Major Transitions in Political Order

We present three major transitions that occur on the way to the elaborate and diverse societies of the modern era. Our account links the worlds of social animals such as pigtail macaques and monk parakeets to examples from human history, including 18th Century London and the contemporary online phenomenon of Wikipedia. From the first awareness and use of group-level social facts to the emergence of norms and their self-assembly into normative bundles, each transition represents a new relationship between the individual and the group. At the center of this relationship is the use of coarse-grained information gained via lossy compression. The role of top-down causation in the origin of society parallels that conjectured to occur in the origin and evolution of life itself. [T]hey then threw me upon the bed, and one of them (I think it was Mary Smith) kneeled on my breast, and with one hand held my throat; Mary Junque felt for my money; by my struggling about, they did not get it at that time; then they called another woman in . . . when she came in, they said cut him! cut him! — evidence of Benjamin Leethorp in the trial of Mary Junque and Mary Smith for grand larceny, Old Bailey Criminal Court, London, England; 4 April 1779 [1] Unless we are historians, the 18th Century world of Junque, Smith and Leethorp is almost impossible to imagine. In stealing from Leethorp, the two women put themselves at risk not only of imprisonment, but of indentured servitude in the colonies and even death. Leethorp, for his part, begins his evidence by explaining to the jury how he was seeking a different brothel than the one in which he was throttled, stripped, and robbed. Junque and Smith were without benefit of legal counsel and Smith’s witnesses, unaware of the trial date, did not appear. The court condemned them to branding and a year’s imprisonment in less than five hundred words. The indictment, formally for a non-violent offence, was one of hundreds of its kind that decade marked by assault, knives, and (sometimes) freely flowing blood. In the risks they ran and the things they were ashamed of, the minds of the three are alien to us; in its casual violence, so was the society that enclosed them. Yet this world, gradually, continuously, evolved into one far less tolerant of violence and yet far more protective of an individual’s ∗Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Department of Informatics, Indiana University, 919 E 10th St, Bloomington, IN 47408; Program in Cognitive Science, Indiana University, 1900 E 10th St, Bloomington, IN 47406; Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, 513 N Park Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47408; Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA. [email protected] 1 ar X iv :1 51 2. 03 41 9v 2 [ ph ys ic s. so cph ] 1 1 Ju n 20 16 rights—into the world, in other words, of most readers of this volume. How witnesses, victims, and defendants spoke about both facts and norms in the law courts of London shifted, decade by decade, over the course of a hundred and fifty years [2]. This shift in speech paralleled a similar decline in how people behaved towards each other on the street, as the state came, increasingly, to manage its monopoly on violence—part of what is known as the “civilizing process” [3]. These changes took place in the decentralized common-law courts, among hundreds of thousands of interacting victims and defendants. Acts of Parliament, sensational crimes, the invention of the criminal defence lawyer—these changed the courts, but in the moments of their introduction showed little effect on the slow changes in the speech and practices themselves. We are predisposed to see the introduction of a law as identical to the recognition and enforcement of the moral sentiments it invokes. Yet it is, in the final analysis, individuals who constitute a social world. Laws and formal practices may be created by a small group that can unilaterally enforce its will, but they often lag behind the conditions they ratify; when laws do appear, they have unpredictable effects on the minds of the people they concern [4, 5]. Evidence from the quantitative behavioral and social sciences accumulates daily for the existence of a complex relationship between individual minds and the persistent social worlds they create. Over decades of development, writers collectively nucleate new styles of prose on the periphery of the generation that came before, perceiving the patterns of the past and struggling with their influence [6]. French revolutionaries borrow words such as contract, rights and the people from Enlightenment philosophers to both signal and make possible their shifting political alliances [7]; these same words appear, hundreds of years later, as signals in the House and Senate of 21st Century America [8]. Pre-Hispanic Mexico and 21st Century Europe have similar patterns in the distribution of city sizes, outputs, and infrastructure, showing how widely-varying cultures find similar solutions to the management of social contact over more than three millennia [9]. Such phenomena are often called political, but homo sapiens is not the only political animal. As we will show, increasing evidence from the behavioral sciences shows that social animals such as pigtailed macaques and monk parakeets interact not only with each other, but with the creations of their society as a whole. As we approach our own branch on the evolutionary tree we find a sequence of transitions in the nature of the relationship between the individual and the group: individuals come to know coarse-grained facts about their social worlds; they gain the ability to reason normatively, from a collective ought; they gather their norms into self-reinforcing bundles. New research provides a quantitative window onto the distinct and traceable imprints each of these transitions leaves on the logic of society. In their book Major Transitions in Evolution, John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry [10] argued that leaps in complexity over evolutionary time were driven by innovations in how information is stored and transmitted. Our social feedback hypothesis extends their argument to account for the major transitions in political order. We argue that these later transitions are driven by innovations in how information is processed.1 Our attention to information processing focuses in particular on the summary of large numbers of individual-level facts to produce coarse-grained representations of the world. Understanding what coarse-graining is, and how it works, is essential. We begin there. 1We do not, however, describe the evolutionary pressures that might drive the creation of these novel abilities; most notably, the collective action problem [11, 12], whose study has formed the basis of fruitful contact between the anthropological and political sciences.