Bruce Pascoe’s new book dares us to decolonise our minds – but moralising trumps nuance

Bruce Pascoe is a theorist of human civilisation, drawing on history and ecology to point the way for the human species to survive. The University of Melbourne has recognised his work by appointing him an honorary (enterprise professor) in its School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences. He also farms.

Review: The European Mind: Colonialism, Capitalism, Christianity and how to recover – Bruce Pascoe (Magabala Books)

In his new book, The European Mind, Pascoe argues there is more than one way for humans to get food from working the land. For the sake of our species’ survival, we should recalculate the cost of the practices typical of contemporary, industrialised agriculture.

His phrase “the European mind” refers to all the ideas that stop us from making the changes we must make. The book is thus a sequel, of world-historical scope, to his investigation of Australia’s agricultural history in Dark Emu (2014).

Pascoe as redemptive historian

Like Dark Emu, this sequel is a highly moralised and political history. The primary argument of Dark Emu was that Aboriginal Australians once practised a kind of agriculture. This thesis could have been no more than an esoteric contribution to archaeology, but for Pascoe, an account of the past is also an opportunity to charter our future in explicitly moral terms. By attaching two secondary arguments to his Aboriginal agriculture thesis, Pascoe gave a contemporary political edge (and evident reader appeal) to his portrayal of Aboriginal civilisation.

One argument was that Australians have been denied knowledge that Aboriginal people were skilled practitioners of a kind of agriculture. From the beginning of colonisation, he asserted, there arose an intellectual tradition of seeing Aboriginal people as ignorant, opportunistic wanderers. (“It was wise [of the colonists] to destroy any evidence that suggests organised production”, he remarks in The European Mind.) This obfuscation has made it easier for us, as colonists, to assume ownership over Indigenous lands, he argued.

Dark Emu’s other secondary argument was that although Australians have supposed their own use of natural resources to be superior to Indigenous Australians’, our exploitation of nature since 1788 has been ruinous. Revaluing Indigenous Australia’s food-getting regimes, Pascoe enjoined our better care for Mother Earth.

Dark Emu positioned its author as the postcolonial sage Australians require if we are “to decolonise our minds” and save the Earth (and not least our continent) for further use.

Pascoe’s quest for national renovation continues in The European Mind. He hopes that

understanding the European state of mind will help colonising people understand, and love, their new home and develop responsibility which, naturally, leads to care and, most importantly, belonging.

The argument

The European Mind is not a work of intellectual history. Rather, it is about how we assure a food supply. Pascoe quotes extensively from historians and anthropologists who have studied the ways different systems of food production meet physical and cosmological needs.

In 21 rather repetitive essays, he reiterates his key assertions about the history and current contents of “the European mind” that has done so much to shape humanity’s food quest. The central event of human history was agricultural intensification, he writes.

However, Europeans have behaved as if ploughing was essential to agricultural productivity. Colonial powers have imposed their plough-centred, chemically boosted agriculture on peoples who were using their land in different ways. The plough was not essential, he argues. The intensification of agriculture “looked different in different botanical and geographic zones”.

As “the European mind” believes “in the centrality of capitalism to our human nature”, colonial authority has tethered such transformed lands/people to global capitalism. It has also concentrated people in cities. In effecting these changes, he suggests, “the European mind” has assumed its superiority over the cultural systems it has destroyed and displaced, promoting ideas of individualism and “freedom”.

Christianity has also played its part. In the “Christian version of creation”, there is no “bond between people, nature and animals”. Pascoe was raised in a Christian household. “I grew up with the Christian tracts of the wild beast being tamed by the innocent child.”

His corrective “cultural education” included visiting “the sites of stories, some of which stretch across and beyond the Australian continent.” It would be interesting to know what some of these sites were, but Pascoe gives us very little autobiographical detail.

He is not “anti-faith”. But he questions what has been done in the name of the monotheist faiths that command “individuals and the Earth” to serve God and be “procreative” (for example, eschew contraception and proliferate).

One path to “a better relationship with Earth”, he writes, would be to change accounting practices: calculating “the cost of eliminating the harm caused by production, or the reclamation of its waste”. This “resource management assurance” would be paid by land-users (he does not say which ones) to the government as the agent of Mother Earth and of the nation that owns these resources.

Pascoe’s voice

Pascoe’s voice is that of a spiritual counsellor and tutor in a revised patriotism, and in The European Mind his tone is often denunciatory. For example, he writes:

It is not just the violence and cheating of the colonial impulse, it is the devilry of the thought and planning that goes into it, the bald-faced treachery.

And without naming them he refers to

Australian missions and towns where white authorities make sure the inhabitants know the masters think they are zookeepers looking after a dying race.

He gives at least one admired author martyr status: historian Henry Reynolds. Though he has “withstood unrelenting invective”, Reynolds will one day “be revered as a custodian of decency”.

Pascoe is fond of homely metaphor. “If our spiritual energy was invested in Earth,” he writes, “we would not leave the broken tractor dripping oil and brake fluid onto the buttercups.”

And he plumbs the national psyche. Fire-ant colonies will be reassured to know that

Australia does not comprehend the economic need to suppress invasive species because, consciously or unconsciously, we identify with the invader.

At the same time, we “rebel” against “sharks, spiders, snakes, droughts, blacks” and “there is probably no country on Earth where the environment or environmentalist is more reviled”.

His agrarian faith is dismissive of much of modernity, labelling “banking, insurance, consultancy, advertising and law” as “largely unproductive”.

Pascoe and science

To make his critique of “the European mind”, Pascoe has furnished his own mind with authors who think with time depth and geographical breadth about the problems of humanity. His quotations from big-thinking authors such as Yuval Harari (Sapiens), David Graeber and David Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything) and Charles Massy (Call of the Reed Warbler) enable readers to imagine and to respect, what Pascoe refers to as, the many “experiments in human social organisation”.

He praises “modern science and new analytical techniques” for “providing irrefutable evidence of earlier methods of food production systems around the world”.

However, his relationship with the discipline – archaeology – on which Dark Emu and The European Mind draw heavily seems to me to be ambiguous. There was much archaeology in Dark Emu. Interestingly the two most effective critics of that book were an anthropologist/linguist (Peter Sutton) and an archaeologist (Keryn Walshe).

For Pascoe, to engage with archaeology is to choose a side. He makes several approving references to Paulette Steeves’ 2021 book The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere, which proposes an older date for the peopling of the Western Hemisphere (North and South America) than has been accepted by most archaeologists – prior to the Last Glacial Maximum and perhaps as far back as 100,000 years.

Pascoe praises Steeves’ indictment of American archaeologists whose “deliberately crafted misconceptions” (his words) have made them sceptical of her thesis. The “colonial grip on the accepted truths of archaeology”, he writes, is “hampering the explanation of Indigenous peoples’ histories”.

One project in Australian archaeology to which Pascoe refers several times is the investigation of a hearth site at Point Ritchie in western Victoria. Evidence found there has raised, in some minds, the possibility that human occupation of Australia began 120,000 years ago.

Conceding that this dating is “contentious” and that local Aboriginal people are not invested in it being proven, Pascoe nonetheless makes several appeals to the reader to commit to it. For example, he cajoles the reader: only a “curmudgeon” would be content to think human occupation of Australia is a mere 65,000 years old.

In this book, Pascoe warns that “science is being undermined around the world by political charlatans”. He does not give examples of these charlatans but he does warn that, “Scientists extol the scientific method, but when results contest the existing accepted wisdom, Europe and her colonies can’t accept them.”

His approach to decolonising our minds dares us NOT to commit to contestable claims about human antiquity. Positioning himself as our decolonial champion in such rhetorical flights, The European Mind shows us Pascoe becoming a victim of his own celebrity.