The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (88 page)

The first kingdoms or oligarchic states appeared 5,000 years ago in Egypt and Mesopotamia and 2,000 years ago in Mexico and Peru. We find it hard to date the moment of state formation, because the creation of a state often required several generations of aggressive rulers. And despite all the similarities we have seen in first-generation states, they were neither common nor inevitable. As late as the twentieth century, many parts of the world still displayed nothing more complex than rank societies.

What are the clues that a kingdom has been created? At the regional scale, archaeologists look for signs that the political hierarchy had at least four levels, the upper three of which featured administrators. They look for the standardized temples of a state religion, as well as for secular buildings whose ground plans reflect councils or assemblies. At the capital they look for palaces built by corvée labor and tombs with sumptuary goods appropriate for royalty. At Level 2 administrative centers there may be smaller versions of such residences and tombs, often displaying the standardized architecture of a top-down administration. Another clue would be workers’ receipt of rations doled out with standardized bowls, griddles, or redeemable tokens. Sometimes the archaeologist’s task is made easier by a kingdom’s use of writing or art to convey the agenda of its leaders.

Few of the rulers who created kingdoms were content with the territories they controlled. Whenever a new state was surrounded by weaker neighbors, the temptation to expand was great. Sometimes, as in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, this expansion set off a chain reaction that created multiple fortified kingdoms. In other cases, as on the north coast of Peru, expansion created a multiethnic empire. The key to expansion lay in knowing which neighbors were vulnerable and which were best left alone.

Who created the world’s first empire? While many archaeologists would point to Sargon of Akkad, he may have received more credit than he deserves. An earlier king, Lugal-zagesi, claims to have held sway from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean. And even before Lugal-zagesi rose to power, some Egyptian kings may have subjugated the whole region from Nubia to the Southern Levant.

Empires, in other words, are probably more than 4,300 years old. And along with empires came ethnic stereotyping, an escalation of simpler societies’ long-standing ethnocentrism. The precedent for racial, religious, and ethnic intolerance had been set.

Early kingdoms and empires did more than this, of course. Many state regimes took away whatever vestiges of equality the individual commoner had left. In the Aztec state, even commoners who cultivated cotton were forbidden to wear cotton mantles. Sumerian law restricted commoner marriage to one man and one woman, giving later societies the impression that monogamy was a divinely sanctioned norm. The Sumerians also strengthened economic inequality among commoners, increasing the likelihood that it would endure even if hereditary privilege were to disappear.

Finally, empires took away the freedom of other societies by turning them into subject colonies. To be sure, the commoners in those societies had been treated as an underclass even before they were colonized; it was their elite who wound up losing the most. Sometimes conquered leaders were mollified with gifts, or they were allowed to participate in the joint rule of their former territories.

We have left the topic of colonialism until now because few subjects evoke more passion from today’s anthropologists. That field has had a long-standing love affair with political correctness, and many anthropology courses preach that colonialism is evil and that resistance to colonialism is good. So pervasive is this mantra that many of today’s professors refuse to assign the anthropological literature written in Queen Victoria’s era, even those works considered classics. Some go so far as to accuse the nineteenth-century social anthropologists of being complicit in colonialism, since few of them vigorously denounced it.

This is political correctness times ten. Colonialism was created neither by anthropologists nor by Queen Victoria. It is at least 4,300 years old, the product of kings who sought to add land and tribute to their realms. The Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Moors, Aztec, and Inca did not learn their craft from anthropologists, and most of their leaders make Queen Victoria sound like Mother Teresa.

Roman archaeologists do not refuse to read Caesar’s commentaries on the grounds that he was “the tool of a colonial power.” Latin Americanists do not ignore the 1580
Relaciones Geográficas
on the grounds that the Spaniards writing them had colonized Mexico. One can thus oppose the phenomenon of colonialism without trashing every author who lived in an empire.

WHAT IF FORAGERS WERE IN CHARGE?

Archaeologists are frequently asked two questions about inequality. One, which we have tried to answer, is: How did it arise in the first place? The second is: How can we get rid of it?

Rousseau had his own ideas about the second question. He believed that people could only be happy and free in a community simple enough to be intelligible to them and small enough to enable them to take a full and equal part in its government. In a huge society with a complex economy, there would, out of necessity, be hierarchy and inequality; the majority of what Rousseau called “passive citizens” would be controlled and exploited by the “active few.” Some of Rousseau’s readers took this to mean that hereditary privilege in eighteenth-century France could only be overturned by a bloody revolution.

The perspective taken in this book, however, allows for alternatives to bloody revolution. If inequality is the result of incremental changes in social logic—and if those changes can be reconstructed—might we not be able to return society to equality just as incrementally, beginning with the most recent changes and working back?

If inequality could be reversed by identifying and retracing its steps, at least some of the information would need to come from archaeology and social anthropology. That fact should provide both fields with incentives to work together.

We once broached this subject with Scotty MacNeish, an archaeologist who had spent 40 years studying social evolution. How, we wondered, could society be made more egalitarian? After briefly consulting his old friend Jack Daniels, MacNeish replied, “Put hunters and gatherers in charge.”

We are not sure whether the suggestion came from Jack or Scotty, but it gave us something to think about. Putting hunter-gatherers in charge would reduce inequality overnight. It would, to be sure, require a bit of getting used to, because modern society has eliminated many behaviors that foragers took for granted.

Let us briefly consider what our life would be like if we were to leave it in the hands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers or achievement-based farmers. To begin with, there are a few things that probably would not change. Even after our society had been turned over to the people mentioned earlier, a certain degree of sexism and age-based discrimination would remain. Not all egalitarian societies believed that women had the capacity to be as virtuous as men. And few of them considered young men to possess the virtue of older men.

Our society would also retain its ethnocentrism. Our treatment of other groups, however, would no longer include religious proselytizing. Foragers and achievement-based farmers believed that each ethnic group had been created by different celestial spirits, received its own instructions for living, honored its own ancestors, and could not expect other groups to share its beliefs. If our neighbors’ dress, religion, and behavior were different from ours, it would not be because they were wicked but because their origins were different.

Our society’s tolerance of variation would extend to marriage. A man with two or more wives, a wife with two or more husbands, or even a foursome such as the one in
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
would be accepted. We would permit same-sex weddings, such as those involving Native American “two-spirit” people. Marriage would not be seen as a match made in heaven but as an economic partnership in which maximum flexibility was desirable.

Since many foragers practiced infanticide, our new leaders would not outlaw abortion. Because of their belief in reincarnation (a view that survives even among twenty-first-century Americans), foragers felt that every “spirit child” would have multiple opportunities to be born.

Tribal societies had no laws preventing child labor. For our teenagers there would not be as many hours of video games and hanging out at the mall, just lots of chores. It is likely, however, that our teenagers’ frenzied music and dancing would bring on the same awe-inspiring high that tribal societies experienced.

Foragers believed that success depended partly on skill and partly on magic. If you think that anything has changed, watch a dugout full of baseball players putting on their “rally caps” to influence the outcome of a game.

In fact, despite their pragmatism, hunters and gatherers saw no contradiction in combining magic, science, and religion. Our belief in the separation of church and state would surprise them. At the same time, whenever their cosmology interfered with the adoption of a useful scientific or technological innovation, they would change the cosmology.

Foragers had an ethic of sharing that would alter business as we know it. They would never allow CEOs to earn thousands of times what assembly-line workers earn. Achievement-based villagers, for their part, would pressure management into throwing huge feasts for the workers and their families. They would also insist on a safety net for the less fortunate, such as the Tewa distribution of food to poor families.

Hunters and gatherers would admire philanthropists. At the same time, they would keep those generous millionaires from getting too pleased with themselves. They would rely on sarcastic comments such as, “You call that a charitable donation? The check was hardly worth cashing.”

As for people who have the opposite problem—those who have accepted so much from others that they cannot pay it back—achievement-based villagers would have a solution. Such people would be turned into servants or slaves, forced to work off their debt through hard labor. Don’t tell Master Card.

Then there are thieves who take others’ property with no intention of returning it. Traditional foragers reacted angrily to theft and had little patience with repeat offenders. They believed in capital punishment and had no concept whatsoever of long-term imprisonment. If it were left up to the Basarwa, Bernie Madoff would simply have been lured into the wilderness and shot with poisoned arrows.

How would foragers handle the problem of illegal immigration? They would establish hxaro exchanges or namesake partnerships with as many families on the other side of the border as possible. When times were hard, they would allow those partners to share in the bounty of their territory. On the other hand, strangers who showed up without having established a prior relationship might be driven away.

Our drug policies would change. Many foragers and small-scale horticulturalists used narcotic and hallucinogenic plants, so they would not believe in criminalizing them. At the same time, they would not want to see drugs used merely for “recreation.” They considered them sacred plants, because they possessed the power to open a window into the spirit world. Such drugs would therefore be used exclusively in the context of ritual.

While many achievement-based villagers were willing to massacre their enemies, burn their villages, poison their wells, and turn them into slaves, they never engaged in anything resembling nation building. They found it implausible that an enemy society, with its different supernatural ancestors and social logic, could be turned into a replica of their own.

Consider, for example, Mesopotamia. We have seen that it developed rank societies more than 7,000 years ago. It has had monarchies or oligarchic states for at least 5,000 years. Never once in all its millennia of ensís, lugals, sheikhs, emirs, sultans, warlords, and military dictators has Mesopotamia voluntarily created a democracy.

Societies do not embrace forms of governance that are incompatible with their social logic, especially when that governance is imposed from the outside. The aggressor doing the imposing usually finds that maintaining the illusion of democracy requires an effort that makes head-hunting and pincushioning seem rational by comparison. That is why so many empires relied on joint rule instead.

In addition to the high cost of forcing every other society to be just like ours, there is a compelling reason not to do so. One day we may discover that preserving the world’s reservoir of diverse social logic was just as important as preserving its biodiversity.

THE MYSTERIOUS FIRST PRINCIPLES

Imagine, for the sake of argument, that we have just reversed the premises that led to social inequality. Still looming before us would be the first principles of social logic. Does their widespread nature mean that they are innate to our species? Or is it simply the case that the limitations and biases of human logic are widely shared?

From time to time one prominent scientist or another has argued that our society would work better if we grounded our values in science and logic instead of religion. This idea appeals to anyone fed up with religion’s intolerance of diversity, or its frequent disdain for science.

The problem with the idea is its underlying assumption that our ancestors began with logic and acquired religion later. The fact is that even the first principles of hunter-gatherer logic include notions of the sacred. And when we search for the source of those first principles, we do not uncover an earlier, even more primordial logic; instead we encounter a cosmology filled with the instructions of celestial spirits. Cosmologies are built on sacred propositions, unchallenged despite the fact that there is no empirical evidence to support them.

Even among the most pragmatic hunters and gatherers, this is where logic ends. Cosmological propositions can be validated only by strong emotions, because they defy validation by logic or evidence. And while anthropologists doubt the existence of genes for religion, no one doubts that we have genes for emotions.