Am I Less Than?

From this paper, on the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling:

It is not enough to know how to act in a given situation; individuals need to know that others also know how to act. While language is undoubtedly essential as a medium of communication for coordination, here we propose that storytelling in particular may have played an essential role in the evolution of human cooperation by broadcasting social and cooperative norms to coordinate group behavior.

The first sentence is crucial, and general, not unique to hunter-gatherers of the past. For example, it is, similarly, not enough to know how to drive in your country—you need to know that others also know how to drive. This ‘social-proof’ necessity likely won’t occur to you or give you much worry unless it is missing to a noticeable degree. If licenses were widely purchased via bribes or driving instruction became ‘personalized,’ your knowledge about how to drive would decrease sharply in value or be altogether moot. With academic content the analogy is even better. There would be virtually no point in learning anything in school if you weren’t confident that other people were also learning it.

Hunter-gatherer societies have strong oral storytelling traditions dictating social behavior regarding marriage, interactions with in-laws, food sharing, hunting norms and taboos. These stories appear to coordinate group behavior and facilitate cooperation by providing individuals with social information about the norms, rules and expectations in a given society. It has recently been argued that religion with high-gods is a form of fictional story that helped in the expansion of large-scale human cooperation. However, moralistic high-gods cannot be the original form of norm-enforcing fiction in human societies, as phylogenetic reconstructions suggest that they only emerged after increased political complexity associated with agricultural expansion. Furthermore, hunter-gatherers display widespread cooperation . . . and, despite being inveterate storytellers, mostly lack the belief in moralistic high-gods . . . .

Are we any different today? The stories have changed, but the function of those stories has not. We still live inside and converse in norm-enforcing fictions and nonfictions. We still use narratives to coordinate behavior, to explain why some people deserve honor and others correction, to mark some practices as enlightened and others as backward, and to decide which forms of authority feel legitimate.

One way, perhaps, the stories have changed is in their treatment of inequalities.

Here we show that: (i) Agta stories convey messages of cooperation, sex equality, and social egalitarianism; (ii) stories from other hunter-gatherer societies also appear designed to coordinate social behavior and promote cooperation . . .

We asked three elders to tell us stories they normally tell children and each other. The elders told us four stories over three nights . . . . [these are plot synopses]:

The Sun and the Moon

There is a dispute between the sun (male) and the moon (female) to illuminate the sky. After a fight, where the moon proves to be as strong as the sun, they agree in sharing the duty—one during the day and the other during the night.

The Wild Pig and the Seacow

Wild pig and seacow were best friends and always raced each other for fun. But the seacow injured his legs and could not run anymore. The wild pig was unhappy and carried the seacow to the sea. They could race each other again, pig on land and seacow in the sea.

Researchers coded the first story as promoting the social norms of sex equality and cooperation between men and women through the method of “calculation and comparison of payoffs to cooperation vs. competition.” The second story was coded as promoting friendship and cooperation via “advantageous inequality aversion.” The next two stories are said to promote social equality, cooperation, and group cohesion through social acceptance, group identity, and a reverse dominance hierarchy:

The Monkey and the Giant

The monkey and his other animal friends would like to camp close to the river. However, there was a giant there who would attack whoever went close to the river. They went anyway, and had to take turns to look after the camping site during the night. The giant came and said to the monkey he was going to eat them. Together they plot a defence plan against the giant: the monkey tricked the giant into a cave where they had hidden bee and ant nests. The giant died. The monkey was the leader of the plan. His friends congratulated him, but reminded him that even though he was the smartest animal in the forest, he was still vulnerable, as the monkey-eating eagle could take him.

The Winged Ant

An ant who had wings lived together with other ants. One day she said to herself: ‘I am not their friends because they don’t have wings.’ She went to bird and said, ‘You must be my friend because you have wings.’ Bird said, ‘No you are an ant and I am a bird.’ Then she went to the wasp, mosquito and butterfly and they all said the same. Then she went back to an ant and said, ‘You must be my friend even though you don’t have wings.’ The Ant said, ‘Yes you are an ant and I am an ant.’ So all the ants welcomed her and said, ‘Ant with wings, you are our queen.’

About 7 out of every 10 stories the researchers catalogued were about “prescribing social norms or coordinating behavioral expectations,” which, of the categories ‘social content,’ ‘cosmological content,’ ‘natural phenomena,’ and ‘resource use,’ was the most frequently occurring type of story.

And addressing social inequality is a major theme of hunter-gatherer stories. In Sand Talk, for example, by Tyson Yunkaporta, the author tells us, through a traditional story of his ‘own,’ that social inequality was the central problem that Aboriginal societies were designed to avoid:

Emu’s problem can be seen in the mathematical greater-than/less-than interpretation of the symbol. Emu is a troublemaker who brings into being the most destructive idea in existence: I am greater than you; you are less than me. This is the source of all human misery. Aboriginal society was designed over thousands of years to deal with this problem.

Even though we don’t put it this way often, we should. Because “I am less than you; you are greater than me” is equivalent and just as destructive.