I wonder if anyone’s ever done a comparison between Jaynes’ theories and those of Agner Fog, known for his theory of regal and kungic societal structures, or regality theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regality_theory). The two theories aren’t necessarily incompatible, as the regality theory has a different focus (namely, the perceived level of external danger or fear, and the accompanying variation in behavior and social organization).
The examples of bicameral societies that Jaynes cited mostly seem to fall towards the regal (or “warlike”/hierarchical) end of the spectrum, as defined by Fog. That being said, there are also plenty of examples of conscious societies that likewise display regal traits (such as the Roman Empire and its successors in medieval and early modern Europe).
The more egalitarian type of society that Agner Fog describes as “kungic” does not seem to be compatible with the bicameral mentality as Jaynes described it, since these societies have relatively little need for the kind of social control that bicamerality provides. That does not imply that all such societies are automatically conscious, though. Indeed, the regal vs. kungic continuum is not even unique to humans, as it is also observed in the contrast between chimps (regal) and bonobos (kungic).
That raises the question of what the mentality of people in a pre-conscious kungic society would have been, and how exactly it would have differed from what Jaynes described as bicamerality. It seems like this would be a very difficult topic to study, though, since many kungic societies (including the !Kung people after whom the term was named) did not necessarily have writing systems prior to contact with Europeans, so historical records from pre-conscious times would be difficult to pin down.
Bicameralism and Regality Theory
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benjamindavidsteele
- Posts: 39
- Joined: Thu Apr 19, 2018 7:07 am
Re: Bicameralism and Regality Theory
I must have missed this post. It's hard to keep track of new discussions. Then again, maybe I saw it earlier and didn't appreciate it at the time. I'm not sure when I first came across regality theory. But it stood out to me because, just a month or so ago, I mentioned it in a comment here at another thread.
In any case, over the past year, I too started thinking about Jaynesian consciousness in relation to such things as regality theory. Jaynes postulated that it was stress that elicited voice-hearing. And regality theory is about the stress of threat, risk, danger, and violence. It's a variation on the research about threat reactivity and related to mean world syndrome (violence, distrust, xenophobia, punitiveness, etc). It stands out to me because certain kinds of stress have increased over the centuries and millennia.
I've had many similar thoughts to what you express here. But I sometimes interpret them differently. Or else apply them in another way to Jaynesian scholarship. I don't necessarily see it as directly and simply related to (J-)consciousness vs pre-(J-)consciousness, nor between different types of pre-(J-)consciousness. Though it seems as obvious to me, as it does to you, that all of such things are likely mixed together.
I suspect stress, in numerous forms plays a larger role in social construction of mentalities, identities, and social orders. Besides regality theory and threat reactivity, there is disgust response, sickness behavior, conservation withdrawal, behavioral immune system, and parasite-stress theory. I'd argue that all of these are related or overlapping, at least with similar or related factors and effects that could be exacerbating and cumulative.
The last two, behavioral immune system and parasite-stress theory, are particularly parallel to regality theory. They're based on research that shows parasite load, pathogen exposure, and infectious disease rate (or even just the perception of such a threat) increases collectivism, right-wing authoritarianism, and sociopolitical conservatism (not economic ideology of any variety), while lowering 'openness to experience'.
On a related note, according to the research of Thomas Talhelm in the same country (e.g., China), rice-growing regions have more collectivism and synthetic thought, whereas wheat-growing regions have more individualism and analytical thought. Talhelm speculates it has to do with the communal labor required with the former, while the latter potentially allows individuals to farm alone or at least not dependent on highly organized collective labor.
That might be true to an extent. But what made people drawn to particular kinds of agriculture in the first place? In rice-growing areas, the wetter and warmer conditions are perfect for the proliferation of parasites and pathogens. Indeed, the data shows this. Whereas wheat-growing needs drier conditions and hence less spread of infectious diseases, particularly through human transmission.
The earliest agricultural societies, by the way, were plagued by infectious diseases. This is partly because farming began in warmer, wetter areas. But also there is the problem of farming being the first time there was greater population concentration of humans and animals. Combined with the malnutrition and immunocompromise of an agricultural diet, it was the perfect breeding ground for disease epidemics.
To broaden the scope, such massive stressors did precede the agricultural revolution. In the prior millennia, there was the megafauna die-off, the loss of humanity's favorite food for most of human evolution. Megafauna were as blubbery as whales and extremely nutrient-dense. There is no food that could replace that loss, as small prey is less fatty and it's in the fat where many of the most important nutrients are located.
Even so, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle persisted for most humans long after the agricultural revolution. That is because agriculture was rather primitive and didn't have dependable high yields to be a food staple. Among the early city-states, they regularly dissipated during hard times and returned to a tribal lifestyle. This was a release valve on extreme stressors.
All of this changed in the late Bronze Age when not only settlements increasingly became permanent but also began to grow. The first hierarchical, large-scale, and expansive empires appeared; as Jaynes writes about. It's likely because of improved cultivars and farming practices. Humans were now trapped within civilization and so, when stressors hit, they had no where else to go and no other sufficient source of food.
From what I can tell, bicameral mentality was a more contained psychosocial construction of animistic mentality. Because of far less stress, most tribal hunter-gatherers, prior to agricultural pressures (encroachment, land theft, environmental destruction, poaching, conflict, etc), presumably would've been kungic cultures. Even bicameral societies showed no evidence of large-scale violence until close to the Bronze Age collapse.
It was probably a slow increase of stressors over millennia. The end of the Bronze Age was simply the final breaking point that resulted in totalizing sociocultural rupture. Up to then, I'd guess there was a more smooth transition from animism to bicameralism, as both were voice-hearing traditions. Bicameralism was simply a more organized and structured animism.
Imperialism, though, was something entirely different. No variation of the bundle theory of mind was going to work any longer. That would've been tragic, as humanity had been dependent on a bundled mind probably since the earliest hominids. There was hundreds of thousands or years, maybe a million years, of evolution and cultural development behind the bundled mind.
It would've required immense stress to dislodge that deeply imprinted pattern. That is presumably why there is evidence of a sudden appearance of mass violence all over the world, even in northern Europe. But up to that point, it's possibly all societies were more kungic than not. When we look at violent tribes (e.g., Yanomami) and violent species (e.g., chimpanzees), they are living in areas of extreme stress caused by agricultural societies (civil war, poaching, historical border regions, etc).
You are, therefore, correct to ask "the question of what the mentality of people in a pre-conscious kungic society would have been, and how exactly it would have differed from what Jaynes described as bicamerality." Bonobos are the opposite of chimpanzees and interesting precisely because they are genetically and geographically close. For the Yanomami, a comparable example is the nearby kungic Piraha (non-stressed, nonviolent, egalitarian, non-hiearchical, etc).
The Piraha seem to be unique on a number of accounts. They lack a native tradition of religion, theology, storytelling, art, etc. Also, besides having no linguistic recursion or numeracy, they have few terms for colors and personal pronouns. There sense of time is non-linear and non-cyclical but more shifting like a flickering flame, as based on an immediacy principle. They have no conception of an afterlife and rarely talk of the dead. But they do have an informal voice-hearing tradition, sometimes where the dead or else a spirit will speak.
In any case, over the past year, I too started thinking about Jaynesian consciousness in relation to such things as regality theory. Jaynes postulated that it was stress that elicited voice-hearing. And regality theory is about the stress of threat, risk, danger, and violence. It's a variation on the research about threat reactivity and related to mean world syndrome (violence, distrust, xenophobia, punitiveness, etc). It stands out to me because certain kinds of stress have increased over the centuries and millennia.
I've had many similar thoughts to what you express here. But I sometimes interpret them differently. Or else apply them in another way to Jaynesian scholarship. I don't necessarily see it as directly and simply related to (J-)consciousness vs pre-(J-)consciousness, nor between different types of pre-(J-)consciousness. Though it seems as obvious to me, as it does to you, that all of such things are likely mixed together.
I suspect stress, in numerous forms plays a larger role in social construction of mentalities, identities, and social orders. Besides regality theory and threat reactivity, there is disgust response, sickness behavior, conservation withdrawal, behavioral immune system, and parasite-stress theory. I'd argue that all of these are related or overlapping, at least with similar or related factors and effects that could be exacerbating and cumulative.
The last two, behavioral immune system and parasite-stress theory, are particularly parallel to regality theory. They're based on research that shows parasite load, pathogen exposure, and infectious disease rate (or even just the perception of such a threat) increases collectivism, right-wing authoritarianism, and sociopolitical conservatism (not economic ideology of any variety), while lowering 'openness to experience'.
On a related note, according to the research of Thomas Talhelm in the same country (e.g., China), rice-growing regions have more collectivism and synthetic thought, whereas wheat-growing regions have more individualism and analytical thought. Talhelm speculates it has to do with the communal labor required with the former, while the latter potentially allows individuals to farm alone or at least not dependent on highly organized collective labor.
That might be true to an extent. But what made people drawn to particular kinds of agriculture in the first place? In rice-growing areas, the wetter and warmer conditions are perfect for the proliferation of parasites and pathogens. Indeed, the data shows this. Whereas wheat-growing needs drier conditions and hence less spread of infectious diseases, particularly through human transmission.
The earliest agricultural societies, by the way, were plagued by infectious diseases. This is partly because farming began in warmer, wetter areas. But also there is the problem of farming being the first time there was greater population concentration of humans and animals. Combined with the malnutrition and immunocompromise of an agricultural diet, it was the perfect breeding ground for disease epidemics.
To broaden the scope, such massive stressors did precede the agricultural revolution. In the prior millennia, there was the megafauna die-off, the loss of humanity's favorite food for most of human evolution. Megafauna were as blubbery as whales and extremely nutrient-dense. There is no food that could replace that loss, as small prey is less fatty and it's in the fat where many of the most important nutrients are located.
Even so, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle persisted for most humans long after the agricultural revolution. That is because agriculture was rather primitive and didn't have dependable high yields to be a food staple. Among the early city-states, they regularly dissipated during hard times and returned to a tribal lifestyle. This was a release valve on extreme stressors.
All of this changed in the late Bronze Age when not only settlements increasingly became permanent but also began to grow. The first hierarchical, large-scale, and expansive empires appeared; as Jaynes writes about. It's likely because of improved cultivars and farming practices. Humans were now trapped within civilization and so, when stressors hit, they had no where else to go and no other sufficient source of food.
From what I can tell, bicameral mentality was a more contained psychosocial construction of animistic mentality. Because of far less stress, most tribal hunter-gatherers, prior to agricultural pressures (encroachment, land theft, environmental destruction, poaching, conflict, etc), presumably would've been kungic cultures. Even bicameral societies showed no evidence of large-scale violence until close to the Bronze Age collapse.
It was probably a slow increase of stressors over millennia. The end of the Bronze Age was simply the final breaking point that resulted in totalizing sociocultural rupture. Up to then, I'd guess there was a more smooth transition from animism to bicameralism, as both were voice-hearing traditions. Bicameralism was simply a more organized and structured animism.
Imperialism, though, was something entirely different. No variation of the bundle theory of mind was going to work any longer. That would've been tragic, as humanity had been dependent on a bundled mind probably since the earliest hominids. There was hundreds of thousands or years, maybe a million years, of evolution and cultural development behind the bundled mind.
It would've required immense stress to dislodge that deeply imprinted pattern. That is presumably why there is evidence of a sudden appearance of mass violence all over the world, even in northern Europe. But up to that point, it's possibly all societies were more kungic than not. When we look at violent tribes (e.g., Yanomami) and violent species (e.g., chimpanzees), they are living in areas of extreme stress caused by agricultural societies (civil war, poaching, historical border regions, etc).
You are, therefore, correct to ask "the question of what the mentality of people in a pre-conscious kungic society would have been, and how exactly it would have differed from what Jaynes described as bicamerality." Bonobos are the opposite of chimpanzees and interesting precisely because they are genetically and geographically close. For the Yanomami, a comparable example is the nearby kungic Piraha (non-stressed, nonviolent, egalitarian, non-hiearchical, etc).
The Piraha seem to be unique on a number of accounts. They lack a native tradition of religion, theology, storytelling, art, etc. Also, besides having no linguistic recursion or numeracy, they have few terms for colors and personal pronouns. There sense of time is non-linear and non-cyclical but more shifting like a flickering flame, as based on an immediacy principle. They have no conception of an afterlife and rarely talk of the dead. But they do have an informal voice-hearing tradition, sometimes where the dead or else a spirit will speak.
