Ultrasociety: a summary
A chapterwise summary of a book by Peter Turchin
Chapter 1: The puzzle of Ultrasociality
This chapter begins with a bold claim: one can and should build testable and scientific models of historical dynamics, labelled as Cliodynamics. Author then contends that the evolution of large-scale complex societies cannot be attributed to the invention of agriculture alone. He proposes the theory of cultural multi-level selection.
Chapter 2: Destructive Creation
Author seeks the synthesis of multiple academic silos under the generic framework of evolution. “Cultural Evolution gives us the tools to analyse societies as coherent, integrated wholes, rather than a collection of separate economic, political, and social subsystems.” He identifies group selection as a key force of the cultural evolution (following the tradition of Darwin, who attributes it to the evolution of morality).
Here is the central tenet of this book: Defining characteristic of a society is cooperation. Small-scale (Dunbar) cooperation based on personal acquaintance is fairly easy. Large-scale (intra-group) cooperation evolved because, “God is on the side of big battalions”, “Just as economic competition eliminates the less efficient businesses, military competition in history eliminated less cooperative societies. “ This “destructive creation” led to the net effect of “more cooperative, more peaceful, and more affluent” societies. Solution of coordination problems required sophisticated cultural mechanisms (e.g. religions)
This was not a linear trend but more of a Greek lambda ʎ pattern as elaborated in the subsequent chapters.
Author makes it a point to note how individual large-scale societies tend to decay with corruption, “Imperiopathosis” in the absence of destructive creation beget by wars.
Chapter 3 The Cooperator’s Dilemma
It is true that “more cooperative groups of organisms outcompete less cooperative ones” (yours truly, C.D., 1871) but here is the basic game theoretic catch: “No matter what others do, a rational agent’s best course of action is always to defect”. Author critiques Dawkins for “gene-centric view” of evolution (peddled in the selfish gene) and his conceptions of “accidental morality” and kin selection because they provide “spurious moral justification” “for people who want to revel in greed”. Author contends multi-level selection is a much better explanation.
Chapter 4: Cooperate to Compete
In a nutshell, “competition within groups destroys cooperation, but competition between groups creates cooperation”. Author presents so-called price equation to illustrate these dynamics.
It states that cooperation will increase if the ratio of inter-group variance and intra-group variance (A)(of co-operators vs defectors) is greater than the ratio of intra-group selection pressure to inter-group selection pressure (B). Crude description of the later (B) is, “Within each tribe, cowards do better than brave men, on average (in the context of warfare). But at the same time, cowardly tribes are eliminated by courageous ones.” Further implication is that inter-group warfare (increase in the selection pressure) would favour the evolution of intra-group co-operation. Former (A) illustrates that if certain groups are significantly more co-operative than others (positive assortment), they will thrive better.
Chapter 5: ‘God Made Men, but Sam Colt Made Them Equal’
Author claims that projectile weapons were significant contributors to the demise of alpha-males (leaders could no longer dominate by brute, physical force…) and rise of social intelligence.
Chapter 6: The Human Ways of War
In this chapter, author substantiates his case for wars as an engine of evolution (destructive creation). But it works only in the conditions of cultural variations. Thankfully, more dire forms of selection (genocide) have been gradually replaced by softer ones (culturicide).
Chapter 7: The Rise of God-Kings
With examples from Hawaii vs New Guinea, author contends that “societies that went down the path to civilization — growing large, acquiring cities, developing writing and extensive division of labour, and eventually becoming states — became highly unequal, even despotic.” This path to civilizations requires deeper explanations (hint: larger polities consistently outcompeted smaller ones) elaborated in the next chapter.
Chapter 8: The Iron Law of Oligarchy
Author asserts that war is the primary reason for the emergence of big states and complex societies. For example, Lanchester’s Square Law: “during each round of engagement, the proportion of casualties inflicted by an army on its adversary is the square of its numerical advantage” Author states, “There is an intense selection pressure for cultural groups living in flat terrain to scale up, and a very high price to pay by those that fail to do so (In the mountains the selection pressure for larger societies is reduced considerably)”. War is also of course augmented by agriculture and rituals but nevertheless it is the key driver for rise of complexity. And by the way, property implies inequality (small differences magnify unless they are redistributed).
Chapter 9: The Pivot of History
Author notes, “around 2,500 years ago, we see qualitatively new forms of social organization — the larger and more durable Axial mega-empires that employed new forms of legitimation of political power. The new sources of this legitimacy were the Axial religions, or more broadly ideologies. During this time, gods evolved from capricious projections of human desire (who as often as not squabbled among themselves) into transcendental moralizers concerned above all with prosocial behaviour by all, including the rulers.”
Author contends the driver that shifted the balance in favour of “egalitarian prophets” and empires at this time was the origination of the remarkable technology of horse-riding which remained extremely effective until the age of Napoleon (“Amateurs study strategy, professionals manage logistics”)! Solution was to drastically increase the size of the state to protect against the nomadic hordes.
Author illustrates how religions enabled humans to multiply social scales beyond the Dunbar number by virtue of the following mechanism: belief in almighty enforcers translates into the currency of trust between the strangers. (flipside: in the US, you still cannot be trusted to become a president if you are an atheist!)
Chapter 10: Zigzags of Human Evolution
In this capstone chapter, author starts with the following pictorial representation of the zigzag pattern from the previous chapters.
He helpfully reminds us that (post-axial) religions and nationalism were instrumental bootloaders of cultural evolution that fuelled intra-group cooperation and its flip-side, inter-group competition.
“What we have here is a paradoxical conclusion. It was violence — societies making war on each other — that drove the evolution of ultrasociality, and it was ultrasociality that ultimately made violence decline.”
He also notes that 18th century enlightenment was indeed remarkable but more of an extension of the trend towards “expanding circle of sympathy” since the early evolution of ultra-sociality and post-axial religions. He also reiterates how greater structural inequality within societies leads to less cooperation (he substantiates this with an example of how monogamous societies have consistently outcompeted polygamous societies — contrary to what Ayn Rands of the world would predict). While rebuking Pinker, he makes a much more cogent case of how less violent forms of cultural evolution are replacing more violent mechanisms (cold vs hot wars).
“This, then, is the great hope for humanity: that war can finally fade away, displaced by more obviously constructive contests.”
He takes a bolder step further and lays down plans for an ambitious “science of cooperation”, the systematic and universal collection of historical data (Seshat Database) “to subject rival theories about the social evolution of human beings to an unprecedented degree of empirical scrutiny”.
