Backward, Forward, Sideways
Or how to stake out a political position
The shot across your bow:
There will be pirates.
Just this morning I spoke with someone who is getting involved in politics for the first time, someone who is, like me, in the second half of life. I can relate. And I find myself trying yet again to figure out my political “position.” It won’t be simple. I can’t adopt a label and try to squish my thinking into a required box. Even when I was much younger — and never very political — I couldn’t fit anywhere neatly. My causes didn’t line up with preferred methods. I was pro-environment, pro-education but pro-small government, pro-freedom, essentially libertarian. Put differently, I couldn’t abide the inconsistency I encountered in all the policy “platforms” on offer. For example, I wanted a consistent pro-life ethic. I didn’t want to be pro-family, against abortion, but simultaneously against the environment and for the death penalty.
Lately I’ve been thinking about conservatism and progressivism and wondering why and how they must somehow be at odds. Why not discerningly conserve whatever is good from the past, while at the same time seek prudently make progress where it’s needed and feasible? Must we be all-in on only the past, or only the future? Must we skeptical only of the past and its mistakes, or only of present-day inexperience and folly? Let’s look backward to past wisdoms whenever possible. Who wants to reinvent the wheel? Surely there are lessons from history that need to be learned and remembered. Old wisdoms at the very least must be re-applied, adapted, adjusted. But let’s also look forward and seek to improve. These are new times we’re living in. Not only are there genuinely new problems to address, there are innovative new technologies, scientific and economic, social and political, to employ (potentially) in coming up with new solutions.
I am backward looking in one sense, conservative, a dutiful student of history. And I am forward looking as well, progressive, in search of what can be better. Why must I choose between them?
But also…
I find myself wanting to go sideways.
The Dawn of Everything
Yesterday I featured Dan Allosso’s work and noted at the outset that I had attended one of his book clubs. At the time I joined, I found out that I had missed the first book his group read, by “the Davids” (as we call them), David Wengrow and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything.
Dawn of Everything is an enormity of a doorstop tome, weighing in at over 500 pages of text plus another 150 of notes! But it’s an enjoyable read, accessible, and provocative to the max. It’s mostly about what the Europeans encountered in the new world (North America) when they set up shop here, and how anthropologists, historians, and political theorists since have read that encounter depressingly wrong. Getting it right, claim the Davids, should open up new vistas of political opportunity and, thereby, space for some renewed hope given present-day impasses.
It turns out that native American political structures were strategic, functioned pretty well, and were more egalitarian and free than most Europeans felt (at all) comfortable with. The Davids even make the argument that without the early European encounter with native Americans, European political thought could never have developed in the way that it did, in the (sometimes vague) direction of incorporating a wider range of voices, democratic equality, freedom. What if Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu et al got many of their ideas from much further west? In short, there’s more diversity and variety in the possible ways of being political humans than later thinkers give our species credit for. There are even fewer boxes to squeeze into than we have been led to think.
One isn’t obliged to look only backwards to classical verities, or only forwards along a prescribed trajectory.
As a species, we can go sideways, too.
Civilization?
Probably it was Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens book, an easygoing philosophical-historical romp if ever there was one, that first made me think that the agricultural revolution wasn’t necessarily such a miraculous accomplishment, setting the human species firmly on a road to positive growth, cultural accomplishment, and the wonders of civilization.
At the time I read it, I think I did know that in fact hunter gatherers were actually quite successful — there was no need to rush headlong into civilization — and that mixed and opportunistic ecological strategies can definitely be a good thing: combining classic hunting and gathering with a bit of cultivation here and there, a bit of pastoral herding, shifting settlements by season. Still, when it does happen, most people today tend not to question the advantage of the rise of thoroughgoing agriculture, permanent settlements, cities, and civilization.
On the contrary, Harari talks about the “trap” of rising populations and the fairly miserable quality life of most early city-dwellers, riddled with disease, surviving in squalor at mere sustenance levels, victims of emerging social classes with compulsory slave labor in agriculture and building projects, burdened by oppressive tax regimes (for both corvee and grain), becoming proverbial cannon fodder with growing militancy.1 This is what goes along with “civilized” monumental architecture, the glories of kingship, and early territorial conquests and empire-building. Yes, eventually there is art and culture and written language and big gods and big religion. But at what cost?
Along with David Wengrow and David Graeber in The Dawn of Everything, probably the most brilliant theorist questioning the previously unquestioned good of civilization, and especially the emergence of governmental states, is James C. Scott. His books Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed trace the lifeways and politics of (among others) the peoples of Zomia, the name he gives to the disparate mountainous regions of southeast Asia, where a diversity of tribes live on the fringes of great river valley civilizations. Low-country large civilizational states are in a continual battle, both figuratively and literally, to tame and “civilize” the mountain peoples. What’s essential to understand is that people living in these fringes are not usually “primitives,” people who have never been contacted before by civilization. They’re runaways, people who have generational or ancestral experience of civilizational states and have decided they don’t want any part of it. Scott, after a lifetime of study of un-governed peoples, has written about the appeal of living in relative anarchy compared to under an over-bearing state, with all its mechanisms of control, regimentation, and calls to conformity.
Other examples of sideways peoples include the maroons in the Americas (Charles Mann writes about them in his book 1493), or Christian monastics who began escaping into the deserts from the time of Constantine. Today we have survivalists, homesteaders, and people who live “off-grid.” In early America there was the frontier, and the lawless wild west.
It’s a consistent historical phenomenon.
Pirates
My friend Dan Allosso recently re-posted a book review2 concerning the origins of piracy on the Atlantic high seas at the same time of the origins of capitalism, and American democracy — when the commons were being enclosed in Britain, and peasants were being thrown off the land.3
Here is yet another case of things going sideways.
The event that set these long waves in motion for [the book authors] was the rise of capitalism, specifically the expropriation of commons that began with British enclosure. “In the seventeenth century,” they said, “almost a quarter of the land in England was enclosed. Aerial photography and excavations have located more than a thousand deserted villages and hamlets, confirming the colossal dimensions of the expropriation of the peasantry.” (17) … The peasants thrown off the land took to the roads and are called vagrants, criminals, vagabonds. They were chased, jailed, beaten, branded, and sometimes hanged. And many were impressed or transported, or in [the authors’] word, enslaved.
Source: Long Waves Breaking - by Dan Allosso (substack.com)
When landed peoples are displaced and thrown off their traditional rural lifeways, what happens? Modern economic systems require defined property rights as part of an “enlightened” new set of rules of the game. But what about the losers in that new scheme? They become indentured servants, “criminals” who deserve extreme punishments, victims impressed into naval service, or — if they can regain their freedom — pirates, whose code was radically more egalitarian. They become fringe people living against the injustices of the System.
The most visible expression of the “world turned upside down,” that linked all the places around the Atlantic and communicated revolutionary ideas, was the pirate ship. (162) Pirate crews were egalitarian, racially integrated, and democratic. (Rediker [one of the authors] is regarded as the foremost authority on privateers and pirates.) While some of the descriptions may have been a bit romanticized… Hyrdarchy, the pirate world-view, was central to their story, as was Britain’s war against it. [The authors] suggested that pirates became a target of the empire when they turned their attention from harassing Spanish shipping to attacking the slave trade. (168) But even when the pirates were defeated, the “motley crew shaped the social, organizational, and intellectual histories” of the Atlantic world by spreading a “proletarian experience” and a resistance tradition that [the authors] believed was a catalyst of the American Revolution. (212)
Source: Long Waves cont’d
The roots of democracy and freedom in the American experiment thus run deep into some less “respectable” sources, including to the sideways politics of North American native peoples and pirates!
I’ll leave you to read the rest of the pirate story from Dan, including the connection with Boston revolutionary Sam Adams!
Harari helpfully presses the general point about the problem of scale. Once you reach a certain level of population, you cross a threshold from which it’s impossible to go back. There is no way to sustain billions of people living on the fringes or “off-grid.” Only an organized, controlled, conformed civilization can house and feed that many.
The dilemma is that this may not in fact be the best way for humans to live, or for the planet to stay in (relative) balance.
As I continue to stake out my un-boxed political position, I’ll be looking backward, yes; and forward, yes; but also sideways, to pay attention to the many different examples we have of humans actively choosing to escape, run away, and cultivate alternative forms of freedom.
James C. Scott’s more recent book Against the Grain traces similar lines to Harari re: the rise of agriculture and the accompanying fallout.
Of The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, 2000. It sounds so good that I’ve ordered a copy.
Again, regarding the enclosure of the commons for the sake of enabling modern property rights, see Karl Polanyi’s criticism in The Great Transformation. I continue to wrestle with the critique Polanyi makes of modern capitalism.