WHO MAKES A BETTER VILLAIN - THE FARMER OR THE TAX COLLECTOR?

YUVAL NOAH HARARI VERSUS JAMES C. SCOTT

Hey Folks,

For much of the last year, I have been working on a book report.

If that sounds like a dubious use of time, I should probably explain that the reason I’m spending so much time on a single book is because the book in question boldly promises “A New History of Humanity”.

So, really, I have been spending the last year investigating the history of humanity. Hey, there are worse uses of time, okay?

This brings me to today’s subject - Yuval Noah Harari’s dubious claims about metaphysics.

The Dawn of Everything argues convincingly against the idea promoted by Yuval Noah Harari that agriculture was “humanity’s worst mistake”.

This is very important to me as a green anarchist, because green anarchism is often associated with primitivism, which is anti-civ (against civilization).

This leads us to a question that tends to make green anarchism inaccessible to most people.

HOW COULD ANYONE BE ANTI-CIVILIZATION?

The first time that I heard someone described as “anti-civ”, I thought it was ridiculous. “Anti-civilization? You’re against civilization? What? How? Are you against humanity too?”

It took me a minute to figure out that what was being referred to was “a way of life characterized by the growth of cities”, to use Derrick Jensen’s succinct definition.

Soon, I learned that the argument went something like this: Cities are by definition unsustainable, because the concentration of people in a given area beyond a certain point will eventually exceed the carrying capacity of the local ecology, meaning that cities ultimately require resource colonies and sacrifice zones.

Honestly, the logic is kind of inescapable. If cities can be presumed to have a tendency to increase in population over time, it seems likely that they will grow until encountering some sort of ecological limit. The argument that civilization is by definition unsustainable is hard to argue against.

These ideas were, I believe, first promoted by John Zerzan in the 1990s, but became popular largely due to the writings of Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay.

They were popularized by the anarchist filmmaker Franklin Lopez, who produced an influential documentary called END CIV, which was based on the ideas of Derrick Jensen.

All the names mentioned so far are credible environmentalists, with the exception of Yuval Noah Harari, who promotes the idea that humans are hackable animals and that humanity has entered into some kind of new phase of its evolution thanks to technology.

Harari also calls agriculture “humanity’s worst mistake” and promotes the idea that although we humans arrogantly think that we domesticated wheat, it is equally possible than wheat domesticated humans.

This idea, while possibly entertaining to stoned teenagers, is not supported by logic, reason, or science.

Indeed, it is so stupid that it merits dwelling upon. We’re not talking about garden-variety stupidity here. This is so stupid that it actually requires an explanation. Why would intelligent people waste brainpower asking themselves whether they might have been outsmarted by wheat?

Let’s remember that wheat is a tall grass which lacks a central nervous system or brain. To attribute volition to wheat would be an extraordinary claim to make, especially within the frame of “scientific materialism” within which Harari makes his claims. So is Harari then saying that wheat domesticated humans unintentionally? What would such a claim even mean? To my brain, this claim is so absurd and asinine that it annoys me to have spent any mental energy whatsoever addressing it.

In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow write:

Yuval Harari waxes eloquent on this point, asking us to think ‘for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat’. Ten thousand years ago, he points out, wheat was just another form of wild grass, of no special significance; but within the space of a few millennia it was growing over large parts of the planet. How did it happen?

The answer, according to Harari, is that wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. ‘This ape’, he writes, ‘had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat.’ If wheat didn’t like stones, humans had to clear them from their fields; if wheat didn’t want to share its space with other plants, people were obliged to labour under the hot sun weeding them out; if wheat craved water, people had to lug it from one place to another, and so on. There’s something ineluctable about all this. But only if we accept the premise that it does in fact make sense to look at the whole process ‘from the viewpoint of wheat’. On reflection, why should we? Humans are very large-brained and intelligent primates and wheat is, well … a sort of grass.

James C. Scott addresses the question sardonically, asking of our ancient ancestors:

Were not they domesticated in turn, strapped to the round of ploughing, planting, weeding, reaping, threshing, grinding, all on behalf of their favorite grains and tending to the daily needs of their livestock?

It is almost a metaphysical question who is the servant of whom—at least until it comes time to eat.

I’ll quickly mention that I find it odd that Graeber and Wengrow, both of whom are supposedly anarchists, treat Harari so respectfully. Does the above passage truly qualify as “waxing eloquent”? Are they being ironic? What is going on here? They treat Jared Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, and Steven Pinker in similarly respectful tones, which is strange, given that they are all arch-statists.

The Dawn of Everything mentions Harari 14 times, Fukuyama 12 times, Pinker 27 times and Jared Diamond more than 20 times. Why?

The following passage, taken from the introduction to The Dawn of Everything, is reflective of the bizarrely respectful attitude that the authors take towards their ostensible foes:

“Jared Diamond, in The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012) suggests that such bands (in which he believes humans still lived ‘as recently as 11,000 years ago’) comprised ‘just a few dozen individuals’, most biologically related. These small groups led a fairly meagre existence, ‘hunting and gathering whatever wild animal and plant species happen to live in an acre of forest’. And their social lives, according to Diamond, were enviably simple. Decisions were reached through ‘face-to-face discussion’; there were ‘few personal possessions’ and ‘no formal political leadership or strong economic specialization’. Diamond concludes that, sadly, it is only within such primordial groupings that humans ever achieved a significant degree of social equality.”

“For Diamond and Fukuyama, as for Rousseau some centuries earlier, what put an end to that equality – everywhere and forever – was the invention of agriculture, and the higher population levels it sustained. Agriculture brought about a transition from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’. Accumulation of a food surplus fed population growth, leading some ‘tribes’ to develop into ranked societies known as ‘chiefdoms’. Fukuyama paints an almost explicitly biblical picture of this process, a departure from Eden: ‘As little bands of human beings migrated and adapted to different environments, they began their exit out of the state of nature by developing new social institutions.’ They fought wars over resources. Gangly and pubescent, these societies were clearly heading for trouble.

It was time to grow up and appoint some proper leadership. Hierarchies began to emerge. There was no point in resisting, since hierarchy – according to Diamond and Fukuyama – is inevitable once humans adopt large, complex forms of organization. Even when the new leaders began acting badly – creaming off agricultural surplus to promote their flunkies and relatives, making status permanent and hereditary, collecting trophy skulls and harems of slave-girls, or tearing out rivals’ hearts with obsidian knives – there could be no going back. Before long, chiefs had managed to convince others they should be referred to as ‘kings’, even ‘emperors’.

As Diamond patiently explains to us: “Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary.”

But I digress.

In Chapter 10 of The Dawn of Everything, the authors finally get around to noting that James C. Scott has studied early state formation and produced a detailed theory:

James Scott – a renowned political scientist who has devoted much of his career to understanding the role of states (and those who succeed in evading them) in human history – has a compelling description of how this agricultural trap works.

The Neolithic, he suggests, began with flood-retreat agriculture, which was easy work and encouraged redistribution; the largest populations were, indeed, concentrated in deltaic environments, but the first states in the Middle East (he concentrates largely on these; and China) developed upriver, in areas with an especially strong focus on cereal agriculture – wheat, barley, millet – and relatively limited access to a range of other staples.

The key to the importance of grain, Scott notes, is that it was durable, portable, easily divisible and quantifiable by bulk, and therefore an ideal medium to serve as a basis for taxation. Growing above ground – unlike, say, certain tubers or legumes – grain crops were also highly visible and amenable to appropriation. Cereal agriculture did not cause the rise of extractive states, but it was certainly predisposed to their fiscal requirements.

Graeber and Wengrow go on to interpret Scott’s work, writing:

Scott’s focus isn’t really on states at all: it’s about the ‘barbarians’ – a term Scott uses for all those groups which came to surround the little islands of authoritarian-bureaucratic rule, and which existed in a largely symbiotic relation with them: some ever-shifting mix of raiding, trading and mutual avoidance.

As Scott argued about the hill peoples of Southeast Asia, some of these ‘barbarians’ became, effectively, anarchists: organizing their lives in explicit opposition to the valley societies below, or to prevent the emergence of stratified classes in their own midst.

As we’ve seen, such conscious rejection of bureaucratic values – another example of cultural schismogenesis – could also give rise to ‘heroic societies’, a hurly-burly of petty lords whose pre-eminence was founded on dramatic” contests of war, feasting, boasting, duelling, games, gifts and sacrifice. Monarchy itself is likely to have started that way, on the fringes of urban-bureaucratic systems.

CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM - THE DARK TWINS

Graeber and Wengrow continue:

Throughout much of history, grain states and barbarians remained ‘dark twins’, locked together in an unresolvable tension, since neither could break out of their ecological niches. When the states had the upper hand, slaves and mercenaries flowed in one direction; when the barbarians were dominant, tribute flowed to appease the most dangerous warlord; or alternatively, some overlord would manage to organize an effective coalition, sweep in on the cities and either lay waste to them, or more typically, attempt to rule them, and inevitably find himself and his retinue absorbed as a new governing class. As the Mongolian adage went, ‘One can conquer a kingdom on horseback, to rule it one must dismount.

They also note:

One problem with evolutionism is that it takes ways of life that developed in symbiotic relation with each other and reorganizes them into separate stages of human history.

This is actually quite a profound insight, and is much more helpful than Harari’s farcical fable about wheat domesticating humans.

Curious about to learn more, I decided to read delve into Scott’s work, starting with his magisterial Against the Grain, which should be required reading for anyone who wishes to have an informed opinion on early state formation.

WHO IS JAMES C. SCOTT?

Before I start quoting from this full-blown masterpiece, I’d like to say something about its author, who I believe is one of the world’s greatest living scholars. Given that he’s one of the most-cited political scientists of all time, that statement shouldn’t be too controversial.

Certainly, no one who reads Against the Grain will put it down without having learned something.

Okay, I’m going to indulge myself in a digression here.

WELCOME TO THE FIRST-EVER EDITION OF (drum roll, please):

SEMANTIC QUIBBLES WITH CROW QU’APPELLE!

VOLUME ONE: POLITICAL SCIENCE IS NOT A THING

James C. Scott is a professor of Political Science at Yale University, although I’ll note that he doesn’t believe that such a thing as “political science” actually exists.

Here’s a handy rule of thumb: Generally, if a settlement has the word “city” in it, it’s not a city.

Let me give you two examples from Northern Canada: Dawson City & Uranium City.

IF IT’S GOT THE WORD “SCIENCE” IN IT, IT’S NOT SCIENCE!

Similarly, if an academic discipline has the word “science” in it, it’s not a science. Political science is not a science. The social sciences aren’t science, either.

“Medical science” might involve science, but because health is holistic, it would be overly-reductionistic to say that medicine is a science. It would be more accurate to call it an art.

The word “science” used to be very fashionable, which led to it being applied to all kinds of situations in which it didn’t apply.

Science is fundamentally about measurement, and measurement only gets you so far in politics, which basically comes down to persuasion.

There’s an easy way to know if something is science or not. All you have to do is ask yourself one simple question:

1. Is it based on the interpretation of data produced by measurement?

If the answer is yes, it might be science. If it isn’t, it’s not science. Science is about measurement. Its domain is limited to that which can be measured, which is the reason that “scientific socialism” is dumb. Any questions?

Okay, this has been today’s edition of “Semantic Quibbles with Crow Qu’appelle”. Let’s move on.

JAMES C. SCOTT IS THE MOST-CITED ANARCHIST SCHOLAR OF ALL TIME

There’s a great documentary about James C. Scott that I highly recommend, which is called In A Field All His Own and is available for free on YouTube.

I’ll quickly mention that he was involved with anti-war activism throughout the Vietnam War and ended up becoming an expert on peasants, later founding Yale’s Agrarian Studies department.

Feeling that in order to call himself an expert on peasants, he should spend some time living amongst them, he spent two years living in a peasant village in Southeast Asia.

All this to say that James C. Scott likes to know what he’s talking about. He’s about as legit as academics get, and I personally am in awe of his scholarship.

So what does he have to say about the importance of agriculture in early state formation?

Well, honestly, I would highly recommend reading Against the Grain, because it’s a very concise book which packs an absolutely incredible amount of information into relatively few words. It reads like an executive summary of the latest, most up-to-date human knowledge on the subject. The audiobook version will take you 8-and-a-half hours to listen to, but no words are wasted. Every minute of that time, you’re learning something.

Beyond hyping the book, I’ll also point you towards these videos:

HOW DID WE BECOME SEDENTARY?

The book definitely expanded my mind about the history of humanity. The first myth that Scott dispels is the idea that early humans couldn’t wait to become sedentary. Remember, Homo Sapiens has been nomadic for the vast majority of its existence.

This is a matter which is ignored by many of the thinkers who cast agriculture in the role of the Forbidden Fruit that cursed humanity to toil, disease, warfare, statecraft, slavery, and bureaucracy. The real answer to the question “How did we get stuck?” would necessarily involve asking “How did we first become sedentary?”

In Against the Grain, Scott writes:

It turns out that sedentism long preceded evidence of plant and animal domestication and that both sedentism and domestication were in place at least four millennia before anything like agricultural villages appeared.

Scott’s treatment of this question is enormously complex, but it is a credit to his skill as an educator that he is able to express it in an admirably straightforward way.

He doesn’t do it without inventing some technical terms, though.

ENTER THE “LATE-NEOLITHIC MULTISPECIES RESETTLEMENT CAMPS”

The domestication of grains—especially wheat and barley, in this case—and legumes furthers the process of concentration. Coevolving with humans, cultivars were selected especially for their large fruit (seeds), for their determinate ripening, and for their threshability (nonshattering quality). They can be planted annually around the domus (the farmstead and its immediate surroundings) and provide a fairly reliable source of calories and protein—either as a reserve in a bad year or as a basic staple.

Domesticated animals—especially sheep and goats, in this case—can be seen in the same light. They are our dedicated, four-footed (or, in the cases of chickens, ducks, and geese, two-footed) servant foragers. Thanks to their gut bacteria, they can digest plants that we cannot find and/or break down and can bring them back to us, as it were, in their “cooked” form as fat and protein, which we both crave and can digest. We selectively breed these domesticates for the qualities we desire: rapid reproduction, toleration of confinement, docility, meat, and milk and wool production.

The domestication of plants and animals was, as I have noted, not strictly necessary to sedentism, but it did create the conditions for an unprecedented level of concentration of food and population, especially in the most favorable agro-ecological settings: rich flood plain or loess soils and perennial water.

This is why I choose to call such locations late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps. It turns out that while it provides ideal conditions for state making, the late- Neolithic multispecies resettlement camp involved a lot more drudgery than hunting and gathering and was not at all good for your health.

Why anyone not impelled by hunger, danger, or coercion would willingly give up hunting and foraging or pastoralism for full- time agriculture is hard to fathom.

He then goes on to make an extremely valuable observation:

It is surely striking that virtually all classical states were based on grain, including millets. History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit, or sweet potato states. (“Banana republics” don’t qualify!) My guess is that only grains are best suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing. On suitable soil wheat provides the agro-ecology for dense concentrations of human subjects.

In contrast the tuber cassava (aka manioc, yucca) grows below ground, requires little care, is easy to conceal, ripens in a year, and, most important, can safely be left in the ground and remain edible for two more years. If the state wants your cassava, it will have to come and dig up the tubers one by one, and then it has a cartload of little value and great weight if transported. If we were evaluating crops from the perspective of the premodern “tax man,” the major grains (above all, irrigated rice) would be among the most preferred, and roots and tubers among the least preferred.

It follows, I think, that state formation becomes possible only when there are few alternatives to a diet dominated by domesticated grains. So long as subsistence is spread across several food webs, as it is for hunter-gatherers, swidden cultivators, marine foragers, and so on, a state is unlikely to arise, inasmuch as there is no readily assessable and accessible staple to serve as a basis for appropriation.

One might imagine that ancient domesticated legumes, say—peas, soybeans, peanuts, or lentils, all of which are nutritious and can be dried for storage—might serve as a tax crop. The obstacle in this case is that most legumes are indeterminate crops that can be picked as long as they grow; they do not have a determinate harvest, something the tax man requires.

So, there you have you, folks - we have a new candidate for the role of the Serpent in the tale of our secularized retelling of our Fall from Grace.

WHO MAKES A BETTER VILLAIN - THE FARMER OR THE TAX COLLECTOR?

This is important, and The Dawn of Everything neglects to give taxation, moneylending, usury or bureaucracy the attention that they deserve in a book supposedly co-written by David Graeber, author of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, which is basically an anti-usury manifesto.

In fact, The Dawn of Everything doesn’t even include the word usury once!

Don’t believe me? Here’s proof:

How could Graeber and Wengrow dedicate space to discussing the possibility that fiendishly wily grass tricked us into inescapable slavery, yet fail to mention that cereal grains lend themselves particularly well to taxation?

Like Scott, Graeber was a member of the Yale faculty, though he was fired right before he would have become eligible for tenure.

DAVID GRAEBER AND JAMES C. SCOTT WERE COLLEAGUES AT YALE

Let me drive that point home - Graeber and Scott were colleagues at Yale.

Scott is mentioned in the acknowledgements at the beginning of the book, yet the central insight of Against the Grain is given such short shrift that I’m tempted to call shenanigans.

Why would Graeber and Wengrow give so much attention to Harari, Fukuyama, and Pinker, three totally irrelevant writers who have never contributed anything whatsoever to human knowledge, let alone anarchist theory?

Why would they neglect the work of James C. Scott, which is so valuable?

Well, if you’ve been following my work for some time, you can probably guess how I feel about the matter. I believe that David Graeber was murdered and that The Dawn of Everything is basically counterfeit. If Graeber and Wengrow were genuinely interested in contributing to an anarchist “New History of Humanity”, they would have built on the incredible work of James C. Scott, quite possibly the world’s greatest living anarchist scholar.

In Against the Grain, Dr. Scott asks:

Why, however, should cereal grains play such a massive role in the earliest states? After all, other crops, in particular legumes such as lentils, chickpeas, and peas, had been domesticated in the Middle East and, in China, taro and soybean. Why were they not the basis of state formation?

More broadly, why have no “lentil states,” chickpea states, taro states, sago states, breadfruit states, yam states, cassava states, potato states, peanut states, or banana states appeared in the historical record? Many of these cultivars provide more calories per unit of land than wheat and barley, some require less labor, and singly or in combination they would provide comparable basic nutrition. Many of them meet, in other words, the agro-demographic conditions of population density and food value as well as cereal grains. Only irrigated rice outclasses them in terms of sheer concentration of caloric value per unit of land.

The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” Other crops—legumes, tubers, and starch plants—have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages.

To appreciate the unique advantages of the cereal grains, it helps to place yourself in the sandals of an ancient tax-collection official interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation.

The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal grains make a scorched-earth policy that much simpler; they can burn the harvest-ready grain fields and reduce the cultivators to flight or starvation. Better yet, a tax collector or enemy can simply wait until the crop has been threshed and stored and confiscate the entire contents of the granary. In practice, in the case of the medieval tithe, the cultivator was expected to assemble the unthreshed grain in sheaves in the field, from which the tithe collector would take every tenth sheaf.

Compare this situation with, say, that of farmers whose staple crops are tubers such as potatoes or cassava/manioc. Such crops ripen in a year but may be safely left in the ground for an additional year or two. They can be dug up as needed and the remainder stored where they grew, underground. If an army or tax collectors want your tubers, they will have to dig them up tuber by tuber, as the farmer does, and then they will have a cartload of potatoes which is far less valuable (either calorically or at the market) than a cartload of wheat, and is also more likely to spoil quickly. Frederick the Great of Prussia, when he ordered his subjects to plant potatoes, understood that, as planters of tubers, they could not be so easily dispersed by opposing armies.

The “aboveground” simultaneous ripening of cereal grains has the inestimable advantage of being legible and assessable by the state tax collectors. These characteristics are what make wheat, barley, rice, millet, and maize the premier political crops.

Okay, I could keep going, but I think that I’ll end there for now. If you’re interested in this subject, you should really just read Against the Grain. It’s one of the most nutrient-dense intellectual feasts you’re likely to come across anytime soon.

What are you waiting for? You want me to tell you how to get the book for free? For fuck’s sake, you want me to wipe your ass for you too?

Okay, okay, fine. You can download a free PDF version here or you can access it on The Anarchist Library here.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this article, and I’ve got lots more coming your way soon.

Stay tuned!