I don’t know why, but I started with a view of self-domestication as a kind of passive and benign drift that came with sedentism, agriculture, and symbolic sociality (i.e. we domesticated plants and animals but were, in turn, domesticated by them). But I’ve been reading James C. Scott recently, and he points out that early states (and much of the “civilizing process”) were neither passive nor benign. At the very least, human domestication wasn’t just self-domestication. It was also (largely, even) the domestication of other humans.
In Against the Grain, Scott shows beyond a doubt that civilization depended on enclosure, grain taxation, raiding and enslavement to maintain labor populations, and that flight and resistance were common responses. Civilization was never attractive…it had to be enforced.
Slavery is the foundation of civilization.
And when this becomes clear, you see that rather than some sort of soft selection for docility, the domestication of humans is the product of millennia of deliberate constraint of movement, enforced labor routines, punishment of disobedience, and breaking of wild behavior. These are textbook domestication techniques…and, yes, they were applied to humans.
If slaves, captives, and conquered populations were the ones who had to survive in early states, then compliance, emotional suppression, and symbolic fluency would have been necessary for survival. Over generations, these traits could be biologically and culturally selected (and feedback sensitivity selected against). This is what captivity breeding looks like.
The “self” domestication that gets talked about (the one that doesn’t involve slavery, castration, rape, harems, etc.) probably only occurred among the elite. As the systems they built (for domesticating a labor population) gained internal momentum, rewarded behaviors that served them, and punished deviation (even in elites)…they became autonomous. And to maintain their position, the elite had to perform their role, suppress feedback, and inhabit their own abstraction. Some sort of hyper-domestication (powdered wigs?) where they weren’t just compliant, but enslaved by the structures they created to dominate others. This might explain why civilization doesn’t produce sovereign elites…it produces Donald Trumps. Actors, symbol manipulators, technocrats, surrogates. Hollow men.
The First to Fall 