Paths to peace

his is the fourth installment in a series of letters between myself and Elle Griffin, exploring anarchy in practice. Previous exchanges can be found here:

• Part 1 by Elle Griffin

• Part 2 by Peter Clayborne

• Part 3 by Elle Griffin

Dear Elle,

I think we are indeed looking at different versions of history. David Graeber, in his comprehensive volume The Dawn of Everything, outlines two popular but misleading views of history and modernity: 

• The Hobbesian view that life before modern civilization was nasty, brutish, and short, and that our violent natures must be corralled by institutions of control such as police and militaries, otherwise chaos and suffering would erupt and engulf us all. The necessary evils we now endure are a small price to pay for the pleasures we enjoy. Calls for improving society bely an ignorance about our privilege relative to our ancestors, and can thus be dismissed. 

• The perspective of Rousseau that views antiquity with a wistful nostalgia, romanticizing the “noble savages” who came before us, in god-like harmony with nature and each other, representing an Eden to which we could never hope to return. By comparison our modern lives may seem busy and beleaguered, and the best we can hope for are some tweaks to the system. We no longer live in the old world, so we’ve got to make do with what we have. 

As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between “Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves”: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.

But both these views rest on myths about who we are, not on the facts of how people before us actually lived. Hobbes didn’t know a thing about prehistory, nor did he pretend to. His work was intentionally allegorical, as were those of his contemporaries. Meanwhile Rousseau was instrumental in responding to the indigenous critique of European society. Neither were willing to countenance any alternative to their way of living. 

Graeber offers a third way: