Ed Weick takes me to task in my "28. Imminent plans" posting where I wrote:

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[Of the two ideas which conjoined in my mind.]

The lifetime idea is that it is quite obvious to me that the most prominent characteristic of man, and which has evolved over millions of years, is an ineradicable urge for status which has bedevilled the whole history of man since the earliest days when cities began. The other component was a photograph of a brainscan in which the subject had been presented with a novel problem which he was trying to solve. In the photo, his frontal lobes lit up powerfully.

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. . .and he writes:

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EW

Perhaps, Keith. But invariably? I was watching a documentary on Japan last night, and the dominant characteristic there seemed to be wanting to be included in the group. The documentary argued that to be excluded from the group, as people who had committed more than one criminal act were, was devastating. In northern Canadian Aboriginal groups, people do not activily seek status but acquire it through what they do well - ie., they become recognized as good hunters. To become good hunters is important for reasons other than status - ie., people need food and they need to get it with the least possible expenditure of energy. I would suggest that there is always a prior question, and this involves the rules and values by which a society or group operates. Our society emphasizes status and makes strong links between wealth and status, or possesions and status, but this would not necessarily hold in other societies.

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I'll start my reply by saying that it's unfortunate that a very good Japanese friend of mine, the Dean of a College in Tokyo, and originally invited onto my list, has either died or has changed his address because my mailings to him have been bouncing back. It would have been interesting to hear what he had to say about Japanese society. However, by way of balancing up your observation, it's necessary to say that although Japanese society has very strongly retained the group aspect of village life (in comparison to westerners) and where the richest in the community will invite the poorest to his daughter's wedding, it is also still an extremely hierarchical society where one businessman doesn't even speak to another on the first occasion without exchanging cards first so each knows the other's rank within his firm.

Yes, perhaps I've presented the status urging too strongly so far. It is not as though all males have an equally strong drive to get to the top, or that all females have equally strong urges to partner only the richest or most successful of males. This is patently not so. My original sentence was really only a bird's eye view over all mankind's history in which most of it (or at least the wartime episodes) seems to consist of the behaviour of a succession of particularly ambitious (I almost wrote obnoxious) males who stopped at nothing to get to the top and, when there, were ruthless in maintaining power.

Our frontal lobes, with their manifold potentialities for novelties, specialities and individual talents as well as our basic genetic abilities means that the status game in mankind is a great deal more sophisticated than the brutal aggressiveness that we see in the other primate species such as the baboon or the chimpanzee (with much smaller frontal lobes). The rather more crude exercise of status ranking in our case takes place typically when little boys fight in the school playground. But from then onwards it's a much more subtle affair -- and with many strands, too. One male may have high status as regards one particular skill, another may have a high status due to another.

By and large, except for those males where the urge for power borders on the psychopathic (e.g. wife-beaters, some politicians, some 'organisation men', etc) most rankings are peacefully arrived at by the time we reach mature adulthood (whenever that may be in the case of the male!). And the reason for this is that, at the same time as there is the necessity for instant rank order in times of emergency or peril, it is also about the cohesion of the community in which these status games take place. The more cohesive a group is when compared with another, the more likely it is that it will survive in adverse circumstances than another which is at odds with itself with ambiguous leaders and alternative ideas. Thus, rank ordering is a part of togetherness -- an acceptance of the structure that has been arrived at. The reassurance of belonging -- whatever the rank --is the other side of the coin of rank orderliness. Even the village idiot has some status in medieval society by just belonging there. "He may be an idiot, but he's our idiot". Just as status ranking has been important in history, so has been obedience to authority and deference, and often with as many unfortunate results.

Ed writes further:

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EW

I've been doing some reading on the Gnostics lately. The more extreme and ascetic among them would have absolutely nothing to do with the world, and lived in caves or trees or holes in the ground all by themselves. Christian Anabaptist groups like the Mennonites and Hutterites would eschew the ways of the world and live in egalitarian communal groups. Before the Norse got there, Irish monks lived in complete isolation in Iceland. How would these people fit with your model of status-seeking man? Perhaps in some cases, one could argue that they were seeking status with God, but that would seem to be stretching it a bit, wouldn't it?

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Yes, it would be stretching it! But I'm not so sure that the ancient hermits and ascetics were quite as status-free as you suggest. Most had disciples before they withdrew into their respective wildernesses or else, without food being brought to them fairly frequently, they would have starved to death. Simeon Stylites, who was the ultimate at this sort of thing -- both atmospherically as well as penitentially! -- lived for 37 years at the top of a stone column and, in time, became a tourist attraction with heaps of gifts and food brought to him. In fact, it was such a thoroughly sensible profession for those days that pillar-hermits lasted for another six centuries up until about 900AD in various parts of the Near East.

As for the Mennonites and Hutterites, well, I imagine that they were very similar to the Plymouth Bethren in which I spent my childhood. This is as egalitarian-seeming bunch of folk as you could wish for. At their beautifully simple Breaking of Bread services of a Sunday morning, any member of the congregation can stand up and minister or pray or start a hymn, and any baptised member of the chapel can proceed to the front and break the loaf and pass the wine. Yet behind it all are the Overseers -- six or seven of the older men (no women!). These take all the important decisions and, if the truth were known, I'd guess that there are precise rank orderings there, although there were no named positions, except one who, in my time, was the Superintendent of the Sunday School. And then in the Quakers, in which I spent some time as an attender in later years, are also similar. Time and again at business meetings a consensus would be arrived at after much careful discussion -- but then an Elder would then stand up and summarise the proceedings by pronouncing an exactly opposite decision!