Several years ago, I read Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, James Scott. I had read his book, Seeing Like a State, quite a few years ago. Both books are intriguing and provocative, with many astute insights, but like “Seeing,” which starts strong and then fades to a sort of intellectual rant, “Against” is more plausible than convincing. It never answers, or even acknowledges the fundamental question raised by its investigation, i.e., why did cities form at all?
The title of the book is a multilayered pun. Scott sees his work as going against the grain of received academic wisdom, and he believes that the mass domestication of grain in the early agricultural states supported the growth of oppressive cities with hierarchical class societies, which he loathes, so he is “against the grain” in at least two ways. Personally, I can’t shake the association with À rebours (often translated as “Against the Grain”), the so-called “breviary of decadence” by Joris Karl Huysmans which is about as far from Scott’s point of view as you can get.
Scott’s book begins with his presentation of the “standard narrative” of urban formation: people gradually figured out how to raise crops, grew sedentary, achieved surpluses and superior living conditions to their previous hunter-gatherer nomadic existence, and formed cities. This is quite a straw man, as some reviewers have noted, and I personally, recall reading and hearing discussions in the late 1970s that undermined it by claiming that hunter-gatherers actually had quite pleasant and well-fed existences, but this is a minor point. His rhetorical strategy is telling, however. He has an agenda.
The bulk of the book is devoted to exploding the notion of the city as progress. Instead, Scott describes it as a locale replete with noise, filth, periodic epidemics, class exploitation and forced labor, and minimal increases in fertility supported by rigidly controlled agriculture. The achievements of grain harvesting, writing, warehousing, etc. are all bricks in the wall of class domination by the priest-taxmen who rule. He is quite convincing in his presentation of the doleful picture of city life in the days of Ur and Uruk, and he cites voluminous recent scholarly literature.
He concludes with a chapter titled, with a tinge of irony? “The Golden Age of the Barbarians.” His thesis here is that the early days of urbanism were the best time to be a nomadic raider since the cities were ripe for the plucking. The ex-urban riders had better lives, better health, more freedom, less government, better food, and, I suspect, more fun. The city dwellers were the poor schnooks of the world. But here is the problem: Why then, did cities form at all if they were so awful in comparison to the free and easy life of a nomad? Scott has much scholarly backing for his claims that the early days of cities saw many false starts, cities that formed and dissolved rapidly, failures all around. It was a fragile thing, the early city. Why did people keep trying to make them work?
Scott pays a lot of attention to the role of force, armed force, taxation and debt as a control on peasants, to keep residents in the city: The lure of the free range always beckoned. How ya’ gonna keep ’em down on the plantation? But why were they there in the first place? Armies come from cities, so you can’t have a free roaming army rounding up poor peasants and forcing them to citify.
Scott’s ode to the barbarians suggests one answer to the question, but not one that Scott would like. Perhaps the nomadic barbarians forced people into settlements where they would form cities. They created the communities so they could periodically loot them. Interesting logic, but not too plausible. Another path to urbanization that is suggested by Scott, and at least one reviewer, is akin to Al Gore’s frog in the pot analogy. (Frogs sitting in a pot on a stove don’t notice the temperature is rising until it is too late to escape. Of course, frogs don’t act that way, as anyone who kept lizards and amphibians as pets as a child would know.) People grouped together, got some settled agriculture going, battened off the harvests, liked the situation, and almost without knowing it, a city grew up around them and before they could escape to the hinterlands and ride with the nomads, a priestly caste had taken over and pretty much enslaved them as agricultural laborers.
I find this scenario hard to credit: just as frogs are sensitive to any temperature change and show it in their behavior, rather than being oblivious to the change, wouldn’t people have noted changes in their lives, compared them to their previous lives as free-rangers, and resisted, if only by leaving? I think that they would, unless there was something keeping them in place, and that had to be something other than an organized army, as I noted above. What could that be?
Scott never once asks if there was anything positive in the urban experience, but perhaps his omission is exactly the answer. Perhaps ancient men and women found living in large groups exciting, fascinating even. Maybe it made them feel a part of something interesting and thrilling, despite the negative aspects of crowded urban life. Isn’t that the essence of urban culture, the desire to be part of it, to see and be seen on the urban stage, to play a part in it, even if it’s just a tiny walk-on role? Could it be that the intense social nature of human beings was the secret sauce, the fundamental glue, that kept the cities together despite the beckoning of the open range, and the squalor in which most urban dwellers lived?
Journey to Perplexity 