While the pyramids of Egypt are not the oldest human structures, they do capture the historical imagination like few others. Egypt was one of the greatest agrarian, or farming cultures. Birthed by the Nile River, the civilization of the Pharaohs lasted several thousand years, longer that is from the time of the ancient Greeks to present day. The pyramids became Egyptian culture's symbol of greatness and longevity. Also, the pyramids symbolized the centralized power hierarchy of pharaonic rule. At the pinnacle was pharaoh, all else below, with the great mass of people comprising the base.
Egypt did not invent human social hierarchy. It seems to have arrived most acutely, five thousand or so years previously, when homo sapiens quit hunting and gathering to begin planting and herding. The wonderful neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky states in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, “Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitability the unequal distribution of surplus, generating socioeconomic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies.”
The history of how human social hierarchy first came to be is largely unwritten and probably lost, though endlessly speculated upon. Nonetheless, hierarchy, in a vast variety of forms and processes, is deeply etched across history, defining us still today. It is imperative to point out that social and political hierarchy, and by this it is meant unequal, centralized political power, is almost entirely culturally derived, having little to no meaning beyond us. Looking across nature, whether animal or the physical universe, the hierarchies we seek to impose on the rest of nature are inevitably little more than a mirror. As the sublime quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg noted, in our looking to understand nature and the universe, humanity encounters only themselves.
Historically, cultural hierarchies – social, economic, and political – have been the power structures of society. Like the pyramids, all were highly centralized, one or a few persons at the top, the vast majority at the bottom. Centralized power always comes with all sorts of laws and rules as to why it should exist. Sapolsky writes, “People on top generate justifications for their status.” This is an essential and too little recognized understanding. No hierarchy ever need exist, whether justified by commandments and laws of religion, political thought, or economic theories. Hierarchy is simply our own creation, nothing more.
In recorded history of humankind, there have only been a few exceptions to hierarchically controlled government, they are the democratic eras of ancient Athens, republican Rome, Renaissance Italy, and the modern republican era beginning with the founding of the United States. Over two centuries, the last was replicated, no matter how inexactly, across much of the planet. The organization of all these democratic cultures were in no way completely horizontal, but opposed to hierarchical pyramids, they were a great deal flatter, with the enfranchised bottoms having some control over a wider, distributed top.
These democratic cultures construed some, certainly not all, less rigid social categories, economic equity though not economic equality, and structures for participation of the enfranchised in political decision making, including elections and places to freely gather politically such as the Roman Forum or the old American town hall. Most imperative to decentralized democratic order was freedom of information; in conception, editing, and communication, opposed to the tight control of information imposed by all centralized government hierarchies, be it Pharaoh's Egypt, Imperial China, or Romanov Russia.
This control of information has been essential to hierarchy from the dawn of the Agrarian Era. Humanity moved from roaming the distributed natural cornucopia that evolved us, to settling on a plot of land with centrally controlled granaries. Agrarian society was reliant on more information, necessary for the methods of sowing and reaping, and most importantly, for understanding the calendar, knowing when to sow and reap. The calendar, time itself, was tightly controlled by the top across all early agrarian civilizations.
With industrialism, information creation and its communication saw a certain necessary lessening of control. However, the ability to act on information at an industrial societal level, became overwhelmingly the domain of the its great social innovation, the very hierarchical corporation.
The corporation, not the state, became the premier hierarchy of the Industrial Era. The state became trapped in the structures of the Agrarian Era, bumbling at best and completely incapable most of the time in reacting to the burgeoning industrial landscape. The state hierarchies ancient justifications for power became ever tighter restrictions on their actions, assuring their ever more obvious failure.
As agrarian society was birthed by a growing understanding and manipulation of plant and animal life, industrialism was birthed by the great scientific revolution of the last five centuries and its resultant technologies. In the last century and half, biology and quantum physics opened new perspectives on nature and the universe. These new perspectives quash the idea of order from stasis centralized hierarchy, instead revealing order rising from below, through the constant movement of innumerable cells and particles. Today, this knowledge fosters the creation of ever more powerful technologies. This process is far more radical than the control of a few plants and animals that brought about the Agrarian Era, or the control of fossil fueled technologies largely responsible for the Industrial Era. Yet, fully entrenched remain both our agrarian, in the form of the state, and our industrial, in the form of the corporation, hierarchies.
At this point, the ineptitude of our agrarian political institutions are fairly, or should be, obvious to all. Our contemporary pharaohs, the industrial corporation, failures not quite as obvious, but then their justifications for power still remain largely unchallenged. The supposed need for our mega-corporation and their dangerously comical, edict spewing CEOs, is as great an illusion as the necessity of Egypt's Pharaoh. Unfortunately, the failure of the industrial corporation will not become glaringly obvious until the technologies of this new era spin faster out of both their and humanity’s control, in part, because quite paradoxically, they are futilely being designed to be centrally controlled.
Our old hierarchies create ever greater discontent. Humanity does have limited though important experience with an alternative, decentralized and distributed order — democracy. To meet the challenges of today, democracy could be revived, reformed and evolved. A good starting point, exactly the opposite of building hierarchy, is the recognition of the universality of the human experience.
Have you read On Authority by Engels? If so, what do you think he gets wrong in his analysis?
https://redsails.org/on-authority/