Thinking about @pluralistic’s powerful article about #schismogenesis drawing on #GraeberWengrow’s work https://doctorow.medium.com/schizmogenesis-755bbb6a8515 (will replace this with a non-Medium link when I find it) a lot today because my disagreeing with the LLM-haters absolutely does not mean suddenly that VCs or OpenAI or the laser-eyed class (https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/110087666364908932) aren’t shit. My mental models probably overlap a ton more with the LLM-fearers than the median LLM-lover and I cannot stomach the possibility of appearing to be allying with the shit-shilling types, the Chamaths and the YCombinators.

People are right to distrust capitalism’s latest devilry (that seen in Fellowship of the Rings—Boromir seeing the distant flames and asking, “What is this new devilry”?)

Also interesting that #GraeberWengrow rightly trace the origin of 'what we understand as left/right divisions' to the seating positions in the French National Assembly at the start of the French Revolution (aristocrats on the right, commoners on the left) - but only in terms of 'the formation of left-wing thought' - missing the crucial point that this division was grounded not primarily in ideas, but in the very real economic fact that those on the right actually held privilege and power in the status quo - those on the left didn't.

It's this reality we need to keep strongly in mind in this age of identity politics.

If you want to refer to an idea or argument that originates with The Dawn of Everything, do you say "Davidian"?

#TheDawnOfEverything #GraeberWengrow #davidgraeber #Graeber

This 150 people thing, that is, Dunbar’s number, is another casualty of my reading #GraeberWengrow’s “Dawn of Everything”. In discussing ancient cities and continent-spanning cultural systems that allowed individuals to move far away from their family and expect to find welcome and shelter and help, thousands of years ago, they propose a number of ways to see why Dunbar’s limit is at most a soft limit, nothing as serious as we all tend to believe.

For example, after discussing the modern hunter-gatherers whose groups are only 10% kin, and individuals migrate far to join those groups, they note:

“It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents… In this, at least, modern foragers are no different from modern city dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. We all have the capacity to feel bound to people we will probably never meet; to take part in a macro-society which exists most of the time as ‘virtual reality’, a world of possible relationships with its own rules, roles and structures that are held in the mind and recalled through the cognitive work of image-making and ritual. Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not – and probably have not ever – lived in small-scale societies.”

BBC reporting that one Ben Bacon, a furniture guy from London, has decoded various markings on 20,000 year old cave paintings across Europe as indicating the mating time of various creatures according to a lunar calendar: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64162799

I dug up the full paper in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, it’s open-access! https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19

This. Is. Superb! #GraeberWengrow have taught me to see this as, wow, our ancestors were indeed brilliant, observant, sensitive people just like us. Nothing like old misguided ideas about them being stuck in some primitive/class-less ahistoric sameness.

(Reminds me of how the #Maya hieroglyphs, thought to be undecipherable 😂!, were cracked in the 1950s by not a historian or archeologist but a linguist who studied the local languages in Yucatec Maya (anathema in archeology—the present/the locals living there can’t tell us anything about the past 🥸!).) #archeology

Zo vader zo dochter. Haar kerstkado en die van mij. Different stories. Same subject. #harari #GraeberWengrow

@chema I will literally buy it for you 😁 what @scott undersold is, the book’s critique of Rousseau isn’t theirs, they just replay the indigenous critique of European society from the 1600s! Turns out the Jesuits and traders and other French people up in the Great Lakes region interacted with brilliant indigenous orators and thinkers steeped in a tradition of political debate—for example the amazing Huron-Wendat leader Kandiaronk whose debates with Frenchmen (about how shitty European society and Christianity were) were republished to great enthusiasm in Europe and directly led to the burning enlightenment questions of “what’s wrong with us” and “how can we legitimately kill these people”.

The absolute banger is. Scholars up to and after Rousseau plainly wrote that their ideas were based on Indigenous sources but for centuries, thanks to the incredible power of racism, subsequent historians of the Enlightenment just ignored that, assuming Rousseau et al. were making all that up—because haha there’s no way savages from America could have dreamed up such astute questions as the right to rule. #GraeberWengrow just retooted recent research by Indigenous scholars that shows that, no lol the European “fathers of democracy” cribbed most of their ideas from stuff that was common as water in the Great Lakes: freedom, self-determination, inequality.

“not only did indigenous North Americans manage almost entirely to sidestep the evolutionary trap that we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to the rise of some all-powerful state or empire; but in doing so they developed political sensibilities that were ultimately to have a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers and, through them, are still with us today. In this sense, at least, the Wendat won the argument. It would be impossible for a European today, or anyone, really – whatever they actually thought – to take a position like that of the seventeenth-century Jesuits and simply declare themselves opposed to the very principle of human freedom.”

“the evidence we have from Palaeolithic times onwards suggests that many—perhaps even most—people did not merely imagine or enact different social orders at different times of year, but actually lived in them for extended periods of time. The contrast with our present situation could not be more stark. Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like. Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them.

If something did go terribly wrong in human history—and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did—then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.” —David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

This book is a great cornucopia of examples from history and archeology and anthropology of such alternative social and economic structures that our ancestors imagined and moved between and fought for. I am for the first time in my adult life beginning to dare to hope for a world very different than what we have, and even more audacious, hoping that world is better.

#GraeberWengrow #TheDawnOfEverything

The legacy of #GraeberWengrow continues to grow. Hearing an argument that presumes the Hobbes–Rousseau dichotomy, I still tend to reach for the ahistorical idea that domination has dominated human existence until Graeber and Wengrow pop up to remind me, no, archeology and anthropology has already rewritten the past and the message is diversity and variety and flexibility in how humans have chosen to organize themselves.

For now it seems that for every example of a warlord dominating a society we also have a counterexample of an equally large and equally long-lived society that self-governed and had few markers of status, or a society dominated by priests, or a variety of other distinctly different organizations.

I cannot wait for the various digs and findings profiled by Graeber and Wengrow to become more well-read and well-integrated with theories of development.

Anfänge von David Wengrow und David Graeber will eine andere Geschichte der Menschheit erzählen als es bisherige Bücher dieses Umfangs taten. Das Buch las ich im Sommer und schließlich noch einen kritischen Artikel darüber im Merkur. Dort wird kritisiert, dass die beiden Autoren gern auf ihre überlegene Wissenschaftlichkeit gegenüber anderen Darstellungen abheben - das scheint zweifelhaft zu sein.
Ich sehe Anfänge nicht als Forschungsarbeit, sondern als eine große Erzählung wie sie bspw. Yuval Noah Harari und viele andere über die Menschheitsgeschichte vorlegten. Hierbei weisen Wengrow/Graeber zu Recht auf das Motiv Rousseau vs. Hobbes hin, dass dabei immer wieder aufgerufen wird. Verkürzt gesagt steht Rousseau für ein positives, Hobbes für ein negatives Menschenbild. Diese Erzählung durchbrechen die beiden ebenso wie sie valide Kritikpunkte an archäologischen Vermutungen formulieren.

Besonders stark finde ich ihren Freiheitsbegriff, der als Gratmesser für die untersuchten Gesellschaften dient und sich von althergebrachten unterscheidet, denn wichtig ist für sie, u.a. die Freiheit zu gehen wohin man will und die Freiheit Befehle zu ignorieren. Das ermöglicht neue Blicke auf vergangene und gegenwärtige Gesellschaften.
Obwohl es genug valide Kritik am Buch gibt, empfehle ich es sehr zum Lesen. Anfänge können als Ausgangspunkt für neue Perspektiven auf Freiheit, Herrschaft, Staat oder Entwcklung dienen. Und Gesprächsansätze liefert es zuhauf. Mich hat das Buch bewegt, emotional und kognitiv. Das Wichtigste ist m.E., dass das Buch uns konkret vor Augen führt, dass es keine geradlinige Entwicklung in der Geschichte gibt und dass wir es selbst in der Hand haben, welchen Weg wir einschlagen und unsere Möglichkeiten vielfältiger und offener sind als wir denken.
#anfaenge #menschheit #Anarchismus #GraeberWengrow #rezension #rezensionen
David Graeber, David
Wengrow: Anfänge. Eine neue Geschichte der Menschheit. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta Verlag2022. ISBN: 978-3-6089-8508-5.

“I think that people are really exhausted at being angry” —@bcantrill

👏 I love this! People, tired of the way things are, change! Classic #GraeberWengrow for the modern era: instead of TINA (there is no alternative), we realize we can have nice things.

@Whysatan it is probably very tasteless for me to try and apply something that an archeologist and an anthropologist wrote to a very tragic modern situation but frankly if the theory doesn’t work for our most pressing cases, it’s probably not that great. Graeber and Wengrow’s book The Dawn talks about how we are trained to think that ”there is no alternative” (TINA), that our societies and our social relationships—on every scale, between individuals or between nations—are fixed or it’s impossibly hard for them to change. But they spend the whole book looking at examples from archeology and anthropology, from a ton of the latest not-yet-widley-known research and digs, to show that humans have always had a bewildering, staggering variety of ways they structure their societies and furthermore (this is the part that pertains to this conversation) that they have always been very self-conscious about the societies they are in and very willing to experiment with and change their societies.

My favorite example is Teotihuacan in Mexico. For the first hundred-ish years of the common era the city was going down the typical route of the Mesoamerican kings package but in the archeological record we see them do a U-turn and the city became heavily-anti-kings and self-governing for centuries afterwards. And there are countless examples from all over the globe from all times up to 12,000 years ago like this—people have a culture, for various and varied reasons they change it.

To me this is an incredibly empowering message because it invites people to realize we have always been capable of introspecting on our own societies and capable of changing them dramatically, consciously, mindfully. That “the cycle of violence that lasts forever” is a learned cultural behavior that we can not only reject but that our forebears have rejected several documented times in the past.

To the extent that there’s any appetite for this kind of theorizing impacting the tragic situation in the Middle East some reading might be this short profile https://www.wired.com/story/david-wengrow-dawn-of-everything/ I also was live-tooting reading the book with #GraeberWengrow.

@WahbAllat