by Alvin Finkel
JAMES LORIMER & COMPANY
2024/$25.95/416 pp.
In Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality, former Athabasca University professor Alvin Finkel embarks on an ambitious project: chronicling social justice campaigns across the entirety of human history and the globe. The result is a broad, thought-provoking survey that covers early empires and feudalism, the emergence of capitalism, European imperialism and the two world wars, the Cold War, neoliberalism and the present day.
Finkel argues that inequality is not inevitable or inherent to “human nature.” Rather, “societies choose consciously or unconsciously what values to promote,” he writes, asserting that for the vast majority of human history these values were largely collectivist. Using somewhat limited archaeological and anthropological evidence, Finkel argues that for nearly 300,000 years societies were almost exclusively organized around common ownership, open decision-making, gender equality, resource sharing and peaceful relations. Some, he says, still are.
While scholars generally view the agricultural revolution as the driving force behind the fundamental shift towards competitive and militarist principles about 10,000 years ago, Finkel disagrees. That shift, he claims, was a long, drawn-out process essentially disconnected from farming and always resisted by various groups and individuals.
But why and how do inequality and conflict come to dominate human societies? Finkel appears to blame so-called “aggrandizers,” defined as “unscrupulous leaders” that arise in communities containing more than 50–100 members and who use both private property and surplus resources to achieve and maintain political and economic control over the masses. “Even if only a few groups… in a territory adopt hierarchical and militarist social organization,” he says, “their ability to force others to accept their leadership can result in wide swaths of humanity being deprived of peace and egalitarianism.”
But he cannot mean that to restore social justice we must disperse eight-billion-plus people on the planet into small, communal, egalitarian collectives at risk of scarcity and famines without surpluses. That it does not matter how many people fight for justice and equality, because the conditions allowing such values to exist are long gone. Or perhaps this is why, despite thousands of years of resistance, the masses have failed to do more than contain the worst excesses of the “parasitic elites.”
Answers aren’t clear from the book. In Humans Finkel discusses slave rebellions in ancient Greece and China; religious uprisings leading to Buddhism, Christianity and other sects; peasant and worker resistance in the imperial core; Indigenous and slave uprisings on the peripheries of empires; recent protests against climate change, economic inequality and war; and much more. It’s a lot, and a more thorough discussion of the function of oppression might better connect and explain them.
But this is not the main focus of the book. Finkel is mostly concerned with efforts “to re-establish… rights to inclusion, justice and equality that our early ancestors enjoyed.” “At almost all times in the history of humans,” he writes, “there have been at least some communities that are organized around the same principles as the original members of our species organized their communities.” As such, it is impossible to view human nature, defined as “plastic and not fixed,” by focusing solely on stratification, discrimination and conflict.
While oppression is experienced and opposed differently depending on context, he writes, it is also remarkably consistent across time and place. Ultimately, it’s a hopeful thought. For approximately 97 per cent of human history, our ancestors organized their societies around egalitarian and pacifist principles and, even today, many stubbornly fight against incessant oppression and injustice. Perhaps we can too.
Roberta Lexier is a professor in the departments of general education and humanities at Mount Royal University.
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