The Wealth of People
Exploring Implications for Work and Identity in the Digital Environment.
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Foraging for Curiosities in the Digital Environment of-for-by The Curious.
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Tuesday, January 13, 2015
The Mutual Constraints of Identity and Social Fabric – Part 1
In the last post I finished with a quote by Stuart Kauffman,
regarding the fundamental role of constraints that are fundamental to enabling
complex and living systems to perform work.
The
first surprise is that it takes constraints on the release of energy to perform
work, but it takes work to create constraints. The second surprise is that
constraints are information and information is constraint.
Stuart Kauffman –
personal communication – quoted in Deacon (2012).
A basic definition of a constraint is a causal agent that
restricts or confines a system or situation with boundaries. In “Incomplete
Nature: How Mind Emerges From Matter”, Terrence Deacon makes a very
comprehensive case that often constraints are not perceivable as what is
visible – but have to be conceived as ‘what is not there but could have been’.
Constraints then are alternatives or choices that are unable to be undertaken. Furthermore
constraints can arise inherently within a system or from its context. Generally
dynamic systems are constrained within relevant degrees of freedom and tend to
reflect attractor qualities.
The next series of posts I want to explore how information
and identity are shaped by and shape fundamental social constraints.
Ancient Ground of
Constraint Shaping Social Fabric
According to David Graeber, no society has ever existed that
depended primarily on barter, as a system of exchange. Barter did occur, but
only rarely and generally only between strangers. What did exist, always and
everywhere was accounting. Furthermore, systems of accounting are the
foundation of written languages.
Before the rise of currency, there was not
systems of barter – rather it was was always credit & debt, and debt was
transferable.
The question that arises is how were these early societies
able to do such accounting?
Robin Dunbar has argued that group size is determined by a
cognitive limit related to the number of stable social relationships that can
be maintained. In essence, the Dunbar number is related to the number of close
ties that any individual can sustain. Dunbar’s claim was based on a correlation
between primate brain size and the size of the average social group. His theory
holds that social group size is a direct function of the relative size of the
neocortex which imposes a limit on processing capacity on social relationships.
By extrapolating from his studies of primates and adjusting
for the size of the average human brain he proposed that human can only maintain
stable relationships comfortably with between 100 to 250 people (commonly about
150). By stable relationships Dunbar meant the actual number of people a person
was actively engaged with – he didn’t include people generally known or past
relationship not actively sustained. The full range of people one could ‘know’
would be much higher and also dependent on long-term memory. Furthermore,
others who agree with Dunbar have asserted that the maintenance of larger
numbers of such ‘close ties’ in a stable cohesive group requires more restrictive
rules, laws and norms.
One constraint inherent in the group’s small Dunbar number,
is that specialization of ‘occupation’ was not possible – a very few natural divisions
of labor is possible in such conditions. For example, elder, adult, child; man,
woman; hunter, gatherer; shaman, healer. These ‘divisions’ were generalist
roles where the idiosyncratic nature of individuals had to be contained in the
statuses and roles established and sustained by groups dynamics. At best, individual
talents and skills where acknowledge and nurtured as they could fit within the
status and roles ascribed to each individual. A role is like a general purpose
technology – a bundle of obligations-and-corresponding-tasks.
Accounting and
Exchange
A very important consequence of the Dunbar number as a constraint
on the size of early groups of humans, is that there could be no ‘private’
person, no experience of anonymity. This is a fundamental constraint (an
absence of possibilities of anonymity and a modern sense of individuality) that
enables the work of creating and sustaining the social fabric of the small
group. The public transparency of behavior in the small group, enables the dynamic
homeostatic-like ‘social computation’ of the status structure of the group as a
form of ‘moral accounting’. In this way, I would argue that even the grooming
behavior in primates is the homeostatic moral accounting to maintain group status
structure and cohesion.
The correlation between group size and the relative size of
the neo-cortex may have played an important role as a constraint in pre-human
groups or at least before the invention of the technologies of language and
culture. Marshall McLuhan quipped, “The most human thing about us is our
technology.” And because language and culture are so inherently human, it can make
accepting and understanding language and culture as technology, especially
difficult. McLuhan also asserted that technologies were extension of ourselves –
in this light we see that the discovery of the control of fire and the
invention of clothes was an externalization of our capacity to regulate temperature
and an extension of this regulation so that we could survive in a much wider
variety of environmental conditions. With fire also came cooking which
externalize our digestive function and extended our capacity to eat a wider
variety of food and also extract much more nutrition from the food we ate.
The invention of the technologies of language and culture
was an externalization of human memory. By externalizing memory – learning was no
longer solely dependent on the need to be ‘encoded’ into DNA and experienced as
instinct – learning could now be encoded in ‘memes’ enabling rapid transmittal
and even more importantly – old learnings could be more rapidly displaced with
new learning – again enabling adaptive acceleration to live in a wider variety
of environmental (and changing) conditions.
With the technologies of culture and language and the rise
of learning-as-meme, the behavioral platform that provided for the homeostatic
maintenance/adaptation of group status structure and social cohesion could also
be integrated into mechanisms of cultural homeostasis. This is another way of
describing the ‘moral’ accounting that Graeber argues was the basis of social
fabric before currency (this idea will be explored more deeply in part 2).
Christopher Boehm (among other) has been instrumental in
establishing the concept of Darwinian selection on a group level as a
foundation for cooperation. Simply put if competition is only between individuals
then selfishness will always trump. But if competition arises between groups –
then the group of cooperative or altruistic members will trump the group of
aggregate selfish individuals.
Boehm further argues that nonhuman primate groups and early
human social structures tended to be shaped by practical egalitarianism, which
he defined as form of hierarchy in which the weak combine to hold the strong in
control. Although ‘alphas’ individuals had power (and were more often a sort of
bullies than they were group leaders) they did not make decisions for the
group. This makes sense if such groups were to maintain a practical egalitarianism.
Graeber argues that governance within such groups tended
toward what he calls anarchism, which he defines as forms of practices that
enables both cohesion and relative autonomy by avoiding authoritarian means.
Group governance had to embody in all its relations both the broad principles
related to the unity and purposes of the group and the reality that many people
the group can’t be converted to other points of view. Group decisioning
therefore had to emphasize issues of concrete action, which everyone could
accept without a feeling of fundamental violation of principles. Where everyone
could walk away feeling that they had been heard and felt no loss of ‘face’.
Graeber argues that this pragmatic by small groups to focus
on figuring out what most want to do and/or can live with is easier than effort
to convince those group members who might not agree with a majority approach since
they had no way to compel the minority and still hope to maintain necessary
group cohesion. Even attempts to hold a vote transform pragmatic inclusive
efforts into a type of public contest that will create ‘winners and losers’ – generating
public humiliation, resentments, aggravated feelings likely to damage the
community. As Graeber (2004, p. 89) notes: “What
is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact,
a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have
been totally ignored”.
Colin Tudge (1999), has made the argument that human were
proto-farmers for about 30,000 years before we were able to enable the phase
transition into agrarian societies. What this means is that we knew for a very
long time how to protect food sources (so that they could shift energy away
from ‘self-defence’ and into producing bigger/better roots, fruit and seed). We
also know about planting food sources. Tim Ingold (2011) argues in his seminal
work The Perception of the Environment:
Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, that human relationships with the
animal world were often perceived as an intimate relationship where many
animals, plants and even landmarks were considered to be persons.
If Tudge is right – the question that arises is: What kept
early humans from making the shift to agricultural societies? I think the
answer is not because of a lack of human knowledge about growing food and
establishing relationships with animals that would lead to their domestication –
but rather in another constraint. That constraint relates to the capacity for
keeping accounts of social exchange and of surplus production. But this concept
of accounting may seem to ‘modern’ to be appropriate to small hunter-gatherer
groups, unless we reconsider the Dunbar number and it’s explanation.
As I’ve already noted, Dunbar’s claim is that group size is
limited by a corresponding relative size of the neo-cortex which limits the
number of ‘close-ties’ any individual can process. However, let’s consider the
more fundamentally established (but inextricably related) concept of ‘peeking
order’ – a group behavior that is easily observed in all sort of mammalian
groups and even in many modern situations with human groups. Establishing a peeking
order is a cognitively complex and demanding social process – whereby every
individual assesses the place of every other individual in relation to
themselves to establish a dynamic group status structure. This is a sort of
parallel processing social computation carried out largely unconsciously whose
result is a very conscious social experience.
The real challenge is the behavioral ‘accounting’ necessary
to homeostatically maintain and adjust this structure of social statuses. In
primates, one could argue that the many acts of grooming are simply the
embodied social accounting necessary to sustain the ‘statuses’ of the social fabric.
For example, a hunter brings in a large animal to the group – the division of
the animal tends to be already predetermined by the social structure – everyone
knows the portions and parts and order of eating (of the animal) that the
elders, mothers, children and others will get. In this way the pecking order is
not simply applicable to ‘who’s Alpha and who’s not,’ but is rather, a much
more comprehensive dynamic structure of statuses and roles that forms the ‘attractor’
of the homeostatic moral accounting maintaining group cohesion.
With this view we can argue that very similar accounting
processes are necessary to maintain Boehm’s reverse hierarchy whereby the group
sustains its practical egalitarianism as well as Graeber’s processes of
anarchic self-governance. George Lakoff provides evidence of how deeply human
language and thinking is imbued with accounting metaphors. He argues that just
as financial bookkeeping is vital to a functioning economy so a ‘moral
bookkeeping’ is vital to the function of social fabric. For example, Lakoff
establishes that the general metaphor of moral accounting is revealed with some
basic moral schemes such as – reciprocation, retribution, restitution, revenge,
altruism and fairness (for a more substantive elaboration see the link to the
reference below).
Even Adam Smith acknowledged the fundamental role played by
a form of ‘moral accounting’ in shaping the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. His
first book “A Theory of Moral Sentiments” where he used the term for the first
time made the claim that all people fundamentally want to be ‘praiseworthy’ and
‘blameless’.
In this way I would argue that the Dunbar number represents
the upper limit on the capacity of a group to ‘manage the books’ on exchanges
that are necessary to sustain the social/moral fabric of the hunter-gatherer
group. This is the fundamental constraint on group size and identity (as shaped
by the pecking-order, status, role, etc.). It is also the fundamental
constraint on identity as necessarily a publicly defined relation to group
history (lineage, geography, etc.)
As I noted above with the technologies of language and
culture, human learnings could now be encoded as meme – enabling faster more
adaptive learning, sharing and unlearning as needed. Despite the advantages of
the technologies of language and culture – small groups remain vulnerable to a
sort of ‘genetic drift’ where specialized skills and learning embodied in one
or a very few individuals can be suddenly lost to the group if/when those
individuals are lost to disease of unexpected death. The meme as
learning-exchange platform provided a better form of ‘insurance’ against loss
of group knowledge through ‘genetic drift’ (the easy loss of beneficial genetic
advantage in small populations because of contingencies cause death in those
with the genetic endowment).
Denise Schmandt-Besserat (2010 – a wonderfully illustrated
and accessible book), establishes that the origins of writing arose from
systems of accounting. In fact, people didn’t need to be able to count as we
think of numeracy today, in order to develop simple systems of one-for-one representations
that enable accounting. For example, one round clay artifact per sheep, one
scratch on a stack of bamboo per bushel of rice, enables representations of ‘things’
that can be exchanged on credit. Once these simple systems of accounting were
developed human could begin the shift into agricultural societies and manage
surpluses in ways that enabled exchange and social fabric.
Graeber, talks of how debt was a means of maintaining social
fabric in small groups and even before currency. For example, people tended to
either return a bit less or a bit more of something borrowed – this enabled a
sort of ongoing social obligation of relationships. In this context – returning
an exact equivalent of what was exchanged was a signal of wanting to sever
(divorce from) the relationship.
The ground of this accounting was a rich network of close
ties (Dunbar number). People knew each other and everyone knew them. The ground
for this original accounting economy was the social fabric of status order of close
ties – of personalized exchange networks. This was the major information constraint
– that a person’s identity was constrained within a status structure of close-ties,
which was the basis of the requisite trust that enabled the systems of
accounting based on human memory and later simple pre-writing technologies of
accounting.
What this means is that a person’s identity was constrained
within the sort of status-role-character determined through the close-knit
social fabric of the group. To frame this constrain in modern experience we can
recall challenges of high school when one tries to change oneself – it’s like
asking everyone in the ‘tribe’ to change themselves as well.
These constraints around identity, enabled getting the work
of distributing and allocating resources to be accomplished by trust inherent
in social fabric and accounting methods without currency. The sense of ‘private
identity’ is unknown in these conditions, thus there was no concrete use for ‘privacy’
as we know it today.
As McLuhan’s pointed out – whenever a ground becomes the figure
in social awareness, it is always perceived as a monster. In the case of the ground
of ancient identity – when it becomes the figure, we see it as the intractable
black-hole of the ‘blood feud’, or the ‘Scarlet Letter’ or the sentence of death
through group ostracism and exile.
In Summary
The conditions of small hunter-gatherer groups could be
described as an attractor which creates constraints on identity limiting group
members to embody individual within a small number of roles, status structures
and division-of-labor – which in turn enables the pre-literate group to conduct
the moral accounting of the work of maintaining social fabric. This work
includes the enhanced memory of learnings arising from the technologies of
language and culture. This constraint meant that there could be no sense of the
‘private’ and certainly no concept or experience of anonymity. The ‘self’ was
by definition public, defined by and bound to group history.
The next post will explore the arising of a new attractor – as
a result of a phase transition (change in the conditions of change) from the ground
of hunter-gatherer to the new ground of agricultural (and later industrial)
societies. This new ground is a condition of higher population numbers and
density that enables proliferations of diversity of divisions-of-labor,
specializations, ways of being, domains of knowledge and correspondingly
complex forms of exchange. The new attractor of agricultural-to-industrial
trajectories creates new conditions for the construction and boundaries of
identity.
References
Boehm, Christopher. 2001. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Harvard University Press. http://www.amazon.com/Hierarchy-Forest-Evolution-Egalitarian-Behavior/dp/0674006917/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420701789&sr=1-1&keywords=hierarchy+in+the+forest
Deacon, Terrance, W. 2011. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. WW Norton. http://www.amazon.com/Incomplete-Nature-Emerged-Terrence-Hardcover/dp/B00C7F1AYG/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420701672&sr=1-2&keywords=incomplete+nature+how+mind+emerged+from+matter
Dunbar, Robin. 2014. Human
Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Pelican. http://www.amazon.com/Human-Evolution-Pelican-Introduction-Books-ebook/dp/B00I9PVKM0/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420701508&sr=1-10
Graeber, David. 2012. Debt:
The First 5000 Years. Melville House. http://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years-ebook/dp/B00Q1HZMCW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420701712&sr=1-1&keywords=Debt%3A+The+First+5000+Years
Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments
of an Anarchist Anthropology. Prickly Paradigm Press. http://www.amazon.com/Fragments-Anarchist-Anthropology-Paradigm-Graeber/dp/0972819649/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420793988&sr=1-1&keywords=Fragments+of+an+Anarchist+Anthropology
Ingold, Tim. 2011. The
Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge;
Reissue edition. http://www.amazon.com/Perception-Environment-Essays-Livelihood-Dwelling/dp/0415617472/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420971819&sr=1-3&keywords=tim+ingold
Lakoff, George. 1995. Metaphor, Morality, and Politics. http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html
McLuhan, Marshall; McLuhan, Eric. 1989. Laws of Media: The New Science. University of Toronto Press. http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Media-Science-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/0802077153/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420701746&sr=1-1&keywords=Laws+of+Media%3A+The+New+Science
Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. 2010. How Writing Came About. University of Texas Press. http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Came-About-Denise-Schmandt-Besserat-ebook/dp/B008YXIOVC/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420701237&sr=1-1&keywords=how+writing+came+about
Tudge, Colin. 1999. Neanderthals,
Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began. Yale University Press. http://www.amazon.com/Neanderthals-Bandits-Farmers-Agriculture-Darwinism/dp/0300080247/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420701184&sr=8-1&keywords=Neanderthals%2C+Bandits+and+Farmers%3A+How+Agriculture+Really+Began