How Psyche Scaled Up over Time: Our Mental Architecture Undergirds Kinship and Political Systems
How the family has related to nonfamilial social spheres of existence involves what ways human history has unfolded on a grand scale down through the millennia. In the prehistorical period, encountering members from outside one’s kin group probably meant engaging in defensive hostile activities, random and casual interaction, or occasional trade. Utilizing agreed-upon, persistent, or consistent rules to govern exchanges and relations was, one would think, absent in the no-man’s land between small groupings (presumably, but not necessarily, related by blood). Organizing principles inspired by trade relations and expedient alliance formation may have existed in the prehistoric period that transcended kinship units. However, describing human relations in this era as “political” or “religious” is inappropriate given what we know from the archaeological record.
From Extra-kinship to Trans-kinship: Supra-kinship Authoritative Configurations
The individual psyche, kinship unit, and extra-kinship networks are interrelated in various ways and for different reasons. The challenge, then, becomes explaining how religion, politics, and economics arose from the interplay between familial and extra-familial units (“extra-” here means external to, outside of, unconnected to). Familial is about relations between familiar intimates, while extra-familial concerns unfamiliar, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous strangers. Another way to phrase the issue is how do we explain the trajectory of the demographic explosion, from bands, chiefdoms, kingdoms, regional empires, trans-continental empires, to modern national states. These describe “supra-kinship authoritative configurations.” They are “supra-“ because they are not just extra-kinship but trans-kinship in how they subsume and incorporate lower, local groupings. They are “authoritative” because they establish supervisory and subordinate relations. And they are “configurations” in how they align, put together, and integrate various societal components (political structures, families, economic roles, castes, etc.).
Supra-kinship authoritative configurations require constellations of organized ideas that justify culturally-elaborated authorization, i.e., ideologies. Supra-kinship systems, whether religious or political, require highly ideologized forms of knowledge to legitimize themselves, and this in turn demands that the psyche is socially primed so it can manipulate abstract knowledge forms. After all, familial and trans-familial relations demand very different socioemotional and cognitive responses and aptitudes (incidentally, both religion and politics share the same basic ingredients: Socioaffiliation or the desire for belongingness; a framework providing lived significance or a purposeful, meaningful live; and authorization or the need for guidance from a trusted superior).
On the evolutionary timescale, the high-speed transmutation of extra-kinship networks into supra-kinship authoritative structures occurred in a blink of an eye. This rapid change is impressive and for the most part transpired because of the malleability of culture, not genetics.
Another question, and one that may not seem related to the aforementioned query but is, concerns what each individual mind has been endowed with by natural selection, i.e., our psychic architecture. The human mind is designed to soak up and organize information from the external environment. That is obvious. But what is not so clear is to what degree are the operations of social structures, especially as they increase in size over time, traceable to our psychological inner springs. In other words, in what ways does an inborn mental infrastructure prop up sociocultural organization? Before tackling these questions, a few basic notions need to be introduced.
The Interaction of “Top-down” and “Bottom-up” Forces
Any account that addresses the questions posed above how unorganized extra-kinship relations became organized supra-kinship structures must acknowledge the interactive quality of psychological and extra-psychological processes (i.e., societal). Three formulations can be postulated to frame a discussion: (1) psyche society (innate mental mechanics shape culture); (2) society psyche (historico-cultural forces shape mind); and (3) psyche society (innate mental mechanics and historico-cultural forces inter-develop, not co-develop). The third formulation is the most accurate but the trickiest to sort out as it requires a solid interdisciplinary approach that incorporates historical analysis (another angle from which to view the issue: Are psychological processes and society dependent on each other? Or are they independent from each other? Or are they interdependent?). Next I unpack the third formulation in order to add some specificity to the issues.
One way to appreciate the relation between the individual psyche and the socioecology in which it operates is to see how “top-down” and “bottom-up” forces interact in the construction of the human condition. Changes in civilization through time can be described by two mutually reinforcing, long-term processes. The first is top-down socio-externalization or the enculturating, political, and economic forces impacting psyche from the “outside.” Increased resources and scientific advances expand populations, which in turn enlarge the size and number of social institutions. Consequently, religious, political, or economic elites came to see the need to position individuals in larger and larger groupings (e.g., occupational castes, corporations, state-defined territorial units, citizenship). This integration can be visualized metaphorically as wrapping more “layers” around individuals in order to firmly position them in power arrangements that vary through the centuries: Theocratic, political, capitalist consumerist systems, etc.
The second process is bottom-up psycho-internalization which accounts for changes “inside” the person. The accretion of layers—more social roles, specialized expertise, formal education, regulations, disciplinary practices, bureaucratic rationalization, and so on—is not just an accumulation of more knowledge or sociopolitical management. Sociopolitical wrappings configure psycho-internalization so the latter can adapt to increasingly demanding historical vagaries and pressures. Below I dissect psycho-internalization by describing it as the psychic architecture upon which rests sociopolitical edifices.
The Superstructure of Sociopolitics Rests upon a Mental Infrastructure
The first example of innate mental mechanisms include language; this is a highly-developed communicative capability of the human species and comprised of a collection of mental attributes. Second is socioaffiliation, or the impulse to seek out attachment and belongingness, especially during sociodevelopmental stages necessary for incorporation into and productive participation within larger social groupings. For psyche to developmentally unfold from childbirth, it must be properly socialized, i.e., it needs to be nurtured within a healthy attachment regimen and absorb acceptable and appropriate templates for behavior (by the same token, if society is to function reasonably well as a system, it requires the smooth operation of psyche). Third is authorization, or the tendency to form and fit into dominance hierarchies (a key characteristic of many of our primate relatives).
A fourth piece of mental machinery deserves special focus: Bicamerality or the left–right hemispheric system that at one time subserved our “hallucinability” (innate hallucinatory ability) (despite being a default feature of the human neuropsychological apparatus, hallucinations were overridden by the more adaptable, culturally-instilled subjective consciousness about three millennia ago). Our bipartite mentality undergirdsbut does not simplistically determinethe superior-to-subordinate communicative system that in turn establishes lines of authorization. These hierarchical relations of authorizer-to-authorizee tie together the individual with kinship and political systems. In other words, authorization operates at three scales of human organization: (1) within the individual (in bicameral times, supernatural superior-to-mortal subordinate, but presently “I”-to-“me” communicative acts); (2) within a close-knit kin grouping (parental figure-to-dependent offspring); and (3) supra-kinship contexts (ruler-to-ruled).
Our evolved psychic equipment is intermeshed in terms of functionality. In other words, it is easy to see how speech/listening (linguistic ability), parenting, nurturing, and rearing youth through attachment-focused verbalizations (socioaffiliation), accepting the need to receive instructions and guidance (authorization), and built-in psychohierarchy (bicamerality) are interrelated and reinforce each other.
The four aforementioned evolutionarily baked-in traits might be called “instincts,” but this term is problematic. Jaynes suggested “aptic structures.” These make organisms prone to behave in a particular way under certain conditions. Such structures are activated during a critical period in the developmental course when an organism is susceptible to specific environmental triggers. None of the four aforementioned psychic mechanisms have only one corresponding aptic structure. Instead, crucial facets of human psychology—i.e., our mental architecture—is rooted in collections of aptic components (e.g., consider the intricacy of language production).
We need to tread very carefully, since I am neither claiming that human relations (familial, religious, or political) can be reduced to bicamerality, nor that they are an inevitable unfolding of some dynamic driven by neurological structures. Politics does not rest on neuropsychological structures in any straightforward manner. Only in the most convoluted way is politics scaled-up psyche. What I am claiming is that for the optimum adaptability of homo sapiens as a species, psyche had to scale up in such a way that it met the demands of larger groupings. Politics, whether of ancient theocratic or more modern secular varieties, involves not just extra-kinship relations (outside one’s familial system), but rather supra-kinship connections. In other words, politics subsumes and then organizes and configures familial relations; it is the super-expansion and super-extension of our mental mechanisms.
Technology Expands and Intensifies the Functionality of Our Psychic Architecture
The key variable in our discussion is technology, as this is the magic ingredient that extends the aforementioned mental attributes throughout the social environment. In other words, the features of our psychic architecture have been technologized and super-charged. Language (speech) is memorialized and spread around within a community (once engraved or written down it gains a certain permanency). Writing, obviously, greatly augmented verbalization; this was a momentous technological innovation in and of itself. But with the letterpress printing of Gutenberg, economic exchange was accelerated, political control was both enhanced but destabilized, and the conveyance of ideas and knowledge through society was sped up. This drove the scientific revolution. The next step was computerization and digitalization, super-powered by electricity. Socioaffiliation, or the inborn need for attachment for more effective enculturation, is prolonged during an individual’s life by mass education and bolstered by hyper-communicative social media (modern national states devote huge educational resources and efforts to socializing young people to ensure that they fit into political economic structures). Authorization, the predisposition to establish ranking systems for organizing social behavior, is strengthened since communication happens so rapidly and widely between superiors and subordinates (these days practically at the speed of light). And while authoritative hallucinations grounded in a bipartite mentality are obsolete, superior–subordinate dynamics continue to configure politics, everyday interactions, and updated religious traditions. But when excessive, a darker authorization is evident in political fanaticism, religious fundamentalism, and cult behavior.
Conclusion: Evolved Traits and Social Existence
Is politics scaled-up psyche? The short answer is yes, i.e., psychological processes do subserve social dynamics. However, the long answer is one of cautious qualification, especially since the mind and society are so interdependent, i.e., it is very difficult to argue which is more of a dependent on the other, or independent of the other. On the one hand, mega-sized groupings are stepped-up expressions of certain evolved and built-in traits of psyche. But on the other hand, our mental infrastructure and superstructural supra-kinship organizations are intertwined in such a difficult-to-discern manner that disentangling their impact can seem insurmountable. Our mental machinery (or if phrased differently, our aptic structures) cannot be easily separated out from the socioecological matrix within which we function.
How Psyche Scaled Up over Time: Our Mental Architecture Undergirds Kinship and Political Systems
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benjamindavidsteele
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Re: How Psyche Scaled Up over Time: Our Mental Architecture Undergirds Kinship and Political Systems
As for your several formulations, my view is in line with the third option: "psyche society (innate mental mechanics and historico-cultural forces inter-develop, not co-develop)." I'm glad to see you writing about this. This has been on my mind for years. But of what I've read, I don't recall having come across it in previous Jaynesian scholarship. It seems like a natural extension of Jaynes' way of thinking. If the container metaphor was an internalization of human-built containers, it stands out that the likely timing had to do with containers having become more important for storage, transportation, and trade as civilization developed more complexity that presumably resulted in the Bronze Age collapse.
This isn't only about Jaynesian consciousness, obviously. Bicameral mentality seems to have already been using containers to create a more stable version of voice-hearing animism. Once a voice became associated with an individual, that voice could be permanently entrapped and imprisoned (i.e., contained) by mummifying the individual or saving their skull, and then building a temple or god house to keep them in a single place; sometimes even taking precautions to make sure they couldn't walk off or otherwise escape. Using holy books to capture spirits, gods, and ancestors was basically the same concept where the book was the container, with the advantage of it having froze the voice to make a better system of control. The trick with the new egoic individuality was a shift to sealing these voices, instead, inside of every human body.
It also makes one think about how the container metaphor not only applies to the human psyche (maybe related to Ernest Hartmann's thick boundaries) but to every other aspect of humanity. It's not just that our minds became more contained. Everything was more contained, increasingly narrow and rigid, from walls of buildings to walls of city-states. In the Bronze Age, there was already highly structured city planning and boundary lines based on geometry and proto-mathematical calculations. I wonder, for example, how far back might go such practices as beating the bounds, as reminiscent of Australian Aboriginal Songlines that contain ancestral spirit mentalities and voices.
This is where I was inspired by a non-Jaynesian scholar, Lynne Kelly. She writes of traditional mnemonic systems, with the Songlines being a key example. The original structuring of psyche and society was not an unnatural container but the surrounding landscape. Based on her scholarship, one might see an even earlier structuring device than the god houses Jaynes focused on. She argues the megaliths were built as a replacement for landscapes that had been used to store vast knowledge systems. But for various reasons, a people might've had to leave a particular place while wanting to maintain the knowledge. The megaliths were possibly the first human-constructed container of psyche, but on a communal level.
You state that, "The human mind is designed to soak up and organize information from the external environment." It's not just info. The environment influences us in numerous ways, as research shows. Look at Thomas Tallhelm's theory about how different agricultural systems (rice vs wheat) create different kinds of social orders, cultures, identities, mentalities, thinking styles, and behaviors. Or consider the studies done that show pathogen exposure and/or parasite load (or even just the perception of these) elicits higher population rates of conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), along with lower population rates of the personality trait 'openness to experience'; as explained by the behavioral immune system and parasite-stress theory. I've accumulated vast amounts of evidence along these lines.
"But," you go on to say, "what is not so clear is to what degree are the operations of social structures, especially as they increase in size over time, traceable to our psychological inner springs. In other words, in what ways does an inborn mental infrastructure prop up sociocultural organization?" There is no doubt about that either. Each is a cause of the other and an effect of the other, in a reinforcing cycle; once some set of cultural, structural, and psycho-behavioral conditions have become established. There seems to have been a feedback loop, for example, between agriculture and the container metaphor. Agriculture made possible and required new ways of thinking, perceiving, behaving, and relating.
Then as civilization advanced, particularly with larger populations, what was needed was more productive farming with better control. With the Axial Age, there was a corresponding agricultural reform involving more contained farm fields, a transition from once weedy semi-wild to weed control. A secondary effect of that was not only that society became more contained and controllable overall, such as the relationship of literacy, legibility, and taxation (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State). By the way, legibility is one of those fascinating concepts that has a lot of explanatory power. Grain farming, in being more easily measured and recorded, allows for larger and more centralized states.
Two other things resulted. Grains increased in the diet, with wheat being linked to alterations in the brain, such as wheat-eating populations having higher rates of individualism, analytical thought, and certain mental illnesses (Tallhelm argues a cultural explanation in that wheat farming can be done by a single individual or a single nuclear family, whereas rice farming cannot). But maybe more interesting, control of weeds also meant control of the psychedelic ergot. The Axial Age simultaneously saw the cultivation of such things as poppies (i.e., opium) and sugar cane. So, there was a shift in psychoactive substances, varying by regional environment. Some suspect ancient religions were often psychedelic cults, in using ergot, psilocybin, etc; as is typical among shamanistic and animistic cultures. Psychedelics seem to have a lot to do with thinner boundaries and an experience of a living world full of voices.
As an example, I love using an anecdote recorded in early-to-mid 19th century books, originally a newspaper account. In rural northern England, a minister asked an old man why the fairies disappeared. The explanation was that it was caused by tea (i.e., the stimulatory caffeine) replacing nappy groot ales (i.e., strong and sometimes mildly psychedelic herb-infused alcohol). Land reforms were coinciding with imperial and colonial changes, including new trade goods and hence new psychoactive substances. Some have argued that, without stimulants like caffeine and nicotine, modern industrialized capitalism wouldn't have been possible. But one might equally argue that hyper-individualism wouldn't have been possible either.
There is something that stands out to me in that period following the early modern revolutions. Elite social and moral reformers, like Mary Shelly's father William Godwin, sought to enforce change in social identities and relations by not only restructuring laws but also boundaries and the landscape itself. They destroyed the last of the feudal villages, enclosed the last of the commons, eliminated the last of wilderness, privatized nearly all land, built boundary walls everywhere, leveled hills where needed, straightened roads, and channelized waterways. They did so because there was an awareness that the old communal self of feudalism lingered with a strong working class because of how the surrounding world helped maintain it. The purpose was to create a new system of isolated, autonomous individualism (i.e., disorganized labor).
Without a doubt, it wasn't to create an equality between all individuals but to make an individualized working class more manageable. This brings us to another point you made: "Authorization, the predisposition to establish ranking systems for organizing social behavior, is strengthened since communication happens so rapidly and widely between superiors and subordinates (these days practically at the speed of light). And while authoritative hallucinations grounded in a bipartite mentality are obsolete, superior–subordinate dynamics continue to configure politics, everyday interactions, and updated religious traditions. But when excessive, a darker authorization is evident in political fanaticism, religious fundamentalism, and cult behavior."
Yet it's not only that structure shapes the psyche. The general environment plays a role, such as seen with the nexus of infectious disease, conservatism, and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). In my own speculations, I've suggested that group and hierarchical authorization has much to do with stress overall, not just infectious disease. This could be supported by Jaynes' arguing that the bicameral voices likely being heard when someone was under stress. But we can bring this back around to your other point, of how it feeds back the other direction.
One major chronic stressor is high inequality (see: Keith Payne, Richard Wilkinson, & Kate Pickett). High inequality draws into power those who are high in social dominance orientation (SDOs), which essentially is the personality type that makes an effective authoritarian leader with RWAs that will fall in line. It's not clear that high inequality causes SDO, but I suspect it might, or at least that it exacerbates it. What we do know is that, once SDOs are in power, they will further build, entrench, and strength high inequality. That is an example of a mentality causally relating to an effect on the social order.
This makes me think of a point you made early in your piece: "Another way to phrase the issue is how do we explain the trajectory of the demographic explosion, from bands, chiefdoms, kingdoms, regional empires, trans-continental empires, to modern national states. These describe “supra-kinship authoritative configurations.” They are “supra-“ because they are not just extra-kinship but trans-kinship in how they subsume and incorporate lower, local groupings. They are “authoritative” because they establish supervisory and subordinate relations. And they are “configurations” in how they align, put together, and integrate various societal components (political structures, families, economic roles, castes, etc.)."
That is a great explanation. And it reminded me of another component that set the stage for what was to come. In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama talks about the Hobbesian fallacy of primordial individualism. He has a great account of how and why individualism was promoted. The enforcement of clerical celibacy and cousin marriage bans were used to break up the organic power structure of local kin groups, both among commoners and aristocracy. This ensured more centralized power within the Church hierarchy, specifically distant control from the Vatican, including guaranteeing legal certainty of property ownership (e.g., a bastard child of a monk or priest couldn't make a legal claim).
One of the interesting things that feudalism established was the nuclear family, in place of the ancient kinship networks that once so dominated society, from tribalism to kingdoms. It was somewhat of a proto-eugenics breeding program since the lord determined who was allowed to live in the village and who could marry, with his having first dibs on all women prior to being bedded by their husbands ('right of the lord' or 'right of the first night'). An unintended side effect is that it created the conditions for a precursor to modern individualism, by slowly whittling down pre-feudal social relations, with the organizing factor being equal parts aristocracy and theocracy (i.e., SDO-style top-down authoritarianism).
Protestantism, Anabaptism, and other dissenter religions built on this to push proto-individualism to the next stage. It wasn't only the promotion of mass literacy that, without a doubt, did alter the brain and psyche as many scholars have discussed. In terms of structuring and containment, there is an interesting example with the Quakers. They were fully on board with nuclear families, in largely dismissing any formal systems of kinship and community. They didn't like to have church buildings or to build public spaces like city greens. Private life was upheld. This extended to every individual.
Quakers were the first group to systematically build houses where every family member had their own private bedroom (Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family). Basically, it was a container for socially constructing and psycho-behaviorally developing the individual self (e.g., praying alone in one's own mind-soul). But we could push it back a step further. What was the mentality that allowed these Quakers to even think up this possibility and imagine it to be a good thing? That emerging mentality had been developing piecemeal over millennia, and so it slowly ratcheted itself up into further extremes of psychology and behavior, ideology and structure.
You wrote that, "Supra-kinship systems, whether religious or political, require highly ideologized forms of knowledge to legitimize themselves, and this in turn demands that the psyche is socially primed so it can manipulate abstract knowledge forms." A supra-kinship system is an amazing thing to construct and no minor achievement. The Quakers couldn't have made that simple last step toward of a fully and physically contained individual self without the prior developments, including what the first Christians inherited from the Axial Age universalist ideology of a 'brotherhood of mankind' and the singular 'cosmos' that originally primed and justified the deconstruction of separate people in separate worlds with separate gods.
As a last point, I wanted to throw out a possible critique, although it doesn't seem to alter any part of your overarching argument. But I always feel compelled to clarify this issue, as it's such a common view. One section is titled, "The Superstructure of Sociopolitics Rests upon a Mental Infrastructure." In giving multiple examples of "mental mechanisms" as related to "aptic structures," the "Third is authorization, or the tendency to form and fit into dominance hierarchies (a key characteristic of many of our primate relatives)." We could interrogate that conclusion. In this light, I always turn to two paired comparisons.
Chimpanzees and bonobos are genetically and geographically close, with only a river in between them. One has dominance hierarchies and the other does not, or rather in the latter case relationships are more peaceful, friendly, and maybe even egalitarian. If anything, those bonobos with the most social influence tend to suppress dominance behavior. Similarly, in the Amazon, there are two nearby tribes, the Yanomami and the Piraha. The former are infamous for being aggressive and violent within dominance hierarchies; whereas the latter lack all punitive enforcement and any kind of hierarchy at all, with dominance behavior being rare such as when their drunk, but they never had alcohol until traders brought it.
This is where an environmental explanation becomes so powerful. Chimpanzees live in a region of human encroachment, poaching, environmental destruction, and civil war. Likewise, the Yanomami live on a historical borderland where they had to fight to defend themselves and their land. Yet both bonobos and the Piraha have lived non-stressful lives in mostly peaceful regions. This goes back to my earlier commentary. Be it infectious diseases, high inequality, violent conflict, or whatever -- all of these kinds of chronic stressors elicit particular kinds of mentalities.
This is relevant since agriculture and agricultural societies increase such chronic stressors, directly among agricultural people and indirectly such as the chimpanzees and Yanomami who are under extreme pressure and threat from agricultural people. As such, it's no accident that the bicameral mind is specifically associated with agricultural societies with their concomitant rise of malnutrition, periods of starvation, physical stunting, immunocompromise, infectious disease, and premature death. But even agriculture, was simply a survival response to the megafauna die-off, possibly the greatest loss of nutrient density in all of hominid evolution.
All of this would distort the psyche in entirely new ways that never would've been possible before. That is why it's useful to look at non-agricultural cultures for comparison. The Piraha do have a voice-hearing tradition, but it's framed within communalism and dividualism, an entirely different kind of psychological and social system, of which would prime them for entirely other things. Dividualism has been an important concept in anthropology. To understand bicameral mentality, we might need to understand pre-bicameral mentality that was the (shattered) foundation upon which it was built. But that is going further afield than was your primary focus here.
This isn't only about Jaynesian consciousness, obviously. Bicameral mentality seems to have already been using containers to create a more stable version of voice-hearing animism. Once a voice became associated with an individual, that voice could be permanently entrapped and imprisoned (i.e., contained) by mummifying the individual or saving their skull, and then building a temple or god house to keep them in a single place; sometimes even taking precautions to make sure they couldn't walk off or otherwise escape. Using holy books to capture spirits, gods, and ancestors was basically the same concept where the book was the container, with the advantage of it having froze the voice to make a better system of control. The trick with the new egoic individuality was a shift to sealing these voices, instead, inside of every human body.
It also makes one think about how the container metaphor not only applies to the human psyche (maybe related to Ernest Hartmann's thick boundaries) but to every other aspect of humanity. It's not just that our minds became more contained. Everything was more contained, increasingly narrow and rigid, from walls of buildings to walls of city-states. In the Bronze Age, there was already highly structured city planning and boundary lines based on geometry and proto-mathematical calculations. I wonder, for example, how far back might go such practices as beating the bounds, as reminiscent of Australian Aboriginal Songlines that contain ancestral spirit mentalities and voices.
This is where I was inspired by a non-Jaynesian scholar, Lynne Kelly. She writes of traditional mnemonic systems, with the Songlines being a key example. The original structuring of psyche and society was not an unnatural container but the surrounding landscape. Based on her scholarship, one might see an even earlier structuring device than the god houses Jaynes focused on. She argues the megaliths were built as a replacement for landscapes that had been used to store vast knowledge systems. But for various reasons, a people might've had to leave a particular place while wanting to maintain the knowledge. The megaliths were possibly the first human-constructed container of psyche, but on a communal level.
You state that, "The human mind is designed to soak up and organize information from the external environment." It's not just info. The environment influences us in numerous ways, as research shows. Look at Thomas Tallhelm's theory about how different agricultural systems (rice vs wheat) create different kinds of social orders, cultures, identities, mentalities, thinking styles, and behaviors. Or consider the studies done that show pathogen exposure and/or parasite load (or even just the perception of these) elicits higher population rates of conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), along with lower population rates of the personality trait 'openness to experience'; as explained by the behavioral immune system and parasite-stress theory. I've accumulated vast amounts of evidence along these lines.
"But," you go on to say, "what is not so clear is to what degree are the operations of social structures, especially as they increase in size over time, traceable to our psychological inner springs. In other words, in what ways does an inborn mental infrastructure prop up sociocultural organization?" There is no doubt about that either. Each is a cause of the other and an effect of the other, in a reinforcing cycle; once some set of cultural, structural, and psycho-behavioral conditions have become established. There seems to have been a feedback loop, for example, between agriculture and the container metaphor. Agriculture made possible and required new ways of thinking, perceiving, behaving, and relating.
Then as civilization advanced, particularly with larger populations, what was needed was more productive farming with better control. With the Axial Age, there was a corresponding agricultural reform involving more contained farm fields, a transition from once weedy semi-wild to weed control. A secondary effect of that was not only that society became more contained and controllable overall, such as the relationship of literacy, legibility, and taxation (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State). By the way, legibility is one of those fascinating concepts that has a lot of explanatory power. Grain farming, in being more easily measured and recorded, allows for larger and more centralized states.
Two other things resulted. Grains increased in the diet, with wheat being linked to alterations in the brain, such as wheat-eating populations having higher rates of individualism, analytical thought, and certain mental illnesses (Tallhelm argues a cultural explanation in that wheat farming can be done by a single individual or a single nuclear family, whereas rice farming cannot). But maybe more interesting, control of weeds also meant control of the psychedelic ergot. The Axial Age simultaneously saw the cultivation of such things as poppies (i.e., opium) and sugar cane. So, there was a shift in psychoactive substances, varying by regional environment. Some suspect ancient religions were often psychedelic cults, in using ergot, psilocybin, etc; as is typical among shamanistic and animistic cultures. Psychedelics seem to have a lot to do with thinner boundaries and an experience of a living world full of voices.
As an example, I love using an anecdote recorded in early-to-mid 19th century books, originally a newspaper account. In rural northern England, a minister asked an old man why the fairies disappeared. The explanation was that it was caused by tea (i.e., the stimulatory caffeine) replacing nappy groot ales (i.e., strong and sometimes mildly psychedelic herb-infused alcohol). Land reforms were coinciding with imperial and colonial changes, including new trade goods and hence new psychoactive substances. Some have argued that, without stimulants like caffeine and nicotine, modern industrialized capitalism wouldn't have been possible. But one might equally argue that hyper-individualism wouldn't have been possible either.
There is something that stands out to me in that period following the early modern revolutions. Elite social and moral reformers, like Mary Shelly's father William Godwin, sought to enforce change in social identities and relations by not only restructuring laws but also boundaries and the landscape itself. They destroyed the last of the feudal villages, enclosed the last of the commons, eliminated the last of wilderness, privatized nearly all land, built boundary walls everywhere, leveled hills where needed, straightened roads, and channelized waterways. They did so because there was an awareness that the old communal self of feudalism lingered with a strong working class because of how the surrounding world helped maintain it. The purpose was to create a new system of isolated, autonomous individualism (i.e., disorganized labor).
Without a doubt, it wasn't to create an equality between all individuals but to make an individualized working class more manageable. This brings us to another point you made: "Authorization, the predisposition to establish ranking systems for organizing social behavior, is strengthened since communication happens so rapidly and widely between superiors and subordinates (these days practically at the speed of light). And while authoritative hallucinations grounded in a bipartite mentality are obsolete, superior–subordinate dynamics continue to configure politics, everyday interactions, and updated religious traditions. But when excessive, a darker authorization is evident in political fanaticism, religious fundamentalism, and cult behavior."
Yet it's not only that structure shapes the psyche. The general environment plays a role, such as seen with the nexus of infectious disease, conservatism, and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). In my own speculations, I've suggested that group and hierarchical authorization has much to do with stress overall, not just infectious disease. This could be supported by Jaynes' arguing that the bicameral voices likely being heard when someone was under stress. But we can bring this back around to your other point, of how it feeds back the other direction.
One major chronic stressor is high inequality (see: Keith Payne, Richard Wilkinson, & Kate Pickett). High inequality draws into power those who are high in social dominance orientation (SDOs), which essentially is the personality type that makes an effective authoritarian leader with RWAs that will fall in line. It's not clear that high inequality causes SDO, but I suspect it might, or at least that it exacerbates it. What we do know is that, once SDOs are in power, they will further build, entrench, and strength high inequality. That is an example of a mentality causally relating to an effect on the social order.
This makes me think of a point you made early in your piece: "Another way to phrase the issue is how do we explain the trajectory of the demographic explosion, from bands, chiefdoms, kingdoms, regional empires, trans-continental empires, to modern national states. These describe “supra-kinship authoritative configurations.” They are “supra-“ because they are not just extra-kinship but trans-kinship in how they subsume and incorporate lower, local groupings. They are “authoritative” because they establish supervisory and subordinate relations. And they are “configurations” in how they align, put together, and integrate various societal components (political structures, families, economic roles, castes, etc.)."
That is a great explanation. And it reminded me of another component that set the stage for what was to come. In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama talks about the Hobbesian fallacy of primordial individualism. He has a great account of how and why individualism was promoted. The enforcement of clerical celibacy and cousin marriage bans were used to break up the organic power structure of local kin groups, both among commoners and aristocracy. This ensured more centralized power within the Church hierarchy, specifically distant control from the Vatican, including guaranteeing legal certainty of property ownership (e.g., a bastard child of a monk or priest couldn't make a legal claim).
One of the interesting things that feudalism established was the nuclear family, in place of the ancient kinship networks that once so dominated society, from tribalism to kingdoms. It was somewhat of a proto-eugenics breeding program since the lord determined who was allowed to live in the village and who could marry, with his having first dibs on all women prior to being bedded by their husbands ('right of the lord' or 'right of the first night'). An unintended side effect is that it created the conditions for a precursor to modern individualism, by slowly whittling down pre-feudal social relations, with the organizing factor being equal parts aristocracy and theocracy (i.e., SDO-style top-down authoritarianism).
Protestantism, Anabaptism, and other dissenter religions built on this to push proto-individualism to the next stage. It wasn't only the promotion of mass literacy that, without a doubt, did alter the brain and psyche as many scholars have discussed. In terms of structuring and containment, there is an interesting example with the Quakers. They were fully on board with nuclear families, in largely dismissing any formal systems of kinship and community. They didn't like to have church buildings or to build public spaces like city greens. Private life was upheld. This extended to every individual.
Quakers were the first group to systematically build houses where every family member had their own private bedroom (Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family). Basically, it was a container for socially constructing and psycho-behaviorally developing the individual self (e.g., praying alone in one's own mind-soul). But we could push it back a step further. What was the mentality that allowed these Quakers to even think up this possibility and imagine it to be a good thing? That emerging mentality had been developing piecemeal over millennia, and so it slowly ratcheted itself up into further extremes of psychology and behavior, ideology and structure.
You wrote that, "Supra-kinship systems, whether religious or political, require highly ideologized forms of knowledge to legitimize themselves, and this in turn demands that the psyche is socially primed so it can manipulate abstract knowledge forms." A supra-kinship system is an amazing thing to construct and no minor achievement. The Quakers couldn't have made that simple last step toward of a fully and physically contained individual self without the prior developments, including what the first Christians inherited from the Axial Age universalist ideology of a 'brotherhood of mankind' and the singular 'cosmos' that originally primed and justified the deconstruction of separate people in separate worlds with separate gods.
As a last point, I wanted to throw out a possible critique, although it doesn't seem to alter any part of your overarching argument. But I always feel compelled to clarify this issue, as it's such a common view. One section is titled, "The Superstructure of Sociopolitics Rests upon a Mental Infrastructure." In giving multiple examples of "mental mechanisms" as related to "aptic structures," the "Third is authorization, or the tendency to form and fit into dominance hierarchies (a key characteristic of many of our primate relatives)." We could interrogate that conclusion. In this light, I always turn to two paired comparisons.
Chimpanzees and bonobos are genetically and geographically close, with only a river in between them. One has dominance hierarchies and the other does not, or rather in the latter case relationships are more peaceful, friendly, and maybe even egalitarian. If anything, those bonobos with the most social influence tend to suppress dominance behavior. Similarly, in the Amazon, there are two nearby tribes, the Yanomami and the Piraha. The former are infamous for being aggressive and violent within dominance hierarchies; whereas the latter lack all punitive enforcement and any kind of hierarchy at all, with dominance behavior being rare such as when their drunk, but they never had alcohol until traders brought it.
This is where an environmental explanation becomes so powerful. Chimpanzees live in a region of human encroachment, poaching, environmental destruction, and civil war. Likewise, the Yanomami live on a historical borderland where they had to fight to defend themselves and their land. Yet both bonobos and the Piraha have lived non-stressful lives in mostly peaceful regions. This goes back to my earlier commentary. Be it infectious diseases, high inequality, violent conflict, or whatever -- all of these kinds of chronic stressors elicit particular kinds of mentalities.
This is relevant since agriculture and agricultural societies increase such chronic stressors, directly among agricultural people and indirectly such as the chimpanzees and Yanomami who are under extreme pressure and threat from agricultural people. As such, it's no accident that the bicameral mind is specifically associated with agricultural societies with their concomitant rise of malnutrition, periods of starvation, physical stunting, immunocompromise, infectious disease, and premature death. But even agriculture, was simply a survival response to the megafauna die-off, possibly the greatest loss of nutrient density in all of hominid evolution.
All of this would distort the psyche in entirely new ways that never would've been possible before. That is why it's useful to look at non-agricultural cultures for comparison. The Piraha do have a voice-hearing tradition, but it's framed within communalism and dividualism, an entirely different kind of psychological and social system, of which would prime them for entirely other things. Dividualism has been an important concept in anthropology. To understand bicameral mentality, we might need to understand pre-bicameral mentality that was the (shattered) foundation upon which it was built. But that is going further afield than was your primary focus here.
