Ultrasocial. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future. By John Gowdy. Cambridge University Press. 2021. xv+165pp.
This is a book supporting the view, as many others have recently, that human nature is not an entirely fixed phenomenon but largely an expression of the material and social situation in which human beings find themselves. It draws upon a vast range of sources to show that, until, around 10,000 years ago when we started to adopt settled agriculture, human beings lived largely cooperative and egalitarian existences as hunter-gatherers with mutual aid and empathy as the social and cultural norm and without destabilising their habitats. The transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture was not, however, as the author points out, a rapid, simple or inevitable change. Rather it was a long-term, incremental process taking place for different reasons in different areas. It was ‘stumbled into’ in a sort of ‘tyranny of small decisions’ for what seemed like practical reasons at the time, but with unanticipated consequences. Yet wherever it did take serious hold, there was no going back and it inevitably led to stratified societies in which a small number controlled the surpluses that were produced and ruled over the vast majority whose lives were made poorer and less secure than before (‘Human society made a critical leap from small-scale cooperation to top-down coordination and coercion’). This led to the development of hierarchies, belief systems to support them and condition their subjects and, eventually, the states that dominate the world today with the elite few possessing most of the wealth.
But Gowdy goes even further than others in arguing that, with the advent of agriculture, human society not only broke away from its purpose of serving its individual members and groups to eventually become what it is today, but embarked on becoming an impersonal ‘superorganism’, which today we see in its most advanced form, the global market, subordinating the interests of the humans who exist under it to its own survival and furtherance. To this ‘autonomous’ superorganism he attaches the label ‘ultrasocial’, in that it operates very much like a huge colony of ants or termites in which the requirements of the whole take precedence over the individuals within it. Unlike ant and termite societies, however, the human superorganism exhibits gross social and material inequality, even if this is often justified as a necessary consequence of the ‘freedom’ of the individual in a ‘free market’. A further consequence of this, the author argues, is rapacious environmental degradation and a catastrophic loss of nature, since no group, state or individual is in a position to prevent the interest of the ‘superorganism’ from dominating and in modern capitalism that means profit is always the ultimate goal whatever the effect on the biosphere. He holds out no hope, therefore, of capitalism being able to regulate itself to prevent ongoing environmental decline and eventually disaster but does hope that such an occurrence will eventually lead to a lifestyle for the humans left after that catastrophe that is closer to the kind of society that existed for the vast majority of humankind’s 300,000 years’ history before it was put paid to by agriculture, states serving the interest of controlling elites, and capitalist production (‘the commodification of people and nature’).
Gowdy’s arguments about all this are complex, many-faceted and multi-layered and it is difficult to do justice to such a ‘grand narrative’ in a short review. So it may seem churlish to highlight certain elements that are less than convincing. But it needs to be said that, despite his pessimism about the ultimate future of humans within a system in which he sees us as trapped, like cogs in a wheel, and his reference to the futility of ‘limited measures within a business-as-usual framework’, the author does propose palliative solutions (‘ a minimal bioeconomic programme’) which he considers might show the way to at least less harsh social arrangements than exist at present and enable us, as he puts it, ‘to start down a new evolutionary path compatible with basic human needs and our place in nature’. These include, perhaps predictably, various social reforms such as guaranteed basic income, tax changes, maximum limit to income and wealth, old-age security, etc. While perhaps reflective of laudable sentiments, these, we would argue – even if they were somehow or in some form to be implemented – would clearly make little impact on the gross inequality that the profit system, portrayed so well by the author himself, inevitably brings with it. He also falls into the ‘overpopulation’ trap suggesting that the earth cannot, whatever the circumstances, sustain the current and increasing population. And he does not consider – and has perhaps never heard – the socialist remedy. We are referring here to majority political action via the ballot box to take control of the system of production and distribution of goods and services and then to operate it in a sustainable, environmentally sound way. This would have to mean harnessing the human propensity to cooperate on the basis of need not profit in a moneyless, wageless society of free access, arguably with the same kind of social relations as – if on a more secure level of technology than – the hunter-gatherer societies that Gowdy describes so graphically and admiringly, and argues ‘human nature’ is best geared to operate within.
Despite these reservations, what we have here is an important book of great insight about human nature and economic and political organisation and one which above all contests powerfully the commonly held ‘evil-human-nature’ notion, Hobbes’s infamous ‘war of all against all’. It adds to the increasing body of unequivocal evidence that ‘human nature’, though selfish, acquisitive and violent behaviour can be part of it, is not a fixed quantity and that, as the author puts it: ‘Our current predicaments are not gene-based. They have risen out of the material base of human economies and the associated cultural adaptations and supporting institutions’.
Howard Moss
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