A fictional interview with James C. Scott, author of 'Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States' *
Madeleine Kando: Your book ‘Against the Grain: a Deep History of the Earliest States’ contradicts everything that we take for granted about the ‘progress’ humankind has made, by moving from our ‘barbaric’ past as bands of ‘hunters and gatherers’ to an agrarian society, which in turn resulted in the birth of ‘the State’.We are told to believe that our ancestors’ existence was ‘short, nasty and brutish', but it turns out that hunting and gathering is a good way to live. Anthropologist James Suzman, in his new book,“Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen”, calculates that Bushmen spend 17 hours a week on finding food and 19 hours on chores. Compare that to the average American, with his 40-hour workweek and 36 hours of domestic labor.
M.K.: But were they healthier? Life expectancy has grown from under 20 years before the Neolithic revolution. We can argue over “quality” vs. “quantity” of life and all that, but a four-fold increase in life expectancy is nothing to sneer at...
Nobody knows for sure why we abandoned the ‘state of nature’ and agreed to submit ourselves to an authority by agreeing to a social contract. If Hobbes was wrong and most of us were not miserable most of the time, why do we call civilization ‘progress’? After all, it caused slavery on a massive scale, wars to plunder and capture entire populations and created rule by an elite.
M.K: Right. Those are the downside. On the other side are the “social contract” arguments of people like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and many others. We now live at a time when groups who would have us return to anarchy question the value of the social contract. But Hobbes and Locke lived during the Age of Reason, when people had faith in the idea of progress achieved by a benevolent State. So the issue should not be whether the State is needed or not, but how we achieve a GOOD state (more like the Dutch one, rather than corrupt and dictatorial ones).
J.S.: Of course. I am not an anarchist or a primitivist. I am aware that only the State has the power to make effective changes. The whole point of the book is to re-examine what we all take for granted and make room for an alternative approach.
M.K: In the book you also ask the question ‘why are all early states based on cereal grains and not on another type of food?’ There are no cassava states or sweet potato states. What’s so special about grains?
J.S.: The answer is that cereal is easy to tax. Potatoes are buried and can be hidden from the tax collector and legumes ripen at different times of the year. In other words grains are “visible, divisible, assessable, storable and transportable." Agriculture has given the state the power and ability to tax and extract surpluses, which led to the creation of complex societies with hierarchies, division of labor, specialist jobs and an élite. This required huge amounts of forced labor in the form of slavery; the easiest way to find slaves was to capture them.
And writing: who would object to calling the invention of writing a sign of progress? But for the first 500 years after its invention, writing was used for the sole purpose of keeping track of harvests and prisoners. The State needed to keep track of how much and whom to tax and how many prisoners were captured, so their stock of slaves could be replenished. Only much later did writing acquire its more positive uses, like poetry and a conduit for art and culture.
M.K: You also question the meaning of terms like ‘Dark Ages’ and ‘Collapse’.
J.S.: These words have negative connotations, but what does it really mean for an age to go ‘dark’? Dark for whom? Is it just that temples stopped being built or written records no longer kept? Or is it that people moved away and kept on living their lives without being told what to do and most importantly, without the tax collector knocking on their door?
M.K: But the Middle Ages WERE incredibly dark - as measured again by objective standards such as public health: human life became way shorter. The rule of law was replaced by anarchy or at best, theocracy. And there was a vast increase in ignorance and superstition, replacing the impressive scientific knowledge of the ancients. Despite all the injustice and cruelty of antiquity, weren't people better off in, say 100-200 A.D. than 500 years later?
J.S.: Point taken. But in the book, I refer to ‘dark ages’ in general, the period after a ‘collapse’, like the Greek Dark Ages.
M.K: You say that central to a hunter-gatherer society to live a life that is affluent but without competitive acquisition is egalitarianism. Suzman describes how hunted meat is very carefully distributed amongst the Bushmen, and the people who eat the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it. This ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and is designed to make sure the hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than anyone else. The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make him gentle.”
J.S.: Yes, I believe that we have a very negative and distorted view of pre-agricultural society. I try to point that out.
M.K: This is a very important topic, and you are basically right. “Modernity” may be what will seal our fate and destroy us. I agree with your questioning the whole idea of “progress” and “civilization,” and I agree that, on balance, we seem to be nearing a point where the negatives outweigh the positives, as we are destroying the planet. On the other hand, we have penicillin, air travel, the Internet, our life expectancy, etc.
J.S.: The story of civilization is just a small part of our total existence on earth and agriculture gets all the glory. The fact that things didn’t leave a mark doesn’t mean that they were not important. The majority of our past was lived outside cities and empires. People burned up their surpluses feasting together, in camps or villages, and they didn’t leave a footprint.
* Thank you Tom, for adding your academic knowledge to this difficult topic.
** Some of the ideas in this post are based on a review in the New Yorker: ‘The Case Against Civilization’, by John Lanchester
