4.3.4 Class Difference In Society

I wish to give a little time to class difference in this Chapter on Anthropology because the website encourages practitioners to share power, something that is the norm in hunter-gatherer societies. Because it is the norm – it is not something that people have to be urged to do.

One of the reasons why sharing power is not the norm in our modern society is that class distinction has existed for millennia. That is, we divide ourselves up into different classes that are distinguishable by practices, types of employment, property owned, habits, customs, wealth, education, sometimes even entertainment, sports and hobbies.

We call the mixture of all of these things our culture.

For example in education, highly-formally-educated professionals, because of decades of exposure to particular norms in their culture in respect of all the above, tend towards using different language and having different interests, as well as having different expectations, than people who have little or no formal education, and are exposed to different norms in their culture. Of course, one set of norms is not really superior to the other, but because of the sheer power of Pillars thinking it appears to be.

The relevance of all this to us is that the class that perceives itself to be at the top rung of the culture and education ladder appears to be fearful that its members will somehow be disadvantaged if it shares power.

Getting back to hunter-gatherer societies, many different studies, some of which are mentioned above, revealed that there is little or no class difference, or class distinction in such societies.  There may be some elders who have more status than the majority of the people, but there is no upper class, middle class, lower class, educated class etc. as we in the modern technological world are so familiar with.

I propose that one of the main reasons for this is that in nomadic peoples, that rely on hunting and gathering, what we’d recognise in our modern world as academic, logic/linguistic type intelligence (left brain) does not bring that many advantages.  Of course it does offer some advantage, but physical prowess, guile, sensory awareness, (sight/smell/hearing), rhythmic awareness and relationship building, would be of equal (or might even be of greater) advantage.

Differences in status (which eventually resulted in what we now know as class distinction) began to emerge about 10,000 years ago when we became farmers.  The reason why farming (that is, cultivating and growing some crops over others, and keeping – and then domesticating – certain types of animals) evolved was to ensure certainty in food supply – which would in turn reduce uncertainty in our lives in general.

Of course, this did not happen overnight – it may have taken a hundred generations.

Because emotional matters are our concern, it is interesting for us to consider what feelings people had when the first man (or men – we’ll call them settlers just for convenience) put a fence or some form of barrier around some good, arable, fertile land and said to others ye can’t come in here because this is mine/ours. I am fairly sure one of the emotions felt was anger. Another was probably envy. And the settlers probably felt fear! (I will expand on this theme in the next post).

What farming brought, however, was competition for food.

This is paradoxical – one would imagine that competition would arise from hunting and gathering, a very uncertain activity, where the results of our endeavours are unpredictable, than the far more predictable activity of farming!

In the next post I’ll attempt to unpack this paradox.

I mentioned in the last post that certainty in food supply increased competition rather than cooperation, and noted it to be a paradox of sorts.

I thought about this a good bit!

It appears to me that, in the getting-on-well-with-each-other department, a harmful by-product of certainty in food supply (surely a very desirable thing) was greed.

But how did we become greedy as food supply became more certain?

An explanation is probably buried somewhere in the reality that usually land was acquired by people who were strong and smart, and mostly by methods that contained some element of force, bribery, dishonesty or even violence.

We only have to look at the way, for example, the Americas were colonised by landowners who replaced nomadic tribes in the 1800’s to see how this happens. I am sure it was no different thousands of years ago when land ownership first began in what is known as the Fertile Crescent – where farming as we know it today is reputed to have started.

I am sure that those early farmers gave short shrift to the existing hunter gatherers in those places where farming began, as the smart strong manipulators, those who would eventually become the nobility, (the fast-processors to be described in the Chapter on Leadership) rose to the upper echelons of society.

I cannot imagine any nomadic tribes obligingly abandoning their traditional hunting/gathering grounds to facilitate those who wanted to put fences around the land and own it!

Indeed, the insecurity that is evident in all our dealings with each other may come from our deeply embedded folk memory of scarcity going back to Paleolithic times (when virtually all of us were hunter-gatherers) and our efforts to eliminate same by farming. When we began to own land, the human mean gene was cultivated – pardon the pun – (or, perhaps, favoured or gained prominence) over the generous gene.

How did this happen?

Let us imagine for a moment that I own a lot, and I and my family are full, and have plenty, and you own nothing, and you and your family are hungry and constantly struggling.  Obviously, you will want what I have, or the equivalent, and if there is no way that you can see yourself getting it then you will be angry.  Then I will be afraid of your anger and will tend to protect what I have, fearful that I will lose it all if I give a little away to move towards equality.

Because my possessions now not only ensure food supply, they almost define me, and give me a kind of status in society that is enviable and desirable, perhaps an ability to influence and control others, and that most mysterious and seductive of attributes that I find so difficult to share…………… power.

And amongst my own peers, other landowners, there is inevitable competition over who has the best land, who has the most land, who can exercise most control over food production, puchase, distribution etc. and who among us can add to our wealth at the expense of others.

The irony is, of course, that we’d all be safer (and happier) if we all had an equal amount – but for me who has plenty – it is getting more and more difficult to imagine no possessions, as I mentioned already.

I believe that property ownership is related to many problems that beset society in the areas of birth, inheritance, inequality, illness and death, what used to be called illegitimacy etc., and even the tendency for males to dominate females.

When owning possessions became the norm, as well as land and livestock, women and children became men’s property.  Those who were smarter, stronger and had the know-how to be able to manipulate others were able to acquire the most property.

Therefore marriage became ritualised, women’s purpose was to bear children and children’s purpose was as much inheritance of land, to keep it in-the-family, as anything else.

I suggest that, in exploring the origins of trauma in the world in general, which I mentioned here, we should look at ownership. The reason I suggest this is that, if we are of a mind to, we can do whatever we feel like to something we own. If that includes other humans – including those in our own family – we can use and abuse with impunity, thereby causing trauma in those we abuse. This behaviour then propagates through time and space.

Negative type emotions that arose from having/not having possessions (fear, anger, envy, jealousy, shame etc.) and the trauma from experiencing violence propagated through the generations through upward and downward causation and became embedded in our genetic make-up as each generation passed.

It stands to reason that such emotions are not as intense at all in a society where no-one owns property and there is far more equality.

I propose that the more class distinction there is in a society the more fear there will be. This is as true nowadays as it was 10,000 years ago – we see it in our attitude to immigration.

During the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and property owning, not everyone could, of course, actually own a farm so many people were labourers who worked on farms and later, as farming developed, in trades and small businesses that serviced the needs of farms.

Intermarriage between families who owned big farms ensured that property ownership was kept within a relatively small group, or what we would now call a class, of people. From competition arose bigger farms and therefore more status, more greed and more materialistic ways of looking at the world. 

Other things that are important in farming are, of course, learning how to store food after harvesting, and then transporting food to people who will buy it.

With owning property came the need for and the rise of technology and the status of technologists i.e. people who could use knowledge to figure things out and fix things, as well as turning vegetables, grain, animals etc. into food that we can eat.

Of course such people were of some importance, but not as important as the land-owners, so they were a different class. There were also people who owned a lot less land, or who were tenants and paid rent to the big landowners.  They were also a different class.

And class of course was (and, I suppose, still is) very important in the colonisation by highly technological countries of less technological countries and societies.

The lowest of the lower classes in the colonising countries usually had more authority than the upper classes of the colonised – though sometimes the upper classes of the coloniser gave the upper classes of the colonised a kind of pretend status to initially win over the population before they exploited them.

Just as an aside, on the subject of domination, is it not fascinating that within the colonising areas of the world that developed together, there are loads of examples of internal colonisation/domination by one country/people/ethnic group over another?

For example, in Europe, the Irish, Scots and Welsh were colonised by the English, as were the Armenians by the Turks, the Catalans and Basques by the Spaniards. (There were a lot of other examples in Europe).

I cannot speak for other colonised peoples, but we were always told that the English were able to dominate us because they had coal, iron ore, (and therefore steel) so they became industrialised whereas all we had was bogs and spuds and sean-nós singing!

But I’m not that sure.

Perhaps the English/Turkish/Spanish ruling classes had a much greater desire to dominate than the Irish/Armenian/Catalonian ruling classes.  (And others – I’m just picking three as examples).  And people who were colonised may have been less left brain and logical, than the ruling elite of the coloniser. [1]

(I don’t know this; it’s just that the coal, iron, steel, industrial development reason on its own seems a bit too convenient).

And talking about left and right brain – I intuit that while a high level of sophistication in left-brain development is necessary for technologically advanced societies where there are distinct classes divided into upper, middle, lower etc., a high level of right-brain sophistication is needed for classless, hunter-gatherer, or tribal societies where there is a lot of sharing of resources and self-organisation. [2].

More about this in Section Five, Practical Applications, particularly when I explore compassion and spirituality in the Chapter on Organisational Matters.

[1]. I have often wondered at the phenomenon (up to the modern day) of wealthy parents in former colonised countries sending their children to prestigious schools and universities in the countries of the former coloniser. Is this because the parents feel that they will learn the skills of left-brain domination – which they associate with their former colonial masters?

[2]. I remember reading once that most ancient Irish symbolism and imagery is based on the circle, whereas that of the English tends towards the square.  Perhaps there is a link to right-brain – left-brain differences here.  I can’t speak for other colonised countries though it might be an interesting study for someone!

It has always fascinated me that, despite the obvious disadvantages of city life, we choose it. In cities there is more crime, homelessness, disconnection, (some might argue more danger to children), unaffordable housing, lower air quality, traffic – I could go on – than in smaller towns and country areas. Yet in every country in the world we flock to cities in our millions.

Let us look at how cities developed.

As we evolved from hunter gatherers to farmers we could not all be farmers. Farmers, essentially, were food producers who sold food to other people who were not food producers. Success in food producing involved having technological support that I mentioned above (primitive at first, perhaps, in comparison with our modern standards – but technological nonetheless) to optimise food production, store it and transport it.

Those non-food-producers almost all chose (mostly for convenience) to live in close proximity to each other – so towns and cities grew up to accommodate the diverse skills and services needed to develop, test and market the tools that made efficient food production possible.

As landowners became more and more powerful, and a hierarchy of ownership developed, (ever before large scale industrialisation) cities developed into entities that were populated by people employed in the bureaucracies necessary to retain the power of the most powerful landowners, e.g. the lord, or king etc.  These would have been military, civil servants, tax collectors, enforcers of various kinds, teachers and other educators, legal experts and various other professions and trades such as those needed to build houses, make clothes, fix things that broke, transportation workers, medical workers, police etc.

While the movement towards city living was driven mostly by economic factors, it is also interesting to look at cities from the perspective of relationship.

When towns became cities, we discovered that we could have different types of relationships.  (Perhaps we are addicted to relationship and attention as I mentioned previously).

Cities also fostered richness of ideas, variety of work, opportunities for education and near constant stimulation. The word cosmopolitan generally applies to city life, diverse, modern and sophisticated. And more importantly than perhaps we think, cities also offer us a choice in respect of anonymity.

There is excitement generated by constantly meeting people because when we meet another person that we like our energy rises.  We will endure all the disadvantages of cities referred to above to guarantee that encounter is a continual part of our lives. 

We obviously like hustle and bustle, movement, being in a crowd, doing what the crowd are doing, and being in the company of other people.

In terms of public health, it is well known that deadly diseases that wiped out many of us spread quickly because of cities – but our ancestors living in cities also developed immunities from those diseases; which, in the long term, made city-based societies far more resilient. 

This was a causative factor in countries where big cities had been located for centuries being able to conquer tribal societies of hunter-gatherers so easily.  For example, in the Americas, the tribal nomadic peoples had little or no immunity to the diseases Europeans brought with them and they died in their millions [1].

Nowadays, despite the disadvantages – we are still choosing cities more and more. I mention it to stress how dependent we are on relationship – and highlght our insatiable desire to keep communicating with each other!

And the nature of cities also points to how enduring class is.

We might imagine that the melting pot of city life would lessen the differences between landowner-tenant, educated-uneducated, farmer-labourer etc. that might be more obvious in the countryside and smaller towns and villages where everyone knows everyone else – but while it dilutes it a little, it doesn’t get rid of it…….

[1]. I once saw a chilling documentary on TV about how European colonisers, when they realised that a particular native population had no immunity to smallpox, deliberately contaminated blankets and other goods that they were trading, knowing that they would cause the death of the native population a lot more efficiently than war.

They also concealed the antidote and/or knowledge of what would enable healing from the native population when they came looking for help.  I’m not sure whether this weighs heavily on our conscience or not but it is an indication of just how indifferent we can be to the suffering of others when we have domination in mind.

There is no space in this website to track the development of farming communities over 10,000 years from the big farms, small farms, tenant farms, big traders, small traders, unemployed or casual labourers etc. to the vast consumer society we have nowadays – but it is worth remembering that we are where we are today because our most basic need is (obviously) food.

And it is also worth remembering that different classes in society in our modern world are a result of hundreds if not thousands of years of unfairness and injustice.

The subsequent anger and fear, and, indeed, disingenuous game-playing that are constant companions of unfairness and injustice (that I referred to in the Chapter on Power and Control in Society) are largely due to differences in class.

And class difference exists throughout the world and in every nation state.  It straddles East and West, North and South, religious fundamentalism, caste systems, developed and underdeveloped world – and is endemic in what we call the democracies of the Western World.

Hunter-gatherers are truly exceptional in this respect!