Graeber & Wengrow 'The Dawn of Everything,' brief review
David Dewhurst
Graeber Wengrow Dawn Everything 13Nov21
Needed for Political Dialogue
David Graeber and Wengrow’s ‘The Dawn of Everything’ – A New History of Humanity’ is seen by many (me, NN Taleb) as stupendous. Inevitably its challenge to the status quo has already triggered a trickle of faint praise and (imo) misgrasps or misframes (Guardian, New Statesman). It will doubtless receive a more full blooded assault as it gains wider public attention.
Sure, every reviewer has to burnish their credentials with some criticism. (I won’t disappoint.) However Graeber and Wengrow’s remorseless detail and exemplification provides the tilth, and a lot of rationale, for more thinly held anti-hierarchy idealisms. Yup, it’s 135 pages longer than, ‘Debt, the first 5000 years,’ (before the notes begin); however there’s a thread of ironic humour which has got me through, with some enjoyable procrastination, in only a fortnight – so definitely your choice for Christmas, Solstice, Yule, Winterful – and still 100 pages less than, ‘Dune.’
Essentially the last few decades of archaeology and anthropology show that the myth of egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes followed by agricultural and authoritarian states is just that. ‘Hunter gatherers’ can live in ‘democratic’/egalitarian cities, ‘states’ or confederations or authoritarian ones; ditto communities based on farming. All these terms tend to be simplistic polarisations. There is no valid clockwork ‘stage’ theory from apparent economic simplicity to complexity which compels hierarchy and authoritarianism, or at least mass indoctrination.
Ideally here I’d give you three compelling exemplars, but I’d guess your brain would wheedle out of them. It’ll be harder after 526 pages.
Likewise, when David and David say that the Enlightenment and ‘Western values’ were brought in by the revelations of Native American ideology you will have reservations – if, as a kid, you watched ‘Cowboys & Indians’ on telly, like me.
What the authors show is that politically self-reflective societies existed for millennia before the ‘Enlightenment,’ particularly in North America. Moreover societies played or oscillated between ‘hunter-gathering’ and agriculture for centuries or millennia with signs of a more sophisticated evaluation than current cost-benefit analysis.
They illustrate conventional misconceptions as stemming from 19th century reactionary counter-attacks (sometimes swallowed by, ‘the left’). I expect this dynamic to be validated by reaction to Davids’ doorstopper.
Thus they have done an excellent job of dethroning the existing simple story. Frustratingly they have not provided a new one, to show how we might sustain uncoercive prosperous societies. However some possible elements are indicated. (Spoiler alert: patriarchy looks like an impediment.).
That is the job for the rest of us to take forward. As some sort of psychologist I suspect there is still worthwhile ore in evolutionary psychology, sociobiology and more sophisticated game theory, although all of them have been traduced by simplistic social-Darwinist narratives.
I think the authors underplay European pre-Columbian political challenges. The last third of the 1647 Putney Debates references the 1217 Charter of the Forest rather than the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s Caliban projected during the 16th century slave trade. Even Machiavelli upheld democracy in, ‘Discourses on Livy.’
As an obsessional reader of notes and references I found nothing significant to cavil at. Some reviewers have twisted, ‘many’ or ‘most’ statements into, ‘all’ statements and then triumphantly exemplified the exception.
I’d justify posting this on the Economic WG list as it provides a socio/ecological context for our ballpark. Likewise my mates in the Cybernetics Society will like the final note recognising that it could all have been written in terms of systems theory and acknowledging the guidance of Nora and Gregory Bateson.
The idea of ‘schizmogenesis’ or desperately identifying our ‘identity’ with whatever the ‘other’ is not will be part of the future conversation, along with the recognition that our brain is predominantly tens of billions of neural flip-flops which are conformable to a homomorphism with much more than we generally manifest. This links with the authors’ critique of social science as seeking a reduction to deterministic compulsion, rather than reflective and collective growth of capacity and variety.
My rationale for emailing this screed is that Amazon won’t accept my review as there is less than £40 on my account for the last year, and today is a Facebook boycott day.
I knew David Graeber less well than others around Occupy London. To argue ad hominem, he was a very decent bloke, though understandably seeming sometimes ill at ease and frustrated and, in one case, bloody difficult to herd into an organised debate. But I feel an even deeper sadness knowing that we have lost his awesome practical scholarship. Regards also to David Wengrow.
It is for us to continue from where David Graeber left us.
Dave D
[btw it's all easier to read than some of my paragraphs..
Regards,
Dave]
Clive Menzies
Thanks David
Glad to hear you're still active :-)
On the subject of Amazon, what can I say? Post Covid, Amazon has
become the global Kommisariat Emporium within the growing global
gulag, all competition having been destroyed as a precursor to the
Great Reset... I try to avoid Amazon wherever I can but it gets
increasingly difficult to find alternative sources. I've not
conducted extensive research but digital book-burning seems to be
part of the emerging tyrannical landscape - titles disappearing
from both Amazon's "shop" and Kindle irrespective that people had
purchased them in good faith.
As you probably recall, we referenced Debt, the First 5,000 Years in our analysis at Critical Thinking as well as the video with the two Davids on paleo-political economy. https://vimeo.com/145285143
Since Critical Thinking's final analysis (published on the 18
October 2019, the same day as the rehearsal for what has been
going on in the last 20 months, Event 201) we further developed
our work on money. Interestingly, we discovered that Marx, Engels
and Lewis H Morgan were exploring the dynamics of human
relationships in families and small groups 150 years earlier.
By coincidence, I presented a snapshot of where we've got to in our work last Monday, at a meeting in London - I've just posted the video.
https://www.outersite.org/covid-pseudopandemic-and-money/
I may get around to delving into the Wengrove/Graeber tome but
your assessment will do for now :-)
Regards
Clive
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-- Clive Menzies https://outersite.org We can be confined by fear, ignorance, arrogance or ideology Or we can liberate ourselves and each other through co-creative learning https://cocreativelearning.org/
Mark Barrett
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Clive Menzies
Hi Mark
Well now you've done it! I think I'm going to have to read it sooner rather than later - between you, you've convinced me :-)
Not least because of this:
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: in the Light of the Researches of
Lewis H. Morgan 7 . The book is an early anthropological work and is regarded as one of the first
major works on family economics .
Some of their conclusion were fundamental in relation to the origins of Private Property and the
State
“The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State begins with an extensive discussion of Ancient
Society which describes the major stages of human development as commonly understood in Engels's time.
It is argued that the first domestic institution in human history was the matrilineal clan. Engels here
follows Lewis H. Morgan 's thesis as outlined in his major book, Ancient Society. Morgan was a pioneering
American anthropologist and business lawyer who championed the land rights of Native Americans and
became adopted as an honorary member of the Seneca Iroquois tribe. Traditionally, the Iroquois had lived
in communal longhouses based on matrilineal descent and matrilocal residence , an arrangement giving
women much solidarity and power. Writing shortly after Marx’s death, Engels stressed the theoretical
significance of Morgan’s highlighting of the matrilineal clan:
The rediscovery of the original mother-right gens as the stage preliminary to the father-right gens of the
civilized peoples has the same significance for the history of primitive society as Darwin’s theory of evolution
has for biology, and Marx’s theory of surplus value for political economy.
— Engels, Friedrich (1884). "Preface to the Fourth Edition". The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State. New York: Pathfinder Press. pp. 27–38, the quotation is on p.36.
The brain is not a computer? The more I learn, the more I
encounter the limitations of reductive logic, highlighting the
need for inductive, intuitive reasoning. Abstraction of data from
highly complex issues/systems and reductionist thinking got us
into this mess.
A quotation that resonates is from Werner Heisenberg: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
Clive x
david wilkinson
Clive Menzies
HI Greg
Good to hear from you too. I'm afraid I can't offer much in the way of support or consolation.
Bread and circuses to keep the human herd distracted and divided
en route to the abattoir...
Regards
Clive
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Clive Menzies
Incidentally, in looking for the book, I found Steve Rushton's review
David Dewhurst
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Mark Barrett
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david wilkinson
david wilkinson
Clive Menzies
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John Courtneidge
In due course I suppose.
The name of that plan is the plan for Co-operative Socialism.
There is an Occupy London webpage for this. And YouTube videos and a radio interview by Tony Gosling, there also, entitled 'Reform the City of London says Occupy's John Courtneidge'
(Which, incidentally, Schwab co-opted - and corrupted - for his 'Great Reset' plan.)
Very best wishes to you all,
For The Common Good,
John Courtneidge
14 Nov 2021 18:48:42 Clive Menzies <cl...@clivemenzies.co.uk>:
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david wilkinson
Clive Menzies
Hi Greg
I attended an interesting talk on "shake spear" in August:
https://www.outersite.org/media-in-elizabethan-i-england/
And John Dee was very much the mystic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTX2X-WtM_Q
Regards
Clive
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