Hierarchy in the Forest

"Yes, indeed it is. Boehm starts from the paradox that we share a common ancestry with apes and monkeys who live in very hierarchical societies, and that today we live in pretty hierarchical societies, but that all the evidence suggests that in between the two we went through a period of existence as hunters and gatherers in societies which were remarkably egalitarian, with very little stratification of wealth and other resources. Boehm wants to know why. So the question is: Did human nature change in the interval? For a long time Jean-Jacques Rousseau sold the world a vision of society before modern civilisation, which suggested that human beings were naturally egalitarian and that it was only some corruption of modern society that had made it hierarchical. Boehm shoots down that view quite comprehensively and replaces it with a much more compelling story. In his picture, which is meticulously researched, the desire for status and competitiveness was no weaker in forager societies than it was with their great ape ancestors and than it is in modern society. The crucial thing is that in forager societies it’s counterbalanced by an equally strong – and in his view a distinctively human – talent to form coalitions to restrain the tendency of successful individuals to abuse their success. So, according to Boehm, everybody in a forager society wants to be successful and indeed has an intense sense of relative status and competition with others, but if any warrior gets too big for his boots he provokes a defensive coalition of the beta males who will ensure he is restrained and if necessary punished – to the point of being excluded or killed if he abuses the privileges to which his success gives him access. The beta males can achieve this because the powerful males need them in a forager ecology, unlike, say, in agricultural societies, which can rely on coercion and slavery. So Boehm’s vision of an egalitarian society is a much more realistic one. It’s not that everyone acquires this soppy desire to be equal to everybody else. Everybody remains as status conscious and competitive as they ever were, but they are also acutely aware of the dangers of abusing the privileges to which the acquisition of status might give rise. That’s something he documents as a remarkable human talent. I think Boehm’s book reconciles bourgeois society to the criticism that Nietzsche made of it, which was that it was a slave morality – according to him, modern bourgeois society enthrones the morality of the weak against the splendid instincts of the strong. Nietzsche meant that as a criticism, but in some sense Boehm is saying that it’s not a criticism. It is what makes modern society possible – the dashing and the strong are kept in check by the instincts of the rest of us. A very good example is of political leaders, where the processes that Boehm describes are beautifully illustrated. We go through this very dysfunctional process by which we all desperately want to believe in a leader, a warrior if you like, who will lead us out of our current doldrums. So we elect a warrior whom we briefly regard as a hero, and then we all start muttering in corners that he has feet of clay. I think this partly explains the depressingly masculine character of so much of political life. We want a warrior figure but then we start complaining about his failings. We bring him down to earth by deploying everything Nietzsche complained about as being the slave morality. Boehm reminds us that these are two inextricable facets of the way we treat our leaders. We want our leaders to both solve all our problems for us and not get above themselves. Boehm believes we’re asking the impossible."