I'm reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of the World, by the late David Graeber and David Wengrow. I haven't quite finished it but I don't need to for the discussion to follow.
Graeber and Wengrow are often tendentious, and I note that the book is controversial and has attracted both ecstatic and hostile reviews. But for my purposes today they don't need to be right about everything. You can read a (very positive) review that summarizes their argument by William Deresiewicz in The Atlantic if you like.
The basic mission of the book is to demolish the conventional story about human history. We started in the "state of nature," living by foraging in small bands, which were highly egalitarian. Then people invented agriculture, which which caused them to settle down and the population to grow, while at the same time there was a surplus for some people to seize, and dominate others. Then we lived in cities that required complex administration, and bureaucracy in the service of the ruling alliance of a priestly caste with warrior kings, and the emergence of the state. Then there was the industrial revolution and science and capitalism, new forms of domination and inequality, along with an ever larger bureaucracy and managerial class that was necessary to administer all the complexity.
G&W's main idea is that while it is true that bureaucratic states, defined essentially as entities with a monopoly on legitimate violence, today cover the earth, this was not inevitable nor was the process of getting here the linear story of "stages" that inevitably followed on after another. Some foraging societies developed very large polities, featuring periodic assemblages of thousands of people, but with little sign of inequality. Others did develop hierarchies including kings and slaves. Some people tried farming and didn't like it and stopped doing it; some large cities with surrounding farmland did not develop hierarchies or bureaucracies. Sometimes people overthrew bureaucratic states and lived in more egalitarian societies for a long time after.
They don't give a very satisfactory answer as to how we got stuck in the present universality of nation states, but they do make a convincing case that it happened in very messy way and with very different trajectories around the world. Which means, they think, that we don't have to live this way, that there are possible alternatives even in our age of high technology.
Just as important, although they don't much dwell on it, states have not historically been a permanent, well, state of affairs until fairly recently. We all know what happened to Rome and the various Chinese dynasties -- which, unlike say English dynasties did not sequentially succeed to a continuous nation state but rather were interrupted by non-dynastic periods in which there was no single Chinese state. And there are many other examples. If the United States dissolves, as it very well may, there will be human societies left within what are now its borders, and they may take various forms. Some, to be sure, will be very unpleasant and destructive, but others may create more congenial and productive forms of society.
However, our species faces critical challenges, which will require global commitment and cooperation. Whether that can happen within the present system of nation states is a challenging proposition.
2 comments:
Since you one-sidedly ONLY presented a 'very good' review of The Dawn, I'll try to present (assuming it gets posted) a 'very bad' review...
"The Dawn of Everything" is a biased disingenuous account of human history (www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity ) that spreads fake hope (the authors of "The Dawn" claim human history has not "progressed" in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system... so there's hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book's dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavor geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history has "progressed" by and large in linear stages, especially since the dawn of agriculture (www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). The book's alleged major "fundamental" insight is "the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently" (the first part of that statement is hardly a great insight because a perceptive child can recognize that) YET fails to answer why we do NOT make it differently than it is now if we, supposedly can make it "EASILY" different, why we've been "stuck" in this destructive system for a very long time. THAT is really where "the ultimate, hidden truth" is buried and the answer is... it is because of the enduring hegemony of “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html ) which the fake hope-giving authors of "The Dawn" entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding the nature of humans)
A good example that one of the authors, Graeber, has no real idea what world we've been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn't know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they've been wanting that for thousands of years (and that's not the only ignorant notion in the title). Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
"The Dawn" is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked "science," served lucratively to the gullible ignorant underclasses who crave myths and fairy tales.
"the evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” ... just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm." --- Unknown
Well look, you have a right to disagree but I don't understand your intense hostility and personal disdain for the authors. That is not a constructive way to argue.
As I said myself, assuming you actually read my post, they don't do a good job of explaining why and how we got stuck where we are. I have thoughts about that but your cynicism is just surrender and I really don't see the point of it.
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