David Graeber and David Wengrow – ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’. This new book from Graeber and Wengrow seeks to challenge assumptions about human social evolution and narratives of a linear development from primitive brutes to civilised people. Instead, the authors draw attention to the diversity of earlier human societies, arguing that humans had lived in large, complex, and decentralized societies for thousands of years. In doing so, Graeber and Wengrow fundamentally transform both our understanding of the past, and our vision for new ways of organising society in the future.

Schedule

  • Thursday 23rd December - Foreword, Chapters 1 & 2
  • Sunday 2nd January - Chapters 3 & 4
  • Sunday 9th January - Chapters 5 & 6
  • Sunday 16th January - Chapters 7 & 8
  • Sunday 23rd January - Chapters 9 & 10
  • Sunday 30th January - Chapter 11 & Conclusion

Outline

  • Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood

    • SOME BRIEF EXAMPLES OF WHY RECEIVED UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE BROAD SWEEP OF HUMAN HISTORY ARE MOSTLY WRONG (OR, THE ETERNAL RETURN OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU)
    • ON THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
    • HOW THE CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE OF HUMAN HISTORY IS NOT ONLY WRONG, BUT QUITE NEEDLESSLY DULL
    • ON WHAT'S TO FOLLOW

  • Chapter 2: Wicked Liberty

    • IN WHICH WE SHOW HOW CRITIQUES OF EUROCENTRISM CAN BACKFIRE, AND END UP TURNING ABORIGINAL THINKERS INTO ‘SOCK-PUPPETS’
    • IN WHICH WE CONSIDER WHAT THE INHABITANTS OF NEW FRANCE MADE OF THEIR EUROPEAN INVADERS, ESPECIALLY IN MATTERS OF GENEROSITY, SOCIABILITY, MATERIAL WEALTH, CRIME, PUNISHMENT AND LIBERTY
    • IN WHICH WE SHOW HOW EUROPEANS LEARNED FROM (NATIVE) AMERICANS ABOUT THE CONNECTION BETWEEN REASONED DEBATE, PERSONAL FREEDOMS AND THE REFUSAL OF ARBITRARY POWER
    • IN WHICH WE INTRODUCE THE WENDAT PHILOSOPHER-STATESMAN KANDIARONK, AND EXPLAIN HOW HIS VIEWS ON HUMAN NATURE AND SOCIETY TOOK ON NEW LIFE IN THE SALONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT EUROPE (INCLUDING AN ASIDE ON THE CONCEPT OF ‘SCHISMOGENESIS’)
    • IN WHICH WE EXPLAIN THE DEMIURGIC POWERS OF A. R. J. TURGOT, AND HOW HE TURNED THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION ON ITS HEAD, LAYING THE BASIS FOR MOST MODERN VIEWS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION (OR: HOW AN ARGUMENT ABOUT ‘FREEDOM’ BECAME ONE ABOUT ‘EQUALITY’)
    • HOW JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, HAVING WON ONE PRESTIGIOUS ESSAY COMPETITION, THEN LOST ANOTHER (COMING IN OVER THE PERMITTED WORD LENGTH), BUT FINALLY WENT ON TO CONQUER THE WHOLE OF HUMAN HISTORY
    • IN WHICH WE CONSIDER RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE, THE MYTH OF PROGRESS AND THE BIRTH OF THE LEFT
    • BEYOND THE ‘MYTH OF THE STUPID SAVAGE’ (WHY ALL THESE THINGS MATTER SO MUCH FOR OUR PROJECT IN THIS BOOK)

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  • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Yeah, I'm going to have to revisit it just to really get it. But it does seem to be a more interesting take on philosophy than...well than what most philosophers that I know of have to say. That quote in particular stood out to me, as did Graeber's comment on it that a lost third substance is imagination. He discusses that idea for a more general at some length in Utopia of Rules, I think in the first essay.

    Some theorists are certainly interested, though in my experience they have essentially no foundation in philosophy of science that would help them come up with better ideas. Experimentalists, who arguably need to be more well-versed in the nature of how one can try to know reality, are even less likely to have meaningful internal or external discourse about what it is they're even attempting to do. String theorists and their adjacent ilk in particular are what come to mind when I think about philosophy of science in the context of contemporary physics though.

    As for math, I think you're onto something there. I have been thinking for a while now that math is in some sense the most advanced form of magic that humans have been able to construct. It's inextricably tied to the developments in European industrialism that helped European forces advance capitalism across the globe, developed on the back of the deeply exploited colonized masses. I came across the argument of Hartry Field a few months ago that mathematics is philosophically a "useful fiction" that greatly simplifies doing science but isn't an actual way of knowing nature as it is.

    • CptKrkIsClmbngThMntn [any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Yeah, I’m going to have to revisit it just to really get it. But it does seem to be a more interesting take on philosophy than…well than what most philosophers that I know of have to say.

      Right? Sometimes stuff like this is almost a bit of a breath of fresh air. It's just a dump truck of incredibly novel ideas that I have to incorporate somehow or wrestle with. That's probably one of the most attractive things about binging through a :graeber: text

      I know fewer physicists than you so I'm probably just biased. One of the main ones that comes to mind is a younger accomplished theoretical physicist who clearly knows a few things about some of the relevant branches of philosophy (not to mention history and leftist politics) so I'm inclined to think he has a pretty good birds-eye view of his ideas, his profession, and his place in it. Most of the rest in my circles were just graduate students.

      As for math, I think you’re onto something there. I have been thinking for a while now that math is in some sense the most advanced form of magic that humans have been able to construct. It’s inextricably tied to the developments in European industrialism that helped European forces advance capitalism across the globe, developed on the back of the deeply exploited colonized masses.

      You remind me another striking sentence by Graeber: "A debt is a promise corrupted by violence and math."

      I came across the argument of Hartry Field a few months ago that mathematics is philosophically a “useful fiction” that greatly simplifies doing science but isn’t an actual way of knowing nature as it is.

      I think that's true, but I have my own weird take on it. It's true because nature is incredibly and ridiculously complex, far beyond any kind of human brain or computing power, but not because it's actually a different substance than math. I'm sympathetic to a certain kind of ontic structural realism. Why shouldn't universe itself just be a complex mathematical object? Physics is just the study of a mathematical structure from it's inside so to speak, and the mathematical structures that are complex enough to generate life with some capacity for conscious observation appear as universes to that life. This isn't a new idea but I've had a bit of trouble letting go of it.