“That’s a human person.”
“...and now they’re everywhere.”
We have a deeply skewed idea of
what human history looked like, shaped by state propaganda, folk history, works
of fiction, capitalist realism, and religion. Grand narratives and great men come together, in
stories written by victors, to craft a tale of linear progress from “primitive” gatherer-hunters
to ambitious empires to industrial advancement. The classic story of “societal evolution” from
the supposedly intellectually and culturally inferior to the so-called pinnacle, which always
seems to be the society the writers lived in. It’s easy to package, easier to digest and often
very difficult to complete uproot. The pernicious influence of our distorted perspective of the past
has seemingly paralyzed our ability to be flexible and creative about how we view and shape our
present and future. Reality, however, is far more complex and nuanced than we’ve allowed ourselves
to view it as, and history is no exception.
Supposedly, as the story goes, for most of
our 200,000 years, humans lived in these tiny egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands of 20-40
individuals. The world was rough but unspoiled, and we were on the move, foraging and hunting,
creating art, telling stories, and working for only a few hours per day. That chill state
of human affairs—before classes, castes, and dynasties—had to end eventually, around 10,000
years ago, with the “agricultural revolution.”
We discovered the arduous yet rewarding work of
farming, amassed herds, grew fields of crops, accumulated wealth, invented private property,
and built cities. Inequality arose cuz, once we had cities and private property, well,
naturally, we had to have centralised government, with its bureaucrats, priests, and warlords.
Women had to be sequestered to the realm of the domestic, and conflicts with the “barbarians” led
to their assimilation, relocation, elimination, or enslavement. Civilization. With all its
wars, taxes, slavery, and bureaucracy—but also its literature, science, philosophy,
fancy architecture, and videogames.
Speaking of video games, the narrative is
present in all forms of mass media, but especially the genre of 4X games. From Sid Meier’s
Civilization series to Amplitude’s Humankind, the real human story truly begins with the rise
of settled cities and states. Any “barbarians” left on the map must be completely cleansed, lest
they hamper your expansionist ambitions. Truly, a whole video essay could be written about how games
perpetuate the logic of imperialism. I digress.
This is the story of the “State of Nature”
which Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about in the 18th century. Essentially, a secular version
of the Garden of Eden. A narrative of innocence before the “fall”. We lost our equality,
but at least we got Oreos and Jeopardy. And other stuff too, I guess.
Optimum Inequality
Bri’ish historian Ian Morris’s
Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels, follows his attempt to bring anthropology
and economics to dialogue about inequality by establishing a “uniform measure of inequality”
that could be applied across human history. He took the “values” of Ice Age gatherer-hunters
and Neolithic farmers and translated them into modern economicspeak, looking at their Gini
coefficients and formal inequality rates.
The Gini coefficient, by the way, is a single
number that demonstrates a degree of inequality in a distribution of income and/or wealth.
It runs from 0 meaning completely equal to 1 meaning completely unequal. Morris divides
human history into three big Fs--foragers, farmers, and fossil fuels--and suggests that
all societies have an optimal level of social inequality appropriate to where they fall within
those three Fs. In forager societies, he assumes that people consumed the equivalent of $1.10/per
day/per person, with a Gini coefficient of around 0.25 for both income and accumulated wealth.
In farmer societies, which includes everything from Ancient Rome to Louis XIV’s France to Ancient
Mesopotamia, people supposedly consumed an average of $1.50-$2.20/per day/per person. These societies
had far higher inequality though, with an average Gini coefficient of 0.45 for income inequality
and 0.80 for accumulated wealth inequality.
In fossil fuel societies, we’re supposed to
find our “optimum level of social inequality.” Morris suggests the “right” level of post-tax
income inequality seems to lie between a Gini coefficient of about 0.25 and 0.35, and that
of wealth inequality between about 0.70 and 0.80. You see? We just need to find a “reasonable”
amount of social inequality and everything will be a-okay. At least, that’s one conclusion. American
archaeologist Scotty MacNeish , when asked how we can reach an egalitarian society, replied,
“Put hunters and gatherers in charge.” Austrian historian Walter Scheidel concluded, in his book
The Great Leveler, that there’s nothing we can do about social inequality, other than wholesale
catastrophe. That’s just civilization for ya.
When we discuss the problem of social inequality
in mainstream politics, the conversation has been centered on how we approach or don’t approach
managing it to reasonable levels. Folks hear things like “1% of the world controls nearly 50%
of the wealth,” they notice that levels of social inequality have been BONKERS lately, and they’ve
been demanding that something be done about it: “Tax the rich! I mean, the exploitative
circumstances by which they become rich will still exist, but tax their wealth more!” A lot of
people want to move towards a more equal society. But more or less are relative, and the built-in
assumption is that as long as we live in an urban, technological society, we just have to accept
some level of inequality as a feature, not a bug.
The central questions for progressives become:
How do we most efficiently and effectively manage the amount of power wealthy people have
over their peons? and how do we meet the needs of those on the bottom rungs? In other
words, how do we adjust the size of the boot that will be stomping on our faces forever, cuz
there will always be rulers and ruled, right? I mean, otherwise, do we just go back to living
in forager bands, all for the sake of equality?
Do you see the problem? The conversation is
limited by our perception of our potential. Real social transformation, an end to the
exploitation of the masses, is basically off the table. Our historical narrative sets the
stage for our modern political possibilities. We either get civilization and its inherent
inequality (with some tweaks and reforms here and there), some imagined industrial equivalent
to the “primitive utopia” we left behind, or a forcible return to hunter-gathering
life. A Neoneolithic, if you will.
But the common historical
narrative simply isn’t true.
In fact, overwhelming archaeological and
anthropological evidence contradicts that conventional tale. We didn’t spend most of our
history in tiny bands, agriculture was not some irreversible threshold of progress and inequality,
and our first cities were often quite egalitarian. So let’s begin by deconstructing these conceptual
shackles and taking a look at what’s really been happening in human history.
Agriculture and the “Inevitable”
Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political
Order and Jared Diamond’s World Until Yesterday posit a history where humans lived
equally, simply, and meagerly, but “naturally and inevitably,” bureaucratic, centralized states
would emerge with the development of agriculture. Why? Cuz with agriculture comes food surplus and
population booms. With large populations comes chiefs who become kings who become emperors.
Resistance at that point is basically futile. As Diamond writes, “Large populations can’t
function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and
bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Sorry anarkiddies.”
But is that true though? Diamond may be a smug part-time distortionist
of human history, but is he right this time?
Nah. He’s wrong, actually. In fact, it’s pretty
common for these sorts of folks to state their prejudices as facts. But there’s no evidence
pointing to the inevitability of small societies being egalitarian and large societies being
authoritarian. Part of the problem here is this “big picture” approach to prehistory.
It’s almost never grounded in actual evidence. For example, in The Creation of
Inequality, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus proposed that the invention of farming led to the
emergence of demographically extended ‘clans’, and as it did so, access to spirits and
the dead became a route to earthly power. Then the especially talented healers or warriors
would give their status to their descendants and boom, chiefdoms arise, sowing the
seeds for the inevitable everything else.
Source(s): Dude trust me. They don’t bring actual
archaeological evidence until after the birth of states and empires. Their story of the “creation
of inequality” comes from descriptions of modern, small-scale foragers, herders, and cultivators in
parts of Africa and South America. The problem is, these people are not living fossils. The
assumption that they are is one that has its roots in a legacy of white supremacy. In his
1798 ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’, Thomas Malthus invoked the indigenous peoples
of North America to help illustrate his model of human progress, from hunting to pastoralism
to agriculture to further development. This was part of his whole debunked narrative of
population growth leading to humanity’s doom. But like far too many modern observers, he
believed that the most effective way to access the early history of human society was to study the
contemporary people he judged to be primitive.
Rousseau himself illustrated his thought
experiment with comparisons between the “Historical Savage” of prehistory and the
“Modern Savage” of the Caribbean, who was still in his “State of Nature” and therefore
unburdened by the responsibilities of the “Civilized Man.” Even Marxists have fallen into
this trap, generating their own version of the linear, Eurocentric model of social evolution
in stages, with a grand narrative of humanity that begins with “primitive communism” and is
destined to end with a renewed iteration of it.
But the people that these political theorists
have looked to as evidence for their theories of human progress are not naive or primitive.
They’re not a window into humanity’s past. They’re not “stuck in the early stages.” They have
been around for thousands of years, interacting with agrarian states, empires, raiders, and
traders. They are conscious shapers of their own lifestyles and societies, based on their
own histories and experiences. Only archaeology can tell us what they have in common with
prehistoric societies, not preconceived biases.
But before we can uproot the assumption that
agriculture is inevitably linked to the rise of states, we must interrogate the assumption
that agriculture was an absolute upgrade in all respects. In Against the Grain, James C.
Scott uncovered osteological analysis that demonstrated that sedentary lifestyle, with
domesticated animals and plants, lead to a significant decrease in health and wellbeing due
to zoonotic diseases, a less diverse staple diet, and greater hours of toil. Scott also discovered
that there was a several thousand year gap between the emergence of sedentary farming communities
in the Fertile Crescent and the development of the earliest city-states in the same region. The
rise of states wasn’t really an upgrade either. Slavery, taxation, and war would exact immense
suffering on the populace wherever states would arise, and for most, collapse was
the best thing a state could do.
But then we have to dig even deeper and question
how we’re defining agriculture here. See, for a long time, it was believed (by European scholars)
that Indigenous peoples in Australia and Melanesia didn’t practice agriculture. The imperialist
mindset was that (European) agriculture naturally replaced the savage, lawless, and violent
world of hunter-gatherers with monoculture: the origin and guarantor of the settled life, of
formal religion, of society, and of government by laws. Anyone who didn’t adopt that method
was clearly either ignorant or stagnant.
That mindset, that assumption, persisted because
Aboriginal agricultural practices weren’t exactly like the farming practices of the Europeans
that studied them, so they didn’t recognize them as such. But the Aboriginal people planted
and harvested crops, managed irrigation systems, and cleared cropland with controlled burning.
It wasn't a virginal outback, untouched by man. It was a well cultivated, human shaped
environment. Archaeological evidence indicates that these practices have been ongoing
since humans first settled in Australia, thousands of years ago. Grain-based monoculture
is only one form that agriculture can take. It’s a form that was prevalent in parts of
Eurasia, but other forms of agriculture, like garden agriculture, were extremely
successful in other parts of the world.
Rousseau’s thought experiment fits neatly in the
legacy of imperialist European societies viewing other peoples in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and
the Americas as less developed and thus, ripe for exploitation and domination. Rousseau’s white
supremacy, wrapped up in the so-called rational bow of the Western canon, continues to shape
common and even academic perceptions of history today. But what has actual archaeological and
anthropological research really taught us about early human life, since the time of Rousseau?
The Wealth of Evidence
Let’s start by breaking down how archaeologists
divvy up the human record. Homo species first appeared roughly 2 million years ago, with Homo
Habilis, sparking the “Old Stone Age,” also known as the Lower Paleolithic. Homo Sapiens wouldn’t
show up until around 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, in the Middle Paleolithic, which lasted until
about 50,000 years ago. By the Upper Paleolithic, we’d peopled every continent, reaching the south
of South America by roughly 15,000 years ago. That’s where most of our information about
prehistoric human social life begins. The Upper Paleolithic, that is. Before then, we
really have little clue. The Upper Paleolithic marked the peak of the last great Ice Age,
before all the cash-grabby sequels. With our new, warm conditions, our current
geological epoch began: the Holocene. Keep in mind that, due to the
historical distribution of archaeological study, most of our evidence comes from
Eurasia, and particularly Europe, so these divisions don’t apply 1:1 with the
rest of the world’s archaeological record. At least as far as we know so far. Europe isn’t
some extra special magical place, it’s just where most of our evidence comes from for now.
Let’s get a picture of the Paleolithic in Europe. It’s the ice age, but the habitable
bits of Europe are as lush as the Serengeti. Between the tundra of Northern Europe and
the forested shorelines of the Mediterranean, rich valleys and steppes, traversed by deer,
bison, and mammoth, sustained a human life quite unlike the blissfully simple picture we envision.
East of Moscow, in Sunghir, we’ve found one of many rich burials of the era. Twenty five thousand
years ago, a middle-aged man was buried with honour: bracelets of polished mammoth-ivory, a
diadem or cap of fox’s teeth, and nearly 3,000 laboriously carved and polished ivory beads.
Man’s drip was IMMACULATE. A few feet away, in an identical grave, two children were laid
to rest, of about 10 and 13 years respectively, adorned with comparable grave-gifts, including
a massive lance carved from ivory. Similarly rich burials like these can be found from
rock shelters to open air settlements, from what is now south west France to north east
Spain to north west Italy to south west Russia.
If rich burials weren’t enough, we’ve also found
sporadic but compelling evidence for relatively monumental architecture in the era too. They
weren’t building massive pyramids or anything, but by the standards of the time, they were
probably pretty impressive public works. Picture the frames of impressive mammoth houses
we’ve found in modern day Poland and Ukraine from 15,000 years ago. Or consider the heavy,
limestone temples, adorned with carved artwork, excavated on the modern Turkish-Syrian
border, built 6,0000 years before Stonehenge.
Were these Paleolithic kings and queens, living
in luxurious temples and adorned in burial? Do we just abandon the notion of an
egalitarian human history entirely? Well, er...no. The evidence for institutional
inequality is itself pretty sporadic. Grand burials appear centuries and hundreds of
kilometres apart, and there’s no evidence that these “Ice Age princes” acted like how we’d
expect princes to act, with fortifications, storehouses, palaces, or really anything
that would indicate ranked society. In fact, over tens of thousands of years, this
sporadic evidence points in a different direction, with most of these burials consisting
of physically anomalous individuals like giants, hunchbacks, or dwarfs.
Plus we need to consider how people lived at this time, cuz it doesn’t paint
a picture of sustained social inequality. When Ian Morris calculated a Paleolithic income
of $1.10 a day, seemingly derived from the caloric value of daily food intake in 1990, he failed
to consider all aspects of Paleolithic society. Our modern incomes may be higher, but what are
we paying for that they wouldn’t have to pay for? First of all, organic, free-range
produce and natural spring water, but also free security, free dispute resolution,
free primary education, free skillshare premium, free elderly care, free medicine, free
housing, free fur coats, free entertainment, including music, storytelling, and religious
services. There’s a reason Marshall Sahlin’s calls them the original affluent society.
And as for the massive structures we’ve found, rather than pointing to a grand, lasting social
order, the evidence instead tells us that they were not buildings meant to last. Rather,
each structure lasted until a great feast, where they would be torn down again. A cycle
of building, feasting, and destruction, maintained by hunter-gatherers. There was a rhythm
to their life, one that lay in the seasons.
The seasonal rhythms of prehistoric social
life are indicated in the evidence for annual or biennial periods of aggregation, where
various groups of people would come together for hunting parties of game herds, fish
runs, and nut harvests. At “microcities” like Dolní Věstonice, in the Moravian basin
south of Brno they congregated en masse, feasting on a super-abundance of wild resources,
engaging in complex rituals, creating ambitious artistic enterprises, and trading minerals,
marine shells, and animal pelts over striking distances. Even after agriculture gained greater
prominence, such seasonal patterns endured. Stonehenge was only one of many ritual structures,
of timber and stone, where people congregated and dispersed from during the Neolithic.
In the British Isles, while the cycle of erecting and dismantling grand monuments
endured well into the Neolithic, the people made a decision in striking contradiction with
the contemporary linear narrative. In 3300 BCE, after they adopted the continental farming
economy, they let go of one crucial aspect of it, keeping cattle herding but abandoning cereal
farming, instead adopting hazelnut collection as a staple food source. They existed in the limbo
between foragers and farmers. What these seasonal variations and lifestyle fluctuations show is that
prehistoric humans, just as intelligent as modern humans, were self-consciously experimenting with
different social possibilities. Anthropologists have dubbed these societies, past and present,
as possessing a “double morphology.”
One such society was described by French
sociologist Marcel Mauss in the early 20th century. The circumpolar Inuit “[had] two social
structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they [had] two systems
of law and religion.” In the summer months, Inuit dispersed into small patriarchal bands in
pursuit of freshwater fish, caribou, and reindeer, each under the authority of a single male elder,
who possessively marked property and exercised coercive power over his kin. However, during the
winter months, when seals and walruses flocked to the Arctic shore, a different social system took
charge. Wealth and partners were shared in common, as Inuit gathered together to build
great meeting houses of wood, whale-rib, and stone where the virtues of equality,
altruism, and collective life prevailed.
Similar double morphology can be found on Canada’s
Northwest coast, where indigenous hunter gatherers alternated between aristocracy and slavery in
the winter and more informal clan structures in the summer. In the American Great Plains, nomadic
Cheyenne and Lakota bands, who at one point tried out farming, congregated in large settlements to
make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. In this sensitive period, they adopted a seasonal,
temporary authoritarian police force, with the coercive power to imprison, whip, or fine any
offender who endangered the proceedings. Yikes. But once hunting season was over, they’d
return to more anarchic forms of organization.
The linear conception of
social evolutionary stages, like from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states
can’t reasonably be applied to these societies. I mean, are they sliding forward and moonwalking
backward in their “evolution” every year? Most anthropologists can now
recognise that these categories are pretty useless when it comes to describing
the broad variety of human social life.
Archaeological evidence points to similar seasonal
practices taking place in the last Ice Age, with libertarian and authoritarian social structures
rising and falling through the year. They seemed to recognize that no particular social order was
ever fixed or immutable, and with that flexibility comes the ability to step outside the boundaries
of one’s given social structure and reflect, making and unmaking one’s political reality.
Rethinking Human History
We have a tendency, as humans, to look
to our past in order to figure out where we should go in our future. Consciously
or unconsciously, we’re impacted by the narratives we’re told about what humans are
and can be. We must recognize that there is so much left to be told about our species' long
history, a drama of tens of thousands of years. We will need to shed our prior assumptions
about whether humans are fundamentally anything, whether good or evil, competitive or cooperative,
egalitarian or hierarchical. Our ancestors were our intellectual peers, not half-apes
whose primordial innocence had not yet been violated by the Pandora’s Box of inequality.
They took part in a theatre of pioneers, who explored the planet and themselves with a
variety of social arrangements and experiments.
So we must ask ourselves why, after spending
so much of our history experimenting, did we get stuck in the chains of our present, rigid
political order? We must interrogate the baseless and biased assumption of many political theorists
that complex society requires authoritarian rule in some form. And we must ask, what other
treasured beliefs and common sense narratives must we also discard in our quest for the truth?
First of all, there’s no longer any support for the view that the origins and spread of
agriculture marked a major transition in human societies. In the parts of the world where
animals and plants were first domesticated, there was really no discernible switch from Paleolithic
Farmer to Neolithic Farmer. The “transition” from life based mainly on wild resources to life based
mainly on cultivation took something like three thousand years, and while agriculture did make
unequal concentrations of wealth more possible, that’s not what happened every time, or even most
times, it was developed. At least, not for a solid millenia later. From the Amazon to the Middle
East, different peoples were trying farming, mixing it into their annual modes of production
and social structures. Sometimes, farming even failed, leaving only resilient foragers in its
wake. Considering the length and variety of the “transition”, it makes little sense to point
to “the agricultural revolution” as some sort of switch from an egalitarian to a hierarchical
society. Some foragers were highly stratified and many early farmers developed societies even
more egalitarian than their forager neighbours, with an increase in the economic and social
importance of women reflected in their art.
And what about civilization and cities? Are
they inseparable? A package deal? Not quite. The world’s first cities didn't all pop up
with centralized, authoritarian government, literate administration, and the whole shebang
once thought necessary for their foundation. Long before the rise of China’s earliest royal
dynasty, we know of cities as large as at least 3 square kilometres on the lower reaches of
the Yellow River. In the valleys of Peru, sunken plazas indicate a city four millenia
older than the Inca Empire. In Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Basin of Mexico, there’s mounting evidence that the first cities
were organised on self-consciously egalitarian lines, with significantly autonomous municipal
councils, no trace of royal burials or monuments, no standing armies, and no hint
of direct bureaucratic control.
There’s no evidence that top-down structures
of rule are necessary for large scale social organization. Nor is there evidence that such
structures of rule can only be dismantled by general catastrophe. For example, the city
of Teotihuacan in Mexico, with a population of 120,000 in the year 200 CE, transformed itself
from a city of pyramid temples and human sacrifice to a city run by frequently-whipped municipal
councils and similarly sized, comfortable villas. While people may insist that participatory
democracy, whether direct or consensus based, can only work in small groups and
can’t “scale up” to the size of a city, region, or country, the evidence suggests the
opposite, with the rather common occurrence of egalitarian cities and regional confederacies.
However, what isn’t so common in human history is the egalitarian family. In fact, some of the
most painful losses of human freedoms began at the small scale, at the level of gender relations,
age groups, and domestic servitude. Relationships that can contain both the greatest intimacy
and the deepest forms of structural violence. It may be true that inequality began at home. And
so home may be the place where our most difficult work for social transformation may take place.
As information pours in from every quarter of the globe, based on careful empirical fieldwork,
advanced techniques of climatic reconstruction, chronometric dating, and scientific analyses
of organic remains, we’re beginning to examine ethnographic and historical material in a new
light. A body of research has been and continues to be built that clashes against the familiar
narrative and forces us to rethink human history. If we can let go of our prejudices, and engage
with history’s rich complexities, we can see the implications of what’s really there.
The role of revolutionaries should be as the imagination movers of society, linking past,
present, and future to generate and power creative and uplifting revolutionary movements that can
shape society for the better. The Zapatistas of Chiapas and the democratic confederalists of North
East Syria understand that freedom, tradition, and the imagination have always, and will
always be entangled, in ways we don’t completely understand. It’s time to catch up. It’s time
to imagine. There’s so much we don’t yet know. There are many things that we’ll never truly
know, but the unknowability of our whole past doesn’t cut us off from the possibilities of
our future. In fact, in some respects, it may free us to think anew. What we already know so far
only demonstrates that so much more is possible. There is nothing irreversible or inherent about
our contemporary condition. We can fight back.
Peace.
Outro
This video was inspired by and mostly based on
an article in Eurozine by Bri’ish anthropologists David Graeber, who is now unfortunately deceased,
and David Wengrow. Their new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, is set
to release on Tuesday, October 19, 2021. Order a copy today. They didn’t sponsor me or anything
(but they’re free to send me a free signed copy, wink wink hint hint). I just think it’s an
important book. I myself am looking forward to delving into all 704 pages. Thanks for
watching. Please like, comment, subscribe, and share with your fellow peoples. Thanks once again
to the Famalay, including Zane, Hector LaVeau, Ishmael Mbugua, Tara Dawson, Tiffany Bennett,
Joe Hines, Punky, Em, and Brad Hunt. If you can, join these beautiful humans and support me too
on Patreon.com/saintdrew. Check out all my other videos for a range of radical topics. Follow
me on Twitter @_saintdrew. Thanks again, peace!
