As part of recovery, some RfMers have enjoyed the big books of human history, books by Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, and Steven Pinker. It’s time for an intellectual correction.

I’ve dipped into these big books, always beginning with the bibliographies, and I always come out of it intensely unsatisfied. Nice, orderly prose sure enough, but these books are always too reductionist, too deterministic and too tendentious, and overall don’t overcome being too ostentatious.

This Christmas treat yourself to another way of looking at it. The late David Graeber and David Wengrow have written a big book of correction, *The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity*:

>>>*Dawn of Everything* is written against the conventional account of human social history as first developed by Hobbes and Rousseau…accepted more or less universally. The story goes like this. Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men.

Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).

It is also, according to Graeber and Wengrow, completely wrong.<<<

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/

If you’re not familiar with David Graeber, here’s his bio and a sampling of essays from The Baffler:

https://davidgraeber.org

https://thebaffler.com/authors/david-graeber

The book:

https://bookshop.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity/9780374157357

Human



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2021 02:06PM by Concrete Zipper.

“How Finding the Truth Helped Me Pick out My New Pajamas” by Brendan Awkdoodle Le’el.

This is not meant to imply that I believe my offering surpasses that of Bro. Human, rather it is simply by way of noting that options often exist.

My personal favorite:The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2021 02:02PM by Concrete Zipper.

I'm very slowly reading this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Hunter-Gatherer-Childhoods-Evolutionary-Developmental-Perspectives/dp/0202307492

So far the one thing that has really stuck with me is a difference between the foragers and the marginally agricultural people they live in close proximity to.

The foragers much less often have a mother leave her young children to the care of others (siblings, grandparents, others in the group) whereas the agricultural people do often.

I was raised in a sibling soup.

To me this is telling. I think more egalitarian societies probably have large swaths of individuals bolstered by strong mother to child bonds whereas in other societies this may be much less.

Just a thought.

There is no simply reasons for things in my opinion. I do think that there are "freakeconomics" types of things that probably played into humans progressing to where I am today - typing on the internet my thoughts to almost complete strangers.

Interesting book and observation, Elder Berry.


> I do think that there are
> "freakeconomics" types of things that probably
> played into humans progressing to where I am today
> - typing on the internet my thoughts to almost
> complete strangers.

I’m not so certain that is “progress”, or “better” for us as individuals or as a species, but it is where we are now.


The idea of the book I posted seems to be that humans are far more creative and free than the prevailing narratives give us credit for, and therefore things can be otherwise than they are. It’s a more hopeful picture, and I’m expecting a lot of evidence and argument showing it to be a more accurate picture.

Cheers

First definition.

prog·ress
verb
gerund or present participle: progressing
/prəˈɡres/

move forward or onward in space or time.

advance or develop toward a better, more complete, or more modern state.

Yes, precisely.

And?

I think you read into what I wrote in the following.

"I’m not so certain that is “progress”, or “better” for us as individuals or as a species, but it is where we are now."

Just clarifying for you.

Another review out of the UK is more savage:

“In a book that is already being championed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Noam Chomsky and the like, David Graeber and David Wengrow take their neolithic axes to this mythology and leave a field of distinguished corpses. Harari is one, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who argued that these prehistoric bands had an upper limit of 150 members, is another. The world-famous psychologist Steven Pinker is left for dead because of his belief in the ascendancy of contemporary reason and what he sees as the comparatively recent rise of civilisation. “What follows,” the authors say, “is, to put it bluntly, a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along.” Even gentle Jared Diamond, he of Guns, Germs and Steel fame, is given a going over for his rather depressing assessment of early human society.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity-by-david-graever-and-david-wengrow-review-how-sapiens-got-it-wrong-mncclwr0g

I must say that anyone who had the ability to read evolutionary sociology or evolutionary psychology with a critical eye could see through the nonsense of these authors without the need of a 700 page book. Yet, of course, such a book is welcome. (Although I have not read it, and thus cannot comment on it directly.)

The authors noted and refuted are just a few of hundreds of authors in the social sciences desperate to establish objectivity and scientific respectability, and finding their way to "evolution" as their panacea for social "evolutionary development." Here are two interesting quotes from the 70s addressing this issue:

First a quote from sociologist Pierre van den Berghe criticizing traditional sociology and insisting that they turn to biology for credibility:

"The era of cultural determinism in social science left a stinging intellectual legacy. During the last half century, biology has made enormous strides while the social sciences have remained largely stagnant. They [social scientists] manipulate great masses of dubious data but make few findings; they use a lot of jargon but their so-called concepts and theories are largely reiterations of old ideas, pretentious platitudes, or, worse yet, pompous nonsense. . . Their textbooks are tiresome commentaries on the gospels according to "Saints" Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Pareto and on the epistles of "Saints" Parsons and Lévi-Strauss. During their half century of lofty isolation from the natural sciences, the social sciences have become, in short, a scholastic tradition rather than an evolving scientific discipline."

"Some social scientists have given up the pretense of doing science and claim affiliation with the humanities. They should be free to pursue their worthy calling unhindered. Here, however, I shall address the majority of social scientists who continue to claim affiliation with the scientific community, and I shall suggest to them that unless their disciplines return to their biological roots their claims to scientific status are going to become increasingly tenuous. More specifically, I shall suggest that the paradigm of sociobiology, while still very much in the formative stage, is the more promising."

Now, here is the reaction of Sherwood L. Washburn, the evolutionary anthropologist:

"As I read anthropology, I see a long history of biology confusing and retarding the development of the social sciences. Nineteenth-century evolutionism, orthogenesis, reductionism, biological analogies, homeostasis, racism, IQism, eugenics, and the ever present confusion of genetic and environmental causes -- all have been major liabilities to social science. History cannot be changed, but a strong case can be made that the founders of social science would have been far better off if they had never heard of biology or evolution. But at the same time that biology was a liability to the social sciences major progress was being made in the biological understanding of human behaviors."

Anyway, you can see that this debate has roots. Of course, traditional sociology, relying on "social facts" for its sources, was also dismissive of the individual human will and related contingencies because they thought such things were unscientific. So, this book is particularly welcome in this regard.

Thanks for this post.

Thanks, Bemis. Excellent juxtaposition with the two quotes.


I for one, at first, did not have a critical enough eye to see through the prevailing narrative. For me it took time and experience.

I marvel at anybody that can hold to the same positions, scientific, religious or political, throughout a lifetime. I think that is technically called retarded.

"If your mental process was the same as mine, you'd understand my point of view. But the reverse is probably a certainty: if my mental process was the same as yours, I'd not only understand your point of view but would already have adopted it."

--Brendan Awkdoodle Le’el

Another review:

https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/emily-m-kern-radical-promise-human-history

Snippet:

“The Dawn of Everything is also an outlier on another front. We have long moved on from the era where the accepted convention was to refer to “Paleolithic Man” as a universal-neutral term, but, as Alison Bashford pointed out in an essay in 2018, many people writing about the evolutionary history of the species continue to leave women out. In The Dawn of Everything, by contrast, gendered analysis runs throughout the entire book. As Graeber and Wengrow write, ‘women, their work, their concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate understanding of civilization.’”

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_differences

I 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.

I didn't engage with this thread until now because the introductory material is patently absurd. The reportage acts as if Hobbes did not describe the evolution of the state, Finer did not do the same for government in his tripartite opus, and Wittfogel did not describe the development of early societies before, during, and after the flood-based origins of agriculture. Graeber and Wengrow may have changed the emphasis at various points, but they are not breaking new ground.

Moreover some of the coverage is just silly. You cannot, in the first place, put Rousseau and Hobbes in the same category because their views were diametrically opposed. While Rousseau posited a noble savage who existed cooperatively with his neighbor, Hobbes spoke of a horribly competitive and sanguinary pre-agricultural civilization. The "Hobbesian state of nature" had nothing in common with the other philosopher's optimistic if erroneous vision.

In the second place, while Sapiens is a superficial and silly book, Pinker is better and The Dawn of Everything does not discredit any of Diamond's main theses. BoJ is correct in remarking on the more or less contemporaneous emergence of agriculture--in fact, I think he understates the point--but Diamond's argument about the agricultural revolution and the emergence of regional powers is that the extent of the gains from domestication depend critically on the initial set of crops and animals available to each society. Since the Near East had the largest number of candidate species, it benefited the most from the new technologies.

Putting that aside, where I think BoJ understates his argument is in failing to underscore the plurality of agricultural revolutions. Farming appeared earliest in the most promising region but then with some delay originated independently in two parts of China, the Indus River Valley, and one and probably two different parts of the Americas. What this means is that the end of the ice age set in motion dynamics that produced agriculture and the development of more sophisticated societies in places with the requisite preconditions all around the world.

The same thing may be true of the emergence of life universally. What had to happen for life to develop on earth was the existence of a fortunate combination of locational and chemical traits whose interactions were set in motion when the universe cooled to a point where the necessary reactions began naturally to occur. There must be countless worlds in the universe that had comparable portfolios of characteristics at roughly the same temporal remove from the Big Bang, and it would be foolish to say that the chemical process of life only happened once. In fact, logic dictates that life would inexorably appear in many places.

So why haven't humans encountered any of those other life forms? Well, perhaps we have. But if we haven't, it could be because none of the various cultures (in both senses of the word) have had sufficient time to achieve vastly better technologies than more backward groups elsewhere in the universe. Maybe humans on earth are one of the more advanced organic civilizations--a prospect that is disturbing to say the least--and none have managed to achieve interstellar capacities sufficient to permit visits to earth.

In short, maybe people are thinking about life, economics, and technologies in the wrong way. Maybe these things are baked into the chemical fabric of the universe and only change on the margins due to, if they exist, free will and other idiosyncratic factors.

For those who might not know who David Graeber is, from the New York Intelligencer:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/david-graeber-dawn-of-everything.html

If the vast and fragile balance in this universe isn't odd enough, isn't it strangely queer that ordinary (Mormon banned) beer set our most recent ancient model mode into motion?

“How Beer Saved The World”

https://vimeo.com/143565112?ref

“I take my hat, and my pants, off to beer!!”

—-Joseph Smith, Jr.

"Sounds like a bunch o' damn city folks flappin' their gums about nuthin' "

---- My grandpa, probably

Chicken N. Backpacks Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Sounds like a bunch o' damn city folks flappin'
> their gums about nuthin' "
>
---- My grandpa, probably

Nice, I'll likely keep that one around.

Yet another article on Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everyrhing:

https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-everything

Snippet:

“Curiously enough in our aggressively presentist era, “big histories” of the world seem to be reliably popular. Yet until Graeber and Wengrow’s intervention, most of the people who tried their hands at this genre —which has its “scientific” origins in the cosmographical works of early modern authors such as Sebastian Münster (1488-1552), and which has always been, as Graeber and Wengrow acknowledge, its own sort of mythmaking about origins— have a scholarly formation that prepares them poorly for the undertaking. Steven Pinker is a psychologist, a field that hardly has any special grasp of how culture works, and that is no better equipped to understand methodological and epistemological challenges in reconstructing the distant past than is, say, structural linguistics. Jared Diamond is principally an ornithologist, and in his leap from the birds of New Guinea to the peoples of the earth, he makes considerable speculative errors. Yuval Noah Harari is some kind of “big historian” and a disciple of Diamond. What has been missing is the kind of expertise that comes from anthropology, which at its best straddles the boundary between hermeneutical art in its application to culture on the one hand, and on the other exact science, while sometimes slipping onto the one side of this divide and self-destructively disowning the other.”