The parable of the tribes

Summary The parable of the tribes offers a theory of social evolution to explain why civilization has developed as it has, in particular, why its major transformations of human life have not better served human needs. It challenges the commonsense view that people have freely chosen among the many cultural options. Another selective process has operated, one not under human control and not a function of human nature. Before civilization, all life was governed by a complex, biologically-evolved order. For a creature to develop culture to the point that it can invent its way of life appears to offer freedom, but this freedom is a trap. For what is freedom for any single society is anarchy in an interactive system of such societies. Anarchy — unprecedented in the history of life — makes inevitable a struggle for power amongst societies. This ceaseless competition, combined with open-ended possibilities for cultural innovation, inevitably drives social evolution in an unchosen direction: ways of life that do not confer sufficient power, regardless of how humane intrinsically, are eliminated, while the ways of power are inexorably spread throughout the system.Reference to the book from which this article by Dr Andrew Schmookler was extracted, was made in a recent Book Review inThe Environmentalist (Vol. 5, p. 315) and in the Editorial (pp. 241–243) in the same volume. Schmookler, a graduate of Harvard, undertook this work for a post-graduate thesis at the University of California at Berkeley. He has produced an interesting thesis on the forces controlling mankind's evolution and social behaviour. The article represents only the slightly modified first Chapter of Andrew Schmookler's bookThe Parable of the Tribes and is reproduced here by kind permission of the University of California Press.