Inequality is a big deal today. It was the subject (or persistence thereof) of Greg Clark’s most recent book, The Son Also Rises, and more famously Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. And obviously it is at the center of many contemporary policy debates. But to frame these modern arguments we need to get a sense of inequality’s natural history. In Clark’s previous book, A Farewell to Alms, he reported the standard economic historical finding that agricultural societies had high rates of inequality, which began to drop after the arrival of modernization in societies due to industrialization. The wage gap between skilled and non-skilled workers in Britain dropped between ~1800 AD to ~1970, only rising again over the past two generations.
But what about a more anthropological perspective? The May 23rd issue of Science focused on the topic (there was even a contribution by Piketty). Two articles sum up two contrasting views, The ancient roots of the 1% and Our egalitarian Eden. The latter is probably closer to the received wisdom, while the former piece reports on revisionist work which highlights findings from hunter-gatherer societies in situations of natural surplus where inequality seems to have been tolerated or accepted. Finally, I want to point to a Peter Turchin preprint, Religion and Empire in the Axial Age, which touches upon many of the same issues. Reading the first two pieces it does seem that to a first approximation the idea that hunter-gatherers tended toward egalitarianism is still valid. The exceptions from what I can gather are cases where there were temporary surfeits of natural resources which could be hoarded and corralled in some fashion. This is in contrast to post-Neolithic agricultural societies where gross inequality coexisted for long periods with Malthusian conditions. The implication from the pieces in Science is that in the Paleolithic inequality could persist when there was plenty to go around. But we know from the historical record that in mass agricultural societies gross poverty and inequality could go hand in hand. Why? Because in Paleolithic societies the lower ranks could collude and redistribute resources in situations of scarcity, and they could not in post-Neolithic societies.
Why is a complicated issue, but here I turn to the Turchin article, which emphasizes that in terms of social inequality the archaic despotisms of the early historical epoch may have been maximal expressions of the range of human dignity, from the god-kings of Egypt down to the slaves who were sacrificed by the Mycenaeans in the wake of attacks upon their citadels by the Sea Peoples in the 13th century. Turchin indicates that the decline in social inequality was signaled by the intellectual revolution of the Axial Age. But where did these ideas come from? Were they innovations of genius of the kind of modern scientific theories? Novel, counter-intuitive, but true? I don’t think so. Rather, I suspect that the Axial Age is simply a distillation of human intuitions with deep evolutionary roots in our Paleolithic past. As cooperative social primates egalitarianism was part of our evolutionary past, and the cultural excesses of the post-Neolithic archaic age were bound to trigger intellectual innovations which more easily fit our cognitive toolkit.*
But the flip side of this is that we are not a purely egalitarian species, and hierarchy is also part of our heritage. If this was not the case I don’t think it would have been so easy to develop the concentrations of social power which arose after the Neolithic. What Turchin’s essay highlights is that egalitarianism and hierarchy are both tendencies which are at dynamic tension, and different social structures and historical epochs have obtained quasi-equilibrium states which balance and synthesize the two forces. Even egalitarian religious systems often manifest themselves in a hierarchical fashion. Conversely, even inegalitarian systems (e.g. caste) have had mechanisms for promotion and demotion. Our human natures likely dictate there will be no end of history.
* There is a bit of irony here because the Axial Age religio-philosophies tend to have an abstruse exoteric layer which is manipulable only by literate professionals.
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