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A review by studeronomy
The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins by Stefanos Geroulanos
challenging
informative
slow-paced
3.25
1.
We’ll never know everything we want to know about our distant ancestors. They’re gone.
And insofar as we gather evidence about the lives they lived and make conjectures about those lives, we still only see them through a glass darkened by our own shadows. That’s my key takeaway from Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory, a fun and frustrating work of popular scholarship.
In his epilogue, Geroulanos summarizes his overall project:
Throughout this book, I have tried to offer a strong criticism of our pretensions to grandeur, our thirst for powerful stories, our belief that we grasp the whole picture and spin it into a thorough system of knowledge. It’s always nice to blame others, the ideologies of the enemy; but this project is more of a criticism, as philosophical as it is historical, of our delusion—that we grasp the origin as much as the end, that we control the definitions, that we have master knowledge.
This tracks. The central thread that runs through Geroulanos’s book is his opposition to post-Enlightenment humanism. The project of humanism, he argues, has failed. The ideology of humanism put us squarely on a path toward violent colonialism, the genocides of the twentieth century, and climate catastrophe. Whether he wants to or not, Geroulanos joins a diverse group of grumpy scholars and anti-humanists like Giorgio Agamben, Alasdair MacIntyre, René Girard, and Girard’s pupil Peter Thiel in concluding that the Enlightenment was a mistake and humanism really messed things up.
To be clear: Geroulanos isn’t a post-humanist. Rather, he seeks an alternative, more humane paradigm through which we can live together on the planet. In many ways, the field of prehistory is incidental to his overall project. It’s one of several lenses he could have chosen through which to examine the problems inherent in humanism. Our acquisition of knowledge about any subject (especially history) always always always always reinforces the ideology of the present day, for better or for worse (and usually at the expense of actual knowledge). This is true whether we’re talking about the deep past of our hominoid ancestors or the human past since the beginning of the historical (re: written) record.
To be fair, Geroulanos admits that the field of prehistory does produce legitimate knowledge about the past that is probably worth having. But what we do with that knowledge is usually problematic. Geroulanos writes: “We telescope at will back in time to draw meaning from the deep past about ourselves and the world we want.” Yes, that’s true…and show me a scholarly discipline that emerged from the Victorian era that wasn’t used to justify obscene criminality. I don’t think you’ll find one.
But it’s not really until the epilogue that Geroulanos finally admits that recent discoveries by geneticist and paleoanthropologists have revealed much solid information about our lineage. But really, he asks, what do we want to know about our ancestors? That question changes with every generation and within every cultural and political context. And usually, the answer to that question has disastrous results for people on the social, political, and cultural margins. Geroulanos writes:
The most obvious and greatest cost of the 250-year obsession with human origins research has been borne by the Indigenous peoples whose destruction was rationalized because they were ‘primitives’ who were ‘vanishing’ anyway; by Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others deemed subhuman by Nazism; by all those who were racialized by ideas about prehistoric humanity; and by refugees, still disdained today as a watery mass and a horde.
Later, he writes:
The problem lies less with science or museums rather than with the humanist impulse that accompanies them. The story told in this book is in part a story of scientific horrors. But it is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy. It is a story of the lengths that we will go to convince ourselves that we share something more than (most of our) DNA with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago: that what we share with them is meaningful, that it is our ‘human nature.’
A noble sentiment, I think. “Human nature” is a term that is usually invoked to push people around, to oppress people who are marginalized (look at how often neoliberal economists “naturalize” their theories and justify their most brutal policy recommendations by appealing to “human nature”).
But even here, I’m a little irked. To minimize the DNA we share with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago is, in my view, to minimize something genuinely important. Our shared DNA does indicate that we share something—perhaps a lot—with our ancestors.
2.
Don’t get me wrong: The Invention of Prehistory is a fantastically entertaining and informative work of popular scholarship. I loved the chapter about the Catholic paleoanthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose theory of the teleological “omega point” at the end of evolution was…just wild. Geroulanos seems to sympathize, a little, with Bataille’s attempt to preserve the spiritual dimensions of human life amid our discoveries about the distant past (Bataille described the Lascaux cave as “the holy of holies”: problematic but beautiful).
And Geroulanos’s epilogue departs from a lot of the moralizing that precedes it. In the final pages, he encourages caution when we study human ancestry and (especially) disseminate knowledge about human origins to the public.
But on the whole, I was frustrated with The Invention of Prehistory because, too often, Geroulanos conflates our paradigms of knowing (and interpreting knowledge) with the acquisition of knowledge itself. He writes with a very moralistic, sometimes shrill, tone about the men and women whose work has produced a lot of our best knowledge about our distant ancestors. At times, it seems like Geroulanos believes that such knowledge is not worth having if it is used to justify atrocities.
Geroulanos claims that The Invention of Prehistory “is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy.” You could have fooled me. He has virtually nothing good to say about any scholar, professional or amateur, whose work he examines. Two of the exceptions is his treatment of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and (to a lesser extent) Sigmund Freud…all darlings of what Paul Ricœur famously called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Geroulanos has adopted these hermeneutics wholesale.
Take Saussure. His linguistic analysis (in Geroulanos’s account) bucks the most politically problematic accounts of the origins of human language. Saussure sees through his contemporaries, whose morally reprehensible racial ideologies framed their theories about language. Nevermind, of course, that Saussure’s account has been widely rejected by linguists, and that today’s most credible theories of the origin of language a) amount to corrections of the morally reprehensible models or b) rest on new models of genetic and cognitive analysis. Saussure got the morality right, even if he got the knowledge wrong.
Geroulanos writes: “The fantasy [of humanism and prehistory] allows us to forget that in reality, humans have almost nothing in common with our paleolithic forefathers. We live in the world we have created.” Okay, fair enough. But who is the we here? I don’t live in a world that I’ve created—other people created it for me. And other people created their world for them. And on and on back…all the way, perhaps, to our “paleolithic forefathers.” The past is a foreign country, it’s true. But it’s not utterly inaccessible, as some post-structuralist critics have implied.
In Courting the Abyss a study of the contradictions of free speech within the English liberal tradition, John Durham Peters divides Anglophone society into three camps: religiously-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through revelation; empirically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through the scientific method; and critically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through rational (often skeptical) inquiry. Two groups in these three camps will often unite against the third group, and the religiously-minded and critically-minded typically “team up” against the empiricists in order to undermine the authority of “science” per se (especially when they don’t like the products of scientific knowledge).
And few people are as skeptical as me of “science” as a category of ultimate knowledge acquisition. The scientific method is a powerful process of knowledge acquisition, but it is viewed by most English-speaking people as an ultimate arbiter of truth. This is a problem, and it actually contributes (I think) to scientific illiteracy. People in general have no idea what “science” actually is, and at the same time nothing shuts down an argument like “scientific evidence.”
But for Geroulanos and other scholars in the humanities, scientific knowledge is not merely one type of knowledge among many. It is inherently compromised by its imperialist origins. And yet, as I’ve reiterated throughout this review, every imaginable field of knowledge and art since the Enlightenment has deployed in the service of empire.
After a while, I began to feel guilty for being curious about ancient hominids at all!
Reading The Invention of Prehistory, you get the impression that it’s virtually impossible to acquire scientific knowledge without hurting someone. Geroulanos’s struggle with the ethics of knowledge acquisition is most apparent in his chapter on Neanderthals. He rightly criticizes the racist framework within which specialized knowledge about Neanderthals is presented to the public. And he admits that, given the power of recent genetic analysis, we have a much clearer sense of what the Neanderthals’ lives, including their relationship with anatomically modern humans, was like. But, he writes in that chapter’s conclusion, “We still cannot reach the Neanderthal. However much we may ‘know’ about him…he continues to say more about us.” Consequently, Geroulanos’s hypercritical approach to knowledge acquisition, his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” often deploys the same language and critical tools that creationists, climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists, and medical charlatans use when they attempt to overturn scientific consensus.
This is not a party I would be eager to join.
We’ll never know everything we want to know about our distant ancestors. They’re gone.
And insofar as we gather evidence about the lives they lived and make conjectures about those lives, we still only see them through a glass darkened by our own shadows. That’s my key takeaway from Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory, a fun and frustrating work of popular scholarship.
In his epilogue, Geroulanos summarizes his overall project:
Throughout this book, I have tried to offer a strong criticism of our pretensions to grandeur, our thirst for powerful stories, our belief that we grasp the whole picture and spin it into a thorough system of knowledge. It’s always nice to blame others, the ideologies of the enemy; but this project is more of a criticism, as philosophical as it is historical, of our delusion—that we grasp the origin as much as the end, that we control the definitions, that we have master knowledge.
This tracks. The central thread that runs through Geroulanos’s book is his opposition to post-Enlightenment humanism. The project of humanism, he argues, has failed. The ideology of humanism put us squarely on a path toward violent colonialism, the genocides of the twentieth century, and climate catastrophe. Whether he wants to or not, Geroulanos joins a diverse group of grumpy scholars and anti-humanists like Giorgio Agamben, Alasdair MacIntyre, René Girard, and Girard’s pupil Peter Thiel in concluding that the Enlightenment was a mistake and humanism really messed things up.
To be clear: Geroulanos isn’t a post-humanist. Rather, he seeks an alternative, more humane paradigm through which we can live together on the planet. In many ways, the field of prehistory is incidental to his overall project. It’s one of several lenses he could have chosen through which to examine the problems inherent in humanism. Our acquisition of knowledge about any subject (especially history) always always always always reinforces the ideology of the present day, for better or for worse (and usually at the expense of actual knowledge). This is true whether we’re talking about the deep past of our hominoid ancestors or the human past since the beginning of the historical (re: written) record.
To be fair, Geroulanos admits that the field of prehistory does produce legitimate knowledge about the past that is probably worth having. But what we do with that knowledge is usually problematic. Geroulanos writes: “We telescope at will back in time to draw meaning from the deep past about ourselves and the world we want.” Yes, that’s true…and show me a scholarly discipline that emerged from the Victorian era that wasn’t used to justify obscene criminality. I don’t think you’ll find one.
But it’s not really until the epilogue that Geroulanos finally admits that recent discoveries by geneticist and paleoanthropologists have revealed much solid information about our lineage. But really, he asks, what do we want to know about our ancestors? That question changes with every generation and within every cultural and political context. And usually, the answer to that question has disastrous results for people on the social, political, and cultural margins. Geroulanos writes:
The most obvious and greatest cost of the 250-year obsession with human origins research has been borne by the Indigenous peoples whose destruction was rationalized because they were ‘primitives’ who were ‘vanishing’ anyway; by Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and others deemed subhuman by Nazism; by all those who were racialized by ideas about prehistoric humanity; and by refugees, still disdained today as a watery mass and a horde.
Later, he writes:
The problem lies less with science or museums rather than with the humanist impulse that accompanies them. The story told in this book is in part a story of scientific horrors. But it is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy. It is a story of the lengths that we will go to convince ourselves that we share something more than (most of our) DNA with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago: that what we share with them is meaningful, that it is our ‘human nature.’
A noble sentiment, I think. “Human nature” is a term that is usually invoked to push people around, to oppress people who are marginalized (look at how often neoliberal economists “naturalize” their theories and justify their most brutal policy recommendations by appealing to “human nature”).
But even here, I’m a little irked. To minimize the DNA we share with hominids from tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago is, in my view, to minimize something genuinely important. Our shared DNA does indicate that we share something—perhaps a lot—with our ancestors.
2.
Don’t get me wrong: The Invention of Prehistory is a fantastically entertaining and informative work of popular scholarship. I loved the chapter about the Catholic paleoanthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose theory of the teleological “omega point” at the end of evolution was…just wild. Geroulanos seems to sympathize, a little, with Bataille’s attempt to preserve the spiritual dimensions of human life amid our discoveries about the distant past (Bataille described the Lascaux cave as “the holy of holies”: problematic but beautiful).
And Geroulanos’s epilogue departs from a lot of the moralizing that precedes it. In the final pages, he encourages caution when we study human ancestry and (especially) disseminate knowledge about human origins to the public.
But on the whole, I was frustrated with The Invention of Prehistory because, too often, Geroulanos conflates our paradigms of knowing (and interpreting knowledge) with the acquisition of knowledge itself. He writes with a very moralistic, sometimes shrill, tone about the men and women whose work has produced a lot of our best knowledge about our distant ancestors. At times, it seems like Geroulanos believes that such knowledge is not worth having if it is used to justify atrocities.
Geroulanos claims that The Invention of Prehistory “is not a story, for the most part, of evil philosophers or scientists, nor at all a story in which science is the enemy.” You could have fooled me. He has virtually nothing good to say about any scholar, professional or amateur, whose work he examines. Two of the exceptions is his treatment of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and (to a lesser extent) Sigmund Freud…all darlings of what Paul Ricœur famously called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Geroulanos has adopted these hermeneutics wholesale.
Take Saussure. His linguistic analysis (in Geroulanos’s account) bucks the most politically problematic accounts of the origins of human language. Saussure sees through his contemporaries, whose morally reprehensible racial ideologies framed their theories about language. Nevermind, of course, that Saussure’s account has been widely rejected by linguists, and that today’s most credible theories of the origin of language a) amount to corrections of the morally reprehensible models or b) rest on new models of genetic and cognitive analysis. Saussure got the morality right, even if he got the knowledge wrong.
Geroulanos writes: “The fantasy [of humanism and prehistory] allows us to forget that in reality, humans have almost nothing in common with our paleolithic forefathers. We live in the world we have created.” Okay, fair enough. But who is the we here? I don’t live in a world that I’ve created—other people created it for me. And other people created their world for them. And on and on back…all the way, perhaps, to our “paleolithic forefathers.” The past is a foreign country, it’s true. But it’s not utterly inaccessible, as some post-structuralist critics have implied.
In Courting the Abyss a study of the contradictions of free speech within the English liberal tradition, John Durham Peters divides Anglophone society into three camps: religiously-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through revelation; empirically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through the scientific method; and critically-minded people for whom knowledge is acquired through rational (often skeptical) inquiry. Two groups in these three camps will often unite against the third group, and the religiously-minded and critically-minded typically “team up” against the empiricists in order to undermine the authority of “science” per se (especially when they don’t like the products of scientific knowledge).
And few people are as skeptical as me of “science” as a category of ultimate knowledge acquisition. The scientific method is a powerful process of knowledge acquisition, but it is viewed by most English-speaking people as an ultimate arbiter of truth. This is a problem, and it actually contributes (I think) to scientific illiteracy. People in general have no idea what “science” actually is, and at the same time nothing shuts down an argument like “scientific evidence.”
But for Geroulanos and other scholars in the humanities, scientific knowledge is not merely one type of knowledge among many. It is inherently compromised by its imperialist origins. And yet, as I’ve reiterated throughout this review, every imaginable field of knowledge and art since the Enlightenment has deployed in the service of empire.
After a while, I began to feel guilty for being curious about ancient hominids at all!
Reading The Invention of Prehistory, you get the impression that it’s virtually impossible to acquire scientific knowledge without hurting someone. Geroulanos’s struggle with the ethics of knowledge acquisition is most apparent in his chapter on Neanderthals. He rightly criticizes the racist framework within which specialized knowledge about Neanderthals is presented to the public. And he admits that, given the power of recent genetic analysis, we have a much clearer sense of what the Neanderthals’ lives, including their relationship with anatomically modern humans, was like. But, he writes in that chapter’s conclusion, “We still cannot reach the Neanderthal. However much we may ‘know’ about him…he continues to say more about us.” Consequently, Geroulanos’s hypercritical approach to knowledge acquisition, his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” often deploys the same language and critical tools that creationists, climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists, and medical charlatans use when they attempt to overturn scientific consensus.
This is not a party I would be eager to join.