Up Here, We Are Human

What if, instead of measuring relationships in terms of what others owe us or what we owe them, we were to affirm reciprocity and interdependence as axiomatic to the human condition? What if, instead of regarding each other so often as rivals — actual or potential — we were to look at one another as parts of the same whole, interconnected as trees and fungi are that exchange nutrients through a mycelial web, and mutualistic as are neighbors that share food and fuel between houses in winter?

The following passage comes from the 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber:

The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche’s fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other’s bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen’s Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

“Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.”

The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began “comparing power with power, measuring, calculating” and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.

(Emphasis mine.) This anthropological depiction of humanity as defined not by competition or transaction, but by a refusal to calculate, resonates with the ecological worldview I have been thinking through in this essay series. Forests don’t keep score. Rivers don’t charge tolls. Evolution doesn’t pick winners and losers on account of who is in the red.

The mycelial networks that stitch together tree roots and fungal spores operate on a logic older and deeper than market exchange. They move with the urgency of shared survival, not strategic advantage. What would it mean to build our civic life, our neighborhoods, even our friendships, on the same refusal? To choose to help not because we’ll be helped in turn, but because that’s what being alive among others demands? If there’s a future worth growing toward, it likely begins there, with the quiet, indignant insistence that up here, we are human.

My tip of the hat to designer Jesse Turri for taking the trouble to post this excerpt to his personal webpage and making it that much easier for me to share Graeber’s work with you.