Anarchist Artists of Prehistory:
celebrating the unknowable richness of cultures distant past.
Firstly, let me just mention that I am highly unqualified to speak on this subject, so humbly welcome any clarification or objection from any anthropologists, archeologists, sociologists etc. I am a painter (more on that later). But I felt it interesting to note my thoughts on two articles published recently about Anarchism and early humans: Adam Lent’s piece ‘Anarchism is normal. It is hierarchy and the exploitation of nature that is odd’, and Simon Kaye’s response: Rousseau and the whales: A (very) quick defence of modern human civilisation.
I will address the two articles, before expanding on my own thoughts about how prehistoric cave paintings can shed some light on the potential sophistication of early hominids. I say hominids rather than humans since we have growing evidence of the sophistication of other early hominid species, potentially equalling that of early homo sapiens.
The overall questions are:
- Can we really call early hominid communities ‘anarchist’ or ‘green’?
- To what extent can they be credited with the conscious implementation of egalitarian social organisation or an understanding of ecology and could they place any value in those concepts anyway?
- Is it possible to learn lessons from them which are applicable to modern humans today?
Crudely summarising, Adam Lent’s piece suggests an excited ‘yes’ to all, while Simon Kaye responds with a more wary ‘no’.
Both are very good articles and — to echo Kaye — I share many objectives and concerns with both writers. I recommend that you read both pieces, but hopefully this will also make sense if you don’t.
Anarchism is ‘Normal’
Lent explains that:
“Humanity has been organised for the majority of its existence along lines that are best described as a form of deep green, egalitarian anarchism. Based on extensive analysis of the archeological record and what we know of the lifestyles of present-day hunter-gatherer communities, anthropologists are pretty much in consensus that homo sapiens has spent most of its time on this planet living in small self-governing groups with little or no economic stratification based mostly on subsistence foraging with a relatively small impact on the environment.”
Shocking as the word anarchism has become to most people, it does seem the case that within the scientific community at least, a consensus has settled upon the likelihood of humanity’s long anarchist past. Perhaps the idea has become much more broadly commonplace since Harari’s smash hit mega-history Sapiens opens with a similar celebration of hunter-gatherer lifestyles.
Recognising the benefits of this way of life (relatively equal relations, low environmental impact, increased leisure time, health) compared to the misery of many generations of ‘civilised’ humans in agricultural societies that followed raises two challenges in my mind.
Firstly, it undermines the more triumphal humanist ideas of linear progress; the continuous upwards trudge of civilisation out of the swamps of early barbarism towards its glorious technological future.
Secondly, it counters many prevailing ideas about ‘human nature’, especially those often promulgated by free market capitalists. No longer must we see humans as forged by nature red in tooth and claw; fundamentally violent, power-seeking and thriving through competition. Emerging once again is a rosy vision of humanity’s essentially benevolent nature, characterised by co-operation and humility.
If I were to believe in one description of human nature, I’d like it to be this. The problem is, I don’t place faith in any sort of essentialism, and neither should you.
To be fair, Adam Lent doesn’t seem to either, and doesn’t mention anything about ‘human nature’, only suggesting that anarchism was merely ‘the norm’ for most of human history. But when talking about this subject, essentialism looms unspoken anyway, so I think it’s best to confront it.
Despite that elephant, I’m excited by these challenges and in agreement with Lent that we can learn from different methods of social organisation, even those forged in the distant past.
The Unbridgeable Chasm (?)
I have a bit more quarrel with Simon Kaye’s response, sensible as it first struck me. He makes three main points:
- “First, that early human social orders are fundamentally incomparable and incommensurable with contemporary ones. This is a problem, because it makes it hard (or impossible) to derive normative prescriptions even from a very good understanding of our own prehistory”.
- “Second, that Lent is undervaluing contemporary humans — as a collective and as individuals — in various ways”.
- “Third, we are becoming more than just a threat to our planet. We are becoming its only plausible recourse to an insurance policy.”
I largely agree with the third point. Not necessarily in suggesting that the answer to ecological breakdown lies in hyper-technological solutions (geo-engineering or Earth escapism/space colonisation perhaps), but I do agree that it is our actions that will determine the future survival of our species and our planet. (Side note: I’ve just been reading Lui Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which is stylistically limited and technocratic (at least in translation) but very interesting in terms of speculating on humanity’s psychological and practical responses to the realisation that our impending destruction is no longer debatable or avoidable.)
So I’ll focus more on the first two.
On the first: are we over-estimating early hominid communities?
Kaye begins by arguing that it it disingenuous to describe these hunter-gatherer societies as egalitarian; it is a term that is only meaningful within a modern context, presumably used to describe equality between citizens within a state. But how is a state defined and where in history does one draw the line? Are we not allowed to use the term ‘egalitarian’ to describe anything prior to the French Revolution? What about city states of the middle ages and ancient world? If the formation of a state is characterised by the gathering together of social, political and economic functions into one centralised power structure, perhaps we can call anarchists “stateless”, but does that mean we can’t refer to their ideals as egalitarian?
Kaye’s point seems only a semantic difference to me; a quibble between a broad definition of the word ‘egalitarian’, and a more specific one which is tied to modern political history and theory. Likewise, terms like anarchist, conservative, liberal, and so on, can be used in a broad way to describe sets of values, or in a more specific way (often with a capital letter to effectively turn the word from an adjective into a noun) to describe concrete political organisations situated in particular historical contexts. Lent seems to be using the word egalitarian in the broad sense, while Kaye exclaims the error of using it in the second, more specific sense. So is Kaye really in disagreement over the nature of these communities, or does he just think we should be more careful with language? He claims that he is starting from the assumption that everything Lent says is basically correct, so we may assume it is the latter. However, we soon get the sense that in fact he is rather unimpressed by and even dismissive of these early communities.
He continues to say that:
“the absence of hierarchy…seems unspectacular to me in a world where there is also absence of surpluses, absence of social complexity and diversity, and absence of traditions/norms of property”.
This rather nonchalant judgement throws out some swingeing assumptions about a huge array of early cultures. Kaye is practically suggesting that hunter-gatherer communities find their shape only by lucky accident; they don’t choose their lifestyle, they’re just ignorant of other alternatives and their cultures insufficiently large or complex to conceive of them.
I feel sure that these early people would have experienced surpluses (do we distribute the spoils of a large hunt equally or make a group choice to preserve a share of it for later?) social complexity and diversity (even in a small group of say 30 people, there are many inner dynamics as well as interactions with other groups) and traditions/norms of property (where there are objects, whether tools, trinkets, garments or houses, the problem of property arises and must be worked out through the formation of traditions and norms which facilitate co-operative behaviour beneficial to the survival of the group).
Of course, modern labels such as anarchist or egalitarian would mean nothing to a hunter-gatherer 50,000 years ago, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have their own ways of thinking, communicating and enacting similar ideas. Communities of early hominids would have had to manage all sorts of questions about resources and social organisation on a localised level. I don’t think they had more egalitarian relations because it was natural, or as an accidental consequence of their group size, but at least to some extent because they worked out that this particular way of organising things was the best response to the environment and challenges that confronted them; that it was the best way to create a good life for the whole group.
I think to suggest that our early forbears fell into these social forms without any intention or deliberate organisation is to grossly underestimate their intelligence. I remember (sorry, too vaguely to cite) reading about one hunter-gatherer community that had a tradition where a village chief was periodically appointed with certain powers, but as a consequence had to work twice as much as any other man during the period without any recompense. There are so many different choices to make in the arrangement of a community. Some hunter-gatherer cultures are known to have created rituals and social structures that deliberately curb excessive accumulation of power or property. It wasn’t that they existed innocently in a pre-Fall state and just hadn’t come up with the idea of being greedy or power hungry yet; they knew of these dangers and acted communally to curtail them. They may not have been Anarchists in name, but were actively creating forms of organisation that sure look like anarchism in practice. If methods of communal organisation to curtail excessive accumulation of wealth and abuse of power are not relevant to us today, I don’t know what is. Of course their methods are not directly applicable, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them.
Kaye continues to argue that using the term ‘deep green’ to describe hunter-gatherers is also fallacious:
“Environmentalism of any stripe is defined by the deliberate intentions of its adherents. Early humans didn’t intend to leave only footprints — they just did. Their experience isn’t a guide for modern action”.
Again, the suggestion that early hominids carried on with no intention or had no awareness that one could be more or less sensitive in one’s treatment and exploitation of the environment seems like a large and unjust assumption. No, they weren’t aware of global climate, and yes at least some of them helped to drive megafauna to extinction. I’m sure there are many choices they made that modern humans would scorn as ecologically unwise (hypocritical as that would be). I’m not suggesting that they lived utopian eco-hippy lives. However, I do think that during thousands of years of continual existence most of them would have developed some ideas about reciprocality with nature, or not being too greedy, or working in harmony with some natural processes and other species, or being thrifty and not wasteful, respecting the hunted animal by using every part.
Again, no single early culture provides a directly applicable guide, but we can still potentially learn from each and every one. I don’t think that Lent, or anyone who argues for paying heed to distant or radically different cultures suggests that they provide us with immediate practical steps to solve our very modern, very global problems. Lent is not suggesting “this is what we should do”, but more “this is who we are” or perhaps “this is who we can be”, or at the very least “this proves what we are not (by nature competitive)”.
In my personal experience, one comes to environmentalism not necessarily just because one recognises it as a practical and rational set of ideas and deliberate intentions to act in the best way, but rather because of a much more mysterious — dare I say even spiritual — sense of kinship with the living world around us. I believe that environmentalism requires both. This philosophy, spirituality or state of mind — Timothy Morton’s ‘ecological thought’ — underlies environmental actions, provides the necessary commitment to actually make them happen, and the moral conscience to check them. Without intellectual rigour and pragmatic real world application, environmentalism can become merely a pose or overly mystical; but without a sense of wonder, connection (ultimately, love) it also risks becoming merely a green facade to business as usual; nature being valued only in terms of it being a resource to fuel further development, sets of numbers on a balance sheet. I believe that ‘how’ and ‘what’ should not come before ‘why’. The ‘why’ is rooted in a feeling of kinship and interconnection with the living environment, a feeling I think hunter-gatherers would be very familiar with.
On the second: could early communities come to understand and value nature in a meaningful way?
Think of the daily experience of hunting and gathering. It requires the most intimate observation of plants and animals. Not just their identification and potential uses, but their behaviour, character and interrelations with the living environment surrounding them, the web of life. In those cultures, practically everyone was an ecologist in some way, and their lives depended on it.
Not according to Kaye.
While he agrees with Carl Sagan that we are “how the universe comes to know itself”, Kaye doesn’t think that we got to do much of that as hunter-gatherers.
I don’t think we can make such derisive claims about the knowledge and kinds of understanding possessed by early cultures, or lack thereof. We cannot know, but it seems likely to me that the average hunter-gatherer would have had in many ways a far deeper and more intimate understanding of nature than modern urban humans. Of course, they would have described things in their own ways, passing down oral knowledge and preserving it in songs, art works, rituals and traditions. The probable fact that many of them may have had an animistic worldview is in a way a proof of their understanding that every part of the natural world — even trees, rocks, and the sky above — is alive. In many ways, modern ideas like the ‘ecological thought’, Gaia and systems theory are nothing new, but a return to something incredibly old. For animistic cultures, certain actions may have pleased the ‘spirits’ while others angered them; these superstitions would have arisen originally in response to observed effects and are a form of proto-scientific, environmental thinking. The development of agricultural and urban civilisation prompted a shift through poly and monotheistic belief systems, which become increasingly removed from the natural world. These religions focused more on moral questions in an exclusively human sphere and further, created a sense of human exceptionalism used to promote and justify our destructive behaviour. No longer part of nature, we became it’s manager, or guardian. Now, living in the Anthropocene, we see the reality of human potential to act on a geologic scale in a destructive, polluting sense, but it is preposterously arrogant to suggest that we understand enough about ecological systems to actively control and manage them for good on a similar scale.
Today we all know so much, but how much of it relates to our actual lived reality, let alone that of the living world that supports us? Our minds are dominated by abstractions; our job, our leisure, our culture exist predominantly in the realm of information, a virtual environment accessed through interfacing with screens and devices. Yes, as a global civilisation we now ‘know’ an inconceivable amount more than we used to, yet most people live in a way which is arguably more alienated from nature and more alienated from real communities of mutual human support than the early hunter-gatherers.
Kaye suggests “Early hunter-gatherers might never threaten our global climate.. But they could also never value it”; the scale of one’s conception or depth of understanding apparently equates to your level of appreciation of its value.
Yet, despite all our knowledge, how well is modern civilisation valuing the living planet at the moment? We’re heading to destroy our home, but according to Kaye, the fact we modern humans decided to ‘save the whales’ “matters”; it is apparently a proof that all that damaging industrial progress was worth it for the parallel development of our intellectual capacity to value nature and decide on deliberate ethical action. But isn’t the example of ‘save the whales’ in itself an indictment of modernity more than a feather in its cap? In the scheme of things, such environmental campaigns have been small, few and ineffective (while some high profile species have been protected, in the last 50 years another 500 have been driven to extinction and global wildlife populations have been reduced by two-thirds). These activist-led upswells of moral action in fact often explicitly oppose the orthodoxy of exploitative capitalism that characterises modern civilisation. Indeed, I suspect the average Greenpeace activist is more than a little acquainted with anarchist ideas.
Compared to hunter-gatherers, we have different systems of value, theirs being more localised and immediate, ours being more global and abstracted. Owning so little, their lives must have involved acute awareness of the value of things; what they could find, what they could catch, wringing the most value from it and being thankful. They may have had an abundance of some things, but a scarcity of many; luxuries would have been few. Many resources would disappear or become untenable. How much would you value a square of chocolate if you thought it could be the last you ever eat? Even accounting for barter, compared to us I don’t think they would have been concerned with ‘exchange value’. Modern humans on the other hand, tend to still fit the cliché: we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The modern relationship between the money price on the sticker and the actual value of the item is loose to say the least, whether you measure that in terms of the amount and kind of labour and resources involved or its environmental impact. More people have lives of abundant consumerism, but many value the items they buy less and less. The impulse to buy is often related to spurious or generated wants, rather than actual needs. Needless to say our ideas of value as mediated by a global monetary system are highly abstracted, and enable an economy prone to manipulation and grotesque accumulation of wealth and power which bears increasingly flimsy relation to actual real-world value.
Painting through the ages: what do the surviving glimpses of early hominid culture suggest about their intelligence and relationship to the natural world?
I think the relationship of early hominids with the natural world was very much an example of the universe coming to know itself. The slowness of their technological progress is not proof that their intellect was stagnant. Think of how many stories, rituals, practical lessons and traditions were passed down through those thousands of years.
Culture is a medium through which to understand the universe. Music, art, storytelling and dancing combine technical skills, observation and discipline with ‘softer’ aspects of creativity such as intuition, openness and empathy. I think most scientists would agree that their field also requires similar qualities and forms of intelligence. That science is seen as a field on its own, separate from philosophy, culture and spirituality is a recent phenomenon.
I don’t think we know enough about the culture of these early hominids to make a fair comparative judgement about their intelligence. The present moment is awash in an incredible overabundance of culture and information, but we have so little left of theirs. At best we can form speculative and intuitive conclusions from what is left.
The most striking and well-preserved examples of ‘what is left’ are usually works of art, particularly painting and engraving on stone. Kaye says he doesn’t want to undervalue these early people, yet to some extent dismisses their culture compared to the dramatic strides of modernity. For example, he admits their “legacy of artistic expression” whilst critically adding that “their media were limited, their subjects [merely] specific reflections of the things important in their own routines”. Among the many different ways to draw and create objects that would have been available to these people, presumably Kaye is thinking mainly about cave paintings which depict animals, made using ochre and other earth pigments, mixed with binder and applied to rock surfaces.
Well well... how would we go about defining painting in the modern era? What Kaye meant as criticism actually wouldn’t be a bad definition: painting is characterised by the use of limited media — generally speaking, a pigment or dye mixed with a binding medium, applied to a surface — to create representational or abstract content which reflects things important in our lived experience. After all, the vast majority of Picasso’s oeuvre focuses on objects and people literally contained within the bounds of his studio, yet provokes endless admiration and interpretation. Just because some early hominids were predominantly depicting animals, doesn’t mean their painting is merely a straight-forward reaction to reality and that it is absent of metaphor or depth. Indeed, those images may have possessed incredible kinds of power and significance to their community, or symbolically represented ideas that were important for them to preserve.
I think that paintings tend to depict that which is important and valued by the culture they emerge from, either by literally representing valued things in the picture (portraits, still lives and landscapes all imbue a transient subject with a sense of importance and permanence) or suggesting significant ideas in a less direct way (through allegory, symbolism, metaphor and abstraction). Paintings take on value by doing so; we value them not just for the skill or time that went into their production, but by the degree to which they depict or express something considered to be valuable. Some things are valued almost universally, whilst others require more personal and historical context. John Berger explains (to paraphrase off the top of my head) that more than any other art form, to paint and draw is fundamentally an act of affirming and celebrating the real against the inevitability of its disappearance. In various ways we seek to preserve that which we value. The fact that some hunter-gatherer people chose to depict animals (often those which they hunted) and the way in which they did so, tells me that in fact they saw nature — and especially those animals they relied on — with the deepest respect and understanding. And yes, undoubtedly even sadness at their disappearance and the wish to preserve their memory.
Their images manage to capture both anatomical accuracy and a sense of real character, of the animal moving, having traits and even feelings of its own. What is the image above depicting if not empathy (between the animals but also between us and them)?
How much time did they spend observing and coming to understand the form and character of these animals in order to depict them so well? How many long-since-disappeared sketches did they make — maybe using charcoal to draw observationally, scratching down onto a piece of wood or stone from life in the landscape — to develop such a sophisticated use of line and form? It is hard to draw solid conclusions about the ways in which these people thought about animals and nature as a whole. But as a painter, my instinct is to say that they certainly valued them, loved them. Have you ever carved a toy animal, or made one from play dough? Try drawing your dog or cat, a pig or even a spider. How do you feel about the creature you made? For me, just to look at and try to depict animals is itself an act of complete fondness and wonder. Whose heart isn’t stirred in some way by seeing a horse run past you? Art is devoted to recording that feeling.
I think for most artists, cave paintings are a proof of the non-linearity of technical and intellectual ‘progression’ through time. The whole history of art demonstrates this, but the comparison with cave paintings is even more amazing because of the sheer distance between us and an artist up to 40,000 years ago. Their paintings were made in an unknown and probably radically different context, yet seem to exhibit qualities and concerns that are shared by painters throughout history. The quality of the drawing is so exceptional in much early stone painting that it explodes any idea that artistic skill and sophistication increases in a straight line alongside humanity’s technological development. Yes, technology enables more techniques, more colours, but beneath all that ultimately lies the image, and the hand that makes it. Their work displays a deep knowledge and insight into the subject, a sophisticated sense of form and beauty of line that artists of any era would be hard pressed to match. I haven’t been lucky enough to go into somewhere like the Lascaux or Chauvet caves, but I suspect that if I did, I would feel exactly the same sense of wonder that I felt as a sixteen year-old entering the Sistine Chapel.
All this and I haven’t even started talking about the many abstract and symbolic languages of drawing and painting created by hunter-gatherer and low impact communities throughout history. The incredibly rich history of Aboriginal Australian art cultures for instance, which — no, I’m not even going to start.
And for a moment, lets just consider all the works of art and craft that could (and would) have been created by those cultures using materials not possessing the permanence of painting on or carving into stone. What incredible images and objects must have existed throughout history which haven’t survived? The more distant the culture, the less we really have to go on; we uncover frustratingly small glimpses of the potential richness of their culture. As we come to discover more, we are continually surprised at the level of sophistication of the art and objects. Almost like, y’know, they’re not that different to us. Turns out humans have been capable of complex behaviour and beautiful, meaningful culture for a very long time indeed.
The point is that while Kaye accuses Lent of under-estimating the value of modern humans, I think Kaye does in the end vastly under-estimate early hominid societies.
As a painter I can find astonishment and inspiration from the work of an early hominid artist as much as from a Fayum portrait, a Michelangelo, a Picasso. So too, despite the aspects made unreachable by the chasm of time between us, we can find inspiration and learn lessons from those early people in terms of social organisation, of connecting to and understanding nature, of living sustainably. Their way of life is not a guide — no single culture or period of development is — but the evidence of their art alone is a powerful suggestion of fine, adept minds, with deep feeling, a level of understanding of nature and a capacity for technical sophistication which cannot be dismissed. So why can’t we credit them with the same level of thought when it comes to their social organisation? Terms like anarchism or capitalism are abstractions, but in a smallish community, managing a roughly egalitarian set of social relations and a relatively sustainable use of resources is a complicated but tangible business of everyday mundane interactions. Who’s hunting, who’s gathering, who’s doing the washing up and when can I paint that cave? It seems sensible to me that many cultures would have created stories, songs and images that would have expressed and reaffirmed their way of life, creating myths and ideas that not only reflected their accumulated knowledge and shared principles, but also propagated and reinforced social norms and traditions which increase group stability and foster positive relations between each other and with the environment. There aren’t many stories that don’t have some sort of moral conclusion to be found within. Probably — just like modern, ‘civilised’ people — their culture provided simple pleasures and distractions, but also a kind of communal heart, memory and conscience. When looking at art, we often find that suddenly we are struck by the fact that someone, somewhere far away in a different time touched this very canvas, this wall, this clay pot, this manuscript. What tends to strike us most is that despite those huge distances between us, we are very much the same.
