Systemic

History

Articles/Essays/Op-eds

  • What the Origins of Humanity Can and Can’t Tell Us, Maya Jasanoff.

    “There’s still much to be learned about our prehistory. But we can’t help using it to explain the societies we have or to justify the ones we want…. Either way, Geroulanos points out, real-life “primitive” peoples on the receiving end of the civilizing mission (people like the Andamanese, to whom King compared the Neanderthal) were frequently described as “disappearing”—natural casualties of human evolution, rather than targets of conquest and extermination.... Prehistoric instinct continues to be a popular explanation for behavior that seems somehow “inhuman.” The neuroscientist Paul MacLean suggested in the nineteen-fifties that the human brain contained a “reptilian” core, governed by instinct.... [read more]

  • World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste, Sunil Khilnani.

    “By comparing white supremacy in the U.S. to the caste system in India, her new book at once illuminates and collapses a complex history.” Wilkerson argues that underlying and predating racism is a hidden system of social domination: a structure that ranks people based on neutral human differences, as with Nazi Germany, Indian castism, and American racism.

  • Digging for Utopia, Kwame Anthony Appiah.

    “In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom... And cities [they say] could function perfectly well without bosses and administrators... In their view we should give up both and reject the inevitability of states... [But] when the dust, or the darts, have settled, we find that Graeber and Wengrow have no major quarrel with the “standard historical meta-narrative,” at least in its more cautious iterations... They don’t dispute that forager societies—with fascinating exceptions—tend to have less capital accumulation and inequality than sedentary farming ones... Human beings are riven with both royalist and regicidal impulses; we’re prone to erect hierarchies and prone to topple them. We can be deeply cruel and deeply caring... It’s just that Graeber and Wengrow aren’t content to make those points: they want to establish the existence of large, dense, city-like settlements free of rulers or rules; and, when the fumes of conjecture drift away, we are left without a single unambiguous example.” [read more]

  • A Finnish Scholar Wants to Change How We See American History, Jennifer Schuessler.

    “Indigenous Continent,” (by Pekka Hamalainen) published on Tuesday by Liveright, aims to do nothing less than recast the story of Native American — and American — history, portraying Indigenous people not as victims but as powerful actors who profoundly shaped the course of events.

    Hamalainen, a professor at the University of Oxford who has written acclaimed histories of the Comanche and the Lakota, is hardly the first scholar to argue against the trope of the “doomed” Indian, who inevitably falls victim to the onslaught of guns, germs and capitalism. But he takes the argument further.

    The confrontation between European settlers and Indigenous America, he writes, “was a four-centuries-long war,” in which “Indians won as often as not.”...

    Back then, Hamalainen was part of a cohort of scholars who were building on the so-called New Indian History. And the field has only continued to explode.

    [read more (behind paywall)]

  • Cultural Transformation Theory, wikipedia

    proposes that societies used to follow a “partnership model” of civilization but over time, it gave way to today's current “dominator model” of civilization. This theory was first proposed by Riane Eisler, a cultural scholar, in her book The Chalice and the Blade. Eisler affirms that societies exist on a partnership-domination continuum but we as a species have moved away from our former partnership orientation to a more domination orientation by uplifting masculine ideals over feminine ideals. She insists that people do not have to live in a society based on the rule of one gender class over the other. There is historical evidence that another type of society, where all individuals are equal, is possible.” [read more]

  • Ezra Klein Interviews James Suzman.

    “Suzman has spent the last 30 years living with and studying one of the oldest enduring hunter-gatherer societies… Hunter-gatherers were usually healthy. They were usually well nourished. Even in very unforgiving climates, they tended to have diverse diets. And they did it while only spending about 15 hours a week on hunting and gathering.

    Suzman’s new book is called Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. And the overarching argument is that the way we work today isn’t driven by what we need. It’s driven by what we want. It’s also driven by how, socially, we regulate or encourage wants, which is part of where his research on hunter-gatherers and how they approach this comes in.”

  • On Human Nature, Wade Lee Hudson

    “Assumptions about human nature shape beliefs about the potential for change. Reflections on human history and child development indicate that compassion and the desire to cooperate are more primal, stronger, and deeper than hate and the desire to dominate. Which instinct prevails depends on many factors, including training, social conditions, and personal decisions. As Sitting Bull said, “Inside of me there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most.”

    When people feel secure, they’re more likely to be loving and cooperative. But when they’re insecure, they’re more likely to be hateful and domineering — and willing to submit. Insecurity hardens the tendency to form ingroups and outgroups. Healthy competition becomes vicious. The hope to improve your material condition becomes all-consuming.

    Society can encourage one pole or the other — domination or cooperation — or it can nurture a balance.” [read more]

  • The Case Against Civilization, John Lanchester.

    “Did our hunter-gatherer ancestors have it better?… [James C.] Scott’s work has focussed on a skeptical, peasant’s-eye view of state formation;… His best-known book, Seeing Like a State, has become a touchstone for political scientists, and amounts to a blistering critique of central planning and “high modernism,” the idea that officials at the center of a state know better than the people they are governing. Scott argues that a state’s interests and the interests of subjects are often not just different but opposite.

    Fortunately for us, the anthropologist James Suzman did exactly that: he spent more than two decades visiting, studying, and living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari, in southwest Africa. It’s a story he recounts in his new book, Affluence Without Abundance: the Disappearing World of the Bushmen.

    The Bushmen have long been of interest to anthropologists and scientists. About a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, fifty thousand years after the emergence of the first anatomically modern humans, one group of Homo sapiens was living in southern Africa [. . .] [read more]

  • No Return to the ‘Old Dispensation’, Roger Cohen.

    “The monster of modernity must be slowed. [. . .] Perhaps rebalancing is a useful word because attempts at wholesale reinvention, like those utopias, tend to end badly. From consumption to contemplation, from global to local, from outward to inward, from aggression to compassion, from stranger to guest, from frenzy to stillness, from carbon to green. [. . .] But a lot of people, in this quieted world, have experienced some transforming miracle. [. . .] They have heard Rilke’s admonition in the last line of “Archaic Torso of Apollo: ”You must change your life.” [read more]

Books

  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson.

    Wilkerson argues that underlying and predating racism is a hidden system of social domination: a structure that ranks people based on neutral human differences, as with Nazi Germany, Indian castism, and American racism,

  • Humankind A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman.

    “The Dutch historian’s overview of debate around humanity’s core instincts has blind spots, but its optimism is invigorating…. [Are humans] selfish, untrustworthy and dangerous man [or] was [man] born free and it was civilisation – with its coercive powers, social classes and restrictive laws – that put him in chains.”

  • Sustainability and Well-Being: the Middle Path to Environment, Society, and the Economy, Asoka Bandarage.

    “An integrated analysis of the twin challenges of environmental sustainability and human well-being by investigating them as interconnected phenomena requiring a paradigmatic psychosocial transformation. She presents an incisive social science analysis and an alternative philosophical perspective on the needed transition from a worldview of domination to one of partnership.” [see review]

  • The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area, Malcolm Margolin.

  • “Two hundred years ago, herds of elk and antelope dotted the hills of the San Francisco–Monterey Bay area. Grizzly bears lumbered down to the creeks to fish for silver salmon and steelhead trout. From vast marshlands geese, ducks, and other birds rose in thick clouds “with a sound like that of a hurricane.” This land of “inexpressible fertility,” as one early explorer described it, supported one of the densest Indian populations in all of North America.

  • One of the most ground-breaking and highly-acclaimed titles that Heyday has published, The Ohlone Way describes the culture of the Indian people who inhabited Bay Area prior to the arrival of Europeans. Recently included in the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Top 100 Western Non-Fiction” list, The Ohlone Way has been described by critic Pat Holt as a “mini-classic.”

  • Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen, James Suzman.

    “What We Can Learn from the World's Most Successful Civilisation. A vibrant portrait of the ‘original affluent society’ — the Bushmen of southern Africa-by the anthropologist who has spent much of the last twenty-five years documenting their encounter with modernity.

    If the success of a civilization is measured by its endurance over time, then the Bushmen of the Kalahari are by far the most successful in human history. A hunting and gathering people who made a good living by working only as much as needed to exist in harmony with their hostile desert environment, the Bushmen have lived in southern Africa since the evolution of our species nearly two hundred thousand years ago.

    Suzman vividly brings to life a proud and private people,… the oldest hunting and gathering society on earth. In rendering an intimate picture of a people coping with radical change, it asks profound questions about how we now think about matters such as work, wealth, equality, contentment, and even time.”

  • Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James C. Scott.

    “Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family—all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction.

    Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the ‘barbarians’ who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.”

  • The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, Murray Bookchin.

    “‘The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human.’

    With this succinct formulation, Murray Bookchin launches his most ambitious work, The Ecology of Freedom. An engaging and extremely readable book of breathtaking scope, its inspired synthesis of ecology, anthropology, and political theory traces our conflicting legacies of hierarchy and freedom, from the first emergence of human culture to today's globalized capitalism, constantly pointing the way to a sane, sustainable ecological future. On a college syllabus or in an activist's backpack, this book is indispensable reading for anyone who's tired of living in a world where everything is an exploitable resource.”

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