How to change the course of human history. By David Graeber & David Wengrow
The story we have been
telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of
inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth
of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole
lot more we can learn from our ancestors.
Inequality’
is a way of framing social problems appropriate to technocratic reformers, the
kind of people who assume from the outset that any real vision of social
transformation has long since been taken off the political table. It 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?
0.1% of the world’s population controls over 50% of the wealth!’), all 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.
For centuries, we have
been telling ourselves a simple story about the origins of social inequality.
For most of their history, humans lived in tiny egalitarian bands of
hunter-gatherers. Then came farming, which brought with it private property,
and then the rise of cities which meant the emergence of civilization properly
speaking. Civilization meant many bad things (wars, taxes, bureaucracy,
patriarchy, slavery…) but also made possible written literature, science,
philosophy, and most other great human achievements.
Almost everyone knows
this story in its broadest outlines. Since at least the days of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, it has framed what we think the overall shape and direction of human
history to be. This is important because the narrative also defines our sense
of political possibility. Most see civilization, hence inequality, as a tragic
necessity. Some dream of returning to a past utopia, of finding an industrial
equivalent to ‘primitive communism’, or even, in extreme cases, of destroying
everything, and going back to being foragers again. But no one challenges the
basic structure of the story.
There is a fundamental
problem with this narrative.
It isn’t true.
Overwhelming evidence
from archaeology, anthropology, and kindred disciplines is beginning to give us
a fairly clear idea of what the last 40,000 years of human history really
looked like, and in almost no way does it resemble the conventional narrative.
Our species did not, in fact, spend most of its history in tiny bands;
agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution; the
first cities were often robustly egalitarian. Still, even as researchers have
gradually come to a consensus on such questions, they remain strangely
reluctant to announce their findings to the public – or even scholars in other
disciplines – let alone reflect on the larger political implications. As a
result, those writers who are reflecting on the ‘big questions’ of human
history – Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Ian Morris, and others – still take
Rousseau’s question (‘what is the origin of social inequality?’) as their
starting point, and assume the larger story will begin with some kind of fall
from primordial innocence... read more:
Throughout its 5000
year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian
sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on
debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current
era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the
creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in
order to protect the interests of creditors...
