Quotes from this book:
Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity's Childhood
This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly – the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?
It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.
As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they:
- simply aren’t true;
- have dire political implications;
- make the past needlessly dull.
To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.
To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century.
There are, certainly, tendencies in history. Some are powerful; currents so strong that they are very difficult to swim against (though there always seem to be some who manage to do it anyway). But the only ‘laws’ are those we make up ourselves.
After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagine overthrowing
capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.
Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own 44 per cent of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.
When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality. It didn’t take long before we realized this simply wasn’t a very good approach. Framing human history in this way – which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong – made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were genuinely interesting. It felt like almost everyone else seemed to be caught in the same trap. Specialists were refusing to generalize.
Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects – very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed?
All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language (‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy.
Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialities – one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters – to acquire things they cannot produce themselves; sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time; and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.
When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.
Chapter 2: Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress
Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual – whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather than seeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions in debates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties or public gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but which otherwise might never have been written down. It’s a bit like pretending William Shakespeare had somehow invented the English language. In fact, many of Shakespeare’s most brilliant turns of phrase turn out to have been common expressions of the day, which any Elizabethan Englishman or woman would be likely to have thrown into casual conversation, and whose authors remain as obscure as those of knock-knock jokes – even if, were it not for Shakespeare, they’d probably have passed out of use and been forgotten long ago.
Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.
A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day or Christmas, when much of society revelled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down’, where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mockery of. Often the celebrations were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’ – the Age of Cronus, or Saturn, or the land of Cockaygne. Sometimes, too, these ideals were invoked in popular revolts.
True, it’s never entirely clear how far such egalitarian ideals are merely a side effect of hierarchical social arrangements that obtained at ordinary times. Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. Early Christianity similarly insisted that all believers were (in some ultimate sense) equal in relation to God, whom they referred to as ‘the Lord’. As this illustrates, the overarching power under which ordinary mortals are all de facto equals need not be a real flesh-and-blood human; one of the whole points of creating a ‘carnival king’ or ‘May queen’ is that they exist in order to be dethroned.
After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’.
This is something that we've seen a resurgence in as of late, particularly in societies that are trying to separate themselves from the State (or in community-oriented discussions for those that try to operate within the confines of the State but to remove elements of State control from their spaces).
Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.
Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience.
Do you seriously imagine, he says, that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris, to take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make-up, to bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happened to have been born with an inheritance? Do you really imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry; that I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into naval service?
Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’.
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Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’
Something to go back to because this seems like an interesting line of exploration.
The book is considered a feminist landmark, in that it may well be the first European novel about a woman which does not end with the protagonist either marrying or dying. Graffigny’s Inca heroine, Zilia, is as critical of the vanities and absurdities of European society as she is of patriarchy. By the nineteenth century, the novel was remembered in some quarters as the first work to introduce the notion of state socialism to the general public, Zilia wondering why the French king, despite levying all sorts of heavy taxes, cannot simply redistribute the wealth in the same manner as the Sapa Inca.
In 1751, preparing a second edition of her book, Madame de Graffigny sent letters to a variety of friends asking for suggested changes. One of these correspondents was a twenty-three-year-old seminary student and budding economist, A. R. J. Turgot, and we happen to have a copy of his reply – which was long and highly (if constructively) critical. Turgot’s text could hardly be more important, since it marks a key moment in his own intellectual development: the point where he began to turn his most lasting contribution to human thought – the idea of material economic progress – into a general theory of history.
Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’ – in principle. But we must consider a larger context. In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and, therefore, where everyone is equally poor. As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour. We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some – however lamentable it may be – is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole.
There is no avoiding such inequality, concluded Turgot in his reply to Madame de Graffigny. The only alternative, according to him, would be massive, Inca-style state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions: an enforced equality which could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and, therefore, result in economic and social catastrophe. In light of all this, Turgot suggested Madame de Graffigny rewrite her novel in such a way as to have Zilia realize these terrible implications at the end of the book.
Unsurprisingly, Graffigny ignored his advice.
A few years later, Turgot would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization. Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development.
Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food. ‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal parties to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.
The Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality has been taught, debated and picked apart in a thousand classrooms – which is odd, because in many ways it is very much an eccentric outlier, even by the standards of its time.
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Almost all the examples in this Discourse on the Arts and Sciences are taken from classical Greek and Roman sources – but in his footnotes, Rousseau hints at other sources of inspiration...
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As for Rousseau, he spent much of the next several years writing well-publicized responses to criticisms of the piece (as well as using his new fame to produce a comic opera, The Village Soothsayer, which became popular at the French court).
Also an interesting line of inquiry to explore.
What needs to be investigated, instead, might better be called the ‘myth of the myth of the noble savage’: why is it that certain Europeans began attributing such a naive position to others? The answer isn’t pretty. The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.
Chapter 3: Unfreezing the Ice Age
The problem is that prehistory turns out to be an extremely long period of time: more than 3 million years, during which we know our ancestors were, at least sometimes, using stone tools. For most of this period, evidence is extremely limited. There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint. While the technology we are capable of bringing to bear on such remote periods improves dramatically each decade, there’s only so much you can do with sparse material. As a result, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to fill in the gaps, to claim we know more than we really do. When scientists do this the results often bear a suspicious resemblance to those very biblical narratives modern science is supposed to have cast aside.
Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans.
I hate this phrase. I know it's harkening back to Richard Dawkins and his bullshit, but it usually just rubs me the wrong way.
In the 1980s and 1990s it was widely assumed that something profound happened, some kind of sudden creative efflorescence, around 45,000 years ago, variously referred to in the literature as the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ or even the ‘Human Revolution’. But in the last two decades it has become increasingly clear to researchers that this is most likely an illusion, created by biases in our evidence.
Here’s why. Much of the evidence for this ‘revolution’ is restricted to a single part of the world: Europe, where it is associated with replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens around 40,000 BC. It includes more advanced toolkits for hunting and handicrafts, the first clear evidence for the making of images in bone, ivory and clay – including the famous sculpted ‘female figurines’, dense clusters of carved and painted animal figures in caves, often observed with breathtaking accuracy; more elaborate ways of clothing and decorating the human body; the first attested use of musical instruments like bone flutes; regular exchange of raw materials over great distances, and also what are usually taken as the earliest proofs of social inequality, in the form of grand burials.
All this is impressive, and gives the impression of a lack of synchrony between the ticking of our genetic and cultural clocks. It seems to ask the question: why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms of behaviour; between when we became capable of creating culture and when we finally got round to doing it? What were we actually doing in the interim? Many researchers have puzzled over this and have even coined a phrase for it: ‘the sapient paradox’. A few go so far as to postulate some late mutation in the human brain to explain the apparently superior cultural capacities of Upper Palaeolithic Europeans, but such views can no longer be taken seriously.
In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the whole problem is a mirage. The reason archaeological evidence from Europe is so rich is that European governments tend to be rich; and that European professional institutions, learned societies and university departments have been pursuing prehistory far longer on their own doorstep than in other parts of the world. With each year that passes, new evidence accumulates for early behavioural complexity elsewhere: not just Africa, but also the Arabian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Even as we write, a cave site on the coast of Kenya called Panga ya Saidi is yielding evidence of shell beads and worked pigments stretching back 60,000 years; and research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi is opening vistas on to an unsuspected world of cave art, many thousands of years older than the famous images of Lascaux and Altamira, on the other side of Eurasia. No doubt still earlier examples of complex pictorial art will one day be found somewhere on the continent of Africa.
This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, one could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’ – since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.
So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way; then, of course, they began to rush headlong into their chains, and ape-like dominance patterns re-emerged. The solution to the battle between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’ turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty much exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. This is an unsettling conclusion, especially when we consider some of the actual archaeological evidence for the existence of ‘Palaeolithic politics’.