Human History Shows a Long Heritage of Personal Autonomy

No wonder it took so long for patriarchy to actually take hold

What happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 in which it did?

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (p. 523). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

This is the central question of the book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity which I’ve recently been reading. The prominent narrative in anthropology has often been that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers abandoned their egalitarian ways as they moved into settlements and began farming. It was here that dominance hierarchies enforced by violence or coercion, patrilineal dominance, gross wealth disparity, and warfare emerged — in other words, patriarchy.

Patriarchy is not just about power differentials between men and women. This was just one aspect of a larger socio/political development characterized by Might Makes Right. Those with more power took what they wanted, and those who did not have the power to resist fell under their control. This applied not only to women but also to weaker, poorer, men as well and a highly stratified class system emerges for the first time in human history. In fact, social stratification is the central element of patriarchy.

I’ve nodded to this from time to time, that agriculture wasn’t the only thing that brought these drastic social changes about, but I may also have sometimes painted with too broad a brush in the interest of making a larger point about the relative newness of patriarchy. In truth, agriculture or even settlements did not necessarily always lead to dominance-based hierarchy, and one example of this I’ve already covered is in Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic proto-agricultural settlement in what is now Turkey that existed from approximately 7100 BCE to 5700 BCE.

As I noted in that story, at its height, the population numbered around 10,000, but all evidence is that for most of its existence, the inhabitants lived very peaceful and egalitarian lives. We know this is the case because Çatalhöyük is one of the most thoroughly excavated archeological sites in the world. The settlement did eventually become more hierarchical and allowed individuals and families to accumulate wealth, but this was near the end of the settlement’s lifespan, and cannot simply be directly attributed to greater agriculture. In fact, we don’t know exactly why this shift took place.

“We believe people in Çatalhöyük were quite equal, but it might not have been the nicest society to live in,” says anthropologist, Ian Hodder. “Residents had to submit to a lot of social control — if you didn’t fit in, you presumably left.” Perhaps a movement towards greater personal autonomy might have been a part of the equation, although that is only speculation. Natural disasters, incursions from outside, or other socio-political events that we do not understand may well have played a part as well.

But, as I’m finding out, there are also innumerable other examples of settlements, cities, and even kingdoms from around the world where there was little to no top-down hierarchy or centralized political administration. From 300-hectare settlements in China’s Shandong Province that predate the earliest royal dynasties by 1000 years, to enormous ceremonial centers of the Maya which also predate the rise of the kings by 1000 years, we have evidence of many large communities with no evidence of central government or top-down hierarchy. Although Bali is a notably densely populated island historically governed by a series of kingdoms supported by wet-rice production, the management of that was overseen by a complex system of consensual decision-making by the farmers themselves — not the kings. These are only a few examples and there are many more.

For much of our history, humans have valued their personal autonomy so completely that we did not tolerate anything else. Often chiefs or even kings only had theoretical power or wielded power more substantively only in their immediate vicinity. Out of sight, people continued to do what they wanted and to make decisions communally amongst themselves. In fact, there are even places where hierarchy and centralized authority did begin to arise, only to be later dismantled.

We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places; and that very possibly the same is true of war. Obviously, such abolitions are rarely definitive. Still, the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant. In fact, if you bracket the Eurasian Iron Age (which is effectively what we have been doing here), they represent the vast majority of human social experience.

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (p. 523). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

One illustrative example of this sort of freedom was the Wendat, an Iroquoian-speaking nation. With the notable exception of many West Coast tribes, their social and political organization seems to have been quite common amongst indigenous peoples of North America.

As Father Lallemant, whose correspondence provided an initial model for The Jesuit Relations, noted of the Wendat in 1644: I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever — so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger.

After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control.

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (p. 42). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Missionaries had a difficult time translating words such as lord, obedience, or commandment into local languages because there was no concept of such things amongst the tribes they hoped to convert to Christianity. This “wicked liberty of the savages” was considered one of the primary impediments to getting them “submitting to the yoke of the law of God.” If local political leaders had no real way to compel anyone to do anything that they did not wish to, how was an unseen deity going to inspire that sort of subservience?

In this sense, equality was all about freedom — something that seems to have been viewed as an inalienable right. European-style equality at this time meant equality before the law, which essentially meant equality before the monarch — equality in the ability to be subjugated. Individual freedom for Europeans was mostly a concept drawn from property ownership, which rose out of Roman law, wherein a male head of household has complete control over all of his possessions, including his children and slaves.

By this way of thinking, freedom was posited as something you had the right to do at the expense of others — completely opposite from native concepts of freedom. It indicated not being reliant on others, once again the complete antithesis of many indigenous cultures that balance personal autonomy with a dedication to the well-being of the community. As Dr. Peter Gray points out about contemporary hunter-gatherer bands, their concepts of self-determination are very much in contrast with how we tend to think of it from a “civilized” perspective.

Western individualism tends to pit each person against others in competition for resources and rewards. It includes the right to accumulate property and to use wealth to control the behavior of others. In contrast, as Tim Ingold (1999) has most explicitly emphasized, hunter-gathers’ sense of autonomy connects each person to others, in a way that does not create dependencies. Their autonomy does not include the right to accumulate property, to use power or threats to control others, or to make others indebted to oneself. It does, however, allow people to make their own day-to-day and moment-to-moment decisions about their own activities, as long as they do not violate the band’s implicit and explicit rules. For example, individual hunter-gatherers are free, on any day, to join a hunting or gathering party or to stay at camp and rest, depending on their own preference. (source)

What this same sort of freedom looked like pre-patriarchy certainly differed in specifics from culture to culture and from era to era. In some cultures, it even shifted with the seasons, where the structures of winter villages stood in steep contrast with the greater freedoms of the rest of the year. Times of congregation were often the season for rituals, and temporary kings or ritual police who did have actually coercive power might be appointed for those events. There’s actually a fair amount of evidence that later secular sovereigns and hierarchy may well have emerged out of dynamics established during religious observance, but that’s a whole other story in itself.

According to The Dawn of Everything, there are, however, three main components of historical autonomy:

• The freedom to leave one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands;
• The freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; and
• The freedom to disobey authorities without consequence

This too could, and probably will be, the topic of a future story, but we do see these elements, which are all characterized by opportunities for change at will, as central elements of human life that were a given in the pre-patriarchal past. For most of human history, people not only wanted but managed to have great say over their own lives in a wide variety of ways, and under many divergent systems until the rise of coercive dominance hierarchies when people became more at the mercy of those above them — something that goes back only a few thousand years.

The purpose of this piece is not to say that we can easily return to that place of personal autonomy mixed with social interdependence that our ancestors so often enjoyed, but I do think it is still important to recognize how much of a core human value it does seem to be. It’s easy to fall into the supposition that the world has always been much like it is now, just without modern conveniences but there’s just too much evidence to the contrary.

As stated above, the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant. In fact, they make up most of human existence. When the indigenous population of North America met the French, they saw the Europeans as little better than slaves, living in constant terror of their so-called superiors. Jesuit missionaries were simultaneously outraged that native women were considered to be in control of their own bodies and could have sex before marriage and divorce at will with no stigma. Not all pre-patriarchal cultures had the exact same mores or structures, but they do seem to have all valued autonomy in a way that was foreign to dominance-based cultures.

We can’t recreate the past, but we can take some of the best aspects of it and think about how they might inform the present and the future. And, as a student of history, I want to learn about what really happened, not just how it was fed to me in school, which was invariably Eurocentric, patriarchal, and simplistic. Reading this book has taught me a lot of new things, and rounded out my understanding of others. What really stands out most for me in reading it is how deeply we humans value personal autonomy. In fact, when patriarchy did arise, it spread because it was so disruptive. “In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural — or physical — extinction of egalitarian societies.” New Scientist

In this context, egalitarian refers not only to Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands, but also to a wide variety of larger and more developed cultures where individual autonomy was valued and fostered — including within settlements, cities, and kingdoms.

Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.

Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (p. 133). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2022