为什么几乎所有古典国家都是基于谷物建立的？
James C. Scott,
2017. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University
Press.
讲述人类历史时，主流叙述通常将其视为一个进步的过程，文明的过程，建立公共秩序的过程。人类社会从采集狩猎走向游牧，又从游牧走向农业，从部落到村庄，从村庄到城市。每一步都代表者人类伟大的进步：更多的闲暇，更好的营养，更长的寿命，定居生活促进了艺术创造和人类文明发展。
现代人类不过20万年历史，人类历史大部分时间都以采集狩猎为生。直到12000年前，人类历史发展决定性转折时刻：新石器革命，从旧石器狩猎采集文化转向定居农业，驯化动物，种植庄稼，最重要的庄稼是谷物，包括小麦、大麦、稻米和玉米，至今仍是人类的主食。谷物使得人口增长、城市出现、国家形成和复杂社会产生。从此农业文明取代了野蛮、荒野、原始、无法无天、暴力的采集狩猎和游牧的世界。农业种植是定居生活、宗教和法治社会的起源和保障。
几乎在每一个农业起源地都流传着关于农业发明的传说，讲述某个法力强大的神或者女神把神圣的谷物种子交给选中的凡人。其中暗含一个假设：定居生活比采集狩猎生活方式更优越，更吸引人。
果真如此吗？
耶鲁大学政治学教授詹姆斯・C・斯科特（James C. Scott）在《反对谷物：最早国家的深度历史》一书基于最近二十年的考古发现和历史研究，质疑这一主流叙述，并从谷物与早期国家形成的关系来解释智人为何放弃了采集狩猎，转向定居生活方式，与驯化的畜生和庄稼比邻而居，并在我们今天称之为国家的前身的统治下生活？
斯科特并不是第一个质疑农业和农业革命的人。贾雷德·戴蒙德曾经把农业的发明称为“人类史上最大的错误”（枪炮、病菌与钢铁：人类社会的命运），农业使人类劳作时间更长、更辛苦、身材更矮小、营养更差、牙齿更坏、死得更早等。尤瓦尔·赫拉利把农业革命称为“史上最大的骗局”。无论从饮食、健康和闲暇时间来看，农民都比采集狩猎者过得差。饮食从采集狩猎者的杂食变成以谷物为主，不仅矿物质和维生素含量不足，对牙齿和牙龈大大有害，身高变矮。农民与牲畜比邻而居，死于人畜之间传染疾病的可能性大增。从民生经济来说，采集者有几十种不同食物维生，碰到荒年不用担心饿死；农业社会依靠寥寥几种农作物，很多地方只有一种主食，遇到灾害，容易发生饥荒。就暴力危险来说，农业社会为保护田地、房屋和存粮，死于暴力概率大大增加。
《反对谷物》一书从谷物与早期国家形成之间的关系论述为什么农业的发明对于多数人是一场灾难。斯科特认为，最早的农业国家脱胎于驯化的累积：先是火，然后是植物、动物、国家统治的对象、俘虏、父权制家庭里的女性——都是控制繁殖的方式。斯科特的专长并非早期人类历史，而是从农民的视角批判国家的形成，他的观点可从他出版的专著窥见一二，《农民的道义经济学》、《弱者的武器》、《统治与抵抗的艺术》和《国家的视角》等。其中，最广为人知的当属《国家的视角》，批判中央计划经济和极端现代主义。斯科特的新书《反对谷物》把这些观点延伸到远古，并基于最新的研究发现论述人类历史并非线性过程，时间线更为复杂，标准主流论述把因果顺序搞错了。斯科特的论述集中于美索不达米亚（现代伊拉克），是最早出现国家这一新型社会组织的地方，也是最早有文字记录的国家，同时还是近东和埃及地区国家发展的模板。
近期最大的考古发现莫过于在定居生活方式与采用农业之间存在时间差。以往研究认为农业的发明使得定居生活成为可能，但最新考古证据表明，两者存在一个巨大的时间差，从“两个关键的驯化”（动物与庄稼的驯化）到第一个农业经济出现两者之间存在4000年的差距。农业发明之后很久，方才成为一种新的生活方式。美索不达米亚是一个湿地三角洲，河网纵横，名字意思是“河流之间”，河里有鱼，陆地有动物，猎物众多，食物来源丰富，适宜人类定居。美索不达米亚最早的定居地的出现，不是因为人类开始从事农业，而是因为湿地提供了丰富的食物来源。依赖单一作物的农业种植风险太大，难怪直到几千年后人类生计才转向农业。
为什么当时的人类祖先要放弃复杂的食物供应网络，转向单一庄稼的种植？并没有确定的答案。斯科特认为气候变化可能是一个原因。但有两点很清楚，第一，农业革命对大多数人而言是一场灾难。化石记录显示农民的生活比采集狩猎者艰难多了。骨骼显示饮食的压力：农民更矮、更多病、死亡率更高。与驯化的动物同住，人畜之间的传染病，足以毁灭密集居住社区。斯科特将其称之为“新石器时代晚期的多物种集中营”。
第二，谷物庄稼的种植与最早的国家的产生之间存在关键的联系。谷物并非人类唯一的主食，但是谷物是唯一利于国家产生的主食。“基本上所有古典国家都是基于谷物（包括小米）。历史上没有木薯国家，没有西米、山药、芋头、大蕉、面包果或者红薯国家”。谷物有什么特别之处？原因在于，谷物易于课税。有的粮食，例如土豆、红薯、木薯等可以埋起来，躲过收税官，就算被发现，需要费力从地里挖出来。其他粮食，例如豆类，要么在不同时期成熟，要么在整个生长季节都可以收获，没有一个从生到熟的固定轨迹，换言之，收税官没法来一次就收齐税。只有谷物是“可见的、可分的、可量化的、可储存的、可运输的以及可定量配给的”，其他粮食只具有部分上述特点，只有谷物具有上述全部好处，因此谷物成为人类的主食，实物纳税的单元以及农业日历的基础。课税官可以前来评估田地价值，设定纳税水平，然后在成熟收获的时候索取他的份额。
斯科特认为，正是这种可以从农业产出中课税、攫取剩余的能力导致了国家的产生、复杂等级社会的出现、劳动力分工、专业人士（士兵、牧师、仆人、行政人员）和精英统治阶层的产生。国家需要大量的体力劳动灌溉农田，需要不同形式（包括奴隶）的强迫劳动力，获得奴隶最容易的方式就是俘虏，因此国家有发动战争的倾向。
文字的发明使得战争、奴隶、精英统治变得更加容易。没有系统地数字记录技术，最早的国家就不可能产生。隔着时间的距离，我们只看到文字美好的一面：文字记录文化、娱乐、交流和集体记忆。但是在美索不达米亚，在文字发明后的五百年时间里，文字完全用于记账，用一套复杂的符号系统记录社会、人力和农业产出，使得统治者和官员一目了然，用于攫取谷物和劳动力。每一块文字泥板都由各种名单组成，按出现的频率排名的名单主题分别为大麦、战俘、男奴、女奴。德国犹太文化批评家本杰明曾说过，“每一个文明的记录，同时也是野蛮的记录”。
生活在国家定居文化之外的人类历史对于理解整个人类历史非常重要。否则，人类历史只是是一个简单的进步的故事：在大多数的时间里，大多数的人类过着悲惨的生活，然后人类发展了文明，一切都变好了。如果在大多数的时间里大多数的人类生活并不悲惨，那么文明的到来就是一桩模棱两可的事情。账簿的一列，可以列出复杂物质文化发展带来的现代科学、医学和艺术奇迹；账簿的另一列，可以列出不那么好的东西，例如瘟疫、战争、奴隶、社会分层、精英阶层无情的统治和剥削。
The
Case Against Civilization
Did our hunter-gatherer
ancestors have it better?
By John Lanchester
Science and
technology: we tend to think of them as siblings, perhaps even as twins, as
parts of stem (for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics”). When
it comes to the shiniest wonders of the modern world—as the supercomputers in
our pockets communicate with satellites—science and technology are indeed hand
in glove. For much of human history, though, technology had nothing to do with
science. Many of our most significant inventions are pure tools, with no
scientific method behind them. Wheels and wells, cranks and mills and gears and
ships’ masts, clocks and rudders and crop rotation: all have been crucial to
human and economic development, and none historically had any connection with
what we think of today as science. Some of the most important things we use
every day were invented long before the adoption of the scientific method. I
love my laptop and my iPhone and my Echo and my G.P.S., but the piece of technology
I would be most reluctant to give up, the one that changed my life from the
first day I used it, and that I’m still reliant on every waking hour—am reliant
on right now, as I sit typing—dates from the thirteenth century: my glasses.
Soap prevented more deaths than penicillin. That’s technology, not science.
In “Against the
Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,” James C. Scott, a professor of
political science at Yale, presents a plausible contender for the most
important piece of technology in the history of man. It is a technology so old
that it predates Homo sapiens and instead should be credited to our ancestor
Homo erectus. That technology is fire. We have used it in two crucial, defining
ways. The first and the most obvious of these is cooking. As Richard Wrangham
has argued in his book “Catching Fire,” our ability to cook allows us to
extract more energy from the food we eat, and also to eat a far wider range of
foods. Our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, has a colon three times as large
as ours, because its diet of raw food is so much harder to digest. The extra
caloric value we get from cooked food allowed us to develop our big brains,
which absorb roughly a fifth of the energy we consume, as opposed to less than
a tenth for most mammals’ brains. That difference is what has made us the
dominant species on the planet.
The other reason
fire was central to our history is less obvious to contemporary eyes: we used
it to adapt the landscape around us to our purposes. Hunter-gatherers would set
fires as they moved, to clear terrain and make it ready for fast-growing,
prey-attracting new plants. They would also drive animals with fire. They used
this technology so much that, Scott thinks, we should date the human-dominated
phase of earth, the so-called Anthropocene, from the time our forebears
mastered this new tool.
We don’t give
the technology of fire enough credit, Scott suggests, because we don’t give our
ancestors much credit for their ingenuity over the long period—ninety-five per
cent of human history—during which most of our species were hunter-gatherers.
“Why human fire as landscape architecture doesn’t register as it ought to in
our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds
of millennia and were accomplished by ‘precivilized’ peoples also known as
‘savages,’ ” Scott writes. To demonstrate the significance of fire, he points
to what we’ve found in certain caves in southern Africa. The earliest, oldest
strata of the caves contain whole skeletons of carnivores and many chewed-up
bone fragments of the things they were eating, including us. Then comes the
layer from when we discovered fire, and ownership of the caves switches: the
human skeletons are whole, and the carnivores are bone fragments. Fire is the difference
between eating lunch and being lunch.
Anatomically
modern humans have been around for roughly two hundred thousand years. For most
of that time, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, about twelve thousand years
ago, came what is generally agreed to be the definitive before-and-after moment
in our ascent to planetary dominance: the Neolithic Revolution. This was our
adoption of, to use Scott’s word, a “package” of agricultural innovations,
notably the domestication of animals such as the cow and the pig, and the
transition from hunting and gathering to planting and cultivating crops. The
most important of these crops have been the cereals—wheat, barley, rice, and
maize—that remain the staples of humanity’s diet. Cereals allowed population
growth and the birth of cities, and, hence, the development of states and the
rise of complex societies.
The story told
in “Against the Grain” heavily revises this widely held account. Scott’s
specialty is not early human history. His work has focussed on a skeptical,
peasant’s-eye view of state formation; the trajectory of his interests can be
traced in the titles of his books, from “The Moral Economy of the Peasant” to
“The Art of Not Being Governed.” His best-known book, “Seeing Like a State,”
has become a touchstone for political scientists, and amounts to a blistering
critique of central planning and “high modernism,” the idea that officials at
the center of a state know better than the people they are governing. Scott
argues that a state’s interests and the interests of subjects are often not
just different but opposite. Stalin’s project of farm collectivization “served
well enough as a means whereby the state could determine cropping patterns, fix
real rural wages, appropriate a large share of whatever grain was produced, and
politically emasculate the countryside”; it also killed many millions of
peasants.
Scott’s new book
extends these ideas into the deep past, and draws on existing research to argue
that ours is not a story of linear progress, that the time line is much more
complicated, and that the causal sequences of the standard version are wrong.
He focusses his account on Mesopotamia—roughly speaking, modern-day
Iraq—because it is “the heartland of the first ‘pristine’ states in the world,”
the term “pristine” here meaning that these states bore no watermark from
earlier settlements and were the first time any such social organizations had
existed. They were the first states to have written records, and they became a
template for other states in the Near East and in Egypt, making them doubly
relevant to later history.
The big news to
emerge from recent archeological research concerns the time lag between
“sedentism,” or living in settled communities, and the adoption of agriculture.
Previous scholarship held that the invention of agriculture made sedentism
possible. The evidence shows that this isn’t true: there’s an enormous gap—four
thousand years—separating the “two key domestications,” of animals and cereals,
from the first agrarian economies based on them. Our ancestors evidently took a
good, hard look at the possibility of agriculture before deciding to adopt this
new way of life. They were able to think it over for so long because the life
they lived was remarkably abundant. Like the early civilization of China in the
Yellow River Valley, Mesopotamia was a wetland territory, as its name (“between
the rivers”) suggests. In the Neolithic period, Mesopotamia was a delta
wetland, where the sea came many miles inland from its current shore.
This was a
generous landscape for humans, offering fish and the animals that preyed on
them, fertile soil left behind by regular flooding, migratory birds, and
migratory prey travelling near river routes. The first settled communities were
established here because the land offered such a diverse web of food sources.
If one year a food source failed, another would still be present. The
archeology shows, then, that the “Neolithic package” of domestication and
agriculture did not lead to settled communities, the ancestors of our modern
towns and cities and states. Those communities had been around for thousands of
years, living in the bountiful conditions of the wetlands, before humanity
committed to intensive agriculture. Reliance on a single, densely planted
cereal crop was much riskier, and it’s no wonder people took a few millennia to
make the change.
So why did our
ancestors switch from this complex web of food supplies to the concentrated
production of single crops? We don’t know, although Scott speculates that
climatic stress may have been involved. Two things, however, are clear. The
first is that, for thousands of years, the agricultural revolution was, for
most of the people living through it, a disaster. The fossil record shows that
life for agriculturalists was harder than it had been for hunter-gatherers.
Their bones show evidence of dietary stress: they were shorter, they were
sicker, their mortality rates were higher. Living in close proximity to
domesticated animals led to diseases that crossed the species barrier, wreaking
havoc in the densely settled communities. Scott calls them not towns but
“late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps.” Who would choose to live in
one of those? Jared Diamond called the Neolithic Revolution “the worst mistake
in human history.” The startling thing about this claim is that, among
historians of the era, it isn’t very controversial.
The other
conclusion we can draw from the evidence, Scott says, is that there is a
crucial, direct link between the cultivation of cereal crops and the birth of
the first states. It’s not that cereal grains were humankind’s only staples;
it’s just that they were the only ones that encouraged the formation of states.
“History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit or
sweet potato states,” he writes. What was so special about grains? The answer
will make sense to anyone who has ever filled out a Form 1040: grain, unlike
other crops, is easy to tax. Some crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava) are
buried and so can be hidden from the tax collector, and, even if discovered,
they must be dug up individually and laboriously. Other crops (notably,
legumes) ripen at different intervals, or yield harvests throughout a growing
season rather than along a fixed trajectory of unripe to ripe—in other words,
the taxman can’t come once and get his proper due. Only grains are, in Scott’s
words, “visible, divisible,
assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ ” Other crops have some
of these advantages, but only cereal grains have them all, and so grain became
“the main food starch, the unit of taxation in kind, and the basis for a
hegemonic agrarian calendar.” The taxman can come, assess the fields, set a
level of tax, then come back and make sure he’s got his share of the harvest.
It was the
ability to tax and to extract a surplus from the produce of agriculture that,
in Scott’s account, led to the birth of the state, and also to the creation of
complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs
(soldier, priest, servant, administrator), and an élite presiding over them.
Because the new states required huge amounts of manual work to irrigate the
cereal crops, they also required forms of forced labor, including slavery;
because the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them, the states had a
new propensity for waging war. Some of the earliest images in human history,
from the first Mesopotamian states, are of slaves being marched along in neck
shackles. Add this to the frequent epidemics and the general ill health of
early settled communities and it is not hard to see why the latest consensus is
that the Neolithic Revolution was a disaster for most of the people who lived
through it.
War, slavery,
rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control:
writing. “It is virtually impossible to conceive of even the earliest states
without a systematic technology of numerical record keeping,” Scott maintains.
All the good things we associate with writing—its use for culture and
entertainment and communication and collective memory—were some distance in the
future. For half a thousand years after its invention, in Mesopotamia, writing
was used exclusively for bookkeeping: “the massive effort through a system of
notation to make a society, its manpower, and its production legible to its
rulers and temple officials, and to extract grain and labor from it.” Early
tablets consist of “lists, lists and lists,” Scott says, and the subjects of
that record-keeping are, in order of frequency, “barley (as rations and taxes),
war captives, male and female slaves.” Walter Benjamin, the great German Jewish
cultural critic, who committed suicide while trying to escape Nazi-controlled
Europe, said that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the
same time a document of barbarism.” He meant that every complicated and
beautiful thing humanity ever made has, if you look at it long enough, a
shadow, a history of oppression. As a matter of plain historical fact, that
seems right. It was a long and traumatic journey from the invention of writing
to your book club’s discussion of Jodi Picoult’s latest.
We need to
rethink, accordingly, what we mean when we talk about ancient “dark ages.”
Scott’s question is trenchant: “ ‘dark’ for whom and in what respects”? The historical
record shows that early cities and states were prone to sudden implosion. “Over
the roughly five millennia of sporadic sedentism before states (seven millennia
if we include preagriculture sedentism in Japan and the Ukraine),” he writes,
“archaeologists have recorded hundreds of locations that were settled, then
abandoned, perhaps resettled, and then again abandoned.” These events are
usually spoken of as “collapses,” but Scott invites us to scrutinize that term,
too. When states collapse, fancy buildings stop being built, the élites no
longer run things, written records stop being kept, and the mass of the
population goes to live somewhere else. Is that a collapse, in terms of living
standards, for most people? Human beings mainly lived outside the purview of
states until—by Scott’s reckoning—about the year 1600 A.D. Until that date,
marking the last two-tenths of one per cent of humanity’s political life, “much
of the world’s population might never have met that hallmark of the state: a
tax collector.”
The question of
what it was like to live outside the settled culture of a state is therefore an
important one for the over-all assessment of human history. If that life was,
as Thomas Hobbes described it, “nasty, brutish, and short,” this is a vital piece
of information for drawing up the account of how we got to be who we are. In
essence, human history would become a straightforward story of progress: most
of us were miserable most of the time, we developed civilization, everything
got better. If most of us weren’t miserable most of the time, the arrival of
civilization is a more ambiguous event. In one column of the ledger, we would
have the development of a complex material culture permitting the glories of
modern science and medicine and the accumulated wonders of art. In the other
column, we would have the less good stuff, such as plague, war, slavery, social
stratification, rule by mercilessly appropriating élites, and Simon Cowell.
To know what it
is like to live as people lived for most of human history, you would have to
find one of the places where traditional hunting-and-gathering practices are
still alive. You would have to spend a lot of time there, to make sure that
what you were seeing wasn’t just a snapshot, and that you had a real sense of
the texture of lived experience; and, ideally, you would need a point of
comparison, people with close similarities to your hunter-gatherers, but who
lived differently, so that you would have a scientific “control” that allowed
you to rule out local accidents of circumstance. Fortunately for us, the
anthropologist James Suzman did exactly that: he spent more than two decades
visiting, studying, and living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari, in southwest
Africa. It’s a story he recounts in his new book, “Affluence Without Abundance:
The Disappearing World of the Bushmen.”
The Bushmen have
long been of interest to anthropologists and scientists. About a hundred and
fifty thousand years ago, fifty thousand years after the emergence of the first
anatomically modern humans, one group of Homo sapiens was living in southern
Africa. The Bushmen, or Khoisan, are still there: the oldest growth on the
human family tree. (The term “Bushman,” once derogatory, is now used by the
people themselves, and by N.G.O.s, “invoking as it does a set of positive if
romantic stereotypes,” Suzman notes, though some Khoisan prefer to use the term
“San.”) The genetic evidence suggests that, for much of that hundred and fifty
thousand years, they were the largest population of biologically modern humans.
Their languages use palatal clicks, such as a tsk, made by bringing the tongue
back from the front teeth while gently sucking in air, and the “click” we make
by pushing the tongue against the roof of the mouth, then bringing it suddenly downward.
This raises the fascinating possibility that click languages are the oldest
surviving variety of speech.
Suzman first
visited the Bushmen in 1992, and went to stay with them two years later, as
part of the research for his Ph.D. The group he knows best are the Ju/’hoansi,
between eight and ten thousand of whom are alive today, occupying the
borderlands between Namibia and Botswana. (The phonetic mark /’ represents a
tsk.) The Ju/’hoansi are about ten per cent of the total Bushman population in
southern Africa, and they are divided into a northern group, who retain
significant control over their traditional lands, and who therefore still have
the ability to practice hunting and gathering, and a southern group, who were
deprived of their lands and “resettled” into modern ways of living.
To a remarkable
extent, Suzman’s study of the Bushmen supports the ideas of “Against the
Grain.” The encounter with modernity has been disastrous for the Bushmen:
Suzman’s portrait of the dispossessed, alienated, suffering Ju/’hoansi in their
miserable resettlement camps makes that clear. The two books even confirm each
other’s account of that sinister new technology called writing. Suzman’s
Bushman mentor, !A/ae, “noted that whenever he started work at any new farm, his
name would be entered into an employment ledger, documents that over the
decades had assumed great mystical power among Ju/’hoansi on the farms. The
secrets held by these ledgers evidently had the power to give or withhold pay,
issue rations, and determine an individual’s right to stay on any particular
farm.”
It turns out
that hunting and gathering is a good way to live. A study from 1966 found that
it took a Ju/’hoansi only about seventeen hours a week, on average, to find an
adequate supply of food; another nineteen hours were spent on domestic
activities and chores. The average caloric intake of the hunter-gatherers was
twenty-three hundred a day, close to the recommended amount. At the time these
figures were first established, a comparable week in the United States involved
forty hours of work and thirty-six of domestic labor. Ju/’hoansi do not
accumulate surpluses; they get all the food they need, and then stop. They
exhibit what Suzman calls “an unyielding confidence” that their environment
will provide for their needs.
The web of food
sources that the hunting-and-gathering Ju/’hoansi use is, exactly as Scott
argues for Neolithic people, a complex one, with a wide range of animal
protein, including porcupines, kudu, wildebeests, and elephants, and a hundred
and twenty-five edible plant species, with different seasonal cycles,
ecological niches, and responses to weather fluctuations. Hunter-gatherers need
not only an unwritten almanac of dietary knowledge but what Scott calls a
“library of almanacs.” As he suggests, the step-down in complexity between
hunting and gathering and domesticated agriculture is as big as the step-down
between domesticated agriculture and routine assembly work on a production
line.
The news here is
that the lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think. We’re
flattering ourselves by believing that their existence was so grim and that our
modern, civilized one is, by comparison, so great. Still, we are where we are,
and we live the way we live, and it’s possible to wonder whether any of this
illuminating knowledge about our hunter-gatherer ancestors can be useful to us.
Suzman wonders the same thing. He discusses John Maynard Keynes’s famous 1930
essay “The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Keynes speculated
that if the world continued to get richer we would naturally end up enjoying a
high standard of living while doing much less work. He thought that “the
economic problem” of having enough to live on would be solved, and “the
struggle for subsistence” would be over:
When the accumulation of wealth is
no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of
morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral
principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have
exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of
the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the
money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as
distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities
of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one
of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over
with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
The world has
indeed got richer, but any such shift in morals and values is hard to detect.
Money and the value system around its acquisition are fully intact. Greed is
still good.
The study of
hunter-gatherers, who live for the day and do not accumulate surpluses, shows
that humanity can live more or less as Keynes suggests. It’s just that we’re
choosing not to. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies
in the ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. For example, the most
valuable thing a hunter can do is come back with meat. Unlike gathered plants,
whose proceeds are “not subject to any strict conventions on sharing,” hunted
meat is very carefully distributed according to protocol, and the people who
eat the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it.
This ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and it is designed to make sure the
hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than
anyone else. “When a young man kills much meat,” a Bushman told the
anthropologist Richard B. Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a
big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. . . . We
can’t accept this.” The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make him
gentle.” For these hunter-gatherers, Suzman writes, “the sum of individual
self-interest and the jealousy that policed it was a fiercely egalitarian
society where profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material
inequality were not tolerated.”
This egalitarian
impulse, Suzman suggests, is central to the hunter-gatherer’s ability to live a
life that is, on its own terms, affluent, but without abundance, without
excess, and without competitive acquisition. The secret ingredient seems to be
the positive harnessing of the general human impulse to envy. As he says, “If
this kind of egalitarianism is a precondition for us to embrace a post-labor
world, then I suspect it may prove a very hard nut to crack.” There’s a lot
that we could learn from the oldest extant branch of humanity, but that doesn’t
mean we’re going to put the knowledge into effect. A socially positive use of
envy—now, that would be a technology almost as useful as fire.
This article appears in other versions of the September 18, 2017,
issue, with the headline “How Civilization Started.”
John Lanchester, the author of “How to Speak Money,” is a
contributing editor at The London Review of Books, and has written for The New
Yorker since 1995.Read more »
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