Communication helps with the organisation of group behaviour, and it opens up survival techniques that are more subtle than bashing others on the head. Within the group, cooperation becomes a far more viable option. Today's great apes generally work as small groups, and it seems likely that their ancestors did the same. When humans split off from the chimpanzee lineage, those groups became what we now call tribes.
Competition between tribes was intense, and even today some jungle tribes in South America and New Guinea think nothing of killing anyone they meet who comes from a different tribe.
This is a reversion to the 'bash on the head' option, but now one group cooperates to bash the other group's members on the head. Or, usually, one such member at a time. Less than a century ago, most such tribes did the same (one of the stories we've told ourselves throughout our tribal history is that we are The People, The True Human Beings -which means that everyone else isn't).
Chimpanzees have been observed killing other chimpanzees, and they regularly hunt smaller monkeys for meat. That isn't cannibalism. The food is a different species. Most humans cheerfully consume other mammals, even quite intelligent ones like pigs.33
Just as dog-packs need an agreed recognition signal to identify their members, so each tribe needs to establish a distinct identity. The possession of big brains makes it possible to do this by means of elaborate, shared rituals.
Ritual is by no means confined to humans: many species of birds, for instance, have special mating dances, or engage in strange devices to attract the female's attention, like the decorative collections of berries and pebbles assembled by the male bower-bird. But humans, with their highly developed brains, have turned ritual into a way of life. Every tribe, and nowadays every culture, has developed a Make-a-Human kit whose object is to bring up the next generation to adopt the tribal or cultural norms and pass them on to their own children.
It doesn't always work, especially nowadays when the world has shrunk and cultures clash across non-geographical boundaries -Iranian teenagers accessing the Internet, for example -but it still works surprisingly well. Corporations have taken up the same idea, with 'corporate bonding'
sessions. This is what the wizards were up to with their paintballs. Studies have shown that sessions of this kind have no useful effect, but businesses still waste billions on them every year.
The second most probable reason is that such sessions are fun anyway. The first most probable is that everyone likes an opportunity to shoot Mr Davis in Human Resources. And one important reason is that it sounds as though it ought to work; our culture is full of stories where such things do.
An important part of the Make-a-Human kit is the Story. We tell our children stories, and through those stories they learn what it is like to be a member of our tribe or our culture. They learn from the story of Winnie the Pooh getting stuck in Rabbit's hole that greed can lead to constraints on food. From the Three Little Pigs (a civilising story, not a tribal one) they learn that if you watch your enemy for repetitive patterns, you can outwit him. We use stories to build our brains, and then we use the brains to tell ourselves, and each other, stories.
As time passes, those tribal stories acquire their own status, and people cease to question them because they are traditional tribal stories. They acquire a veneer of -well, the elves would call it
'glamour'. They seem wonderful, despite numerous obvious faults, and most people do not question them. On Discworld, precisely this process occurred with stories and folk-memories about elves, as we can illustrate with three quotations from Lords and Ladies. In the first, the god of all small furry prey, Herne the Hunted, has just come to the terrified realisation that 'They're all coming back!' Jason Ogg, who is a blacksmith, the eldest son of the witch Nanny Ogg, and not very bright, asks her who They are:
'The Lords and Ladies,' she said.
'Who're they?'
Nanny looked around. But, after all, this was a forge ... It wasn't just a place of iron, it was a place where iron died and was reborn. If you couldn't speak the words here, you couldn't speak
'em anywhere.
Even so, she'd rather not.
'You know,' she said. 'The Fair Folk. The Gentry. The Shining Ones. The Star People. You know.'
'What?'
Nanny put her hand on the anvil, just in case, and said the word.
Jason's frown very gently cleared, at about the same speed as a sunrise.
'Them?' he said. 'But aren't they nice and—'
'See?' said Nanny. 'I told you you'd get it wrong!'
You said: The Shining Ones. You said: The Fair Folk. And you spat, and touched iron. But generations later, you forgot about the spitting and the iron, and you forgot why you used those names for them, and you remembered only that they were beautiful ... We're stupid, and the memory plays tricks, and we remember the elves for their beauty and the way they move, and we forget what they were. We're like mice saying, 'Say what you like, cats have got real style.'
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No-one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.
For most purposes (though, admittedly, not when dealing with elves) it doesn't greatly matter if the traditional tales make no real sense. Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy make no immediate sense (on Roundworld, but see Hogfather for their Discworld significance). Mind you, it's clear why children are happy to believe in such generosity. The most important role of the tribal Make-a-Human kit is to provide the tribe with its own collective identity, making it possible for it to act as a unit. Tradition is good for such purposes; sense is optional. All religions are strong on tradition, but many are weak on sense, at least if you take their stories literally.
Nevertheless, religion is absolutely central to most cultures' Make-a-Human kit.
The growth of human civilisation is a story of the assembly of ever-larger units, knitted together by some version of that Make-a-Human kit. At first, children were taught what they must do to be accepted as members of the family group. Then they were taught what they must do to be accepted as members of the tribe. (Believing apparently ridiculous things was a very effective test: the naive outsider would all too readily betray a lack of belief, or would simply have no idea what the appropriate belief was. Is it permitted to pluck a chicken before dark on Wednesday?
The tribe knew, the outsider did not, and sine any reasonable person would guess 'yes' the tribal priesthood could go a long way by making the accepted answer 'no'.) After that, the same kind of thing happened for the local baron's serfs, for the village, the town, the city and the nation. We spread the net of True Human Beings.
Once units of any size have acquired their own identity, they can function as units, and in particular they can combine forces to make a bigger unit. The resulting structure is hierarchicaclass="underline" the chains of command reflect the breakdown into sub-units and sub-sub-units. Individual people, or individual sub-units, can be expelled from the hierarchy, or otherwise punished, if they stray outside accepted (or enforced) cultural norms. This is a very effective way for a small group of people (barbarian) to maintain control over a much larger group (tribal). It works, and because of that we still labour under its restrictions, many of which are undesirable. We have invented technique like democracy to try to mitigate the undesirable effects, but these techniques bring new problems. A dictatorship can generally take action more rapidly than a democracy, for example. It's harder to argue.