Chapter 5. Stone Age or Old Age: An Unbridgeable Chasm

For many years now the Director Emeritus has exhibited, as I have mentioned, a personalistic preoccupation with old age. Often his opinions are scarcely sublimated emotions — for example, his transparently autobiographical anxiety that “the lives of the old are always clouded by a sense of insecurity.” And only an insecure (and paranoid) old man could suppose that one of the groups against which mass discontent is channeled by reactionaries is — besides the usual suspects (racial minorities, the poor, etc.) — “the elderly.”[187] As so often, Bookchin echoes his beloved Athenians, this time the Aristophanes character who says: “Isn’t old age the worst of evils? Of course it is.”[188] His insecurities are not, however, “always” felt by the elderly — not in primitive societies: “The idea that one might fear or resent growing up or growing old does not evidently occur in traditional preliterate, preindustrial societies.”[189]

Shortly after he turned 60, Bookchin’s Ecology of Freedom (1982) advanced, among other eccentricities, the thesis that the origin of hierarchy in human society was gerontocracy, domination by the elderly. After all, “People who have lived longer can often be expected to know more than those who are very young.” Or to think they do. According to the Director Emeritus, “gerontocracy, whose priority I emphasize as probably the earliest form of hierarchy, is one of the most widespread hierarchical developments described in the anthropological literature,”[190] but he neglects to cite a single example of these widespread developments in The Ecology of Freedom, Remaking Society or, so far as I know, anywhere else. The only anthropologist to review The Ecology of Freedom (and surprisingly sympathetically) wrote that the ex-Director’s “emphasis on age stratification as the key to domination is unconvincing and suffers from such a paucity of empirical evidence that it reads at times like a ‘Just-So’ story.”[191] You’d think an anthropologist would be aware that gerontocracy is one of the most widespread hierarchical developments described in the anthropological literature, but, what does she know anyway?

Bookchin’s Just-So story is unrecorded in any ethnographic, historical or archaeological source. It does not even appear in the 19^th century conjectural histories alongside the primal horde, the matriarchy, animism, and the “psychic unity” of mankind. Exactly how he knows the thoughts of prehistoric men is unclear, since he was probably too young to remember anything. It looks like an example of the ex-Director’s trademark introspective/projective method. Occasionally, the emergence of age hierarchy — or rather, the emergence of age groups which might be ranked hierarchically — is known to have taken place in historic time. The one example I came across, though, does not seem to corroborate Bookchin’s theory. It is the Plains Indians after they become heavily involved in the fur trade: “Age grades were borrowed from neighboring groups as a mechanism for expressing and channeling the vertical mobility which accompanied increasing wealth.”[192] In this case the origin of age grades was economic — namely, incorporation into the capitalist world-system — an aspect of social change the Director Emeritus usually ignores.

In East Africa, the stronghold of age groups, the origin was military. The age class consisting of all initiated males below the current set of elders, where there is only one such set, is the warrior age grade: “A political system of this kind is clearly focused on military organization.” The first Zulu king, Dingeswayo, “organized regiments of warriors on the basis of their social age-grades, and thereby increased organizational efficiency and morale.” Colonial governments demilitarized the warrior age grades throughout Africa, artificially tilting the balance of power in favor of the easily controlled elders. Thus among the Samburu, the ex-warriors have lost their power while the elder grade has retained theirs, and so the younger men have “turned from warriors into angry young men.”[193] You can call it gerontocracy if you want to, but by any name, it is a policy or byproduct of colonialism which has nothing to do with the emergence of hierarchy.

In Anarchy after Leftism I suggested that Bookchin’s belief in gerontocracy as “one of the oldest forms of hierarchy” or “the original form of hierarchy” (which is it?) was wishful thinking.[194] The San, for instance, have no gerontocracy. A cross-cultural study of the role of the aged found a strong negative correlation (-.44) between hunting and aged men in councils.[195] The Director Emeritus may have erred by generalizing from his own, no doubt satisfying career experience. Something approximating gerontocracy does prevail on college campuses (there it’s known as “tenure”), but in few other areas of any society. No contemporary anthropologists believe that true gerontocracy ever existed anywhere. Their infrequent use of the word is metaphorical. The word does not even appear in anthropological encyclopedias and dictionaries.[196] The ex-Director’s personalistic obsession with age increases as his own does.

By definition, gerontocracy, as an -ocracy, does not appear among stateless (acratic) primitive societies. What have appeared to be age-based hierarchies often result merely from the fact that it may take a lifetime to accumulate the material and social resources to assume an influential role: authority is achieved, not ascribed.[197] The U.S. Senate is an example. A false impression of gerontocracy may also result from the common situation where roles of authority, such as chief or (sometimes) elder, are held for life, so the average age of the official is likely to be much higher than the average age of accession to office, the latter being the true indicator of gerontocracy. The U.S. Supreme Court is an example. But only “in relatively rare cases has age alone qualified one for positions of civil responsibility.”[198]

Both factors are at work in the so-called “gerontocracy” of the Jokwele Kpelle in Liberia. The ethnographer applies the term to the loi namu, high ritual officeholders who, it is averred, have power over public officials although they cannot hold public office themselves. Her single anecdote hardly persuades that the power exists, but even if it does, it rests on other sources than age: birthplace, ancestry, long-term residence, skills as public speakers and advisers, completion of a progress through the stages of initiation of the ritual hierarchy of a secret society, and finally, retirement from the civil office of chief. “Clearly, the loi namu do not attain their positions simply by becoming old.” In fact, only 2.3% of the population over 50 become loi namu (or “town elders,” a lesser honor), and there were eight loi namu in their late 60s or 70s in a town of 757. The author makes clear that their glory does not reflect on the ordinary oldsters, who have no distinctive prerogatives and may not be treated respectfully.[199] Here is hierarchy all right, but not gerontocracy.

The existence of age-sets or age-grades in a minority of societies likewise does not entail gerontocracy. The leading scholar of age class systems, Bernardo Bernardi, rejects the application of the word “gerontocracy” to such systems. Age groups may be mere categories “which never act corporately,” as among the Nuer in the Sudan or, in Australia, the Walbiri.[200] Even where political authority, such as it is, is assigned to a certain age group, it is may not be assigned to the oldest age group. Among the Nyakusa of East Africa — who carry age distinctions to the unique extreme of residential segregation in “age-villages” — the middle of three age groups, known as “the ruling generation,” is responsible for administration and defense; the elder group is respected but restricted to ritual functions. Similarly, among the Walbiri of Australia, the 40–55 age group, are the men who have seen all the ceremonial and ritual objects, and have the highest social status. But by age 60 one is considered an “old man,” enjoying only ritual recognition.[201]

Among the Arusha of Tanzania, no age-group dominates the parish assembly, and of the four adult age-groups, the third highest, the junior elders (25–37) most heavily participates in political, legal and ritual affairs; the senior elders (37–49) participate to a lesser extent, but are considered indispensable in diplomacy and dispute resolution; and the retired elders (over 49) “give up participation in public affairs unless personally involved; indeed they are specifically excluded and their experience ignored.” In fact, societies where politics is the primary or exclusive prerogative of a middle-aged group, not the elders, seem to be common in Africa. It seems ludicrous to appy the term gerontocracy to a society like that of the Samburu where the “elders” are those 35 and older![202] And it is difficult to see how gerontocracy could emerge where the ruling class is subject to term limits.

Such is the pattern almost everywhere in Oceania (including Australia), a vast area, although its societies do divide the life cycle into sequential stages defined by physical and/or behavioral criteria. Old men per se were relied upon and respected for their expertize in matters of sacred ritual and belief — but only within that domain. As for the public sphere, in nearly every society, most privileged or influential roles “were held by males who were past ‘youth’ and not yet ‘old.’”[203] According to Bookchin, as discussed below, it is with gerontocracy that hierarchy emerges, “slowly, cautiously, and often unnoticeably” — first “big men/small men [sic],” then warriors/followers, then chiefs/community, then nobles/peasants, and finally the “incipient, quasi, or partial states.”[204] It would seem, then, that societies without gerontocracies are in no immediate danger of becoming states, or even chiefdoms. Yet several Oceanian societies — notably Hawaii and Tahiti — developed what were at least socially stratified complex chiefdoms. The anthropological debate is whether they were states or only on the threshold of statehood.[205] Either way, the grand theory of the Director Emeritus is refuted.

Bookchin’s conjectural reconstruction of gerontocracy is inconsistent and unconvincing. To an old man such as himself, rule by old men is simply “logical”:

The logical beginnings of hierarchy, as well as a good deal of anthropological data at our disposal, suggest that hierarchy stems from the ascendancy of the elders, who seem to have initiated the earliest systems of command and obedience. This system of rule by the elders, benign as it may have been initially [how would he know?], has been designated as a “gerontocracy” and it often included old women as well as old men [not true]. We detect evidence of its basic, probably primary role in virtually all existing societies up to recent times — be it as councils of elders that were adapted to clan, tribal, urban and state forms, or, for that matter, in such striking cultural features as ancestor-worship and an etiquette of deference to older people in many different kinds of societies.[206]

Thus hierarchy begins, in part, with — (the logic of) hierarchy. If this is not a tautology it is gibberish. Either way, it is no support for the thesis. The claim that many ethnographic data support the idea that gerontocracy is the first form of hierarchy is false, not only because there is no such thing as a true gerontocracy, but because origins are not necessarily deducible from later developments. No ethnographer of patriarchy, shamanism, councils of elders, age-class systems or anything else has ever drawn the conclusions from his data that Bookchin has. The Director Emeritus presents gerontocracy as a turning point in the evolution toward the state. Scholarship on the origins of the state does not so much as mention age groups, much less gerontocracies. Indeed, anthropologists rarely speak of gerontocracy, not even with reference to Australia.[207] And an archaeologist has made the obvious point (see below) that if, as Bookchin claims, old people in our sense of the term were absent in prehistoric times, “then in prehistoric societies there was no gerontocracy.”[208]

Revealing here is the empirical part of the ex-Director’s methodology here (if a ten dollar word can be said to apply to a ten cent scribbler). The existence of an institution in the past is inferred from its “survivals” in the present, the only difficulty being that there is no independent evidence that the survival was ever part of the institution. E.B. Tylor, the first to use the term, defined it: “These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has evolved.” Interpreting survivals was crucial to the reconstructions of the past in the theories of the 19^th century social evolutionists, but came under withering attack in the first half of the 20^th century from empirically oriented anthropologists. Today, they deny that survivals explain anything: “On the contrary, the concept of survival is almost a confession of defeat before the challenge to find a contemporary sense in anything.”[209] Even an anthropologist who does not “totally discount” survivals acknowledges that “to identify something as a genuine survival in the present always requires some independent corroboration.” Without it, “to speak of survivals merely begs the whole question.”[210]

Thus we have this method to thank for the theory of “mother right” lately revived by feminists: the existence of matrilineal descent in (a minority of) contemporary or historical primitive societies is taken to prove matriarchy, rule by women, in the prehistoric past. The problem is that there is no independent evidence that matrilineality and matriarchy are related, or for that matter that matriarchy has ever existed. In fact, all known societies, including all known matrilineal societies, are patriarchal. Still less does the existence of a trait in some societies in the present prove that it existed in all societies in the past. The simplest societies, bands of hunter-gatherers, are patrilineal or composite, never matrilineal.[211] Matriarchy does not exist in the present, there is no direct evidence of its existence in the past, and all of its supposed survivals may coexist with authority systems which are not matriarchal. Ethnohistory reports no patrilineal society which turned matrilineal, but reports at least one — the Tiwi of Australia — which went from patrilineal to matrilineal before the eyes of Western observers. And the clincher: the Director Emeritus does not believe in primitive matriarchy.[212] Similarly, gerontocracy does not exist in the present, there is no direct evidence of its existence in the past, and all of its supposed survivals may coexist with authority systems which are not gerontocratic.

Bookchin’s first contention which smacks of being an argument is the proposition that councils of elders are tantamount to gerontocracy because they have played a basic role in all societies until recently. He is wrong, first, because ubiquity does not prove antiquity. The state, for example, is ubiquitous, but nobody thinks it is older than anarchy. Many states are of recent vintage. Capitalism is also ubiquitous, but it is relatively recent, whereas the domestic mode of production is ancient but increasingly marginalized.

Second, antiquity does not prove priority. No matter how old gerontocracy is, patriarchy, for instance, might be older.

Third, councils of elders and the like play no part in the lively current debate among archaologists and ethnohistorians on the origins of the state, whose antecedent is usually considered to be the complex chiefdom in ranked society.[213]

Fourth, councils of elders are not ubiquitous. This requires no documentation. They do not exist now in Western societies or most others. They did not exist in the European monarchies of the ancien regime; or in any of the Hellenic and Italian Renaissance city-states which Bookchin celebrates; or at any time in American history. They are also absent from many small-scale traditional societies, including the Nuer, the Yanamamo, the Tikopia, the San, the Montenegrins, the Kalinga of northern Luzon, the Basseri tribesmen of Iran, Sicilian peasants, the Kachins, the Tsembaga Maring, etc., to mention only some that I happen to know of. In Australia, the supposed stronghold of gerontocracy, “there are almost no judiciary bodies which we can reasonably call ‘councils.’”[214]

Bookchin’s reliance on ancestor-worship is, for several reasons, no evidence of gerontocracy past or present. I grant that the association seems plausible. Ancestral ghosts may be conjectured to concern themselves with the superior rights of the elders who will be joining them soon. But ancestor worship is not universal. Ghosts cannot promote elder power where the living do not attach much importance to the ghosts, as among the Nuer, who have no “‘elders’ concerned with the administraton of the country.”[215]

Furthermore, an age class system is a sine qua non of gerontocracy, yet some ancestor-worshiping societies lack them. Such systems are far from ubiquitous. They have always been as rare in Eurasia as they have been common in Africa. Outside Africa, age sets and age grades find only limited application. Even in Africa they are not “overwhelmingly important in most societies.” In South America they are found only in Brazil.[216] As noted in Roy Rappaport’s classic monograph Pigs for the Ancestors, the ritual/ecological cycle among the Tsembaga of New Guinea revolves around ancestor worship, but there is virtually no social differentiation by age.[217] The Chinese are well-known for ancestor worship, but in traditional China there were no age-grades and “age is not, of itself, a qualification for leadership.”[218]

Note too that ancestor worship is not the cult of the dead in general. People may worship only their own ancestors,[219] which is the spiritual counterpart of household patriarchy, not gerontocracy. Even where the aged form an age group (i.e., a corporate group) and ancestor-worship prevails, the elder class may be assigned ritual rather than political functions, as we have seen, or just put out to pasture.[220] Ancestor worship is even compatible with the custom of killing useless old men like Bookchin. In a cross-cultural study of the role of the aged in 71 societies, there was a positive correlation (+.29) between ancestor worship and the practice of killing old men.[221] In the social sciences that is a respectable though not a strong positive correlation, but on Bookchin’s argument, the correlation should be strongly negative.

The purported fact that the aged possess essential technical or ritual knowledge which they turn to political advantage is not universally true. In many societies all adults, subject to gender differentiations, possess all necessary know-how: “Unlike the manufactured capital of industrial society, hunter-gatherer capital stock is knowledge that is freely given and impossible to control for individual advantage.” [222] The aged possess no such special knowledge among the San, where nobody rules. Boys play at hunting from as early as age 3, and receive formal instruction from “older men” (not “old men”) from age 12. The main tracking skills, though, are acquired in the field. Hunters say that it takes a lifetime to learn the country. Thus the aged have no more to teach than other men, and cannot impart the vital skills training gained away from camp.[223] Among the Netsilik Eskimo, “Despite the complexity of articles such as the kayak and the composite bow, every man had the skills and the tools to be technologically self-sufficient.” Even if the old make themselves useful with their craft skills, as among the Eskimos, once an elderly Eskimo’s children leave the household, the elder will be resented as a burden and encouraged to kill himself, which he is usually willing to do.[224] The only knowledge the aged might monopolize is religious knowledge, as in Australia.[225]

One would think that if this theory were valid, gerontocracy would have “emerged” in all the earliest human societies, which would contradict the ex-Director’s continued belief in primitive egalitarianism. To patch his theory, the Director Emeritus explains that it was “growing knowledge” which the elderly used to take power. [226] But if the growing knowledge was technical, it would have to be shared to be used, and if it was ritual or esoteric knowledge, since the elders have all of it anyway, what difference does it make if it grows or not? Especially since Bookchin would be the first to assert that superstition in any quantity is not knowledge at all.

The hypothesis makes no sense. Even if the elders possessed essential technical knowledge, they would have to transfer that knowledge in order for it to be used for everybody’s benefit, since the elderly are usually, or even by definition, no longer capable of supporting themselves. In other words — Bookchin’s words — “I’ve cited the infirmities and insecurities aging produces in the elderly and their capacity to bring their greater experience and knowledge to the service of their increasing status.” In their decrepitude they need the young at least as much as the young need them; the young are able-bodied and more numerous than the old; and the old men will probably need a feed before the young men need a ritual.[227] Here is a blunt description of the situation in aboriginal Australia, which is gerontocratic if any place is: “Physical weakness with advancing age meant loss of status for practical purposes, whatever religious knowledge a man possessed.” Superannuated men were known by the uncomplimentary term “close-up dead.” Among the Arusha of East Africa, retired elders are “rather pitied by younger men, and even despised as ‘too old for anything.’”[228] Thus the pension scheme the Director Emeritus attributes to elderly primitives fails when it is most needed; they live on charity; nothing remains of their former power.

Respect for the aged has been claimed to be “practically universal,” and a recent cross-cultural study based on the Human Relations Area Files reported respect for the aged in 88% of the sample. But the same study shows that respect does not confer power, as we saw in the Nyakusa case. 42% of the 60 societies were actively supportive of their helpless elderly, but in 26% the aged were forsaken or abandoned and allowed to die, and in another 19% they were killed. Often, then, respect does not even prevent the useless elderly from being killed or left to die.[229] In this respect civilization is no different. Whether the oldster is set adrift on an ice floe, forced into a Victorian workhouse on a sub-subsistence diet, or denied costly medical care in a modern nursing home, it amounts to killing him.[230]

The way the elders impose their ideology (we are told) is through control over socialization of the young:

Initially, the medium by which the old create a modicum of power for themselves is through their control of the socialization process. Fathers teach their sons the arts of getting food; mothers, their daughters. The adults, in turn, consult their parents on virtually every detail of life, from the workaday pragmatic to the ritual. In a preliterate community, the most comprehensive compendium of knowledge is inscribed on the brains of the elders. However much this knowledge is proffered with concern and love, it is not always completely disinterested; it is often permeated, even if unconsciously, by a certain amount of cunning and self-interest. Not only is the young mind shaped by the adults, as must necessarily be the case in all societies, but it is shaped to respect the curriculum of the adults, if not their authority.[231]

Every aboriginal parent is a mama’s boy or daddy’s little girl. No one has ever reported a society in which adults consult their old parents on virtually every detail of life. Although most of the details of everyday life are routine and repetitious everywhere, Bookchin’s portrayal is of parents, self-supporting adults, with the know-how and the dependency needs of small children. How many times does anyone need to be told how to plant a yam seed? The images are arresting: the old Eskimo mom buttoning up her son’s parka before he goes whaling; the venerable San father reminding his son, as he does every day, to point the spear toward the warthog; the Navajo mother, always there for her daughter, telling her to prepare tortillas for dinner, just like last night. It takes at least as much practical information, probably more, to navigate the day in our own society, but only Norman Bates consults his mother on every detail. For the elders to use their “monopoly of knowledge”[232] would be to use it up.

Since their adult offspring are such helpless nitwits, for the aged to control the socialization process they would have to undertake most of the skills training and child rearing, but there are few if any societies in which they have done so. Children are socialized by their parents, often augmented by older children, siblings, aunts and uncles (both real and classificatory), and sometimes even grandparents. In a few societies, grandparents play a significant role in childrearing, but not in the vast majority. At minimum they would have to live in the child’s household to do so, as part of an extended family, but many societies — more than half of those in George Peter Murdock’s Cross-Cultural Survey — have the nuclear family instead. In the nuclear family, their role in childrearing usually ranges from modest to nil. Thus an early anthropological classic on socialization, Becoming a Kwoma, does not even mention grandparents.[233] Bookchin, who believes that ordinary people can manage our complex society without dependency on technocrats, inconsistently believes that ordinary people cannot manage a simple society without dependency on elders.

I have oversimplified Bookchin’s complex, inflected account of the emergence of hierarchy. If it were just a matter of waiting on old people hand and foot, the benign if self-serving hierarchy of the old would only be annoying. There had to be other, more culpable makers of the fully realized hierarchy of social class and the state. The elders’ form of hierarchy and theirs alone at least began as “benign.” For what happened next, the Director Emeritus exonerates the elderly of full responsibility: “Certain strata, such as the elders and shamans and ultimately the males in general, began to claim privileges for themselves,” from which the state and the class system duly followed. To this enlarged docket of defendants he adds the final authority figures, the “big men”: “When the number of horticultural communities began to multiply to a point where cultivable land became relatively scarce and warfare increasingly common, the younger warriors began to enjoy a sociopolitical eminence that made them the ‘big men’ of the community, sharing power with the elders and shamans.”[234]

Younger men, older men, shamans — that’s universal manhood suffrage in the Stone Age! That leaves nobody to dominate but women and children — in which case, the origin of hierarchy is patriarchy — yet the Director Emeritus gases us: “the sterner features of patriarchy were often absent during this transitional period.”[235] All the usual whipping-boys are on the list except the important one: the chief. And by prestidigitation, Bookchin has derived the state, i.e., civil authority, from civil authority, i.e., the state, just as he derived hierarchy from hierarchy.

“Big man” is a term of art and, as such, beyond the ken of a literalist like the Director Emeritus. He makes it sound like big men comprise warrior bands. But big men are individuals, not groups of men, and they need not be warriors. Marshall Sahlins (that name again!) produced the most influential characterization of the big man of Melanesia. His position is not an office — he is a self-made (big) man — and his power is purely personal. He “must be prepared to demonstrate that he possesses the kinds of skills that command respect — magical powers, gardening prowess, mastery of oratorical style, perhaps bravery in war and feud [emphasis added].” Above all, he strives to assemble a faction by amassing goods (usually pigs, shell money and vegetable foods) and redistributing them in “public giveaways” which attest to his wealth and generosity. The core of his faction is his household, enlarged by plural marriages and by taking in the socially disconnected, by “finessing” via reciprocity relations with kinsmen, and by placing men under obligations to him near and far. His faction is not a group capable of corporate action: he is center-man to each of his clients individually. It dissolves upon his death, and often collapses sooner, because the big man is competing for power with other big men who are doing the same things. Eventually he fails to reconcile his simultaneous needs to reward his clients and to exploit them.[236] All this is played out in autonomous village communities of several hundred people.

What is the big man’s real role in the emergence of advanced hierarchy? He doesn’t play one! The chief, the man in the empty chair, is the incipient ruler. The big man’s quest for power is structurally self-defeating, which is not the path to the state: “Developing internal constraints the Melanesian big-man political order brakes evolutionary advance at a certain level. It sets ceilings on the intensification of political authority, on the intensification of household production by political means, and on the diversion of household outputs in support of wider political organization.” Other men work for the chief; the big man works for other men (Sahlins calls this “autoexploitation”), which is not the path to class stratification. The system is unstable because it depends upon the big-man’s personalistic success.[237] Big-men do not form a group because they compete with each other. And any “warrior” aspect to the role is incidental and not intrinsically more important than the gardening role or the magical role. It has even been suggested that big men are just fallout from collapsed chiefdoms.[238] In that case, big men could not have been a stage in the emergence of hierarchy because they result from devolution, not development, from evolving hierarchy. There is no known example of a big-man system growing into a chiefdom, and “the prospect of a chiefdom to grow into a state seems much better than that of a ‘Big-Man’ system to grow into a chiefdom.”[239] It is like saying that the “Big Man on Campus” is the origin of the Deanship.

The fun is just beginning: “The bas reliefs of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later the writings of Plato and Aristotle, leave no doubt [for Bookchin there is always ‘no doubt’] that the precondition for the emergence of tribal ‘big men’ involved not only material sufficiency but cultural inferiority.”[240] This does not even describe the condition of big men, much less their precondition. There is no “cultural inferiority” in a homogeneous tribal culture; for the third time, the Director Emeritus slips the effect in ahead of the cause. This style of reasoning is Hermetic — it is, in Bookchinspeak, mystical: “a consequence is assumed and interpreted as its own cause” (Umberto Eco).[241] And those bas reliefs must be an eyeful. Too bad he doesn’t say where they are. Herodotus might have written something remotely relevant to big men (although he didn’t), but hardly Aristotle, and certainly not Plato. Contempt for “barbarians” does not comport well with ethnological curiosity.

The Director Emeritus, however, is not quite finished:

The most challenging form of social status, however, is probably the power that “big men” gained and concentrated, initially in their own persons, later in increasingly institutionalized “companies” [why the quotation marks?]. Here, we encounter a very subtle and complex dialectic. “Big men” were notable, as we have seen, for their generosity, not only for their prowess. Their ceremonial redistribution of gifts to people — a system for the redistribution of wealth that acquired highly neurotic [sic] traits in the Potlatch ceremonies of the Northwest Indians, where bitter contests between “big men” led to an orgiastic “disaccumulation” of everything they owned in order to “accumulate” prestige within the community — may have had very benign origins.

Watch out for those benign origins! Whenever the Director Emeritus says “dialectic,” he’s about to tell a whopper. So here’s the sequence: “Everywhere along the way, in effect [sic], conflicting alternatives confronted each community as potential hierarchies began to appear: first, as gerontocracies, later, as individual ‘big men’ and warrior groups.”[242] How does he know the big men didn’t come first? Or, as just suggested, last?

The Northwest Coast potlaches involved chiefs, not big men — this was the very distinction explicated in Sahlins’ article, between big men (Melanesia) and chiefs (Polynesia, Northwest Coast). And Bookchin has said so! Elsewhere Sahlins explains that if the external feastings of Northwest Coast chiefs and Melanesian big men are similar as prestige quests, nonetheless “the chief has an entirely different relation to the internal economy.” The chief as lineage head uses lineage resources; the big man has to establish a personal claim by autoexploitation.[243] Furthermore, for a big man, his military prowess, if any, is secondary to his generosity, not, as Bookchin would have it, the other way around. Now we are told that the potential hierarchies emerged sequentially: gerontocracy, big man, warrior group. We know where Bookchin thinks gerontocracy came from (and we know better). Where do big men and warrior groups come from? If big men are warriors, they cannot very well emerge from gerontocracies of the enfeebled. Warrior groups presumably come from big men. Where do big men come from?

“From out of the skin of the most able hunter emerged a new kind of creature: the ‘big man,’ who was also a ‘great warrior.’” It follows that warrior groups emerge from, well, warrior groups. By definition, there has always been an ablest hunter in every hunting band such as flourished for 99% of human existence — why after two million years did he finally start to get out of line? The Director Emeritus proceeds to replace one imaginary oath, the “blood oath,” with another one, “oaths of fealty” sworn by “soldierly ‘companions’” (why the quotation marks?) recruited from outside the clan. (I suspect that Bookchin swears a lot.) Whereupon “‘lesser men’ [why the quotation marks?] appeared [out of whose skin this time?] who were obliged to craft his weapons, provide for his sustenance, build and adorn his dwellings, and finally, erect his fortifications and monumentalize his achievements with impressive palaces and burial sites.”[244] The Director Emeritus gave us an explanation, albeit a preposterous one, for the gerontocrat emerging out of the wrinkled skin of the old man. He gives no explanation how or why the big man emerges out of the skin of the hunter. If he were “the most able hunter,” he must have been doing all right already, why rock the boat? What’s his motivation? Personalistic self-advancement at the expense of the community? Bookchin has told us that people don’t think that way in organic societies.[245] If he can’t tell us why they changed their minds, he can’t tell us how hierarchy emerged.

Why does it have to be the most able hunter? The least able hunter would be the one most motivated to try something he might be better at, like ordering people around. Why a hunter? Why not a gardener? The assumption is gratuitous unless they’re all hunters. But if they’re all hunters, Bookchin is positing the emergence of ranked society — chiefdom — directly out of band society, which is impossible if only because chiefdoms are “an order of magnitude larger than simpler polities.”[246] Almost (if not quite) all anthropologists and archaeologists believe that chiefdoms emerge only from tribes. The Director Emeritus might be affiliating with the minority view, but it’s more likely he’s oblivious to the issue, or he might have mentioned it.

The big man’s retinue is “drawn from clans other than his own, indeed, from solitary strangers.”[247] How can Bookchin possibly know this? DNA testing? And why not draw men from the big man’s own clan, since they’d be the most likely to sign on with him? Two pages later he tells us that they do![248] Are there no editors at South End Press? In real life, a big man’s original power base is his household and relations. Once again, the Director Emeritus assumes the consequent. Who but a big man could recruit a military retinue in the first place? As depicted, the big man’s domination commences with sheer brute force. But “difficulties arise from the fact that force is a crude and expensive technique for the implementation of decisions. More importantly, force itself has to depend on interpersonal relationships that are based on something other than force.” Bookchin himself admits that even the state can’t rule by brute force alone.[249] Still less can a chief, who does not, in fact, possess any coercive power.[250]

Why should anybody repudiate his sacred blood oath (Chapter 9) for such a dubious venture? And who are these “solitary strangers,” why are they solitary, and if they are solitary (rather than merely shy), how is it possible they’re still alive? Lord Bolingbroke ridiculed Locke for positing pre-political “solitary vagabonds” and “strolling savages.” The mockery, unfairly applied to Locke, fairly applies to Bookchin. Why didn’t the big man’s clan stop his putsch before it started? Two or three weak men can always kill one strong man, as Hobbes remarked: “For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by cofederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.”[251] These “companions” also allow for bounding over developmental stages, although Bookchin formerly told us that “a leap from tribalism to despotism is an obvious myth.” Without social loyalties or traditions, the companions “can easily be set against the community or reared above it into a coercive monarchy and aristocracy.”[252] That is, these deracinated mercenaries skip over chieftainship and create the state out of communities of several hundred people. No known states are so small. Even in chiefdoms the population is at least one thousand, and usually tens of thousands.[253]

The best way to mock Murray Bookchin is to take him seriously. In a still stateless society of indeterminate socioeconomic form, “lesser men” are crafting the big man’s weapons. While they’re at it, why don’t they craft some for themselves? Suddenly — for this is an abrupt break with previous life-ways — yesterday’s hunters are today’s engineers, architects, masons, carpenters, overseers, etc. The great leap forward is even greater than it seemed at first. The archaeological record has so far identified monumental building only in states.[254] “Hierarchy,” according to the Director Emeritus, “did not suddenly explode into prehistory. It expanded its place gradually, cautiously, and often unnoticeably, by an almost metabolic [sic] form of growth when ‘big men’ began to dominate ‘small men’ [why the quotation marks?], when warriors and their ‘companions’ begin gradually to dominate their followers” — their followers or their subjects? — “when chiefs began to dominate the community, and finally, when nobles began to dominate peasants and serfs.”[255]

The difference between stone age and iron age economics is that band and tribal peoples produce no surplus, although they could.[256] I cannot imagine how an egalitarian hunter (or gardener, for that matter) could “gradually” out of a face-to-face kinship society recruit an armed force small enough for him to support but large enough for a takeover. If these misfits and strangers can be spared from subsistence activities, the primitive affluence thesis must be true. If not, after their recruitment but before the coup, what does the big man do, tell his men to keep their day jobs? Private plotting could never escape notice in primitive societies where social life is almost entirely public.

Finally, in the last act, the Prince of Denmark appears in the play. “Still another refinement of hierarchy was the transition from the big man,” this time defined semi-accurately, “into a quasi-monarchical figure who evokes fear” with his goon squad and pretensions to supernatural power.[257] Thus the chief emerges out of the skin of the big man, but, as with the big man’s emergence out of the skin of the hunter, cause and motive are not mentioned. The big man is not explained, nor does he explain anything. All we have is a row of increasingly hierarchal statuses — an array of “alternatives” for the anarchist society shopping, for reasons unstated, for hierarchy. It’s hard to imagine that this was a matter of choice, although we do have the Biblical story of the Israelites importuning Samuel to make them a king, “but the thing displeased Samuel,” understandably (I Sam. 8: 6). Add the king and the series is complete, but we will never understand why, as His Majesty Alley Oop comes as the culmination of three unexplained transmutations.

Despite the subtitle of The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin has failed to explain the emergence of hierarchy, and he never even tries to explain any prospects of its dissolution. When David Watson confesses his inability to explain the emergence of hierarchy, the Director Emeritus is scathing: “I hate to think how desiccated social theory would become if all its thinkers exhibited the same paucity of curiosity and speculative verve that this off-handed remark reveals.” A prudent agnosticism compares favorably with delusional certitude. Rather would I say, with Malatesta, that “the fact of not knowing how to solve a problem does not oblige one to accept unconvincing solutions.”[258]

It’s remarkable for an incipient, quasi or partial Marxist to proffer a theory of hierarchy — or anything else, for that matter — which completely ignores economics, technology and demography. Bookchin does find it “difficult to not believe that class rule, private property and the State could have emerged, fully accoutered and omnipresent, largely because surpluses made their existence possible.”[259] Although that’s more plausible than saying that class rule, private property and the state emerged because old men felt insecure. What’s even more difficult is to believe that it’s possible to analyze the emergence of chiefdoms and states while ignoring such variables as population size, population density, sedentarism, agriculture, environmental and social circumscription, long distance trade, ecological variation, esoteric wealth, fission, redistribution, external ideologies, food storage, potential for intensification, craft specialization, primogeniture, and irrigation.[260] These are among the concepts, some self-explanatory, some not, which figure in serious contemporary research and argument about the origins of hierarchy.

An anarchist theory of the origins of hierarchy, no matter how many prior stages it conjectures, has to assign unique importance to the onset of coercive hierarchy, and recognize the fundamental discontinuity — the unbridgeable chasm — between stateless and state societies. The primitive affluence thesis is true. For farmers, social complexity leads to the loss of personal independence and a lower standard of living: “The essential question is, why do so many people accept from a few a social contract that is clearly disadvantageous? The only conceivable answer is that it is not a matter of choice, but the process that leads to stratification is coercive, mechanistic, and highly predictive.”[261] That answer cannot be found by spinning prehistoric fairy tales which make the creation myths of primitives look plausible by comparison.

To sum up: Murray Bookchin has no theory of the emergence of hierarchy.

Claims of primitive gerontocracy are found in travelogues and older accounts, especially narratives by missionaries or colonial officials, or in early ethnographies based on the memories of nostalgic old men. The Victorians were highly susceptible to interpreting aboriginal phenomena in terms of their own ideologies, such as nationalism (“Take me to your leader!”) and Christianity. The first instinct of colonizers is to “find the chief” — or invent him.[262] In some cases, something like gerontocracy was not observed, it was constructed. British colonial rulers perpetuated Nyakusa chiefs in office much longer than they would have served in precolonial days, and they expanded the power of the Igbo elders in Nigeria.[263] Stories of the Old Testament patriarchs were vividly familiar to Victorians of the respectable classes. Thus Jehovah, after devoting four chapters of the Book of Exodus to dictating rules to the Israelites, continued: “Come up unto the LORD, thou, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel; and worship ye afar off.” There are many other references.[264] Bookchin’s faith reflects “the strong gerontocratic prejudice we have inherited from the Judaic tradition.”[265]

Bookchin does not seem to have noticed that his notion of a short primitive lifespan, discussed below, contradicts his notion of gerontocracy. If, for example, the average lifespan of foragers (the San, let’s say) is 30 years, as he says at one point, they don’t have enough elders for gerontocracy. Adult foragers could not consult their parents about almost every detail of everyday life because nearly all their parents would be dead. To make matters worse, San bands or camps are rather small, 10–30 people, with shifting compositions, including temporary residents. In 1964, the average population of the eight permanent water holes in the Dobe area was 58. In the older age grades, women outnumber men, as they do in all societies,[266] 7 females for 1 male, and it is always male elders who monopolize essential esoteric knowledge if anyone does. The percentage of elderly males (60+) ranged, at three points of time, from 7.8% to 9.1%, with the ratio of children to elders 3:2. On the ex-Director’s assumptions, the average water hole would not have even one resident male elder.

Obviously his assumptions are false. Average age of death is always irrelevant, and San elders do not monopolize sacred knowledge. Using real figures — which were available to Bookchin — and using a conservative estimate of 8% male elders, there would only be at most one elder in every other camp. But actual camps vary widely in size, so actually the odds were over two to one against there being a male elder in even the camp with the most people (35). Some camps, of course did include elders.[267] But the point is that Bookchin’s vision of male elders indoctrinating boys with gerontocratic values is demographically impossible.

At the tribal level, the residential unit will be larger, in the low hundreds,[268] but mortality might be higher and the children may be required to commence subsistence activity sooner. I can just barely imagine a village of 200 horticulturists with 16 elders indoctrinating 24 or more children, but only apart from the household in something like a school, and that I can’t imagine at all. Apparently, neither can Bookchin, since he nowhere hints that the old wise men operated schools.

Prehistoric man, according to Bookchin, never lived past age 50. Actually, the remains of a Neanderthal man in his fifties show that his people not only provided his food but specially prepared it for him, much as Janet Biehl must do for the ex-Director. That opinion was based on earlier measures of skeletal aging which were systematically biased.[269] At the Shanidar site in Iraq were found two Neanderthal infants, three young adults, and four older adults, a fossil sample “clearly dominated, in numbers and degree of preservation, by elderly males.” The author cites three other sites containing elderly males.[270] A summary of the data from all the many Neanderthal remains found up to 1961 reveals that 35.8% of them were from 31 to 60 years of age at death.[271] Besides, it is not obvious — if this even matters — that Neanderthals were the ancestors of those now denominated “anatomically modern humans,” namely, ourselves. The experts have debated that question for decades and they still do. For present purposes, it’s irrelevant.

In SALA, and now again in its sequel, Bookchin indicts the San (standing in for hunter-gatherers) for their brief life-spans. Unlike in SALA, Bookchin this time provides a source for his claim that the average San lifespan is 30 years — it is Headland’s old review of Wilmsen.[272] Headland has done no research on the San and provided no reference to anyone who has. In SALA, Bookchin left the impression that “Wilmsen and his associates” came up with this figure,[273] but Wilmsen does not even refer to San lifespan, much less purport to estimate it based on his own research. It begins to look as if Bookchin has never read Wilmsen.

Arriving at ages for the San is actually a research problem. The San don’t know how old they are (the usual situation among primitives), and in their own language they can only count to three.[274] The most thorough investigation of San demography was done by Nancy Howell, a member of the Lee/DeVore team, among the Dobe San. Her estimate of life expectancy at birth was 30–35 years.[275] Another study, which I cited in Anarchy after Leftism, produced an estimate of 32 years.[276] For the ≠Kade San, Tanaka’s estimate was 40 years.[277] But a San who survives to the age of 15 can expect to live to be 55.[278] Laura Marshall counted 15% of a !Kung population who were over 50.[279] By comparison, the life expectancy for ancient Romans was 20 to 30 years;[280] thus the highest estimate for the civilized Romans is the lowest estimate for the savage San. Just a century ago, American life expectancy was only 40 years. And as the ex-Director remarks, in the mid-19^th century, “to be in one’s mid-sixties was to be quite elderly.”[281]

Are these statistics appalling? No doubt they are to a sick, scared old man like Bookchin who knows his time is short. Had he died at 40, none of his books would ever have been written. It is embarrassingly obvious that his recent tirades are the outbursts of someone in a desperate hurry to perpetuate an ideological legacy he rightly perceives to be in eclipse. He fears the loss of the only kind of immortality he believes in. But his private terror at the prospect of death and disregard is a personalistic demon. There is more to the quality of life than the quantity of life. How much more is strictly a value judgment. Bookchin’s philhellenism fails him here; he should heed Epicurus: “As [the wise man] does not choose the food that is most in quantity but that which is most pleasant, so he does not seek the enjoyment of the longest life but of the happiest.”[282]

According to one of the Grimm’s fairy tales, “God originally set the life span for all creatures at 30 years; finding so long a life wearisome, the ass, the dog, and the monkey had theirs reduced by 18, 12, and 10 years respectively. Only man wished a longer life, and added to his previous span what the others had relinquished. He paid dearly for longevity; at 48 his condition became that of the ass, carrying countless burdens; at 60 like the dog’s, growling toothlessly and dragging himself from corner to corner; and at 70 like the monkey’s, a derisory, witless creature.”[283] I leave to the reader the amusement of tracking this sequence onto Bookchin’s career. Achilles chose a short life as a hero over a long life as a nobody. Pirates preferred a short and merry life to a longer life of drudgery. Some people, as Zapata put it, would rather die on their feet than live on their knees. And some people can pack a lot of life into a short span. If foragers generally live lives of liberty, conviviality, abundance and ease, it is by no means obvious that their shorter, high-quality lives are inferior to our longer, low-quality lives.

Murray Bookchin tells us that it is modern medical technology which is keeping him alive.[284] This is not the best argument for modern medical technology. Most of the maladies which afflict our elders — including hypertension, for which Bookchin receives treatment — are nonexistent among the San.[285] These absent conditions include obesity, coronary and hypertensive heart disease, high cholesterol, and suicide (and homicide is very rare). Viral diseases are unknown among hunter-gatherers.[286] Tuberculosis, unknown in prehistory, “is associated with keeping livestock and living in sedentary or urban centers.”[287] Among tribal and band peoples, for example, one would never find a “portly” fellow, short of breath, “a man of sixty or so, bald on top, flatfooted on bottom, wide-assed narrow-minded and slope-shouldered, he resembled in shape a child’s toy known as Mr. Potato-Head.”[288] That is, one would never find — as here described by Edward Abbey — Murray Bookchin. Judging from SALA and “Whither Anarchism?” the Director Emeritus is not enjoying his golden years. Nobody else is enjoying his golden years either.

Lest anyone else panic over the statistics, let’s consider what they really mean. In Anarchy after Leftism I already pointed out that life expectancy at birth is no measure of how long those who survive infancy, or who reach any particular age, can expect to live.[289] That’s why there are jobs for actuaries. Bookchin first fell for this fallacy in SALA, and I corrected him in AAL; he repeated it in the on-line version of “Whither Anarchism?” and I corrected him again in the shorter pamphlet version of the present essay.[290] Its recommitment to text for a third appearance cannot be a mistake. It is a conscious lie, a recrudescence of Bookchin’s irrepressible Stalinism.

In all human populations, including ours, infant mortality is high relative to the mortality of all other age groups except the very old. In this respect, as Nancy Howell concluded, “the !Kung have an age pattern of mortality more or less like everyone else.”[291] Richard B. Lee observed that “the Dobe population pyramid looks like that of a developed country, for example, like that of the United States around 1900.”[292] The high rate of infant mortality depresses the average lifespan, but real people live, not the average lifespan, but their own lifespans. According to the ex-Director, back in the Old Stone Age, “few lived beyond their fiftieth year.” (more recently he says that no “human beings survived beyond the age of fifty”).[293] As Nancy Howell discovered, that was not true of the San. Over 17% were over 50; 29% were over 40; 43% were over 30. One San man was approximately 82.[294] In 1988, another anthropologist interviewed at least one San who was in his 90s.[295] According to Tanaka, too, many San live far beyond the age of 40.[296] According to Shostack, a San who lives to be 15 can expect to live to 55, and 10% of the population was aged over 60.[297]

To these figures we may compare those compiled from the tombstones of ancient Romans (n = 4,575) and non-Roman Italians (n = 3,269). Only 10% of the Romans were over 50, compared to 17% of the San; for the Italians it was 18.4%. 16% of the Romans and 22.5% of the Italians were over 40, compared with 29% of the San. 26.7% of the Romans and 18.4% of the Italians were over 30, compared with 43% of the San. For both ancient populations, the life expectancy of persons aged 5–44 was much less than 20 years in every age cohort.[298] The life expectancy for a San at age 15, according to Konner and Shostack, is 40 years. The Roman and Italian statistics, by the way, based on the evidence from tombstones, greatly underestimate mortality, because very few babies under one year old were buried with tombstones. According to United Nations Model Life Tables, which average the life expectancy rates of underdeveloped nations, the first year of life has the highest mortality rate (33.2%) except for the 60–64 cohort (35%).[299] Another historian, whose own tombstone survey produced an estimated lifespan of 30, observed that the population structure of the later Roman Empire resembled that of India in about 1900.[300]

Mortality rates for Bookchin’s revered classical Athens are like the Roman rather than the San figures. A study of 2,022 classical Greek sepulchral inscriptions, where again infants and small children are underrepresented, as children of the very poor may also be, yielded an average life expectancy of 29.43 years — a little lower than the lowest figure, Bookchin’s false figure, for San life expectancy. 42.63% of the sample died before they were 21, and an astonishingly high 64.73% before they were 30. Only 16.43% were over 50 — again lower than the San figure.[301] Death was ever-present: “In the Greek world death was prevalent among persons of all age groups, whether as a result of warfare, accident, or illness or, in the case of women, as a consequence of giving birth.”[302] In fourth-century Athens, only 2% of people over 18 were over 40,[303] reflecting a much higher mortality rate than among the San. The high respect the Greeks accorded their elderly reflects the fact that there were not enough of them to be burdensome.

In his celebrated Funeral Oration, Pericles consoled the parents of sons fallen in the war by assuring them that their troubles are almost over: “As for those of you who are now too old to have children, I would ask you to count as gain the greater part of your life, and remember that what remains is not long.”[304] Parents with adult children, in other words, will soon be dead. It occurs to me that many aspects of Greek life — such as war and philosophy — might be illuminated by the fact and the awareness of early death. Ancient philosophers who disagreed about everything else agreed that “fear of death is the supreme enemy of life.”[305] These “appalling” mortality rates have never troubled the Director Emeritus, perhaps because he admires almost everything about classical civilization but despises everything about the San, from their size to their shamanism, but above all, for their anarchism.