Prehistoric Anarchists, Civilized Dominators, and Alienated Posthumans

The history of our shifting environments

AI-generated image by HANSUAN FABREGAS from Pixabay

History is like the familiar fairytale that teaches children to stay out of the woods.

The past that historians seek to understand is part of the reality of deep time that dumbfounds our simplistic conceptions. These conceptions are stereotypes that idealize the subject matter and ignore the uninteresting details, and our models and narratives likewise amount to incomplete representations, even if they’re adequate for certain purposes.

Thus, like a medieval European forest that would have overwhelmed a child with such dangers as wolves and bandits, the interconnections between events in the deep past stretch well beyond the limits of our intuitions, encompassing the evolution of all terrestrial species across hundreds of millions of years. History is indeed a story even if it’s nonfictional in adhering to some rational standards.

We begin to make sense of deep time or to humanize that monstrosity by carving the beast into sections or eras. Again, we mainly indicate our interests, deeming them important and meriting a special marker. Christians did this, for instance, when they divided history into the eras before and after Jesus’s birth.

We can also get a sense of progress or decline by imagining what would have epitomized previous ages. How we got where we are depends on what’s already happened.

Prehistoric freedom in the wild

And if we investigate the deep past, following the archeological nomenclature, we can’t help but notice the comparative vastness of the Stone Age (around 3.3 million years in duration). Partly, this is because the evidence dissipates as time moves along, so there are fewer reasons for us today to draw cultural distinctions between tribes living hundreds of thousands of years ago. We lack the evidence to justify such distinctions.

But it’s also because of the nature of prehistoric human life. Specifically, the wilderness was in charge then, which is to say that early humans were like other animals in that they lived mainly in wild places. This forced those humans to cooperate in tightly knit groups, dividing their labours and relying on only primitive tools that they could take with them as they lived nomadically, moving as dictated by the weather and the herds’ migrations.

Hunter-gatherers were free from the artificial restrictions that would apply much later in the civilized period of sedentary, hierarchically regimented societies, but those early humans were burdened or at least intrigued, instead, by the wild environment.

We can think of prehistory, then, as the Wild Age, not because all early people were savages, but because what predominated in that period of human experience was the wilderness. Early humans were largely nomadic, so they adapted to nature like the other animals. These humans had high intelligence, which enabled them to craft tools, outsmart their prey, and exploit other natural resources such as fire, but their cultures would have reflected their imperative of reconciling themselves with nature’s wild rhythms. The earliest religions we know of were animistic in that they emphasized organic cycles, including the mother’s fecundity, the seasons, and the sacred energy that’s transmitted between stages of growth and renewal.

Masters and slaves of civilization

Simplifying the historic transitions, the next great period is the civilized one. What separates the two is the shift in environments: instead of ranging as free as the prehistoric nomads, humans packed into buildings, and domestic functions came to determine acceptable conduct. Prehistoric tribes accommodated themselves to natural patterns, whereas citizens of large societies obeyed counterfeit laws and divided themselves into social classes rather than just ethnic clans.

This transition revolutionized social structures. Whereas early humans were relatively free from political domination, even as they were all dominated by nature (or even as they willingly submitted to nature in viewing the wilderness as sacred), civilized humans were split mainly into two groups, masters and slaves. Almost every civilized society, beginning in the fifth millennium BCE, depended on large slave populations. These societies were also generally patriarchal, so women were likewise second-class citizens. Animals and plants, too, were domesticated, although this occurred long before civilization, foreshadowing the civilized power dynamics.

Slaves were needed to farm since farming maintained the larger human populations, and slaves also fought to protect the strategic stretches of land and the grain stores. Fertile land was crucial to civilized people not because it was deemed sacred in the animistic sense, but because it was instrumental to the incipient humanist project. Land near freshwater that could aid in agriculture was crucial to the early sedentary way of life.

At the bottom of the civilized power pyramid, then, were masses of servants and slaves who performed their social functions like cattle. With hindsight, and picking up on Lewis Mumford’s concept of the sedentary society’s “megamachine,” we could say that those lower classes were protomachines. Slaves, peasants, and women were tools used to cultivate resources and generate wealth. Who used those human tools? The masters.

If the lower classes were outwardly mechanical, in that their bodies were crucial to their labour value, the masters were inwardly mechanical in that they tended to be psychopathic. So if prehistoric people were physically free in that they roamed the wilderness, and these wild places presented no official signs that barred entrance to certain areas, civilized masters were “free” specifically from the restrictions of slave morality (which is roughly morality as such). The noble virtues befitting masters were so many “conservative” or traditional excuses for psychopathic or authoritarian temperaments.

After all, while enslaved people needed to be physically fit and skilled to work the land and fight in wars of conquest, masters needed to be mentally unfit, in a sense, since they needed the gall to rule over fellow people. Psychopaths sufficed for that role, although naturally there were exceptions since not all rulers have been purely evil. Nevertheless, elite, subcriminal psychopathy is the freedom from moral scruples, the inability to empathize, the megalomaniacal selfishness or sadism that luxuriates in other people’s suffering.

Without psychopathy, there would have been no imperialism, and thus no civilization.

The human transition, then, from wild to artificial environments turned anarchistic, nomadic tribes (“barbarians” and “savages,” according to civilized standards) into psychopathic rulers and their slaves. This is the Age of Civilization, which amounts to the age of amoral rulers and enslaved masses.

Posthumanity and the automation of masters and slaves

The next main turning point is probably that of absolute modernity, which is flagged especially by the scientific revolution. And again, taking as our theme the transition of environments in human experience, we can observe how science, capitalism, and democracy gave rise to a new kind of industry, one that mass-produced not just tools but machines. And what’s crucial about machines is that they potentially replace enslaved people.

Karel Čapek coined the word “robot” to criticize the communist celebration of the peasant’s compulsory labour. And indeed, the point of a robot or an artificial peasant would be to replace the human labourer. A race of robots might liberate our species entirely from drudgery, thus democratizing upper-class privileges and depravities.

The invention of the computer does for the mind what machines do for the body, in that while machines potentially replace lower-class labourers (slaves, servants, peasants, factory workers), algorithms can replace upper-class sociopathy (hyper-logic and the freedom from social emotions and moral concerns).

Hence, this third age that’s just dawning is that of posthumans since machines and computers will have made both prehistoric and civilized social classes obsolete. The master-slave dynamic could conceivably be automated, as both blue-collar and white-collar jobs are overtaken by our handiwork. That is, the high-tech environment itself will do our work for us, our jobs fading into the background rather than being central to our lifestyle or social identity.

Robots will take over as more efficient slaves, but computers will likewise outcompete tyrants and executives in their psychopathic games, ruling over society without pity or remorse. Even if emotions, too, can be programmed into a computer, the computer will lack a human context or upbringing and would make for an alien master, again potentially outshining the majesty of Thomas Hobbes’ “leviathan” or political sovereign that would still be all-too-human and familiar.

We may catch a glimpse of what’s to come by noticing how in the gig economy, algorithms dictate how content is produced and consumed, and this new high-tech environment reestablishes feudal divisions in what Yanis Varoufakis calls “technofeudalism.”

Far from liberating the lower classes, the Pareto principle is preserved, and a minority still reap most of the benefits, leaving the bottom three-quarters of the power pyramid to eke out a living like medieval peasants. It’s just that whereas medieval lords would send soldiers to collect taxes and portions of the harvest, extracting wealth from the dominated lower classes, in the late-modern, high-tech environment algorithms automate many of the impositions. Of course, humans program these systems but once unleashed the systems largely run themselves, maintaining neofeudal levels of economic inequality.

This third age, the Age of Posthumanity features what John Vervaeke calls the “meaning crisis.” We see this explicitly as early as Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections on the death of God, and in the rise of existential angst. But the early modern search for progress has always alienated traditionalists who feared and loathed the growing prominence of secularism.

The crisis here is that human life seems meaningless if those who keep up with automated society will have to be posthuman. That is, we’ll have no idea what to do with ourselves if all civilized social functions for people are made obsolete by high technology (machines and computers). Slaves and masters will both have been left out in the cold, as our programmed environment takes center stage. We’ll be like the mythical creator deity that stands aloof from nature, having formed an entire universe that runs itself in being natural.

In a sense, we’ll have come full circle, regaining the freedom of prehistoric tribes, but we’ll no longer have the wilderness to assign us our natural tasks. Thanks to full-spectrum social automation, we’ll be alienated both in body and mind. Absolute modernity will have condemned us to be perfectly useless. At most, we might imitate robots and AIs, adapting to this fully domesticated environment.

The irony of progress

The historic trajectory is one of projecting human qualities onto the inhuman environment, starting with mere imaginary projections, as in the animistic religious sensibility. We then moved on to civilization’s replacement of wild places with artificial ones, including physical structures but also urban lifestyles. And the projections terminated perhaps in the replacement not just of outer nature but of human nature, with robots and AIs standing in for slaves and masters.

One question here is whether this domestication has always been self-destructive. In seeking “progress” in this sense, we humanized ourselves and the wild, developing cultures to divide us and give us purpose in so far as we could serve as functionaries. We became people rather than animals. But what exactly would the completion of this process look like? What would count as the full humanization or elimination of wildness?

We’d perfect ourselves not with anything like self-help therapy, but by externalizing ourselves, developing robots and computers that could be endlessly re-engineered with precision. The cost of that control via mechanization and automation, though, is that we’d have superseded humanity, as our technologies would replace us as the engines of progress. The Age of Civilization would be over, as we’d no longer excel as masters and slaves.

But the ultimate question here is about the role of posthumans. One scenario is that they’d act as transhumans in that they’d use this entire high-tech edifice as gods, expanding their reach and carrying on the progressive quest for nature’s taming off-world. Another possibility is that we’ll die off, unable to cope with the attendant angst and alienation. Or maybe we’ll thrive in our technology’s shadow as decadent, child-like third wheels, a phenomenon begun with cultish, infantilizing forms of political correctness.

In any case, again, this big-picture history is only one way of understanding and humanizing deep time. The story will appeal if it helps us make sense of our situation.