(09/17/2024) A dominance hierarchy is a social structure where some people are allowed to hit you, and you're not allowed to hit back. It is defined by a sustained, institutionalized asymmetry of aggressive-submissive interactions. This skewed distribution of aggression enables a skewed distribution of resources and opportunities. Modern history has ostensibly been an epic conflict between different political ideas, but from this biological perspective, it has been awfully monolithic: mostly a conflict between dominance hierarchies that are justified with different language. Moreover, because reasoning is embodied, and subordination generates a distinct embodied state, we often have trouble seeing how coercion pervades our everyday life, or conceiving of other ways of being.
In this episode, we see how biological parsimony is the most fundamental counter to the justifications of the state that academics and laypeople alike tend to employ: dominance hierarchies do not exist in any other species for the reasons they are claimed to exist in humans. Species occupy a wide despotic-egalitarian continuum, and this continuum is not also one of social complexity or social order. We also sketch how a robust parallelism of social formations capable of exercising violence is necessary to prevent any one of them from gaining despotic power. Relying on the same logic of fluid alliance formation and fission that states have long employed, we describe a society in which each individual is the epicenter of a unique configuration of armed force, each of which must act as a counter-power to every other.
Bibliography for episode 77:
Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press, 2009.
Carneiro, Robert L. “A Theory of the Origin of the State.” Science 169, no. 3947 (1970): 733–38.
David, J. T., M. C. Cervantes, K. A. Trosky, J. A. Salinas, and Y. Delville. “A Neural Network Underlying Individual Differences in Emotion and Aggression in Male Golden Hamsters.” Neuroscience 126, no. 3 (2004): 567–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2004.04.031.
De Waal, Frans B. M., and Denise L. Johanowicz. “Modification of Reconciliation Behavior Through Social Experience: An Experiment with Two Macaque Species.” Child Development 64, no. 3 (1993): 897–908. https://doi.org/10.2307/1131225.
Dingemanse, Niels J., Anahita J. N. Kazem, Denis Réale, and Jonathan Wright. “Behavioural Reaction Norms: Animal Personality Meets Individual Plasticity.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 25, no. 2 (February 1, 2010): 81–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2009.07.013.
Haley, Hillary, and Jim Sidanius. “Person-Organization Congruence and the Maintenance of Group-Based Social Hierarchy: A Social Dominance Perspective.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations 8, no. 2 (2005): 187–203. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430205051067.
Kelly, Robert L. The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Ph.D, Peter A. Levine. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences. North Atlantic Books, 1997.
Lorenz, K. Z. “Evolution of Ritualization in the Biological and Cultural Spheres.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 251, no. 772 (1966): 273–84.
Lorenz, Konrad. On Aggression. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1974.
Mitani, John C., David P. Watts, and Sylvia J. Amsler. “Lethal Intergroup Aggression Leads to Territorial Expansion in Wild Chimpanzees.” Current Biology: CB 20, no. 12 (June 22, 2010): R507-508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.04.021.
Natarajan, Deepa, Han de Vries, Dirk-Jan Saaltink, Sietse F. de Boer, and Jaap M. Koolhaas. “Delineation of Violence from Functional Aggression in Mice: An Ethological Approach.” Behavior Genetics 39, no. 1 (January 2009): 73–90. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-008-9230-3.
Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press, 2009.
Sherman, Paul W., Eileen A. Lacey, Hudson K. Reeve, and Laurent Keller. “Forum: The Eusociality Continuum.” Behavioral Ecology 6, no. 1 (March 1, 1995): 102–8. https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/6.1.102.
Shirer, William L. Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Simon and Schuster, 1990.
Sloan Wilson, David, Anne B. Clark, Kristine Coleman, and Ted Dearstyne. “Shyness and Boldness in Humans and Other Animals.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 9, no. 11 (November 1, 1994): 442–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/0169-5347(94)90134-1.
Vehrencamp, Sandra L. “A Model for the Evolution of Despotic versus Egalitarian Societies.” Animal Behaviour 31, no. 3 (August 1, 1983): 667–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0003-3472(83)80222-X.
Wilson, Edward O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Wilson, Edward O. The Social Conquest of Earth. W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
Wolf, Max, G. Sander van Doorn, and Franz J. Weissing. “Evolutionary Emergence of Responsive and Unresponsive Personalities.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 41 (October 14, 2008): 15825–30. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0805473105.
Woodburn, James. “Egalitarian Societies.” Man 17, no. 3 (1982): 431–51. https://doi.org/10.2307/2801707.
Wrangham, Richard W. “Targeted Conspiratorial Killing, Human Self-Domestication and the Evolution of Groupishness.” Evolutionary Human Sciences 3 (January 2021): e26. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2021.20.
Photo by Tim McAteer
Comments