PET PEEVE: Theorists who use "superstition" as a buck-stopping explanation for broad patterns of human behavior. Below: A passage from "The Origins of Political Order" by Francis Fukuyamapic.twitter.com/gEGTidYCuW
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Fukuyama is right that there's a puzzle, though: Individuals have almost no reason to prefer their fourth cousin to a friendly stranger. So how do tribes of distant relatives cohere?
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It's not fear of supernatural retribution. Rather, the shared ancestors serve as a focal point for coordination.
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If everyone formed political alliances only with their friends, the resulting network would be a stringy mesh, centerless and incoherent. Instead, when people unite around a common (patrilineal or matrilineal) ancestor, the political network takes the shape of a firm knot.
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Superstitions then get grafted on later, as stories to tell children. "Don't disrespect your cousins or Great Grandpa will be mad." Crucially, these fables reinforce political ties **that make sense for other reasons**. The dead are just a Schelling point.
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Fascinating idea. Do you think inter-ethnic cooperation works along the same lines?
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not sure what you mean exactly, but yes i think the big universalist gods (yahweh, allah, etc.) serve just such a function
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Or, perhaps, as
#Nietzsche speculates, fear of the supernatural retribution of shared ancestors as a focal point for coordination?https://books.google.com/books?id=s0_HGBEmnx8C&lpg=PP1&dq=nietzsche%20genealogy%20and%20hackett%20and%20maudemarie&pg=PA61#v=onepage&q=%22through%20imagination%20of%20growing%20fear%20the%20progenitors%22&f=false … -
i will tolerate this explanation :)
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me thinks "Surnames / last names / family names " are that invention which set the co-ordination, trust and reputation layer. It could then incentivize distant cousins to uphold the value accrued at the layer. But this doesn't explain why some last names are location based
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i think cleisthenes (a reformer in ancient athens) switched everyone from family names to location-based names precisely to break the power of families
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Number of possible options of how 4th cousin will behave toward *you* significantly smaller than in the case of a stranger, so you start with a better field for mutual assumption of benevolence.
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But why are those options smaller?
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