How fear makes us human
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Highlights
- As Graeber and Wengrow show in a survey ranging from ancient Egypt to the near East, India and China, but focusing particularly on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, there was an enormous variety of social experiments. Some communities had different forms of governance depending on the time of the year – more tightly organised during the hunting season, otherwise highly decentralised. Some kept slaves, others did not. Foragers might not be small bands but far-flung networks. There were many kinds of archaic society, changing along with human needs and circumstances, but all of them lacked the enduring hierarchies of states.
- When a stateless zone comes into being, its survival is contingent on the states that surround it. This is the case in the autonomous region of Rojava in Kurdish northern Syria, which Graeber visited in 2014, and which he pronounced a practical experiment in anarchism. (The zone’s imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan has acknowledged the influence of Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), the American theorist of “post-scarcity anarchism”, so there is some basis for Graeber’s view.) Rojava’s future depends on Turkey, Iraq, Bashar al- Assad’s Syria and the Kurdistan Regional Government, and on the US – still an active presence in the region. Awkwardly, given the ecological demands of Bookchin’s anarchism, fossil fuels are the zone’s chief asset.
- The authors deplore the “tawdry, shop-worn and politically disastrous” myths that rule our thinking about the past and future. They are persuasive in arguing that early human societies were much more varied, and at times more experimental, than has been commonly supposed. Yet what Graeber and Wengrow have done is to re-embellish a familiar myth propagated by Rousseau and his many unwitting disciples: the belief that humankind has been “stuck” throughout much of its history. There is no reason to believe an original condition of freedom and grace ever existed. We are where we have always been, making the best of our difficulties and somehow getting by.