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Edited on Tue Sep-25-07 11:30 AM by igil
citizenship and its benefits, while requiring some loyalty in return, there were other entities that conferred benefits and required duties.
Lets hop back 5k years. In some places there were organized ethnic groups that were imperialistic. Groups like the Hatti come to mind.
Go back earlier in the area and you still get war: A city would be from one ethnic group and be prosperous, invaders would be from another and be less prosperous, and have men willing to die for booty.
Go back earlier--or simply go back to 600 AD in Arabia--and you have tribal loyalties. The tribe is all: The worst of your tribe is better than the best of the enemy tribe; "enemy tribe" is what you call a tribe that either is competing for resources or hasn't acknowledged that the worst of your tribe is better than the best of his tribe.
If you don't like ethnic tribes, let's go for religious tribes. Take Islam, with its millions of non-Muslim slaves, mostly black but also white; it's persistent raids on other territories and conquering/looting of universities in N. India, and tolerance of non-Muslims until intolerance and complete forced submission was practicable. The dividing line was 'in group' or 'out group', as with most tribes, but the border was the Shahada (along with whatever was actually required on the ground by the enforcers and preachers of Islam at the time).
Or we can go back to places like Papua, where the estimate is that in any given century 30% of the tribes would have been eradicated through genocide. You kill off enough of their males and voila, their females become breeding stock.
In all of the above, if there is enough wealth to be concentrated, it gets concentrated. If you have a tribe of 50, it's not likely that the chief will have much more than the lowest full member.
What do you get from such arrangements? Security, first off, mutual defense--and note that the defense starts with the family and moves outward in concentric rings (if a clansman from a different family dishonors your, your family rallies around you; if a tribesman from a different clan dishonors you, your clan rallies around you; if a member from a different tribe dishonors you, your tribe must rally around you). Such groups are usually social groups; we're fairly social animals, so having people around that we can relate to is a desirable trait. There's usually a preference for people in your group to provide you assistance, if they're going to provide it to anybody, and it's seldom explicitly justified as a possible tit-for-tat arrangement. In the case of clans, there's usually some help if you fall on hard times; in the case of nation-states, you can petition the king or government for assistance. But the obligations to you are usually nicely mirrored by the responsibilies imposed upon you; there's no free lunch. If you're attacked, you get defended (probably), but if somebody else is attacked off you or your son goes to fight ... and whining about it is dishonorable and jeopardizes your position. There's a common system of laws, not always a system you like and certainly not always fair (as we would see it); ther's a common cultural background that you may be against, that guarantees you a group in which you're likely to get some form of justice--unlike the kind of justice you get from enemy groups, all "erroneously" believing that you're automatically worse than the worst in that group. What's important in such terms is the tribe. Individualism is a highly restricted kind of thinking, and it's unclear that it's one that contributes, in anything more than the very short run, to evolutionary success.
Most tribes don't tolerate large differences in wealth since there are usually two forces in tension. Those that are seen as representatives of the tribe are excluded from this to a large extent, of course. In that case while there may be grumbling inside the group, there's a common face presented to those outside. As tribes can have military heroes (i.e., individuals that are bears of the group's honor in martial settings), so also there are economic and political heroes. One does not traditionally diss one's heroes in public; to do so is shameful. But the two forces work: The first is that the wealthy must show generosity--it's a duty. It's not a reciprocal relation: A given poor person has no right to generosity. And the second is that in exchange for generosity, the giver gains prestige and honor and other privileges. Some try to flip it around: The poor have more prestige and have rights, while the wealthy have no rights and should be embarrassed. This provides no incentive for the wealthy to be generous.
Moreover, notice that location is pretty much immaterial--for you it's a big deal, but really, it's not much of a factor. How humans perceive their *social* reality trumps location, social and psychological space are far more important than geographical space. Most tribes have some way of taking outsiders into their group--you can marry in, go through some ritual (whether ritual scarring or being baptized), you can perform useful, not ritual, acts on behalf of the tribe whose adoption you seek. But simply living among a tribe has never granted you membership, even when the tribe's been sedentary. You can argue that nearly all of human history has been immoral, unnatural (?), wrong, misguided, whatever you want; you're entitled to your beliefs.
You see this kind of thing in the earliest records in Asia and right up through 20th century America. In general terms it's consistent from Australia to Africa to Scandinavia to the Aztecs. It holds for matriarchies and patriarchies, for animists and adherents of "Abrahamic religions" (for the most part).
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