As mechanically and as unambiguously as traffic lights at a crossroad, our normal signalling devices reveal our basic emotions -- of love, fear, anger, disgust, shame, wonder and three or four more -- those emotions that we characterise collectively as our humanity. Our signalling devices are almost as simple as traffic lights. Our eyebrows can be up, level or down; our eyes can be facing an interlocutor or not; our mouth can be up, level, or down; our nose can be crinkled or not; we can be showing our teeth or not; our cheeks can be blushing or not; our ears can twitch or not; our voice can be pitched up, level or down; and our irises can widen or narrow from the normal conditions required by the ambient lighting. All these are genetic and not learned. All these are automatic in normal converse. A blind person who has never seen these in the face of another person signals his or her interior emotions in exactly the same way that sighted people do. Skilful cartoonists can show us the emotion of a character in a few simple lines -- the easiest part of his task.
All these signals, in varying degrees of expression and in various combinations, can reveal all the subtleties of human emotions. If we are very skilful, we can tell exactly what emotions another person is feeling unless he or she is very expert and assiduous in disguising those signals. Politicians, business leaders and entertainers do this all the time when in public view, and the observer has to augment the facial clues of the observed by noting what the hands, feet and other body movements are telling us. These can't convey emotions but they can give us clues as to the stress the actors are under when disguising their facial clues. Even the disguising of these stray clues are now part of the basic training of politicians. It is noticeable these days that they always make sure that their hands are perfectly still on the lecturn when they are speaking or giving a press conference or that they never dart to the face or neck when a particularly sensitive question is asked.. However, all this requires the most tremendous control and can seldom be carried out for more than a few minutes without some clue escaping momentarily. It is these escapees that the political journalist is looking for when a politician is being interviewed.
Why should our emotions be so obvious? Quite simply, because we are a social species. When some species of mammals began to evolve in social units millions of years ago rather than remain strictly in pairs, or as individuals for most of the time, it was necessary for the safety of them all that each of them could read the signals from all the others within the group. Initially this would have been for reasons of external threat but, as social species became more complex and rank-ordered for sexual selection reasons, signalling became necessary in ensuring the internal stability of the group.
I have used the above example to try and convey what anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are increasingly telling us. This is that what we tend to consider as our special sort of humanity -- our apparent uniqueness -- is, in fact, deeply embedded in the circumstances of the past. And one of those circumstances of is that we, and our hominid ancestors, and our ape-like predecessors millions of years before then have lived in small groups. Even if we did not have archeological evidence of this, and only that of the anthropological evidence from hunter-gatherer tribes that managed to struggle through into the 20th century, we could also derive this genetic circumstance by the fact that, if we had lived in large groups we couldn't possibly have the energy or time to have been able to read all the subtle clues of all the other members. Social mammals that live in very large groups have extremely simplified sets of emotions and signals, usually gross bodily movements.
However, the advent of weaponry meant that we were forced into larger sorts of associations than the smallish groups in which we had lived hitherto. The invention of the bow and arrow at about 15,000BC meant that those very early farmers of about 10,000BC were at the mercy of wandering bands of hunter-gatherers. So they had to start associating in cities, or at least to position their smallholdings near to cities to which they could flee if they were being attacked. The building of simple clay or stone walls around a spring or water supply, and a hoard of food would be enough to protect them from bow-and-arrow attack. In a few days at the most, the attackers would have to leave in order to find food for themselves and the farmers could emerge from their refuge.
Such early cities, while very small in comparison with today's cities, needed a further degree of organisation and specialisation -- as well as permanent caretakers and those who could make tools and weapons permanently instead of farming -- and were certainly larger than the normal sizes of hunter-gatherer bands. Thousands of years later, when bronze weapons and body protection were adopted by warrior gangs, the simple small cities of clay or stone walls were insufficient and a much further degree of protection was required which meant much larger sizes. These cities also learned to build good quality roads between them so that one city could come to the protection of another in the case of attack -- usually now by warrior hoards that were much larger than previous bands. And then, when the horse-borne warrior and the chariot became the norm and distances were able to be traversed very quickly, one city that was slightly larger than another could subdue it and become the capital city of an empire, exacting tribute from other cities in exchange for protecting them from even quite large armies of potential attackers -- increasingly, those of other contiguous empires.
It is weaponry, and successive innovations, that have been responsible for mutational changes in the type and size of governances throughout pre-history and history. Nevertheless, we still retain the genetic signalling, emotions and social behaviours that characterise the small hunter-gatherer group. There is no possible way that these can be dispensed with because they are too deeply embedded within us. It is still the fact that we work and communicate best in small groups and that, within those groups, there are various degrees of status or rank order, particularly among the males. Females are somewhat less inclined to rank order though it is a general rule that a female will try to entice a male of as high a rank as possible in order to obtain maximum economic secruity for herself and children.
Let us hop over thousands of years of history to almost the present time when the modern nation-state took shape about 200 years ago. This was not so much the product of a brand new weapon alone but of the conjunction of the modern artillery gun and the railway, formerly a peaceful invention. Whole regiments could be transported swiftly from one end of a railway line to another. Many modern nation-states began to associate from previous largely autonomous regions, provinces and free cities simply because they were strung along railway lines or were connected by good roads. All sorts of other factors were also involved, such as resources of coal or iron ore, or ports, or rich agricultural land, or languages, and so on. These occurred to its furthest extent in Europe and, lo and behold, as one might expect, the big new nation-states started falling out with one another and we have had two massive wars in the last century.
Since about the middle of the last century as other accoutrements of a nation-state took shape -- radio broadcasting, national airlines, ever increasing 'pomp and circumstance', and more efficient and compact weaponry -- then there has been a stampede on the part of many other isolated pockets of humanity to associate as nation-states. Instead of a couple of dozen nation-states a century ago we have a couple of hundred now registered with the United Naitons Organisation.
We could proceed to discuss the undoubted fact that the nuclear weapon is now the death knell of the nation-state because the highly centralised governments of nation-states can be taken out with one weapon hurled by another nation-state or carried in a briefcase by a terrorist. But let us leave that on one side for this posting and briefly discuss the fact that the basic parameters of our original hunter-gatherer bands are still retained even in the modern nation-state, no matter how large or small it might be.
It is still the case that, because of the necessity of reading one another's emotions, only a small group can successfully communicate together. All governments therefore -- once again, no matter how large or small -- find themselves with one particular hunter-gatherer gang right at the top. This can be the Cabinet in England, or the National Security Council in America, or the Poliburo in China, and so on. They may all have subsidiary Parliaments and various forms of election or selection procedures but the fact of the small group at the top remains and usually, within that group, there is clear rank order. And often, too, the alpha male (and sometimes, albeit rarely, the female) reigns supreme. And often, he then gather an extra-curricular group of non-politicians around him, pays them well or grants them favours in return for his physical protection. This is a far more common form of government in the modern world of 200 plus nation-states than those we call democracies.
But the administration of a large developed nation-state also requires either a large civil service or a large army or both -- with emphasis one way or another. A small group at the top cannot possibly issue all the necessary instructions for the smooth running of everything. Although civil services and armies also acquire small select groups at the top (albiet notionally subservient to the formal political leadership) they, in turn, can't administer their own organisations all by themselves. So they fall back on the other prime characteristic of social mammals -- rank order. Ascending through many ranks in a large pyramidal oragnisation can be very satisfying to the ambitious male, and also the attainment of a decent position -- social inclusion is the current buzz phrase -- in the organisation can be satisfying to those males who are not so ambitious. And the more ranks there are, the more ambitions that can be satisfied. A modern army in a large developed nation-state typically has about 15 ranks, and a civil service about 25. And, of course, each of them is striving to grow as large as possible in order to acquire even more ranks to satisfy those at the very top.
All this is so satisfying to those concerned that there'd be no end to the growing numbers and ranks of the army or the civil service in a developed country. Except for two reasons. The first is that there is usually rivalry between the two systems and one of them usually succeeds in getting on top and making sure that the other doesn't get too large. We've had an interesting excample of this in China where the mandarinate has recently managed to curtail the size and power of the army, but it took 20 or 30 years for this to happen and it's still not entirely clear that they've totally succeeded. But it's likely, because the Chinese are sensible enough to observe that the countries that do best are those that keep their army under control.
The second reason is that large armies or civil services cost a huge amount of money to run so this has to be paid for by taxation from the wealth-producers of the population whether workers or owners of commerce. The evidence at the present time from the Scandinavian countries in particular, but also Germany and France more recently (and England very soon), is that 50% non-productive employment within the public services is about the practical limit. But even this has only been attained because, during the last century, we have had a bonanza of oil and gas that has enabled enormous wealth to be produced -- and thus enormous taxation to be exacted. Thus, quite besides the vulnerability of centralised nation-states to nuclear weapons, and also the sheer inefficiency of information going up increasingly narrowing channels within pyramidal organisations, the size, cost and complexity of very large nation-states is now becoming a penalty rather than an advantage.
There are more than enough signs from within all the large nation-states that strong devolutionary political forces are now rising. Chunks of nation-states want to break away from the highly centralised systems of modern governments because the latter are now too distant from ordinary concerns. In addition, whereas armies and civil services a century ago could recruit the very best intellects fom the universities, they can no longer do so. There are so many more opportunities and so many other specialisations in different professions, the media, large organisations -- commercial or non-governmental -- where the intelligent and ambitious don't have to ascend through innumerable ranks for a lifetime before getting to the top. Even the very largest mutinational corporations, unlike civil services, have learned to decentralise have perhaps no more than 5 or 6 ranks
And ,besides all that, what has seldom been noticed by politicians and economists in particular (since they are numerous only in large developed countries) is that the most prosperous countries these days are not necessarily the large and powerful ones. The first sentence of the following article from the Economist is one of the most arresting sentences I have read in a long time and I warmly recommend this article as yet another angle on what must now be considered the end of the typical nation-state of the past century and the beginning of quite new forms of lateral governances necessary for the increasing number of transnational problems. Yes, these new governances, too, will have ranks -- we simply can't escape from these because of our genes -- but the geographical separation of their systems will mean that they can also be structured in smaller groupings (with much smaller numbers of ranks within them) which have their own additional social satisfactions them (because they can signal to one another more honestly) and well as the efficiency of their specialisation. It seems to me that the shape of tomorrow's governments will be more like the beads on a string than the tectonic plates of today.
Keith Hudson
<<<< WHEN SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
How big should a nation-state be?
Of the ten richest countries in the world in terms of GDP per head, only two have more than 5 million people: the United States, with 260 million, and Switzerland, with 7 million. A further two have populations over 1 million: Norway, with 4 million and Singapore, with 3 million. The remaining half-dozen have fewer than 1 million people. What do such variations imply about the link between population size and prosperity?
People have been debating the optimal size of a nation-state since the days of Aristotle. Understandably, given the diminutive size of Greek city-states, he thought that "experience has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a populous state to be run by good laws." The Founding Fathers of the United States fretted about the excessive size of their new nation; but James Madison argued that large size might be an advantage in a democracy, because it reduced the likelihood that special-interest groups would be able to act in unison to suppress the rights of other citizens.
Now two economists, Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Enrico Spolaore of Brown University, explore the question in a new book on the subject, The Size of Nations (MIT Press). Its importance has grown in the past half-century, as old political empires have disintegrated: more than half the world's countries now have fewer people than the state of Massachusetts, which has about 6 million.
The book argues that the best size for countries is the result of a trade-off between the benefits of scale and the costs of heterogeneity; and that openness to trade alters this trade-off. The gains from being big are considerable. Large countries can afford proportionately smaller government (although they often don't). Essential running costs can be spread over many taxpayers. Embassies, armies and road networks are all likely to cost less per head in populous countries. Defence in particular is cheaper for giants. "It is only safe to be small in a peaceful world," say the authors (who, unusually for economists, offer two stimulating chapters on conflict, war and the size of nations).
Large countries are able not only to spend more efficiently; they can also raise taxes in more cost-effective ways. Income taxes are more efficient than customs duties, but require a bigger initial bureaucracy. Large countries have bigger internal markets, allowing more specialisation and returns to scale. And they can redistribute resources geographically, providing insurance when one part of the country is hit by disaster or recession and shifting income from rich regions to poor ones.
But size has costs too. Thus large countries are also likely to have a diverse population whose varying preferences and demands a government may find hard to meet: America, Brazil and India are cases in point. A study of local government in the United States suggests that Americans are willing to put up with the higher running costs of small municipalities and school districts in exchange for living in communities with little variation in income, race or ethnicity. This could imply that people also prefer to live in more homogeneous countries. With the main exception of America, successful big countries (such as Japan) have relatively homogeneous populations.
One implication of this analysis is that, where the preferences of a country's people count, their country is likely to be smaller than it would otherwise be. Dictators typically suppress dissent, regional or ethnic. They see the benefits of size (and grab many of them); democracies are more conscious of its costs. So there are few recent examples of mergers between nation-states (North and South Yemen and the two Germanies are rare exceptions) but many of secession. The main reason for the resulting rise in the number of mini-countries is the shift from empire or dictatorship to self-determination, especially in the past quarter-century. "Borders need to satisfy citizens' aspirations," observe the authors.
However, the trade-off between the costs and benefits of size is affected by another factor: trade restrictions. The importance of economic size for prosperity depends crucially upon how open a country's economy is. Small countries that may not be viable in a world of trade restrictions can prosper when trade is liberal and markets are open. "Henceforth," say the authors, "one should expect economic integration and political disintegration to go hand in hand, in a mutually reinforcing process." An instance: the existence of the North American Free Trade Area has arguably reduced the cost of separatism to Quebec.
The American exception
None of this, however, satisfactorily explains the United States. It has a hugely successful economy and one of the world's highest levels of income per head, yet is also one of the most diverse countries on earth. Surely this winning combination of size and heterogeneity disproves the trade-off theory?
The answer, says Mr Alesina, lies partly in history: as in many countries, borders are partly a legacy from the past. In America, the cost of heterogeneity was a protracted and bloody civil war. More important is America's federal structure. If the United States were as centrally ruled as, say, France, the country would break up.
In fact, a world of small economies with open borders will have to replicate America's federal strength. It will need more supra-national organisations, with more power, to preserve markets and co-ordinate policies. The European Union may be a prototype of such bodies, combining large economies of scale with political independence. For the small countries about to join it -- Malta, the Baltic states, Slovenia -- that is good news. And would-be separatists everywhere need to become free-traders, if they are to aspire to prosperous independence.
The Economist -- 20 December 2003 >>>>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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