On the political psychology of killer chimpanzees

Humans once moved past the barbaric hierarchies that defined our primate past. We can do it again.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

Earlier today I got into a brief exchange with The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams over a student’s email to his professor. Thomas declared it “outrageous” that the student failed to open his letter with a formal greeting, and declared it an example of the sad fact “that basically no one is willing to accept simply being a junior member of the hierarchy anymore.”

I objected, of course, though there’s not much to add there other than to point out that this is just the standard argument that the left and right have been having since the French Revolution. I’m an egalitarian who disapproves of hierarchies; Thomas is a conservative who thinks that they are good and necessary.

There was also, however, a second apparent disagreement in our exchange. I wrote:

I can be wrong sometimes, and my ego does not require primitive dog-brained displays of submission…These demands for little displays of respect are not civilized. They are an embarrassing inheritance of our evolutionary past and we will be much better off when we leave them being.

Thomas seemed particularly shocked by this one, and since even a lot of my followers don’t seem to have encountered this argument before, I think it worth spelling out.