Gwynne Dyer, in his interesting column ‘‘World View’’, has argued several times, in various contexts, that a democratic kind of governance is ‘‘natural’’ for humankind.
Simply put, Homo sapiens started out this way and there is a natural tendency to return to it.
Very recently he returned to this theme in the opinion page of the ODT (5.1.26). It would be nice to think his proposition is correct.
Dyer is certainly right when he says world-wide the number of democratically run (or near-democratically run) countries regrettably is now shrinking, after a brief period of excessive optimism aroused when the Soviet Union self-destructed (officially) in December 1991.
This momentous event led Francis Fukuyama to publish his epically gushing, but erroneous, thesis (published in his book enigmatically titled The End of History and the Last Man).
It heralded the end of political change and variability through a resounding victory of the principle of democratic governance. The world-over, all nations and countries would fall into line as the death-knell of authoritarianism, dictatorship, despotism and communism has rung.
This misperception briefly seduced the US administration to engage in a foreign policy of gross interventionism, military invasion, occupation, regime-changing wars and fateful lies (like Iraq under Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction), all in order to hasten the final victory march of global democracy.
It also seeded the so-called ‘‘Arab Spring’’, a well-intentioned initiative, but a flash in the pan devoid of the hoped-for lasting effect.
The truth is, democracy is not ‘‘natural’’ for humans — or, it is as natural as kindness.
The relatively equal sharing of social power through electoral enablement is simply just one of the political possibilities humans are capable of developing — or rather approximating — but it is not inscribed in the human DNA.
There is simply no firm evidence for Dyer’s proposition, although shared by many, that ancient hunter-gatherer societies, at the beginning of Homo sapiens’ social evolution, demonstrated this natural tendency.
Whether they were egalitarian and had a democratic governing system — ‘‘a rule of the people by the people’’ — is a matter of speculation. In other words, it is a mistaken belief there was no differentiation in the degree adult individuals could wield social power and had an equal stake in shaping the rules by which a group’s interaction was governed.
No hint of any kind has been delivered by scientific research that all mammoth hunters were equals, let alone that their women could tell them what to do.
Equally, there is no evidence that if there were leaders they were chosen by popular acclaim and could be easily removed if they turned out to be incompetent. Archaeology does not deliver any firm evidence in support of this idealistic vision.
This belief of the original democratic state of affairs hinges entirely on an idealised notion of what in more modern times hunter-gatherer societies were like or rather seemed to be like (often based on misperception). This in turn is rooted in the discredited notion recent hunter-gatherers are ‘‘museum exhibits’’; in other words, it is a fallacy to think they had faithfully and authentically preserved ancient conditions and are now (or rather at the time the first quasi-scientific observations were made in colonial times) the living evidential exhibits of an unchanged pre-historic condition.
They have been arrested in their development and have remained static over thousands of years. This view — apart from being based on a flawed model of sociocultural evolution — does not take into account that such historically or recently evident societies represent local adaptations to environmental and climatic conditions.
The concept of democracy provides for many political iterations conventionally seen as democratic. There are many forms of democracy, ranging from the Swiss model of ‘‘direct democracy’’ through a surfeit of referenda, to ‘‘guided-democracy’’, a euphemism for an authoritative style of exercising political power, and further on to the very extreme: the kind of democracy achieved by sham elections and leavened with corruption, violence and nepotism.
Second, democracy does not necessarily mean complete equality, let alone equity. The gender gap has probably always been a big obstacle to universal equality and equal sharing of social power. It is well to remember how very new universal suffrage, status and gender-blind, is.
Classical Athenian polity in the popular view is often held up as an early form of democracy, but like other senatorial governance systems political power lay in the hands of inherited nobility. There was no public electoral system, women and slaves had no voice and the influence of common folk — the ‘‘big unwashed’’— though being the majority, was disproportionally minimal as the decisions were not based on numerical count.
Third, often the San (so-called Bushmen) and other historically existing African hunter-gatherers are held up as examples of egalitarian, quasi-democratic societies. But these are societies forced into unfavourable ecological fringe areas in recent centuries. Extreme living conditions enforce unusual social solutions.
Many years of doing research among Australian Aborigines and to some extent also Southeast Asian Orang Asli have convinced me these societies were far from truly egalitarian and democratic in the modern sense.
In pre-modern Australian Aboriginal society, gerontocracy was the rule, which means elites, men of advanced age, held absolute power over life and death, and made the important decisions affecting the collectivity.
Rising to become part of the powerful elite depended on outstanding religious expertise acquired gradually over many years — the greater this expertise, the greater the power and influence in the decision-making process. It was a meritocracy rather than a gerontocracy and certainly not democratic.
Another society traditionally based on a hunting economy were some of the Northwest American Indian First Nation tribes. Their whole economy was focussed on salmon catching and thus by a stretch they may be seen as a variation on the hunter-gatherer model.
These tribes were well known for their Potlatch system, regulating their political culture. Honour, prestige and political influence depended on sponsoring ceremonial shows of feasting and wealth destruction in which contenders vied in the massive wasting of valuables and property (burning houses, demolishing canoes and weapons, destroying masses of food, copper items and carvings, or giving the food away, perhaps even killing captive slaves).
Those too poor to organise such potlatch shows were left behind in the competition for political influence and leadership.
As political analysts point out, in Western society there is now a considerable swing towards populism, including a predilection for a more authoritative governance.
New Zealand does not seem to be an exception, as can be surmised from the report Social Cohesion in New Zealand (authored by S.Eaqub and R.Collins, Helen Clark Foundation, April 2025). It mentions that a considerable number of New Zealanders do not trust the government and are open to a ‘‘strong leader’’.
This does not bode well for the pursuit of democratic governance in the true sense of the concept.
The expectation of the political pendulum always to swing back from autocracy or dictatorship to democracy as the condition most compatible with human nature, remains a virtuous illusion, an idealist wish dream at best.
There is no such natural inclination engraved in Homo sapiens. If it does happen it seems rather the exception, a warning to be vigilant.
- Erich Kolig is a former social anthropologist with the University of Otago.
