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Laura Betzig studies history as natural history. She's done fieldwork in the Caroline Islands; looked at the cross-cultural record; and read ancient, medieval and modern history. She's written over a hundred scientific and scholarly articles on subjects from sex in the Old Testament, to the persecution of Christians, to the causes of the English Revolution; she's published 3 books; and she's spent the last couple of decades at work on The Badge of Lost Innocence, a history of the West. Why is equality rare in history? It's rare in natural history too, and that�s a
good clue. Whenever animals get together, they
play by the same rules. Stronger animals take more
than their share; weaker animals take less.
Winners relax, are well fed, and breed. Losers
work harder, eat less, and don�t get as much sex.
Sometimes the differences are small. Other times,
they�re not. Just short of 28 years after he
boarded HMS Beagle and set sail around the
world, Darwin ended The Origin of Species
with a prophecy: �Much light will be thrown on the
origin of man and his history.� Betzig asks: How
much light? She started her career on Ifaluk Atoll, a
6-square kilometer ring of coral 7� north of the
equator in a Micronesian archipelago. Where she
discovered that, compared to the families of
commoners, chiefs' families were better off. When
fish were redistributed after island-wide catches,
chiefs went home with more than their share; when
taro and other staples were traded on a daily
basis, their households took in more than they
gave out; they were able to spend more time with
their daughters and sons; they adopted out more of
their children than they adopted in. And they were
able to raise bigger families as a result. Betzig followed up with a comparative study of
106 politically autonomous societies drawn from
the Standard Cross Cultural Sample. Where it
became obvious that, on every continent, political
power maps onto sexual access in an almost linear
way. In societies without hierarchies, most men
make do with one woman at a time. At the edge of
the Serengeti and in the forests of Paraguay, the
best Hadza and Ach� hunters father around 10 sons
and daughters. Big men, on the other hand,
often have dozens of women. A Yanomam� headman on
the Orinoco River Basin was the progenitor of 231
grandchildren by 43 children; and in settlements
all along the salmon-rich Northwest Coast, chiefs
supported as many as 10 wives, with dozens of
captive slaves. And emperors have had access to
hundreds or thousands of women. The Sui Dynasty
emperor Yangdi, who built the Grand Canal and
rebuilt the Great Wall, kept an inner palace
retinue of 100,000; and on statues and scarabs and
ostraca and in the tomb of the 19th-dynasty
pharaoh Rameses II, the names of more than 50 sons�generals,
hereditary counts, chiefs of secrets,
scribes�survive from his 66-year reign. Over the last couple of decades, Betzig has
looked at the historical record. Where she's found
that, over the last few centuries, political and
reproductive privileges declined at the same time.
Under the Roman Empire, knights and senators were
punished for sexual excesses; but Roman emperors
like Augustus had access to wives, to the
concubines who occupied their palace apartments,
and to hundreds or thousands of slaves. Even under
the Roman Church, dukes with iniquitous morals got
locked up in monasteries for life; but kings like
Charlemagne had sexual access to spouses, to the
trollops who lived in their castles, and to the
well-secured and well-provided-for serfs who
worked on their estates. But as the millennium
turned, things changed. After king John conceded Magna
Carta in 1215, his son Henry III summoned
knights and citizens to Westminster, where taxes
were granted and petitions were heard. Subsequent
parliaments had Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI
deposed: they were "incorrigible and without hope
of amendment;" or "women had been violated and
raped;" or "the ravishing and defiling of
religious women, maidens, widows and men's wives"
had gone on. Then on a cold day in 1649, "for the
advancement and upholding of the personal interest
of will, power, and pretended prerogative to
himself and his family, against the public
interest, common right, liberty, justice, and
peace of the people of this nation," a High Court
of Justice had the head of Charles I cut off.
Which raises another question. What makes societies more or less fair?
Why do winners take all in some groups, and why do winners in other groups take less? Because, as Darwin pointed out in The Descent of Man, mobility makes hierarchies topple. �Nomadic habits, whether over wide plains, or through the dense forests of the tropics, or along the shores of the sea, have in every case been highly detrimental.� Animals tend to form groups where resources are clumped, or where they're hemmed in by obstacles to flight. And as the costs of leaving a society increase, monarchies rise up. That's true of social insects, fish, birds and mammals. And as it turns out, it's true of us. For hundreds of thousands of years, most of us
made a living by moving around. We followed the
migrations of game animals, and the windfalls of
natural harvests; we wandered in search of water,
and from shelter to shelter. And whenever the food
and water were gone, we moved on. Contact: |
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