Chapter Six: Utopia, Then and Now

“Though to speak plainly my real sentiments, I must freely own that as long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily . . . ”
“On the contrary,” answered I, “it seems to me that men cannot live conveniently where all things are common: how can there be any plenty, where every man will excuse himself from labor? . . .”
“I do not wonder,” said he, “that it appears so to you, since you have no notion, or at least no right one, of such a constitution: but if you had been in Utopia with me, and had seen their laws and rules, as I did, for the space of five years, in which I lived among them . . . you would then confess that you had never seen a people so well constituted as they.”

St. Thomas More, Utopia

Demonic Males

In their book, Demonic Males, evolutionary biologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson ask the question, “Where does human violence come from, and why?” Their answer? It is imprinted in us as part of our pre-human heritage. How do they know this? From studying our “cousins,” the chimpanzees, who, in the wild, “live in patrilineal, male-bonded communities,” operating through “a system of intense, male-initiated territorial aggression, including lethal raiding into neighboring communities in search of vulnerable enemies to attack and kill. Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more other animal species, this suite of behaviors is known only among chimpanzees and humans. . .”

How is it that humans are so much like chimps? “[S]imilar evolutionary forces continue to be at work in chimpanzee and human lineages, maintaining and refining a system of intergroup hostility and personal violence that has existed since even before the ancestors of chimpanzees and humans mated for the last time in a drying forest of eastern Africa around 5 million years ago.”

The message has been widely disseminated and its premise uncritically accepted in the media (though it's hardly the first of its kind -- viz. Robert Ardrey's equally influential The Territorial Imperative). Witness the response of Washington Post literary critic Daniel Pinchbeck, who is clearly convinced:

Such male aggression has structured the lives of humans as well as chimpanzees for thousands of generations. Every human society has been patriarchal, with men retaining most of the dominant spots in the hierarchy and using their power to control women and annihilate their enemies.

Actually, there are matriarchal as well as patriarchal societies, but you get the point. He continues, echoing an all too familiar refrain:

The authors regretfully dismiss the possibility of some paradisiacal society that existed in a Golden Era or on a South Seas island, whether matriarchal or truly non-hierarchical and peaceful. Yet they do not believe that this means the future is a closed book. Evolution means continual adaptation and change, and the authors hold a rational faith that “to find a better world we must look not to a romanticized and dishonest dream forever receding into the primitive past, but to a future that rests on a proper understanding of ourselves.”

Wrangham and Peterson base their hopes for the future on a close cousin of the Chimp, another sort of ape, whose social behavior does indeed suggest “some paradisiacal society that existed in a Golden Era or on a South Seas island”: the Bonobo. According to the authors, “Chimpanzees and bonobos both evolved from the same ancestor that gave rise to humans, and yet the bonobo is one of the most peaceful, unaggressive species of mammals living on the earth today.”

As far as bonobos are concerned, I fully agree. However, as far as humans are concerned, we know that Wrangham and Peterson are almost certainly wrong. As evolutionary biologists, they have done their job. Their assumptions regarding chimp behavior may well be accurate. And their conclusions regarding human behavior would appear to follow quite logically from the evidence they present.

As we’ve learned, however, the Pygmy and Bushmen groups on whose traditions I’ve drawn for the construction of an ancestral baseline, are nothing like chimps. Indeed, when we examine those cultural elements shared by so many Pygmy and Bushmen groups, promoting close cooperation and free interaction, sharing, equal treatment for all, relative indifference to property rights, individual autonomy and freedom, non-violence, the independence of women and the loving indulgence of children, we approach a social structure remarkably similar to the one described in Thomas More's frequently referenced, but rarely read, Utopia. It looks, in fact, as though our ancestors were closer to bonobos than chimps. And if so, then maybe it isn't so easy to dismiss “the possibility of some paradisiacal society that existed in a Golden Era.”

An Age of Gold?

So, would the ancestral society I've posited here (HBC) have been a Utopia? Not exactly. For one thing, Thomas More's Utopia was an agricultural society, while early homo sapiens were almost certainly hunter-gatherers. Utopia had towns, but there's no evidence of towns during the Old Stone Age. Utopia had fortifications, but there's no evidence of Old Stone Age fortifications either. Perhaps they weren't needed. Utopia was a hierarchical society, with magistrates of varying degrees of power, and also a prince, but, as seems likely, our ancestors, like today's Pygmies and Bushmen, were non-hierarchical and acephalous. Also, the Utopians, believe it or not, had slaves.

More's remarkable book notwithstanding, the word “Utopia” has come to imply some kind of ideal society -- too ideal, perhaps, to actually exist. So did our ancestors live in an ideal society? A paradise? Was theirs a Golden Age? A “Utopia”? For an answer, you can read any number of books and articles on the Pygmies and Bushmen, listen to their recorded music, watch the films -- and decide for yourself. You'll find opinions pro and con, and you can make up your own mind. Sadly -- tragically -- you may not be able to find any of these societies actually functioning in the world of today, since most have been hobbled or destroyed by forces beyond their control -- from the inroads of farmers or logging camps, the social pressures exerted by missionary groups, well meaning environmentalists, valuing animals over humans, or, more recently, the forces of what is known as “market reform” or “the global economy,” the same forces that are currently tearing our own world apart.

I personally find it difficult to see Pygmy or Bushmen societies as Utopias, either in the literal sense, as more primitive replicas of the community fantasized by Thomas More, or in the generic sense of an ideal society, where everyone gets along perfectly, disputes are rare, and always settled fairly and without violence. On the contrary, what we learn from those who've spent time with them in the field is that individuals can be quick to assert themselves if something bothers them, which means that disputes, especially marital disputes, are not unusual and serious violence, though rare, is not unheard of. This is only to be expected. In any society that values both group integration and individual autonomy, tensions are going to emerge, people are going to assert themselves, and there is always the possibility of violence.

What especially troubles me in this regard is the tendency by many of our intellectuals and public pundits to make exactly the sort of “romantic,” idealizing statements justifiably questioned by skeptics such as Roscoe (see previous chapter), Wrangham and Peterson, and ridiculed by the “revisionist” school of contemporary anthropology. Such skepticism is understandable given the widespread tendency for laymen and even professional anthropologists to make unwarranted assumptions when writing about hunter-gatherers. A case in point is the book After Eden, by Kirkpatrick Sale, who decides, on the basis of very little evidence indeed, that homo erectus must have lived in much the same manner as contemporary hunter-gatherer groups, what he calls “immediate-return” societies. Quoting some of Colin Turnbull's more enthusiastic descriptions of the Mbuti, he concludes, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, as follows:

Thus the ethnographic record provides a striking picture of the coherence and concord of immediate-return societies, who are after all managing for the most part . . . to carry on traditions that in many respects date back more than a million years. Back to the Erectus, who, if we accept the premise that all immediate-return societies must look pretty much alike, can be regarded as having lived in some generally similar way. The worldview of the Mbutis: that is what I take to be the worldview of Erectus (p. 118).

Far too much of this sort of highly questionable speculation, based purely on assumptions, has been written and uncritically accepted by far too many. So much so, that it's not surprising when we find serious professionals responding with dismissive knee-jerk reactions in the opposite direction. What too often gets lost in all the posturing and rhetoric is exactly what was neglected in the first place: the evidence. As someone who prides himself on following the evidence, I find myself caught in the middle, where it's all too easy to be mis-perceived as yet another one of those hopeless “romantics,” drawing extravagant conclusions on the basis of unwarranted assumptions.

As far as the evidence is concerned, it's necessary to reiterate the fact that all “immediate-return societies” do not look alike. A great many such societies around the world, whether strictly hunter-gatherers or nearly so (e.g., part-time swidden gardeners), can be, as we have learned, extremely violent, waging continual warfare with their neighbors and in some cases, until recently at least, engaging in head-hunting and cannibalism. While a great many such groups worldwide do tend to be egalitarian and non-hierarchical, strong leaders do emerge, in the form of so-called “big men,” and what may well have begun as Pygmy/Bushmen-like customs of communal sharing have sometimes morphed into elaborate and occasionally destructive systems of extravagant gift-exchange, not too different from what we would call conspicuous consumption.

It's also important to understand that we have very few means of uncovering any aspects whatever of the non-material culture of either homo erectus or neanderthals, known to us only through a sparse and incomplete fossil and archaeological record. While, in my view, it is possible to extrapolate backwards into our deep past, on the basis of comparative studies of the culture and genetic makeup of living peoples, sifting the evidence and drawing inferences, there is nothing in the culture or genes of living people that can tell us anything at all regarding what amounts to a completely different species, either homo erectus or neanderthal, with essentially independent histories.

We cannot even say very much about the earliest homo sapiens, because, for all we know, they may have been very different from the Pygmies and Bushmen of today. I've been very careful to draw conclusions only where they are warranted by the evidence and reasonable inference therefrom. On such a basis I feel confident in arguing that it is acceptable to draw certain conclusions regarding the common ancestors of the Pygmies and Bushmen as of the period of earliest divergence. Prior to that cutoff, we are no longer in a position to draw meaningful inferences -- though we are certainly free to speculate.

Regardless of all the many differences between More's original vision and the lifestyle of my hypothetical baseline population, we do in fact find some striking similarities when we, once again, pay special attention to core values. In More's Utopia there is no private property, and money has been eliminated as a “standard of all things.” He praises the Utopians as a society “with so few laws; where virtue hath its due reward, and yet there is such an equality, that every man lives in plenty . . .,” and praises Plato for advocating “a community of all things,” and “setting all upon a level.” In such statements, More encapsulates what could be called the core values of his Utopia, all but identical to those I’ve postulated for HBC. Which would, in that sense at least, have made the society of our mutual ancestors, if not a Utopia, then at least: Utopian.

A Lesson for Today

The baseline ancestral group whose culture I attempted to recreate in Chapter Four, would not have been some generic founding band of “anatomically modern” humans, but the very specific group of common ancestors who existed prior to the earliest divergence of the Pygmy and Bushmen lineages -- very real people who, as suggested by the genetic evidence, were “our” ancestors as well. It is this group whose core culture appears to have been maintained among certain Pygmy and Bushmen peoples of today.


As I see it, therefore, whatever we can learn about our ancestors will necessarily be based on what we can learn about them. It's important to remember that I am not talking about “hunter-gatherers” or “indigenous peoples” in general, because, as we've learned, many such groups have very different sorts of culture, often far more violent and far less egalitarian.  Too many anthropologists and cultural commentators tend to lump all these groups together, a huge mistake.

So. If we can put aside that difficult and divisive word “Utopian,” and simply consider the culture of our common ancestors, as mirrored, however imperfectly, in the baseline I’ve concocted, we might, out of the corner of our eyes, catch a glimpse of a society that, while by no means perfect or ideal, may well have embodied at least some of those idealist “stereotypes” so many love to roll their eyes over.

For me, there are at least two aspects that stand out as especially important for us, their “sophisticated,” “globalized” descendants, to note: first, the avoidance of war, vendetta, or any other type of socially sanctioned violence; second, the “setting of all upon a level,” to quote More, i.e., the imperative toward social equality in terms of individual liberty, indifference to personal property, and the equal sharing of goods.

The fact that so much in the common wisdom of the day so confidently contradicts this view, on the basis of completely unsubstantiated assumptions, is especially disturbing. Here, for example is a recent interview with economist Paul Seabright, from The American Scientist, which begins as follows:

Economist Paul Seabright is fascinated by human cooperation. Mistrust and violence are in our genes, he says, but abstract, symbolic thought permits us to accept one another as “honorary relatives”—a remarkable arrangement that ultimately underlies every aspect of modern civilization.

Everyone's favorite pundit, Steven Pinker, is particularly grating on this topic. In a recent essay, A History of Violence, he ludicrously asserts that humans have, contrary to popular opinion, been getting progressively less violent through history:

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion. . .

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

Once again, as with so many others, Pinker indifferently lumps all “contemporary foragers” together into one category of “inherently” violent representatives of humanity at its earliest stages. He continues, digging an even deeper hole for himself:

At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. . . . The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals . . . But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

Aside from this being utter nonsense on its face, a perfect example of the revisionist impulse at its most ignorant and embarrassing, it also reflects what has become an all too common article of faith, that humans are inherently violent, something determined, no doubt, by their genetic makeup, as has been “proven” evidently by our close affiliation with all those violent chimps. In full, self-satisfied, Victorian mode, Pinker is determined to set us straight on the value of the “improvements” civilization has provided in our battle against our own deepest and direst instincts.

There is more. If Pinker can't convince us that violence is in our genes, maybe it's there because, after all, it's “only logical”:

. . . Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don't strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta.

While the above “logic” may, very sadly, hold for certain societies, past and present, in truth there is neither a “primal thirst for blood” nor an “inescapable logic of anarchy,” mistrust, fear, and violent self-defense. We know this because there are peoples in the world who have lived in peace and harmony with their neighbors and one another for a very long time. And, indeed, as I have been at pains to demonstrate, there is strong evidence that their “pre-state ancestors” shared the same values.


There is no evidence whatsoever that we began as mistrustful, selfish, fearful and violent barbarians. And it is not necessary for any society to behave in such a manner in order to survive. If the evidence I’ve been presenting here is credible, the line from HBP to the Pygmies and Bushmen of today is as long as any in human history -- and throughout the length of that line we see, in generation after generation, essentially the same picture: an image of survival through cooperation, equality, sharing, independence, mutual respect and non-violence, all the values we so cherish today, but have such a difficult time achieving.

[Added May 18: I've decided the section that originally appeared at this point  is more effective as the concluding passage of the book as a whole, and have therefore, after a fair amount of editing, moved it there.]