Faced with litanies of bad news, it is easy to become disheartened about the future of human society. But there are two reasons to think that change for the better is possible. First, enormous social change has taken place in the recent past. . In many countries, women can now vote, obtain abortions and become heads of government. Outspoken . and , at least on some measures. Support for strong action on climate change is growing. Social media exists. Whether or not one approves of all these changes, they have happened, and fast.
Second, anthropology and archaeology are revealing that a human society can take myriad forms. This is “both disorienting and inspiring”, says at University College London, who believes the diversity of past societies opens up possibilities for reshaping our modern ones. at Utah State University agrees. “We can look at the past as experiments with sustainability, as experiments with governance structures,” she says. “We are just experimenting with making life better.” What, then, might we change?
“One thing that’s fairly new is the degree of systemic racism and oppression that’s baked into some of our societies,” says at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. In our evolutionary history, people wouldn’t have met others that look so different from them that they would consider them a different race. Some and surely mistreated them, but modern societies take dehumanisation to new lows. “The degree to which the United States is systematically oppressing Black people, going back to the days of slavery and all the laws that followed, I think that would probably be a fairly new thing – one that we should try to get rid of,” says Jaeggi.
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Built-in resilience
Other social developments also look regressive when compared with our forebears. This is : the crop monocultures modern societies tend to rely on provide a reduced diversity of food sources compared with previous societies. “That’s partly what makes it more vulnerable to all of the things that farmers worry about, like climate change, weather patterns, vagaries in the availability of labour at key times in the agricultural cycle,” says at the University of Oxford.
In general, we need to make our systems more resilient. But we also need to minimise climate change, because farming and the emergence of complex societies only became possible when the climate stabilised around 10,000 years ago at the dawn of the Holocene, our current geological epoch. “What’s special about the Holocene is stability,” says Bogaard. There have been some climatic shifts, but . “What makes the current crisis so frightening is realising that it’s screwing up the stability that is what got us here over the last 10,000 years.” A new study estimated the ideal climate niche for human societies, and concluded that – with up to 39 per cent potentially outside it by the end of the century. A second study found that .
Another major concern is the balance of power in many modern societies. While hierarchies may be inevitable in large-scale, complex societies, for them to succeed, . “Having this kind of social contract between those in power and those not in power is a very important thing,” says at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. That requires flattening hierarchies as much as possible in terms of both political power and wealth. “I think economists pretty much agree that too much [wealth] ,” says Jaeggi. “It’s good for the 1 per cent, but you reach a point where the super-rich stop investing in society as a whole, so you get fewer public goods like a public school system.”
Fairer is better
Wealth inequality is also . In this century, climate change will bring enormous challenges, including destruction of infrastructure and massive migrations. In the past, when faced with environmental challenges, some societies coped and others didn’t. “They can weather those challenges pretty well if the levels of wealth inequality are not too high,” says at Washington State University. “When the levels of wealth inequality are high, it seems more likely that will cause social disruption and violence.”
The realisation that human social structure is more flexible than we thought may be inspiring, but it isn’t obvious how we can change it. Wengrow offers a rule of thumb for creating a better society. “The first and most important feature would be that it wouldn’t be designed by me or by any other one person,” he says. “I think a more fair and equal society can only come about when people are given the right to make decisions collectively about what they truly value in life and then are given access to material resources which make it possible to distribute those values as widely as possible.”
That is challenging, but there is more. We may also have to expand our concept of what a society is. Noting that the problems we face now are often on a global scale, Kohler argues that unless we think big when it comes to our view of society, we are inviting trouble. “To the extent that we don’t consider ourselves one global population and try to help each other out – to the extent we see ‘us’ in competition with ‘everybody else’ – the world’s going to become a very difficult place to live in.”
