Play with life

I spend a lot of time thinking about how we might live differently (better) than we do. What this usually means is trying to imagine some other arrangement of property, production, education, etc. that would be stabler, happier, more sustainable than the one we live in. I know perfectly well that it’s hopeless and really misguided to try to dream up a way of living, that forms of life must evolve gradually and ad hoc through the working out of practical problems by living people. But I also know that the way we’re living now is bad and getting worse, and we seem to be trapped in it: it keeps evolving but always in the direction of more dehumanization, mechanization, alienation, waste, destruction, hysteria. It seems clear that, without some radically new idea, things will keep going the same way. So I keep dreaming and scheming, even though I know that’s the wrong way—because what’s the right way? 

 

This same dilemma is expressed in the debate between the radical and the reformer: the radical (nowadays—I don’t pretend to speak for the past) sees that things have gone terribly and irrevocably wrong, that all the efforts of reformers at most retard, or only reduce the acceleration of, a relentless movement towards dystopia. The reformer knows that there’s no such thing as tearing down and starting from scratch, that this is not merely impossible but really meaningless, and that attempts to do it produce nightmares if they don’t just fizzle. They’re both right.

 

This dialectic longs for a synthesis.

 

Graeber and Wengrow’s book on the history and possibilities of human society, The Dawn of Everything, contains many oversights, hasty conclusions, and suspiciously loose argumentation, but it is full of good ideas, of salutary thoughts, of things that feel like they must be true, and if they’re not, well, they ought to be.

 

One of the central claims of the book is that we typically imagine “primitive” humans (hunter-gatherers, say) as living in fixed, static social and cultural conditions, conditions that are “natural” to homo sapiens, are not chosen or theorized by their inhabitants, and which differ from place to place mainly just because of differences in available resources, weather, terrain, etc.; and that this image is wrong. According to Graeber and Wengrow, prior to the development of the kinds of political structures we’re familiar with (kingdoms, empires, bureaucratic states, etc.) people had great freedom to choose their social and political conditions and exercised this freedom with plenty of conscious intention.

 

The primary mechanism of political choice was movement: if an individual or a group didn’t like a particular legal system, authority, set of laws—they would just go somewhere else. These societies were generally mobile anyhow, there was usually plenty of unoccupied wilderness, and no authority had a long enough reach to stop anyone from leaving.

 

Even if you didn’t opt out, pre-state societies typically had a lot of social, political, and economic experimentation built into them. Many were highly variable from season to season, with people living in large settlements during one season and in roving foraging bands in another. The social structures, political systems, mores and laws were often radically different in these two environments, with, e.g., a rigid authoritarianism prevailing in one and a highly anti-authoritarian horizontalism prevailing in the other. People moved comfortably back and forth between these, accepting each in its season.

 

Graeber and Wengrow argue that these societies were playing with notions of authority and social structure: putting them on, taking them off, obeying them within their purview and season, openly flaunting them or forgetting about them altogether in other times and places. And they argue that a lot of innovation, not only in political structures but in economic arrangements, modes of production, settlement, tribal affiliation, etc., were developed and persisted for hundreds or thousands of years in these modes of play and experimentation, without becoming fixed and inescapable. If there is something G & W see as “natural” to human societies, it is this flexible, playful relationship to socio-political structures; what is peculiar, what needs explaining, is how we got “stuck” in one particular arrangement.

 

Whether or not the anthropological claim here is true (and, from what I’ve read, this is not one of the claims under attack by critics), it suggests a useful way of thinking about projects for social and political change in the contemporary world. If we are trying to live differently (start a commune, a collective, a school, etc.) we should think not of building one thing to last into the future, carefully crafted and ideal, but of trying out an arrangement, of playing with social relations, child rearing, pedagogy, organizational structure, values, obligations, etc. We should think of whatever we’re undertaking as the first of many experiments, as the beginning of a way of life based more on experiment and less on accepting (feeling trapped in, at the mercy of) fixed and dysfunctional forms and institutions.

 

There is no question of fighting against or destroying worn out forms and broken institutions; we will simply pass beyond them and render them irrelevant. 

 

But how do we acquire the power to do this?