Did the Neolithic Revolution Lead to the Rise of Inequality?
The Neolithic Revolution is (mostly) about humans going from hunting and gathering to farming. It happened around 10,000 years ago and is widely considered to be one of the most important developments in human history.
In other words, it’s worth looking into.
When you do look into it, you quickly learn that the effects of this revolution include cities, civilization, other “c” words (cuneiform, carrots, cybernetics), armies, hierarchies, and a whole host of technologies, institutions, and ways of thinking that contemporary folks see as natural features of the world.
They aren’t.
Instead, they’re human inventions developed at particular moments in history.
With that said, it’s impractical (and perhaps impossible) to draw out the details of each effect in this humble blogpost, so I have to pick and choose. For this post, I pick hierarchies. By that, I mean some of the social, political, economic, and spiritual hierarchies that are so embedded in everyday life that we assume they’ve always been there.
But have they?
Most likely not.
At least that’s the claim that Morris Berman expands upon and defends in his provocative book Wandering God. So, in part three in this series of book reviews, let’s look into the question in the title of the post: did the Neolithic Revolution lead to inequality?
In order to answer that, however, we need to look into what life was like before the Neolithic Revolution.
Life before the Neolithic Revolution
Before the Neolithic Revolution kicked off in 10,000 BCE or so, humans had been living as hunter-gatherers for nearly two million years. Clearly something worked.
By “hunter-gatherer”, we mostly mean “immediate return hunter gatherers”. That is, human cultures who hunt animals, gather food, and then immediately share it upon returning to camp. They do not store it for later (more on that later).
Although rare today, immediate-return hunting and gathering was all the rage back in the Paleolithic day — in that glorious time before the Neolithic Revolution kicked it in the proverbial genitals.
Features of Immediate-Return Hunter-Gatherer Cultures
Psychologists Leonard L. Martin and Steven Shirk defined some of their major features:
- Small, Nomadic, & Ever-Changing Camps: this “fission and fusion” pattern allows people to come and go as they please
- Intentional Avoidance of Formal Long-Term Binding Commitments: “by avoiding formal long-term, binding commitments, they reduce the possibility of social domination.”
- Relational Autonomy: since groups are so ad-hoc and fluid, each member has a high level of autonomy while simultaneously viewing themselves and others as part of a larger group.
- Highly and Intentionally Egalitarian: they have leveling mechanisms (mostly ridicule and scorn) to bring people down a notch when they get too high and mighty. Certain people are better hunters, but they don’t boast about it or try to dominate others because of it.
- Non-Contingent Sharing: they share with everyone regardless of if someone has helped in the hunting and gathering or not. They tolerate mooches to a degree.
- No Formal Leaders: although the most skilled hunter might have influence over others during a specific hunt, that influence fades when the hunt is over — they don’t retain coercive power forever after. If they tried, most people would criticize them, ridicule them, or simply disobey.
- Distributed Decision Making: a series of individual decisions eventually grows into a group decision rather than a top-down formal leader deciding for everyone.
- Benign View of Nature: they view nature as they view human culture — centered around egalitarianism, sharing, and autonomy
- Cultural Instability: they don’t hold tightly to strong narratives of right and wrong or single versions of truth
- Present oriented: very centered in what’s happening the present moment rather than what might happen in the future
Immediate-return hunter-gatherers were able to maintain their egalitarian ways for some two million years or so. However, around the Neolithic Revolution, they began to morph into delayed-return hunter-gatherers.
If you flip the features above, you get delayed-return hunter-gatherers. In contrast to immediate-return societies, delayed-return ones didn’t immediately share what they hunted and gathered. Instead, they stored it.
They created a food surplus — and a group of people with power over that surplus. In the long run, that seemingly insignificant act of food storage kickstarts a kind of inequality that eventually leads to Jeffrey “Space Cowboy” Bezos and his seven buddies having more combined wealth than 3,600,000,000 people.
How?
How the Neolithic Revolution led to inequality
Although hunter gatherers were by no means perfect, they did manage to keep inequality low for about 20,000 centuries — which is a lot when you consider that “civilization” has only been around for 60 or so centuries. That astonishing fact dismantles the idea that inequality is baked into human society.
Anyways, a little before the Neolithic Revolution, some immediate-return hunter-gatherers were becoming delayed-return hunter-gatherers by storing food. Social anthropologist Alain Testart traces the origins of social inequality back to this change.
Morris Berman agrees with that in Wandering God, but adds a few more factors, including:
1. Population pressures
2. The influence of “aggressive subgroups”
3. Alteration in child-rearing practices
4. Breakdown of ‘leveling mechanisms’
5. Deliberate human intention
Food storage plus the five factors above caused inequality to grow. As humans became more deeply involved in agriculture, it led to disease and food insecurity.
Disease because people were domesticating animals, and that led to animal diseases transferring to humans, and humans transferring it to other humans. Food insecurity because droughts, floods, and raids made it impossible to guarantee food each year.
These were times of stress, and in times of stress aggressive subgroups take power. In the earlier egalitarian days, these mini-Napoleon’s would have been ridiculed, criticized, and disobeyed. Most people would have fissioned off from that toxic group and fused in with another.
But, as populations grew and the climate changed, that was a lot harder to do. Instead, they stayed. Unlike in earlier times when the temporary influence of the best hunter faded after the hunt, the temporary influence of these mini-Napoleon’s stayed after the stressful time. It became formal coercive power for the individuals.
Over time, those individuals formed institutions, and those institutions formed civilization. And that is where we are now.
Summary
So, in short, yes, the Neolithic Revolution did lead to inequality.
Sure, it was slow and gradual. But, over time, food storage, population pressures, climate change, and mini-Napoleon’s created the inequalities around us.
In Wandering God, Berman frames this gradual shift from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to hierarchical civilizations in terms of a change from a Horizontal to a Vertical world.
A horizontal world involves world presence, egalitarian social relations, and leveling mechanisms for checking power. A vertical world, in contrast, involves hierarchical world views, social inequality, and the loss (or ineffectiveness) of power checks. (More on that in future posts).
For now, we have a world that went from Horizontal to Vertical over the course of a few thousand years. Although that’s true for a large percentage of humans, it isn’t true for all of them. One group in particular — nomads — staked out a third position, what you might call a diagonal position that fluctuated between both poles.
That diagonal position of nomads is what we’ll look at in the next post.
