Category Archives: History

The Dawn of Everything

By David Graeber and David Wengrow (Penguin, 2021).

Review by Robert M. Ellis

This extraordinary new book is an extended implicit application of the Middle Way, as well as a highly innovative mould-breaking theory of history. Its authors (one now deceased) are an archaeologist and an anthropologist respectively, who were struck by the increasing misfit between the gathering evidence of complexity in the early history of human beings, and the dogmatic assumptions through which it was being routinely interpreted. One of those dogmas is Hobbesian – that life for earlier humans before the state evolved, was ‘nasty, brutish and short’, and the other, opposed set of assumptions stems from Rousseau – that early humans were noble savages and we have declined into a sick civilization. The thing I found most striking and inspiring about this book straight away, then, is that engages in the two phase critique of the Middle Way rather than a reactive flip, following the complexity of the evidence and seeking new ways of interpreting it that do it justice. The result, too, is an inspiring theory that provides a source of hope – that is, that the historical evidence shows that humans do not inevitably have to adopt top-down ways of thinking and living their lives, but are clearly capable of living together in ways that are much more open, consultative, democratic, and ‘free’ in the concrete ways that actually matter.

At the same time as putting forward this inspiring and ground-breaking historical theory, this book synthesises an impressively wide range of evidence from all of early world history: including evidence of Paleolithic life from around the globe, and discussions particularly of Sumeria, Egypt, and the Pre-Columbian Americas. Amongst the epiphanies for me regarding the Americas were that there were non-Aztec Republics in Mesoamerica, that the Native American groups around the Great Lakes had very sophisticated ways of reaching decisions through discussions (giving no real power to chiefs), and that the Native American groups in the north-west and in what is now California had totally contrasting social systems that constantly played off in reaction to each other: self-indulgent slave-holders versus ascetic egalitarians.

Graeber and Wengrow argue, with constant reference to very varied evidence, that the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ actually took 300 years, and had nothing inevitable about it, being sometimes deliberately ignored or reversed. They also argue that when agriculture did start to support cities, this did not immediately mean that they had to be organized in a top-down authoritarian fashion. Irrigation, for instance, was often managed co-operatively, and the evidence seems to be that many early cities were organized by citizens’ councils rather than by kings. When the harsh rule of kings did occur later, it was often initially developed elsewhere, in the highlands, rather than the cereal-cultivating river valleys. Many of the distinctive characteristics of particular cultures, including the technologies, forms of rule, and ways of life they adopted, were not due to an inevitable ascent on an evolutionary ladder towards the modern world, but rather in a ‘schismogenetic’ response to neighbouring groups that they wanted to differentiate themselves from.

I finished this book generally slightly more sympathetic to two kinds of views that I have previously considered naive: one being anarchism, in the sense of the conviction that humans could manage without the ‘state’ as we currently understand it, and the other being the view that Native North American groups have a superior insight (compared to cultures originating in Europe) as to how to live in harmony with their environment. What made the difference is simply the amount of evidence that challenged my previous assumptions. Whatever the practical difficulties of recapturing that situation, it seems clear that people in the past have lived effectively without the current authority and bureaucratic power that we currently associated with the ‘state’. The assumption that we always had to have the state in this form began to seem to me an unnecessarily top-down assumption – the application of a dogma that didn’t actually fit the evidence. Similarly, with the view of Native Americans that I’d previously regarded as an idealization, I can now see that there is actually a lot of good evidence that supports the view that they lived (not perfectly, but) in better harmony with their environment than we have managed (at least in the eastern and central parts of North America). This is particularly, it seems, because they developed a state-like urban civilization at Cahokia and associated sites, but then consciously abandoned it, leaving behind river-valley farming and consciously limiting their numbers to those that could be supported by hunting, gathering, and a little small-scale gardening.

Sacred cows of history are systematically slaughtered throughout this book. You may reconsider your view, not only of all the issues I have already mentioned, but of the origins of farming, the role of women, the origins of ideologies of liberation in the West (which seem to owe a lot to the critique offered by Native Americans), the pivotal role of ‘civilizations’, and the origins of kingship. If there’s an assumption about human history you don’t yet realize you have, this book will make you re-examine it. Personally, I’ve found it immensely valuable to provide a new perspective on aspects of the book I’m currently writing, which is called ‘A Systemic History of the Middle Way’, and incorporates cultural history along with biology and developmental psychology. The Middle Way is a response to absolutization, and one can hardly trace the history of one in any sense without the other. What this book has helped me to do most is to make a clear case that there is no inevitability about absolutization: one can see this in its social expression as power hierarchies as well as in the development of human psychologies. We did not adopt power hierarchies with their attendant dogmas as a matter of course with agriculture and urbanization, any more than we must inevitably adopt metaphysics as a necessary set of assumptions in our thinking. It may seem just as unthinkable to be without either – but all you have to do is to consider the evidence, and open your mind to new possible interpretations of it.

We are not locked into the power-relationships that have brought us the current world crises, any more than we are necessarily locked into the absolute beliefs that are used to justify those power relationships. There are always grounds for hope, because we can always start to adopt the Middle Way of judgement in response to whatever particular set of conditions start to confront us, however many previous mistakes we have made. Now I see further grounds for hope, too, after reading this book: in the past, people have thought and acted in all sorts of ways that we now may consider unthinkable, yet for those people they were normal. We should never limit our understanding of what is possible.

Hiroshima at 75

The 75th anniversary of the first military use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima has been the prompt for London’s Imperial War Museum to commission a a special example of reflective art. Es Devlin and Machiko Weston were preparing an exhibition, but have now produced a remarkable video called ‘I saw the world end’, so we can access their work online instead. This video is well worth watching and reflecting on, so I will embed it below, and it will be followed by some further reflections from me. Is Hiroshima to be a prompt to further conflict, or for learning? Much depends on finding the Middle Way in relation to it. You can see more about the context of the video on the Imperial War Museum site.

One of the things I find most helpful about the video is the way that it combines two perspectives, above and below the line. These can be seen as Western and Japanese, bomber and victim, but they are much more than that. For the most part they use very different sorts of language. Those above the line are scientific and universal: they think in terms of abstract generalities, either in terms of the science that produced the bomb or the justifications that launched it. Below it, however, there is only immediate overwhelmed experience and emotional response: the response of the right hemisphere of the brain that is desperately trying to respond to new experience, rather than the left hemisphere that marks the language above the line. Above the line, too, the language is often passive (rather like academic language, avoiding personalisation), but below the line, the bomb happens to real people in a real situation.

I have been reflecting on the ways that the helpfulness of our response to Hiroshima depends very much on whether we are prepared to straddle that line. A common response for anyone with a degree of sensitivity and compassion today is just to be enormously shocked by what happened, and to immediately feel the bombing to be a monstrous and inhumane action that must never be repeated. As long as we remain with that human experience of what happened and have sympathy with the immense suffering that occurred, we are likely to go on feeling like this. However, if we instead enter the world of the people above the line, we find a very different experience: one of abstract reasoning in which technologies are developed for what are sincerely believed in as humane ends, for the purposes of resisting Fascist regimes that were capable of even greater calculated cruelty than any that might have contributed to Hiroshima. We are in the world of utilitarian reasoning, in which the end justifies the means, and the lesser evil averts the greater one.

The challenge of practising the Middle Way in relation to this topic, as I see it, is to extend our awareness both above and below the line, not prematurely rejecting one tendency above the other, but rather putting them both into as large a context as we can manage. As a former ethics teacher, I have organised debates about the justification of Hiroshima between students, and am aware from this how quickly the whole issue can become over-abstract, as it becomes merely a matter of proving a moral theory, rather than maintaining our sense of what extreme human suffering is actually like. At times it can seem like an insult to the sufferers to debate their fate in the abstract – yet we necessarily do this all the time, whenever we give a specific situation the wider context of its relationship to other situations. At the point of judgement on medical resources, for instance, the suffering of a patient requiring an enormously expensive treatment can no longer be the only thing we consider. We start having to weigh it up against the further suffering that may result by not spending that money on other needful causes. Getting caught up completely below the line can be just as limiting as being caught entirely above it. We have to try to be amphibious, however difficult that may seem.

The utilitarian reasoning for Hiroshima ran along the lines that greater suffering might well result if the Allies continued to fight the war against Japan by conventional means. Japan was deemed unlikely to surrender before the end of the huge bloodbath that a conventional invasion of Japan would have required. The use of nuclear weapons, however, was intended to force a rapid Japanese surrender without this. Of course, such reasoning depends on the accuracy of our assessment of our actions and their likely effects, but in wartime it is very difficult to avoid such reasoning. Similar thinking had already been employed in the war against the Germans when the decision was taken to conceal the fact that the Enigma Code used by German communications had been cracked. Many Allied lives were thus lost in the short term that could have been saved, but in the cause of an ultimate victory. Remarkably, this strategy worked.

So, in my view, we cannot simply dismiss utilitarian reasoning. Utilitarian reasoning is capable of saving the world, and may have already done so. At the same time, we cannot rely on it exclusively, without constantly renewing our wider experience of both the practical and the emotional impact of our actions. However, helpful utilitarian reasoning depends on honest and accurate assessments of the effects of our actions of a kind that are all too rare in practice, taking into account even unknown unknowns as far as we can. Utilitarian reasoning can also be held responsible for much of our past treatment of the environment, and the insufficiently foreseen rebounding effects this is now having on us. There are no single abstract moral theories that can give us all the right answers in any situation, only a toolbox of different responses, and the potential to cultivate the kind of awareness and provisionality we need to use that toolbox wisely. I do not think that we should now try to answer the question of whether Harry Truman’s judgement was right or wrong, because it is our own judgements now that we need to take responsibility for, not his. However, the practice of trying to understand both sides of the question offers valuable resources to us even today.

The New Class Struggle

In recent weeks I have been hacking my way through piles of exam papers, particularly featuring a question about Marx. Although this activity generally requires the suppression of all creative impulses in favour of total concentration, I still haven’t managed to stop myself engaging in some reflections about the relevance or otherwise of Marx’s beliefs about class struggle today, and how it all relates to the Middle Way. Now that I’ve finished the marking, I’m finally at sufficient liberty to write down my thoughts.

In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx and Engels famously described the whole of human history as a history of class struggle. In one way or another, they say, the propertied classes have constantly found new ways of exploiting the unpropertied proletariat, in differing circumstances from ancient slavery to the factory floor. However, they go on, capitalism creates such extreme exploitation that eventually the workers “will have nothing to lose but their chains”. Purified by their total exploitation, they will overthrow the bourgeoisie in a revolution, which will usher in a merely temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, followed by the ultimate stability of the communist society.

The elements of dogma in this story are not too hard to identify. The socio-economic determinism is one: Marx’s ‘inevitable’ story shows no signs of turning out quite like that. The purification of the proletariat through suffering is also a projection that seems to have no basis in psychological, let alone historical, conditions. Far from gaining the ultimate wisdom to finally end social and political conflict, people who are suffering acutely tend to get more stressed and more reactive. It’s only if you are very well prepared for your suffering that you might be able to learn from it, but even then it’s unlikely to bring you to an absolute state of moral perfection.

Nevertheless, the power in Marx’s story, fuelling several revolutions, also suggests to me that there must be some insights in it, mixed in with the dogmas. The story that history is a matter of class struggle does seem potent, because it is indeed quite possible to analyse history in that way.  More profoundly, though, class struggles are also struggles within individuals, who identify with different sets of beliefs that may either prioritise narrow economic interests or wider values. Those conflicting values also defy resolution because they are framed in absolute terms. When you feel that you have to choose between your job and your conscience, for instance, that is ‘class struggle’ in a the wider sense, whether you are a nineteenth century mill worker or a modern Conservative Member of Parliament. You can focus on class struggle sociologically and ignore the psychology (as Marx did), or you can focus on resolving the psychology of the personal struggle and ignore its political dimension (as in the recent phenomenon of ‘McMindfulness’), but the phenomena you are dealing will have all these dimensions, and the tendency to ignore some of them is an unfortunate result of over-specialisation.

Property can provide powerful vested interests, but vested interest is not the only human motivation, so I cannot agree with Marx’s assumption that the story of class conflict is only about the division between those who have property and those who do not. Instead, it seems to me more powerfully to be between those who absolutise narrow motives (including, but not limited to, property interests) and those who, whilst remaining human and having interests, are capable of thinking provisionally about them and weighing up different values. Ironically enough, those who are capable of doing this quite often have a modest amount of property, which has given them enough security to be able to start thinking provisionally. Those who have no property at all are often (but not always) so insecure that it’s difficult for them to avoid thinking in absolute ways that are constantly fuelled by craving and anxiety. No, the proletariat are not purified by their suffering. Rather their suffering makes them easier for unscrupulous absolutists to exploit.

So what is the class struggle today? Well, we are in the midst of it. The US and the UK particularly are currently wracked by political conflict that seems to have a strong class basis. That political conflict involves ongoing polarised disagreement about climate change, about nationalism, about social justice, about the rights of minorities, and about the role of the state, along with many other associated issues. It’s not a conflict between the property-owning bourgeoisie and the propertyless proletariat though. Rather it’s primarily a conflict between, on the one hand, a cabal of autocrats and billionaires with their numerous stooges, and on the other, middle class intellectuals. Not all members of any particular socio-economic group are necessarily on one side or the other – there are still middle class intellectual climate change denialists, working class internationalists, and billionaire liberals. Nevertheless, the conflicts have a strong class dimension as well as a psychological and philosophical dimension. It would be surprising if they didn’t, given how important social class is to our identity.

The ‘middle class intellectual’ class has not been merely created by material conditions and accompanying vested interests, as Marx would tell us. Rather, they have come to appreciate conditions better, and overcome some of their biases, by having their minds opened in one of a variety of possible ways. University education and professional training provide the most common vectors for it (as shown in Robert Kegan’s work on the contexts for what he calls stage 4 and 5 adult psychological development). Travel, friendship, study, art, and religious experience all provide other possible routes to bigger perspectives that may help to inoculate you against becoming a stooge.

The new propertied exploiters, on the other hand, are defined either by their narrow focus on power and economic advantage, or by other dominant absolute beliefs that facilitate that exploitation (such as religious fundamentalism). The majority of their supporters, though, are subject to what Marx called ‘false consciousness’: that is, they have been influenced into a set of beliefs that are against their own long-term best interests. The sources of false consciousness now come overwhelmingly from media manipulation that can apparently be traced back to autocrats and billionaires, from Fox News to the Daily Mail to Russian troll factories. This media bias chart provides a useful reference of the sources of such manipulation (which are found on left as well as right, but are overwhelmingly weighted towards the right). The strong links between climate change denial, the fossil fuel industry, and right wing politics are also confirmed by a number of academic studies.

In Marx’s analysis, intractable class conflict can come to an end only through violent revolution that breaks the mould of the system. Unfortunately this seems to be another of his delusions, if the evidence of actual revolutions is anything to go by. A revolution may change those in power, but it is unlikely to change the systemic patterns of interaction, which are likely to reassert themselves to a greater or lesser degree (as they did in the Soviet Union). The stakes in our new class conflict, though, are far higher than just the exploitation of one class. The very survival of human civilisation is at stake. The conflict may end in the ‘revolution’ of the destruction of all, or it may be gradually ameliorated through changes in the ways that we respond to conditions. Either way, though, the middle-class intellectuals will evidently prevail in the long-run, just as Marx predicted that the proletariat would prevail, either by being proved right or by running the world their way. That’s not because they’ve been purified or because their perspective is perfect, but rather because they imperfectly recognise that their perspective is imperfect when their opponents do not.

Is this another story as incredible as Marx’s? I think it identifies some of Marx’s insights (class conflict, its intractability, its relationship to ideology, its asymmetry, and the nature of false consciousness) whilst also drawing attention to his dogmas (determinism, absolutisation of vested interest, purification of suffering) and limitations (ignorance of psychology, ignorance of ecology). Marx was concerned, most basically, with how people address conditions, but the ‘science’ with which he interpreted this was heavily loaded with false assumptions. The updated story I’m offering in its place may also be based on some false assumptions, but at least it is based to some degree of recognition of the need to address such assumptions (Marx tended, instead, to say that his story was ‘science’ and everyone else’s was ‘ideology’).

I expect some of the first reactions to that alternative story to be based on false equivalence, which is a common absolutist strategy (think of Trump drawing equivalences between white supremacist demonstrators and their opponents). For an absolutist, everything is dual, and there can be no such thing as better judgement through provisionality. Their opponents are therefore always assumed to be as absolute as they are, and they will insist on reducing all complexity to that equivalence. Incremental marks of credibility (such as expertise, relative lack of vested interest, ability to observe, and corroboration) as well as every kind of evidence and every widely-used value, are ground down by absolutists into the same false equivalence. However, as Marx recognised, the class struggle is asymmetrical. One side is right and the other wrong (even if it’s not always clear who is on each side), because the wrong side is entirely blinded by its assumptions, totally immersed in confirmation bias. We are all subject to confirmation bias, but some of us are facing up to this fact and others are not.

The other objection I am expecting will be to point out a false dichotomy. “It’s not as simple as that,” you may say. “Surely there were not just two conflicting classes in Marx’s day, and there aren’t now either?” I agree. I am only trying to make sense of the idea of “class conflict” by separating out the elements that seem to demonstrably cause conflict from those that are just Marxian dogmas. However, any generalisations we make about “classes”, especially when they involve determinately dividing people up, are fraught with all kinds of complex difficulties. That’s why I only want to define the “classes” in terms of their relationships to absolutisation. Whenever you or I are dominated by absolutisation, we’re in the repressive class, as exploiters or their stooges, even if we’re middle-class intellectuals. If we cease to do so and start to judge provisionally, even if we’re in the pay of Fox News, we cease at least temporarily to be in that exploitative class. We cannot define the classes sociologically in any way that I find remotely satisfactory. The social categories I have used above can only be proxies for psychological ones, and are just ways of pointing out that the psychological conditions do have constant social implications.

Psychologically, too, absolutism is not defined by counter-absolutism, but by its own assumptions.  Once again, then, we also see that the Middle Way is not a compromise. If we respond to absolutists with counter-absolutism (as some left-wing absolutists do) we become absolutists. However, if we respond critically but with confident provisionality, we are not being dogmatic. The practice of the Middle Way is provisionality, not compromise, and the confidence with which it needs to be taken up must not be automatically mistaken for dogma. The Middle Way seems to be the only practical solution to the class conflict that so much concerned Marx.

The Age of Wonder

Over-specialisation, with its attendant false dualities between different areas of thought, is in my view a major issue of our time. It even affects our widespread current inability to face up to the climate crisis, as the authority of specialised experts is such a matter of conflict wherever scientists have to communicate unpalatable findings to the wider population. Surely, I often reflect, if we had a slightly more adequate education system in which both critical thinking and general psychological awareness featured more strongly, it would be a good deal harder for opportunistic denialists to gain such a popular following, and the politics of facing up to difficulty would be at least a bit easier? There are potential future ways of healing the rift – if we have a future, that is.

From time to time, though, I find contemplating the current and likely future situation too much to bear, and take refuge in the past. The past, particularly, before all this specialisation – of the gentleman scholar and the polymathic clergyman. In no way do I want to idealise the past, but it does show us in some ways, not only that things can be done differently, but that they have been. The difference is nearly always that in the past, the things that were better only applied to a very small minority, whereas now our expectations have risen to such an extent that we expect everyone to share in any improvement. When I look (with a temptation of nostalgia) at a less specialised past I have to keep reminding myself of this. Nevertheless, the intellectual integration that some groups managed in the past can still potentially be developed by a wider population in the future.

My appreciation of a pre-specialist past has been boosted recently by reading a book by Richard Holmes (best known as a biographer of Romantic English poets), called ‘The Age of Wonder’, published in 2008. This book offers an account of a crucial phase in the development of science (focusing especially on Britain), from around 1770 to around 1830, but also highlights its constant connections with the Romantic movement. It may come as news to many that during this period all scientists, as well as other thinkers, were still known as ‘philosophers’, as they were in ancient Greece. Such great figures as Joseph Banks (botanist and anthropologist), Humphrey Davy (chemist) and William Herschel (astronomer) described themselves as ‘natural philosophers’. Herschel was also a musician and Davy a poet. Davy was a close friend of Coleridge, Southey and other poets: the arts and the sciences actually talked to each other and maintained an integrated view of the world!

The theme of wonder, that gives the title to the book, is an important one. Poets and scientists were united by wonder, and wonder is an open emotion implying a strong continuing access to experiential right hemisphere perspectives. Though of course none of these figures were free of dogmatic assumptions, their sense of wonder, and their social sharing of it, could provide a check to the tendency of a specialised theoretical perspective to assume that its view of the world provides a total explanation. Not only did this make these great early scientists apparently open to new forms of discovery, but it also made them much more flexible in their use of their expertise than one would expect from a modern academic. Sir Humphrey Davy not only pioneered our understanding of the constituent gases of the atmosphere, the carbon cycle, and the isolation of substances like chlorine and iodine through electrolysis, but he also developed a safety lamp that greatly reduced the likelihood of coal miners dying in gas explosions. Today that would be considered the work of a technologist, not a scientist, but in Davy’s day there were no such distinctions.

There was wonder, too, in William Herschel’s astronomical achievements. Not only did he discover Uranus, but he was also the first to recognise the vast distances between the Earth and the stars, together with the existence of galaxies. He did this partly by developing larger and better telescopes, but also (on his own account) by just learning to look at the stars. Observation became not just a matter of passively watching, but rather a matter of actively altering your method of observation so that the visual data coming through the telescope made sense. There was wondering receptivity as well as theoretical expectation there, in a form that can add to our confidence that Herschel was not merely observing what he wanted to observe. We can never entirely rid ourselves of confirmation bias, but we can definitely make a difference.

In the hands of these inspirational early scientists, science often seems like a Middle Way practice – one in which we are constantly adjusting our view of the world in the light of new experiences and perspectives, rather than seeking only to confirm or deny. Of course, there are also many modern scientists who take this approach. There are also far more educated people in the population able to understand what they do than there were in 1830. Nevertheless, it seems to me that something important has been lost, not always in individual attitudes, but primarily in the educational and academic system that frequently isolates those individuals from each others’ perspectives. Academics can usually only compete effectively in their specialised niches by hardening their assumptions to fit the social expectations of that discipline. The relentless managerialist emphasis on ‘efficiency’ of research in modern academic life also removes much of the leisure enjoyed by those in the Age of Wonder, and so further closes the doors of wider exploration.

There are also many signs of a thirst for a return for that lost interdisciplinarity today. Recently I was intrigued to learn of the launch of the London Interdisciplinary School, due to open its doors in 2020 to an entirely interdisciplinary cohort of students. They were looking for founding faculty, so I applied, but I’ve since heard that they had 612 applications for 6 places. I thus don’t expect to be successful, but this tells you something about how much pent-up longing there is to get back, in some sense, to the age of philosophers worthy of the name (ones who are not just experts in Dismissiveness Studies).

The Age of Wonder is after all still going on, and will continue as long as we are capable of wonder.  We’ll be capable of wonder as long as we can reach out beyond our own little niches of assumption – whatever they are. As long as we’re capable of wonder, we’ll also be capable of creative discovery.

The MWS Podcast 133: Jeremy Lent on the Patterning Instinct

Our guest today is the author and integrator Jeremy Lent. Jeremy grew up in the UK but has spent most of his adult life in the US, where earlier in his career, he was the founder, chairman and CEO of the internet company NextCard. His writings investigate the patterns of thought that have led civilization to its current crisis of sustainability. He is the founder of the non-profit Liology Institute, which is dedicated to a worldview that enables humanity to thrive sustainably. He is the author of Requiem of the ‘Human Soul’ and ‘The Patterning Instinct’ the latter of which will be the topic of our discussion.