NEW WINE IN OLD BOTTLES

Eric linked to an article, which I read and posted an enthusiastic comment about, and I have preordered the new book by the authors of the article, which is due to be published in early November. I found the article fascinating, provocative, and informative but also intensely irritating. I thought I would spend some time today explaining something of the background to the article, why I think it is important and also why I found it irritating. Obviously the best thing you can do is read the article and/or the book when it appears, but anybody who is interested could hunt up lectures four through seven of my 10 lecture series on the subject of Ideological Critique available on YouTube.

 

This will take me a little while so settle down (or drift off to WhatsApp.)

 

The available paleontological evidence indicates that Homo Sapiens has been around for about 200,000 years, plus or minus. Until the last 6000 years or so of that period, just about all the evidence we have of the doings of human beings was what could be dug up out of the ground and inspected. Since mostly what lasts is bones and stones, scientists have had to make do with whatever they could figure out from that hard stuff about what human beings were up to. Hominids more generally appear to have developed in East Africa maybe as much as several million years ago and one way and another they migrated across the land bridge that then existed between Africa and the Middle East and from there to Europe, to central and eastern Asia, Southeast Asia, and even, maybe 15,000 years ago or maybe longer, to North, Central, and South America.

 

There is a good deal of evidence that hominids, including human beings, have had tools of various sorts for  a million years or more. There is artwork in caves and elsewhere dating back 40 or 50,000 years. At some point, Homo STheapiens (and other hominids? Who knows) developed language.

 

How did human beings live? Well, from their teeth and other evidences we can infer that they were from the beginning omnivores, eating both meat and such plant materials as fruits, nuts, and the like.

 

And that is pretty much it, as far as the evidence goes, until maybe 10,000 years ago or thereabouts. At some point, in the late 19^th century, more as a reflection of their own social norms than on the basis of much in the way of evidence, anthropologists decided that for the first 190,000 years or so men hunted and women gathered, so the anthropologists started calling early human beings “hunter gatherers.”

 

Then, rather late in the history of the human race, some big things happened. The standard story is this:  roughly 10,000 years ago in an especially fertile area located between two Middle Eastern rivers (or, as they say in Greek, in Mesopotamia) people learned how to tame wild animals and they learned how to cultivate, grow, and selectively develop plants. People became farmers and shepherds. More or less at the same time, which is to say over several thousand years, people started building permanent dwellings from clay, wood, stone, and animal hides and to live in cities. We know this happened because we can dig up the remains of the cities, sometimes only the foundations of the buildings but sometimes entire dwellings.

 

This much is not disputed by Graeber and Wengrow, at least as I understand them from the article Eric linked to. But agriculture, domestication of animals, and city building were of course just the beginning. Then, in the relatively brief span of 10,000 years or so, which is scarcely the blink of an eye in the history of the human species, we get kings, queens, armies, generals, slaves, plutocrats, and even – God forgive us – philosophers.

 

The standard argument goes something like this. For the first 190,000 years or so, people had all they could do just to chase down game and scrounge up nuts and berries and stay alive. Even if we assume a functional differentiation between what women did and what men did (and that, recall, is pure speculation), there was not enough extra food to support people to spend their time practicing various crafts rather than gathering food. But with the extra food from herds of animals and fields of grain, it was possible to support people whose sole function it was to build, to spin, to weave, to carry weapons and compel people to do the bidding of those who had gotten their hands on extra food and could parcel it out. By the time human beings got around to inventing writing, maybe 6000 years ago or so, all of this was so well-established that it seemed a law of nature.

 

Now apparently (I have not been keeping up, for which I apologize) ideological defenders of the current god-awful state of affairs have been arguing that there is an inseparable link between the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture and the building of cities on the one hand and full-scale economic inequality and oppressive state authority on the other, so that you cannot have New York or Rome or Beijing or Podunk or TV or cell phones or 7 ½ billion people without Jeff Bezos and the Democratic Party.

 

Well, lately, which is to say in the last 40 years or so, all manner of interesting anthropological evidence has cropped up about people who seem to have managed in one way or another to have avoided this Hobson’s choice. Graeber and Wengrow cite a whole lot of examples of people who manage functional differentiatio in their productive activities without authoritarian social organization. They also cite a lot of interesting recent archaeological research suggesting that there must have been differences of wealth and power back in the good old hunting and gathering days. So the standard story, they suggest, is wrong. Human beings did not hunt and gather in small socially undifferentiated groups until the explosion of the Neolithic Revolution.

 

All of this, as I say, is fascinating and I look forward to reading their book. But I wish they would get rid of the geewhiz snarky tone. Edwin Wilmsen did a much better job of this in his work LAND WITHOUT FLIES, which I discussed at great length in my YouTube lectures.