I posted a while ago about The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow; and I mentioned more recently that I was reading Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, I have now finished it, and read Humankind, by Rutger Bregman.
These books overlap considerably in their concerns and arguments, although they have different emphases and narrative spines. They all argue, from one direction or another, that the path humanity has taken since the neolithic revolution, has led us to the wrong place, and that a different and better world is possible. In making this claim they all propose that the conventional understanding of prehistory is incorrect, as are equally the conventional modern understanding of human nature, and the structural requirements for a complex technological civilization.
I should note that they are not in agreement about everything, and both Graeber/Wegman and Bregman explicitly criticize Harari on some points. I'm not sure, however, that the disagreements are as substantive as the authors seem to think.
All of this is rather too complicated for a blog post, but one key to all of three books is an emphasis on the inherently cooperative and trustworthy nature of Homo sapiens. The conventional view, or at least the view of many, that we would mostly be egotistical thieves, liars and exploiters if not restrained by law and religion, is systematically debunked. The problem that exceptional people -- malignant narcissists and sadistic psychopaths -- often constitute much of a ruling class or even emerge as autocrats is a pathology of civilization. In small scale societies, such people are shunned, even exiled. They are the opposite of the kinds of people who gain influence and respect, who are characterize by rectitude, humility, compassion and generosity.
The consequences of this singular idea are complicated, and they include as many problems as they do possible solutions. But I would say that whether or not you believe this is at the heart of our basic political differences. I will have more to say about it.
3 comments:
A very interesting article.
All of these guys think we're not supposed to the way we are. And they are correct, in small groups, people do arrange their society differently.
There are many things that work one way on the micro and completely differently on the macro scale.
From best we can tell from the earliest records of ancient peoples to today, in larger organized groups, they all would be wrong. So one one hand, we have smart thinkers thinking about this and coming up with one answer and on the other we have a record of thousands of years demonstrating just the opposite.
Super important concept. Thank you for posting. As I've said recently, if I were a mathematician at this point in history, I would be working on a way to keep the one person in the concert hall from ruining the experience for everyone else by coughing hyperdramatically; the one person who drives like a moron and inconveniences 20,000 people and endangers their lives on the highway; and the one person who decides they need to run a country to destroy everything in order to try to fill the insatiable hole at the center of their being.
Well Mini, that's the problem, you haven't read the books. The whole point is that what you are saying is not actually true.
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