Back to The Future
In the fourth essay in this series, I consider some ancient precedents of today's looming catastrophes.
In the early 2000s a retiring senior executive from a prestigious German car company predicted our definition of luxury was about to change. Grandeur and excess would be superseded in the new century by fresh air, clean water, space, time, and silence.
It was a surprisingly ascetical forecast, especially coming at the ‘end of history’[1] from a ‘captain of industry’. Decades later it seems less controversial.
Around ten million people die each year from air pollution[2], much of it the result of fossil fuel use. A third of the world lacks safe access to potable drinking water[3]. Over half of us live in cities[4], many of them so densely populated[5] we become invisible trees in a human forest. More of us work and commute long hours away from loved ones[6]. And the world is getting louder[7].
Meanwhile the rich seek convivial tranquillity in pristine locations[8].
Curiously, these new extravagances were commonplace for our ancestors. Whatever else they lacked, and there was much, even medieval European peasants often enjoyed more of them than many modern city dwellers.
The modern world is an anomaly. The way we evolved to live is very different. There are people still living that way, as all humans did until the Neolithic Era, and most until much more recently. They shape their habitats for utility with the same ingenuity we applaud in ourselves. But they tend to be more cautious and moderate in doing so and for good reason.
Our evolution is encoded in our brains and nervous systems. We are naturally predisposed to replicate the pattern which enabled our ancestors to flourish. And from early in our species’ evolution that pattern involved active care for our fellow humans and the natural features, plants, and animals we depend on.
Cultures like this have persevered through environmental upheavals and sometimes the onslaught of colonisation by genocidal invaders. They are what ‘survival of the fittest’ looks like in a human culture.
Something has diverted this instinct in modern humans. We feel compelled instead to work hard, consume voraciously and amass possessions, often to the detriment of our health, our relationships, and the planet which sustains us. We flatter ourselves this is ‘progress’. And we spurn the cultures which have thrived for an unimaginably long time, enjoying 21stCentury ‘luxuries’ as only the rich among us do today.
This contradiction makes modern Westerners defensive, mocking the idea we might learn anything from ‘the stone age’.
But ‘the stone age’ isn’t a real place. There certainly was a long period of time when many tools were made of stone, inviting a technocentric distinction from scholars of prehistory. But ‘the stone age’ in common parlance is a place of the imagination. Its connotations of squalor and deprivation derive not from the lived experiences of unmodernised peoples but from the insecurities of modern ones.
The ‘stone age’ is the convenience shopper’s nightmare, a feared dystopia, like Linda’s miserable experience in Huxley’s prescient Brave New World[9]. It’s hell for those with poor survival skills, which is most of us today. And ironically, it’s now a possible aftermath of dramatic collapse; the likely one if we don’t change course.
But the modern world and its ‘stone age’ phobias are prescriptions neither of ‘human nature’, nor of human need. So where did they come from?
The Yellow Brick Road
The ‘hero’s journey’ myth is ubiquitous in modern Western culture[10] where simply living takes a back seat to ‘getting somewhere’. For everyday heroes it manifests as a quest for self-fulfilment, customarily signified by success, wealth, and status.
Most commonly, this drive acquires tangible expression through the piece of 'private property' we call a 'home'. Each day, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz[11], millions of ordinary people set off in search of it.
A dwelling will be the biggest purchase many of us make, and the nucleus of the self-fulfilment ideals we will absorb from modern marketing. But for many others, 'home' will mean little more than safety from eviction. In the unforgiving world of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ we have created, basic needs like housing are far from assured. Even after decades on the yellow brick road, we may be lucky just to have a roof over our heads. Yet how many of us pause to ask why, with all our impressive technology, ‘home’ is the uncertain end to a perilous odyssey, instead of a condition we are simply born to?
And do you ever wonder why this quest often requires many hours in transit and powered buildings, burning fossil fuels and heating and polluting the Earth? It’s almost as if the system was designed to achieve precisely that.
It’s doubly ironic that so many of us have ‘bullshit jobs’, a term coined by the late David Graeber[12]. These are jobs we could easily relinquish if we simply arranged our societies differently. Research tells us the incumbents often know their jobs satisfy no genuine need and don’t improve human life in any meaningful way[13]. Even worse, they’re frequently soul-destroying. Why do they exist at all?
Whatever obscure process brought them into being there is one obvious result. Every ‘bullshit job’, from the lowliest box ticker, bean counter or paper shuffler to the most glamorous corporate lawyer or marketing executive, serves directly or indirectly to increase power, prestige, or profit for the cohort economist Joseph Stiglitz christened ‘the 1%’[14]. Much of the carbon burnt, the forest razed, and the stultifying daily grind which keeps people from their loved ones points to no purpose beyond that other than survival in a system which lacks alternatives. And the aggregate of all that sacrifice, the wholesale conversion of life into hoarded wealth, we celebrate as GDP.
Few people prefer to take these jobs. Most have other enthusiasms and causes they would rather pursue. But those wouldn’t support a 30-year mortgage and expensive private school fees.
Studies have shown that much of your time in a bullshit job is likely to be wasted[15], consumed by irrelevant emails, aimless meetings[16] and low value tasks such as producing reports for someone else in a bullshit job. As an essential worker, on the other hand, you are likely to be pushed to the brink of exhaustion.
A Munchkin’s Life
Let’s suppose you’re a nurse in a public hospital ward[17]. Unlike many bullshit jobs, you’re probably quite poorly paid. You may be forced to take a second job just to make ends meet.
It’s also likely your ward is overfilled with patients. And this will probably worsen in the years to come, as health budgets are overstretched while populations age and potentially deadly infections appear more frequently. But many people also put themselves there with what we call ‘lifestyle choices’[18]. They’ve lived on sugar, alcohol and fast food while slumped in front of screens. And now they’re converting their accumulated assets into expensive health and aged care.
It's naïve to think this system is intended to provide for human needs. Its purpose, explicit in everything from its monstrous investment in marketing to its corruption of politics and public policy, is to make us need what it provides. By goading us to work, borrow and spend, it can harvest profits from the fossil fuels, manufactures, mortgages, education, entertainment, edible products, advertising, pharmaceuticals, and aged care we consume.
Many of us have a stake in it now as we trudge along our yellow brick roads; but only as many and as much as is required to keep us trudging. Its principal beneficiaries are the anonymous shareholders in the Emerald City on the horizon.
That’s why carers and many others in sectors like the arts, retail, and hospitality – in fact, nearly every worker in the ‘service economy’ prescribed decades ago by neoliberal economists – are overburdened and underpaid. They’re ‘overhead’, a begrudged ‘hit to the bottom line’. They’re the Munchkins; little people born to serve.
‘The economy’ which beckons aspirants to the Emerald City is fastened to them like a giant parasite sucking them dry of time, energy, and hope. It’s also why we’re sacrificing our 21st Century luxuries and damaging Earth’s biosphere. And it persists by convincing us the alternative is ‘the stone age’.
The Wizard’s Machine
Think about what you did in the last twenty-four hours. Did any of it involve space travel, billion-dollar deals or red-carpet galas? If it did, that was probably confined to your phone; along with endless product placements, data harvesting and scare campaigns tailored just for you.
Johann Hari showed how these technologies prey on our frustrated need for connection[19]. Like the Wizard’s conjuring tricks, they create an illusion of involvement in heroic exploits. And they evoke feelings of kinship or animosity toward public figures who embody our own desires and fears which can then be mobilised for profit.
In the real world, apart from working, shopping and looking at screens, you probably slept, ate, exercised, performed some chores, or wrangled some kids. Maybe you socialised, kicked a ball, or practiced a hobby. Does a happy, healthy, human life truly require a giant engine of destruction to keep us out of ‘the stone age’? We may fantasise about cruising on a mega yacht or sleeping in a palace, and perhaps even pull it off for some special occasion, but how many of us really believe that's how to become fulfilled? Apart from the rich, who seem to have fallen prey to this idea, I'd say very few of us.
When we’re not making the rich richer, either as workers, borrowers, or consumers, the great majority of us do what our distant ancestors did. But the space for our essential humanness shrinks every day. And it turns out this trend began a long time ago.
Alexander the Great Destroyer
Alexander III of Macedon is the archetypal hero. According to custom, his territory stretching from Athens to India laid foundations for the emergence of ‘Western’ civilisation via Rome; and his ‘method’ of military conquest followed by expanded trade and cultural syncretism under centralised rule became a template for the eventual ‘westernising’ of the world.
The conquering hero is the protagonist in the story of ‘progress’, which is how we explain the human transformation of the biosphere. Captain Cook, explorers and pioneers are the central casting substitutes in white Australian mythology. Is this justified?
Alexander’s armies butchered great numbers of people, including women and children, and enslaved the survivors. Whole societies which had evolved in place over millennia were decimated and their lands, crops, livestock, and natural resources appropriated[20].
When Europeans deployed this ‘method’ around the world, Australia’s original inhabitants were similarly displaced, massacred[21], and enslaved[22].
Is this what ‘progress’ means?
Empire
‘Progress’ and ‘civilisation’ are used as euphemisms for ‘empire’. People who cohabit peacefully on desirable real estate are often classified by invaders and their descendants as ‘primitive’. Becoming a persecuted, landless minority in their own country is their path of ‘progress’ toward ‘civilisation’.
Like Alexander’s subjects, Aboriginal Australians exchanged goods and knowledge across a large landmass within a system which managed conflict. In contrast, theirs depended on intricate relational assurances developed over many generations, rather than the violent imposition of centralised rule.
‘Progress’ toward ‘civilisation’ may appear to those who are comfortable within its ambit as a sort of inexorable process deriving from innate superiority. But there’s another way to understand it, and the development of agriculture provides a clue.
You can sow crops in places where people also hunt and forage. This seems to have been quite common among ancient peoples. Subverting the linearity of the ‘progress’ plotline, the evidence taken as a whole suggests that settlement, hierarchy, and agriculture were neither inevitable nor inseparable. In The Dawn of Everything[23], David Graeber and David Wengrow expose the diversity of mixed systems emerging from the Pleistocene onwards during a long period of experimentation.
Once land is cleared and fenced for livestock or broadacre monoculture, however, it can’t readily be used for anything else, as the First Australians discovered after European settlement. Agriculture didn’t need to be demonstrably better, nor preferred by everyone, as long as it suited those with the power to impose it.
What advantages did it convey and to whom?
Commodities
Modern mechanised agriculture is an industrial process. The land, water, and organisms it needs, including humans, are ‘inputs’, appropriated by shareholders at minimised cost and typically under the protection of coercive states. Its fossil fuels, fertilisers and pesticides elicit devastating consequences for our climate, soils, rivers, birds, insects and people[24]. These ‘externalised’ costs are transferred to us and our descendants.
To make this extractive process palatable we allow it to be costumed with a popular romance of farm life. But traditional farming has long been in decline. The farming ‘families’ who remain are often also corporations. This doesn't necessarily mean they have no affinity with the land. But the communities which host production, like those which consume its products, are collateral to its main purposes which are profit and capital accumulation. Many of its practices[25] and end products[26], refined and packaged by Food Inc., are helping to fill our hypothetical nurse’s hospital beds.
Extant non-agrarian societies are typically self-sufficient and nonautocratic. Why would they submit to a seasonal cycle of hard labour consuming precious land and water to produce goods for someone else to sell elsewhere in exchange for what they could otherwise provide for themselves? Commodities require a radically different social order.
Domination
Alexander is an expression of what Riane Eisler calls the ‘dominator’ model of human society. Her interpretation[27] of historical and archaeological evidence is that as recently as 6,500 years ago this model began to replace variations on a much older ‘partnership’ model. Societies oriented towards gender equity, peace, and ecological stewardship gradually gave way to suppression of women, warfare and ecological destruction.
We know that conflict over resources, with other species and among our own, has been a feature of human evolution[28]. And we know that large population centres bring special organisational challenges. Graeber and Wengow show that centralised rule wasn’t the only answer. Forms of localised autonomy persisted through periods of resource scarcity and the rise of cities.
Nor does hierarchy inevitably mean domination. Inequality appeared in many times and places along with private property, money, debt, and what we think of as charity but without oppressive rule[29].
The lesson seems to be that cultures can support select minorities, but only when their appetites are held in check. Our modern world is unusual in its conflation and concentration of wealth, status, power and privilege and their immunisation from reciprocal obligation.
Why did we set off down this path?
The Making of Monsters
Graeber and Wengrow theorise that domination consolidates from some combination of monopolies on coercion, executive bureaucracy and charismatic influence. These are factors clearly recognisable in modern states, some famous precursors like pharaonic Egypt and in many contemporary private enterprises. The authors find evidence of possible origins in sport and ritual, ancient forms of association which lionise extraordinary individuals.
Kim Sterelny’s broad survey of the research[30] suggests that domination developed on the scaffolding of clan structure, which extends identity and therefore potential agency beyond one’s subsistence group. This may have been accelerated by the privileging of emerging forms of specialised knowledge, which could have been anything from new foraging techniques to presumed supernatural insight.
Another way to put it is that cults of aggression escaped the partnership order in places. But it can’t be mere coincidence that the spread of dominator societies accompanied a gradual shift in production from subsistence to accumulation and trade[31].
Declining accountability for unproductive elites depends on increasing subservience for those who do the work. It seems doubtful that hierarchy, settlement, or agriculture alone in self-sufficient communities would have mandated the dominator system. But a powerful motivation must have been the fungible material surplus an ambitious minority could wrest from subjugated lands and peoples.
If you own shares or real estate you’re partaking of these spoils. Your land once supported Indigenous custodians; your stocks appreciate thanks to exploited labour; your bank shares feed on other people’s debt.
Today this racket is widely admired and protected by law. You may prefer to see it as ‘progress’, ‘civilisation’ or even the ‘survival of the fittest’. But it comes at great cost, doesn’t benefit everyone and has never been inevitable. So how did it spread?
The Monster Next Door
The widespread presumption that humans are inherently warlike leading to a Pleistocene bloodbath which was only curbed by authoritarian rule has been discredited[32]. In the case of Aboriginal Australia, the combined weight of Aboriginal oral history and western anthropology suggests organised conflict was used sparingly to restore stability. But warrior kings have appeared elsewhere, and the world is very different as a result. Something must provide an inflection point which undermines the trust, solidarity and peaceful interdependencies with other groups which maintain partnership orders.
Natural disasters don’t seem to do it. In Australia, the partnership order absorbed with some conflict the displacement of coastal dwellers caused by rising sea levels[33]. Pueblo peoples in North America claim a similar accommodation from neighbours for their ancestors displaced by water shortage[34]. Conversely, climate change has often triggered the collapse of dissipated empires like the Kmer into older more partnership-like arrangements[35].
Since the late Neolithic period, however, appearing like steppingstones from partnership to domination across the globe, invasion and colonisation have propelled avaricious elites to power and wealth at ever greater scale.
As the diversity of older cultures emerges in new evidence, and alternative explanations of convergence from archaeologists like Marija Gimbutas[36] are favourably reassessed, we can understand the formation of the modern world less as a series of technological breakthroughs on a golden road of ‘progress’ than a mosaic of viable local adaptations gradually overrun by expanding regimes of exploitation.
And the tools of oppression are depressingly simple.
The Banal Mechanics of Domination
The prisoner’s dilemma demonstrates that humans are naturally biased towards cooperation but can be persuaded to sacrifice solidarity for survival or personal advantage.
In the famous example, a prosecutor proffers a plea bargain for betraying a fellow prisoner. He could also be an emperor extending sinecure to a cooperative local chieftain, or a business leader rewarding complicity in a subordinate. The common factor is a disparity of executive power which is not regulated by a superior partnership order.
We can readily picture a typical trajectory of empire aggregating from systematic repetition of similar exchanges. Those who cling to principles would eventually be winnowed out until complicity is normalised. In the resulting hierarchical matrix of obligated privilege, purpose would naturally tend towards acquisition and consolidation, galvanising military adventurism, integrating subject entities, and once expansion reaches material or logistical limits, cannibalising the weaker parts of itself until structural hollowing creates vulnerability to overthrow or collapse. Powering it all would be multitudes of ‘othered’ people – women, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers, who must be kept busy, distracted, and dependent; but there’s a limit to what anyone can tolerate.
This is one reason empires don’t endure. The acquisitive politics of personal ambition which reinforces the dominator system demands it expand or become self-consuming; which brings us to the modern era.
The Monster as God
Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore explain in A History of The World in Seven Cheap Things[37] how capitalism organised war and conquest into a machine for converting the entire planet into concentrated power and wealth for its minority interests. And it did this by systematically devaluing nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives; virtually everything on which a human community thrives. When Margaret Thatcher claimed, "there is no such thing as society", she was unwittingly observing the results of centuries of deliberate attrition.
Capitalism extended the othering previously reserved for the untitled to the entire Earth in a new kind of empire which knows no bounds. Technology continued to magnify human agency; but how it was applied, and how aggressively, was increasingly decided by a new kind of potentate called ‘the investor’, facilitated by a burgeoning bureaucracy, and performed by slave labour, initially from animals and ‘othered’ humans, then increasingly supplemented by carbon-powered machines harvesting the biosphere[38].
That’s why we work more than our ancestors and dance less. It’s why we can’t protect the natural world, house the homeless or treat carers with respect. These mainstays of healthy cultures aren’t ‘worth’ anything anymore. The ‘creation of value’ in capitalism’s self-promotion is a fig leaf covering violent extraction. Alexander’s ‘method’ is our true but unspoken creed.
We have reached a natural limit. The hero’s exploits require a theatre in which he isn’t accountable, a playground which is not his home. Only where he feels no duty of care can the hero unleash his lust for conquest. With no more ‘undiscovered’ continents ripe for plunder, the untamed hero’s rapacious instincts must turn against his own. The heroes of capitalism and their vassals are devouring their homelands and the planetary home which sustains us all.
What in our nature made this even possible? In my next essay I will examine the evolutionary roots of Alexander’s ‘model’.
The Proven Alternative
Kombu-merri and Wakka Wakka academic and elder Dr Mary Graham once said that we humans flourish when we commit ourselves to what is greater than us. This understanding is central to Indigenous lore.
In pursuit of self-interest, especially in competition with our fellows, our survival abilities shrink to our personal repertoire, diminished by threat chemistry, and consumed by unproductive conflicts. Alexander can do what he likes with us then.
Such a state is far from ‘natural’. Aunty Mary describes it as ‘survivalism’. It’s the culture of the frontier, now universalised throughout a dislocated world, labouring under Alexander’s distant rule, bereft of the communities we left behind, each one built on trust in a place that was loved. It’s the social embodiment of unrepaired disruption; damaging to individuals, and contagious to others.
Aunty Mary’s word for the Indigenous worldview, which aligns with Eisler’s partnership model, is ‘relationality’. No one is ever alone in Aboriginal culture. Everyone has a place to take care of. And when Alexander appears he is given remedial support, not the keys to the city.
It wasn’t empires which first domesticated fire, plants, and animals. Warrior kings didn’t invent pottery, weaving, the canoe, or navigation. Alexander’s capitalist heirs don’t show much capability for productive innovation either. Even the Wi-Fi and internet which delivered this essay to you are products of public money. What capitalists are good at is sequestering the innovators, commercialising their efforts, and claiming the rewards.
The conviction that technological liberation from the ‘stone age’ depends on capitalism is an illusion created by the Wizard’s smoke and mirrors. Fans of the film will recall that Dorothy already has what she needs to find ‘home’ without his trickery. In fact, unfettered extraction now puts many of our cherished technological advantages at risk.
It would be sensible to disregard the Wizard and listen to wiser counsel, time-honoured and modern.
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[2] Cowan, T. (2021) Air Pollution Kills Far More People Than Covid Ever Will, www.bloomberg.com, Mar 11
[3] Osseiran, N. (2019) 1 in 3 people globally do not have access to safe drinking water – UNICEF, WHO, www.who.int, Jun 18
[4] Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2018) 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects, UN DESA, May
[5] Serody, J. (2018) Five Cities Suffering from Poverty and Overcrowding, The Borgen Project, Jul 2
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[7] Bosker, B. (2019) Why Everything Is Getting Louder, The Atlantic, Nov
[8] Reynolds, E. (2021) The Wealthy Are Moving To These 5 U.S. Mountain Towns, Forbes, Jan 14
[9] Huxley, A. (1932) Brave New World, UK, Chatto & Windus
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[14] Stiglitz, J. (2012) The Price of Inequality, US, W.W. Norton & Company
[15] TeamStage (2022) Time Management Statistics: Facts and Myths in 2022, teamstage.io
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[19] Johann Hari (2021). Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention, UK, Bloomsbury
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[21] Sentance, N. (2022) Genocide in Australia, Australian Museum, Jul 7
[22] Anthony, T. and Gray, S. (2020) Was there slavery in Australia? Yes. It shouldn’t even be up for debate, The Guardian, Jun 11
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[24] Čirjak, A (2020) What Is The Environmental Impact Of Agriculture?, www.worldatlas.com, Jun 16
[25] American Society for Microbiology (2018) Foodborne illness caused by common agricultural practice, casts doubts on biocidal product labelling, ScienceDaily, Apr 17
[26] Williams, D. (2018) Numerous studies concur: Eating processed food results in chronic, degenerative disease, www.food.news, Jan 29
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[30] Sterelny, K. (2021) How equality slipped away, Aeon, Jun 10
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[34] Gershon, L. (2020) Ancestral Puebloans Survived Droughts by Collecting Water From Icy Lava Tubes, Smithsonian Magazine, Dec 10
[35] Lovgren, S. (2017) Angkor Wat’s Collapse From Climate Change Has Lessons for Today, National Geographic, Apr 5
[36] Gimbutas, M. (2001) The Living Goddesses, US, University of California Press
[37] Patel, R. and Moore, J. W. (2018) A History of The World in Seven Cheap Things, US, University of California Press
[38] Mouhot, J. (2012) Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels, The Guardian, Feb 3