Inequality and the Language of Real Life

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.” – Karl Marx

At one point in his book After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination, Kirkpatrick Sale says of the Hau de no sau nee (Irokwa) people’s description of their culture, “It is almost as if the Erectus bands were speaking.” Kirkpatrick Sale is wrong. He is appallingly wrong. Sale, a well-respected historian and academic, has written a book-length work arguing that hunter-gatherer people such as the Irokwa and the Hadza have an “Erectus consciousness” that is “different in some fundamental ways from that of the Sapiens, different from our own.” His intent might have been to advocate a sustainable culture within which humans recognize themselves as part of nature, and which reflects this healthy, harmonious worldview in its relationship with non-human creatures and the ecosystems they together compose.

But by making his point from a stance of the most unabashed cultural essentialism, and making claims that amount to saying that sedentary and Western civilization is somehow more Homo sapiens than nomadic or non-Western societies, Sale instead succeeded only in repeating the same racist arguments that have been used to dominate and exterminate the same people Sale seems to admire so much. By the end of the book, it is clear that the “Humans” in the title only refer to those civilized Western parts of the Homo sapiens family, those “modern” and, in Sale’s own words, “corrupted” enough to merit the name. Non-sedentary members of the species, meanwhile, are left in the same position as were Native Americans in the 17th century- with their inclusion in the human family left up for debate, up to a European intellectual to decide.

Whether it is the old missionaries’ “kill the Indian, save the man,” or Sale’s “kill the man, save the Indian,” the result is the same- people are denied their humanity for the sake of someone else’s constructed ideology of domination. Kirkpatrick Sale, with his shameless attempt to tell Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, African nomads, and others who they are, what their culture is, and how “Sapiens” their worldview may or may not be is as guilty of cultural genocide as any missionary cutting off a Native boy’s braids or European colonist forcing an Australian girl to wear a dress and be domestic. Sale, fancying himself a sort of enlightened sedentary, white, Western Lorax, tries to “speak for the trees;” except in this case, the trees include not only plants, animals, and land, but also other humans. Sale makes them all equally passive objects to be observed and discussed, speaking in the same breath of extinct Homo erectus and of present-day nomadic humans.

Sale is so caught up in promoting his ideology of bioregionalism and sustainability that he prefers to deny agency, personhood, and even humanity to people in order to make them fit more comfortably within his argument. However much truth there is in Sale’s views on the environment, animal-human relations, and other issues, his method and perspective are equally dehumanizing and oppressive as the imperialism and global capitalism he denounces.

They all are ultimately the same- attempts to dominate others by constructing ideologies and ideas, metaphors and symbols that take precedence over actual humans and relationships. Imperialists have the orderly structure of Empire, capitalists trust the infinite wisdom of the Market, and Kirkpatrick Sale hails the Erectus consciousness, yet they are all hierarchies of thought and oppressive systems that deny people a voice in their own representation.

Rousseau asked “What is the origin of inequality among men?” and answered “The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine…” For the most part, he was right. The present system of inequality, between humans and non-humans, between the rich and the poor, women and men, adults and the young, and between all groups that are divided between oppressors and oppressed, relies upon very clear, real control of access to resources. Whether it is gender inequality in income, malnutrition in Africa, the transfer of wealth from the Global South to the industrialized West, or factory farming, all these can be analyzed and resisted, at least insofar as they have a physical existence.

Yet however many times Rousseau’s fence may be cut down, the idea of property remains. Segregated bathrooms may be eliminated and abortion may be legalized, but racial ideologies and sexism remain. This is the second part of the answer to Rousseau’s query- the part so conveniently forgotten by Sale. Behind each instance of oppression in the world, there is an oppressive ideology and an oppressive system of thought. The existence of such an ideology implies the subjugation of human action to its demands, and the accommodation of human life into the symbols and metaphors originally used by the originators of the ideology to represent reality. This is original domination- that of systems of ideas, materialized in a variety of ways, reigning over communities of beings.

Thus, the real origin of human inequality is the idea of inequality itself. This is not an idealistic proposition, but only a recognition of the human truth that the characteristics of a society is a reification of that society’s ideology, and that for every oppressive system that imposes one group’s authority over another, there is a corresponding system of thought to justify it. Inequality begins at the point where a person not only realizes the inherent differences between people (self and other, ally and competitor, male and female, light- and dark-skinned), but also assigns different value to them.

Christopher Boehm, in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, argues that inequality, in the form of hierarchy, is inevitable for humans. In any human community, behaviors of domination and submission are as inescapable as the forces of natural selection and competition that made these behaviors part of our species heritage. The question, then, is how any society will harness these forces and incorporate them into its cultural structure. Boehm presents a clear example by explaining the use of domination in egalitarian societies. It is not that these societies lack dominating behaviors, he says, but rather than the domination is wrought by the community onto the upstart individual who seeks to command. In this way the very act of suppression is done to ensure overall freedom for the community, which includes, save for the specific suppressed action, the freedom of the upstart individual.

This interplay of behaviors and values, which taken together help compose a worldview, or ideology, are present in all human communities. The difference is not a vague, spiritual one of “Erectus” versus “Human consciousness” onto which any Kirkpatrick Sale can project their half-formed ideas and pet projects, but a much more complex, real difference between the environmental realities of a society, its economic arrangements, &c., and the way that all these are derived from and supported by the value system and structures of a culture. Inequality and equality will be present in all these components, in the construction of exactly who and what is included into conceptions of the self, the community, and all others.

In the same manner that capitalist society makes use of institutionalized racism, private ownership of the means of production, warfare, and narratives of imaginary equality to guarantee the continued dominance of the ownership class, so do other societies, often egalitarian in form, make use of female coalitions to guarantee gender parity, potlatches and other arrangements to ensure an equal distribution of wealth, and even spiritual practices and hallucinogens to facilitate the understanding of the individual self as part of an environmental or universal whole. These are very real occurrences, and show how closely intertwined symbolic values and their physical manifestations are. What Sale ignores in his book is that any given society can hardly be called “perfect,” and that to even attempt to have a standard of perfection is a fall into the same trap of constructing idealized structures and then forcing reality to conform to it at whatever cost.

Anarchist theoretician Hakim Bey, in his seminal book T.A.Z., calls the process “ontological anarchism,” and describes it as “too paleolithic for eschatology.” That is, contrary to the puritanical strain of anarcho-primitivism as evidenced by Sale, which mourns in religious language of how “there is no going back to Eden” because of humans’ “corrupt” nature, and proposes a doctrinaire either-or dichotomy of damned humanity versus blessed Homo erectus, Bey envisions an “insurrectionary ‘noise’” of “uprisings, refusals and epiphanies,” and points out that “separation cannot overcome separation-” Sale’s typification of hunter-gatherers as representing something, as being stand-ins for an idea, implies an ontological domination where Sale, the actor, reduces a people to a symbol, enslaves them to his ideology, and is tantamount to the symbolic domination Sale and other anarcho-primitivists so desperately seek to escape.

To accomplish the goal of a free, sustainable society, one need not merely try to emulate the ridiculous concept of an “Erectus consciousness” or follow a Marxist or primitivist program to final victory. Even Sale recognizes this. Rather, the struggle towards a “saner and more harmonic world” necessitates the destruction not only of societies’ oppressive practices and institutions, but of the modes of thought, symbols and metaphors that support them. It will require the creation of a new language of real life, one with the words necessary to speak of the unity of being and the equality of persons it will always seek out.