[Main Blog Post] How the Cost of Freight Has Shaped the World

[jprussell]

Short post this week where I barely scratch the surface of what I suspect will be a big, deep topic - how cheap transportation has been the less obvious, but maybe just as important, side of the industrial revolution next to mass production.

Comments

[jprussell]

No worries, I did bring up that question in the same comment that I linked this post, so it seems fair to respond to it.

I didn't realize which academic field Girard claimed, and doing no ethnography does seem like a strike against a serious anthropologist, though sometimes comparative religion-types have a tough time finding an academic home. Regardless, yeah, fitting evidence to theory does sound quite likely if you have a grand theory of how all mythology works, so that reputation doesn't surprise me too much (though, I will note some amusement at arch-Marxist David Graeber criticizing others for giving evidence the theory-based Procrustean treatment!).

As for Girard and his theory, I have no particular attachment other than that I've seen his name come up and his theories spoken of as interesting and/or useful by folks who have been worth listening to in at least some contexts. In this case, Girard came up as I've been reading and thinking about how to think about the role of Christianity in the history of Western culture - how much of what has been good about Western culture does Christianity deserve credit for? How much was coincidental? How much of what has gone wrong should be laid at Christianity's feet? One of the tempting things (and also one of the dangerous things) about Girard's theory is that it offers an analytical/explanatory framework that purports to make sense of some of that complicated mess.

Anyhow, thanks very much for the effort to hop over here and share your thoughts and experience even after MM had closed!

[scotlyn]

I wonder have you read much of Graeber's work? I wonder on what basis you might have judged him to be "arch-Marxist"? And also, what this term means to you?

Yes, as I said, what Girard has to offer is very seductive in some quarters. I think it is because it is very comforting to the Christian view that the life and death and resurrection of Jesus represent a definitive turning point in the history of the world - that all was changed and that nothing after was or could be the same as all that came before it.

Still, his fundamental concept of mimetic desire makes no sense to me. How can we know what a person desires? And presuming we could know the interior state of another person, why would we not (say) want to help them fulfill that desire? What makes rivalry the automatic go-to response. Sure, sometimes... but always? Anyway, the procrustean bed that Girard forces everything into is the idea that the first truly human act was an act of human sacrifice - which murder then unified/bonded everyone who took part. And that this proto-human act was perpetually repeated in ritual and myth, throughout human history, until Christ came along and voluntarily sacrificed himself. And, while I think that it is true that some humans, in some places, have sacrificed one another, this is not true of all humans in all places. Needing to turn the first into the second is where Girard has to "force" his material.

[jprussell]

Okay, I have to admit to being a bit dramatic with the "arch" part. And to be fair, the only Graeber I've read is his article "Debt: the First 5,000 Years," not the later much more extensive expansion into a full book (it's been on my list for years). As for what I mean by "Marxist," I mean that my understanding is that he self-described as a Marxist and used a Marxist-derived theoretical basis for understanding things - looking mostly at economic conditions and conflicts between classes to understand historical and social trends. My accusations of Procrusteanism come from what I did get from the article-length version of "Debt," especially on the origins of money and early urbanization, which did not exactly jive with what I've read on those subjects elsewhere, and where they didn't match, seemed to do so in a way consistent with a Marxist understanding of societal development. All told, though, I was likely being slightly unfair, and as I said, I really am looking forward to reading his book, as I've heard that it is a remarkable work, whether or not you agree with the conclusions he draws in it.

As for Girard, I get the impression some folks at least have gotten some mileage from looking at various cultures or events and asking "what would I conclude about this if Girard's theory were true?" and gotten results they found useful. From my very limited understanding, I think that it might be helpful for understanding things like fads and fashions, but I share your skepticism that it is the underlying driver of all human striving and conflict.

Also, I was not aware of the centrality he gave human sacrifice, and yeah, that does seem like a weird way of conceptualizing things. I assume that in any culture that engages in animal sacrifice, there has at some point, somewhere, been someone who engaged in human sacrifice, if they were at it long enough, because the logic is pretty straightforward: if killing an animal pleases the Gods, and killing higher value animals pleases them more, then what about the highest value thing? To argue that this is fundamental to all religious expressions everywhere, though, that seems a stretch, especially given the highly variable frequency, significance, and just about every other factor having to do with human sacrifice around the world and across cultures.

By the way, I wanted to say explicitly (since it's the internet and there's fewer context clues) that I appreciate your comments and am enjoying the conversation, even if there's been some disagreement. For what it's worth, Graeber's higher on my "to get to" reading list than Girard!

[scotlyn]

As to Graeber, I only ever heard him self-identify as an anarchist, who is also an anthropologist. Never as a Marxist. :) As an anthropologist he was aware of being in a position to testify to the extraordinary and huge variety of ways in which humans have organised things for themselves. Which he took as a sign that the range of human possibility was, and is, huge, and not pre-determined, which is why anarchy made sense to him. This is what I most appreciate about his work - the sense that whatever IS, is not a sentence, nor is it inevitable, and that there are many, many, other possible ways... and that the possibilities are as wide and as broad as we let them be.

I do think that in "Debt" he firmly quarreled with what he probaby would call the Adam Smith "just so" story of barter preceding - and inevitably developing into - money (granted, he says, Adam Smith did not have the wealth of ethnographic material we now have, and was free to let his imagination rip when trying to figure this out). Because, he says, ethnologically, it is nonsense. Nowhere in any ethnographic source ever described from direct observation, is barter (in the "spot trade", or this for that, sense) ever actually found to precede money. Although barter can often succeed money, whenever folk used to trading in money have to deal with the money disappearing - eg in prisons. In relation to this detail, I think he may have annoyed economists of all kinds, both the classical kind, and of the Marxist kind. ;)

But also, it really IS a good book. Please do post something when you get around to reading it. I'd be interested in your thoughts on it. :)

Re Girard, yes, the concept that all human culture and mythology arose following the (purported) first fully human cultural act - a human sacrifice - is what really put me off him. Still, perhaps there are others who find something of benefit in his work. Who am I to say?

[jprussell]

Hmmmm, maybe I heard someone call him a marxist and mistook his anti-(modern understanding of) capitalist stance as evidence that was right and then misremembered him calling himself that? Anyhow, if he was applying an anarchist lens (even a "left anarchist" lens), that's still different than my conception that he was intentionally and explicitly using a Marxist or Marxist-derived analytical framework, so thanks for the correction.

Also, for what it's worth, I also agree that the Adam Smith and Mises-flavored idea that money derived from barter are historically wrong. There's a fairly reasonable argument to be made that the logic they describe is helpful for understanding some of the likelihoods and necessities of a monetary system once you have one, but that it's utterly wrong as to how actual living folks went from not having money to having it (similar to how Locke's and Hobbes's arguments from a "state of nature" describe no actual historical time, but might still have some utility for understanding how folks should think about organizing themselves, if they get to choose).

My current favorite attempt at understanding the actual historical rise of money is Nick Szabo's "Shelling Out". He's also coming at it from an anarchist perspective (but an anarcho-capitalist one, admittedly), and he also incorporates ethnographical observation and archaeological findings (though he is not an anthropologist, and so did none of the fieldwork himself). The core of his argument is that "exchange" (trade, barter, and such) was the smallest part of what proto-money and early money was used for. Instead, it was more often used for rare, large transfers of wealth between parties with some reason not to trust each other - tribute, weddings, and inheritance.

I haven't come back to this in a few years, despite my views and knowledge on a lot of things changing, so I can't guarantee it's not wrong in important ways, but if nothing else it's a fascinating case of "but what if it did work that way?"

[scotlyn]

Thank you - it sounds like it could be an interesting read. Although, initially, there does not seem to be much appreciation that the colonists who adopted wampum for money simply found in wampum a good substitute for the coinage they were accustomed to using (something like prisoners using packs of cigarettes as currency). The role that wampum played in native cultures is unlikely to have much resembled the uses the colonists put it to.

Also, there are a couple of "just so" stories from the world of biology appearing in this summary. ;) For example that you can understand society by centring "genes" as the [presumed] rational actors in your story instead of people. (Dawkins "Selfish Gene" book is actually one of the most religious books I have ever read by someone who is said to abhor religion!) And, the assumption that "co-operation" is sharply constrained in nature. Hmmm... Lynn Margulis had a great deal to say to that!

The most interesting part of this summary is that it barely mentions social relationships - which is the context in which all exchange between humans takes place. What Graeber (influenced by Marcel Mauss, Marshall Sahlins, and others) shows is that what we in the west have come to fetishise (the *things* that are traded), most people conceive of "things" in relation to the people from whose hand, or to whose hand, the thing will move. Goods that move from hand to hand, are only a part of a larger language of relationship.

The "distance" in time between the giving of a gift and its reciprocation (which is the "problem" that money is supposed to have solved) is not a problem at all when the two people involved are not strangers and have a long term relationship - long term enough to easily hold any and all of the long time gaps between a gift going one way and a gift going the other in a normal state of trust. The problem only becomes a problem if strangers find themselves needing to trade with each other - and [importantly] needing to remain strangers at the end of the trade. It seems to me that Graeber offers a much more sophisticated and ethnographically nuanced analysis of the many languages of exchange that people have used, and of which money (as we use it) comes down to us as one narrowed and impoverished [and also, incidentally, impoverishING] stream.

Yes... now that I think of it, I must take another look at Graeber's Debt book.

PS - thanks for entertaining this lengthy conversation! :)