AS WE all know, a week is a long time in politics. A week ago, Gordon Brown was toast and the stock market was in freefall. As I write, on Monday morning, Gordon is now the saviour of capitalism, home safe and the markets have stabilised – although God only knows how things will have changed for better or worse by the time you get to read this.
At times of frenetic flux, it’s sometimes advisable to take the longer view – like 10,000 years or even 200,000. Those timespans, although mind-boggling set against the average human lifespan, are deeply significant. The latter is the time it’s been calculated that our branch of hominid has been around on the planet; the former marks the time since we discovered agriculture and began creating the world we now live in. And what’s significant is that for 95 per cent of the entirety of human history, we lived our lives very differently from the way we have for the last 5 per cent of our time on Earth.
It’s difficult for us to accommodate the implications of that ratio. Until five or six generations ago, everyone assumed the whole of existence was synonymous with the recorded history of our species. Even today, a terrifyingly large proportion of citizens of the world’s most powerful nation still insist that everything began only 6,000 years ago and that humans have been around from the very beginning – give or take just under the week it took for God to get round to creating us. But even in acknowledging the true length of human existence, because pre-agricultural people inhabited “pre-history”, they fall outside history itself and thus become unknowably different and almost certainly inferior – their lives through 190 millennia merely “nasty, brutish and short”. They’re not even a proper subject for most historians, who leave them to anthropologists and archaeologists, whose basis in science rather than storytelling compounds the unbridgeable otherness of our forebears.
Nevertheless, these were people just like us, who in almost all regards would certainly have thought and acted and loved and laughed just as we do. In one regard, they were different, if we take an even longer view, looking forward from even deeper in time rather than looking back at them from today.
The anthropologist Christopher Boehm argued compellingly almost a decade ago that the evidence from still-existing groups of human hunter-gatherers showed that we marked a paradigm shift from the standard template of the higher primates we evolved from. That template is hierarchical, but humans for almost all of our history were not. Instead, given the nature of their lives, these people lived in communities which were egalitarian and co-operative, because to be anything else would have been counter-productive. Moreover, they developed strategies for keeping things that way, where weaker members of the group would form alliances to prevent the stronger members seeking to impose a hierarchy on them. Highly significantly, these included mockery (as I always suspected). An example of this kind of living is outlined in Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore, where he describes the first Australians encountered by European invaders just over 200 years ago, who themselves had been living round Botany Bay for 40,000 years. They gathered all they needed for comfortable survival in a couple of hours everyday, and spent the rest of the time lounging around telling each other stories, a bit like lions which somehow manage to sleep 23 hoursa day, despite the apparent harshness of life on the savannah.
Then came agriculture and everything changed. Hunting and gathering, which were necessarily co-operative, were replaced by endless back-breaking toil which also necessitated coercion, terrorisation to implement the coercion, elites of the strong to do the terrorising, the development of new hierarchies of those elites and 10,000 years of slavery, servitude, inequality, injustice and our reduction as a species back to the condition of baboons.
That’s not history as we normally understand it, because history was written by the elites which prospered at everyone else’s expense. We imagine that agriculture, civilisation and the triumphs of technology all mark our capacity for progress, although in the longer view almost all of them have been profoundly retrogressive. Worse still, our embracing of technology now threatens to destroy us (and it’s worth remembering that Stalin, among others, killed millions, not in the name of Marxist dogma, but industrialisation).
We can’t recapture our past, but we constantly, if inarticulately, acknowledge it, not just in yearning for the pastoral (or yearning for the past), but politically, too. It’s our politics of socialism, recognising that beneath all the accrued garbage of kings and priests and moneymen, we’re fundamentally co-operative and egalitarian. It’s also the politics of oppositionism, which doesn’t seek power, but constantly struggles to thwart the power of the elites that usurped it. This remains Tribune’s agenda. And it also happens to be the only politics which is truly, deeply human.
