IS A STRATIFIED SOCIETY "NORMAL"?
(Posted 2015-12-29 10:09:20 by Ray Lopez)
Historically, stratified societies have outnumbered egalitarian societies.�
By "stratified", I mean the separation of people into (more or less) clear,
hierarchical levels of class or rank.� All of the great ancient
civilizations were made up of stratified societies, and it could be argued
that American society is the first to attempt to be explicitly
egalitarian.
However, American society is changing back into a stratified state.� Modern
American conservatism has all but destroyed the role of the Federal
government in its ability to regulate us into a more egalitarian
framework.� More and more people seem to believe that it is more "natural"
to let the "market" take its natural course and distribute wealth how it
shall.� This has caused a great debate regarding wealth inequality and the
disappearance of the middle class.
Because Americans (as a group) seem to have no problem with abandoning our
core values, letting the wealthy get wealthier, and allowing society to be
segregated into distinct socioeconomic classes, it begs the question about
how "normal" or "abnormal" social stratification is.� Certainly in the
context of post-modernist and feminist America, stratification is a deadly
sin.� But what if it is the egalitarian ideal itself that is not "normal"?�
That's not a hard argument to make.� Societies, left to their own, tend to
become stratified.� Among large groups and organizations, such as
corporations or the military, stratification and hierarchy are the norm,
because they promote stability.
Perhaps that is the key: stability?� In society as a whole, the one thing
that seems to promote instability is access to resources.� Whether those
resources are made up of money, gold, water, food, property, slaves, or
women of child-bearing age, the scarcity of them causes instability, which
in turn leads to stratification.� Perhaps, then, the age-old battle for
resources, and the instability it causes, is the main reason why social
stratification has always been present among humans.
Going further we can even speculate that social stratification seems to be
innate to humans. It is likely that the idea of banding together with your
tribe/family and defending resources is something that is part of our
evolutionary past, because it has worked in the past to preserve our
species.
Rogers, Deshpande, and Feldman (2011) used agent-based computer simulation
to demonstrate that unequal access to resources causes "destabilization" of
societies such that they become more stratified.� These stratified
societies also experience more migration, which leads to the spread of
stratification.� They also found that survival of the society was _enhanced
_when the society was stratified, as death and suffering was confined to
the lower classes.
Stratified societies are tied to the struggle for resources, and are likely
the result of our evolutionary past.� This being the case, it raises
questions about the foundations of modern American society and American
government.� The American experiment in egalitarianism has been in a slow
death spiral since the end of World War II.� Ronald Reagan sealed the
ending of the US as we know it in his first inauguration speech when he
declared that government is the problem, not a solution.� Egalitarianism
requires an active and strong government to counter our natural
evolutionary tendencies.� With the US government now in the control of the
upper classes, the end of egalitarianism is a forgone conclusion.
*Reference*
Rogers, D., Deshpande, O., and Feldman, M. (2011). The spread of
inequality. _PLOS ONE_, 6(9), e24683.
PDF [
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0024683&representation=PDF
]
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