What the Kansas Legislature could learn from our hunter-gatherer ancestors
Originally published at the Kansas Reflector: https://kansasreflector.com/2021/03/06/what-the-kansas-legislature-could-learn-from-our-hunter-gatherer-ancestors/
The Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion pieces from writers who share our goal of widening the conversation about how public policies affect the day-to-day lives of people throughout our state. Marcel Harmon is an anthropologist, engineer and former Lawrence school board member.
Life could be precarious for our hunter-gather ancestors. Disease, drought, wildfires, flash floods and other natural disasters could put their lives in immediate or long-term danger. There were also threats from predators and occasionally from other humans. Over time, evolutionary forces honed our abilities to cooperate in these small groups to survive and thrive.
Social guiding mechanisms like collective decision-making, behavioral transparency and varying degrees of sanctions (from gossiping and shunning to banishment) evolved to promote “prosocial” behaviors that benefited the whole group while discouraging “selfish” behaviors benefiting one person or a few individuals at the expense of everyone else.
One researcher, the political scientist/sociologist and Nobel Economics prize winning Elinor Ostrom, discovered eight principles of cooperation that evolved over the course of our history spent predominantly in smaller hunter/gatherer groups:
Strong group identity.
Equitable distribution of contributions and benefits.
Fair and inclusive consensus decision-making.
Monitoring of agreed-to behaviors.
Graduated responses to helpful and unhelpful behavior.
Conflict resolution perceived as fast and fair.
Authority to self-govern.
Collaborative relations with other groups.
These became the workhorses of our social cooperative toolkit.
But as we started living in larger groups with increasing social complexity and diverse cultural norms, requiring greater levels of hierarchy, these principles became less effective. Promoting prosocial behavior grew difficult, allowing more occurrences of toxic individualism, extreme wealth disparities and resource depletion compared to our hunter/gatherer past.
Modern neighborhoods and communities and even nations have by chance landed on varying aspects of these principles at times. But it’s arguable humanity has reached a point where we can no longer wait for chance to bring us applications of the principles that are more effective in modern societies.
Large scale social disruption could very well happen before we get there. If we don’t mindfully direct our own evolution — by developing contextual versions of the principles, applying them, evaluating them and improving them moving forward — then evolution is going to take us to where we don’t want to go.
So, how do we better align our modern world with our hunter gatherer past?
Roadmaps to promote prosocial behavior at multiple scales are out there. Prosocial.World’s ARC (awareness, relationship, culture) process is one of them. A practical methodology rooted in evolutionary theory and contextual behavioral science, it involves a series of workshops to help groups uncover individual and group interests and values, find commonalities, reconcile differences, and integrate them into a larger collective purpose, or identity. Goals and actions are then formulated within the context of Ostrom’s principles, and their implementation is monitored and tweaked moving forward. Success is also dependent on including all relevant key stakeholders.
I could envision every Kansas legislative committee publicly using Prosocial each year to assess their own collective values and develop their own versions of the principles relative to their goals, day-to-day operations and other work.
If members were to come to consensus on what defines their committee identity — a consensus that must span both parties, rural/urban divides, etc., — then Kansas would likely see more cooperation within the legislature and less undermining of public education, public health and renewable energy, fewer attacks on transgender individuals and other minorities, as well as a reduction in other “selfish” behaviors and legislation.
Let’s take the Senate and House education committees as an example. One could imagine an agreement among committee members that part of what defines them as a committee (first principle) is using the power and purse of the legislature to facilitate the equitable education of all kids across the state based on best practices, peer reviewed research, insights from educators/experts and other relevant evidence. Given that, voucher bills that siphon money away from public education to private schools lacking the same oversights and restrictions would violate the second principle’s required equitable distribution of costs/benefits, and have more difficulty making it out of committee.
In our current hyper-partisan, GOP dominated legislature, I’m not overly optimistic Republican leaders will be chomping at the bit to implement this or similar processes. And frankly, some Democrats might be nervous as to what the specific principles end up looking like for any given committee. However, it has potential to reduce our current levels of hyper-competition and increase collaboration.
There are existing examples of implementing Prosocial within a governmental context to draw upon. Imagine if every governing body, community organization or corporate boardroom looked at their operations through the lens of Ostrom’s principles. Prosocial.World has resources to support such efforts.
The challenges we face are immense. If we don’t find a way to better integrate the most adaptive trait of our hunter-gatherer ancestors — cooperation — more widely within and across contemporary societies, the future of Kansas, and of the planet, may not be that bright.
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