By: Strypey

Strypey — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 08:50:20 +0000

This succession of political-economic forms has also been described in Ken Wilbur’s book ‘A Brief History of Everything’. Wilbur describes it using his AQAL matrix (All Quadrants, All Levels), which breaks the historical development into a series of “worldviews”, each of which has its physical, psychological, cultural, and socio-economic correlates. I like the way Wilbur tries to integrate non-European philosophy and history into the mix, as David Graeber does in debt, but I think we need to be conscious that all of these descriptions are still located within a somewhat Eurocentric, modernist notion of continual and inevitable “progress”, shared by both marxist and neo-classical economic thought.

An alternative perspective on the whole question is provided by Daniel Quinn. In his book ‘Ishmael’, humans are seen as following two diverging paths, the “development” path described above (agricultural > industrial > post-industrial), and one of sustainable hunter-gathering that is as old as humanity itself and still in operation wherever agricultural and industrial societies have not managed to colonize and assimilate its practitioners.

Thom Hartmann synthesizes the two perspectives (the developmental and the primitivist) nicely in ‘The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight’. He agrees with Quinn that we should see surviving hunter-gatherer and nomadic herding societies as role models to protect and learn from, rather than primitives in need of “civilization”. But he also acknowledges that most of us don’t have the option of going back to the jungle or the prairie, there are just too many humans on the planet and too little wild habitat left. If we are to avoid wiping ourselves out and taking the surviving indigenous people and a huge number of other species down with us, we need to transcend the industrial society and its institutions, as described nicely in this article.

Comments on: A Synthesis of the Findings of P2P Theory: Ten Years After

By: Strypey