Shortly after I published my essay, Mathematical Models of Human History: Are They Plausible?, on the use of mathematical models in history, I saw an article by Stephanie Pappas summarizing some results of work done by Simon Powers, “a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolution at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.” Powers is working on the initial concentration of power in a despotic hierarchy and will next be moving on to try to deal with the next stage in which a large-scale state arises, but the results of his initial work point to the possibility of producing a different understanding from that found in the article Modeling World History in Math Is Possible by Khan, an article discussing War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies by the research team led by Turchin.
The article about Powers’ work, Origins of Hierarchy: How Egyptian Pharaohs Rose to Power, points to the possibility that:
[V]oluntary leadership arises when leaders give enough benefits to their followers at the outset, Powers said. If leaders give their people an advantage in producing food, the people will follow them, he added.
Moreover:
[L]eadership turns to despotism when two factors arise. The first is the growth of population density and size, which follows naturally from an organized, agricultural society.
“It basically becomes hard for individuals to stop following the leader,” Powers said. “As the density of the population grows, there is less free land available.”
If we consider this analysis and the analysis I discussed in that prior essay, Mathematical Models of Human History: Are They Plausible?. we are getting into some potential useful confusion. Powers is developing an explanation based upon internal factors (advantages coming from strong leaders and then maybe the difficulties of escaping control by those leaders) while Turchin and colleagues were concerned with external factors (starting with the conquest by or reaction against nomadic horsemen of the grasslands of central Asia).
Let me add another bit of useful confusion by referring back to an essay I published on this blog in 2011: Be Obnoxious and Be Our Leader. According to the study I comment upon, rude and pushy rule-breakers are perceived as already having power and human beings take them more seriously as leaders or potential leaders.
There are going to be no clean, sharply defined answers to the questions of human community-formation or, more in line with my worldview, questions of the creation and shaping of human communal being. This means there will be no answers corresponding to, say, the thermodynamics of gas in a piston which can compress or relax. There likely will be many quantitative models which will help us deal with specific aspects of human social or political or economic behavior but those will work only if they are part of a more general framework of what might be labeled qualitative models, though subject to the disciplined analyses to be found in certain fields of mathematics—see Mathematical Models of Human History: Are They Plausible?, already referenced above. For some very general discussion in light of quotations from some highly regarded mathematicians, see Adopting Mathematical Reasoning in Non-quantitative Fields of Thought.
I’m reluctant to speculate too much on what might eventually work to produce a deeper and more exact understanding of human nature both individual and communal but I have a very vague image on the edge of my mind of a single entity which is like a manifold—that is subject to well-defined analyses in each `small region’, `locally’, where the proper analyses might be quantitative or qualitative. An odd chimera indeed, but that is what we seem to be—as individual human beings or as communal human beings.
And we must remember that we are human beings, entities which are unified and coherent and complete—no matter how imperfectly so. Our knowledge of our own being should be knowledge of such an entity and not just a handwaving explanation which points toward a quantitative model here and a qualitative explanation there.