Introduction

I won't mince words or waste time: We live in two different "societies" and that fact, combined with the lack of explicit knowledge that we do so, is destroying the larger "society" and crushing the smaller. I got my second clue to this unfortunate situation from the following:

"If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once. To apply the name 'society' to both, or even to either, is hardly of any use, and can be most misleading . . ." -F. A. Hayek, THE FATAL CONCEIT The Errors of Socialism, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1988), p. 18.

I'm not "hyping" or exaggerating much when I suggest that the correction of the misleading "confusion of societies" characterized by Hayek would go a very long way indeed toward solving a large number of the human world's most intractable problems -- mega-war, terrorism, income disparity, poverty, rampant alienation, genocide, and many others.

In order to untangle the two groups in the "real world" and in our daily interactions, we first must do so in our own thinking. Theoretically at least, the easiest of Hayek's two "societies" to understand should be the "micro- cosmos," that is, our "band," "troop" or family. Not by chance, these words - - - band, troop, family - - - describe the folks we know face-to-face - - - and as suggested by Hayek, the implicit rules by which we operate with these folks need to be quite different from the ones we use in dealing with the rest of the world, that is, with strangers -- people we don't know face-to-face or at all.

The fact that we know these people face-to-face is extremely significant as we shall see. It is this face-to-face level of society within which our genetic ancestors evolved exclusively and thus within which our natural genetic tendencies, shaped by that "society" and inherited by us, work best. And it is literally the face-to-face information our ancestors got from each other each and every day that enabled our extremely successful ancestral groups not only to function but to prosper - - - and thus enabled them to survive, multiply, and pass their genes on to us.

Face-to-face information exchange is the main part of how we synchronize with each other, how we know what we're all thinking -- which is clearly essential for group cohesion. Author Steven Johnson, speaking of what we do with the information we exchange thru our face-to-face information "inter facing," goes so far as to call us "mind readers" - - -

Human beings are innate mind readers. Our skill at imagining other people's mental states ranks up there with our knack for language and our opposable thumbs. It comes so naturally to us and has engendered so many corollary effects that it's hard for us to think of it as a special skill at all. -Steven Johnson, Emergence (New York, NY: Scribner 2001) p. 195, 196, 197

And Johnson gives an example of just what he's talking about - - -

Your facial gestures, eye movements, body language, would all be sending a steady stream of information about your internal state--signals that I would intuitively pick up and interpret. I'd see your eyelids droop during the more contorted arguments, note the chuckle at one of my attempts at humor, register the way you sit upright in the chair when my words get your attention. I could no more prohibit my mind from making those assessments than you could stop your mind from interpreting my spoken words as language. (Assuming you're an English speaker, of course.) We are both locked in a communicational dance of extraordinary depth--and yet, amazingly, we're barely aware of the process at all.

This makes it clear that group functioning, requiring regular, intensive exchanges of information as we'll see, uses faces as a main "interface" or pathway for those exchanges. [1] So there's more to "face-to-face" than that simple phrase suggests -- and as a result, it would be quite logical to call this level of society (including families, bands, and "tribes") "face-to-face society." In keeping with common usage, we might also call it "tribal society," - - - IF we keep in mind that regular daily face-to-face interaction is a main feature of "tribal society".

Since there is a definite limit on how many people we can interact with face-to-face on a daily basis, there is a definite - - - and small - - - limit to the size of groups which can effectively operate depending only on our inherited face-to-face "rules." The failure of religious sects once they grew beyond a certain size is well known, and the lesson was learned again in the sixties with the failure of large numbers of "hippie" communes once they grew too large.

Vestiges of this size limitation remain, particularly in the size of the basic military unit and elsewhere. Members of some Hutterite and Amish sects ^^w still go so far as to split into two groups when their numbers get too large. It was claimed that Julius Caesar knew every one of his legionnaires by name, but if so, that was still a maximum of 5500 to 6000 men which severely stretches the extreme upper limit for the size of coherent face-to-face groups.

I want to emphasize that by "small-group," I mean really small. As in 150 individuals is not a small-group, let alone any large tribe or tiny nation. We modern humans have become inured to what our ancestors would have considered perniciously over-crowded conditions. In order to understand their world, we need to keep constantly in mind that to them, thirty folks all in the same place was a remarkably large group.

But large size wasn't a problem for our archaic ancestors - - - for most of our history there weren't enough of us to form large groups in the first place. [2] Unlike today when it's become a common-place daily or even hourly occurrrence, the appearance of a stranger on the scene, by definition someone we don't already know face-to- face, was indeed a relatively rare and remarkable event for our ancestral groups.

The "other" society, the "macro-cosmos" or "wider civilization" Hayek refers to on the other hand, is a very new invention. It revolves around interactions, mostly wide-spread long-distance trade indirectly involving strangers, people we don't even know exist and will almost certainly never even meet, let alone exchange face-to-face information with them every day. When was the last time you spoke face-to-face with the salesman who sold you your last car - - - and how well do you know him? What are the odds of your ever even meeting the guy on the assembly line who installed the windshield - - - or the guy who dug the sand to make the glass for that windshield?

As opposed to "face-to-face tribal society," we might call Hayek's "wider civilization," involved mostly with long-distance trade, "extended-order society" (the designation favored by Hayek himself) or perhaps, "economic society."

From the above discussion and as implied by its name, it's clear that in "economic society," "trade" plays the central role. But we will discover that trade of a different yet closely related type is central to face-to-face society as well. This small-group face-to-face trade is usually referred to as "reciprocal altruism" in the humanities literature -- but there's a problem: As implied by the name "reciprocal altruism," the phenomena it labels aren't regarded as trade -- and that mis-perception isn't limited to the humanities: most economists don't regard "reciprocal altruism" as trade either -- such small low-level micro-economic transactions are not even on their radar screens.

Despite these mis-perceptions (and partly because of them), we will find the trade processes labeled "reciprocal altruism" centrally important. Unsurprisingly -- given the mis-perceptions -- a disproportionate number of the confusions between Hayek's "two societies" are directly related to the failure to recognize "reciprocal altruism" as the basic form of trade that it is. We will try to untangle some of this in a later section, specifically in Chapter 22, Could It Be Trade?.

Another significant point for later discussion: If you never even meet the vast majority of people who produce the products you trade for - - - and they never meet you - - - it is fairly clear that the face-to-face information which works so well to moderate and guide small groups is highly attenuated - - - if not totally absent - - - from this "wider civilization." What takes its place? If a fellow hunter does something to hurt you in some way, he can see the resultant look on your face. And in small ancestral groups, he'll see it day after day. How can the salesman -- let alone the guy who dug the sand for your windshield -- feel your pain when you learn the car you bought from him was a "lemon" if they don't regularly see you face-to-face?

So we now have "face-to-face" or "tribal" society versus "extended-order" or "economic" society - - - and the assertion by Hayek that they do not mix well. For the time being then, we can suggest that the defining characteristic of "face-to-face society" is inter-personal interaction, some of which involves short-range intra-group trade in the form of "reciprocal altruism," strongly influenced and/or moderated by genetic tendencies thru face-to-face information. The defining characteristic of "economic society" on the other hand, is formal wide-spread long-distance and essentially impersonal trade, controlled by, well, something else. We'll flesh-out and refine these models as we go.

While it might seem that of these two "societies," we should most easily understand the nature of bands, troops and families since these produced our genetic predispositions, we don't and neither have our more recently domesticated forebearers for many centuries. In fact they - - - and we - - - have been regularly amazed, baffled, and even "stunned" (no hype) by these small-groups.

Our "modern" cultures have evolved so far from the original circumstances of our ancestral groups that it's become incredibly difficult for us to understand the environmental and social circumstances we remain genetically predispoqed to exist in. [^^w Stephen Pinker, "The Blank Slate"] This difficulty of modern "economic man" to understand, let alone adjust his cultures to, his face-to-face small-group genetic heritage has been the case for several centuries and perhaps even, since the beginning of the Great Transitions 10,000 years or so ago - - - and the cause of many severe problems.

As one result of this difficulty, as seminal anthropologist Chirstopher Boehm put it in 1999, "... scientific anthropology emerged in the nineteenth century as a robust but tiny discipline that faced the enormous task of explaining nonliterate cultures [including our face-to-face ancestral groups -lrw] and their natural history to a world of urban literates." [3] The difficulty of this "enormous task" is buttressed by sociologist and history textbook researcher James W. Loewen when he noted that as early as the 1500s, reports of nations such as the Arawaks in newly discovered America "stunned Europeans." [4]

What was it about our ancestral cultures that most "stunned Europeans" - - - and made explaining them to "urban literates" an "enormous task"? Well, for the moment I guess, that gets added to our repertoire of unanswered questions.

To thoroughly understand the confusions between tribal society and extended order society - - - and thus avoid the consequences of these confusions - - - it is essential to understand the ancestral context within which "reciprocally altruistic" trade - - - and for that matter, many other of our inherited tendencies - - - are embedded, and that is what we will attempt to do in the next chapters.

Summary

We began this chapter and paper with an observation from Fredrick Hayek that there are "two sorts of world(s)" in which we must learn to live, that these worlds are confused by describing both with the word "society," and that this confusion causes problems for both "worlds." The first "society" we called "face-to-face" or "tribal" society, the second, "extended-order" or "economic" society. As the name suggests, face-to-face society involves those we know face-to-face -- those we know best, our "bands, troops and families" -- with whom we can exchange information face-to-face on a daily basis while "economic society" involves interactions with folks in the "external world" who we don't know. Almost the only interaction we have with those people in the "extended order" is that we indirectly ^^w[5] trade with them.

While trade plays an important role in both "societies," that role is explicitly central in "economic society," but it is less than explicit in "face-to-face society" -- where "trade" is traditionally mis- perceived as "reciprocal altruism" by anthropologists, ethnologists, economists and other scholars. We suggested that "tribal society," including trade, was guided by face-to-face information not regularly available to "economic society" -- which must use "something else" to guide it.

We further suggested that face-to-face society, at least as practiced by our genetic ancestors, baffles not only us (and our "urban literate" ancestors) but our anthropologists as well, and thus, ironically, that we probably understand "economic society" better, and so in our quest, we need to take a closer look at "face-to-face society" first.

We leave this section carrying along three explicit unanswered questions: If the regular face-to-face information which controls and moderates interpersonal interactions in tribal society isn't available to "economic society," what takes its place? And, "What's so 'amazing,' 'baffling,' and 'stunning' about our small-group ancestors that we find it difficult to understand them? Also, if Hayek was the second clue, what was the first?

Notes:

[1] The "face" part of the word "interface" is very significant in this context and shows up in its meanings: "connection," "link," or "bridge" when used as a noun; "cooperate," "coordinate," "mesh" and "unite" when used as a verb. Clearly the english language subliminally recognizes the importance of our faces -- and implicitly, the information they exchange -- in many important social contexts, particularly in producing group cohesion. return

[2] New research suggests that there may only have been 10,000 or fewer humans alive ~73,000 years ago after the eruption of the Tambora "super-volcano" -- and some estimates put the total number of humans world-wide fifty- thousand years ago at about 50,000. return

[3] Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1999) p. 30 & 31 return

[4] James W. Loewen, LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, (New York, NY: Touchstone 1996), p. 67 return

[5] Indirect trade involves a "medium of exchange," that is, "money." When you work for money it's not really the money you want, it's the TV set, gasoline, or sushi you can trade it for. By the same token the people who produce the above are unknown to you and you to them -- you trade with them indirectly (without knowing them directly face-to-face) using "money." The use of "money" facilitates the flow of goods and services so that they nearly always flow through many unknown hands before they arrive in your hands. You don't know the assembly line worker who put the windshield in your car or the guy who dug the sand to make it for example. return