Wednesday, January 26, 2022

"Smile always — and live the smile!"  ECRL 1819-1

Bryan Kent Ward

Once We Were

Now, we exist

As we abandoned the No•Mad way of life and turned away from the itinerant or half-pastoral life that left us going along streams and rivers — opening new ways or crossing old paths, along the lines of force of the earth's field — we forgot how much the planet host and all living creatures within its realm were intimately bound.

Long after the knowledge was forgotten, we tried to mesh and square that living field with landmarks, cairns, dolmens and menhirs that soon were integrated at and within the level of the human body, calling some of the lines patterns, meridians, 經絡系統, and the strong energy spots found all along them, acupoints, 穴位.

The once known rejuvenation process was thereafter pursued through shamanic, magical or alchemical processes, with more poisonings than any success.

Seeking The Rhythms

“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - these qualities you find always in that the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush of the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and in our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

Dawn of Everything

What if the arc of history isn't inevitable? 

Long, long ago human beings lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. These bands were relatively egalitarian because there was not much to own. Then, some of these bands discovered agriculture and essentially domesticated themselves. Surplus food from farming led to increased populations, which turned villages into towns and then towns into cities and then cities into empires.

The switch from hunter-gathering to farming happened at different times in different places, but it eventually happened almost everywhere and became the dominant mode of human social arrangement. This ascent of complexity, however, came at the cost of inequality. Ruling classes claimed surpluses for themselves, and most others ended up working for the king (or emperor). Such empires and their repression were, however, the engines that allowed culture — art, philosophy, etc. — to flourish. Eventually, the Age of Science and the Enlightenment led to massive increases in human wellbeing, though they didn’t manage to undo the divisions between rich and poor.

This story before is the basis for many best-selling history books by authors like Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari. And beyond best-sellers, this story of an inevitable rise from simple hunter-gatherers to farming and then industrial societies is pretty much the only way we know how to talk about the long-term arc of human civilization. It is essentially the story of “progress,” which we mostly accept. We still hope we can do better in terms of inequality and, in the face of things like climate change, deal with the dark side of progress. But, by and large, we accept the story that our current form of civilization is the inevitable form.

The inevitable arc of history?

But what if that story is wrong? What if that inevitable arc turned out to be not so inevitable? What if there were more possible choices because, across the last 100,000 years or so, many people had made them?

This is the premise behind The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. It, too, is a best-seller and is generating lots of buzz and controversy. The Dawn of Everything is a big history book that is anti-big history.

The basic idea, D. Graeber and D. Wengrow want to explore, is that when it comes to political and social arrangements, human beings have been remarkably imaginative throughout our time on the planet. The notion that there is some inevitable arc to history and all human societies have followed it into the forms we have today is, they claim, a holdover from Enlightenment-era thinking. Most importantly, they also claim, archaeological and anthropological evidence from the last few decades makes such “inevitable arc” stories scientifically untenable.

D. Graeber and D. Wengrow are particularly wary of the Hobbesian notion that human society is “founded on the collective repression of our baser instincts, which becomes all the more necessary when humans are living in large numbers in the same place.” Looking at the history of this idea, along with the notion that early on we lived as equalitarian “noble savages,” forms an entertaining early chapter of the book. D. Graeber and D. Wengrow are just as interested in the question of how we came to think about “the origins of inequality” as they are in the answer. That’s because the answer, for them, is that we lost our capacity to imagine something different.

Same actors, different play

What makes The Dawn of Everything so remarkable to any avid reader of J. Diamond or Y.N. Harari is to see the usual actors and places in the story of human evolution reappear with a completely different script. Stonehenge and the first human city Catalhoyuk are no longer markers on the inevitable route to the modern industrial nation-state but part of a broader tapestry of human beings adopting and abandoning different political and social forms as experiments in what worked and what did not, what suited people at the time and what did not. For D. Graeber and D. Wengrow, just because these people lived a long time ago didn’t mean they were sock-puppets playing out their historically determined roles in the march toward us. Instead, they were — like us — conscious, creative, and capable of making choices. The difference is that these ancient generations had more freedom to choose and explore how they wanted to organize themselves. They were not, in David Graeber and David Wengrow’s words, “stuck” as we are with such narrowly circumscribed choices for their futures (unrelenting resource extractive industrial economies be they capitalist or socialist or communist).

What is exciting is the possibility that there is another story to tell about who we are, what we are, where we are going, and how we might get there. We, humans, are facing a difficult moment right now as it becomes clear we basically slept through global warming’s first act. Things are likely to get bumpier from here, and we will need all the creativity and imagination we can get. If the new story in The Dawn of Everything has truth in it, then it would be a welcome addition.

— Wiki page for The Dawn of Everything with links to an overview of the debates

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. It was published in the United States on November 9, 2021, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.^[1]

Drawing attention to the diversity of early human societies, it critiques traditional narratives of history's linear development from primitivism to civilization.^[2] Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia.^[3] It relies on archaeological evidence to show that early societies were diverse and developed numerous political structures.^[4]

Graeber and Wengrow finished the book around August 2020.^[4] Its American edition is 704 pages long, including a 63-page bibliography.^[4]

Contents

• 1Reception
• 2References
• 3Further reading
• 4External links

Reception

Gideon Lewis-Kraus said in The New Yorker that the book “aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past.”^[5] In The Atlantic, William Deresiewicz described the book as “inspiring”.^[6] Historian of science Emily Kern, writing in the Boston Review, called the book “erudite” and “funny”.^[7] Giulio Ongaro, a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at the London School of Economics, stated in Jacobin and Tribune that “Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what [Galileo and Darwin] did to astronomy and biology respectively.”^[8][9]

While wondering whether a book that “hypothesizes confidently in the face of scant or confusing evidence, can be trusted”, historian Daniel Immerwahr described the book as “a work of dizzying ambition”.^[10] Andrew Anthony accused the authors of "cherrypicking" but said the authors persuasively replace "the idea of humanity being forced along through evolutionary stages with a picture of prehistoric communities making their own conscious decisions of how to live."^[11] Historian David Priestland argued that Peter Kropotkin had more powerfully addressed the sorts of questions that a persuasive case for modern-day anarchism should address. However, Priestland lauded the authors' historical "myth-busting" and called it "an exhilarating read".^[12]

Anthropologist Chris Knight called The Dawn of Everything "incoherent and wrong" for beginning "far too late" and "systematically side-stepping the cultural flowering that began in Africa tens of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe”,^[13] but also concluded that the book's "one important point" was "its advocacy of [political] oscillation".^[14] While James Suzman in the Literary Review claimed that the book doesn't “engage with the vast historical and academic literature on recent African ... small scale hunter-gatherers”.^[15] Writing for the New York Journal of Books James H. McDonald noted the omission of classic work by anthropologist Edmund Leach (1954) on the gumlau and gumsa systems of socio-political organization found among the mountain Kachin, but also noted that The Dawn of Everything “may well prove to be the most important book of the decade, for it explodes deeply held myths about the inevitability of our social lives dominated by the state.” ^[16]

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argued in The New York Review of Books that there is a “discordance between what the book says and what its sources say", but also that the book, which is “chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic minutiae, is an oddly gripping read”.^[17] The New York Review of Books subsequently published an extended exchange between Wengrow and Appiah, under the title 'The Roots of Inequality,'^[18] in which Wengrow expands on the book's use of archaeological sources, while Appiah concludes that "Graeber and Wengrow’s argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable."

The Princeton historian David A. Bell, responding solely to Graeber and Wengrow's argument about the Indigenous origins of Enlightenment social thought, accused the authors of coming "perilously close to scholarly malpractice."^[19] By contrast, the University of Paris historian and philosopher of science Justin E.H. Smith suggests "Graeber and Wengrow are to be credited for helping to relegitimise this necessary component of historical anthropology, which for better or worse is born out of the history of the missions and early modern global commerce."^[20] Reviewers in the Ecologist expressed that "Graeber and Wengrow seem caught in a time warp and fail to engage with the enormous body of new scholarship on human evolution" while, in the same review, calling the book a "howling wind of fresh air".^[21]

Writing for The Hindu, G. Sampath notes that two thematic strands run through the book: "the consolidation of a corpus of archaeological evidence and a history of ideas." Inspired by "the rediscovery of an unknown past," he asks, "can humanity imagine a future that’s more worthy of itself?" ^[22] Reviewing for Science, environmental scientist Erle C. Ellis describes The Dawn of Everything as "a great book that will stimulate discussions, change minds, and drive new lines of research."^[23] Richard Handler claims that the book’s endnotes “often reveal that a particularly startling interpretation of archaeological evidence depends on one or two sources taken from vast bodies of literature,” but he also claims that the stories told, “are stories we need and want to hear.”^[24] Historian Ryne Clos claims that the book partly relies on "a specious, exaggerated interpretation of the historical evidence" but that it is also "incredibly informative".^[25]

Writing for Artforum, Simon Wu calls The Dawn of Everything a “bracing rewrite of human history”, suggesting that while its “premise is exhilarating” its “implications are only beginning to be considered.”^[26] In Anthropology Today, Arjun Appadurai accuses the book of “swerving to avoid a host of counter-examples and counter-arguments”, while also describing the book's "fable" as “compelling”.^[27]

References

1. ^ "The Dawn of Everything"
   . Kirkus Reviews. August 24, 2021. Archived
    from the original on October 19, 2021. Retrieved October 18, 2021.
2. ^ Deresiewicz, William (October 18, 2021). "It Didn't Have to Be This Way"
   . The Atlantic. Archived
    from the original on October 18, 2021. Retrieved October 18, 2021.
3. ^ Bratishenko, Lev (October 18, 2021). "Our ancient ancestors may have been more civilized than we are"
   . Maclean's. Archived
    from the original on October 19, 2021. Retrieved October 23, 2021.
4. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Schuessler, Jennifer (October 31, 2021). "What if Everything You Learned About Human History Is Wrong?"
   . The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331
   . Archived
    from the original on October 31, 2021. Retrieved October 31, 2021.
5. ^ Lewis-Kraus, Gideon (November 2021). "Early Civilizations Had It All Figured Out"
   . New Yorker. Archived
    from the original on December 12, 2021. Retrieved December 9, 2021.
6. ^ "Human History Gets a Rewrite"
   . The Atlantic. October 2021. Archived
    from the original on October 18, 2021. Retrieved October 18, 2021.
7. ^ Kern, Emily (November 2021). "The Radical Promise of Human History"
   . Boston Review. Archived
    from the original on December 9, 2021. Retrieved December 9, 2021.
8. ^ Ongaro, Giulio (October 2021). "David Graeber Knew Ordinary People Could Remake the World"
   . Jacobin. Archived
    from the original on October 23, 2021. Retrieved October 23, 2021.
9. ^ Ongaro, Giulio. "David Graeber's Final Challenge"
   . tribunemag.co.uk. Archived
    from the original on December 14, 2021. Retrieved December 14, 2021.
10. ^ Immerwahr, Daniel (September 2021). "Beyond the State"
    . The Nation. Archived
     from the original on October 18, 2021. Retrieved October 18, 2021.
11. ^ Anthony, Andrew (October 2021). "Have we got our ancestors wrong?"
    . The Guardian. Archived
     from the original on October 18, 2021. Retrieved October 18, 2021.
12. ^ Priestland, David (October 2021). "Inequality is not the price of civilisation"
    . The Guardian. Archived
     from the original on October 23, 2021. Retrieved October 23, 2021.
13. ^ Knight, Chris (December 2021). "The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow"
    . Times Higher Education Supplement. Archived
     from the original on December 9, 2021. Retrieved December 9, 2021. (Review also accessible here
    )
14. ^ Knight, Chris (December 2021). "Wrong About (Almost) Everything"
    . Focaal. Retrieved December 25, 2021.
15. ^ "On the Origin of Our Species"
    . Literary Review. November 2021. Retrieved December 29, 2021.
16. ^ "The Dawn Of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Review)"
    . New York Journal of Books. November 2021. Retrieved December 29, 2021.
17. ^ "Digging for Utopia"
    . New York Review of Books. December 2021. Archived
     from the original on December 9, 2021. Retrieved December 9, 2021.
18. ^ "The Roots of Inequality"
    . New York Review of Books. January 2022. Archived
     from the original on January 13, 2022. Retrieved December 25, 2021.
19. ^ "A Flawed History of Humanity"
    . Persuasion. November 2021. Archived
     from the original on November 20, 2021. Retrieved November 20, 2021.
20. ^ "On David Graeber and David Wengrow's New History of Humanity"
    . Substack. November 2021. Retrieved November 15, 2021.
21. ^ "All things being equal"
    . Ecologist. December 2021. Archived
     from the original on December 17, 2021. Retrieved December 17, 2021.
22. ^ "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity review: Exploding myths of prehistory"
    . December 2021. Retrieved December 18, 2021.
23. ^ "New views on ancient peoples: a bold reappraisal of human history upends long-held theories about early societies"
    . Science. December 2021.
24. ^ Handler, Richard (January 2022). "Prehistory without hierarchy"
    . Times Literary Supplement.
25. ^ Clos, Ryne (January 2022). "The Dawn of Everything: by David Graeber and David Wengrow"
    . Spectrum Culture.
26. ^ "Breaking Dawn: David Graeber and David Wengrow's new history of humanity"
    . Artforum. January 2022.
27. ^ Appadurai, Arjun (February 2022). "The Dawn of Everything?"
    . Anthropology Today.