Our understanding of history sets the parameters of how we think of ourselves and how we imagine it is possible to live. If all we know is what we have experienced, few other possibilities present themselves. We view our lives through a keyhole.
In her appearance on “The Last Word” Thursday night, author Isabel Wilkerson observed that “the majority of Americans don’t get a chance [or] an opportunity to know our country’s true history, our true and full history.” Readers have told her, “I had no idea. I had no idea that this happened in our country, and I had no idea that this happened in my region of the country. I had no idea,” she said.
“And not having an idea has consequences because … it’s harder to see what we have in common, it’s harder to get on the same page about how we got to where we are, it’s harder to understand how we happen to be where we are.”
Harder still today because the losers of the Civil War succeeded in rewriting the history of the conflict to make themselves into mythic heroes. There were essentially no consequences for the South for making war on the United States. We are living today with the consequences of not holding the South more accountable in 1865.
What few realize, Wilkerson said, is that slavery lasted for 246 years. For so long, that it will not be until 2022 that the U.S. will have been a free nation as long as slavery existed here.
“Slavery lasted so long that no adult alive today will be alive at the point at which African Americans will have been free for as long as African Americans were enslaved,” Wilkerson added. That won’t happen until the second decade of the 22nd century.
At The Atlantic, William Deresiewicz writes how the late David Graeber and co-author David Wengrow have rewritten the history of the last 10,000 years of human civilization in “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.”
The standard narrative is linear:
Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.
Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires.
Etc., etc.
Not so, say Graeber and Wengrow and their 63-page bibliography. The real history is “far more interesting: textured, surprising, paradoxical, inspiring,” Deresiewicz explains.
According to Graeber and Wengrow,
… hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a “hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state.” They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.
The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.
Or to enslave them in the name of profit and to fight a bloody civil war to keep them.
What the authors argue against is our own stuckness brought on by lack of imagination and commitment to the modern bureaucratic state that has written out other models that functioned well and provided greater freedoms over the last 10,000 years. But perhaps didn’t enrich and empower the right people.
Is “civilization” worth it, the authors want to know, if civilization—ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, imperial Rome, the modern regime of bureaucratic capitalism enforced by state violence—means the loss of what they see as our three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements? Or does civilization rather mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others”?
When French missionaries arrived in North America, the pair explain, Natives with a long intellectual tradition already had well-developed opinions on “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”
The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom. The authors persuasively argue that Indigenous ideas, carried back and publicized in Europe, went on to inspire the Enlightenment (the ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy, they note, had theretofore been all but absent from the Western philosophical tradition). They go further, making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.
Right now, those most invested in enriching themselves and retaining control have no interest in building back better, much less in building back different. And for all their chants of freedom, theirs is a more constricted view of it than existed before their view of civilization became the dominant one. A fuller understanding of history ancient or modern is not their idea of better.