Reflections on Richard Wrangham's book, The Goodness Paradox - Part II

Intra-Tribe Coalitions

Aug 14, 2024

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"The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community." - William James

[NB: I spent a lot of time with this book, a tangent to my ongoing queries into "psychological safety." Even though I prefer the long form article, my notes pushed the boundary into book form. So I've split this up across several posts. The series isn't a review of Wrangham's book. It's a reflection on the insights I've gained from "The Goodness Paradox" and how they have deepened my understanding of the world and my place within it.]

Part I of this series touched on the origin and evolution of the patriarchal system of social control and how that system, as least in Judeo-Christian and secular Western societies is waning. Concurrent with this shift within the past 40-ish years, is the rise of gender-independent coalitions of power that nonetheless leverage the legacy patriarchal system as they pursue nearly identical goals: power, status, and control. In Part II, I explore aspects of the latest iteration of an ancient system based on "coalitionary proactive aggression," to use Wrangham's characterization.

The Origins and Influence of Contemporary Intra-Tribe Coalitions

To recap, current theory holds that mankind's journey toward self-domestication began somewhere around 300,000 years ago. This process began to accelerate with the emergence of language and the ability to exchange information and collaborate on shared goals - somewhere between 150,000 and 60,000 years ago. Psychologist Michael Tomasello considers this ability a uniquely human development, which he calls "shared intentionality," and is the genesis of all the creative human endeavors that followed.

Along with planning great things, humans could also plot violent acts. Language enabled us to coordinate efforts to defend against or conquer neighboring tribes. It also enabled us to form internal sub-groups and coalitions, each intent on defending or furthering the success of the sub-group's goals and objectives.

Perhaps the most influential intra-tribe coalitions to form in the early years were those of the beta males whose objective for banding together was to oust a tyrannical alpha male. If teasing, shaming, pleading, shunning or other tools for social control failed to temper an aggressive alpha male's behavior, the cohort of lesser males could plot, coordinate, and act on the execution of an abusive male with little risk to themselves. Language enabled co-conspirators to develop trust with one another and plot the demise of a bully when other social restraints failed. This is referred to as the "execution hypothesis." Wrangham cautions:

"The execution hypothesis is purely a scientific explanation, without any ethical implications: it is not intended to suggest that capital punishment nowadays is a social good. Its core claim is nevertheless somewhat unnerving. It proposes that selection against aggressiveness and in favor of greater docility came from execution of the most antisocial individuals."

Over many thousands of years, the theory postulates, individuals expressing aggressive and antisocial traits were culled from the population, thereby preventing any progeny with similar traits. This selected for more docile males who would pass along less reactive traits, a process Wrangham refers to as "self-domestication." Paradoxically, the brutal behavior deemed necessary to benefit the interests of a larger portion of the tribe resulted in the selection of more docile males and a more tolerant society.

For tens of thousands of years, the strongest drivers of social control were the male coalitions, leveraging a system of control generally referred to today as "The Patriarchy." This system wasn't unique to any particular race or civilization. It's a system that evolved thousands of years before the existence of discrete civilizations and has been prevalent in virtually all human populations.

I find it helpful to think of this system - patriarchal though it was - as the nascent human society's operating system. Version 1.0 was the alpha male dominated tribe. It brought a rough form of order to an existence bent on raw survival. Crude, but workable. The emergence of language was a major upgrade, version 2.0. Still patriarchal, but it carried with it phenomenal potential.

For thousands of years the energy that fueled the system was physical power. By virtue of physical strength and size, males had the requisite power to use the system, setting and enforcing rules to their advantage. This had good and bad consequences. And so through the ages, human society lurched forward - and sometimes backward - incrementally upgrading the underlying operating system along the way.

Today, control of the systemic rules inherited from Society 2.x is much less tied to who has the physical power, although physical power is still critical to the enforcement of systemic rules for social control. Rather, the system is controlled by those who are more adept at communicating, persuading, organizing, and controlling the message.

Who harnesses the power to control the system began to shift significantly in Western cultures with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and the invention and availability of tools - such as guns, the telegraph, automobiles, and telephones - that enabled less powerful people to easily communicate, organize, and exert influence. Individual physical strength, while still a player in the system, was no longer the prevalent or even desired lever for manipulating the Society 2.x system.

The population distribution also shifted dramatically from rural to urban. More and more people were living in densely populated cities and so more people with similar interests and challenges could easily communicate with each other. The rise of the women's suffrage movement and labor unions are examples of new types of urban coalitions that resulted from the shift in who controls the power that runs the system.

This shift has been gaining speed and momentum ever since. With the arrival of the Information Age and the social media and mobile communication tools that leveraged the Internet, the rate of change has been nothing short of exponential. In my view, we are currently living through the awkward and tumultuous upgrade from Society 2.x to Society 3.0.

Using the same principles and tactics employed since Society 2.0, coalitions of like-minded individuals can easily organize and target perceived threats to their identity, security, or both, and effectively eliminate them via virtual execution. The effort required and the risk of injury to the modern-day executioners is even less than it was for the preceding thousands of years. In fact, it's vanishingly small. With near-complete anonymity and with barely lifting a finger - literally - modern day nano-coalitions can exert an influence that greatly exceeds any social benefit they can define or justify. All too frequently they act as judge, jury, and executioner simply out of spite. For the target, however, the loss of a job or career is no longer just a local or time-boxed consequence. The Internet goes everywhere and it never forgets.

As with any upgrade, some things about the new version are good and some things are bad. There's much more good than bad and I'm not concern much about the good. After all, good is good. It's easy to find examples of spectacular advances that have emerged from social interactions that are based on equal opportunity and unfettered initiative. However, the bad risks corrupting the underlying system and crippling the upgrade to version 3.0, effectively negating all the good.

For thousands of years coalitions of powerful men with time to deliberate played the long game for maintaining control and dominance. Under Society 2.x, the prevailing coalitions could accurately be describe as wielding the "coalitionary proactive aggression" described by Wringham toward those whom they viewed a threat to their desired social and power structures. The intra-social coalitions of today, however, are vastly different from those that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution. In some cases, this has been a net positive. In other cases, the shift has been decidedly negative when the intra-social organizations display "coalitionary reactive aggression."

I'll have to defer discussing the differences between legacy and contemporary coalitions and the examples of corrupting elements to later posts to avoid straying too far from the goals of this series. I'll close by noting many of outdated legacy male dominated coalitions are being replaced by legitimately balanced representation from society as a whole. As I discussed in Approaching the Behavioral Sink, however, many key modules of Society 2.x have failed to take the upgrade and have become even more invested in preserving their identity and influence. It's important to note that the resulting corruption is independent of sex or gender, even though the same system of intimidation that has been used for thousands of years by male dominated coalitions is very much in use.