## Metadata - Author: [[Darrin M. McMahon]] - Full Title: Equality - Category: #books ## Highlights - With their ostensible commitments to equality, observers in modern democratic societies often skirt the subject, treating it, as one group of eminent scholars recently complained, as “taboo.” Alternatively, they speak of it exclusively in pejorative terms, as if hierarchy were only synonymous with oppression, rather than what it most often is: a socially sanctioned system that formalizes access to resources, be these food or power, salary or status. ([Location 493](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=493)) - Within forty milliseconds, human beings can tell the difference between a dominant face staring them in the eyes and a subordinate one, with averted glance. Human beings draw on a range of other indicators—including intelligence, reputation, attractiveness, income, profession, and the ever-nebulous prestige—that our primate relations don’t in order to make judgments about status and rank. And, unlike animals, we regularly inhabit multiple hierarchies at once, with the result that a low-status individual in one environment, say a janitor at a corporation, may be a high-status individual, the captain of the company softball team, in another. ([Location 500](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=500)) - But like it or not, they draw disproportionately from the alluring, the athletic, the strong. And the tendency of others to gossip about them, just like the tendency of human beings to gossip in general, is driven by an intense interest in rank differences. As the biologist Robert Sapolsky has remarked, “Gossip is mostly about the status of status.” And status is part of the air we breathe. ([Location 510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=510)) - As de Waal puts it succinctly, our inner ape is “bipolar.” We are at once selfish and selfless, despotic and democratic, moved by interests of power and by the common good. ([Location 558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=558)) - But if a tendency to hierarchy lurks in our DNA, so, too, on the other hand, does an inclination to resist it. “To be human,” the biologist E. O. Wilson insists, “is also to level others, especially those who appear to receive more than they have earned.” What in Australia is called the “tall-poppy syndrome,” the urge to lop off the head of anyone who dares to rise above the rest, or, in Chile, chaqueteo (jacketing), the teasing sport of grabbing another by the lapels and pulling them down to size, has analogues in almost every culture, from the razzing of the !Kung to the grumblings at the water cooler about the boss.20 ([Location 560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=560)) - But as our hominid ancestors broke away from the branch of common descent and their brains steadily increased in size, their political or “actuarial” acumen grew. That gave them an enhanced capacity not only to work together, but to see the benefits of cooperation and sharing. Keeping track of favors, obligations, and slights, they were able to evaluate complex systems and negotiate power. The upshot is that subordinates were presented with a new tool that could help them limit the power of aggressors. By working together, the many could contain and even dominate the few. ([Location 628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=628)) - And so the foundations of what the anthropologist Christopher Boehm describes as a “reverse dominance hierarchy,” or an “egalitarian hierarchy,” in which the many combine to dominate the few, were put in place. ([Location 632](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=632)) - efforts to constrain hierarchy in one realm can easily displace domination onto another. In the case of hunter-gatherers, the more equal relations enforced among men in “public” by reverse dominance hierarchies were likely predicated in many cases on domination over women and children in “private.” ([Location 711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=711)) - One shocking study from more recent times estimates that as many as sixteen million people alive today are descended from just one man, the Mongolian emperor and warlord Genghis Khan. ([Location 732](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=732)) - From modern hunter-gatherer societies we know that women’s foraging activities account for a significant share of the food supply—as high as between 60 and 90 percent in the tropics—giving them a share of the power and autonomy that economic importance confers. ([Location 761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=761)) - for all our capacity for cooperation, we Homo sapiens have ever been creatures of power. On the continuum of animal behavior, we are “semi-despotic,” a little less prone to domination and the seductions of status than the great apes, but not that much in the end. Which means that where and when equality of conditions can be made to flourish, they must be actively put in place, guarded vigilantly against upstarts and aggressors both within and without. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=881)) - And though being a hunter-gatherer was never a cakewalk, studies of the amount of labor necessary to procure the necessities of life suggest that ancient foragers had it comparatively good. The average Paleolithic workweek was probably close to about thirty-five hours, even less than that of the most generously funded welfare state today. ([Location 994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=994)) - The persistence of slavery is a sobering thought, and it needs to be considered alongside the no less sobering persistence of patriarchy. The two, in fact, often went together. It is hardly a coincidence that in a number of languages, the word for “slave” is closely related to the word for “woman” or “concubine” (nu, for example, in Chinese). ([Location 1045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=1045)) - Patriarchy’s grip proved powerful and lasting. More than two thousand years later, that pillar of enlightened jurisprudence, the Napoleonic Code of 1804, continued to lay out the legal duties of women and wives in depressingly familiar terms. As Napoleon himself is said to have observed, in explaining the underlying rationale of the code’s provisions regarding the female sex, “Women ought to obey us, [because] nature has made women our slaves.” ([Location 1064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=1064)) - Well into the late modern period, over 90 percent of the world’s inhabitants were peasants, and the great majority of them were desperately poor. The spoils of civilization went overwhelmingly to the few. ([Location 1096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=1096)) - “It is part of the definition of the Axial age,” Bellah stressed, “that it was then that a universally egalitarian ethic first appeared.” If hunter-gatherers, broadly speaking, had lived as equals, or so we now imagine, to the best of our knowledge they never conceived of themselves as such. The prophets of the Axial Age began to do so for the very first time, sketching the initial outlines of human equality as a self-conscious value and representation. ([Location 1338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0BXKXRHNH&location=1338))