humans are similar to and different from other primate species. Similarities likely indicate that the trait was already present before humans evolved. For instance, many primate species, including humans, seek to dominate others and are adept at forming coalitions. It is thus likely that their common ancestor also possessed these traits. Dominance seeking and coalition