Civilisation versus Tribalism

(Title changed from 'Return to Reason')

Civilisation versus Tribalism

(Note: I wrote this essay as theoretical background for my new book ‘South Africa Explained: Why your intuitions about the country are right’. The book will be released in Spring 2021).

Introduction

“And as imagination bodies forth, The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen, Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing, A local habitation and a name.” (Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

Society is held together by forms: symbols, language, ideas, mathematics. How did humans get so good at communicating in abstraction and what does this tell us about civilisation? In this piece I reference the work of evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar in arguing that language has gone through three stages of maturation: 1. Grooming, 2. Category and 3. Reason. In the first stage language functions as an efficient mechanism for grooming, a social glue for those early hunter-gather bands of around 150. In the second stage humans use language not only for grooming but also for relational categorisation, melding clans of around 150 into larger groups commonly known as tribes, which range in size from a few hundred to millions. In the third and final stage literacy provides the tools for communicating in complex systems of reason and logic by which humanity transcends tribal thinking, or at least repurposes it in service of universal inclusivity.

In Europe the third stage culminated in the Enlightenment when great thinkers used cognitive tools like reason and logic to give form to science and humanism, the foundations of our modern society. But the death of religion and the rise of secular ideology in the 20th century (e.g. Marxism) threaten the assumption that civilisation is different to – and better than – tribalism. This to me is a narrow reading of the truth. Civilisation is qualitatively different and it calls forth a heightened moral commitment.

You may recognise the themes here as resonant with Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory. Wilber argues that at the group (society) and individual (personality) level we are systems trending towards a greater capacity for cognitive complexity and moral care. Wilber argues that the mechanism of moral advancement is “transcend and include”, by which we integrate the lessons of a previous stage as part of our commitment to finding ever more inclusive 9and coherent) frameworks for our story. Wilber’s theory tends toward the simplistic. His three main stages are egocentric, ethnocentric and world-centric.

Dunbar’s number?

In the early 1990s British biologist Robin Dunbar published a paper arguing that the size of hunter-gatherer clans is limited by the number of personal relationships the average member can maintain, which in turn is limited by the size of the brain. Dunbar showed that there is likely a correlation between the average size of the neocortex and the average size of humanity’s original social unit – the hunter-gatherer clan. After crunching all the data, including correlating primate troop size with brain size, Dunbar came up with 147.8 as the golden mean of members that sustained Sapiens clans for so long…and still do.?

When you bypass bothersome Beth in the shopping mall it’s because in that moment your brain runs an algorithm about whether she falls in or outside your virtual clan circle. If she is outside the circle, your clan algorithm nudges you to avoid her. But if Beth is one of your virtual village you engage in a ritualistic act of social grooming. This explains why we tend to groom a certain set of people and offer, at best, social pleasantries to the rest. Except we do not groom the same way our primate cousins do. They fuss over the fur of their grooming partner, while we make a fuss over their new hairdo. There is a good reason why ‘grooming’ has both a literal and figurative meaning. For apes grooming is literal, for us mainly figurative, or what Dunbar calls “vocal grooming” in his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language.

Grooming is how primates maintain troop cohesion and get to know and like (or at least tolerate) each other. Trust is built by the very personal and specific way one individual grooms another. It takes brainpower to remember each individual and groom them just the way they like it; hence primates tend to have large brains compared to most mammals. Interestingly, hyenas have been shown to solve collaborative food-reward tasks better than chimpanzees. The point is that although primates are cleverer than hyenas, primate intelligence is largely dedicated to sociability. Social memory takes neurological bandwidth and selects for intelligence.?

Given the complexity of maintaining multiple grooming relationships, Dunbar wondered if there is a correlation between primate neocortex size and troop numbers. It seems that indeed bigger-brained primates do tend to have bigger troops, which could explain why the planet’s most intelligent species – us – evolved from primates. Bigger troops have an advantage: they’re better able to fight off competitors and predators and they can share chores like child-rearing. Grooming is the social instrument by which primate troops bond. What does this tell us about human evolution?

It’s difficult to maintain multiple parallel relationships through grooming, a labour-intensive activity that demands full attention on one primate at a time. As Dunbar explains it, “…there is an upper limit on the size of groups that can be maintained by direct personal contact.” Hence primate troops tend to be relatively small. By contrast, as Dunbar explains, “speech can be combined with almost every other activity [we can forage and talk at the same time], but it can also be used to address several different individuals simultaneously.”[1]

The miracle of language, Dunbar argues, “…evolved as a ‘cheap’ form of social grooming, so enabling ancestral humans to maintain the unusually large groups demanded by the particular conditions they faced at the time.”[2] A group of 150 cooperative sapiens would have mustered a platoon of men (30-50) to see off predators, hunt big game and wipe out the Neanderthals. And if the Bushmen of the Kalahari are anything to go, their social cohesion ensured survival for tens of thousands of years in harsh country, with little need for technological innovation. The main survival mechanism of Sapiens was not tools or environmental knowledge, it was sociability refined through language. As Dunbar puts it:

“…the need to increase group size at some point during the course of human evolution precipitated the evolution of language because a more efficient process was required for servicing these relationships than was possible with the conventional nonhuman primate bonding mechanism (namely, social grooming). These arguments appear to mesh well with the social intelligence hypothesis for the evolution of brain size and cognitive skills in primates.”

Language, Dunbar suggests, first developed to facilitate social bonds and only later took on the role of “information-exchange”. Language is a socio-psychic technology richly capable of facilitating health and good feeling. The idea that indigenous peoples use language in a gruff direct way is plain wrong; language, as it first evolved, is about creating and sharing good feeling, about saying those special things that evoke feelings of pride and belonging.?

Unsurprisingly, many of us modern folk yearn for the belonging and intimacy which sustained hunter-gatherer clans. James Suzman in Affluence Without Abundance: The disappearing world of the Bushmen writes about Khoi-San communities in Botswana and Namibia. He notes how Bushmen survive rather well in harsh desert conditions while working only 20 hours a week.[3] One of the questions Suzman gets on his speaking tours is, “But what do they do with all their free time.” His answer: “They woo each other.” Spare time is not devoted to refining hunting or gathering techniques, it’s devoted to grooming.

With language, humans could enforce good clan behaviour without the need for excessive violence. Dunbar writes: “…language evolved to allow individuals to learn about the behavioural characteristics of other group members more rapidly than is possible by direct observation alone.” Gossip is a system for punishing behaviour that threatens clan unity. Contemporary studies on conversation show that, “60% of time is spent gossiping about relationships and personal experiences.”[4] Our brains are primed to be fascinated by the doings of our fellow clan-members.

Words, when used in a certain way, are meant to harm. Gossip and hurtful scolding are the flipside of social grooming. Language offers various ways to encourage and enforce cooperation. Our ‘normal’ and most common way of being together is in close-knit bands where everybody knows each other. The big human brain evolved not in myth-making societies but before that in socialising ones that used grooming and gossip to maintain clan cohesion. There are some clans in the Amazon Forest that don’t have words for ‘past’ and ‘future’ or for numbers more than three, which shows that humans do not need a wide vocabulary of abstract terms to survive as a hunter-gatherer clan. And we certainly don’t need abstract concepts to meet our psychological need for love and belonging. We meet these needs very happily through communal song, dance and storytelling and through the language of grooming.

Clans become tribes

Humans did not stay in hunter-gather clans, but – at certain historical and geographical instances – clans merged to form tribes. What’s the difference between a clan and a tribe? Clans cannot grow to much more than about 150 members. Why? Because they rely on direct grooming to hold them together and the human brain is not capable of maintaining more than about 150 personal relationships. But what if the most martial members of the clan swear allegiance to a higher authority? What if the warrior men of the clan bond with warrior men from other clans? The historical record shows how this is one way in which clans unite to form a tribe. Shaka Zulu drew young men from various KwaZulu clans to regimental headquarters at his Royal Kraal. There they shared important coming-of-age rituals, transcending clan allegiance to e.g. ‘Mkhize’, ‘Nkuta’, or ‘Mbuli’, becoming ‘amaZulu’.

Tribes consist of anything from a few hundred people to many hundreds of thousands and possibly millions. Tribes do not replace clans but rather include clan structures within a broader tribal structure. Tribes tend to be held together in a sacred hierarchical order around a uniter-chief on whom members project divine-like powers, as in how the Jews held Moses in awe. If everyone knows their place in the hierarchy and there is a coherent system of succession, tribes function cohesively. This cohesion is achieved through linguistic innovation. Tribalism places a burden on language absent from clan-living. In a clan, words are serviceable insofar as they meet the grooming needs of members and govern behaviour through gossip and shaming. (It’s a bonus that language can also help members refine hunting and gathering techniques). When clans commune to form tribes, language must transcend the limits of grooming and gossip and give meaning to tribal order. Dunbar asks: “How is it that, despite these apparent cognitive constraints on group size [our ability to retain knowledge of only 150 people], modern human societies are nonetheless able to form super-large groups?” He answers his question:

“…language has two unusual properties that make it possible to form groups that are substantially larger than the 150-200 predicted by neocortex size: it allows us (1) to categorise individuals into types and (2) to instruct other individuals as to how they should behave towards specific types of individuals within society…This ability to categorise individuals into types clearly makes it possible to create very much larger groups than is possible by direct interaction. It is only necessary to learn how to behave towards a general type of individual, rather than having to learn the nature of each individual relationship. By structuring relationships hierarchically in this way, social groups of very substantial size can in principle be built up.”

When you only have a 150 people in your clan you don’t need a sophisticated grammar for roles and responsibilities. How does tribal language bond hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, in common cause? Zulu, in common with some other African languages, has a system of isiHlonipho (‘language of respect’) which helps maintain tribal hierarchy. isiHlonipho sabafazi is a subset of isiHlonipho and is aimed specifically at women of a certain age and role in the tribe. A wife must perform verbal gymnastics to avoid the use of certain phonemes that appear in the names of her husband’s relatives. For a modern equivalent of isiHlonipho consider the example of a couple entertaining an important business contact whose name is ‘Stu’, short for 'Stuart'. After cooking lamb stew for the occasion the couple agree to avoid embarrassing puns by referring to the dish as ‘lamb casserole’. isiHlonipho sabafazi also limits some women from using plain terms for sexual organs, which has implications in the modern context when women report incidents of rape or sexual abuse. We may judge isiHlonipho sabafazi as conflicting with our modern value of women’s rights, but – to paraphrase Dunbar – tribes use language to categorise individuals into types, instructing them how to behave to other types. Filial order and hierarchical structures are maintained through linguistic systems like isiHlonipho.

In our distorted masculine retelling of history we emphasise the military aspects of Zulu power. But the welding of the peoples of KwaZulu Natal into a group we call ‘amaZulu’ owes much to Shaka’s linguistic innovations, his ability to unite disparate clans in common tongue, which we call isiZulu. Shaka’s military organisation led to innovations and advancement in the language as youngsters tuned into a shared language of military instruction and sacred ritual, helping them transcend narrow allegiance to clan. Sapiens are essentially talkers who sometimes get into scraps. In even the most violent society, time spent fighting will constitute but a fraction of time spent talking. Violence is not a sustainable solution to social order, language is.

Eileen Jensen Krige’s landmark The Social System of the Zulus describes how language enables a sophisticated filial order. The traditional Zulu social system allots distinct roles for relatives. Roles prescribe level of familiarity, power gap, and function in coming-of-age rituals. In English we don’t differentiate between an uncle on the mother’s side versus the father’s side. In Zulu it’s very specifically Umalume and Ubaba. English doesn’t have a word for sister’s son’s wife, it only has the catch-all ‘daughter-in-law’. In Zulu Umakoti points to the specific nature of the relationship – ‘wife-of-one’s-sister’s-son’.[5]

Krige’s in-depth study of the Zulu people and their language provides ample evidence for Dunbar’s idea that by “categorise[ing] individuals into types, language can create very much larger groups.”

The dark side of tribal category

To recap, tribal communication transcends grooming communication in one important feature: categorisation. In tribal language words not only categorise objects, but they categorise roles and relationships too. By contrast, in a gatherer-hunter community if you only have 150 people to get along with there is less need for categorisation. You can address people as individuals. But if you’re part of a tribe of 150?000 then category is essential.

Our tribal categories did not die with the advent of modernity, to the contrary they are the backbone of our social order, providing the roles, titles and tags that help us navigate a complex network of relationships. Labels like ‘father’, ‘doctor’, ‘policeman’, ‘son’, ‘teacher’, ‘judge’, ‘brother’, ‘wife, ‘girlfriend’, ‘chairman’, ‘boss’, ‘rapist’, ‘racist’, ‘psychologist’ etc. help us calibrate behaviour and attitude toward others.

According to Hegel, contrary to conventional wisdom, stupid people think in abstract terms while intelligent people think in concrete terms. Hegel was talking about superstition. Tribal people tend toward superstition, a moral hazard, and can be manipulated by courtiers, petty tyrants and corrupt operators. In Hitler’s retribalisation of German, ‘Jew’ was a category that guided behaviour to horrifying consequence. The association of category ‘Jew’ with category ‘vermin’ and ‘disease’ worked an evil magic on Hitler’s followers. Subtly, the moral foundations for murder were being laid. This is the dark side of tribalism: it tends to be overly categorical in language, thinking and ethics. At best this binds clans in common cause giving members a defined role and a sense of belonging. At worst categorical tribal language dehumanises those who fall outside the circle of membership.?

What about our modern attempts at political correctness by which we police category for sake of compassionate inclusion? Liberal humanist discourse relies on words like ‘teenager’, ‘transgender’, ‘ethnic minority’, ‘previously oppressed’, ‘LGBTQ+’, ‘gay’, ‘people with disabilities’, ‘economically disadvantaged’, etc. These categories are humanist attempts to include those who might otherwise not enjoy the warm embrace of our humanist ideals. Our attempts at compassionate categories (e.g. ‘transgender’) confuse when categorical repurposing defies reason, like transgender women (biological males identifying as women) competing in female sports.

Plato’s Cave Allegory

Plato’s cave allegory is a foundational narrative for Western Civilisation. Plato asks us to imagine a group of prisoners chained in a cave and forced to face toward a wall on which their captors project shadow puppets with torch flames. The prisoners know no other reality and assume this to be all there is. But then one of the prisoners is taken out the cave and “reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun.” Finally the prisoner sees reality as it as and not as some mocking illusion.

After being “dazzled” by the intensity of the light, his eyes adjust and take in the magnificence of the scene. In only a few sentences Plato provides an authority to our civilising project, to the assumption that higher culture is possible and desirable. He does so by telling us to imagine that this prisoner, who is really us, “will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven…Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of it in the water, but he will see it in its own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate it as it is.”[6]

This is what civilisation is meant to be dedicated to. Something beyond the senses and – as I argue here – also beyond limiting social custom. Plato spells out the allegory: “the prison-house is the world of sight…and the journey upwards [is] the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world.”[7]

What is waiting for us in this intellectual “world of knowledge”, as Plato calls it? It’s our very moral beacon: “In the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and when seen is also inferred to the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of the light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.”[8]

In a simpler world Plato’s allegory would be the end of the story, with good people hitching themselves to rational action and intellectual discernment. But Plato knew nothing of Darwin, Jung, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud – those modern men who dared to speak the unspeakable. What could Plato have known about selfish genes? What are the implications of the biological fact that much of what passes for human motivation has been pre-programmed at the most basic cellular and neuronal level? And yet there is something deeply moral about the human project. ?

Civilisation’s moral posture

Morality in the world’s most advanced countries extends unprecedented freedoms and rights to children, women, minorities, and even animals and the environment. This warm embrace of all souls is grounded in the same morality that held clans together in the Paleolithic age. Indeed the foundation of all morality is mammalian care, which takes us back hundreds of millions of years. However, our ideology of liberal humanism is something of a riposte to evolution’s dark forces. It seems to be saying that we humans are spiritual animals; and possibly uniquely so. And that through reason and honest discourse we can transcend the constraints of evolutionary programming. And we can become so refined in our moral sensibility that we can even project our spiritual qualities onto fellow animals with whom we share this planet. Ours is a vaulting moral ambition.?

The reason I rate Ken Wilber as an important 20th century thinker is because he has tried to solve the contradiction at the heart of our liberal humanist ideology. How can we be both functions of biological evolution, as well as spiritual beings? And how do we revive our enchantment in the face of the fact that our truth-seeking has become singularly scientific? How do we marry sense and soul; religion and science?

Wilber’s answer is that we are beings of endless depth and possibility. And that our intellectual frameworks should at least account for the fact that as a matter of experience we are an expression of consciousness.[9] And that our philosophy and truth-seeking should promote integration, care and more enlightened expressions of consciousness.

Wilber borrows from Jung to argue that humans, as both individuals and communities, are animated by hidden psychic forces which become narrowing and potentially destructive if not seen in their proper place. This played out in the 20th Century when twice European Civilisation was reduced to barbarism.

Jung’s?idea of ‘shadow’, Freud’s ‘id’, and Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ is a warning to civilised Man that the evolutionary forces of sex, will- to-power and aggression bubble beneath the veneer of our civility. ?

Does this mean we should judge tribes for being barbaric? Not necessarily. Jung (for one) enjoyed his time with tribal people in Africa and seems to have found their way of life much to his liking. It was with some effort that he dragged himself back to ‘civilised’ Europe. Wilber is dead-scared of striking a judgemental tone to those in earlier developmental stages. And yet it’s impossible to describe Wilber’s ideas without assuming that some groups are behind in the game of consciousness

I also have no major negative judgement against tribal people. There’s a case to be made for the opposite, given that many in Western societies could do with a dose more tribalism to ward off the haunting loneliness of individualism. My point is that nation-states can only survive as civilisations and not as a collection of tribes. Given that we are in the age of the sovereign nation, it’s advisable for all peoples to choose civilisation over tribalism; or at least to moderate their tribal instincts.

So where is the cutting edge in this debate, how do we tell barbarian behaviour from civilised behaviour? It’s in how we express ourselves and how we communicate; the posture we adopt in the world; and the commitment to personal growth and professional advancement.

In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion a lower-class flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, has her world shaken when a customer tells her: “A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere – no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit their crooning like a bilious pigeon.”

Literary works like Shakespeare and The Bible beckon us toward a transcended use of language, “the divine gift of articulate speech”. I spend hours of my day engaged in this world and so do most of the world’s most powerful people. Thanks to the invention of writing and then widespread teaching of literacy, Sapiens entered a third language phase that in Europe culminated in the Enlightenment. With writing humanity could grasp at truths it could hitherto only vaguely intuit; and intelligent people could order their thoughts, giving logic and reason the edge over chiefly whim and tribal power games. With writing, abstracted intellectual flights about humanity could be embedded in legal code, the foundations of our humanistic morality. With literacy, a community of serious thinkers – across thousands of years in time and thousands of miles in distance – could collaborate in seeing logical pattern in the natural world. It all culminated in the Age of Reason and Enlightenment, with its breakthroughs in humanism, logic, mathematics and science. Language was no longer captive to political or priestly power; geniuses could freely speculate about the nature of things and hold readers with the power of their prose, the undeniable logic of their scientific claims. As literacy grew, the power of language devolved to ordinary people and like a “divine gift” literacy gave us the means to engage our Godly powers of reason. I refer to this third use of language variously as ‘reasoned language’, ‘the language of reason’, ‘reasoned discourse’, ‘reason’, ‘measured speaking’, ‘dialogic argumentation’[10], etc.?

What distinguishes civilisation from tribalism? Tribes and clans made use of complex language, sophisticated concepts and reasoned argument, why aren’t they civilised? Civilisation is different from tribe in its institutionalization of literacy and reason. When a society commits resources to a parallel world of abstracted truth – Plato’s ‘intellectual world’ – then that society is becoming civilised. But the transformation from tribe to civilisation is gradual, with categorical tribal logic being slowly superseded – particularly in places of high decision-making – by more subtle, complex systems of logic.

?Civilisation comes about when individual genius is sufficiently freed (by law) and supported (by institutions) to delve into the true nature of things beyond categorical tribal truths. We respect those who master abstract forms – be it in science, psychology, literature, or mathematics – and we devote enormous resources to introducing our children to this realm. Our world rewards those who can read a spreadsheet, interpret a graph, write a legal contract, understand how a cell works, grasp the power of compound interest, code computer programs, appreciate Dostoevsky, etc.

And at the heart of it all is our commitment to the logos.

Socrates’ sacrifice: learning the logos in the Axial Age

Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy defines logos as “the ‘argument’ that comes to life in dialogic argumentation” and “…the living ‘word’ of dialogue in the context of philosophical argumentation.”[11] In his discussion The Last Words of Socrates at the Place where he Died, Nagy explains that Socrates, facing his execution, calls on his followers to keep their “composure” and “endure”, for “…a man should come to his end in a way that calls for measured speaking.” ?

And what should we make of Socrates’ cryptic last words, “don’t forget to sacrifice a rooster to Asklepios”? ?To Nagy, this is a reference to the possibility of resurrection. Asklepios was the son of Apollo and the god of healing, famed for his ability to bring mortals back to life. Nagy interprets Socrates’ teaching as: “He [Socrates] is dead, and you are asleep. But then, as the sun comes up, you wake up to the voice of a new rooster signalling that morning is here, and this voice will be for you a sign that says: the word that died has come back to life again. Asklepios has once again shown his sacred power. The word is resurrected. The conversation may now continue.”

Socrates lives on in the imagination as the sacrificial truth-seeker. Where old tribal Man sacrificed himself for sacred social order, new Axial Man put himself on the line, a new post-literacy man found himself the servant of a strange transcended reality.

Socrates marks a clear departure from the tribal age to the Axial Age, a term coined by Karl Jaspers (1883-1969). Jaspers tells us that from 800 to 200 BC philosophers in Persia, India, Judea, China and Ancient Greece laid “the spiritual foundations of humanity”.[12] He credits people like Buddha, Moses, Confucius, Plato, Lao Tzu and Zoroaster for creating “universal religions” and for fostering a global – even cosmic – vision of morality.[13]

The Axial Age is important in that we see for the first time that religion and philosophy are starting to become institutionalised. Urbanisation and increasing specialisation of labour freed up a priestly class to think and meditate, which led to a spiritual shift in humanity and put individual conscience centre-stage. With this new orientation came a revolutionary idea: that society is made up of sovereign individuals who directly access a transcended order.

Urban living is less communal, less dependent on tribal bonds. You can learn a craft like woodwork, or sewing, and become independent. You start to trust less in the rules and fashions of society and more in your own conscience. Guilds and professional associations laid the foundations for the Enlightenment value system, which philosopher Stephen Hicks sums up as objectivity, reason and individualism. Steven Pinker defines it as science, reason and humanism.

The logos is a product of the Axial Age. And it has become so commonplace that we’re not sure what to do when people attack. As the modern left does today. Such is the pervasiveness of political correctness in our age that even conservative thinkers try backdating the triumph of the logos to pre-Axial times. In Enlightenment Now Steven Pinker grants that the San of the Kalahari used reason in hunting. Citing the studies of Louis Liebenberg, Pinker notes that a young hunter can “challenge the majority opinion of his elders” by “engaging in reasoning”, and “if his interpretation of the evidence is convincing, he can bring them around, increasing the group’s accuracy”.[14]

One imagines the young San hunter reasonably making his point against the elders, but would he hunt alone in defiance of the clan? It’s possible that some did. However ‘defiant loner’ is not a category that was encouraged by clans and tribes. In contrast, Western ?literature is singularly dedicated to it: Catcher in the Rye, The Outsider, Hamlet, Don Juan, Crime and Punishment. These are foundational texts of modern ethics, with rich and conflicted characters expressing internal worlds of angst in a struggle for authenticity amidst a social milieu of mirrors. The San hunter is morally and ideologically committed to clan unity, not to individual conscience and reason.

The Axial philosophers laid the foundations of civilisation and sanctified the pursuit of personality; they dignified society by sharing gifts retrieved from their lonely flights of transcendence.

Mathematics and the problem of language and truth

My term ‘reasoned language’ presupposes that it’s possible for language to map reality, for it to communicate something worthy, reasonable and true. The most reasonable language we have is mathematics. Like a humble servant who masters his domestic chores, mathematics sticks to keeping its house in order, not pretending to any truth beyond the logical framework within which it operates.

Not only is mathematics modest it also involves numbers, those abstract entities that give us a firm grip on the world. I cannot hold ‘three’, but I can hold three balls, three spoons, or three dishes. Mathematics – expressed in engineering, economics, medicine, statistics, finance etc. – is key to this modern project of unimagined knowledge and human agency. It has given scientists a consistent method of verification and extrapolation, a wonderful tool to create forms of truth from thin air. Plato would have been proud. Today leaders of large institutions – be they business or government – daren’t make an important decision before consulting the numbers. We no longer trust in the righteousness of God; we trust in the calculating powers of mathematics.

Galileo, the ‘father of the scientific method’, put it more delicately: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.” Thomas Aquinas pointed out that God cannot do something logically impossible, like make a triangle that does not add up to 180 degrees: even God must follow the laws of mathematics. Isaac Newton sought divine inspiration in numbers and in mathematics.?

In the spirit of discovering an immaculate logic, Bertrand Russel and AN Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica, some 2?000 pages of it. They were trying to bind mathematical truth to pure logic and to reconcile the logic of mathematics with the logic of language. (Famously, it was only 80 pages into Volume II that they could confirm the proposition ‘1+1=2’). Can mathematics be reduced to “certain fundamental notions of logic”[15], as Russel hoped? Perhaps not. Godel’s Theorem (1931) “showed that no finite system – logic or anything else – could be used to derive all of mathematics.”[16]

Douglas Adams satirises our faith in numbers when, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a computer called Deep Thought takes 7.5 million years to answer “…the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”, and comes up with “42”. What if there is no absolute logical framework, no ground zero on which to build our monuments to truth? Ever since Nietzsche announced the “death of God” we’ve been casting around for something else on which to base absolute truth claims. The thinking goes: ‘Science and mathematics are as absolutely true as we’re likely to get, so perhaps this is our rock of truth on which to build a brave new civilisation.’ Stephen Batchelor, a famed interpreter of Buddhist wisdom, rejects the idea of an absolute truth that individuals can reliably access. He instead avers that our human condition is contingent, poignant and tragic. It’s also computational. We’re not so comfortable with mathematics as an oracle for truth, but we’re very comfortable with it as a tool of computation. Our computational disciplines – which attain to ever greater heights in the digital age – give us a handle on the world. But they do not entirely resolve our need for that foundation of truth.?

Upgrading language to encompass the ethics of individualism

After starting his career as a logician and mathematician, Bertrand Russel (1872 -1970) turned his formidable genius to ethics. The shift was partly inspired by an incident in his late 20s when he witnessed the deep suffering of a close friend:

“Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable; nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong,…that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that.”

While scientists journey out into the world, artists and mystics go within. Bertrand Russel embodies both intellectual movements, a mathematical genius who had a handle on the moral calculus behind world events. He anticipated our liberal advances and was on the right side of the main moral debates of his time. Russel’s examined approach suggests that we cannot navigate this complex world without a map of the territory, even if an imperfect one. During the Enlightenment people began to turn away from the Bible and toward great artists and writers for guidance…for a moral map to navigate the ethical intricacies of individualism. ?

Enlightenment writers increasingly took on existential and psychological themes, like authenticity, alienation and world-weariness. Shakespeare’s masterwork Hamlet offers a dignified way to vent disgust at our tawdry existence. The play opens with Hamlet pensive about the unseemly haste of his mother and uncle’s marriage after the death of his father. He has a bad feeling about it and would kill his uncle if only he could find the right words to justify it. The decisive action is paused for three hours as Hamlet reinvents the English language. While mathematicians and scientists improve our ability to describe the natural world, thinkers like Shakespeare and Dante give us the language to express our sacred inner world. If Shakespeare couldn’t find the right words he invented new ones: ‘invulnerable’, ‘lonely’, ‘jaded’, ‘amazement’, ‘addiction’, ‘nervy’, ‘obscene’, ‘critic’, etc.

Thinkers, from Socrates to Shakespeare, upgraded our language to handle the new complexities of civilised ethics. From around the time of the Axial Age, European and Asian thought became infused with conceptual terms that point to a world beyond this one; a more ‘potent’, ‘substantial’ and ‘essential’ world than the tribal one. Writers like Josef Conrad, Dostoevsky and Shakespeare take us to the edge of language and narrative, wrestling with meaning and flirting with nihilism, as in Hamlet’s: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals – and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” (Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2) If Hamlet had been a modern character he may have ended with the question, “…and yet to me, what is this primate?” To the melancholic loner it can seem that humans are no more significant than primates. What would our literary greats have made of the modern genre of primatology, which dignifies our ape cousins by giving them a backstory? Robert Sapolsky, renowned primatologist and author of A Primate’s Memoirs, notes:

“Primates are super smart and organised just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out... If you live in a baboon troop in the Serengeti, you only have to work three hours a day for your calories, and predators don’t mess with you much. What that means is you’ve got nine hours of free time every day to devote to generating psychological stress toward other animals in your troop. So the baboon is a wonderful model for living well enough and long enough to pay the price for all the social-stressor nonsense that they create for each other. They’re just like us: They’re not getting done in by predators or famines, they’re getting done in by each other.”[17]

Baboons have social needs like humans and get emotionally hurt just like them. The will to power, the need for belonging and recognition, maternal bonding, paternal sacrifice – it’s all there in the primatology literature. Our great and petty acts of sociability play out on the African savannah daily among a troop of baboons. Hamlet’s personal crisis of meaning resonates today. There is a nagging suspicion that the biological reality of our situation disqualifies the possibility of a transcended truth. It is not easy to rise above the comforting bullshit of our society and the glib rationalisations of our privileged position in it, a theme French existentialist Albert Camus explored in his landmark novel L’etranger (1942).

Camus has Meursault, a Frenchman, shoot an armed Arab in an altercation on an Algerian beach. Meursault finds himself unexpectedly the subject of a murder trial; he muses “…all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colourless swirling river that was making me dizzy.”[18] What’s it like having no soul? Is Meursault tortured by having lost his freedom to judicial process? Not at all: “I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys.”

Meursault, the heroic anti-hero, does not fear society…not even at pain of?death. He refuses to make inauthentic noises of grief at his mother’s passing, or to pretend to anything other than what he is – a man who lives for today and enjoys the beauty of the moment. Camus’ exploration of Meursault’s inner landscape is an attempt to push back against a world civilisation that had become totalising, leaving a god-sized hole in the psyche. When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 Camus was purported to have said: ?“The purpose of the writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.”[19] Without reasoned language, measured speaking, “the living ‘word’ of dialogue”, etc. civilisation will indeed destroy itself. An abandoned logos leaves an ideological vacuum inevitably filled by tribal morality. This is what happened in the 20th century in communist and fascist countries. Both systems undermined rule of law, promoted cult of personality, glorified militarism and debased science and reason. Both systems attacked the ethic of individualism, the dignity of the lonely self, that our greatest writers did so much to promote. And no-one wrote about this subject more potently than George Orwell.?

The warp and weft of language-morality torn apart by the modern left

George Orwell was fascinated by the interplay of ?language and morality, and he distinguished himself among intellectuals with his embodied commitment to justice. He fought fascists in Spain, lived among miners in Wigan and self-isolated at a remote retreat in the Scottish Hebrides to write 1984. In the novel Big Brother is the all-pervasive presence of the state, reaching deep into the soul of the citizenry, controlling thought with synthetic language: Newspeak. The syntax of language must bend towards the will of The Party. Big Brother decrees that 2+2=5 and citizens buy it. Orwell based this perversion of reason on a Soviet slogan (‘2+2=5’) in which citizens were exhorted to complete the second five-year plan in four years. Orwell was intrigued and disturbed how the Soviets so brazenly reinvented facts. With the stroke of Stalin’s pen the 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression transformed the Nazis from hated enemy to loyal friend, immediately rubber stamped by the Soviet press.

Although his greatest works parodied communism, Orwell was in fact socialist. Like Marx he believed careful analysis could help reform society and alleviate poverty and exploitation, but – unlike Marx – he maintained a light touch, a flexibility of thought and a commitment to investigating on-the-ground reality. Orwell would never let himself become ideologically possessed. He was very much a liberal, in the sense that Alan Paton defined the term: “…a generosity of spirit, an attempt to comprehend otherness, a commitment to the rule of law, a high ideal of the worth and dignity of man, a repugnance for authoritarianism and a love of freedom.”[20]

Orwell recognised that things go wrong when words no longer mean what they mean, when individuals – by force or fashion – surrender their autonomy to make meaning of what they see and instead parrot dogma. In his essay ‘Visions of a Totalitarian Future’ he notes that totalitarianism destroys the “…common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal…”[21] Nazism, Orwell tells us, dictates, “There is…no such thing as ‘science’. There is only ‘German science’, ‘Jewish science’ etc.”[22] (My guess is that Orwell would be against postmodern ideas by which literature, history and even science are re-imagined in the pursuit of race and gender equity). Where some modern leftists argue that 20th century totalitarianism is morally equivalent to traditional religion, he nuances the difference in his essay ‘Literature and Totalitarianism’:

“In medieval Europe the Church dictated what you should believe, but it at least allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death. It didn’t tell you to believe one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday…Now, with totalitarianism exactly the opposite is true. The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it doesn’t fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but it can’t avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declares itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth.”[23]

Power players use categorical language to galvanise supporters and shame enemies, as the communists did with terms like ‘bourgeois’, ‘capitalist class’, ‘kulak’, ‘imperialist’, ‘enemy of the people’, etc. This in contrast to the Enlightenment idea that the dynamics of individual personality is what is truly interesting and numinous (shining forth). Is the left – with its insistence on correct speech and its eagerness to label enemies ‘racist’, ‘sexist’ or ‘fascist’ – taking us back to tribal modes of categorical thinking? They would argue that politically correct speech is helping rid the Enlightenment of hypocrisy and hold its champions to the flame of their own standards.

But what would Orwell make of Judith Butler, who is something of a high priestess of the postmodern left. Butler writes in terms that insinuate, that hint at the dark forces of hidden oppression without spelling out who exactly has done what to whom. In her essay ‘Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire’ she writes: “That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalised ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped – as if it could be.”[24] (This type of syntax is fairly typical of Butler’s writing.)

Gossip is how clans have patrolled the borders of decent behaviour; gossip is also an effective tool for women who aspire to power. Our modern left resembles not so much a tyrannical male system like you had in Communist Russia, but a female-run system where people are kept in check through gossip and insinuation. Gossip and insinuation are tribal tools to keep drifters in check and maintain the unity of the tribe.

Politics in most parts of the world has a strong tribal element. As Jonathan Haidt puts it: “People vote as groups, not individuals. Political affiliation is an act of tribal solidarity. And its facilitated by a type of shared talk that cements bonds of solidarity. Language has this power of us…a sort of fetish. ?

Language, fetish and opposing ideologies ?

According to Marx (1818-1883) commodity fetishism is the false belief that a product has inherent value independent of the work that went into making it. It’s like Marx is saying there’s no such thing as brand equity, only the brute object and the brute force that went into making the thing.

Marx came up with ideas like this to counter Adam Smith’s claim that markets are self-regulating, automatically assigning a useful value for goods and services. Marx wanted to free Man from the tyranny of the hierarchical capitalist order and deliver her into more benign social conditions. Marx’s use of ‘fetish’ references anthropological studies of ancient peoples who believe that certain special objects have magic power. Like the Kalahari Bushmen in Jamie Uys’ The Gods Must be Crazy, to whom a coke bottle takes on enchanting significance.

Marx’s thinking was not true in any technical economic sense. But it has a ring of prophecy, given how chained humanity has become to the things it produces.

Marx believed he had chanced on a secret that would free Man from the bonds of a hierarchical society. But the problem runs much deeper than Marx imagined. Improving material conditions does not resolve the yearning for meaning and belonging. We care more for words of praise and affirmation than we do for precious objects, which are only a substitute for the grooming we yearn for, a fetish to ward off the evil said against us.

We imbue words with the magical quality of meaning, which makes them as fragile and precious as bone China. Our primate cousins trick each other with cry wolf signals, warning male companions to ‘look out’ and leaving themselves free to chase an available?female. Our high-minded values, when refracted through the lens of evolution, cast us in the shadow image of a lustful ape. We do not and cannot dignify language; but language can dignify us. ?

When we become civilised we have to let go of the language fetish. Tribes fetishize language to maintain coherence and meaning. Civilised people are meant to adorn their utterances with the ornaments of polite speech, modest assertion and measured riposte. Civilisation is simply a function of masses of people acting in concertedly civilised ways. What would help us achieve this? A good start would be to dignify our existence on this Earth in more epoch terms than the ironic comedy that pervades entertainment channels. Tragedy would be a more appropriate genre.

Thomas Sowell (in A Conflict of Visions) contrasts the “constrained vision” with the “unconstrained vision”. In his The Blank Slate Steven Pinker rendered Sowell’s idea as the “tragic vision” versus the “utopian vision”, while Jonathan Haidt also references the idea in his The Righteous Mind: [25] The unconstrained vision puts utopian faith in society to fix human ills; the constrained vision sees human nature as tragically flawed and selfish. The above writers all agree that the tragic vision is what animates conservatives, while the utopian vision animates liberals and progressives.

Ironically then, Marx seems to support the tragic vision. He writes in the Communist Manifesto that “the bourgeoisie” have “drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” His romantic-tragic instincts are deeply offended by our age of calculation and instrumentalism. And so they should be.

Practicing logos

Whether we’re talking about maths ability or language ability, civilisation depends on citizens communicating in symbols and concepts. Our notion of intelligence is directly linked to our ability to perceive abstract patterns that other intelligent people agree are there and that have real-world implications in academic and general problem-solving ability. The social sciences call this ‘general intelligence’. Why is this important in distinguishing between tribes and civilisations?

There’s no dominance hierarchy to intelligence: the tribal chief does not determine patterns of meaning. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz independently developed the mathematical system of the calculus. In terms of the ensuing ‘who-got-their-first’ controversy what was beyond doubt was that some clever person would eventually have found it. Calculus is not only a computational tool it’s also proof of an accessible universal order. It’s exactly like Plato suggested, a realm beyond our senses that is somehow more potent and meaningful than anything offered up by our senses.

Universal meaning works…the wise know this. Those better able to discern and express coherent patterns – be it in mathematics, language or ethics – can become successful engineers, doctors, spiritual mentors, marketers, entrepreneurs or lawyers. Our world is founded on conditions that require multitudes to speak freely and reasonably in mutually intelligible terms about things that don’t exist. This is the opposite of tyrannical hierarchy and political tribalism, whereby social power constrains truth-seeking.

The implications of this progress reverberate today. Economic progress allows us to trade on a global scale. Political progress gives us notions of self-determination, democracy and human rights. And scientific progress frees the mind to engage with material reality on the deepest of terms. None of this would have been possible had language not flowered with the advent of civilisation. By the time of the Enlightenment, language and logic had been sufficiently set free for Newton and Leibniz to describe the calculus and Shakespeare to describe Hamlet’s inner turmoil. It’s a great intellectual tradition, facilitated by a great language, that can do these things. Our progress does not depend on cooling the climate, banning the bomb, or foiling clever bots, it depends on our commitment to logos, our commitment to objectivity and reason in the pursuit of progress.

How do we know this theory works?

In his 2008 bestseller Outliers Malcolm Gladwell explores Korean Air’s campaign to improve its terrible safety record. As Gladwell explained in Fortune:

“Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. When we think of airline crashes, we think, Oh, they must have had old planes. They must have had badly trained pilots. No. What they were struggling with was a ?cultural legacy, that Korean culture is hierarchical. You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the US. But Boeing and Airbus design modern, complex airplanes to be flown by two equals. That works beautifully in low-power-distance cultures (like the US, where hierarchies aren’t as relevant). But in cultures that have high power distance, it’s very relevant.”[26]

Korean Air turned the situation around and now boasts an exemplary safety record. One of their solutions was to mandate English as the language of aviation. Korean pilots were safer when they spoke in a language that had enabled the Age of Reason and the rise of individualism and therefore was less loaded with the baggage of tribalistic social hierarchy.

How do we know the logos works, that it offers an ethical calculus for a kinder, less sectarian reality? If logos is real and if we can access it through measured speaking then we would expect that after the Enlightenment it would become the weapon of choice in emancipatory movements. This is precisely what happened. Once remarkable individuals like Frederick Douglass and Sol Plaatje had got a handle on reason they could challenge social assumptions about race and agitate for humanism and fair treatment. Douglass (1818-1895) was “a living counter-example to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens.”[27] Through reason Douglass helped abolish slavery. As he remembers his six-year-old self, working through the problem…

“I had, through some medium, I know not what, got some idea of God, the Creator of all mankind, the black and the white, and that he had made the blacks to serve the whites as slaves. How he could do this and be good, I could not tell. I was not satisfied with this theory, which made God responsible for slavery, for it pained me greatly, and I have wept over it long and often.”

Sol Plaatje applied the same logic to South Africa and found white racist attitudes not befitting their Enlightenment heritage. History shows that race-justice warriors like Douglass and Plaatje won their battles, as did those fighting for women’s rights and gay rights. Reason delivered an inclusive ethical realm unimaginable to our ancestors.

If my thesis is correct then what are the implications for our current political disagreements about how society should be ordered? Physicists talk of four fundamental forces (also known as fundamental interactions). These consist of, on the one hand, the long-range forces of gravity and electromagnetism and on the other, the short-range forces that bind atoms and molecules together. Similarly, our social reality consists of the top-down forces of economics, politics and culture. Moving in the other direction is the bottom-up force of clan grooming, by which individuals resolve their psychological and physiological need for human warmth through grooming interactions. If we are to resolve social conflict (e.g. racial conflict and ideological conflict) then we must resolve the situation not only top-down – by expounding ideas of inclusivity and diversity – but also from the ground up. You can guarantee that all social breakdown is a direct result of clan breakdown. This is our true social unit and all social improvement will have consider the importance of the clan belonging. ?

Conclusion

Reason is free open-source software that can be purposed by any society that stays consistent with its code. If we are to deal in truth and human decency we must first commit to transcending tribal bias. Debased language is the tool of tyranny, of the subtle and unsubtle type. Our language is always reaching down to its roots for feeling and authenticity; and is always reaching up to its god-point in singular displays of righteousness. Keeping balance is a test. ?

Today, the subject of biologically determined group difference (be it race, sex, or sexual persuasion) presents a gnarly problem for ethical thinkers, testing our ability to balance righteous mind with compassionate heart and calculating intellect. What do we make of genetic and cultural diversity in the human species? It’s an area rich with fascinating caveat and unexpected turn. It’s well beyond my limited grasp of biology but not beyond my reasonable right to lean into the ethical aspects with some moral conviction, some ‘dialogic argumentation’.

Civilisation requires us to drop the mask and speak the word of truth.

Bibliography

Alexander, P. F., 1995. Alan Paton: a biography. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.

Camus, A., 1993. The Stranger. s.l.:Everyman's Library: Penguin.

Dunbar, R., 1993. Co-Evolution of Neocortex Size, Group Size and Language in Humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16(4), pp. 681-735.

Jaspers, K., 2003. The Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press.

Klein, R., 2017. Kurt Vonnegut Once Sent This Amazing Letter To A High School. s.l.:HuffPost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kurt-vonnegut-xavier-letter_n_4964532.

Lewis, J. E., 2003. The New Rights of Man: An Anthology of the Events, Documents and Speeches that have shaped Western Civilization. London: Constable & Robinson.

Nagy, G., 2015. The Last Words of Socrates at the Place where he Died.. Boston: Harvard University. Classical Enquiries, https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/the-last-words-of-socrates-at-the-place-where-he-died/.

Orwell, G., 2020. Fascism and Democracy. London: Penguin Books.

Pinker, S., 2018. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. London: Penguin.

Saguaro, S. e., 2000. Psychoanalysis and Woman: A Reader. New York City: New York University Press.

Shwartz, M., 2007. Robert Sapolsky discusses physiological effects of stress. s.l.:Stanford News, https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707.html.

Wolfram, S., 2010. 100 Years Since Principia Mathematica. s.l.:Stephen Wolfram Writings, https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2010/11/100-years-since-principia-mathematica/ .

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[1] (Dunbar, 1993)

[2] (Dunbar, 1993)

[3] This is disputed by some who claim the 20 hours does not take food processing into account.

[4] (Dunbar, 1993)

[5] (Krige, 1988)

[6] (Lewis, 2003)

[7] (Lewis, 2003)

[8] (Lewis, 2003) p. 45

[9] This framing owes something to Sam Harris

[10] (Nagy, 2015)

[11] (Nagy, 2015)

[12] (Jaspers, 2003, p. 98)

[13] (Jaspers, 2003)

[14] (Pinker, 2018, p. 354)

[15] (Wolfram, 2010) This is Russel’s term, as cited by Wolfram, from Russel’s introduction to The Principles of Mathematics.

[16] (Wolfram, 2010)

[17] (Shwartz, 2007)

[18] (Camus, 1993)?

[19] These are the words of Bernard Malumud paraphrasing Camus, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/11/08/keep/

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[20] (Alexander, 1995)

[21] (Orwell, 2020, p. 34)

[22] (Orwell, 2020)

[23] (Orwell, 2020, p. 17)

[24] (Saguaro, 2000)

[25] Subtitle: ‘Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion’. He discusses the psychology behind the conservative versus liberal divide.

[26] Sourced from The Atlantic, Ohlheiser, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/malcolm-gladwells-cockpit-culture-theory-everywhere-after-asiana-crash/313442/

[27] Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass