"Anarchism is normal. It is hierarchy and the exploitation of nature that is odd." Localist Adam Lent writes for the Ⓐ-curious
By Golden Cosmos, from “The Case Against Civilisation”, New Yorker
We’re interested in the opening up of municipal and local-government thinking that comes from The New Local - who, for example, recently fully engaged with the “commoning” practice and theorising of Elinor Ostrom.
Their promulgation of the term “community power” will be effective if it’s genuinely composed of mutual-aid-like, bottom-up activity, and the welcome of that (rather than recoil from that) of local authorities.
So we’re happy to see this piece from the director of the New Local, Adam Lent, which comes to a conclusion we’ve made for a while - which is that there are resources in the anarchist tradition that really do answer a lot of our crises around a “broken” politics.
In this cross-posted Medium piece below, Adam addresses the issue head on, and from the perspective of evolved human history (as well as his “post-progressive” position):
Adam Lent: Anarchism is normal. It is hierarchy and the exploitation of nature that is odd
Since losing my faith in progressive politics, I’ve been reading a fair bit of anthropology trying to get to grips with the roots of the current environmental mess.
One of the more remarkable things I’ve discovered is that the political ideology widely regarded as the most radical, utopian and frankly dangerous is, in fact, the most tried-and-tested, long-lasting and successful.
Humanity has been organised for the majority of its existence along lines that are best described as a form of deep green, egalitarian anarchism. Based on extensive analysis of the archeological record and what we know of the lifestyles of present-day hunter-gatherer communities, anthropologists are pretty much in consensus: homo sapiens has spent most of its time on this planet living in small self-governing groups with little or no economic stratification based mostly on subsistence foraging with a relatively small impact on the environment.
And when I say ‘most of its time’, I really mean most. The way we live now in profoundly hierarchical societies based very heavily on the generation of vast amounts of surplus goods(i.e. stuff beyond what we need to survive and reproduce) is very recent.
The deep green anarchist model existed since modern humans first evolved around 250,000 years ago. By contrast, our current mode emerged gradually before the first recognisably ‘civilised’ settlements appeared around 10,000 years ago and then, for a long period of time, only in select areas.
In short, our current hierarchical, surplus-driven lifestyle has been a significant feature of some human societies for around 5% of our existence as a species and a significant feature of nearly all human society (i.e. since the conquest of the New World) for approximately 0.2%.
The more recent intensification of that lifestyle, since the agricultural and industrial revolutions, has been around for just 0.1% of our species’ existence and a genuinely global phenomenon for just 0.02%.
Many may shrug their shoulders at that fact. All it goes to prove is that deep green anarchism is a ‘primitive’ way of life that hung around until humans, with their uniquely superior intelligence, had had enough time to develop something far better.
Yes, our current mode of existence is relatively short-lived but it spans a time that has seen the flowering of human civilisation with all its innovation, social complexity and scientific understanding.
There are, however, two big problems with that perspective. Problems that should lead us to question whether deep green, anarchist principles can be dismissed quite as easily as they usually are.
The first problem is that for the great majority of that ‘civilised’ existence, life probably wasn’t better for the bulk of humanity than it was for our foraging ancestors. The osteological evidence is pretty clear that the average agricultural worker had a worse diet, was much more prone to infectious and parasitic disease (a painfully topical finding) and died younger than your average forager.
On top of that, those agricultural workers had to contend with the subjection heaped on them by a ruthless, usually violent, elite who required them to hand over the surplus goods they generated, or their equivalent value, so the elite could fund lives of ostentatious leisure, build monuments to themselves and regularly fight wars against other ruthless elites.
An indignity to which subsistence foragers were not subjected — in large part because there was no surplus to hand over. There is also evidence — although less conclusive — that women and children had greater equality and freedom in foraging communities than in agricultural society [see this A/UK post].
To be clear, I am not suggesting, as some do, that life in foraging communities was some sort of utopia. It wasn’t. But the evidence does suggest that, on the whole, the life of the average forager was decidedly preferable to that of an agricultural slave, serf or peasant.
OK, says our detractor, but since the agricultural and industrial revolutions, things have got way better. The average global income is now ten times higher than it was a couple of hundred years ago — twenty to thirty times higher in the advanced economies.
Modern public health and medical practices have massively enhanced longevity and physical well-being. Publicly funded education is widespread and, in a large part of the world, people get to kick out political elites once every four or five years.
But this is where the second problem comes in. Even if we accept that the latest iteration of civilisation is arguably better than the foraging lifestyle, climate change alters the whole comparative calculation.
Those improvements on a previously grim agricultural existence have been literally funded by a massive intensification of the generation and consumption of surplus goods resulting from the rise of modern industry.
The huge wealth required to lift billions out of poverty and pay for all the expensive development and adoption of innovations in public health, medicine, education etc was simply unavailable until the explosion of economic growth since the mid-eighteenth century.
An explosion that has been bought with the extensive use of fossil fuels and a wide range of other intensified exploitations of the natural world that have led to climate change, deforestation, ocean acidification and massive species extinction.
In short, we are destroying our natural environment in an effort to haul ourselves out of an older, grimmer way of life that was significantly inferior to an even older way of life that was not environmentally destructive.
And the better way of life we have created for ourselves is, in fact, now very likely to get far worse precisely because of the environmental destruction we have wrought in achieving it.
Will we in fifty years time still be able to say with any confidence that our modern civilisation is a clear advance on the far, far more enduring world of the forager?
Where does this leave us? At the very least, it should lead to the acknowledgement that deep green anarchism is not some weird, unsustainable set of ideas and practices.
In fact, in historical terms, the weird and, as it turns out, unsustainable set of ideas and practices are the ones we cleave to right now.
Egalitarian anarchism is rooted in our deepest history; it is, in that sense, the truest form of conservativism — everything that has emerged since is radical, experimental and increasingly dangerous.
But, and it’s a big but, humanity is self-evidently not about to return to the life of our foraging forebears. We clearly don’t have the will. Even if we had the will, we don’t have the necessary skills.
And even if we had the will and skills, we no longer have the natural environment to support a return to such a way of life — certainly not for eight billion people.
In that sense, it is fair to say that deep green anarchism as a universal project is, under the circumstances we have created for ourselves, now impossible. But this is to be lamented not just forgotten as though it were some ideological footnote.
Instead, we need to ask ourselves, as we stand on the eve of climate catastrophe, what we are going to do about it.
Should humanity, at least, try to approximate, however imperfectly, the anarchism of our not-so-distant ancestors? If that can’t happen, should we as individuals opt out of our surplus-driven hierarchies and exploitation of nature and embrace, instead, a life closer to that of our ancestors?
Or maybe we need to recognise that the moment to make such a shift is not now but when climate catastrophe finally strikes and the civilisation we have built becomes untenable in part or whole?
Note: there’s a very interesting thread descending from Adam’s tweet of this piece - worth exploring those rising to his challenge, and their range of references:
UPDATE: We noticed that there’s been a speedy response to Adam’s column by fellow-think tanker Simon Kaye - making essentially three objections:
First, that early human social orders are fundamentally incomparable and incommensurable with contemporary ones. This is a problem, because it makes it hard (or impossible) to derive normative prescriptions even from a very good understanding of our own prehistory.
Second, that Lent is undervaluing contemporary humans — as a collective and as individuals — in various ways.
Third, we are becoming more than just a threat to our planet. We are becoming its only plausible recourse to an insurance policy.
FURTHER UPDATE: There’s a response to Simon’s response from Micheal Chance here. An excerpt:
As a painter I can find astonishment and inspiration from the work of an early hominid artist as much as from a Fayum portrait, a Michelangelo, a Picasso. So too, despite the aspects made unreachable by the chasm of time between us, we can find inspiration and learn lessons from those early people in terms of social organisation, of connecting to and understanding nature, of living sustainably.
Their way of life is not a guide — no single culture or period of development is — but the evidence of their art alone is a powerful suggestion of fine, adept minds, with deep feeling, a level of understanding of nature and a capacity for technical sophistication which cannot be dismissed.
So why can’t we credit them with the same level of thought when it comes to their social organisation? Terms like anarchism or capitalism are abstractions, but in a smallish community, managing a roughly egalitarian set of social relations and a relatively sustainable use of resources is a complicated but tangible business of everyday mundane interactions. Who’s hunting, who’s gathering, who’s doing the washing up and when can I paint that cave?
It seems sensible to me that many cultures would have created stories, songs and images that would have expressed and reaffirmed their way of life, creating myths and ideas that not only reflected their accumulated knowledge and shared principles, but also propagated and reinforced social norms and traditions which increase group stability and foster positive relations between each other and with the environment.
There aren’t many stories that don’t have some sort of moral conclusion to be found within. Probably — just like modern, ‘civilised’ people — their culture provided simple pleasures and distractions, but also a kind of communal heart, memory and conscience.
When looking at art, we often find that suddenly we are struck by the fact that someone, somewhere far away in a different time touched this very canvas, this wall, this clay pot, this manuscript. What tends to strike us most is that despite those huge distances between us, we are very much the same.