Sometimes you read a book that makes you walk through the world like a child, with a lot of stupid children’s questions in your head. Why do I have to pay tax? Why are there limits? Why is there a government? Why do I have a boss? Why do I have to be on time, ask ‘free’, obey?
The book that refreshed my hopes was The beginning of everything. A New History of Humanity† It was written by archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber. Throughout his life, Graeber asked annoying children’s questions about the social organization and relationships in our world. take his book Bullshit Jobs: the idea that most people shove themselves into made-up jobs where they are mainly busy keeping other people busy with made-up jobs. Graeber is like a kid at the breakfast table asking, Mommy, why do you have to go to work?
Do you always know the answer?
Children’s questions are helpful. Anyone who grows up surrounded by red barrier tape no longer notices that barrier as an adult. When you grow up in a zoo, behind a fence, one day you forget that you live behind a fence. And when you do see it, and you ask your cage mate ‘why do we live behind a fence’, he probably shrugs or spoons, chewing his food quietly, the standard story. That it just couldn’t be otherwise. That our species once roamed free, but decided to tame wild grains and grow them in raked fields, doused with animal droppings. And that agriculture inevitably led to our lives today. It was a trap. Agriculture meant land ownership and population growth, surpluses in granaries, trade and capital, division of labor, bureaucracy, sovereign states. In other words: complexity leads to hierarchy.
And if you don’t like all that, says your cage mate, you have to learn to live with it. This fence is a logical consequence of history. Inevitable even. And let’s face it, you’re the only one complaining. The rest think it’s best.
I also read this story, originally written by Rousseau in the eighteenth century, in books by Diamond, Harari, Fukuyama, and Pinker. Although it was always served in a different variant, but still. Man is a religious, story-telling creature of habit. Shrugs are deep in our DNA. You can lower the gate and everyone will still remain tidy in their accommodation, because we believe that this is how it should be, that there is no other way.
Can it be otherwise? Or walks the Homo sapiens in a parallel society also in the ‘agricultural trap’, with the nation state, mortgages, parking fines and Sander and the gorge result? In chapter 1, the authors present an encounter with that parallel Homo sapiens world, namely the eighteenth-century American Indian peoples. And guess what? Social inequality was certainly not inevitable on the other side of the ocean, agriculture was not a trap, large populations were not necessarily hierarchical. On first acquaintance, the Iroquois-Wendat statesman Kandiaronk reacted with disgust at the ranks and classes in society, the obsession with money and property in European society.
Well, we might also be horrified at eighteenth-century France. And life with an indigenous people was not a bed of roses either. As a reader I got the impression that the two Davids really like to see their own perspective in the scant evidence about prehistoric ‘egalitarian’ societies. They also tell a story.
But it is a necessary story, a counter-story. Certainly at a time when the amount of red tape is only increasing, in which personal freedoms are increasingly curtailed by an appeal to health and safety as the last values that matter in the first place.
Graeber passed away suddenly last year after finishing the first draft of the manuscript. But from every page in this book he whispers to us that there is absolutely nothing inevitable in our existence, that a thousand and one peoples who lived differently have preceded us. Without fence.
Rosanne Hertzberger is a microbiologist. This column is based on a contribution to the presentation of The beginning of everything30/3 in Amsterdam.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC Handelsblad of 2 April 2022
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of April 2, 2022