SIX years ago this weekend, on February 15 2003, between one-and-a-half and two million people marched – or, in most cases, ambled – through the streets of London in order to tell Tony Blair that they didn’t want to be party to an American-led invasion of Iraq. As we all know, he preferred listening to voices in Washington – or possibly even in his head – to those coming from the streets. As we also know, his selective deafness had dire consequences, not just for the hundreds of thousands of people who are now dead as a result, be they Iraqi civilians or British or American soldiers, but also for his premiership and his reputation.
Still, as Blair has told us repeatedly ever since, he did what he did because he thought both it and he were “right”. That, as he’s also often said, is what “leaders” do. Which I suppose must be right, too. After all, we have these people to lead us, by the nose if necessary, in whichever direction they think “right” – a decision they come to because of their greater wisdom, experience and judgement. Which (to go full circle) is why they are the leaders and we are the led.
Except, as ever, it’s not quite as simple as that. You may remember that, a few months ago, I mentioned a book I’d just read by an American anthropologist called Christopher Boehm. In Hierarchy in the Forest, he argued that, unlike almost all of our primate cousins, we humans are not – or, more to the point, were not – hierarchical in the same way as chimpanzees, gorillas or baboons. By studying the ethnographic record, he realised that pre-agricultural people on every inhabited continent not only don’t exhibit social hierarchies of the kind we now endure, but actively go out of their way to prevent the hierarchies, and the leaders at their summit, from emerging. He called this structure “counter-hierarchical”, and further argued that it was an evolved mode of behaviour which is also present in bonobos, our closest genetic relatives.
More interesting still, he triangulated from his findings and suggested that, until the advent of the settled communities that arose because of agriculture, this was how all previous humans had lived, for around 95 per cent of our time on the planet.
As is only appropriate as we celebrate Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, as well as the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, which demonstrated how we humans are interwoven into the whole tapestry of life on Earth, it’s worth repeating that this shows what kind of animals we actually are – and how we’re meant to be. In the wild, so to speak, humans are strictly egalitarian. But this is merely a consequence of a deeper human motivation, which is altogether more heartening than the kind of brutal, collectivist egalitarianism you might conjure up in your mind, following nine thousand of years or so of being both conditioned and coerced by the imposed hierarchies of civilisation. In our natural state, we strove successfully against the emergence of hierarchies in order to protect our individual personal autonomy. In other words, we acted collectively to stop ourselves being individually terrorised into submitting to the will of putative leaders.
And that, in a nutshell, is the bedrock of all human history hitherto, back to around 7000 BC. Before then, there were no leaders. Or, as the anthropologists would have it, no alpha males.
Now, of course, with the benefit of civilisation and technology, which have resulted not only in more or less permanent exploitation, inequality and warfare, but also the probable rendering of the planet as uninhabitable, we have leaders to show us the way. But the question arises – sticking with an anthropological turn of phrase – of just how alpha those alpha males (and females) actually are. Because it’s now obvious that our recent leaders who’ve droned on most about “leadership” – that is, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – showed all the signs of behaving like cringing baboons fawning to the City of London in order to avoid a clip round the ear from the well-heeled alpha males therein.
In Thatcher’s case this is understandable, although unforgivable. As the “leader” of a party committed to the maintenance of hierarchies, she torched manufacturing in order to terrorise any challenge to the hierarchy from the unions or the working class into submission, meaning there was only the financial sector left to fuel the economy.
But Blair and Brown’s abject surrender to Thatcherism, and their subsequent subservience to the hierarchy their party was created to undermine, is far more unforgivable. Then again, Blair has beta male written all over him, along with a potential for lackeyism which cost countless Iraqis far more than a banker losing his bonus.
Which brings us back to the Stop The War march. It happened to take place on my 44th birthday, and even a banker could probably do the simple maths involved to tell him that that means that this Sunday I’ll be 50. Which is no big deal in itself, although it’s enormously gratifying to enter my sixth decade to the clatter of the latest elite of idiots tumbling from their false hierarchy. Twitching the strands of DNA that stretch back through the millennia to our ancestors, such a response is only – and truly – human.
