Posted by:
Brother Of Jerry
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Date: November 06, 2021 08:53PM
I somehow missed this thread the first time around, but caught the resurrection a couple days ago. I read the Atlantic article, and yesterday there was a nearly identical article in the NYTimes. I then realized what was up. A new book had been published, and the marketing department had done a bang-up job of getting press coverage.
Anytime I hear the previous work of others described as "completely wrong", my BS detector goes on High Alert. That is almost always a tipoff of a case of "the narcissism of small differences".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differencesI haven't read the book, but the articles paint a cartoon version of the other books of Big History (history of the entire sweep of human existence). Rousseau may have been guilty of romanticizing the pre-civilization peoples as living in some sort of idyllic state, because that was a thing in the early Enlightenment. I don't think it is fair to lay that claim on the contemporary authors.
The other authors certainly never claimed there was not war and territorial disputes prior to the development of agriculture. The Neaderthals didn't go extinct because they were too busy playing video games to procreate,
I gather that the authors of "Dawn of Everything" are making the point that hierarchies of ruler and ruled were not the only sorts of government organization that existed as civilization (living in cities) took root. Fair enough. There may have been alternate societies. So they should make that case. The existence of an alternative does not mean everyone else was "completely wrong" (the phrase in both the OP and in the Atlantic article). At worst, they were missing an important part of the overall picture.
I think a more fascinating example was what happened with the massive natural anthropological experiment that happened when human from central-eastern Asia migrated to the Americas, then got separated from all contact with Eurasia when the sea level rose and submerged the land bridge.
That happened long before the development of agriculture, which only became possible when the climate stabilized as the most recent Ice Age ended.
So we had two groups of humans independently developing civilizations, and the astonishing thing is not that they developed vastly different civilizations, but how similar they were.
When Cortez invaded the Aztec capital, the Spanish had no particular trouble understanding the basic Aztec organization.
Both societies survived on agriculture, as did the Incas, so it is reasonable to assume that any group of humans, given the right climate, would manage to find a staple crop and develop agriculture. BTW, for the most part, the initial staple crops of early civilization are still our staple crops today, they have just spread to much wider parts of the world. It's not like any old plant can become a staple crop.
They had language of course, but they had also developed writing, though the Europeans were a couple thousand years ahead on the sophistication of their writing systems, but still, it did develop.
The Aztecs had a king, vassal states, a warrior class, a priestly class, religion, a judicial and penal system which often involved killing, but the Spaniards certainly understood that, though both civilizations thought the other group's reasons for killing were kind of weird.
Both groups had what we now call land use zoning. Both had professional athletes and spectator sports. They had counting systems, accounting, and calendars. In fact, their calendar was better than ours, and I have wondered if that discovery had any influence on Pope Gregory finally fixing up the Julian calendar 50 years after the invasion of Mexico. Something put a burr under his saddle. [Actually I think the Protestant Reformation scared the Catholics and got them to start running a tighter ship, and fixing that calendar problem they had known about for centuries]
What the Aztecs didn't have was domesticated animals, and as Jared Diamond pointed out, guns, germs and steel. Actually, the Eurasians got most of their serious germs from their domesticated animals, so those two are linked. It turns out the Americas drew the short straw when it came to getting any animals that could be domesticated. Llamas were sort of domesticable, and that was about it, other than dogs, which were too small for heavy labor.
But I digress. Even with completely independent development, the Eurasian and western hemisphere civilizations developed in surprising similar ways.
So Diamond, Harari, et al were not completely wrong. But books gotta be sold, so let's attack the elites and grab a few eyeballs.