The New Human History

How last two decades of scientific discoveries are changing our understanding of our past, and of what we might become.

Hello, and welcome to this very first post of my new substack. Thank you for being here. What I’d like to do here is take a wide-ranging and probing look at the historical origins of some of the major problems facing us today — the ecological collapse, the gender and culture wars, the economic inequality, the growing epidemic of meaninglessness and loneliness — in the hope that it can be of help in our collective effort to address them. First, however, a few disclaimers:

I named this blog _thoughtfree_, which carries three different meanings for me, two that I’d like to explain and one that I’d like to apologize for. I’ll begin with the apology, which is to my Zen teachers and the Zen lineage as a whole: I have studied and practiced Zen for 25 years, my whole adult life, and yet this blog has almost nothing to do with that. The first step of Zen practice is to see through and become free of our self-obsessed, repetitive, and mostly negative thoughts — but the way to do that, in Zen or any other deep spiritual tradition, is through meditation and various other practices. It happens by doing, not by thinking. Piling words on top of words and thoughts on top of thoughts, as I’m doing here, is definitely the wrong way to go about it! The old Chinese masters would have called my whole effort here “playing with a ball of mud.”

With that being said, the second meaning of the title is that while it’s quite possible to let go of thoughts, that doesn’t mean that they go away; it means that we develop freedom in how we interact with them. In that sense, to be _thought-free_ is to let the thoughts stretch out and luxuriate, take the weird and unusual shapes they sometimes want to take, and let them come and go as they will.

The third meaning returns us to the historical investigation. In all the years grappling with my spinning, ruminating mind through zen practice, I’ve wondered how it came about to begin with. A dog or a monkey doesn’t sit and think about themselves all day, so there must have been a point in human evolution when humans started doing that. In a sense, going back to my initial apology, this is a very unimportant question. The Buddha likened it to getting shot by an arrow and laying on the ground bleeding, wondering what kind of wood the arrow is made of, how fast it was traveling on impact, or what the motives of the shooter may have been, rather than trying to get the arrow out and bandaging the wound. Nonetheless, now that I have gotten the arrow out, I’m curious to find out more about it!

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It is a strange, painful, and also wonderful time to be alive. Ideas and institutions that just recently seemed like they would last forever are rapidly crumbling, previously unimaginable possibilities keep sprouting up, and both our future and our past are rapidly transforming.

History is not a fixed and static truth that we already know the basic outline of and that only needs to be fully excavated from the soil. It is a living, breathing, always changing thing, a mirror image of ourselves in the present projected out to make up what we call the past. We understand our past differently when we change and begin living in a new way, and we feel different in the present when we discover a new side of our history. A limiting history limits our present possibilities, and an opening one reveals new options. To create a new and better future, we must also reimagine the past.

In their groundbreaking, bestseller book, The Dawn of Everything, published in 2021 after ten years of research, David Graeber and David Wenslow discussed how the last few decades of scientific discoveries have upended our traditional views on human evolution:

"The evidence that has accumulated in archaeology, anthropology and kindred disciplines points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative, but too often the most remarkable discoveries remain confined to the work of specialists, or have to be teased out by reading between the lines of scientific publications.

The pieces now exist to create an entirely different world history - but so far, they remain hidden to all but a few privileged experts (and even the experts tend to hesitate before abandoning their own tiny part of the puzzle, to compare notes with others outside their specific subfield). Our aim is to start putting some of the pieces of the puzzle together, in full awareness that nobody yet has anything like a complete set. The task is immense, and the issues so important, that it will take years of research and debate even to begin to understand the real implications of the picture we're starting to see. But it's crucial that we set the process in motion. One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent big picture of history … has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that's before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required."

This conceptual shift that they call for is to our traditional, linear, and technology-oriented Western understanding of history. As they describe it, this story comes in two basic forms, inherited from philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Jaques Rousseau (1712-1778), that portray earlier people as either savages or noble savages. Hobbes' version of the story is the one favored by industrialists and technology-enthusiasts, where we used to live "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" lives in a "war of every man against every man," pursuing self-preservation by any means necessary. By giving over some of our autonomy to the King, the Government, Big Tech, etc, we receive protection and security in return, and this contract is what forms the basis of civil society and prevents us from descending into violence and chaos again. The tradition derived from Rousseau, on the other hand, is a sort of denatured version of the Christian origin story, where we once lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers in a primitive, childlike innocence that somehow got tainted by the original sin that is the source of all our problems, causing us to live in a fallen, discontented state, where we are torn between fear of further condemnation and a vague hopes of future redemption.

Graeber and Wenslow's research showed that we've always faced fundamental societal and cultural problems, that we've dealt with them in a wide variety of ingenious ways down through the millennia, and that the out-of-whackness of the present moment is a quite recent phenomenon that is not caused by some inherently sinful part of ourselves, but rather by a lack of imagination. Where people of the past were able to change and adjust their social orders according to need, we have forgotten or relinquished the core, foundational freedoms that make this possible and are keeping ourselves powerfully trapped in a limited, untruthful, and dull view of ourselves and our history.

Let's take the example of war. Many of us assume it has always existed, and although that is not true, the belief itself limits us to a world in which war has to continue to exist. The fear of competition and violence continues to create a competitive and violence-oriented frame of mind. In reality, while we humans have always occasionally attacked each other physically, it was only a few years ago when we began doing so systematically. War depends on the logical principle that there are two teams opposed to each other and that any member of one team can treat all members of the other as equal targets. If someone from one team kills someone from the other team, the second team can retaliate against any of the members of the first team, not only against the actual murderer. "If there is a war between France and Germany, any French soldier can kill any German soldier, and vice versa. The murder of entire populations is simply taking this same logic one step further. There is nothing particularly primordial about such arrangements; certainly, there is no reason to believe they are in any sense hardwired into the human psyche. On the contrary, it's almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other in such systematic yet indiscriminate ways. It would seem that for most of human history, no one saw much reason to do such things; or if they did, it was rare."

Archaeology shows that organized warfare first appeared in Eurasia in the late Bronze Age. In Central Europe serious sword wounds only become clearly recognizable from the Iron Age Celtic Hallstatt epoch onward, and wounds from incessant warfare are only common from the time of the Roman Empire and the Christian Middle Ages. To appreciate how remarkable this is, we have to consider it in the greater context of human evolution, but our perception of that has been skewed by our technology-focused contemporary mindset that classifies time periods by the material used to make tools. Our so-called stone age Paleolithic period lasted more than 3 million years, while the Mesolithic that followed it lasted around 10,000 years, the Neolithic after that around 8,000 years, the Bronze Age around 2,000 years, and the Iron Age less than 1,000 years. For most of human history, technological innovation has not been considered important, as evidenced by ancient cultures inventing agriculture before choosing to abandon it again, by the Greeks using steam machines just to open temple doors, by the Incas using the wheel just for children's toys, and so on.

Here's a timeline from when we were already well separated from apes and walking around on two feet (bipedaling), until the present. The tiny, orange blip to the right is the last 8000 years of historical time, sized bigger than it really is to make it visible on this scale.

Let's zoom in closer on the last 300,000 or so years. Here, we see the so-called Upper Paleolithic Transition, where we developed the activities that are still most dear to us to this day: music, representational art, projectile weapons, and complex social organization in large groups. From this point onwards, humans are considered behaviorally identical to how we are now. Here the period of “historical time” also becomes clearly distinguishable.

Finally, let's expand the time since the Upper Paleolithic Transition, and call it “Modern humans”. In this timeline, the yellow bar represents the era of advanced, egalitarian cultures that focused their collective energy on building stone circles, massive religious earthworks and pyramids. The Bronze Age is the great, mythical era of empires which birthed systematic violence. The brown bar represents the current era since the time of the Buddha, Socrates, Chuang-Tzu, and the rest of those sages that gave us philosophy and religion.

The orange Bronze Age bar not only gave us war but also individual accumulation of wealth, slavery, permanent social hierarchies, the commodification of women and animals, and human-driven environmental destruction. How did all this come about? Graeber and Wenslow trace it back to the emergence of the state, which they, toward the very end of their book, connect to the patriarchal household:

"The state, as we know it today, results from a distinct combination of elements - sovereignty (supreme authority), bureaucracy and a competitive political field - which have entirely separate origins (but) map directly onto basic forms of social power which can operate at any scale of human interaction, from the family or household all the way up to the Roman Empire or the super-kingdom of Tawantinsuyu. Sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics are magnifications of elementary types of domination, grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge and charisma. All early states deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system (whether that violence was conceived as a direct extension of royal sovereignty or carried out at the behest of divinities); and all to some degree modelled their centres of power - the court or palace - on the organization of patriarchal households. Is this merely a coincidence? On reflection, the same combination of features can be found in most later kingdoms or empires, such as the Han, Aztec or Roman. In each case, there was a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might. But why exactly should this be the case?"

This is part of the question I'll be digging into over the next few posts, by combining Graeber's and Wenslow's economic and indigenous line of inquiry, with the emerging female perspective on history in the form of so-called matriarchal studies, and the development and practice of self-transcendent spirituality.

In astrophysics, an event horizon is a boundary we cannot see past, and beyond which events cannot affect us. I’ve come to see the Bronze Age as the event horizon for Western civilization, as a sort of collective cognitive prison that prevents us from effectively addressing our cultural problems. The Bronze Age was when what one might call the Homo Masculus human narrative first appeared — the view of history as something being driven forward by technology and ambitious, innovative men. This new way of thinking was itself what gave birth to our historical time and our idea of civilization, so the reason our idea of history haven’t been able to describe what existed before itself, is because it wasn't present to observe it.

Just within the last 150 years, the Homo Masculus narrative that was tied up with authoritarian and dogmatic Christianity have dramatically collapsed, cyclical and holistic perspectives are returning to us, and women have moved from being the property of men to a new kind of sovereign individual. Some of these developments can be seen as ancient ways coming back to us after a brief intermission, others are unhealthy and unsustainable patterns that are being let go of, while some are entirely new turns in the course of human evolution. Adopting the old invocation, I hope that this investigation can help us accept what cannot be changed, give the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know one from the other.

In my next articles, I will explore the connection between feminism and divine feminine symbolism, what one of the leading feminist historians has to say about our ancient past, and what it was that brought about patriarchy.

Thank you for your attention!