We had cities and confederacies, governed by consensus and cooperation, thousands of years ago. With tech, what could we build today?
We are as excited as anyone by Wengrow and Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything (covered well in these pages). And it keeps reverberating. Above is a TED Talk by David Wengrow which provides an excellent potted summary of the book. From the transcript, the leading points are:
“I've always felt that there was basically something very weird about our concept of civilization, something that leaves us lost for words, tongue tied. When we're confronted with thousands of years of human beings, say, practicing agriculture, creating new technologies, but not lording it over each other or exploiting each other to the maximum.”
Wengrow goes on to identify examples in China, Peru, the Indus Valley, Ukraine, Mexico and Turkey, where large-scale, city-level living was taking place (from about 10,000 BC to 6000 BC). But these didn’t involve a ruling caste or aristocratic class; were explicitly egalitarian in their house building and market trading; made many innovations in plumbing and street design; and were part of continental networks which shared best practice.
The most interesting part of Wengrow’s TED talk is where he dares to suggest there may be lessons from this past - where human beings were much more fluid, conscious and experimental with their social and economic structures - for the political present:
Now what do all these details amount to? What does it all mean? Well, at the very least, I'd suggest it's really a bit far-fetched these days to cling to this notion that the invention of agriculture meant a departure from some egalitarian Eden.
Or to cling to the idea that small-scale societies are especially likely to be egalitarian, while large-scale ones must necessarily have kings, presidents and top-down structures of management.
And there are also some contemporary implications. Take, for example, the commonplace notion that participatory democracy is somehow natural in a small community. Or perhaps an activist group, but couldn't possibly have a scale up for anything like a city, a nation or even a region.
Well, actually, the evidence of human history, if we're prepared to look at it, suggests the opposite. If cities and regional confederacies, held together mostly by consensus and cooperation existed thousands of years ago, who's to stop us creating them again today with technologies that allow us to overcome the friction of distance and numbers?
Perhaps it's not too late to begin learning from all this new evidence of the human past, even to begin imagining what other kinds of civilization we might create if we can just stop telling ourselves that this particular world is the only one possible.
More from TED here. And for further political implications of their history, see this piece in the LA Review of Books.
Protestors in Zucotti Park in Nov. 2011. Graeber liked to say the goal of his book with Wengrow was “to change the course of human history — starting with the past.”Credit...Robert Stolarik for The New York Times