This makes me think of the differences between living in small towns and big cities -- someone I met recently described her upbringing in a town where she knew LITERALLY everyone, and conceded that while to her it was heaven, to someone else it might sound like hell. The fact that she was universally beloved in her home town, "a very big fish in a very small pond," as she said, has everything to do with it. I've mostly lived in vast metropolitan areas where running into someone you know at the store is a rare coincidence, and you can manage separate social circles easily, and you can, if you play yourself out or have a falling out with a certain group of people, give yourself a "second chance" with an entirely different group of people and the two groups will never overlap.
Social media has changed this too -- in the sense that social media tends to keep people connected to their "high school friends" or "old job friends" or any other past group of connections, and in the sense that it documents and latches you to your foul-ups for much longer periods of time, making "second chances" much more difficult. Social media does make the whole world a bit more like a small town or tribe, and that can be heaven or hell depending on whether your see yourself as the big fish or the "trapped" fish -- the fish who wants to start over, but can't, because the past is dragging them down like a dead albatross into the murky depths of sameness.
It's interesting to think that that cold, dark sameness could go on for tens of thousands of years!!
I love this observation, totally agreed. It helps explain why so many historical ideas and inventions came out of cities, whereas the vast majority of people lived outside of them (I say this as someone who lives outside a major city)
Inventions and innovations require risks, including (especially?) social risks, and if there is one thing that distinguishes the person who thrives in the small town from the person who experiences small town life as a non-stop nightmare, it's the ability to fit in, go with the flow, not make waves, not stand out, not be the object of popular derision -- but a person who stands out, goes against the grain, disrupts the usual, and risks disapproval is the person more likely to come up with something new. Groups who do this, even more so.
Is this a contradiction, or is this an indirect demonstration that scientific performance is no longer a good indicator of inventive, innovative, or even useful new ideas?
An alternative to the gossip trap (While I do think the idea has some merits, I doubt it is the whole story): the end of humanity's great migrations.
The main distinguishing feature that separates pre and post civilization societies globaly is the cessation of large scale human migrations with the crossing of the bering straight in 10,000BCE. There still existed small scale migration into peloponeisia, for example, but no large new landmasses that could support steady population growth.
Before this point new lands were available for humanity to expand into, so we did not need to live in social arrangements denser than Dunbar's limit. If a group grew too large to handle with gossip it would split and migrate. If a foreign group were to move into your home, you could migrate as well, displacing yet further groups in a chain ending at the frontier. With the absence of a frontier, groups need to learn to live together.
This explanation neatly avoids requiring some innate human nature that keeps us in prehistory, and also explains why civilizations started basically everywhere in the globe within the same time period, from the fertile crescent, egypt, china and the yukatan peninsula. It also explains where these civilizations were founded: in the paths of large migration routes. Bottlenecks in continents, now the melting pot of different migrating groups with no frontier to release the pressure.
This explanation also indicates that twitter won't destroy civilization. While people prefer to live in social environments where they can have full knowledge of social interactions, civilization is not built upon suborning that instinct by creating a hierarchy where some people are untouchable. It's just built on people finding themselves in a situation where that doesn't work anymore, through no fault of their own. Creating that hierarchy was just the most convenient method during a time before modern scientific, philosophical, and technical knowledge allows for a more egalitarian political solution.
I think you're onto something. But I wouldn't place the crossing of the Bering Strait as the important milestone - colonization of land in the Americas could have no effect on population pressures in the Middle East.
The biggest novel conditions within the last 12000 years ago are the presence of Homo sapiens outside of Africa, and the lack of an Ice Age. Of course, that begs the question, why did hierarchy not develop among H. sapiens in Africa during the last interglacial? Why did Neanderthals and Denisovans with brains just as large as our own not develop hierarchy within Eurasia?
Which leads me to think that either there was something special about Homo sapiens and limiting about Africa, or else something very special about the specific population that sourced the OOA event (and also contributed significantly to modern African populations). The timing roughly corresponds to the start of the Upper Paleolithic, so I think it's reasonable to assume that Homo sapiens underwent a major change around that time.
Not original, but I'd bet that this corresponds with the development of full language. Nothing else unifies all of modern humanity, and could explain on its own why complex societies were possible in the benign climate of ~12k years ago and not ~120k years ago.
That was what I was thinking as I read it. Plus things were pretty brutal tens of thousands of years ago in terms of predatory fauna. I’m not sure we are gossiping about hunting expertises when we were literally cowering in caves sucking on bones of carrion
I am dismayed that your first instinct matched mine, given your obvious and total ignorance of anthropological and archeolgical evidence. Things were not “pretty brutal” during the paleolithic, by all evidence ancient peoples were just that: people. Paleolithic societies had high infant mortality compared to us living with modern medicine, but not noticeably higher than even reneissance societies. And ever since ancient homonids learned to weild sticks and throw rocks we have been apex predators and not regularly hunted. At no point was humanity ever “cowering in caves sucking on the bones of carrion”. The fuck?
I guess my multi-day visit to Musée National de la Préhistoire - which goes through in great detail the archeological evidence of my contention including the numerous tools used by paleolithic humans to literally scrap out bones of the carrion they found while contending with 14 foot tall deer (homeo sapiens was much shorter than today) as one example of fauna that weren’t scared of “rock throwing” - counts as total ignorance in your world perspective.
I apologize for my insults, they were unwarranted and harmful. I could have just laid out the facts instead, you seem quite eager to learn about prehistory, which is great!
Early humans were not prey, they were apex predators. All large land animals that did not learn a deep instinctual fear of humanity went extinct around the time that early humans migrated into their areas.
Early human diets were mostly based on gathered plants, supplemented by hunted (not scavanged) meat. Early humans did not scavenge for meat, their digestive tract was not able to process the toxins found in carrion. Yes they scraped bones for the marrow and to fashion tools, a practice humans continue in the present day. We just use machines now.
Early humans did occasionally live in caves, but most lived in temporary wooden, wattle-and-daub, or animal skin shelters and tents that could move with foraging patterns. Their shelter was not as expansive as modern houses, but comfortable, warm, and safe nonetheless.
Early humans gossiped ferociously, and almost all social structures were informal ones based on raw popularity. The breaks in this pattern were accepted outsiders such as wandering entertainers, holy people, and the occasional exile.
These are the facts based on primary sources: peer reviewed archeological and anthropological studies using modern methods. Do what you will with them.
Great read! I ultimately disagree with your final thoughts, but only because they cast the "Gossip Trap" as a singular cause. More elaboration is needed to justify the theory, at least in my opinion.
Hope I'm not too far off here, but best I can gauge it: If the gossip trap holds true, then human progress should be measured by sufficient, concentrated population size. People start innovating once a population grows beyond the 150 or so mark, without the ability to split off into separate groups. That should allow for broad-scale societal change which isn't wholly reliant on small town social kudos. So through the gossip trap, you've shifted the question a bit. Now it isn't "Why didn't we make any progress for 50,000 years?", but rather "Why didn't human populations reach sufficient concentration for 50,000 years?" Is there a good answer to that? I'm honestly not well-read enough to put forward my own theory.
The "Sapient Paradox" has genuinely bugged me for years now, mostly because no one ever seems to address it. 200,000 years is such a massive amount of time from a human perspective, it's frustrating that scientists don't feel the need to justify the monumental lack of progress that comes with such a number. I don't think you've quite hit the nail on the head, not yet, but with one essay you've added more to the conversation than I've heard from anyone else I've run across. So thanks for the read!
I grew up as a Spokane Indian on the Spokane Indian Reservation—a salmon tribe—and gossip and social shaming in major and minor ways is very prevalent. My tribe is renowed in our region for being "mean." We tease and tease and tease. In many Native tribes now, including my own, the humor and teasing can be very risqué, very blue. I've lived away from the reservation for thirty years but recently spent time with some tribal members and family and immediately fell back into domestic social custom and speech patterns. Of course, I still express myself in this way among non-Indians and that has aided me as a writer/performer. But I think I tease non-Indians and my audiences less than I tease tribal members and family.
great essay. i've had similar thoughts about the rise of patriarchy as greater male fluency/manipulation of formal rules and structures, as opposed to gossip, where men and women are more level
A thoughtful review, Erik. Congratulations on the prize. One thought: historians need texts, and so “prehistory” is the period before written records. A discussion of why people stayed in “prehistory” has to reckon with the absence of a writing system. As far as I’m aware, no non-agricultural society has developed a writing system. Creating and transmitting a writing system requires non-laboring people with surplus time and mental energy. These are more available when you have stored food energy, usually in grains. Writing, then, is both a cause and result of societal complexity and specialization of labor.
The introduction of a writing system is often fiercely contested and controversial. Some, such as Plato, objected that writing fostered complacency and weakened the human power of recall. But some of the controversy may reflect people’s discomfort with increasing social stratification. Codified in ritual, religious, or legal texts that legitimize certain power relations (e.g. obey priests and judges), writing can short-circuit the dynamic governance by high-school style gossip and cliquishness that you describe.
James C. Scott, in The Art of Not Being Governed, suggests that hill peoples of the vaguely defined SEAsian territory he calls Zomia were not “pre-literate” but “post-literate,” actively rejecting writing after seeing how it fostered rigid, durable power relations. Just as they actively resisted calls from valley civilizations (*ahem* China) to become sedentary farmers, pay taxes, and serve in the military, they also rejected the writing system that made possible all this organization, extraction, and, to them, exploitation.
All this is to say that for people accustomed to a high degree of social fluidity and permeability, writing can appear not as a tool of civilization, but as a tool of oppression. Many peoples around the world seem to have flirted with writing before rejecting it. Tens of thousands of years of this back-and-forth can appear as stagnation or the absence of civilization, even barbarity. But perhaps that is because you and your readers are winners in the world that writing wrought. For more on this topic, I recommend Daniel Quinn’s didactic but provocative parable, Ishmael.
Side note—I didn’t understand the quite jarring reference to the Gestapo! But anyway, great newsletter. I look forward to further essays.
Very thought provoking and kind of scary! I don't want to be trapped in the gossip trap!
I suppose this could be called "Revenge of the Popular Kids"? Nerds (I consider myself to be one, so no offence meant) essentially took revenge on the popular kids by developing science and technology, eventually building the internet and social media, managed to at least get some respect and a ton of money, (though not much love), but in the process sowed the seeds of their own downfall? That seems so unfair!
Marshall McLuhan foresaw Twitter when he coined the phrase, "the global village":
> The multiplication of far-reaching techniques of communication has two important results. In the first place, it increases the sheer radius of communication, so that for certain purposes the whole civilized world is made the psychological equivalent of a primitive tribe.
This is like reading a favorite Arthur Clarke or Isaac Asimov short story complete with horrifying punchline. You might be my new favorite blogger, Erik
I agree that we stuck to small groups wherein popularity provided enough of a group structure to self-manage, but I'm not sure that was a trap. We don't stay stuck in high school forever, we strike out on our own and find a band more like us. As Harari posits in Sapiens, "When the group grew too large, its social order destabilised and the band split." (Emphasis on "the band split.")
We don't stay stuck in our crab bucket, we move on to better ones. What made one small group decide to become a bigger group? Probably needing to band together for some cause (war, shelter, food supply). Even today, when we have organized into larger groups (countries) in order to band against other larger groups (conquesting countries), we still organize in smaller communities—a fanfiction community, a soccer team, a university—and break away if they are not to our liking.
In this way, I don't think Twitter is indicative of some kind of natural "we just love being part of the drama" state. Rather, I think the inability to form small communities there (that people can break away from) is what makes it go awry.
A note on band splits: Going off of Chagnon's work on the Yanomami, band splits almost always occurred on a factional basis over some personal/political dispute (the two being inseparable in Dunbar-limited societies).
In other words, it wasn't based on personal choice. You split off to join a new band because your clique (esp. its leader) couldn't get along with the band's other clique. Curiously, this fission process seems to organically limit bands to Dunbar-viable numbers..
Small hunter-gatherer bands, limited in size by Dunbar's number, enjoyed natural social relationships centered on gossiping. When the ice retreated, farming appeared; next up was irrigation. But that required large-scale cooperation, which came with a cultural change to agricultural civilization. Once achieved, societies of a size far beyond Dunbar's number could develop.
One string of developments led to medieval Europe, central to which was the village church. An echo chamber for conditioning minds into speaking only (the then) politically correct thoughts and ensuring that only feelings deemed virtuous were signaled. But outside the earshot of the priest, the village was small enough for the gossip of natural social relationships.
Today we are blessed with social media and, as you persuasively argue, the gossip trap. But the technology is also used to filter and preach in virtual echo chambers. Perhaps our societal regression is not as far back as hunter-gatherer bands but rather to the gossip and censorship of medieval times.
I'd love to hear from people working on agent-based simulations of social systems to comment on the gossip trap hypothesis. In simulations do they observe long periods of small groups/social simplicity before spontaneous emergence of complexity? Under what conditions? I believe Dunbar has done some of this work, among others. Here's an example of a paper (Dunbar et. al.) in the field for a flavor: https://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/15/4/3.html
Well-done and congrats on the win. I am wondering if you might draw from this essay and write an op-ed for _The New York Times_ (of course word limit would be a challenge) on our current political mess and the effects of social media on the potential devastation of our constitution and our democracy?
Thanks Mary - you're right to see the connection to the modern day. I'll definitely cover this in more detail soon, as I think this is the beginning of an ongoing series on these issues that I'll add to sporadically. I don't freelance anymore but tbh if I was offered by The New York Times to write something like this, or an extension on related topics, I'd likely accept.
Eric, _The New York Times_ does not solicit. You need to offer a piece. My research indicates 800 to 1,200 words. Write it and help save the US democracy and our Constitution, both currently at stake. --Mary
I was reminded of mimetic theory while reading your piece. Our herd behavior helps us to adopt ideas. Also, we are so certain of our own innocence that someone must be to blame when things go poorly, so we look for those we find odd and make them our scapegoat. When we have someone to point a finger at (rather than ourselves) we feel great, great relief. Gossip is a tool for this.
Though I find it quite difficult to observe "Mean Girls" playing out in our society, especially when so many can't see themselves being manipulated by their desire to be accepted. By themselves, or a standard they judge with, often their parents. But then there is this beast, the crowd.
How do we rectify individualism with the benefits of the herd?
Another thought I wondered at was that of gathering sites being cultivated. This might originally occur due to a need for protecting these from other grazers, and in time one could have observed the ideal conditions that preceded a good harvest and this could have developed into Agriculture. But I'm spitballing here.
Now for a curve!
When it comes to memetics, I think they have some of the same mechanics as ideas. It seems possible to mix and match them to make a new formulation of culture. Early on in society we didn’t have a large arsenal from which to spark ideas and customs. Now we have more ideas from which we can connect concepts, and this makes us more adaptable.
While there are more ways to innovate, there are also more ways to go awry. Though I believe our intelligence will win out, as that’s what is believed when one values democracy and free markets (of things and ideas). However, this must be done with more foresight than a gossip machine. And this requires a valuing of reason alongside the tribal instinct of gossip.
Tribalism is a tough nut to crack. Acceptance by the group fits a primeval need for survival. And this makes it really easy to point our fingers at others, with a bunch of others. We instinctively know this will help ensure we aren't next on the chopping block. We want to maintain our tribe's value in us so we allow another to be pushed under the bus and we breathe easy a moment that we aren't the one being ostracized. Go to hell whoever is cool to mock!
However, with this seemingly comes the origins of our battle with ego-centricity. Now, most of us are just swell decent folks, but the problem with social media and the Mean Girls is that they will stifle innovation if the global gossip village keeps us from wanting to challenge the status quo for fear of retribution. Or, being cancelled, as the woke of the woke call it. (That is some ol' school meta-shit right there. Being so woke, you're against wokism. Dang! I hope I don't get too much shit for that.)
Now, something I am wondering about here is within our tribes, with our separate tribal customs, does living in echo chambers keep us from a greater organized success?
This makes me think of the differences between living in small towns and big cities -- someone I met recently described her upbringing in a town where she knew LITERALLY everyone, and conceded that while to her it was heaven, to someone else it might sound like hell. The fact that she was universally beloved in her home town, "a very big fish in a very small pond," as she said, has everything to do with it. I've mostly lived in vast metropolitan areas where running into someone you know at the store is a rare coincidence, and you can manage separate social circles easily, and you can, if you play yourself out or have a falling out with a certain group of people, give yourself a "second chance" with an entirely different group of people and the two groups will never overlap.
Social media has changed this too -- in the sense that social media tends to keep people connected to their "high school friends" or "old job friends" or any other past group of connections, and in the sense that it documents and latches you to your foul-ups for much longer periods of time, making "second chances" much more difficult. Social media does make the whole world a bit more like a small town or tribe, and that can be heaven or hell depending on whether your see yourself as the big fish or the "trapped" fish -- the fish who wants to start over, but can't, because the past is dragging them down like a dead albatross into the murky depths of sameness.
It's interesting to think that that cold, dark sameness could go on for tens of thousands of years!!
I love this observation, totally agreed. It helps explain why so many historical ideas and inventions came out of cities, whereas the vast majority of people lived outside of them (I say this as someone who lives outside a major city)
Inventions and innovations require risks, including (especially?) social risks, and if there is one thing that distinguishes the person who thrives in the small town from the person who experiences small town life as a non-stop nightmare, it's the ability to fit in, go with the flow, not make waves, not stand out, not be the object of popular derision -- but a person who stands out, goes against the grain, disrupts the usual, and risks disapproval is the person more likely to come up with something new. Groups who do this, even more so.
That would be somehow contradicted by conformity of Scandinavian population:
https://assistantvillageidiot.blogspot.com/2022/12/sweden-and-denmark.html
vs scientific performance of Scandinavian population:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/08/scientific-productivity-by-country/
Is this a contradiction, or is this an indirect demonstration that scientific performance is no longer a good indicator of inventive, innovative, or even useful new ideas?
Consider, e.g., that "disruptive science" has virtually ceased: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5
We can no longer “light out for the territories...”
An alternative to the gossip trap (While I do think the idea has some merits, I doubt it is the whole story): the end of humanity's great migrations.
The main distinguishing feature that separates pre and post civilization societies globaly is the cessation of large scale human migrations with the crossing of the bering straight in 10,000BCE. There still existed small scale migration into peloponeisia, for example, but no large new landmasses that could support steady population growth.
Before this point new lands were available for humanity to expand into, so we did not need to live in social arrangements denser than Dunbar's limit. If a group grew too large to handle with gossip it would split and migrate. If a foreign group were to move into your home, you could migrate as well, displacing yet further groups in a chain ending at the frontier. With the absence of a frontier, groups need to learn to live together.
This explanation neatly avoids requiring some innate human nature that keeps us in prehistory, and also explains why civilizations started basically everywhere in the globe within the same time period, from the fertile crescent, egypt, china and the yukatan peninsula. It also explains where these civilizations were founded: in the paths of large migration routes. Bottlenecks in continents, now the melting pot of different migrating groups with no frontier to release the pressure.
This explanation also indicates that twitter won't destroy civilization. While people prefer to live in social environments where they can have full knowledge of social interactions, civilization is not built upon suborning that instinct by creating a hierarchy where some people are untouchable. It's just built on people finding themselves in a situation where that doesn't work anymore, through no fault of their own. Creating that hierarchy was just the most convenient method during a time before modern scientific, philosophical, and technical knowledge allows for a more egalitarian political solution.
I think you're onto something. But I wouldn't place the crossing of the Bering Strait as the important milestone - colonization of land in the Americas could have no effect on population pressures in the Middle East.
The biggest novel conditions within the last 12000 years ago are the presence of Homo sapiens outside of Africa, and the lack of an Ice Age. Of course, that begs the question, why did hierarchy not develop among H. sapiens in Africa during the last interglacial? Why did Neanderthals and Denisovans with brains just as large as our own not develop hierarchy within Eurasia?
Which leads me to think that either there was something special about Homo sapiens and limiting about Africa, or else something very special about the specific population that sourced the OOA event (and also contributed significantly to modern African populations). The timing roughly corresponds to the start of the Upper Paleolithic, so I think it's reasonable to assume that Homo sapiens underwent a major change around that time.
Not original, but I'd bet that this corresponds with the development of full language. Nothing else unifies all of modern humanity, and could explain on its own why complex societies were possible in the benign climate of ~12k years ago and not ~120k years ago.
That was what I was thinking as I read it. Plus things were pretty brutal tens of thousands of years ago in terms of predatory fauna. I’m not sure we are gossiping about hunting expertises when we were literally cowering in caves sucking on bones of carrion
I am dismayed that your first instinct matched mine, given your obvious and total ignorance of anthropological and archeolgical evidence. Things were not “pretty brutal” during the paleolithic, by all evidence ancient peoples were just that: people. Paleolithic societies had high infant mortality compared to us living with modern medicine, but not noticeably higher than even reneissance societies. And ever since ancient homonids learned to weild sticks and throw rocks we have been apex predators and not regularly hunted. At no point was humanity ever “cowering in caves sucking on the bones of carrion”. The fuck?
That seems like a needlessly dickish way to respond to someone you disagree with.
You are quite right, I was needlessly insulting. I'll apologize.
The cowering in caves and the savage brutality of ancient man has got quite annoying over the decades,
I guess my multi-day visit to Musée National de la Préhistoire - which goes through in great detail the archeological evidence of my contention including the numerous tools used by paleolithic humans to literally scrap out bones of the carrion they found while contending with 14 foot tall deer (homeo sapiens was much shorter than today) as one example of fauna that weren’t scared of “rock throwing” - counts as total ignorance in your world perspective.
I apologize for my insults, they were unwarranted and harmful. I could have just laid out the facts instead, you seem quite eager to learn about prehistory, which is great!
Early humans were not prey, they were apex predators. All large land animals that did not learn a deep instinctual fear of humanity went extinct around the time that early humans migrated into their areas.
Early human diets were mostly based on gathered plants, supplemented by hunted (not scavanged) meat. Early humans did not scavenge for meat, their digestive tract was not able to process the toxins found in carrion. Yes they scraped bones for the marrow and to fashion tools, a practice humans continue in the present day. We just use machines now.
Early humans did occasionally live in caves, but most lived in temporary wooden, wattle-and-daub, or animal skin shelters and tents that could move with foraging patterns. Their shelter was not as expansive as modern houses, but comfortable, warm, and safe nonetheless.
Early humans gossiped ferociously, and almost all social structures were informal ones based on raw popularity. The breaks in this pattern were accepted outsiders such as wandering entertainers, holy people, and the occasional exile.
These are the facts based on primary sources: peer reviewed archeological and anthropological studies using modern methods. Do what you will with them.
I am going to copy and paste that and pass it to my daughter who's in high-school,
She will give citation
Oh, how and did the Mongols move the scythians out of Central Asia or were the Mongols seems to just made up,
Great read! I ultimately disagree with your final thoughts, but only because they cast the "Gossip Trap" as a singular cause. More elaboration is needed to justify the theory, at least in my opinion.
Hope I'm not too far off here, but best I can gauge it: If the gossip trap holds true, then human progress should be measured by sufficient, concentrated population size. People start innovating once a population grows beyond the 150 or so mark, without the ability to split off into separate groups. That should allow for broad-scale societal change which isn't wholly reliant on small town social kudos. So through the gossip trap, you've shifted the question a bit. Now it isn't "Why didn't we make any progress for 50,000 years?", but rather "Why didn't human populations reach sufficient concentration for 50,000 years?" Is there a good answer to that? I'm honestly not well-read enough to put forward my own theory.
The "Sapient Paradox" has genuinely bugged me for years now, mostly because no one ever seems to address it. 200,000 years is such a massive amount of time from a human perspective, it's frustrating that scientists don't feel the need to justify the monumental lack of progress that comes with such a number. I don't think you've quite hit the nail on the head, not yet, but with one essay you've added more to the conversation than I've heard from anyone else I've run across. So thanks for the read!
I grew up as a Spokane Indian on the Spokane Indian Reservation—a salmon tribe—and gossip and social shaming in major and minor ways is very prevalent. My tribe is renowed in our region for being "mean." We tease and tease and tease. In many Native tribes now, including my own, the humor and teasing can be very risqué, very blue. I've lived away from the reservation for thirty years but recently spent time with some tribal members and family and immediately fell back into domestic social custom and speech patterns. Of course, I still express myself in this way among non-Indians and that has aided me as a writer/performer. But I think I tease non-Indians and my audiences less than I tease tribal members and family.
Playing the dozens? https://www.thoughtco.com/the-dozens-game-of-insults-1690410
Ha! Not so formalized. And far more directed at the individual that Mommas!
great essay. i've had similar thoughts about the rise of patriarchy as greater male fluency/manipulation of formal rules and structures, as opposed to gossip, where men and women are more level
btw, robin dunbar, not robert :)
Great catch Razib, thank you
Yes the divine, immaculate conception of the matriarchy...
A thoughtful review, Erik. Congratulations on the prize. One thought: historians need texts, and so “prehistory” is the period before written records. A discussion of why people stayed in “prehistory” has to reckon with the absence of a writing system. As far as I’m aware, no non-agricultural society has developed a writing system. Creating and transmitting a writing system requires non-laboring people with surplus time and mental energy. These are more available when you have stored food energy, usually in grains. Writing, then, is both a cause and result of societal complexity and specialization of labor.
The introduction of a writing system is often fiercely contested and controversial. Some, such as Plato, objected that writing fostered complacency and weakened the human power of recall. But some of the controversy may reflect people’s discomfort with increasing social stratification. Codified in ritual, religious, or legal texts that legitimize certain power relations (e.g. obey priests and judges), writing can short-circuit the dynamic governance by high-school style gossip and cliquishness that you describe.
James C. Scott, in The Art of Not Being Governed, suggests that hill peoples of the vaguely defined SEAsian territory he calls Zomia were not “pre-literate” but “post-literate,” actively rejecting writing after seeing how it fostered rigid, durable power relations. Just as they actively resisted calls from valley civilizations (*ahem* China) to become sedentary farmers, pay taxes, and serve in the military, they also rejected the writing system that made possible all this organization, extraction, and, to them, exploitation.
All this is to say that for people accustomed to a high degree of social fluidity and permeability, writing can appear not as a tool of civilization, but as a tool of oppression. Many peoples around the world seem to have flirted with writing before rejecting it. Tens of thousands of years of this back-and-forth can appear as stagnation or the absence of civilization, even barbarity. But perhaps that is because you and your readers are winners in the world that writing wrought. For more on this topic, I recommend Daniel Quinn’s didactic but provocative parable, Ishmael.
Side note—I didn’t understand the quite jarring reference to the Gestapo! But anyway, great newsletter. I look forward to further essays.
Very thought provoking and kind of scary! I don't want to be trapped in the gossip trap!
I suppose this could be called "Revenge of the Popular Kids"? Nerds (I consider myself to be one, so no offence meant) essentially took revenge on the popular kids by developing science and technology, eventually building the internet and social media, managed to at least get some respect and a ton of money, (though not much love), but in the process sowed the seeds of their own downfall? That seems so unfair!
Marshall McLuhan foresaw Twitter when he coined the phrase, "the global village":
> The multiplication of far-reaching techniques of communication has two important results. In the first place, it increases the sheer radius of communication, so that for certain purposes the whole civilized world is made the psychological equivalent of a primitive tribe.
This was actually Edward Sapir apparently, way back in 1935!
https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Sapir/Sapir_1935_b.html
Perfect.
This is like reading a favorite Arthur Clarke or Isaac Asimov short story complete with horrifying punchline. You might be my new favorite blogger, Erik
The rule of bullies. Charming.
I agree that we stuck to small groups wherein popularity provided enough of a group structure to self-manage, but I'm not sure that was a trap. We don't stay stuck in high school forever, we strike out on our own and find a band more like us. As Harari posits in Sapiens, "When the group grew too large, its social order destabilised and the band split." (Emphasis on "the band split.")
We don't stay stuck in our crab bucket, we move on to better ones. What made one small group decide to become a bigger group? Probably needing to band together for some cause (war, shelter, food supply). Even today, when we have organized into larger groups (countries) in order to band against other larger groups (conquesting countries), we still organize in smaller communities—a fanfiction community, a soccer team, a university—and break away if they are not to our liking.
In this way, I don't think Twitter is indicative of some kind of natural "we just love being part of the drama" state. Rather, I think the inability to form small communities there (that people can break away from) is what makes it go awry.
A note on band splits: Going off of Chagnon's work on the Yanomami, band splits almost always occurred on a factional basis over some personal/political dispute (the two being inseparable in Dunbar-limited societies).
In other words, it wasn't based on personal choice. You split off to join a new band because your clique (esp. its leader) couldn't get along with the band's other clique. Curiously, this fission process seems to organically limit bands to Dunbar-viable numbers..
What I am curious to know, then, is what got us OUT of the gossip trap?
Small hunter-gatherer bands, limited in size by Dunbar's number, enjoyed natural social relationships centered on gossiping. When the ice retreated, farming appeared; next up was irrigation. But that required large-scale cooperation, which came with a cultural change to agricultural civilization. Once achieved, societies of a size far beyond Dunbar's number could develop.
One string of developments led to medieval Europe, central to which was the village church. An echo chamber for conditioning minds into speaking only (the then) politically correct thoughts and ensuring that only feelings deemed virtuous were signaled. But outside the earshot of the priest, the village was small enough for the gossip of natural social relationships.
Today we are blessed with social media and, as you persuasively argue, the gossip trap. But the technology is also used to filter and preach in virtual echo chambers. Perhaps our societal regression is not as far back as hunter-gatherer bands but rather to the gossip and censorship of medieval times.
I'd love to hear from people working on agent-based simulations of social systems to comment on the gossip trap hypothesis. In simulations do they observe long periods of small groups/social simplicity before spontaneous emergence of complexity? Under what conditions? I believe Dunbar has done some of this work, among others. Here's an example of a paper (Dunbar et. al.) in the field for a flavor: https://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/15/4/3.html
Well-done and congrats on the win. I am wondering if you might draw from this essay and write an op-ed for _The New York Times_ (of course word limit would be a challenge) on our current political mess and the effects of social media on the potential devastation of our constitution and our democracy?
Thanks Mary - you're right to see the connection to the modern day. I'll definitely cover this in more detail soon, as I think this is the beginning of an ongoing series on these issues that I'll add to sporadically. I don't freelance anymore but tbh if I was offered by The New York Times to write something like this, or an extension on related topics, I'd likely accept.
Eric, _The New York Times_ does not solicit. You need to offer a piece. My research indicates 800 to 1,200 words. Write it and help save the US democracy and our Constitution, both currently at stake. --Mary
Yes, a shorter piece would be much appreciated. Honestly, I got way lost in reading all this.
I was reminded of mimetic theory while reading your piece. Our herd behavior helps us to adopt ideas. Also, we are so certain of our own innocence that someone must be to blame when things go poorly, so we look for those we find odd and make them our scapegoat. When we have someone to point a finger at (rather than ourselves) we feel great, great relief. Gossip is a tool for this.
Though I find it quite difficult to observe "Mean Girls" playing out in our society, especially when so many can't see themselves being manipulated by their desire to be accepted. By themselves, or a standard they judge with, often their parents. But then there is this beast, the crowd.
How do we rectify individualism with the benefits of the herd?
Another thought I wondered at was that of gathering sites being cultivated. This might originally occur due to a need for protecting these from other grazers, and in time one could have observed the ideal conditions that preceded a good harvest and this could have developed into Agriculture. But I'm spitballing here.
Now for a curve!
When it comes to memetics, I think they have some of the same mechanics as ideas. It seems possible to mix and match them to make a new formulation of culture. Early on in society we didn’t have a large arsenal from which to spark ideas and customs. Now we have more ideas from which we can connect concepts, and this makes us more adaptable.
While there are more ways to innovate, there are also more ways to go awry. Though I believe our intelligence will win out, as that’s what is believed when one values democracy and free markets (of things and ideas). However, this must be done with more foresight than a gossip machine. And this requires a valuing of reason alongside the tribal instinct of gossip.
Tribalism is a tough nut to crack. Acceptance by the group fits a primeval need for survival. And this makes it really easy to point our fingers at others, with a bunch of others. We instinctively know this will help ensure we aren't next on the chopping block. We want to maintain our tribe's value in us so we allow another to be pushed under the bus and we breathe easy a moment that we aren't the one being ostracized. Go to hell whoever is cool to mock!
However, with this seemingly comes the origins of our battle with ego-centricity. Now, most of us are just swell decent folks, but the problem with social media and the Mean Girls is that they will stifle innovation if the global gossip village keeps us from wanting to challenge the status quo for fear of retribution. Or, being cancelled, as the woke of the woke call it. (That is some ol' school meta-shit right there. Being so woke, you're against wokism. Dang! I hope I don't get too much shit for that.)
Now, something I am wondering about here is within our tribes, with our separate tribal customs, does living in echo chambers keep us from a greater organized success?