RECENTLY, I'VE BEEN READING Hierarchy in the Forest, by Christopher Boehm.
It's a fascinating book. Boehm's thesis (and I'm oversimplifying here) is that one way humans differ from other primates involves the way we handle hierarchy.
"If we are going to escape the evils of hierarchy, we must begin by listening, not only to others, but to ourselves."
There's a great deal of evidence that our natural human state, before the development of early civilizations, was a sort of informal, democratic, egalitarianism—the same sort of culture which is common among modern hunter-gatherers.
In these societies the freedom of the individual is paramount. No one orders anyone else about, and yet all cooperate for good of the entire band.
The earliest civilizations supplanted this system using a combination of brainwashing through religious ritual, economic control through a theory of ownership centered in the king, and the threat of violence against those who did not conform.
Boehm's contribution is to argue that this strange path, which takes humans from the kind of hierarchy which is still common among our nearest ape cousins, to an almost universal egalitarian culture, and then back to hierarchy with the appearance of early civilization, can be best explained by assuming that we never gave up hierarchy at all.
Rather, he suggests that we turned hierarchy on its head, making the community as a whole dominant over any individual who might threaten to dominate others. The egalitarianism which is our natural human heritage is a kind of deconstructed hierarchy: the pyramid of power has been turned upside down, with the point in the chest of the would-be dictator.
Under his model, freedom and egalitarianism is not simply a given human trait, but is and always has been a hard-won prize, requiring the commitment of the entire community to a set of distinctively human values.
It's a fascinating suggestion, with interesting implications for all of human life. Politically, it means that the struggle against hierarchy will never be over. There will always be those who prefer that the pyramid point upward, that the structure of society be top-down.
Economically, it means that some will always try to co-opt the economic power. If we are not watchful, a handful of people will always monopolize the wealth of any nation.
Religiously, it's a caution, to begin with, against a model of reality which is based on the idea of a king—which is the model fundamentalists of various religions call "God". Such a model always gives the real power to God's earthly representatives.
But beyond that there's a spiritual lesson for the individual as well. When I allow a single principle, or ideology, or desire, or obsession, to co-opt my entire life—whether that be wealth, a person, a belief, or a political stance—I have created a sort of internal hierarchy, with a consequent lack of democracy, of freedom, of nurture to the rest of my self.
I become the victim of an internal dictator.
I remember a movie (but, alas, not the name) about fascist Italy. Mussolini is exerting complete political control of the country, and every male is pressed into service. These same men are taught that it is essential for the husband to be the absolute dictator in the home.
I doubt if the parallel stopped there. Almost certainly the next step down the pyramid was the interior life of the man himself. The part of the man which embraced fascism had to exert the same kind of control over the rest of his personality—to repress any thoughts or feelings which contradicted the rule of Mussolini.
If we are going to escape the evils of hierarchy, we must begin by listening, not only to others, but to ourselves.
At least, that's what I think today.
