Interregnum, Part 3: Hope
In the extended “Interregnum” humanity is entering, will many of us self-organize in small, supportive communities that respect the natural limits of the planet and its other inhabitants? Or as the old governing structures fail with no masterplan in place for replacing them, will people’s lives become “nasty, brutish, and short” in the manner imagined by Thomas Hobbes at the dawn of the capitalist era?
Alongside the heaps of real and imagined evidence for the Hobbesian view in the here-and-now of neoliberal decomposition, ample support can be found for the more optimistic take on humanity’s potential. All it takes is some hope, some trying — and acceptance that there’s no one-off, one-size-fits all solution.
Glove that Fits the Invisible Hand
Capitalism as forged in the Industrial Revolution of turn-of-the-18th Century Britain, and as now practiced virtually worldwide, holds as an article of faith that people are selfish, value property above all else, and act most effectively when whatever they’re doing is in their individual self-interest. As Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s (in)famous privatizing Prime Minister of the 1980s, put it “…who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families…” That’s it.
The link to “individualism” is foundational. Individualism sounds better than selfishness, but as the theory goes, it amounts to the same thing.
Governments are needed to protect private property, fight wars (mainly to protect private property), and ensure that everything else is left to the (supposedly) smooth functioning of the marketplace. As long as people and corporations have free rein to pursue their self-interest, i.e. to make an ever-growing profit; and as long as the property they accumulate is protected so the motive for investment isn’t weakened; things will turn out well for everyone — meaning economic activity (GDP) will grow.
Selfish self-interest is the glove into which the invisible hand of the market neatly and necessarily fits. From time to time, nations and peoples have strayed from that orthodoxy, but to terrible effect, according to the liberal/neoliberal party line.
Respect by humans for other humans, other animals and plants, or the Earth itself does not figure in this formulation. We have “dominion” over the Earth and everything on it, not some wooly obligation to practice reciprocity, as suggested by indigenous thinkers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Put in contemporary practical terms, “externalities” such as wildlife loss, water pollution, or soil depletion that may result from capitalist activities don’t have to be paid for by producers or consumers of commodities. Anything external to the monetized system of capitalism — including even the traditional labor of women and slaves — is under the “dominion” of humanity and there to be used and abused as we humans see fit.
For more details, check out Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Elon Musk and/or others liberal and neoliberal thinkers too numerous to name.
Under capitalism, we hear constantly and have mostly come to believe, that this is how people naturally are and how the world naturally works. If people were naturally inclined to generosity and compassion, surely we’d have some other system, one that put the highest value on something other than return-on-investment (profit).
That Was Then…
Coming from that historical background, what would lead us at this time of Earthly, social, and economic turmoil to think that humans have the potential to organize effectively for any purpose other than self-interest — staying alive and, with luck, having more stuff than the next guy? What would lead anyone to imagine that compassion and appreciation for the values of community and reciprocity with non-human creatures have a future in a world of failed large-scale governance?
One source of hope for human potential is recent findings that have filtered out from the academic confines of archeology and anthropology. These provide little support for Thomas Hobbes’ imagined murderous dystopia of selfish individuals in the absence of strong government, any more than for the idyllic Garden of Eden world imagined by Hobbes’ intellectual opposite, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
What they do suggest is a much more diverse and inventive prehistory and pre-industrial history than the standard model adhered to by liberals, which sees all humanity moving down the same path to the same inevitable capitalist, liberal-democratic future, albeit at different speeds and spots.
The starting point for this model is hunter/gatherer times, in which it is supposed that small bands of nomads live off the fruit of the land without cities, political structures, or sophisticated social patterns. The best thing you say for them is that they are relatively egalitarian.
Gradually this gives way to settled agricultural communities that create surplus food and open a path to cities and social complexity, including hierarchies and inequalities of all sorts. And finally — with help from the massive power unleashed by burning fossil fuels — people arrive at industrialization, machinery, and the glories of education, nation states, and multi-party democracy. And now AI. Not at all like Charles Dickens, as the standard model would have it.
Anthropologist cum activist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow shot immense holes in this presumed progression in the 2021 book The Dawn of Everything. As Graeber and Wengrow put it, what the last few decades of work on prehistory has turned up is that “the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory.”
Numerous examples follow over hundreds of pages. They show how societies across Eurasia and the Americas moved in and out of hunter gathering, of agriculture, and of cities, with what look to have been highly variable degrees of social and political inequality. In addition to the hundreds of academic papers cited in footnotes, several similar or overlapping accounts of such research have been offered to the broader public over the decades. These include Riane Eisler 35- year-earlier The Chalice and the Blade, and political scientist and anarchist James C. Scott’s 2017 “trespasser’s reconnaissance report” on the agrarian structure of the earliest states entitled Against the Grain.
One of Scott’s key contentions is that the early governments we might call large states or empires “were fragile and liable to collapse,” while the “interregna, fragmentation, and ensuing ‘dark ages’” in between were more common and may often have marked an actual improvement in human welfare — that is the lives of the mass of people were “easier, freer, and healthier.”
…What About Now
Could it be that humans in the late 21st Century and beyond will repeat that pattern, finding life after the intensity of neoliberal capitalism to be “easier, freer, and healthier” than life is now?
Graeber and Wengrow appear to have seen such a possibility. They are clear that what made their discoveries about the inventiveness and diversity of prehistory important was the potential success it suggests if, as seems likely, “our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different… [and to] rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place.”
There are herds of elephants in the room that this upbeat discussion of human potential ignores. The biggest is the climate and the possibility that much of the currently inhabited Earth will soon be under water or too hot to live in. And there’s the plastic wastage and other poisons humans are continuing to pump into the oceans and bury under the ground. And all those nuclear bombs and other weapons in the hands of unstable national governments (that’s pretty much all of them at the moment) and the smaller but more numerous guns in the possession of individuals and entities we don’t choose to call governments.
Imagining a single fix, or even pattern of interconnected fixes, to all that is not just difficult, it’s impossible for most of us. Myself included. That leaves us with a choice. Give up. Assume the end is nye and respond with suicide, partying, or whatever other approach seems appropriate to you. Or suppose that the imagination and inventiveness humanity has exhibited in the past will allow groups of us to form compassionate and functioning communities in the future.
You can say it’s putting hope over rational expectation if you like. But plenty of people who are very far from being Pollyannas choose hope where knowledge fails and are seeking practical small-scale applications for that hope, with no expectation that those applications can or should “scale up” and save the entire world-as-we-have-known-it. Maybe it’s simply learning to talk to your friends and neighbors about loss. Maybe it’s formulating a plausible story of hope, as I’ve tried to do and as a long line from Dougald Hine through Ursula La Grin and China Mieville back to Thomas More have done.
Maybe it’s just doing something practical to help get yourself and a few others through the next few years, and perhaps bring into view something hopeful for the few years after that. Hopefully, when hope is all we have, it will be enough.
Interregnum, Part 1: Collapse https://medium.com/@sarahmiller_22747/interregnum-part-1-collapse-1e6331c6cf0b
Interregnum, Part 2: Inaction https://medium.com/@sarahmiller_22747/interregnum-part-2-inaction-cf892658b896
Interregnum, Part 4: Stuff https://medium.com/@sarahmiller_22747/interregnum-part-4-stuff-b71f7ff097ac
