The Past Was Stranger Than We Think (Part I)

Any analysis of fascism will eventually have to include a discussion of origins. Fascists of all stripes fixate on the past. They realize this fixation by pantomiming the hierarchies, traditions, myths, symbols, and aesthetics of so-called predecessor peoples. A properly anti-fascist analysis ought to suggest some avenues for problematizing those fascist views of human beginnings. So rather than begin with another discussion of fascist mythology, I want to introduce some evidence by which we might instead begin to articulate an anti-fascist mythology or at least an anti-fascist view of human origins.

I’ve been reading Dave Graeber’s final work, The Dawn of Everything, co-written with the archeologist David Wengrow. I won’t be reflecting on its conclusions in this article because I haven’t finished it yet, but I hope to soon. I bring it up because some ideas from an earlier iteration of their project have been bouncing around in my head for several days that may allow us to begin articulating this anti-fascist mythology.

I first tuned into Graeber and Wengrow’s work together in 2015, when they gave a lecture titled Paleolithic Politics and Why it Still Matters. This essay describes how an implicit evolutionary narrative structures our normative assumptions about the past. According to this narrative, social complexity and hierarchy are always inextricable. These hierarchies would, the evolutionary narrative contends, then have already been present forty or fifty thousand years ago, well back into the Paleolithic. The principal evidence for this would be the enormous amounts of valuable art objects, like strings of deer bone beads, found in many of the graves of the era.

However, Wengrow shows in the lecture that what we find is much weirder when we look at the archeological evidence. Because the skeletons found in many of these ornate graves had genetic mutations such as hunchback, giantism, or dwarfism. Based on this evidence, Graeber and Wengrow claim it is unlikely that the Paleolithic had a stratified elite that consisted of these various types of unique individuals. But, they note, perhaps the most interesting thing about these individuals, given the era in which they lived, is the fact that they were buried at all.

We have no idea if the people whose graves do not feature any signs of disability may have been different in that the skeletal record does not retain. Graeber and Wengrow point out that they may have been anomalous in some other way, like having different colored eyes or being very clever. The pair also posit that there may have been some connection between these anomalous individuals and social power. They say this because archeologists continue to find disabled individuals in venerable social positions into the early historical era, clustered around early royal courts the world over.

If we begin with the idea that there was indeed something anomalous about the physically abled bodies in those Paleolithic graves, we must ask ourselves, “What might it have been?”. Graeber and Wengrow offer us some possibilities, such as being albino, having one green eye and one blue eye, or being very clever. But if I may speculate, I think a recent article published in The British Journal of Psychiatry may offer another possibility.

The article entitled Differences in voice-hearing experiences of people with psychosis in the USA, India, and Ghana by Tanya Luhrmann and her team, describes their survey of psychotic patients in mental hospitals worldwide. What they found was that “the voice-hearing experiences of people with [a]serious psychotic disorder are shaped by local culture.” Specifically, individuals in cultures like the USA, where disembodied voices are pathologized and considered intrusive noise, have worse relationships with those voices than individuals in India or Africa. They regard their voices as a person, spirit, or religious figure. The different status of the voices changes the content of what the voices say, causing them to be either less or more harsh to the patient depending on the patient’s attitude towards them and their cultural context.

It looks pretty likely to me that we could draw this line back through history and postulate that some of the elaborate Palaeolithic graves may contain individuals who heard voices as well. It would certainly make sense for their fellows to regard them with both some measure of awe and fear if their kin knew them to be in communication with spirits, ancestors, or both.

Before institutionalization, people would have had to accept a broader conception of the human mind and human capacity. And they would have had to find ways to make these people’s lives meaningful and valuable to the community. A disabled or neurodivergent person might excel at making arrowheads, for example. Or perhaps they would be given ceremonial tasks essential to the spiritual upkeep of the community. The same is true of gender and sexually diverse people, as I’ll discuss in Part Two.

It is important to note that all these figures seem to have been well cared for in life, suggesting what Murray Bookchin called an irreducible minimum, the idea that indigenous societies provide a basic level of livelihood to everyone out of a sense of mutual care. This sort of caretaking still occurs in indigenous communities. My linguist friend Alex once told me a story about an alcoholic man who lived in the village in Borneo where he did his dissertation fieldwork. The man couldn’t take care of himself, but everyone knew him and understood why he was that way, so they all pitched in to help him take care of himself. I think there’s something ethically crucial there.

Because evidence of “indigenous communism” undercuts the warrior imaginaries that fascists project back into the past. Because right-wing mysticism easily incorporates shamanic imagery and potentially can even absorb the concept of shamanism as madness by marking that figure as an exception or an outsider to the social order. But disabled “shamans” or other ritual figures suggest communal forms of living that threaten the coldness of fascistic family relations.

And these forms of social care are just the beginning of what the past can teach us about human freedom. Since prehistory, humans have experimented with every conceivable form of social organization. Many peoples even have different social forms at different times of the year, such as the Inuit. The modern left inherits this history of playful but serious engagement with our own social structure.

At the end of his life, Marx became obsessed with indigenous societies, as we see in his unpublished notes, the Grundrisse. Anthropological speculation has always been a critical element in building and differentiating different political groups in the Modern Era. In the last few years, a new wave of this sort of fabulation has arisen on the right, particularly in right-leaning New Age and Wellness spaces due to influencers like Jordan Peterson. As yet, the left has been unable to respond except with critique. The left, in return, must now articulate a clearer, more empathetic, more visionary, and implicitly anti-fascist image of the past to draw from as a source of possibility and hope. The future is counting on it.

This essay is the first of a three-part series developing an anti-fascist historiography of the human pre-history. Check back for parts two and three in a couple of weeks!