Lockean Meritocracy Satisfies the Evolutionary Natural Desire for Social Status and Egalitarian Hierarchy

There are at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are rooted in human biology as shaped by evolutionary history.  If the good is the desirable, then these twenty natural desires provide a universal basis for moral judgment.  A Lockean liberal social order can be judged to be the best regime in so far as it allows for the fullest satisfaction of those natural desires.

For example, there is a natural desire for social status that was formed in the Lockean evolutionary state of nature.  And we can see how the meritocracy in a Lockean liberal society satisfies that desire for social status.

Human beings generally desire social status through comparative social ranking.  This is a human universal found in all human societies (Brown 1991).  Human beings' esteem for themselves requires they be esteemed by others whose judgments they respect.  Human beings attain high social status through prestige, fame, or honor within the groups to which they belong.  And they can be ranked differently in different groups.  Although some societies are much less hierarchical than others, all societies rank individuals as higher or lower based on age, sex, kinship, physical formidability, physical attractiveness, social competence, and practical skills.

Individuals become socially dominant through any trait or activity that elicits deference in others.  A few charismatic individuals become heroic leaders because of their extraordinary power to win the respect of the people around them.  

And yet, subordinate individuals can resist excessive or exploitative dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy.

Men generally (on average) have a stronger desire for dominance in social hierarchies than do women.  Men compete for mating opportunities, and dominant men are generally more attractive to potential mates.

In a recent article published in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Noah Smith and Reuven Dukas have surveyed the evidence and arguments for the evolutionary psychology of social ranking in humans and other animals.  They identify five major dimensions of social ranking in humans and two subcategories for each dimension:  physical formidability (height and muscularity), social conventions (age and nepotism), physical attractiveness (symmetry and health), social competence (empathy and extraversion), and practical competence in complex skills (intelligence and perseverance).  Although I agree with them about these five dimensions, they have overlooked a sixth major dimension of social ranking--the counter-dominance of subordinates that can establish what Christopher Boehm called a "reverse-dominance hierarchy" or "egalitarian dominance," which corresponds to what Locke identified as the natural equality of human beings in the state of nature.

Let's consider each of these six dimensions of social ranking.

(1)  Physical formidability.  Many animals live in social hierarchies in which higher ranking individuals can claim priority in access to scarce resources (such as food and shelter) and opportunities for sexual mating (Wilson 1975; Tibbets et al. 2022).  This ranking is mostly determined by physical formidability, which is the ability of an individual to win a fight.  Those who win a fight are more likely to win the next fight.  Those who lose a fight are more likely to lose the next fight.  Those with a reputation as winners can usually avoid costly fights by acting assertively and deterring challengers.  Those with a reputation as losers avoid costly fights with those who seem to be winners.  Consequently, actual fighting is usually rare, because conflicts are often settled through ritualistic displays of dominance and submission without the violence of real fighting.

Although physical formidability is not as important for human ranking as it is for nonhuman animals, it does have some influence in human social ranking.  For example, height is a cue for physical formidability, and height is correlated with high status and leadership positions (Cheng and Tracy 2014; Zeng et al. 2022).  One illustration of this is that the Presidents of the United States have been generally taller than the average for men.  But some of this correlation between height and high status could be explained by the correlation of height with intelligence and cognitive ability, because nutritional status during childhood affects both height and cognitive development in adults (Lindqvist 2012).

(2)  Social conventions.  Age and nepotism are two social conventions for determining social status that are important for both nonhuman animals and human beings.  Adults rank higher than children, and often older adults rank higher than younger adults (Redhead and Power 2022).  Nepotism (the tendency to favor one's kin) also shapes social hierarchies in which one's social ranking depends on the ranking of one's family (Bellow 2004).

(3)  Physical attractiveness.  Physically attractive people tend to have a high social status.  They have more friends, higher incomes, and better jobs.  This is true for both men and women (Frevert and Walker 2014).  Despite the variability in the perceptions of physical beauty, there are some general patterns that are universal, such as the judgment that the bodily signs of health and vigor, the youthful nubility of women, and facial and bodily symmetry are physically attractive (Jones et al. 2001).

(4)  Social competence.  In all human societies, people recognized for their social competence have high social status.  Social competence is the skill for performing social tasks and handling social interactions--such as leading a social group or mediating social disputes.  This requires a mixture of social intelligence, sociable personality traits, and social experience.  Socially competent people show cognitive sympathy (understanding other people's mental states) and affective sympathy (responding to people's mental states with appropriate emotion).  They also show sociable personality traits such as extraversion (Dukas and Bailey 2024; Smith and Dukas 2024).

(5)  Practical competence in complex skills.  In hunter-gatherer societies, people have high social status when they show competence in complex tasks such as hunting and toolmaking (Henrich 2016).  In modern societies, people gain high status when they show professional expertise in providing all kinds of goods and services (Anderson and Willer 2014).

(6)  Counter-dominance.  Smith and Dukas fail to recognize the importance of counter-dominance for subordinate individuals who need to resist exploitative dominance by socially superior individuals.  In their analysis of the traits necessary for social competence, Smith and Dukas (2024:164) include "the ability to control the impressions that other people have of an individual, and the ability to manipulate others for personal gain," and in support of this idea, they cite Niccolo Machiavelli's Prince and the writing of Richard Christie and Florence Geis (1970) on the "Machiavellian personality."

But they do not notice that the longest chapter in Machiavelli's The Prince--Chapter 19 on "Of Avoiding Contempt and Hatred"--is about how princes who become hated by the people they rule open themselves up to conspiracies leading to their assassination.  Although the people don't want to rule, they don't want to be exploited by those who rule them, and they will resist exploitative rule, sometimes violently.  Frans de Waal saw that political assassination was also part of the Machiavellian politics of chimpanzees, in which resistance to exploitative rule established an "egalitarian hierarchy" in chimpanzee communities as opposed to a "despotic hierarchy."  

Christopher Boehm saw this in both chimpanzees and in the foraging ancestors of human beings--a natural tendency to counter-dominance--the natural propensity of individuals to resist being dominated.  Among some primates, subordinate individuals can resist excessive dominance and thus limit the power of dominant individuals.  Subordinate individuals can form large coalitions to challenge those at the top of the hierarchy.

Locke saw this natural resistance to exploitative dominance in the evolutionary state of nature as the natural support for an egalitarian hierarchy, in which some have higher status and power than others, and yet all men are naturally equal in their liberty to live without being ruled by anyone without their consent.

REFERENCES

Anderson, C., and R. Willer.  2014. "Do Status Hierarchies Benefit Groups?  A Bounded Functionalist Account of Status."  In The Psychology of Social Status, eds. J. T. Cheng, J. L. Tracy, and C. Anderson, pp. 47-70.  New York: Springer.

Bellow, Adam.  2004.  In Praise of Nepotism: A History of Family Enterprise from King David to George W. Bush.  New York: Knopf Doubleday.

Brown, Donald.  1991.  Human Universals.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Cheng, J. T., and J. L. Tracy.  2014.  "Toward a Unified Science of Hierarchy: Dominance and Prestige Are Two Fundamental Pathways to Human Social Rank."  In The Psychology of Social Status, eds. J. T. Cheng, J. L. Tracy, and C. Anderson, pp. 3-27.  New York: Springer.

Christie, Richard, and Florence Geis.  1970.  Studies in Machiavellianism.  New York: Academic Press.

Dukas, R., and N. Bailey.  2024.  "Evolutionary Biology of Social Expertise." Biological Reviews https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.13115.

Frevert, T. K., and L. S. Walker. 2014. "Physical Attractiveness and Social Status."  Sociology Compass 8:313-323.

Henrich, Joseph.  2016.  The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jones, B. C., et al.  2001.  "Facial Symmetry and Judgments of Apparent Health: Support for a 'Good Genes' Explanation of the Attractiveness-Symmetry Relationship."  Evolution and Human Behavior 22 (November): 417-429.

Lindqvist, Erik.  2012.  "Height and Leadership."  Review of Economics and Statistics 94:1191-1196.

Redhead, D., and E. A. Power.  2022.  "Social Hierarchies and Social Networks in Humans."  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377:20200440.

Smith, Noah M. T., and Reuven Dukas.  2024.  "Winner and Loser Effects and Social Rank in Humans."  The Quarterly Review of Biology 99:157-174.

Tibbets, E. A., et al.  2022.  "The Establishment and Maintenance of Dominance Hierarchies."  Philosophical Transactions for the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377:20200450.

Wilson, Edward O.  1975.  Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Zeng, T. C., J. T. Cheng, and J. Henrich.  2022.  "Dominance in Humans."  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377:20200451.