Despite what Jordan Peterson says, the world is not your lobster*

I’ve been enticed back into reading about Jordan Peterson and his exemplary lobster. For the uninitiated, Peterson – ‘classical liberal’ and self-help guru – believes we should be inspired by the not so humble lobster, willing to fight all-comers (well other lobsters) for the best places to live. The lobster (and also the merciless wren, the chicken, the chimpanzee etc.) is an example of nature’s dominance hierarchy which is a “near-eternal aspect of the environment”. Older than trees in fact.

Humans, according to Peterson, are just as subject to the unforgiving laws of this dominance hierarchy. Despite our cultural pretensions and elaborate societies it still operates under the surface. “It’s inevitable,” avers Peterson, “that there will be continuity in the way animals and human beings organise their structures”. Thus, brutal economic inequality – the fact that 85 ultra-wealthy people at the top of society have as much as three and half billion at the bottom – is given a biological justification.

Read the memo: it’s inevitable, get used to it and don’t – the ultimate Peterson sin – start getting resentful.

The immediate temptation, to which many have succumbed, is to say Peterson’s examination of the natural world is hopelessly partial. Why choose to focus on the lobster or the status-obsessed chimpanzee and pass over the egalitarian, sharing bonobo or the unaggressive, vegetarian gibbon? An argument that can be traced back to Kropotkin’s highlighting of mutual aid among animals, in contrast to the simplification of the survival of the fittest.

Civilised hierarchies

However, this argument rather misses the point, or to be more precise, it concedes too much before it gets to the bone of contention. Because human hierarchies – that is actually existing hierarchies that have dominated the history of human civilisation before reformers, revolutionaries and utopians messed with them – are radically and qualitatively different to animal dominance hierarchies. In fact the latter don’t merit the appellation ‘hierarchy’ at all, the word originally applying to the rule of the high priest in ancient Greece, a uniquely human dispensation.

Only in early hunter-gatherer societies, can human arrangements be said to resemble dominance ‘hierarchies’ among animals in the sense that charismatic and talented individuals might acquire power. And even then, the evidence suggests tribal members were aware of the dangers of power becoming entrenched and embodied in certain individuals and took steps to ensure that, uniquely in the natural world, economic relations, family structure and political life were regularly shuffled.

The history of civilisation in all parts of the world, by contrast, and despite its undoubted benefits, is the history of dynasties, aristocracies, land-owners and empires on the one side and serfs, slaves, indentured labourers, and workers on the other. Slavery was an unmissable feature of ‘civilised’ society for thousands of years. It’s not a Western invention or imposition; it was only abolished in China in 1908.

In such societies, the facts of birth and inheritance were all-important. Intelligence, cunning, physical strength, charisma – or whatever other attributes Peterson thinks differentiates winners from losers – would at best have enabled the lucky incumbent to progress within their caste or class. Only very rarely would they have permitted them to rise within the hierarchy itself. Hannah Arendt’s description of the “caste conceit” of the British aristocracy in the 19^th century – “the pride in privilege without individual effort and merit, simply by virtue of birth” – could be applied to ruling castes and classes throughout history the world over.

‘God hath placed them there’

Such hierarchies were, in Murray Bookchin’s description, were “clothed in ideologies” because they were anything but natural. They were, however, intended to endure and such longevity was not merely secured by immense military power but also because most people, especially those oppressed by such hierarchies, were assiduously convinced of their, often divinely-ordained, legitimacy. Something animals obviously can’t be. Lobsters don’t bequeath their hiding places to their offspring nor insist to other lobsters left with stringy pieces of seaweed as camouflage that it’s blasphemy to object to such inequality because it’s been prescribed by the great lobster god.

Hence belief systems like the medieval ‘Great Chain of Being’ in which everyone – serfs, vagabonds, yeomen, lords etc. – had a recognised position because ‘God hath placed them there’.  In 17^th century England, parish priests issued weekly instructions for servants to obey their masters and behave “lowly and reverently” towards their betters.

In such societies, the personal attributes and characters of rulers might be a source of regret or rejoicing, but they were irrelevant for determining the power they wielded. As Bookchin noted about now infamous European monarchs:

Figures like Louis XVI of France and Nicholas II of Russia, for example did not become autocrats because they had genetically programmed strong personalities and physiques, much less keen minds. They were inept, awkward, psychologically weak, and conspicuously stupid men (even according to royalist accounts of their reigns) who lived in times of revolutionary social upheaval. Yet their power was virtually absolute until it was curtailed by revolution.

But, but ...  I’m guessing Peterson would instantly interject were he to be – unlikely I know – reading this: what you’re saying might be true for human hierarchies deeply ensconced in tradition and time-encrusted practices, but since the advent of liberal-democracy and capitalism and the demise of ancien regimes it has been possible for people born in difficult circumstances to, through their own native ability and self-discipline, rise in society and transform their lives.

“… the most valid personality trait predictors of long-term success in Western countries,” says Peterson “are intelligence … and conscientiousness.”

As a precursor, “success” needs to be defined. Because so much intelligence, conscientiousness and talent that doesn’t fit into money-making purposes and interest those organizations that hire people to do their bidding (and into which democracy is not permitted to intrude) simply withers or is actively suppressed.

Yea, even unto the Middle Ages

However, the other side of the coin is that liberal capitalism’s reputation for social mobility – progressing up the income scale during your lifetime – has been greatly exaggerated even on its own terms. So many of our current political leaders have emerged from privileged backgrounds and wealth amassed before y’know everyone had a crack at it. David Cameron is descended from King William VI and was brought up in a stately home, Boris Johnson’s full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Donald Trump inherited his fortune from his property tycoon dad.

Social mobility’s heyday under capitalism was actually in its post-war social-democratic incarnation when the rich were heavily taxed and finance forced into productive investment. Since the 1980s, after capitalism became more purely capitalistic, it’s gone down. A 2017 report found that in the US after the ‘inflection point’ of 1980, inequality skyrocketed and social mobility started “declining sharply”. The British Social Mobility Commission reported last year that inequality is now “entrenched from birth to work” and according to the UN Development Programme a “great new divergence” is taking place around the world, leaving educated young people stuck in low wage, dead-end jobs:

“What people perhaps 30, 40 years ago were led to believe and often saw around them," an UNDP administrator says, “was that if you worked hard, you could escape poverty.” Yet in many countries today, he says, upward social mobility is “simply not occurring” anymore.

This is modern-day capitalism, where intelligence and conscientiousness aren’t, after all, enough to help you lead a better life. And by the way, this conclusion is not impaired by Peterson’s revelation that human and lobsters share “basic neuro-chemistry” so you can administer an anti-depressant to a lobster and it will fight “harder and longer”. Anti-depressants have been administered to millions of human beings since the late 1980s, making evidently no difference to rates of social mobility.

Entrepreneurs and capitalists

Why, you might ask, does it have to be this way? Because capitalism is at heart a system where great wealth is extracted by people who do nothing to earn it. It isn’t, despite the advertising, a justice dispensing machine where, notwithstanding the rough edges, diligent and creative entrepreneurs are rewarded for the improvements they bring to people’s lives.

As author David Schweickart has astutely shown, the entrepreneur is capitalism’s “white knight”, routinely unveiled to justify ‘returns to capital’ that have nothing to do with inventions or improving methods of production. Vast fortunes are made and replenished daily simply by virtue of the ownership of real or financial assets:

In a capitalist society, enormous sums are paid to people who do not engage in any entrepreneurial activity or take on any significant risk with their capital. Trillions flows to shareholders who make an entirely passive contribution to production.

In fact, despite the enormous changes wrought by the economic system known as capitalism, the capitalist bears an uncanny resemblance to the landowners and landlords of past centuries who commandeered immense wealth and power without doing anything to deserve it. Indeed, capitalism has frequently coexisted with small coteries of landowners in most parts of the world. Which is why land reform was such a seminal political issue for numerous countries in the 20^th century – something you might be aware of if you manage to get over a fixation with capitalist white hats and communist black hats.

Don’t complain

The awkward problem is that wanting human society to replicate the daily fights for survival, nourishment and safety evident in the animal world requires not a laissez-faire approach, but massive government intervention in society. It demands severe taxation of the rich and punitive restrictions on inheritance. It compels instituting downwards as well as upwards social mobility, which means abolishing private education that works, in effect, to over-promote a small section of the population and lavish resources on them. And even then, the result would be a pale imitation of animal ‘hierarchies’.

But western societies are intent on the diametrically opposite policy. Every time in recent history – for example the 2008 financial crisis or the current Covid-19 crisis – the wealth of the moneyed and propertied has been threatened, governments stepped in to artificially protect it and institute bogus stock market booms.

Isolated conservatives and ‘classical liberals’ may have objected to this massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich but the vast majority – Peterson included – raised not a whimper of protest.

The grain of truth in Peterson is the emphasis on personal responsibility and the insistence that, whatever your circumstances, no-one, apart from yourself, determines how you react. But others before have expressed this anti-determinism better. “It makes no sense to complain since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, how we live, or what we are,” said Jean-Paul Sartre, trickily also a Marxist, in 1943.

But ignoring the structures of society that are not amenable to individual efforts to change them but can, nonetheless, still be changed collectively, is not only wrong but is liable to lead to depression and resentment, the very things Peterson says he wants to alleviate.

* my son

Neither chimps or bonobos – In Defence of Enlightened Humanism

According to the primatologist Frans de Waal, humankind is suffering from “anthropodenialism” – a refusal to accept the complexity of other animals. Because, he says, if we reject the notion that animals can feel pain, possess a consciousness, a mental life or self-awareness – that they are in many ways similar to us (or we are similar to them) – then any amount of cruelty or instrumental treatment is justified. I remember reading about vivisectionist monks in the 17^th century, who following the philosopher René Descartes, were convinced that animals were merely machines so when they strapped dogs to tables and cut them open the resulting screams were, in their view, just due to air coming out.

This is where the humanistic arrogance that humans are somehow unique seems to lead.

There has been progress since then but it’s been slow, attritional and selective. In March last year, for example, Switzerland became one of the first countries to make it illegal to boil lobsters without stunning them first. Italy had already made the practice illegal and in 2017 an Italian court ruled that freezing lobsters in ice before cooking them was cruel. In 2008 Switzerland, which seems to be a pioneer in animal welfare, made illegal to own a single guinea pig because it will get lonely.

The reason why headway is so fitful, I think, is fear of where giving ground on this issue will ultimately end. If they are sentient and feel pain, is it ever right kill animals for food? Or should we grade them and exempt those with ‘higher consciousness’ like octopuses and squid?

Hiding from ourselves

However, there is also an opposite danger – though one that is rarely voiced. That is in asserting that there is no human-animal duality, but rather a continuum, we lose sight of how humans are different – as a result of evolution – from every other animal species on earth. And how, in indulging in such denial, we evade responsibility for dealing with our own creativity and intelligence.

In fact, de Waal illustrates the danger. On one level, it’s hard to disagree with him that insisting on human uniqueness has justified – and still does legitimise – cruel behaviour that, in reality, has no justification. But de Waal does not leave it there. Since our emotions are no different from the emotions of most mammals, and since like most primates, “we are a hierarchical species”, the putatively civilised institutions we spend our lives within bear the unconsciousness imprint of our animalistic nature. They are, in fact, eerily similar to the social structures of chimpanzees, our closest animal relative (we share 98% of our DNA). In denying this affinity, we are hiding from ourselves.

The English writer Will Storr, clearly influenced by de Waal, elaborates. “By observing behaviours the human self shares with the chimp self,” he writes in Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed, “we might find clues to which parts of us are so old they predate our ascent to the top of the world.”

These mutual behaviours include hiding feelings to get your way, bearing long-term grudges and manipulating others. Above all, there is a common preoccupation with hierarchy – younger chimpanzees engage in conspiracies and coups to topple the ruling alpha male, group members form shifting alliances and engage in ‘political’ beatings and murders. And once in power, the leader doesn’t just need prove his physical prowess; he needs to be an arbiter of disputes, to disrupt bonding amongst rivals and act as a protector of low ranked chimps.

“… despite the din and wizardry of modern life,” writes Storr, “despite how separate we feel from the beasts, the truth is that we are great apes that sit in the primate superfamily Hominoidea. We are modern yet ancient, advanced yet primitive. We are animals.”

The other side of the family

But if the chimp-human analogy is a little too right-wing for your taste – all that hierarchy, dominant alpha males and violence – there is an alternative. Step forward the bonobo, the so-called ‘caring, sharing’ ape that we are equally closely related to (we share 98% of our DNA with both chimpanzees and bonobos). Unlike with chimps, female bonobos are at least as important as males and dominance hierarchies are much less pronounced. Bonobos, who live the Congo basin and are classed as an endangered species, also share food with strangers, express empathy, hug, kiss, and use sex, rather than violence, as a means of resolving disputes (male bonobos, apparently, get erections at the prospect of food).

                                         A group of Bonobo apes

So, we have a choice it seems – we can prefer to believe we are more like chimps or more in tune with bonobos. There is no correct answer – why de Waal, who has written books about both chimpanzees and bonobos, feels we have more in common with chimps is not immediately obvious.

But what if the answer to the puzzle, ‘Are we more like chimps or bonobos?’ is neither?

This is not to deny that we ‘possess’ the suite of behaviours on show here. Clearly, humans can be aggressive, manipulative, deceitful, form informal alliances with others and jockey for power. They can also be empathetic, like the bonobo. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level say that we possess “mirror neurons” in our brain that enable us to make the same movements as others in sympathy. So, for example, people routinely flinch when they see someone experience pain in a film they are watching.

Open to subversion and change

However, crucially, our social arrangements do not simply stem from the way we behave towards each other. This can be seen in the hunter-gatherer tribes in which homo sapiens have spent 9/10^ths of their time on earth, mostly dissipating from around 10,000 years ago. These were comparable in scope to chimp and bonobo bands. But they were qualitatively different and not just in terms of intelligence and the use of technology. Early humanity – in contrast to other apes or any other animal species – was quite aware of the danger of dominant individuals seizing power and took steps to ensure that the possibility of egalitarianism was preserved and that no social or political order became eternally fixed.

It’s actually not straightforward to establish how our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived. The assumption that traditional tribes that have survived into the present provide a window to life 40,000 years ago is a very big leap to make. But David Wengrow, Professor of Comparative Archaeology at University College and David Graeber, Professor of Comparative Anthropology at the London School of Economics, have together make a concerted attempt* to imagine what life was like many thousands of years ago, rather than relying on intuition or political preference.

Their conclusion is that hunter-gatherer bands consciously switched from hierarchical social arrangements at certain times of the year to resolutely egalitarian forms at others. “Strongly dualistic patterns of organisation” as the authors call them, existed, for example, in the glacial fringe of Europe during the last Ice Age (which began to end around 20,000 years ago), concurrent with tribes assembling in large numbers and then disassembling into smaller groups. “The same population might experience entirely different systems of economic relations, family structure and political life at different times of year,” they say. Features like territoriality, social ranking or material acquisitiveness would be put into effect at certain times of year and then reversed.

Note, this is not just a matter – as in chimp bands – of one alpha male seizing ‘power’ in summer, only for a rival to take the reins in winter. Human bands, by contrast, knowingly switched the nature of social arrangements.

“What makes us human,” say Wengrow/Graeber, “[is] the inherent complexity of our political repertories, and in particular the range of strategies for resisting domination, which far outstrip those available to other primates. At the psychological level, these include ridicule, moral censure and ostracism; at the social level they involve complex institutional arrangements to limit or subvert the exercise of power.”

The reference to institutions is significant because power in human societies is now mediated through institutions. In contrast to early humanity, social arrangements are not easily reversed because they are fixed in institutions which are intended to endure. These institutions control access to resources and political power. Within them, shifting alliances, coups, conspiracies, power grabs – ‘chimp-like’ behaviour if you will – may take place. But their existence and effectiveness does not depend on the prevalence of such behaviour. They rely on bare coercion and also obedience in non-privileged ranks – ideologically-induced feelings that their power is justified and morally correct.

'First' and 'Second' Nature

The social ecologist Murray Bookchin made an essential distinction between consciously designed human social structures and animal communities, the latter conditioned solely by instinct and idiosyncratic forms of behaviour. In this sense, no animal group is hierarchical; the word – derived from the ancient Greek meaning rule of the high priest – belongs firmly to the human realm of institutional power. When we speak of hierarchies among animals, we are merely projecting our own systems of social ranking, whose contingency and non-biological origins we can’t deal with, onto them. In his view:

… dominance and submission must be viewed as institutionalized relationships, relationships that living things literally institute or create but which are nether ruthlessly fixed by instinct on the one had nor idiosyncratic on the other. By this, I mean that they must comprise a clearly social structure of coercive and privileged ranks that exist quite apart from the idiosyncratic individuals who seem to be dominant within a given community, a hierarchy that is guided by a social logic that goes beyond individual interactions or inborn patterns of behaviour.  The Ecology of Freedom, p 94

Bookchin distinguished between ‘first’ and ‘second’, or social, nature. First nature is the realm of human beings’ animality. We are mammals, and primates and apes and have “natural, primal urges”. But at the same time – and singularly among living things – we exhibit choice and discretion about how we live together. Though human social forms might appear static, a cursory glance at history reveals that they do change both incrementally and explosively. Or as Noam Chomsky succinctly expresses it, “humans are unique in the natural world in that they have history, cultural diversity and cultural evolution”.

It is important to realise, however, that first and second nature are not isolated, abstract categories. As Bookchin emphasised, in the evolution of homo sapiens first nature gradually phased into second nature. Our propensity to function cooperatively with each other is a product of first nature, for example. “Quasi-biological institutions” around family, kinship, age and gender – neither definitively part of first or second nature – still play a major part in social life. Nationalism, racism and religious bigotry, for example, can be compared to the proclivity for chimp bands to aggressively attack strangers, in contrast to our awareness, however honoured in the breach, of the existence of a universal humanity. There is always the danger, said Bookchin**, of “our animality conspiring with our intelligence or cunning to yield unforeseeable terrors and unexpected horrors”. But the element – perhaps the burden – of choice is always present. This, at its most basic level, is what freedom means.

Beware the Lobster

So human beings are both like other animals and not like them. Perhaps this can be best illustrated by the aforementioned lobster. The psychologist and “classical liberal” Jordan Peterson, for example, claims that it’s inevitable “that there will be continuity in the way animals and human beings organise their structures”. The dominance hierarchy, he points out, is a “near eternal aspect of the environment”. Extreme economic inequality among humans has the same ultimate cause as the certainty that lobsters will fight over who has access to the best hiding places – a perpetual striving for dominance and survival that only a small minority can win. “It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies,” says Peterson, “where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent – and where the richest eighty-five people have as much as the bottom three and a half billion.”

He is quite enamoured of the revelation that anti-depressants can be successfully administered to lobsters – a defeated, hunched lobster, low in serotonin, can be perked up and readied for battle again by giving it Prozac. It will “advance on former victors and fight longer and harder”. Despite the evolutionary gulf that separates them, humans and lobsters share basic neuro-chemistry. “The drugs prescribed to depressed human beings, which are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,” says Peterson “have much the same chemical and behavioural effect.”

But the fact that humans and lobsters share the same neurotransmitters – and both can feel pain – does not mean we share the same social structures. For one thing, lobsters don’t have a social structure. And for this reason, anti-depressants, while they similarly affect personal behaviour in both lobsters and humans, are less than useless when it comes to changing human social structures. In contrast to the revived lobster, the mass prescribing of anti-depressants that has taken place in the developed world since they were first introduced in the late 1980s – by 2004 Prozac had been prescribed to 50 million people – has not made the slightest impact on social structures or made those structures more permeable to people of low social rank. The same period that has seen the wholesale dispensing of anti-depressants, undoubtedly one of great business success stories of the last thirty years, has also witnessed sharp declines in social mobility in the US and UK. Rather than opening up careers and better incomes to people previously shut out from them, they have instead simply relieved the pain induced by increasingly segregated and mapped out lives.

Social classes and social strata are, in Bookchin’s description, “made of sterner stuff” than individual behavioural traits. Changing them, therefore, cannot be achieved by reforming individual behaviour. Ironically, however, the belief that socially-created forms of domination and hierarchy ultimately stem from the way humans behave – are biologically determined, in other words – can shield them from change. To free ourselves, we first need to stop believing.

*Wengrow & Graeber’s first paper on the subject – “Farewell to the ‘Childhood of Man’: Ritual, Seasonality and the Origins of Inequality” – was published in 2015. Another joint essay – “How to change the course of human history” – was published in 2018 and touched on similar themes. And I believe a book is forthcoming.

** Bookchin, who died in 2005, is a neglected thinker in my opinion. His books include Re-enchanting Humanity (where this quote is from), The Ecology of Freedom and Remaking Society.