Tolstoy's War and Peace's epilogue. Human social dominance hierarchy

Comments on Tolstoy’s War and Peace:

Dominance Hierarchy in Human Groups

by James A. Saalfield

5/23/11 

Copyright 5/23/11

In War and Peace Tolstoy asserts that what ever moves human history (or “what force moves peoples”¹⁾, specifically what propels a people to war, is a mystery.  The mover is neither people acting freely, nor big men leading, nor any deterministic forces known to him. But while coming to its mystical conclusion, War and Peace in fact beautifully illustrates what we posit is the main force of human history – the desperate pressure human social dominance hierarchies exert to preserve themselves. 

Tolstoy’s characters all live in dominance hierarchies – indeed a number of nested dominance hierarchies (family, town, army, country). He shows that it is the characters’ place within those social orders that defines them more than their biological or character  traits.  And then Tolstoy illustrates how each dominance hierarchy – as a definable unit - is exquisitely attuned to their own self perpetuation and the mechanisms they use to do so.  He describes how dominance hierarchies’ struggles to preserve themselves are the force which moves “peoples” through history.  Human social dominance hierarchy is the organizing principle of human society.  It is the source of its culture like the hive is to the bee.  Its survival is the key to the survival of the individuals within it.  

Our effort to explain dominance hierarchy as “what force moves peoples” starts by parsing the phrase itself.  We first provide a tight definition for “peoples”; and second we describe the “force” which acts at the scale of “peoples” and how that force works to propel them to war.

One has to provide a concrete definition for “peoples” if the word is to represent a discrete quanta – a unit that acts as a unit; something that can be propelled through history as a unit. ².  What glue is powerful enough to keep a group of people together through the hell of war or at the expense of their own freedom? What is the nature of the glue that makes it less painful and more beneficial to be part of the “peoples” than it is to be outside of the group even in the absence of an enemy?

In War and Peace Tolstoy investigated the dynamics of social structure at various scales - from the family to the town to the city and nation; from the platoon to the brigade to the army and government.  Tolstoy gives ample illustrations of the benefits of being enveloped in a dominance hierarchy and ample illustrations of the costs of falling outside that envelope. He inadvertently but amply illustrates that status within a dominance hierarchy establishes the degree of access to resources in competitive situations.  He shows that the societies that are characterized by, and can maintain “rigid social hierarchies are more stable than those that lack them” because the individuals in them and the group as a whole are more productive.  Each of his examples leads one to deduce that what defines “a peoples” at each scale is the dominance hierarchy (family, town etc.) they are in.

Dominance hierarchy in biologically related groups is well studied.  The adaptive benefits of dominance hierarchies in groups of non-biologically related people are not.  To posit how dominance hierarchy could play the important role of defining a polity, let me start at first principles – primitive principles.

For all species there is a premium on the ability to work productively, and to limit wasteful inter group conflict, because it is on this basis that the species is most successful surviving. There is ample literature on the role of dominance hierarchy in all species ((e.g. reducing intra group conflict; facilitating access to energy [“one at a time, no fighting”] etc.). 

Given humanity’s limited physical attributes, there has been a large survival premium on their ability to work productively.  Although humanity has a number of characteristics and capabilities which are distinct from other species, the ability to make fire (consciously manipulate the use of energy) is central to its identity.  It is humanity's ability to use fire to make things that makes it most productive and therefore it is that ability which MOST distinguishes our species.   It is the species chief comparative advantage. It therefore follows that human social structure (its unique pattern of dominance hierarchical social structures) evolved in large part to facilitate the orderly access to and use of energy to maximize productivity for a bonded group of people.  Dominance hierarchy only exists for discrete bodies of people (you are either in it or not) and therefore provides a clear understanding of who is a member of that polity and why.  In other words, dominance hierarchy defines “a peoples” - the quanta which moves through history.

If we have established the unit - “a peoples”- then what “force” propels the peoples through history much less to war? 

The assertion is that, again, dominance hierarchy self perpetuation is the force which moves “a peoples” through history.  To make the assertion we have to establish that human dominance hierarchical social structures are adaptive forces in the Darwinian sense.  For this hypothesis - that dominance hierarchy works at the group scale – it would have to be shown that it contributes to the adaptive health of individuals within the dominance hierarchy whether biologically related or not; that it demonstrably contributes to their collective survival, and individual welfare.  We theorize that the relative productivity of a group in comparison with the productivity of the individuals within the group acting individually is a measure of its adaptive health and dominance hierarchy’s contribution to it. There is existing overwhelming micro-economic and macro-economic data that this is indeed the case.  .

It is therefore easy to hypothesize that adaptive Darwinian forces exist at the human group (biologically unrelated) level and that those forces come in the form of dominance hierarchies.   It is much harder to explain how a group of unrelated people would be compelled to go to war which was the question Tolstoy was struggling with.   Using the same template we used above we have to first ask what is the “adaptive” function of war in a Darwinian sense?  What is war’s “productive” purpose? 

To measure the adaptive function of a particular human dominance hierarchy in war would require doing an objective analysis of the age distribution and productive health of the dominance hierarchy before and after a conflict.  The literature sites ample examples of where war disproportionately “thinned out” the old, the young and other un-productives (to coin a phrase) improving the health (net productive capacity) of that dominance hierarchy.  In other words war makes the dominance hierarchy more productive by improving the ratio of productive members of the cohort to the unproductive burden. This is clearly a less than satisfactory assertion (not to mention extremely politically incorrect) and it may be un-provable given the difficulty of collecting demographic data related to wars.  Of course other Darwinian forces may be at work at the same time. But war explicitly is waged to defend the productive capabilities and to protect or gain resources necessary for the dominance hierarchy to survive (territory, treasure, stores, productive manpower) and grow.  In other words, war might be fought simply to defend the dominance hierarchy itself and improve its health.  

In sum, Tolstoy paints a historical picture of the Napoleonic wars of subtlety and beauty but also of immense forces which he strained to explain. Studying the efforts of human dominance hierarchies to self perpetuate could provide a material and measurable context within which to come to grips with the question “what force moves people”.

1 “From Part Two II – “If the aim of history is to describe the movements of mankind and of peoples, then the first question, without answering which the rest will remain incomprehensible, is the following: what force moves peoples?”


2“As in the question of astronomy then, so now in the question of history, all the difference in views is based on the recognition or non-recognition of an absolute unit serving as a measure of visible phenomena. In astronomy this was the immobility of the earth; in history it is the independence of the person – freedom.

Jim Saalfield

5/23/11

Tolstoy’s questions in the epilogue:

· How individual men made peoples act according to their will, and

· What governed the will of these men themselves.

· “During this twenty-year period of time an enormous number of fields go unplowed; houses are burned; trade changes direction; millions of people become poor, become rich, migrate; and millions of Christians, who profess the law of love of their neighbor kill each other.

oWhat does it all mean?

oWhy did it happen?

oWhat force made people act that way.

§ To settle these questions, mankind’s common sense turns to the science of history, which has for its goal the self-knowledge of peoples and of mankind.

· What force moves people?

· What is the meaning of power?

oPower is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. 

§ On what condition are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people.  That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

· The presence of the question of man’s free will, though unspoken, is felt at every step of history.

oFreedom is the lack of necessity.

· “What is the cause of historical events?  Power.  What is power?  Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person.  On what condition are the wills of the masses transferred to one person?  On condition that the person express the will of the whole people.  That is, power is power.  That is, power is a word the meaning of which we don not understand.”

· From the eighth paragraph of Part I, section II of the Epilogue - “Only by renouncing the knowledge of an immediate, comprehensible purpose and admitting that the final purpose is inaccessible to us, will we see the consistency and expediency in the life of historical figures; the cause will be revealed to us of that effect incommensurate with common human qualities which they produce and we ill not need the words chance and genius.” 

· And from the beginning of Part Two of the Epilogue – “The subject of history is the life of peoples and of mankind. To grasp directly and embrace in words – to describe- the life not only of mankind, but of people appears impossible.”

· And from the books end - “As in the question of astronomy then, so now in the question of history, all the difference in views is based on the recognition or non-recognition of an absolute unit serving as a measure of visible phenomena.  In astronomy this was the immobility of the earth; in history it is the independence of the person – freedom.”

From Part Two II – “If the aim of history is to describe the movements of mankind and of peoples, then the first question, without answering which the rest will remain incomprehensible, is the following: what force moves peoples?”  “If the force that moves peoples is not in historical figures, but in the peoples themselves, what then is the significance of historical figures?”

And I would take his admonition “… modern history should study not the manifestations of power but the causes that form it.”  And it seems that he begins to describe many of those causes without having a principle to organize them around.  This article provides some scaffolding for those causes. 

Tolstoy throws the concepts of free will and determinism into the water of his historical novel War and Peace to see that neither swims very well alone.

The Great Recession - Immediate Causes

To the degree you can use an organizing principle, here is my elevator story on what happened to cause the Great Recession. 

1.      FFDERAL GUARANTEE:  The root cause, and by far and away the main cause, is the sub-prime mortgage issue.  Ironically Fannie and Freddie were depression era government guaranteed corporations set up to encourage broad home ownership.  The (not just implied, but now actual) government guarantee of Fannie and Freddie was equivalent to putting up a sign over their door saying "steal here", you can’t lose.

2.      FAILURE OF REGULATION:  Barney Frank, George Bush - the whole policital class - used the government guarantee to corrupt Fannie and Freddie by weakening their ability to enforce normal lending practices but instead they provided loans to the politician's constituencies. To their discredit, the financial institutions (Goldman and Lehman et al and sub-prime mortgage borrowers getting houses they in no way “deserved”), did steal - and over-fed at the trough.  Letting them over feed, Barney says, was a failure of regulation.  Indeed, it was that too.  However there aren't many whole governments in the world large enough to regulate what Freddie and Fannie came to be, particularly with Barney getting legislation passed PRECLUDING careful lending and regulation by calling it discriminatory.  Well, yes, being discriminating is discriminatory.

3.      WALL STREET GREED - OVER LEVERAGING:  The implied guarantee had a second order effect also.  It encouraged the investment banks to over leverage.  For every one dollar in mortgage assets as collateral (because the mortgage "would never fail") they themselves borrowed thirty dollars.  Wrong, and the Bushies relaxed the regulation on leverage allowing just four select investment banks to go above the 12.5/1 ratio that had been in force, including Paulson’s firm, Goldman Sachs.

4.      FAILURE OF THE RATING AGENCIES;  The investment banks then took the underlying mortgages and mixed triple AAA rated mortgages with less well rated mortgages (sub-prime) and sold them as a package.  And, low and behold, the rating agencies rated the bundled mortgages as triple AAA!  So the investment banks mixed in more and more sub-prime mortgages, effectively buying sub prime mortgages for cheap but getting to sell them for the same price as triple AAA mortgages - very profitable.  The rating agencies were in no position (staffing and resources) to have any idea how to rate these complex packages of mortgages, but, maybe because they were paid to rate financial instruments, and NOT paid to NOT rate them, they didn't admit to the instruments being unratable. 

I personally don't feel the solution is for the government to buy sub prime mortgages from financial institutions.  It is buying a pig in a poke - the opaqueness of the instruments is the core of the problem in the first place so there is no efficient market to price the asset.  No one yet knows what are in those packages of mortgages.  The intervention point, it seems to me, is at the company level.  Warren Buffett can answer pretty clearly what he gets for his $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs.  What does the US tax payer get for $700 billion?  Warren gets 10% of Goldman in Preferred Shares paying a 10% dividend.  Doing the numbers, the US taxpayers should get at least fourteen Goldman Sachs (more, given that few of the remaining companies are worth what Goldman is).  If the taxpayer were to say we will buy the next fourteen Goldman Sach, first come first serve, and the rest of you are on your own, it would be interesting to see what happens.  More importantly than the infusion of capital, perhaps, is that the government would then own institutions which know the underlying assets and have the people and systems to manage those assets.  Just buying bad loans means the government, not having any people or systems to handle the assets, will hire – you guessed it – Goldman Sachs to manage and sell those assets and even be a customer for those assets at cents on the dollar!  One could be cynical.”

I think the government should consider taking over the rating function from Standard and Poors and Moodys, which acted so badly.  The government role would be to act as the referee, and that could be an appropriate role.  After all, the government is better reffing than playing, and given that the tax payers are de facto guaranteeing the facilities, why not have the government say up front what they will back and what they won’t?”

Written in 2009

Political philosophy - current

I offer my opinion on “what direction (politically) we should take from here”.  Michael suggested that that conversation, being charged, if not toxic, begged for some structure.  We agreed that we would each have the opportunity to speak in turn, uninterrupted, for a considerate period of time.  Once we each have had our turn we might, or might not, decide to discuss what had been put on the table.  But at a minimum we will have had a chance to hear each other out.  By the way, I hope that at least a portion of what each of us is to speak to are our definitions of “direction” and “we”.

First, “direction”: On the table are extracts (and one full copy) of the report from The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (the Simpson/Bowles committee set up by Pres. Obama).  I would support the implementation of all the recommendations in the report if taken as a whole early in this session.  The growing national fiscal crisis must be addressed as our first national priority.  That is the direction I would have the government take. 

Unfortunately, upon release of the report the congress voted against adopting the Commission’s recommendations and the Obama administration failed to support the recommendations.  In fact, soon after voting against adopting the commission’s recommendations, congress and the Obama administration cynically did exactly the opposite of the recommendations. Despite signs of a growing national fiscal crisis, the congress and the white house, by a last minute “compromise” around the Bush taxes, voted not to increase taxes and to initiate an additional $800 billion in pork barrel spending (some revisionists say it was only $400 billion in pork).  Combined, the “compromise” will increase the projected crushing and already unsustainable deficit by almost one third. It is widely felt, domestically, and internationally that the “compromise” is not for the benefit of the country. 

Second, a definition of "we":  It depends on your concept of government, of course, so let me start there.  In fact, let me start at first principles.

Although humanity has a number of characteristics and capabilities which are distinct from other species, the ability to make fire (consciously manipulate the use of energy), and the ability to use fire to make things – and destroy them - most distinguish our species, I think. I believe that the ability to use fire is core to the evolutionary success of the species because it greatly enhanced our productivity.  Throughout our history as a species there has been a survival premium on our ability to work productively.  I surmise then that human social structure was molded, at least in part, to facilitate orderly access to energy (“one at a time, no fighting”) and to establishing efficient patterns for its use (intensely powerful energy imposes significant physical risks and technical risks on the user and society as a whole requiring control).

Therefore I submit that the definition of "we" turns on who are productive members of society because:

• The core comparative advantage of the human species is its ability to make fire (manipulate energy) for productive purposes; to use fire to make things; and to use fire to destroy things. The unique ability of the human species to use fire was core to its survival as a species because it greatly enhanced its productivity
• Dominance hierarchy helped the human species to maximize the benefit (and minimize the cost) of its core comparative advantage.
• Government is a manifestation of dominance hierarchy in the human species.
 

Therefore, productivity should be recognized as the core metric by which to measure the effectiveness of government and those who should be considered for inclusion in the polity;

 Therefore “We” are citizens who are, or because they are children, can become productive.  Productive citizens are 1) those who provide goods and services to others as evidenced by their trade for goods and services in the private market place and 2) those who pay Federal income tax roughly in proportion to the benefits they receive, or more than the benefits they receive.  The unproductive members of society are dependent on the productive – a subset and not “we”. 

Of course there is a lot of mushiness in the meaning of “productive”, “goods” and “services” etc. and lest the definition of “we” be stove in on those shoals let me offer some banter on the subject.  Who should be included? Are soldiers productive?  Are those who minister to the sick of body or soul?  And teachers? 

The answer I would offer simply turns on what market they serve.  For instance, I think all the professions mentioned above that trade their services in the private market can be productive and, if they pay taxes in proportion, are part of the community I would support for inclusion. 

Why base who to include in the definition of “we” on the market they serve, even in part?  In the private market the buyer makes his decision what to buy based on his own needs and he spends his own money based on his decision.  Those service providers who are paid from government sources (however distant) take payment from people many, if not most of whom, have been coerced to pay.  They end up paying for services to beneficiaries who, did not pay for contribute and they seldom use the services themselves.  Doing business with people on a free basis versus a coerced basis - it is hard to think of a more stark distinction except maybe in a communist society where the productive providers are not only coerced to pay for benefits to the oligarch, they are coerced to PROVIDE them as well - slaves. 

Granting that certain government functions are necessary for a functioning society (security - internal [police] and external [military], fiscal policy management and a restrained right of eminent domain, etc. etc.), where do those people fall in the definition of “we”? If government were right sized and its role limited to that of a referee rather than as a player, government employees’ inclusion in the “we” would a minimal compromise of the definition, but a compromise none the less. 

In conclusion, I offer the following description of the "state" and those who run it by Martin van Creveld from his book The Rise and Decline of the State. He is a professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

"Born in sin, the bastard offspring of declining autocracy and bureaucracy run amok, the state is a giant wielded by pygmies.  Considered as individuals, bureaucrats, even the highest-positioned among them, may be mild, harmless, and somewhat self-effacing people; but collectively they have created a monster whose power far outstrips that of the mightiest empires of old.  One reason for this is because, unlike all previous ruling groups, they do not have to pay the expenses of government out of their own pockets.  On the contrary they draw their nourishment from it;"