While some species have affiliative and even cooperative interactions between individuals of different social groups, humans are alone in having durable, positive-sum, interdependent relationships across unrelated social groups. Our capacity to have harmonious relationships that cross group boundaries is an important aspect of our species’ success, allowing for the exchange of ideas, materials, and ultimately enabling cumulative cultural evolution. Knowledge about the conditions required for peaceful intergroup relationships is critical for understanding the success of our species and building a more peaceful world. How do humans create harmonious relationships across group boundaries and when did this capacity emerge in the human lineage? Answering these questions involves considering the costs and benefits of intergroup cooperation and aggression, for oneself, one’s group, and one’s neighbor. Taking a game theoretical perspective provides new insights into the difficulties of removing the threat of war and reveals an ironic logic to peace – the factors that enable peace also facilitate the increased scale and destructiveness of conflict. In what follows, I explore the conditions required for peace, why they are so difficult to achieve, and when we expect peace to have emerged in the human lineage. I argue that intergroup cooperation was an important component of human relationships and a selective force in our species history beginning at least 300 thousand years. But the preconditions for peace only emerged in the past 100 thousand years and likely coexisted with intermittent intergroup violence which would have also been an important and selective force in our species’ history.
Commentary
A big interest for us re [[wiki/Second Renaissance]] is how to get a new planetary scale of human cooperation underpinned by a shared sense of identity.
I’m currently half-way through Turchin’s full book Ultrasociety. Worth the effort. It’s useful to set up a debate between authors like Graeber and Wengrow on the one hand, and Pinker or Kurzweil on the other. One side blames civilization for all violence. The other blames lack of civilization for all violence. Of course, at the end of the day, I prefer Turchin (and other authors with similar methods), whose empirical research yields a more nuanced view.
Today I binged deeply on Donella Meadows’s leverage points prior to writing a bit about global conflicts. Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project The problem I identified is most of us have precious little leverage on global conflicts. We can be as transparadigmatic as possible on the level of personal understanding, but that on its own does not exactly stop the missiles from flying.
What Turchin can offer us is ways to better navigate conflict in smaller social formations in which we may indeed enjoy some considerable leverage. The basic message of Ultrasociety is that intra-group cooperation leads to positive results in inter-group competition. (To put this another way, play Game B with your teammates to win at Game A in the larger tournament). So to sum up, if we in this forum call be become supportive of one another, it will likely pay dividends in our dealings with others outside the forum.
I don’t rate Graeber and Wengrow that much – though i like and admire Graeber i think he belongs to the post-modern pre-data side in anthropology and wasn’t that aware of the resurgence of rigorous cultural evolution work.
As you say Turchin (and e.g. Henrich) tend to have a more nuanced and evidenced based view IMO.
Aside: i (long-time) dream i have is taking the text of of one these books, html-ifying it and putting it somewhere (private) and then using hypothes.is to do collective annotation. Would love that … (first effort of that was with shakespeare 20y ago …)
About 2/3 in to Ultrasociety, one thing that struck me is how Turchin’s work on the transition from hunter-gather to the archaic god-king state really lines up very, very well with Graeber and Wengrow. By any of our current standards, the god-king state really was bloody awful, and few humans ever would have voluntarily chosen that over the freedom of the nomad. That said, however, on a methodological level, I find Turchin’s approach for more defensible and far more useful for any ideas we might wish to explore about how to navigate current dilemmas or how to constructively seed new systems going forward.
That would be great! In the meantime, I’ve now finished the book. Generally, I’m on board with Turchin’s overall argument, but I want to focus here on the section that to me is the thinnest: the Axial Age.
in the zigzag between great ape alpha males to hunter-gatherer equality back to god-king alpha males, the Axial Age is when it all starts to zag back to equality again. Agreed.
the general reason is, empires got bigger (and more internally pacific). Why? Horse warriors and Axial religions. I generally agree. However, where Turchin could use more is on the connection between horse-bore warriors from the Iranian plateau turning into prophetic and Vedic religions, not to mention philosophy.
on this point, for me Habermas fills in a lot of the gaps, and until better explanations surface, I’ll stay with Habermas.
short summary - the horse warriors knocked over all the god-kings of the plain. This de-mythologized the god-kings, causing cognitive dissonance. Axial religions and philosophies emphasizing personal virtue and ethical action under the watchful eye of very transcendent deities were the creative result of new cultural productions to overcome the contradictions.
Turchin contrasts his selection-driven cultural evolution model with Pinker’s psychological evolution model (basically, for Pinker, over time, human got more reasonable). I agree with Turchin’s critique of Pinker. However, for me, the answer is not to drop evolutionary psychology, but to improve evolutionary psychology. Why, for example, did the Buddha walk away from his palaces? We need answers to questions like that, because, in effect, to switch to a more sustainable civilization in our current world, voluntarily walking away from material plenty is a decision many millions will be called upon to replicate.
This is not actually correct, across primates, cetaceans, birds, insects, fish, trees, and fungi, we see enduring, positive-sum interdependence linking unrelated social units—often between entirely different species, sometimes between neighboring communities of the same species. Humans are spectacular at scaling this pattern, but we didn’t invent it; we grew inside it.