A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization. Strangely enough, though, this is often seen as a reactionary move. ‘So are you saying true equality has never been achieved? That it’s therefore impossible?’ It seems to us that such objections are both counterproductive and frankly unrealistic.
