For the second time in as many years, Barack Obama has come to Ann Arbor. And for the second time, I followed him
online. There were the shout outs to Denard Robinson and the basketball
team. There was the order from Air Force One for a Zingerman's pecan
pie.The president was, as he has been, in campaign mode. He will be for the next 10 months, and so will his opponents. There will be plenty of Tea Party and Occupy rhetoric about political fairness. And there will be rhetoric, from both sides, about family values.
It occurred to me that credit should be given where credit is due. Here is a man who walks the walk more than he talks the talk. A man who has spent decades in public life, a product of Chicago politics, an Illinois state senator, US Senator and President of the United States, without a whiff of scandal about his personal life. A man who takes his wife out to dinner, and is protective of his daughters. A devoted family man.
That matters, partly, because children with devoted fathers do better. And it matters, partly, because -- I've said it before, I'll say it again -- monogamous societies have always been more egalitarian.
Anthropologically speaking, the evidence is overwhelming. For by far our longest stretch of time on the planet, for more than 100,000 years, we lived as hunters and gatherers. We lived in small, family groups, where nobody was encouraged to stick out too much. Like people in 21st century families, hunters and gatherers lit into each other for bragging, or hoarding, or not working hard enough. And nobody was supposed to have too many mouths to feed. For most foragers -- from Africa, to the Americas, to Australia -- ranges and variances in family size tended to hover in, or around, single digits. The most successful hunters were the fathers of roughly a dozen children.
It was after we settled down and started to live on the land that the Big Men started to set themselves apart. They built roomier houses, they hoarded more food, and they had many more women and children to feed. Family size estimates ran well into double digits. Men like Shinbone, who lived on Amazon basin gardens, or Mung'ot, the East African cattle herder, fathered dozens of sons and daughters.
But the first civilized heads of state, who lived, you guessed it, in cities -- from Mesopotamia to Peru -- were the worst. There were rumors that the Inca emperor, Pachakuti, was the father of 300 or 400 children; and in Persia, the emperor Artaxerxes II is supposed to have fathered 118 sons. Most emperors surrounded themselves with tens of thousands of women, and their children ran to triple digits: many had more kids than anybody bothered to count. That meant that tens of thousands of political prisoners, soldiers, slaves and eunuchs had to go without. Even now, in some parts of the world, heads of state are promiscuous. The trend back toward egalitarianism -- both politically, and personally -- is a rare and remarkably recent one.
Anthropologically speaking, democracy begins at home. Egalitarianism means many things to many people. But to most of us, it probably involves a chance to have dinner with our partners, and to protect our dependents. It did, for more than 100,000 years, for our forager ancestors. And it does, these days, for the President of the United States.
There will be the usual rhetoric, over the next few months, about equal access to good health care, a good education, and a good job. And there will be the usual rhetoric about family values. Anthropologically speaking, it may be not be a trivial issue. And it's nice to have a man in office who both talks the democratic talk, and walks the monogamous walk.
REFERENCES:
Betzig, Laura. 2012. Means, variances and ranges in reproductive success: Comparative evidence. Human Behavior and Evolution, 34, in press.
Betzig, Laura. 1986. Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History. New York: Aldine-de Gruyter.
