I’m now reading Elementary Structures of Kinship where Claude Levi-Strauss claims that the defining moment which transitioned man “from nature to culture” was the incest taboo. Others like Freud and Robin Fox have claimed the same. To them, the minimum human property (MHP) is “the incest taboo.”
Linguists and scientists like Deacon, Wrangham, Chomsky, and Dunbar claim that language is the trait which “transitioned” us to hominization. To them, the MHP is “language.”
(Wrangham is an odd exception. He appears to jump around between different MHPs. In Catching Fire, he claims that cooking allowed us to eat more meat and grow our brains. In The Goodness Paradox, he claims that this growing brain was better at gossiping which put alphas down and produced egalitarian, human society. Frazer’s Myths of the Origins of Fire is a great collection of ancient myths which also claim that this was the crucial moment of hominization. So technically, for Wrangham, and for much of ancient society, the MHP is “use of fire.”)
There are cognitive theories like Tomasello’s which claim that joint attention is the decisive factor. Simon-Baron Cohen claimed it’s Theory of Mind. Both deny these are present in Autistics, yet maintain that they are the MHP. Ayn Rand called man the “rational animal.” So to these thinkers, the MHP is “cognition.”
Most compelling to an action designer like me is Rene Girard’s theory. In Violence and the Sacred he claims that the collective murder of a victim and his or her subsequent deification as a god(dess) who brings miraculous peace inaugurated the transition from ape to man. Though on paper scapegoating a human victim is the transitory act, the real mechanism is an expanding propensity to mimic one another, which explodes in apocalyptic violence against the victim. Eric Gans uses the same logic in The Origin of Language but denies a human victim was necessary. They both believe the MHP is “mimesis,” which is more specific than “cognition.”
All of these theories have the same problem: they must answer what exactly triggered the transition. And this is always vague and a bit hand-wavy. No matter how minimal the theory, there is always some transitory state that is inexplicable.
Contrast this with the simple ROBA Hypothesis: the fact that we can use objects in combat means that all human relations are potentially infinitely violent, but also human love is potentially infinitely empathetic.
The individual, seeing himself in his enemy, his kin, and his lover, who also see him as a mirror looking back, has recursion. By my theory, recursion is the MHP.
Let’s test recursion as the MHP:
- Violence: recursion forces the individual, who has the capacity to bring objects to combat, to anticipate the same capacity in the opponent. The individual is incentivized to escalate, which he then intuits will cause his opponent to escalate, until things go to the extremes. Hesitation in human combat is a direct result of the recursive black hole.
- Incest: blood-kin must avenge the deaths of blood-kin, which recursion allows to go on infinitely, destroying the entire society. This is checked by the incest prohibition, and its violation brings death to the violators in ancient society.
- Language: recursion produces the threat of infinitely apocalyptic destruction, but this is bundled up in a word which can be fought over infinitely, splitting into other words, requiring qualifiers, or being redefined.
- Cognition: this is the weakest of the MHP theories since it’s so vague. Recursion simply gives it specificity.
I’m sure recursion can explain every other human behavior too like the arts, religion, the sciences, etc., but these seem to be couched under the main 3.
Inevitably the question will arise, What produces recursion? I think the best guess we can make is that recursion results from the connection between object usage and combat. This behavior most clearly differentiates humans from animals. One is too easily tempted to see incest prohibitions, language, religion and other human traits in animals in vestigial form, even if they’re not really there. Violence is clear as day. We have it, and they don’t.
A ripe field of study is understanding why the sciences have, for years, tried to convince us that human violence was animalistic, when it’s actually the best candidate for finding the MHP. I believe studying this propaganda campaign would reveal covert religious tenets of the scientific establishment, tenets probably unknown even to the establishment’s adherents. It might also reveal why they are so opposed to ancient religion on principle. Ancient religion points readily to violence as uniquely human. The establishment seems not to like this because it violates Darwinian theories of gradual hominization, which violates the Copernican Principle that humans cannot be special. But you cannot gradually acquire human violence. It’s suddenly just there. It escapes gradualist theories.
And violence is not going anywhere. This probably bothers them too, so they can’t really process it. So their books on violence are bloated and confused and resort to a surprising amount of moralizing for such “scientific” works.
So for now, violence is the best place to seek recursion.