Nascent Central Projects and Cultural Evolutionism
Friday 29 July 2023
It’s been a good week for philosophical reflection, so that I have been led in many different directions by my wandering mind. Part of my philosophical productivity has been finding a summer routine that is cheap and enjoyable. Much of my former routine was built around my parents’ lives. Earlier in my life it was the activities we did together, and later as they (and I) aged it turned into something more like caretaking. Now that I have lost both of my parents, these routines have vanished. I still occasionally meet with my sisters, but mostly my time is my own to organize as I please.
I live on the North Portland Harbor, which is a channel off the Columbia River. Most days I have been paddling my canoe downstream to a small beach on the river. While a lot of the river bank is muddy, there are some nice stretches of sandy beach, and usually I have it all to myself. I used to just get into my canoe and paddle around, but now I have started packing for my canoe trips. I take a folding chair, a change of clothes, food, water, books, and notebooks. On the warm days I go for a swim in the river after I have arrived at the beach, then I change into my dry clothes, set up my beach chair, and enjoy a leisurely afternoon of reading and writing on the beach. Usually I start back at sunset, and it takes me 30–40 minutes (depending on the strength of the current and how hard I paddle) to make it home again, by which time it is nearly dark.
With Machiavelli I can say that, as long as I am reading and writing on the beach, I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; I give myself entirely to the life of the mind. Unlike Machiavelli, I require no courtly garments; flip flops, swim trunks, and a T-shirt will do. The ancient courts of ancient men to which I am admitted entry, despite my flaunting of the dress code, includes Machiavelli himself, who has now joined those whom he once engaged in conversation. As Machiavelli once did, I inquire of them the reasons for their actions; they, in their kindness, answer me, and I record our conversations so that I may recall them later and profit the more from them.
In this way I am filling my notebooks with ideas, though very little of it is getting typed into my computer. After a day of canoeing and swimming I find that I am quite tired. I fall asleep early and sleep soundly (just so, I fell asleep early last night, so I am completing this newsletter on a Saturday because I couldn’t’ stay awake on Friday night). Usually when I am writing at my computer, I start in the evening and work through the night, so I am not currently following this work regime, which usually comes quite naturally for me. But I have learned over the years that a larger routine consists of periods of generating new ideas captured briefly in notebooks, alternating with periods of transcribing, developing, and building on ideas, which is the process that puts them in a readable form. Both are necessary phases of being philosophically productive. But it is the initial cultivating of ideas that I enjoy most — reading, pausing, recognizing an idea, writing down a thought, and allowing that thought to lead on to further thoughts, and thereby to cultivate what Nietzsche called a secret garden. I have many such secret gardens, some of which I have been tending for years.
The older I get the more I see that people mostly get out of life what they put into it. I saw this very clearly with my parents, for example, since I knew them so well. My father loved trucks, and he managed to fill his life with trucks right up to the end. There was much else in his life, too, but it was his love for trucks that was central to his life, and the rest was more-or-less epiphenomenal. I have loved ideas, and I have managed to make for myself a life of ideas. I don’t’ have much else, but I do have a life filled with ideas. I read a chapter of a book before getting out of bed, upon rising I write down new ideas in a notebook. Throughout the day I go back and forth between reading and writing, and usually I read again before going to sleep. Because this is what I have put into life — a focus on ideas — this is what I have gotten out of life. In that narrow sense, I have my just desserts.
A common cope, however, is that, in doing what one loves, other goods will also accrue in life. Sometimes this is true, and sometimes it is not. My father managed to earn a lot of money through his love of trucks, but that was partly because he also had the perfect temperament for business. He had no love of business per se, but he was good at it instinctively. I didn’t inherit this. I have no talent for earning money, nor do I have a talent for networking, which is another way that people get ahead in life even if they lack the hard-driving temperament required to make a success at business. We might call these other things in life, those things in the penumbra of one’s ruling passion, the adjacent goods of life. These things, to my observation, are highly variable. I guess I could say that my adjacent goods in life are enjoying the river, canoeing, and swimming, Fortunately, I knew myself well enough to get a house that gave me access to these things, so I can enjoy them on a daily basis now that I have time to do so. I have not been so fortunate in other choices I made early in life.
One of the reasons that people tend to get out of life what they put into it is that the temperamental bias of one’s ruling passion lays down a tendency to act in a given way early on in life, so that one makes choices that are consistent with one’s ruling passion even without knowing what it is or what one is doing. The other choices in life, lower down on the hierarchy of preference, drive fewer choices, and shape life to a lesser degree. We may covet these things when we see them in the lives of others — they look worth having, from a distance — but that is not the direction in which our passions led us. Coming to terms with this is part of the struggle of self-knowledge.
Nietzsche, in the same passage where he develops the theme of a secret garden, said, “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge.” And he was right. Socrates laid it down at the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition that self-knowledge is to be sought, but there is no intrinsic guarantee that living the examined life will issue in some given degree of self-knowledge. Indeed, having the desire to live the examined life as one’s ruling passion often gets in the way of self-knowledge, resulting in Nietzsche’s realization that we are unknown to ourselves despite our cultivation of knowledge. Again, we can see that the kind of knowledge with which we will be rewarded will be a reflection of the particular inflections of our ruling passion. A passion for knowledge might also be a passion for self-knowledge, and a man in possession of such a passion will be rewarded with a disproportionate degree of self-knowledge. By the same token, a passion for knowledge might be only tangentially a passion for self-knowledge, so that self-knowledge is essentially set to one side, as just another adjacent good in life — a good that might or might not come to fruition.
The individual and his passions, however intense or deeply felt, take their place within a social context of many individuals, each with their ruling passions and adjacent goods. It often turns out that some adjacent good comes to the fore in life simply because it is shared by a great number of people. That shared interest means that the infrastructure is in place by which such a good can be readily cultivated in life, whereas a ruling passion, despite its centrality in life, may have no such social support, and thus may take a subordinate position in social life. This tension between the forsaken ruling passion and the achievable adjacent good informs both the individual life and society. This is the source of dissatisfaction and mid-life crisis for the individual; it is the source of conflicts among those influential few who manage to bring their own ruling passion to the fore, i.e., conflict among elites.
Because we are all human beings with a shared evolutionary psychology with deep roots in a common past, much that the individual desires, even that which he desires above all else, will be shared. I expect that many couples have the shared ruling passion of desiring the good for their children, and this interest has, as it were, a formal equivalence to the love that most feel for their children, so that this good and its (reasonably) ready satisfaction are built into the institutions of all human societies. Similarly, every people has its traditional cuisine that is loved by those whose life has been maintained by it, and such traditions are cultivated to the mutual benefit of everyone in a society.
It is, perhaps, the exception when a marginal ruling passion (something not shared by all, in contradistinction to food and child-rearing, which is shared by all) is able to be cultivated, thus ruling passions are subject to strong selection pressure. Some dominant personality with a ruling passion expressed in a charismatic fashion may leave their imprint upon a society with a tradition that then is handed down, and again a selection process takes place in which those in subsequent generations with the same ruling passion, or a willingness to subordinate themselves to the passion of another in exchange for prestige, maintain and further develop this legacy. It is by some such organic process that nascent central projects emerged from social groups and become the characteristic form of expression of these groups.
In Elman Service’s classic taxonomy of band, tribe, chiefdom, and state, we see the growth and transformation of the nascent central project from the mutually recognized interests of a hunter-gatherer band up through stages of increasing hierarchical organization, increasing density of settlements, and increasing complexity of organization. A source of social cohesion can be transmitted in this way from some highly particularistic incarnation in a band, through an aspiration to universalism in a state, but throughout this process the nascent central project is itself subject to mutation and selection, so that, as the society develops, their basis of social cohesion develops in parallel in a process of co-evolution with the social group.
It is relevant in this context to note that Service, in addition to his famous social taxonomy, also formulated what he called the Law of Evolutionary Potential, stated thus:
“The more specialized and adapted a form in a given evolutionary stage, the smaller is its potential for passing to the next stage. Another way of putting it which is more succinct and more in conformity with preceding chapters is: Specific evolutionary progress is inversely related to general evolutionary potential.” (Service and Sahlins, Evolution and Culture, p. 97)
For a nascent central project to make the transition through band, tribe, chiefdom, and state requires that its evolutionary development not take it down a particularistic blind alley; any social cohesion that either remains mired in particularism or develops toward greater particularism will be proportionately limited in its ability to make this transition. And it is also relevant in this context to note that, in parallel with the Law of Evolutionary Potential, Service also formulated the Principle of Stabilization:
“A culture is an integrated organization of technology, social structure, and philosophy adjusted to the hfe problems posed by its natural habitat and by nearby and often competing cultures. The process of adjustment or adaptation, however, inevitably involves specialization, a one-sided development that tends to preclude the possibility of change in other directions, to impede adaptive response to changed environmental conditions. While adaptation is creative, then, it is also self-limiting. A particular technology requires particular social adaptations for wielding it, and conversely a given social order is perpetuated by co-ordinated deployment of technology. Thus, whereas a given technological development may generate a new organization of society, the latter in turn operates to preserve the technology that gave rise to it. Metal implements fashioned by techniques designed for stone materials, a movement of handicraftsmen which involves the destruction of newly developed textile machinery, the purchase of patent rights by corporations to prevent their being used — these illustrate the role of social systems in resisting or actively inhibiting changes that would disrupt or modify the existing culture (White 1959: 27). Ideological systems, too, are inherently conservative and backward-looking, deriving their authority and sanction from conditions of the past. The ideals and values of most cultures take continuance and changelessness for granted.” (Service and Sahlins, Evolution and Culture, pp. 53–54)
Service and Sahlins develop these ideas in the context of prehistory and the origins of civilization, but we can continue to apply them to later civilizations, and indeed even to our own civilization and future civilizations. The long history of Egyptian civilization points to the dominance of the Principle of Stabilization. Henri Frankfort says that, “every significant trait of Egyptian culture had been evolved before the end of the Third Dynasty” (The Birth of Civilization in the Near East, p. 16), thus by 2600 BC Egypt had developed those cultural traits that were to remain almost unchanged for thousands of years, i.e., this was the characteristic form of expression of the Egyptian people. On the one hand we could say that the Egyptians were trapped in a stagnant particularism; on the other hand, we can say that they achieved magnificent things within the parameters they established for themselves. And we can look around the planet today and ask ourselves, which of the societies we see has already established a stagnant regime in which the Principle of Stabilization will predominate, and which of the societies we see, if any, exhibit the Law of Evolutionary Potential, and so can be the basis of further cultural evolution.
