The Rhetoric of Reaction and the Dawn of Everything

The logic against change

Albert O. Hirschman was an economist who died in 2012 (here's a rundown of this work from Aeon Magazine). His main area of expertise was the economics of developing countries, but he also wrote an important book in which he described the three main types of arguments used by conservatives. The book is entitled The Rhetoric of Reaction. Once you read it, you can't help but see its tactics everywhere you look in today's discourse.

Hirschman's examples primarily come from reactionary philosophical thinkers from the Enlightenment through the Twentieth century, but they are perhaps even more applicable today. Thinkers cited include Alexis de Tocqueville, George Stigler, Herbert Spencer, Jay Forrester, Edmund Burke and Charles Murray (Jordan Peterson is an ideal modern example).

Hirschman identified three main categories of conservative rhetoric:

• The Jeopardy Thesis.

• The Futility Thesis.

• The Perversity Thesis.

Let's start with the last one. The Perversity Thesis says that anything you try to do to help people will actually end up hurting them instead. The entire discipline of economics is basically one long articulation of this idea.

Want to raise the minimum wage? Well, then, you'll only end up making unemployment worse because you're raising the cost of labor above its "natural" market rate. Want to make housing more affordable? If you pass rent control, you will only make homeless and precarious people worse off because it will lead to a shortage of rental units. Want to stop business price gouging? That will only lead to shortages and black markets. Want higher wages for low-income workers? Inflation will just eat away any gains they make anyway. And so on.

Of course, the end result of this economic logic is that you can do nothing whatsoever to help the less fortunate or mitigate the suffering caused by markets. The only thing you can do is allow markets to take their course and let the chips fall where they may, hence the attitude of conservatives (unless they need help, of course).

The Jeopardy Thesis posits that a potential change could harm or threaten some existing hard-won feature or benefit of the status quo.

A lot of the current rhetoric against universal health care is a variation of this: that it will cost more, or will lead to unreasonably long waiting times, or health care rationing, or less doctors, or lower-quality care, or "death panels," and so forth. Better the devil you know, they say (despite the fact that all of these things currently exist under the United States' extravagantly wasteful, spectacularly expensive and unimaginably cruel health care system).

According to the Jeopardy Thesis, the stability of society is constantly threatened by assorted malcontents and revolutionaries who must be disabused of their naive shortsightedness. The social order is precarious and can potentially tip over into unpredictable chaos at any moment. Of course capitalism may be bad, conservatives say, but it's the least worst system, and any alternative will surely be worse. We just don’t realize how good we have it.

One book that has become popular among conservatives lately is Walter Scheidel's The Great Leveler. Scheidel examined the history of various civilizations and concluded that inequality has historically only fallen under conditions of 1.) War; 3.) Disease; 3.) Famine; 4.) Revolution; and 5.) Societal and political collapse. Thus, conservatives argue (unlike Scheidel himself) that we all should earnestly hope and pray that inequality keeps rising because those are the alternatives. It's a canard of conservative thinking that any attempt to create a more equitable society or redistribute wealth will lead to tyranny because people are inherently unequal (implying that inequality is based primarily on intrinsic ability).

And finally, the Futility Thesis states that a proposed change "just won't work," or that it will “fail to make a dent".

For example, conservatives often argue that it is pointless to increase taxes on the wealthy because they will just find creative new ways to avoid them (or move away). You see a similar cynical pessimism around campaign finance reform or getting money out of politics.

A currently popular conservative take is to refer to the prevailing social circumstances as iron laws that cannot be broken. For example, conservatives like to cite the Pareto Principle and a theoretical discipline called Econophysics to argue that extreme wealth concentration is simply inevitable, and therefore any attempt to mitigate or constrain it is futile (or will actually make things worse according to the Perversity Thesis).

Another common staple of the Futility Thesis in recent conservative rhetoric is appeals to what they claim to be "fundamental human nature." We are greedy, selfish, and violent apes, they say, and any alternative to cutthroat capitalism assumes that we all must behave like selfless angels. Or they will state that people are naturally power-hungry and self-serving, and so we are destined to live under some sort of narcissistic sociopath forever and ever no matter the economic or political system. So why bother trying to change things? Appeals to evolutionary biology naturalize a society "red in tooth and claw" where only the strong survive and the the majority are ground into dust. All we can do is throw elbows and try to claw our way to the top.

The reason I bring this book up now is because I recently finished reading David Graeber and David Wengrow's epic book, The Dawn of Everything. It's an excellent book, and an important one, but I think it goes astray in a few key places.

One of the reasons I think it goes astray is because of the Futility Thesis, or rather, fear of the Futility Thesis. The problem is that fear of the Futility Thesis implies acceptance of the Futility Thesis.

Throughout the book, the Davids are constantly looking over their shoulder at a spate of "Big History" books that have come out in recent years purporting to explain the grand narrative of human history since the end of the last Ice Age and the beginning of agriculture and cities. These books typically conclude that hierarchy and oppression are simply the inevitable outcome of living in large-scale complex societies, and that this is a trivial price to pay for material prosperity and the suppression of interpersonal violence. And furthermore, even if we don’t like it, there's nothing we can do to change it—these unfortunate dynamics are built in to large-scale societies. It’s inevitable and irreversible.

Of course, that’s the very definition of the Futility Thesis. The Davids describe it this way:

The ultimate effect of all these stories about an original state of innocence and equality...is to make wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: the natural result of viewing ourselves through history's broad lens. Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you're a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to create a society of true equality today, you're going to have to figure out a way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no significant personal property.

Since foragers require a pretty extensive territory to forage in, this would mean having to reduce the world's population by something like 99.9 per cent. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces; or, perhaps, to wangle [sic] a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way. (pp. 7-8)

But in their rush to debunk this grim fatalism, they end up throwing out a lot of important things that we've learned over the years about how societies emerge and develop and what causes inequality to become established and entrenched. Paradoxically, this makes us less able to understand (and therefore mitigate) our circumstances in my opinion.

According to Graeber and Wengrow, if this story is true, then it is basically a secular retelling of the Garden of Eden story. It is a “fall from primordial innocence,” where we used to be egalitarian but can't be anymore because we were forever cast out of the Garden. They also connect this myth to the secular theories of Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Rousseau. Here is how they describe the implications of the egalitarian origins theory:

Far from rushing blindly for their chains like Rousseau's savages, [anthropologist James] Woodburn's 'immediate-return hunter-gatherers' understand precisely where the chains of captivity loom, and organize much of their lives to keep away from them. This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it's anything but.

What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is only possible for all but the very simplest foragers. What kind of future might we then have in store? At best, we could perhaps imagine (with the invention of Star Trek replicators and other immediate gratification devices) that it might be possible, at some point in the distant future, to create something like a society of equals once more. But in the meantime, we are definitively stuck. In other words, this is the Garden of Eden narrative all over again—just, this time, with the bar for paradise set even higher. (p. 129)

Furthermore, the Davids argue that this story cements the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years we were like innocent children, and then somewhere along the line we decided to "grow up" and establish cities, states, rulers, governments, administrators, bureaucracy, literature, science, and so forth—an idea they associate with Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. That's why they entitle their first chapter (and a published paper), "Farewell to Humanity's Childhood." In that chapter, describing the narratives offered up by Big History authors, the authors write:

For [Jared] Diamond and [Francis] Fukuyama, as for Rousseau some centuries earlier, what put an end to...equality—everywhere and forever—was the invention of agriculture, and the higher population levels it sustained. Agriculture brought about a transition from 'bands' to 'tribes'. Accumulation of food surplus fed population growth, leading some 'tribes' to develop into ranked societies known as 'chiefdoms'. Fukuyama paints an almost explicitly biblical picture of this process, a departure from Eden: 'As little bands of human beings migrated and adapted to different environments, they began their exit out of the state of nature by developing new social institutions.' They fought wars over resources. Gangly and pubescent, these societies were clearly heading for trouble.

It was time to grow up and appoint some proper leadership. Hierarchies began to emerge. There was no point in resisting, since hierarchy—according to Diamond and Fukuyama—is inevitable once humans adopt large, complex forms of social organization. Even when the new leaders began acting badly—creaming off agricultural surplus to promote their flunkies and relatives, making status permanent and hereditary, collecting trophy skulls and harems of slave girls, or tearing out rivals' hearts with obsidian knives—there could be no going back. Before long, chiefs had managed to convince others they should be referred to as 'kings', even 'emperors'. (pp. 10-11)

They then go on to quote Jared Diamond in The World Until Yesterday giving perhaps the most explicit articulation of the Futility Thesis ever, concluding: "Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state or government…you'll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger and where kings, presidents and bureaucrats are unnecessary." Yikes! Those are fighting words!

However, in order to combat this idea, they reject the notion of social development and the categorization of societies altogether, saying that no categories can adequately explain what we observe. Clearly they believe that the "egalitarian origins" thesis articulated by Christopher Boehm and other anthropologists would confirm the secular Garden of Eden narrative allegedly spun by the authors of Big History. Of Boehm's thesis, they write (emphasis mine):

[Christopher] Boehm assumes that all human beings until very recently chose instead to follow the exact same arrangements—we were strictly 'egalitarian for thousands of generations before hierarchical societies began to appear'—thereby casually tossing humans back into the Garden of Eden once again. Only with the beginnings of agriculture, he suggests, did we all collectively flip back to hierarchy. Before 12,000 years ago, Boehm insists, humans were basically egalitarian, living in what he calls 'societies of equals, and outside the family there were no dominators’.

So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way; then, of course, they began to rush headlong into their chains, and ape-like dominance patterns re-emerged. The solution to the battle between 'Hobbesian hawks and Rouseauian doves' turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. (p. 87)

Which is a curious way to summarize Boehm's arguments. It's awfully strange for an anthropologist—especially an anarchist one—to say that for thousands of years "nothing happened" just because we didn't have states, leadership, governmental institutions, or hierarchical societies. And it's also baffling to imply that this means that people everywhere chose to follow "the exact same social arrangements." How does that follow from what Boehm's said? In fact, he says the opposite, as do other specialists on hunter-gatherer societies. In fact, they present evidence in their own book which indicates that band societies were incredibly socially complex and probably much larger and more sophisticated than we give them credit for. They just weren't hierarchical, and so this means, according Graeber and Wengrow, that "nothing happened" for thousands of years. Even more pointedly, they write:

Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as 'egalitarian', can be treated as if they were all literally the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form—different 'bands' being different from each other—its is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness, or certainly anything we'd not call visionary politics, would have been impossible. (pp. 95-96)

Which is just a gross mischaracterization of Christopher Boehm's position and that of most other anthropologists. It's also unclear what sort of "visionary politics" could arise in societies where nearly every member of the group was immediately involved in the production of food and material goods.

By tacitly accepting this portrayal, they acquiesce to the Futility Thesis supposedly served up by the authors of Big History that they reference, none of whom happen to be anthropologists. Fukuyama may believe that political order and political consciousness began with the advent of farming ten thousand years ago, but no serious anthropologist would make that claim. But in order to debunk those ideas, they end up making a lot of assertions which can be easily refuted.

Among these assertions are that population size and complexity had no effect on social organization, and neither did food surpluses or other forms of stored, transferable wealth. They explicitly argue, in fact, that there is no link whatsoever between population density, technological development, sedentism, and political centralization or hierarchy. I’m sorry, that’s not only muddle-headed, but demonstrably wrong. Instead, they seem to atrribute political structures primarily to voluntary choice, and claim that people frequently rearranged their social order in the past whenever they felt like it.

By explicitly rejecting material conditions as a significant shaper of human social development they throw out a lot of the most potent explanations for human sociocultural evolution that we have developed.

Consideration of similar material circumstances and environmental conditions does not mean that everyone in the Paleolithic period had the exact same social arrangements, or that no one had any agency, or that there was no political consciousness. It simply means that environmental conditions put constraints on societies including how unequal they were, how much power leaders could wield, and how much wealth certain people or groups could accumulate. These limiting factors caused prehistoric societies to have much the same—but not identical—social structures during the Paleolithic. Furthermore, inequality is primarily a result of asymmetries of bargaining power and whether some people can control the resources that others need to survive, and not voluntary collective choices, which would imply that some cultures simply “chose” things like despotism and slavery.

And herein lies the problem with the book's main thesis as the What Is Politics? podcast notes:

Why do [Graeber and Wengrow] throw away the analytical tools they need in order to explain the phenomena that they're describing, and that we need in order to understand how to build egalitarian institutions in this hierarchical world? I can only guess...but it seems pretty clear that, in Graeber and Wengrow's minds, if human beings are in fact limited in our choices by practical and material conditions, then that means we are in fact doomed to live [under] hierarchy because we live in civilization. Like, deep down inside, they're so afraid that Jared Diamond and Francis Fukuyama and Yuval Harari are right, that they don't want us to think about material conditions at all.

In other words, fear of the Futility Thesis.

In fact, what anthropology shows is that appealing to human nature as a defense of our current social arrangements is backwards. If we spent the vast majority of our existence as a species under relatively egalitarian conditions (which is what the preponderance of evidence shows), then that is our natural state and the social order to which we are most ideally suited. In fact, it is the conditions of extreme inequality we live under today which are unnatural and contrary to "human nature." A raft of psychological studies backs this up. And it follows that many of the maladies of the modern world are caused by hewing against this evolved preference including spiraling levels of depression, anxiety, violence, drug abuse, ill-health, political breakdown, social instability, and so forth.

Fundamentally what anthropology really tells us is that there is no one “natural” universal way to organize human society, and that human nature is not some fixed variable that makes our current social arrangements inevitable or desirable. That’s an important message, I think.

The best way to debunk the Futility Thesis, then, is not to wave away inconvenient facts but to take it on directly. More effective would be to show exactly where the oversimplifications of Big History cause blind spots, and this can be accomplished under the rubric of "conventional" anthropology. Is greater equality only achievable by eliminating all property and going back to hunting and gathering? I don’t think so. As Ian Hesketh writes:

…much like the Judeo-Christian conception of history from which it derives, Big History reduces the vicissitudes of human history to processes that are ultimately beyond human control. What this means is that Big History necessarily privileges the cosmic at the expense of the human, the natural at the expense of the political. This is, unfortunately, a necessity that follows from Big History’s goal of uniting the human species under the framework of a story that is supposedly for everyone. It may make for a popular just-so story that appeals to billionaires looking to empty history of politics and divisions, but it offers little for those hoping to understand how we go about thinking through the problems and possibilities of writing history in the age of the Anthropocene.

What Big History misses (Aeon)

Most of all, what Graeber and Wengrow do is ask the right questions. The fact that they may not have come up with all the right answers does not mean the book is not worth reading, because asking the right questions and not taking things for granted is the first step towards challenging and overcoming the rhetoric of reaction which dominates today’s discourse.