The right to move, to disobey, to reshape society

My Sunday movie was Choco Milk Shake. It’s a South Korean Boys Love story of 11 short episodes that fit into 2½ hours. I learned of this series through the Boys Love articles written by Krotor on Daily Kos. Jungwoo is a young man feeling quite sad and lonely. He works for his uncle in a coffee shop (which seems to rarely have customers – saves on hiring extras?). The uncle appears to be not much older. One day as Jungwoo is walking home two young men greet him with bright smiles. When the strangers have a chance to explain themselves they say they are the reincarnation of Jungwoo’s pet dog Choco and pet cat Milk. They were given bodies not of infants but of young men. Choco has a bright smile and follows Jungwoo around. Milk is more reserved. Both want their owner to pet them when they’ve been good (which is most of the time). Over the course of the show we learn that Jungwoo rescued Choco, which explains the devotion. Since Krotor writes about Boys Love stories one quickly wonders where this is going. Hopefully not a threesome. We are quickly shown through a blind date that Jungwoo is gay. And that Choco can be jealous. But where does that leave Milk? The acting is excellent (Krotor agrees). The story is cute and fun. I enjoyed it. If you watch be aware there is always one more scene after the episode credits roll. I finished the book The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I read the paperback edition of the book and it begins by Wengrow announcing that Graeber died three weeks after they finished writing the book. The book had taken ten years to write, first as a way to bounce ideas off each other, then in earnest once they saw they had an important story to tell. That story examines human history since the end of the Ice Age (10,000 BCE). And their central questions are: Where did inequality come from? Is a social hierarchy the natural and default human condition? Seeing that focus I thought, yep, I’m in. These are questions I’ve been exploring. So I want to hear what these guys say about it. Alas, they don’t quite answer them. That doesn’t mean reading the book was a waste – there’s a lot of good and hopeful information here. Yeah, it’s long – 525 pages with another 165 pages of notes (worth reading), bibliography, and index. And, yeah, towards the middle as they reviewed yet another society, it got to be a bit of a slog. There has been a standard way of archaeologists to understand what they saw as they excavated ancient sites. Humans progressed from hunter-gather bands, to tribes, to cities, to states. Each one is declared more advanced than the previous. Along with that was the assumption that as agriculture took hold, which made cities possible, the social complexity of a city required a social hierarchy in which administrators and eventually kings organized the work and a worker class did it. The authors used 500 pages to show that view is contradicted by the evidence. The authors examined evidence of ancient sites from around the world – North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The earliest sites were inhabited in 8,000 BCE, the latest in 1800 AD. These late ones were on the Pacific coast of North America as Europeans arrived, so they were documented directly by Europeans. Some of these places developed hierarchies. Many did not. Some developed hierarchies and later abandoned them. Over and over the authors looked over the evidence and saw previous researchers, in explaining what they found, projected the standard model as well as their own thoughts and understanding onto the evidence. A man steeped in patriarchy would project patriarchy onto an ancient society. A researcher who had been schooled in the social hierarchy would interpret findings as evidence of a social hierarchy. Places where the evidence didn’t fit that was seen as an outlier or was about to develop into a society that fit the pattern. The authors said the older researchers assumed too much. Why is this society – and that, and that – an “outlier?” Why must this place develop in this way to fit the model? Perhaps your model is wrong. A lot of this book seemed like an indictment of how archaeology had been done over the last couple of centuries. Some of the things I learned in those 500 pages: We must assume that throughout human history people were as smart as we are, even if they didn’t know all we know now. They could figure things out. In the 12,000 years since the Ice Age the standard model assumed all of the ancient cultures of a particular size did the same thing. 120 centuries is a long time for societies to try different ways of organizing themselves. That organization does not require an administrative staff. In some situations involving more people than previously believed the people are quite capable of administering and organizing themselves. The authors discussed places, one if them in Florida, where the society was hunter-gatherer, yet was ruled by a brutal king. If I remember right, the Spaniards took him out. The shift from hunting to farming didn’t happen all at once. In many societies it happened over centuries. Many times they farmed small amounts when they had good weather and hunted at other times. A big influence in the Enlightenment in Europe was native tribes of North America facing their first contact with Europeans. Jesuits learned native languages in hopes of converting the natives, but the natives were good at pushing back. The native societies were not hierarchical. Leaders could not give commands because the rest of the community refused to follow commands because that would place one person over another. Jesuits wrote about what they learned and their books became widely read (by those who could read) across Europe. Wendat chief Kandiaronk traveled extensively around Europe describing native life. The idea of a society not based on hierarchy caused a stir and lead to the American and French Revolutions. Kandiaronk was good at arguing that native life was better than the European hierarchical life, though Europeans tried to argue the reverse. One argument in Kandiaronk’s favor was that many Europeans who were raised by natives and later offered the chance to return to European style life chose to stay with the natives. The native life was more concerned with the person. European life was boring – a person had to do the same thing every day. My family is well acquainted with the story of Frances Slocum. There is a Frances Slocum State Park in Indiana. She was abducted by natives at age 5. Her siblings found her when she was in her 70s (I think). She refused to go with her siblings, saying her life was with the natives now. We has always assumed the reason was she felt she was one of them now – well, she had married a prominent member of the tribe and produced two children. This book suggests another reason – she thought the native way of life was better. So the assumption that natives would prefer the European lifestyle once they got to know it, was hubris. Europeans said they had the right to take land from the natives because natives didn’t use the land (as in farm it) and were lazy. Natives countered they managed the land, such as burning out the undergrowth in a forest or reshaping a river bottom to improve fish spawning. Also, their hunting and gathering took less time than farming so they had time to be lazy. Natives were amused by the European belief that natives had dispersed across the North and South American continents by overland routes. They said they had spread down the coasts and up the rivers. The authors talk about basic freedoms and rights. And they aren’t what we have in our Declaration of Independence. The freedoms are: (1) The right to move, to leave this community and join a different one. (2) The right to disobey an order. (3) The right to reshape their social connections, to work out a different way to manage the community. They also listed ways one person or group is able to control another. The methods are: (1) Violence. (2) controlling information. (3) Charisma. I wasn’t able to get a clear sense of whether this last one referred to individuals, such as Hitler, or to a group of people, such as a warrior or hero class. Maybe both. The authors discussed the Cahokia society centered east of St. Louis. They had extensive influence across the Mississippi watershed. After thriving for centuries the leadership turned tyrannical. The society collapsed for what appears to be a simple reason. People objected to being ruled by tyrants. They exercised their first right and moved away. (One thing I feel this book lacked is a timeline, showing when many of these cultures were active. The only thing I remember of when the Cahokia society was active was that it collapsed before Europeans arrived yet the natives were still reacting to it.) Though I feel the authors didn’t quite answer their important question. A great deal of the world today is stuck in a social hierarchy where a government or oligarchs control or oppress those under them. There are many examples in human history where the people threw off the control and oppression. Since they did it so can we. There is hope.