I’ve spent six years now traveling throughout Western Europe, also reading histories of western civilization…from earliest prehistory to modernity. I’ve but scratched the surface, I know…an adequate appreciation would require a lifetime. But even with my limited exposure, there is one theme I see virtually taken for granted rather than deeply explored: social stratification, class and the distribution of power and wealth. The effects have been hugely studied: feudalism, the French Revolution, colonialism and imperialism, capitalism and Marxism and communism, slave revolts, American civil rights, even in budding movements like Occupy Wall Street within the U.S. today. And the recent election in the U.S. is no less a reflection of its continuing dominance.
But I want to know the when, the how and the why: When, how and why did differentiation and stratification by income and social status begin? What are its drivers? Why has it been so ubiquitous throughout history, and why have the less empowered classes accepted it so readily? And what’s more, why throughout history have those in power so insistently treated their “lessers” like dirt…and why do the underprivileged so readily put up with it?
This seems indeed a ubiquitous theme throughout all recorded history, and not just in the West…Ancient Egypt, the Middle East, the Orient, India all did the same. A cursory consideration would suggest it arose in the Neolithic with the onset of agriculture and the availability of surplus resources. But that seems a cop out…the seeds are there as early as the origins of language and religion, and more than likely, buried within our evolutionary psyches as some instinctual drive towards social organization even at a tribal level. But what would those be? How did they play out in aboriginal societies? And how and when did they evolve into the drastically disparate societies evidenced since the Pharos? Why did even Marxism and Communism, the great experiments in egalitarianism, quickly degrade into the Orwellian world where some were “more equal than others?” Why do the lower classes put up with it when they could end it virtually overnight in a simple paroxysm of anarchical rage.
All this seems like an excellent thesis for a multidisciplinary degree in economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology and history. Hmmm…
As a biologist you know very well that such stratification predates the appearance of human primates by millions of years. Stratification in human societies is strictly continuous with that found in Nature.
Thanks, Michael.
The problem is, I don’t think it’s that simple. I agree (and said towards the end of my post), the seeds of what we see are most likely imbedded in our biology. But it just seems to me like there is a hell of a lot else going on: It’s too complex an issue, with too many possible permutations. For one thing, what we might classify as “stratification” in non-primate species is very different. Its genetic drivers are likely different and varying (and I’m not any kind of authority here); but also, it manifests itself in very different ways: territoriality in songbirds is very different from the programmed roles of honeybees, and both are different from the kind of social dominance exhibited in social carnivores like wolves or lions. If anything, our lessons are to be learned from studying non-human primates and probably aboriginal humans.
You can’t even argue that (as in so many other species) the right to breed and pass on genes within humanity is reserved to the powerful and wealthy. The first five minutes of the movie “Idiocracy” will disabuse anyone of that notion. There is just a lot of other stuff going on that, taken together, conspires to make the lives of a few extremely comfortable and the lives of a far greater (and collectively stronger) mass of humanity very miserable. Yet with a few very notable (and historic) exceptions, the masses have continued to accept, support, and even endorse this disparity.
If we could ferret out more of the mechanics of all this, I just wonder if we could not find ways to improve things for everyone without the reactive violence which we are witnessing even now in some quarters (and which is sure to get worse everywhere).
The pie, the pool of resources, is only so large, and human population is expanding at a rate to makes competition for available resources all the more vicious. Most liberals believe that mankind, together with all other life, is the product of evolution. But this is a purely academic, a purely theoretical acceptance. None of these people believe that we live in a Darwinian WORLD, a world that is inherently resistant to the perfectibility they demand. Modern societies are so huge and complex that equality is scarcely to be thought of: stratification is an unavoidable consequence of the division of labor and the obligation to govern populations in the hundreds of millions. Besides, people are radically unequal in their cultural inheritance: the idea that an American army could enter Afghanistan or Iraq and transform it into a modern democracy is preposterous. A reduction in Earth’s human population by 95% and reversion to a hunter-gatherer existence would achieve you aim by insuring that the haves and have-nots are virtually equal.