Page 483 - Cultures and Organizations

448 IMPLICATIONS

24
business. Trade gradually replaced war as the prevailing mechanism of
transferring wealth, although wars for wealth still occur today.
Plants and animal herds enable concentration of harvests in one place,
along with increase in the scale of society. This advance made theft even
more rewarding than it was in villages. As people became more skilled
agriculturalists, population sizes increased. Scale increases opened pos-
sibilities for specialization. Armed forces could be kept to protect stores
of food. Once established, though, they could be under temptation to seize
power. For instance, armed factions could rise in competition for succeed-
ing a deceased emperor or for contesting taxes. An escalation in violence
was probable unless people grew even more meek, to the point of virtual
slavery, or else accepted arbitration, impersonal justice, and separation of
powers. Once states started to appear, the complexity of behavioral and
symbolic evolution soared, while still being highly path dependent.
People are still learning how to live in large-scale anonymous soci-
eties; after all, such societies started to occur only some four hundred
generations ago. To help explain some of the societal innovations that our
ancestors have evolved during this period, the work of American soci-
ologist Talcott Parsons (1902–79) will be referenced here. Parsons was
revolutionary in that he thought of social inventions as evolutionary. Once
they have been hit upon, he said, these innovations will not go away. He
made the analogy to biological evolutionary innovations such as vision—
vision provides such crucial advantages that selection will preserve it and
improve it once it has begun. Only, in this case the evolution takes place at
the group level. Large-scale societies both enabled and necessitated social
evolution.
Thinking about the growth of civilizations, Parsons proposed a num-
ber of such pivotal, irreversible innovations. These he termed “evolutionary

universals in society.” In a 1964 article he mentioned the following list:

social stratification, alongside cultural legitimation, bureaucratic orga-
nization, money and markets, generalized universalistic norms, and the
25
democratic association. In the discussion that follows, each of these six
evolutionary universals will be the subject of a section. The order is not
necessarily historic; these innovations have occurred gradually, in interde-
pendence, and elements of them have been present in preagricultural com-
munities. Nevertheless, agriculture and the attendant population increase
immensely favored their development.