From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State”
—Randall Jarrell, “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

This is the second in our series on the nature of the state and James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Our first part is here:

The Story So Far

Humans, for millions of years, lived in tribal communities. These groups, like all human groups, had structure, but nothing dramatic, nothing like masters and slaves or workers and kings. Nothing systemically coercive. This hierarchy was mostly benign because people could walk away, take family and cousins and leave. Social life depended more on agreement than force. There were no coersive states with their monopolies on violence.

Two additional facts:

• Tribes and similar groups had a mix of structures, a smorgasbord of ways to organize themselves, often created by a process called “schismogenesis” (David Graeber again). Life in some tribes was dramatically different from others; no one structure was “natural” and always selected.

• Between the first instances of settled human life and the birth of the earliest states, millennia passed. Literally. For four or five thousand years, humans who more-or-less stayed in much the same place, and got much of their food from something like agriculture, did NOT create coercive states.
  
  That’s a very long time. So much for the inevitability of state formation, and the (assumed) connection between agriculture and states. As we’ll see later, only certain crops (like grain) could be used to compel state formation.

Thus, contrary to popular belief, the development of coersive states was not a necessary outcome of sedentary life, nor did it depend on agriculture. In parts of the world where the first states did evolve, this was just one way of many to organize life.

What made state life spread? Why is almost everyone living now subject to states? A topic for another day, though the spread of the state-controlled West to America offers a clue. (Hint: Human concentration, the ”domus,” is a feast for disease.)

Against the Grain

To understand the state as a structure, anthropologist James C. Scott examined its origin and nature in a book titled Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest State.” Wikipedia:

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is a 2017 book by James C. Scott that sets out to undermine what he calls the “standard civilizational narrative” that suggests humans chose to live settled lives based on intensive agriculture because this made people safer and more prosperous. Instead, he argues, people had to be forced to live in the early states, which were hierarchical, beset by malnutrition and disease, and often based on slavery. The book has been praised for re-opening some of the biggest questions in human history. A review in Science concludes that the book’s thesis “is fascinating and represents an alternative, nuanced, if somewhat speculative, scenario on how civilized society came into being.”

In our first piece discussing this book, we said our examination would follow its chapters. So we start with human control of fire and its consequences.

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The Anthropocene Starts with Fire

Scott starts with the debate surrounding the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch “during which the activities of humans became decisive in affecting the world’s ecosystems and atmosphere.” When did the Anthropocene start? The options include: roughly now, with our temperature spike; with the first nuclear tests and radiation debris; or at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

But if you think about a planet, as it were, minding its own business until humans evolved, at what point did humans start reshaping the world — not just a creek, like beavers, but the planet itself? Scott’s answer: the point at which we began domestication, deliberately and at scale.

And that point begins with fire.

Fire, which we owe to our older relative Homo erectus, has been our great trump card, allowing us to resculpt the landscape so as to encourage food-bearing plants—nut and fruit trees, berry bushes—and to create browse that would attract desirable prey. In cooking, fire rendered a host of previously indigestible plants both palatable and more nutritious. We owe our relatively large brain and relatively small gut (compared with other mammals, including primates), it is claimed, to the external predigestive help that cooking provides. (Preface)

Control of fire is the gift of our ancestor species, the long-lived Homo erectus. There is evidence that erectus had fire at least 400,000 years ago, if not a lot earlier.

Fire, Food and Brains

Fire made us kings. From Scott’s Chapter 1:

What fire meant for hominids and ultimately for the rest of the natural world is presaged vividly by a cave excavation in South Africa. At the deepest and therefore oldest strata, there are no carbon deposits and hence no fire. Here one finds full skeletal remains of large cats and fragmentary bone shards—bearing tooth marks—of many fauna, among which is Homo erectus. At a higher, later stratum, one finds carbon deposits signifying fire. Here, there are full skeletal remains of Homo erectus and fragmentary bone shards of various mammals, reptiles, and birds, among which are a few gnawed bones of large cats. The change in cave “ownership” and the reversal in who was apparently eating whom testify eloquently to the power of fire for the species that first learned to use it. At the very least, fire provided warmth, light, and relative safety from nocturnal predators as well as a precursor to the domus or hearth.

The case for the use of fire being the decisive transformation in the fortunes of hominids is convincing. It has been mankind’s oldest and greatest tool for reshaping the natural world. “Tool,” however, is not quite the right word; unlike an inanimate knife, fire has a life of its own. It is, at best, a “semidomesticate,” appearing unbidden and, if not guarded carefully, escaping its shackles to become dangerously feral.

Man-made fire, even in pre-history days, had a huge effect on the planet. Scott calls it “environmental landscaping”:

The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous.

Our ancestors could not have failed to notice how natural wildfires transformed the landscape: how they cleared old vegetation and encouraged a host of quick-colonizing grasses and shrubs, many bearing desired seeds, berries, fruits, and nuts. They could also not have failed to notice that a fire drove fleeing game from its path, exposed hidden burrows and nests of small game, and, most important, later stimulated the browse and mushrooms that attracted grazing prey. Native North Americans deployed fire to sculpt landscapes favored by elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, ruffed grouse, turkey, and quail, all of which they hunted. The game they subsequently bagged represented a kind of harvesting of prey animals they had deliberately assembled by carefully creating a habitat they would find enticing. Quite apart from being the designers of hunting grounds—veritable game parks—early humans used fire to hunt large game. The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed.

Fire was the key to humankind’s growing sway over the natural world—a species monopoly and trump card, worldwide. The Amazonian rain forest bears indelible traces of the use of fire to clear land and open the canopy; Australia’s eucalyptus landscape is, to a considerable degree, the effect of human fire. The volume of such landscaping in North America was such that when it stopped abruptly, due to the devastating epidemics that came with the European, the newly unchecked growth of forest cover created the illusion among white settlers that North America was a virtually untouched, primeval forest. According to some climatologists, the cold spell known as the Little Ice Age, from roughly 1500 to 1850, may well have been due to the reduction of CO2—a greenhouse gas—brought about by the die-off of North America’s indigenous fire farmers.

In other words, fire-sculpted landscape made hunting and gathering easier by reducing the “radius of a meal.” We dominate fire; fire shapes the natural world; that world feeds humans the food we need to live. One should never forget how important this “tool” was in human evolution.

In the ancient Greek tale, when Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man, humans were never the same. Zeus was so angry that men could now challenge the gods that he punished Prometheus severely.

In later retellings (Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example), the gift of fire is treated symbolically: the real gift, we’re told, was technology, science, and civilized life itself.

But that part’s not true. Fire didn’t just symbolize control — fire was control. It was fire itself that let Homo erectus become us. No fire, no Homo sapiens.

Fire Remakes Its Master

Chimpanzees have large guts. They need them to process raw food. With fire, humans externalized much of their digestion, making conversion of food to energy much more efficient. Scott:

It is virtually impossible to exaggerate the importance of cooking in human evolution. The application of fire to raw food externalizes the digestive process; it gelatinizes starch and denatures protein. The chemical disassembly of raw food, which in a chimpanzee requires a gut roughly three times the size of ours, allows Homo sapiens to eat far less food and expend far fewer calories extracting nutrition from it. The effects are enormous. It allowed early man to gather and eat a far wider range of foods than before: plants with thorns, thick skins, and bark could be opened, peeled, and detoxified by cooking; hard seeds and fibrous foods that would not have repaid the caloric costs of digesting them became palatable; the flesh and guts of small birds and rodents could be sterilized. Even before the advent of cooking, Homo sapiens was a broad-spectrum omnivore, pounding, grinding, mashing, fermenting, and pickling raw meat and plants, but with fire, the range of foods she could digest expanded exponentially. As testimony to that range, an archaeological site in the Rift Valley dated twenty-three thousand years ago gives evidence of a diet spanning four food webs (water, woodland, grassland, and arid) encompassing at least 20 large and small animals, 16 families of birds, and 140 kinds of fruit, nuts, seeds, and pulses, not to mention plants for medicinal and craft purposes—baskets, weaving, traps, weirs.

Cooking not only dramatically widened the range of nutritional sources and freed up calories for digesting instead of slow chewing and fermentation, the resulting soft foods allowed infants to be weaned more easily, and the old and toothless to eat.

In addition, a half-million years of cooking led to big brains:

The gains in nutritional efficiency, Richard Wrangham [of Harvard University] claims, largely account for the fact that our brains are three times the size one would expect, judging by other mammals. In the archaeological record the surge in brain size coincides with hearths and the remains of meals. Morphological changes of this magnitude have been known to occur in other animals in as little as twenty thousand years following a dramatic shift in diet and ecological niche.

Fire’s Mastery of Man

This leads to a starting insight. We have not only domesticated fire. It has domesticated us. We are so adapted to fire that we can’t live without it. The implications are huge. Scott on this concept; I’ve seen this nowhere else:

If the litmus test of domestication for a plant or animal is that it cannot propagate itself without our assistance, then, by the same token, we have adapted so massively to fire that our species would have no future without it. ... One small but telling piece of evidence is that raw-foodists who insist on cooking nothing invariably lose weight. [emphasis mine]

Could we go back to life without cooking? Not with our small guts and calorie-consuming brains. The human brain is roughly 2% of our weight, yet consumes 20-30% of our calories. We’d have to grow dumber and constantly feed ourselves to live without fire.

Can We Unadapt to Our Tools?

That gives rise to a general thought about tools and dependency: We were loose in the world when young, raw and undomesticated by the tools we use now. In that sense we were more adaptable then than now; to survive required only ourselves. We didn’t need tools like fire, we didn’t need larger brains to struggle through life.

Now we depend on our tools for everything. We’re like children who could add, and then bought calculators and forgot. Once we’ve been changed by our tools, can we go back?

The day when we’ll need to is coming. We’ll always have fire, of course; that won’t be lost. But the “first world,” for just one example, is adapted to electrical power and depends on its use — another two-way domestication. If that disappeared in a day, a week, or a year, who would survive? The return to non-electrical life would be wrenching to all and fatal to more than a few.

Would life as we know it survive without today’s tools? I’m certain it won’t.

Next Up

Next in this series we’ll examine the “domus,” a created amalgam that concentrated humans, animals and plants in a modified landscape. Remaking our world in this way resulted in “consequences no one could have possibly foreseen.” What were they? Stay tuned for more.

“The state is an inherently coercive social system for exploiting and immiserating the many to benefit the few. States differ in this quality only by degree.”
—Yours truly

This starts our look at James C. Scott’s brilliant examination of the origin of states, a book named Against the Grain. We peeked at two of Scott’s insights in this earlier post:

As usual, this won’t be a book review as such, but a selection of insights to help us answer the primary question inspired by David Graeber:

How did we get stuck in these destructive, exploitive structures when so many other ways to live were available?

My original thought was that our warlike Western way had its source in the conquering proto-Indo-European people who worshiped a “sky father” god — Dyḗus ph₂tḗr, Deus phter, Zeus or Jupiter — and fought their way out of the steppes, sweeping before them settled neolithic farmers and replacing the female gods who gave them grain.

I still think that’s plausible, as you’ll see later in this series. But first, we have to consider the nature of states. There’s a 4000-year gap between start of sedentism and proto-agriculture — life in one place, life with stable food — and the emergence of the oppressor we’ve come to call “the state.” (Why “the oppressor”? Read on.)

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The Rise of Sedentism in Selected Places

Sedentism could only begin in certain locations — basically, nutrition-rich wetlands and deltas. He discusses what he calls the “standard narrative” — the “sequence of progress from hunting and gathering to nomadism to agriculture (and from band to village to town to city).” Then says this (emphasis mine):

It turns out that the greater part of what we might call the standard narrative has had to be abandoned once confronted with accumulating archaeological evidence. Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never looked so bad—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure.[6] The current fad of “Paleolithic” diets reflects the seepage of this archaeological knowledge into the popular culture. The shift from hunting and foraging to agriculture—a shift that was slow, halting, reversible, and sometimes incomplete—carried at least as many costs as benefits. Thus while the planting of crops has seemed, in the standard narrative, a crucial step toward a utopian present, it cannot have looked that way to those who first experienced it: a fact some scholars see reflected in the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

The wounds the standard narrative has suffered at the hands of recent research are, I believe, life threatening. For example, it has been assumed that fixed residence—sedentism—was a consequence of crop-field agriculture. Crops allowed populations to concentrate and settle, providing a necessary condition for state formation. Inconveniently for the narrative, sedentism is actually quite common in ecologically rich and varied, preagricultural settings—especially wetlands bordering the seasonal migration routes of fish, birds, and larger game. There, in ancient southern Mesopotamia (Greek for “between the rivers”), one encounters sedentary populations, even towns, of up to five thousand inhabitants with little or no agriculture. The opposite anomaly is also encountered: crop planting associated with mobility and dispersal except for a brief harvest period. This last paradox alerts us again to the fact that the implicit assumption of the standard narrative—namely that people couldn’t wait to abandon mobility altogether and “settle down”—may also be mistaken.

And about domestication as a decisive step in the creation of civilization and therefore states, Scott says this:

Perhaps most troubling of all, the civilizational act at the center of the entire narrative: domestication turns out to be stubbornly elusive. Hominids have, after all, been shaping the plant world—largely with fire—since before Homo sapiens. What counts as the Rubicon of domestication? Is it tending wild plants, weeding them, moving them to a new spot, broadcasting a handful of seeds on rich silt, depositing a seed or two in a depression made with a dibble stick, or ploughing? There appears to be no “aha!” or “Edison light bulb” moment. There are, even today, large stands of wild wheat in Anatolia from which, as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year. Long before the deliberate planting of seeds in ploughed fields, foragers had developed all the harvest tools, winnowing baskets, grindstones, and mortars and pestles to process wild grains and pulses.[7] For the layman, dropping seeds in a prepared trench or hole seems decisive. Does discarding the stones of an edible fruit into a patch of waste vegetable compost near one’s camp, knowing that many will sprout and thrive, count?

So free your mind of the counter-factual assumption, that there’s a straight and necessary line from hunter-gatherer uncertainty to cozy state life. The line’s neither straight nor necessary, and the state was coercive, not cozy.

What places were wet and rich enough to support hunter-gatherer sedentism? (This is my term for a hunter-gatherer life with no moving around, as opposed to state-controlled sedentism — my term again — where food, and therefore, people are centrally controlled.)

Scott lists those places; they’re the usual suspects: the southern Mesopotamian alluvium (the silted area of the Tigris-Euphrates delta), the area around Jericho, the Levant, the Nile delta and Indus valley, northern China, and so on. In sum, not that many, and crucially, not all of these places grew states, which has special requirements.

Timeline of State Formation in Mesopotamia

I’ll close with two points. One is a timeline of state formation in Mesopotamia to support the idea of the long pre-state gap between the start of sedentary life and the creation of states.

The following is adapted from Scott’s Figure 4 (blue boxes mine).

The Late Uruk period is the time of first state formation. Settlements — hunter-gatherer sedentism — preceded that by millennia with no states in sight.

Topics Discussed in This Series

The book’s argument proceeds quite logically, so this series will be following that. Its chapters are these:

1. The Domestication of Fire, Plants, Animals, and … Us

Before we could be made the object of state making, it was necessary that we gather—or be gathered—in substantial numbers with a reasonable expectation of not immediately starving.

2. Landscaping the World: The Domus Complex

This chapter looks at the length of the human project: landscaping the world. This process starts with the domestication of fire by Homo erectus — and fire’s domestication of us.

3. Zoonoses: A Perfect Epidemiological Storm

The burdens of life for nonelites in the earliest states … were considerable. The first, as noted above, was drudgery. … A second great and unanticipated burden of agriculture was the direct epidemiological effect of concentration … Diseases with which we are now familiar—measles, mumps, diphtheria, and other community acquired infections—appeared for the first time in the early states.

4. Agro-ecology of the Early State

It is surely striking that virtually all classical states were based on grain, including millets. … My guess is that only grains are best suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing.

5. Population Control: Bondage and war

If the formation of the earliest states were shown to be largely a coercive enterprise, the vision of the state, one dear to the heart of such social-contract theorists as Hobbes and Locke, as a magnet of civil peace, social order, and freedom from fear, drawing people in by its charisma, would have to be reexamined.

6. Fragility of the Early State: Collapse as Disassembly

The agro-ecology favorable to state making is relatively stationary, while the states that occasionally appear in these locations blink on and off like erratic traffic lights.

7. The Golden Age of the Barbarians

Barbarians are not essentially a cultural category; they are a political category to designate populations not (yet?) administered by the state. The line on the frontier where the barbarians begin is that line where taxes and grain end.

I hope each of these topics will draw you back. Yet as interesting in themselves as they are, we’re not going to lose sight of our goal, which is to discover:

          What is a state? 
          What are the alternatives to states? 
          Why are we stuck in states? 
          How to get free of them? 

One thought for free: Like it or not, this century will see the end of state formation and the forced return to alternatives. Some alive will see this; all of their children will.

Please join us as we continue this examination. I’m looking forward to it.

We're approaching the end of our look at Alfred McCoy's To Govern the Globe, his examination of the centuries-long Western project to, well, govern the globe.

Links to previous parts of this series appear below:

• Introduction: ‘To Govern The Globe’ — A view from the edge of the cliff

• Alfred McCoy: The Quest for Global Control — The Iberian Age

• Alfred McCoy: A World in Transition and the Rise of Capital Rule — The Dutch encroach on the Spanish and Portuguese Empires

• Alfred McCoy: The British Empire and Scientific Racism — Justifying Western abuse in the 19th century

• Alfred McCoy: Controlling the 'World Island' (this piece) — Using sea power to dominate Asia

Here we’ll examine a single persistent notion, an idea that has driven the West since the global project began — the domination of Asia, which Western strategists came to call the “world island.”

Consider the image below, from McCoy’s Chapter 2, “The Iberian Age.” It shows the Portuguese Empire circa 1570.

Note that while this is ostensibly a map of trade routes and ports — not military installations per se — it foreshadows what’s to come in Western thinking.

Note also that the ports and routes consist of two parts — those that dominate littoral (coastal) Africa to secure the Portuguese slave trade, and those that dominate littoral (coastal) Asia to secure access to that continent’s great wealth. (Littoral, noun and adjective, comes from the Latin for “shore.”)

The slave trade eventually disappeared, but the domination of littoral Asia, the Asian coast, as a way to dominate the continent itself has informed Western strategists from that day through now. Why else do you think the West is today so upset about China building out islands in the South China Sea to use as bases? Answer: The West doesn’t want China to challenge Western control of its coast.

The West wants control for itself. The thinking behind dominating the coast of Asia goes way back. Let’s take a look through Alfred McCoy’s eyes.

What is Geopolitics

McCoy’s notion of “geopolitics” as a way of managing empires underlies the West’s whole strategy. From Chapter 1 (emphasis mine):

Geopolitics is essentially a method for the management of empire through the use of geography (air, land, and sea) to maximize military and economic advantage. Unlike conventional nations, whose peoples can be readily mobilized for self-defense, empires are, by dint of their extraterritorial reach and the perils inherent in the overseas deployment of armed forces, a surprisingly fragile form of government. They seem to require a strategic visionary who can merge landforms, seascapes, and societies into a sustainable global system, allowing such strengthened empires both extraordinary power and exceptional economic opportunity.

Empires are fragile and require extraordinary strategies to maintain. Hitler, for example, relied on the flawed geopolitical analysis of H.J. Mackinder — he thought the “world island” could be dominated by land — in his attempt to conquer post-Revolution Russia and prevent an Asian (Russia plus China) domination of Europe. That turned out badly.

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Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, followed similar ideas when he armed Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen in the late 1970’s in Afghanistan.

As an intellectual follower of Mackinder, Brzezinski would prove adept at applying the British don’s famous dictum about the geopolitical connection between Eastern Europe and Eurasia’s “heartland.”⁵³ Wielding a multibillion-dollar CIA covert operation like a sharpened wedge, Brzezinski drove radical Islam from Afghanistan deep into Soviet Central Asia. That geopolitical gambit drew Moscow into a debilitating decade-long Afghan war, which weakened the Soviet Union sufficiently for Eastern Europe, three thousand miles away, to finally break free of its imperial grasp.

Brzezinski was proud of this move, even when, decades later, the chickens returned to the roost and these wars began to come home.

“What is most important to the history of the world?” [Brzezinski] asked in 1998. “The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”⁵⁴

That’s geopolitics at work — modern attempts to dominate “the world island” by land or by sea. Needless to say, attempts to dominate by land have, all of them, failed.

Controlling the ‘World Island’ by Sea

Enter the American strategic thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan, a rather incompetent Navy captain and a more respected historian at the Naval War College. Mahan wrote extensively about the importance of sea power in the 1890’s, and his work formed the basis of American naval strategy in the Pacific from then until now. From Chapter 1 (emphasis mine):

When Washington [meaning the U.S.] took its first steps onto the world stage in the 1890s, an American naval historian, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, argued that sea power was, through the exceptional mobility of warships, the key to national security and international influence. His writings inspired Washington’s decision to build a blue-water navy and seize an empire of islands for naval bases stretching halfway around the globe, from Puerto Rico to Hawaii and the Philippines. Mahan’s international influence was extraordinary. His view that modern wars turned on a concentration of capital ships for a “decisive battle” would shape the strategies of Germany in World War I and Japan in World War II.⁴⁶

Mackinder’s and Mahan’s geopolitical ideas formed the basis of modern strategic thinking. Those ideas even preceded their writings and properly describe the Western Project from its start.

If we combine Mahan’s emphasis on naval strength as the means to control continents with Mackinder’s focus on the “world island,” we will find that a succession of leading empires—Portuguese, Dutch, British, US, and Chinese—have all tried to achieve global power by dominating that tri-continental landmass of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Indeed, Portugal’s sixteenth-century chain of 50 fortified ports around Africa and across the Indian Ocean seems strikingly similar to China’s current string of 40 commercial ports covering much of the same terrain. Of course, China’s position has also been strengthened by a transcontinental grid of railroads and pipelines. Beneath the visible, much-discussed issues of trade and technology, this geopolitical strategy has become a battering ram for Beijing to break Washington’s control over Eurasia and thereby challenge its global hegemony.

The ‘Pax Americana’

This leads us to consider the present imperial age, what came to be called (by Americans) “Pax Americana.” That American Peace was, from the start, to be achieved through empire, and according to Mahan, the leading geopolitical thinker of his day, that empire rested on sea power. In America’s case, that meant the need to dominate strategic Pacific islands (emphasis mine):

Written at a time when America was just beginning its ascent to global power and expanding its navy, Mahan’s book made the crucial argument that Washington needed both to build a battle fleet and to capture island bases that could control the surrounding sea-lanes—particularly in the Pacific. In marked contrast to the Royal Navy’s chain of fortified bastions that made an “extensive empire, like that of England, secure,” US warships with “no foreign establishments, either colonial or military” would be “like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores. To provide resting-places for them … would be one of the first duties of a government proposing to itself the development of the power of the nation at sea.”¹⁷ In reviewing the book for the Atlantic Monthly, a young Theodore Roosevelt wrote: “Captain Mahan shows very clearly the practical importance of naval history…. We need a large navy, composed not merely of cruisers, but containing also a full proportion of powerful battleships.”¹⁸

China and the Pacific Littoral

The book contains a lengthy and fascinating discussion of the way the U.S. came to rule the Pacific. Consider, for example, that in the 1920’s much of the West had claims (“mandates”) to Pacific territories.

But in the end, World War II, which closed a dying imperial age, that of the British, had birthed the aforementioned Pax Americana, the next new world order. And under the veneer of what McCoy calls “liberal internationalism” — which means, for example, the ideals behind the U.S.-led United Nations — lay the reality of consolidating and keeping power. On this contradictory stance, McCoy cites George F. Kennan, the chief architect of U.S. post-War foreign policy, who saw the situation clearly:

“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only about 6.3 percent of its population,” said George Kennan in 1947, when he was chief of policy planning at the State Department. “Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all … high-minded international altruism.”

U.S. global domination depended, then as now, on domination of the Pacific coast of Asia, the “Pacific littoral.” President Obama’s geopolitical strategy was to reduce American need for Middle East oil (a goal he accomplished) while simultaneously “pivoting toward Asia” and reinforcing our control of, you guessed it, the Asian coast.

As Obama withdrew troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington began rebuilding its chain of military bases and strategic alliances along the Asian littoral. In March 2014, a full battalion of US Marines was deployed at the port of Darwin, Australia, on the Timor Sea, well positioned to access the strategic Lombok and Sunda Straits that lead to the South China Sea. Five months later, the two powers signed the US–Australia Force Posture Agreement allowing for the basing of American troops and warships at Darwin.¹⁵⁸

Further north, in February 2016, the South Koreans completed a naval facility on Jeju Island, between that country and Japan, giving the US Navy access to a strategic port astride the East China Sea. Washington also signed an enhanced defense agreement with the Philippines, allowing use of several military bases astride the South China Sea.¹⁵⁹ In combination with its eight established air and naval bases in Japan, Washington had effectively rebuilt its chain of military enclaves at the edge of Asia.¹⁶⁰ To operate them, the Pentagon planned to “forward base 60 percent of our naval assets in the Pacific by 2020” along with a similar preponderance of Air Force fighters and bombers, which would be bolstered by “space and cyber capabilities.”¹⁶¹ By strengthening long-standing bilateral alliances, the Obama administration had taken the first steps, militarily speaking, toward rebuilding the US axial position on the Pacific littoral, which had long been central to its control over the vast Eurasian landmass.

Now perhaps we can understand the context of the Chinese reaction to these advances. The West has been encircling Asia with an eye to control since the mid-1400s. This is the Western Project, properly considered.

U.S. geopolitical strategy, from its earliest entry into the Western Project game, has been, explicitly, to control the Asian coast. It achieved that goal by the start of World War II, and by the end of the war and the years immediately following, achieved its strongest position to date in that region.

China, since the days of British domination, has worked to prevent Western domination of Asia. Its wish to build bases in the Spratley Island atolls are just the start of that struggle. This is what the conflict between the U.S. — inheritor of the Western Project — and China is actually about. It’s geopolitics American style.

The fight for control of Asia’s Pacific coast is six centuries old, and it will not end until the West has finally failed, or the inevitable chaos of climate makes mincemeat pie of everyone’s empire dreams. And now you know.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
—John F. Kennedy

“The state and early civilizations were often seen as attractive magnets, drawing people in by virtue of their luxury, culture, and opportunities. In fact, the early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage”
—James C. Scott, Against the Grain

I’ve been writing about how hunter-gatherer and early neolithic lifestyles are both different from the lives most in the West “enjoy” and also are viable alternatives to it. That is, there’s nothing inevitable about kingdoms and empires as a method of organizing society — it’s just what our European ancestors settled into, or were forced into by the ethnic group that overran their lands millennia ago.

For more on that, see here:

Many readers have since asked, “OK, we’re stuck with our rulers — so what do we do? If living controlled in hierarchies is simply a choice made by our ancestors, how do we get out of it now? What is the mechanism of change?”

Valid questions all. I think the answers start with the ideas below.

Three Roads Home

If we think of tribal, hunter-gatherer, or small village life as “home” — after all, as a species we spent almost 95% of our time adapted to smaller, low-hierarchy communities — what’s the machine that breaks these states, these giant engines of control, so we can free our lives?

Keep in mind, those of our species who pathologically love control, will not give it up easily, no more than an emperor would change place with a salt mine slave. Not a normal abnormal emperor at least, not Jamie Dimon, say, or Elon Gates.

This means that control will have to be torn from their grasp. How? I see three ways.

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• Electoral decapitation and system restructuring, whereby those in control are removed from power by organized peaceful means and the system rebuilt to be much more fit for the purpose. A transition, in other words, of both leaders and systems from oppressive and predatory engines to egalitarian and nurturing ones.

I’m not sure this option is likely, but this is the “theory of change,” as it’s called, of most sincere, progressive, Party-aligned Democrats, voters and operatives alike. Sanders supporters in his two failed runs were driven by this idea — reform the system using the system’s rules.

• Forceful overthrow and system restructuring, whereby those in control are removed against their will using unapproved means and the system rebuilt. This is the “tell, don’t ask” approach. People in control are told or made to leave, and the place is remodeled when cleared of their debris.

As the Kennedy quote above makes clear, this method often occurs when the first method fails and people have reached their limit. When asking fails, eventually telling takes over, even if it takes a while, years or centuries. All empires fall; all king-controlled states break down; all corrupt big city machines eventually lose power. Often the reason for these failures is forceful revolt — overthrow outside of constitutional means.

But we can’t say this happens all the time. Yes, all empires fall, but not always from revolt. That brings up the third reason for things to change.

• Collapse, whereby a system fails on its own, brought down by its own inadequacy or felled by an external force. A drought will do kingdoms in. Disease does the same. A meteor shattered the rule of the dinosaurs, collapse on a global scale.

And needless to say, we’re on the verge of it now — collapse of an empire that’s arguably in its last throes, by which I mean the rule of the West over all of the rest of the globe; plus collapse of a climate system that sustains every species adapted to Holocene temperatures.

The Sumerian empire fell for a combination of reasons — population shift and drought being two of them. The Aztec empire was overthrown by Western expansion — the Spanish and Portuguese hunt for global colonies — but the Mayans fell much as the Sumerians did, through drought and social exhaustion. A Greek Dark Age ended the Mycenaeans — the world of Agamemnon and Achilles — just as a Roman Dark Age ended, well, Rome.

Can Collapse Be a Good Thing?

And here’s the rub: we think of collapse as a tragedy. It’s almost built into the name. A “lapse” is a fall from something, often religion (“lapsed Catholic”), and “co-lapse” first meant a group that falls together.

“Falling” is never thought good, and we often think of temples and monuments, ruined and abandoned, romantically, as though a good thing had died.

We think of the building of large and oppressive social structures as accomplishments, things to desire, and we mourn their passing as though the move away from that life is a loss.

But what if that loss is a gain?

Collapse As Gain

A book we’ll be taking a longer look at shortly is James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. I first mentioned it here.

One of his theses is that these large and oppressive structures — kingdoms and empires, giant cities and states — were not good, nor were they inevitable in the sense that they represented inescapable social advances. We don’t, in other words, “move forward” to life in large states, nor do we “turn into savages” when those states collapse. That’s a romantic notion, and an illusion.

Here’s Scott on the surprising (to most) four millennia span between the rise of sedentism (small village life) and the oppressions of “civilization” (life ruled by kings).

Note the “We thought … but it turns out” structure of the passage below. There are several of these pairs. From the Preface, all emphasis mine:

The astonishing advances in our understanding over the past decades have served to radically revise or totally reverse what we thought we knew about the first “civilizations” in the Mesopotamian alluvium and elsewhere. We thought (most of us anyway) that the domestication of plants and animals led directly to sedentism and fixed-field agriculture. It turns out that sedentism long preceded evidence of plant and animal domestication and that both sedentism and domestication were in place at least four millennia before anything like agricultural villages appeared. Sedentism and the first appearance of towns were typically seen to be the effect of irrigation and of states. It turns out that both are, instead, usually the product of wetland abundance. We thought that sedentism and cultivation led directly to state formation, yet states pop up only long after fixed-field agriculture appears. Agriculture, it was assumed, was a great step forward in human well-being, nutrition, and leisure. Something like the opposite was initially the case. The state and early civilizations were often seen as attractive magnets, drawing people in by virtue of their luxury, culture, and opportunities. In fact, the early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage and were plagued by the epidemics of crowding. Finally, there is a strong case to be made that life outside the state—life as a “barbarian”—may often have been materially easier, freer, and healthier than life at least for nonelites inside civilization.

Each of those pairs deserves its own expansion — the surprising 4,000 year span between the first sedentary villages and plant and animal domestication; the place of wetland abundance, not irrigation, in pre-state sedentary lifestyles; the fact that fixed-field agriculture long preceded kingdom and state formation; and the fact that the agricultural life was not a step up in leisure, but exactly the opposite, a life lived as slaves to the land.

But for now look at the last point — The early states had to capture and hold much of their population by forms of bondage and were plagued by the epidemics of crowding.

There’s nothing romantic or desirable about living in crowds and filth (think Medieval cities and towns). I’ll add without citing for now David Graeber’s similar observation, that many hunter-gatherer tribes who tried fixed-field agriculture abandoned it later, just as the shepherds forced into British industrial hell-towns and factories would have loved to go back, if only their masters had not taken their fields away along with their freedom.

Escaping Civilization

This leads us to think about collapses differently. From Scott’s Chapter 1:

In unreflective use, “collapse” denotes the civilizational tragedy of a great early kingdom being brought low, along with its cultural achievements. We should pause before adopting this usage. Many kingdoms were, in fact, confederations of smaller settlements, and “collapse” might mean no more than that they have, once again, fragmented into their constituent parts, perhaps to reassemble later. In the case of reduced rainfall and crop yields, “collapse” might mean a fairly routine dispersal to deal with periodic climate variation. Even in the case of, say, flight or rebellion against taxes, corvée labor, or conscription, might we not celebrate—or at least not deplore—the destruction of an oppressive social order? Finally, in case it is the so-called barbarians who are at the gate, we should not forget that they often adopt the culture and language of the rulers whom they depose. Civilizations should never be confused with the states that they typically outlast, nor should we unreflectively prefer larger units of political order to smaller units.

Collapse as re-fragmentation. Not death, but rebirth, reconfiguration. The United States un-united, regionally governed. China the same. De-growth and de-globalization. Local control. More choices.

I’ll stop for now, but please consider that thought. Collapses aren’t always terrible tragedies, with fires and armies and death. They’re often just places abandoned because no one wanted to stay. The city collapses, yes, but its people now thrive, living separately, simply and well. No big screen TVs perhaps, but supportive communities replace heartless billionaire kings intent on their own aggrandizement at others’ expense. Fair trade? You’d get to choose.

Of course people will die, especially if the inevitable climate rears its head, but those consequences are, frankly, already baked in. We'll have them whatever we do. What will come out of that may be a blessing, not “collapse” in the tragic sense, but a wipe of the slate, a chance to construct a much more humane life.

If orderly restructuring fails (it’s failed so far), is “collapse” as considered above worse than violent revolt? I think I might choose the former, however hard, over the kind of great civil war we would otherwise get.

The long march down, then large, magnificent,
then — here the miracle occurs — the fire put out
in one dark hellish Krellish punishing night. 
Thus the universe folds back on itself 
and lifts its glass: To mankind, coming and gone. 

The world has gone crazy; perhaps you’ve noticed that.

One of the least important things this whirlwind has caused is to throw me off schedule for the Book Club feature at this site. That feature started with reflections on David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything and went on to include works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and Alfred McCoy’s To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.

The Book Club menu is here.

The Book Club has grown to include many topics. A few of the pieces are offered just for fun, like the way Gore Vidal’s critique of FDR’s entry into World War II is repeated in Anthony Horowitz’s James Bond pastiche Forever and a Day. (You may know Horowitz as the creator of the TV series Foyle’s War and Magpie Murders.)

The Tale of Our Species from Start to Near Its End

But the works we’ve covered in some depth have a single focus: In the whole of human history — which spans either 200,000 years if you include just Homo sapiens (us), or two million years if you also count Homo erectus, maker of tools, user of fire, and mother of all modern humans — in all that time, we’ve spent most of our lives in tribes. We call that long period the Old Stone Age. That life is what we call home. Counting just us (Homo sapiens), non-sedentary life — life moving around — covers 92% of our time on earth.

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Then some of us, not very many, began switching to mixed or sedentary lives. Of those, some adopted a kind of proto-agriculture (taking advantage of naturally occurring fields), then fixed-field agriculture (think weeding and plows). After another long stretch, again lasting thousands of years, we evolved (devolved?) to states and empires, and with it the joys and pains of life with rulers. None of this happened quickly. Thousands of years passed between stages, each occurred regionally at different times, and some stages never happened at all in certain locations.

This is the time of interest, what I want to study, this long transition from full hunter-gatherer life to rulers and ruled — to life with states and kings.

Why do this?

For one thing, you could argue that hierarchical life is killing us all. Our current rulers, the less than a thousand people whose actions have force, will murder the rest of us, not sparing themselves, in less than a century or so. Those who escape will enter … you guessed it … the Old Stone Age, again. A perfect arc.

Another reason is the question of inevitability: Did we really have to end up living this way? If not, what happened to force it? And how do we get out?

Coming Attractions

So that’s what’s been interrupted here at God’s Spies, a closer examination of our species’ great path. What’s coming? I’m going to make looking at this a priority.

In particular, I’m going to complete our look at the destructive march of the West in Alfred McCoy’s To Govern the Globe. It still has much to teach us.

Then we’ll look at two works interspersed: David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which we’ve already started (see here), and a new work that touches on the same topic and time, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

Each asks the same questions: How did we get stuck, almost eight billion of us, living with rulers and states? Is this mode of life an advance, a regression, or neither? Are there other paths a society could have taken? If so, why did we take this one?

The answers won’t come in a series of essays — that would involve writing a book — but a series of observations that, I hope, will be easily digested and stimulate thought.

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A Taste: ‘Western’ Notions of Liberty Came from Aboriginal Americans

One such observation from these works is this: Did you know that the Enlightenment critique of European life, with its kings, nobles, much-abused citizens and slaves — a critique that produced our modern notions of “freedom” — came not from Enlightenment thinkers, but from aboriginal Americans who encountered the West, saw it for what it was and criticized it brilliantly?

The idea that our current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are somehow products of the ‘Western tradition’ would in fact have come as an enormous surprise to someone like Voltaire. As we’ll soon see, the Enlightenment thinkers who propounded such ideals almost invariably put them in the mouths of foreigners, even ‘savages’ like the Yanomami. This is hardly surprising, since it’s almost impossible to find a single author in that Western tradition, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Erasmus, who did not make it clear that they would have been opposed to such ideas. The word ‘democracy’ might have been invented in Europe (barely, since Greece at the time was much closer culturally to North Africa and the Middle East than it was to, say, England), but it’s almost impossible to find a single European author before the nineteenth century who suggested it [democracy] would be anything other than a terrible form of government.
—from Chapter 1, The Dawn of Everything

More to follow in future Book Club pieces.

Free and Paid Subscriptions

A note: Some pieces will be free, and some will have sections marked paid. As originally intended, I want to give something back to the generous folks who can afford to help by paying for what we do.

Free subscribers need not fear — regular posts will continue as before, generally once a week. In addition, all paid pieces will have significant opening parts that are free to all. We value each of you; our goal is to spread information, not put fences around it.

I hope you’ll find these changes helpful and enlightening. Feel free to give your thoughts on this in the comments.

Just as Christianity legitimated slavery during the Iberian age, so a distortion of evolutionary science formed the ideological framework for the British imperial era, creating a racial hierarchy to excuse both the cruelty of European conquest and the harshness of its colonial rule in Africa and Asia.
—Alfred McCoy, To Govern the Globe

Take up the White man's burden
—Rudyard Kipling, “White Man’s Burden” (1899)

This is the fourth in a series that looks at Alfred McCoy’s To Govern the Globe, a magisterial account of the history of what I would call the “Western imperial project,” the successful attempt, starting in the mid-1400s, to control the non-Western world, its people and wealth.

All parts of this series are found at the top of the main page under the Book Club pull-down menu. These include:

• Introduction: ‘To Govern The Globe’ — A view from the edge of the cliff

• Alfred McCoy: The Quest for Global Control — The Iberian Age

• Alfred McCoy: A World in Transition and the Rise of Capital Rule — The Dutch encroach on the Spanish and Portuguese Empires

• Alfred McCoy: The British Empire and Scientific Racism (this piece) — Justifying Western abuse in the 19th century

• Alfred McCoy: Controlling the 'World Island' — Using sea power to dominate Asia

Today we look at the transition from Dutch to British control and the period of the next great age, that of the British Empire.

A Brief Note

As usual with posts like these, this is a paid-subscriber posts for the reason outlined here.

From Dutch to British Dominion

Chapter 3 of the book details the transition, at the end of the Iberian Age, first to Dutch, then to British dominion. The transition phase includes the rise of capitalism — the title of the chapter, in fact, is “Empires of Commerce and Capital.” The cruelty also continued. (All emphasis below is my own.)

Indeed, the Iberian vision of expansive sovereignty—acquisition of terrain by conquest and oceans by exploration—would continue under Dutch and British hegemony, illustrating the capacity of these global systems to survive the empires that created them. As the Dutch extended their colonial rule across Java and the British across India in the eighteenth century, the violence of their transgressions against the sovereignty of indigenous states would approach anything the Iberians had done in Africa or the Americas. Thanks to the British and Dutch decisions to strip their colonial subjects of civil liberties and carry the transatlantic slave trade to new heights, the Iberian hierarchy of human inequality would, in all its cruelty and tragedy, continue.

The success of the early East India companies (Dutch and British) pointed the way to an evolving economic system, one where joint-stock companies were a de facto “company (or surrogate) state”. In other words, these early corporations were handed state power.

For much of the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, the driving force in European colonization would be a myriad of joint-stock companies—notably, the Virginia, Massachusetts Bay, Dutch West India, French East India, Hudson’s Bay, Royal African, and many more.

In the process, Europe’s empires were evolving away from the quasi-feudal Iberian system toward a more capitalist, market-based commerce. In the metropoles of Amsterdam, London, and Paris, monarchs and legislatures devolved a portion of their state power to those chartered companies, which were the world’s first real corporations, with balance sheets, shareholders, elected directors, and legal personae. During the seventeenth century as well, the British East India Company (EIC), like its Dutch counterpart, became a de facto “company state” with delegated royal authority to build forts, make laws, sign treaties, coin money, and make arrests. Out on the imperial periphery, such chartered companies served as the fulcrum for contact between Europe’s monarchies and indigenous states, whether Indian maharajahs, Arab emirs, or African chiefs. Thus, they slowly knit European commercial enclaves into territorial empires that would, in the course of the eighteenth century, extend to cover the whole of India and Indonesia.

Thus evolved a hybrid, transitional form of commerce that “fused state coercion and commercial monopoly to secure hyper-profits.”

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Of course, slaves were involved:

These chartered companies employed a hybrid form of commerce called mercantilism that fused state coercion and commercial monopoly to secure hyper-profits. While the Dutch advocated free trade and open seas in principle, their VOC [the Dutch East India Company] was ruthless in crushing any competition for the spices of Southeast Asia. To control the export of nutmeg and mace, it curtailed unregulated production in the Banda Islands of eastern Indonesia by slaughtering their populations or deporting them to serve as slaves elsewhere.

As was extensive commerce in drugs:

In pursuit of mercantilist profits, European empires active in Asia during the eighteenth century found the trade in addictive substances—coffee, tea, tobacco, and opium—enticingly susceptible to lucrative monopolies. Given the light weight and high value of these drugs, and the certainty that customers habituated to caffeine, nicotine, and morphine would always return, companies were assured of both recurring sales and soaring profits. After discovering the exceptional gains to be made from the India–China opium trade, the VOC headquartered at Jakarta, Indonesia, increased its imports of Indian opium from just 617 kilograms in 1660 to 87 metric tons by 1699, retaining some for local sales and sending the rest to China, where addiction would grow rapidly.

But the full transition to the next great age doesn't occur until the justification of Western enslavement changes — which tells you (again) how much the rise of the West depended on the debasement of non-Western people, their thingification (treatment as inhuman objects), and the constant violation of their sovereignty.

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The God that holds you [the unconverted] over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.
—Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741)

This is the next in a series of essays that looks at Alfred McCoy's epic telling of the quest for world domination — not regional rule, like Caesar or Alexander, but truly global control.

The full series includes these pieces:

• Introduction: ‘To Govern The Globe’ — A view from the edge of the cliff

• Alfred McCoy: The Quest for Global Control — The Iberian Age

• Alfred McCoy: A World in Transition and the Rise of Capital Rule (this piece) — The Dutch encroach on the Spanish and Portuguese Empires

• Alfred McCoy: The British Empire and Scientific Racism — Justifying Western abuse in the 19th century

• Alfred McCoy: Controlling the 'World Island' — Using sea power to dominate Asia

This part looks at the transition from the Iberian order, what McCoy calls “state sovereignty,” which began in the 1400s, was dominated by Portugal and Spain, was based on imperial armies, murder and rape and was morally backstopped by Papal permissions like this:

As his captains delivered the first African captives, Prince Henry [of Portugal], in a clever diplomatic artifice, petitioned the Vatican to elevate his explorations to a crusade, prompting Pope Eugene IV to issue a bull (Dum Diversas, 1452) that would legitimate “perpetual servitude” for all non-Christian captives. ... While earlier papal bulls had granted Christian crusaders limited rights to enslave Muslim captives in the Holy Land, the pope now broadened that permission to allow for the perpetual slavery of all peoples beyond the known world.

The new order that would emerge, which today we identify with the British, was in fact ushered in by the Dutch, who challenged the Iberian order in two simultaneous ways:

• The Dutch through superior technology began to chip away at Portuguese- and Spanish-controlled territory and trade

• Iberian "state sovereignty" began to give way to infant Dutch capitalism via the Dutch East India Company (1602) and others like it. The state gave way to the merchants and money control: the wave of the future, our future, and also our end.

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A Brief Note

As usual with posts like these, two notes. One, they're nestled under the ‘Book Club’ pulldown at the top of this site’s main page. And second, they are paid-subscriber posts for the reason outlined here.

The Protestant Justification for Murder and Greed

As I said at the start of these posts, McCoy has two themes. One is the struggle for global wealth and power and the advantages that shifting energy sources and tech conferred on cultures also inclined to be cruel.

The other is the shifting justifications for monstrous brutality, inflicted by the West on all who stood in its way. The wealth-mad Catholic murders of Iberia absolved themselves of their sinfulness via the Pope. Here's how the Protestant Dutch declared themselves clean:

In an assembly convened in 1618 to resolve theological conflicts within Protestantism, known as the Synod of Dordrecht, the Dutch Reformed Church adopted the Calvinist doctrine of “divine election,” which held that certain individuals and groups were favored by God’s protection. According to that logic, the Dutch, as God’s elect, could struggle confidently against enormous adversity to win their independence from Spain, while denying that same freedom to subjects overseas who lacked such divine grace. Specifically, the Synod ruled that a slave’s conversion to Christianity did not confer freedom, implicitly affirming the morality of slavery. As a result, for much of the seventeenth century, the Dutch would, in good conscience, dominate both the transatlantic slave trade and the production of sugar on slave plantations, while using slave labor throughout their Indian Ocean empire, whether in the cultivation of spices in eastern Indonesia or on farms in South Africa. Even in the late eighteenth century, when Enlightenment ideals inspired an abolition movement in England, the Dutch attitude was largely unaffected, and they continued to trade slaves without restraint until the British finally forced them to stop.

For more on this, see Erich Fromm's magnificent and seminal book, Escape from Freedom, which starts with the question, “Why did the German's love Hitler?” and ends by asking instead, “Why did the West turn so cruel at the start of the Age of Science?”

The answer: because of the spread of what he called the “sado-masochistic personality” — people who need to be slaves to someone above and vicious to those below — a need undiminished and very much with us today. (See “Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God” by the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards for a helpful reminder of both of those sick needs. Or watch Judge Judy; your choice.)

Dutch Wealth, Technology and Merchant Culture

The following details the start of Dutch domination and the transition to the next world order, that of the British.

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For the next ten years, those conquistadors swept the island of Hispaniola, enslaving the population and slaughtering any who resisted. In the process, they reduced the original population of 400,000 to just 60,000.
—Alfred McCoy, To Govern the Globe

I recently started a short series that looks at Alfred McCoy’s To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Changes.

In it he covers all the truly global empires, starting with Portugal and Spain, under the rubric of “world orders.” Note that empires are less enduring than orders, since orders include the rules by which truly global empires draw legitimacy and are allowed. The “Iberian order” encompassed several empires, each ruled under the same “permission structure” (my phrasing), delivered, in this case, by the Pope himself.

The full series includes these pieces:

• Introduction: ‘To Govern The Globe’ — A view from the edge of the cliff

• Alfred McCoy: The Quest for Global Control (this piece) — The Iberian Age

• Alfred McCoy: A World in Transition and the Rise of Capital Rule — The Dutch encroach on the Spanish and Portuguese Empires

• Alfred McCoy: The British Empire and Scientific Racism — Justifying Western abuse in the 19th century

• Alfred McCoy: Controlling the 'World Island' — Using sea power to dominate Asia

The Introduction opens like this:

As we enter the next phase of the imperial Western experiment … as we wait for announcements that will firm up our understanding of the pivot our President takes … as we watch dismantled what should never, perhaps, have been built, it’s useful to take a long view of what we’ve done, how long we’ve done it, and how America’s turn as king of the place was thought out and managed. Until it wasn’t — wasn’t thought out; wasn’t very well managed.

If you haven’t figured it out, “we” in the statement above is us in the West.

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A Note on These ‘Book Club’ Reflections

First, all of these pieces are found under the ‘Book Club’ pulldown at the top of this site main page.

Second, this and the pieces like it are paid-subscriber posts, for the reason outlined here.

Third, I quite enjoy writing these diversions, and have many more planned. As I mentioned earlier, there’s quite a lot to learn from Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s novel, The President Is Missing. Clinton reveals a lot. As well, though I haven’t read it, the same may be true of Hillary Clinton’s tome about the struggles of a fictional, put-upon female Secretary of State.

And beyond question I’ll return to the book that started these reflections, David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which traces humanity’s “conquest and empire culture” to neolithic days. Why this culture and not another? Did we have to end up this way? Graeber says no.

To Govern the Globe: The So-Called ‘Age of Discovery’

McCoy opens his examination of the Iberian Age (named after the Iberian peninsula, Portugal and Spain) like this:

[From Chapter 2: The Iberian Age]

In August 1960 on Lisbon’s historic waterfront, Portugal staged an elaborate commemoration for a minor prince known as Henry the Navigator, who died in 1460. Led by the president of Brazil, a delegation of international dignitaries inaugurated the spectacular Monument to the Discoveries, which soars above the Tagus River to a breathtaking peak of 171 feet. At the apex of this massive concrete structure stands Prince Henry, larger than life, holding up a model sailing ship and pointing across the Atlantic toward “the roads of the sea.”

Some two hundred miles south at the Sagres Peninsula, naval vessels from fourteen nations sailed in parade formation past the ruins of the prince’s castle. Overhead thundered jet fighters from Britain, Spain, and the United States, paying tribute to the famous Sagres Academy, where Henry reputedly gathered the world’s most brilliant cartographers and mathematicians to map those roads to exploration. After the jets’ roar had faded and the ships had sailed away, more than three hundred historians attended an international conference in Lisbon to reflect on the remarkable role of that scholar prince in launching the Age of Discovery.

But there was another date in the prince’s biography that was of great historical consequence, yet little discussed during those days of celebration—1441, the year that marks the start of the modern struggle over human rights. That was the year one of Prince Henry’s voyages of discovery reached a point on the African coast eight hundred miles south of Lisbon that the ship’s crew would mistakenly name Rio Douro (river of gold). Instead of the gold they were searching for, however, they found an unexpected prize: twelve captive slaves, whom they likely seized from a Tuareg desert encampment. When they returned to Lisbon, docking just a few miles downriver from where that soaring monument now stands, the prince’s response was not what one would have expected from such a celebrated figure.

“I see before my eyes,” wrote the royal chronicler of Henry’s reaction, “how great his joy must have been … not for the number of those captives, but the hope, oh Sainted Prince!, for others you could have in the future.” Indeed, three years later, more of his ships returned, holds filled to capacity with 235 slaves seized in raids further down the African coast. When they docked, crowds gathered as Prince Henry, astride a strong horse, claimed his rightful share of the human cargo, the “royal fifth” of 46 slaves. The rest were divided into lots that separated families, with much weeping, says the court chronicler, as “mothers clung to their children and were whipped with little pity.”2 Nonetheless, that chronicler celebrated the enslavement of those Africans who once “only knew how to live in a bestial sloth,” but now “turned themselves with a good will into the path of the true faith.”

On the other side of the Atlantic in October 1982, the presidents of Mexico and the Dominican Republic inaugurated a monument with a more somber message. Rising one hundred feet above the waterfront of Santo Domingo, a statue of the friar Antonio de Montesinos, gazing out across the Caribbean Sea, raises a giant bronze hand in an angry gesture to commemorate the impassioned sermon he gave here in 1511, denouncing Spanish abuse of the Amerindians. Flanked by the uniformed military of both nations, the president of Mexico pointed out that this had been “the first time a voice was raised in defense of human rights. Never before in the history of humanity had the victor questioned the basis of his victory.” Indeed, that sermon marked the start of the Iberian world’s long, painful appraisal of the dark underside of Prince Henry’s legacy.

In 1502, as the first ships carrying Spanish colonists and conquistadors to the New World approached Santo Domingo, their commander had told them: “You have arrived at a good moment…. There is to be a war against the Indians and we will be able to take many slaves.” For the next ten years, those conquistadors swept the island of Hispaniola, enslaving the population and slaughtering any who resisted. In the process, they reduced the original population of 400,000 to just 60,000 [emphasis mine].

Thus begins the story of Western global conquest of non-Western lands. The abrogation of rights of all non-Western people is fully half of the story, from start to end. Every step in the Western expanse is a tale of abuse, brutality, and mass murder.

Slaves Forever

As we’ll see in each of these ages, the abuse of non-Western people is the necessary bride to Western global expansion. And in each of these ages, that cruel abuse acquired a permission structure. In the case of the Iberian Age, permission to murder and dehumanize native people came from the pope. In addition, the post-medieval energy equation continued that dynamic.

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As we enter the next phase of the imperial Western experiment … as we wait for announcements that will firm up our understanding of the pivot our President takes … as we watch dismantled what should never, perhaps, have been built, it’s useful to take a long view of what we’ve done, how long we’ve done it, and how America’s turn as king of the place was thought out and managed. Until it wasn’t — wasn’t thought out; wasn’t very well managed.

This story is different than what you may have heard. You might have thought, for example, that Obama’s claim to have created the fracking boom was just his ego speaking. Or that his final push for TPP was just a beg for post-official wealth. Yes, they were likely those things; but they were both more. Obama had a grand strategy that died when he left office, one that matches the recommendations of the 19th Century naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan and has been followed by U.S. minds from before, during, and after World War II.

That strategy: Control the combined “big island” of Europe and Asia by controlling its coasts and inland population. It’s why, before World War II, our Western forward bases were at Asia’s front door.

To do this, we’ll take long looks over the next several weeks at the book pictured above: Alfred McCoy’s To Govern the Globe. It’s a massive history of what I’ve called above the “imperial Western experiment.” It covers all the “world orders”: the Iberian, birthed in Portugal and Spain; the British, with which we’re familiar; the American, which sadly few of us understand; and the next, what’s coming for us, the wolf or the Chinese, whichever, and probably both.

The full series includes these pieces:

• Introduction: ‘To Govern The Globe’ (this piece) — A view from the edge of the cliff

• Alfred McCoy: The Quest for Global Control — The Iberian Age

• Alfred McCoy: A World in Transition and the Rise of Capital Rule — The Dutch encroach on the Spanish and Portuguese Empires

• Alfred McCoy: The British Empire and Scientific Racism — Justifying Western abuse in the 19th century

• Alfred McCoy: Controlling the 'World Island' — Using sea power to dominate Asia

The story begins in the early 1400s and starts like this:

If you read that carefully, you see how brutality is the key to success.

1415 Portugal ventures abroad, capturing port of Ceuta, North Africa, and massacring Muslims.
1441 Portugal’s ships arrive from Western Sahara with first shipment of African slaves.

The Pope gave permission in 1455, and the race (and the rape) was on.

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About World Orders

There’s a difference between world orders and world empires. Empires are things created; they come and go. Orders are ideas; they tend to persist. McCoy:

[From Chapter 1]

Despite their aura of awe-inspiring power, empires tend to be ephemeral creations of an individual conqueror like Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte that fade quickly after their death or defeat. By contrast, world orders are much more deeply rooted, resilient global systems created by a convergence of economic, ideological, and geopolitical forces. On the surface, they entail diplomatic agreement among the most powerful nations, which are usually those with formal empires or international influence. Lacking the sovereignty of nations and the raw power of empires, world orders are essentially broad agreements about relations among nation-states and their peoples, lending them an amorphous, even elusive quality.

At a deeper level, however, world orders entwine themselves in the cultures, commerce, and values of countless societies. They influence the languages people speak, the laws that order their lives, and the ways they work, worship, and even play. They are woven into the fabric of an entire civilization, with a consequent capacity to far outlive the empires that formed them. If the economic globalization of the past two centuries was a process, then the current world order is its ultimate product. World orders have much less visible power than empires, but they are more pervasive and persistent. To uproot such a deeply embedded global system takes an extraordinary event, even a catastrophe. Across the span of five continents and seven centuries, a series of calamities—from the devastating epidemics of 1350 through the coming climate crisis of 2050—has produced a relentless succession of rising empires and fading world orders.

… Since the start of the age of exploration in the fifteenth century, some 90 empires, major and minor, have come and gone.²³ In those same five hundred years, however, there have been just three world orders, all arising in the West—the Iberian age after 1494, the British imperial era from 1815, and the Washington world system from 1945 to perhaps something like 2030. [emphasis mine]

“Age of exploration” is polite. “Age of exploitation” is more accurate, since, as you’ll see, that’s the most common thread. Man’s inhumanity to man, globally expressed.

Why Study World Orders?

We’re looking at this now because it’s interesting. But more than that, we stand at a pivot from one order to the next, or worse, from one order to none, to dis-integration.

• What do these orders look like? On what strategies are they based? Why is the Pacific integral to them all?

• What’s America’s contribution? What makes the U.S. unique?

• And perhaps the biggest questions of them all: Was the whole thing, the project, worth doing to start with? And why did it start in the West?

Perhaps the original sin, as it were, was the existence of the proto-Indo-European “sky father” god, Dyḗus ph₂tḗr (Deus phter, “Zeus pater” to the Romans), who led a conquering people of the steppes as they swept before them neolithic humans who worshiped creatures they honored with statues like this:

What’s Special About the West?

Was a conquering male-godded people the start of it all? Is that why the West has followed such a murdering course? Or did the West just get lucky, get started earlier?

The Mongols, people of the steppes, a conquering tribe, took armies through half the world; the Han Chinese did not, nor did they want to. The Spanish and other Europeans had steel in their hands and cruelty in their hearts; the people they met in what we now call America were far less evil-minded. There are many tales along the Oregon Trail of how Original Americans were shocked at the awful behavior of the whites, even to each other (a post for another day).

We won’t answer all these questions in this on-and-off series, but we’ll touch on them. We’re about to see new aggression against nations bordering the Pacific (the reason for studying Mahan and the “American century”), and we’ll see how it plays out. I hope, through our reading of Alfred McCoy, we’ll see context as well.

‘I have been thinking a great deal about my legacy and what I can do to change the way my country is heading,’ Wolfe went on. There was a rasp in his voice. ‘We are coming to the belief that we can solve all the problems in the world and, as we become ever more powerful, with ever greater weapons, we don’t see what’s happening. We don’t see that we risk becoming monsters!’
— From Anthony Horowitz’s James Bond book Forever and a Day

I’ve always been enamored of the writing of Anthony Horowitz. You may know him as the creator and main writer of Foyle’s War, a British TV series. He’s also a novelist, and quite a clever one. He’s written a Holmes series (House of Silk and Moriarty); two Susan Ryland books (Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, both now TV mysteries); a series in which he appears as himself, Watson to a difficult Holmes (the Hawthorne books: The Word is Murder, etc.); plus quite a few others.

A hallmark of his later style is stories that twist back on themselves, or are contained inside themselves, something M.C. Escher does with his art. This style is most apparent in the Ryland books, which I highly recommend. To experience this type of story in film, watch Get Shorty or The Player. The subject of each film is the film you’re presently watching: Get Shorty is about Get Shorty. The Player is about The Player.

Which brings us to Horowitz’s James Bond novels. There are three so far — one in which Horowitz gets his feet wet using the form (Trigger Mortis); one that serves as a prequel to the Fleming series (Forever and a Day); and one that serves as a sequel to the last Fleming book (A Mind to Murder). Horowitz may write a fourth, but I doubt it. The Ryland and Hawthorne series are doing quite well and may keep him busy for some time.

Part of what interests me about these books, aside from their fun and literary delight, is the way they comment on politics, which is my point today. For instance, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels never depict the FBI as corrupt. Yet when Child’s brother Andrew starts writing Reacher books, they’re quite realistic in a political sense: in the latest, In Too Deep, the treacherous FBI is treacherous indeed, almost another villain.

Forever and a Day

Our subject today is Forever and a Day, the second of Horowitz’s Bond books. It has a couple of unique and delightful features. First, like Trigger Mortis, his first Bond book, it has masterful set pieces. (In Trigger Mortis, Bond is buried alive and must claw himself up from six feet under ground. If you’re claustrophobic at all, the sequence will drive you mad.)

Forever and a Day has three of these set piece scenes. In one, the heroine, a character named 16 and spelled Sixtine in the book, tells her story, tells how she became who she is. The action stops entirely while she talks. Great chapter; a tale within a tale. Another set piece near the end shows Bond captured and tortured (he’s always captured and tortured in the Fleming books). This time the torture involves a massive injection of heroine. How he escapes immediate incapacitation ­— and a life of slavish sexual dependency — is itself worth the price of the book.

The third set piece has one of the book’s two villains, a billionaire aptly name Wolfe, finally revealing what the story’s been about, the evil plan that has driven all of the action. That part is reprinted below. (The other Big Bad of the story, a master drug lord from Marseilles named Scipio, turns up in this excerpt in a minor role.)

As you read this, consider what motivates Wolfe to act: Both of his sons were killed in World War II (the year is 1950), dead in a war he’s convinced we never should have fought, and for which he blames Franklin Roosevelt. You’ve may have read this view of Roosevelt before, perhaps from Gore Vidal, but this is its first appearance in a mainstream novel.

Note that no character in the novel questions this view; their criticism is directed only at Wolfe’s response. I think you’ll find the scene below remarkable.

Why This Is Paid-Subscriber Post

As before when I excerpted a very large chunk of Ministry For the Future…

…so here, I’m excerpting so much that we’re well past “fair use.” My belief is that placing this section behind a paywall converts this post into a private newsletter, a missive between friends. The public website doesn’t contain the excerpt.

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Today I want to continue something I started a little while ago — mini-discussions of books like David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything. Here we’ll discuss two under-noticed themes of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For the Future: the use of violence to create a political effect and treatment of those doing harm.

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As a starting point for these thoughts, let me refer you to two posts, “Name the Damn Perp” and “Climate Change or Genocide?” Consider the ideas carefully; you won’t see them in the mainstream of “straight” climate change discussion. But you will see them in almost the whole of climate fiction.

By the way, as first mentioned here, the next book I’ll tackle like this is Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s thriller The President Is Missing, likely in multiple posts.

It’s quite revealing in a fun, unintended way. Stay tuned.

Note: I’m going to put the rest of this post behind the paywall — one of the few times I’ve done this — since that placement positions this material as part of a newsletter, not part of a public website. The reason: Most of what follows is from the book and too long to be considered “fair use.”

Now on to our literary hour.

The Ministry for the Future

Since reading The Ministry for the Future, I’ve been struck by its twin themes of violence and responsibility.

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Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins
—Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

We’re headed for prehistoric times, I’m sure of it, and as a result, human prehistory has been a focus of mine for quite a few years.

What were our Stone Age lives like? And who lived them? After all, “we” might be just homo sapiens, maybe 200,000 years old; or “we” might be broader, including our contemporary cousins, homo neanderthalensis, or even the ancient, long-lived homo erectus. Erectus had very good tools and fire perhaps. Neanderthals were much like us — we interbred — though evidence suggests, while they probably had some kind of language, we were far smarter.

One of the bigger questions is the one David Graeber and David Wengrow took on in their book The Dawn of Everything: Was it inevitable that the myriad of Stone Age cultures resolve to the single predatory mess we’re now saddled with?

After all, it’s our predatory masters — the Kochs, the Adelsons, the Pritzgers, the Geffens, their friends — whose mandatory greed (which most of us applaud, by the way) have landed us where we are, mounting the crest of our last great ride down the hill.

What’s the Origin of Syntax?

One set of mysteries regarding our ancient ancestors involves their language. How did it emerge? How did it grow? If the direction of modern languages is to become more simple — in English, the loss of “whom”; in French the loss of “ne”; the millions of shortenings and mergings all languages endure — how did that complication that we call syntax first come about?

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The most famous theory is the one by, yes, Noam Chomsky, that humans are born with a “universal grammar” mapped out in our brains, and learning our first language applies that prebuilt facility to what we hear. His argument: No child could learn, from the “poverty of the stimulus” (his or her caregiver’s phrases), all the complexity of any actual language.

There’s, of course, much mulling and arguing over this topic, especially since it’s so theoretical.

Something that’s not theoretical though is this: a group of experiments that shows that syntax evolves, from little to quite complex, all on its own, as a natural byproduct of each generation’s attempt to learn from their parents.

The process is fascinating and demonstrable. The authors of this work have done computer simulations, and they’ve worked with people as well. The results seem miraculous: like putting chemicals into a jar, then thirty days later, finding a butterfly.

The Iterated Learning Model

I’ll explain the experiments here, then append a video that’s more complete. (There are others. Search for Simon Kirby or Kenny Smith.) The root idea is simple. They start where Chomsky starts, with the “poverty of the stimulus,” the incomplete exposure every child gets to his or her first language. Then they simulate learning.

Let’s start with some principles:

• All language changes, year after year, generation to generation. The process will never stop. It’s how we get from Chaucer to Shakespeare to you.

• Holistic language vs. compositional language: That’s jargon for a language made of utterings that cannot be divided in parts (holistic), versus one made up of those that can (compositional).
  
  For example, “abracadabra” means “let there be magic,” yet no part of that word means any part of its meaning. It’s entirely holistic. The whole word means the idea; it has no parts. “John walked home,” on the other hand, is compositional; it’s made up of parts that each contain part of the idea. (Note that the word “walked” is compositional as well: “walk” plus “ed”.)

This matters for two reasons. First, the closest our monkey cousins get to a language is a set of lip smacks, grunts, calls and alerts that each have a meaning, but can’t be deconstructed or assembled. If this is the ultimate source of our great gift, it’s a truly holistic one. No part of a chimp hoot or groan means any part of the message. The sound is a single message.

Because of this fact — the holistic nature of “monkey talk” — our researchers seeded their experiment with a made-up and random language, entirely holistic. Then they taught this language to successive generations of learners — both people and in simulations — with each learner teaching the next as the language evolved.

Remember, the question we’re interested in is: How did syntax start? Who turned the holistic grunts of the monkeys we were, into the subtle order of our first real languages.

The answer: Nobody did.

The Experiments

All of the experiments are pretty much alike; they just vary in tweaked parameters. Each goes like this:

Step one. Create a small artificial, holistic language made up of nonsense words, where each word “means” a small drawing. In this case, each drawing has three elements: a shape, a color and a motion. Here are a few:

Since each “meaning” (symbolic drawing) has a color, a shape and a motion, and since there are three colors (blue, red, black), three shapes (circle, square, triangle), and three motions (straight, wavy, looping), there are 27 ideas (symbols) in the language and thus 27 words. Again, the words are randomly assigned.

Following this pattern, a 27-word language might look like this:

Step two. Teach the first “agent” (A1, the first learner) the whole language.

Step three. Let A1 teach A2, the second learner, just half of the language.

Step four. Test A2 on the whole language. She is shown all of the “meanings” (the symbols) and has to try to guess the names of the ones she doesn’t know.

Step five. Let A2 teach A3, the third learner in the chain, a random half of her language, filtering out duplicated words, words with two “meanings” (two associated symbols).

Step six. Test A3, as before, on the whole language. Show him all of the symbols and ask him to guess the names he hasn’t yet learned.

Step seven. Repeat the above as often as you like.

The researchers did this with people and by computer simulation. The beauty of a simulation is that you can iterate the process endlessly if you like (the number of generations from Sumerian writing to now is about 200). You can also vary parameters like population size (how many teachers and learners in each generation), as well as the bottleneck size (does each generation teach half the language, a third of it, or three-fourths?).

The Results

The results were astounding. The bottleneck — each student’s incomplete learning — always creates, over time, a compositional, syntactical language. As Steven Mithen put it in Chapter 8 of his book The Language Puzzle, the work that put me onto this idea:

Although rules [of a language] gradually change over time, just as the meaning and pronunciation of words change, each generation learns the rules used by the previous generation from whom they are learning language. As an English speaker, I learned to put adjectives before nouns from my parents, and they did the same from their parents and so forth back in time. That raises a question central to the language puzzle: how did the rules originate? Were they invented by a clever hominin in the early Stone Age, who has left a very long legacy because their rules have been copied and accidentally modified by every generation of language learners that followed? No, of course not. But what is the alternative?

The answer was discovered during the 1990s: syntax spontaneously emerges from the generation-to-generation language-learning process itself. This surprising and linguistically revolutionary finding was discovered by a new sub-discipline of linguistics that is known as computational evolutionary linguistics. This constructs computer simulation models for how language evolves by using artificial languages and virtual people.

Here’s what that looks like in a lab with people. Look again at the “language” above, the 27 words. At this stage, the words are holistic — “miniki” means “blue square straight” and “wige” means “red triangle wavy.” No part of a word means part of the associated symbol.

After just ten generations, this is what the language evolved into:

The hyphens were added to this slide for informational purposes; they weren’t part of the actual words. Anything starting with “n” is black in color; “ere” in the middle is starting to mean a square; anything ending in “plo” has a wavy motion.

Ten generations more and this would be smoother. Again, the order, the syntax, its compositional nature, emerges from the process itself, from the iterative act of one generation learning, then teaching, and the next group doing its best to fill in the blanks.

For a video describing these experiments, see below. I’ve cued it to start in the middle, at the point of interest.

I’d be wrong to say there aren’t those who disagree, but this is lab work, not theory, and repeatable, both with SimCity scenarios and actual people.

For me, it answers a question I’ve had almost forever: What first gave languages order? The answer: Speech itself.

New Series — Reflections on 'The Dawn of Everything'

Regular readers will remember that in this scheduling note I promised a new set of features:

I’ve been slowly reading my way through Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, and it has radically changed my view of prehistoric humans — who they were, how they lived, and more importantly, how they thought.

Why does this matter? Because, simply put, we’re going back there. The next anthropological era will be the New Old Stone Age. And for the first time since I started writing about climate, I see this “devolution” not as a loss, but simply as a return to ways of life — yes, ways — our present thinking blocks imagining.

I’d like to share these thoughts with paying members — glosses on quotes from the book, notes on major and minor points the authors make, questions that need answering.

None of this will subtract from what free subscribers receive. It’s merely a bonus, should the new series prove worth reading.

That series starts with this post:

• Reflections on Graeber and Wengrow’s ‘Dawn of Everything’

All of these posts can be found in a separate section of the site. To access them, click the item labeled ‘The Dawn of Everything’ near the Home tab at the top of the site’s main page:

Most of these pieces will be reserved for paid subscribers as a thank-you and expression of my gratitude, though some will be available to everyone. Free subscribers, however, for whom I'm also grateful, need not fear — regular posting will continue on the same schedule as before, generally once a week except for the occasional hiatus.

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Another Series — ‘Short Takes’

I'm also thinking about adding another series, “Short Takes” — quick comments on items that catch the eye or the imagination. These will generally be free and will have their own section as well, accessed from the pull-down item “Short Takes” under the site's title banner.

Feel free to let me know in comments or by email what you think of these ideas. I'm interested in your feedback.

At some point, I may start publishing fiction here as well, but I'll explore that with all of you at another time. Serialized Substack fiction is becoming a “thing.” Whether it's also becoming a good thing for most writers is another story.

Again, thanks to you all. Every subscriber, paid and free, has helped build this site and given me a precious opportunity — a chance to put my thoughts in a public forum and see which ones sparkle in the eyes of readers. No writer could ask for more.

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“What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.”
―Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“In the end, climate change is the only story that matters.”
—Charles Pierce, Esquire, September 24, 2022

As I promised here, this is the start of a series, hopefully a long one, though one that I will keep light. That is, I’ll likely have a lot to say — I’m less than halfway through the book and I already have a lot to say — but I’ll keep most of these pieces relatively brief so I can focus, with you, on one observation at a time.

This series will consist of glosses on my reading and thoughts about Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, and it will take the shape of a considerably down-rev version of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. These thoughts will have a theme, and they will lead, I’m certain, to a number of certainties. After all, it was Pascal who wrote, “It is not certain that everything is uncertain,” and I’m certain he was right. (Whether we'll find that certainty for our own individual selves, and in time to matter, is a separate issue.)

The Late David Graeber

So let’s begin, first by honoring one of the authors, David Graeber. For a little independent reading, his Wikipedia entry is a good place to start. Note especially the comment on his first major book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, which has been called “the most read public anthropology book of the 21st century.”

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Note his activism, and especially his role in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which Graeber himself called “the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire.” Whether you agree or not, the fact is that Graeber himself agreed, which should give you a sense of how far out of the conventional box his thinking went, and how far his thinking reached into past and future. “The dawn of everything” is as far into our past as you can get. The “dissolution of the American Empire,” sans extreme disruption, is hard to imagine happening anytime soon.

By the way, Debt: The First 5000 Years is a hell of a book if you want to know what money and debt really is. Like all of Graeber’s books, it’s a remarkably easy read. Even in audio book form, it’s a delight.

‘The Dawn of Everything’

The Dawn of Everything opens with a short introduction penned by Wengrow. I invite you to read it through:

David Rolfe Graeber died aged fifty-nine on 2 September 2020, just over three weeks after we finished writing this book, which had absorbed us for more than ten years. It began as a diversion from our more ‘serious’ academic duties: an experiment, a game almost, in which an anthropologist and an archaeologist tried to reconstruct the sort of grand dialogue about human history that was once quite common in our fields, but this time with modern evidence. There were no rules or deadlines. We wrote as and when we felt like it, which increasingly became a daily occurrence. In the final years before its completion, as the project gained momentum, it was not uncommon for us to talk two or three times a day. We would often lose track of who came up with what idea or which new set of facts and examples; it all went into ‘the archive’, which quickly outgrew the scope of a single book. The result is not a patchwork but a true synthesis. We could sense our styles of writing and thought converging by increments into what eventually became a single stream. Realizing we didn’t want to end the intellectual journey we’d embarked on, and that many of the concepts introduced in this book would benefit from further development and exemplification, we planned to write sequels: no less than three. But this first book had to finish somewhere, and at 9.18 p.m. on 6 August David Graeber announced, with characteristic Twitter-flair (and loosely citing Jim Morrison), that it was done: ‘My brain feels bruised with numb surprise.’ We got to the end just as we’d started, in dialogue, with drafts passing constantly back and forth between us as we read, shared and discussed the same sources, often into the small hours of the night. David was far more than an anthropologist. He was an activist and public intellectual of international repute who tried to live his ideas about social justice and liberation, giving hope to the oppressed and inspiring countless others to follow suit. The book is dedicated to the fond memory of David Graeber (1961–2020) and, as he wished, to the memory of his parents, Ruth Rubinstein Graeber (1917–2006) and Kenneth Graeber (1914–1996). May they rest together in peace.

If you think about it, about the process by which The Dawn of Everything was written, the work is a kind of secular “Pascal’s Pensées,” but this time not left in fragments, but brought to completion — a series of nuggets, reflections and ideas, that connect its fragments to a whole. If you read it along with me, you’ll understand what I mean. The structure feels seamless, yet the pieces, the nuggets, are interesting on their own.

Nugget 1: The History of Man

That said, the first thought I’d like to bring to your attention is this, from the opening of Chapter 1:

Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 bc. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.

The authors immediately discuss why people don’t think of these things, or what they do think when they do think of them, which leads most people to ask questions about the inherent goodness or wickedness of mankind in general.

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“Are humans innately good or innately evil?” we ask ourselves when looking at our presumed myth-shrouded past. Graeber’s comment on that question — are humans good? — is worth quoting, as a kind of nugget 2 for this piece:

[I]f you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. [emphasis added]

As tempting as it may be, however, let’s not linger here, but look again at the initial point about the loss of human history. We’re brought to a surprising conclusion.

One Past or Two? One Being or Two?

We often think of our story, the story of our species, as having two parts — “history” and “prehistory.” This bifurcation allows us to think very vaguely, to cloud our minds almost completely about all that happened to our species prior to the use of writing, some 5400 years ago. It allows us to think of ourselves, not just as having two pasts (which we haven’t), but also as being two beings (which we aren’t).

What if we have just one past instead, part recorded and part not? If so, and if we do the math (5400 divided by our roughly 200,000 years on earth), we reach a striking conclusion: 98% of all human history has been lost.

Again, that doesn’t mean that 98% of our story is prehistory, as though prehistory were some kind of foreign or mythical time, an age of legends and ignorance different from our own. That “different from our own” construct has no basis in fact.

And if our “prehistory” is just history unrecorded, what does it say about us as beings? Is there any reason to think “prehistoric” versions of ourselves are different from modern ones?

The Road Into Our Past Leads to Our Future

What we do know is this — our species has existed for about 200,000 years, and today we understand 2% of it. What’s in the rest of the story? Because it’s certainly true that the stories we believe about our past will influence our view of the future our billionaires are relentlessly marching us to, its possibilities, even its benefits. On the day that climate trumps all, who will we be? Perhaps we’ll become what we’ve been.

That’s why I’m taking this lingering book-club journey, and I invite you to take it with me. Put your prejudices and pre-conceived notions aside and look at the data an anthropologist like Graeber can unearth. We might then, with Blaise Pascal, be able to say, “Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain” — it’s not certain that everything is uncertain.

Is modern capitalist man the inevitable end of social evolution? Many believe it is. Or is our current culture merely a choice, and a bad one, a choice that somehow went global?

What can we learn by looking with an anthropologist’s eye at all of human history, and not just the part in which hierarchies of power and wealth began to proliferate?

Who, in fact, are we? Who will we become? That’s what this is about.

Note: Edited to correct a typo in the age of the earliest writing.

“The end is where we start from.”
—T.S. Eliot

Two brief notes for subscribers.

A Short Hiatus

First, some scheduling news. I’m on a semi-long vacation, a period of rest, starting last week and extending through the end of the month. Substack writing will resume after Labor Day.

I hope you are similarly resting, taking advantage of a lull in our increasing cultural madness and recharging, as best you can, your own late-summer batteries.

An Added Feature

The second note has to do with a new feature here at God’s Spies.

I’ve been toying with the idea of offering something extra to the paying subscribers. One possibility is to post new fiction — stories, chapters of upcoming novels — that paying members may enjoy and wish to comment on. I completed a book this year, a near-future political thriller set in a climate-stressed America, and it’s making the rounds of agents as we speak. Several short stories, some set in the world of the book, are also ready and will go out to publishers in September. It’s these I’d consider for posting.

But something more immediate has come to mind. I’ve been slowly reading my way through Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, and it has radically changed my view of prehistoric humans — who they were, how they lived, and more importantly, how they thought.

Why does this matter? Because, simply put, we’re going back there. The next anthropological era will be the New Old Stone Age. And for the first time since I started writing about climate, I see this “devolution” not as a loss, but simply as a return to ways of life — yes, ways — our present thinking blocks imagining.

I’d like to share these thoughts with paying members — glosses on quotes from the book, notes on major and minor points the authors make, questions that need answering.

None of this will subtract from what free subscribers receive. It’s merely a bonus, should the new series prove worth reading.

Feel free to send me your thoughts via email, as many of you already do, or post them in the comments. I’m interested in your reaction to this material.

To End Where We Began

I have to say, this reimagined prehistoric paradigm has already changed the direction of the novel series. (Sequels are in the works, as well as a prequel, the story of how now became then.) Our inevitable climate endpoint may not be extinction, but instead, if we avoid the dark of expiration, a mere reboot — a less majestical, less fantastic version of the end of Asimov’s story “The Last Question,” when AC says at last, “Let there be light!”

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Entropic darkness, of course, will eventually fall, Azimov notwithstanding, but we may thrive till then. The path will be hard, of course, at least at start. But a hard road got us here. People decry the Terror of the French Revolution — the named few suffered cruelly — but few recount or recall the unnamed many, the impoverished, enslaved, abused and casually killed whose centuries of misery led to that revolt.

I’ll end this here. Starting in September look for this feature. To;; then I offer the indigenous greeting “aloha”, which appropriately means “love,” to all of you.