“…Societies are much messier than our theories of them” (Mann 1986-2013, vol. 1, p. 4).
Chapter 1. Traditional society and simple consumption
1. Co-evolution of humans and meanings
Henrich-Popov bridge and the first needs trap
The human culture presents itself as an immense accumulation of meanings, its unit being a single meaning. The co-evolution of humans as living subjects of culture and meanings as its growing substance is the essence of all human history.
In its origin, meaning is a mutual adaptation of the natural environment and the human species living in it. In the course of this mutual adaptation, the natural environment became a toolbox for human self-reproduction, and the behavior of protohumans became its practice. Meaning is a mediation, a niche in the habitat created by the human species for survival. Humans evolved from animals because and when animals had to resort to extra-biological, meaning mechanisms of self-reproduction. Biological traits are transmitted through genetic inheritance, and cultural traits are transmitted through communication with other people, primarily in childhood. As is known, it is impossible to teach animals (including monkeys) to speak, since their body and behavior do not have the properties necessary for this. And the incidents with the feral children (Mowgli) show that it is impossible to teach a person older than about 12 years to speak, who as a child was completely isolated from communication with other people.
In the early stage of human evolution, that of natural selection, the very first meanings functioned as a continuation of the animal organs of hominids and as a differentiation of their animal signals. Just as a stick or a stone was an extension of the hand of prehistoric man, the various calls or gestures that warned of different dangers (e.g., from the ground or from a tree) were variations of animal signals. In this early stage, meanings were only a continuation of animal behavior, and their transmission occurred through so-called “animal traditions.”
As Vaclav Smil notes, the earliest feature that distinguished hominids from other animals was not the larger brain or toolmaking, but the structurally unlikely transition to upright walking, which began about 7 million years ago. Compared to chimpanzees, it saved 25 percent of energy, freeing the hands for tool-use, mouth and teeth for a more complex system of sound signals, i.e. proto-language. These changes demanded a larger brain with energy requirements three times higher than the brain of a chimpanzee (Smil 2017, pp. 22-23). Of course, upright walking itself demands an explanation that cannot be reduced to an unlikely accident. However, as Joseph Henrich notes, the precise evolutionary sequence in which meanings arose—gestures, vocal speech, social norms, tool-use—is not crucial, since cultural evolution created significant genetic pressure in all directions. If the freeing of the hands led to the development of language, then the evolution of tongue freed the hands for using tools, preparing food, and maintaining balance when chasing prey (Henrich 2016, p. 252).
Culture as an accumulation of meanings begins when an animal species goes beyond the limits of natural selection or mere adaptation to the environment and begins to adapt the environment to its needs, that is, it forms its own niche in the environment. The formation of a niche means, first, that the animal’s organs and their functions go beyond the animal’s body: part of the environment becomes a “continuation” of the organism. An ape, for example, takes a stick to “extend” its arm and pull termites—its favorite food—out of a termite mound. Second, the organism gradually changes due to its own niche-altering actions: for example, an increase in brain size in humans with the development of meaningful actions. The evolution of meanings is the evolution of indirect, roundabout, instrumental and symbolic behavior aimed at building a niche within nature, a domus for humans.
Henrich notes that cultural evolution initially faced a start-up problem: it had to provide both a bigger brain and more meanings. A small brain cannot retain too many meanings, and a bigger brain is not needed if there is nothing to learn. So, how could we jump-start the cumulative engine of cultural evolution? To make a leap over a chasm that can only be crossed in two leaps, you need a “bridge.”
“Once cumulative cultural evolution is up and running, it can create a rich cultural world, full of adaptive tools, techniques, and know-how that can more than pay the costs of building and programming up a larger brain designed and equipped for cultural learning. However, in the beginning, there won’t be much out there to culturally acquire, and what is there will be simple enough that it will still be learnable by one’s own individual learning efforts (without social learning), by trial and error for example. Thus, natural selection may not favor larger brain size or complexity, because brains are costly to develop and program” (Henrich 2016, p. 297).
According to Henrich’s hypothesis, the “bridge” problem was solved by two intertwined pathways (Henrich 2016, pp. 298 ff.). First, by multiplying meanings without notably increasing the size of the brain: in open areas with many predators large hominid groups formed for collective defense and exchange of meanings. Second, by reducing the costs of creating and maintaining larger brains. Henrich believes that female hominids, in order to avoid inbreeding, left their group upon reaching sexual maturity and moved to the neighbors, losing all family ties. The formation of stable protofamilial pairs in large groups, in which the child’s kinship could be established not only through the maternal, but also through the paternal side, made it possible to form a circle of relatives of the mother by marriage, that is, the child’s relatives (alloparents). This spread the burden of child-rearing among a larger number of individuals, thereby extending both the time in which the child could acquire a culture and the size of his brain.
Other hypotheses can also be put forward regarding the “missing link,” that is, the practices of self-reproduction that made it possible to build a bridge between the mental abilities of higher primates and the intelligence of Homo sapiens, living in the world of symbols. Evgeniy Panov believes that the entrance to the bridge has been discovered, but most of it has not been preserved, and the remains may never be found (Panov 2012, p. 383).
The problem of a bridge between animals and humans has been the subject of endless debate. Charles Darwin believed that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 1981, p. 105). However, Derek Penn and his colleagues write that Darwin was wrong and that the deep biological continuity between humans and animals masks an equally deep divide between human and non-human minds and between their ability to employ systems of abstract physical symbols (Penn et al. 2008). We do not attempt to resolve this problem here. Apparently, at some point the great apes could no longer reproduce within the animal behavioral program. At this critical point, the animals resorted to cultural practices of self-reproduction and cultural needs emerged. Protohumans fell into a “needs trap” in which their animal needs became cultural needs, their animal behavior became meaningful behavior, that is, human action.
Material social abstraction in action
If behavior is an adaptation to the environment, then activity is an adaptation of the environment to one’s needs. The “needs trap” meant that proto-humans now had to again and again transform the environment, including their own organisms and behavior patterns, into means of self-reproduction based on the transmission and processing of social information. After this critical point was passed, the degree of adaptation to the environment, the degree to which the needs of proto-humans were satisfied, was determined not only by their animal instincts but also by the sociality and abstractness of their actions. Benjamin Schumacher noted that information is a paradox: on the one hand it is material, and on the other hand it is abstract. If we want to share information, we must give it the physical form of a signal—sound, light, electricity, etc. However, information is abstract in content: the messages transmitted by signals are not identical to the signals themselves (Schumacher 2015, p. 4).
As an elementary form of culture, meaning is social information in action, that is, an action (and its result) that has social, material and abstract properties. This active gist of culture is missing in most of its definitions, here is an example: “…Culture is information that is acquired from other individuals via social transmission mechanisms such