Nomads and Power, Part II

Continued from Nomads and Power, Part I.

Evolutionary Psychology and the World of Work

London Business School’s Nigel Nicholson, an organizational psychologist who applies the principles of EP to the study of business life, describes this ‘out of place-ness’ better than most observers. Speaking about the growing body of evidence from EP, he frames this in the following way. “A key conclusion has emerged from all this evidence. This is that the profile of human nature was fully delineated long before the dawn of recorded civilization. Over the past few millennia, no single environmental pressure- such as global climate change- has pushed the evolution of our species in any new direction. The period since we made the transit from hunter-gatherer existence into a life of crop management and stock breeding in fixed settlements - around 10,000 years ago- is too short an interval for anything other than superficial variations (absorption of lactated milk, skin pigmentation) to occur…No significant mutation to our mental architecture could have been able to get a grip and spread. Almost all our psychology has an ancient lineage that we share with our ancestors and that we continue to hold in common with other species, especially other primates.” (Nicholson pp. 26-27). Or, as Nicholson said to me in a private conversation: “You can take the humans out of the Stone Age, but you can’t take the Stone Age out of humans.”(n.)

According to Nicholson, “what has changed for humans is culture. The recent invention of agriculture was the change in our story line that led to all the problems and dilemmas of modern life. It was almost just as Genesis tells us. Out of our hunter-gatherer Garden of Eden we sallied forth into a world of toil. Once you start cultivating crops, you can support a population a hundred times larger on the same territory, and you don’t have to go wandering to find your next site for hunting and gathering. The catch is, you have to work harder- much harder. The more you can produce, the larger the population grows. The more people you need to support, the harder you have to work to provide for them. Thus the vicious cycle of modern existence started to turn. To sustain an agricultural society you need discipline, organization, and relentless labor.” (Nicholson, ibid.)

Contrast this with what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins suggests about hunter-gatherers. In an ethnological study of different hunter-gatherer societies, Sahlins shows that in these societies basic health indicators such as caloric intake, infant mortality, and life expectancy, hunter-gatherers have much healthier profiles than most people assume. Furthermore, they achieve these levels of health while working, on average, around 20.6 hours a week. Among the cultures studied by Sahlins and his colleagues, the rest of their time was spent playing games, telling jokes, telling stories, gossiping, and resting. This combination of solid health figures with (compared to our working lives today) significant amount of leisure time, is what prompted Sahlins to refer to hunter gatherers as the original affluent society. (n). Then came the social cage.

The Social Cage

The subsequent need for relentless labor has been playing our under the ‘leadership’ of priests, emperors, kings, nations, and now governments and corporations. The freedom and independence of hunter-gatherers’ sweat and toil has been gobbled up by myriad sorts of free-loafing, surplus sucking sedentists ever since we were induced to come in from camp. Often in this arrangement called ‘civilization,’ the less one does the higher in the hierarchy one travels, until you make it to King or Queen or Pope. At that point all you have to do, periodically, is sit in a car (or Pope mobile) and wave to people. The entire artifice of ‘civilization’ and its hierarchies- monumental architecture, organized religion, armies and their broken things, bureaucracies, tax collectors and other administrators, fine art blah blah blah- have evolved over time into what sociologists Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan Turner refer to as a ‘social cage.’ The ‘social cage’ is a human cultural trap that separates humans from their natural instincts and behaviors, and creates untold varieties of confusion, stress, violence, anomie, and other wonders of ‘civilization.’

As it relates to human labor and work, Nicholson suggests that there are Four Ages of Work that humans have passed through over time. The first of these was the long, hundreds of millennia during which we lived as hunter-gatherers. The Second Age of Work began around 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution, when we settled down and began to put on weight and develop lower back problems. The Third Age witnessed the industrial revolution and the advance of production and transportation technologies, which combined to create the conditions for modernism and all its marvels. This is where the real trouble began in terms of separating people from themselves. “Work and home became separate in a new age of wage labor. A new kind of economic servitude for the masses required people with jobs to work harder and longer than any previous generations. As the distance increased from our ancestral origins, so grew our psychological and social disorders- crime, social conflict, mental illness, deviation, alienation.” (Nicholson, p. 41).

Herein lies the heart of the problem of contemporary work organization, and this is the ‘distance we have travelled from our ancestral origins.’ Some people, middlers who toil away near the center of the corporate hive, see no problems here. They just see life as it has been imagined by others and handed to them. They simply soldier on, getting fatter and softer the further they move away from the primal mainstream of their human nature. Others- independents and teleworking corporate employees- now say NO! We are not going to take it any more…It is time to return to the way we are designed to live and work.

The Butcher