Social animals

In philosophy, the state of nature is about human nature and our natural way of life. We are social animals who operate in groups. What makes us unique is that we can collaborate flexibly on any scale. We employ language and shared imaginations like corporations, nation-states, money and religions. They help us collaborate. In this way, we created an imaginary world, civilisation. We can program ourselves to a significant degree and have different cultures. So, what is our natural way of living? That is hard to tell, but we can say a few things.

We help our family and friends but can also cooperate with strangers. It is not something we learn. It is natural human behaviour. Other social animals also do it, including chimpanzees, our closest relatives. Chimpanzees live in small troops of a few dozen individuals. Like us, they have close friendships, work together with reliable congeners and avoid unreliable ones. They have social rules, may cheat and probably can feel guilty. Like human males, chimpanzee males can be violent and kill each other.

Like human leaders, chimpanzee alpha males acquire their status by building coalitions and gaining support. Others show their submission to the alpha male. He strives to maintain social harmony within his troop, like a king maintaining peaceful relations between his subjects. He takes coveted pieces of food like the government takes taxes. Alpha males gain their position by building a coalition of supporters. Usually, a chimpanzee band has several alliances.

Coalition members in a chimpanzee band build and maintain their ties through intimate daily contact. They hug, touch, kiss, groom and take fleas from each other’s furs. Like humans, they do each other mutual favours. The coalitions in a chimpanzee band have good relations to protect themselves against outside enemies. Within the group, there are friendships and more distant, colder relationships.

There is a limit to the size of a group of chimpanzees. To function as a chimpanzee band, all members must know each other intimately. They must remember how others acted in the past to guess what they will do. Unlike humans, they have no language to share social information. Humans gossip to share information about others. Thus, we can learn someone is unreliable without being cheated upon ourselves. That allows us to collaborate in more sophisticated ways in larger groups.

Chimpanzee groups with more than a few dozen individuals are unstable. Its members do not know each other well enough to establish a hierarchy. Separate groups of chimpanzees seldom cooperate and compete for territory and food. There have been cases of prolonged warfare between groups of chimpanzees, including a few instances of genocide. Early humans lived similar lives but could live in larger and more stable bands of up to 150 individuals. The size of a group with which we can closely cooperate is one of our natural limits. We have overcome that limit with shared imaginations, which might be unnatural and a source of many troubles we have today.

Shared imaginations

We think in terms of cause and effect. We believe clouds cause rainfall. Our imagination also allows us to attribute causes to imaginary things. If the harvest fails, we can think the gods are angry. To deal with that, we can start a ritual like sacrificing a goat in the planting season to please the gods. Rituals also have another role. They bond a community and can outlive the beliefs that created them and lose their meaning. Many atheists still celebrate Christmas and think of eating turkey rather than the birth of Jesus.

Large groups face difficulties acting as a collective. Distinguishing between the contributions of individual members becomes challenging, so cheating and opportunistic behaviour are more common. Money, states, and belief systems like religions and ideologies help us deal with that. Money can keep track of our contributions and usages. States enforce cooperation. Religions and ideologies help us collaborate, for instance, by promising rewards in the afterlife or telling inspiring tales of worker solidarity.

For that, we share our imaginations. We imagine laws, money, property, corporations and nation-states. We think a euro banknote has value, even though it is just a piece of paper. And that is why we can use it for payment. If we believe the banknote is worthless, we cannot accept it or use it for payment. We imagine a law exists and, therefore, it works. Without these shared imaginations, our societies would stop functioning. Our cooperation also requires an inspiring story like a myth about the founders, a religion or an ideology.

Stories are the basis of our large-scale cooperation. We change how we cooperate and build societies by changing the stories. In 1789, the French population switched from the story of the divine right of kings to the sovereignty of the people. That changed the organisation of French society from feudal to modern, an advantage that Napoleon could subsequently exploit on the battlefield. Intelligent animals like monkeys can learn new behaviour but cannot change their organisation because they lack the stories to do so.

Norms and values

We invent rules and follow them. That is also in our nature. The rules differ per group, but all groups have rules. Norms are shared rules and expectations about the behaviour in a group or society. They maintain the social order, define cultural values, and shape social interactions. Norms can be laws, folkways, mores, taboos. Values are beliefs about what is important to us and society. Values can be honesty, respect, fairness and kindness. Norms and values thus reflect our rules.

Our rule-following behaviour is ingrained in our nature and comes with emotions like anger, shame and pride. If we have rules, we can spend less time negotiating about who does what and who gets what. It allows us to cooperate more efficiently and effectively. It also limits our freedom. We cling to our norms and values. Rules make societies stable. But they cause trouble if they have outlived their usefulness and block much-needed change.

Most of our communication is gossip. We need the group to survive. To survive, we must understand what is happening in our group. We talk about other people in our group, for instance, who is cheating or breaking agreements and what we should do about it. Groups enforce their rules by pressuring or ostracising those who do not conform to them. Being evicted from your group is particularly traumatic as it can lead to death.

Our inclination to attach value to mental models and theories promotes social stability. It also makes societies conservative regarding ideas and rules. Rules and institutions emerged to meet a specific challenge and become a burden once they have outlived their usefulness. Social change is often not a process of small steps but of long periods of standstill alternated with sudden dramatic changes.

Violence is often crucial for change. The fear of violent death can motivate us to do things we would not do out of self-interest alone. Those who benefit from the current arrangement hold off changes, so violence or the threat of violence can end the stalemate. That happened in the French Revolution. The human desire for recognition means politics is seldom about mere self-interest. We also judge leaders and the rules in society with our norms and values.

The struggle for recognition

Societies require individual members to play particular roles. Each role has a status and norms based on the values and beliefs of the culture of that society. Socialisation is learning your role in society and the norms and values that come with it. Groups of humans, including societies, have social hierarchies with statuses attached to the roles people play. In organised societies, status differences are more pronounced than in small groups. That is called stratification.

An individual or a group can recognise another person’s or group’s status, including this person’s or group’s beliefs and customs. The struggle for recognition differs from the struggle for material goods. All parties can gain from an economic transaction. You can exchange your fish for bread if you want bread more if someone else has bread and desires fish. But humans imagine social hierarchies. The recognition of one person, group or nation thus comes at the expense of others.

We aspire to social status, and some compete for leadership. Chimpanzee males compete for the status of the alpha male but also cooperate to defeat an enemy. We not only desire recognition for ourselves. We also seek respect for our beliefs and the groups we belong to. Much of our struggle concerns respect for groups such as women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals. There is an economic aspect, such as equal pay for women, but it is primarily about recognition. Pay is also a token of respect.

You cannot enforce recognition. Others must feel you deserve it. Leadership comes from a group acknowledging that a specific person has exceptional courage or wisdom or is impartial in conflicts and a desire from a community to have a leader. Once a society develops, we transfer our recognition to political institutions like parliaments and courts rather than individual leaders. In both cases, the political order requires legitimacy to make people accept the order and adhere to the rules.

Changing our environment

We change our environment. So, if we have a natural environment, we can make it unnatural. The first humans lived as hunter-gatherers in small groups of a few dozen individuals. Everyone in the group knew each other. If that is our natural way of living, city life would be unnatural. Our mental makeup emerged from evolution, so living in large cities could produce psychological problems like stress and alienation. The biblical vision of the state of nature is Eden, where people lived in harmony with nature.

But what does that mean? In the last 400,000 years, humans have become the top predators. That had enormous consequences for what we can eat and do. And it had psychological and social effects. Humans did not evolve but suddenly rose to their new position. Many historical calamities and things about how humans behave towards others and the environment, from the deadly wars to how people treat the ecosystem around them, result from this fast change that our evolution could not match.

Humans like Neanderthals, and later the modern humans, Homo Sapiens, began using fire. It gave them light, warmth, and an effective weapon against dangerous animals like lions and bears. That changed the balance of power between the animal species. The humans came out on top. Humans also used fire to change their environment. They started burning down forests and collected dead animals cooked in the fire to eat them. And cooking allowed them to eat more sorts of food.

The Agricultural Revolution was another dramatic change in human lifestyle. To feed more people, humans began to grow crops and herd animals. With agriculture, more people could survive, but it created new problems. Hunter-gatherers could move on in the case of conflict, but farmers had to protect their land and cattle against thieves and invaders. And so there were more intense conflicts, and people began to organise themselves for larger-scale wars in tribes and states.

Latest revision: 23 December 2023

Featured image: cover of The Origins of Political Order

From: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution of Francis Fukuyama.