We human beings have developed our leadership skills and our capacity for collaborative behavior as our social and cultural environments have evolved over many millennia. Though every individual human being nowadays lives out his or her life span within an environment typically including no more than seven generations (from their great-grandparents to their great-grandchildren), our current capacities and skills are ultimately the result of some ten thousand generations of human development, invention, and innovation. This is a brief version of the story.
Like all other animal species, human beings have always faced the challenges of finding food and shelter, raising their young, protecting the group against danger, and adapting to the natural environment. For hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of years, our human ancestors met these challenges in small roving bands, hunting animals they could track, kill, and bring back to camp; gathering plants wherever they grew; and using whatever tools their hands and their wits could fashion. Though humans could never bank on size, strength, speed, or sharp claws and teeth, they were able to walk upright (thus seeing at a greater distance) and to manipulate objects with their fingers and thumbs. Eventually, the front part of the human brain grew large enough to facilitate language, in turn generating collaboration. No single hunter can kill a buffalo, bring it back to camp, or eat it all before it spoils, but a team of hunters can.
All members of the earliest human groups lived within extended families ranging in size from 40 or 50 to several hundred. The normal human life span back then was barely 20 years and only a minority of newborn babies survived infancy. Thus the challenge of raising each new generation absorbed a great deal of the group’s energy and attention, especially for women. The demands of motherhood absorbed a large portion of adult women’s life span and required ample portions of caring behavior, driven partly by oxytocin, a brain chemical which fosters compassion and trust. Meanwhile, male hunting behavior is driven partly by adrenalin, which increases stress levels and gives rise to “fight or flight” responses. During much of our hunting and gathering stage, life among the human beings was similar in many ways to life among the chimps and other primates. But as the front part of our human brain grew larger and people developed the capacity to communicate through language and shape the environment with tools, human groups grew larger, human life became more complex, and we human beings became a major factor in the evolution of every environment we entered.
Within the last 100,000 years, human beings in some areas created cultures which greatly enhanced the ability to survive and adapt to environmental challenges. Our big brains made it possible to think about how things work and then take action to make things work better. Sophisticated tools and language made it possible to think together about the past and the future in art and stories. Before long, we were even questioning the meaning and purpose of things in general, planting the seeds of philosophy, religion, and science.
Very early in the development of human cultures, we became fascinated with our personal yet universal journey from life to death and in the continuous rebirth of all living things from one generation to the next. One of the pivotal leadership roles within hunting and gathering bands was the shaman or healer, whose job was to keep in touch with the spirits and forces of nature and whose power lay partly in the knowledge of supposedly magical words and rituals. Still, life in the hunting and gathering band was largely a physical struggle, so the earliest human leaders displayed the same kind of physical dominance associated with the alpha males of other mammal species, and the tasks of survival were still organized largely by age, gender, competence, and power. Close family ties and genetic inheritance remained the primary building blocks of the social structure.
The chiefs, kings, and emperors who accumulated most of the power and wealth in these systems were able to convert the skills and tools originally used for hunting other animals into skills and tools for military conquest and political power over their fellow human beings. And just like the alpha males of other mammal species, they maintained their power by physical force and passed it along genetically to their own biological children. For about 10,000 years after the advent of agriculture, societies all over the world took on the forms we now call “aristocracy,” which implies a hierarchy of power passed along through family lines–mostly through a system of “primogeniture” or rule of firstborn sons. Throughout the ancient agricultural world, most public leader figures were human versions of the dominant alpha male, and they were frequently direct beneficiaries of primogeniture. Until the 20th century, in fact, leadership in the public realm was generally considered a masculine activity and the physical virtues of strength, aggressiveness, and fierceness were generally associated with leadership in the public eye.
Because life in the prehistoric and ancient world revolved around relatively primitive physical challenges, and because our knowledge about things in general was also relatively primitive, aristocratic forms of social organization worked as well as any system could have at the time. In hindsight we can easily see the problems and limitations of a social system in which brute force and simple family ties are more important than wisdom and justice, but aristocratic social systems did offer several functional advantages in their heyday.
First of all, as human groups got bigger and bigger, somebody had to organize things somehow. Back then there were no other ways to organize things; brute force and family ties were just about all we had to work with. And people who gain power are always reluctant to give it up, so any system which concentrates power will tend to reinforce itself and become more rigid over time. Also, strangely enough, people have always been fascinated by power and attracted to people who hold power, so the least powerful members of a society are sometimes quite willing to submit (though perhaps unwittingly) to the most powerful even against their own best interests. Even where aristocratic rulers were quite ignorant, psychologically flawed, and even inhumane, the system of aristocratic rule did provide a modicum of security and stability to most members of the community most of the time. Finally, most members of ancient cultures were in a chronic state of communal ignorance and superstition, which made it much easier for power wielders to wield their power.
Perhaps the most obvious advantage of aristocratic organization is its capacity for quick decisions. Theoretically, only one person makes an actual decision and everyone else follows orders. In our hunting-and-gathering days, we often required and usually got quick decisions. In fact, our brains are wired for snap judgments in response to sudden dangers, which has become a distinct liability in the modern world where most of our significant problems are extremely complex. During our life in aristocratic systems, we developed a communal habit of letting the dominant rulers and their associates make decisions for us. Ironically, people who live in chronic ignorance and never exercise significant judgment may actually welcome the freedom from responsibility implied by aristocratic systems.
Aristocracies also have another related advantage: since we always know that the next leader will be the firstborn son of the current leader, we don’t have to spend much time identifying and educating tomorrow’s leaders. According to the theory of aristocracy, we only have to educate a small number of boys for leadership in each generation. For the rest, life in an aristocracy can supposedly be stable, predictable, and free of responsibility, as long as everyone accepts the system and obeys the orders of those in power. The only real necessity for leadership in this context is the genetic inheritance of the leader; in this sense, all leaders in an aristocracy were “born” rather than “made” and leadership skill itself was supposedly inherited, not learned.
In ancient and prehistoric times, most of our knowledge about leaders and leadership can be described as mythological. Before the spread of literacy and scientific methods, most information was passed along orally from person to person and from generation to generation. Since reliable knowledge about human behavior was lacking, stories about leaders and leadership in the prehistoric and ancient world were often a fantastic mixture of recognizable humanity and extraordinary or even supernatural heroism.
The prevailing assumption seemed to be that normal, average, everyday human beings could never be significant leaders; only people endowed with supernatural or divine powers at birth could change history or move mountains. All over the world, myths about warrior-chiefs, founders of civilizations, kings, prophets, and great leaders include references to their half-human, half-divine nature. The chiefs and kings of ancient civilizations were also attended by priests and prophets who ensured some divine justification for the ruler’s political power. In the last few generations of European aristocracy, apologists for the system developed a complex rationale around the notion of “the divine right of kings,” as if to repel attack from any merely human logic.
The drawbacks and dysfunctions of aristocracies, of course, eventually outweighed their functional contributions. The idea that normal, average human beings could govern themselves wisely on a large scale had never made much sense in the ancient world, especially to the dominant power holders; but it began to make more and more sense to more and more people over the last 500 years. As human societies became more complex and more wealthy, as commerce and trade with far-flung civilizations progressed, as scientific method provided reliable knowledge and undermined old myths and superstitions, and as the printing press and public education made knowledge commonplace, the old methods of organizing and exercising power became more and more suspect. Looking back objectively, the history of aristocracy now seemed like a scary succession of brutal and ignorant kings and power mongers; eventually it became obvious that being the firstborn son of a king is no guarantee of wisdom, compassion, or leadership skill.
