I recently enjoyed "What Would Jefferson Do?"; the erudite assemblage of an overall view of Jefferson's beliefs was enlightening. However, I was appalled and dismayed by Chapter 7, "Democracy, not Dominance, is the Way of Nature". This chapter offers the thesis that democratic approaches are the "natural" means of group decision-making. It certainly demonstrates the old saw that a little knowledge is dangerous. Mr. Hartmann parlays a small amount of knowledge of anthropology and animal behavior into a stunningly incorrect thesis.

Mr. Hartmann bases his thesis on a paper published in the journal Nature presenting a theoretical model for group behavior. The original paper does not attempt to prove that the model is correct: it instead offers a theoretical explanation of how decentralized decision-making could be beneficial to individual members of the species.

There is certainly plenty of empirical data to support the basic thesis. There are certainly SOME kinds of group decision-making in SOME species that are based on decentralized decision-making. For example, many herd grazers determine the direction in which they will move by an almost stochastic process in which the aggregated majority decision determines the behavior for the entire group. Bird flocking also shows this kind of behavior: without any central direction, the flock operates as a unit. Indeed, one can build a strong argument that social insects (ants and bees, for example) are democratic because so much of their decision-making is highly decentralized.

However, Mr. Hartmann takes this thesis and runs amok with it. He jumps to the completely unjustified conclusion that democracy is the "natural" way to run any society. He completely ignores the many cases of animal behavior that are undeniably tyrannical, especially in the crucial matters of food acquisition and mating. A huge array of species grant special status to a dominant male who "rules the roost", relegating all other males to genetic oblivion. Indeed, dominance behavior is much more common than decentralized cooperative decision-making. The reason why, 150 years after Darwin published, we are just now getting around to addressing the phenomenon of decentralized decision-making is because it is an outlier in the range of animal behavior. It is most certainly not the norm.

Mr. Hartmann's mangling of evolutionary theory is matched by his abuse of anthropology. Harkening back to Rousseau's notion of "The Noble Savage", Mr. Hartmann advances the completely discredited notion that low-density hunter-gatherer societies are benign democracies that eschew violence. This notion has been pulverized by countless studies. Yes, there are some interesting examples from history of cultures that minimized reliance on violence in their relations with their neighbors. But in many of these cases, we learned that there was some special oddity at work behind the scenes that resulted in such behavior. History is populated with more Attilas than Christs. The canvas of all human history, not just Western history, is overwhelmingly colored blood-red. The reason why most of the hunter-gatherer cultures we have studied in modern times are peaceable is simple: violent hunter-gatherer societies were exterminated by Westerners before the anthropologists got to them. And any anthropologist who attempted to study a violent hunter-gatherer society probably never made it home to publish.

Mr. Hartmann's argument is further compromised by his reliance on simplistic notions of dominance and hierarchy. He approaches the problem as a black-and-white distinction between despotism and democracy. But there has never in history been any absolute distinction; all societies have varying degrees of hierarchical structure. The most civilized democracies still have lots of powerful males who throw their weight around to make things happen. While I will not offer American democracy as an example of an "advanced democracy", it's still well ahead of most other governments in its adherence to democratic principles. But consider how consistently those principles are abused by politicians throwing their weight around. That's hierarchical behavior, not democracy. And even the most brutal totalitarian regimes are unable to exert control over the most private aspects of their citizen's lives.

When you think of the history of civilization in terms of "degree of hierarchical control" instead of Mr. Hartmann's simplistic "despotism versus democracy", you can see a steady erosion of hierarchical control and its replacement by the rule of law. We still have a considerable ways to go down this path, of course.

The most unsettling aspect of Mr. Hartmann's thesis is its denial of the very idea of human progress. Mr. Hartmann would have us believe that building democracy is like falling out of bed -- something so obvious and natural that the only reason for our failure to achieve democratic paradise on earth is the intervention of evil people who deny us our birthright. This puts Mr. Hartmann in same camp with Mr. Bush and the neoconservatives who expected to snap their fingers and make democracy sprout in Iraq. The collapse of Iraqi society demonstrates just how hard a thing it is to build democracy.

Democracy is like the Internet, modern medicine, great literature, or any of the other noble products of civilization: it is NOT natural, it doesn't come easily, it has taken the efforts of millions of people over many centuries to develop, and it should be cherished precisely because it is such a huge forward leap from the old way of doing things. Mr. Hartmann manages, in a single chapter, to grossly misunderstand and foully minimize what is perhaps the noblest achievement of civilization.

Your dogma reminds me of those who claim ever so dogmatically that "Man is NOT an animal!". The argument you pose upholds humans as "spectacularly different" from animals, who could not possibly have a functional social organization. Even the Humanist Greeks who glorified Democracy as uniquely human did so with an almost religious reverence, as though bowing before a graven image.

Therefore, I suggest that you are erecting an edifice to Ego. While you may be right about the "Noble Savage" part, the "democratic" animal group Thom speaks of does seem to be essentially right.

Your comparison of the internet, etc, to other great human achievements is off the mark. These things we have built are communication mechanisms, a more effective way to share our wishes collectively. We as individuals remain animals, forever separate and alone.

Gnarlodious, your suggestion that I am presenting Homo sapiens as something other than an animal runs afoul of the fact that I am relying primarily on Darwinism and anthropology -- science -- to make my case. I most certainly do not elevate humankind to some mystically special status. Yes, humans have accomplished a great deal -- they have radiated into many ecological niches and they have established themselves as the top predator. But none of this gives them any mystical special status.

Could you expand on your statement that "the "democratic" animal group Thom speaks of does seem to be essentially right." in light of my own comments on the subject?

Thank you for that first clarification.
As to the second point, I would say that the authoritative animal group is inherently self limiting. Higher animals, like dogs, cats and primates, that may well be authority oriented seem to have a small number of individuals. There seems to be a maximum number of individuals that can be effectively dominated.
Lower animals, such as ungulates, fish, birds and insects almost certainly do not have an alpha leader. There is no way imaginable that a bee swarm, for example, could be controlled by authority. Collective thought would be the reasonable explanation for their behavior. In that case, the only disputable point would be the definition of "higher animal".

erasfrog,

I'm not agreeing with you nor am I disagreeing with you.

You post reminded me of this study

Gnarlodious, you are taking an overly anthropomorphic approach when you use terms like "authority". The preferred term here is "dominance hierarchy" because it clearly communicates the notion that there is some sort of hierarchy, not absolute domination, despotism, or tyrrany. Moreover, we must always remember that these hierarchies are always confined to a few aspects of behavior. The bull seal makes no effort to control food resources; he controls only sexual access to the females in his harem. Other dominance hierarchies are based on territory. In a number of monkey species, the females establish loose hierarchies based on alliances with each other; these hierarchies serve to control access to the best food.

Lastly, we try not to think in terms of "lower" and "higher" animals. Each species represents the best adaptation to its ecological niche, and so no species is "better" than any other. Yes, homo sapiens has established itself as the alpha predator over the entire planet, and adapted to many ecological niches, and so is wildly successful -- but not better. Ghengis Khan was wildly successful, too.

Bonnie, yes, that study about altruism certainly suggests that some forms of cooperative behavior are innate. Humans definitely have a lot of social intelligence.

quote:

Humans definitely have a lot of social intelligence.

Hehehehee... ...I think even that is debatable.

I can only speak of our chicken experiment. We had many roosters and many hens but not enough for each rooster to have a collective group of hens. However, hens did "pick" the rooster and not always the dominant one came out on top (sorry no pun intended.)

In fact, right now we've got a majority of large hens (Buff Orpingtons) to one small rooster (blue silkie.) And by no means is he dominant. In fact, my beautiful Golden Laced Polish Rooster had to be taken out because he got mean and started attacking my daughter. (He was the best Tina Turner chicken look a-like ever.)

I consider the human phenomenon to the same weekend questions between my husband and myself.

"How do you want your eggs cooked?"

"I don't care, surprise me."

The End.

I have to say I think it is silly to try and argue for _any_ political philosophy on the basis of some general theory of animals. Animals have evolved into millions of evolutionary niches and employ just about any strategy human ingenuity can think of. Generalizing about them just cancels out into "stuff happens."

There are a lot of reactionaries who try to argue that various forms of hierarchy and exploitation--male dominance for instance--are "natural." It may actually make some sense to look at _humans_ in the "state of nature" _we_ evolved before we invented stuff like agriculture. Because we lived as gatherer-hunters, not in a very distinctly different way than our clearly pre-human distant ancestors did, for over 100,000 years before anyone started farming. If we have any "natural" tendencies, they would have to be those that suited ancient gatherer-hunters, not more recent types of human society.

The trouble with reactionary "state of nature" theories is that they just about never take account of how actual human gatherer-hunters actually live. I think there is a lot of support for the thesis that democracy _is_ natural to H Sapiens Sapiens based on how our pre-agricultural ancestors lived their lives.

Before agriculture, we lived in "bands" of between 50-200 people. All GH peoples I have heard of did have division of labor by gender--women would gather plants for food and materials for baskets, clothes, huts, and so forth, and men would go off in smaller bands to hunt. Sometimes the hunt would be a big project involving all the men at once, sometimes it would be small groups off on their own.

But first of all the basic economic principle was sharing. GH people relied on very few items of simple technology; no one had a monopoly of skill on how to make anything anyone needed, so it would not have made sense for anyone to try and claim privileges. If one woman made better baskets than any others, and wouldn't share, the others could always make their own well enough. The women would gather in groups of kin and friends, sharing the work of taking care of the young children that moved around with them. A hunter who tried to claim too big a share of the kill for himself would become unpopular and risk being shamed or threatened with exile (equivalent to a death sentence, rarely carried out, and when carried out an expelled member of a band could either join a neighboring band or his old band would eventually let him or her come back--having learned a lesson about the need for cooperation.)

There is no evidence that any gatherer-hunter peoples had any tendency to create a privileged class among themselves. There was an effective balance of power between men and women; all children were raised with equal status; those who lived to be old were respected for their knowledge but were hardly given any kind of dictatorial authority.

I think if we want to explain class hierarchy, authoritarianism, or systematic terrorization of some or all members of a society (which is indeed common throughout history) we do better to understand and acknowledge how drastically different our economies are from those we evolved for; how they allow for the possibility of monopolization of crucial resources and skills; how psychologically stressful it is for people who evolved having to work, on the average, just 4 hours a day to become enslaved to crops in the ground and thus held hostage to quirks of weather, and bound to day after day of backbreaking labor. Most of all, we have to consider that when we multiplied our productivity with agriculture and made possible (indeed mandatory) settled life and thus the accumulation of wealth, it became possible for some people to seize this surplus wealth by violence and to raid other communities for more--thus the levels of society we know in history are characterized by organized, systematic violence, the foundations of class hierarchy and unbounded individual ambition. I think this is the foundation of sexism as well, as societies polarized between warrior men and women bound more and more to domestic work and childbearing to replenish the supply of warriors.

I don't mean to represent our ancestral gather-hunter societies as Paradise on Earth, although our idea of Paradise and our deepest moral foundations are I think certainly rooted in gatherer-hunter values. Economic and social progress beyond that level was essential to enabling humanity to exist in numbers more than a percentage or so of the current population. As gatherer-hunters we were already fully human, but we were living basically like animals--very successful animals, with relatively little to fear, thanks to our intelligent social cooperation, but still animals, living off the existing ecosystem. It is only as post-agricultural people we can develop our potential to transform the world and ourselves by our work.

The question is, to what end will we do this?

Democracy, I think, is not about getting the smartest, or wisest, people in charge. It is about guaranteeing the equal dignity of all people, so that those visionaries who do come along with grand projects in mind will take care to respect everyone and exploit no one. Quite obviously this ideal is out of whack with post-agricultural history, but it is the moral order, I think, we all yearn for. Only by distributing real power to everyone can we hope to see to it everyone gets respect, and only by guaranteeing equal respect for all can we satisfy our deepest yearnings for how the world should be.

A final word about the distinction between people and animals--I quite agree that there is an old and false distinction, which I believe emerges from the interests of hierarchical militaristic exploiters, radically separating us from the animals. We _are_ animals, and we emerge from the Earth, and owe the natural order some deep respect. We can't trash the planet without suffering grim repurcussions we ought to be able to avoid.

That said--I think there _is_ a distinction. The individual human brain is basically the same kind of thing as the brain of a smart animal like a dog or a horse or the like--bigger, able to process far more information to be sure. But we _got_ that way because we evolved a unique ecological niche in which creatures that didn't have any particular bodily trick to give us an advantage instead invested in brain power to better comprehend our environment, to organize cooperation between ourselves, and to pass information on from one of us to another. Our manipulative abilities enabling us to make tools and other items of material culture co-evolved with language and sheer brainpower to make us, uniquely, the creatures who develop _ideas_ about the world and refine them cooperatively. Smart animals I think have ideas too, but they can't share them, they can't check them with different perceptions. They can't pass them on to later generations, build complex and potentially unbounded models of the world they live in, devise ever more sophisticated economic and social systems.

To my mind the fundamental _human_ trick, whatever various animals may do, is social cooperation. What one individual cannot accomplish, a sufficient number of humans, working on a problem for enough time, can eventually do, and then we learn to do it more and more efficiently. This is the basis of our power. I feel it is also the basis of our responsibility--to take care of each other, and then to take care of the world that gave us birth, and to explore and revere the Universe we belong to. I don't know if there is any limit to what humanity may accomplish--if we remember to love ourselves, our neighbors, our cosmos.

If we don't we'll probably figure out how to kill ourselves completely off quite soon now.