The quickening of social evolution: perspectives on proprietary (entrepreneurial) communities.

• Author: MacCallum, Spencer H.

Years ago I read a translation, supposedly true, of a very early Egyptian sequence of hieroglyphs that said in effect that the world was going to it the dogs. After listing a number of lamentations, including the disobedience of young people and how they no longer respected their elders, it ended with the observation that "everybody's trying to write a book."

So it always seems to every generation that the world is disintegrating. There's a good reason it should appear that way, a very understandable reason. The world is in flux, with new forms always evolving out of the old. We are familiar with the old patterns because we have lived them, but not with the new, emerging ones, because they have never been part of our experience. Consequently we rarely recognize the new patterns that are in process of forming. Knowing only the patterns that were, all we see in change is disintegration -- patterns being lost. This is particularly easy to see in language, in the losing efforts of pedagogues to train the young to speak "grammatically." But the same phenomenon occurs in all areas of our experience. So the disintegration lamented by the early Egyptians and probably every generation before and after is, for the most part, appearance only. It could just as well be called integration rather than disintegration, except that we don't have the evidence before our eyes. We must take it on faith.

The same is true of societal change -- the broad sweep of human social evolution. Only evolutionary change isn't gradual but seems to be punctuated by abrupt shifts from one plane of comparatively stable forms to the next-always building on what went before. It's like a stair consisting of treads and risers. The treads are long eras of comparatively stable institutions, whereas the risers are periods of turbulent change and instability that must be negotiated before the next broad tread is reached, just as the spawning salmon must negotiate the steep rapid or rocky waterfall before reaching the next comparatively calm stretch of river. The salmon leaps and falls back, leaps and falls back, but each time it progresses farther and falls back not quite as much, until it negotiates the waterfall.

Mankind has been negotiating a waterfall for at least nine thousand years-an exceedingly brief period in the cons that man has occupied the earth. His leaping and falling back again is the all-too-familiar pattern recounted in history textbooks, the seemingly endless rise and fall of civilizations.

The previous broad tread on the stair, the calm stretch of water we have now pretty much left behind us, was that of tribalism, characterized by dependence on systems of kinship status for sorting out all the customary roles and activities in society. Now relying less on kinship, humankind is experimenting with a wide assortment of contractual relations. Sir Henry Sumner Maine was sound when he observed more than a hundred years ago in his classic study, Ancient Law, "We may say that the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from status to contract" ([1861] 1986, 141).

I believe we salmon have now reached the point where, as we leap, we can just begin to see over the top of the falls or rapids to the next calm stretch in our river. We can just begin to discern and make some judgments about what the nature of human society will be as it stabilizes once again on the next broad tread of evolution. I'm going to take the risk -- I don't think it's a very great one -- of making some predictions about human society as it settles into comparatively smooth swimming in the twenty-first century -- and probably for quite some time beyond.

Tribalism versus Today's Nation-States

Consider first where we've been. As an anthropologist, I've focused a good deal of my attention on tribal societies. In many ways the era of tribalism, as compared with today's world, was a golden age, to be exceeded only by what is yet in store for us. Tribal life, however, left much to be desired. Tribal man's technological proficiency was so limited that he was constantly at the mercy of nature. This limitation was particularly serious with regard to health; general life expectancy of less than thirty years barely permitted biological replacement. A second grave shortcoming under tribalism was that human social life coalesced, as it were, in antagonistic droplets scattered over the globe with little communication or cooperation between members of one and those of another. Opportunities were essentially limited to the circle of face-to-face acquaintances into which one was born.

Notwithstanding such serious drawbacks, tribal society had a positive side. Within each of those antagonistic droplets, social relations had an orderliness and sense of fair play almost incomprehensible to us today. Society consisted of small management units, quite human in scale, and relations among the members (at least among the men) tended strongly to be egalitarian, fair, and just. The headman of a village, for example, though he usually enjoyed more influence and prestige, exercised no authority over the person or property of anyone else in the village. He had the same authority in kind as that exercised by the humblest member. There was no conscription of persons, no taxation. Tribal society was consistent in this respect throughout. Freedom in the juridical sense is this: when one enjoys full integrity of his person and property, he is said to be free. Tribal society was free.

Let me tack a caveat onto that generalization. It doesn't include transitional forms on the boundary between tribes and states. When tribes cross that boundary and become states, they may retain many of their tribal characteristics for a long time. We know we're dealing with a state, however, when force has become institutionalized and is accepted as proper conduct within the group. In The Art of Community, I described the example of the Cherokee in 1761 forming themselves into a state (1970, 98-99). The moment of transition was definite, although many tribal characteristics persist to this day. The Cherokee fell within our generalization before 1761, but not after.

Modern society under the rule of political governments presents the reverse image of tribal society. Imagine humankind as a bird attempting to fly. Whereas under tribalism one of its great wings dragged on the ground, preventing it from rising into flight, now that great wing is up and the other drags. In science and technology we've made enormous gains; we've more than doubled our average life expectancy within a few generations and may do so again. We can seek opportunities for fruitful communication and exchange with other human beings virtually anywhere on the earth. That much is progress. But in our political life we have regressed. For example, 268 million people in the United States are ruled monolithically from the top, and their chief executive, a warrior (commander-in-chief of the armed forces), regularly exercises an authority that differs absolutely in kind from that exercised by private citizens in their day-to-day affairs. People have become ciphers, their individuality erased; our gains, even in science and technology, are endangered by the uncontrolled -- and apparently uncontrollable -- growth and spread of naked force.

The prospect of life under the rule of the nation-state is bleak indeed if seen only from the viewpoint of the disintegration of the institutions and lifeways we grew up with and know from our grandparents' accounts and from reading. But change, as I have noted, characteristically occurs not only from but toward. It has two modes, one quite invisible almost until we bump up against it. Patterns newly forming are not encompassed within our experience; hence we see only the disintegration that change brings. What of the future? Will human society ever get both wings aloft at the same time?

Past experience should reassure us that in the broad picture, at least, change is more integrative than disintegrative. This tendency is demonstrable, for in the long run if health were not more catching than disease -- to use a homey phrase of my grandfather's -- none of us would be here today. But happily we salmon have reached a point, almost at the top of our rocky waterfall, where we need not rely on philosophic conjecture alone. In our mind's eye, at least, we can begin to see...