Grand Strategy Annex

3rd May 2016

Post with 11 notes

Social Stratification and the Dominance Hierarchy

It would deceptive at best, and an outright falsification at worst, to associate the emergence of social stratification with the emergence of civilization, because social stratification is simply the dominance hierarchy within a given population of a given species, translated into terms relevant to a social species.

Many species have dominance hierarchies; dominance hierarchies are not limited to mammals (think of the “pecking order” among chickens). Species that do not live together in social groups have few opportunities to form a dominance hierarchy, so we tend to see the most elaborate and established dominance hierarchies among social animals.  

I have several times noted that Darwin held that, “…any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” (The Descent of Man, Chap. 4; I have implicitly referenced this passage in Teleological and Deontological Conceptions of Civilization and Religious Experience and the Future of Civilization.) But another way to express this idea would be to observe that a moral sense comes to supervene upon existing social relationships, and in human social groups this moral consciousness comes to its most explicit formulation.

In a sentience-rich biosphere such as has followed the mammalian adaptive radiation it is to be expected that social structures will be pervasively informed by emotional responses, and a large part of conventional morality is simply an emotional response to a social milieu or event (and I say this without advocating the positivist’s emotive theory of ethics; one need not be a reductionist to order to understand the scope of the application of this interpretation). And, obviously, one of the primary social structures to which we mammals experience emotional responses is the dominance hierarchy, which in the fullness of time becomes invested with an explicitly moral interpretation.

The explicitly moral conception of the dominance hierarchy (i.e., social stratification), with its elaborate rationalizations and justifications that Marx identified with the ideological superstructure, is a product of civilization, but the dominance hierarchy itself (and therefore social stratification in its rudimentary form) is in no sense a product of civilization. Nevertheless, social stratification, or social differentiation, is often cited as one of the conditions that typifies civilization. It appears on most V. Gordon Childe-derived lists of the essential properties of civilization.

Part of the problem here could be addressed by better distinctions made between social differentiation, division of labor, and craft specialization. Sometimes when anthropologists and archaeologists speak of “social differentiation” they mean social hierarchy, and sometimes they mean a division of labor that might better be called craft specialization. I noted recently in Shopping and Gathering that the sexual division of labor goes back into prehistory; probably it goes back farther yet, so that division of labor is in no sense distinctive of civilization, but there is certainly something valid in V. Gordon Childe’s observation that, “…the development of urban civilization can be traced continuously till the moment when the full light of written history dawns upon it and within it. The story is one of accumulating wealth, of improving technical skill, of increasing specialization of labor, and of expanding trade.”

The take-away lesson here is that it is not the case that when human beings began to come together in larger numbers and to organize in a manner that we now call civilization, from this new organizational milieu a social stratification emerged that had not previously existed. Social stratification is simply the human expression of dominance hierarchies far older than human beings, far older than our species, older than our genus, older than our family, older than our order, and so on. The dominance hierarchy was present in nature long before we evolved, and we evolved with the dominance hierarchy shaping our evolution from the beginning.

Tagged: social stratificationdominance hierarchycivilizationideological superstrucureV. Gordon Childe