Cultural Evolution: Caught in the Devil's Bargain: Volume I, Human Nature - Culture and Biology

By James E. Lassiter

Until we start to think of culture and cultures more as relations between individuals and groups and less as objects, we will have little chance of realizing the greater peace, flourishing, and ecological stewardship we are capable of and must achieve to avoid becoming abjectly inhumane or extinct. What I am suggesting is a moral approach to the study of culture and culture change. I am asking that cultural anthropology extend its scope to once again include the cultural evolution of humankind as a whole. And in doing so focus on patterns of human relations in a way that throws light on the caring, social bonding aspects of our nature. Based on those findings I dare to prescribe a belief and moral system that can help avert the eventual, inevitable collapse of industrial consumer capitalism and its attendant ecological degradation. Cultural Evolution: Caught in the Devil's Bargain redefines culture and reveals elements in its specific and general evolution, from the dawn of humanity to the present, that illuminate how we have now arrived at the brink of civilizational collapse. Based on this framework of thinking and evidence from the past, the book offers a better way of relating to each other as persons. This approach has the power to inform and persuade humankind to find better ways to live within and between our groups and serve as successful stewards of Earth.

Volume II, Influencing Sociocultural Evolution contains Chapters 13-17.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baobab Atlanta Publishing
• Release date: Jun 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227995681

Book preview

Introduction to Volume I

Perhaps a synthesis of the biological and cultural evolution of the hominids is too large and complex a task. Given the scarcity of data for evolutionary reconstruction and the extreme complexity and richness of our lineage’s past and present biosocial existence, perhaps the task is impossible. But I am not yet convinced this is so. – James E. Lassiter, 1974

HUMANS HAVE ALWAYS had ideas about themselves and the world. Concerning themselves, these ideas have been in the form of personal and group knowledge of human physical and social existence – I am, I am here, we are this, not that. This also includes ideas about the character and behavior of our fellows and outsiders, and about what we consider good and bad thinking and behavior – I/We are this and should think and do these things, not those.

Human ideas about the world include understandings of the threats and resources of the physical environment and biosphere – weather, seasons, plant food and water sources, predators, prey. These understandings inform the development, remembering, and teaching about tools and techniques to avoid or lower environmental threats; and what can be done, individually and collectively, to extract resources deemed useful for survival and flourishing – We are here and must do this.

Human’s ideas about themselves, the world they occupy, and what to do is known as culture, the main object of anthropological study. Culture includes the ideas of specific societies. Culture is also an abstraction, one level removed from the daily beliefs and practices of specific peoples. In this sense, culture is an adaptive strategy used by all humankind to survive and flourish, with varying degrees of success, over the full range of time and space of human existence.

The subtitle of this book, Caught in the Devil’s Bargain, was borrowed from the lyrics of Woodstock, a song composed by American singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell in 1969. In both Mitchell’s usage and mine, a devil’s bargain refers to a Faustian transaction or pact whereby a person or, in the sense Mitchell and I use it, the majority of humankind, trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as humankind’s basic humanitarian values, for some selfish, worldly, or material benefit such as knowledge, power, or riches.

A Faustian bargain comes from the legend of Faust, Faustus, or Doctor Faustus, a character in German folklore and literature who agrees to surrender his soul to an evil spirit (Mephistopheles or Mephisto, a demon representative or agent of Satan). This is done by Faust in exchange for otherwise unattainable knowledge and magical powers, and access to all the world’s pleasures. A Faustian bargain is willfully and knowingly made with a power that the bargainer recognizes as evil or amoral. Faustian bargains are by their nature tragic or self-defeating for the persons who make them because what is surrendered is ultimately far more valuable than what is obtained regardless of whether the bargainer appreciates that fact. This tragic self-defeat and surrender also applies to modern humankind and its forsaking of equality and fraternity in the hope of thereby obtaining the power, wealth, and pleasures that total freedom is thought to provide.

One could argue that humankind did not enter a Faustian bargain because there really is no devil in the Abrahamic sense. There not being such a devil, we therefore did not know beforehand such a bargain’s terms would require our becoming enslaved by forces of evil or amorality. To an atheist there is no devil and therefore there cannot be a devil’s bargain. We simply live day to day, season by season and co-evolved with the increasing quantity and quality of knowledge in the Ethnosphere, and in accordance with the influences of technology and economics, both of which we have incessantly improved upon.

The matter of whether humankind or any group of humans knowingly considered the possible consequences of pursuing wealth and power before humankind undertook settled agriculture and urban living, and later capitalism, remains an open question. At least five times during our cultural evolution (Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, East Asia, West Africa, and the Americas), groups of humans must have known in an intuitive if not literal sense, or became quickly aware, they had acquiesced, willingly or under duress, to a way of life far different from that of their hunter-gatherer past.[1]

What I am referring to in my use of the devil’s bargain metaphor is less the bargain or devil aspects and more the verb caught. I am not interested in the theological notions of humans being captured and eternally enslaved and tortured by a supernatural devil such as the Satan of Christianity. I use the term caught to refer to having been entrapped or entangled in a seemingly inescapable way of life that gradually and ultimately became immoral, unsustainable, and destructive to Earth. It is a way of being human that now in the 21st Century offers few if any means of escape short of human societal or civilizational collapse, or life extinction and Earth becoming uninhabitable.

Regarding humans being caught in more general, existential terms, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), in his 1850 book, On the Suffering of the World, wrote that human existence, being born and life itself, is an arduous and often brutal entrapment or catchment. He saw this as a thrusting of an individual, who had no choice in the matter, into a difficult and mostly painful and stressful existence fraught with constant struggle. This, he said, was a relentless daily ordeal of trying to survive in and ameliorate the challenges of the natural environment and the demands of the social environment of our fellows.

This world is a battleground of tormented and agonized beings who continue to exist only by each devouring the other. ... To this world the attempt has been made to adapt the system of optimism, and to demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring. ... Powerful as are the weapons of understanding and reason possessed by the human race, nine-tenths of humanity live in constant conflict with want, always balancing themselves with difficulty and effort on the brink of destruction. Thus throughout, for the continuance of the whole as well as for that of every individual being, life is a ceaseless struggle for existence itself, while at every step it is threatened with destruction. – Arthur Schopenhauer, 1850

Biological evolution has equipped us with basic mammalian organs and physiological systems to maintain our bodies, and drives that force us to seek food, shelter, safety, sex, and companionship. Beyond that, our fellow humans, through enculturation, fill in the details of how we ought to conduct ourselves as individuals and how we must relate to others. This applies particularly to those who gave birth to us and nurtured and protected us until we reached adulthood, and others within ever more inclusive groups. Individuals who survive and thrive under such conditions are those who are simply fortunate biologically and socially. Many do not survive or flourish due to their own biosocial shortcomings or failures, or due to calamitous circumstances the onset of which are completely beyond their control.

Happiness is a fruitless pursuit, thought Schopenhauer. He says the happiest moment of the happy person is that of falling asleep, just as the unhappiest moment of the unhappy person is that of awakening. An indirect but certain proof of the fact that people feel unhappy, and consequently are so, is also abundantly afforded by the terrible envy that dwells in all. This quest for happiness, he claims, is an endless, ever repetitive pursuit of material and social achievement with no end, no arrival point or state of satisfaction. The pursuit of happiness and satisfaction was a myth concocted to keep us sane and in compliance with the will of the human collective comprised of the family, the local community, the tribe, the nation.

The best one could do, reasoned Schopenhauer, was to live the life of an ascetic somewhat in the Buddhist sense, a withdrawing from engagement with the world and detachment from its material offerings and happiness chasing as much as one could without going too far and incurring the lethal wrath of Nature and the human collective.

Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and humanity’s happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes they have the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to their lot, they believe that they suffer an injustice, in fact that they miss the whole point of existence; whereas it is far more correct to regard work, privation, misery, and suffering, crowned by death, as the aim and object of our life.... – (ibid.).

Schopenhauer’s catchment is related to the sense that I am using the term caught in a devil’s bargain. A devil’s bargain is the most extreme response to human life that Schopenhauer tells us about. That is, to escape the arduous impermanence and suffering of living, humankind has struck a deal with a devil. In exchange for relief from the day-to-day uncertainty of the nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life, and a reprieve from the daily toil of manual labor through technology, to taste the best of life in consumptive goods and services, to perhaps one day become rich, humankind gave to the Devil the very essence of its humaneness. That being its moral commitment to and covenant with our fellow humans as their keepers, and our reverence for the natural processes and forces of Earth.

Hunter-gatherer life had become intolerable for some of our earliest civilized ancestors. Within the city-state walls of Mesopotamia and later elsewhere many groups found themselves uncertain of what the new life that lay ahead would bring. But something had to give. What was given was the natural compassion of humankind in exchange for possible opportunities to make food acquisition easier and more reliable, and later the possibility of acquiring wealth and a life of convenience and leisure, and perhaps someday achieve personal power over others.

Schopenhauer was wrong about existence being absurd and striving futile. About the elevation of human will above reason and the illogical and directionless striving to which they have led. Since the emergence of Homo sapiens within the primates, striving to achieve survival and flourishing has been central to our major adaptive strategy: the use of symbolic linguistic culture, tools, and cooperation. It is not in Nature and life itself and in our striving and pursuit of progress, even happiness, that lies our problem. Humankind’s problem, then and now, is the direction and excesses we have chosen when exerting our will.

Another German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), said our thoughts, our categories, our concepts about Nature and all else are artifacts of our perceptions and not the things in themselves. He was correct. Schopenhauer’s later take on Nature and life is not Nature and life themselves. They are his perceptions as influenced by his experience and the society and times in which he was enculturated. Early mid-19th Century Europe was a time of European wars[2] and pessimism about the prospects of humankind. This included the zeitgeist[3] that influenced his thinking and that of the patron saint of absurdism Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a contemporary of Schopenhauer for most of the latter’s life.

Nature and life are not what Schopenhauer declared them to be. They simply are, independent of his or anyone else’s thoughts about them. We are different from the other primates, not in kind but in degree. And from that degree of difference emerged a new form of adaptation to Nature. If humankind had taken Schopenhauer’s suggestion of having no optimism or ambition of prospering and flourishing given the absurdity of Nature, humankind would have remained just another primate, an unexceptional creature, among an exceptional order of mammals. But not what we have become, for better and worse.

The infamous Theodore Kaczynski (1943-2023), also known as the Unabomber, in the beginning of his 1995 manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, regardless of the wrongness of his actions, aptly described modern humankind’s ill-conceived priorities, direction, and excesses.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in advanced countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in advanced countries.

Our problem, humankind’s catchment, has been the priorities we established and the direction and excesses we chose to achieve them from the beginning of the Neolithic to the present. The way forward and out of our dysfunctional human relational, ecological, and economic problems is not through a retreat into asceticism per Schopenhauer. It is through a reconfiguration of our relationships with Nature and each other that offers our best chance of achieving survival, flourishing, and effective life-sustaining Earth stewardship. This will require optimism, self-will, and a vision or aspiration for something better; not a Schopenhauerian withdrawal from the absurdity of Nature or a choosing of contentment with our destructiveness over flourishing and happiness. Whether we enact this change of priorities before or after civilizational and/or ecological collapse will determine the direction and nature of our and Earth’s future.

The reader should not conclude that my use of the subtitle Caught in the Devil’s Bargain reveals a fatalistic disapproval of sociocultural change per se on my part. There is merit and usefulness in not rejecting out of hand the postmodernist condemnation of scientism and Western notions of progress, and PM’s promoting extreme cultural relativity and rejection of the status quo among indigenous cultures.

Likewise, there is some truth in the ecology movement’s condemnation of modernity,[4] especially beginning during the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time when conservation-minded citizens began drawing more focused and critical attention to modernity’s harm – industrial pollution, environmental degradation, depletion of non-renewable resources, the environmental harm of uncontrolled population increase. And challenging mainstream Western society’s belief that cultural and material change was an absolute good, the predominant idea of the time, and proclaiming that the status quo was a dangerous if not lethal alternative to change. Today, remarks anthropologist Bruce Trigger (1998), with the collapse of Marxism as a political and moral force, the ecology movement has emerged as the most powerful opposition to the dominant neo-conservative philosophy and its effort to legitimate unrestricted growth and minimally regulated market economies.

Nor should you think I oppose all aspects of modernity and long for some imagined golden age where humankind once lived in a religious mythic Garden of Eden or an equally mythic secular condition of Rousseauian noble savagery, and that we have fallen from such a vastly superior way of living into the inequality, depravity, and barbarity that modernity has become.

What I am referring to in my book’s subtitle is the various choices human societies have made and the resulting changes that were embarked upon led by powerful and wealthy rulers, and that their masses subsequently acquiesced to or were coerced into accepting, especially since the transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture and urbanism. It is the sociocultural choices and changes that have been made at various times in history, from about 12,000BP to the present, that I am referring to.

Choices and changes, when taken cumulatively, have deepened our commitment to exchange our humanity for material progress, for wished for opportunities for greater wealth and status, for our humanity; and this to a point where we may not be able to break the bargain and regain the greater humaneness we once had as hunter-gatherers. When I say this, be assured I have considered the realities of hunter-gatherer life as a mix of the benevolent and malign. It is not hunter-gatherer behavior I think we need to revert to. That would be undesirable and impossible. Rather it is their ideals of face-to-face social relations, caring, sharing, and personal accountability to each other and the natural world that I think modern humankind must pursue as the only way to free ourselves from the devil’s bargain. We must take back our humaneness from the wealthy and powerful. We must reconstitute our commitment to equality and fraternity.

THIS BOOK EXAMINES the possibility of the collapse of modernity because of a metaphorical Faustian bargain humankind entered at the advent of settled agriculture and urbanism, and especially after it compounded its wager during the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent rise of consumer capitalism. Humankind is caught and now being called to account not by a devil in the religious sense. Rather for the centuries of harm done to humankind and Earth by an insufficiently controlled pursuit of wealth, power, comfort, and convenience over the pursuit of equitable human relations and effective planet stewardship.

The masses of humanity have endured most of the inequality this bargain led to through their exploitation, depravity, and suffering, and by the degraded air, land, and water environments they must live in. Environments that are increasingly and more violently heaving in retaliation for the damage they have received from humankind’s pursuit of evermore wealth and power compared to what we valued and sought as pre-settlement hunter-gatherers – an accommodation with each other and lives lived within, not in command of, Nature.

From this starting point this book answers the following questions by looking at the specific and general cultural evolution of humankind: What exactly is culture? How does it change? How did the cultures of specific people become different from other peoples’ cultures? How might humans, individually and within their groups, live better by coming up with and using answers to these questions? What might all of humankind do to achieve a better global state of being human, surviving, and flourishing?

The first step in answering these questions requires learning certain past and present ideas about social change, evolutionary biology, and cultural and evolutionary anthropology. This will also involve considering ideas from economics, politics, psychology, the natural sciences, and history and the other humanities.

Part I of this book defines culture by focusing on the study of culture; culture as an emergent, complex system; the relationship between culture and society; society as a cultural construct; the individual in society; culture and agency; and cultural ownership and appropriation.

Part II describes the processes of culture change by examining various theories; the uses of culture; and processes of counterculture such as doubt, deviance, invention and innovation, diffusion, and conflict.

Part III explains the difference between the processes of change within a culture and the evolution of a society’s culture over extended periods of time; and the evolution of culture writ large as an adaptational strategy of humankind. Its chapters include discussions of various theories of cultural evolution; evolution specific and general; the search for a good theory of cultural evolution; cultural diversity; techno-economic determinism (cultural materialism); memetics; and the relationship between biology and cultural evolution.

Part IV is the heart of this volume. It attempts to develop an accurate and usable theory of cultural evolution. It does so by describing the difference between culture change and cultural evolution and discussing ideas such as individual selection; the standard model of evolutionary anthropology; evolutionary psychology; group selection; punctuated equilibrium and other analogous evolutionary biology concepts; and devolution and evolutionary degeneration. The section ends with Chapter 12, We – A Theory of Cultural Evolution?.

Volume II discusses the many facets of how humans might use notions of culture, culture change, and cultural evolution to live better. Specifically, what they might do to increase their ability to survive, flourish, and effectively carry out their responsibility for Earth stewardship. Covered in this volume are social change; applied anthropology; producing new cultural scripts; interventions from the levels of personal being and social organization from the community to the global community; cultural change and evolution standards; progressivism; reactionism; cultural homeostasis; a retrospective assessment of key occurrences and eras in the cultural evolution of humankind; and conclusions based on all the foregoing.

COUNT ME AMONG THOSE who believe in Spinoza’s God, an impersonal deity that exists only in the processes of Nature and the cosmos. Still, there are two stories from the Christian tradition I invite the reader to consider. The first comes from the Bible. In the Book of Genesis, humans are tempted to eat the God-forbidden fruit from of the Tree of Knowledge. At this crucial turning point in the Abrahamic history of humankind two paths lay before us. One is to continue a life of God-like ease where, after one’s mortal death and if one proves worthy, s/he would be granted entrance to heaven to live happily, eternally.

The other harder, more perilous path at this turning point was no different from that trodden by all non-human animals, a life exposed to every Earthly delight and peril possible. A life where the in-God’s-image-created humankind would have no choice but be demoted to survive by its labor and wits no different from the lives of other animal’s God had also created. A life, as far as Adam and Eve knew, without the possibility of humankind atoning for its original sin or the possibility, not certainty, of individual redemption and returning to the favor and grace of God. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and were cast out from the Garden of Eden. And humankind thereby devolved into depravity and immorality until God once more intervened and reset his human creation through Noah and his family and their descendants.

To a believer in Spinoza’s God, being cast out from the Garden of Eden and God’s favor and grace cannot have been a catastrophe. It was an opportunity! Humankind had broken the only rule God had set so humankind was now free. One can only surmise that Adam and Eve accepted that God was still around but He Himself had set them free to fend for themselves. And this they did on their own, much to their surprise. But their descendants behaved in a manner unacceptable to God. They thought they had a deal. The original couple had broken the one and only rule. Their descendants had it wrong. The learned that much of their behaviors were so heinous in God’s estimation they were punishable by death at the hands of God.

Dumbstruck, the descendants of the first couple found out there were many more rules than the one about the Tree of Knowledge. The remaining story of humankind to the present, continues the Christian narrative, has been one of never being sure if one was in full compliance with all of God’s rules. Since the time of Noah and the Flood, humankind has gone forth and multiplied and established dominion over all life on Earth just as God had told them to do in the beginning. Yet now, in the present, 6,000 Biblical years later, on command, humankind has multiplied and dominated Earth’s life. Alas, immorality in the estimation of God has once again become the order of the day especially in the most modern societies. And the efforts of our tool-use and ideas for work in pursuit of greater wealth and power over the millennia have created conditions in the 21st Century that place humankind, with the exception a select few who await The Rapture, in perilous danger of extinction within a veritable Garden of Eden we have irreparably damaged. We now await the Second Coming of Christ.

The other story, introduced earlier, is one from a German legend based on historic figure Johann Georg Faust (1480-1540), a man who makes a pact with the Devil where he exchanges his eternal soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Most notable are two books based on this legend. The first by English playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1589). The second is a tragic play in book form by German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One (1808) and Faust, Part Two (1832).

In Marlowe’s telling and the early German renditions, the Devil and Faust enter a bargain. In exchange for his soul the Devil gives Faust ultimate knowledge and all the pleasures of the world he desires. In the end the Devil comes and takes him to Hell and eternal enslavement.

In Goethe’s play, however, God releases the atheistic Faust at the end of his life from his bargain with the Devil and takes him into Heaven. He does this because of Faust’s constant striving for knowledge and his efforts to build an earthly paradise open to all, not just for himself, thereby serving others and bringing humanity lasting joy. Through the powers of Hell Faust had built a Heaven on Earth, a new Garden of Eden.

Before Goethe, works alone could not save a godless man. Faust’s works far outdid those of any other non-believer. He made no mention of God in his final words and did not ask for forgiveness from anyone for his sins. What saved Faust was that his work was in service to a higher good, the benefit of his fellows. Faust at first used the Devil’s powers to serve himself but ultimately shared the results of his actions, his palatial Heaven on Earth, with all others. It was not through his intentions, faith, Biblical words read or spoken, or any desire for redemption and salvation that Faust’s soul was saved. It was due to his actions that led to the improvement of the lives of others.

It is from Goethe’s play that this book derives some of its inspiration. I see similarities between myself and Faust, if the reader will allow me. Both of us are sinners who do not believe in the God of Abraham. Our God is that of Nature like Spinoza’s God, an impersonal cosmic combination of matter and processes in which all that emerges, including life, occurs and by whose laws all are bound. There is no purpose or meaning beyond that of our own making, only existence. Human cultural evolution is a self-creation process, not a divine teleology. Finally, we both wish to serve our fellows without any desire for reward or redemption and salvation from any quarter. Faust ultimately sought to provide others with a better life and greater happiness through his material works. I am trying to do something similar through the ideas and suggestions I have included in this book.

No man can serve two masters: for either he

will hate the one, and love the other; or else

he will hold to the one, and despise the other,

Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

- Matthew 6:24, KJV

Cursed Mammon be, when he with treasures

To restless action spurs our fate!

Cursed when for soft, indulgent leisures,

He lays for us the pillows straight.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, 1772;1775

Since the dawn of humankind, after what seems to us an eternity, we have reached a time of reckoning. A time to pay the piper, the dreamer, the imaginer, the siren within that lured us from our uncivilized hunting and gathering way of life. Away from a way of being human in a sociocultural sense toward back-breaking agrarian drudgery, our estrangement from each other among the anonymous crowds of urban living toward a modern life of ease, convenience and luxury offered by Mammon, and a pursuit of unprecedented individual and social wealth and power.

Mammon in Hebrew means money or wealth. Figuratively, Mammon refers to the promise of money or material wealth – a greedy pursuit of gain. Christians use mammon as a pejorative to describe gluttony, excessive materialism, greed, and unjust worldly gain. Mammon is variously portrayed in art and film, in literature, and in popular culture as the Philistine god Beelzebub, a fallen angel who values earthly treasures over all other things, a god of riches similar to the Greek god Plutus and the Roman god Dis Pater, and generally as a human corrupting devil of excessive wealth and greed. Wikipedia notes that under the influence of the Social Gospel movement, American populists, progressives, and muck-rakers between 1880-1925 used Mammon to refer to the wealth and power of US banks and corporate institutions on New York’s Wall Street and their predatory activities throughout the US.

Shall we choose between the paths of the God of Abraham or Spinoza’s God? In the former we may pray and serve God and our fellows. In the latter we simply go about our work as did Faust, unconcerned and therefore unburdened about eternal salvation at the right hand of God or damnation forever in the hands of God’s fallen angel, Satan.

In choosing Spinoza’s God we opt for the best understanding of Nature we can come up with through science and reasoning, and we make our best efforts at working toward those things that enhance our chances of survival and flourishing, and that honor and provide good stewardship for all the life forms and material processes of Earth. Under this God there will be no bargains except those we enter into with the biosphere and each other. No praying for the fate of eternal life, or hellish slavery to worry about. Just actions to be taken for the good of each other and Earth.

THIS BOOK IS THE STORY of our bargain. The bargain humankind struck metaphorically with the Devil of Christianity, with Mammon; but realistically, tangibly, with civilization and ultimately with modernity. It is also a story of how we can free ourselves.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates asked a question which has echoed ever after: how should one live? ...  Anthropologists ask a related question: how do we live together? ... We cannot know ourselves except by knowing ourselves in relation to others. – Michael Carrithers, 1992

The central theme of this book is that human relations matter most. All that we achieve in terms of personal virtue, the respect of and kindness from our fellows, even our material creations as individuals and members of groups depend on this one thing primarily, how we relate to each other.

Throughout the history of the social sciences most of its practitioners have told us that if we wish to understand the essence, the crucial part of what it means to be human, we must look closely at certain things. Among these have been how the brain works; how minds come into being and form thoughts and use the body to express them; how and why we create a personal identity; how and why we behave as members of groups; the unique range of values, beliefs, and behaviors favored by specific groups; the social structures and functions of groups, subgroups and institutions; and the tools and other artifacts we produce and how we use them. Countless volumes have been filled with this information accompanied by researchers’ explanations of them and their processes, and what they and other scholars think are the reasons behind it all, often with encouragement and advice on how to go out and collect more information.

The data of anthropology teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilization different from our own, that we should learn to look on foreign races with greater sympathy and with a conviction that, as all races in the past have contributed to cultural progress in one way or another, so they will be capable of advancing the interests of mankind if we are only willing to give them a fair opportunity. – Franz Boas, 1911

Notable and impressive has been the contribution of anthropology to this body of knowledge through the study, analysis, and explanation of the full range of human social structures, functions, and cultures. Culture is, in the most general terms, what pioneering anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in 1871 called that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits.

Most members of the generations of anthropologists that came after Tylor have, for the most part, sought to understand these things of culture in an objective, scientific way. This has been a manner of inquiry based largely on the scientific methods of the natural sciences they were convinced would provide the most accurate and truthful depiction of the human experience. Knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits were to be studied most promisingly if studied scientifically.

The various components of culture, like matter and its physical, chemical, and biological processes, were most often seen as objects that could be isolated, broken down into their respective components, categorized, named, defined, contextualized, and otherwise described as to their structures and functions within human living. The object of such study being to develop a science of humankind, an anthropology in the strictest sense of the term, that one day could be relied upon to accurately explain these various cultural facets of being human – their constitution, workings, and uses by individuals and their groups. To what end? The seldom spoken but persistent, overall goal of anthropology has been the use of the discipline by all peoples for improving humankind’s ability to continue to survive and possibly flourish. Pure, objective detachment from its findings, especially within cultural anthropology, has waned, especially since the middle of the 20th Century.

Humanistic approaches – biographies, historical narratives, folklore narrations, mythologies – with antecedents in history and religious and secular literature, have also been a part of anthropology since its philosophical founding in 18th Century Europe. Anthropological humanism has remained viable to the present. This has occurred despite the emergence of interest in cultural evolutionism in the middle and late 18th Century among the Enlightenment philosophers, and the later influence of biological evolutionism that began in the middle of the 1800s based primarily on the research and writing of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

With this emphasis on a biological evolutionary focus within anthropology has come a greater objectivization of culture and humankind, especially since the early 19th Century when philosophical and sociological notions of cultural evolutionism began in Europe, and more so since Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859. Yes, even the early 20th Century humanistic leaning Boasians (Mead, Benedict, and others) were objectivists who insisted on firsthand, objective observation for the understandings of culture they came up with and wrote about.

It is reasonable to ask if during the intervening two hundred years, from about 1820 to the present, has this enhanced emphasis on science within anthropology, relative to humanistic studies, made any greater difference in the quality of human living than, say, the contributions of history, philosophy, art, and literature? Could anthropology have had a greater impact on human flourishing had it not followed the lead of the natural sciences and instead doubled down on its exploration of what I emphasize in this book – the deeply emotional and face-to-face social relations aspects of being human?

In this book I argue for a study of culture that focuses not on culture as an object. Not on the psychology of the individual, or the structures and functions of human groups, or individuals as components of groups. I want to understand culture content and processes not as objects, rather as a dynamic process of relations between human individuals, past, present, and future. The values and beliefs of individuals about other individuals and the actions they take based on these thoughts; that is, the dynamic process of human relations. This is the very essence of being human and therefore it is this that is in greatest need of understanding. It is in understanding these human relations that future human survival and flourishing depend.

The social scientific objectivization of culture and society and the formalizing of relations in terms of structures, functions, laws, and rules have contributed to perpetuating our ignorance about something very fundamental to being human; and done little to impede the emergence of the great estrangement that has arisen between people and peoples globally, and remains unremedied and lethal at the personal, societal, and species levels.

Until we start to think of culture and cultures more as relations between individuals and groups and less as objects, we will have little chance of realizing the greater peace, flourishing, and ecological stewardship we are capable of and must achieve to avoid becoming abjectly inhumane or extinct.

What I am suggesting is a moral approach to the study of culture and culture change. I am asking cultural anthropologists to once again extend their scope to include the cultural evolution of humankind as a whole. In doing so they can focus on patterns of human relations in a way that throws light on the caring, social bonding aspects of our nature. Based on those findings there could be a point of view and moral system that can help avert the eventual, inevitable collapse of industrial consumer capitalism and its attendant ecological degradation.

In prescribing a moral approach for anthropology I have, in the eyes of most philosophers, abandoned the scientific search for is and entered the subjective world of ought. I will discuss David Hume’s is-ought problem later. For now, let us define culture fundamentally and ask some basic questions about that definition of this key concept of cultural anthropology.

I have come to accept culture to be essentially what Tylor said it was a century and a-half ago – the agreed to, learned, shared, and malleable ideas, beliefs, values, and ways of behaving of human individuals living in groups. Is this definition of culture necessary and sufficient? There is a need for a definition of culture for understanding humankind as a starting point if for no other reason. But is our definition sufficient? Are we missing something? Do we need to add something here amid the crises of the early 21st Century? Maybe we need to add something about how we should or ought to behave toward each other as we go about adapting to new economies, technologies, and social, cultural, and ecological realities. Such shoulds or oughts are ignored by most social scientists as domains most suited to politics, religion, or the humanities.

For most of human cultural evolution morality was an integral part of culture and daily life. Between about 12,000-5,000BP, how we treat each other became detached from the group and placed under the control of political and religious elites. Since the advent of agriculture (12,000BP) and city living (3,000BP) our way of life has improved in many ways. But those improvements were accompanied by acts of severe brutality.

I ask that we reconsider the study of culture and cultures with an eye toward coming up with a better way of being human before humankind crosses too many more thresholds on our way to what most see as imminent global economic and ecological collapse. The lesson here is the need to take political and economic control of morality away from the wealth and powerful and return it to people by reigning in, through the ballot box, the efforts of more and more leaders who would these days have us live under authoritarian, Social Darwinian rule.

THREE SOURCES FOR LESSONS for a future anthropology are at hand: 1) the prehistory and history of how humans have thought of and behaved toward each other from the dawn of humankind in the early Paleolithic (300,000BP) to the present; 2) the accumulated wisdom of human, civil and equal rights thinkers and climate change activists; and 3) the insights and recommendations of ecological scientists and advocates.

First, let us consider our primal covenant with each other. The one we accepted for over a quarter of a million years as hunter-gatherers before we entered a new social contract. A new, civilized way of living following the advent of plant domestication, and that new economy’s later requirement that we live in permanent settlements and all the sociocultural transformations that new urban social structure entailed. What became of those primal affiliations and the emotional needs that required them, and the new social structures and functions that were created to try and maintain them?

Band affiliations were replaced by formalized relationships mediated by laws and money. Hunter-gatherer social structures and functions centered on horizontal, personal and egalitarian kinship relations were replaced by mediated formality based on economics and economic functions; and a new vertical relationship was added between the individual and a new ruling elite. Our emotional needs as social primates were supplanted by the economic and political needs and desires of the leaders of agrarian city-states. Humankind in Mesopotamia, and later elsewhere, grew economically, politically, and demographically but we became estranged from one another within and between groups. Our emotional needs for intimacy and trust went relatively neglected to the point that we increasingly behaved toward each other in a more impersonal and hierarchical manner in terms of politics and economics. Social intimacy, personal responsibility, and friendships were not abandoned but they were replaced as our primary means of social cohesion. Authoritarianism replaced egalitarianism, and anything approaching a movement back to egalitarianism did not appear until later with the quasi-democratic ideas of the Ancient Greeks. I will describe egalitarian efforts from that time to the 20th Century in the next section.

Second, many millennia later, we should consider one of the best descriptions of the new being human we have inherited as laid out by author James Baldwin. This he eloquently presented during his 1965 debate with American archconservative William F. Buckley, Jr. at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.

Essentially, Baldwin acknowledged in his speech the standard social, economic, and political aspects that are normally part of all discussions of human rights. But most importantly he gave the heart of his remarks from the level of the person. He described in detail the impact of all that has gone on in US society - socially, economically, politically, personally – at the deepest seat of personal existence of being a Black American or member of other racial and cultural minorities in the US. How beliefs and values for guiding person-to-person relations have been established in such a way that harms the persecuted, the persecutor, and US society and its future.

To the question being debated, Is the American Dream at the Expense of the American Negro?, Baldwin responded:

I have to speak as one of the people who’ve been most attacked by what we now must here call the Western or European system of reality. ... When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books, that Africa had no history, and neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the less said, the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America. And, of course, I believed it. I didn’t have much choice. Those were the only books there were. Everyone else seemed to agree. If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem, downtown, the world agrees. What you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage. People obviously can pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. You’re not. And you go back home, and it would seem that, of course, that it’s an act of God that this is true! That you belong where white people have put you.

...

It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact, that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and Black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other and that I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country. Until this moment there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. Because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West. – James Baldwin, 1965 (emphasis mine)

Baldwin’s words on the personal, existential impact of White-Black relations in the US highlight the broader issue this book is about, the evolution of human relations. Specifically, how we develop, why we hold onto, and how and why we must now, in the 21st Century, change our thoughts about others. These thoughts are the ideas about human relations that are expressed in our personal interactions especially with different others and in our impersonal social, economic, and political relations with all others as defined by race, class, occupation, education, ideology, religion, or any other demarcation. Until cultural anthropology includes these relations prominently in its study of culture and its evolutionary past, present and future, that very grave moment for the West, and the rest of us Baldwin closes with will remain threateningly hovering over the hearts and minds of all humankind.

The third lesson for anthropology’s future comes from the recommendations of ecology, science, and environmental conservation/protection advocates. I have frequently written elsewhere on my optimism about Humankind's future based on our long-term survival and flourishing as a species; and, within that, a prospective, self-correcting, and successful future offered by the ideals and methods of the Enlightenment. I could be wrong, very wrong. According to members of the Dark Mountain Project I am, especially about the self-correcting part. In fact, members of DMP are convinced there is no slowing down much less turning back from the ecocidal path humankind is on. They believe we must find new ways forward through and beyond the end of civilization.

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Dark Mountain Project Photo by Natalie Matthews-Ramo

ACCORDING TO THE DARK Mountain Project Manifesto here is the future we face:

Human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future. We find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. ... Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm. – Anonymous 4, 2013

Ecocide demands a response, declare the founders of DMP, a response too important to be left to the standard model favored by politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, and number crunchers. The problem of the ongoing ecocide is too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed, they say to do something they call Uncivilised art, Uncivilised writing in particular. This, the DPM manifesto says is writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence. In DPM’s view we are apes who have constructed a sophisticated myth of our own importance which we use to sustain our civilising project. This project involves taming, controlling, subduing, destroying the forests, deserts, wild lands, and seas; a civilizing of these and the imposition of bonds on our minds such that we feel nothing when we exploit or destroy our fellows and other lifeforms. ... Within all this, DPM thinkers continue, shifts are under way which suggest that our whole way of living is already passing into history. Now, they conclude, it is time to look for new paths and new stories, ones that can lead us through the end of the world as we know it and out the other side. DPM followers believe that by questioning the foundations of civilisation, the myth of human centrality, our imagined isolation, we may find the beginning of such paths.

American journalist and author Laura Miller summed up the Dark Mountain Project’s position this way:

‘The world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction, and social and political unravelling,’ the network of writers, artists, and thinkers called the Dark Mountain Project believe. ‘We want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it.’ In Dark Mountain’s view, the reformist stance of big environmental groups who stump for ‘sustainability’ is delusional; civilization as we know it is toast and deservedly so. It’s time everyone stopped pretending and time we started acknowledging humanity’s impending diminishment into a ragtag smattering of survivors. ... The monsters who walk among us and want to kill us are made of our fellow human beings, and soon enough we’ll all be monsters, too. – Laura Miller, 2017

There are other non-apocalyptic views of our current predicament and possible future. Among the most notable are those of Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012), an American political economist and 2009 Nobel Laurette. Ostrom is best known for bucking the widespread belief in the inevitable destructiveness of economic activity through Malthusianism and the tragedy of the commons. Based on cross-cultural evidence she shows that humans were not trapped and without options amid diminishing natural resources. She describes how natural resources – pastures, fishing waters, forests – are being jointly managed and used in small, local communities. That under conditions of resource scarcity, rules can be established for caring for and using natural resources economically and in an ecologically sustainable way.

Ostrom shows that caring for shared resources involves multiple tasks that have to be organized from the ground up, and shaped by cultural norms. Efforts have to be discussed face to face and based on trust. She finds that when people simply discussed what they should do before beginning, their rate of return was more than double. In her later work, Ostrom focused on how humans interact with ecosystems to maintain long-term sustainable resource yields from common pool resources such as forests, oil fields, grazing lands, and irrigation systems. Essentially, Ostrom argued for multifaceted human-ecosystem interaction as opposed to any singular panacea for social-ecological problems. More will be said about Ostrom’s ideas later including her design principles for stable local common-pool resource management.

Another optimistic view of humankind’s future is that of Australian David Holmgren (2017). Holmgren, an environmental designer, ecological educator, and writer is best known as a co-originator, along with Bill Mollison, of the permaculture concept. Permaculture is a means of land management and a philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes design principles based on whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in efforts such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience. Permaculture originally came from ‘permanent agriculture,’ but was later adjusted to mean ‘permanent culture,’ incorporating social aspects as inspired by Japanese agricultural scientist, farmer, and author Masanobu Fukuoka's (1913-2008) natural farming.[5] Holmgren and Mollison coined the term ‘permaculture’ in 1978 as a concept opposed to Western industrialized methods and being consistent with indigenous or traditional knowledge.

Despite criticisms and not yet having become a mainstream scientific tradition, permaculture remains a viable option to traditional agriculture and stands as a beacon of hope in contrast to the dire and hopeless condition of modernity described by the Dark Mountain Project.

CULTURAL EVOLUTION: Caught in the Devil’s Bargain redefines culture and reveals elements in its specific and general evolution, from the dawn of humanity to the present, that illuminate how we have now arrived at the brink of civilizational collapse. Based on this framework of thinking and evidence from the past, the book offers a better way of relating to each other as persons. This approach has the power to inform and persuade humankind to find better ways to live within and between our groups and serve as successful stewards of Earth. The ecological ideas of Ostrom, Holmgren, Mollison, Fukuoka, and others are a necessary part of this better way.

Part I Culture

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1 The Study of Culture

Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. – Edward B. Tylor, 1871

AT THE TURN OF THE 20th Century a major divide opened within cultural anthropology, most notably in the US. This split emerged initially from reactions to 18th Century cultural evolutionism and 19th Century misapplications of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution to human society and behavior. Some early 20th Century cultural anthropologists favored a continuation of an evolutionary approach with certain caveats and modifications. Others insisted it best to abandon an evolutionary approach and its associated search for panhuman universals and focus instead on the cultural particulars of societies. Elsewhere in the discipline, notably in archaeology and physical or biological anthropology, an evolutionary approach remained favored given the extremely long time spans inherent to many of their topics of study, and a deep-seated interest in finding patterns of behavior through time and globally. We will examine much of what has been learned within archaeology and physical anthropology later. For now, our focus is cultural anthropology and its object of central interest, culture.

During the first half of the 20th Century objections within cultural anthropology to using the ideas and methods of evolutionary biology to study and understand culture took various forms. Some objected that biologized understandings of humankind degraded or missed the point or essence of being human. They argued that the best understandings of humankind’s behavior were not to be found through a scientific study of human biology, rather through historical, descriptive explanations that focused on the ideas, beliefs, values, and behaviors of living populations. This group of cultural anthropologists, however, had no objection to the use of scientific methods and evolutionary perspectives borrowed from biology in the recovery and analysis of archaeological findings. Prehistoric archaeology, they thought, supported extrapolations of ideas, beliefs, and values of past peoples based on a scientific analysis of the artifacts they left behind and the characteristics of the living sites they once occupied. To the most ardent of the anti-evolutionists, however, the study of culture’s evolution as a biological adaptation, and speculation on the stages of culture’s evolution and the levels of humankind’s cultural development from earliest times to the present, were a waste of time. Among these scholars was American cultural anthropologist Julian H. Steward (1902-1972).

Writing in the 1950s, Steward was not interested in universal explanations of human behavior. The patterns of behavior of one or more but not all groups of people must be thought of differently from efforts to arrive at human universals. Universals, thought Steward, were confined to biochemical and psychological processes. The cultures of specific peoples are determined by history and local cultural adaptations. They [cultures] are super-organic, he declared, and were therefore matters to be studied by cultural anthropology, not biology or psychology.

All men eat, but this is an organic and not a cultural fact. It is universally explainable in terms of biological and chemical processes. What and how different groups of men eat is a cultural fact explainable only by culture history and environmental factors. All men dance, but the universal feature of dancing is bodily rhythm which is a human rather than cultural trait. Specific movements, music, attire, ritual, and other attributes of dancing which have limited occurrence and give dances meaning as cultural facts are not subject to universal explanation or formulation. A formula that explains behavior of all mankind cannot explain culture. ... My own objective is to formulate the conditions determining phenomena of limited occurrence. The category of nature to which these belong is known generically as culture and is found among all mankind, but no cultural phenomena are universal. – Julian Steward, 1955

Steward’s approach has had a lasting effect. Four decades later, Durham University anthropologist Michael Carrithers was influenced by Steward’s notion that a formula that explains behavior of all mankind cannot explain culture. Carrithers therefore gave attention to the meaning of culture