The Three Musketeers: What do We Still Need to Know About Our Passage Through Prehistory?

Abstract

Any author is lucky to have readers, but to have three readers as subtle, attentive, and generous as Geoff Brennan (GB), Ben Fraser (BF), and Kim Sterelny (KS) is a privilege indeed. I have learned much from all three of them, both from these pieces and more generally from their other writings and the discussions we have had. I am grateful to them for the many generous things they say about The Company of Strangers (hereafter TCOS), and in particular for agreeing that the ease with which we citizens of prosperous modern societies interact with strangers is a puzzle given our prehistoric origins. But all three chide me, diplomatically though firmly, for imprecision about some crucial aspects of the transition of humankind from hunting and gathering to modern society, for appealing to metaphors (such as ‘‘tunnel vision’’ and ‘‘honorary friends’’) instead of mechanisms. I think there is much truth in this criticism, and I would like to take this opportunity to say more about what we know—and, crucially, about what we still don’t know—about how this transition happened. To do this I propose not to answer the questions and criticisms of the three commentators point by point. Instead I shall set out six broad questions about the transition, each of which is posed explicitly or implicitly by one or more of these commentators and about which they are right to point out that TCOS does not have enough to say. In some cases this is because the state of our collective knowledge is inadequate, in others because TCOS does not clearly enough reflect that collective knowledge. These are the questions: (1) Was Pleistocene life transparent enough for prudent calculation based on self-regarding preferences to support cooperation via mutual monitoring, punishment of defectors, and incentives for reputation building? (2) How violent was the Pleistocene? And how much of this violence was intra-group rather than inter-group? (3) Was interaction with strangers frequent or rare? (4) What exactly would have been necessary for a psychology adapted to the Pleistocene to make sense of a much more frequent exposure to strangers in the Holocene? Was it just a matter of adjusting to a higher frequency of stranger contact or was it a qualitative shift? (5) What ensured that when agriculture arrived the social contract did not either (a) collapse, or (b) remain sufficiently robust to resist substantial increases in inequality? (6) In what sense, precisely, does the psychology we inherited from the Pleistocene continue to shape (either in the sense of enabling, or in the sense of constraining) the way we interact with strangers in modern societies?