I don't know where hierarchy is "innate" -- if, as I suspect, that means "hierarchy is gebetic, so unchangeable, so to be cheerfully embraced" it embodies so many confusions about biology and ethics that it would take a lot of work to disentangle the mess. I have discussed these topics here before. Dogmatically, three points on that:
"Innate" doesn't mean "rigidly manifested ina ny environment in the same way regardless of circumstances," thus "totally unchangeable." It means that there is a biological propensity to manifest the trait in certain circumstances. That that sense hierarchy is certainly "innate."
Even if hierarchy is in fact manifested in the entire range of circumstances in which humans today would seriously consider worth living, that doesn't mean that it has to be cheerfully embraced. Likewise the human propensity to kill each other (certainly innate in ther specified sense -- exists, but is to be restrained rather than embraced. There is a solution to the problems of hierarchy, imperfect, rough and ready, but fairly satisfactory. It is called democracy.
All that said, my argument that the state is necessary, desirable, and inevitable in any circumstances that we would consider worth living in does not depend on any innateness hypothesis. For all that it matters to my argument, humans could have a strong innate tendency to be anti-hierarchical. Or (per impossible) no innate propensities at all.
My argument is just a variation on Michael's observation that hierarchy and civilization go hand in hand. It is possible, though I doubt it, that for most of human existence, when we were small bands of hunter-gatherers, that we lived in egalitarian bliss. Suppose that it is so.
But with agriculture, city living, mass society, we need formalized ways of making and enforcing decisions. In particular we need to be able to make and enforce decisions to create public goods -- goods that individuals will not create on their own because it is easier to ride free on the contributions of others. Even if we "naturally" hated hierarchy and resisted it, we would need to create it to be able to enjoy the benefits of civilization.
Charles has a fantasy common to Marxists that somehow the motivational structure of people living in large complex groups will miraculously change with the elination of classes and markets. He supposes that somehow those altered circumstances will make people happy to contribute fully to projects from which they would benefits regardless of whether they contributed, and also that there would be no disagreements about important decisions that are divisive enough to require enforcement. It is hard to understand why Marxists think those changes would have those effects.
jks
--- Michael Dawson <MDawson at pdx.edu> wrote:
> I know that a belief in innate hierarchicality is a
> vital premise for your
> misanthropy, but Charles has already answered this
> question (which, by the
> way, is not about proto-humans). For the large
> majority of the years during
> which homo sapiens has existed in modern form,
> people lived in kinship
> societies which were extremely egalitarian, and
> produced no durable
> hierarchies. That fact alone disproves the
> innateness claim.
>
> The reason things changed was not because of human
> nature. It was because
> of increased population and the subsequent invention
> of agriculture. Those
> are both social-situational changes, not automatic
> expression of inborn
> human aggression. If anything, despite their
> unfortunate consequences, they
> are evidence of human inventiveness and mutual care.
>
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