The point that this book has been hammering home is that hunter-gatherers were not ‘innocent’ or just roaming bands. Not only did foragers of the Stone Age have complex social structures and build great monuments, they were politically self-conscious and sophisticated.
Building on this, Chapter 5, ‘Many Seasons Ago,’ describes two very different cultures which lived along the Pacific coast of North America, drawing a series of fascinating comparisons and contrasts between the two. But the arguments and conclusions, this time, I found far less convincing than in previous chapters.
The argument is in essence: look at how radically different these two societies were, even though they had the same mode of production. So, isn’t the idea of a mode of production a bit useless?
The two North American ‘culture regions’ Graeber & Wengrow outline are the Californian Region and the North-West Coast Region. These were not pre-agricultural societies, the authors argue, but anti-agricultural – ie, they knew about farming but chose not to practise it.
Reconstruction of a Californian Yurok plank house
Within this, as the most striking examples of the two regional cultures, they zoom in particularly on the Yurok (California) and the Kwakiutl (North-West).
Let’s try to sum up what Graeber and Wengrow put forward here.
They say that idea of a ‘culture region’ is not perfect but makes more sense than ranking and sorting societies based on ‘mode of production.’ In other words, let’s group different societies based on what games, foods, clothing and values they share, not on whether they are foragers, farmers or industrial workers.
They say that societies (or at least these societies) are ‘ultimately’ shaped by political and cultural dynamics, by human agency, and not by ecology or economics. Concretely, the Kwakiutl ate salmon and the Yurok ate nuts and acorns, but that had nothing to do with their respective social structures.
Societies define themselves against their neighbours – ‘dynamically interconnected [and] reciprocally constituted’ (Marshall Sahlins.) People traveled a lot in the Stone Age and were aware of neighbours’ customs and tech. What they consciously chose not to borrow is what defines each group: we are the people who don’t go in for slavery, who prefer a spartan aesthetic, etc.
A Kwakiutl woman
So what do I think of all that?
I come to this without much prior knowledge, but it seems to me that the Yurok and Kwakiutl are bad examples for what the authors are trying to argue. Their means of subsistence could be crudely grouped together as ‘forager’ but were radically different. Culture and politics are weird and wonderful, so I’d agree that you can’t say that X climatic-economic input produces Y political-cultural result; if I say that the Kwakiutl eat fish, therefore they make colourful masks and enslave people, clearly there’s a missing link in the argument. But even though we can’t trace the causal relationship, I intuit strongly that there is one. It’s no coincidence that the people who lived on a diet of fatty, oily creatures made a virtue of amassing fat in their possession and in their own bodies. The people who hunted fish also hunted people. The people who ate dry, hard, austere nuts preferred not to hunt people, and themselves valued austere simplicity, hard work and physical thinness.
Between input X (the means of subsistence) and its many, practically untraceable outputs there is plenty of room for randomness and invention, and for the unique historical experiences of a given community, to interfere. It’s delightfully complicated.
Graeber and Wengrow’s thesis is appealing because it assigns the lion’s share of explanatory power to the political initiative of the people themselves. And it’s probably true that western Eurocentric writers are too keen to talk about their own history as a matter of political decisions, leadership, values and principles, while jumping to the most smug, glib, reductive, deterministic explanation they can think of when it comes to someone else’s history.
An idealistic, voluntarist philosophy lends itself well to judging certain communities for conditions forced upon them. But if we make our own choices, we make them from the set of choices available to us. Some people have more and better choices than others. This obvious enough to the authors that at one point they attempt to say, in essence, ‘No, not like that.’ Also, the limits of a given mode of production intrude when the authors acknowledge in passing that the population sizes in these communities were tiny. Neither fish nor nuts could support as large a population as settled agriculture. It’s fair to talk about ‘advance’ or ‘progress’ in relation to productivity of labour.
So they haven’t convinced me that there is a serious ‘problem with modes of production.’ But in the course of their argument they talk about a whole lot of great and interesting stuff. Once again, the journey is such a pleasure that you don’t mind if you never reached the promised destination.
I love it when a news site makes their headline ten words longer than it needs to be, just to shoehorn in some way to frame the story in a politically agreeable way. Take this headline from the front page of the Guardian’s website:
Israel ‘will do whatever it takes to avoid 7 October-style attack’ as it launches Lebanon ground raids
Sunday September 30th
The Israeli leaders are stating their intention of invading Lebanon with sweeping war aims. But we are supposed to go along with the fiction that it’s just ‘ground raids,’ like it would be totally irresponsible to say any more than that for now. That armoured brigade and airborne division massing on the border might turn around and go home any minute now.
To really plumb the depths of that headline, imagine if the Guardian had framed the October 7th 2023 attacks as
Gaza ‘will do whatever it takes to avoid Cast Lead-style attack‘ as it launches Israel ground raids
Israel must be portrayed as the victim. That’s why even in a headline, which is supposed to be brief and to the point, the purely hypothetical attack is mentioned before the actual real attack.
So moving on two days and reading the headlines from October 2nd 2024, we can easily imagine western politicians and journalists sighing with relief and leaning back in their chairs.
US THREATENS ‘SEVERE’ RESPONSE AS IRAN ATTACKS ISRAEL
Daily Express, front page, 2 October 2024
We are back on safe territory. The Iranian government is doing a mostly symbolic and nearly ineffectual thing that it did before a few months ago. Now Israel can once again be portrayed as the victim without any need for suspicious convoluted headlines.
But what is ‘severe’ in this context? What could be more severe than what the US has been helping the Israeli state to do for the last year? 40,000 dead, at least. Millions forcibly displaced and the ‘safe zones’ bombed. Millions starved. Journalists and doctors and aid workers killed in their hundreds. Ambulances bombed and shelled. Every hospital and university in the Gaza strip, destroyed. Tens of thousands imprisoned without trial, many beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted. And this hellfire has been raging for a year now with no end in sight.
IRAN MISSILE ATTACK ON ISRAEL SPARKS FEARS OF NEW WAR
Independent (UK), front page, 2 October 2024
‘Fears of new war’ are prominent in my mind too right now. But you know, the pager attacks, the assassination of Nasrallah, the bombing and the invasion were the main cues there, just for me personally. Didn’t Israel bomb Yemen just the other day? How many people did they kill – was it more or less than the one poor soul who was killed by the Iranian missiles?
ISRAEL VOWS TO RETALIATE AFTER IRAN LAUNCHES MISSILE ATTACK
The Guardian, front page, 2 October 2024
It’s jarring to see these papers rewriting history in front of our eyes. Maybe they want Wikipedia in ten years time to say that Iran started the war by launching that missile attack.
Even after the slaughter in Gaza and onslaught on the West Bank over the last year, it is still somehow possible for me to be surprised and horrified at the actions of the Israeli government. After all it has done and is still doing in Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli state is taking the show on the road. They want an all-out regional war. Until the pager attacks, I didn’t see it. Now I see it more clearly every day. They are hell-bent on raising the stakes.
Maybe they want to grab whatever land they can and kill whoever they want to kill while the going is good. Maybe they want to drag the US in even more than they already are. I don’t know. Usually I can assess the motivations behind why states do what they do. But this is just wild. The stated war aim (ending all capacity for Hezbollah to launch rockets into northern Israel) is not achievable. But it is a blank cheque for the IDF to go in and cause as much havoc as Netanyahu wants, for as long as Netanyahu wants.
By the way, I’m not going to take up 100 of these 1000 words issuing the mandatory disclaimers. You can assume I don’t support the state which killed Jina Amini and which executed hundreds for protesting her death. Let’s move on, without wasting any more of your time and mine, and look at another headline.
US would not support Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, says Biden
Well, that’s a relief. Because Iran doesn’t even have nuclear weapons. You know which country does? Israel. 88 of them. Even in the headlines about who they are not bombing yet, the unspoken assumption is that the country without nukes represents a greater nuclear threat than the one with them.
Evacuation
In these headlines there is not a hint of the horror of the war that is now starting in Lebanon, not a suggestion of the responsibility of the Israeli government. We hear of Israel evacuating villages. Phrases like ‘evacuation orders’ and ‘evacuation notices’ make it all seem formal and inevitable, as if they are helping people escape from a chemical spill or a flood. Telling people that if they don’t abandon their homes you will probably kill them is not an ‘evacuation.’ What these journalists are doing is like giving credit to a hurricane for the efforts of disaster relief workers.
And of course, Israel could have stopped waging a one-sided war on civilians in Gaza, and thereby stopped the Hezbollah rockets, any day out of the last 360+. That offer has been on the table the whole time.
Proxies
These articles go out of their way to remind us that Iran-backed Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, is an Iran-controlled Iranian proxy in the region. They would do better to manage expectations about the coming war. Hezbollah is indeed backed by Iran, but it is also a massive political and military force with a lot of popular support in Lebanon. It’s difficult to see Israel winning. But just as the invasion is a ‘ground raid,’ Hezbollah is spoken of as if it’s just some guerrilla camp or terror network.
The right to defend itself
All my life we’ve been hearing that Israel has a right to defend itself, or even ‘herself.’ This was an infuriating and stupid line even before 2023, when somehow the balance of fatalities in the Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ was always at least 10:1; when any visitor to the West Bank could see that an apartheid system is in force there; when, every four or five years, the IDF would ‘mow the lawn’ by killing a few thousand Gazans.
But the last year has been a horrible revelation. Somehow, things have gotten so much worse. And now Netanyahu wants to bring all this to Lebanon.
And Keir Starmer and Kemala Harris are standing up in front of the world and saying with straight faces that Israel has a right to defend itself. They’re still saying it, like nothing has happened, like that phrase has any meaning at all in this context.
Sometimes I wonder what atrocity Israel has to commit before the Americans feel obliged to stop giving them bombs. What would it take? But at moments like these I only wonder, what would it take before people like Starmer and Harris retire that self-defence line and think of some new hypocritical and stupid formula.
If there’s one thing to take away from this book, it’s that the Stone Age was way richer and more interesting than most of us would have thought. Moving from the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) to the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age, from about 12,000 BCE), us humans have not started working metal and a lot of us aren’t farming yet. Nonetheless even those who have not settled down to agriculture are still very busy:
1930s aerial photograph of the Poverty Point site.
At Poverty Point, Louisiana, US, there are massive earthworks dating from 1200BCE and larger than the contemporary cities of Eurasia. Analysis of artefacts and of the apparent systems of measurement used by the builders links this site all the way up the Mississippi and to the Great Lakes, and down to the Gulf of Mexico and even Peru. The builders were hunters, fishers and foragers.
In Japan, we have a wealth of archaeological data showing a rich and complex social life passing through cycles of nucleated settlement and dispersal from 14,000-300 BCE. My notes get a bit scattershot here: OK, they had acorn-based economies, they stored a surplus, they smoked weed, and they left no evidence of aristocracy or a ruling elite.
In Finland around 2,000-3,000 BCE we have ‘Giant’s Churches,’ massive structures built by the collective labour of hunter-gatherers.
Drawing of a Finnish ‘Giants’ Church’
This makes intuitive sense to me. We have seen that hunter-gatherer life could involve seasonal or local superabundance. This allowed for specialisation (people to do the maths and the crafts, the planning, overseeing and mobilising) and collective projects, such as monument building. But since the superabundance was temporary, local or conditional, so was the specialisation, and so was the mobilisation of the people in collective goals. That’s why kings, hierarchies, inequalities tended not to arise. The way I’d see it, agriculture, on the other hand, creates the basis for a permanent surplus, and so a lot more societies start to turn hierarchical, and these hierarchies grow more permanent.
As with previous chapters, we then turn to anthropology, that is, to modern and early modern hunter-gatherers, and see a few examples of where they have had kings (returning to Louisiana and Florida). ‘The economic base of at least some foraging societies,’ the authors conclude, could sustain priests, royal courts and standing armies.
KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
Swallows and summers
The authors make repeated claims that they are overturning conventional wisdom and rewriting history. In this chapter they are arguing that there is no causal link between the widespread adoption of agriculture and the widespread turn to hierarchy, inequality and subjugation, or if there is a link it’s too broad to have any meaning. The evidence they present in this chapter consists of the amazing social and physical structures that hunter-gatherers built – all without agriculture. But are ‘at least some foraging societies’ enough to prove such a big argument? I am very impressed, but not yet convinced. If the stale old ‘conventional wisdom’ still seems to hold for all but ‘at least some,’ then it holds. A dam designed to let through a trickle of water still holds back a massive volume in the reservoir.
Usually the tone is good-humoured, but sometimes it’s nearly a Hancocky tone of denouncing ‘traditional’ and ‘conventional’ scholars. The thing is, it’s not clear to me that this book contains a conceptual revolution, as opposed to merely synthesising, collating, bringing into relief, making informed and imaginative suggestions. So far, more the latter. The authors make bold claims and hedge them, or fail to carry through fully with the evidence. For example they scold us for assuming that pre-agricultural societies were all equal, and regularly caricature that position. Saying that pre-agricultural societies were generally more equal is apparently the same as saying they were childlike and innocent, all one identical blob, or animalistic – except when Graeber and Wengrow say it, as when they acknowledge ‘the flexibility and freedom that once characterised our social arrangements.’ (p140)
To be clear, the project of synthesising, bringing into relief, etc. is more than enough of a reason to read this book. I’m really enjoying it. And often its denunciations of ‘conventional wisdom’ are on point, for example when they describe the idea of writing off 7,000 years of American history as ‘the Archaic Period’ as ‘a chronological slap in the face.’ You don’t have to agree with everything these guys say to appreciate and enjoy the close-up tour of the messy interface between social systems in our deep past.
A reference to Marx surprised me. I assumed that the authors were squishing Marxism and its theory of primitive communism into their general critique of the Rousseau ideological tradition, and I criticised them for not mentioning it. But here they describe primitive communism as the collective ownership and control of the surplus, clearly distinguishing it from more romantic or pessimistic views where communism is only possible with no surplus at all.
‘Conventional Wisdom’
But I’m not done with ‘conventional wisdom’ yet. A lot of the things that are set up and scoffed at as ‘conventional wisdom’ are not really that. Here are a few of them as laid out on page 127:
‘…Rousseau’s argument that it was only the invention of agriculture that introduced genuine inequality…’
‘It’s also assumed that without productive assets […] and stockpiled surpluses […] made possible by farming, there was no real material basis for anyone to lord it over anyone else.’
‘Once a surplus arises, craft specialists, priests and warriors will arise to lay claim to it.’
Reading the above, you’d expect the authors to set about disproving these claims. They do nothing of the kind, at least in this chapter. As we’ve seen, they demonstrate that there are ‘at least some’ examples to the contrary. The built environment from the pre-agricultural age is impressive in absolute terms. As the reader, I have no way of judging whether this is a trickle or a torrent. OK, it’s useful to note that Poverty Point (more pictures below) has a bigger footprint than Uruk – but do all the sites built by foragers in that period have a bigger footprint than all the sites built by farmers?
‘The idea of ranking human societies according to their means of subsistence’ is described as a bad and weird idea that some eighteenth-century freaks thought up and that we have all accepted without question until now. I don’t believe in ‘ranking’ different societies, unless in relation to some specific and measurable quality. But I think that the way people put food in their bellies is actually foundational to how they organise their society. Those hunter-gatherers who changed their political structures every year? They did that because there were changes in how they could get food. It’s true that we look at prehistoric societies more than others through the lens of how they filled their bellies. But that’s entirely justified – because we know next-to-nothing about their politics or culture.
What is more, I’ve never had the above ideas presented to me as ‘conventional wisdom.’ Throughout my own formal education I never got an earful about the primacy of economics. At university we looked at Marxism as one topic of a dozen in Critical Theory, and one topic of a dozen in Historiography, plus Bloch and the Annales school. That’s it.
To be fair, I didn’t study Archaeology as such, or Anthropology – maybe it’s different in those fields. But in the broad public understanding of these fields, none of these claims in my experience constitute ‘conventional wisdom.’ On the contrary, the primacy of politics and warfare is asserted throughout popular history. In school, in the media and in popular culture, we compare societies not by their economic base but by their cultural and political ornamentation, through the prism of personalities and events. Economics gets only an indirect look-in, via inventors. Popular discourse evaluates societies according to the most arbitrary criteria (where for example Sparta somehow represents ‘democracy’) or with the aid of idiotic aphorisms like ‘Strong men create good times [etc]’ or even through the mostly-meaningless and deeply problematic lens of race. That’s where we’re at. We’re really not suffering from an excess of economic determinism.
An armed band of Aranda in early-20th Century Australia
Work and leisure
There’s a lot more in the chapter. There’s the trope about how people in past ages had more free time than modern office or factory workers, which the authors take as read and don’t attempt to prove. As they note, it holds true for the !Kung people, but not for other foraging societies – the ones in what is now Canada appear to have been workaholics. One thing about the !Kung that I would definitely think is universal, though, is that they know about agriculture, could do it if they needed to, but have no pressing incentive to turn to it.
There’s some intriguing stuff about how the only thing close to private property or hierarchy in many forager societies was (is?) the concept of the sacred. The Aranda people in Australia treated their children with kindness but initiation into adulthood involved painful rituals; subjugation and violence was only present in a sacred context. Sites like Poverty Point were probably ‘sacred,’ the only place in the social life of the community where demands for absolute obedience were made.
Linked to this, the authors note about ‘kings’ of the Mesolithic: ‘It is possible for explicit hierarchies to arise, but to nonetheless remain largely theatrical, or to confine themselves to very limited aspects of social life.’ (P 131) This is food for thought for scholars of Gaelic Ireland who are struck by the pedantry of the seating and portioning arrangements which our sources prescribe for a feast. I have a feeling this is building toward a theory of where private property came from, a theory that relegates agriculture to background noise.
But this chapter has not, in my brain anyway, broken the causal link between agriculture and inequality. But the assumption that towns, specialisation, crafts and science are impossible without agriculture is completely wrong. Graeber & Wengrow have proved this hands-down. They have given us a fascinating picture of the real social and political lives of foraging societies and the monuments and social structures they can sustain.
Another powerful point here is that colonisers routinely claim that the land they are seizing is somehow fair game because the people who live there are not working it ‘properly,’ ie they are hunting and gathering rather than farming (And of course, even when they are farming, as in the case of Palestine, the colonisers still have the nerve to pretend they ‘made the desert bloom’). So the idea of foraging as not being a valid economic activity, of not being able to sustain ‘civilisation,’ however you define that, has a blood-soaked and disgusting legacy. This part is conventional (though it was never wisdom) and we can’t dispense with it quickly enough.
How was life in the Stone Age? Was it all people shooting arrows at one another and falling into glaciers, or was it one big hippy commune? In this chapter Graeber and Wengrow leave behind the Enlightenment and start a chronological study of the earliest human societies, focusing on society in the Upper Paleolithic period. That’s the final part of the early Stone Age.
The first thing I learned here was pretty surprising: that humans lived spread out all over Africa for hundreds of thousands of years, with strong regional variations that meant they would have resembled giants, elves or hobbits to one another.
Then homo sapiens formed from a composite of all these very different sub-species, moved north into Eurasia, met the Denisovans and Neanderthals, and in time absorbed them.
The authors then perform the by-now familiar shuffle: thesis, antithesis, forget-about-either-thesis. Hobbes was wrong, Rousseau was wrong, here’s a better explanation.
A monument atGobekli Tepe, Turkiye. On which, more below…
Princely Burials
What about the Upper Paleolithic ‘princely burials’ in Europe? Are these richly-endowed graves (countless person-hours of labour would have gone into them) not evidence of a rigid social hierarchy like what Hobbes said?
Reading about ‘princely burials’ myself in other contexts, I’ve always been annoyed at the assumption that they necessarily indicate social hierarchy, aristocracy, etc. An individual might be honored in death for all kinds of reasons – for heroism in battle or skill in crafts, for being an inventor, for saving lives, for poetry, for metallurgy, for mystical visions. They might be honored for being great leaders, but this doesn’t mean they were aristocratic ones.
Graeber and Wengrow make an argument along similar lines to my guesses – that these were eccentric and visionary outsiders-turned-leaders, who were buried in riches (at a time when no-one was buried in death, with or without riches) as much to contain their potentially dangerous magic as to honour them. They construct a whole argument which takes in anthropology and archaeology, and which I found convincing.
So far they are at least living up to one promise: their version of history is interesting and rich. Our heads are full of capitalist and feudal assumptions, so we have to remember that just as objects which travel a long distance do not always indicate mere ‘trade’, elaborate burials do not always indicate ‘ruling class.’ The past is so much broader than the scopes of capitalism and feudalism through which we view it.
Monuments
We see the same pattern with the other type of artefact from the Stone Age which, like ‘princely burials’, are often taken up as proof of hierarchies and kings: grand, monumental buildings.
I’ve come across the fantasies of Graham Hancock and Ancient Apocalypse, in which Göbekli Tepe is evidence not just of kings but of an entire ancient empire which was more advanced than us and which left cryptic celestial warnings, and which colonized the world ‘teaching’ people how to do agriculture and masonry. A lot of the narrative hinges on the idea that Stone Age hunter-gatherers could not have built great stone monuments.
Even though they are so florid and fantastical, such arguments have always struck me as paradoxically boring. There is a more-than-open attitude to the possibility of Atlantis, aliens and giants, but dull pedantry when it comes to ancient societies. In unimaginably long stretches of time, tens of millennia, Graham Hancock cannot see any possibility that hunter-gatherers could have established a society which was, even temporarily, capable of building something like Göbekli Tepe.
Like with the burials, here Graeber and Wengrow give us a bit of archaeology (Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe, Russian mammoth houses) and a bit of anthropology (such as the Inuits, the Nambikwara in Brazil and the Plains Indians in the United States) and paint a picture that is colourful and informative. I mean colourful not like atlanteans came along one day to teach us about seeds and the principle of the lever, but more like nomads and hunter-gatherers vary their social systems from season to season, sometimes gathering for great coordinated collective labour, sometimes dispersing to hunt and gather.
A small part of theGobekli Tepe site from around 9000 BCE
It’s satisfying to get a clearer idea of how these monuments were built. But the best part is the idea that these societies changed their whole social system regularly to meet their needs. In one part of the year, the modern Nambikwara roamed in small bands, all these bands being under the strict control of one chief. For the other part, they gathered in hilltop villages, became democratic and communist, and had chiefs who functioned more like a social welfare department than a monarchy. But across all the other examples, no single pattern prevails: among one people, there is a settled season of strict hierarchy and a roaming season of relative informality. Among another, police functions are strictly seasonal and rotate between clans on an annual basis.
The anthropological stuff gives an insight into how Stone Age peoples might have lived: gathering after a great hunt with a superabundance of food and other goods, feasting, processing materials, building great structures, then dispersing again when the seasons turn.
A reconstruction of a house built from mammoth bones, Japan, 2013
What’s the upshot of all this?
Prehistoric society was not a realm of innocence or animal instinct – our ancestors were politically sophisticated.
Prehistoric society was not all one thing. A grading of one political system alongside each economic mode (for example, claiming that hunter-gatherers live in ‘bands’, horticulturalists under ‘chiefdoms’) is too pedantic even as a general guideline.
And here I kind of get the ‘plague on both your houses’ approach to Rousseau and Hobbes, because it’s ultimately from Rousseau that we get the idea that people pre-state and pre-class were simple and innocent.
However, this wouldn’t have been my understanding, and I’m broadly in the Rousseau ideological legacy. So they’re only throwing out bathwater here. Fine by me.
They haven’t succeeded in turning me off the idea of an economic basis corresponding to a political regime. Hunter-gatherers never seem to get around to parliamentary democracy, fascism, Stalinism, the Paris Commune or the Petrograd Soviet – not because they were/are too innocent to think of them, but because these systems do not correspond to their needs or means. The above are political systems proper to our age. There is a wide range of them, and which one you end up with depends on the last analysis on the outcome of a political struggle. But a certain type of economy, one where things like factories and railways are central, is a necessary prerequisite.
Though it seems political systems are more broad and fluid the further back you go. Even what we file under ‘feudalism’ is by definition immensely varied and full of local peculiarities. And when I looked at Gaelic Ireland, I realised that under its legal constitution many different de facto regimes could exist, depending on hard factors like population and resources and soft factors like politics and culture.
But even that phrase ‘the further back you go’ is weighted with an assumption, isn’t it? An assumption about progress, development, advance. That economies actually do develop through stages, and do not slip backwards as easily as political systems do; it’s never actually happened that a country has been ‘bombed back to the Stone Age.’ I admit thermonuclear weapons do raise the possibility.
I guess Graeber and Wengrow wouldn’t agree, but it is possible to speak of progress and development and economic stages without being racist or reductive.
Our industrialized world has global warming, endemic and stark inequality, addiction, shanty towns, systematic cruelty to migrants, homelessness for the sole purpose of enriching landlords, debt bondage as a precondition for housing, widespread precarity,long hours and low pay, universal exploitation, and hysterical bigotry against anyone who’s different. It also has vaccines, washing machines, incubators, clean running water, and a super-abundant supply of manufactured goods. I think that second collection of things are more than mere creature comforts or mod cons – yes, even the manufactured goods that clutter my house and ‘do not spark joy’ – and what’s more I don’t see that they are predicated on the first set of things, the bad things, or dependent on them in any way.
The Marxist criterion at work here, as I’ve mentioned before, is the productivity of labour. In relation to that, we can speak of our society as being advanced or developed in relation to a society that lacks these things.
But the bad things listed above, and their absence in prehistoric societies, are a reminder that our society is still at an absolutely pitiful and contemptible level of development. The idle person who thinks it’s OK for him to be thousands of times wealthier than a nurse or cleaner, just because a piece of paper says that he owns this or that, is a victim of the greatest superstition that has ever held sway over the human mind. The 16th-century German had more reason when he bought indulgences off Johann Tetzel, and the Aztec priest had more practical common sense when he ripped the hearts out of war-captives to keep the sun in the sky.
The most valuable insight from this chapter – and it is a refutation of Rousseau whatever way you slice it – is that hierarchy is not a necessary overhead of (a) social complexity or (b) large population or (c) collective projects or (d) coordination over long distances. Sure, hierarchy is one way to do it, and indeed one way that it appears to have been done even in some pre-class societies. But this chapter tells a story of political sophistication and huge monuments, apparently without hereditary rulers or coercion.
I grew up with Gary Larson images of people living in caves and even coexisting with dinosaurs (Yabba dabba doo!). But even as a more well-read adult I still would have thought that before agriculture, people lived in small roaming groups of a few dozen people. This chapter has challenged this idea, but in a way that is actually very encouraging. These pre-agriculture, pre-state, pre-class societies could be large, complex and at least seasonally settled. Probably they had a wide variety of social structures, including hierarchies and castes, but these were not the rule.
Hi, this is Part Two of my run-down on The Dawn of Everything, a book that asks how unequal, hierarchical and class-ridden societies first arose. Here is Part One.
In this chapter Graeber and Wengrow ask:
What did indigenous Americans in the 17th Century think about Europeans?
To what extent did the Enlightenment draw on sources outside Europe?
What does ‘egalitarian’ even mean?
And they emphasize the urgency of these questions: ‘A very small percentage of [the world’s] population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion.’ (p 76) If we want a free society that is not careering toward ecological and social catastrophe, we need to figure out how it came to be that a small minority ended up in control.
Before starting their story of humanity from the beginning, the authors detain us for one chapter to argue that a lot of our ideas about that epic story are wrong to begin with, and to give an account of why. This involves rewriting the history of the Enlightenment. So that’s the fairly ambitious idea of the part we’re looking at today:
Chapter 2: The Indigenous Critique
Along the way, the book delivers a lot of what I expected and wanted. For example, we get a sketch of several indigenous American societies before their destruction by European settlers.
The Wendat (Huron) grew crops around inland fortified towns. They had formal political officers and a caste of war-captives with limited rights, whom the European observers assumed were slaves. Other tribes such as the Mi’qmak and Montagnais-Naskapi, meanwhile, were bands of hunter-gatherers.
The Europeans saw these people as eloquent and very good at reasoned debate, skills honed in near-daily discussions of communal affairs. The Europeans also noticed that they possessed individual liberty, and wholeheartedly disapproved. Laws were not enforced, fathers did not control children, captains had to rely on their own persuasive power to get people to fight.
Jesuit missionaries were shocked to observe the ‘equality of the sexes’ – women had sexual freedom and the right to divorce. But there was a gendered division of labour, with women owning and working the fields while men hunted and fought. This reminds me of Engels’ explanation of how gender inequality came about. His vision of the prior state of equality does not preclude a gendered division of labour.
Looking at the Wendat, I feel like I’m re-playing the greatest hits from Celtic Communism? In an exact parallel with Gaelic Ireland, the Wendat practised communal compensation rather than punishment. There were wealthy people among the Wendat – but, and we saw elements of this in Gaelic Ireland too, the main incentive in hoarding material things was to give them away and thus boost one’s own prestige.
Graeber and Wengrow say lots of clever and interesting things – such as, in relation to the Wendat, ‘insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom’ (p 48) – but they miss one obvious point. The 17th-Century Wendat (I specify 17th Century because, as far as I know, they are still around) had richer and poorer individuals, and individuals who held political office (on the sufferance of those who did not). What they did not appear to have had was distinct classes in conflict with one another. Again, here we see some parallels with Ireland. The Wendat were equal and egalitarian and communist in the sense that they all belonged to a single class. Like with my previous Celtic ruminations, here we are troubled out of complacent identification with the people of the past by the spectre of the un-free, the layer or caste who existed within the community but with curtailed rights. But the authors here don’t seem at all interested in class, and are visibly aggrieved when the Enlightenment salons turn from discussions of political institutions to discussions of economics.
Indigenous people roasting Europeans
What’s equally fascinating is the low opinion these Indigenous people had of Europeans when the latter arrived in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For some reason I tend to forget that European colonisers and indigenous people lived in proximity for centuries, had developed opinions and analyses about each other, and left records of same. What is more, these records were a very popular type of book in early modern Europe.
The Mi’kmaq, around 1608, saw their (overwhelmingly male) French neighbours as envious, slandering, lying, quarrelling, covetous and ungenerous. ‘They are saying these and the like things continually,’ writes the Jesuit missionary who recorded these opinions. To the missionary it was obvious that while the French had more material goods, the Mi’kmaq had more ease, comfort and time.
Twenty years later a missionary among the Wendat recorded that they had no lawsuits and were not covetous. There were no beggars ‘in their towns and villages’ (I admit, embarrassed, that I didn’t know they even had towns and villages before I read this). As for beggars the Wendat heard of existing in France, they ‘blamed us [the French] for it severely.’ While the Wendat had daily community gatherings and discussions, the French interrupted one another, quarrelled, competed to hog the limelight, and often resorted to weak arguments.
This chapter does great service to history by promoting knowledge of a Wendat political leader named Kondiaronk who actually visited France as a diplomat and, in lengthy salon discussions with Frenchmen back on his home turf, voiced a powerful critique of European society.
‘The whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly,’ declared Kondiaronk – that ‘contrary apparatus’ consisted of money, property rights and profit. If you want to learn more about Kondiaronk, I really recommend you read this book.
Stages
This brings us to the main focus of the chapter. The authors basically give an alternative history of the Enlightenment, arguing that this indigenous critique was of key importance. The idea of societies developing through stages is attributed to the economist Turgot, who developed the idea as a defence mechanism against the indigenous critique: in short, the indigenous people say that Europeans are un-free and miserable, but it doesn’t matter what they say, because they are on a lower level. Their freedom is ‘lower’ than our slavery.
Rousseau’s famous essay on the origin of social inequality appears here as a strange synthesis of the indigenous critique and of the ideas developed to counter it.
I have mixed feelings on this. Texts such as the main one cited here, Curious dialogues with a savage of good sense who has travelled (1703), are fascinating and valuable and it’s a shame they were dismissed so lightly as fabrications. And this narrative of the Enlightenment as a period when Europeans encountered and opened up to ideas from other parts of the world was fresh and interesting. It’s an ambitious argument, though, and the fact that it’s so much at odds with other accounts of the Enlightenment that I’ve read would give me at least pause for thought. Doesn’t the receptiveness of European minds to the indigenous critique say something about how developments within Europe were also driving the Enlightenment?
Whatever Turgot’s agenda was, the idea of societies ascending through stages of economic development is, in itself, a good one. Married to arbitrary criteria, or none at all, (sorry, Age of Empires), this idea leads to bad places. But you can attach it to valuable criteria (such as the productivity of labour) and thereby give some meaning to the concept of progress underlying it. I predict the authors are setting things up for an attack on Marxism in future chapters. They are emphasizing the conservative pedigree of the idea of stages of economic development as part of lining up those dominoes. We’ll see how that goes in the coming chapters.
I enjoyed this chapter in spite of reservations. I hope Kondiaronk and his opinions on early modern European society become a staple of school history courses.
Have human societies always been divided into classes? Do we naturally tend toward hierarchies? If not, when and how did we stumble into this vale of tears, and which way is the exit?
This blog meditated on these questions before in my series Celtic Communism?in which I asked whether James Connolly and others were right to assert that Gaelic Ireland was socialist.
At the moment I’m reading the very successful 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Wengrow and the late David Graeber. So far, it’s fascinating – which is not to say that I agree with all of it. Reading it, I sometimes tut and shake my head, sometimes suppress an urge to cheer out loud.
To continue my ruminations on history, hierarchy and communism, I’m going to be blogging my reactions to The Dawn of Everything chapter by chapter, as I read it.
This post looks at…
Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood
From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021 (Penguin, 2022)
The authors set up two philosophers, Rousseau and Hobbes, as reference points. I haven’t read either myself, but here is a brief summary of what I learned from this chapter:
Hobbes argued that in early human societies life was ‘nasty, brutish and short,’ ‘a war of all against all,’ and that inequality, hierarchy and harsh penal systems rescued us from this chaotic state.
Rousseau argued that humans once lived in a state of wholesome communist innocence, but ‘ran headlong into their chains’ because inequality was a necessary overhead of prosperity and progress.
Graeber and Wengrow, on the other hand, argue that humans are neither innately good (as implied by Rousseau) nor evil (as implied by Hobbes), but creative and brilliant, and that actual early societies do not conform to either the Hobbes or the Rousseau model.
Rousseau, discoursing on inequality while a servant lights the fire
These two models, they argue, have three basic faults in common:
They ‘simply aren’t true.’
They have ‘dire political implications.’
They make the past ‘needlessly dull.’
The chapter is engaging and witty, and plenty of the evidence presented here is really interesting. But my nagging feeling throughout was that ‘a plague on both your houses’ doesn’t really cut it.
For example on page 4 we read that many of the ‘first farming communities’ and the ‘earliest cities’ (my emphasis) remained democratic and egalitarian. This statement is meant as a refutation of Rousseau’s claim that once we invented agriculture we all started bowing down to priests and kings. But the authors are saying, in essence, ‘it took a while and didn’t happen everywhere all at once’ – not ‘it didn’t happen.’ It’s zooming in closer to the transition from primitive communism to class society and pointing at the messy interface. I am fascinated by that messy interface and I want to zoom in. But this chapter has failed to convince me that Rousseau’s version of events is broadly untrue.
Moving on to the ‘Dire political implications.’ Regarding Hobbes, the dire implications are obvious to me: his model is an argument against freedom and for authoritarianism, against equality and for hierarchy. No thanks.
Thomas Hobbes, in a painting by John Michael Wright
But what are the dire implications of Rousseau? The authors say that talk of ‘inequality’ tends to reinforce inequality, to make it seem permanent, and that fifty or a hundred years ago there was a more powerful critique of ‘concentration of capital’ rather than inequality. But those who critiqued ‘concentration of capital’ 50-100 years ago, the communists, socialists and anarchists, would have had a much firmer theoretical grounding in Rousseau, via Engels, than the critics of inequality today. I feel Graeber & Wengrow do not shoulder the burden they have taken on themselves to prove that Rousseau has ‘dire political implications.’
The Marxist development of the ideas of Rousseau added a vital component: that modern industrial society has created such an abundance of goods that it is possible to return to a classless and stateless society while preserving material prosperity. This view is not pessimistic, does not accept inequality as inevitable. I assume it is dealt with later, but it is an omission here.
There is a powerful and memorable assertion on page 8: ‘The ultimate question of human history […] is not our equal access to material resources […] but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.’ Now, I don’t actually agree with that. I think the part about contributing to decisions (politics) is actually subordinate to the part about material resources. First, because most of the decisions will tend to be about how to allocate resources; second, because if there are some people who control most of the wealth, they will in the final analysis call the shots even in the most democratic system. But I appreciate the authors laying their cards on the table. The word that springs to mind for me is ‘voluntarism’ – an approach that downgrades considerations of how material conditions might limit the possibilities of human agency.
A museum reconstruction of Ötzi
This first chapter contains a satisfying rebuke to some modern-day iterations of the Hobbes model – the writings of Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond and Stephen Pinker. The latter presents Ötzi, a 5,000-year-old body found in the Alps with an arrow wound, as a ‘poster child for humanity in its original condition’ – the whole nasty, brutish and short thing. Graeber and Wengrow introduce Ötzi to Romito 2 – the 10,000-year-old remains of a man who suffered from a severe disability. Romito 2, in life, was taken care of by his community, given an equal share of meat, and when he died he was buried with care and respect.
The book also promises to be a stinging rebuke to eurocentrist and basically racist assumptions about history. ‘Western civilisation’ is just today’s ‘accepted synonym’ for what used to be called ‘the white race.’ As for the supposedly ‘western’ tradition of freedom, democracy and equality, ‘it is almost impossible to find a single author in the Western tradition, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Erasmus, who did not make it clear that they would have been opposed to such ideas […] it’s almost impossible to find a single European author before the nineteenth century who suggested [democracy] would be anything other than a terrible form of government.’ (Page 16) I agree wholeheartedly and I look forward to the further development of these ideas.
A Massim man in the Trobriand Islands, 1900s.
The last part of the chapter argues that the Hobbes and Rousseau models make history ‘needlessly dull.’ For example, material artefacts travelled great distances through such diverse means as vision quests, travelling healers and entertainers, women’s gambling, and the death-defying adventures of the Massim Islanders. To assume that objects can only travel through ‘trade,’ or to sum up such fascinating cultural activities as mere ‘trade,’ is to sell history and archaeology short. I’m not sure how much Rousseau or Hobbes can be blamed for the poverty of imagination which is under fire in these passages, but I’m looking forward to learning more about such cool and interesting stuff in the pages that follow.
Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis by Nick Bano
Verso, 2024
So that headline about ‘landlord abolition’ caught your attention. Maybe you’re wondering, is it just a sensational name for a moderate reform policy, like when people talk about ‘prison abolition’? No, landlord Abolition, as laid out by Nick Bano in this eye-opening and well-written book, is the real deal.
Consider the following:
Renters in Britain in 1957 spent 6.5% of their income on rent (now think, how much do you spend on housing?).
Before 1951, any increase in land value created by planning decisions was taxed at 100%.
In the late ’70s, private rental was a dwindling sector and ‘the death of the landlord’ was widely predicted.
Landlords were eager to sell, councils willing to buy. Social housing stock grew massively without anyone having to lay one brick on top of another.
The private rental sector was saved by concerted government intervention during the Thatcher years. Housing stock was in poor repair. How to fix it? Give grants to local authorities to renovate their stock? No! Get private capital to pump money into housing! What could possibly go wrong?
Fast-forward thirty years: terraced houses built by local authorities a century ago are being sold for half a million.
We could fix our housing crisis today by increasing social housing stock. Rent controls are not only fair; they would drive landlords to sell to councils. The more social housing stock there is, the less desperate people will be for housing, the less landlords will be able to get away with charging. It would be a virtuous cycle culminating in the private rental sector shrinking away to occupy an insignificant margin of society.
House prices are tied to rental yields; when you buy a house, you are actually paying for the right to receive rents from it for the rest of your life, even if you never have any intention of renting it out. Reducing the private rental sector to insignificance would benefit home buyers and make mortgage lenders cry bitter, salty tears at all the money we get to keep in our pockets instead of giving them.
Bano is under no illusions that the collapse of the housing market, while it seems necessary and desirable, would be an economic catastrophe for Britain whose governments have bet the country’s shirt on the impossible dream of eternally rising housing costs. And under capitalism, the poor would pay first and steepest for any economic disaster.
The housing market is not a bubble – people are actually realizing profits. But it has to hit the limit of a crisis of affordability, unless British renters can be convinced to live in tiny cubicles or ever-worsening Dickensian squalor – which Bano, to be clear, does not rule out.
The main clarifying point for me was that this is not a crisis of housing supply, but a crisis of housing costs. The imperative to “build more houses”, unless they are all public, social housing, will actually continue to drive up costs (and also destroy the environment).
There is a lot in this short book. There is historical material, for example, about an amazing rent strike in 1915 and the role of housing in the lead-up to the Battle of Cable Street. There is incisive commentary on Grenfell. There is a chapter on race. There are plenty of concrete examples of the squalor, injustice and absurdity of housing in Britain today. There is an overview of how landlords changed from social pariahs to celebrated entrepreneurs in one generation.
My only reservation was wondering how much this analysis applies to Ireland, which is my neck of the woods. Here investment funds seem to be playing more of a role than in Britain, but the mom and pop landlord seems to be very much a social phenomenon here as well.
In 2022 £63 billion was paid in rent in the UK – of which £23.4 billion was Housing Benefit. All that public money – gone, just to reward landlords for charging unaffordable rents. Meanwhile they are incentivised to keep on hiking the rents. Ireland’s Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) is the same, and I bet similar numbers apply.
This series has been very negative so far. But teaching can be a great job for a range of different kinds of people. I didn’t ultimately have the energy or patience to stick with it, but here are some things I loved about teaching.
(1) Knowing loads of people
Teaching is one of the most sociable jobs you can do. In every school you’re going to meet hundreds of kids and dozens of staff. I still meet former students regularly, sometimes after a gap of nearly a decade. It’s extraordinary, seeing them grown into adulthood but still seeing the 12 year old underneath.
The teaching profession is a great reservoir of personality and eccentricity. Some colleagues can be immensely likeable and admirable, others… not so much, but at least they’re interesting.
(2) Getting to know people who are not like you
As a teacher you get to pick up dialect, including rude dismissals (like the Midlands phrase, “go ‘way from around me”); get some insights into the current youth lore, in-jokes and vulgarity (eg, “chungus” c 2018); and learn about different cultures (for example, that twins from some parts of Nigeria have a special pair of names, or how gender works in Lithuanian surnames).
(3) Appreciation
I’ve gotten cards and emails from former students telling me how much they benefited from my teaching. Other times I’ve just run into students randomly and they have told me the same. Naturally this produces a great feeling, even years after I stopped teaching.
(4) My subjects
I loved teaching English and History. Personally I got a lot out of approaching a poem or a novel from a new angle, from the perspective of trying to figure out how best to introduce a diverse group of young people to it. You see new things in old favourites, or explore entirely new stories.
(5) Elaborate games
Sometimes this meant coming up with far-fetched but fun ways to teach. I was teaching a 2nd year group about World War Two and that involved funny hats, role playing and moving different-coloured pins around on a map of the world. Probably sounds chaotic. Actually I prepared well so it went smoothly.
(6) Planning and preparation
When I had time to do it properly, which was rarely, planning and preparing lessons could be a lot of fun. I enjoyed making up my own resources and figuring out how a lesson plan could approach a subject from several angles at once: verbal, visual, interactive, etc. This creative aspect is something no chatbot can do – and even if they could, it’s fun, so let’s make sure it remains our job and not theirs.
(7) Reading
With a fairly chill and well-behaved class group, reading through a novel or play together can be really enjoyable. I had one fifth year who read for Macbeth for the entire year. He spoke with gravitas and in rich tones and knew how to skim over words he couldn’t pronounce. He liked to speak but was not big-headed. The Shadow of a Gunman, suitably abridged, was a very fun one to act out in class in a more physical way, with props and swaggering, threatening soldiers.
(8) Being the centre of attention
Some people get scared of talking in front of groups, or leading activities with a room full of people. I can relate to shyness but when it’s expected of me that I will run the whole show, I don’t have that. It’s enjoyable to have it all on my shoulders and to deliver. There’s messing, but most of the time it works out fine. Everyone’s different, but for me, when it’s going half-way well, and when the inherent problems in the system are not grinding you down, it is great fun and very satisfying.
I sat down in the staffroom towards the end of a January day. It was quiet in there, a free period, and I probably had a pile of A4 hardback copies to read through, or a worksheet to finish off and print 25 copies of.
The principal stuck his head in the door and addressed me in a soft polite voice. ‘Can you come into the office for a second?’
I went to the principal’s office, wondering what it was all about, and sat on one of the sombre antique-looking armchairs. I hadn’t been in the place since before the old principal retired last year.
The new principal and deputy were younger men who went about their new jobs with a hurried, impatient air that suggested they thought the old principal had been too easygoing. I felt the new principal liked me. But from the deputy I’d always got a vibe that he didn’t quite understand the point of me. I can imagine him thinking: A male teacher who doesn’t do rugby or GAA? Why does he even get out of bed in the morning?
I can’t remember if Roberto was already there or if he was summoned in after me, or if he arrived in the custody of the deputy. Roberto, not his real name, was a fifth-year Spanish Lad (Actually Catalan, but anyway, a member of that school’s numerous and anomalous Iberian tribe).
The deputy spoke to Roberto in an angry, impatient way. ‘Mr ______ here says that you wouldn’t take your jacket off. Do you have anything to say for yourself?’
I was more confused now. A couple of days before Roberto had refused to take his jacket off in class. That was such a trivial thing I’m not sure why I even wrote him up on VSware for it. It was January in Ireland and this kid was from the Mediterranean.
Winter in Ireland. ‘Why do you have your jacket on?’
Roberto said that it was true and he was sorry, but he was not sure why he was being singled out.
He turned to me. ‘Come on, sir. You know I don’t mess as bad as the other guys.’
I hope my voice didn’t come out as wheedling as I remember. ‘It’s true that we have problems in that class. And you’re not the worst. But if I ask you to do something, you need to do it and not argue with me.’
But he was right. The jacket thing was unusual. Roberto was one of the few kids in that English class who weren’t a constant headache to me. I was putting up stuff on VSWare every other day about that crowd. But Roberto was dozy and withdrawn – I mean withdrawn from the work, but also from the messing. In the context of that absolute urinal of a class, I’d take that trade-off.
But in making the classic ‘Why are you singling me out?’ defence, Roberto had walked right into the trap.
The principal and deputy laid into him: ‘This is not acceptable.’ ‘What other people are or aren’t doing has nothing to do with it.’ ‘You need to take responsibility for your own actions.’
These are the things us educators always say. But this wasn’t a schoolmarmish telling-off. The tone was harsh, aggressive. In the army they’d call it a bollocking. Roberto withdrew into himself.
‘You can be sent back to Spain. Do you understand? If you don’t start behaving yourself, we’re going to send you back.’
Roberto listened to these ugly threats, looking sullen and upset, saying only ‘Yes… Yes…’ whenever it was demanded of him.
After Roberto was dismissed, the principal and deputy turned to me. ‘You shouldn’t have agreed with him. The way you said there were problems in the class. You can’t accept any of that.’
And I realised: this ambush was not for Roberto. It was for me.
I was too surprised to really argue. ‘OK, but it’s true, there are serious problems in that class. And Roberto is far from the worst…’
They shook their heads. ‘You can’t just accept a certain level of disruptive behaviour. You can’t let them get away with breaking the rules. You shouldn’t have let things get so bad with that class.’
I can’t remember which of them said what, and I’m only pulling together our words from memory as best I can a few years later; I think the principal did most of the talking. They weren’t quite as aggressive in tone as they were with the kid, but it was just as obvious that this wasn’t a discussion. So I pretended to accept what they were saying, just so I could get out of that room quickly and get back to work.
***
After school I had to cycle out to the suburbs on an errand. I pumped those pedals hard on that bike ride, ranting in my head about what I should have said.
I had barely seen the principal or deputy since September. They had not spoken to me about this challenging class or, as far as I know, spoken to any of the kids for whom I’d written long rap sheets. They hadn’t said a word to me about it right up until this weird encounter in the office.
In fact, they hadn’t wanted to know about it. A couple of months before, I’d brought four kids from that class straight up to that same office after some particularly bad incident. But the principal had dismissed us impatiently and hurried off somewhere. I remembered, too, that a couple of times the deputy had burst into my classroom. Paying no heed to me, he had laid into the students like an unusually rude drill sergeant – for wearing jackets in class.
Always with the jackets!
The kids could shout ‘f****t’ and ‘foreigner’, throw stuff around the room, interrupt me – but god help anyone who still had his jacket on at 9:05 on a winter morning.
Maybe it was ‘broken window theory’ or something. But I call it chickenshit.
That wasn’t the word I used to their faces. But I did challenge them (In the mild way I have when I’m not safely behind a keyboard). The next day I approached the deputy and principal together and asked to speak to them.
The three of us sat in that office again. ‘I had a big problem with our discussion yesterday.’ I gave chapter and verse on the ways I’d been following policy and teaching the curriculum in spite of challenges. ‘I don’t accept this idea that I haven’t been doing my job.’
The principal responded in a kind tone that I shouldn’t be trying to deal with these problems all by myself. He spoke with a confiding lean toward me, and the deputy backed him up with sympathetic nods. The principal said I should work alongside my colleagues more and communicate more to try to tackle these problems.
He’d shifted the goalposts. But I said that was fair enough and that maybe I hadn’t communicated enough and that this was something I had to work on. I stood up and most likely said some complete platitude, and we all thanked each other and got back to work.
***
And we never spoke of it again. Which contradicts the bit about communicating, right? But it was consistent with the real message I had received: that from now on I should deal with this crap by being tough and mean and zero-tolerance. They had blamed me for the students’ behaviour, so I knew it was not just pointless but dangerous to ask them for any help.
Roberto wasn’t packed off back to Iberia. Nothing else changed either. From then til summer I dragged that class kicking and screaming through a respectable quantity of great literature. The year head continued being helpful, but I had very little to do with management or they with me. We remained polite, and the principal did offer me a job supervising on exams in June.
As for their advice to get all mean and tough, I didn’t make the slightest effort to act on it. Partly because it’s not in me – and I wouldn’t accept the idea that teachers need to have that in them. Partly because I knew that even if it was in me, it wouldn’t salvage that class.
And partly because I knew that their advice was rubbish. ‘Communicate more with us’ – yes, us, the people who ignored you and then blindsided you. ‘Take a zero-tolerance approach with those kids’ – even though we’ll never, ever back you up (unless it’s a question of jackets).
My only real regret is that I didn’t tell Roberto that I thought it was bullshit, the way they treated him.
To this day I don’t really understand what the principal and deputy were trying to do that day in the office. But I understand that their advice was just an attempt to put all the responsibility back on the young and precarious teacher. Like the Spanish Lad, the bindle-stiff sub teacher is not going to be here next September.
A couple of years later in another school I encountered a principal and deputy who were helpful, sympathetic, kind, open and patient. It was all the more impressive because this school faced bigger problems. I was only there for 6 weeks or so, but that was when it really sank in, what a load of crap that previous principal and deputy had tried to put over.
I’m not writing this to be bitter, but to show the importance of good management in tackling messing, and what bad management looks like. Whoever needs to hear this: your boss may seem busy, important, experienced and confident. But don’t judge by appearances. Judge them on whether or not they are actually helping you to do your job. Sometimes you need to accept that you can’t do it on your own, and if management offer you bullshit instead of help then failure is not your fault.
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The 1919 Review 