Against the Grain cover image

This book pairs well with Seeing like a State, developing one of the themes from that earlier book. It also provides a somewhat more studious take on Yuval Noah Harari‘s thesis in Sapien that sedentary agriculture made life worse for participants.

The key insight here is that there was no singular Agricultural Revolution, but repeated movements back and forth over what had previously been seen as a one-way barrier. Throughout history and long before, people have adopted mixed lifestyles that combine agriculture with foraging, with and without sedentary habitation. They have also chosen to take up or abandon sedentary agriculture for a variety of reasons (war, famine, and disease). Finally, from the very earliest traces that we can find, states have worked to limit this movement and retain their agricultural workforce, using a combination of force and cultural factors such as religion and shared mythology.

This argument is laid out persuasively and honestly, making it clear what is extrapolation from very thin data — as must be the case when we are talking about institutions that predate writing and built in perishable materials such as wood and mud. I certainly found it convincing, although as a lifeform that is highly evolved for its particular high-civilisational niche, the attractions of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle are limited.

Where I think this argument falls down a bit is when it comes to how the possibility for this fluid lifestyle ended. It’s not just that states got better at hanging on to their workforces, and expanded their borders to swallow up the wild lands in between where other lifestyles had been possible. The book also misses technological aspects. For instance, the ”golden age” of piracy was based among other things on the fact that, given a ready supply of lumber and skilled labour, it was possible to keep a stolen capital ship operational for some time. It gets much harder to run a pirate coaling station! So with the end of the Age of Sail, piracy becomes much, much harder. The only places in the world where piracy is still a going concern are the ones like the Horn of Africa, where a fractured state on land cannot (or will not) interdict the pirates, and shipping passes close enough to the coast for small boats to be viable pirate vessels. No pirates are cruising around in frigates or destroyers in the twenty-first century.

This effect of centralised technology is a logical development of the dynamics described by Scott, in particular in the way in which it enlists elites to the state project by offering them the opportunity for personal profit from the construction of the mechanisms the state will use to capture and retain its population.

The decentralisation of technology promises the potential to break that bargain. One centralised social network like Facebook or Twitter is easy for a government to understand and control: there is one central owner, there is a legal domicile and therefore a set of applicable laws, and if all else fails, it’s obvious where to send the cops. Decentralised systems like the Fediverse do not work that way. Even if individual servers can run afoul of particular states, the network as a whole remains operational.

Scott’s other mechanisms, however, do remain operational in this scenario: an important advantage of a centralised Facebook or Twitter is the ability to enlist elites (content creators) who will benefit from the growth and pervasiveness of the medium that is key to their own success.

The immediate parallel to hunter-gatherers, then, would be something like digital nomads, who partake of digital culture, but attempt to do so on their own terms. However, this comparison does not bear up. Digital nomads, with their drop-shipping operations, Global North incomes, and Global South expenses, are parasites upon those centralised systems, as much as they claim to be checking out from them. While at least some of the “nomads” are successful, what would be required to operate entirely outside state control at 21st century tech level?

The gap between the few remaining “uncontacted” people in the Amazon or on islands off the coast of India and the “civilised” people in the rest of the world is far greater than it was back in parahistoric1 Mesopotamia. Andaman Islanders are not going to pick up laptops and join the Chennai tech workforce, any more than people in Chennai are going to throw their laptops into the sea and head out to the Andamans. This makes the line between state subjects and freer hunter-gatherers far less permeable than it was even just a few centuries ago, before the Industrial Revolution.

Of course the great tool of state cohesion, then as now, is elite conscription. While it may be true that populations as a whole were better off after the collapse of a centralised state, urbanised educated elites certainly were not. Part of the reason the notion of grimdark Dark Ages endures is that so many people wrote about how bad the collapse of empire was for them personally. These days, 26% (and falling) of the population works in agriculture; to a first approximation, these are the only people who would have a hope of still making that transition to a more decentralised lifestyle. Most of the rest of us — and I would guess, everyone reading this blog — is in the other three-quarters of the population that would not be at all well-equipped for that shift.

On a final un-hopeful note, if all else fails, we can already see a return to old-school levers of state enforcement, especially border controls. These have worked throughout history to coerce populations to stay within the borders of the state, from the Great Wall of China to the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”.

If this all sounds unhopeful, it’s not meant to! I just need to remind everyone (including myself) that any fantasy of retreating to some sort of imagined Good Life is just that — a fantasy. We are all highly evolved for our particular niche, and any sort of collapse is not going to end as well for us as it did for our ancestors.

🖼️  Book cover image from publisher’s website

  1. Not the Roy Sorensen version! I just mean the span of time encompassing the end of prehistory through early history. ↩