Conscious Cultural Evolution

This book is an attempt to find realistic, broad-based solutions for the most pressing problems of our time. It is divided into two sections. The first develops a theory of cultural selection that explains how human societies develop destructive institutions such as racism, sexism, and ecological blindness. The second part explores how we can consciously direct our cultural evolution toward environmental sustainability and social justice.

The term “they” is used in this book as a gender-neutral pronoun instead of “he”.

CULTURAL EVOLUTION

CHAPTER ONE

The Second Great Leap

The animals have lived by the rhythms of the seasons for thousands of years, their adaptation guided by the steady hand of evolution, the trial and error of countless generations. Animals have adapted by slowly changing their genetic code, the shapes and forms of their bodies, and their genetically predetermined behaviors in order to survive in their environments.

As human beings came to be less dominated by genetically predetermined behavior, our adaptation came to be more a result of learning from previous generations rather than changing our genetic code; we became cultural beings. Though we still live among animals, we have become different from them. Thousands of years ago, we took a Great Leap from biological to cultural evolution. Cultural evolution moves with lightning speed compared to biological evolution and has allowed humans to populate and dominate every corner of our world.

For tens of thousands of years, human societies have evolved by a process of non-conscious cultural evolution.^¹ Our cultural evolution is non-conscious because, although we as individuals are intelligent beings who can plan for the future, we are not consciously aware of the cultural evolutionary forces that shape our society.

Cultural evolution and biological evolution are very different, but one thing they have in common is that they are both reactive. They only respond to changes in the environment as they arise. Animals do not evolve thicker fur in response to the knowledge that their environment is going to grow colder in the future. Their fur thickens in response to their environment as it grows colder.

Human culture is the same way. The evolution of our beliefs and our political structures occurs in response to stressors as they arise in the economy and ecology of our society, not because we possess knowledge of future changes. We will examine this idea more in future chapters. The reactive nature of non-conscious cultural evolution is at the root of ecological unsustainability among large human societies. Whether or not their final undoing is political or military, the underlying reasons for the demise of most large human societies have been ecological.^¹

Some small agricultural and gathering societies have practiced a more conscious evolution, and some modern societies have employed a degree of conscious economic management. While industrial society is focused on short-term profit, some societies have been mindful of the impacts of their actions decades or even hundreds of years into the future.

What makes the difference between societies that practice conscious evolution and those that remain at the mercy of non-conscious evolution? The purpose of this book is to try to answer that question and apply that answer to the issues of our time. If we could learn to consciously guide the evolution of culture on a large scale, that would represent a second Great Leap, a historically unprecedented change in how human beings adapt to their environment in large social units.

Why is it important that we achieve a more conscious evolution? We are presently playing out a script written by past human civilizations. We can see this in two sets of global crises currently facing us. The first is a crisis of social justice. That the rich are growing richer and the poor are growing poorer is not simply a cliché. In our time a small percentage of humanity is gaining control over the vast majority of wealth and productive power of the planet Earth, as enormous numbers of people are in fact growing poorer in spite of increased economic growth.^² The polarization of wealth undermines democracy worldwide. Polarization also fosters ecological unsustainability as the rich are separated from the ecological impacts of their actions and the poor dig their eroding soil ever deeper simply to survive.

The other crisis of our age is an ecological crisis. The basic form of human cultural evolution has not changed for thousands of years. We live in danger of being destroyed by the same blight that early civilizations faced, though now the scale of our mistakes is much grander. Attempts at corporate greenwashing notwithstanding, we are living in an age of planetary, cataclysmic, ecological decline. Middle-class Americans are cushioned from this decline by technologically sophisticated industry and agriculture. We are not aware of the worldwide erosion of topsoil as we consume our prepackaged meals; we barely notice growing extremes of weather as we sit in our air-conditioned domiciles.

Ignorance notwithstanding, the scale of our environmental crisis is unparalleled in human experience. The “greenhouse effect” is going to make itself unmistakably visible in the next fifty to one hundred years.^¹ The current decline in the number of species is unprecedented. Forests are dwindling precipitously. Everywhere we look, our global environment is taxed.

Our ability to produce food is approaching its limits. The world fish catch peaked over a decade ago and has since degenerated. There has been a net decrease in global grain production per capita in recent years, a dramatic reversal of historic trends.^² Whatever estimates one accepts concerning the rate of degradation of the environment or the depletion of resources, it is clear that we are facing limits to our economic growth within the closed system that is our planet Earth.^³

We have enough. Our problems are social, not technological. We can support the needs of all of humanity forever, not by using new machines, but by learning to consciously direct our cultural evolution.

That is not what we are doing. We are stealing our planet from our children. Individually, we can save money in bank accounts for our children and our grandchildren and think that we are taking care of future generations. As a society, however, we are not saving for future generations; rather, we are incurring enormous debts. Here again, we are looking at the difference between the ability we have as individuals to plan and the inability of large social groups to prepare for the future. That is the impact of non-conscious cultural evolution. We must achieve a more conscious evolution. The stakes are high.

Cultural evolution is a long-term process. In the short-term, the dazzling parade of politics and personalities compels our attention. We are not particularly aware of cultural evolution, and yet it may well be the most powerful force on the planet influencing how we live, individually and as a society.

Cultural evolution is the guiding force that creates our society, our beliefs, our political structures. It creates the social environment we grow up in; it sets the stage for the kinds of relationships we are likely to have with the people around us. It influences the choices we make about what kinds of productive processes to use in our economy. Cultural evolution guides the development of racism and sexism; it guides the creation - or destruction - of ecological awareness in our society.

In order to understand cultural evolution, we have to learn to see culture itself. We have to be able to see the extent to which our beliefs are learned and not innate, inevitable, or a product of “ human nature.” We have to be able to step outside of some of our deepest unconsidered and unquestioned assumptions about why people think and act as they do.

It is not easy to see our culture from the outside, because it is so much a part of who we are as human beings. We spend most of our lives among people who have grown up in the same culture and who share a lot of our own cultural conditioning. Within the context of our own society, our core beliefs and attitudes are not challenged. So many people within our culture agree with our basic assumptions so much of the time that our own culture becomes invisible to us.

Our cultural conditioning reaches deep inside of us. Culture is everything we learn as a group. It is a set of shared norms, behaviors, laws, and material things that groups of people large and small develop together. If a group of people has a common way of burping, then that way of burping is culture. How we build our furniture and our houses, how we dress our bodies, what we think about nationalism, war, food, and sexuality are all pieces of culture. All of these beliefs evolve. Culture creates a large part of who we are. Our learned behaviors are the greatest piece of who we are as human beings.

Culture is also a system -- an active, adaptive process that seeks its own survival and prosperity. Culture makes use of us as individuals; it conditions us to behave in ways that are beneficial for the society at large. Just as the cells and organs of a body must cooperate closely for the common good, so individual people must cooperate if the larger society is to survive and prosper. Culture teaches us cooperation largely without our knowledge or consent. We are often unaware of our role in larger cultural systems.

In order to understand cultural evolution, we have to separate from our own beliefs, our own culture, to look as outside observers on the beliefs of our society and other societies. The point is to be able to understand how and why particular beliefs evolve. In order to reach that understanding, we have to let go of our own prejudices and preconceptions about why people think and act as they do.

Beliefs about food in different cultures offer one example. In the U.S., we tend to believe that insects are gross and disgusting and should not be considered food under any circumstances, short of the threat of starvation. We don't think of this belief as culture -- we think of bugs as innately gross and disgusting.

If we look at humanity across time and across the world, however, we find that most cultures throughout most of history have considered insects to be good food, just as we consider french fries or pizza to be good food. Most human cultures have eaten bugs and liked them.^¹ This is important because if we want to understand why some cultures eat insects and other cultures eat pizza and french fries, we have to understand that none of these foods are innately gross or good. What we eat is a cultural choice, one that we make as a society.

There are other cultural choices that we are likely to feel even more strongly about, such as those pertaining to sexuality. In Western society, we have a tradition of thinking that premarital or extramarital sex is wrong. Many Americans feel that sex is a significant ethical and spiritual issue. But if we look at cultures across the world, we find that Western society is near the conservative end of a spectrum of sexual restrictiveness.^² Other cultures throughout the world hold a wide variety of attitudes toward sexuality. Most cultures accept premarital sex as perfectly normal.^³ Historically, most cultures have accepted multiple marriages - polygamy - as perfectly normal.^⁴ And yet in our culture polygamy is considered both illegal and immoral. If we are going to understand why some cultures practice polygamy and other cultures practice monogamy, why some cultures are permissive and others are very restrictive, we need to be able to step back from our attitudes about these beliefs. We have to accept that other cultures are very different, that it is not innately right or wrong for any society to hold any particular belief.

Religion is another area that people feel strongly about. If we look across the spectrum of human cultures, we can see how our own beliefs are learned, how even our deepest self is shaped by our cultural experience. All human cultures have some form of spirituality. For people living in large, stratified cultures, God, Satan, Heaven, and Hell may be a central part of daily life. For traditional Christians, God is present everywhere, involved in and judging the daily affairs of human beings, handing down punishment on the wicked and prosperity on the virtuous. In other cultures, people may believe in spirits who cause sickness or do favors when asked properly, but God and Satan do not exist for them. They perceive themselves differently in their spiritual relationship to the greater universe. The gods are not far-away, unreachable powers, but rather accessible spiritual beings embedded in the plants, animals, and artifacts of daily life. If we are going to understand where our deepest beliefs come from, we have to understand that we as a society create those beliefs. We have to be able to look at the beliefs of other cultures past and present and accept those beliefs without prejudging them.

The Social Animal

Culture creates us as human beings, but it is not just an individualized process. A culture tries to create people who will behave in a manner that is profitable to the society at large. A culture uses people’s need to be respected by their fellow humans as a tool to mold identities.

“Love is such a fundamental need that people go where the love goes just the way the roots of a plant turn toward water and the leaves turn toward light. Our culture trains us to take certain roles by putting the love in that direction - and we just grow that way!” Barbara Sher^¹

Human beings are social animals. It is a vital lesson when looking at human history that people will literally do anything to gain the love and respect of their fellow humans. The anthropological record is full of cultures that demand extreme self-sacrifice from people in order to gain respect. A number of American Indian cultures engaged in “sun dances” where the dancers pierced sticks through the muscular flesh on their chests, tied these sticks to a pole, and then danced around the pole until the sticks ripped through the muscle. All over the world, people have mutilated themselves, or deprived themselves of food and shelter to gain the respect of their fellow human beings. There are examples reaching from the Natchez of North America to India, where people take their own lives to conform to cultural dictates.^¹

As people will destroy themselves to conform to cultural mandates of appropriate behavior, so too people define their own well-being in terms of cultural values. Cross-cultural studies have been conducted that ask people to rate their own happiness. One might expect people in wealthier countries to rate themselves as happier than people in poor countries. Surprisingly, self-rated happiness in human societies does not correlate with the overall wealth of a society, but rather with the wealth of the individual relative to the rest of their own culture. Thus a poorer person in the West may be very rich compared to someone in a developing country, but the Westerner is likely to rate themselves as unhappy if they are poor compared to the people around them. Likewise, a person in a less wealthy country may be very poor by the standards of industrialized countries, but if they are well-off compared to the people around them, they are more likely to rate themselves as happy.^² Cross-culturally, people consistently rate themselves as happier than the class below them, and less happy than the class above them, regardless of their absolute wealth. But the voluminous consumption of Western society does not bring happiness, only social respect brings happiness.

Social acceptance and respect in every human society are tied to appropriate behavior, and the need for social acceptance is the deepest, most pervasive human drive. Culture can thus use our need for social acceptance as a means to influence our behavior. In Western society, the accumulation of wealth stimulates economic activity in our hyper-productive economy, thus wealth is tied to social acceptance. In all cultures, access to sex is tied to social acceptance, thus sexuality is used by culture to motivate us to do what is beneficial for the culture at large. We will discuss this in more detail in another chapter.

Parallel Evolution

Even if we accept the power of culture to make use of our social needs to influence our deepest beliefs, how do we know that there is a common or universal process of cultural evolution? Because of the existence of parallel evolution.

With biological evolution, natural selection operates on the same principles whether it is occurring in Australia, Antarctica, or Asia. The animals may look different, but the process through which they evolve operates similarly all over the world.^¹ On distant continents one can find very similar but unrelated animals filling similar niches. In Australia, for instance, biological evolution has produced a plethora of marsupials that mimic in form the animals on other continents, including rodents, herbivores, and even large marsupial lion-like carnivores (now extinct). Though the animals look different, natural selection has guided the evolution of animals in similar niches on distant continents along parallel paths.

Cultural evolution operates by a process of cultural selection which, like natural selection, is similar no matter where on earth is it happening. The strongest evidence for a consistent process of cultural selection all over the world is what anthropologists have referred to as parallel evolution. Parallel cultural evolution refers to the spontaneous arising of similar cultural institutions in very distant places. Examples of parallel evolution include male supremacy, social stratification, and the ecological unsustainability of large societies. Parallel evolution indicates both the existence and the power of an underlying evolutionary force that shapes human culture.

Male supremacy is one significant example. Human beings lived for tens of thousands of years in hunting and gathering cultures.^² It is impossible to know exactly what such groups were like, but studies of modern gatherers indicate that our ancestors probably lived with relative egalitarianism between the sexes. Male supremacy probably did not exist for tens of thousands of years.^³

Now male supremacy is ubiquitous, often taking extreme forms. In China up until mid-twentieth century, they used to bind women's feet, leaving them crippled for life. In some areas of India, women were expected to kill themselves when their husbands died. In modern Iran or Saudi Arabia, women are often not allowed to show their faces in public, being compelled by law to wear veils. All over the world, political leaders are overwhelmingly male. Worldwide, women earn less than men and own less than men. Women are subject to violence at the hands of men far more often than the other way around.^⁴ In our own culture, sexism is not simply a primordial holdover. Granted, the status of women has improved in the last few decades, but sexism is an institution that continues to re-create itself.

Male supremacy is a powerful cultural institution which arose spontaneously in hundreds, if not thousands, of places all over the world.^¹ This clearly indicates that some underlying evolutionary force has a tendency to create male supremacy. I would argue that male supremacy is in no way natural or inevitable to the human species. Thus, this global recurrence represents the spontaneous creation of male supremacy, or parallel evolution.

Similar patterns of parallel evolution can be seen in the political development of human culture. The evolution of agriculture and the creation of state-level societies all over the globe indicates patterns of parallel evolution.

Before the growth of Western colonialism, pre-industrial state-level societies arose in isolation from one another in distant places. These states were characterized by the existence of standing armies, centralized leadership, and established political bureaucracies. In Mesopotamia in the Middle East, the Indus Valley in India, the Yellow River valley in China, the highlands of central Mexico, and in South America, states arose.

The cultures that preceded these states were diverse, and yet consider the commonalities of ancient states. Some human cultures have lived with a relative equality of the sexes, but all early states were strongly male-dominated. Some human cultures have lived without any specialized weapons of war, but all early states were highly militarized. Human beings the world over hold a wide diversity of spiritual beliefs. But in every early state, the paramount leader was considered a divine being, a god, or a descendant of God. Many human cultures had a high degree of awareness of the ecological balance. But all large scale human civilizations appear to evolve by a means that makes them blind to the ecological impacts of their actions. This is only the beginning of a long list of patterns among human societies, large and small. Given these similarities, there must be consistent reasons for the development of similar beliefs in diverse cultures around the world.^²

If we are ever to gain any conscious influence over the evolutionary forces of culture - this unseen power that not only creates sexism, but also drives our society on an unsustainable path - we will need to understand that evolutionary force.

The Illusion of Conscious Control

Culture has the power to create institutions of racism, sexism, ecologically unsustainable production, democracy, war, and peace. What guides the evolution of these cultural institutions that have so much influence over our lives? What creates culture?

It's not a question most people tend to ask. When we do think about it, we tend to think that we consciously guide our own society. This is a pervasive view in academics, the media, and politics. It is apparent when we read history, and we hear about how Plato or Napoleon had an idea that had particular impacts on the development of society. We talk about the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, inventions and leaders, and how culture changed in response to this philosophy or that idea. In modern times, the politicians, pundits and preachers talk about personal responsibility, values, and the moral integrity of particular leaders - again with the strong message that we guide the evolution of our society through our conscious choices.

Academics interpret history to make it seem like they can change the course of society, if only people will support their philosophies and ideas. Politicians claim that their policies have created positive changes, and that bad things happen as a result of their opposition's ideas. Leaders of all stripes try to make it appear that they are at the cutting edge of change, that they are leading society forward. As they try to gain public support by making their roles seem indispensable, leaders tend to reinforce the idea that we guide the evolution of our society with our conscious ideas.

For these and other reasons, we tend to believe that we have conscious control of our culture. It is a deeply held belief throughout our society, one that is quite obvious and intuitive to us, as people once thought the earth was flat. If we look across the horizon, the basic line of the land is flat. It is inescapable, it is obvious, it is clear, and it is wrong. Our belief in conscious control is like that. We can see that, if leaders make conscious choices, if we as a society hold certain beliefs or philosophies, then that has large historical impacts on how society changes.

As with the flat earth, however, there is a reality beyond immediate perception. The bigger reality is non-conscious cultural evolution, and it is not obvious or immediately visible. In spite of the enormous impact male supremacy has throughout the world, we do not know where it came from or why it continues. We ascribe our freedom and democracy to the wisdom of the founding fathers, but we do not know what guides the creation of democracy or slavery in human society. Cultural evolution creates the core institutions of our society outside of our conscious awareness or influence. Cultural evolution operates like a silent machine deep in the heart of our culture. It is very powerful, but it is not conscious or ethical. It simply drives our culture forward without our being aware of its profound influence.

In order to achieve a more conscious evolution, we will need to be more aware of cultural evolution. We will need to learn how to see the machine and how it operates, to learn how to guide it consciously. In order to do that, the first thing we will need to do is to learn to let go of our illusion of conscious control. Our illusions make use feel secure. The truth is often less orderly than the ideas we create to bring us comfort.

Our illusion of conscious control is reinforced by politicians and vested interests who want to take credit for progress and prosperity. We do not have nearly as much control as we would like to believe. Our survival may well depend on our ability to understand the unseen forces of cultural evolution, disseminate such understanding widely, and act on it in an organized way.

The culture into which we are born determines who we are as individual human beings. We learn from our culture what is good to eat, or gross, when sex is good or sinful, whether God is an individual being or a group spirits, whether God is an angry father or a benign spirit.

Culture has enormous influence over us. The question then becomes - what creates that culture? What creates all of our beliefs about food, sexuality, God, and other aspects of our culture? What guides the evolution of the culture around us?

The laboratory for researching that question is the past. Humans have lived in large and small cultures from the pack-ice on the north pole to the sands of the Sahara. As biologists study and compare the evolution of many animals to understand the principles of biological evolution, so we can look at the history of human cultures to understand the principles of cultural evolution.

To understand our cultural evolutionary past, we first have to dispel some of the misunderstandings that are quietly woven into our understanding of history. We imagine that we consciously guide the evolution of our society. Inextricably linked with this illusion of conscious control is the notion of progress. According to the mythology of progress, we have developed socially and technologically from a dark and difficult past to a more comfortable present and perhaps a brighter future.^¹ A more realistic look at cultural evolution does not put modern society at the pinnacle of progress, but rather sees our modern situation in the context of a long history of population growth and ecological change. The social sciences tend to avoid the real reasons for cultural evolution, because they make people uncomfortable. But we need to understand the past, whether or not it is flattering. The truth of the matter is that our distant past was not so difficult as we imagine.

Human beings evolved in gathering and hunting groups. Some gathering groups have survived into modern times. Gatherers tend to live in small bands that move around in a limited area, taking wild plants and animals for food, clothing, and shelter. This means of subsistence was practiced by our apelike, pre-human ancestors, as well as by humans for tens of thousands of years until the development of agriculture.^¹

The lives of our gathering ancestors were not “nasty, brutish, and short” as is sometimes imagined; they were in fact quite healthy. Height is one measure of nutrition, that is, people who have good nutrition tend to be taller. The height of human skeletons reached a peak some thirty thousand years ago. It is only in very recent history that the average height of human beings in developed countries has reached the “high point” that it reached tens of thousands of years ago. Dental health is another measure of nutrition. The average human being died with fewer teeth missing thirty thousand years ago than in Roman times.^² Marshal Sahlins coined the term the “original affluent society” in referring to gatherers.^³ They were skilled at living healthily in their environments.

As far as the quality of a gatherer’s life is concerned, there is much we cannot know about people who lived thousands of years ago. But there are gathering and hunting groups still in existence that have been studied. Such groups include the ! Kung and Hazda in Africa.^⁴ The ! Kung live in the Kalahari Desert in Bostwana and Namibia and are one of the most well studied groups of modern gatherers. The !Kung have practiced hunting and gathering into modern times. In the last few decades, their culture has been greatly impacted by the larger cultures around them and they have shifted away from their traditional lifestyle. But it is interesting nonetheless to examine what their gathering life was like.^⁵

The !Kung lived in small groups -- bands -- that ranged from four to thirty-four people when they were actively gathering and hunting. There were much larger gatherings during certain times of the year and for certain events.^⁶

The !Kung had a very wide diversity of plants and animals from which they could gather food. They were astute biologists and could name hundreds of local plants and animals, many of which they knew to be edible.^⁷ Of this inventory, only a few plants and animals made up the bulk of their diet, but the others were available if the more common ones should fail in a given season. One ethnographer who studied the !Kung of southern Africa wrote that they have no significant lack of any significant nutrient.^⁸

The diversity of the food supply of gatherers stands in contrast to subsistence agriculturalists who depend almost entirely on one or two staple crops. This brings us to one of the odd lessons about gathering societies: they had a more stable food supply than the agriculturalists who followed them. In the area where the !Kung lived as gatherers, neighboring agriculturalists had a greater seasonal body weight fluctuation than the !Kung themselves. For subsistence agriculturalists, there is a harvest season and a lean season. For the !Kung, there is a harvest season of different foods all the year round. When drought or other hard times struck, the agriculturalists turned to the bush to look for food, where the !Kung already lived with relative stability.^¹

The !Kung were peaceful people. The social fabric of their society, as with all pre-industrial societies, was kinship. They established kin relations across bands to maintain peaceful relationships. They would even create kin names for people who were not actual kin in order to establish a relationship.

“The applying of kin terms (to people beyond their actual kin) means to the !Kung that they are not strangers but that they belong together and should accord each other polite, respectful behavior, as they would to kin ... and take care not to give offense. Methods by which the !Kung help to keep peaceful relations amongst individuals within a band, methods such as meat sharing and gift giving ... are employed also with name relatives and have worked for peace in inter-band relationships. Our informants never heard of a fight between bands in the Nyae Nyae area, even from the old, old people.” Lorna Marshall^²

Even if one accepts that gatherers were physically healthy, it is hard to imagine camping in the wilderness for a lifetime. Without our institutions of literature, education, and art, mustn't they have been simple people, or at least bored?

Rather, it is a richness different from our institutions that they found. Many anthropologists have commented on the intensity of the social life of the ! Kung and other similar cultures. Their lives were neither boring, nor unpleasant, nor simple.

“The !Kung are the most loquacious people I know. Conversation in a !Kung encampment is a constant sound like the sound of a brook, and as low and lapping, except for shrieks of laughter. People cluster together in little groups during the day, talking, perhaps making artifacts at the same time. At night, families talk late by their fires, or visit at other family fires with their children between their knees or in their arms if the wind is cold.” Lorna Marshall^³

The art, music, and play of the !Kung were rich and diverse, as with any healthy human culture.

“The children play all their waking hours, free play and structured games. The adults also play games.” Lorna Marshall^¹

They spent a lot of time making music, playing, traveling from band to band and socializing.

“The !Kung are a music loving people. Most of the time someone in a !Kung encampment is making music. People sing to their babies to soothe or entertain them. They sing to enliven their tasks and their games. They sing at the waterhole and in leisure hours by their fires. Everyone sings, and almost everyone plays an instrument. Although some are more talented as musicians than others, and some take more interest than others in playing and singing well, none are specialists in any of the several repertories of music, and no one performs before others as musicians in European culture perform at concerts before an audience. People sing and play for their own delectation, and all participate to some degree in all aspects of the musical life.” Lorna Marshall^²

Their rich social life was central to their culture, and to personal identity.

“[T]he !Kung are dependent for their living on belonging to a band. They must belong; they can live no other way. They are also extremely dependent emotionally on the sense of belonging and on companionship. Separation and loneliness are unendurable to them. I believe their want to belong and be near is actually visible in the way families cluster together in an encampment and in the way they sit huddled together, often touching someone, shoulder against shoulder, ankle across ankle. Security and comfort for them lie in their belonging to their group free from the threat of rejection and hostility.” Lorna Marshall^³

Out of Eden

Our world has changed a lot since people lived in gathering cultures. We can't go back, and I am not sure we would want that. But it is important to understand that, from the beginning, it has not been “progress” that has pushed our cultural evolution. Our distant past was neither physically, socially, nor spiritually miserable. We did not develop agriculture and civilization to escape starvation, drudgery, and brutality. The truth of our history is more complicated than that, and less flattering.

If it hasn't been progress driving humanity forward, then what has brought us here? If our ancestors were comfortable and happy, then why did they change? If one could name a single factor that has influenced the course of cultural evolution more than any other, it would be the changing relationship of human beings to the environment that supports them - in a word, ecology. As we are reluctant to examine the ecology of our own time, so we have trouble seeing the role of ecology in our history. But our ignorance does not reduce the power of ecology to influence our cultural evolution.

Ecology has been an unseen, unknown, but enormously powerful force driving the evolution of human societies. It operates largely outside of human consciousness. The ecology of cultural evolution is that population growth and resource depletion have caused societies to evolve from smaller, more egalitarian societies to the large, stratified societies we live in today.^¹

Gatherers, for instance, tend to have extremely low population densities. The ! Kung, for instance, had about one person for every 10 square kilometers.^² The wild plants and animals growing in the semi-desert where they lived probably could not support many more people. The !Kung lived in a semi-desert. Richer environments can support more gathering people, but populations of gatherers remain limited by the availability of wild foods.

Pre-industrial cultures practiced a wide range of population limiting techniques, but populations still grew. As they did, people turned to smaller plants and animals that occurred in greater abundance, but were harder to gather. This is referred to as “ broad spectrum” hunting and gathering: instead of hunting deer or bison, people might start hunting rabbits, or even snails or lizards. Instead of just digging up the largest roots they can find, they might start relying more on smaller roots or seeds that take more time to gather but occur in greater abundance.^³

It is yet another one of our myths that gathering groups somehow had to “invent” agriculture because they did not understand the nature of plants and seeds. They lived in nature every hour of every day of their lives. They knew it with an intimacy that we will never possess. They knew quite well about the nature of reproduction of plants and animals. Gatherers knew how to plant seeds; they chose to not practice agriculture, because it involved more work and they simply didn't need it as long as population densities remained low.

The population densities of early gatherers grew over time. As human populations grew beyond the level that broad spectrum gathering could support, our ancestors began to invest more effort in manipulating the wild plants and animals. They replanted, weeded, and otherwise tried to see to it that wild plants produced more. Over time, this manipulation of wild plants and animals developed into domestication and agriculture.^¹

Agriculture was adopted independently in hundreds of places all over the planet earth. It was not “invented” in one place and then spread. The development of agriculture thus represents a pattern of parallel evolution. Repeatedly, human beings learned how to domesticate plants and animals for food. Agriculture can support many times more people on a given area of land than can gathering.

At first our predecessors practiced simple forms of agriculture such as slash and burn farming. They would burn sections of the forest and plant in the ashes for a few years. This kind of agriculture is still practiced among small cultures such as the Yanomamo in the Brazilian Amazon.^² Slash and burn farming can be sustainable if there is enough forest and few people, which is often not the case in modern times.

Population continued to grow. Over time agriculturalists started to practice more intensive forms of agriculture. They dug trenches to channel water and irrigate crops. They domesticated large animals and pulled plows with them, thus creating plow agriculture.

It is part of our cultural mythology that a settled agricultural life decreased the workload of our forbearers and gave them more leisure time. The opposite is true. The evolution to more intensive forms of agriculture followed a pattern of increasing labor inputs. Starting with gathering cultures like the !Kung, we can see that their economy demanded much smaller labor inputs than what was to follow. They worked only a few hours a day to maintain themselves -- a paltry workload compared to what was to come.^³ On average, subsistence agricultural peoples work harder than gatherers. Slash and burn horticulturalists work harder than gatherers, but not as hard as plow agriculturalists who have to exert great effort hoeing and plowing the fields, as well as building and operating irrigation works.^⁴

Agriculture demands more labor for a return that was in some ways less reliable than gathering. Plow and irrigation agriculture demands still more work. In spite of these disadvantages, many human cultures all over the world adopted agriculture in order to feed their growing populations. To what degree were they conscious of the long-term effects of their choices? While we cannot know for certain, it seems that they were largely unaware of the greater implications of the changes they were undergoing. It appears that cultural evolution becomes less conscious as human cultures get larger. This is a point to which we will return.

As the populations of our ancestors grew, easily accessible resources were depleted. People turned to agriculture to feed themselves, even though this involved more work. As populations continued to grow, people turned to more intensive forms of plow and irrigation agriculture.

That is what happened materially. At a social level, these material needs created a cultural need for a means to motivate people to work harder. Methods of building motivation and unity among large groups of people hence became the strongest force shaping the social structure and belief systems of all large human cultures. This need to build motivation has become embedded in our cultural fabric though centuries of history.

The Intensification of Production

We can trace the beginning of the evolution of motivational schemes to small cultures as they stand at the beginning of the long road we have traveled. The purpose of building motivation is to increase production. Anthropologists refer to increasing production within a given productive process as intensification. Intensification means working harder to get more. If a farmer goes out into their fields and tills the soil deeper, pulls more weeds, spreads more fertilizer or manure, then they are intensifying their productive effort and they will produce more. For human societies with growing populations and the depletions that result, the issue becomes how to motivate people, how to create a social organization that encourages each member of the society to intensify their production.^¹

With each step along the cultural evolutionary ladder, people had to work harder. How do you motivate large numbers of people to work harder? There are a number of schemes that human societies employ. Not surprisingly, the motivational approaches human societies use across the globe evolve through a parallel set of stages. For the purposes of this discussion, I will be referring to these motivational strategies as volunteerism, cheerleading, coercion, and individualism. Each of these strategies is present to some degree at each level of cultural evolution. Each strategy is present in our modern industrial society. But each stage of our cultural evolution holds one of these strategies as a defining characteristic of that era, as we shall see. Social stratification and male supremacy are the results of these motivational strategies.

Volunteerism

The beginnings of intensification of production can be seen in gathering cultures. Most human cultures throughout most of history have practiced polygyny -- one man having multiple wives. The opposite -- polyandry, or one woman having multiple husbands -- is rare. The beginnings of polygyny can be seen with gathering groups. In some gathering groups, good hunters would have more than one wife. The ! Kung were primarily monogamous, but good hunters among them sometimes had more than one wife. Polygyny was even more common among desert-dwelling Australian aborigines.^¹

Among gatherers and other small cultures, women often had a higher social status than in Western society. There are a significant number of small cultures, including some settled agricultural societies, who had female deities.^² Why did polygyny become so common, and why is polyandry so rare? Because men were being rewarded with increased sexual access for intensification behavior.

In gathering societies, women are the primary gatherers and men are the primary hunters. This division of labor is very consistent among gathering groups, but it is not enforced with the weight of law and economics that is used to maintain the divisions of labor in more stratified societies. This division of labor is primarily rooted in the necessities of child-rearing and hunting in the circumstances under which gatherers lived. Primitive hunting using bows, spears, and other similar weapons involves a great deal of mobility since wounded animals must be chased over great distances. Men do not bear or breast-feed children, and are thus more suited to hunting.

If we look at gathering societies in terms of their growing populations within their natural ecosystems, we can begin to see why it is the hunters (men) rather than the gatherers (women) who might end up having more than one spouse. I would contend that intensification and the pyramidal nature of ecosystems are the original causes of polygyny. Ecosystems have a lot of small plants and small animals at the bottom that form a broad base, fewer larger animals further up the pyramid, and very few large animals at the top. A culture that relied on larger animals at the top of that pyramid to support itself would be very susceptible to ecological stress. As an ecosystem becomes stressed, the few large animals at the top are reduced in number most quickly. If you were a member of a tribe living by digging roots and hunting deer, you would reduce the number of deer much more quickly than you would reduce the number of roots, or the number of rabbits. As the number of deer was reduced, the nutritional intake that the group was accustomed to receiving from that source would be consequentially reduced.

Gatherers responded to the depletion of huntable animals by creating a system of social and sexual reward. They rewarded good hunters with more than one sexual partner. Meat obtained by male hunters has consistently been idealized as the best kind of food by human cultures across the globe; thus it has played a significant role in our cultural evolution.^¹ Vegetarianism and veganism are viable options in modern society, but it is important that we understand the choices of our ancestors on their own terms.

Returning to our earlier examples, the ! Kung live in a semi-desert, and practiced a small degree of polygyny. The inland Aborigines in Australia live in a harsher environment where hunting is more difficult, and polygyny is more common. The gathering cultures where men hold the most power are the Innuit (Eskimos) who live entirely by hunting. From the beginning, men have been the primary target of motivational schemes intended to intensify production.

It is worth noting that male supremacy has spontaneously arisen among hundreds of cultures all over the globe.^² The sexual reward system that provided good hunters with more than one wife was the beginnings of voluntary intensification, or volunteerism. Society provided a sexual reward for hunters to work harder. Meat is always shared in gathering groups; thus the increased labor of these individuals improved the nutrition and health of the group. In this first stage of volunteerism, society provides a reward and simply allows people to seek that reward.

Cheerleading

The second stage of intensification is cheerleading. As human societies began practicing small scale agriculture, leaders became more prominent. But these leaders do not have any coercive powers, or even any clearly defined class status. Their function seems rather like that of community cheerleaders. One such culture is the Siuia of Bouganville in the South Pacific. In the words of a Siuia:

“Hiding in your houses again; copulating day and night while there's work to be done! Why, if it were left up to you, you would spend the rest of your lives smelling yesterday's pig. But I tell you yesterday's feast was nothing. The next one will be really big.”^¹

This man is trying to rouse people to work in preparation for a feast. Many small scale agriculturalists have competitive feasts with each other. These feasts are organized by ambitious men who want to gain the status of leadership. An ambitious young man will talk to his friends and family and try to get them to support him in throwing a feast. He will go through the village, rousing people out of bed, getting them to work harder in preparations for it.

One village will hold a feast, and challenge another group to come to their feast to see how much the first group can give away.^² It is a question of social status to give away the most, to provide the largest feast. The group invited to a feast has a limited amount of time to try to reciprocate with a larger feast. The leader of the village that wins the competition by hosting the largest feast will be called a “big man.”^³ (Among other things, the competitive giving of feasting shows us that greed and acquisitiveness are not human nature, but rather learned behaviors in more stratified societies.) The cheerleaders of competitive feasts are always male. These leaders are intensifiers of production, and they may also be military and spiritual leaders.^⁴

A “big man” is not like a wealthy person in our society who gets paid more, gets a bigger house, or anything like that. If anything, a “big man” gets paid less, eating the crumbs of the feast after everyone else has finished. But he does get two rewards. The first reward is social respect; the second reward is sexual access, often in the form of multiple wives. Social respect and sexual access to multiple partners have long been very closely linked in our cultural evolution.

The purpose of competitive feasting is the intensification of production. Intensification becomes much more possible with the advent of agriculture. There are only so many wild animals one can hunt or roots one can gather, but with agriculture one can till more land for a greater return. Agricultural outputs are not as limited as wild plants and animals.

Subsistence agriculturalists often depend on one or two staple crops to survive. If there is a crop failure one year, the yield of their planted staple food may be greatly reduced. In order to insure that they have enough food in bad years, subsistence agriculturalists have to plant more than enough in good years. Some cultures idealized the sight of rotting food as a symbol of wealth in order to assure there would be enough in the lean years.^¹ Primitive agriculturalists also tended to have more dense populations, settling down in villages, unlike their nomadic gathering predecessors. Agriculturalists had faster rates of population growth than gatherers. All of these factors created a constant incremental demand to intensify production.

Within a culture practicing the “ big man” system, both the individual seeking to be a leader and the people supporting him are seeking social status. The overall effect of this is to raise the level of production, thus increasing, or at least maintaining, the standard of living of the group as a whole in the face of population growth and the ecological depletion of important resources.

Coercion

As the populations of small scale agriculturalists continued to grow, they intensified their agricultural production from simple forms of agriculture - such as slash and burn - to more labor intensive forms of plow and irrigation agriculture. The development of these new forms of agriculture corresponded with the creation of greater social stratification.

It would seem that the intensification of production and the creation of taller social hierarchies was not simply a coincidence. The correlation between social stratification and heightened production was first pointed out by Marhsal Sahlins who studied several societies on islands in the South Pacific, including small agricultural societies and larger, more stratified chiefdoms. He found that the larger, more stratified societies were more productive and had more intensive redistributive networks.^² Creating new motivational schemes is what led to the development of social hierarchy

The development of highly intensive forms of agriculture corresponded with the evolution of state-level societies. If we look at state-level societies -- the ones we refer to as civilizations -- we see that there is a parallel pattern in the circumstances that led to their creation.

In trying to understand what led to the formation of the state, anthropologists have identified a few key variables, including the presence of storable foods, such as grains -- as opposed to foods that rot, such as yams. The ability to store food allows a centralized political authority to gain more power by storing more food.

Early states were also ecologically circumscribed, i.e., they lived in a fertile area that was surrounded by an infertile area, such as a river valley. Civilizations developed in the Yellow River Valley in China, the Indus River Valley in India, and along the Tigris and Euphrates in the middle East.^³ Apparently agriculturalists living in those fertile areas went through a period of gathering, and then primitive agriculture. They intensified production with volunteerism and cheerleading, consistently pressured by population growth. As their populations grew in these fertile areas, there was no other place to go because the land around them was infertile.

Warfare played a key role in the formation of states.^¹ As human cultures became more settled and population more dense, the frequency and severity of warfare increased. “Big men” became war leaders. War represented a strong selective force that tended to add to the power of “big men.” Warfare greatly increased the severity of social stratification and male supremacy. Warfare and other stressors cause people to rely more on leadership.^² Warfare forces small cultures that might prefer to remain more egalitarian to band together in larger, more stratified social systems for their own defense. Even in our own time, warfare has been the key to increasing executive power.^³ Warfare strongly selected for the development of state-level societies. As militarism grew in a circumscribed area, one culture began to take over another until the smaller social units in a circumscribed area were consolidated under a centralized state.

For the individual members of these societies, the state grew more demanding and burdensome. But because they were surrounded by infertile land, they had little choice but to stay and farm the irrigated land under the control of the state. That led to a new form of intensification -- coercion. Early states were highly militarized and male supremacist. By means of a standing army and a standing police force, the state had the power to coerce people to work harder.

The states with the most powerful centralized governments were those that had irrigation agriculture, which allowed centralized political powers to use the control of the water works to enforce their will.^⁴ In areas of the world where fertile land was more dispersed and rainfall agriculture dominated, states were much slower to form. This latter situation was the case in Europe, where there were many small and diverse societies long before states formed, and state formation came only after long periods of warfare.^⁵

Larger human cultures also reversed a longstanding tradition of our species regarding population control. The practice of primitive forms of birth control, infanticide and abortion were nearly universal among small cultures, but states actually started seeking population growth. For the state, more people meant more workers and more soldiers. States became pro-natalist.^⁶

The continuous ecological pressure of population growth pushed the evolution of culture forward. The growth of population and the development of social stratification is not simply a historical correlation, but rather a causal one. Social stratification was created to increase production and military power. Human societies didn't make these choices consciously, but rather were pressed into them by ecological circumstances.

Individualism

There were a few civilizations that traveled the long path from the health and freedom of gathering, to the relative health of small-scale agriculture, into centralized but still largely free chiefdoms, descended into peasant/ slave states, only to turn around in the end and develop democracy. In these states, instead of restricting civil liberties more and more they began to create more civil liberties, to allow more freedom. This was the process that led to the development of Western democracy.

Democracy is growing in the late twentieth century. It would behoove us to know what causes democratic freedoms to grow or contract. Democracy is the outgrowth of yet another motivational strategy to intensify production, but results from a dramatic new set of circumstances.

The development of Western democracy occurred in the United States, Europe, and going further back, in Rome, Greece, and Crete. In each of these societies, varying degrees of democracy came after a period of slavery or monarchy.

The Greeks and Romans evolved from having a monarch, to a certain degree of democracy, and then back again to monarchy. How did it happen that they evolved from less freedom to more freedom, then back again to less freedom? What was the motivational strategy that drove the transition to democracy?

If we look at the development of the Western democracies, we find a parallel set of circumstances. What happened in these societies -- with the Romans and Greeks in particular -- is that they went through the cycles of population growth and intensification, evolving into centralized chiefdoms or monarchies that were organized for intensification of production and military protection. In response to continued population growth and ecological stress on the land, they started to sail the oceans and conquer the lands of other peoples, opening new sources of resources to these centralized states. Imperial power began to bring home the fruits of plunder. A mercantile class began to grow more powerful, based on the wealth of trade, and challenged the landed aristocracy.

Over time, colonialism brought in more and more resources and the mercantilists became more powerful than the established, land-owning aristocracy. Slaves and peasants cannot become entrepreneurs, neither can they buy very much. It became in the interests of the mercantilists for more people to have more freedom to produce and consume more and bolster the economic growth of the society. Civil liberties began to expand outward, first to the mercantilists, then to the males of the dominant ethnicity, and then, to some extent, to slaves, women, and people of minority enthnicities. In some cultures this process went much further than others.

This process of spreading out civil liberties became a new form of intensification. A lot of resources were coming into these civilizations, but there was still a great deal of population growth and resource depletion. The demand for intensification of production and the creation of social motivation remained ever present. The new motivational strategy was individualism.

When a society is met with a vast new input of resources, it becomes desirable to have a large number of people working harder to achieve social status. Then everyone has the opportunity to become a “big man,” or even a king, each serving as an intensifier of production, each living on their own estate. Provided the resources are available, individualism drives production more effectively than volunteerism, cheerleading, or coercion. Individualism becomes a self-propelling, self-reinforcing process whereby many members of society are provided the resources and given the incentives to increase their production and consumption of goods. Economic activity then becomes self-magnifying. The more people work, the more wealth they generate, the more the whole system drives itself forward.

Crete provides an example of this pattern. On the island of Crete there was an ancient civilization that has been studied only recently. Around 2,000 B.C., Crete became a small, state-level society with a centralized political structure that was not a highly militarized.^¹ This was in part because Crete is an island; the sea served as a moat. Ancient Crete developed its wealth by mastering trade on the Mediterranean Sea -- which they alone commanded. This brought them great riches in trade. Even the poorest members of society appear to have been reasonably well-off. They were also highly democratic and egalitarian, so much so that their works of art and political records left from that time do not even bear the names of the people who created them, and there are no statues of great leaders.^² This stands in stark contrast to civilizations with which we are more familiar. It would appear that the great wealth brought to Crete allowed its citizens to develop individualism and democracy to a great extent.

Greece is another example. Ancient Greece is well-known as the birthplace of Western democracy. But before the Greeks had democracy, they had kings.^³ The Greeks never were as tightly organized as other civilizations, so these kings were more like chiefs ruling over leagues of tribes.^⁴ The Greeks were not circumscribed; their agriculture occurred over a wide area. But over time population pressure pushed them to try to colonize surrounding areas.^⁵ This colonization began around 750 B.C. In time, colonization and trade brought home wealth, and a new class of mercantilists vied for and took power.^¹

By 500 B.C., Greece was entering its democratic era. Trade created new markets and wealth. As this new wealth grew and spread, civil liberties and democracy were extended beyond a select class to more people. More and more people were motivated as intensifiers of production.^² The expansion of colonialism and the democracy it purchased brought forward an unprecedented intellectual expansion.^³ The ancient Greeks have ever since been renowned for their science, including the basics of modern math, geometry, and astronomy. Greek democracy never spread far enough to include slaves and women. There were several classes of Greek slaves, and the higher classes had nearly as many rights as a working-class person today.^⁴ Eventually Greek democracy fell prey to increased militarization and warfare after 300 B.C.^⁵

The ancient Romans are an example of a limited evolution toward democracy. The Romans, like the Greeks, went from monarchy, to democracy, then back to monarchy again. Starting in 500 B.C., the Roman Empire lasted nearly a thousand years in some form. It was early in the Roman empire that democratic institutions reached their peak. Before the rise of the Roman Empire, Roman monarchs were very powerful.^⁶ As the Roman empire grew, a measure of democracy grew with it, although it never developed as far as in Greece. The Romans conquered and brought home wealth from as far away as Britain, Spain, and northern Africa. At its peak, Roman colonialism was so profitable that for a time native Romans were allowed to not pay taxes at all.^⁷

One measure of Roman individualism is that the Romans created the “family farm,” perhaps for the first time in history. Most subsistence agriculturalists prefer to live in villages and walk out to their fields. The Romans developed family farms with family houses more separate from each other, as we are familiar with in modern times.^⁸ After the “collapse” of Roman “civilization,” the outlying colonies simply reverted to village-based agriculture.^⁹

One function of family farms was no doubt that they served as a distinction of social status - an important consideration in a stratified, individualized society. We might also conjecture, knowing the social richness of village life, that family farms might actually cause people to work harder because they are not socially distracted. If such were true on a larger social scale, it would serve the purposes of the intensification of production.

Another result of Roman individualism was the growth of democracy. There was in pre-Christian Rome a plebeian, or citizens', assembly. In the early empire, the Plebeian Assembly had the power to veto acts of the state senate and, for some time, had the power to pass laws that were binding on all Romans. Roman law also allowed for the rights of citizens to have a trial and appeal when accused of a crime.^¹

When plebeian power was at its peak, Rome was still a “limited democracy,” in the words of one historian.^² There were probably several reasons for the limitations of Roman democracy. Even though Roman imperialism brought home great wealth at times, in general Rome was poor relative to other democratic states. Poverty became especially acute in the later empire.^³ This poverty was a substantial burden in the home state.

The Romans were also highly militarized. They were expansionistic; they practiced severe brutality in their conquered lands.^⁴ The Roman system of slavery was also more harsh than Greek slavery. Slavery was so much a part of Roman society that it served to stifle the development of markets and technological change. Slave labor was so cheap that the Romans never even used water mills to grind their flour, only slave-driven hand mills.^⁵ Unlike the Greeks, the Romans never developed significant institutions of scientific investigation. This again, can be seen as the result of slavery and the resulting repression of wages and markets.^⁶ In the later Roman empire, limited democracy collapsed under the weight of slavery, poverty, and warfare. Rome again was ruled by an absolute monarch.

The development of democracy in Europe and the United States followed some similar patterns to its development in earlier civilizations. In both the U.S. and Europe, agriculture was rainfall-based, thus political power was more dispersed from the start. In Europe, there were kings before the rise of democracies. Democracy began to develop as the booty of colonialism flowed to the home states and into the hands of new mercantile classes. Population pressure and ecological stress continued and production was intensified with the development of individualism and democracy.

In the U.S., great reserves of resources were acquired by the conquest of the North American continent, as well as colonial development later on. In spite of the abundance of resources released by the conquest of new lands, ecological depletion and population growth created constant pressure.^⁷ The depletion of easily accessible firewood is in part what led to increased use of fossil fuel, even in the U.S. where wood was plentiful.

Individualism got a boost of dramatic new proportions with the expanded use of fossil fuel and the industrial revolution. The use of fossil fuel effectively created resources on an entirely new scale by making it possible to extract natural resources in new ways. In the case of the U.S., individualism started with a select class of white men and has since dispersed a great deal as a result of the explosion of resources released by the use of fossil fuel. As political and economic power has dispersed, we have developed an entire society of individual “big men” and now “big women” -- an entire society of intensifiers of production. The economic growth that has resulted is unprecedented.

Democracy and Ecology

In modern times, we cherish our democracy and civil liberties. We are proud that we have extended these liberties to a larger and larger circle of people, to include women and minorities who at other times had less power and freedom. But we have to understand that it was not simply conscious choice driving this process of expanding civil liberties. I would not go so far as to say that conscious choice has no influence in the matter; history is not that simple. But the economic effects of large numbers of individuals intensifying their production based on a vast new availability of resources cannot be ignored.

There are many things that influence the course of history, but some factors are more influential than others, economic and ecological forces being the most powerful and persistent. The historical descent into slavery that humanity experienced was not a choice, nor was the evolution from that slavery back to democracy. Both were the result of changing economic and ecological circumstances that we have not consciously understood or chosen. We must understand that, because our present level of democracy is based on a very high -- and ever growing -- level of resource consumption. As more and more people make use of those resources, produce more and buy more, we consume more resources, the economy is driven forward, and civil liberties expand. The question then becomes -- can our democracy sustain through a substantial decline in resource consumption? To the extent that we follow the patterns of history, the answer to that question is clear. As with Greek and Roman democracy, they went from autocracy, to democracy, and back to autocracy or monarchy as their colonial success and resource base declined.

We are facing growing ecological stress. Some resources will be limited as a result of depletion, others as a result of pollution and its mitigation. This ecological stress will tend to increase poverty. Our response to poverty is likely to be a decrease in civil liberties in order to maintain social control. If we follow the ruts of history, we will constrict civil liberties as our resources are constricted. These are not things we think about much while we are out shopping, but that does not weaken the forces of history. The decline of civil liberty will be inescapable if our cultural evolution remains non-conscious.

Technology is a powerful force affecting humanity. With it we have produced a bounty of spaceships and microchips, more food than ever before, and atomic weapons. We have created gargantuan machines that dig, cut and crush wood and minerals at a rapid pace. If we wish to direct this power in socially beneficial directions, we must understand the place technology has held in human history.^¹

Many people believe that technology can solve our ecological problems. At the same time, we don't really know what causes technology to change. We have this idea of progress, that once people found enough leisure time they started innovating and building gadgets to make life more comfortable and secure. We tend to think that technological innovation leads cultural change like a master leads their dog. This is in keeping with our belief in conscious control, and is no less than an article of faith for a great many people. This idea that we represent the pinnacle of progress is flattering, but historically inaccurate.

Technology is not simply an outcome of progress. Historically, technology has been pushed forward by the changing relationship between people and the environment. These changes can be seen to occur through a series of stages.

The starting point is equilibrium. If we look at animals in their natural environments, we find that they have many behaviors that are intended to maintain a balance with the natural environment. The tendency of birds or other animals to mark and defend a territory is an attempt to create an area that is large enough to sustain a family. Such animals may only mark their territory when they are reproducing, and they may vary the size of their territory according to the density of food and other resources available. There is a tendency in biological evolution toward reaching an ecological equilibrium between the supply and demand of needed resources. For an animal to try to acquire more than it needs would be a maladaptive waste of energy, and less would not suit either.

Culture is always changing. But other than in our growth-based industrial society, cultural evolution seeks equilibrium in a similar fashion to biological evolution. Many pre-industrial cultures intentionally limited their population growth to seek equilibrium with the availability of natural resources.

Under conditions of equilibrium, humans tend to use the resources that are most easily found, processed, and consumed. Given a choice, people will pick the largest berries, dig the shallowest roots, and hunt the biggest, least wary animals. If needed resources are easily attained and adequate in volume, a society is not under any stress and technology tends to remain static. No extraordinary new inventions are created.^¹ As we will see, technological change often comes at a price. As long as people are well fed by one means, they don't have any good reason to create an new one.

Population growth and ecological stress have pushed human societies to alter their social organization. Perhaps it is not too surprising then that these same factors are what precipitated the great technological revolution of which we are a part.

When population growth and ecological depletion begin to cause a decrease in the standard of living, the first stage of technological change is initiated. This first stage is intensification of production within the existing productive process. If there are more mouths to feed, the gatherer will gather more, the hunter will hunt further afield, the subsistence farmer will plant more.

Up to a certain point, the more one invests in a productive effort, the more one increases output of a usable product. If you plant more grain, all other things being equal, you get more grain at harvest time. But when a given resource is producing about as much as it can, then working harder yields less and less return. When a hunter hunts increasingly scarce animals, they start to get less meat for each hour they spend hunting. When a farmer tries to get a piece of land to produce beyond the capacity of the soil and the technology at hand, then more work will not yield a greater harvest. This is referred to as the “ point of diminishing returns.” Pushing beyond this point can degrade the resource to the point that additional effort only yields less return.

When and only when a culture has reached a point of diminishing returns within a given mode of production is there sufficient incentive to “ invent” a new mode of production. It is only when naturally occurring plants and animals have been exploited to their maximum capacity that gatherers invest the extra effort needed to for agriculture. It is only when the fallow periods of a slash and burn horticulturalists have become too short that they have any reason to invest the effort in constructing irrigation works for a more intensive form of agriculture.

When a culture has reached the point of diminishing returns within its existing methods production, then it seeks new technologies. What this means is picking the smaller berries, digging the deeper roots, and hunting the animals that are smaller, faster, and smarter. It also means planting berry bushes and root crops, and domesticating animals.

This is a consistent pattern in technological development that is important to understand because it applies to our society as much as any other. Resources that are used first include those that: (a.) are the ones that are most easily attained; (b.) require the least technological complexity to process; (c.) require the least labor to process; (d.) require the least energy to process; and (e.) are of high quality. As a result of population and economic growth, these resources become more scarce. Other resources are substituted for the now increasingly scarce resources. These substitutes consistently: (a.) are more difficult to obtain; (b.) require more technological complexity to process; (c.) require more labor to process; (d.) are often of inferior quality; but (e.) occur in greater volume in the natural environment.

Some examples will make this clearer. The way Europeans have clothed themselves over the centuries represents one instance of the advantages and costs of technological development.^¹ Animal skins were the first form of clothing used; they were easily accessible and easily processed into high-quality garments. To this day they are considered the highest quality of clothing. (Though the ethics of wearing fur in the modern context are another matter.) When the population grew and the supply of skins ran short, people made a transition to wool. Wool required more labor and energy inputs and more complex technology to produce a garment that was inferior, but because it could be supplied in greater quantity to meet the needs of growing populations, the change was made. People had to work harder to keep themselves clothed and warm, but there simply weren't enough wild animals around to supply the increasing numbers of people with clothing.

When the population had grown further still and the land used to graze sheep was needed to grow food, a transition was made to the use of cotton. By that time, cotton was being imported into Europe from colonies all over the world. Once again more complex technology and more energy and labor inputs were required to produce a garment that was considered inferior at the time. People had to work still harder for their clothing, but they had little choice. Population growth and ecological pressure caused the change.

The most recent transition has been to synthetics. Now it takes a lot of oil and very complex machinery just to make a piece of cloth. Large volumes of fossil fuel energy have been -- and continue to be -- substituted for human labor. While specific synthetics have qualities that are suited for specific uses, many people still prefer silk, wool, and other natural fibers. What was once readily available with little effort is now produced by an enormous mechanical infrastructure. While we do not work as hard as people did in the early industrial revolution, our decreased workload now comes at the price of an enormous consumption of energy and other resources.

The same situation can be seen in the production of food. First, humans ate the foods that were the easiest to obtain and process. When these food sources were overburdened by growing populations, people moved on to those food sources that required more labor and more complex technology. Gatherers knew how to plant, though they chose not to. People who practiced slash and burn horticulture knew that they could produce more by working harder and developing more intensive agriculture, but why would they?

We mentioned earlier how workloads increased rather than decreased as human cultures went from gathering, to slash and burn horticulture, to plow and irrigation agriculture. But some of the highest workloads shouldered by any society were seen during the early industrial revolution.

“One can gauge the scale of their drudgery by one of the first pieces of corrective factory legislation passed in Britain in the early nineteenth century. It limited children of twelve years and under to an eighty-four-hour week.” Barbara Ward^¹

That is how hard people had to work to support themselves and the social hierarchy to which they were subject. Early industrial

Ecodem Press

Charlottesville VA, 2006

Introduction

CULTURAL EVOLUTION

CHAPTER ONE

The Second Great Leap

The Power of Culture

The Social Animal

Cultural Evolution Has Been Driven by Ecological Limits

Building Motivation

Can Technology Save Us?