Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Family Values 499Status is the public knowledge that you possess assets that would allowyou to help others if you wished to. The assets may include beauty, irreplaceabletalent or expertise, the ear and trust of powerful people, andespecially wealth. Status-worthy assets tend to be fungible. Wealth canbring connections and vice versa. Beauty can be parlayed into wealth(through gifts or marriage), can attract the attention of important people,or can draw more suitors than the beautiful one can handle. Asset-holders,then, are not just seen as holders of their assets. They exude an auraor charisma that makes people want to be in their graces. It's alwayshandy to have people want to be in your graces, so status itself is worthcraving. But there are only so many hours in the day, and sycophantsmust choose whom to fawn over, so status is a limited resource. If A hasmore, B must have less, and they must compete.Even in the dog-eat-dog world of tribal leadership, physical dominanceis not everything. Chagnon reports that some Yanomamo headmenare flamboyant bullies but others achieve their station by shrewdnessand discretion. A man named Kaobawa, though no wimp, earned hisauthority by leaning on the support of his brothers and cousins and cultivatingalliances with the men with whom he had traded wives. He conservedhis authority by giving orders only when he was sure everyonewould follow them, and magnified it by breaking up fights, disarmingmachete-wielding maniacs, and bravely scouting the village alone whenraiders were in evidence. His quiet leadership was rewarded with sixwives and as many affairs. In foraging societies, status also clings to goodhunters and knowledgeable naturalists. Assuming that our ancestors,too, practiced occasional meritocracy, human evolution was not alwaysthe survival of the fiercest.Romantic anthropologists used to claim that foraging peoples wereunmoved by wealth. But that is because the foragers they studied didn'thave any. Twentieth-century hunter-gatherers are unrepresentative ofhumanity in one respect. They live on land that no one else wants, landthat cannot be farmed. They don't necessarily prefer their deserts, rainforests,and tundras, but farming peoples like us have taken the rest.Though foragers cannot achieve the massive inequality that comes fromcultivating and storing food, they do have inequality, both of wealth andof prestige.