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The Early Roots of a Modern Crisis

February 20, 2021

The Early Roots of a Modern Crisis

This is our challenge: to move a world of almost 8 billion people, most involved in an economic system with tremendous inequality, a clear imperative to expand, and a chronic tendency to stagnate, toward some real rapprochement with earth. This is a monumental challenge. If nothing else, the Anthropocene idea is the truth of the moment encapsulated as a geological epoch. Yet it explains little of the cause.

The question is how to explore social evolution in order to give insight appropriate to the historical moment. Engage for a moment in an exercise to reveal the complexity of social evolution. Begin with what we know about exponential growth—that it starts out slowly and finishes very rapidly. We are on the upper neck of an exponential flight but the structure and dynamic of this trajectory were in place long before the twentieth century and even long before the present world system (capitalism) took hold. We have to ask ourselves where we mark the inflection point where we entered this present phase of our social evolution. It is important to go beyond the Capitalocene if we are to understand how we ultimately landed where we are.

Let me offer two stylized economic systems in order to highlight something about the complexity of our social evolution as it pertains to this matter. The first is a hunting-and-gathering economic system where homo sapiens lived as minimalists, surplus did not exist, feedback loops prevented expansion, and humans were mostly independent and self-reliant (most could quite literally fend for themselves). Each human had an expansive knowledge of the more-than-human world, and they used that knowledge to garner their material necessities (food, shelter, clothing). One can argue that it was an economic system embedded in the rhythm and dynamic of the more-than-human world and did not have feedback loops of expansion.

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Lisi Krall, anthropocene, great transition initiative, economic systems, hunting-and-gathering, complex systems, feedback loops, exponential growth, evolution, social evolution

The Big Story

March 24, 2018

The Big Story

Can We Change Civilization by Changing Its Origin Story?

The Slave Market – Gustave Boulanger Public Domain

How did humans go from savanna-dwelling primates to moon-bouncing Tide Pod™ eaters? This is the big question that Big History has been trying to answer for millennia. Sure, other ages may have framed the question differently.

Pre-Internet historian Herodotus may have asked, How did humans get from Promethean clay to Babylon? Mass death enthusiast Christopher Columbus may have asked (he didn’t), How did humans get from biblical clay to Indian gold? But for the past few hundred years, the Big Thinkers, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jared Diamond, have generally agreed on the basic contours of our history:

Humans set out on our baffling journey in a pristine Garden of Eden, living benignly in small bands of hunting and gathering primitives. They would dance, copulate, and paint in caves in an egalitarian state of nature, or a nasty, brutish one depending on your temperament and desire for couch cushions, cotton cuffs, and monarchy. Our fall from Eden came with the slithering of agrarian city-states into our lives. As soon as we began cultivating beans and beer, the story goes, we had to build a large bureaucratic apparatus to manage all the products and people populating these nascent city-states. Given the complexity of this task, dictators, kings, and emperors – keen administrators, that is – were unfortunately necessary to organize this dense population into productive workers. Most of the people living in this new thing called “civilization” would have to toil as slaves, alas. Sorry, this is just the Faustian bargain one must make to enjoy cities and storable food: wage/chattel slavery and all-powerful despots in exchange for literature, indoor plumbing, and memes.

But anthropologist and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber, is having none of it. In a recent piece published in Eurozine, he and UCL archaeology professor David Wengrow argue that this story is all wrong. Instead, the Davids suggest, the story is a lot messier and a lot more open to alternative forms of civilization and economy:

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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