UNILINEAR EVOLUTION THE STAIRCASE THEORY

What Morgan propounded is generally known as the theory of unilinear evolution. It purports that there is a single dominant line of evolution, and that all societies pass through the same stages. Since the pace of ‘progress’ differs from society to society, those with a slower pace were placed on the lower rungs of the ladder, compared to those that were developing faster. Considering that the Western societies have progressed with speed, Morgan regarded Western culture as the contemporary pinnacle of social evolution.

Different scholars tried to build unilinear evolutionary ladders for different aspects of human society—material culture, levels of subsistence, kinship system, religious beliefs, and scientific ethos. Evolutionists also believed in the interrelatedness of different aspects of social and cultural life and proposed that changes in any aspect of social life brought about changes in other aspects as well.

The proponents of evolutionism can be classified into two broad categories:

1. those who ‘worked on broad canvases and attempted to describe and account for the development of human civilization in its totality’; and
2. those who ‘restricted their efforts to specific aspects of culture, taking up the evolution of art, or of the state, or of religion’ (Herskovits, 1955: 432).

These theories of evolution can be described as conjectural history.

According to Herskovits, there were three basic elements in the studies of cultural evolution. To quote:

1. The postulate that the history of mankind represents a unilinear sequence of institutions and beliefs, the similarities between which, as discerned at the present time, reflect the principle of the psychic unity of man.
2. The comparative method, whereby the evolutionary sequence of human institutions and beliefs is to be established by comparing their manifestations among existing peoples, who are assumed to be living exponents of earlier stages of culture through which the more advanced societies are held to have passed.
3. The concept of the survival of customs among peoples regarded as more advanced in their development; these survivals to be taken as evidence that such societies have passed through earlier stages whose customs, in vestigial form, appear in their present ways of life.

Morgan divided human civilization into three phases, namely savagery, barbarism and civilization. Savagery and barbarism were further sub-divided into older, middle and later periods. He then attempted to classify the present-day societies of his time into these categories. He kept the older savagery category empty as no living society could be put into that category. In terms of technological innovations, Morgan said that Man in the Savage era invented fire, the bow and pottery.

 

 

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81)

 

In the Barbarian era occurred the domestication of animals, agriculture and metalworking. And with civilization came the alphabet and writing. Morgan called Savage societies communistic, and argued that the concept of private property grew as societies advanced technologically. In this manner, Morgan introduced a link between social progress and technological progress. Morgan viewed technological advancement as a driving force behind social progress. He believed that any changes in social institutions, organizations, or ideologies are consequences of changes in technology.

This is diagrammatically represented in Figure 18.1.

 

Figure 18.1 Evolution of Contemporary Cultures

 

 

In brief, the contributions of unilinear evolutionists were based on the following three assumptions:

1. Contemporary societies may be classified and ranked as more ‘primitive’ or more ‘civilized’;
2. There are a determinate number of stages between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ (for example, band, tribe, chiefdom and state),
3. All societies progress through these stages in the same sequence, but at different rates.

Unilinear evolution is thus a staircase theory. There are stairs or stages through which any society passes through as part of its developmental journey. The theory premises that every society has to climb up stair by stair. To take an example, John Ferguson McLennan traces the origin of polyandry to the shortage of women in earlier times, when a struggle for food led to female infanticide. Since a woman had many husbands, it was difficult for them to determine the father of any given child. Therefore, the society reckoned descent matrilineally. Patrilineality came later when men began to capture, and subsequently exchange, women with men of other bands.

For marriage as such, Morgan believed that in the beginning there was promiscuity, which gave way to group marriage, and then to polyandry and polygyny, and finally to monogamy. In a similar fashion, Morgan talked of the evolution of family. He listed five successive forms of family:

1. The Consanguine Family: It was a family in which siblings—own and collateral—married as a group.
2. The Punalaun family: It was either (i) a family of all sisters with their husbands, though the husbands were not consanguineally related to one another, or (ii) a family of brothers with their wives—though the wives were not related to each other. In both cases, they shared their spouses.
3. The Syndasmian Family: It was created through a marriage between single pairs but without exclusive rights for cohabitation, and the relationship could be broken at any time by either party.
4. The Patriarchal Family: It was founded by a man marrying several wives—polygyny.
5. The Monogamous Family: In this type, marriage occurs between single pairs, and they have exclusive rights of cohabitation.

Morgan’s work influenced Karl Marx and his literary executor Friedrich Engels, as is evident in the socialist classic, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. Marx transformed the hypothesis of stages propounded by Morgan into a ‘doctrine of hope’ for the underprivileged by suggesting that the stage of socialist order is the next step beyond the industrialized capitalist societies.

As an aside, it must be said that the pioneers in the field of sociology also developed similar dichotomous views of social progress. For example, Durkheim defined social evolution in terms of progressing from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. In mechanical solidarity, people are self-sufficient, there is little integration, and thus there is the need for the use of force and repression to keep society together. In organic solidarity, people are much more integrated and interdependent, and specialization and cooperation is extensive. Population growth and rising population density transform mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity, which is further cemented by what Durkheim called ‘morality density’. Increasing specialization in the workplace caused a certain Division of Labour.

In the twentieth century, it was Leslie A. White who further contributed to the theory of evolution. But he was described as ‘an isleted evolutionist in a sea of relativism’. As a pioneer of neo-evolutionism, he authored The Science of Culture (1949) and The Evolution of Culture (1959). Focusing on the history of humanity as a whole, he outlined the course of evolution from the ‘Primate Revolution’ to the ‘Fall of Rome’, in which energy played the key role. Leslie White, The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome (1959), attempted to explain the entire history of humanity in terms of the development of technology. According to him, a society’s energy consumption is a measure of its advancement. He differentiated between five stages of human development:

Stage I: people use the energy of their own muscles.

Stage II: people use the energy of domesticated animals.

Stage III: people use the energy of plants (domestication of plants; agricultural revolution).

Stage IV: people learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas.

Stage V: people harness nuclear energy (Industrial Revolution).

White introduced a formula, P=E*T, where E is a measure of energy consumed and T is the measure of efficiency of the technical factors utilizing the energy.

His approach was followed by Marshall Sahlins, Elman Service, and Marvin Harris, among others. But as they proceeded, their approach became more multilinear.

Another notable contribution to evolutionary thinking was made by Gerhard Lenski. Power and Prestige (1966) and Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology (1974), Lenski expanded on the works of Leslie White and Lewis Henry Morgan. He also regards technological progress as the key factor in the evolution of societies and cultures. But unlike White, who defined technology as the ability to create and utilize energy, Lenski laid emphasis on information—its amount and uses. The advancement of a given society, according to Lenski, depends on the amount of information and knowledge it possesses. He distinguished four stages of human development in terms of the history of communication.

Stage 1: information is passed by genes.

Stage 2: humans gain sentience, they can learn and pass information.

Stage 3: humans start using signs and develop logic.

Stage 4: humans can create symbols and develop language and writing

Lenski posited that advancements in the technology of communication translate into advancements in the economic system and political system, distribution of goods, social inequality, and in other spheres of social life. On this basis (using technology, communication and economy as the key variables), he classified societies into:

1. hunters and gatherers,
2. simple agricultural societies,
3. advanced agricultural societies,
4. industrial societies, and
5. special (like fishing) societies.