Rise of Civilization, Part I

How humans rose beyond the Gossip Trap

Recently I happened upon an intriguing post by Substacker Mike Hoel called the Gossip Trap that got me thinking about human social development. I have been collecting pieces of the story of how we got to where we are now as a civilization for a quarter of a century and Hoel provided another piece, a new way to think about one of the key elements of the story. In this post I lay out the pieces I have found and give a rough overview of this enormously complex process. Some pieces are more fleshed out than others.

Our species arose during the last tenth of the Pleistocene epoch. For tens of millennia before the end of the Pleistocene, anatomically modern humans with brains as large, or larger than those of modern people lived. During all that time they achieved nothing remotely equivalent to what we moderns (with smaller brains no less) have been able to achieve in recent millennia.  Through cultural evolution, the collective power of many brains has been harnessed to produce cultural solutions to the problems of living. This collective power has grown with the population so that all the learning humans achieved in their first 200,000 years of existence is roughly equivalent to just three months of knowledge cumulation today.

During the Pleistocene there is no evidence that humans lived in groups larger than the Dunbar number. The Dunbar number is “a cognitive-determined limit to the number of individuals with whom a primate can maintain stable social relationships.” It increases with brain size, with humans able to manage the largest number, around 150. A society smaller than this size can be managed through raw social power, but to do bigger things societies must scale up. Figure 1 shows how human societies did just that since the end of the Pleistocene.

Figure 1. Increase in size of the largest human societies since the end of the Pleistocene

In less than twelve millennia human societies have scaled up by seven orders of magnitude! Progress was glacially slow and then, suddenly, things changed. As Eric Hoel puts it, let’s say modern humans genetically (mostly) and physically (definitely) were around 100,000 years ago: why does it take 90,000 years to get Göbekli Tepe? Hoel describes small-scale society as a hellish “gossip trap:”

A gossip trap is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is Mean Girls (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible way to organize society. So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years. Being in the gossip trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down. All cognitive resources go to reputation management in the group, to being popular, leaving nothing left in the tank for invention or creativity or art or engineering. Again, much like high school.

Hoel continues, “this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization—at a certain size…you simply can’t organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans.” By civilization Hoel means the invention of scale-up social technologies implied by Figure 1 through cultural evolution. Hoel doesn’t answer his fundamental question of why did humans escape his “gossip trap” when they did. The obvious answer it seems to me is the end of the Pleistocene. 

Human groups living under the gossip trap would tend break up when the Dunbar limit was reached, as seemed to have happened to the Kasakela community of chimpanzees in 1972. The two daughter groups became hostile to each other, with one exterminating the other. After this there were other clashes with different chimpanzee bands when the victorious band attempted to expand their territory.

Unlike chimpanzees, humans are capable of acquiring cumulative culture. In a world where communities frequently grow in size beyond the Dunbar number and split up, war would be endemic. There would be a strong cultural evolutionary pressure towards invention of social scaleup technologies enabling societies to remain intact with populations exceeding the Dunbar number. This evolutionary pressure would only exist for groups living in favorable environments, in harsher environments much population growth would not be expected to happen in the first place. The highly variable climate of the Pleistocene meant locations with favorable environment could rapidly shift to unfavorable and vice versa, limiting the amount of time the evolutionary pressure to scale up was present for any one population. Hence, sustainable development never had a chance to happen. Once a stable climate appeared with the onset of the Holocene (see Figure 2) this evolutionary pressure would become continuous for populations in favorable locations such as the Fertile Crescent and evolution of scaleup technologies began.

Figure 2. Temperature fluctuations over the last hundred millennia.

Social scale-up techs are social norms that cluster into cultural institutions that govern relationships between members of the group. Such evolution is adaptive if it prevents group fission. This property helps cultural groups increase population size, enhancing success in sometimes-violent intergroup competition. The prevalence of such social norms in the human population will increase as they spread through conquest and enculturation of smaller groups lacking them by larger groups possessing them, or, by emulation of a successful group by another. Examples of such social norms include things like marriage customs which create family bonds between members of different bands, rhythmic dance rituals that create a sense of solidarity, and food taboos that encourage food sharing which both minimize food waste and enhance the fitness of group members. Hoel notes early formal governments are often described as being “theatrical” or seasonal, serving as a mask of the raw social power governing small-scale societies. Theatrical governments of popular people might have organized monument construction like at Karahan tepe as a “cool kids” project that also served a team building function about which a common identity could form. Another large-scale collective “project” was war. War requires leaders who give orders and requires hierarchy to work effectively at larger sizes. Since the bigger army generally prevails, war provides a potent selection for hierarchy.

Evolutionary scientist Peter Turchin in his book Ultrasociety suggests that hierarchies present in modern societies (e.g. in corporations) show multiple organizational levels each consisting of an approximately egalitarian group resembling hunting bands and their leader. Such groups number about the size of a high school clique or sports team and are self-organized through social power. Direct interaction between widely different levels is minimized. Much of life is lived in a manner reminiscent of a small-scale society, it just happens in multiple contexts and as a component of a larger society. Just as biological evolution frequently repurposes biochemical motifs: adenine is used in reproduction (DNA), energy metabolism (ATP), and as a redox reagent (NAD), cultural evolution achieves scale up by repurposing existing structures like hunting bands, military units, or sports teams.

One of the more potent of these social scale-up techs is religion. Particularly effective in creating cooperation between strangers are religions involving powerful, all-seeing, moralizing “big gods,” who concern themselves with human social behavior and sometimes punish those who transgress their laws. Cooperation-promoting norms and institutions like government and religion enabled tribes and chiefdoms numbering in the thousands to scale up into states and empires a hundred times larger. The evolution of ever more elaborate intensive kin-based and religious institutions eventually produced mega-states with populations in the tens of millions. The selection process involved in scale-up included competition between states and empires in the realms of war, trade and cultural exchange. For example, the earliest western European nations arose from tribal chiefdoms governed by kin-based social structures located on the borders of the Roman Empire, who evolved into states through the pressure of warfare with the empire and emulation of Roman cultural attributes.

The Rise of the West

One of these Roman cultural attributes was western Christianity. According to anthropologist Joe Henrich, the western (Roman Catholic) Church brought a cultural package that re-normed the societies of the Germanic successor states to the Western Roman Empire after its collapse in the fifth century. The Church instituted what Henrich calls its ‘Marriage and Family Program’ (MFP). The MFP suppressed polygamy and cousin marriage as contrary to God’s will, which, over centuries, undermined the intensive kin-based institutions that typically held together traditional states like the post-Roman Germanic kingdoms, replacing them with institutions based on religion, commerce and shared interests. The ultimate result of this program was the evolution of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology.

As a result of the MFP, young people who previously were bound to roles in life dictated by family, clan, or tribal responsibilities, gained more freedom to pursue alternate lifestyles and develop new institutions based on common beliefs, interests, or goals, rather than kinship. An early development illustrating this phenomenon appeared in religious expression. Breakdown in central authority in France occurred between 860 and 890 CE, during a time of Viking and Saracen raids when “the countryside sprouted ramparts and castles.” Lacking the sponsorship of the state, Christian monasteries increasingly came to be private institutions owned and operated by individual warlord families. A new cultural variant arose with the founding of the French monastery at Cluny in 910 CE. Cluny was established to be independent of any secular authority, acknowledging only the authority of the Pope (who, consumed with Italian matters, was largely out of the picture). As an organization consisting largely of productive adults, independent monasteries like Cluny generated substantial surplus product, some of which was invested in forming new monasteries under the direction of Cluny. The Cluniac system “went viral” in the 11^th century, and by 1109 more than a thousand monasteries acknowledged Cluny leadership.

Figure 3. Formation of voluntary organizations 800-1600
Shown are the establishment of monasteries and universities, central European towns post-1150, and urbanization rate.

Figure 2 shows an acceleration in monastery formation after the tenth century indicative of this viral expansion. The Cistercian offshoot of Cluniac monasticism inculcated the moral value of manual labor—an early version of what Weber would later call the Protestant work ethic. Cistercian monasticism also served as a technological driver (they were major producers of iron and other manufactures). Twice a year, representatives reported to the mother house, officially to ensure doctrinal consistency, but also to share best practices in management and technology. The development of a class of religious and economic elites operating independently of local political authority meant a new political culture-shaping force had emerged. To protect their properties and people, the Church (and Cluny in particular) launched Pax Dei (Peace of God) program in the late tenth century. Pax Dei was a millenarian movement beginning in southern France that combined lay and ecclesiastical legislation regulating warfare and establishing a social peace. Although it was not directly successful, its offshoot crusade was more fruitful. By redirecting intra-elite violence to an external party, the crusade movement likely played a role in Western European nation-building similar to that played by jihad in the unification of warring Arabian tribes under Islam in the 7^th century.

The success of Church programs led to an era of Church authority in the 12^th century unparalleled in Western history. According to legal scholar Harold Berman, a Papal Revolution over 1075-1122 gave birth to the modern Western state. The rise of Church power created a need for a consistent basis for Church policy, leading to development of canon law. Following this, secular rulers in Sicily, England, Normandy, and France began to develop their own bodies of law and governmental departments such as a treasury, judiciary, and chancery. These developments created a demand for trained lawyers and administrators. This need, and the exposure to Arab learning following the first Crusade, gave rise to the university, in which such personnel were trained and this new learning was taught. Figure 3 shows the rise in universities after 1200, which can be thought of as a continuation of the pursuit of religious and professional careers by young people freed from the obligations of the intensive kin-based institutions that formed the basis for non-Western societies.

The Church’s MFP also led to young people pursuing careers outside of those based in religion and academics. Contemporaneous with the Cluniac movement, Peace of God and the Papal Revolution there were expansions of career opportunities in commerce and industry. The inhabitants of London formed a gegildan (guild) in order to maintain peace and security in the city during the reign of Athelstan (924-39). A similar guild was established in Cambridge in the late 10^th Century. Both of these were fraternal organizations analogous to militia and had as yet no economic function. They were a parallel to the Pax Dei movement, concerned with protecting the property and livelihood of the members (and comradeship). Northern Italy, then the most economically advanced region in Europe, saw the rise of communes. Communes were associations of town dwellers who became citizens by pledging to defend and strengthen the rights of the town. They were an extension of the self-protection function of the early guilds to self-government that developed over the 11^th century, reaching critical mass during the Papal Revolution and Investiture Controversy of 1075 to 1122, when the cities were helped quite a bit by the imperial-papal schism. Similar developments occurred around the same time in other economically developed regions in Northern France, Flanders and the Netherlands.

Over time, guilds and communes evolved economic roles, laying the foundations for a true market economy through quality controls on goods sold, control over transmission of technical knowledge, and regulation of price and quality, all of which served to reduce transaction costs. These developments were parallel to the Cistercian practices mentioned earlier. Figure 3 shows a rise in urbanization after 900, and a proliferation in new town formation in the later stages, both of which reflect these developments. Competition among guilds and communes resulted in the development of an independent commercial lifestyle that paralleled the development of an independent religious lifestyle. Both had been made possible by the Church’s MFP program. A similar phenomenon occurred with universities, leading to an independent academic lifestyle and, eventually, the environment in which the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution could happen.

The MFP, by breaking down the normal kin-based social structures, enabled talented individuals lacking familial/tribal connections to pursue careers in commerce or academia that would otherwise be unavailable to them. Selection could be made on ability rather than familial connections. Today, people with WEIRD psychology see nepotism and cronyism as aberrant and corrupt. Typically, corrupt systems do not function as well as meritocratic ones, yet throughout history these have been the norm in societies built on complex kin-based institutions. Due to the MFP, medieval Europeans had the opportunity to build economic institutions where corruption was not as prevalent, because employment was based on ability as well as connections, and concepts like the Rule of Law applying equally to all were developed. Competition for promising talent among commercial firms and universities selected for cultural attributes that made European economies fertile ground for the later evolution of capitalism. The MFP may also be credited with the spectacular expansion of the Western European economy over 900 to 1300, despite the rise in political fragmentation.

A key idea behind evolutionary change is that it reflects the cumulative effect of individual actions made for short term objectives unrelated to the eventual outcome of the evolutionary process. For example, the MFP may have increased the frequency of bequests to the Church which would provide short-term benefits to the Church elites pursuing this policy. The value Christianity placed on celibacy, perhaps because St. Paul apparently was asexual (see 1 Cor 7:5-9), primed celibate religious elites to be unyielding when secular elites seeking additional wives made requests for leniency on marriage rules. Whatever the reasons for the MFP, its purpose was not to create the conditions necessary for the development of industrial capitalism a millennium later. This is the strength of evolutionary mechanisms; spectacular changes that look like intentional design can appear over time without any intent.

Continued in part 2.