Back to the future

We live in a g l o b a l e c o n o my c h a r a c - terised by obscene inequalities between haves and havenots. The poor may not be getting poorer in every region of the world, but the rich are definitely accumulating at supernormal levels and leaving the middle and lower classes far behind everywhere.

Even upholders of the highly iniquitous neoliberal world order are flagging inequality as a cardinal flaw of our times. The International Monetary Fund ( IMF), which is no ideological friend of the poor, has of late been warning that “something is seriously amiss” in the way wealth and income are being distributed in many countries.

The current global economic crisis is proving insurmountable because of the widening disparities in most societies. In the words of Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, “Increasing inequality means a weaker economy, which means increasing inequality, which means a weaker economy.” The so- called “recovery” which the world media keeps projecting every few months since the financial crisis began in 2008 has proven impossible due to vicious inequality being both the cause and the consequence of the global downturn.

To get some statistical insight into how we are passing through the most unequal age ever in human history, look at the table of World Gini Coefficients which measure income inequality between individuals by taking the whole planet as one unit. In the year 1820, when industrialisation and colonialism were stratifying the earth’s inhabitants brutally, the World Gini Coefficient was .43. By 1960, it rose to .64. At present, it is estimated to be a stupendous .70.

For lay readers, this figure of .70 is explained by Branko Milanovic, an economist at the World Bank, as a “92- 8 world”, i. e. the richest eight per cent of humans take one half of the entire global gross domestic product and the remaining 92 per cent get to share the rest of the pie.

Statistically, the world as a single unit is more unequal than quintessentially unequal individual countries like the US or the UK. America is only a “78- 22” economy, while Germany is a “71- 29” economy.

Defenders of the status quo would retort that inequality is natural and ingrained since the advent of life itself because people have different innate strengths and abilities. But this is a fallacious proposition, as social inequalities are structurally formed through political manipulation rather than being just naturally present. Two anthropologists from the University of Michigan, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, have shown through a crossregional comparison of hunting- gathering societies thousands of years ago that they deliberately and successfully curbed stark inequalities.

Karl Marx’s notion of a “primitive Communism” and Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s concept of an egalitarian “state of nature” in prehistoric times are not off the mark. Flannery and Marcus demonstrate in their book, The Creation of Inequality, that selflessness was high among our ancestors, who preferred “achievement- based societies” over “rank- ordered societies”, where hereditary elites of privileged “Big Men” could dominate the rest.

The early humans practised “social pressure and ridicule to prevent anyone from developing a sense of superiority”. Only later, with the onset of agriculture and animal husbandry, did these achievementbased norms get sidelined by manipulative individuals and cliques that claimed sacred descent and divine origin. This new elite dispossessed commoners by hoarding and accumulating precious things and using their command over surpluses to launch extensive territorial conquests culminating in kingdoms and empires. Even after the downfall of monarchies and colonialism, new platforms for extreme inequalities were laid by capitalist expansion and financial globalisation since the 1980s.

Yet, the historical journey of inequality has not been a linear progression. The belief — that as societies grew more complex and occupationally diverse, inequality kept on accentuating — is factually incorrect. Flannery and Marcus argue that inequality has a zigzag path, with hierarchical orderings of society being periodically challenged by inter- elite rivalries and mass revolutions. They record a continuous “struggle between those who desired to be superior and those who objected”.

At times, the majorities have wrested back the privileges usurped by the minorities. This was the perennial spirit motivating the Arab Spring, the “Occupy Wall Street” and the Indignados movements.

If inequality is indeed not foreordained or predestined but just a political construction that can be reversed, what about war and organised violence which are closely associated with inequality? Popular wisdom presents human beings as hardwired since the dawn of civilisation to fight and establish domination over one another. Aggression and cruelty are said to be inherent in human DNA. But again, new research is questioning this normalisation of violence.

A path- breaking study by anthropologists Douglas P. Fry and Patrik Söderberg in Science magazine reveals that “coalitionary aggression against other groups”, i. e. war, was not at all prevalent among early humans. Whatever lethal violence did occur in those days was mostly interpersonal murders and small- scale homicides rather than coordinated attacks that cause mass casualties. War was not ever- present since time immemorial, and there were ways in which competition and jealousy were managed without leading to mass destruction. Fry and Söderberg are thus refuting ontological assumptions about human nature as grabby and nasty.

Inequality and war are the two most hideous features of the contemporary world. Notwithstanding advances in technology and emancipatory ideas of modernity, we are paralysed to find solutions to these twin evils. This helplessness owes to arrogance about ourselves as more evolved and superior than our forefathers. The “primitives” and “savages” we mock were actually, as Rousseau said, “born free and equal”. In aboriginal communities, the ancestors still teach the living how to arrange a less violent and more equal society. At the risk of romanticising the past, we should revisit it and learn lessons for our own good. The writer is dean at

the Jindal School of International Affairs