Thursday, June 17, 2021

Equality

 I find this Aeon article by Kim Sterelny, on the origin of social inequality, to be utterly baffling. The 'egalitarian' society is represented by mobile foragers who (as the article explicitly notes) consist of tiny groups. This equality is slowly disrupted by the development of clans (i.e., extensive families acting as such) and skill specialization. These are, Sterelny says, "scaffolds of inequality", which begins to accelerate once people start settling down into villages and begin storing food.

One would expect from this the obvious conclusion: it is not really possible for us to have an egalitarian society anymore, because the only known cases require tiny mobile populations who don't specialize heavily, don't store food, and don't closely cooperate on a large scale. And that indeed seems to be the conclusion, with a bit of a crude tone-down thrown out at the very end: maybe, maybe, new "social technologies" can mitigate inequality, a hope that seems rather tenuous given that the article also explicitly notes that they are currently being used by people in power to surveil and control everyone else.

Sterelny's article, which is much more speculative in character than the author sometimes makes it sound, makes a common error by assuming 'equality' to be univocal, in this case across no less than three hundred thousand years. Mobile foragers are not 'equal' in any political or social sense that we would normally recognize, although one can identify things in which they would themselves recognize that they make no differences between people or groups. Stable farm-village life changes entirely what kind of 'equality' is even on the table. Market cities change it yet again. Nation-states change it again. The point is not that you can't identify ways in which one form has equality that you don't find in other forms; it's that you can do this for every form and all the kinds of equality are different. You have to have measurable wealth even to have a notion of relative equality in wealth; you have to have a society with a conception of juridical rights to have one in which everyone has equality in right before the law; equality and inequality in a feudal society simply do not mean the same thing as equality and inequality in a consumerist society. Equality and inequality are a matter of how people are related to each other; make a significant change in how people can be related to each other and you change what is relevant to discussion of equality and inequality. Sterelny is not describing changes in how egalitarian a society is; he's just describing changes in the form the society takes.

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Anonymous
0 points
13 years ago

What would it mean to "think with one's body"?

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branemrys
0 points
13 years ago

The real question is what it would mean not to think with one's body. Some ways in which we do:

  • We estimate heights relative to eye-level.
  • Goal-directed movement involves constant kinaesthetic feedback -- it's not a mere brain-to-hand thing, for instance, but a complex interaction.
  • We develop motor learning skills.
  • We count with our fingers, thus using our bodies directly as cognitive instruments.
  • When trying to rotate imaginary shapes, we can use our hands to simulate the rotation, thus keeping track of the sides.
  • When trying to understand what someone else's feelings are, it often helps to go physically through the same motions and facial expressions.
  • We make use of 'gut feelings'.
  • We analogize things to our bodies (Roger Scruton has some good discussion of this, if I recall correctly, in the context of music).

In other words, we measure with our bodies, simulate with our bodies, train our bodies to give the right solutions to problems, use our bodies as metaphors, not to mention sense with them. The list could be made very long. Despite the fact that we do this a lot, we don't do it very systematically, nor do we take full advantage of the potential. And despite that only very specific kinds of cognitive activity, a much smaller number than our full cognitive panoply, can be located wholly in the brain, we still tend to think of ourselves as stuck inside our skulls somehow. But when I am counting with my fingers, my cognitive act of counting is not in the brain; it's a brain-nervous system-muscular system  interaction involving brain, arm, and hand.

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branemrys
0 points
13 years ago

Hmm. MrsDarwin had a comment, but it seems to have bypassed Disqus somehow.   Here it is:

I was going to protest "Love is drama", but on further consideration this makes sense. Drama is change, and love (at least human love) requires constant change and alteration to thrive. Even an externally happy, peaceful love demands constant internal self-abegnation and readjustment of priorities on the part of the individual lovers - "dying to self" is the traditional religious description of the drama of love.

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Anonymous
0 points
13 years ago

For research purposes: sent that comment from my cell phone.