Hesiod, the 8th century Greek poet and mythology writer, tells us that the Gods created four different races of humans until they settled on ours, the fifth. For those who see the world as a half-empty glass, the Gods stopped perhaps too soon. They should have tried a few more races.
We are that last race of humans that has survived to this day. Our close relatives and potential rivals for survival, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, are now just faint echoes in our DNA. I am not sure whether we have a collective sense of our ultimate biological triumph, but we certainly have come to behave as the entitled species of all creation.
The need to feel superior goes beyond comparing ourselves to other species; it also affects how parts of humankind view other parts and their ways of life or how new generations of humans look at the accomplishments of past generations. Our need for superiority, however, fails us in both ways.
First, we fail to recognize the merits of other cultures and different ways of life. An early example of this comes out of the stories of the first century BCE geographer Strabo, who wrote that he had difficulty understanding the ways of the Celts. In the age of explorations, it was the Europeans who fell victims of cultural misunderstanding and hubris. They were unable to appreciate the civilizations of the people they found in the New World. By dismissing their culture and their social and political customs, they became indifferent to their demise. The same thing happened when the first colonists arrived in North America. But soon they were surprised to find that those “primitive” natives were sophisticated enough to outsmart the Europeans in logical thinking and debating skills. Kandiaronk of the Wendat tribe is a legendary North-East American native who dazzled his European encounters with his brilliance, oratorical skills and keen political sense.
The second way we fail to develop a better self-awareness is to believe that our way of doing things represents a definite progress over older modes of life and, if in doubt, we do away with our skepticism by postulating that our ways came about as the result of an inevitable evolutionary historical process, which is the equivalent of saying “it is what it is.”
But evidence from archeology and anthropology shows that our modern ways are not the only possibilities nor the inexorable result of the march of history. Instead, humanity has lived in different ways, some of them better than ours, and our reading of human history as a linear trajectory of constant progress is a false reading of history. In reality, our human path is full of wrong turns which later generations have tried to correct with what we – quite subconsciously and ironically appropriately – call historical turning points. Thus, many of these landmarks of progress instead of representing genuine innovations, they should be better understood as attempts to set humanity back to the right course.
According to our familiar narrative of historical evolution, things developed along the following path: emergence of agriculture led to formation of cities which led to the creation of dynastic and centralized power centers with aristocracies and elites which led to using religion to legitimize authority, enforce moral and legal order, and create cohesion; and as a result of all that we had the emergence of social classes and inequality.
But, as said above, this course of human experience is not the only one we see in the historical record. Across the globe, from the Americas to Europe to the Middle East, India and China, there were societies living in city-like arrangements who managed their administration and food production without resorting to centralized command and organization. These societies organized themselves through people’s assemblies, were ruled with considerable degree of consensus, and in many cases had and applied an egalitarian ethos.*
Viewed from the perspective of these societies, the development of dynastic and centralized power, secular and religious elites, social classes, inequality, and recurring warfare represent wrong turns that moved humanity away from ways of life that had none or very little of these maladies.
Contrariwise, from our standpoint of the conventional reading of history and under the notion that humanity was never anything better, we interpret our breakthroughs as entirely new innovations in human history. Thus, to us, the birth of democracy in Greece is an innovation against dynastic power. The Enlightenment is the rebellion of reason against dogmatic thinking and superstition. Socialism and progressivism are political movements against extreme inequality and social injustice. The development of environmental and climate awareness is our intellectual achievement, though coming after centuries of human-inflicted ecological damage. What we miss is that a lot of what we call progress has been experienced by humans before us.
The benefit of a fresh understanding of the history of humankind in its entirety is to realize that our modern world is not the only possible one. That our ancestors were sophisticated enough to organize societies that avoided some of the shortfalls of our own world. Though not exactly Gardens of Eden, these pre-modern societies show us we are not locked in some sort of a black hole of human condition out of which we can not escape if we choose to.
Thus, the most exciting way to imagine the future may not be what new corners of our present world and life we will discover. The most exciting and hopeful vision of the future may instead be what different but better worlds our creativity can take us to if we have the wisdom to avoid wrong turns.
* The story of Kandiaronk and how pre-modern societies lived come from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity of David Graeber and David Wengrow.
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