Playful history

Over the last few years, I’ve read a fair number of summaries of recent archaeological research and what it has uncovered about the dawn of civilization. Davids Graeber’s and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything does us all an enormous service by compiling a ton of that research from different times and places into one large, but highly readable work, along with a new interpretive meta-narrative of history. Actually, it’s not so much that G&W propose a new narrative but that the evidence they present debunks a narrative that has been drummed into our subconscious assumptions about how the world works.

The standard story runs roughly like this: Foragers lived in small, more or less egalitarian bands for tens of thousands of years of human history. Economic pressures resulting from poor resource management and climate change encouraged, then forced, some cultures to experiment with sedentarism, cultivation, and pastoralism. These technological innovations in production led to higher yields of foodstuff, then population growth, higher-density settlements, and the need for greater social innovations, including the division of labor and a hierarchical political structure to coordinate specialists and manage collective resources like irrigation infrastructure. Whenever and wherever technological and social innovations reached some kind of stable equilibrium, societies would produce a surplus, leading to population growth, higher levels of population density, higher complexity, again the need to innovate technologically and socially.

This cycle has corkscrewed us up through a sequence of political-economic forms, a sequence determined by economic and environmental necessity. The sequence is inevitable in an evolutionary sense. The only alternative to the screw’s next turn is a collapse to a lower level of the sequence, often by way of a Hobbesian war of all against all, always with the option of complete annihilation.

What Graeber and Wengrow’s work accomplishes is to take off the blinders of “inevitability.” The archaeological record shows us hierarchical foragers, egalitarian urbanites with non-hierarchically organized infrastructure, and dense population nodes that appear independently of the underlying economic mode of production. The (pre)historical records abound with different answers to “What is the good life” and “What do we owe each other,” with experiments that seem to have taken place not always out of economic necessity but often for the sheer hell of it, playfully.

Playfulness characterizes much of G&W’s account of history. The Neolithic is littered with monuments, of which only works in stone and bone survive, that we can endlessly try to interpret in functional terms – to worship gods, honor the dead, or keep time – but that might just as well have been erected for fun, no more and no less than an excuse to share an epic experience. On a recent vacation in the UK, my family visited Stonehenge and Avebury, practically neighboring sites whose use and construction phases overlapped. They are both similar and different. Did they inspire each other in friendly competition, or in friendly complementarity? G&W point out that a motive force for innovation and creativity may be nothing more than the desire to try out something different. A few days before making the pilgrimage to the British monuments, we had spent a day with friends at a Welsh beach. While two aspiring young architects constructed a sandcastle of superlatives, I decided to sculpt a model of a fishing village, to contrast both with the “competition” and with my own gargantuan sand-based replica of Minas Tirith of the previous year. Just because.

Inevitability and necessity rather than playfulness characterize so much of our political and economic thinking, particularly the branch called, ironically, game theory. Hobbes’s war of all against all prefigures the classic statement of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, wherein the possibility of win-win cooperative solutions is undermined by the mere possibility of a player exploiting others’ cooperation. Fearing shirkers, rational actors withhold cooperation preemptively, self-fulfilling their own dark prophecy. Game theory actually shows, though, that social dilemmas of the Prisoners’ Dilemma form need not inevitably lead to non-cooperation when they are repeated. And in real life, when are they not repeated? It is possible to credibly negotiate and commit to cooperative social contracts. Hobbes argued for only one stable social contract, under a unitary and necessarily unconstrained sovereign. The crucial, underreported, and playful insight of game theory is that mathematically, the number of stable social contracts – some more, some less egalitarian – is infinite.

What the case studies collected by Graeber and Wengrow show is that an infinite array of social contracts is not just a mathematical possibility but a historical fact, and that the range of possibility is limited not only by economic and environmental necessity, but by the playfulness of our imagination.