(soft piano music)
- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal. Naked. Large-brained.
Long the master of fire, tools, and language,
but still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable.
Yet, filled with optimism,
we grow up slowly. We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future from
our shared understanding of the past.
CARTA brings together experts from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who we are and how we got here.
An exploration made possible by the
generosity of humans like you.
(upbeat music)
Thank you very much.
What I want to talk about is dealing with the
organization of human society
and the nature of human society.
And I believe that if we think of it
in general evolutionary terms,
we see that the organization of human society
is really quite different to that
of our nearest primate cousins, the chimpanzees.
I think that manifest the results of the difference
are clear and they're two.
One of them is that we are able to build up societies
at far greater size than we find
in the other close primates, and greater complexity.
And the second one
is that we think of our social organization
as lasting far, far longer
than the life of the people
who might be part of that society.
I believe that both these differences
are due to the fact that
many aspects of human society are imaginary.
And therefore I'm going to start to look at imagination
in the certain art of detail.
The notion of imagination isn't very often linked
with creativity and quite rightly.
And it is also linked with individual creation.
That's not what I'll be talking about.
I'll be talking about something quite different.
Which is shared imagination.
How the same imaginary features are shared within a group.
And how that comes back is due to a number of factors,
but I think already if we remember the slide we've seen
about pretend pay, we can see that both there seems
to be a general predispositions in humans for pretend play.
But that pretend play gets slot-in with things which are
instituted within the culture and the society
of people who are doing this pretend play.
So I think we have to think of predispositions
enabling us to take on historically created structures.
Like schools was obvious in the last picture
in that series about pretend playing.
We have to think of this articulation between
the two kinds of things.
How, as I was saying, how is articulates...
So, what I'll be talking about is not individual
imagination, though obviously it's involved,
but the sharing of imagination.
And let me go back to what I started off with,
saying that there are many aspects
of human social organization which have to be imaginary.
First factor of this I want to talk about
is the notions of the groups we often think we belong to.
Let me start off with the examples of clans,
which we find in various forms in many human societies.
Now, one of the interesting things about humans,
about clans, is that they're thought of as lost in time
far longer than the life-span of individuals.
That already means that they have to be imaginary
because obviously if they were attached to the individuals
they would sort of end or have no great continuity.
But this would also be true of nations.
For example, one can think of the Greeks as a nation,
quite apart from their territory, having gone on
for very, very long periods in time the Greeks continued,
they passed on from one another something called...
a vague Greekishness that is very difficult to define
what that might be and very interesting, it is
difficult even for the people who think this is
extremely important to define it.
So, again we imagine, and I think I can use the word,
that there is a level,
a twitch, a social continues
on quite a different time-scale
than the life, our biological life.
That doesn't mean...
And there is another factor which is even more important.
We continually think of as an
important part of our society
is that we have instituted roles.
Husband, a wife, to use an example which
was used by the philosopher Searle.
But policemen, and so on.
Now, there is something rather odd about these roles.
Because they can't, they don't seem to have very little
to do with what people actually get up to.
People may hate each other, husbands and wives may
hate each other, but we think there is something about
being husband and wife independently of this.
So, if we think of our society as systems of roles,
as a large number of roles,
we realize we have to think on another level,
on an imaginary level.
Other than the interactions, which has been
the greatest focus in psychology when people
are thinking of the social.
We have to think of how it is possible that these systems,
that they're shared systems of the social,
which don't correspond to anything empirical.
I should've mentioned that when I was talking about clans,
that clans, you know, if people can imagine themselves
as belonging to clans without anything obvious
marking them out from people who belong to other clans,
that they usually do not live together,
that they're dispersed, it's somehow there is
a level, an imaginary level that which people
can think of themselves as one.
So, this is really presents...
This is something which we do not find
in any other primates.
This is why I would argue that we should stop thinking
of human society as a sort of incremental business
of getting better and better at knowing other people
and knowing the world.
There is also a discontinuity which I would identify
with the presence of that imagination.
Having said that, however, this presents a problem.
How, with what I started off with talking about,
which is I was saying something very different about
human societies is that they seem to be able
to be expanded to extraordinarily large size
in a way that doesn't apply to other primates.
And that there's also this idea
of them continuing in time.
Of course, this is not a problem if by society
we mean these imaginary representations
that I was talking about.
They can be as large as you like.
Or as and, indeed, their systems, which are
not tied to particular moments.
But I was talking about practical results.
How can this imaginary level have practical results?
Which are tremendously important if we want
to understand the evolution of human society.
I think we answer comes from the fact that
this imaginary level is not as imaginary
as it might seem at first.
There are what I've called emergences.
That is moments when the shared imagination
is actually acted out,
where people can live in the shared imagination
as well as they live in the practical, interactional world
which is normal, sort of every day leveled.
These are very largely rituals which involve
people losing many of the aspects of themselves
as individuals in that what characterizes
rituals is their repetitions of previous...
People say the same things other people have said.
They, therefore, lose their intentionality.
They become kind of elements in an abstract structure,
but it is acted out.
And at other moments...
In normal life, or in normal traditional life,
people step in and out of the imaginary level
to an interactional level,
and they're able to hold two quite different ways
of thinking about society.
This is what is not found in other primates.
And this has practical results.
For example, if you imagine yourself living
in a pre-Neolithic village and you want to set up
another... to move to another village,
you have to move to this imaginary level
in order to be able to build up kinship relationships
with other people, people in that other village.
Convince them somehow that there is something
in common and that is moving to another level,
to that imaginary level.
And then you can move to that sort of place.
This, I think, explains how pre-ape humans managed
to have very far-reaching
and distant trading relationships.
And, also, to the other practical level,
to the other practical factor, which is imagining
that your society lost in time,
that somehow we imagine that we have a social
which lasts in time quite independently
of our biological life.
It means that there is some point in...
First of all, in passing on, and accumulating
either objects because we are passing them on
to people that we don't know with who are our continuation
but only in imagination.
And, perhaps, passing on knowledge which then
becomes the basis of what the evolutionary biologist
Michael Thomas Seller has called the wretched effect
that is building up
on knowledge which is already there
so that it can be then
be used for evermore complex systems.
This is the basically the ability in human culture
to continue and to accumulate and to advance.
So the possibility of stepping in to moments of
what is normally shared imagination
explains, I think, the most fundamental differences
between our society and the society of,
as I said, the chimpanzees.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
(peaceful music)