'The Dawn of Everything' by Graeber & Wengrow
The Dawn of Everything
Finally got to the top of the pile and instantly overwhelmed my resistance, like just about all of my non-fiction reading for some years (apart from the guilty pleasures of Damien Lewis and Max Hastings).
Even if its sources, like Lohantan, and conclusions were works of fiction, it's all true, like all good fiction, good drama.
But part of my but remains (although it's no crock). Like Kamala Harris; she's right, she's true. But how do we row back 5,000 years? How do we take civilization forward, carrying the overwhelming majority of the helplessly unenlightened self-interested? In our helpless privilege? More than slightly tinged with liberal hypocrisy? Is an occasional Sir Keir, Jo Biden, please God Kamala Harris the best we can hope for? A slight brake on 'civilization'?
Or can the dawn only remotely possibly come after an at (remote) best case (remote) collapse like
Finally got to the top of the pile and instantly overwhelmed my resistance, like just about all of my non-fiction reading for some years (apart from the guilty pleasures of Damien Lewis and Max Hastings).
Even if its sources, like Lohantan, and conclusions were works of fiction, it's all true, like all good fiction, good drama.
But part of my but remains (although it's no crock). Like Kamala Harris; she's right, she's true. But how do we row back 5,000 years? How do we take civilization forward, carrying the overwhelming majority of the helplessly unenlightened self-interested? In our helpless privilege? More than slightly tinged with liberal hypocrisy? Is an occasional Sir Keir, Jo Biden, please God Kamala Harris the best we can hope for? A slight brake on 'civilization'?
Or can the dawn only remotely possibly come after an at (remote) best case (remote) collapse like
Robert Harris' The Second Sleep
(and in that there is no dawn).
Comments
For instance; a lot of anthropological work has indicated that more egalitarian arrangements in primitive societies seem to correlate with immediate-return hunter-gatherer strategies being viable. So it's not always a case of 'we could just as easily make things differently'.
Still, without specifics, one of the things I think is valuable about TDoE is the emphasis on -- in comparison to an individual lifetime -- the vast periods of time over which human
societies/cultures have developed, and been morphing. We talk about the roots of the Enlightenment in the Middle Ages as a turning point in human history. That's a mere 500 years ago!
Rowing back isn't possible, and controlling the movement isn't either. "We" might be able to influence a bit now in our tiny spheres. But like evolution, geology, cosmology, the process goes where it goes, if it goes on its own.
Welcome back, @Martin54, and thanks for starting this thread.
Delighted to see the interest @Caissa & @The_Riv. And @Kendel, you out-real me!
What more essential reading is there please?
Hailing @MaryLouise! Hailing @MaryLouise!
And yes @Doublethink, from @stetson here, then your (monosyllabic) comment followed by mine, I see nothing but reinforcement of the fact that institutionalized social injustice, aka civilization according to the so civilized, starts with land grabbing.
Something else?
Correct revisionism of history, from that of the winners, including in academia. Like John Newsinger's The Blood Never Dried.
There is no civilizational "forward" or "backward", there's just change. All you're saying here is "how can we change civilization the way I want it to change?"
I'm no Whig! Civilization is backward. We lost freedom and equality in return for class based public health. Democracy perpetuates that, let alone all other worse forms of government.
There's a difference between the observation of development progression and have a up-front teleological view.
Not true. Some change is objectively good. The idea that every person should have the same civil rights, however imperfectly implemented it may be, is a big step forward.
We can't even do as well.
Hmmmm. He vituperated his enemies. Which is where Richard Dawkins comes unstuck. It doesn't work.
I need some help grasping your point.
Blame, insult, strong or violent language are not allowed in a rowed back society? Enemies do not exist? This is beyond the scope of the societies that Graeber & Wengrow describe.
What is it that we need to do better than Jesus?
Sorry, I know little to nothing of Dawkins, really. I'll need a hand here.
What doesn't work?
Who are "we"?
Yet Graeber and Wengrow spill a good deal of ink contering this claim.
@Martin54, yes, I mentioned David Graeber some months back in a thread I'll never find again. Although Graeber was best known as an anarchic thinker for his work with the Occupy movement in the United States and his book Debt: The First 5 000 Years, he is known in my corner of the world for his ethnographic studies in Madagascar on the roles played by ritual and suppressed histories of slavery (Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar ), Graeber's last book, provocative as ever, returned to the Indian Ocean for Pirate Enlightenment looking at the attacks on slave trader shipping by small groups of local 'pirates' trying to set up anarchic utopias on lonely islands.
His co-author David Wengrow completed Dawn of Everything after Graeber's death and it goes back to the notion of inequality (why do some groups always have more wealth and power than other groups?) explored first in Debt. As I understand the book (I read it a while back), a core issue is unlearning the standard Eurocentric monolithic history of what happened when societies began to move from hunting and gathering practices to established agriculture, and looking anew at the differences found in overlooked indigenous communities around the world.
@Kendel,
Well, he wasn't as bad as his cousin ('You brood of vipers!', 'You basket of deplorables!'...). He confronted, shamed his opponents and gave them no way out, no way ahead, no honour, ... no love. He didn't embrace them, in their weakness, fear and ignorance, and take them with him. He didn't actually lead the Trumpians to water. Nobody does. His excuse was that he had the doomed Messianic, saviour complex agenda. What's ours?
Yeah we can blame, insult, and use strong or violent language to our enemies (Enemies? What enemies?), as long as that's rhetoric bracketed by loving them. Not forcing them to double down. And yes, we must stand by those they are about to stone regardless.
We, just about all of us liberal, 'enlightened', minority folk are crap at it. Captain Mbaye Diagne spectacularly excepted. And Dr. King of course. And a certain M. K. Gandhi. And St. Francis of Assisi.
Richard Dawkins can only speak to, for his followers. He alienates even nice liberal Christians, who react against his 'theology'.
You and @chrisstiles actually overlap.
They don't really. While Chapter 4 of Dawn of Everything is a lot better than "Farewell to the 'Childhood of Man'" in this regard, they basically summarise Woodburn's argument only to throw it away with a reference to Star Trek replicators (because Graeber is allergic to materialist explanations).
@Martin54, we seem to be reading an entirely different book, although I am only about 1/4 done. There are plenty of enemies mentioned in TDoE
Or maybe you are challenging some of G&W's ideas. What you describe sounds like what I understand from you to be a Rogerian, therapeutic sort of society. I don't know id there is a way for some such society to exist.
The good Captain and the good Reverand had enemies for certain, and they knew how to wield diplomacy as a tool of persuasion as well as a tool of survival. At least for a while. Until that didn't work. But I don't think they would fit the Rogerian mold I think I see you suggesting.
Perhaps of interest, a few reviews of the book.
The links from subscriptions like "The Atlantic" have limited numbers of accesses.
Please use your own subscription, if you have one. If you want access, and the link no longer works, please, PM me, and I will try to get you a new gift link, although each subscription has limits on shares.
From "The Atlantic": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/?gift=Nj2ilHyDVOlj2nRNLahe1OVbD2iM6fRW-i7FYYItQro&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
"The Washington Post"
https://wapo.st/3LK8XdX
"The New York Times"
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/31/arts/dawn-of-everything-graeber-wengrow.html?unlocked_article_code=1.900.ok13.phSwIfkWFstP&smid=url-share
Graeber & Wengrow indicate that such optimism would have been well founded at least since the last ice age?
@Martin54, you may need to spend more time in the throne room. On the throne. Reading.
You have caused me no confusion.
There are plenty of references to violence, humiliation, coercion, enemies...but to your point...we -- nearly every human alive today probably -- need to treat others as worthy of respect and consideration, with genuine grace, patience. Even people who are making decisions that are disasterous and dangerous.
If the method appeals to you, maybe reference specifics from the book that you find valuable as you go, and we can hash them over as a group. I am really enjoying the book and the unconventional questions its authors asked -- and the amount of research they have pulled together.
What has impressed you so far?
Sorry, I must pull against my own inclinations. I am looking at the wrong things.
You are looking for civilized civilization, I think. A humane way to be, humane societies that comprise a humane world. Something worth hoping for -- real social justice that is universal.
A way of being that does not lead to an endless post-apocalyptic millennium.
What do you think about your questions: rowing back 5000 years, taking civilization forward?
How is such an massive project undertaken? Humanely? Without the tactics, for example, of the Cultural Revolution, which certainly achieved the utopia vision that outweighed the cost in terror and blood.
If you really do want a list on essential, correctly revised history, I would be happy to start looking for authors and titles for you. But I recommend you enlist others as well. It's worth it. You won't get the same answer, even if there is some overlap.
I'm sorry to show no compunction about lining up my own posts in a thread. G&W say early in the book that "Human thought is inherently dialogic." I obviously talk to myself and answer back. Sorry to clog up the thread with so much of my interior dialog.
I loved Dawn's point about dialogue. Julian Jaynes came to mind... I loved Dawkins' comment of course. Explains why I talk to myself so much. Journaled from an early age. Engage badly here.
And I impute no confusion to you, except with regard to my own! (Although I don't feel confused; there is much in flux here). And I'm being naive, how we, you, progressive Americans respond to Trump redux on steroids, in passive resistance without civil war, over immigration, I cannot imagine.
Occasional progressive governments cannot undo the damage, the five millennia of institutionalized injustice, of conservative ones. Because none reform land. Perhaps population decline can help?
There's a bit more in chapters 4 and 5 (I'm only in the middle of 5 I think) than the quip about replicators. Including discussions of deliberate choices to change how groups acquire food as well as material possessions.
Yes, but that's a entirely different argument, they throw away the correlation because it doesn't fit their argument and then use a subset of the groups Woodburn wrote about (and a number of groups that he didn't) to revisit 'what is equality anyway' and then make an argument about religious rituals giving rise to private property.
G&W. TDoE, pp. 205-206
While I think societies do have and make choices, what is the mechanism, and who guides or controls it? And how?
Must we rely on a crisis event that forces a choice? Must we first commit unpardonable sins, seeing the destruction first hand, in order to recognize what we've done? Or can we really change our own history, proactively within the current conditions?
Early in the book - and then again throughout it - G&W refer to brilliant and pursuasive people like Kandiaronk, whom they credit with the Enlightonment's most formative questions. In spite of the possible effects of Kandiaronk's pursuasion on the Enlightenment, his people, and all other indigenous peoples of North America were, or nearly were, wiped out. The remaining few were deported en masse to "reservations".
How to prevent evil? How to do it fast?
The 'civilized' way is to harden your infrastructure, including social. So when the rains come, or not, because of your warming of the globe, you won't drown, be buried alive
Much like hardening hearts.
Superb. We can't roll back 5,000 years and address climate injustice in that direction. We can't roll it forward to Kandiaronk's seasonal benevolent anarchy either. Yet. To Ian M. Banks post-scarcity Culture. To Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, where we run naked through the unownable woods of game and get medevaced out when we get gored. But we can pursue the third way, as a realistic compromise, despised by left (including my absurd geoist idealism) and right.
We can invest, and level up our greatest market, the poor. China's done it spectacularly. Bangladesh is doing it. The World Bank raves over its success...
Something tells me that with at least another foot to go this century, for a start, we'll be investing for centuries...
I'm looking within for a shred of cockeyed optimism, that that the storm clouds have a silver lining. That despite our majority civilization hardened hearts, we'll move in a utilitarian direction.
Me, too.
Your third way sounds a lot like Michigan in the late '70s - before Reagan.
A boring, moderate governor, cooperation, well-funded, vibrant schools and universities, jobs.
Do you see any kind of movement whose values you share, whose goals seem more achievable than others? Is there something going in the right direction that you can aid with whatever it is you have to give?
I was thinking more about this Saturday at the library. In the U.S. there actually is a longish tradition of "revisionist" history that has often been limited to places like African-American Studies, Chicano/Hispanic Studies, Women's Studies, Asian-American Studies, Native-American/First Nations/Indigenous-American Studies programs starting in the late 1970s. Before those programs could get any traction in the most liberal universities and colleges, the books were sometimes only available a tiny, specialized bookstores like Vaughn's in Detroit, until it was destroyed by whites in the 1967 race riot. I have no idea about this kind of work outside the U.S.
I wonder, if there's anyone who could help with reading suggestions for non-fiction works outside the U.S.
I did check your local public library's catalogue, and there seems to be some promising items there. Also, is there a radical bookstore in your city? It's hard to imagine it NOT having one. Or something at least seriously independently minded.
Also the Uni named after your city also allows access to the public. You can get a library card there. There is an application on their website. Certainly worth checking their collection.
You might consider looking into not only updated history, but histories of movements you value -- anti-colonial, civil rights, the like.
Reading more on the Third Wave this morning, this book came to mind. A major focus of it is on the long term and multifaceted value of spending liberally on a wide variety of infrastructures:
https://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Economics-Hamilton-Approach-Economic/dp/1422189813
I do think reparations need to be part of the picture -- at least here in the US -- but what the structure of that looks like, I don't know. And that is where we could remain stuck forever.
EW&F sang:
Americans (like me) have found an effective way to prevent dealing with real solutions by maintaining federal gridlock. Stuck on paperwork solutions at best. We can maintain the status quo (winners and losers) and blame the other side.
To which social or political movement can each of us add our meager (in comparison to the need) "momentum"? Who's going in the right direction already, working with allies who add to the momentum, and in ways that reflect our values and pragmatic virtues?
What does the cock-eyed optimist say?
Ooooh. Chapters 7 and 8 are really neat.
I need to keep plowing.
Not even Battlefield Earth or Atlas Shrugged.
That archaeology is bunk.