Rousseau and the whales: A (very) quick defence of modern human civilisation, in response to Adam Lent

This is a tidied-up version of some thoughts I scribbled down in response to a draft of Adam Lent’s essay, Anarchism is normal. It is hierarchy and the exploitation of nature that is odd.

I’m going to offer three main responses here:

• First, that early human social orders are fundamentally incomparable and incommensurable with contemporary ones. This is a problem, because it makes it hard (or impossible) to derive normative prescriptions even from a very good understanding of our own prehistory.
• Second, that Lent is undervaluing contemporary humans — as a collective and as individuals — in various ways.
• Third, we are becoming more than just a threat to our planet. We are becoming its only plausible recourse to an insurance policy.

What Adam Lent argues

In that piece — which is great and which you should read — Lent argues that humans were essentially living in a version of ‘deep-green anarchism’ for most of the time that they have been biologically modern, and that only for a small fraction of that time have their lived the more sedentary and hierarchically organised lives which are familiar to us. For most of that time, the average human life was probably quite a lot worse than was the case for early hunter-gatherers. Only recently — a tiny subset of a subset of human existence — have *some* societies advanced to the point where perhaps the average human life is measurably better, through technological advances, commitments to welfarism, modern medicine, and so on.

The twist in Lent’s tale is that, factoring the extraordinary environmental costs of those very modern lifestyles, it becomes clear that our current way of living is so unsustainable and destructive that we must again be left preferring the long-term ‘norm’ of human existence: the deep-green and stateless hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Lent doesn’t argue that we can now get back to that way of being, but rather wants to make the point that ‘deep-green anarchism’ isn’t a strange mode for us, but the most long-lived and sustainable of them all. Our inability to recapture it is something to be “lamented”. And the piece leaves open a further question: should we try to at least *approximate* the social order of early humans?

What I am arguing

Here, I will offer some objections to Lent’s arguments, mostly from a broadly humanist perspective. I share many of his objectives and concerns. I’m dreadfully worried about climate change, I have a deep-running scepticism of the state as a phenomenon, and I have the same basic progressive commitments.

What I am not arguing

I’m not going to question the version of human prehistory presented in Lent’s piece. In fact, I’m going to start from the assumption that everything he asserts is basically correct. From what I’ve read in the relevant literature, Lent is simply reflecting the expert consensus when he says that early hunter-gatherers experienced minimal hierarchy, minimal conflict, and seem to have had better nutrition and longer lives too.

So my starting point isn’t you’re wrong about early humans. It’s also not you’re wrong to say that life sucked for the average person on the slow march to modern civilisation. I am going to accept all of that and offer some different objections.

1. The Rousseau problem: the state of nature doesn’t get us very far

Here’s a hill to die on in these debates about prehistory. Early hunter-gatherers may not have had much or any hierarchy, but that doesn’t make them egalitarians. They may have had a minimal environmental impact, but that doesn’t make them deep green.

The reason why the great theorists of the social contract tended to start with (usually totally imaginary) accounts of the state of nature is because we believe this reveals something unfaltering about human nature. These sorts of arguments from nature, even those based on the best available evidence, run into problems. One is that natural is not synonymous with good. Another is what Quentin Skinner describes as the “mythology of prolepsis”.

To be an egalitarian, in the contemporary usage of that word, is to be a proponent of a whole host of behaviours and policies, all of which is situated within a particular context. Our context. Prehistoric social forms might not entail unequally held private property, might not feature heavily stratified social hierarchies.

But that bears about as much relation to egalitarianism as the behaviour of my cat does to rugged individualism. The basic effects are comparable, but it’s not a useful basis for prescription.

Egalitarian is not a useful word for a homogeneous, tiny tribe that doesn’t need to solve problems to do with sharing a surplus of some kind, and doesn’t experience the complexity and meaningful internal differences brought about by larger-scale and (cognitively, culturally, value-)diverse societies.

Egalitarianism is a an (occasional) property of modern social orders. The absence of hierarchy — as we understand it — seems unspectacular to me in a world where there is also absence of surpluses, absence of social complexity and diversity, and absence of traditions/norms of property.

I think that this effectively torpedoes the idea of venerating the ‘egalitarianism’ of early humans. Hunter-gatherers didn’t have the tools to be egalitarian in any meaningful way, because they didn’t encounter the socially complex conditions under which that idea is meaningful. If they had encountered the conditions under which egalitarianism is meaningful… they would probably have solved for them in exactly the same way as they, I mean we, erm, did.

The same goes for ‘deep green’. Environmentalism of any stripe is defined by the deliberate intentions of its adherents. Early humans didn’t intend to leave only footprints — they just did. Their experience isn’t a guide for modern action.

It is very thought-provoking that our hunter-gatherer norms were non-hierarchical, didn’t involve property rights, didn’t entail significant environmental impact (though I think the megafauna may have something to say about the last part). It’s even more provocative to reflect on how long those norms persisted, compared to ours. But that reflection doesn’t lead me to think that there’s anything here that adds up to a new basis for a normative argument in our current situation — diverse, non-homogeneous, surplus-driven mass publics.

2. The ‘save the whales’ problem: the value, potential, and lens of contemporary human civilisation

This section is about how we end up running into the brick wall of other people’s value-systems. My value system places a higher premium on individual potential and the output of modern civilisation than Lent’s, I think. Let me explain why.

‘Civilisation’ has always been something of an elite project. Its demotic components have been added-on later, and in every case imperfectly. Its commitment to important consequences like social justice, equality, sustainability, and flourishing have been patchy, and sometimes completely accidental. Civilisation tends to entail hierarchies, and being at the bottom of a hierarchy usually sucks. It sucks a bit less now, in some places, but still sucks plenty.

Yet the products of civilisation — of settled generations of human lives, living in a more or less organised way, cooperating en masse in intended or unintended ways, able to broadly predict the circumstances of their own and their children’s lives — are spectacular.

I have not lived as a hunter-gatherer, either now or in the deep past. I cannot say that I am sure they have no philosophy, no immense culture of allusion and comparison and detailed thought. I cannot say for sure that they do not feel a capacity for wonder at the unknown, a taste for exploration, an appetite for finding new ways to imagine and have fun. I know they have a long legacy of artistic expression, but their media were limited, their subjects specific reflections of the things important in their own routines.

I do not want to undervalue the experience of such a life. I want to say something positive about how contemporary civilisation — and all the heinous social orders that have led us to it — is actually worthwhile. Even when we factor in climate change. Philosophy, scientific understanding, technological innovation, endless craftsmanship and artistic expression across ever-changing media. New kinds of understanding that bridge diversity. New ways of looking at the world. The encountering of the ‘other’ on equal terms that expands our horizons.

Early hunter-gatherers might never threaten our global climate. But they could also never value it. They may have never threatened to drive whales to extinction. Modern societies have — and have thought better of it. We’ve been so bad that we’ve noticed it. We’ve thought proactively about our own impact on the world. As far as we know, we are the only species that can and has done so. We’re the only species that has come up with ‘save the whales’ — and it’s our fault we had to -but it matters that we came up with it.

I’m with Carl Sagan — I think we are how the universe gets to know itself. You don’t get to do much of that as a hunter-gatherer. It’s good that we’ve multiplied so much and developed so far, because each human brain is the only thing we know of in the universe that can actually achieve a sense of wonder, or ask ‘why’, or be artistically creative, or feel bad on behalf of other humans messing up a hundred years ago and try to do something about it.

We can’t predict which of us will create that next great thing, or solve the current yawning problem. Some people will live normal lives, maybe most. Some will do more harm than good, maybe most. But it’s the potential that matters. And we’re finally coming up with ways to organise society to help ensure that everyone gets a chance to fulfil their potential.

These are huge achievements for what evolved from a basically quite aggressive chimpanzee creature. We shouldn’t be so surprised by all the screwups, and we should be much more pleased with the achievements.

3. Humanity as insurance policy

Anthropogenic climate change is probably the biggest individual threat to life on this planet that has arisen during the time of humanity’s dominance. And, of course, it is self-inflicted — in part, as Lent points out, due to our very efforts to improve the lives of such a huge population.

A quick thought experiment, though. What could or would early hunter-gatherers have done if faced with catastrophic climate change from another source? Pick a plausible one, like a supervolcano explosion, a change in solar behaviour, an asteroid impact.

The answer, of course, is nothing.

Early humans couldn’t have survived a major out-of-context problem or black swan event of meaningful scale. By comparison, we have become a species that can not only create big problems like climate change — even something as simple as blue-green algae can do that — but also one that can, plausibly, solve, limit, mitigate, and adapt to such problems too.

And in a few hundred years — in geological terms, an eyeblink — it is at least plausible that we will have started to install Earth life on other worlds. Or in habitats in space. We may even be thinking of taking a long dark trip to another solar system altogether.

We are causing a lot of problems to get to this point. Not just for the planet, but for ourselves. There has been a lot of misery. But we’re at the cusp now of doing something incredible: first doubling, and then more-than-doubling, the sustainability of the only life we know for sure to exist in the universe. The only source of the universe’s self-perception.

We are the only known species, the only civilisation, to have come to such a point. In my view, this drastically changes the equation on whether or not our way of doing things is worthwhile.

Final thoughts

To think in the way Lent does in his piece, I think it’s reasonable to offer a reductio-ad-absurdam. Why does Lent draw the line at early human hunter-gatherers? Wouldn’t an even earlier point in our biological or cultural evolution entail even less impact, even more simple joys of some kind? If we were pre-hominids, and set to stay that way, at least then there wouldn’t be any sense of squandered potential. And the planet could spin on until something catastrophic and not anthropogenic happens.

I think it is wrong — valuing the things I do — to ‘lament’ our inability to return to such an earlier way of being (either the pre-hominid one OR the hunter-gatherer human one). I think we’ve arrived where we are for probably unavoidable reasons. And, for the most part — and I’m aware it’s easy for me to say this, from where and when I am in the scheme of things — I am very glad we did.

Approximating the deep-green anarchism Lent describes may or may not be the next best step. But it would probably curtail our ability to leap through problems, imagine past them, rather than shrink back to mitigate. In any case, I don’t think we can get much inspiration from our distant, distant forebears. They lived important and very different lives, in a wholly different world. THIS is our world. We should learn the lessons we can, and own it.