Determinism, Uncertainty, and the Origins of States


Samuel M. Wilson

Presented in the series "Facing the Uncertain"
Organized by Professor Ilya Prigogine

in L'Homme devant L'Incertain. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2001

Introduction

This volume is about the idea of uncertainty as it has been encountered, discovered and explored in physics, chemistry, statistical mechanics, and other disciplines. In this paper my aim is to explore how the principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy applies in the wide range of disciplines that study human behavior. That is an ambitious project, so I hope at least to make some general statements that apply to most of the social sciences about theoretical changes that have taken place since the Second World War. Then I will focus on a set of questions in my own subject area - the study of early forms of political and social organization. I think that some of my comments about this specific topic will apply in general ways to other disciplines, particularly with respect to the movement towards, and then away from, determinist models of human behavior.

All of the disciplines concerned with generalizing about human behavior have relied upon general and specific models of the interactions of matter and energy that have come from disciplines like Physics, and they will continue to do so (Adams 1975, 1988). In the social sciences the stochastic nature and unpredictability of individual human action has been more or less accepted, but for a very long time there has been the belief that in aggregate, human social behavior tends to track along some general, predictable paths. This is to say that while there is considerable noise at the level of the individual person's behavior, there are deep running currents in human societies that aren't very strongly affected by the "sound and fury," of day to day events, but rather are currents that respond in predictable ways to deeper and more powerful forces at work in the world -- to changes in climate and long-term patterns of trade, or to gradual changes in birth rate, population growth, or frequency of warfare. This idea of the periodicity of events draws on the French social historian Fernand Braudel's conceptualization of history, especially his distinctions between the history of everyday events versus what he terms thelongue durée (Braudel 1980). In the social sciences there is a constant need to put together robust models that attempt to explain many kinds of complex behavior - how the Stock Market will do, how much people will charge on their VISA cards in December, how people will vote, how they organize cities, and so on.

After the Second World War there was a strong and widespread movement towards the development of formal models of human behavior, and in several disciplines, Anthropology, History, and Sociology among them, this peaked in the early 1970s. Other disciplines like Geography, Economics, and Political Science experienced the same kind of thing with different timing. After the mid-70s there was a shift away from determinist models. In talking about a specific issue relating to Anthropology, I hope to draw out general points about the movement towards, and then away from determinism in disciplines dealing with human behavior.

I am an archaeologist and student of history and my area of study is how complex social and political systems came into being. In what follows I'll look at what complex societies are, and look at some similarities and contrasts among the early complex societies in the world. I will look at the ways social scientists have tried to describe and understand complex societies and how they have attempted to account for their emergence? Using historical and archaeological work with the people who were living in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived in 1492, I will examine whether complex societies came into being because of a culmination of large-scale factors - a conjuncture of powerful forces that made complex society the inevitable outcome -- or whether there was there a considerable measure of coincidence and chance involved in the process? It is possible that the complex societies of the modern world are the result of combinations of unlikely events. This leads us to consider whether huge differences in the trajectory of human history were brought about by factors that most determinist model-builders would view as inconsequential.

Finally, I will explore the possibility that when complex societies first came into being some five to ten-thousand years ago, there were varieties of complex societies that did not survive and no longer exist in the world - complex societies that we would probably view as very strange. There is a necessary caveat in this paper, however. The questions I'm discussing are ones that many Anthropologists find really intriguing, but they aren't questions we necessarily have answers to. So in some cases I am going to have to leave some questions hanging precipitously.

The Emergence of Complex Forms of Society

Prior to ten thousand years ago, all the people in the world lived in small social groups - 50 people or fewer. They did not live permanently in one place, and they did not cultivate their own food or keep animals, apart from dogs. They did not have any form of government except the natural hierarchies that appear in all groups and one's status depended on skill (and depending on the society, on gender and age).

Over the next five to eight thousand years complex societies emerged. "Complex society" is a fairly unrevealing term, since all societies are complex. Among anthropologists it means a group of people with some complex social and political institutions. One criterion is that complex societies are groups of people whose decision-making is organized at above the village level, with several villages taking their orders from another village. Another criterion is that there are enduring hierarchies of social status, which is to say that status is determined not skill but by descent, by whose lineage one is born into. When status is governed by descent, and there is a wide gulf between "commoners" and people of high status, there is said to be social stratification.

In trying to understand how complex societies came into being, one of the most interesting facts to reckon with is the dramatic similarity in complex societies in the Americas and the "Old World" - Africa, Asia, and Europe. These two groups of people had been separated from one another for more than ten thousand years, and then after 1492 they came to realize that the others existed. During these ten thousand or more years of separation it can be argued that there was little or no significant trans-oceanic exchange of information about how to organize complex societies. Yet interestingly, the societies on either side of the world were very similar.

Some of the similarities, such as huge pyramids, are obvious, but there are hundreds of others down to the minute eccentricities of urban life. In both the Americas and the Old World there were systems of social stratification, often with descent and the use of power determined by the male lineage. These practices are called patrilineality and patriarchal political organization. While there are also many matrilineal and matriarchal societies in the work, most of the world's complex societies in the last 5,000 years have been patriarchal.

In complex societies on both sides of the Atlantic the systems of social stratification included and multiple strata of other kinds of folk below them, and in nearly all complex societies there was slavery. Just as society was arrayed in a hierarchy, many of its institutions were organized in hierarchies. For example there were hierarchies of warriors or military specialists and sometimes the people at the top of these hierarchies also held political power. Bureaucracies were also organized like a hierarchical pyramid, with various levels of bureaucrats and civil servants. All complex societies had some system of punishment for people who acted in ways that are prohibited, as well as a hierarchical system of judges and law enforcement people. Law codes are remarkably similar among the world's complex societies. In nearly all complex societies there were also strong religious institutions, with hierarchies of religious specialists - priests, church administrators, etc.

Another way that New and Old World complex societies are similar is the way their cities are organized. If one were lot lay a map of Uruk or Ur over one of Teotihuacán or Chan Chan, the similarities are remarkable. Cities are functionally divided, with ceremonial, commercial, and residential areas, and the residential areas are remarkably similar in terms of their dimensions and functional organization of space. A resident of one of these cities would have understood the basic arrangement of the others. When Cortés and his army marched into Tenochtitlan in the Basin of Mexico, they identified all the things they saw as plazas, temples, palaces, markets, and so on, accurately picking out all of the features which had counterparts in the large European cities of the day. They would also have recognized another important aspect of complex societies, the state's participation and control in economic spheres. Another universal feature of complex societies that is difficult to ignore: taxes. In 1492 and long before, complex societies all over the world, from Beijing to Cuzco and Tenochtitlan to Venice, levied taxes.

The similarities are quite remarkable, and they raise a number of complex and difficult questions: How did this come to be? Was there in fact some kind of trans-oceanic contact that kept the complex societies of the Americas and the Old World developing along similar lines? Archaeological evidence suggests some minor incidents of contact, but in my view the evidence is inadequate for imagining that this contact affected such a large and complex process as the emergence of complex societies. A second possibility is that the human race on both sides of the Atlantic was grappling with the same set of problems -- mostly of dealing with a large population -- and they arrived at these similar forms of complex society as the only workable answers. There is a third, rather troubling possibility: are people, like bees, somehow "hard-wired" in such a way that they can only organize themselves into one kind of complex society?

We are confronting the prospect that either in response to similar problems or circumstances, or because of some intrinsic quality, the paths taken in both parts of the world were very similar, and not very sensitive to the initial conditions under which complex societies first began to emerge. So this is the question - what are the processes by which complex societies develop and how does it account for the similarities among those in the Americas and the rest of the world?

Theoretical approaches to the Origins of States

There is a long lineage of thinkers engaged in the issue of the "origins of states." In The Republic, Plato outlines the way it went, or for him the way it should go - that the need for economic specialization and efficiency necessitates that people surrender individual liberty to the common will. "A State, I said, arises . . . out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants. Can any other origin of a State be imagined?" "Then, I said, let us begin and create in idea a State; and yet the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention" (Plato, The Republic 6, 369). This is still a central tenant of most models for the origin of the state even today.

In The Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes says that people need some mechanism that will allow them to put individual will and desire second to the will and needs of all of the people in the society. It was a matter of self-preservation for Hobbes, who believed that without such a mechanism the individual and the group would perish.

Lewis Henry Morgan, Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels were among the important 19th century thinkers concerned with the problem of where states came from. Morgan (1877) proposed a framework for societal change from simple to complex. The names he gave to his three stages lack "political correctness" -- savagery, barbarism, and civilization -- but in their essence they are very similar to terms that Anthropologists still use. "Savagery" was a time without the production of domesticated food and permanent occupation of villages. It is what some modern theorists would call "band societies" or hunter-gatherers. The title "Barbarism" was associated with people who grew their own food and lived in villages, but didn't have social hierarchies or complicated political institutions. Some people today call these "Chiefdoms." "Civilization" had both social stratification and political integration. These are what are often called "complex society" or the "state" but the category includes a wide range of social formations - from a few villages to the entire Soviet Union. This typology of political structures interests those of us who study this problem. Not very many people these days believe that these named units are discreet entities - that there is a definable state of being that is a "chiefdom," or that the existence of such a society implies that it is developing in a direction that will one day make it a state.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), based on Karl Marx's notes on the work of Lewis Henry Morgan, Engels says:

The denser population necessitates closer consolidation both for internal and external action. The confederacy of related tribes becomes everywhere a necessity, and soon also their fusion, involving the fusion of the separate tribal territories into one territory of the nation. The military leader of the people ... [, res, basileus, thiudans -] becomes an indispensable, permanent official. The assembly of the people takes form, wherever it did not already exist. Military leader, council, assembly of the people are the organs of gentile society developed into military democracy -- military, since war and organization for war have now become regular functions of national life.

How do people explain the origins of complex society? Engels' example is the sort of argument that is typically made- the population grows and problems arise which call for some administrative mechanism. That mechanism becomes entrenched, and the rest is history.

From Marx and Engel's time to the present, what has come to interest scholars in this area more are the causes of change. Around the middle of the 20th century V. Gordon Childe wrote about what he called the neolithic and urban revolutions (Childe 1934). The neolithic revolution had to do with the change from hunting and gathering to food production, and the Urban Revolution had to do with the origins of complex society. Our interest today follows Childe, particularly in attempting to understand the processes that generated these changes. As Childe was, we are interested in why complex societies began to emerge in the first place.

In the 1960s and 1970s there was renewed interest in this problem, and at that time researchers in Anthropology and related fields were influenced by developments in Physics, and also Systems Theory. They were interested in the flows of energy and information in complex political systems. The models for complex society emergence that came out in this period were organized in ways systems theorists would recognize, with feedback mechanisms, degrees of hyperintegration, etc. A typical model is shown in Figure 1. It shows that a growing population puts stress on the resources - plants, animals, farmland, water - upon which a society depends. The people choose to intensify their production, getting more food from the same amount of land. They might do this by digging a canal and irrigating, or by terracing or using fertilizers, or other means. Some of this work can only be done if there is some form of organization, so managerial specialists emerge to get the job done. These managers, in this scenario, tend to become permanent political fixtures (in bureaucracies it is easier to create levels of hierarchy and new jobs than it is to get rid of them). The work of intensification and the additional burden of the managerial specialists create an additional need for labor and surplus, and additional rises in population feed back through the system.

The preceding is a generalized example of how this sort of model works. A common feature of most of them, however, is that they are very vague about the initial conditions. How did these systems get started? Why does population growth begin? Many models do not speculate about this - they only say that "extrasystemic kicks" happened early on and were amplified into complex formations.

There was quite an industry in this kind of modeling in the 1970s. This inquiry into the origins of the state in Anthropology occurred at the same time as a theoretical movement in archaeology called the "New Archaeology." New Archaeologists aspired to a Newtonian-like approach to human behavior. They hoped to derive "law-like generalities" that within limits worked for all human behavior. The quest for these "law-like generalities," however, was not very successful. Those that were proposed were so general that they invited ridicule. One critic called them "Mickey Mouse Laws," and the scholar on the receiving end of this criticism still occasionally wears a Mickey Mouse tie to archaeology meetings to remember the battle. My point here is not to trivialize these important debates. This difference of opinion was certainly characterized by a lighter touch than that used by the postmodern critics of modernist and positivist approaches in the social sciences. For example Zygmunt Bauman, in Intimations of Postmodernity, says "[f]or most of its history modernity lived in and through self deception," because of its "obsessively legislating, defining, structuring, segregating, classifying, recording and universalizing state [which] reflected the splendour of universal and absolute standards of truth" (p. xiv).

The problem with these laws, and the models for state emergence, was that they were so general they were almost impossible to test and refine, or even to find evidence for. Archaeological evidence has an enormous amount of "noise" and confusion in it. There are massive gaps in what evidence we have, and many of the things we might be interested in - the deals made between early rulers cutting others out of an emerging system of tribute, the discoveries of raw materials or trade routes - aren't there to be dug up. The major problem was that there was too wide a gulf between what theorists were talking about and what archaeologists were able to find in the ground.

There were two other problems: first, what archaeologists were finding wasn't meshing well with the models being proposed. In nearly all models for how the system should behave, population growth preceded complex society. The belief was that growing populations produced the problems that complex society solved. Except that in cases where there was good evidence, political integration often preceded population growth. Complex social and political institutions came first, then the population began to grow. This is a key point, which shakes the confidence with which we can talk this question, and human systems generally. Figure 2 shows two models, both with axes of time and population, with population increasing through time. The one above shows the view that population growth precedes the appearance of complex societies; the one below shows evidence for complex society appearing before population really starts to increase.

The second problem was that these models were armchair versions of how less complicated social and political systems were supposed to function, written by "first world" scholars with little familiarity with such societies. Ethnographers who specialized in such systems, (for example Luc de Heusch in The Drunken King) tended to say, "that just couldn't happen." The models that were based on premises that worked in Western societies do not work universally.

I was doing my dissertation work at about this time, when people were beginning to challenge models on ethnographic grounds and showing that sometimes the "Prime Mover" of population growth sometimes came after the formation of complex society. I was trying to conduct an archaeological survey in the central valley of the Dominican Republic, investigating on prehistoric patterns of settlement by counting and measuring archaeological sites of various periods. The aim was to reconstruct the demography of the valley from before the beginnings of the Taíno chiefdoms until their fluorescence, from roughly A.D. 500-1550.

Through one of those chance changes of direction that are hard to anticipate in doing research, I had to sit around for a long while waiting for permission to undertake the survey. I spent this time in the archives reading documents from the time of the Spanish conquest. Of most interest were the ways that local rulers reacted to the arrival of this powerful external force, the Europeans. In the maneuvering that was going on among these local elites some of the strategies they used to try to increase their own power were made apparent. This ended up being the topic of my dissertation - how in the tragic destruction of the Taíno chiefdoms one could see the processes by which they were formed (Wilson 1986, 1990).

In my view, these processes weren't determined by the kinds of forces and responses discussed before (population growth, intensification, managerial inputs, warfare, etc.). Those forces and problems were involved, but often as the consequences or outcomes of other things, such as the decisions and strategies of individuals trying to manipulate and tweak the system to their own (or their family's) advantage. One of the things that prevented rulers from taking over several other villages were the society's rules about who inherited power from whom. I argued that one lineage had subtly found a way so that a ruler could inherit power from two directions, giving him, or in some cases her, the ability to bring new villages under his/her power. At a more general level the argument was that we have to pay more attention to these little factors - microprocesses of social evolution- and to individual actors, human agency, and chance when examining the origins and development of complex societies.

This approach, taken by many other scholars as well, is the second way of looking at the evolution of social complexity. In the first scholars examined the interplay of powerful forces like population growth, production, integration, and defense. They were less concerned with initial conditions as with the processes which take an initial impulse and amplify it into the great complex societies like the Mesopotamian states. In the second, more attention is paid to the initial conditions and to the role of individuals and chance.

Now we must get back to the issue raised earlier. If the processes which produced complex societies are so sensitive to these small-scale factors, wouldn't we expect the outcomes to be very different? Shouldn't the complex societies from the Americas and the rest of the world be very different from one another?

Possible Early Variants of Complex Societies

In his comments made in the seminar that was the source for the papers in this volume, Professor Prigogine noted ways in which the various outcomes were different. He noted differences in Chinese, European, and Mesoamerican views of how the cosmos is organized, and the place of humanity in the different systems. I do not disagree. I am focusing on a different aspect of past societies: the similarities in organizational structure. If these apparent similarities are real, we must return to our original questions: what accounts for the similarities? Are the responses hardwired, or are there only a limited range of ways for people to organize themselves? Archaeological evidence is increasingly suggesting that neither is the case. There are some hints that other kinds of complex society - some of them perhaps radically different from the ones we know - did exist. For more than a century scholars have been interested in ways of understanding complex societies which emphasized their similarities, relations to one another, and trajectories of change. Now it is suggested that we look for early forms of complex societies that no longer exist, and which fall outside of these typologies that social scientists have created.

If early and unusual examples of complex societies exist, one wonders why we didn't notice before. There are several possible factors:

An example of this third problem may be examined in the different (but related) discipline of paleontology.

In Steven Jay Gould's book Wonderful Life (1989) he talks about the discovery of a series of fossil-bearing strata in the Canadian Rockies called the Burgess Shale. In these strata there is an extraordinary record of multicellular animals from shortly after the "Cambrian Explosion," a period of when most of the major groups of animals first came into being.

It is extraordinary enough that in the space of a few million years, or even a few tens of millions, the great proliferation of life forms took place. In the Cambrian explosion we can see the forbears of all of the major groups of animals alive today. What is so remarkable about the deposit is that there are also other kinds of creatures there who have no living descendants. As Gould notes (1989: 25):

For species that can be classified within known phyla, Burgess anatomy far exceeds the modern range. The Burgess Shale includes, for example, early representatives of all four major kinds of arthropods, the dominant animals on earth today - the trilobites (now extinct), the crustaceans (including lobsters, crabs, and shrimp), the chelicerates (including spiders and scorpions), and the uniramians (including insects). But the Burgess Shale also contains some twenty to thirty kinds of arthropods that cannot be placed into any modern group. Consider the magnitude of this difference: taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs! The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.

Gould's view of what this means is that the "cone of increasing diversity" (Figure 3, top) doesn't account for this, or many other catastrophic disappearances in the history of life on the planet. Rather, he sees a pattern of "diversification and decimation," as seen on Figure 3, bottom.

This is not altogether out of the range of what conventional evolutionary biologists might have expected. They might have said that the groups that didn't survive were somehow inferior and less likely to make it according to the principle of the "survival of the fitter." Gould goes farther, however, and says that the demise of whole groups of animals was not due to some deficiency or inability to compete. Rather, their loss was random:

Perhaps the grim reaper of anatomical designs is only Lady Luck in disguise. Or perhaps the actual reasons for survival do not support conventional ideas of cause as complexity, improvement, or anything moving at all humanward. Perhaps the grim reaper works during brief episodes of mass extinction, provoked by unpredictable environmental catastrophes (often triggered by impacts of extraterrestrial bodies). Groups may prevail or die for reasons that bear no relationship to the Darwinian basis of success in normal times (p. 48).

There are many perils associated with assuming that the processes at work in biological evolution also apply to the changes that take place in human societies. I have written about these dangers, and just a little while ago was arguing about the place of individual people consciously trying to change the structure of their society. So I venture into this analogy advisedly.

The thing that seems to have a great deal in common with our subject is that in the beginning of the Cambrian Explosion there was a period of wide diversification. Gould says, "[T]he maximum range of anatomical possibilities arises with the first rush of diversification. Later history is a tale of restriction, as most of these early experiments succumb and life settles down to generating endless variants upon a few surviving models" (p.47). I think the same might be true for early complex societies - that more and more varied models existed early on, with "weird wonders" of complex societies that didn't survive and don't exist in the world today. And now, being so used to the kind of society that is so prevalent in the world today, we couldn't recognize these other models or prototypes if we were staring right at them.

What did they look like? I can't point to specific examples without immediately getting into debates with other scholars about what was and wasn't one of these societies. In general, however, I think that these societies would have had very little aggrandizement of individual rulers - no huge tombs with sacrificial victim, piles of wealth buried with the head man, and so on. Urban concentrations would not have been large, and they probably were not defended. In some cases there was an interest in marking space on the ground as sacred with extensive earthworks or other constructions, not for the glorification of some person, but to mark areas as ritually special. A final observation is that we might look for these societies in the best, richest and most fertile areas. By contrast, most of the big conquest-oriented states emerged in areas that fringed the best areas or were otherwise marginal.

If other models of complex society existed in the centuries soon after complex societies first came into being, what happened to them? There are several possibilities:

(1) They fizzled because they weren't sustainable, or for some other reason they collapsed under their own weight. I think this is the least likely.

(2) Through time, they changed into more aggressive and expansionist polities. This doesn't seem likely on the basis of the archaeological evidence but it merits careful consideration because as noted before, sometimes we're blinded by our models and see what we think we ought to see. Also, if they did become larger and more archaeologically visible states later on, the remnants of these early polities might be buried beneath the foundations of later constructions.

(3) They may have been conquered or otherwise absorbed by newer, fast growing states. This may be the most likely. It may be that these earlier models of complex society did not tend to expand rapidly or move to annex other lands and peoples. When societies there were more prone to expansion emerged, the earlier states, on the best lands, were their targets. Eventually these and all others were absorbed by fast-growers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to draw three summary observations on the issue of complex societies and their emergence. First, however, we must look at the question of the powerful changes in the paradigms of the physical sciences brought about by chaos and uncertainty theory. These profound changes have also made interventions into the social sciences. What we might conclude is that the social scientists, like some physicists, realized that in situations far from equilibrium there were some interesting phenomena that could not be explained by existing models, and that uncertainty theory helped them to understand them. Especially important is the idea of bifurcations, because the emergence of complex societies can best be understood as a bifurcation occurring in a system far from equilibrium.

In this sense the disciplines interested in human behavior and history have set a course that is very similar to that being taken by some physicists - among both groups there has been a movement away from the search for encompassing models that work in all situations, at equilibrium or far from it. For those studying complex societies, discussed in this paper, there was in the 1960s and 70s great enthusiasm that such models could be found. This may have been influenced by the historical context, because in those years there was widespread optimism that even the most complex processes could be understood completely. In the case discussed here, the promise of a scientific archaeology that could produce "law-like generalities" was a disappointment because expectations were impossibly high. This kind of failure, which occurred in other disciplines studying human behavior, led some to reject a scientific perspective entirely, as most postmodern theorists have done. But the direction taken by most scholars in both the social and physical sciences, is to go ahead and engage these complex problems. As has been discussed in this paper, one of the paths taken was to look the emergence of complex societies as a consequence of the decisions of individual people, and not just the outcome of the collision of powerful forces.

With respect to the specific questions and issues covered in this talk, we can end with three observations:

1. We don't yet know the answer to the question posed initially, of the similarity between complex societies of the Old World and the Americas. It seems less likely than ever, however, that the kinds of "prime mover" models for the origins of states that we discussed will cover both cases. I believe the best guess at this point is that the societies that ultimately were the most visible archaeologically were ones with characteristics that were good for short-term gain, not long-term success. These were the ones that grew rapidly and expanded their regions of control very quickly.

2. I believe the evidence is there for "weird wonders" of early complex societies - models of society that no longer exist except through their archaeological remains. I also think that it is important to know about them, because their successors, the faster growing, aggressive, exploitative kinds of complex society cannot sustain themselves in the long run. As a whole, the complex societies that dominate the globe, and the economies they depend on, have created enormous problems of overexploitation in terms of global warming, mass extinctions, and fossil fuel depletion. In this context it would be especially useful to be able to explore other possibly more sustainable complex societies.

3. Finally, we have noted that human systems are complicated, but as one of the first students of society and culture to participate in this symposium and volume, I would like to say that human systems are not something that should be kept completely apart from the models and theories developed in physics. To do so is to repeat the same mistake of hubris that humankind has made again and again -- the mistake of saying that we humans are a special case, that all the celestial bodies revolve around the earth, or that humans are somehow exempt from all of the processes and principles that apply in the rest of the biological world. We are part of an extremely complex self-organized system operating far from equilibrium, but it is somehow comforting that uncertainty is an inherent part of the cosmos.


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