Envy: the Vestige of a Miserable World

Hierarchy in the Forest Review Pt.1

Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.

~Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XIII, paragraph 1

Hierarchy in the Forest is a truly exceptional book. The are two stories to tell about Christopher Boehm. The first is that amidst literal chimps, he stumbled upon evidence of a genetic founding crime so potent in undermining the egalitarian sensibilities of his peers that it needed to be strategically undersold, obfuscated, and mixed with egalitarian platitudes. The second is that Boehm is a narrow academic who has not fully deduced the conclusions of his research, a metaphorical gold mine. 

Here’s what is completely clear: Boehm finds compelling evidence that egalitarianism is a evolved behavior long predating modern social structures. “A distinctively egalitarian political style is highly predictable wherever people Hierarchy and Equality live in small, locally autonomous social and economic groups” (34-35). It is an empirical rebuke to readings of Nietzschians that lay causal blame for egalitarian resentment on Christianity.

Striking in the opposite direction, Boehm finds that egalitarianism is not a natural state, but a coerced conformity carefully and universally enforced. “If a stable egalitarian hierarchy is to be achieved, the basic flow of power in society must be reversed definitively” (10). Boehm proceeds to a compromise between Hobbes and Rousseau that I disagree with. Perhaps I agree with the esoteric reading.

Of Chimps and Men

Chimps and hunter-gatherers have opposite hierarchies. Hierarchy in the Forest is equal parts anthropology and evolutionary theory, and this is the striking conclusion of the former. 

Boehm describes the hierarchical structures of chimps and hunter-gatherer tribes. From there, he asks how those structures can persist. Uncontroversially, he notices that chimps form and contest clearly identified hierarchies through acts of dominance, such as shouting or fighting. In hunter gatherer tribes, such clarity rarely exists. 

Fried pointed to significant individual differences of strength, skill, prestige, influence, and authority, and demonstrated ethnographically that up to a certain point such differences were appreciated and accepted. What was absent, he insisted, was the cultural habit of summing these advantages in such a way as to “establish an order of dominance and paramountcy” (34)

This contrast leads to the key thesis of the book:

If this book is about egalitarianism and its natural history, one might ask about the title Hierarchy in the Forest. It suggests a work about domination, not equality. My thesis, however, is that egalitarianism does not result from the mere absence of hierarchy, as is commonly assumed. Rather, egalitarianism involves a very special type of hierarchy, a curious type that is based on antihierarchical feelings. (9-10)

Humiliation Rituals

With these egalitarian hierarchies come ritual of reality denial that are very recognizable in the modern day. It is worth reading in full.

Even hunter-gatherers had protected classes. And like today, the purpose of protected classes is extortion. Perhaps you see nothing wrong with the humilitation rituals of the hunter-gatherers. At the end of the day, they still eat! The same cannot be said of the humiliation rituals of today. These anti-meritocratic tendencies are deadly and impoverishing in the modern day. But this only scratches the surface of forced egalitarianism.

Gossip is not so bad. If that were all there is, a Rousseauian view of human nature might be justified. That is not all there is. 

We also saw a few serious domination episodes, in which milder social controls such as ridicule or disobedience could not be employed by fearful group members and therefore assassination became necessary. In the extant cases for foragers the deviant is (almost always) a man who has managed to intimidate his group, who becomes in effect a despot. Tribesmen too execute chosen leaders who get out of hand.

At the end of the day, the humiliation rituals are not simply gossip. They are enforced by death. 

In my view, the binary of despot and egaliatarian, or the framing of egaliatarian impulses as “antiauthoritarian”, is a moral holdever that masks this profound evil. This is not to cast a modern moral judgement tribesmen, this is a Hobbesian reality; evolutionary success is often a zero sum game. 

Instead, my criticism is for Boehm, who attributes despotism to one order but not the other. One can take a Straussian reading here. Boehm is writing for anthropologists, after all. Another explanation is that Boehm truly does not recognize the evolutionary shadow the humiliation ritual casts over his profession.

Enter the Longhouse

Of Boehm’s many vignettes, the most striking is the Uktu tribe.

Boehm generalizes these behaviors. You may recognize many of these generalizations in today’s mass morality:

On a collective basis these people do manipulate and control their social and political life to a substantial degree, by acting as a moral community. One way they govern themselves is by imposing an egalitarian blueprint on their social and political life; the main political actors are able to do this cooperatively, behaving as one large and somewhat amorphous political authority that makes its decisions by consensus.

I’ll be honest: to me, this is worse than a Hobbesian war of all against all. This is worse than tribal warfare, starvation, Blood Meridian, or death itself. Between the perpetual denial of reality and the denial of genuine emotion, it is hard for me to imagine a worse dystopia which could realistically come to pass. This is why I will never Retvrn.