The demise of ancient slavery was not limited to Europe. Remarkably, right around the same time — in the years around 600 ad — we find almost exactly the same thing happening in India and China, where, over the course of centuries, amidst much unrest and confusion, chattel slavery largely ceased to exist. What all this suggests is that moments of historical opportunity — moments when meaningful change is possible — follow a distinct, even a cyclical pattern, one that has long been far more coordinated across geographical space than we would ever have imagined. There is a shape to the past, and it is only by understanding it that we can begin to have a sense of the historical opportunities that exist in the present.--David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, p. 212.
Part of Graeber's project is to expand our historical imagination. This is intended to combat a noxious form of status quo bias: namely that we assume that our present institutions are necessary in some sense (because lacking in viable alternatives). But Graeber's is not claiming that any alternative is possible at any given time (recall this post on the significance of modality Graeber). Rather, it seems, one must judge if one is at the moment of (revolutionary) opportunity in a historical process (or cycle). Before I get to that sense of opportunity, a few preliminary observations.
At high degree of granularity,* these processes are world-wide phenomena. To avoid possible confusion about Graeber's position, the processes are largely uncoordinated by agents (he offers examples of co-development or co-invention [coinage] without any historical causal chain), even if the resulting processes produce coordinated patterns. From the agents' perspectives the patterns may often be hard to discern ("confusion"). And those agents that lack -- say due to technological or communicative limitations -- a perspective on the coordinated patterns, may never discern them. That is to say, and this is not a criticism, Graeber's position which entails a possibility to discern the coordinated pattern may itself be historically exceptional. In fact, Graeber is extremely unusual (recall) in his willingness to acknowledge that violence is constitutive of, and makes possible his situated global perspective. He is writing from within empire, and he knows he benefits from it.
Now, because Graeber is quite polemical in various places, one may miss, perhaps, that Graeber clearly wishes to be in some sense to be the prophet of possibility distinct from the status quo. (And, yes, unlike many intellectuals he has been famously involved in attempts at mobilization.) But he is also -- and this is something I find admirable -- quite clear that not all circumstances are right and that sometimes an overt act of rebellion is silly. While commenting on the escapist nature of some religions, he puts the point as follows.
There is something to be said for escapism. Popular uprisings in the ancient world usually ended in the massacre of the rebels. As I've already observed, physical escape, such as via exodus or defection, has always been the most effective response to oppressive conditions since the earliest times we know about. Where physical escape is not possible, what, exactly, is an oppressed peasant supposed to do? Sit and contemplate her misery? At the very least, otherworldly religions provided glimpses of radical alternatives. Often they allowed people to create other worlds within this one, liberated spaces of one sort or another. It is surely significant that the only people who succeeded in abolishing slavery in the ancient world were religious sects, such as the Essenes — who did so, effectively, by defecting from the larger social order and forming their own Utopian communities. (p. 250).
Graeber here is describing the possibilities inherent in the religious imagination (recall also yesterday's post). Even when faced with overwhelming power, the religious imagination can, when combined with various forms of social exit, produce local (so-called; recall) prefigurations of lager systematic transformations.
As an aside, while Graeber's own political sensibilities are far more anarchist (he calls this 'communist') than my own, he identifies here an important role for religious intermediaries. As regular readers know, (recall here and here) I have come to think that the domestication of religion, and increasingly self-domestication of so-called mainline religions, has gone too far. Recently, I have been trying to articulate this in terms of the ways in which religious groups can prevent the collapse of value space (but rather enrich it), but I had missed the ways in which religion can combat status quo bias.** To be sure, liberated spaces of one sort or another do not merely have instrumental value,+ they can be proper ends. A liberalism worth having (recall) recognizes this because play and other meaningful choices presuppose such liberated spaces.
Okay, let me return to the main argument. Graeber is clear that his historical analysis is not being offered as disinterested explanation. Rather his is a kind of action-guiding genealogy -- Foucault is absent for a reason --, that is designed to give people a sense that we are living at a potential turning point in a cycle, and so, thereby, a prophetical call (see my work on philosophic prophecy). Given that he started the book during the financial meltdown of 2008 and finished up his book during the Arab Spring and in the year of Occupy, this is understandable. Global contagions of revolutionary moments -- even if they may well have different local meaning -- are by now familiar enough.
In the 2014 "Afterword," Graeber writes about these themes as follows: "there has been...a certain collapse of our collective imaginations. It's almost as if people had been led to believe that the era's technological advances and its greater overall social complexity had had the effect of reducing our political, social, and economic possibilities, rather than expanding them." Graeber hopes that by revealing "how many different ways humans had found to arrange their political and economic lives in the past, and, in doing so, help open up our sense of the future." (394) Graeber is a willing vector in the spread of such contagions. Now, because I often write about reflexivity, you may suspect that I will claim this is self-undermining. But I do not believe this is so. Writing about the historical pattern that largely goes on behind our backs need not undermine it.
My title promises a word on the impossible in Graeber, but I have gone long enough today. So, let me close with a suspicion. The problem is that Graeber does not take seriously enough the fact that in the vast majority of examples of fascinating alternative institutional arrangements he offers, violence seems to be ever-present and inescapable and is often constitutive of the rather striking anthropological examples he offers. (Graeber is frank about this.) By contrast our present social arrangements succeed in so far as that "violence has been largely pushed out of sight" (210) or, when violence is widely shared on social media, involve, in some sense, imagined others. In fact, as the indifferent response to (say) Black Lives Matters shows, our civilization involves a kind of conditioning or mutual understanding such that to be subject of violence involves some kind of dessert.
My point is that if our choice is among violent societies and only one kind succeeds somehow in suppressing this fact (not the violence) in various successful ways (and predictably produces folk who claim that violence has been reduced), then the choice for a less sincere and more hypocritical life, and one with more possibilities of consumption, may well be fairly robust.++ For, when violence is pushed out of sight, one can imagine being in a liberated space, and call it freedom.***
*"Right around the same time" can be a century apart.
**Of course, of religion reinforces the status quo.
+One important point in this context that Graeber makes is that slavery has been abolished and revived multiple times. Religion can play a constructive role in abolitionism. But he also reminds the reader that when religion does play such a constructive role it is, itself, part of a larger cyclical pattern which may also draw on non religious sources.
++The point is compatible with the further claim that when confronted with imperial expansion of our 'civilization,' locals quite rightly resisted being subordinated to these empires.
***Of course, Graeber himself advocates for a non-violent further possibility. But that's for another time.
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