Right now I’m listening to Why Civilizations Can’t Climb Hills by James Scott, author of Seeing Like a State (which I haven’t gotten around to reading). His thesis is that the characteristics we find among primitive peoples (often low-scale agriculturalists) are not a holdover from pre-history, but rather a reaction to civilization, or more specifically the state. This would seem to have implications for evolutionary psychologists on the nature of the evolutionary adaptive period. Scott focuses on the difference between the state-building valley civilizations and the hill-dwelling barbarian tribes, but he also discusses other groups such as the Cossacks (who he says are now well defined as an ethnic group, though they started out as runaway serfs). He also quotes Owen Lattimore, who I didn’t expect to hear about outside discussions of Freda Utley and her China Story. It seems to contrast with Oppenheimer’s theory of nomadic barbarian pastoralists conquering sedentary agriculturalists (and sometimes hunter-gatherers). Scott mentions the Arabs (as opposed to Berbers) as a force of civilization, but they’re better characterized as nomadic than sedentary crop-growers. He also states that in the New World Europeans killed/kicked out the natives when they hadn’t developed sedentary agriculture or replaced the elites and instituted more efficient taxation otherwise, but that did not happen in the southeastern United States. The part about agricultural strategies to avoid expropriation reminded me of the anecdote Daniel Dennet mentioned about cicadas having reproductive life-cycles prime-numbered years long to avoid synchronization with predators. I got a laugh at the end when someone in the audience accused him of excusing hill peoples for their right-wing political histories. Another interesting part stemming from the same questioner is about the conversion of these peoples to religions that are globally powerful but distinct from the locally dominant faiths, which reminded me of what Razib of Gene Expression has wrote on the topic. Hat tip to Reason Hit & Run.
Via the ATS mailing-list I came across this article about Semco in Brazil, which unintentionally adopted a rather anarcho-syndicalist style of management. The question though that I’ve always had for folks like Kevin Carson is why we don’t see profit-maximizing corporations imitating this if it works so well?
August 27, 2008 at 9:50 am
Thanks for the mention, TGGP.
Part of the answer to your question is that most large corporations, with diversified share ownership, really aren’t profit maximizing. They’re run to maximize the utility of management. And even in the case of private equity firms and public corporations with a dominant shareholder like the founding family, where things really are run to a considerable extent in shareholder interest, shareholder control is still conditioned by the instrument it has to work through; there are a number of alternative ways to achieve fairly high rates of profit, and management will have a de facto veto on which one is chosen (so that less than a maximum rate of profit is achieved, but management utility is at or near maximum).
That’s why you see corporations pursuing policies that involve gutting human capital and hollowing out long-term productive capabilities, which are necessary for maximizing sustainable profit in the long run, in order to maximize management’s stock options and bonuses in the short run.
August 31, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Interesting. Scott’s thesis casts a new light on the ideas of anti-Rousseauians like De Maistre, continued by Evola et al., that existing primitive peoples are more the remains of collapsed civilizations than preserved primordial artefacts. This does, as you suggest, make prehistory far more mysterious.
September 6, 2008 at 8:29 pm
[…] subject to specific circumstances than genetically hardwired. He repeats the claim of James Scott I noted earlier that primitive societies today are unrepresentative of the past (horse-backed nomads are […]
September 21, 2010 at 11:50 pm
[…] Monday Memo , a management website. Hat tip Entitled To An Opinion. TGGP, at ETAO, asks if this works so great, why don’t profit-maximizing corporations adopt […]
November 21, 2010 at 3:29 pm
[…] of living) to most agricultural lifestyles. Examples of that perspective are Jared Diamond and James Scott. The latter has even discussed how such cultures are marked by their nomadic resistance to being […]