David
Graeber has received abundant praise this year for his new book Bullshit Jobs.
It deserves the attention. For my money, though, the most intellectually
exciting thing Graeber has written in 2018 was the essay he cowrote with David Wengrow in Eurozine, on the alleged origins of inequality and how its (false)
history affects modern policy debates. “How to Change the Course of Human
History” affects no false modesty. Wedding “big history” to radical social
critique, the article offers both a new model of ethnohistorical interpretation
and hope for the future of human societies. Not a lot of scholarship like that
nowadays.
Wengrow and Graeber start by observing the sense of futility bred by modern studies of human social evolution. Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and their imitators argue that social “progress” is both a one-way street and inseparable from the increasing concentration of wealth and power. Humans allegedly began their history as small, egalitarian bands, but as they developed agriculture, cities, and the rudiments of industry they necessarily embraced forms of specialization bound to enrich some and immiserate others. Moreover, these civilizational advances trapped human beings who developed them, much as a fishing weir snares a fish. Farmers, city-dwellers, or beneficiaries of an industrial revolution cannot abandon these innovations without depriving most of their enlarged population of work or food. As with human individuals, human societies cannot return to their historical childhood, even if doing so could alleviate poverty and inequality. Kings, robber barons, and one-percenters, in this framework, become necessary evils. The only alternatives to Pareto are Malthus or Hobbes.
Wengrow and Graeber start by observing the sense of futility bred by modern studies of human social evolution. Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and their imitators argue that social “progress” is both a one-way street and inseparable from the increasing concentration of wealth and power. Humans allegedly began their history as small, egalitarian bands, but as they developed agriculture, cities, and the rudiments of industry they necessarily embraced forms of specialization bound to enrich some and immiserate others. Moreover, these civilizational advances trapped human beings who developed them, much as a fishing weir snares a fish. Farmers, city-dwellers, or beneficiaries of an industrial revolution cannot abandon these innovations without depriving most of their enlarged population of work or food. As with human individuals, human societies cannot return to their historical childhood, even if doing so could alleviate poverty and inequality. Kings, robber barons, and one-percenters, in this framework, become necessary evils. The only alternatives to Pareto are Malthus or Hobbes.
The
authors agree that this pessimistic, “realist” view of human history must
appeal to at least some readers. To argue that struggles against inequality are
futile or dangerous is to comfort the comfortable and empower the powerful.
They also demonstrate, I think very persuasively, that this argument has little
basis in historical reality. Go back to the Eurasian Pleistocene and one finds
many of the features of more hierarchical, “civilized” societies: valuable
luxury goods, like ivory beads, buried with (necessarily high-status) children,
“micro-cities” where hunting bands came together to trade and feast and
worship, and even monumental architecture, like the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe (9,000
BCE). Then come forward a few millennia to the early Holocene, and one finds
early agricultural societies who retained their egalitarian social structure,
and who, far from finding themselves caught in a Malthusian trap, were able to
replace horticulture with gathering when it suits their interests. Examine
early urban societies, like the Indus Valley culture and the Sumerians, and one
finds little evidence of armies, personal monuments, or the other trappings of
a political elite. Hunter-gatherer societies could develop gaudy hierarchies,
and farmers and city-dwellers could pull them down. Civilization was not an
antisocial trap but a social opportunity.
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* The Mississippian culture as a whole actually lasted for about six centuries, but larger cities had significantly shorter lifespans, about 200 years or so in Cahokia's case. The Ancestral Puebloan culture (900-1300 CE) of western New Mexico is perhaps a better comparative example.