Cycles of centralization and decentralisation in human history

James Scott is one of my favourite writers in anthropology, even though we do have differing views on the role of pastoralism in history. Scott, who is an anarchist at heart, does not tire to tell us about the drawbacks of early farming societies in Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2018). The last chapter is titled “The Golden Age of the Barbarians” and celebrated the egalitarianism and freedom those “barbarians” (typically pastoralist tribes) enjoyed and often brought to people living in hierarchical states:

Barbarian societies can, like the oppida Celts, be quite hierarchical, but their hierarchy is generally not based on inherited property and is typically flatter than the hierarchy found in agrarian kingdoms. [...] There was a constant drain of peoples escaping from China to the realms of the eastern steppe, where they did not hesitate to proclaim the superiority of the nomad lifestyle. Similarly, many Greeks and Romans joined the Huns and other Central Eurasian peoples, where they lived better and were treated better than they had been back home. [...]  Tribes are, in the first instance, an administrative fiction of the state; tribes begin where states end. The antonym for “tribe” is “peasant”: that is, a state subject.

The invasion of nomadic pastoralists often brought along a weakening of state authority, like after the invasion of the Roman Empire, which was followed by what we typically call the “Dark Ages”. Scott argues that those Dark Ages often meant better living conditions for the simple people (fewer taxes, more freedom, etc.) and we call them Dark Ages because there is a lack of objects, e.g. luxury items, that we associate with high culture, but that are also associated with high status and hierarchy. I would like to add that much more immaterial values also tend to disappear following pastoralist invasions: technology, science, literature and sometimes even literacy. It was mostly in monasteries that these survived in the Middle Ages.

However, despite all his admiration for tribal pastoralist people, Scott also acknowledges the harm they often did to farming societies, especially their tendency to raid, which paradoxically often made pastoralists the lesser evil when compared to the farmer elite who often made people slave away and showed little mercy:

Carried to its logical conclusion, raiding is self-liquidating. If, say, raiders attack a sedentary community, carrying off its livestock, grain, people, and valuables, the settlement is destroyed. Knowing its fate, others will be reluctant to settle there. If raiders were to make a practice of such attacks, they would, if successful, have killed all the “game” in the vicinity or, better put, “killed the goose that lays the golden egg.” Much the same is true for raiders or pirates who attack caravans or shipping lanes. If they take everything, either the trade is extinguished or, more likely, it finds another, safer route. Knowing this, raiders are most likely to adjust their strategy to something that looks more like a “protection racket.” In return for a portion of the trade goods, harvest, livestock, and other valuables, the raiders “protect” the traders and communities against other raiders and, of course, against themselves. The relationship is analogous to endemism in diseases in which the pathogen makes a steady living from the host rather than killing it off.

Let’s assume that farmers and pastoralists have different evolutionary programming: the farmer’s operating system has a tendency toward centralization, whereas pastoralists, who are egalitarian (at least within their in-group) have a tendency toward decentralisation. It would follow that decentralisation within a population is not only a matter of a generation but also a matter of a genetic legacy. Depending on who represents the ruling elite a state with the cycle between centralization and decentralisation and being “tight” and “loose” in Michele Gelfand’s terminology.

The Mafia typically is a decentralised network, which is the reason why it is so hard to fight organised crime. Returning to Scott’s “protection racket”, it isn’t hard to see the parallels between the Mafia and feudalism, which is a decentralised form of government. Of course, in the case of feudalism, it wasn’t so much a matter of organised crime as being the “honourable protector” of the peasantry. However, those honourable protectors operated very much in the way of Mafia clans (which also have strict honour codes, by the way).

There is a third type of human network, “distributed networks”, which is typical for egalitarian hunter-gatherers (foragers), who do generally not form alliances, but fluidly change the bands (groups) they live in.

Foragers are stateless, anarchical people just like pastoralists. However, if we assume that forager genes also survive in the gene pool (the amount of forager genes is around 20% in Europe) they may contribute both to centralization and decentralisation as foragers have a split and merge pattern. I have hypothesised that unification beyond the city-state required a considerable forager effort as farmers tend to be wary of outgroups. On the other hand, being egalitarian, forager types would naturally tend towards federalization and a flat hierarchy.  

Political scientists generally distinguish between four different temperaments that are most likely associated with our ancestral modes of subsistence:



As long as most people are moderate, the government is unlikely to change. However, the pendulum may swing in any direction. Before the revolution Russia was an authoritarian state. Communism was supposed to bring about a more egalitarian society and in the long run, dissolve the state (anarchy). What happened was the exact opposite, a gigantic bureaucratic apparatus in which equality was more nominal than real. When the Soviet Union fell apart Russia was meant to become a liberal democracy with free-market capitalism (a weak form of anarchism). With a free Russia, the West naively expected that the world was on a trajectory to increasing freedom.  The reality was very different, some people, the infamous oligarchs became rich very quickly whereas many other people found themselves poorer than during communist times and without the safety net that communism had provided. The 90s, which had started so full of hope, ended with the beginning of Putin’s autocratic regime on December 31st 1999. Within a little more than a decade we saw Russia going from tight to extremely loose and back to tight as a lot of Russians missed the security of the communist years and were willing to trade in some of their freedom to get it back.

With strong democratic institutions in place, the West does not expect to see this kind of instability at home. However, what we have been seeing for the past decade or so is exactly this tendency towards instability by polarisation. The USA has lost its status as a beacon of democracy and the American president (even the current one) his status as “Leader of the Free World”.  The truth is, the free world doesn’t have a leader anymore and it’s not as free and united as it used to be. The sentiment is very much like “Can’t we undo this whole globalisation thing? It has become too big and troublesome”. When I was a kid, there was an idea in the Star Trek series I loved very much: a United Federalized World. Unfortunately, we seem much further away from the realisation of this idea in the 2020s than in the 1980s.

For more on the different evolutionary temperaments check out my book Different Kinds of Minds: The Evolution of Us


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