War in Ukraine, corona pandemic, climate crisis, refugee flows, famine – something must have gone wrong in human history, despite all the progress. But what? And why? Why have so many plans to lead traditional societies onto a modernization path failed? Why is it that even well-meaning attempts to create a better future in decolonized African countries often end up making things worse?
Two new books are dedicated to these existential questions: Oded Galor’s “The Journey of Humanity. Mankind’s journey through the millennia” and David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s “Beginnings. A new history of mankind”. Both titles sound ambitious.
Galors Verlag sells the book by the Israeli economist as “the first world and time-spanning economic history”. The bestseller “Beginnings”, on the other hand, is the legacy of the world-renowned US anthropologist Graeber. The intellectual leader of the Occupy Wall Street movement died shortly after the book was completed, aged just 59.
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Galor, Graeber and their co-author, the British archaeologist Wengrow, aim to trace the development of mankind from the appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa around 300,000 years ago to the present day in order to develop strategies for a better future. But that’s the only thing that connects the two books. Otherwise they read like thesis and antithesis, the advice could not be more opposite.
Who has the stronger arguments?
Galor’s tour de force through world history boils down to the “iron” law that the historical process follows a pattern of progress and, as the global increase in life expectancy since 1953 from 47 to 71 years shows, is characterized by a development for the better.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Galor will not be dissuaded from his firm belief in global modernization in the Western-liberal sense: Basically, he writes, “all measures that successfully promote pluralism, tolerance and respect for differences can reduce the level of diversity that favorable to national productivity, continue to increase it.”
Alexandre Kojève, Francis Fukuyama – and the end of history
His interpretation of history is reminiscent of the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. In the 1950s he had declared that the last stage of history had been reached with the industrial society of the western type. The US political scientist Francis Fukuyama popularized this view after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 with the thesis of the victory of capitalism and the “end of history”.
But pluralism and tolerance are on the decline worldwide, as the current Democracy Index of the “Economist” shows. In Hungary and Serbia, for example, the nationalist and anti-pluralist forces were able to assert themselves clearly in elections.
China and Russia are forging a strategic alliance against the West and its democratic capitalism. Moscow’s war against Ukraine also denies Galor’s optimism about progress. Just a few days after publication, his book seems a bit out of date.
Oded Galor: The Journey of Humanity. The journey of mankind through the millennia.
Translation: Bernhard Jendricke, Thomas Wollermann
dtv
Munich 2022
382 pages
26 euros
The opposite applies to Graeber’s and Wengrow’s opus magnum: they don’t fall into the trap of “Western superiority” and a supposed telos that the story is leading to. Instead, the warning: Anyone who, despite enslavement and rape, mass murder and the annihilation of entire cultures by European powers since the end of the 15th century, thinks that everything good comes from Europe runs the risk of practicing “genocide apology”.
The problem with contemporary philosophy of history is that it cannot conceive of any historical process that is not related to a goal or purpose. According to Graeber and Wengrow, the current state of the world is anything but the “inevitable result of the past 10,000 years of history”. The book is a phillippic against “practical constraints” and the “lack of alternatives” in politics that have led us to a dead end.
While Galor paints the conventionally deterministic picture that farming, private property and the founding of cities inevitably led to hierarchies, violence and inequality, Graeber and Wengrow look at history through a very different camera lens – and expand our sense of possibility.
Based on new anthropological research and archaeological finds, around 10,000 year old pipes and dancing figures, they show that long before the Age of Enlightenment that began in the late 17th century, people outside of Europe were trying out diverse forms of social organization and striving for freedom, knowledge and happiness .
Rio Reiser – and the rich historical heritage
It is significant that our ancestors, all over the world, often practiced several forms of economic activity at the same time – cattle breeding, hunting, agriculture, trade – and weighed their advantages and disadvantages, not least with a view to the impairment of their free time.
Sometimes this or that form was dropped for centuries and then picked up again. For much of history there has been a motley mix of hierarchical and egalitarian societies.
The 150,000 inhabitants of the metropolis of Teotihuacán, which is comparable to ancient Rome and is now one of the most important ruined cities in Mexico and a popular tourist destination, managed to govern themselves without hierarchy and rulers for 700 years.
There was even social housing there. To date, archaeological searches for figures that could be interpreted as kings or queens have been unsuccessful. The artists deliberately put a stop to such interpretations and gave all the figures in a scene exactly the same size. They wanted to separate their egalitarian society from hierarchically organized neighboring peoples.
David Graeber, David Wengrow: Beginnings. A new history of mankind.
Translation: Henning Dedekind, Helmut Dierlamm, Andreas Thomsen
Klett-Cotta
Stuttgart 2022
667 pages
28 euros
Many cities without hierarchy and rulers also survive in prehistoric Ukraine and Bronze Age Pakistan. The list could be extended indefinitely. In any case, Rio Reiser’s band “Ton Steine Scherben” was able to fall back on a rich historical legacy with their successful song “Keine Macht für Nobody!”.
Graeber and Wengrow question old certainties with new archaeological finds. Her work expands the intellectual horizon, the abundance of detail is impressive. Galor, on the other hand, disappointed after the high-flying announcement. He boldly arouses the expectation of exposing for the first time the eternal “undercurrents” and “primary driving forces behind the entire process of development” of humanity.
The “deepest roots” of today’s prosperity, Galor said, took us back “to where it all began tens of thousands of years ago: to the first steps the human species ventured out of Africa.”
The degree of diversity of any society resulting from the course of this exodus “should have implications for economic prosperity throughout human history.” Those who benefited the most were those who were privileged to live in a society “whose diversity was great enough to enable growth-promoting cross-pollination”.
Let’s tear down the walls that separate us. Come together folks, get to know each other. You are no better than the one next to you. Nobody has the right to govern people. from “No power for nobody” by the band Ton Steine Scherben
Galor’s “groundbreaking” insight has long been part of the corporate culture of many start-ups and modern corporations. Word has finally got around that heterogeneous teams are often more creative than homogeneous groups and have greater problem-solving skills. His advice to politicians, to invest in education and not to endanger the social cohesion despite all the praise for diversity, is also cheap.
Graeber’s and Wengrow’s central questions are a bit more cautionary, but also more realistic: Why have we largely lost the flexibility and freedom that were once characteristic of some of our ancestors? Why are we, unlike the people of Teotihuacán, stuck in permanent relationships of dominance and dependence?
The authors cannot give final answers. However, they show that the course of human history is much less set in stone than is commonly assumed.
Thanks to Graeber and Wengrow, the beginnings of our civilization can now be reconnected with the future of mankind. They encourage people to fight for a freer future for mankind through more courageous, self-determined actions. Will that succeed? The answer is open.
More: Author Yascha Mounk: When dictatorships demonstrate their power, it is important that other states have an attractive counter-vision.