Beyond Machiavelli

Beyond Machiavelli

Look in a mirror. What do you see? A human?

Self-confident, we tell ourselves that we are a gifted species that can see further than any other. And, because of big brains, we are probably right. But smart as we are, we have a lot to learn.

John R. Skoyles and Dorion Sagan, Up from Dragons

Many behavioral differences exist between chimps and humans, just as between chimps and gorillas or between gibbons and orangutans. But we are struck by how much the core of chimpanzee social life in the wild resembles some forms of human social organization, especially under great stress—in prisons, say, or urban and motorcycle gangs. or crime syndicates, or tyrannies and absolute monarchies. Niccolò Machiavelli, chronicling the maneuvering necessary to get ahead in the seamy politics of Renaissance Italy—and shocking his contemporaries, especially when he was honest—might have felt more or less at home in chimpanzee society. So might many dictators, whether they style themselves of the right or left persuasion. So might many followers. Beneath a thin varnish of civilization, it sometimes seems, there's a chimp struggling to bust out—to take off the absurd clothes and restraining social conventions and let loose. But this is not the whole story.

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

The widely renown Renaissance thinker, Niccolò Machiavelli, was a Florentine statesman, writer, and political theorist. Following his retirement from public service, Machiavelli wrote at length on the skill required for successfully running the state. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince, a short instruction book for rulers that attempts to lay out methods to secure and maintain political power. Offering somewhat cynical recommendations, Machiavelli was prescient in his realization that an individual's success is often most effectively promoted by seemingly altruistic, honest, and prosocial behavior. Although Machiavelli was one of the most brilliant and original thinkers of the Renaissance, his name became synonymous with deviousness, cruelty, and willfully destructive rationality. The adjective "Machiavellian" emerged as a pejorative designation used to describe those who manipulate others in an opportunistic and deceptive way.

But Machiavelli was not alone in history. The Arthashastra , a treatise written in Sanskrit which means "the Science of Material Gain" or "Science of Polity," discusses theories and principles of governing a state. The Arthashastra is distinguished by its unabashed advocacy of "realpolitik." The original author, Chanakya, who was a Brahmin minister under Chandragupta Maurya, advocated that the ruler should use any means to attain his goal and his actions required no moral sanction. He has often been likened to Machiavelli by political theorists, and the name of Chanakya is reminiscent of a vastly scheming and clever political adviser.

Prior to the surge of field studies of primate behavior in the 1950s and 1960s, the foundation of human intelligence was thought to lie in the challenge of tool making. But observational studies in the wild and in naturalistic zoological colonies induced a growing realization of the sophistication of social intelligence in primates. An interesting pair of books bearing the title Machiavellian Intelligence present striking evidence of primate social complexity. The books' titles were inspired by Franz de Waal's work, in which he explicitly compared chimpanzee social strategies with the advice offered four centuries earlier by Machiavelli. An intriguing account of a tangled social web in which chimpanzees live is incorporated in Franz de Waal's book Chimpanzee Politics, which recounts de Waal's astute observations of the chimpanzee colony at the Burgers' zoo in Arnhem; de Waal describes episodes of ambition, social manipulation, sexual privileges and power takeovers that could be attributed to human personalities, but were preformed by (Machiavellian-minded) chimpanzees. The contemporary understanding exemplified in these recent titles suggest that the keen observations of human political interaction portrayed in the work of Chanakya and Machiavelli have a foundation in the recognizable social complexity of humanity's closest primate relatives.

The correlation between social skill, group complexity, and brain size gives strong support

to the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. The brain of a monkey or ape is strikingly larger than that of most mammals of similar size, including the prosimian primates.

But the human species, which has inherited its Machiavellian intelligence from ancestral great apes, has been further transformed by evolutionary pressures over several million years. A 3½ million year old footprint in East Africa indicates that bipedal human ancestors had clearly diverged from the great apes. By 2 million years ago, our ancestors had larger heads and were somewhat precocious; taller and larger brained ancestors in the human lineage used symmetrical pear-shaped tools (hand axes) 1.8 million years ago. Over this evolutionary period, the the human lineage developed a capacity exhibited in nascent form by chimpanzees - tool making.

Beginning about 200,000 years ago, a new technique called Levallois, which produced carefully shaped flakes and points of stone, was practiced. Approximately 100,000 years ago anatomically modern humans carried tool-making kits that enabled the manufacture of specialist tools. Around 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens sapiens had appeared, producing yet more sophisticated artifacts—blade tools, clothing, body ornaments, etc.

The process of becoming human has been effectively depicted in the following video:

During the course of this evolutionary process—the Paleolithic Revolution - our species was transformed from polygynous vegetarian quadrupeds into bipedal, monogamous, linguistic, tool-using hunter-gatherers. The transition from great apes to humans can be epitomized graphically as follows:

Amid this transition, Machiavellian intelligence was augmented and complemented by the development of technical (tool-making) intelligence and language.

As a consequence of their evolutionary advent, human hunter-gatherers, as foragers, became top predators who lived off the yield of their surrounding habitat. With their tool-making skills and ability to communicate and organize themselves into groups, early hunter-gatherers were able to explore and settle new environments. Until about 30,000 years ago, early humans dealt with immediate problems: deciding which food to eat, how to survive the winter, how to avoid dangerous animals, where to find shelter. They committed themselves emotionally to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future. Their mental predispositions, like those of other animal species, were circumscribed by the immediate horizon and by short-term problems. There would have been little point in worrying about the long term if immediate threats such as predators and winter were not dealt with.

By 30,000 years ago, our ancestors had colonized much of the planet. At the peak of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, they fabricated clothing and shelter to survive the harsh conditions. At the end of the last ice age, when temperatures rose and the ice sheets receded, plants and animals grew more abundant, and new areas were settled.

Foraging humans had an impact on their surroundings. By 11,000 years ago, intense hunting and expanding human populations contributed to the widespread destruction of large quadruped mammals, such as the giant sloth, mastodon, mammoth, and great elk. Hunting populations gradually intensified their subsistence by pursuing smaller animals; by fishing, collecting shellfish, and exploiting other forms of aquatic life; and by making plants of varied types and increasing part of their diet. By 10,000 years ago, groups of hunter-gatherers in the southwest Asia were living in permanent settlements, harvesting wild cereals and domesticating local animals, commencing the transition to human agriculture (the Agricultural Revolution ). Over the next 5,000 years agriculture became established independently in China, southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, Mesoamerica, South America, and North America.

The earliest agriculture was horticulture—the cultivation of small garden plots with hand tools such as digging sticks or hoes. Early agriculturists identified collections of plants and animals that could live with them in mutual advantage, forming human-centered biological communities that displaced species not immediately useful to humans. As agricultural populations grew, intensive cultivation of large fields emerged—eventually employing plows and draft animals.

Since agriculture could support significantly larger populations, settlement sizes increased proportionately. Large groups lived in permanent villages, surrounded by material structures and goods compatible with sedentary living. Specialized craftsmen emerged, supported by the community as a whole, to meet the community's new requirements—the beginning of social differentiation.

As agricultural populations expanded, an increased degree of social organization developed. The first urban civilizations emerged in the fertile river valleys of the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow. Although cities developed independently in several regions, they exhibited similar characteristics. Urban societies were hierarchical, with complex labor divisions. They were administered by an elite class. Monuments were created to symbolize and represent the powers of the ruling elites. These societies grew larger and more complex, evolved stratified systems of social organization, and developed political systems in which power and control were increasingly concentrated in the hands of small elites and increasingly used by the elites for self-aggrandizement.

During the past 5,000 years until recent centuries, the predominant form of social organization was the agrarian state, exemplifyed by the following attributes:

Class division between a small, land-controlling nobility and a large peasantry. The privileged classes constitute a raft of thousands floating on an ocean of millions, with the class distribution of the agrarian state representated typically as:

Elites manage the economy to maximally extract income (that can be transformed into power and political survival) from the surplus production of the supporting population. The peasantry is compelled to pay tribute in some combination of rent, taxation, or labor services—on the threat of violence—to the nobility. The supporting population performs the digging, burning, flooding, planting, nurturing, picking, cutting, capturing and killing necessary to fulfill requirements stipulated by elites. The relationship is one of naked exploitation backed by military force.
The noble-peasant relationship is based on production-for-use. Production-for-exchange is dominated by merchants—who occasionally attain great wealth, but are customarily allotted low social status.
Despite the noble-peasant class division, there often is no overt class struggle between the nobles and peasants.
Agrarian states are highly militarized societies. Military force, devoted to the twin objectives of internal repression and external conquest, is essential to dominant groups for achieving their aims.