Hierarchies, Classes, and States

Up to now, I have tried to show that humanity and the human capacity to think are products of natural evolution, not “aliens” in the natural world. Indeed, every intuition tells us that human beings and their consciousness are results of an evolutionary tendency toward increasing differentiation, complexity, and subjectivity. Like most sound intuitions, this one has its basis in fact: the paleontological evidence for this tendency. The simplest unicellular fossils of the distant past and the most complex mammalian remains of recent times all testify to the reality of a remarkable biological drama. This drama is the story of a nature rendered more and more aware of itself, a nature that slowly acquires new powers of subjectivity, and one that gives rise to a remarkable primate life-form, called human beings, that have the power to choose, alter, and reconstruct their environment — and raise the moral issue of what ought to be, not merely live unquestioningly with what is.

Nature, as I have argued, is not a frozen scene that we observe from a picture window or a mountain top. Defined more broadly and richly than a slogan on a bumper-sticker, nature is the very history of its evolutionary differentiation. If we think of nature as a development, we discern the presence of this tendency toward self-consciousness and, ultimately, toward freedom. Discussions about whether the presence of this tendency is evidence of a predetermined “goal,” a “guiding hand,” or a “God” are simply irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. The fact is that such a tendency can be shown to exist in the fossil record, in the elaboration of existing life-forms from previous ones, and in the existence of humanity itself.

Moreover, to ask what humanity’s “place” in nature may be is to implicitly acknowledge that the human species has evolved as a life-form that is organized to make a place for itself in the natural world, not simply to adapt to nature. The human species and its enormous powers to alter the environment were not invented by a group of ideologues called “humanists” who decided that nature was “made” to serve humanity and its needs. Humanity’s powers have emerged out of eons of evolutionary development and out of centuries of cultural development. The question of this species’ “place” in nature is no longer a zoological problem, a problem of locating humanity in the overall evolution of life, as it was in Darwin’s time. The problem of the “descent of man,” to use the title of Darwin’s great work, is as accepted by thinking people today as are the enormous powers our species possesses.

To ask what humanity’s “place” in nature may be has now become a moral and social question — and one that no other animal can ask of itself, as much as many antihumanists would like to dissolve humanity into a mere species in a “biospheric democracy.” And for humans to ask what their “place” in nature may be is to ask whether humanity’s powers will be brought to the service of future evolutionary development or whether they will be used to destroy the biosphere. The extent to which humanity’s powers will be brought to or against the service for future evolutionary development has very much to do with the kind of society or “second nature” human beings will establish: whether society will be a domineering, hierarchical, and exploitative one, or whether it will be a free, egalitarian, and ecologically oriented one. To sidestep the social basis of our ecological problems, to obscure it with primitivistic cobwebs spun by self-indulgent mystics and anti-rationalists, is to literally turn back the clock of ecological thinking to an atavistic level of trite sentiment that can by used for utterly reactionary purposes.

But if society is so basic to an understanding of our ecological problems, it, too, cannot be viewed as a frozen scenic view that we observe from the rarefied heights of an academic tower, the balcony of a governmental building, or the windows of a room for a corporate board of directors. Society, too, has emerged out of nature, as I have tried to show in my account of human socialization and the everyday reproduction of that socializing process up to the present day. To regard society as “alien” to nature reinforces the dualism between the social and the natural so prevalent in modern thinking. Indeed, such an antihumanistic view serves to clear the field for exactly all the anti-ecological forces that pit society against nature and reduce the natural world to mere natural resources.

By the same token, to dissolve society into nature by rooting social problems in genetic, instinctive, irrational, and mystical factors is to clear the field for exactly all those primitivistic racist, misanthropic, and sexist tendencies, be they among women or among men.

Far from being a frozen scene, one that makes it easy for reactionary elements to identify the existing society with society as such, — just as the oppressed and their oppressors are grouped into a single species called homo sapiens and are held equally responsible for our present ecological crisis — society is the history of social development with its many different social forms and possibilities. Culturally, we are all the repositories of social history, just as our bodies are the repositories of natural history. We carry with us, often unconsciously, a vast body of beliefs, habits, attitudes, and sentiments that foster highly regressive views toward nature as well as toward each other.

We have fixed images, often inexplicable to ourselves, of a static “human nature,” as well as a nonhuman nature, that subtly shape a multitude of our attitudes toward members of the two sexes, the young, the elderly, family bonds, kinship loyalties, and political authority, not to mention different ethnic, vocational, and social groups. Archaic images of hierarchy still shape our views of the most elementary differences between people and between all living beings. Our mental arrangement of the most simple differences among phenomena into hierarchical orders, say, of “one-to-ten “ have been formed by socially ancestral distinctions that go back to a time that is too remote for us to remember.

These hierarchical distinctions have been developed over the course of history, often from harmless differences in mere status, into full-blown hierarchies of harsh command and abject obedience. To know our present and to shape our future calls for a meaningful and coherent understanding of the past — a past which always shapes us in varying degrees, and which profoundly influences our views of humanity and nature.

The Notion of Domination

To gain a clear understanding of how the past bears upon the present, I must briefly examine a basic view in social ecology, one that has now percolated into current environmental thinking. I refer to social ecology’s insight that all our notions of dominating nature stem from the very real domination of human by human. This statement, with its use of the word “stem,” must be examined in terms of its intent Not only is it a historical statement of the human condition, but it is also a challenge to our contemporary condition which has far-reaching implications for social change. As a historical statement it declares, in no uncertain terms, that the domination of human by human preceded the notion of dominating nature. Indeed, human domination of human gave rise to the very idea of dominating nature.

In emphasizing that human domination precedes the notion of dominating nature, I have carefully avoided the use of a slippery verb that is very much in use today: namely, that the domination of nature “involves” the domination of human by human. I find the use of this verb particularly repellent because it confuses the order in which domination emerged in the world and, hence, the extent to which it must be eliminated if we are to achieve a free society. Men did not think of dominating nature until they had already begun to dominate the young, women, and, eventually, each other. And it is not until we eliminate domination in all its forms, as we shall see, that we will really create a rational, ecological society.

However much the writings of liberals and Marx convey the belief that attempts to dominate nature “led” to the domination of human by human, no such “project” ever existed in the annals of what we call “history.” At no time in the history of humanity did the oppressed of any period joyfully accede to their oppression in a starry-eyed belief that their misery would ultimately confer a state of blissful freedom from the “domination of nature” to their descendants in some future era.

To take issue, as social ecology does, with words like “involve” or “led” is not a form of medieval casuistry. On the contrary, the way these words are used raises issues of radical differences in the interpretation of history and the problems that lie before us.

Domination of human by human did not arise because people created a socially oppressive “mechanism” — be it Marx’s class structures or Lewis Mumford’s human-constructed “mega-machine” in order to “free” themselves from the “domination by nature.” It is exactly this very queasy idea that gave rise to the myth that the domination of nature “requires,” “presupposes,” or “involves” the domination of human by human.

Implied in this basically reactionary myth is the notion that forms of domination, like classes and the State, have their sources in economic conditions and needs; indeed, that freedom can only be attained after the “domination of nature” has been achieved, with the resulting establishment of a classless society. Hierarchy somehow seems to disappear here in a shuffle of vague ideas or it is subsumed under the goal of abolishing classes, as though a classless society were necessarily one that is free of hierarchy. If we are to accept Engel’s view, and to some degree Marx’s, in fact, hierarchy in some form is “unavoidable” in an industrial society and even under communism. There is a surprising agreement between liberals, conservatives, and many socialists, as I have already noted, that hierarchy is unavoidable for the very existence of social life, and is an infrastructure for its organization and stability.

In contending that the notion of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human, social ecology radically reverses the equation of human oppression and broadens its scope enormously. It tries to search into institutionalized systems of coercion, command, and obedience that preceded the emergence of economic classes, and that are not necessarily economically motivated at all. The “social question” of inequality and oppression that has plagued us for centuries is thereby extended by social ecology well beyond economic forms of exploitation into cultural forms of domination that exist in the family, between generations and sexes, among ethnic groups, in institutions of political, economic, and social management, and very significantly, in the way we experience reality as a whole, including nature and nonhuman life-forms.

In short, social ecology raises the issue of command and obedience in personal, social, historical, and reconstructive terms on a scale that encompasses, but goes far beyond, the more restricted economic interpretations of the “social question” that are prevalent today. Social ecology extends, as we shall see, the “social question” beyond the limited realm of justice into the unbounded realm of freedom; beyond a domineering rationality, science, and technology into libertarian ones; and beyond visions of social reform into those of radical social reconstruction.

Early Human Communities

We, of this era, are still victims of our own recent history. Modern capitalism, the most unique, as well as the most pernicious, social order to emerge in the course of human history, identifies human progress with bitter competition and rivalry; social status with the rapacious and limitless accumulation of wealth; the most personal values with greed and selfishness; the production of commodities, of goods explicitly made for sale and profit, as the motive force of nearly every economic and artistic endeavor; and profit and enrichment as the reason for the existence of social life.

No society known to history has made these factors so central to its existence or, worse, identified them with “human nature” as such. Every vice that, in earlier times, was seen as the apotheosis of evil has been turned into a “virtue” by capitalist society.

So deeply ingrained are these bourgeois attributes of our everyday lives and ways of thinking that we find it difficult to understand how much precapitalist societies held to the very opposite images of human values, however much they may have been honored in the breach. It is hard for the modern mind to appreciate that precapitalist societies identified social excellence with cooperation rather than competition disaccumulation rather than accumulation; public service rather that private interest; the giving of gifts rather than the sale of commodities, and care and mutual aid rather than profit and rivalry.

These values were identified with an uncorrupted human nature. Ii many respects, they are still a part of a caring socialization process it our own lives that tends to foster interdependence, not an aggressive self-serving “independence” we call “rugged individualism.” To understand from whence we came socially and how we came to be where we are, it is necessary to peel away our present system of values and examine, however summarily, a body of ideas that provide a clearer picture of a more organic, indeed, an ecological society that emerged from the natural world.

This organic, basically preliterate or “tribal,” society was strikingly nondomineering — not only in its institutionalized structure but in its very language. If the linguistic analyzes of anthropologists like the late Dorothy Lee are sound, Indian communities like the Wintu of the Pacific Coast lacked transitive verbs like “to have,” “to take,” and “to own” which denote power over individuals and objects. Rather, a mother “went” with her child into the shade, a chief “stood” with his people, and, more commonly, people “lived with” objects rather than “possessed” them.

However much these communities may have differed from each other in many social respects, we hear in their language, and detect in their behavioral traits, attitudes that go back to a shared body of beliefs, values, and basic lifeways. As Paul Radin, one of Americas most gifted anthropologists, observed, there was a basic sense of respect between individuals and a concern over their material needs that Radin called the principle of the “irreducible minimum.” Everyone was entitled to the means of life, irrespective of his or her productive contribution. The right to live went unquestioned so that concepts like “equality” had no meaning if only because the “inequalities” that afflict us all — from the burdens of age to the incapacities of ill-health — had to be compensated for by the community.

Early notions of formal “equality,” in which we are all “equally” free to starve or die of neglect, had yet to replace the substantive equality in which those less able to be fully productive were nevertheless reasonably well provided for. Equality thus existed, as Dorothy Lee tells us, “in the very nature of things, as a byproduct of the democratic structure of the culture itself, not as a principle to be supplied”[6] There was no need in these organic societies to “achieve” equality, for what existed was an absolute respect for man, for all individuals apart from any personal traits.

This broad appraisal by Lee was to be echoed by Radin, who for decades had lived among the Winnebago Indians and enjoyed their full confidence:

If I were asked to state briefly and succinctly what are the outstanding features of aboriginal civilization, I, for one, would have no hesitation in answering that there are three: the respect for the individual, irrespective of age or sex; the amazing degree of social and political integration achieved by them; and the existence of a personal security which transcends all governmental forms and all tribal and group interests and conflicts. [7]

The respect for the individual, which Radin lists first as an aboriginal attribute, deserves to be emphasized, today, in an era that rejects the collective as destructive of individuality on the one hand, and, yet, in an orgy of pure egotism, has actually destroyed all the ego boundaries of free-floating, isolated, and atomized individuals on the other hand. A strong collectivity may be even more supportive of the individual, as close studies of certain aboriginal societies reveal, than a “free market” society with emphasis on an egoistic, but impoverished, self.

No less striking than the substantive equality achieved by many organic societies was the extent to which their sense of communal harmony was also projected onto the natural world as a whole. In the absence of any hierarchical social structures, the aboriginal vision of nature was also strikingly nonhierarchical. Accounts of many aboriginal ceremonies among hunting and horticultural communities leave us with the strong impression that the participant saw themselves as part of a larger world of life. Dances seemed to resemble simulations of nature, particularly animals, rather than human attempts to coerce nature, be it game or forces like rainfall.

Magic, which the last century called the “primitive man’s science,” apparently had a twofold aspect to it. One of these aspects seems to have been recognizably “coercive” in the sense that a given ritual was expected to necessarily produce a given effect. This kind of magic, presumably, had its own form of hard “causality,” not unlike what we would expect to find in chemistry.

However, as I have suggested elsewhere, there were rituals — especially group rituals — that may have preceded in time the more familiar, cause-effect magical activities; rituals that were not coercive, but rather persuasive. Wildlife was seen in a complementary relationship of “give-and-take” in which game gave of itself to the hunter as a participant in the broad orbit of life — an orbit based on propitiation, respect, and mutual need. Humanity was no less a part than animals in this complementary orbit in which human and nonhuman were seen to give of themselves to each other according to mutual need rather than “tradeoffs.” [8]

This high sense of complementarity in rituals apparently reflected an active sense of social equality that viewed personal differences as parts of a larger natural whole rather than a pyramid-structured hierarchy of being. The attempt of organic society to place human beings in the same community on a par with each other, to see in each an interactive partner with others, yielded a highly egalitarian notion of difference as such.

Which is not to say that aboriginal people regarded themselves as “equal” to nonhuman creatures. In fact, they were acutely aware of the inequalities that existed in nature and society, inequalities created by differences in physical prowess, age, intelligence, genetic attributes, infirmities, and the like. Tribal peoples tried to compensate for these inequalities within their own groups, hence the emergence of an “irreducible minimum,” as Radin called it, that gave every member of the community access to the means of life, irrespective of his or her abilities or contribution to the common fund. Often, special “privileges were allowed to individuals who were burdened by infirmities to equalize their situations with respect to more endowed members of the community.

But in no sense did aboriginal people equate themselves with animals. They did not act or think “biocentrically,” “eco-centrically” (to use words that have recently come into vogue), or, for that matter, “anthropocentrically” in dealing with nonhuman life-forms. It would be more accurate to say that they had no sense of “centricity” as such, except toward their own communities. The belief held by a tribe that it was “The People,” as distinguished from outsiders or other communities, was a parochial weakness of tribal societies as a whole and generally made for fear of strangers, wars, and a self-enclosed mentality that the emergence of cities began to overcome. Indeed, until territorial ways of living that appear with cities began to replace loyalties based on blood ties, the notion of a common humanity was vague indeed, and tribalism remained very restrictive in its view of outsiders and strangers.

In this inner world of substantive equality, land and those “resources” our present society denotes as “property ” were available to everyone in the community for use, at least to the extent that they were needed. But in principle, such “resources” could not be “possessed” in any personal sense, much less “owned” as property. Thus, in addition to the principles of the “irreducible minimum,” substantive equality, the arts of persuasion, and a conception of differentiation as complementarity, organic preliterate societies seem to have been guided by a commitment to usufruct. Things were available to individuals and families of a community because they were needed, not because they were owned or created by the labor of a possessor.

The substantive equality of organic preliterate communities was not only the product of institutional structures and ancestral custom. It entered into the very sensibility of the individual: the way he or she perceived differences, other human beings, nonhuman life, material objects, land and forests, indeed, the natural world as a whole. Nature and society, which are so sharply divided against each other in our society and or sensibilities, were thereby slowly graded into each other as a shared continuum of interaction and everyday experience.

Needless to say, neither humanity “mastered” nature nor did nature “master” humanity. Quite to the contrary: nature was seen as a fecund source of life, well-being, indeed, a providential parent of humanity, not a “stingy” or “withholding” taskmaster that had to be coerced into yielding the means of life and its hidden “secrets” to a Faustian man. An image of nature as “stingy” would have produced “stingy” communities and self-seeking human participants.

This nature was anything but the relatively lifeless phenomenon it has become in our era — the object of laboratory research and the “matter” of technical manipulation. It consisted of wildlife that, in the aboriginal mind, was structured along kinship lines like human clans; forests, that were seen as a caring haven; and cosmic forces, like winds, torrential rainfall, a blazing sun, and a benign moon. Nature literally permeated the community not only as a providential environment, but as the blood flow of the kinship tie that united human to human and generation to generation.

The loyalty of kin to each other in the form of the blood oath — an oath that combined an expression of duty to one’s relatives with vengeance for their offenders — became the organic source of communal continuity. Fictitious as this source would eventually become, especially in more recent times when the word “kin” has become a tenuous surrogate for authentic kinship ties, there is little reason to doubt its viability as a means for establishing one’s place in early human communities. It was one’s affiliations by blood, be it because of a shared ancestry or shared offspring, that determined whether an individual was an accepted part of a group, who he or she could marry, the responsibility he or she had to others, as well as the responsibility he or she had to him or her — indeed, the whole array of rights and duties that a community’s members had in relation to each other.

It was on the basis of this biological fact of blood ties that nature penetrated the most basic institutions of preliterate society. The continuity of the blood tie was literally a means of defining social association and even self-identity. Whether one belonged to a given group or not, and who one was, in relation to others, was determined, at least juridically, by one’s blood affiliations.

But still another biological fact defined one as a member of a community: whether one was a male or female. Unlike the kinship tie, which was to be slowly thinned out as distinctly nonbiological institutions like the State were gradually to encroach on the claims of genealogy and paternity, the sexual structuring of society has remained with us to this day, however much it has been modified by social development.

Lastly, a third biological fact defined one as a member of a group, namely, one’s age. As we shall see, the earliest truly social examples of status based on biological differences were essentially the age-groups to which one belonged and the ceremonies that legitimated one’s age-status. Kinship established the basic fact that one shared a common ancestry with members of a given community. It defined one’s rights and responsibilities to others of the same bloodline—rights and responsibilities that might involve who one could marry of a particular genealogical group, who was to be aided and supported in the normal demands of life, and who one could turn to for aid in difficulties of any kind. The bloodline literally gave definition to an individual and a group, much as skin forms the boundary that distinguishes one person from another.

Sexual differences, also biological in origin, defined the kind of work one did in the community and the role of a parent in rearing the young. Women essentially gathered and prepared food; men hunted animals and assumed a protective role for the community as a whole. These basically different tasks also gave rise to sororal and fraternal cultures in which women developed associations, whether informal or structured, and engaged in ceremonies and revered deities that were dissimilar from those of men, who had a culture very much of their own.

But none of these gender differences—not to mention genealogical ones — initially conferred a commanding position on one member of a sexual group or an obedient one on another. Women exercised full control over the domestic world: the home, family hearth, and the preparation of the most immediate means of life such as skins and food. Often, a woman built her own shelter and tended to her own garden as society advanced toward a horticultural economy.

Men, in turn, dealt with what we might call “civil” affairs — the administration of the nascent, barely developed “political” affairs of the Community such as relations between bands, clans, tribes, and intercommunal hostilities. Later, as we shall see, these “civil” affairs became highly elaborate as population movements brought communities into conflict with each other. Warrior fraternities began to emerge within early societies that ultimately specialized in hunting men as well as animals.

What is reasonably clear is that in early phases of social development, woman’s and man’s cultures complemented each other and conjointly fostered social stability as well as provided the means of life for the community as a whole. The two cultures were not in conflict with each other. Indeed, it is doubtful that an early human community could have survived if gender-oriented cultures initially tried to exercise any commanding position, much less an antagonistic one, over the other. The stability of the community required a respectful balance between potentially hostile elements if the community was to survive in a fairly precarious environment.

Today, it is largely because “civil” or, if you like, “political” affairs are so important in our own society that we read back into the preliterate world a “commanding” role among men in their monopoly of “civil” affairs. We easily forget that early human communities were really domestic societies, structured mainly around the work of women, and were often strongly oriented in reality, as well as mythology, toward woman’s world.

Age groups, however, have more ambiguous social implications. Physically, the old people of a community were the most infirm, dependent, and often the most vulnerable members of the group in periods of difficulty. It was they who were expected to give up their lives in times of want that threatened the existence of a community. Hence, they were its most insecure members — psychologically as well as physically.

At the same time, the old people of a community were the living repositories of its lore, traditions, knowledge, and collective experience. In a world that had no written language, they were the custodians of its identity and history. In the tension between extreme personal vulnerability on the one hand and the embodiment of the community’s traditions on the other hand, they may have been more disposed to enhance their status, to surround it with a quasi-religious aura and a social power, as it were, that rendered them more secure with the loss of their physical power.

The Emergence of Hierarchies and Classes

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 institutionalized systems of command and obedience. This system of rule by the elders, benign as it may have been initially, has been designated as a “gerontocracy” and it often included old women as well as old men. 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.

The rise of growing male power in society did not necessarily remove old women from high-status positions in this earliest of all hierarchies. Biblical figures like Sara had a distinctly authoritative and commanding voice in public as well as domestic affairs, even in the patriarchal and polygamous family of Hebrew bedouins. In reality, Sara is not an atypical figure in explicitly patriarchal families; indeed, in many traditional societies, once a woman aged beyond the child-bearing years of her life, she often acquired the status of what has been called a “matriarch” who enjoyed enormous influence within the community at large, at times even exceeding that of older males.

But even an early gerontocracy has a somewhat egalitarian dimension. If one lives long enough, one may eventually become an “elder” in an honorific sense, or, for that matter, a domineering “patriarch” and even a “matriarch.” Hierarchy in this early form seems to be less structurally rigid because of a kind of biological “upward mobility.” Its existence is still consistent with the egalitarian spirit of early communal societies.

The situation changes, however, when the biological facts that initially underpin early communal life become increasingly social — that is to say, when society comes increasingly into its own and transforms the form and content of relationships within and between social groups. It is important to emphasize that the biological facts that enter into the blood relationship, gender differences, and age-groups do not simply disappear once society begins to acquire its own self-generative forces of development. Nature is deeply interwoven with many of these social changes. But the natural dimension of society is modified, complicated, and altered by the socialization of the biological facts that exist in social life at all times.

Consider one of the major shifts in early societies that was to profoundly influence social evolution: the growing authority of men over women. By no means is it clear that the hierarchical supremacy of males was the first or necessarily the most inflexible system of hierarchy to corrode the egalitarian structures of early human society. Gerontocracy probably preceded “patricentricity,” the orientation of society toward male values, or (in its most exaggerated form) “patriarchal” hierarchies. Indeed, what often passes for Biblical types of patriarchy are patricentric modifications of gerontocracy in which all younger members of the family — male as well as female — are under the complete rule of the oldest male and often his oldest female consort, the so-called matriarch.

That males are born into a special status in relationship to females becomes an obvious social fact. But it also rests on biological facts that are reworked for distinct social ends. Males are physically larger, more muscular, and normally possessed of great hemoglobin, within the same ethnic group, than females. I am obliged to add that they produce significantly greater quantities of testosterone than females — an androgen that not only stimulates the synthesis of protein and produces a greater musculature, but also fosters behavioral traits that we associate with a high degree of physical dynamism. To deny these evolutionary adaptations, which provide males with greater athleticism in the hunting of game and, later, of people, by invoking individual exceptions to these male traits is to simply overlook important biological facts.

None of these factors and traits need yield the subordination of females to males. Nor is it likely that they did so. Certainly, male domination served no function when woman’s role was so central to the stability of the early human community. Attempts to institutionalize the subordination of women, given their own rich cultural domain and their decisive role in maintaining the community, would have been utterly destructive to intragroup harmony. Indeed, the very idea of domination, not to mention hierarchy, had yet to emerge in early human communities that were socialized into the values of the irreducible minimum, complementarity, substantive equality, and usufruct. These values were not simply a moral credo; they were part of an all-encompassing sensibility that embraced the nonhuman as well as the human world.

Yet we know that men began to dominate women and began to give primacy to their “civil” over woman’s “domestic” culture. That this occurred in a very shadowy and uncertain fashion is a problem that has not received the careful attention it deserves. The two cultures—male and female — retained a considerable distance from each other well into history, even as the male seemed to move to the social forefront in nearly every field of endeavor. There is a sense in which male “civil” affairs simply upstaged female “domestic” affairs without fully supplanting them. We have many ceremonies in tribal societies in which women seem to bestow powers on men that the men do not really have, such as ceremonial re-enactments of the ability to give birth.

But as “civil” society became more problematic because of invaders, intercommunal strife, and finally, systematic warfare, the male world became more assertive and agonistic — traits that are likely to make male anthropologists give the “civil” sphere greater prominence in their literature, especially if they have no meaningful contact with the women of a preliterate community. That women often mocked male bellicosity and lived full lives of their own in very close personal relationships, seems to wane to the footnote level in most accounts by male anthropologists. The “men’s hut” stood actively opposed to the woman’s home, where the everyday domain of child-rearing, food preparation, and an intensely familial social life remained almost unnoticed by male anthropologists, although it was psychologically pivotal to the sullen men of a community. Indeed, sororal life retained an amazing vitality and exuberance long after the emergence of urban societies. Women’s talk, however, was deprecated as “gossip” and their work was called “menial” even in Euro-American societies.

Ironically, the degradation of women, itself always variable and often inconsistent, appears when males form hierarchies among themselves, as Janet Biehl has so ably shown in her splendid work on hierarchy. [9] With increasing intercommunal conflicts, systematic warfare, and institutionalized violence, “civil” problems became chronic. They demanded greater resources, the mobilization of men, and they placed demands on woman’s domain for material resources.

Out of the skin of the most able hunter emerged a new kind of creature: the “big man,” who was also a “great warrior.” Slowly, every domain of preliterate society was reoriented toward maintaining his heightened “civil” functions. The blood oath, based on kinship loyalties, was gradually replaced by oaths of fealty by his soldierly “companions” who were drawn from clans other than his own, indeed, from solitary strangers, thereby cutting across traditional bloodlines and their sanctity. “Lesser men” appeared 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.

Even woman’s world, with its secretive underpinnings, was reshaped, to a lesser or greater degree, in order to support him with young soldiers or able serfs, clothing to adorn him, concubines to indulge his pleasures, and, with the growth of female aristocracies, heroes and heirs to bear his name into the future. All the servile plaudits to his great stature, that are commonly seen as signs of feminine weakness, emerged, throwing into sharp contrast and prominence a cultural ensemble based on masculine strength.

Servility to male chiefs, warriors, and kings was not simply a condition imposed by warriors on women. Side by side with the servile woman is the unchanging image of the servile man, whose back provides a footrest for arrogant monarchs and demeaning capitalists. The humiliation of man by man began early on in the “men’s hut,” when cowering boys lived on a diet of mockery for their inexperience at the hands of adult males; and “small men” lived on a diet of disdain for their limited accomplishments by comparison with those of “big men.”

Hierarchy, which first rears its head tentatively with gerontocracies, did not suddenly explode into prehistory. It expanded its place slowly, cautiously, and often unnoticeably, by an almost metabolic form of growth when “big men” began to dominate “small men,” when warriors and their “companions” began to gradually dominate their followers, when chiefs began to dominate the community, and finally, when nobles began to dominate peasants and serfs.

By the same token, the “civil” sphere of the male began to slowly encroach upon the “domestic” sphere of the female. By degrees, it placed the female world increasingly in the service of the male, without destroying it. The sororal world, far from disappearing, took on a hidden form, indeed, a confidential form, that women shared with each other behind the backs of men, as they confronted new “civil” relationships created by males.

Hence, in gender relationships as well as in intramale relationships, there was no sudden leap from the sexual egalitarianism of early preliterate societies to male “priority.” Indeed, it would be quite impossible, as Biehl has pointed out, to divorce the domination of woman by man from the domination of man by man. The two always interacted dialectically to reinforce each other with attitudes of command and obedience that gradually permeated society as a whole, even producing hierarchies of a more unstable nature among women. At the bottom of every social ladder always stood the resident outsider — male or female — and the assortment of war captives who, with economic changes, became a very sizable population of slaves.

The transition from a largely “domestic” to a largely “civil” society was also conditioned by many less noticeable, but very important, factors. Long before domination became rigorously institutionalized, gerontocracy had already created a state of mind that was structured around the power of elders to command and the obligation of the young to obey. This state of mind went far beyond the indispensable care and attention required for the instruction of children and youths in the arts of survival. In many preliterate communities, elders acquired major decision-making powers that dealt with marriage, group ceremonies, decisions about war, and intracommunal squabbles between persons and clans. This state of mind, or, if you like, conditioning, was a troubling presence that presaged even greater troubles as hierarchy generally extended itself over society.

But hierarchy even in early societies was still further reinforced by shamans and, later, by shamanistic guilds that gained prestige and privileges by virtue of their very uncertain monopoly over magical practices. Be they “primitive man’s science” or not, the arts of the shaman were naive at best and fraudulent at worst — and more often the latter than the former, present-day culls, covens, and pop-literature on the subject to the contrary notwithstanding. Repeated failures by shamans in their use of magical techniques could be fatal, not only to a troubled community or a sick person. Their failure could be dangerous to the shaman as well, who might just as well be speared as exiled in disgrace.

Hence, as Paul Radin notes in his excellent discussion of West African shamans, shamanisdc guilds always sought influential allies who could buffer them from popular anger and incredulity. Such allies were often elders who felt insecure as a result of their own failing powers or rising chiefs who were in need of ideological legitimation from the spirit world. [10]

Still another refinement of hierarchy was the transition from the “big man’s” status — whose prestige depended as much on his distribution of gifts as it did upon his prowess as a hunter — to the status of a hereditary chief. Here, we witness the remarkable transmutation of a “big man,” who must actively earn public admiration with impressive actions of all kinds, into a wise chiefly adviser, who commands respect without any prerogative of power, and finally, into a quasi-monarchical figure who evokes fear, be it because of his considerable entourage of armed “companions,” his status as a demi-god with supernatural powers of his own, or both.

This graded development of a “big man” into an outright autocrat was leavened by basic alterations in the kinship bond and its importance. The kinship bond is surprisingly egalitarian when it is not twisted out of shape. It evokes a simple sense of loyalty, responsibility, mutual respect, and mutual aid. It rests on the moral strength of a shared sense of ancestry, on the belief that we are all “brothers” and “sisters,” however fictitious these ancestral ties may become in reality — not on the basis of material interest, power, fear, or coercion.

The “big man,” chief, and finally, the autocrat undermines this essentially egalitarian bond. He may do so by asserting the supremacy of his own kin group over other ones, in which case an entire clan may acquire a royal or dynastic status in relations to other clans in the community. Or he may bypass his own kinspeople entirely and adopt “companions,” be they warriors, retainers, and the like, who are drawn into his fold exclusively on the basis of their own prowess and fealty without any regard to blood affiliations.

This is a highly corrosive process. A new kind of “person” is created again: a person who is neither a member of the “big man’s” kin group or. for that matter, a member of the community. Like the mercenaries of the Renaissance or even classical antiquity, he is a “companion,” with other companions like himself, who collects into a military “company” that has no social loyalties or traditions.

Such “companies” can easily be set against the community or reared above it into a coercive monarchy and aristocracy. Gilgamesh in the famous Sumerian epic adopted Enkidu, a total stranger, as his “companion,” thereby challenging the integrity of the entire kinship system as a form of social cement and undermining its complex network of commitments that were so essential to the egalitarian values of preliterate society.

What I would like to emphasize is how much hierarchical differentiation simply reworked existing relationships in early society into a system of status long before the strictly economic relationship we call “classes” emerged Age status merged with changes in gender status; “domestic” society was placed in the service of “civil” society; shamanistic guilds networked with gerontocracies and warrior groups; and warrior groups reworked kinship ties, ultimately reducing tribal blood communities to territorial communities based on residence rather than blood ties and composed of peasants, serfs, and slaves.

Our present era is the heir to this vast reworking of differentiation of humanity — not only along class lines but, much earlier in time, into hierarchies in which class systems were incubated. These hierarchies still form the fertile ground in our own time for the existence of hidden oppressions by age groups, of women by men, and of men by men — indeed, a vast landscape of domination that also gives rise in great part to largely exploitative economic systems based on classes.

Only later was this immense system of social domination extended into the notion of dominating nature by “humanity.” No ecological society, however communal or benign in its ideals, can ever remove the “goal” of dominating the natural world until it has radically eliminated the domination of human by human, or, in essence, the entire hierarchical structure within society in which the very notion of domination rests. Such an ecological society must reach into the overlaid muck of hierarchy—a muck that oozes out from fissures in family relationships that exist between generations and genders, churches and schools, friendships and lovers, exploiters and exploited, and hierarchical sensibilities toward the entire world of life.

To recover and go beyond the nonhierarchical world that once formed human society and its values of the irreducible minimum, complementarity, and usufruct, is an agenda that belongs to the closing portions of this book. It suffices, here, to bear in mind that social ecology has made the understanding of hierarchy — its rise, scope, and impact — the centerpiece of its message of a liberating, rational, and ecological society. Any agenda that contains less than these imperatives is obscure at best and grossly misleading at worst.

At the risk of repetition, let me emphasize that the word hierarchy should be viewed strictly as a social term. To extend this term to cover all forms of coercion is to permanently root consciously organized and institutionalized systems of command and obedience in nature and give it an aura of eternality that is comparable only to the genetic programming of a “social” insect. We have more to learn from the fate of our own royal figures in human history that from the behavior of “queen bees” in beehives.

Figures like Louis XVI of France and Nicholas II of Russia, for example, did not become autocrats because they had genetically programmed strong personalities and physiques, much less keen minds. They were inept, awkward, psychologically weak, and conspicuously stupid men (even according to royalist accounts of their reigns) who lived in times of revolutionary social upheaval. Yet their power was virtually absolute until it was curtailed by revolution.

What gave them the enormous power they enjoyed? Their power can only be explained by the rise of humanly contrived and supportive institutions like bureaucracies, armies, police, legal codes and judiciaries that consciously favored absolutism, and a far-flung, and largely servile. Church that itself was structured along highly hierarchical lines— in short, a vast, deeply entrenched institutional apparatus that had been in the making for centuries and was overthrown in revolutionary upheavals in a matter of weeks. Apart from genetically programmed insects, we have absolutely no equivalent of such hierarchies in the nonhuman world. Remove the word “hierarchy” from its social context in human life and we create the utmost confusion in trying to understand its origins in our midst and the means for removing it — a social capacity, I may add, that we alone, as human beings, possess.

By the same token, the word “domination” should be viewed strictly as a social term if we are not to lose sight of its various institutionalized forms — forms that are unique to human beings. Animals certainly do coerce each other, usually as individuals, occasionally even as small “gangs” that presumably demand access to seeming “privileges,” (a word which can also be stretched beyond all recognition if we examine “privilege” comparatively, as it exists from one species to another.)

But not only is this “domineering” behavior associated with one or a few individual animals; it is highly tentative, often episodic, informal, and among apes in particular, highly diffuse. The “privileges” our closest animal relatives claim are very different from one species to another, even one group to another. Lasting institutions like armies, police, and even criminal groups, do not exist in the animal world. Where they seem to exist, as among “soldiers” in insects like ants, they are examples of genetically programmed behavior, not socially contrived institutions open to radical change by rebellion.

It is tempting to ask why such coercive social institutions, indeed, status systems and hierarchies, arose among human beings in the first place, not only how they arose. In other words, what were the causes that gave rise to institutionalized dominance and submission apart from descriptions of their emergence and development?

Status, as I have already pointed out, appeared between age-groups, albeit in an initially benign form. Hence, a psycho-social setting of deference to the elderly was already present in early society even before older generations began to claim very real privileges from younger ones. 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.

Their gerontocracies present no real mystery as a source of status-consciousness. That age-hierarchies would appear is often merely a matter of time: the socialization process with its need for careful instruction, growing knowledge, and an increasing reservoir of experience virtually guarantees that elders would earn a justifiable degree of respect and, in precarious situations, seek a certain amount of power.

The most challenging form of social status, however, is probably the power that “big men” I gained and concentrated, initially in their own persons, later in their increasingly institutionalized “companies” 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 distribution of gifts to people — a system for the redistribution of wealth that acquired highly neurotic 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. To be generous and giving was a social etiquette that promoted the unity, and contributed to the very survival, of the early human community.

Given time and the likely susceptibility of men to seek communal approval, a susceptibility that was rooted in their sense of “manliness” and the community’s respect for their physical prowess, it is likely that “bigness” meant little more than generosity and a high regard for skill and courage. These would have been attributes that any preliterate community would have prized in a male, just as women had many different skills that were deeply valued. This kind of “bigness,” as potlatch ceremonies suggest, could have easily become reified as an end in itself. Or, as in certain communities like the Hopi, by contrast, it could be seen as socially disruptive because of its strident individuality, and thus, it was sharply curtailed. Accordingly, when Euro-American “educators” of the Hopi tried to teach Hopi children to play competitive sports, they had immense difficulties in getting the children to keep scores. Hopi custom discouraged rivalry and selfassertiveness as harmful to community solidarity.

Everywhere along the way, in effect, conflicting alternatives confronted each community as potential hierarchies began to appear, first, as gerontocracies, later, as individual “big men” and warrior groups. Such potential hierarchies could have been developed very much on their own momentum, initially with very little divisive effects on the community, or they could have been sharply curtailed even after they began to appear. There is evidence to show that such opposing tendencies appeared in many different preliterate communities, either advancing into full-blown hierarchies or being arrested at various levels of development, when they were not simply pushed back to a more egalitarian condition.

In fact, custom, socialization, and basic precepts like the irreducible minimum, complementarity, and usufruct, might very well have tended to favor the curtailment of hierarchy rather than its cultivation. This is evident in the large number of human communities that existed well into Euro-American history with little or no hierarchical institutions. Only a surprisingly small part of humanity developed societies that were structured overwhelmingly around hierarchies, classes, and the State. Perhaps a majority avoided in varying degrees this dark path of social development or, at least, entered onto it to a limited extent.

But one fact should be clearly noted: a community that does develop along hierarchical, class, and statist lines has a profound impact upon all the communities around it that continue to follow an egalitarian direction. A warrior community led by an aggressive chiefdom compels highly pacific neighboring communities to create their own military formations and chiefs if they are to survive. An entire region may thus be drastically changed —culturally, morally, and institutionally — merely as a result of aggressive hierarchies in a single community.

We can trace this clearly by studying one community’s grave sites in the Andes which was initially free of weapons and distinctive status-oriented ornaments, only to find that these sites began to exhibit warrior and prestige artifacts at a later level of development. Actually, this change could be attributed to the emergence of a neighboring community that had embarked upon an aggressive, warrior-oriented social development earlier in time, thereby profoundly affecting the internal life of more peaceful communities which surrounded it. So it may have been in many parts of the world, each one in isolation from the others.

No less striking is the evidence we find of changes in American Indian societies from highly centralized, war-like, and quasi-statist “empires” to decentralized, fairly pacific, and relatively nonhierarchical communities. In their centralistic and militaristic phases, these “empires” apparently became so top-heavy, exploitative, and exhausting to the communities they controlled that they either collapsed under their own weight or were simply overthrown by local rebellions. The Indian mound-builders of the American midwest or the Mayans of Mexico may very well have embarked on a vigorous militaristic expansion, only to disappear when they could no longer sustain themselves or retain the obedience of subject populations. This historic see-saw of communal institutions between centralization and decentralization, warrior and peaceful communities, expansive and contractive societies, all appeared in the West as well until the rise of the nation-state in Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In so far as women were reduced to the spectators of the intracommunity changes that gave rise to hierarchy, they were not significant participants in its development. Victimized as they were, they shared with the lower strata of male hierarchies an oppression and degradation that all ruling elites inflicted on their underlings. Men not only degraded, oppressed, and often used women as objects; they also oppressed and killed other men in an orgy of slaughtering and cruelty. The early kingdoms of the Near East were reluctant to keep male prisoners of war because they were regarded as potentially too rebellious, so they were normally put to death rather than enslaved. When male slaves began to appear in large numbers, they were often exploited ruthlessly and were treated, especially in mines and large-scale agriculture, with appalling ruthlessness, Male physical strength became a liability, not an asset, when it was used for exploitative purposes.

The causes of hierarchy, then, are not a mystery. They are quite comprehensible when we dig into their roots in the more mundane aspects of daily life such as the family, the rearing of young people, the segmentation of society in to age-groups, the expectations that are placed on the individual as a male or female in the everyday domestic or “civil” worlds, and in the most personal aspects of acculturation as well as community ceremonies. And hierarchy will not disappear until we change these roots of daily life radically, not only economically, with the removal of class society.

Not only did hierarchies precede classes, but, as Biehl has shown, male domination over other males generally preceded the domination of women. Women became the degraded bystanders of a male-oriented civilization that reared itself up beside woman’s own culture, corroded it, and established systematic ways of manipulating it When men tried to absorb woman’s culture, they warped it and subordinated it — but they succeeded in only a limited degree. Sororal relationships, affections, and lifeways continued behind the backs of men and often outside the range of their vision in the secret alcoves of history, as it were.

Men, in turn, were often the objects of ridicule to women, even in cultures that were overbearingly patriarchal. Nor did women always aspire to participate in a “civil” society that was even more brutal to men than to domestic animals. Let us not forget that it was not oxen that dragged huge blocks of stone up the ramparts of the great pyramids of ancient Egypt, but usually male serfs and slaves, who were regarded as more expendable than cattle.

The Emergence of the State

The institutionalized apex of male civilization was the State. Here, again, we find a tricky dialectic which, if we ignore its subtleties, can lead us into very simplistic discussions of state formation in which state institutions suddenly erupt into history, fully grown and overtly coercive. Indeed, such eruptions of states, from seemingly “democratic” to highly “authoritarian” institutions, are more of a modern than a premodern phenomenon, notably the sudden substitution of republican by totalitarian states. Except in periods of invasions, when alien aristocracies were rapidly imposed on relatively egalitarian communities, rapid changes in state institutions were a comparative rarity. Unless we consider how the State began to emerge, how far it developed, and how stable it was, we encounter many difficulties even in defining the State, much less in exploring the forms it took in different societies.

Minimally, the State is a professional system of social coercion — not merely a system of social administration as it is still naively regarded by the public and by many political theorists. The word “professional” should be emphasized as much as the word “coercion.” Coercion exists in nature, in personal relationships, in stateless, non-hierarchical communities. If coercion alone were used to define a State, we would despairingly have to reduce it to a natural phenomenon — which it surely is not It is only when coercion is institutionalized into a professional, systematic, and organized form of social control — that is, when people are plucked out of their everyday lives in a community and expected not only to “administer” it but to do so with the backing of a monopoly of violence — that we can properly speak of a State.

There may be varying approximations of a State, notably incipient, quasi, or partial states. Indeed, to ignore these gradations of coercion, professionalization, and institutionalization toward fully developed states is to overlook the fact that statehood, as we know it today, is the product of a long and complex development. Quasi, semi, and even fully developed States have often been very unstable and have often hemorrhaged power over years that resulted in what essentially became stateless societies. Hence, we have the swings, historically, from highly centralized empires to feudal manorial societies and even fairly democratic “city-states,” often with swings back again to empires and nation-states, be they autocratic or republican in form. The simplistic notions that states merely come into existence like a new-born baby, omit the all-important gestation process of state development and have resulted in a great deal of political confusion to this very day. We still live with confused notions of statecraft, politics, and society, each of which is deeply in need of careful distinction from the other.

Each State is not necessarily an institutionalized system of violence in the interests of a specific ruling class, as Marxism would have us believe. There are many examples of States that were the “ruling class” and whose own interests existed quite apart from—even in antagonism to _ privileged, presumably “ruling” classes in a given society. The ancient world bears witness to distinctly capitalistic classes, often highly privileged and exploitative, that were bilked by the State, circumscribed by it and ultimately devoured by it — which is in part why a capitalist society never emerged out of the ancient world. Nor did the Stale “represent” other class interests, such as landed nobles, merchants, craftsmen, and the like. The Ptolemaic State in Hellenistic Egypt was an interest in its own right and “represented” no other interest than its own. The same is true of the Aztec and the Inca States until they were replaced by Spanish invaders. Under the Emperor Domitian, the Roman State became the principal “interest” in the empire, superseding the interests of even the landed aristocracy which held such primacy in Mediterranean society.

I shall have a good deal to say about the State when I distinguish statecraft from politics and the authentically political from the social. For the present, we must glance at state-like formations that eventually produced different kinds of States.

A chieftainship, surrounded by a “company” of supportive warriors such as the Aztec State, is still an incipient type of state formation. The seemingly absolute monarch was selected from a royal clan by a council of clan elders, was carefully tested for his qualifications, and could be removed if he proved to be inadequate to meet his responsibilities. Like the highly militaristic Spartan State, chieftains or kings were still circumscribed by tribal traditions that had been reworked to produce the centralization of power.

Near-Eastern States, like the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, were virtually extended households of individual monarchs. They formed a remarkable amalgam of a “domestic” society with a territorial one: an “empire” was seen primarily as the land attached to the king’s palace, not a strictly territorial administrative unit. Pharaohs, kings, and emperors nominally held the land (often co-jointly with the priesthood) in the trust of the deities, who were either embodied in the monarch or were represented by him. The empires of Asian and North African kings were “households” and the population was seen as “servants of the palace ” not as citizens in any Western sense of the term.

These “states,” in effect, were not simply engines of exploitation or control in the interests of a privileged “class.” They were resplendent households with vast bureaucracies and aristocratic entourages were self-serving and self-perpetuating slates. Administration was as the task of maintaining a very costly household with monuments to its power that taxed and virtually undermined tire entire economy. In Egypt’s Old Kingdom, possibly as much effort went into building pyramids, temples, palaces, and manors as was devoted to the maintenance of the Nile valley’s all-important irrigation system. The Egyptian State was very real but it “represented” nothing other than itself. Conceived as a “household” and a sacred terrain in which the Pharaoh embodied a deity, the State was almost congruent with society itself. It was, in effect, a huge social State in which the differentiation of politics out of society was really minimal. The State did not exist above society or apart from it; the two were essentially one — an extended social household, not an assortment of independent coercive institutions.

The Greek polis of the classical era does not offer us any more a complete picture of the State than we encounter in the Near East. Athens may be regarded as the apogee of class politics as distinguished from the private world of the household based on family life, work, friendships, and material needs which we can properly call social, or the administration of armies, bureaucrats, judicial systems, police, and the like, which we can properly call statecraft. Placed within the context of this threefold distinction — social, political, and statist — the Athenian polis is very difficult to define. The State, more properly the quasi-state created by the Athenians in the Periklean Age, possessed highly tribalistic attributes that directly involved the participation of a sizable male citizenry in seemingly statist activities. These Athenians had invented politics — the direct administration of public affairs by a community as a whole.

Admittedly, this political community or “public domain,” as it has been called, existed within a wider domain of disenfranchized alien residents, women of all classes, and slaves. These large disenfranchized populations provided the material means for many Athenian male citizens to convene in popular assemblies, function as mass juries in trials, and collectively administer the affairs of the community. Politics here, had begun to differentiate itself from the social domain of the family and work.

But was this polis really a State? That the Athenians of the classical era used coercion against slaves, women, aliens, and rival poleis is clearly evident Within the eastern Mediterranean, Athenian influence became increasingly imperial as the city forced other poleis to join the Athenian-controlled Delian League and taxed them, using these funds to maintain the Athenian citizenry and aggrandize the polis. Women, of upper and well-to-do strata, were often confined to their homes and obliged to maintain a domestic establishment for their husbands’ public life.

It does not absolve the limitations of the Athenian democracy to say that women were degraded throughout much of the Mediterranean world, perhaps even more so in Athens than other regions. Nor does it absolve it to say that Athenians were generally less severe in their treatment of slaves than Romans. But, by the same token, we cannot ignore the fact that classical Athens was historically unique, indeed unprecedented, in much of human history, because of the democratic forms it created, the extent to which they worked, and its faith in the competence of its citizens to manage public affairs. These institutions were forms of a direct democracy, as we shall see, and reflected a public aversion to bureaucracy that made them structurally the most democratic in the career of human political life. The Athenian State, in effect, was not a fully developed phenomenon.

Indeed, I cannot stress too strongly that Athens, like so many “city-states,” would have normally developed toward an oligarchy if we explore the way in which so many autonomous cities eventually became increasingly authoritarian and internally stratified. This was the case with Rome, the late medieval Italian city-states, the German city federations, and New England townships of America. One can go on endlessly and cite decentralized, seemingly free and independent cities that eventually turned from fairly democratic communities into aristocracies.

What is remarkable about Athens is that the apparently “normal” trend toward oligarchy was consciously reversed by the radical changes introduced by Solon, Kleisthenes, and Perikles in the polis’s entire institutional structure. Aristocratic institutions were steadily weakened and consciously abolished or reduced to mere ceremonial bodies, while democratic ones were granted increasing power and eventually embraced the entire male citizenry, irrespective of properly ownership and wealth. The army was turned into a militia of foot-soldiers whose power began to exceed, by far, that of the aristocratic cavalry. Thus all the negative features of the Athenian democracy, so common to the Mediterranean and the era as a whole, must be seen in the context of a revolutionary reversal of the normal trend toward oligarchy in most city-states.

It is easy to deprecate this democracy because it rested on a large slave population and degraded the status of women. But to do this with lofty arrogance from a distance of more than two thousand years, with a hindsight that is enriched by endless social debate, is to lift oneself up by one’s bootstraps from the rich wealth of historical facts. Indeed, it is to ignore those rare moments of democratic creativity that appeared in the West and have nourished rich utopian and libertarian traditions.

Indeed, we do not encounter the State as a fully professional and distinctive apparatus rooted in class interest until we see the emergence of modern nations in Europe. The nation-state, as we know it today, finally divests politics of all its seemingly traditional features: direct democracy, citizen participation in the affairs of governmental life, and a sensitive responsiveness to the communal welfare. The word “democracy” itself undergoes degradation. It becomes “representative” rather than face-to-face; highly centralized rather than freely confederal between relatively independent communities, and divested of its grassroots institutions.

Educated, knowledgeable citizens become reduced to mere taxpayers who exchange money for “services,” and education surrenders its civic orientation to a curriculum designed to train the young for financially rewarding skills. We have yet to see how far this appalling trend will go in a world that is being taken over by mechanical robots, computers that can so easily be used for surveillance, and genetic engineers who have very limited moral scruples.

Hence, it is of enormous importance that we know how we arrived at a condition where our preening “control” of nature has actually rendered us more servile to domineering society than at any time in the past By the same token, it is immensely important to know precisely those human achievements in history, however faulty, that reveal how freedom can be institutionalized — and, hopefully, expanded beyond any horizon we can find in the past.

There is no way that we can return to the naive egalitarianism of the preliterate world or to the democratic polis of classical antiquity; should we want to do so. Atavism, primitivism, and attempts to ture a distant world with drums, rattles, contrived rituals, and — whose repetition and fantasies bring a supernatural presence into our midst — however much this may be denied or affirmed as innocent or “immanent” — deflect us from the need for rational discussion, a searching investigation of community, and a searing critique of the present social system. Ecology is based on the wondrous qualities, fecundity, and creativity of natural evolution, all of which warrant our deepest emotional, esthetic, and, yes, intellectual appreciation not on anthropomorphically projected deities, be they “immanent” or “transcendental.” Nothing is gained by going beyond a naturalistic, truly ecological, framework and indulging mystical fantasies that are regressive psychologically and atavistic historically.

Nor will ecological creativity be served by dropping on all fours and baying at the moon like coyotes or wolves. Human beings, no less a product of natural evolution than other mammals, have definitively entered the social world. By their very own biologically rooted mental power, they are literally constituted by evolution to intervene into the biosphere. Tainted as the biosphere may be by present social conditions, their presence in the world of life marks a crucial change in evolution’s direction from one that is largely adaptive to one that is, at least, potentially creative and moral. In great part, their human nature is formed socially — by prolonged dependence, social interdependence, increasing rationality, and the use of technical devices and their willful application. All of these human attributes are mutually biological and social, the latter forming one of natural evolution’s greatest achievements.

Hierarchies, classes, and states warp the creative powers of humanity. They decide whether humanity’s ecological creativity will be placed in the service of life or in the service of power and privilege. Whether humanity will be irrevocably separated from die world of life by hierarchical society, or brought together with life by an ecological society depends on our understanding of the origins, development, and, above all, the scope of hierarchy — the extent to which it penetrates our daily lives, divides us into age group against age group, gender against gender, man against man, and yields the absorption of the social and political into the all-pervasive State. The conflicts within a divided humanity, structured around domination, inevitably lead to conflicts with nature. The ecological crisis with its embattled division between humanity and nature stems, above all, from divisions between human and human.

Our times exploit these divisions in a very cunning way: they mystify them. Divisions are seen not as social but personal. Real conflicts between people are mollified, even concealed, by appeals to a social “harmony” that has no reality in society. Like the atavistic ritual with its barely concealed appeal to the spirit world and its theistic “spiritualism,” the encounter group has become a privatized arena for learning how to “conciliate” — this, while storms of conflict rage around us and threaten to annihilate us. That this use of “encounter” groups and theistic “spirituality” to mollify and despiritualize has come so much into vogue from its breeding ground in the American sunbelt is no accident It occurs when a veritable campaign, under the name of “post-modernism” is going on to discard the past, to dilute our knowledge of history, to mystify the origins of our problems, to foster dememorization and the loss of our most enlightened ideals.

Hence, never before has it been more necessary to recover the past, to deepen our knowledge of history, to demystify the origins of our problems, to regain our memory of forms of freedom and advances that were made in liberating humanity of its superstitions, irrationalities, and, above all, a loss of faith in humanity’s potentialities. If we are to reenter the continuum of natural evolution and play a creative role in it, we must reenter the continuum of social evolution and play a creative role there as well.

There will be no “re-enchantment” of nature or of the world until we achieve a “re-enchantment” of humanity and the potentialities of human reason.