The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (30 page)

What binds social status and friendship together in these different ways? The explanation is simple. They represent the two opposite ways in which human beings can come together. Social status stratification, like ranking systems or pecking orders among animals, are fundamentally orderings based on power and coercion, on privileged access to resources, regardless of others’ needs. In its most naked and animal form, might is right and the weakest eat last.

Friendship is almost exactly the opposite kind of relationship. It is about reciprocity, mutuality, sharing, social obligations, cooperation and recognition of each other’s needs. Gifts are symbols of friendship because they demonstrate that the giver and receiver do not compete for access to necessities, but instead recognize and respond to each other’s needs. In the well-chosen words of Marshall Sahlins, a social anthropologist, ‘gifts make friends and friends make gifts’.
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Food-sharing and eating together carry the same symbolic message, and they do so particularly powerfully because food is the most fundamental of all material necessities. In times of scarcity, competition for food has the potential to be extraordinarily socially destructive.

FRIEND OR FOE

Social status and friendship are so important to us because they reflect different ways of dealing with what is perhaps the most fundamental problem of social organization and political life among animals and humans alike. Because members of the same species have the same needs as each other, they have the potential to be each other’s worst rivals, competing for almost everything – for food, shelter, sexual partners, a comfortable place to sit in the shade, a good nesting site – indeed for all scarce comforts and necessities. As a result, among very many species the most frequent conflicts take place not so much between members of different species, despite the danger of predators, but between members of the same species. A low-status baboon has to spend much more time keeping out of the way of a dominant baboon than in avoiding lions. Most of the bite marks and scars which subordinate animals bear come from more dominant members of their own species. You can see signs of rivalry within species all around us – you have only to watch birds at a garden feeder, or dogs fighting, or think of the banned sport of cock fighting: in each case the conflicts are within the species.

Human beings have to deal with the same problem. Writing in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes made the danger of conflict, caused by rivalry for scarce resources, the basis of his political philosophy.
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As we all have the same needs, competition for scarce necessities would lead to a continuous conflict of ‘every man against every man’. Hobbes believed that, because of this danger, the most important task of government was simply to keep the peace. He assumed that, without the firm hand of government, life ‘in a state of nature’ would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.

But perhaps Hobbes missed an important part of the story. As well as the potential for conflict, human beings have a unique potential to be each other’s best source of co-operation, learning, love and assistance of every kind. While there’s not much that ostriches or otters can do for an injured member of their own species, among humans there is. But it’s not just that we are able to give each other care and protection. Because most of our abilities are learned, we depend on others for the acquisition of our life skills. Similarly, our unique capacity for specialization and division of labour means that human beings have an unrivalled potential to benefit from co-operation. So as well as the potential to be each other’s worst rivals, we also have the potential to be each other’s greatest source of comfort and security.

We have become attentive to friendship and social status because the quality of social relationships has always been crucial to wellbeing, determining whether other people are feared rivals or vital sources of security, co-operation and support. So important are these dimensions of social life that lack of friends and low social status are among the most important sources of chronic stress affecting the health of populations in rich countries today.

Although Hobbes was right about the underlying problem of the dangers of competition between members of the same species, his view of how societies managed before the development of governments with the power to keep the peace was very wide of the mark. Now that we have much more knowledge of hunting and gathering societies it is clear that our ancestors did not live in a state of continuous conflict. Instead, as Sahlins pointed out, they had other ways of keeping the peace.
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To avoid the ‘warre of each against all’, social and economic life was based on systems of gift exchange, food sharing, and on a very high degree of equality. These served to minimize animosity and keep relations sweet. Forms of exchange involving direct expressions of self-interest, such as buying and selling or barter, were usually regarded as socially unacceptable and outlawed.

These patterns demonstrate the fundamental truth: systems of material or economic relations are systems of social relations.

ECONOMIC EXPERIMENTS

Economic theory has traditionally worked on the assumption that human behaviour could be explained largely in terms of an inherent tendency to maximize material self-interest. But a series of experiments using economic games have now shown how far from the truth this is.

In the ‘ultimatum game’, volunteers are randomly paired but remain anonymous to each other and do not meet. A known sum of money is given to the ‘proposer’ who then divides it as he or she pleases with the ‘responder’. All the responders do is merely accept or reject the offer. If rejected, neither partner gets anything, but if it is accepted, they each keep the shares of money offered.

They play this game only once, so there is no point in rejecting a small offer to try to force the proposer to be more generous next time – they know there isn’t going to be a next time. In this situation, self-interested responders should accept any offer, however derisory, and self-interested proposers should offer the smallest positive amount, just enough to ensure that a responder accepts it.

Although experiments show that this is exactly how chimpanzees behave,
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it is not what happens among human beings. In practice, the average offer made by people in developed societies is usually between 43 and 48 per cent, with 50 per cent as the most common offer.
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At direct cost to ourselves, we come close to sharing equally even with people we never meet and will never interact with again.

Responders tend to reject offers below about 20 per cent. Rejected offers are money which the responder chooses to lose in order to punish the proposer and prevent them benefiting from making a mean offer. The human desire to punish even at some personal cost has been called ‘altruistic punishment’, and it plays an important role in reinforcing co-operative behaviour and preventing people freeloading.

Although the studies of how people played the ultimatum game were not concerned with the levels of inequality in each society, they are, nevertheless, about how equally or unequally people choose to divide money between themselves and someone else. They are concerned with what people feel is a proper way to treat others (even when there is no direct contact between them and they bear the cost of any generosity). The egalitarian preferences people reveal in the ultimatum game seem to fly in the face of the actual inequalities in our societies.

CHIMPS AND BONOBOS

Some non-human primates are much more hierarchical than others.

Looking at their different social systems, it often seems as if the amount of conflict, the quality of social relations and the relationship between the sexes are functions of how hierarchical they are. Human beings are not of course bound to any one social system.

Our adaptability has enabled us to live in very different social structures, both very egalitarian and very hierarchical. But some of the same effects of hierarchy on other aspects of our social systems still seem to be visible – even though the behavioural patterns are driven by culture rather than by instinct. Less hierarchical societies are less male-dominated so, as we saw in Chapter 4, the position of women is better. Similarly, the quality of social relations in more equal societies is less hostile. People trust each other more and community life is stronger (Chapter 4), there is less violence (Chapter 10) and punishment is less harsh (Chapter 11).

Around six or seven million years ago the branch of the evolutionary tree from which we have emerged split from that which led to two different species of ape: chimpanzees and bonobos. Genetically we are equally closely related to both of them, yet there are striking differences in their social behaviour and they illustrate sharply contrasting ways of solving the Hobbesian problem of the potential for conflict over scarce resources.

Bands of chimpanzees are headed by a dominant male who gains his position largely on the basis of superior size, strength, and an ability to form alliances – often including support from females. Dominance hierarchies in any species are orderings of access to scarce resources, including – as far as males are concerned – reproductive access to females. Rankings within the dominance hierarchy are established and maintained through frequent contests, displays and assessments of strength. In the words of primatologists Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting:

Chimpanzees go through elaborate rituals in which one individual communicates its status to the other. Particularly between adult males, one male will literally grovel in the dust, uttering panting grunts, while the other stands bipedally performing a mild intimidation display to make clear who ranks above whom.
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Bonobos, on the other hand, behave very differently. Not only is there much less conflict between neighbouring groups of bonobos than between neighbouring groups of chimps, but bonobos – again unlike chimps – have a high degree of sex equality. Females are at least as important as males, and dominance hierarchies are much less pronounced. Although males are slightly larger than females, females are usually allowed to eat first. Often dubbed the ‘caring, sharing’ apes, they engage in sexual activity – including mutual masturbation – frequently and in any combination of sexes and ages. Sex has evolved not only to serve reproductive functions, but also to relieve tensions in situations which, in other species, might cause conflict. As de Waal says, ‘sex is the glue of bonobo society’.
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It eases conflict, signals friendliness, and calms stressful situations. Bonobos use sex to solve the problem of how to avoid conflict over access to scarce resources. Feeding time is apparently the peak of sexual activity. Even before food is thrown into their enclosure, male bonobos get erections and males and females invite both opposite and same-sex partners for sex. Possible conflict over non-food resources is dealt with in the same way.

Although sexual activity is not a preliminary to feeding among humans, eating is a peak of sociality – whether in the form of shared family meals, meals with friends, feasts and banquets, or even in the religious symbolism of sharing bread and wine at communion.

Summing up the behavioural difference between chimps and bonobos, de Waal and Lanting said: ‘If, of the twin concepts of sex and power, the chimpanzee has an appetite for the second, the bonobo clearly has one for the first. The chimpanzee resolves sexual issues (disputes) with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.’
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Perhaps as a result of these differences, bonobos are, as research has shown, better at co-operative tasks than chimps.

So what makes the difference? Interestingly, a section of DNA, known to be important in the regulation of social, sexual and parenting behaviour, has been found to differ between chimps and bonobos.
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It is perhaps comforting to know that, at least in this section of DNA, humans have the bonobo rather than the chimp pattern, suggesting that our common ancestor may have had a preference for making love rather than war.

THE SOCIAL BRAIN

The fact that we can simultaneously agree with Sartre that ‘hell is other people’ and also recognize that other people can be heaven, shows how deeply enmeshed in social life we are. Research looking for the most potent sources of stress affecting the cardiovascular system concluded that ‘conflicts and tensions with other people are by far the most distressing events in daily life in terms of both initial and enduring effects on emotional wellbeing’ – more so than the demands of work, money worries or other difficulties.
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The quality of our relations with other people has always been so crucial not only to wellbeing, but also to survival and to reproductive success, that social interaction has been one of the most powerful influences on the evolution of the human brain.

A remarkable indication of this is the impressively close relationship, first pointed out by the primatologist Robin Dunbar, between the normal group size of each species of primate (whether they are solitary, go about in pairs, or in smaller or larger troupes) and the proportion of the brain made up of the neocortex.
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The larger the group size, the more neocortex we seem to need to cope with social life. Our Palaeolithic ancestors usually lived in larger communities than other primates, and the neocortex makes up a larger part of our brains than it does of primates’ brains. Because its growth was key to the enlargement of the human brain, the relationship suggests that the reason why we became clever may have been a response to the demands of social life.