Mike Bown’s Essay “Skins of Ill-Shaped Fishes” Details How Human Society and Its Core Values Have Evolved

Mike Bown is the “most traveled man in the world”. He has written an essay called “Skins of Ill-Shaped Fishes”, where he discusses how his travel across the globe has exposed him to a very wide spectrum of human life and have taught him in detail about the history and current reality of human society. In this episode, Ladan reads this essay and shares his opinion on it.

Top three takeaways:

1. It is a fallacy to assume that if everyone were to have had equal enfranchisement from the dawn of history, that humanity would be better off. In fact, the way out of societal stagnation is industrialization, which is dependent on the unequal system of capitalism. Had everyone had equal rights from the birth of civilization, we may have actually been less scientifically advanced than we currently are.
2. Just as with the earlier industrial revolution, now that we are in the midst of a new revolution, the IT revolution, the unique facets of revolutionary capitalism are again under attack. Fascist and colonialist ideologies are resurging and reviving during this time when capitalist principles are under fire.
3. Globalism is essentially colonialism 2.0. A lot of the problems that caused the first wave of colonialism to fail have been fixed, and colonialism is effectively being rebranded as globalism. In this sense, it is being referred to as a de-colonialism effort, with the belief that “diversity is our strength” widely spreading and influencing this new rise.

An essay I recently finished:

skins of ill-shaped fishes

We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests, and hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been human. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality. Loren Eiseley

Satisfying an interest in the process and experience of reality, and over thirty years of continuous backpacking, I’ve explored our planet’s varied and fascinating life-ways. The first 23 years of travel served to take a friendly look around every country. The last 7 years has necessarily been return visits to regions, landscapes and tribes already familiar from earlier trips. Heraclitus claimed that no man steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. In this sense, nations and tribes are akin to Heraclitus’s rivers - especially in our era of revolutionary transformation.

Village and regional Feudalism gives way, painfully, to a somewhat bewildering mix of economic and political systems: cronyism, socialism, communism, fascism, market capitalism, democracy, and related doctrines not so honestly named but functionally equivalent. My wandering has exposed me to a broad spectrum of human reality, from living in leaf huts with spear-and-net hunting pigmies in the Congo rain forest and Yakuti reindeer herders in the Russian arctic; to drinking sake and enjoying gooey octopus balls with Tokyo tech specialists. Many of these niches of human development fall into categories recognized by socio-economic experts, such as nascent artisanal mining communities. Others support cultures beneath their notice, such as squatters in the liminal spaces of decaying mega cities, surviving by drug dealing and scavenging. This has induced in me a taste for the quirkiness of raw reality as opposed to euphemism, politically expedient obfuscations and outright lies.

The saying goes, liars should have good memories. But, on a global scale, those who make the decisions and disproportionately benefit from the resulting doctrines can’t manage to keep their stories straight, over oceans and deserts, tundra and forests, fraught by dissension, suspicion and war. Comparative history and immersive experience unveil and embarrass these locally well-crafted fables and just-so-stories.

Hunter gatherers were stable for hundreds of millennia and largely egalitarian, so had scant need to come up with new doctrines every generation. And Feudalism was likewise fairly stable for millennia despite spiraling inequality, so baffling doctrines had time to settle in to work their magic. Nowadays, however, revolutions and the doctrines that justify them are ubiquitous; a process and a dream of a swifter sort, sprinting, mind-driven, ahead of our biology toward Progress with a capital P, seemingly as sure-footed as the apocryphal fish crawling out of the Devonian ocean to stride and lord it over the land.

Locally-crafted fables inveigle themselves just as insideously in Western minds, such that educated readers might wonder what there is left to observe in person on earth, and why bother. Isn’t it the case that the populace is better informed than ever and the arc of history bends toward justice? We’ve established, surely, that underdeveloped countries want to develop. So advisors and NGOs show up to assist. Sadly, progress is slow because of Western military adventures, and plundering of nature’s resources by devious multi-nationals who were complicit in colonialism that caused the poverty in the first place. Meanwhile aren’t desperate poor people thus apt to flee to the West for their own safety, although often blocked by the unenlightened politics of heartless deplorables?

Marvin Harris, an eminent anthropologist and author, argued that political and social doctrines are most often crafted in subtle support of elite’s prerogatives over those of the bulk of humanity. “Doctrines that prevent people from understanding the causes of their social existence have great social value.” And in opposition to these elitist doctrines he asserts, “We must regard the expansion of scientific objectivity into the domain of lifestyle riddles as a moral imperative. It’s the only thing that’s never been tried.”(1)

Makes me wonder; certainly easier said than done – revolutions in lifestyle and their explanations are neither straight nor tidy as jaunty diagrams of fish sprouting legs and sprinting up the smooth sand. In illustration and as a matter of fact, consider that ultimate chapter of the history of fish. Much of our initial assumptions need to be flipped over and re-examined after study by experts in the field. For instance, “It looks like hunting like a crocodile was the gateway drug to terrestriality,” neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver said. “Just as data comes before action, coming up on land was likely about how the huge gain in visual performance from poking eyes above the water to see an unexploited source of prey gradually selected for limbs.”(2)

Furthermore, a reactionary clad of lung-sporting fish already half-way terrestrial turned tail and slithered back to the open seas. They repurposed a lung as a swim bladder, and their descendants became the spectacularly successful 28 000 species of bony fishes. Even the primordial land lubber fish had its quirks. As it was the ancestor of all terrestrial vertebrates those quirks were bequeathed to us. For instance, a strange twisted optic nerve, where right-eye and left-eye serving nerves crisscross in front of the brain to connect to the opposite hemisphere – a relic from when this ancestor dabbled in a torque-eyed flounder-ish existence only to abandon the lifestyle. Their eyes ended up ratcheting all the way around instead of simply rewinding to their previous level stare. Revolutions are no simple marches into the daylight, and are usually positively aswirl with staggering countercurrents, eddies and riptides.

Without the shadow of a doubt, this latest industrial revolution is astoundingly powerful: mankind and his domesticated animals have overrun the planet, overpowered all beasts, and even harried the fish of the sea. If we consider anything chicken-sized or bigger, then our planet is now home to 300 million tons of humans, a further 700 million tons of our domesticated animals, and less than a hundred million tons of wild animals. We have taken over the earth. (3)

Non-western people struggle to understand what is happening to their world, and Westerners tender self-serving or even less helpful answers. Modern doctrines are unnatural and hard to grok, in a way that simple feudal farming with digging sticks and plows was not.

Anyway, what is the magic potion of development? What strange elixir takes a nation into the blessed future, or casts it back poisoned with weird visions, seeking solace in ancestral lifestyles?

There have been two world-shaking revolutions among the smaller changes and revolts so far in human history. First was when hunter gathering gave ground to farmers’ superior numbers, belligerence, and penchant for harbouring contact diseases. Even here the transition was convoluted and uneven. But hunter gathers lost out and only waves of livestock herders held their own or conquered these farmers, cyclically being absorbed as a ruling class into a mixed farming sedentary economy. Their big men became chiefs and then lords, kings, occasionally emperors. Human relations adopted the characteristics known as feudalism.

No scholar planned feudalism. Like other economic doctrines it arose organically, before being codified by any scholars, mostly driven by cultural evolution. It’s simply the characteristic type of stable hierarchy that arises when civilization passes the population density that allows chieftains. Of this we can be confident because feudal forms were generated planet wide. Even when agricultural civilizations developed in relative isolation, such as the Papuan highlands and Mesoamerica, they were feudal.

Feudalism is characterized by a kinship-based hierarchical command and control economy. A common feature is largesse: an expectation of open-handed redistribution by the chief, enacting a