How Psyche Scaled Up over Time: Our Mental Architecture Undergirds Kinship and Political Systems

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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 undergirdsbut does not simplistically determinethe 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.