The upper classes claimed privileged relations with the supernatural, and rulers frequently were ascribed divine or semidivine status. Just as class had replaced both real and metaphorical kinship as a basis for organizing societies, so religious concepts replace kinship as a medium for social and political discourse.
Bruce G. Trigger
LAST TIME WE looked at the first major event in human history—our separation from other apes: the period in which we became human.
That division, the event which separated humans from our animal cousins, can be partially described, in modern categories, like this:
| Humans | Apes | |
| Political System | Democracy and Freedom | Dictatorship and Coercion |
| Economic System | Socialism and Free Trade | Capitalism and Concentrated Wealth |
Ape culture had been a dictatorship, where the wealth and power was concentrated at the top, and those at the top coerced everyone further down the line into obedience to their whims.
Human culture broke free of that pattern.
We established a society of shared power and freedom and wealth, where people cared for each other, respected each other, and granted each other autonomy.
But that doesn't mean there weren't still freeloaders and bullies around.
Finally, inequality is not a natural feature of human societies. As the readings in part I of this book make clear, immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies were "aggressively egalitarian"...These societies worked because of, not in spite of, the fact that power and authority were kept in check. Inequality as a result of human nature is another side of the cultural myth of economic man.
John Gowdy
IN OUR ATTEMPT to find the proper perspective on a whole variety of current events, we've been examining the first, and biggest event in human history.
That was the event which made us human—which separated us from our animal cousins, the apes.
Last time, we spotted two political differences between humans and apes:
The modern equivalent of human society, politically, would be a democracy—like America, Canada, the European Union, India, South Africa, or Australia.
The modern equivalent of ape societies, in terms of political structure, would be the former Monarchy in England, the former Soviet Union, States like Egypt, until recently, in which a "state of emergency" has been in effect for years allowing those in power to enforce a hierarchical government, or Afghanistan under the Taliban.
But every society has an economic system as well as a political system.
How do humans compare apes on that score?
Far from scrabbling endlessly and desperately for food, hunter-gatherers are among the best-fed people on earth, and they manage this with only two or three hours a day of what you would call work—which makes them among the most leisured people on earth as well. In his book on stone age economics, Marshall Sahlins described them as 'the original affluent society.'
Daniel Quinn
OUR TRADITIONAL HUMAN life-style, for hundreds of thousands of years, is that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The last mere twelve thousand or so years, which we refer to as "history", are something of an anomaly—a point that I'll get to later, not now.
(Except to say that I will not be suggesting we should return to hunter-gathering.)
Our ancestors, living out the traditional human values, did not have constitutions, or police, or elected officials, so in one way it would be accurate to say that they didn't have a political system at all, in the sense that we would mean that now.
But it's clearly possible to view their lives through our lenses—to ask which of the competing modern political systems is most like what they did have.
Did they have a dictatorship, for example, or a democracy?
How did they go about making group decisions?
For the most part they used consensus.
Among the Hadza, males are dominant over females and adults over sub-adults, but even in these two respects, the difference is slight compared to more complex societies. Some men are clearly much better hunters than others, but this does not result in a dominance hierarchy. Hunting reputation does seem to come closer than anything else to capturing what little status variation there is. There is also no clear hierarchy among adult females, although older women are afforded a little extra respect, as are older men.
Frank Marlowe
IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND any event without the appropriate context.
For example, some current events:
Some context:
All of these events, and a slew of others, make a lot more sense if we put them in a much longer perspective.
A much, much, longer perspective.
The attacks on the disadvantaged, carried out in the name of reconstruction and relief, did not stop there. In order to offset the tens of billions going to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40 billion from the federal budget. Among the programs that were slashed were student loans, Medicaid, and food stamps.
Naomi Klein
A FEW WEEKS AGO John Stewart chastised Democratic Representative Steve Cohen for likening the repeated Republican lie that health care reform was a "government takeover" to the "Big Lie" strategy of Goebbels.
Stewart's point was that because the Nazis did such horrible things there could be no analogy between them and Republicans.
I posted a reply (to both Stewart and Rachel Maddow) in which I made the mistake of assuming that Stewart's difficulty was due to a knee-jerk attitude toward Nazi Germany.
I now think I overestimated him—because about two weeks ago he made almost the same claim about similarities between Wisconsin and Egypt.
His real problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of analogy.
After showing a series of clips where the protests in Egypt and Wisconsin were compared, he commented:
