Part of me thinks I should be writing about the US government and its current dramas. Venezuela. Greenland. Minneapolis. But instead I’ll hold off from the hot takes and go to the other end of the spectrum with a post about long-range human history.
As previously trailed on this blog, I’ve recently been having some interesting discussions on this topic with physicist Tom Murphy, author of the informative Do the Math blog. Here, I’ll try to give a flavour.
So… whereas those of an ecomodernist bent tend to locate the source of human happiness in recent times – all humanity was sunk in utter misery until the invention of cookie dough ice cream or whatever – anti-modernists tend to find the source of current woes in ancient history. It all went wrong with the invention of writing, farming, money or what have you. In a recent comment, Joe Clarkson goes back to the source with this thinking: “No other animals have fire, why should we?”
I’m firmly in the anti-modernist camp, but here I’m going to dig a little into this narrative of humanity’s allegedly ancient mistakes and our blundering invention of early prototypes for modernism and the Machine.
As mentioned, my comments have been prompted by Tom Murphy, initially via an interesting online presentation he gave to the Planetary Limits Academic Network last year. I tuned into the seminar late in the evening, somewhat ironically after a hard day’s work on the farm (in fact a hard day of building – one of the many things I naively hadn’t anticipated before switching to a more land-based lifestyle is that farming involves a lot of building … you know, sedentism and all that). So I was starting to nod off at the end of the seminar when the chair invited me to comment on Tom’s remarks about the role of agriculture in our present planetary predicament. This post represents a slightly more considered, and awake, reprise of that discussion. I sent a draft of it to Tom and he generously responded with comments. We then had an interesting email back and forth about it. I’ve redrafted my remarks slightly in the light of his responses, without fully addressing them, and this slight redraft is what you’re reading here. If Tom, or anyone else, is interested, I’d be happy to continue the debate.
Tom has written two blog posts relevant to this discussion. One is called Our Time on the River, in which he uses the metaphor of a river for human civilizational ‘progress’, gradually turning from a gentle upstream brook that people could easily exit if they wished into a downstream torrent heading for the waterfall of collapse on the rocks below, where escape from the flow is difficult or impossible. The other is a review of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s big history book, The Dawn of Everything. Funnily enough, I independently wrote a post employing the river metaphor, as well as a rather more positive review of The Dawn of Everything than Tom’s, albeit touching on some similar points.
I largely agree with Tom’s river metaphor for civilizational ‘progress’ and ultimate collapse, although I question his historical positioning of things like possessions, property rights, surplus, hierarchy and patriarchy as arising after and as a result of agriculture. I’d argue:
- All these things long pre-existed agriculture or were at least latent in pre-agricultural foraging (hunter-gatherer) societies.
- There’s an intrinsic human tendency toward both status competition/ranking and an egalitarian animus against them that is evolutionarily rooted, is present in every human society and stretches way back beyond the supposed origins of agriculture circa 10,000 years ago, an argument outlined by Christopher Boehm in his remarkable book Hierarchy in the Forest. The deep evolutionary triad of conformism-religiosity-tribalism laid out in Harvey Whitehouse’s Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World is another interesting take.
- It’s possible to overdraw the contrast between foraging and farming. Farming is more than 10,000 years old, and is part of a spectrum of habitat manipulation. Also, many, probably most, farm societies have been heavily involved with foraging until recently.
- In historical writing, it’s important to avoid the fallacy known as post hoc ergo propter hoc (‘afterwards and therefore because of’). I do think there’s a danger of this fallacy in writing about farming (‘farming came before and was the cause of all these bad things’), although it’s likely true that the advent of widespread grain agricultures accentuated various tendencies, such as defining private property rights in land.
- However, as I argue in Finding Lights, care is needed in how we discuss concepts like private property rights and other assumed nasties of modernity. What they meant in local agrarian societies usually isn’t the same as what they mean in modern capitalist society, and they can be protective of rather than exploitive toward relatively disempowered groups.
To build on some of these points, it strikes me that if there’s some fateful human tendency that’s hustling us downstream to oblivion, it lies in our human ability to abstract a world-as-it-might-be beyond immediate sensory experience. Hence, the problem is not writing but language, not science but science-and-religiosity, not farming but habitat manipulation, not money but abstract human connection, and so on. There’s nothing much we can do about this world-as-it-might-be symbolic capacity we have, simultaneously humanity’s blessing or genius and also our curse. Writing, farming and so on were not the cause of our malaise but the result of it.
Deep time and long-haul thinking
In a sense, that chimes with one of Tom’s wider points in his writings and in his presentation, in which he focuses on the evolutionary long haul. Biological evolution came up with humanity. It worked for a short while (a longer one if we include the whole genus Homo and not just H. sapiens) but it looks like our symbolic genius will ultimately prove our undoing, and once we’ve extinguished ourselves and the other species we’re taking down with us, evolution will spawn something else. This is not up to us – we need to get over ourselves.
I can go along with that up to a point. Certainly, people have little agency over the long evolutionary haul. But I’m interested in addressing what we may be able to do in the short term to try as best we can to avoid obliterating ourselves and other species and to make the transition to what comes next as congenial as possible. I’ve long argued that our best option right now is low-impact and low-input local agrarianism with a distributed, bottom-up politics. Not that this will necessarily work even if it were easily implemented, but I don’t see any other game in town. In the longer term even this might not prove sustainable, and may at best be part of a trajectory toward a world that ends up with a much lower human population involved mostly in foraging once again. I don’t have a problem with that – I’m not committed to defending agrarianism for the sake of it, although I do baulk at overdrawn ‘foraging good-farming bad’ dualisms. And of course whether I have a problem with it or not is irrelevant to what happens in the long run. In the short run, I think we’ll cause much less suffering for ourselves and other creatures if we embrace agrarian localism.
On this long run/short run issue, I think Tom’s emphasis on the long run is potentially misleading in its causal inferences about farming. The idea is that a few thousand years between farming and cookie-dough ice cream, nuclear missiles and other modern scourges is an eye-blink in deep evolutionary time, buttressing the causal case that farming represents the fateful step into modernism and thence annihilation. But I’m not convinced deep evolutionary time is to the point in this example. People lived substantially local agrarian lives for many, many generations without their societies devolving to a growth-oriented, world-eating, predatory system of states (while many others continued to do so in the interstices of predatory state power). That, I believe, is the relevant time frame to understanding that agrarianism needn’t intrinsically involve or lead to predatory, growth-oriented states. Also, there’s evidence of agrarian type toolkits in Ohalo from 23,000 years before the present, and I doubt that’s the earliest case. Even at that date, we’re starting to have a livelihood strategy that’s been around for a substantial part of Homo sapiens history. Not really a historical eye-blink, whereas world-eating modernity is much more so.
Foraging versus farming?
Relatedly, I think Tom overstates the difference between farming and foraging societies, or to the subset of foraging societies he calls immediate-return ones. An argument for another time, perhaps, but while I like a good Hadza story as much as anyone, I’m not convinced ‘immediate-return’ societies really exist. I could get behind ‘usually shorter-return than a full agricultural season’ but then we’re talking about differences of degree and not kind. Doubtless there are differences between foraging and farming societies worth highlighting, but in both cases people have used their big-brained capacities to make symbolic representations of the-world-as-it-might-be to instrumental ends. How different in their cognitive fundamentals are the complex technologies and representations of the world of an Arctic whale-hunter and a New Guinea swiddener?
Anyway, long story short is that I’m interested in historical examples of low-impact, distributed local agrarianisms (and foragings) in case there are things to be learned from them as we – well, currently a tiny minority of us, in the teeth of much ridicule – try to chart a path away from world-eating modernity. There are many such examples, even among people who were nominally under the thumb of the modern depredations Tom lists like armies, property rights, classes and ‘states’.
I got the sense that Tom doesn’t greatly share this interest because he views such local agrarianisms as minor back eddies of little consequence to the larger story of the river’s gathering downstream flow. If I remember rightly, he said in the seminar that he didn’t have much use for counterfactuals of this kind. But I think this dismissal may be too hasty.
For one thing, I don’t think they are counterfactuals. Seen from state centres, the way that ordinary people get on with their lives and generate material welfare locally and relatively sustainably has usually been considered less important than the fact that these people are subjects of the state who need to pay their taxes and their respects, and to bend to the larger designs of state power. It’s easy to approach history through this lens, because most history and most other kinds of writing and intellectual output are state-centred. But there’s no reason to see the world through the looking-glass of the state’s own self-importance. So I’ll say it again: it’s worth looking at how ordinary people have generated their livelihoods locally and relatively sustainably in the face of state power.
Dualisms and the concept of structure
There are various metaphors from biological evolution at play in the idea of our time on the river and related ones like ratchets, points of no return, branches, dead ends, natural selection and so on that, while informative, ultimately are metaphors and not real-world processes with the force of biological evolution. I believe it’s important to appreciate this, and so to appreciate the ways in which these metaphors don’t fully work.
On the matter of counterfactuals, for example, Stephen Jay Gould elaborated the point in Wonderful Life that the outcome of biological evolution was a matter of contingency. If you could spool through the history of life on the planet on repeat play over and over again the outcome would be different every time, in the manner of a complex system. Now, looking backwards from the present over deep biological time you can respond to this point with a shrugged ‘so what?’ Life could have played out differently, but it didn’t and here we are. No doubt you can say the same of events in human history, but it’s shakier ground unless you establish that there are larger – evolutionary? – forces at play such that these events were always going to happen.
This is precisely what a lot of people try to argue, but usually not very successfully. For example, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond suggested that the rise of European countries as globally dominant powers in recent centuries was pretty much baked in from the time that discernible farming societies emerged in southwest Asia around ten millennia ago. His argument doesn’t withstand much scrutiny, but it’s a commonplace to argue that because some historical event happened it was always bound to happen. This is basically the opposite of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy – the ‘before and therefore causing’ fallacy (ante hoc ergo hoc causans perhaps? I don’t know – my Latin’s rusty). The effect of such arguments can easily be to justify existing power structures and to underestimate their capacity to change or collapse.
Indeed, talking of ‘structures’, there’s a danger of importing biological concepts of structure inappropriately into human history and society. A vertebra is a biological structure. We can say without any shadow of a doubt that a new species evolving from a mouse, a whale or a human will be a vertebrate. We might say that money, or the banking system, or the executive arm of government are ‘structures’ of contemporary global society. It’s impossible to imagine a government coming to power anywhere in the world right now that could or would dispense with them. But it’s not impossible to imagine new kinds of human societies emerging in the relatively near term that did dispense with them. Social structures aren’t the same as biological structures.
In that sense, there’s a danger of talking at cross purposes. Tom emphasizes materialism and monism in his writing rather than dualism (or idealism), the idea that mind is separate from matter, with associated ideas like free will. I’m fine with that as a matter of natural philosophy, although as argued by the aforementioned Harvey Whitehouse, it seems that due to biological evolution human societies do in fact tend to think dualistically. But when social scientists talk about materialism versus idealism they mean something different: materialism being the idea that the ‘structure’ of society is determined by underlying facts about how people make a living in the world, idealism being the idea that it’s determined by the ideas people have about what society ought to be like (with various possible intermediate positions). So it’s possible to be materialist in Tom’s sense of natural philosophy, but somewhat idealist in terms of one’s theories of social change.
For this reason, I’m less convinced than Tom that the river has an unstoppable force that just ‘is’, and I’m more in tune with Graeber and Wengrow’s openness toward radical social transformation. Nevertheless, I do think human social structures can have enduring historical force and I agree with Tom that Graeber and Wengrow’s perplexity about why oppressive political centralism endures is perplexing in itself. Graeber and Wengrow themselves say somewhere that once status differentiation and monopolies of power get going they’re hard to overturn and that basically answers their perplexity. Once you have a centralized bureaucratic state or an emperor in post, it’s a devil of a job to get rid of them. But it’s not impossible to do so in the way that, for example, it’s impossible for a vertebrate to evolve rapidly into an invertebrate.
Opening the cages
In his critique of Graeber and Wengrow, Tom invokes the interesting metaphor of a menagerie:
We might compare the book’s dizzying array of archeological examples to a menagerie of exotic animals. Each is fascinating to study, and offers lessons on what’s possible in isolation. Now open all the cages, let the animals interact (play?) together and see what happens. Graeber and Wengrow never do this—instead pointing to each animal, safe in its archeological cage, and emphasizing how different it is from today’s arrangement. In my view, the ubiquity of today’s systems marks the outcome after all the animals are “played” out, leaving one dominant beast.
Fair points, but I’d like to press the metaphor further. When the cages are opened, a lot of the littler animals will find nooks and crannies where they can easily evade the one dominant beast (the lion, perhaps?) The lion is still dominant – the smaller creatures can’t afford to forget it’s lurking – but they’re nonetheless able to get on with their little-animal lives in substantial autonomy from it. Metaphorically, that’s one possibility for local agrarian societies I’m interested in.
The larger prey animals – antelopes, let’s say – probably won’t be so lucky once the cages are opened, and sooner or later will get hunted down by the lions. Assuming an impermeable outer perimeter to the zoo, the lions will die of starvation shortly afterwards. Metaphorically, that’s the global polycrisis we now face, with the zoo’s perimeter representing the Earth’s boundaries.
In some ways, the ‘one dominant beast’ metaphor isn’t a great one for the polycrisis. Our present situation would be more akin to one where the lions turn the prey animals into subordinate lions and get them to prey in turn on still more subordinate beasts which they bring as tribute and are allowed to feed on the scraps, all the while being told that they’ve never had it so good and no other kind of life is preferable or even possible. Obviously, lions don’t turn other beasts into subordinate lions in real life. Maybe other biological examples work better. Social insects? Viruses? Cancers? Anyway, hopefully the larger point is clear.
But suppose the perimeter to the zoo isn’t impermeable and the lions and antelopes escape from it into something like their natural savanna home (here the perimeter isn’t the Earth’s boundaries but the boundaries of modernism and the modern economy’s growth parameters). The playing field is now more level. The lions will get some of the antelopes, but not all of them – often enough, the antelopes will outrun them. Between them, they’ll find an equilibrium that prevents either species dying out, at least for the time being. This is another dimension of agrarian society I’m interested in.
Will the antelopes of modernity succeed in escaping its perimeter and get to play with the lions on the savanna where they stand a chance? I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s written in the stars by any kind of materialist monism that they won’t be able to. I’m therefore ‘idealist’ enough in the social science sense of the term to think it’s worth searching for weaknesses in the fence. As I see it, the fence has a lot of weaknesses, but the lions have got pretty good at convincing people not to bother even looking for them – you’ve never had it so good, you too can be a full member of the lion community someday and so can everyone else, it’s a jungle out there, and so on. The first task is to stop believing this deceitful story and start looking at the fence.
Though I’m not persuaded by everything in Harvey Whitehouse’s book Inheritance, his triad of conformism-religiosity-tribalism (and Boehm’s status versus equality dualism) as our basic human evolutionary package holds out some hope that people might take on this task, as well as the possibility they might not. If the package comprised selfishness-accumulativeness-treachery I’d be more inclined to think that modernism’s fiery route to extinction was locked in.
Way down the torrent
Despite what I’ve said, I broadly agree with Tom’s river metaphor inasmuch as humanity has gone all in with a fossil-fuelled growth economy involving a massive and unsustainable throughput. I agree that grain agriculture and the early grain states were an early foray into the river, but not necessarily a decisive one. As I see it, the flow really got going much later with an unfortunate confluence of a capitalism grounded in semi-porous frontiers between South and East Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, and then with fossil fuels – neither of these foreordained by earlier agrarian states. It’s this capitalism plus fossil fuels duality that’s really shoved us down the torrent.
It’s not that hard to see alternatives to where we now are in the torrent and to appreciate their benefits. But it’s devilishly difficult to find any simple way of exiting and reaching those calm banks. We have no plausible mass politics, economics or technologies for exiting it that look capable of diverting us from the rocks without a challenging plunge into the torrent.
Here, we come back to my ‘ante hoc ergo hoc causans’ principle and to some different conceptions of what ‘evolution’ means, where I believe Tom’s river and menagerie metaphors can align with my case for agrarian localism.
There’s a tendency to attach notions of progress to the concept of evolution, both biological and social. And there’s a tendency to attach notions of betterment to the concept of progress that blights both kinds of evolutionary thought, but particularly the social kind. Perhaps ‘progress’ can work as a neutral biological descriptor. First there are unicellular organisms and then there are multicellular ones that emerge out of them and in a sense progress beyond them. But multicellular organisms aren’t ‘better’ organisms than unicellular ones.
Concepts of social evolution are rife with progress and betterment thinking. Much of the intellectual fanfare around the emergence of centralized polities, writing, farming, science and so on amounts to one long self-congratulatory love letter to ourselves about our betterment which is likely to burn soon in a fire of our own making. This is even more true in respect of the self-conscious humanism and modernism that’s emerged in recent centuries, The hubris-nemesis stories of ancient times – Adam and Eve, Prometheus and so on – will need a heavy post-modern update.
Ultimately, then, I think my position is pretty close to Tom’s with his river metaphor and his idea of where that river is going. It’s just that I’m not so convinced it was long written in the stars, and I’m sceptical of maximum power or ecological overshoot notions when they’re applied to present predicaments in over-mechanistic ways (more on that another time, I hope). Therefore, while I’m inclined to treat the deep-time counterfactual of what might have happened if biological evolution had turned out differently with an indifferent shrug, I’m intensely interested in the shallow-time counterfactual of what might have happened if human history had turned out differently, because I think such counterfactuals might help us to steer wisely – if not, at this late stage, out of the waterfall altogether, at least out of the most catastrophic parts of it.
Anyway, my thanks to Tom for helping me clarify my thinking on these issues, and – if you’ve got this far – my thanks to other readers of this essay for indulging me as I torture various metaphors to death in it.
Current reading
Harvey Whitehouse Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World (I’m still working my way through this fascinating, if IMO, somewhat flawed book, as mentioned above. Report to follow).
John Tutino The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, A Nation and World History, 1500-2000 (I took a deeper second dive into this book and finally finished it – also fascinating, if heavy going. TLDR: capitalism started in Peru and Mexico, and if you want to be an anti-capitalist you have to be a farmer. More to follow.)
Zeinab Badawi An African History of Africa (Not the first one but refreshing even so).
