Note: I want to reiterate the warning I gave you at the end of page 1.1. I’m going to be talking here about human evolution. It’s an interesting story I’ve got to tell, even exciting. But the implications of this story are dark.
When you go down to the bottom of the human operating system, that’s where you find the source of human evil, and that’s where any hope for our future dies.
So if this page becomes more than you’re ready to handle or want to handle, please feel free to bail out. You can get all the major benefits of this site without this page.
Do you know who the very first activists were? I didn’t until I got serious about studying our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Let’s pick up our story during the period five to seven million years ago when a creature called Ancestral Pan was alive. Pan, in this case, does not refer to the Greek god with the hairy legs and the enchanting flute, but to Pan troglodytes, the chimpanzees, and Pan paniscus, the newer version of chimps which we call bonobos.
Ancestral Pan was their ancestor and ours. Not gorillas, though, because they had just split off to follow a separate evolutionary path.
It’s likely A-Pan lived in might-makes-right troops where an alpha male dominated everyone else in the social hierarchy through his physical strength and aggressive determination.
Holding the top position gave these alphas special benefits. They got more and better food. They had more sex and more of it with higher-ranking females, so they had more and better progeny and put more of their genetic makeup into the next generation, which is what evolution loves best. This is a lot like how chimps live today.
Domination was the accepted way of life—yet no one liked being dominated. And this is where rebellion enters the picture. The further down the hierarchy you were, the fewer benefits you got, the more bowing and scraping you had to do, and the more stress you were under, which was not good for your health. The higher-ups were doing well at the expense of the lower-downs and doesn’t this sound very much like exploitation?
Everyone kept looking for their chance to move up a notch and improve their situation. It’s not like there was always an open struggle going on, though. You’d bide your time. You couldn’t afford to be fighting those above you all day every day because you’d get beaten down too much. But there was an atmosphere of watchful waiting. The pressure was always on.
This meant the alpha males couldn’t just kick back and scarf up benefits. They had to stay vigilant. Being alpha was not like a Supreme Court appointment, a lifetime sinecure. An alpha kept his position only as long as he could hold on to it by force. And he knew the minute he weakened, others were ready to jump him and take his place.
Sometimes an alpha might put social prowess to work along with his physical prowess. He might make an alliance with another top-ranking male. If a challenger made his move and went on the attack, the ally would wade into the fight on the side of the alpha.
So the alpha might then stay in power even as he aged and his physical abilities declined. In return the ally would share in alpha benefits like more food and more reproduction.
But the ally strategy could work the other way around, too. An ambitious male might recruit a buddy to help him replace a vulnerable alpha, with the buddy understanding that he would get a share of the spoils.
There was yet one more kind of alliance which sometimes happened. If you were the alpha, along with your privileges came duties. You were expected to keep the peace and provide stability by enforcing good behavior, which contributed significantly to the welfare of the troop. When a less-than-competent alpha was in charge, more fights would break out, they’d last longer, there’d be more injuries, and the injuries would be worse.
So what happened when a powerful but incompetent alpha ruled the roost? Did everyone just suffer in silence? I guess that happened sometimes, but observers have seen rebellions in troops of modern chimps, where the majority gangs up to replace the alpha with someone who will do a better job.
Then once the coup is completed everyone submits to the new alpha. They’re not changing the domination way of life. They’re only replacing a particular alpha. The social system under which they live continues as it was before the revolt.
Sometimes though, the system itself gets amended and stays amended. Bonobos are famous for being sex-crazed party animals. Their standard way of settling conflicts is for the two individuals who were just fighting to engage in sexual contact or copulation. Because of this, some humans who believe in reincarnation are praying to come back as bonobos in their next lifetime.
Bonobos are also famous because the females dominate the males, and I wondered how they pulled that off. It turns out that for some unknown reason, male bonobos don’t form alliances—but the females do. And that’s why they’re in charge.
One-on-one, any male bonobo could overpower even the top-ranking female. But the females don’t let that one-on-one match-up happen. They always have each other’s backs.
They dominate the troop, so domination is still taking place, but they’ve amended the ancient alpha-male system and created a way of life that’s better for more individuals, especially the females, but also, it seems to me, for the males.
Here’s another example of amending the system. Chimp females in the wild do not bond like bonobos do. Two things work against them on this score. Food is not easy to come by so they spend a lot of their foraging time on their own, which means they spend less time together. And females, when they become sexually mature, often leave their home troop to join a new troop, which is good because this prevents inbreeding.
But it’s a problem for female bonding because the males stay home where they’re among brothers and other males they’ve known for their whole lives. So their relationships, while competitive, are also longer term and more deeply rooted in cooperative bonding than is true for the females.
However, when chimps live in captivity, like in a reserve or a research center where there’s plenty of food, the females don’t go out foraging and thus they spend much more time at home with other females and they have the chance to engage in much better bonding.
There have been cases where the females ganged up to replace an alpha because they didn’t like him. And a case where they replaced two alphas in a row until they got the one they wanted. And even then they didn’t return to total submission. They kept limits on the power of their chosen alpha. He had to pay attention to them to make sure he kept their support.
When the system gets amended like this, more individuals do better as a result. And I guess we could call that social progress, and maybe we could call situations where females take charge of their fate, proto-feminism.
But these examples presage something even more portentous among humans. During the course of our evolution a confluence of developments happened that had a major consequence for our social structure. We began to walk upright, which left our hands free to do other things besides drag our knuckles.
We developed powerful throwing arms and could hit something we aimed at with pretty good accuracy. For example, we could throw a rock. Today, a major league baseball pitcher can fire a hardball straight into the catcher’s glove at ninety miles per hour. No chimp can do anything like that.
We also began to make tools for cutting, scraping, and digging. Then we developed hunting tools, like simple, sharp-pointed wooden spears we could use for hunting animals. And we discovered we could use these tools as weapons against other people. Hunters who became experienced at killing dangerous animals could kill humans, too.
All of this was bad news for alphas. Now a low-ranking male could take out a much more powerfully muscled alpha with a rock to the head or a spear thrust to the belly.
This was a significant power shift.
And it was intensified by the development of language, which allowed people the opportunity to make plans and agreements. Language, as it developed, allowed us to organize coordinated group action. For example, a group could agree to ignore the orders of an abusive alpha. And if no one would acknowledge his authority, he was done. No weapons needed.
I wish the first invention our ancestors made, back when we were just becoming human, had been the video camera. I wish they’d filmed their transition from domination to their new way of life, maybe capturing interviews with the most articulate of the change agents.
It would be wonderful to see the process take place and get our questions answered directly, instead of having to make educated guesses. Did the transition happen quickly or gradually? Did it happen with one precocious group first and then other bands copied them and spread the good news farther and farther afield? Or did equality naturally emerge in many bands independently over the same general period?
The case can apparently be argued either way. I don’t see how we will ever be able to find a decisive answer to these questions. But for all the things we don’t know, we do know that our ancestors created a way of life that we now call egalitarian. And it became global and it sustained us for tens of thousands of years.
But anthropologists don’t just call this way of life egalitarianism, they call it…
Fierce egalitarianism.
Because in hunter-gatherer bands which practiced it, there was nothing casual about it. It was so important for survival that to keep it working well was a matter of life and death. And people did so much better under the new system that they were serious about not backsliding.
What does the fierce version of equality look like? People don’t tolerate anyone lording it over them. One of the worst sins is to get a “big head.” Or act like a “big man.” And bragging is out. If a hunter has a great day and kills an antelope, when it’s brought back to the village, people say, “Oh, that little thing.” This is to keep egos in check because what matters is group unity.
Cheating is next to impossible. If you’re living in a small band of about thirty, or at the most up to forty or fifty, you watch each other’s behavior all day long. Talk about accountability. Any cheating gets nipped in the bud.
Sharing within a band is taken for granted. The meat from a large kill is divided out among everyone with impeccable equity. And people are happy with this system because if today you have good fortune in the hunt, you share with everyone else. If tomorrow another hunter has the luck, then he shares with everyone else, too, you included. This is a much more secure food system than every individual family going it alone.
The ethic of sharing means there’s no hoarding. No one accumulates wealth at the expense of the others. There’s no exploitation. The band would not put up with it.
So there’s no need for charity. There are no philanthropists “giving something back.”
That’s a complicated phrase. In our day, some people who have gotten knocked down by life, once they get back on their feet, use that phrase to talk about helping others once they’re able to do so, like when a recovering drug addict sponsors a newbie in a Twelve Step program.
But what about a wealthy person who exploits society to make big money and then gives back a penny on the dollar? And they do that specifically to enhance their reputation and position in society, perhaps using their philanthropy to gain even more influence and power. They’re technically giving something back, but wouldn’t it be better not to take so much in the first place?
And small bands didn’t practice the kind of charity we have today where aid is given to the poor but the political system that keeps people poor grinds along unchanged.
Fierce egalitarianism is a way of life rooted in contribution. Everyone contributes to the well-being of everyone else. You don’t act out to get attention. You don’t try to be the most bizarre or vulgar person, causing an uproar to get noticed. You aren’t desperate to get on reality TV so you can become a household name.
You get attention by contributing to the success of the community and you’re honored for that.
Childcare figures in, too. In her book Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes the case that cooperative child-rearing has been an essential part of our success as a species.
Chimp mothers don’t let anyone else take care of their babies. Maybe an older daughter gets involved. But for the most part it’s mother-only work. Chimps wouldn’t dream of setting up a day-care center.
But among humans, we trust others to watch over our children. We’re the only primates who do that, apart from the family of New World monkeys called Callitrichidae, which includes tamarins and marmosets. There you find remarkable participation in child-rearing by fathers, brothers, and other males.
So hunter-gatherer babies imbibed the ethic of cooperative sociality from the first days of their lives. This gives new meaning to the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It’s not just that there’s too much work for a mom or a set of parents.
The village wants to be deeply involved in raising every child…
So every child will grow up to be deeply involved in contributing to the life of the village.
And let’s add that it takes the children of a village to raise a child, too, because, as Hrdy argues, once a child is weaned at about age three, she’s incorporated into the community of children within the band, and much of what she learns comes from playing and working with other children during the day, especially those just a bit older than herself, just a step or two ahead in their development.
I know I’m saying lots of happy things about these small, fiercely cooperative bands. But let’s look again at that word fierce, because this way of life was fierce. It wasn’t a walk in the park.
Humans were still selfish at their core. So our ancestors developed a highly-disciplined system to support their way of life because they knew how self-centered individuals were. They knew that without vigilance, this native selfishness could drag the band back into a hierarchical society.
Once alpha behavior had been effectively suppressed, that did not mean there was a happy free-for-all. It wasn’t hippie time. The group became the alpha. The group became the authority.
And this was necessary because…
Supercooperation takes superauthority.
Our first revolution.
So who were the very first activists? They were our hunter-gatherer ancestors who…
Transformed human community.
They turned our might-makes-right troops into fiercely egalitarian, supercooperative tribes.
I remember some years ago, listening to the radio as a mean-spirited, scatter-brained politician put down community organizers. Her words were dripping with contempt.
The irony struck me. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were all community organizers. And they didn’t just organize a particular community….
They organized community itself.
They invented it. They developed it. They made it cooperative. And they sustained it for tens of thousands of years. Which took a lot of work. Every single day.
So I wanted to tell that politician: Show some respect. Without community organizers you wouldn’t even be here.
What drove this first, great human revolution?
It was moral decision-making.
And…
The spirit of moral-fight.
Why do I use that word “moral” here? Because our ancestors were carrying out a moral project. They were working to make life better for many more people. They created a radically different way of life. They were working to develop communities where everyone got their core needs met.
And how deep did this transformation go? Anthropologists and evolutionists argue that…
It actually became part of our genome.
We didn’t stop being competitive individuals within a competitive species. But our genome was tugged further in the direction of cooperation.
Cooperation became so good for us that natural selection gave a boost to those people who were more cooperative. Who then made their communities more cooperative.
So our activist ancestors actually improved our DNA without any of them having a degree in evolutionary genetics or even knowing what a gene was.
It’s my best guess that these folks did not have a grand plan in mind. They were on a journey where they couldn’t see very far ahead. They just kept making moral decisions day by day, and making grassroots alliances with each other in the face of what must have been determined resistance from the alphas.
They were propelled forward by the moral desire to take care of themselves and each other in a new and deeper way.
And they didn’t have any assurance that their activism was going to be successful.
And they didn’t know that they were going to produce…
Too much success.
Our second revolution
How can there be too much success?
Supercooperative tribes were so good at boosting survival that our numbers increased. Then over the millennia, our numbers increased dramatically. And over the past 200 years our population has exploded.
Now there are so many of us that…
We’re drowning in ourselves.
There are too many of us to be sustainable. So what do we need?
A second radically transformative revolution.
Why wasn’t our first revolution enough?
Because…
It was paradoxical.
And that’s because tribalism is both…
A blessing and a curse.
We can see the curse show up in the two major problems we’ve inherited from that first revolution which we haven’t been able to solve.
1. We don’t know how to scale up small-band cooperation.
We’re actually pretty good at administrative coordination. We’re able to manage to hold together megasocieties of tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and in the case of China and India, societies of over a billion people.
But administrative coordination is not the same thing as fiercely egalitarian cooperation. Not at all.
We lived in our small bands for tens of thousands of years. The leap to mass societies with hierarchical structures and top down politics, is something relatively new. And morally that’s a stunning reverse of our first revolution, because…
So many people are not getting their core needs met.
Throughout recorded history mass societies have run on mass exploitation which results in mass suffering.
So what’s the glitch? Why can’t we scale up supercooperation and turn all of humankind into one giant, unified, global super team? What gets in the way?
2. We don’t know how to turn our tribal past into trans-tribal future.
The problem is that our relatively small tribes had boundaries.
Inside the tribe there was supercooperation.
But outside it was a different story. Our tribal way of life was built on the antagonistic principle of…
Us versus them.
Which sounds like this…
We’re different from you,
We’re better than you,
We’re threatened by you,
So we will fight you.
Of course our ancestors made alliances. Sometimes two tribes would become so aligned for so long that they merged into a single, larger tribe.
But for the most part, alliances between different tribes were provisional. Once an alliance stopped being beneficial to a tribe, they would quickly cut off the relationship and turn against their former ally.
Human cooperation has amended and buffered evolution’s fundamentally competitive nature, but has not wiped it out.
Our ancestors created a remarkable system for living together in harmony within their tribes. Between tribes, though, there was distrust and bloody brutality.
And this brings us to the principle of together-against…
The more external threat there was from other tribes, the more we pulled together internally in our own tribes.
This means our supercooperation is supercharged by external threat.
So inter-tribal competition feeds intra-tribal cooperation.
Which is a big problem.
Our ancestors pulled off an amazing revolution. I think it’s still the most remarkable of all human achievements. It was morally progressive. It made life so much better for so many people. In fact, I would argue it made life better for the alphas, too.
And it gave humans dominion over the earth. It was that powerful.
But now our tribal antagonisms are blocking us from mastering supercooperation at the global level, which we’d need if we we’re going to have a chance to save ourselves.
You’ve heard the argument, “Under the skin we’re all the same, so we should be able to pull together and work together and love one another.”
And it’s absolutely true that under the skin we are the same, but we’re…
The same in being compulsively divisive.
A sameness that doesn’t help us.
The word these days is that climate change is our top problem. That everything hinges on fixing it, so it needs to come first. But that’s just not so. The sad truth is that…
Our #1 problem is our human operating system.
If we could transform our OS, if we could break the tribal boundedness of human cooperation, if we could reach across all our divisions and work together in eager, heartfelt alliances, we might really have a chance to reverse the climate threat.
But if we’re fighting each other, if we can’t make our politics work, if we can’t reverse the global trend of nations becoming stupidly authoritarian and fascist and totalitarian, then there’s no hope that we can stop climate change, and no hope that we can save ourselves.
It’s our divisiveness that’s killing us. And this includes especially racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, along with so many other divisions large and small. It turns out these bitter fractures in the human community will determine our future far more profoundly than any climate considerations.
What exactly is the revolution we need now?
To answer that, let’s first ask…
What game are we really in?
And the answer is obviously…
The human game.
And this means the more ambitious we are about changing society…
The more deeply we need to understand the human operating system.
If we want to make things better we need an accurate diagnosis of what exactly is going wrong. And we need that diagnosis even if the prognosis it reveals is not good.
But this is a problem because one of the very hardest things for human beings to do is to see ourselves as we really are. That’s true for individuals and for us as a species.
And going down to the bottom of the human OS is not something to do lightly, because down there what you come face to face with is…
The source of human evil.
Which can shake you to your core. And kill your hope for the future.
There has to be something very, very wrong with our OS. We all say we hate the horrors of war and yet war continues. And so many other terrible things continue: poverty, racism, the oppression of women, the abuse of children. Thing after thing that so many of us wish would stop we have not be able to stop.
And we wouldn’t be in such terrible danger if there were some easy answer just waiting in the wings to be discovered.
Add this all up and it means that we need…
A genomic revolution.
We need to transform not just our way of life, fundamentally and globally, but we need to transform our genome in order to sustain a transformed way of life. We need to root tribal divisiveness out of our DNA. We need to become capable of cooperation without tribal boundaries.
But think about how hard that would be.
And there’s not enough time for us to pull off such a revolution. Sometimes an evolutionary step forward can happen fast, but not the kind of leap we need to take. And certainly not in twenty years, or whatever time we’re now being told we have left to make radical changes.
And even if we had plenty of time, we still don’t know how to begin to transcend tribalism. We’re able to do it sometimes one-to-one and in small groups, but not on a mass scale.
Why?
Going to the bottom of the human operating system is so grim, why do it?
Think about what it means to attempt a genomic revolution. It means…
We go into the worst of being human to bring out the best.
We work in toxic territory.
We get intimate with evil so we can try to stop it.
We dedicate ourselves to a fight we cannot win.
So, again, why do this?
For two reasons. First…
To deepen our compassion for ourselves.
When we get to know the game we’re really in, that allows us to understand why…
Being human is too hard for human beings.
And…
What the odds really are that we’re up against.
The second reason is that when we understand the danger we’re in and then in response feel deeply for ourselves…
We will be motivated to fight for ourselves.
And…
To fight with everything we’ve got.
If our only goal is to save ourselves from extinction, then post-hope activism will be a failure.
And why fight if we already know we’re going to lose the fight we’re in? Why work for a genomic revolution if there’s no chance of ultimate success? Why engage in post-hope activism?
Personally, I do it because…
My fighting spirit keeps me from being taken by despair.
And I do it because…
I do not want to go gentle into the dark night of our species.
And I do it because…
Post-hope activism is a good way to live no matter what the ultimate result. It allows me to be the best version of myself.
And then there’s this. The twist of grace, the ability to oppose evolution which created our operating system that makes us who we are, this ability gives me a shot of attitude. So sometimes in a bitterly ebullient mood I find myself saying…
“Screw you, Evolution! You made me but you don’t own me. So you can’t take my fighting spirit from me.”
And then, finally, going to the bottom, going all the way down there so we can know the truth about the game we’re in, makes it possible, not to play this damnable game better, but…
To play against the game.
Which is the genius of moral-fight activism.
Note:
If you want more depth on the first activists, or the deadly paradox that tribalism is, or how our operating system has set us up for failure, you can check out Part Three in my first book, Love with Fight in its Heart. For more on how moral-fight can enrich our daily lives, check out Part Four.
But if you decide to take a look at Love with Fight, please be sure to read the warning on the home page first.
And if you want to go even deeper into the history of how human beings transformed their might-makes-right troops into fierce egalitarianism, I recommend you check out these two very substantial yet very readable books by Chris Boehm:
Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior
Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame
And here’s another one that’s really good…
The Social Leap by William von Hippel