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Who We've Been, Who We Could Be: Part 2
Yesterday, I used what little I knew about Born to Run (which I've requested from inter-library loan) to talk about what our physical past might teach us about ourselves, how where we've been can help us think about where we're going. In passing, I mentioned that this could be true of our cultural selves as well, and I wanted to expand on that, especially as I don't recall ever having talked about this on my blog, though it's something I've been thinking about since before I had a blog.
I'm thinking here of ideas developed by Daniel Quinn in just about every book, though Ishmael, My Ishmael, and Beyond Civilization seem the most relevant. I think some of this may come from Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, as well as some anthropological studies I've read or read about.
For roughly 10,000 years, we've seen the ascendancy of civilization as an organizational principle in human life: an organization which is at its root hierarchical, stratified, and specialized. It has produced some incredible, incredible effects, from modern science and medicine to all of the arts that are the flower of human imagination, to an incredible standard of living for an incredible number of people. It also, of course, has over its history exploited millions (at least), pushing many into miserable lives, exploiting resources and the environment to the brink of environmental disaster in what appear to be all kinds of unsustainable activities--the outcome of all this is far from certain, civilization may find a way to transition into a sustainable future or it may ultimately collapse under impossible pressures. Socially, it's easy to read into the history of civilization a march of progress, as we've put behind us the grossest of exploitations and hatreds, and seem to be continuing in that direction (though we should always remember that cultural evolution is never necessarily in the direction we would call progress).
All of which is simply to remind readers that this experiment called civilization has been a mixed bag. Prior to embarking on this adventure (well, anyway, it was an adventure for some), humans lived for hundreds of thousands of years as tribes. One of the central characteristics of a tribe is its basical egalitarianism. While tribe members may take on a leadership role, individuals lack coercive power (which is not to say that the tribe as a majority lacks coercive power). People, in general, are happier in tribal societies, because we all tend to resent being on the bottom (of course, we all like being on the top and we tolerate the middle, which sure beats being on the bottom) of a hierarchy, especially when we don't figure to be able to rise. Tribes have fought strongly to keep their egalitarian ways, both against internal attempts to impose hierarchy and the external threat of civilization's encroachment--though it's been a losing fight, since hierarchy is more organized and specialized--the Union army will always ultimately defeat the Plains Indian tribes. Of course, the egalitarianism of tribal societies is in large part maintained by an odd combination of abundance and scarcity: food, for most hunter-gatherer societies was relatively abundant, to the extent that only a couple hours of work each day was needed to meet everyone's needs, and that food was freely available; at the same time, there were not luxuries to speak of, and therefore nothing to fight over or otherwise determine who gets what. It's a trade-off, certainly.
The hope that Quinn holds out is that we can move, not back to tribal hunter-gatherer societies, but forward to a new tribalism, a new egalitarianism, starting on a small scale. This, too, is an example of learning from the past to inform the future: seeking to recreate egalitarian structures in the context of a modern world, finding ways to reconcile modern existence with social structures more amenable to human happiness than those that got us here.
I'm running out of steam to develop these ideas, and anyway I would only be repeating more of what Daniel Quinn has written about better than I can. If you're interested, head to the source. By the way, in a similar vein and also of interest is Jeff Vail's Rhizome Theory.