Objectivism and the Hunter Gatherers

I'm introducing Objectivism bit by bit to my friend and last night we were discussing this quote by Rand:

"Today, you are supposed to feel guilty and apologize to every naked savage anywhere on the globe if you are more prosperous because you've earned your money, while he hasn't and doesn't intend to learn from you - he just wants your money."

My friend responded with this statement

"The majority of human history was spent in egalitarian groups of hunter-gatherers. We evolved under these circumstances. Our species prospered and came to dominate our landscape by cooperating and working together to survive and prosper. Imagine if during that time we had stuck to your Rand philosophy! We would have been eaten by wolves or simply murdered each other."

The hunter-gatherer theme is something that keeps popping up in discussions like these and I'm wondering how much truth is there in my friend's statement?

Post 1

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 7:38am

Ask your friend how humans ever moved beyond hunting and gathering into agriculture, industry, technology, and service methods of production and trade.

That might break the mindset.

Moreover, if he wants to talk about prospering and dominating, at what point in human history did population growth rates accelerate while mortality rates improved?

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 7/16, 7:56am)

Post 2

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 8:00am

The phrase "eaten by wolves or simply murdered each other" suggests that your interlocutor is, consciously or not, under the influence of Hobbes. Self-interest on this account precludes peaceful co-operation to mutual benefit because its definition precludes peaceful co-operation to mutual benefit. Whether or not Hobbes was the first to come up with this, people typically cite his authority when they say it. I recently saw a longer, fancier exposition of the same belief.

It is in any case dead wrong as a characterization of Rand.

Post 3

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 11:43am

Egalitarianism is not well defined.

I don't think you could do better than to read what Ayn Rand wrote on the subject, some of which has been gathered together on the same web page at the Ayn Rand Lexicon.

You can see that it is possible to discuss egalitariansim as a guiding principle of a political system, where it requires that a government enforce the form of equality that is being embraced - ususally this is financial and the method chosen is the redistribution of wealth.

After reading the Rand material you can see that if the only form of equality being sought is equality under the law, that is not egalitarianism since it doesn't address equality under any measure of end result or equality of ability or character or virtue or effort.

It sounds as if your friend may be coming from the position that egalitarianism arises from aspects of human nature and that it is the imposition of government that is 'unnatural' and that causes the problems. That he advocates a form anarchy.

In essence, he is either forced to take the position that humans don't have inalienable, universal rights - that is, that being human does not grant one the right to life. Or, he is forced to the position that we do have rights, but that their support or defense will arise naturally by not having a government. Neither of those positions is logically defensible, but usually that does not even faze an anarchist.

This 'worship' of the hunter-gather existence is only possible from a kind of academic, ivory-tower idiocy that is steeped in denial. Anyone that tries to go out and actually live in that fashion for real finds that out in days. There is nothing idyllic about going through life with a shelter made of mud or twigs or animal skin. It isn't much fun to be without light, heat, air conditioning, hot showers, shampoo, deodorant, indoor plumbing, or even toilet paper. There is nothing to recommend sustaining oneself with bow and arrow or club or gathering grubs and whatnot when compared to shopping in today's supermarkets. There is no joy in maintaining ones health without modern medicine or bringing children into a world without any medicine. As a species we had to invent a great many things before we could populate the globe. Before that we died in great numbers from things like childbirth, starvation, disease, and homicide (sometimes from someone in the tribe, sometimes from another tribe).

Here is how I break up his statement: "The majority of human history was spent in egalitarian groups of hunter-gatherers."

That it was a majority of human history is not a recommendation. When a person is bankrupt, it take longer to achieve goals that a person with resources could accomplish sooner. It takes a long, long time to get anywhere when you start from nothing.

"We evolved under these circumstances."

Biological evolution? So what? Bacteria, rats, fruit flies... all organisms are always subject to the laws of biological evolution. If you use the population size as the determination of fitness, then our current population says we are more fit now, then back when we existed in the very few numbers of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

"Our species prospered and came to dominate our landscape by cooperating and working together to survive and prosper."

Each increase in technology was accompanied by an increase in prosperity (measured by wealth, or by those who survived, or by the average age attained). It started as the survival of the most brutal - the physically strongest and cruelest. We evolved systems to provide equality under the law. We evolved medicine, agriculture, and the internet.

"Imagine if during that time we had stuck to your Rand philosophy! We would have been eaten by wolves or simply murdered each other."

He has no grasp of Rand's philosophy. Her philosophy makes explicit the principles that make prospering and cooperating possible. Consider just one aspect of this country: We explicitly declared freedom of speech and separation of church and state. By doing that we created an environment where we are free of fears of being interfered with in these realms. The very best of the hunter-gather societies required strict conformity and punishment could be very harsh.

Your friend could move to one of the few places on earth where it is still possible to join a hunter-gatherer society - but I'll bet you he never does.

Post 4

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 12:27pm

Michael,

I agree with Luke's, Peter's, and Steve's answers.

Life in a 50-person tribe is very different from living in civilized society. In a 50-person tribe, it's possible to know everyone, to remember everyone. It's possible for each individual to have a long-standing, behavior- and response-modifying reputation with every other individual in the tribe. This is not possible in civilized society.

Also, in a relatively-unproductive 50-person tribe, survival depends on raiding the neighboring (also unproductive) tribes. A scientific study was done on the evolution of costly cooperation in a nomadic society in Africa:

Understanding cooperation and punishment in small-scale societies is crucial for explaining the origins of human cooperation. We studied warfare among the Turkana, a politically uncentralized, egalitarian, nomadic pastoral society in East Africa. Based on a representative sample of 88 recent raids, ...

88 recent raids?! Give me a break! If you can study a society for a short time, and in that time witness 88 "recent" raids of other societies, then doesn't that tell you that warfare is the very lifeblood of a tribe? If 88 raids are performed in a short (short enough to study) time-frame, then just how many raids does it take to sustain a tribe for one generation? 200 raids? 500 raids? Just how much raping, pillaging, and murdering needs to be performed in order for one of these tribes to be "healthy"?

Tribes are not a proper example for the moral development or evaluation of man. Folks who appeal to tribes, such as Karl Marx, are often not being 100% intellectually honest. This limitation is forgivable if eventually superceded. Many of us, including myself, started out our 'thinking careers' by being less than perfectly intellectually honest with ourselves (and, therefore, with others).

Imagine if during that time we had stuck to your Rand philosophy! We would have been eaten by wolves or simply murdered each other.

The above is so laughable it ought to be answered with a cartoon. Luckily, I made one for just this kind of circumstance:

http://rebirthofreason.com/Spirit/Videos/220.shtml

:-)

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 7/16, 12:49pm)

Post 5

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 12:50pm

Michael Shermer stated in a speech about his book The Science of Good and Evil that early humans experienced a mortality rate of 30% due to tribal warfare.

Clearly the "egalitarianism" and "cooperation" failed to extend beyond tribal boundaries!

(Edited by Luke Setzer on 7/16, 12:52pm)

Post 6

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 1:37pm

Here's the thing: The most basic (and exciting) feature of human nature is the capacity to imagine things that don't exist (but might be able to exist), to reason about these things, and to make choices and take actions that create those new things. Putting imagination, reason, choice and action together explains our continual progress in all areas (given a structure that protects the right to do this).

The hunter-gatherer is trying to figure out how to get a grub out of a tough tree trunk and before long he's invented a chopping implement. Someone else looks at his implement and imagines an improvement. Each new implementation, each improvement - no matter how small, no matter what area it is done in (technology, philosophy, economics, social constructs, relationships, etc.) it becomes a new source of inspiration - a new jumping off point that can be improved upon - and usually in multiple ways - resulting in an exponential rate at which improvements are brought into being. The more gizmos, ideas, practices, skills, AND people there are, the faster the rate at which we get new things/idea/practices/etc.

It isn't just a change for society, or the accumulation of improvements that becomes part of history, but it is personal - you improve your own life. You are driving to work and wonder if taking Main Street before getting to the freeway would be faster despite being a bit longer distance... (that's the imagining of something that you've never done before - that hasn't existed before), you reason that it would save time because of fewer traffic lights, you choose to try it, it works and you have made an improvement. In the dim recess of history a man was deciding the best way to get from his village to his fishing hole. In the future our cars may drive themselves and select the fastest track with real-time analysis of traffic pattern. It is the evolution that flows from human nature.

You boss is a control freak and you realize that some ways of working with him are more productive than others. You reason out an approach that doesn't doesn't trigger his insecurity and put it in place - life at work improves. And of course the best of all expression of this human approach to life is in a person's career. You evolve your life with a continuing process of improving.

This is the heart of human nature. This is where human flourishing comes from - both in the products of this practice, but more importantly in the doing. This is what makes life an experience worth having - this application of productivity to whatever a person's area of expertise is.

People who fight this and envision some static utopia where there is no need for any change, no improvement is needed or wanted, reveal something about their psychology. They hate that life requires anything of them. They are frightened at some deep level of needing to be responsible for producing. Look for anger, passive aggressive behavior, ridicule - those are often the form that fear defends itself with.

(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 7/16, 1:52pm)

Post 7

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 1:41pm

Michael,

A study (see abstract below) was done on the intra-group cooperation found in small societies versus the cooperation found in medium and large ones. It turns out that, in small societies, folks are not as generous to each other. The likely reason for that is that in small societies, there's zero-sum, jungle-law dynamics (one person's gain is another's loss) and there's very little to go around -- so folks hoard "public" goods when they can get away with it (such as in the Dictator Game mentioned in the abstract).

What it means is that living in small societies has a psychological effect on members, making them more short-sightedly and narrow-mindedly "selfish" (it makes them act like small children or even like animals). Also, in small societies, spiteful punishment (punishment of aggressor by victim) keeps folks cooperating with each other. Importantly, this effect is enough to explain all of the cooperation found in small societies.

Also, altruistic punishment (punishment of aggressor by a third-party onlooker or "vigilante") is not as big of a deal in small societies as it is in larger ones. What this tells me is that the sense of objective justice is diminished in small societies. Again, likely due to the zero-sum, each-for-himself, jungle-law dynamics of small societies. A healthy society will have a lot of vigilantes acting for objective justice. The healthiest societies take it one step further, and go ahead and create a unique entity, a government, for the implementation of justice and the protection of individual rights.

These peculiarities make the use of small, hunter-gatherer tribes as a model for man inappropriate at least, if not outright dishonest.

Ed

**********************************************************
Abstract

Proc Biol Sci. 2011 Jul 22;278(1715):2159-64. Epub 2010 Dec 15.

The 'spiteful' origins of human cooperation.

Marlowe FW, Berbesque JC, Barrett C, Bolyanatz A, Gurven M, Tracer D.

Source

Department of Anthropology, University of Durham, , Dawson Building, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK.

Abstract

We analyse generosity, second-party ('spiteful') punishment (2PP), and third-party ('altruistic') punishment (3PP) in a cross-cultural experimental economics project. We show that smaller societies are less generous in the Dictator Game but no less prone to 2PP in the Ultimatum Game. We might assume people everywhere would be more willing to punish someone who hurt them directly (2PP) than someone who hurt an anonymous third person (3PP). While this is true of small societies, people in large societies are actually more likely to engage in 3PP than 2PP. Strong reciprocity, including generous offers and 3PP, exists mostly in large, complex societies that face numerous challenging collective action problems. We argue that 'spiteful' 2PP, motivated by the basic emotion of anger, is more universal than 3PP and sufficient to explain the origins of human cooperation.

PMID:: 21159680

Post 8

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 2:09pm

Luke wrote:

Michael Shermer stated in a speech about his book The Science of Good and Evil that early humans experienced a mortality rate of 30% due to tribal warfare.

And, for more on that, see:

THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE MYTH
Why The Grass is Always Greener in the Other Century

Ed

Post 9

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 6:39pm

Michael Philip,

"The majority of human history was spent in egalitarian groups of hunter-gatherers. We evolved under these circumstances. Our species prospered and came to dominate our landscape by cooperating and working together to survive and prosper. Imagine if during that time we had stuck to your Rand philosophy! We would have been eaten by wolves or simply murdered each other."

1. Murder is an initiation of force, which is antagonistic to capitalism. Capitalism is the optimal political/economic system recognized by objectivists.

2. Egalitarian is poorly defined. Anyways, prosperity results from people creating more or equal value to what they consume, and when they are paid near equal to the value they create... which happens in capitalism, and totally doesn't happen in socialism.

If your friend is not just naive (He is attacking invalid straw man perceptions of Objectivism), but a deep down a socialist, then maybe its not worth any time arguing with him?

Post 10

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - 9:08pm