The modern mind profoundly misunderstands our ancient ancestors. Take the mystery of ancient stone circles. One of the oldest is the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, probably a creation of the culture that later built Stonehenge. Most guidebooks assert that the 21 currently standing stones (8 of them re-erected between 1906 and 1908) are the remnants of a circle of 58 or 60 stones.
The trouble is, this common assertion just isn’t true. There is no sign that there were ever more than 40 standing stones in the Ring – the latest archaeology, using a range of techniques, cannot find evidence for more than 16 sockets for stones other than those still standing. The modern mind has extrapolated from the stones that remain and calculated how many there would be if there had once been a circle of that circumference made up of stones with similar gaps between them (and ignoring the fact that the gaps vary). But that wasn’t the point for the ancient mind. Our ancestors thought differently from us, sometimes in ways that are even odder to our modern eyes: some stones weren’t ever deeply planted in the ground and so may have fallen very quickly.
The point is that the Ring of Brodgar wasn’t a thing, it was a doing: for our ancestors it was the collective action that mattered, its creation, not so much the resulting thing. Brodgar was a community event that brought people together in a shared effort. The stones aren’t matching: they come from different spots around the islands (at least 7), presumably transported by different families the miles from their best quarry, and raised as part of a communal effort. The ditch around the stones was certainly dug in small patches that were then joined together, perhaps further evidence of the bonding process of each family doing its own portion of the work before they were brought together as a unified whole – overall a work requiring an estimated 80,000 person hours.
It’s like Peru’s ancient Nazca lines, about which modern people, flying over them in aeroplanes, puzzle as to the creation of images that can only be seen from above in this way. Most archaeologists now agree that the Nazca images were ceremonial paths, walked by people on special days or for particular reasons. They were not meant to be seen but to be experienced, perhaps to be made anew. The Nazca lines too were a doing, not a thing.
I keep coming back to these thoughts as I read a thoughtful and thought-provoking recent book, Don’t Talk About Politics. Author Sarah Stein Lubrano notes that we fail to persuade each other on politics and are wasting time and energy in talking at – and past – people with whom we disagree. Her core point is that politics is a doing, it is something that we need to participate in rather than see as separate to us, as something about which we can debate while remaining dispassionate observers: “To think effectively about politics…is not only to think about action; it is also, by necessity, to take action. Good political reasoning cannot happen simply by reading and debating.”
She goes on:
“When it comes to politics, we’ve probably placed too much societal emphasis on words and too little on action. Many people would say that democracy is about whether people can make up their own minds and then vote. But this is, in fact, a fairly passive idea of political involvement…our collective common sense of what politics is has, I’d suggest, become hollowed out. It involves too little of what truly changes people, their priorities and their actions.”
Stein Lubrano’s focus is politics, but society too is a doing, and so is the economy. We need to be active participants in both, and dangers lie where many members of a population are not. And at present, too many people do not feel like active participants in either the society or the economy.
This thought process echoed for me across a recent discussion co-hosted by my friends at the Fairness Foundation. They’ll write more fully and directly on what was a discussion under the Chatham House rule, so I will stick with my reflections. The core of the conversation centred on the issues I touched on in An Inequality in Dignity, or the Dignity Deficit; one participant talked about there being a ‘crisis of belonging’ that we all need to seek to address actively.
We discussed the way in which many people currently feel profoundly uninvolved in the economy. It isn’t just that they own little and lack a stake in the economy; more, they feel that the economy is something that occurs elsewhere in which they are not engaged. They lack both belongings and belonging. The unfairness embedded in the current economy, where so many are have-nots, is profoundly alienating and destructive of human dignity. Similarly, a dignity deficit arises because people do not feel they have a place in society, that their voices are not heard and will not be heard, that they have no agency. They withdraw into fury and anger because they feel that they no longer have a place in which they are welcomed as belonging.
This is true in the economy and in society more broadly, and the tensions and disconnects it fuels are plain to be seen. Stein Lubrano devotes a whole chapter to the psychological side of these sentiments. She refers to it as social atrophy, a sense that everyone is becoming isolated, detaching themselves from society and community. She notes the disastrous consequences that arise. As she points out, this is a much more fundamental risk than the way it is usually discussed, as an individual crisis of loneliness; it is a broader communal fracturing. “We may…distrust society more not only because it no longer provides everyone with what they need, but also because, as we become more isolated, the suspicious and paranoia-inducing structures in our brains become more and more activated,” she argues.
If we are to address the dignity deficit, the crisis of belonging, we need to involve people, we need for them to feel that society and the economy (and yes, politics too) is something in which they have a role to play, that these are not just issues that happen elsewhere between other people, but rather that they can act and be engaged. That will require more physical venues for people to meet face to face, for society physically to thrive. It will require a democratisation of finance, so that ordinary people understand that they do literally have a stake in the economy and are economic actors in their own right – an understanding that their pension savings make them part-owners of assets and of companies around the world. This needs to be understood as giving them agency, the scope to be involved and to act, not simply to be onlookers at activity involving others.
It turns out that our ancestors were right: society is a doing, it isn’t about things. We need to get out of the trap of the modern mind, that emphasises the thing rather than the doing. We need less emphasis on belongings and more on belonging.
See also: An Inequality in Dignity, or the Dignity Deficit
Bowling together
The pursuit of happiness
Not all in this together
I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour
Landscapes Revealed: Geophysical survey in the heart of the Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Area 2002-2011, Amanda Brend, Nick Card, Jane Downes, Mark Edmonds, James Moore, Oxbow, 2020
Building the Great Stone Circles of the North, Colin Richards (ed), Windgather, 2013
Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st Century Minds, Sarah Stein Lubrano, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2025
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