A common motive for studying “egalitarian” social practices is a hope of supporting something like the following narrative:
We humans evolved to see ourselves as naturally egalitarian. This is shown by the highly egalitarian practices of modern foragers, who represent our best guess of typical ancestral practices until roughly 10,000 years ago. Modern nonegalitarian social practices are thus likely an affront to natural human morality and add to our modern alienation, stress, conflict, and unhappiness. We should thus move government policy toward more financial redistribution to make more equality.
It seems to me that Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden offer substantial reasons to doubt this narrative. I do not claim that they agree with my claim, only that they do not obviously disagree, and that the evidence they collect supports it.
Yes, they outline eight processes common in human societies that often have substantial effects of reducing particular kinds of inequality: demand-sharing, risk-pooling, prosocial reputation-building, status-levelling, consensus-based collective decision-making, and mobility.
However,
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1) the main motive for participating in such processes was not to reduce inequality,
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2) each such process only cuts a few types of inequality, not inequality in general, and
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3) societies have varied greatly in which processes they supported, and in their details.
This suggests that humans do not in fact have a general moral norm of egalitarianism.
Yes, cultural evolution, our best theoretical account of the origin and shaping of such processes, does suggest that such processes were once often widely adaptive, and that part of their adaptive benefit was often to cut inequality. However, the fact that our more recent ancestors have tended to drop such processes suggests they are no longer as adaptive in our world today.
We thus have at best only rather weak reasons to expect modern alienation, stress, conflict, or unhappiness today to result from our using such processes less. And no concrete reason to expect that reviving such practices would be adaptive on net. Given our weak data on cross-cultural happiness or meaning, we also have little evidence to suggest that such policies would help much today with such outcomes.
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A common motive for studying “egalitarian” social practices is a hope of supporting something like the following narrative:
We humans evolved to see ourselves as naturally egalitarian. This is shown by the highly egalitarian practices of modern foragers, who represent our best guess of typical ancestral practices until roughly 10,000 years ago. Modern nonegalitarian social practices are thus likely an affront to natural human morality and add to our modern alienation, stress, conflict, and unhappiness. We should thus move government policy toward more financial redistribution to make more equality.
It seems to me that Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden offer substantial reasons to doubt this narrative. I do not claim that they agree with my claim, only that they do not obviously disagree, and that the evidence they collect supports it.
Yes, they outline eight processes common in human societies that often have substantial effects of reducing particular kinds of inequality: demand-sharing, risk-pooling, prosocial reputation-building, status-levelling, consensus-based collective decision-making, and mobility.
However,
1) the main motive for participating in such processes was not to reduce inequality,
2) each such process only cuts a few types of inequality, not inequality in general, and
3) societies have varied greatly in which processes they supported, and in their details.
This suggests that humans do not in fact have a general moral norm of egalitarianism.
Yes, cultural evolution, our best theoretical account of the origin and shaping of such processes, does suggest that such processes were once often widely adaptive, and that part of their adaptive benefit was often to cut inequality. However, the fact that our more recent ancestors have tended to drop such processes suggests they are no longer as adaptive in our world today.
We thus have at best only rather weak reasons to expect modern alienation, stress, conflict, or unhappiness today to result from our using such processes less. And no concrete reason to expect that reviving such practices would be adaptive on net. Given our weak data on cross-cultural happiness or meaning, we also have little evidence to suggest that such policies would help much today with such outcomes.
Acknowledgments
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Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests
None.