Do you honestly think slagging "the progressive left" and complaining about the author's refusal to condemn the left as "bloodily autophagic" really adds much to this discussion? We're here to talk about a book of anthropological history; obviously it's gonna involve some politics, but maybe don't start by trying to declare all leftists auto-cannibalistic lackies of Robespierre. It's just a bit uncivilized.
This is some amusingly poignant spam, given the context. Playing the gossip trap element (with references to her "neighbor", who was doing better than her), against a human desire to escape that trap (with references to being her own boss by relying on broad faceless markets for self-sufficiency)
Forgive me for commenting before reading, though I very much look forward to digesting this review - at the request of some subscribers I started blogging my way through this book but quit in disgust after a few chapters. (I did finish reading it however.) I'm someone with a fairly high tolerance for, let's say, ambitious nonfiction, but in terms of citation and responsible reference to evidence this is one of the most irresponsible books I've ever read. Just hundreds and hundreds of pages of inadequately sourced claims and a few instances of misreadings of the provided citations so egregious that it crosses the line into dishonesty.
Did you happen to write down your top ten disputations (and would you be willing to put a few of them here)?
I had a copy of this book, and I don't know how one manages to misplace something with a bright orange dust jacket and over a square foot of surface area, but I did. I was about 1/3 of the way in. So I'm cornered into sitting with the material I remember until I want to pay another 30 clams.
I was a few tens of pages past the introduction of Kandiaronk. I think G&W were getting underway with saying "you didn't prove that" at most/all of the critical junctures in the assumed timeline of the development of political theory. Footnoting that is going to be a b********** anyway... Did they end up postulating their own path, or does it continue with the "we really don't know, but there's lots of doubt to be cast"?
I read the first part of this review. An outline of a book like this is (to me) probably not the way to approach a review. One has to read it and digest it and then write about it, not alongside it. But especially if the reviewer were in a hurry - with a book like this, that might mean having started last year - writing alongside it might seem like the pragmatic choice.
I liked the bit about all the ruins of huge complexes that lacked farming. Farming is like the office, hunter-gathering is the gig economy, and the latter leaves a lot more time to do other stuff. Even thinking that they might have made that work is emotionally liberating.
Ok, I will. I admire someone who reads the whole book and reviews it. The discussion of “progressivism” at the beginning was a “skip this” clue. But I’ll go back. It’s 100 degrees here, looking like a long weekend with iffy A/C, what better to do than dive into this. I think the book is incredibly valuable for raising the questions it raises.
I bought the kindle version and stayed up until 245 tracing the quotes in the review and then wrote an essay which I haven’t yet read in daylight…and then posted it to the comments. I wasn’t mean though.
You’re in philosophy, right - you probably recall the 90s when (where I was) half the acreage of campus said “the encounter with the Other” to each other on a daily basis? Which writers were structuring and driving this? I just read Freddie’s blog entries about DoE from late 2021, one of his criticisms was “how is The Indigenous Critique of the West even a thing?” and all I can do is mutter “but it was such a popular idea it was in comparative literature course descriptions.”
I don't think Appiah shares their politics. He's a liberal cosmopolitan, while Graeber is a hardcore anarchist with a general leftist bent (though he's not really a leftist exactly either).
I tend to think that whenever you have very esoteric political beliefs you are best classified by where you fall when it comes to the real policy debates around you. I find myself vaguely reactionary but I will agree with a neoliberal on economic policy issues most of the time. Id be surprised if Appiah and Graeber have very distinct opinions on the things we actually get a chance to vote on, although I could be wrong.
As far as voting is concerned, sure. But writing a book review isn't voting, and Appiah seems to me to be doing the right service as a book review writer.
Funny, but it was Appiah's review that interested me in the book. When I read it, I took it as an overall positive review but with some nits to pick with the authors about their interpretation of Enlightenment history and the interpretation of the archaeological evidence. And he ended his review on high note:
"Social prophets, including those in the anarchist tradition—from Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman to Paul Goodman and David Graeber—make the vital contribution of stretching our social and political imagination. Facing forward, we can conduct our own experiments in living. We can devise the stages we’d like to see."
What really interested me was Wengrow's response — which to me (with my undergrad background in Archaeology) seemed quite nuanced and reasonable.
In his response to their response, Appiah finally agrees that they did a good job of synthesizing vast amounts of data, but they ignored the counterarguments to their claims. I find that to be a fair comment, but OTOH, when creating such a vast tome, where hundreds of archaeological and historical examples were presented, would it have been productive to spend time arguing with each counterargument for each example. At the risk of falling into the trap of whaddaboutism, Ian Morris in his well-footnoted book _Why the West Rules_ doesn't spend a lot of time discussing the counterarguments to his narrative's examples.
Yes, I acknowledged Appiah's seems to share the overall ideological / political conclusion, but I remember the empirical disagreements as much, much more damning. I mean, Wengrow bothered to write a reply.
I agree it wouldn’t have been productive for G&W to argue every counterexample. I really like that they found interpretations of archaeological evidence which support rotating governmental structures, decentralized systems. I also like their People’s-history style take on what the actual relationships were like between people and the rulers, where rulers existed (I think it was the Natchez society, with the Great Sun king and most of the villages well out of his reach.)
I think as long as each (or most) of G&W’s citations retains a percent possibility that it happened that way, they have created enough of a loophole in the progression-of-civilizations theory to call it into serious question and then deserve more scholarship to line up the pieces in their arguments.
Rousseau & Hobbes is tricky, the whole enlightenment is tricky, to treat quickly - I think they also didn’t mention Foucault - mentioning the big names brings out all the pros with their vested interests in received wisdom.
I’ve read enough Vine Deloria (and Momaday and others) to believe that indigenous societies existed, and can in some places continue to exist, in forms outside the European imagination of the colonial era.
If turning the dial of society back just enough until it hits right-sized agrarian utopia- if that’s not possible, if that mostly did not exist, if the polities were often less agrarian, more materially egalitarian with varying types of social structure - I’m ok with that. Looking at other possibilities of materially egalitarian social structure is important, I agree, whether we find them in history or in theories - if in history, at least somebody made it work at some point, which adds promise.
Saying “the anarchists didn’t support their arguments” is also common and an easy way to dismiss them. There’s some intersection between that being right, and the historical situation. I’d like to do a Scott and inch through DoE putting probabilities on all their assertions. It would take a very long time though.
I think the idea of utopia is a perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good issue. I’d like to see it go. Wendat society was a real place, so it would have had its unfairnesses, but people apparently weren’t dying of poverty. If leaving that balance behind was not inevitable, I see that as good. If it didn’t take bureaucracy- if administration worsened it - that’s very interesting and has a lot of implications.
I think the big question is "Is it possible to organize highly complex societies on more or less anarchistic principles" rather than the uniformity or uniform stupidity of ancient groups of human beings.
The Davids have succesfully proven that ancient humans were not all equally organized and were not all equally stupid. I think that's neat and basically trivial. Pop-X authors very much enjoy taking an 80 year old view, presenting it as the consensus (it is never the consensus) and then demolishing it. It sucks.
But then we go back to the real big question, where the Davids play with all sorts of tricks and then still fail to be convincing because the scholarship is basically sloppy and ideological. It all reminds me of what some economists like to say of MMT “is a mix of old and new, the old is correct and well understood, while the new is substantially wrong".
Why do they fail? I think Turchin explains it quite well:
Even leaving aside discussions about orders of magnitude and the true nature of a coercive state, they still fail because of the objective arrangement of the human planet circa 2022, which is that the State, hierarchy, administration and all the bad things ever won literally everywhere in a manner that suggests limited human agency in the face of more and less primitive ways of running things.
Thanks for the reference, this is really interesting.
As “the consensus” that’s set up and knocked down - do you mean the idea of back to the land/neo-indigenous non-technological utopia?
Part of the reason I think activists were most of the intended audience for G&W is that there are still people who very much believe in that better-society, or consider it “directionally correct” (great phrase from Appiah’s review).
I think contemporary US tribal communities don’t have much use for them but in “pro-Indian” organizing in the society at large it’s harder to fend them off. I was at a gathering recently where some activists were flyering the exit driveway by going up to cars and giving them flyers about Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women. The tiny print at the bottom of the xeroxed-looking paper showed it the upcoming protest was sponsored by something-something Workers. I care about the MMIW issue, I think it’s important.
I also think “indigeneity” can be used as a badge of credibility or reliability. “Here we go getting closer to Rousseau!” say the non-tribal activists going to the MMIW protest organized by whichever left organization. Or the feeling of that.
I think Utopianism is behind some of the land acknowledgements, ie, “if we say this enough times we ourselves will return to the Better World before colonialism.” Descendants of that community have a path to take in terms of negotiating their heritage, tribal government, larger society, and that makes sense to feel and consider things about a hypothetical better world there. People saying that who are not descendants of that community are often either really caring & helpful, or they’re hoping to ride the transformation into their own utopia. I think land acknowledgements are valuable for different reasons but “This was Ohlone land, soon it will be again, here come the farm girls with flowers if you say this often enough” can be an element. So for G&W to knock it down - big name activist - is relevant. There’s a lot to unpack there in terms of real needs of indigenous communities, what it means in the modern day, what a helpful response is from an outsider to that community, etc. I recall Deloria writing about the anthropologists going to Indian communities and intrusively/destructively studying them in service of the prior iterations of debate about utopia. It can still go on.
I’ll read more of Turchin now. His book looks good.
But G&W never bring up the question of whether it's possible to organize a society on anarchistic principles. Just because Graeber was a self-styled anarchist, does that make everything he wrote an anarchist polemic?
As for an "80 year old view" that was "never consensus", V. Gordon Childe was still on my reading list when I was an archeology undergrad. And the theory they taught me was all about the evolution of states from tribes from bands and how do identify these transitions in the archeological record. Of course, a lot of my profs were Marxists, so they bought into that cultural evolution crap. My undergrad experience was 40 years ago, but the fact that people like Ian Morris are still recycling this dogma makes me think it's still consensus—at least in some circles.
I’m not sure the reviewer finished it. I paid for a kindle copy and am locating each of his quotes. So far the furthest in is p. 246. In an hour or so I’ll post.
Not Freddie - I mean this current review. I’ve made a list of all 45 quotes from the book and the furthest in is from p. 257. This doesn’t absolutely mean they didn’t read the whole thing but a few of the reviewer’s questions are answered in chapter 12,
My bad. I guess I missed Freddie's parenthetical comment "(I did finish reading it however)". Apologies to Freddie for mischaracterizing his statement—but no apologies for saying Freddie is overtly mischaracterizing G&W's work by dropping that "inadequately sourced" turd in his opinion. Give me some frigging specifics with links to back up your arguments, Freddie. And don't say you've documented it on your Substack site, because I'm not going bother to subscribe to someone who's is too lazy to post his arguments in a forum where this subject is being openly discussed.
LMAO, nothing sums up Freddie Deboer like "too lazy to read." Sure, buddy. (He did write some interesting comments on the first few chapters, if you'd like to know what some of the issues were.)
My updated opinion: Yes, Freddie claims to have read the book. My bad.
But I'm not going bother to subscribe to someone who's is too lazy to post his arguments in a forum where this subject is being openly discussed. Let him post his arguments here on this forum.
Well, this is a forum for soi-disant rationalists and people interested in rationalism. Maybe I'm be I'm being overly idealistic that we can engage in rational discourse about rationalism and adjacent topics, but a large percentage of the discourse on these threads seems to be non-rational, ill-informed, or informed by personal prejudices, or by ideological obsessions and ego.
Freddie called The Dawn of Everything "one of the most irresponsible books I've ever read." By doing that he dropped a rhetorical cherry bomb into the middle what up until then had been a fairly sensible discussion (albeit with a few ideological digressions). On top of that he smeared the book as being "indequately sourced" — which, if one actually has read this book, is clearly just bullshit.
I'm not expecting an answer from him because I don't think he's really capable of mounting a rational defense for his positions. I must admit I find people who behave like Freddie in public forums to be tiresome. I probably shouldn't have responded to him in the first place (i.e. fed the troll), but even if you don't like Graeber's politics, or G&W's thesis, there's still an immense amount useful information in The Dawn of Everything—and if you're a seriously interested in the questions of why civilizations arose, you'll be following up on the cited works for years to come.
It’s likely many of the same things that most other reviewers have found frustrating. Basically the constant accusations of incomplete and slipshod scholarship for everyone else combined with incomplete and slipshod scholarship. Graeber tends to be at his best when putting forward an intriguing hypothesis that may actually be consistent with the information we have and that challenges orthodoxy in some interesting way that supports an anarchist political agenda, and at his worst when claiming that therefore this alternative hypothesis is definitely true and that the orthodoxy is the result of a political agenda.
This is super concerning to me, since I really liked Debt and thought DoE was very interesting. I'm not an academic, I read it via Audiobook and I didn't check the citations.
I know I'm asking a lot for a forum reply, but how bad are we talking about here? Is this a "author's point is totally shut down by their own citations" situation? Or more a case that they are stretching thin evidence too far.
The bigger problem is simply not citing statements of fact that seem very much in need of citation, but I found three or four cases of the authors misrepresenting what a given citation does say, and that was only in two chapters worth of really looking for that kind of thing.
Everything that David Graeber has ever written is equally "problematic" in these sorts of ways.
Debt: The First 5000 Years is probably the book I have the most ambivalent reaction to of any I have ever tried to read - it both poses a bunch of fascinating ideas that I keep thinking about, and also disgusted me so much with how fast and loose it plays with the facts that I couldn't finish it. If he just said, "economists make up a lot of just-so stories, so let me make up another one and you can decide whether it's got some value and interest", it would have been an amazing book. But the fact that it keeps being "economists are the worst people in the world because they just make up just-so stories and claim they are incontrovertible fact, while here I've discovered the one true fact about the history of money" just disgusted me.
I just read his book on Bullshit Jobs, because it ties in to a paper I'm writing on the concept of bullshit generally, and it kept being frustrating how much weight he wants to put on a single survey to say, "look, the majority of work is bullshit, because 37% of workers admit it, and 37% of the rest are only working to support their bullshit!", and then how credulously he took everything his Twitter followers said to him about what their jobs were like.
I was also extremely interested in Bullshit Jobs before reading that little Economist piece on how their numbers don't make sense and finding out about how dishonest DoE is.
The big thing is the idea that debt can arise before money, and can make the need for a unit of measurement natural even if no one has currency. The idea that debt can be prior to money and that money can be prior to barter reverses a lot of naive ideas I had.
The first chapter about the history of credit in the early fertile crescent civilizations and how it worked without coinage is amazing. Yes, when Graeber first says "Debt" he means "Credit". But then he starts using "Debt" in other contribed ways that sound confusing. The whole section on eastern religious views on "Debt" is like that and kind of ruins the great start of the book IMHO.
Danco also explains better than Kenny Easwaran below - no offense to Kenny, his was a short response - Graeber's argument about growth of bullion as a currency stemming from conquest. In Debt's logic, bullion is an extractive tool, because you can demand bullion from conquered peoples, but you cannot demand credit in the same way, it is much more bound into networks of reciprocity.
I also saw elsewhere that the "Bullshit Jobs" argument wasn't substantiated empirically by other researchers (I think Dur & Lent, 2019, is the main paper, but you may know of others). I doubt Graeber would have been surprised to find that out, given that the idea of having a bullshit job feels not only subjective, but also possible to manipulate experimentally relatively easily. To my mind, interpretations of words like 'socially useful' or 'bullshit' are so context laden as to make surveying people about this very challenging. You are right to say that Graeber is overexcited by a single survey and his qualitative data, but I think he is channelling a more Marxist theory of work and identity that isn't necessarily shared by the random people being surveyed.
For instance, if you read other authors from a similar space as Graeber on work, like Peter Fleming, part of the logic inherent in their conception of neoliberalism is that it ties jobs into identities. Fleming calls this the 'I, Job' function, but it's pretty evident that the link between jobs and identities doesn't exist in the same way for them (they're maybe getting this from the little Marx writes about the future after Communism has been 'achieved', wherein people can be painters in the morning and poets in the afternoon etc.).
If someone's job is a large part of their identity, as it will invariably be in a world where 40hrs+ a week are spent at work, then that will change their perception on whether their work is socially useful. IIRC, Graeber says most jobs in PR are bullshit, and it seems unlikely that most people in PR would agree with him. I think it's very hard to extricate identity from these sorts empirical data collection processes.
I was surprised that the numbers in Dur & Lent were so high if anything: "We find that approximately 8 percent of workers perceive their job as socially useless, while another 17 percent are doubtful about the usefulness of their job."
Perhaps you've read more in this space that could persuade me otherwise, but I'm not fully convinced by the empiricism applied to Bullshit Jobs. I'd love to read your paper about bullshit when you're finished with it, that sounds fascinating!
I’ll have to check out the Dur and Lent piece! The one I link in the other branch of this thread (Soffia, Wood and Burchell, 2021) is good, and sympathetic to Graeber, but reject all his empirical claims.
I have a draft I’m showing people now. If you email me (last name at gmail) I can send it.
that is debating, the book debates Rousseau, Dunbar, Harari plus a bunch of anthropoogists and archeologists, I would not expect general acceptance, it visit a couple of dozen of archeological and historical sites with novel questions, and has 150 pages of notes BTW, do not discount this book because DeLong and Appiah, check the end of Appiah's reply to Wengrow "I hope I made plain, there’s much more to the book than that. Graeber and Wengrow’s argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable. Readers who imagine foragers on the Sahlinesque model of the San will encounter foraging societies with aristocrats and slavery, while the book’s account of the Poverty Point earthworks is a riveting study of collective action. We get an intriguing proposal about the nature of the state. And this is just to begin a long list of fascinations. That “kaleidoscope of social possibilities” emerges vibrantly from these pages."
150 pages of notes is not particularly impressive for a 700 page book. I dont think notes are an end in of itself, but I dont feel particularly reassured when a book has an about average number of them.
Re the debate, people have noted in this same thread Graeber’s tendency to be a pretty bad defender of his own work; having parsed the Graeber-DeLong saga, this seems true. Appiah’s review is not the only generally negative one, there is extreme carelessness displayed elsewhere and this is the exact same carelessness that characterized Graeber’s past work.
Re the actual Wengrow response: I am not really qualified to form a meaningful opinion on how competent it is. I wont ever be, but Bayesian thinking suggests it’s fine to assume Wengrow is wrong.
Also, the deterministic model still seems correct on a level for the simple reason that hierarchical, settled, agricultural civilizations clearly outcompeted everyone else.
To me, the biggest problem with their scholarship is that DoE is always looking at quantitative questions using nothing but qualitative data. For instance, they wanted to "prove" that the hunter-gatherer / band / tribe / chiefdom is "false". But of course there were many groups that fit comfortably into that mold. So the only meaningful kind of claim would be a quantitative one, like "/Most/ early cultures didn't fit that progressive scheme." But they never make such claims, and never give us quantities. In the case of the civilization-pipeline hypothesis, they list exceptions, but don't tell us what fraction of the groups they looked at were exceptions. 10%? 60%?
Brad DeLong very publicly noticed that everything in Debt that he was something of an expert on (modern economic history) was either slapdash or wrong. This lead to quite the internet war of words.
Given how common that is for people to say about his work on their own areas of expertise, there's a decent chance in my mind that's how he was with everything.
I completely agree about distorted use of sources, and I checked cases over many chapters. It's too bad the book didn't go through an academic press review (I'm sure it had some sort of peer review, but either it was inadequate, or FSG was wildly irresponsible in publishing anyway). Some reviewers have praised the depth of its sources, but many discussions make broad claims without sourcing, and then source tangential details. If Graeber and Wengrow had been pulled up short by reviewers invested in accuracy, they might have been forced to rework their argument in more responsible form. It's not as if their central hypotheses aren't interesting.
Graeber never really liked to be forced to rework arguments into more responsible form. A decade ago, the people at Crooked Timber set up a "seminar" on his book Debt: The First 5000 Years (a format they've often done where 5-10 academics read some book, write up a post about it, let the author write up a post responding to all of them, and then have a discussion in the comments) and by the end he got so prickly about being politely asked for more support for some claims that they almost wished they had blocked him from future comment threads. I still found that seminar interesting enough that I decided to get the book and read it, but by about 2/3 of the way through I couldn't bring myself to finish it (even though it was also really fascinating and interesting!)
I much appreciate the lead, Kenny. I went in turn to look at the Beggs review of "Debt," which quotes Graeber saying he intended to write, "the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate, but at the same time, without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor." Reading the review, it's the final phrase which was the problem, just as I think it is in the case of "Dawn."
It's hard enough to retain scholarly rigor in small scale work. I think it's wise to realize that avoiding any sacrifices in rigor isn't possible in works of this aspirational scale, and to at least try to compensate for it with an approach long on humility.
LoL. Inadequately sourced claims?! 145 out of 643 pages (22% of this book) are footnotes and references. Give me a break! So, now let's talk about dishonesty...
A lot of reviewers mentioned how extensive the note apparatus seems to be, beowulf. But midway through, my margin notes began to say things like, "*This* is where we need to see evidence." Nobody's claiming Graeber and Wengrow didn't look at a lot of books and articles.
Graeber and Wengrow use the notes for discussion, rather than embedding tangential strands in the text, which is fine, but when you do that in an academic text, to have 80+ pages of notes for a 500+ page text isn't unusual at all.
Cracking review; one sufficiently interesting and in-depth to make me think again about a book which forced me to rethink what I thought I knew in the first place. The delights of recursiveness...!
Very good professional level writing. IMO though, 9,600 words is too long for a book review. The main reason I read reviews is to see if the book is worth my time. At about 5,000 words we are talking about 20 page of double spaced text. By that point I start to wonder if I should just read the book itself.
Yeah, in grad school they used to force us to write 500-word reviews, but some of the detail was useful - I just skipped some whole paragraphs that didn't appear to be useful.
9,600 words is merely 'above average' for book reviews on ACX/SSC; there have been many longer ones. I enjoy them because of, not despite, the length, when they're written well, and I think I'm pretty typical of the readership here. If you read reviews mainly to figure out if the book is worth your time you're definitely better served elsewhere; that's not how most book reviews here are written (thank goodness).
Normally I’d agree with you on this - and I downvoted most of the longer reviews - some were just baggy, tedious and repetitive. But this one’s pretty damn good and ends with some sound speculation on why humans took so long to get round to building civilisations & stuff. Spoiler alert ~200,000 years of high school level gossip & social shaming that’s now back with a vengeance via social media 🥳
IMO it's right on the edge in terms of length. Scott really needs to impose a upper limit on the length, because a 60-page review is a qualitatively different type of artistic creation than a 4-page review. That's why I think it scandalous that last year's winner was 60 (?) pages long, because why would I read it unless I'm really into Georgism, in which case I'd tend to give the review a high rating?
If it’s not your particular niche interest, at some point you start thinking, “Hmm, ‘Heart of Darkness’ was only 38,000 words. I didn’t start to feel impatient halfway through that….” So much to read, so little time.
Maybe you're wanting a more inverted pyramid writing style, where you can quit at any point and not miss the main point. But that's in tension with the natural essay writing style, in which the entire essay builds to the main point. I've seen book reviews (even within the same publication department) of both types, some are focused on "What's this book about and was it well said?" and some are more focused on "This book sparked some interesting idea, and let me tell you what it was, and how the book sparked it." Each has its advantages, but each will disappoint someone looking for the other thing.
I bailed on this too early. The best stuff was at the end. Excellent essay. I think we might be doing it a disservice labeling it just a ‘book review’.
>Rousseau’s submission, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, became an intellectual sensation. In its long life as one of the foundational documents of the Western world it has been, at times, blamed for the bloody slaughter of The Terror, and, at other times, lauded as the inventor of the progressive Left.
Interesting that these "two" interpretations of Rousseau are posed as alternatives, when it was precisely the progressive Left (i.e., the Jacobins) who carried out the Terror. The purported two are in fact one.
Is it fair to portray the progressive Left as a monolith in which everyone who agreed with the basic thrust of Rousseau would also inevitably execute and support the Terror?
There is evidence that standards of living actually went down with the beginning of agriculture. People became shorter, for example. The gifts of “civilization” initially only benefited the elite. Only with industrial societies has the lot of the many been substantially bettered. I think of agrarian societies as a social trap in and of themselves- where the poor are the majority controlled by a mafia-like elite - an elite who only foster literacy and innovation etc when it helps them . So how did humanity get in that trap initially? Good question.
A person could "benefit" by never expending resources on offspring if you're measuring by how much they get to eat. But evolution has not primed us to see that as an actual benefit. Agriculture greatly expanded the population, and thus was a Darwinian "benefit".
Perhaps my response was too subtle. A substantial fraction of us are perfectly aware of Darwinian selection effects, and don't give a damn about what happens to to the frequency of our alleles in the gene pool.
If you need further clarification, consider Watts's Trunclade's poem in Watts's "Blindsight"
Which is why you need to carefully select a godparent of your children who would be willing to take them in if they were orphaned rather than assuming there'd be an abundant supply of people competing for access to them.
Surely that's only true when you live in a settled society that can forceably transfer the earnings of the young to the benefit of the old -- or at least in a tribe that through some kind of group sympathy is willing to do that voluntarily.
I mean, otherwise in the primeval setting without children you're fucked when you reach age 60 or so and can't successfully forage for yourself.
And at that, I would guess if one were deliberately childless in a primitive tribe, you better have *something* else to contribute -- being a shaman or brilliant about the local animal habits -- or it seems likely they will accidentally leave you behind the next time the tribe moves for the winter.
A settled society, yes - but it suffices for there to be a way to save earnings for one's old age. Social security is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but it is not the only possibility. A trustworthy banking system need not do anything forcible.
Actually, according to the article TGGP linked it isn't that "in the primeval setting without children you're fucked when you reach age 60 or so and can't successfully forage for yourself." -
even _with_ children:
"Grandparents continued to work hard to support their grandchildren and produced more than they ate. At almost no time in their adult lives, did adults produce less than they consumed. When people became too old and frail to work, death followed quickly. Suicide and euthanasia of the enfeebled were frequently reported."
That's a good point, but I wonder if it isn't quite as sharp a distinction as people steeped in modern Western notions might at first think. You still need the state to compel the young population to redeem the IOUs written to you by older people (i.e. your retirement savings), perhaps people now long dead. It's part of our modern heritage that transforming debts into dollars sterilizes them in some sense -- we no longer consider who contracted the debt or why.
But if the debt were framed some other way, we might not. Suppose you gave a goat to a neighbor farmer and he agreed to pay it back any time you asked. Decades go by, the neighbor farmer dies, and his property (and debts) are inherited by his great-nephew. You turn up one day, when you are old, and ask the young great-nephew for the goat. We might actually debate to what extent the great-nephew owes you the goat, notwithstanding his uncle's promise, since he (the great-nephew) wasn't party to the old man's promise.
But if you gave the goat to the neighbor and he gave you $200 on the spot, and then many years later you go to the great-nephew owner and offer him $200 for a goat (assuming the price of goats has not changed), we would consider it weird for him to refuse on the grounds that he didn't agree to give you the $200 in the first place.
When individuals are concerned, we can find strong reasons to distinguish between a direct IOU and a dollar, but we are talking throughout here really about collective debts and IOUs, so it's harder. To what extent does the younger generation owe you labor for your redeemed dollars, which represent obligations an older generation contracted in return for your labor when you were young? (I agree with you that they actually do, but I'm steeped in the same tradition. I'm trying to think like someone who isn't, someone for whom almost all social transactions are direct, not mediated by money.)
We might say, well, the younger generation inherits some responsibility for the debts incurred by the older. But then from *that* point of view public pensions start to also make similar sense. After all, that, too, is argued to be a payment of some kind of intergenerational debt (to which the young did not consent at the time, being too young or not yet born). "You took care of us as children, or at least built/maintained the world we inherited, with many good things, so we owe you support when you are old."
Did you read the link? It's not about a society that "forceably transfers the earnings of the young to benefit the old". Instead it says that in the past old people just consumed less as they get less productive.
I'm skeptical that things were that clear-cut, because if agricultural society was just strictly worse for everyone but the elites, why would it have ever taken off in the first place? Most people, even very poor peasants, were not literal slaves: They weren't kept bound to the land by force, and could theoretically leave whenever they wanted. Occasionally some of them did leave, either to live in the wilderness on their own or to join one of the many nomadic hunter-gatherer bands that still existed at the time. But most of them chose to stay, and presumably wanted to stay. In fact, exile from civilization was often threatened and used as a punishment! Why would that be the case if it was such a bad deal for them? Maybe after a certain point you could just social and cultural inertia, but that would take centuries. How would an obviously terrible system endure that long to begin with?
I think the answer here is that agriculture, stationary settlements, formalized laws, and everything else we associate with civilization provided a level of *stability* that hadn't been possible before. So yes, the average peasant had considerably less to eat than to average hunter-gatherer. He was probably less healthy overall. But he wasn't literally starving to death, and was actually far less likely to starve to death than the hunter-gatherer, because agriculture and the construction of storehouses allowed a large surplus of food to be saved for emergencies. The hunter-gatherer faced the threat of starvation whenever there was a natural disaster, but the peasant only faced the threat of starvation if things went wrong for several harvest cycles in a row, which was considerably less likely (though likely much worse on the occasions when it did occur, given that the peasant had far less flexibility in finding alternative food sources). People can live well into their 60s and 70s even with a fairly poor diet, so while the hunter-gatherer may have benefitted from a higher median nutritional intake, the peasant benefitted from a far lower rate of variability.
And that's not even getting into all the other forms of danger that the hunter-gatherer faces on a semi-regular basis: exposure to the elements, predatory beasts, fatal or incapacitating accidents, and worst of all, encounters with enemy humans. The peasant wasn't entirely protected from these dangers either, but they were noticably less likely in the relative safety of an established settlement. (One counterpoint is that the threat of disease was far worse in civilized areas due to the much higher population density, but that's outweighed by all the other ways that people in agricultural societies were safer.) Living in subpar health with a low chance of death was preferable to living in better health with a much higher chance of death, both on the individual level (again, most people *chose* to stay in agricultural societies) and on the group level (longer average lifespans = more time to have extra children = exponentially larger populations).
And speaking of children, only around half of the infants born in hunter-gatherer societies lived to adulthood. In some tribes, the child mortality rate was as high as 2 in 3! In contrast, the child mortality rate in ancient civilizations was "only" 1 in 3. This is abysmal by modern standards (the worst child mortality rate in the world today is Afghanistan's, at 1 in 10, and that's an extreme outlier - it's many times lower even in other extremely poor nations), but compared to the hunter-gatherers, it was nothing short of miraculous! So there were some very real advantages to agricultural living, and not just for the small minority of royals and nobles in charge.
A factor you seem to have discounted is the importance of geography. Precise knowledge of ancient life is dependent on location in a way that isn’t as true of more recent history. But the availability of food sources is very uneven across the landscape. And the various native cultures of pre-Colombian western N America show this. (I reference them b/c it’s the only area I have any real knowledge of, but it seems likely true elsewhere.) The Puebloan agriculturalists - builders of Chaco, Mesa Verde, etc. - managed to sustain their basic way of life in a difficult environment for many centuries, but generally avoided even more marginal land nearby. There are no known ‘Anasazi’ sites of any significance in most of the Great Basin, which is basically next door. Yet the Paiute were living there, in a very materially ‘modest’ way and continued to do so right up to the reservation era, c. 1900, when the conquest by white society was complete.
I think the argument from people who believe in the agricultural trap is that it only happens in the first place when it must, when the alternative (via geography, inclimate weather, and overpopulation) is starvation for many people. As long as people *can* fade over the horizon in small groups when they dislike the local social structure, they will, and it never takes off.
This is predicated on the observation that as long as the geography and climate (and low population density) support it, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not, as you aver early on, and as is the common assumption, dangerously unstable -- that in fact it is quite stable, and almost never involves feast-and-famine cycles. I think this is based around some modern hunter-gatherer tribes, who don't suffer from the problems one might assume they do. When food in one place is more scarce, they just move where it isn't. As long as you're not dealing with some very large scale and very fast-moving environmental fluctuation (which by definition are exceedingly rare) their mobility allows them to surf over any local weirdness (which actually *would* present a problem for a stationary agricultural society that couldn't just up stakes and move when the rainfall in this valley was 50% lower than last year).
I’m pretty sure the Paiute of the Great Basin are a close fit for demonstrating that. The nutritional yield of the land was relatively low but fairly reliable. B/c it was a harsh environment and not abundant they had no serious competition over a very wide area, and they had developed such an intimate understanding of the landscape that they could forage with reliable success. Seems like a textbook ‘hunter-gatherer society’. But I’m not as familiar w/them as I am w/some other tribes/groups.
One of the things economists know (or at least used to know) is that alternatives matter--a lot. Full time agriculturalism occurs when a wide area has been "hunted out" and "gathered out". If a peasant can easily "go back" to being a hunter-gatherer, he may well. In fact, James Scott's Against the Grain is largely about that. But at some point, there just isn't enough easily available food for the peasant who wants to flee. And at that point, he may well have lost enough of the practical knowledge of a foraging lifestyle to make it possible anyway.
Why would an area get "hunted out" and "gathered out"? My guess would be human population increase. More people are born and fewer die when times are good. Then, when times are bad, you hunt and gather more than the ecosystem can recover from. You're eating your "natural capital".
"And Christ, the most important intellectual figure for medieval Europe, was himself a political radical and revolutionary, overturning the tables of the moneylenders and frequently espousing things like in Matthew 20:25-28...."
To be fair, I understand that the question "was Christ poor?" was rather controversial in medieval Europe, with the princes of the Church seeking, in spite of the voluminous evidence to the contrary, to argue otherwise.
Contrast with the Piers Plowman tradition, which took a much more "progressive" (to modern ears) view of the roles of wealth and power and poverty.
On the other hand, they had to argue against some mendicants who took the poverty and egalitarianism with varying level of seriousness. They had some audience, too. Consider St Francis of Assisi, or the other sects who more extreme and got burned as heretics.
Obviously novels, not nonfiction, but both Eco’s Name of the Rose and Luther Blisset’s Q deal extensively with the question fo Christ’s poverty and mendicants role in the medieval church.
The debate about Christ being "poor" was not about whether he lived like a poor man or a rich man. "Poor" in that context didn't mean that.
The advocates of the "poverty" of Jesus argued that he didn't own anything at all, and that anything he held in his hands was not his own. A doctrine linked to the Franciscan order. Those who argued against Christ being "poor" were in fact arguing against that.
Hilarious to me how they invented a definition of poor that has nothing to do with whether you're able to get your various needs and desires met in a stable and reliable fashion, like it means for the rest of us.
The story i've been telling myself about the sapient paradox is that it was something like a phase change in matter. Your 'gossip' theory maybe ends up telling the same story.
imagine a gas being injected into a weirdly shaped chamber. The chamber represents habitable niches for human beings; the gas is humans. As the gas goes in, first it fills the change (i.e. the out of africa exodus and population of all possible niches) and then the pressure starts to rise.
Pressure could rise for a loooong time, even if individual molecules aren't changing their structure. And-then, at some point, the pressure rises high enough for a phase transition from gas to liquid. What would this look like from the perspective of individual molecules?
From my perspective, a phase change would look like, you'd see some new kind of 'social arrangement' between other molecules, relating to each other in some new way that made the 'normal kind of relationship' (i.e., what happened before) harder to maintain.
So maybe what happened was, population pressure gradually went up, and once it got to a certain point, being better at fighting wars started to matter more than anything else. Gossip networks, because they tear down outstanding individuals, ended up losing out to formalized hierarchies.
There was an offhand remark somewhere in the review about pre-formalized societies sometimes exceeding Dunbar's number. I wonder if there was a really awful phase of history where human communities were usually a bit bigger than Dunbar's number, but not enough so that their organization changed. There's probably many such periods in history, where the structural facts had changed in a way that made an old organization no longer work, but not so much so that a new organization was developed that worked better.
Yes. Whatever happened with the liberal revolutions a century or two after print media, and with the generations after the baby boomers with television, desperately needs to happen for social media. (Computers themselves, and Web 1.0, interestingly didn't seem to have such big consequences. As far as I could tell. But I grew up in that era, so maybe I'm the generation with the biggest blind spot on that.)
I suspect, though, that where we are headed is going to be terrifying for a while. I think the best analogy to what will happen is what happened after the printing press. This time around, i think the role of the catholic church will be played by 'the system of democratic nation states, ngo's, and global trade'.
Dunbar is only mentioned 3 times in text, but G&W say this of Dunbar: "It's simply assumed, in this kind of theory, that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dubar puts it, 'chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to'... G&W point out that the archaeological evidences shows there were large complex communities with potentially thousands of inhabitants where there was no evidence of social hierarchy. Indeed, even the early cities of the Fertile Crescent lacked any evidence of a distinct social hierarchy until well into the advent of the Bronze Age.
Yes, I think this is the major strength of "Dawn," pointing to lack of physical evidence of hierarchy in large settlements. It's much more persuasive to me than the material on Kandiaronk or some of the quickly summarized ethnographic materials.
But there are two major issues that come to mind in considering the argument from silence that these archaeological sites' lack of obvious wealth differentials or power centers suggest. One is that institutionalized status/power differentials don't always correlate with observable wealth, and the other is that religious constraints can be as powerful as physically coercive constraints. Think, for example, of early American Puritan communities or contemporary Mennonite or Haredi ones. These communities (as I understand them) exhibit highly constraining social norms enforced by religious hierarchies of elders--in some cases influenced by hereditary authority--without the major markers of wealth differentials or coercive violence.
I raised in an earlier post what I see as a major gap in the "Dawn" analysis: the persistent interpretation of geographical mobility of individuals as a marker of non-coercive social forms, of freedom to dissociate. I think it is just as likely to be a marker of coerced dissociation (exile), with "casting out" being a common control mechanism in social formations bound by religious constraints.
The point isn't that Graeber and Wengrow are wrong in their reading of the evidence; it's that they rely on an argument from silence without asking whether the data may not be speaking a language different from what their listening for. And it's worth asking, in terms of "Dawn's" underlying advocacy for anarchist values, what is gained in an egalitarian society if its structures depend on maintaining strict social conformity. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with social conformity--we all practice it in excruciating detail whenever we use language--but there is an issue with maintaining it through enforced constraints with life-altering consequences. There's no intrinsic reason to see it as preferable to some forms of hierarchical inequality that may satisfy life needs with less actual coercion.
Excellent point: this is something I always think about when I read archeological stories that state that stone-architectural (or grave goods) inequality must mean actual inequality, and without them, it is egalitarian.
If this theory were true, I'd expect the first civilizations to arise in the part of the world that filled up first: the parts of Africa that are far away from other continents. Instead civilization arose first in Asia, and in the corner of Africa with the best access to Eurasia.
Population density was historically rather low in Africa. This is related to the fact that so much of it was predominately hunter-gatherer until relatively recently, as well as to how much life there was already adapted to humans (to our detriment).
But maybe a high enough carrying capacity is required. It's still suspicious though, that it this threshold just happened to be reached in many distant parts of the world relatively simultaneously.
'Time-binding' was a popular phrase some decades ago. CS Lewis remarked that every craft and art is lost in one generation if no one teaches it, and hunter-gatherers get killed by lots of things. I'd expect techniques that take hunting to ranching, and gathering to agriculture, to be lost as the technicians die without teaching survivors.
Well, that's why we've written stuff down for the past 4000 years or so. It's definitely harder to learn blacksmithing from a book than from a blacksmith, but it can be done.
This is exactly what I was wondering - did 12000 BC coincide with the end of “screw this, I’m leaving” conflict resolution in groups as there wasn’t empty space for the dissatisfied to migrate towards.
That bit I had no problem with, the pet theory I thought detracted from the piece was the concept of the "Great Trap" and then his gossip based explanation for it.
Hah, that's the part of the review that I thought saved it from being a too-positive and too-credulous review of a deeply empirically problematic book.
When a third of your "review" has nothing to do with the book and is instead entirely about your own pet theory that's barely tangential, I'd say that's worthy of critique. It's not insightful regarding the work, to start with.
Very nice discussion. I do take issue somewhat with the framing of a great swath of human history being in a “great trap”: first, because it’s already natural to expect that archaeological records become sparser as one looks further back in time; second, because the conditions for long-term preservation of evidence of human culture are somewhat independent of what might be valued by the ancient people themselves: for instance if for many generations the people of a certain region favoured sky burial over tombs, we might erroneously take this to mean that they were not engaged in much cultural activity, simply because the evidence would not be preserved (much like how the fossil record grows sparse where and when soft-tissued organisms were dominant).
Admittedly these two objections have a ring of “just-so”. My bigger objection is that a society that lacked mass gatherings may not necessarily have been in a “trap” at all. It might not be that they were “held down” from complex social experimentation; rather, perhaps, conditions were such that they simply drew no benefit from doing so. This, though different in affect, is logically no different from a trap; but I do think it’s worth questioning the affect.
I’ll close with a few speculations about what the change in conditions may have been for this apparent blooming in the archaeological record.
1. Suppose in the distant past that languages diverged much more rapidly than they do today: a lack of standardized syntactic patterns, such as those we see in e.g. the Proto-Indo-European language group, could have caused diverging groups to rapidly become unintelligible to each other, and also hindered the development of Pidgin languages or lingua francas. (Call this the Tower of Babel Hypothesis). If this is true, it might further have had the effect of limiting the size of large gatherings to a smaller factor of the Dunbar number. This hypothesis posits that language evolved more or less like a technology, becoming more effective over a very long period of time.
2. Suppose, on the question of violence and rivalry, that despite humans’ demonstrated capacity for making peace, ancient bands always found it preferable to settle new territory instead. Therefore, for many tens or even hundreds of millennia, humans radiated away from each other in response to conflict and made only minimal attempts to coexist across tribes. Only when and where human migration settled into an equilibrium, in such cases as the risk of conflict in settling new land was roughly equal to the risk of conflict in remaining, did humans begin to develop rituals of broader social assembly.
3. I’m not sure how much this book covers this, but it’s well-known that foraging tribes have an active relationship with the land they live on: through techniques like brush-burning and the planting of favourable seeds, they, just like agrarians, have well-established traditions of working the land to make it more fertile. Yet these traditions may have taken a long time to develop. While the carrying capacity of the environment is low, human population density is also low, which limits the viability of assembling large groups of people for rituals or celebration. Perhaps, magnified by human activity, the carrying capacity of the environment gradually increased over many thousands of years until it crossed some critical threshold.
That’s not to say that the “Gossip Trap” idea isn’t compelling in itself. I fear that it—as well as any of the hypotheses I threw in—are all vulnerable to the same question of “yes, but why *then*? Why did humanity pick that particular threshold moment to stop gossiping and get around to building culture?”
Very likely, no matter what consensus we eventually land on, we’ll have to allow for an unrecoverable element of chaotic spontaneity, just like we (implicitly) do in charting the course of biological evolution.
I was also thinking that the things the review postulates as problematizing the "great trap" further might dissolve it. If things like hafted tools and rock art were emerging sporadically around the world for tens of thousands of years before the systematic changes we see around 12,000 years ago, then that breaks up the big 200,000 year period into a 150,000 year one and a 50,000 year one. If each of those then has further divisions within it, and so on, then eventually we get an explanation where it's just a whole bunch of little steps, and it's constant progress the whole time, rather than an apparent long stagnation.
Still, I did think the postulated explanation of the trap is interesting too.
On this note I think it's relevant that the bow and arrow, though probably first invented about 70,000 years ago, did not become common in most of the world until about 15,000 years ago--and in some places much later (California likely did not have bows until around 500 CE, see http://anthropology.ua.edu/reprints/22.pdf).
I have to imagine that other technologies and elements of culture also diffused very slowly through the sparse human population of the paleolithic.
If we leave aside the values question of which form of social organization is "best", then I think the conundrum is why does the species seem to exist stably for a very long time with one form of social organization, and then apparently accelerate rapidly in a different direction? It's difficult to square a long period of slow or absent change with a subsequent period of rapid change, if the same driving force for optimizing social structure underlies both periods. You'd have to adduce some very strong environmental shift that constrains the change (which is I think what you are doing with your alternate hypotheses) -- and then one asks: what is the evidence for that sharp and large environmental shift?
My read on the "gossip trap" argument is that it's saying that something like a phase change occurs instead. When you gradually increase the density of a fluid, nothing much happens until you reach a certain critical density, and then all of a sudden the stable optimum for the material shifts, and the material rapidly reforms itself around a new optimum (e.g. freezes or melts).
So the argument goes that for a long period of gradually increasing human population density the stable optimum for social organization is the smallish group with a fluid heirarchy established by "gossip." But at some point you cross the critical density, and the stable optimum consists of much larger groups with a more rigid heirarchy established by more formal and laborious means -- tradition, formal education, formal social structures like written law and government, whatever -- and humanity rapidly evolves towards the new optimum.
The advantage of this point of view is that you don't require any environmental shift. It just happens abruptly when human population density reaches the critical point[1], the way water just suddenly freezes at 0° when the temperature smoothly and steadily declines.
The major disadvantage I can see is that it begs the question of *why* human beings should have two different optimal self-organizing principles. It requires us to believe that in the process of optimizing our ability to organize at the small group level, evolution accidentally gave us the ability to organize at the large group level also (since we seem to have done pretty well at that level also).
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[1] Arguably technology enters to shift the critical point around a bit.
Speaking as a linguist, on No. 1, I'm not sure I understand what you mean, especially the emphasis on standardized syntax, which really is a concept pertaining to written languages in large-scale societies. (Certainly there does not seem to be any language reported not to have quite regular syntax--but "regular" is not the same as "standardized.") My knee-jerk impression is that your idea glides over the vast time depth involved in considering the languages at all, and overstates the stability of syntax that you seem to be getting at. Don't be misled by the fact that we're able to reconstruct decent amounts of PIE: That mostly reflects the fact that many of the descendant languages were written down quite early, and by the nature of reconstruction, the parts that can be reconstructed are those not lost in the daughter languages. (Clackson's Indo-European Linguistics in the Cambridge red series goes into the question of the actual historical status and overall accuracy of reconstructions of PIE quite well.) Instead consider only the modern languages: How much of PIE could you reconstruct from English, Hindi, French, Modern Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Persian, and Russian using only their contemporary forms in phonetic transcription? Quite little. (Indeed, the Russian would be peculiarly helpful in this context for the noun cases and the basics of the person marking of present-tense verbs, for example, though a total waste of time for the tense and aspect system and much else of verbs--and even what remains in Russian would still leave much that we know of PIE lost in the mists of time: variability in conjugations and noun endings, for example, that have been ironed out by changes within Slavic. Lithuanian, or at least the more conservative dialects that get the press, would help out somewhat more.)
More than that, what supposedly standardized syntax has survived from PIE into those languages? Not a lot: Wholesale destruction of noun and verb endings encoding massive amounts of grammar due to loss of unstressed syllables and other types of change means that the daughter languages HAVE to develop drastically different systems of syntax (much more fixed word order, jury-rigged auxiliary verbs, and on and on.) Indeed, syntax is in some ways slipperier than the lower levels of language (phonetics, phonology, morphology) because it is more closely tied to the conceptual level, and is varied semi-consciously to express shades of meaning in new ways that can stick around; it varies more readily and in a much greater variety of likely ways than sounds do, for example. Thus, the development of auxiliary do ("I went, I didn't go, Did you go?, Didn't you go?") that allowed the simple tenses to be used in closer parallel with the other tenses that use auxiliaries, developed over the space of two centuries, c.1500-1700, and that had major impacts on English syntax rendering it that much more different from earlier stages. The development of a full range of tenses for passive verbs (e.g., "my carriage is being repaired" versus the original form, "my carriage is repairing") took place over about 50 years, 1700-1750, again introducing a greater level of regularity different from the regularities in syntax in earlier stages of the language. If you look at all the records of IE languages over time, they all show similar histories of syntactic changes compounding to end up in very different syntactic systems than in the recorded ancient languages like Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit.
As an aside, probably not what you're getting at: Yes, the Chomskyans argue that language is innate, but in Principles and Parameters, the current formulation (or mark-current-formulation-minus-one, though regarding learnability Minimalism is more a development of P&P than a revolutionary overturning of it), that only means that certain general principles of language are encoded with binary switches for things like head-dependent word order, and the details of any given language are set by children as they learn the language under the influence of the language spoken around them: "Oh, the adjective precedes the noun. [Switch goes click, or in the native terminology of the tribe, parameter gets set for that principle.]" Deep structure isn't some sort of DNA braking change; it's just a model of general innate principles enhancing the learnability of language that simply lay down very broad channels within which language change can go hog wild--syntax can change just as readily under that view as in a view based on general cognitive principles.
Put another way, when was PIE spoken? (Though it is misguided to assume that all the features of PIE that we reconstruct were in fact spoken all at the same time. PIE's better viewed as a sort of projection onto one time slice of all the different aspects of it that we can reconstruct.) No way to say for sure, but we can thumbnail-estimate it at 6000-9000 YBP. How long has it been since out of Africa? How many times would PIE have developed into Hindi versus English versus Albanian in that time? Ten? Twenty? And the same is true for every other language family. The main thing special about IE is the time depth of our surviving records of older forms of the languages (and the Afro-Asiatic family--the Semitic languages and their relatives, especially Ancient Egyptian in this regard--exceeds IE in that respect); knowing what has survived into the modern languages, or just the fact that they are taught in standardized forms in the schools, might lead you to focus on their similarities while ignoring those of other contemporary languages.
However, there is a way in which I think you're getting at something I'd agree with, though the first part might seem like I disagree strongly: If you look at what we actually know of human language as spoken rather than when written down and taught in school and pay attention to what sociolinguistics teaches us, language is likely to change rather more slowly within small-scale societies (say, Dunbar limit or smaller for most interactions of daily life in most times of the year), in great part because there are much stronger cross-generational ties (grandparents taking a greater part in childcare, for example) that slow language change. That does not mean that individual variation is magically reduced; it means that changes are likely to spread much less readily. In modern mass societies, the major source of language change is changes beginning among and adopted by speakers (that latter part is the crucial factor in language change) aged, say, 15-25, and their changes spread rapidly among themselves and then more slowly through smaller numbers of intergenerational ties to other social networks because of strong generational divides due to mass education, division of labor, and social fragmentation--in short, the changes spread through social networks (Lesley Milroy's "web of ties") under the pressure of factors of social prestige (as per William Labov; though "prestige" is a rather catch-all concept). In small-scale societies, there are fewer social networks, the ties within the group are more general, intergenerational ties slow down the adoption of changes, and so on.
HOWEVER, that is change WITHIN a small-scale speech community. If you don't have a mass society, which we might take as a society viewing itself as and acting economically as a single group that is significantly larger than the Dunbar number, then speech within it will tend to remain more uniform than in a mass society, more than you'd expect from just the ratio of sizes. By the same token, however, it will have relatively much smaller connections with other speech communities even if they interact regularly economically and culturally; there will be much less of a brake on changes between groups. As to how those two factors would compare strength-wise in an area of small-scale societies versus the same area with a large-scale society, that would probably depend on the details of the societies (nature of interpersonal and intergroup ties and relations, social views on language "purity," and so on). In any case, you'll probably have a more patchwork picture than in the details of dialects in Europe before the solidification of the state, which in turn is a more patchwork situation than in the modern industrial state with strong political centralization and explicit policies of one state-one uniform language embedded in the educational system (France or Japan would be a good example there).
And above all, that's if we focus only on spoken language. The use of writing drastically changes the way language change acts in the long view, not so much by retarding language changes in the standardized language (it faces the countervailing pressure of easier spread of changes in mass society) but by killing off non-standard dialects and minority languages.
So in short, I don't think standardized syntax is particularly useful here, but you do get at a big passel of sociolinguistic factors.
I should add that upon a third or fourth reread of your post, I think I overestimated the importance of your comment about standardized syntax and didn't pay enough attention to this part: "Suppose in the distant past that languages diverged much more rapidly than they do today...This hypothesis posits that language evolved more or less like a technology, becoming more effective over a very long period of time." My comments don't really address that, focusing more on mechanism; in any case, it seems a hypothesis you couldn't test since it would refer to long stretches of unwritten language that would leave no obvious evidence.
I realize this thread is dead, but I only became aware of it recently and decided to read it.
I really liked your post, and very much agree with the lines of inquiry you raised.
>so”. My bigger objection is that a society that lacked mass gatherings may not necessarily have been in a “trap” at all. It might not be that they were “held down” from complex social experimentation; rather, perhaps, conditions were such that they simply drew no benefit from doing so.
And/or couldn’t?
One has to assume that for all those people to have gathered together in one place there was something very fundamental that they held in common, otherwise they just would’ve wandered off and started their own little community somewhere. From where did this come and by what means was it transmitted? It is here that I believe your speculation about language is crucial. Nothing could be written down. I think that is huge in this discussion, and I think it is under appreciated.
One person acting alone in a moment of kismet might make a small discovery. Another member of the community might watch and imitate. Then they both drop dead.
At some point things could be described in language, spoken language. But that requires someone to remember it and to be trusted with the word. I really think this is the fundamental process. For some reason when we look at what happened with Jesus and we think about people hundred thousand years ago we don’t see the connection. What if everything Jesus said could never have been written down?
Isn't the Sapiens paradox more easily explained by the difficulty to pass on knowledge from generation to generation in small groups? They didn't have writing, and a small group of people doesn't have as good memory as a larger group. Once the group reached a certain size, it was more likely that there was at least another member in the group that knew the skills or ideas that was discovered in the group, which meant that it had a greater chance of being sustained to the next generation, i.e. knowledge became cumulative for the first time. I think a more acurate analogy would be a bathtub without a plug. What does it take to keep the water level rising? Cumulation. No cumulation, no progress. Before cumulation, ideas had to be reinvented again and again. Fortunatly, one major idea was very easy to teach to everyone even in small groups: fire. Smash two flintstones together.
100%. That changed my worldview once I read it. He also just wrote "The Goodness Paradox: How Evolution Made Us Both More and Less Violent", which is well worth reading
The orthogonal direction as neither Rousseau nor Hobbes is consistent, in some part, with Otto Rank's study of primitive culture. He found that ideology dominated psychology more than biology (which caused Freud to have his "golden boy" thrown out of the club). Rank always saw humans as most concerned with their individual soul, and the development of religion and ideology as the collective soul-belief. This avoids historical projection of modern values onto ancient ways which (in the 70's) was known as ethnohistory, and that seems familiar in this review.
I don't buy the comparison of prehistoric small civilizations that operate entirely by informal social power with Twitter, because in Twitter you're encountering way, way more than 150 people. And that's a big part of why Twitter is so terrible: people can tell blatant falsehoods and get away with it a lot more easily on Twitter because the people they're lying to don't have the past experience with them to realize they're lying, and if they mistreat people, they aren't risking the major negative consequences they'd be risking if they mistreated a literal neighbor who was either friends with or related to 20% of their social circle.
High school is also not a good analogue because it's a highly artificial environment with no shared goal.
By contrast, in a persistent community that relies on group cooperation, people are going to care a lot about how much other people are contributing to the community, whether they are willing to help out their neighbors, whether you can trust them to keep their word, whether they're moochers, whether they're always stirring up drama, etc. And...I'm fine with people getting more or less social power based on such factors.
Sure, popularity isn't going to be *entirely* based on those legitimate factors, not by a long shot--humans being humans will also end up gaining or losing social power for stupid reasons and occasionally for positively evil reasons. But the bullshit reasons will be a significantly smaller percentage of what matters to people if they're a functional community where they all need trustworthy fellow-helpers in order to survive and flourish. (Successful) prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes were such communities. Twitter and high school are not, and so are not good models for imagining what that would have been like.
I've read that the court of Louis XIV had a social life like high school, because the king didn't allow the nobility to do any useful work. They awarded status purely on the basis of stupid arbitrary things because they had nothing else to base it on.
I've also read (in the same source, maybe?) that Japanese high schools are different. They take their classwork very seriously and therefore award social status based on grades.
"I've read that the court of Louis XIV had a social life like high school, because the king didn't allow the nobility to do any useful work. They awarded status purely on the basis of stupid arbitrary things because they had nothing else to base it on."
This was a deliberate creation of Louis, to centralise power in his hands and symbolically around his person. In his minority, he had experienced the Fronde rebellion(s), a period I find hard to disentangle because the French state was coming out of and going into new wars, the old king died, the Queen assumes the regency and sets out to govern with the help of her chief minister Cardinal Mazarin.
Anne (the queen mother) wanted to give her son a unified kingdom where he would be the absolute ruler and brought him up in this belief. Then when Louis was ten the Fronde rebellions started, first one where the parlements (courts of appeal) rebelled against the crown taking on their powers, then one of the princes where it was power-grabbing by the powerful nobles to try and seize power, which eventually collapsed when Louis was fifteen.
He would remain under the tutelage of his mother and Mazarin for another few years until, upon Mazarin's death, Louis at the age of twenty-three finally took the rule into his own hands and embarked on what has been called "iron-handed absolutism". Fro now on, *he* would be the sole authority. His ministers served at his discretion and offered advice only when requested. And the symbol of all this was Versailles - a former hunting lodge and then small chateau outside of Paris, in a wetland, which Louis XIV had expanded into a magnificent new palace and which eventually became the seat of the court and of government, though it took decades to complete:
"All these events were witnessed by Louis and largely explained his later distrust of Paris and the higher aristocracy. "In one sense, Louis' childhood came to an end with the outbreak of the Fronde. It was not only that life became insecure and unpleasant – a fate meted out to many children in all ages – but that Louis had to be taken into the confidence of his mother and Mazarin on political and military matters of which he could have no deep understanding". "The family home became at times a near-prison when Paris had to be abandoned, not in carefree outings to other chateaux but in humiliating flights". The royal family was driven out of Paris twice in this manner, and at one point Louis XIV and Anne were held under virtual arrest in the royal palace in Paris. The Fronde years planted in Louis a hatred of Paris and a consequent determination to move out of the ancient capital as soon as possible, never to return."
Power now came from access to the king, and access to the king was obtained at Versailles. Being sent away from court was to be cut off from all hopes of promotion. Being summoned to Versailles cut the nobles off from their power bases in their home regions (so they couldn't get up to mischief and Louis could keep control over them). Isolated in this supreme example of royal magnificence, the way to gain status was those social power games, where maintaining the perfect facade was all-important and to show weakness was to lose.
Louis purposely set the trends in fashion, etc. to maintain his own aura of utmost royal grandeur and to have his nobles following him, and going to great expense to do the same. When they are all jockeying for status via intellectual salon games, they can't be plotting rebellion in the far reaches of the countryside on their estates:
"The Palace of Versailles was key to Louis XIV's politics, as an expression and concentration of French art and culture, and for the centralization of royal power. Louis XIV first used Versailles to promote himself with a series of nighttime festivals in its gardens in 1664, 1668, and 1674,[28] the events of which were disseminated throughout Europe by print and engravings. As early as 1669, but especially from 1678, Louis XIV sought to make Versailles his seat of government, and he expanded the palace so as to fit the court within it. The moving of the court to Versailles did not come until 1682, however, and not officially, as opinion on Versailles was mixed among the nobility of France.
"By 1687, however, it was evident to all that Versailles was the de facto capital of France,and Louis XIV succeeded in attracting the nobility to Versailles to pursue prestige and royal patronage within a strict court etiquette, thus eroding their traditional provincial power bases. It was at the Palace of Versailles that Louis XIV received the Doge of Genoa in 1685, an embassy from the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1686, and an embassy from Safavid Iran in 1715."
Re: the middle ages not having a concept of inequality, I think you may be misreading things somewhat. Obviously they were aware of the concept, and your reference to scripture is on point. But maybe it's just me, whenever I read the Bible, I can't help but notice for all it criticizes corrupt officials and bad kings, it ASSUMES there must be a king and a hierarchy of officials. Jesus doesn't criticize officials for having power, he criticizes them for being overbearing and not using their power to serve the people. But... and I'm just speculating here... the Son of God seems generally OK with authority?
Rather, I think that the David's point is how in the middle ages the default position was that inequality was natural, inevitable, divinely ordained, and ultimately just in a cosmic sense. There can of course be bad/unjust hierarchies, but the solution involves getting the hierarchy "right", not flattening it. If you think it undercuts the point to note how medieval peasants revel in a carnivalesque return to "primitive equality", you also have to acknowledge that they seem to collectively agree "this is not a sustainable social arrangement".
The indigenous critique was thus significant not in providing the IDEA of an egalitarian society, but rather an EXAMPLE of one, and one that seemed to be functioning.
Personally, my critique of the book is that Graeber has rose-tinted glasses when it comes indigenous anarchism. It may be true that egalitarian societies create complex and deeply fulfilling social arrangements, so calling them "primitive" simply inappropriate. Still, such groups apparently weren't very good at producing vast arsenals of quality weaponry and legions of well drilled soldiers. That turned out to be a pretty serious problem, and one that needs to be taken more seriously by anarchists.
I think it’s risky to try and guess too much about what medieval/biblical societies thought about politics - literacy was for elites, and anything that survived until now had to be worth laboriously re-copying by hand. It’s a bit like trying to learn what Americans think about their society, but only using New York Times editorials.
A point on the other side from this is that inequality would have seemed much more natural in the past, as back then elites would often be about a foot taller than everyone else (partly due to the same factors that make them taller now, but mostly due to nutrition). “We’re all equal” loses credibility when it’s being chanted at you by munchkins. They may also have benefited more from whatever intellectual advantages you get from childhood/adult nutrition as well.
>whenever I read the Bible, I can't help but notice for all it criticizes corrupt officials and bad kings, it ASSUMES there must be a king and a hierarchy of officials.
Not really. I don't know how much it affected medieval political philosophy, but according to biblical history, Israel had a more decentralized, clan-based form of government during the period of Judges. And the key text about the establishment of the monarchy, 1 Samuel 8 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%208&version=NIV), pretty much explicitly states that wanting a king was a bad idea, not least because of the hierarchy of officials. You can find some more pro-monarchical viewpoints elsewhere in the Bible, but this doesn't seem to me like the existence of a king was taken for granted.
Authority in the New Testament is a more complicated question; there's certainly lots of grist there for arguing for both radically egalitarian AND radically hierarchical conceptions of ecclesiastical authority (and perhaps by analogy political authority, but since the early Christians weren't in charge of anything, mostly the advice is just to respect existing rulers, so long as they don't make you disobey God). But it's safe to say that when the event that best expresses the concept of "king" is a guy nailed to a piece of wood, that there's some pretty significant subversion of tropes going on, with an implied critique of earthly notions of authority.
I think I may have explained my point badly. You are right of course (especially in the OT) that there are examples of "good" societies without a king. But again: judges. Authority. It's everywhere.
I am specifically contrasting the society described in the bible with that of the indigenous social arrangements Graeber discusses, which is very much dependent on consent of the governed (a concept which simply doesn't appear in the bible).
The Book of Judges does not describe a society with a system of authority. Much of the time, there was no judge. Judges only arose when Israel was conquered by one of its neighbors and needed to cooperate militarily to fight them off. The judge was "chosen" based on who could get the most people to follow him or her (her being Deborah, Judges 4-5). This was a society which depended on consent of the governed. When the son of Gideon tried to declare himself king, most of Israel rebelled against him and he was killed by a woman throwing a rock at him (Judges 9).
I would also encourage you to read 1 Samuel 8. It definitely does not assume that there will be a king and hierarchy of officials.
Medieval Europe itself had several anarchies. From 930-1262, Iceland only had a government seasonally, and had an extremely strange legal system, described in David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. Peasant rebellions were successful in throwing off their lords in Frisia (northern Netherlands) from 1101-1523 and Dithmarschen (southern Denmark) from ~1200-1559. In 1440, the town of Cospaia found that the most recent treaty between Florence and Rome left them under the control of neither, so they got into smuggling and growing illegal drugs (tobacco), and they remained without a government until 1826. There definitely were people who believed that society could exist sustainably without the inequality of the state.
Medieval anarchy is super interesting and I look forward to learning more!
But it's a pretty radical position to take Samuel 8 as proof of the ancient Israelites rejecting authority, then ignore Samuel 7 (which declared Samuel their ruler) and Samuel 10 (where he annoints his successor as king). Ditto Deborah: I am no biblical scholar, but pretty sure she was prophet speaking with God's authority, not a proclaimed representative of the people?
I agree that it's pretty reasonable to assume one doesn't get to BE a prophet of ancient Israel without first being proclaimed by the people. But the medieval readership probably didn't really know that.
This is a massive tangent, but the text we have combines pro and anti-monarchic sources, which is why we quite often find successive chapters expressing opposite views as to the nature of kingship.
You are of course right that nobody involved was a humanist democrat. The debate (as it appears in the Bible) is between monarchy and theocracy, i.e. should the Israelites have a king "like other peoples" who would in effect govern them on God's behalf (while remaining answerable to God) or should the Israelites, as God's chosen people, be governed directly by God?
I think this should mostly be understood as a debate in post-Exilic Judea (or Yehud) between those who looked for the restoration of the Davidic monarchy and those who wanted to vest power in the Temple hierarchy.
I suspect the actual Deborah was in fact a charismatic figure who took her authority from the consent of those who followed her, but this doesn't appear from the text we have received (written much later, by writers who reflected the assumptions of their own times, although the Song of Deborah itself may be authentic).
That's basically my point: there is debate in the bible about the legitimate basis of power, but "consent of the governed" isn't really an option, not is radical equality (even allowing equal submission before God, the Lord has mortal agents who are prophets, kings, or both).
Thus it's not super surprising that the indigenous critique might have been more significant than we think.
There is also literally the “levelers” during the English Civil War. And just generally Graeber does a great job of committing the same academic sins regarding Western civ he and much of the left has been identifying the west did against “savages “ in the 1930s. Except we aren’t in the 1930s.
Reading his points I mostly bounced back and forth between “everyone following these topics knows this”, and “that is wrong”. With the latter most often happening when he thought he was being most clever. The whole thing is a political project. Not a work of scholarship.
Great review and thought at the end. I think one miss was Julian Jaynes and his book ‘the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind’ controversial but still the best explanation for how we got out of the world of Dunbar’s number.
Yes but that part didn’t make sense to me. If felt he just put time at when the Iliad was set. So the fog of the great ‘before’ I read him as saying that is what caused larger group formation. But it was an indirect inference.
On answering your question I’m not sure you aren’t right that I got causality reversed. Let me reflect.
The Davids seem to have fallen into the too-common academic doublethink of deriding the noble savage myth while at the same time buying it hook, line, and sinker.
Just as a heads up, the Northwest Coast Indians are always being cited as “the hunter-gatherers with hierarchy,” and that boils down under the boring/normal theory to the fact that they’ve got colossal fisheries that let them live a settled existence.
This was my question as well. Northwest Indigenous tribes are regularly cited for their technological innovation, building advanced seagoing kayaks that allowed them access to the aforementioned rich fisheries (hat tip, George Dyson). It also created a positive feedback loop since they adopted materials from their aquaculture into their tools.
I’m not as familiar with the California tribes contrasted against but it set off a red flag that the PNW societies were presented as a reasonable comparison set.
Naively, a technologically advanced, more sedentary society having greater hierarchy than hunter gatherers would seem to support the Pinker case!
I read "Dawn of Everything" about six months ago, so my recollection of it isn't fresh, but I found the book's problems to outweigh its strengths, and not by a little. Among the major problems were the fact that it targets straw men (popular writing by Pinker, Diamond, et al., which doesn't represent, and is far more simplistic than the actual states of the fields of archaeology and anthropology). It sets up simple heuristics to measure social criteria of interest and applies them rigidly where flexibility is called for (e.g., assuming that evidence individuals moving from one settlement to another shows "freedom" to dissociate, when it could as easily be reflecting patterns of exile . . . think of our anonymous reviewer's school lunch tables: what does a change in seating mean?). It reduces the concept of power in a way that seriously discounts the role of religion and views ritual as playacting, rather than as social reality. And multiple times statements from cited sources don't match what the sources actually say, strongly enough that in areas I was familiar with that really jumped out as I read. In my own former field (ancient China), I found the representation of data inaccurate more often than not (which is actually pretty common when non-specialists try to jump into an unfamiliar area, as people in the China field routinely discover). Of course, I'm not capable of assessing the evidence "Dawn" cites about South America, Australia, etc., but I found obvious and surprising errors in sections on Egypt, where citations were from materials I was familiar with from comparative study.
Certainly, Graeber and Wengrow are right that the big popular narrative books about social evolution are simplistic, but they are non-specialist arguments that draw on superseded models that practitioners rarely use. I can't judge their use of French accounts of Native American practices and views of Europe, but a review by David Bell (https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity?s=r), who does have requisite skills, suggests it's deeply problematic, and regarding the issue of the pre-prehistoric period of actual "dawn" (about which I know nothing), I'm persuaded by a long review written by two specialists in that field, Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale (https://mronline.org/2021/12/20/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/), that Graeber and Wengrow were simply not in a position to present their perspective with anything like the rhetorical authority they do.
In the end, I think "Dawn" winds up in the same basket as Pinker and Diamond's books, although it's tougher to read because it is so rhetorically self-indulgent (which produces a variety of internal contradictions, because the authors themselves seem to have gotten lost, as the reviewer here notes). But because it has a contemporary anarchist political ax to grind it's likely to have a different kind of influence, one that tends to strengthen with unearned authority a political point of view that is already over-reliant on abstraction, and which will claim the model offered by "Dawn" as "factual" support.
I didn't mean to dump on Pinker and Diamond, Franco. I've read little of their stuff; just browsing. In saying they are straw men for Graeber and Wengrow I meant that "Dawn" treats the ideas in their popular works as though they were academic paradigms in the disciplines of anthropology / archaeology / history.
This is great. I was at first suspicious because of the claims that the book has been getting glowing reviews (most of the reviews I've seen have found the book interesting, but ended up harping a lot on the empirical difficulties that plague most of Graeber's books, including this one), and also because of the simplistic association of Hobbes with the right and Rousseau with the left (while the headline views of these people might sound congenial to one or another side of the post-revolutionary political debate, the actual details of their ideas are both problematic and useful to both sides). But by the end it's doing the good thing of using the book to explore interesting ideas. I suppose I'm biased because I think the idea it comes to at the end is one I also had, when listening to James Suzman's appearance on the Ezra Klein podcast (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-james-suzman.html) - that the constant negging and social control of egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer society sounds a lot like cancel culture.
Now, I'm not as uniformly negative on that as the author of this review is, but I'm also not as uniformly positive on that as the anthropologists seem to be. But it's a really interesting thought - that we've somehow managed to re-create Dunbar-number-style social mechanisms with a population vastly beyond that number.
Yeah, I think there's a stronger case that Hobbes "really" belongs to the left than that Rousseau "really" belongs to the right, but none of the four cases are all that strong.
Agreed that Hobbes is complex and harder to place than many realize. But it's hard for me to come up with an argument that Rousseau could belong to the right. Can you sketch out what that case would look like? I think you'd have to warp the words "left" and "right" beyond *any* recognition to make that one work.
I’ll have to admit I’m not really very familiar with Rousseau at all. But I think the way the case would work is that Rousseau is a critic of individualist enlightenment liberalism, and while not a supporter of monarchy or organized religion, is still an inspiration for the kind of German romanticism that feeds much modern conservative thought.
I've heard people claim that Rousseau's philosophy was one of the main driving factors behind French colonialism in Africa, the Middle East, and Indochina. So in that regard, he could be considered the forerunner of some very right-wing policies and movements.
Maybe people should stop thinking like today's definitions of "left" and "right" are some kind of fixed axis that has existed throughout human history.
Of course, but the liberal tradition is the basis of virtually all political movements in the developed world today. Even far-right reactionary and far-left Marxist movements, which are inherently anti-liberal by their very nature, need to pay some lip service to liberal ideas in order to have any chance of successfully appealing to the masses.
Hobbes is certainly a man of the left relative to, say, the Yongle Emperor, but I'm not sure that's a very useful framing nowadays.
I find the parallels some people are finding between contemporary society and hunter gatherer ones fascinating. I've seen a number of people casually draw attention to other similarities and I'm intrigued by them. Someone should write a long thing on it.
Yes, I really liked the gossip trap idea. I was listening to Jonathan Haidt talk with Lex Fridman and he was describing how social media was practically bad for young teens, and girls more so.
Reading this review I found myself asking a lot: how can the Davids possibly know that? They say very detailed things about the cultural practices of pre literate cultures a very long time ago. Why do they believe these things? Is it just inference from the archaeological record (in which case Macaulay's _Motel of the Mysteries_ seems a pretty good Swiftian critique of the confidence of that inference)? Or is something else going on?
Maybe the answer is just that they are relying inappropriately on dicta from their sources, as other commenters seem to suggest. But in any case the review would have been stronger if it gave some summary of the epistemological model the book uses to draw its conclusions.
Yes, this. I kept wondering how they could infer so much detail about political systems from the remaining (presumably scant) archaeological evidence. I don't know whether they explain their reasoning in the actual book or not. Motel of the Mysteries is an apt comparison.
Did Taleb really praise this book? Yikes, his long decline continues. I can understand the New York Times and the New Yorker taking the line they took, but this book was so awful even the New York Review of Books has a negative review up (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/).
Bryan Caplan discusses a similar "trap", though one that post-dates agricultural civilization (it was first inspired by observations of rural Latin America):
In terms of politics, I would add that before even the middle ages and Christ the Greeks had a tradition of democracy. The Romans refused to admit their emperors were kings, because they had already prided themselves on getting rid of monarchs.
I'm unconvinced that "envy" and tall poppy syndrome are bad things -- if they are keeping you from.becoming someone's serf, that's to your benefit. They presumably evolved for a reason anyway.
Caplan/Cowan tell a story about a Mexican village where wealthy individuals are required to spend a period of time both running things, and funding them out of their own pocket.
The objection is a mixture of "it's wrong per se" and "it stifles growth".
But it's far from inevitable that if wealth accumulation is allowed,the wealth is spent on investments in legitimate business. If nothing prevents you also have the option of hiring thugs and using them to force people to work for you, extort money from them , and so on. In, fact that sort of thing is rather common in Latin America.
(Indeed, the young Castro converted to communism after observing such abuses on his travels. If you get rid of informal forced wealth redistribution, you may be replacing it with formal wealth redistribution via left wing governemnt.)
WEIRD countries have institutions in place that are fairly successful in preventing petty tyranny...other places do not. The Oapan system does two good things: it prevents wealth turning into tyranny, and funds socially useful things. (The economists are rather uninterested in what happens to the "grabbed" wealth). It might do a bad thing as well, preventing growth, but you can't rely on everyone to automatically behave as a pro-capitalism economist would want them to. You have to consider what realistically would fill the vaccum if you somehow get rid of "envy". You need a formal mechanism to prevent kleptocracy if you get rid of the informal one.
Recently, someone here was expressing shocked disbelief at the classical world's custom of exiling successful generals. Why would you want to get rid of someone who is good at their job? The custom existed because successful generals often seized power. It isn't a law of nature that US generals don't set themselves up as dictators, it's the result of a particular set of laws and customs. Likewise, theres no expectation that Gates or Bezos will found private armies
Once someone has started down the road to becoming a local tyrant, they are hard to stop. Early intervention is vital, so constant vigilance is vital. And people do keep a close eye on what the rich and powerful are up to. There's a set of social instincts relating to tall poppies, because tall poppies are dangerous. Maybe what the economists call "envy" is greedy and vicious...but maybe it's all part of an evolved immune response to tyranny.
It may not be "inevitable" that accumulated wealth is spent on investments in legitimate businesses, but it's possible. Preventing the accumulation of wealth means preventing investments. WEIRD countries have primogeniture & monogamy in their past, which encouraged the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, thus permitting civil society to exist independent of the state. That is the thesis of Timur Kuran's "The Long Divergence". https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/the-scylla-of-clannishness-and-the-charybdis-of-despotism/
That's not really a disagreement. If you can firewall tyranny without preventing wealth accumulation , go for it.. But mere.disapproval of envy doesn't get you that. It takes complex social technology to promote the right kind of ambition while suppressing the wrong kind.
Well, the USSR had Lysenkoism, which is plausibly an effect of their tyranny, and which did damage their ability to use genetics and technologies derived from it. Would that count?
The USSR was much more technologically adept than the primitive societies discussed in the book. They were certainly inferior to the US, and we can imagine a hypothetical USSR which didn't make the mistakes they made, but they didn't go technologically backward as a whole.
"The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like [economic growth] are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else."
Excellent review. I enjoyed the book but share the reviewer's criticisms. I'd add only that Graeber & Wengrow repeatedly use phrases like: "it cannot be doubted"; "it is obvious that"; "the evidence is clear" etc., on many occasions throughout the book when there are great doubts and the evidence is vague and even ambiguous.
As far as the Sapient Paradox is concerned, the only out-of-Africa Sapiens DNA we have in readable form is some 15,000 years old. We don't know when human vocal cords and the human palate developed and both were required to fully articulate the complex sounds of language. We also don't know when the FOXP2 gene became fully expressed in Sapiens populations.
Without complex language, none of the pre-history societies that Graeber & Wengrow examine could have existed, and it may have been the case that the gene expressions for both the mechanical and the intellectual elements of language did not exist across large populations of otherwise modern humans until after C. 20,000 years ago.
The Davids have compiled a good overview of recently-overturned hypotheses in archeology, and a qualitative introduction to the new hypotheses. Their usual method is this:
1. Explain a belief archeologists had 40 years ago.
2. List recent discoveries contradicting that belief. Make it sound like /all/ evidence contradicts that belief, without actually giving any numbers. Make it sound like they discovered this themselves, just now.
3. Pose as bravely speaking truth to power, even though they're just presenting something that's now doctrinaire.
4. Explain the vile motives of the archaeologists who conspired for so long to conceal the truth. They were stupid and either racist or sexist.
5. Don't present any quantitative data to support their claim; just imply by omission that the exceptions they've listed (exceptions to the old belief) comprise the great majority of a random sample.
Disclaimer: I read only the first half of the book.
The percolation of concrete facts is very poor. Things are usually not well-known and it's important to just say them. The consequences of facts propagate even worse: the consensus has momentum far beyond the point that people have stopped citing the old beliefs that lead to it. This is true in all fields, and worse synthesizing fields, but anthropology is particularly bad because it has become more hostile to drawing conclusions and especially generalizations over the past 40 years.
This was a really first-class essay, well-written and interesting. I even liked the "Gossip Trap" personal speculation part, it's a point of view I haven't seen before, and it's well presented. The only part I didn't really like was the semi-apologetic semi-false-humility final "In Which The Truth Is Revealed" section. Honestly, you could have just cut the essay with the ending of the penultimate section and it would be 20% better, and say just as much. You were bold in that section, don't navel-gaze and equivocate after, end on the strong note!
So, congratulations to the author, it's a great essay.
On the subject matter: the first caveat I would want to see addressed is the whether there is anything to explain in the first place (about the Sapient Paradox). Complex strongly interacting systems routinely have highly nonlinear emergent behavior, where for a long time nothing much at all seems to happen, and then shazam something drastic seems to come out of nowhere, and the triggering even can be something completely trivial, the way (by analogy) an avalanche is driven by snow that builds up all season, slowly, but it finally happens at a given moment in time because of some very small random jolt. So my question about the "Sapient Paradox" is: what evidence is there that anything happened that needs explaining? It could just've been an avalanche.
Good comment, just thought I would nitpick your analogy. Most avalanches do not happen like that. The highest avalanche danger tends to be right after a big storm, when there is new loading and the snow hasn't had a chance to settle and bond to the snowpack, or when wind moves new snow into an area, to form a slab of cohesive snow. There tends to be more avalanche danger early in the season with new snowpack, though you can get wet loose avalanches when the snow is melting in the spring. But it's all rather complicated, as there are 9 different avalanche types and there are some types that do get more dangerous as the snowpack builds. For example, you can have a deep persistent weak layer that gets more dangerous as more snow builds on top, but they are hard to trigger and tend to be triggered in areas where the snow is more shallow and weak. Professional forecasters spend a life time trying to understand it all. It's a fascinating but difficult area of study, because the feedback mechanism for your predictions is rare and dangerous.
Very interesting additional information, thank you. I triggered a small avalanche myself while skiing only once, and fortunately it fell away below me, and all I had to do was -- very, very carefully! -- back up. Gave me an enormous respect for the phenomenon, though; it was exceedingly weird to see the entire ground for a few hundred feet just shift and melt away below me, like it suddenly became liquid. Brrr.
I agree it was very well-written, especially the introductory paragraphs, which showed the author did more than just read the book. Re. "In which the truth is revealed", I would hate for a rewrite to end without the sentences, "I think it’s likely we did accidentally, via social media, summon back the Elder God that is our innate form of government. And I think we should be worried about civilization itself." I'm not convinced the claim is accurate, but it's worth looking into.
I'd like to bring attention to an older, shorter, and I think better archeological study of the development of social systems: Scott Ortman, Lily Blair, & Peter Peregrine, "The Contours of Cultural Evolution". In /The Emergence of Premodern States/, published in 2018 by the Santa Fe Institute, pp 187-217. See https://www.sfipress.org/premodern-states/the-contours-of-cultural-evolution.
It's much less-ambitious than DoE; but it /quantitatively/ shows that cultural evolution follows many long-term general quantitative trends, suggesting that there is an arrow of civilizational development, though one more more abstract than "band / tribe / chiefdom". This makes DoE's key idea, which I take is that social structures used many thousands of years ago might be transferred into the modern age, look untenable.
CoCE has lots of graphs showing things like
fig 1: the population size a society can support scales exponentially in the number of cultural attributes from the Atlas of Cultural Evolution (ACE) which that society possesses; also see figure 7 showing log(population) ~ # of different social functions
fig 2: the population of the largest settlement of each time interval increases exponentially, back at least to almost 12,000 BP (but note that, though the max population keeps rising exponentially, the existing cultures are spread log-evenly throughout the range from tiny to max)
fig 9: log(length a culture survived) ~ log(population of largest settlement)
Most-intriguing is figure 11, which claims to show that the size of cultures has sweet spots at 25, 500, 2500, and 10,000 people. That is, a culture gets "stuck" at these sizes for some time, and on bursting through one limit, begins developing more rapidly until it hits the next one. The histogram data is even neater than reported; the sweet spots appear by my reading to correspond to populations of 23.7, 237, 2371, and 23714, in a regular geometric progression. But the histogram is noisy, because N = 157. I'd like to see a formal statistical test done on the odds of getting such a clean result by chance.
There are a lot fewer claims in CoCE than in DoE, and they're less-specific; but they've got the proper quantitative science that DoE doesn't.
Sabloff, Jeremy A.. The Emergence of Premodern States: New Perspectives on the Development of Complex Societies. Santa Fe Institute Press. The Kindle edition is $3, which can be in Amazon digital credits (https://amzn.to/3MFQ2zd).
This looks like a worthwhile volume. Reading the precis and linked descriptions at your first URL, it seems the articles make use of complexity and network theory to analyze archaeological data. When I was briefly doing work related to these issues and had a little exposure to the use of that type of modeling to identify emergent structures in early cultures and their stepwise appearance, I felt this was a terrifically promising approach. It is wholly absent in "Dawn." Thanks for the reference. I plan to read it.
Very well written and interesting, thank you for your contribution anonymous author.
I think the sapient trap question is very interesting and one I have never thought about before. I sadly must say that I find your answer to speculative and vague sorry. My main complaint is that you don't have an account about how the gossip trap was escaped.
I mean, the implication is pretty obvious no? The gossip trap was escaped via the formalization of social hierarchy by making permanent those temporary forms of government “the Davids” spend time chronicling.
I read the book... having read David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" I know that he questions mental paradigms or shibboleths or assumptions that deserve to be questioned--and substantiates his positions. Having seen the 2008 financial crisis, I was ready for the fresh air of "Debt," and after working in a hierarchical corporation I was ready to hear in "Dawn" about the possibility of social/economic structures that don't entail so much anomie and powerlessness. Graeber's voice was important. It's sad that he's gone.
I love this review. In your conclusion you nailed several thoughts that have been percolating through my mind for years. I’d love to write a book with you.
The book, though, sounds like it contains a lot of bunk. I’m kind of an archaeology nerd and armchair historian, and some of these quotes sound a bit wild to me. I want to check the citations to find out exactly what evidence is letting them make such precise statements about the political and religious culture of the Upper Paleolithic, or the Pacific Northwest in 1850 BC.
I love prehistory, but the desire to tell a compelling story (particularly an idealized one) is difficult to resist. It’s honestly sort of an obligation as you try to make sense of evidence, and try to make others care. But it bugged me when my tour guide at the Neolithic village recreation said “This burial was of a woman who traveled long distances trading flints. So clearly this society was egalitarian and the woman high-status because flint was important.” We have no idea what conditions led that woman to walk thousands of miles carrying flint, whether or not she had a choice, and how others felt about her.
There is so much we can never know from the archaeological record. It invites pie-in-the-sky idealizations of prehistoric life, and baseless theories about the beliefs and motivations of ancient people. Anybody who tells you a good story is suspect. I personally think your conclusion is the more convincing one. But then I read this blog, so I would, wouldn’t I?
I dunno. I'm all for linking interesting ideas back to our modern lives. But at the moment it doesn't seem like I get the chance to hear any conclusions other than "isn't Twitter terrible?" I've literally started to discount any piece of writing that includes this idea because it just seems vapid and contentless. Which is a shame, because I was quite enjoying the review up till then.
Ditto: the navel-gazing about social media is starting to reach such a concentration that even if I WERE to believe it's an apocalyptic threat to the entire human species on the level of the atomic bomb or climate change, I'd be getting desensitized to it through sheer overexposure.
I think climate change is actually the apt comparison, on a moment's reflection: even though it is in fact real and dangerous, the alarmists are so monomaniacal about it and talk about Twitter Bad is so inescapable that I'm tempted to be come a contrarian about it out of sheer exhaustion of the topic.
Basically, if the modern world is increasingly returning to hunter-gatherer levels of mobility and individual prosperity, might we see a return to hunter-gatherer social structures as well? In both good and bad ways, like people being equal... but only because they're stuck in a high-school like morass where none of your accomplishments actually matter, you can't get away from anyone, and the only thing that differentiates you from the rest is how well you play the social game. A world where the formal hierarchies are weaker (e.g. the student council president doesn't really have any power over you), but informal hierarchies simply sprout up to take their place (e.g. every so often a student commits suicide because of relentless bullying, the star football players or band members get away with the occasional sexual assault or even rape because the community is willing to look the other way for its celebrities, punishment for showing up the 'Queen Bee' at the prom by contrast is swift and decisive, etc. etc.).
It's interesting that observing cancel culture in action you'd never suspect that its a symptom of thriving. All the narratives are about intolerable suffering that wrongthink inflicts on large swathes of the population, and that nothing short of the glorious revolution could possibly fix the irredeemably broken systems.
Yes, it is interesting and counterintuitive, though I must admit it's not actually novel. Generally speaking, the observation that a better life can lead to more suffering has been expressed before by Professor David Lester in his observation that suicide can be triggered by a higher quality of life, because you have 'no one left to blame': https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1475771-while-one-might-expect-that-suicide-is-highest-among-people. The clearest example he gave is that blind people whose sight is restored often become suicidal: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1266694-david-lester-a-psychology-professor-at-richard-stockton-college-in. More generally, the observation that a better life doesn't necessarily decrease suffering is something that more properly originates with the Buddhists and Stoics, which is why they emphasize things like meditation and self-reflection.
And honestly, the specific observation that cancel culture seems to be a disease of affluence, or at least the affluent, is not original to me either. Peter Turchin for example deserves at least partial credit for his theory of Elite Overproduction, which predicts that a prosperous society that can provide education and training to many of its people will find itself destabilized when those people realize that the supply of jobs like "President" and "spiritual leader" hasn't increased in turn, and that most of them will have to settle for jobs like "Presidential intern" and "Megaphone guy on the street who shouts about his spiritual leader" - unless they take what is rightfully theirs through fair means and foul, of course. (E.g. the vast number of journalism grads on Twitter who graduated into an industry that is outright downsizing, that doesn't need them because they can be replaced by a website/online printing press linking to the words of a better journalist. They spend a lot of time trying to get those other journalists fired so they can replace them, because how else are they supposed to find a job that uses their education? They can't form new media outlets, those run into the same problem of being replaceable by websites linking to better media outlets.)
And even more specifically, the criticism that cancel culture only exists because of the safety and security provided by the system that it is trying to overturn is almost as old as cancel culture itself. The most caustic version focuses on the individual, describing how they grew up in a culture that valorizes fighting against an evil empire (Star Wars, Reagan, War of Independence, WW2, you name it and Americans love to be on the side of the plucky underdog), only to grow up and realize that all the evil empires are far away and have names like "the CCP" and "the Taliban". And rather than joining those difficult but worthy fights, the theory goes, or simply accepting that they aren't brave heroes, the coward imagines an evil empire at home and beats it up for heroism points. (I don't really agree with this, but if true it explains conspiracy theorists very well: their conspiracy theories always seem to be about them being brave heroes against an evil empire, i.e. being self-indulgent).
The more charitable version is systematic and argues that it's basically an overactive immune system. Like the common criticism of the Military-Industrial Complex and 'the warrior caste', when reformers look around and see that everything is fine because they've done their job, instead of disbanding they just keep looking for *something* that justifies their continued existence - even if they have to squint and distort things a little. (Or a lot). Part of it is self-interest, but most of it is simply a lack of imagination - they simply can't *imagine* everything being fine, admittedly because they fired all the people who did so for doubting the cause. But it's a bureaucratic issue at heart, the same faced by any government service or company that should realize it's obsolete and disband, but is helmed by people who were selected for their determination/stubbornness and their heart, rather than their imagination and emotional detachment (you'd have to be pretty heartless to agree that everyone you know should be fired, even if it's objectively true). It's just a matter of bureaucratic groupthink and Yes Men, from this point of view.
Anyways, thanks for the praise but I must demur, my originality is simply the ability to stand on the shoulders of many different giants, to paraphrase Newton. (Assuming he wasn't just making a snide remark at Robert Hooke.)
The reviewer seems to have somewhat missed the ultimate point of Graeber and Wengrow's arguments. Although the reviewer admit that G&W objective was to disprove many of the social evolutionary assumptions that have haunted Western Civilization since the Enlightenment, they seems to take this book as a direct attack on modern capitalist society (though capitalism is only mentioned three times in the 500 page text). But the reviewer overlooks the fact, that even though both G&W have Leftie academic credentials, their analysis also guts Marxist arguments about social evolution and social inequality (and it earned them scalding review from the Troties over at WSWS). The reviewer writes "maybe the ultimate truth or falsity of prehistorical narratives is unknowable," but the reviewer overlooks the fact that certain narratives are obviously disprovable — which is what G&W do by marshaling massive quantities of diverse historical and archaeological evidence against current social evolutionary dogmas. G&W do not propose some new grand theory for the origin of civilization, and that seems cause the reviewer a certain amount of discomfort, because of their need to jump in at the end and argue for a Grand Theory of Culture revolving around the Gossip Trap.
I spent a month delving into this wonderfully enlightening tome and I followed up on many of the citations (and I am still waiting for some of the books they referenced to be delivered through ILL) — and, full disclosure, I submitted a much shorter review of this book. So, one might be able to accuse me of sour grapes, I am gobsmacked at how differently this reviewer interpreted G&W's arguments from how I interpreted them. It's almost like we read two different books that had the same outline.
And Kenny Easwaran in the comments here read a very different review that was "a too-positive and too-credulous review of a deeply empirically problematic book" up until the end :)
The reviewer mostly attributes progressivism aka "cultural Marxism" to the authors, which is the dominant mainstream ideology, instead of actual full-strength Marxism which is irrelevant fringe nowadays.
>the reviewer overlooks the fact that certain narratives are obviously disprovable
The reviewer readily admits that despite its faults the book demolishes currently widespread simplistic narratives.
I went looking for it, but I can't find it now. WSWS has a pretty shitty search engine. I can't even find their memorable editorial against the NYTime's 1619 Project — where, in the comments, some CRT folks got into heated arguments with the Troties. It was truly a memorable confrontation between the followers of classical Marxism and a group that utilizes Marxist dialectics but substitutes race for class.
I enjoyed your review of this book as well - your take on it was interesting in a different way. In fact, I ranked your review higher than half of the finalists!
Very good post. It is missing something: the author never explains how or why humans came to escape the gossip trap.
I'm also not convinced that gossip is the enemy of progress: people are often driven to accomplish great feats because of the popularity and status they'll gain from it. In high school, the sports star, the ace student, the most talented actor in drama or musician in band will see gains in the popularity from their accomplishments. I was massively productive as a writer in high school in no small part because I wanted to impress the other kids who enjoyed writing with how good/prolific I was.
I'm likewise unconvinced that "envy" and tall poppy syndrome are bad things -- if they are keeping you from.becoming someone's serf, that's to your benefit. They presumably evolved, anyway.
People who think informal social hierarchies are the incarnation of evil and produce nothing good tend to be people who are extraordinarily inept at socializing. I realize that might seem to a lot of people like the pot calling the kettle black to people who've read my posting history, but I don't bother using most of my social filters when posting here.
What you've said is a good argument for why humanity would *stay* in that "trap" as long as it did (if this is what happened). Id est, you're pointing out there are powerful local (in time and space) advantages: competing for social status within a fluid social environment brings out the best in people, and allows for a rapid re-alignment in leadership if someone has a better idea, proves better at this particular challenge in front of the tribe, et cetera. These all suggest that a fluid social heirarchy is optimal for small groups -- and indeed that is characteristic of families, groups of friends, social circles, and even small start-up firms.
The argument goes that however powerful this approach is in *small* groups, it fails in *large* groups, because the large group exceeds the Dunbar Number and human instincts are inadequate to appropriate judgment. What's left is populism, basically a mob mentality that hares off after the latest fashionable thing, whether it be adoration of a psychopathic mob leader or a Two Minutes' Hate directed at the latest Judas goat held responsible for broad diffuse social ills. ("Why is the price of gas $6/gallon? There must be some Judas to blame!")
How *do* we construct a more rigid social heirarchy that relies less on instinctual human social talent, and more on some constructed method for evaluation and reward (or demotion)? This is kind of the $50,000 question of theories of government and social organization for the past 5000 years, at least. We try aristocracy, inherited and selected monarchy, straight democracy, representative democracy. To certify new ideas, we try having a professional academy (e.g. universities, titles, patent offices, Nobel Prizes), we try fiscal democracy ("Which idea makes a ton of money in the marketplace? Must be the best tone!")
Almost all of these disappoint each of us, at one time or another, and we say "But it's freaking obvious that this/that/the other would've been better!" using our instincts for judgment (and some post-facto understanding) that would've worked great if it was all happening at a local small tribal level.
I can't say I find this argument convincing, because "great feats lead to popularity lead to power lead to great feats" holds true no matter how far you get from a Dunbar's Number-worthy tribe. The only difference between small groups of hunter gatherers and huge empires of sedentary farmers is that citizens of the latter have access to the other means of gaining social power: inheritance. A man works a farm his entire life, enriching it for his son, who buys more land and hires workers to enrich it for *his* son, and so on. With enough land and wealth you can call yourself "king" or "lord" and wear fancy clothes so everyone knows it's true.
If it's true that pre-agricultural humans were in fact far more materialistic and status focused than how Rosseau and Hobbes framed them, then things become doubly confusing! There was fundamentally no difference between pre-Neolithic and Neolithic human groups. It makes the author's argument even less convincing to me.
Sure, but your statement begs the question. The difficult part isn't "Should we reward great feats? If so, how?" the difficult part is "What exactly constitutes a "great" feat?" In a small tribe, human beings have many ways to evaluate "great" and they are generally pretty darn good at it. They have very high levels of knowledge about every aspect of the feat, and the feat doer. Contrariwise in a very large society it is totally possible to be fooled, because many human intuitions for judgment are thwarted by time, distance, unfamiliarity with circumstances.
Let's say I claim George S. Patton, Jr. was a fabulous leader of men and canny war-fighter. If both you and I served with Patton, and indeed half the people we know did, we both have many direct ways to assess that statement, and there's a pretty good chance that we would end up agreeing on the assessment, since we both have copious direct experience, and we share it. Unless one of us is distinctly weird, we're likely to converge on similar assessments.
But if Patton is just a figure out of history to both of us, separated by decades and maybe thousand of miles, and maybe a completely different culture, now what? It gets much, much harder not only to come to a conclusion as individuals, but for us to argue out a consensus on a conclusion.
With a huge society, where most forms of information exchange are not personal, it becomes possible to be fooled, and to fool. Huxterism becomes much more possible, the Pied Piper can exist, and at the least it becomes much harder to arrive at a social consensus about what is great and what is not. Hence recent elections, right? We find ourselves disagreeing violently on who is great. Hence the rise of scams and hoaxes, when widespread anonymous communication becomes possible. "I'm a Nigerian prince who wants to share his good fortune with you." Not knowing Nigeria, or any princes, and how likely it is that might be true, we have a problem those in a small tribe would not have.
We can certainly resolve that, up to a point, by holding votes and such -- indeed that is arguably one of the mechanisms by which we adapt to large-group social structures from small group. But it is necessarily less fluid, less flexible, then the older approach. We can't have elections every day, all day, on every little thing our would-be leaders say or do. We end up with a more rigid heiarchy: "OK, you have to do what this guy says, because he has the title President/Generalissimo/CEO, and you're not allowed to debate whether it's a good idea or not. We'll have an election by and by, and then we'll decide whether on balance he was a good President/Generalissimo/CEO, and you can have your say and argue the point -- but until then, the heirarchy is fixed and you are obliged to obey."
First I want to say I appreciate this review. It has charm.
Something I like about Astral Codex is that people who care about rationalism, Bayesian stuff, "reasoning with insufficient information" as a poster put it a few days ago - these people are often rigorously honest about what they know and how they know it, and what they don't know. It's refreshing. So. If my suspicions are correct and the reviewer did not finish the book, I just want to encourage the writer that here, of all places, unlike undergrad school, it is ok, even preferable, to admit frankly that you stopped before you got to the end of the book. You can even write about why. Leaving the trail of accurate observations is more important than you getting to the end of the book.
The Dunbar number and the Gossip Trap are fun, you "spun a yarn" as you say and I think you would have gotten an A in the class I imagine you having written it for. The prof might have said "please use footnotes" and I would agree. Except if you use footnotes it becomes clear that the last one stops at p. 257 and the darn book keeps going. The final chapter begins on p. 493 according to this kindle version. G&W are just as quotable for the last 200+ pages as they were for the first 200+. Maybe fewer block quotes would help - I am in a social sciences grad program and have to do some writing here and there and sometimes it's just a lot of heavy lifting and one doesn't get there. No one is grading you. You can say exactly where you threw in the towel and why.
Like I said in another post I lost my hard copy before I was done with it. But I decided to get a kindle copy tonight and looked up the quotes. I'm skimming it, truly this makes me want to go over it with a fine-tooth comb. Anyway here's my list of receipts and at the end I will see if I can use G&W to answer at least one of the reviewer's questions. The method I used was to take a distinctive-sounding phrase from the first line or two of the block quote and look it up.
#1 the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed - p 4
#2 our world as it existed just before the dawn - p. 5
#3 struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense - p. 181
#4 Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious - p. 182
#5 in any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might - p. 199
#6 The behavior of the Northwest Coast aristocrats - p. 183
#7 this is emphatically not what we are taught to expect - p. 183
#8 Once cultivation became widespread in Neolithic societies - p. 232
#9 the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent - p. 233
#10 the key genetic mutation leading to crop domestication - p. 232
#11 were not farmers, or at least, not in the usual sense - p. 105
#12 the centre of settlement stood in a long-lived - p. 243
#13 there are heads that are (should be "were") removed - p. 246
#14 most clearly distinguished by the building - p. 245
#15 saw the creation of patterns of life and ritual - p. 245
#16 to Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously - p. 95
#17 when they appear in European accounts, are assumed - p. 36
#18 at the (that) time engaged in a complex geopolitical - pp. 48-49
#19 won a wide audience, and before long Lahontan had become - p. 50
#20 just about every major French Enlightenment - p. 58
#21 there is every reason to believe that Kandiaronk - p. 51
#22 one cannot (even) say that medival thinkers -p. 32
#23 A certain folk egalitarianism already - p. 34
#24 Activities around the stone temples correspond - p. 104
#25 Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty - p. 107
#26 it was winter - not summer - that was the time - p. 108
#27 these would have been kings whose courts - p. 106
#28 among societies like the Iniut or Kwakiutl - p. 115
#29 dismantle all means of exercising coercive authority - p. 110
#30 Most corpses were treated in completely different - p. 103
#31 a (quite) remarkable number of these skeletons - p. 102
#32 Rock shelters around the coastlands - p. 83
#33 a cave site on the coast of Kenya - p. 84
#34 research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi - p. 84
#35 Given that humans have been around for upwards - p. 257
#36 beginning around 12,000 BC, in which - p. 123
#37 picture our ancestors moving between - p. 85
#38 all the authority of their chief - p. 41
# 39 his name through generous feasting - p. 198
#40 urge their subjects to provide - p. 42
#41 Wealthy Wendat men hoarded - p. 43
#42 the Yurok were famous for the central role - p. 177
#43 Among (the) Plains Societies of North America, for instance - p. 160
#44 an office holder could give all - p. 43
#45 talented hunters are systematically mocked - p. 129
#46 Carefully working through ethnographic accounts - p. 86
"It’s almost tautological that early societies had to be organized by raw social power—there are no formal powers to enforce anything else, nor combat social pressure when it’s applied (and humans will always apply it). It also explains why early formal governments are theatrical or seasonal, since they are merely a mask of raw social power—which families are important, which are liked, who’s friends, who’s frenemies, who’s enemies—i.e., what the Davids assume is a set of constantly shifting Neolithic “political experiments” is really just a bunch of constantly shifting mores that, like the Gestapo, hide the real power. Which was who was popular and who was not."
Conceptualizing society, government, and "the state" for societies one is unfamiliar with is a tricky proposition. It inevitably involves an effort of the imagination, an attempt to put oneself into the shoes of others. I believe it is not tautological at all that early societies were organized by raw social power.
Intellectual history - the history of ideas - is also twisty because the records are never complete. Writing about ideas inevitably draws from and sometimes relies upon the unstated and possibly unrecognized assumptions of the writer's sociocultural milieu. What those were in the past is often not what they are in the present. My first exposure to intellectual history was a course I took to fulfill a graduation requirement over 30 years ago. We read parts of Chernyshevsky's "What is to be done?" My vague recollection was that it problematized a certain situation; turns out the situation was that of the peasants in rural Russia (thanks, Amazon). This was my first exposure to problematizing. To problematize means to frame a situation as something that began in some way and has gone wrong, can be productively thought about and requires collective action to address. Before feminism, "the condition of women" in the US was not problematized per se; yes, men saw and treated women as lesser beings, yes, women could not vote, those differentials were noted, discussed - and considered normal. When feminism problematized it, it became possible to think about the situation as something that was negative and ought to be altered. Treating one's reality as a problem to be solved is not an obvious step. Partly it's not obvious because the map is usually incomplete, the solutions impractical, and historically, damage has resulted from attempts to fix things. Partly it's not obvious because it seems so normal. For another example, my high school had a smoking section behind the cafeteria where students were allowed by the school to go and smoke cigarettes. This seemed utterly normal. Youth smoking had not been problematized completely yet. In the early Curious George books, George and the Man in the Yellow Hat smoke a pipe together. That's how normal it was, it was in children's books as an example of cuteness. Subsequent movements problematized it, worked to end it, and now we are generally appalled by the idea of school-supported teen smoking.
G&W are not asserting that medieval European peasants were unaware of power differentials. They are trying to argue that those differentials had not yet been problematized in the way they subsequently were in the Enlightenment. They are arguing that critique of their society from the outside played a significant role in this. As an example of this critique, p. 39, G&W quoting Sagard regarding the Wendat, "They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages." Later, p. 40, G&W, "the Wendat - who might not seem egalitarian in anthropological terms, since they had formal political offices and a stratum of war captives whom the Jesuits, at least, referred to as 'slaves'." Here is an example of a society with social inequality but without material desperation. How did they do that? What were they thinking? This historical encounter with the "Other" served to problematize the idea of inequality in European society. Was it the only impetus? I haven't read all the footnotes. I'm comfortable asserting it was part of the situation.
G&W are trying to measure the question of "what is social inequality" against the question of "what is material inequality." The subtext is that social inequality is assumed to occur at the same time as material inequality in contemporary America. It is specifically stated that material and social inequality traveled together in medieval and colonial-era European societies. But it had not been problematized until the Enlightenment. I'm surprised nobody brought up the Magna Carta. There were at least currents of "we want our society to be different" long before the Enlightenment. How prominent? How did they change with the development of social classes devoted primarily to thinking? How did the problematization change in the Enlightenment?
One way G&W discuss is that writers began referencing non-European social norms rather than the Bible as possible sources of social patterns. That sounds legit to me. Hobbes and Rousseau are mentioned; it seems to me that when you assert that raw social power ran early societies, you may have chosen Hobbes' side there, the "nasty, brutish, short" theory. But that is not what early accounts of the Wendat describe.
American Indian societies had a variety of justice systems and social patterns; appeals to authority existed alongside capacity for individual decision-making to be respected. Why was it not connected entirely to material inequality? That's one of the questions I thought G&W were trying to answer in this book. If social power does not have to travel in lock-step with material accumulation, how are rules enforced? In the US we are so used to social norms being held in place by fear of destitution, it may seem initially plausible that social norms are held in place entirely through interpersonal domination, kindof a caveman archetype. But G&W are writing that that was not happening most of the time either. There are pages and pages of intricate social structures that carried on year upon year, literal mechanisms of culture and tradition enforcing the continuance, not interpersonal humiliation. I think you may have hit a wall trying to imagine that.
John Lennon ("Imagine") and many social theorists go off the cliff saying that the only alternative is a non-society; no possessions, no country, et cetera. G&W are writing that not only did societies exist that had possessions, that was decoupled from the social patterns such that both could exist. A hypothetical state of nature - perfect abundance and cooperation - was not necessary, neither was this destitution-dominance hierarchy. In other words, utopian socialism is not a requirement but neither must the current arrangement stay permanently.
It's an unfamiliar concept.
I have to read the rest of the book and might write more about it tomorrow. This went longer than I meant. But I hope this provides more context for the arguments and descriptions G&W put forth.
You’re right. It was unfair of me to say that. I think the book bogs down in the middle and it’s hard to get past that and bring the questions forward.
The book is so speculative that it’s hard to read and the review is clever. I think I wish they wrote a different book.
So I read Appiah’s review and Freddie de Boer’s substack entries and then skipped to chapter 10 of DoE.
G&W’s intended audience is not academics, as I had assumed. I think it’s activists, because DoE is firmly in dialogue with the “ideas about society that were floating around in the 1990s.” The intended audience is activists and other readers wishing to reclaim and update an intellectual basis for these things. know that’s an awful formulation, but there are a few currents I can elaborate: a) left revolutions in Central and South America, relationship of indigenous cultures and left/anarchist theory with same; b) scholarship by indigenous (tribal) authors worldwide and in the Americas, articulating their own contemporary relationship to cultural practice and left/anarchist organizing; and US activism and theory attempting to articulate viable and transformational social and political movement strategies.
Right!
A decent fraction, maybe most of, a& b is in Spanish and not widely known in the US. As for c, we had/have Occupy, the DSA, DAPL, BLM, Antifa, Chaz, etc etc with a common response being This Is Going Down The Same Bad Road The Other Left Projects Travel. So G&W say “don’t forget about the anarchists!”
But to my knowledge there has been no academic, footnoted, theoretical, historical, sociological Book that could constitute a contemporary synthesis of multi-cultural European, multi-cultural “indigenous” and Left revolution history that a primarily-English-speaking political activist could read. I think that’s what this book is.
So when readers start at the beginning, yes, the dinghy runs aground midway through and we howl “this is a swamp!” That’s not wrong. But it’s a better-footnoted swamp than a lot of activistic quasi- theory. If the book plumbed every detail, it would be ten times longer. Is it full of “maybe” presented as “yes”? Yes.
Here’s an illustrative quote as to what else it is:
“ As early as 1546, a coalition of Maya rebels rose up against Spanish settlers and, despite brutal reprisals, resistance never really died down. Prophetic movements brought a second major wave of insurrections in the eighteenth century; and in 1848, a mass rising almost drove the settlers’ descendants out of Yucatán entirely, until the siege of their capital, at Mérida, was interrupted by the planting season. The resulting ‘Caste War’, as it was called, continued for generations. There were still rebels holding out in parts of Quintana Roo at the time of the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century; indeed, you could argue that the same rebellion continues, in another form, with the Zapatista movement that controls large parts of Chiapas today.”
Build a city in El Salvador? This history matters. Attempt to address the “benefactor of the poor” role of cartel in Mexico? This history matters. Global, regional and local indigenous sovereignty movements? The history matters (this touches everything from natural resource management to education funding and beyond). Trying to be coherent about US politics? Yep. Still matters.
I’ve been unpacking boxes recently and dug up some things from circa 2000. Why do I have a copy of anything by Subcomandante Marcos? Well, things weren’t all on the Internet yet and if you wanted something you had to get a paper copy, and I didn’t spend a lot of time at anarchist book fairs but I did spend a little. The history of the relationship of US radicalism with Central & South American revolutionary socialism in recent times - El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cuba on down to Venezuela and more, and the role of the US left in contemporary American Indian sovereignty - is relevant. Activists make appeals to imagined indigenous utopia all the time. Somebody needed to stick their neck out and filet utopia off of indigeneity in a popular way.
They tried. Is it perfect? Far from it. But even Appiah says there’s a larger worthwhile project in there and I agree.
So the reviewer had better things to do in 2000 than hang around armchair radicals. Good for them. But they ran their dinghy onto the Enlightenment sandbar like so many others and missed the rest of the book, chapter 10 at least and I suspect more of it as well. Maybe they did read it and howled “More swamp!” and didn’t footnote it.
Rescuing an academic left from itself, indigenous history from the academic left, and society from, um, the academic left? Is a weird project. I think the book makes a contribution. Maybe I’ll try blogging about it.
I don´t get the sapiens paradox. Stone tool diversity seems on an exponential trajectory from the onset. Australopithecans used Oldowan industry for over a million years. Acheuleén hand axes were in use for a slightly shorter time. Middle paleolothic industries lasted for tens of thousands of years and younger paleolothic ones for thousands only. The neolithic sees numerous local tool arsenals with only hundreds of years to wait for the next innovation.
Is it supposed to be paradoxical that a modern looking skull is not surrounded by a modern looking arsenal? I would expect artifact diversity to increase with population density primarily, not brain size.
Innovation happens entirely within one brain, and the accumulated brain mass doesn't matter at all for having a new idea. That's why no matter how many chimps or dogs you get together, you won't get special relativity or a tokamak fusion reactor out of them -- but just one man can have that idea.
What more brains working on the problem gets you is a higher chance that any one brain will actually have a new idea. You're rolling the dice more often. Hence the question of technological progress in an evolving species depends critically on two parameters: the first, as you say, is the population density, but the second is how smart each individual is. I don't think you can discount either.
True. Those brains need to grasp a few steps at once and at least be able to imitate each other. Only then population density starts to affect technological progress.
Brains living at the same time yield completely different results than the same brains living after each other. Synchronous brains copy each others artifacts and thereby fortify them against forgetfulness. The more copies, the better the conservation of technology.
Brains in sequence with the same rate of innovation would be forced to constantly reinvent the wheel.
Therefore I think low population density has held hominids back much harder than mental capacity.
The Neanderthalers had a larger brain than us and their artifacts did improve, but much slower than the younger paleolothic sapiens industry. I wonder: If someone had dropped enough medicine to enable them to reach a certain threshold, would they have grown into an even faster progressing mankind? Would the Leonardo of Neanderthalers conduct flight experiments in front of an ice age crowd, instead of repairing spears for his clan?
And on the other side: how low you could go with human intelligence and still make progress, if you intensified communication? The Flores hominids retained a homo erectus inventory even after shrinking to australopithecine brain volumes. Watching parents do something is easier than reinventing. Would the have had a chance to progess, if they had had a way to cut tasks with x steps into small enough pieces so that many can do the work of one smart hominid?
Progress (at least in science) doesn't seem to me to be that one person has 1/4 of the great idea, then the next guy picks up the baton and takes it to 1/2, and so forth, like a relay team. It's more that the first person has a whole new idea, but runs into some problems working out some of the details, and the second schmo (who knows some special applicable skill) works out some of the details, and then a third person polishes up more detail, and so on -- much more like a photo coming into focus.
So even when it ends up being a team effort, the requirements for each member are quite different. The first is the one that needs the big imagination, and probably the most intelligence. The detail team that comes afterward needs other skills, but not as much raw intelligence.
So I don't think it's correct that population density matters much more. Even a high population density can nevertheless have slow technological progress if there is something holding back the idea-generators, the first person on the team[1], such as insufficient intelligence. But I do agree that population density is important as a second-order effect, because you do need the detail team to turn bright ideas into technology. There's a reason Hero of Alexandria didn't invent the steam engine and the Romans didn't invent the tank, and it's not for lack of intelligence.
There's also an aspect of population density that I think you're overlooking a bit, too, which is that high population means a greater chance of an unusually smart individual: you're rolling the genetic dice more often, so you are more likely to come up with a natural 7. So population growth doesn't *just* (or even necessarily primarily) mean better communication, it means more smart people, and it means the smartest person alive is likely to be smarter.
Yes, if you aren't in communication smart minds have to re-invent the wheel. It probably does have an effect -- particularly with the detail team -- but for the top-line invention I think this is much less important. Smart people already often "reinvent the wheel" as part of their learning. Reading Feynman's (semi) autobiography is illuminating here, the part where he talks about having to work out on his own, in his own way, everything he was taught. He talks about inventing new symbols for sines and cosines as part of his effort to "put it in his own words." My experience is that most smart people are like this: they very often reframe what they're taught in their own internal terms, and they often do construct for themselves things that other people already know[2], so there's already a lot of "reinventing of the wheel" going on.
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[1] China is kind of the modern poster-child for this, they have a historical rate of innovation that lags spectacularly behind the rest of the world, if you scale everything by population density. It's clearly not because they don't have smart people, but perhaps because Confucian culture apparently reveres respect for traditions *so* much that smart people are strongly dissuaded from expressing new ideas -- I've taught classes with majority Chinese immigrants and it is incredibly difficult to get them to ask questions, to challenge, to think outside the box I'm drawing, because I'm the professor and the culture says you do NOT challenge the professor. From an American point of view, it's frustrating:
[2] Fermi was supposedly an extreme this way. Apparently he never read the literature, and so when people came to talk to him, he would seem weirdly stupid, because he wouldn't immediately understand what they were talking about, would need terms defined, would ask naive questions that had already been answered, et cetera. Only...Fermi was *so* smart that he would basically deduce on the fly the entirety of what other people had worked out over months and years, and so by and by he would catch up to you, the mere mortal discussing some issue with him, and then zoom beyond, asking difficult questions and making new insights.
"Progress (at least in science) doesn't seem to me to be that one person has 1/4 of the great idea, then the next guy picks up the baton and takes it to 1/2, and so forth, like a relay team. "
Over the short term, I generally agree.
Over the long term, sometimes intellectual tools are invented (cartesian coordinates, calculus, etc.) that make whole classes of problems easier for the people who learn them - effectively handing the students that "1/4 of the great idea" as part of a standard tool set.
I can't read this review because I read Justin E. H. Smith's review of it, which is a great read. After hearing that the facts are in dispute, which I sort of expected but I didn't realize to what extent, I can't bring myself to read another review of it. So this reviewer faces a challenge because some percentage of us reads E. H. Smith, and I even linked to that review on DSL about six months ago.
It's a fascinating subject, but It's probably so fascinating because it's so speculative. David Friedman says that James Scott makes a somewhat similar claim. I tried to get a discussion of it on DSL and there is some:
It's a different issue, but I no longer talk with the DSLers because their culture to me is as foreign as a culture from Mars. There's an uncanny valley feeling, in which I think I am almost one of them, but then I realize I am an alien to that tribe. (which isn't a right-left tribe, more of a video gamer tribe.)
I don't think you're being honest here. You no longer talk to DSLers because you are banned from the forum. You got to that position through having six separate strikes, the last of which was for writing -
"Go ahead and ban me again you cunts, cocksuckers and religious freaks"
I really appreciated the conclusion of the review, but as you say we see ourselves in the distorted mirror, so it's probably because I already felt the same way. (OT but related and maybe interesting: this essay starts from the ideas of mcLuhan to hint in the same direction as the conclusion of the article, albeit from a different direction: https://palladiummag.com/2021/04/17/americas-new-post-literate-epistemology/ )
What i fail to understand is the conclusion the Davids had hoped one would get from the book. If anything, this feels more apologetic of an archipelago (or well, in its more rightist incarnation, a patchwork) kind of scenario. And I love archipelago, but by construction it's not a leftist super egalitarian future with no hierarchies, it's a system of political experimentation which can accomodate even very unleftist political arrangements next to communes in a choose-your-own-ideology way.
And I am not sure this is what they wanted to hint at, expecially when many people would not choose the commune over Singapore
EDIT: pardon a bit of sarcasm:
> So 50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.
The problem with history is that there's so much of it , even if a lot of it is not documented. In general you can find support in the historical record (or in speculations about the gaps) for any reasonable position. So just as science fiction often tells us more about the present in which it is written than the future it purports to describe, so our vision of the past changes as the things we seek in it, and recognise in it, change over the generations. If you've ever written a historical study you will know that it's impossible not to select and emphasise facts according to some presupposition or other, since otherwise you would be simply overwhelmed by the material. In our age, the default mindset for approaching history is secular progressive liberal internationalism; hence the nervousness with which a lot of historians and archeologists treat aspects of even the fairly recent past, as well as important historical figures.
I haven't read this book (and I won't, now) but Debt seemed to me very much open to this kind of criticism: a thesis looking for, and finding, evidence and arguments in support, but not a complete explanation. I think there are two particular problems with writing of this kind, given our current ideological norms and the generic problem of finding what you hope and expect to find.
One is the blindness of an overwhelmingly secular age to the importance of religion. I don't mean people in churches, I mean the sense of the world as inhabited and dominated by forces which humans could not understand, let alone control, and which needed to be propitiated or negotiated with through ceremonies. And this led to reification of such forces in the form of gods and spirits, and more sophisticated ideas of divine order and the interpenetration of the human and the divine. Now given that it's almost impossible to recapture the largely religious world-view behind, for example, the plays of Shakespeare, we should be extremely circumspect about assuming we can do the same thing by inference from civilisations thousands of years ago.
But (second point) in a liberal, teleological society, where we are happy to sit in judgement on the past, we get the problem of what I have called in a recent article "chronicism", which is the evaluation of the past in terms of the present, and attempts to force what are fundamentally anachronistic modern models onto it. So to talk, of "equality" in medieval times is, I would suggest, not very helpful, and what I think we have here, judging from the excellent review, is an attempt at something similar.
Hmm, the "Chornicism" criticism sounds like a re-encapsulation of the idea of the "Whig Theory of History": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history. A liberal, teleological society, happy to judge the past in support of the politicians of the present...
"Whig history" tends to be used to define more specifically all the "Moral Arc Trending Towards Justice" stuff. It is not popular among current historians because they have a tendency to side with the leftists, and they often lose.
The high school theory is interesting, but I think it's missing something, which is that high school social antics may be peculiar to situations when you put together people of that specific age group and basically let them form a society of same-age peers. This is probably an unnatural situation in the ancient world; people wouldn't necessarily be segregated by age in the same way, so the status hierarchies would likely not pan out like high school.
Age always creates natural hierarchies; although the youth may rebel against their elders, it would be natural to defer to people who have more experience, time to accumulate physical and social resources, etc. This is true within high schools as well; your year in high school is a major determinant of your social status. And on average one would expect older people (especially those with families) to have a vested interest in keeping the youth well-behaved so as not to disturb the peace.
There's also a theory that social jockeying is particularly prevalent in *US* high schools, perhaps because of a lack of formal social ranks in US society.
It's a good cautionary point, but there's a broad "middle age" period in human life when there isn't a super strong sorting by age. If a company chose a CEO that was either 22 or 82 that would raise eyebrows. But anything from early 40s to late 60s and we don't notice the age much at all. If you said "So-and-so (age 45/55/65) is a wise and experienced leader" it doesn't much matter which age you put in the parentheses.
We do mellow in middle age, but for most of the period in question people died before 40 (if they were lucky enough to survive childhood). So the prehistoric equivalent of “middle age” was maybe 18-30? High school may be overstating it, but there’s only so much wisdom and maturity you can accumulate in a dispersed, preliterate society before 30.
I don't think that's the case. Life expectancy is not the typical age of death, the two are quite different. Earlier ages suffered from high rates of child mortality, death in childbirth, et cetera, which brought down life expectancy quite a bit[1], but they still had plenty of people who made it to their 60s and probably older. There were plenty of American Indians in the 1800s who were old and wrinkled, it's not the case that they all snuffed it by age 40.
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[1] Obvious example: in a society where half the people die immediately at birth and half die at age 80, the life expectancy at birth is 40.
That is true, but I don't think that looking at the age of modern CEOs tells you much about what age differences meant in stateless (and business-less) societies. Before states, the people you lived with were overwhelmingly your relatives. And when you consider how, say, even small age differences between siblings set their relationships for life, it's not hard to see why age differences are important in societies like that.
With that said, perhaps we can harmonize that with the high-school model by seeing the social jockeying as existing between families more than between individuals. It seems like every society outside the modern West has some concept of "family honor" which means that what you do reflects on the respect that the neighbors have for your whole family, and can act as quite a constraint on behavior.
The whole part of the theatrical nature of hirachies made me think "This is what happens when you let constructivists sit in their own stew for to long."
The answer from Occams razor for why those societies did not have aristocracies year round, was because they couldn't. Their economic mode forced them to disperse every few months. In those dispersed groups everybody had to pull their weight.
Stable year round hireachies need easy to store staple foods, like grains. Before that when you tried to play the courtly games, of the fat season, in other seasons you simply starved.
I've not read the book, though I'm familiar with Graeber (I was there at Crooked Timber when he got nasty but didn't participate in any of the discussions), and this seems like an excellent review.
On the topic of why civilization eventually coalesced around hierarchical societies, Mark Moffett has some observations about that in his excellent, The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall (Basic Books 2019). Moffett studied evolution and ants under E.O. Wilson at Harvard and went on to develop a reputation as a photographer of ants and ant life, publishing photos in National Geographic and many other places. He's also curious and reads a lot and so has written about the nature of societies, from insects to humans.
Among other things he talks about fission-fusion societies in animals and humans. These are societies where bands will spend part of their time on their own, but will also conjoin with other bands in the society for joint activities. That's one of the things discussed in this review and it relates to the problem of why full-time hierarchical societies eventually emerged out of the fluid jumble we see in preliterate social groups. Here's a crucial passage from p. 138:
"Taking to cultivation at all but the smallest scale of simple gardening had another drawback that no early farmer could have predicted: it could ensnare a society in a plant trap. A trap, because the option of going back to hunting and gathering full time faded away once an expanding society committed to agriculture. [...] Yet once a society grew to a huge population, or was packed in tight with other agricultural societies, the numbers of people would be too great to be supported by native foods and starvation would be guaranteed."
So, once a society became so successful at farming that it decides to stick together all year, it will in time become committed to farming and loose the option to fission into small hunting-gathering bands. As this happens, size forces hierarchy on the society. I'm sure the Dunbar number is part of the story but there's more going on.
Gossip per se doesn't stifle growth. Gossip in the service of tall poppy cutting has the potential to stifle growth, but only certain kinds. The west ,. particularly the US, is tolerant of huge inequalities in wealth and fame, and it's gossip is mostly focused on policing their relationship to power and sex.
I feel quite a few of the critiques against this book are isolated demand for rigor, of the sort other thinkers rarely face in this neck of the wood. While it is (together with Debt) a book of "science", it should be compared in the same weight category: against "Sapiens", etc.
The Davids (i'm keeping the term!) are writing two books in one: one is an attack against the current framework of anthropology and prehistory (quite thorough and very well documented); another is their personal replacement framework (less well defended). To say the least, both the old framework and the new are politically charged. Only one of them, though, is dictating all of the public though since anthropology became a science. As such, this book should be read as something which will probably make a bunch of us bristle reflexively (the well known political tags attached to the author does not help in this regard). This goes double with establishment figures from academia: all "I have found this and that" questionable has to go through a filter of "is the person saying that benefitting from the status quo", and mainly: "is the person doing a purely negative review on a few focused points or a true general review with positives and negatives", a test that rarely fails to signal a hit job.
When it comes to misuse of the cited material, I have to step in and defend the authors here: the disciplines being discussed are always *interpretations* of archeological artifacts. The fact that a discovery was published and conclusions drawn will always reflect both the act of discovery (new ruins, etc) and the underlying interpretation framework. If you attack a framework, you will end up citing a bunch of litterature where the conclusions and abstract are seemingly misrepresented: but you have just used the discovery and discarded the loaded / dated / incorrect interpretation. If someone (like I think many of the citation warriors here have done) only skims randomly selected citations using only the intro / abstract/ conclusions and not the actual experimental section, the conclusions will be incorrect a lot of the time... Feel free to correct me here.
All that to say that I enjoyed this book very much, and it was a nice, heavy chunck of thought food to ruminate for a while.
> If someone (like I think many of the citation warriors here have done) only skims randomly selected citations using only the intro / abstract/ conclusions and not the actual experimental section, the conclusions will be incorrect a lot of the time...
Do you know of an example from archeology which shows how a 'citation warrior' could make this mistake? Not necessarily research cited by the Davids, although obviously that would be more relevant.
Hi, good Muster! First, I want to clarify: "citation warriors", on re-reading, sounds condescending. Yet, I intended it to be a kid of compliment: citation verification is hard, a slog and time consuming, and people who do it are literally warriors in my mind. It's true that internet adds a snerk to anything typed and I should have been aware of that, sorry if it offended anyone.
My comment comes not from any expertise in archeology, but from a set of general considerations on "reading research backwards", as Scott might put. It can apply to many (if not all) areas of research, but high interpretability ones are more susceptible. As an example: as a modern psychiatrist well versed in cognitive behavioural therapy, you are dropped in a parallel society (damn these random wormholes) that attaches a lot of importance to correct citations in books, but somehow never got past Freud. To justify your superior theory, you need to add citationsn to your work which all come from a framework of thought where they are self evidently correct and draw the corresponding conclusions... The difficulties come fast!
Hope that is what you were asking? I can try and find the original document where I found the explanation, but it's been a while and I just have the gist: "attacking the previous paradigm tautolaugically means you will cite work contradicting you in their interpretation, and you should rely on the experimental section only"
'Citation warrior' doesn't sound quite as negative as 'data thug', but 'citation checker' or 'citation scrutineer' both have less of potential connotation of any sort. (I had to verify that 'scrutineer' is a word; I meant to invent it if not.)
For another hypothetical solution to the Sapient paradox, that does not politicise the past but ends up wacky nonetheless, I offer the ideas of journalist Graham Hancock (of did-the-Atlanteans-build-the-sphinx fame). His idea is that at some point humans started consuming magic mushrooms, got high on them and saw visions, this inspired them to do cave art and then civilisation somehow followed from these new mental experiences. It's definitely the most fun of the hypotheses, in my opinion.
I’m reminded a little of the Anti-Politics machine review, and a little of the Gary Taubes argument that only dumb scientists study nutrition.
Anthropologists are losers, by which I mean they were nerds in high school, and not particularly smart or creative or they would have done other things with their time, meaning they can’t possibly acknowledge that popularity was the governing principle of pre-civilization (that means they suck historically) and frankly they’re probably not bright/creative enough to ever figure the truth out anyway (because who even goes into anthropology?).
I love the part about summoning an Elder God. It fits so perfectly with the idea that social media gave a megaphone to all the dumbest people in society. They are advantaged because they don’t care about nuance (perhaps aren’t even capable of it). No cognitive dissonance slowing them down.
Social media has tilted the power dynamic to the people running the most primitive human OS, gossiping about people to bring them down. Lmao
Does the book anywhere describe the methods used to deduce political arrangements from 7000 year old arrangements of rocks and bones and shells?
I have personally been very unimpressed by everything I've read about the scholarly interpretation of Gobekli Tepe. You will read a discussion on how the Gobekli Tepe site proves a religious and cultural fixation with the phallus -- that Gobekli Tepe is a temple to a "phallic cult." And then the evidence for this is ultimately ... they used pillars. Which, like almost all pillars across the ancient world, widen near the top in order to support more of the overlying burden while minimizing the weight of the pillar itself, thus looking phallic.
(It gets worse: they also refer to a specific type of t-shaped pilled used in Gobekli Tepe as being shaped like a man covering his genitals with his hands. I implore you to look up pictures of t-shaped Gobekli Tepe pillars and tell me if this description doesn't seem like utter bullshit.)
Also, do the authors discuss the idea that substantial amounts of coastal land, where there should be archaeological sites on the order of 50,000-200,000 years old, is now under water?
I reckon you're onto something, the substantial variation in coastlines over the period being examined has been completely overlooked in the review and seemingly the book. Even today, human settlements express a clear preference for coastal locations. Virtually all of those from 15 to 100,000 years ago, and thus most potential Gobekli Tepes, are now under dozens of metres of sea water. Much of the apparent 'Sapient Paradox' may largely be just gaps in the record.
Another wretched work of heredity denying propaganda. Sorry if that sounds a bit strong, but at this point, it's utterly indefensible to try and explain inequalities without reference to heritable behavioral differences within and between populations. A failure to do so is a sign of profound ignorance and/or ideological bias.
On the topic of bias, "Western society is great unless you're black" and other such nonsense should be sufficient to dismiss this book out of hand. Black people in the west enjoy a standard of living higher than the overwhelming majority of people to ever live, and the plurality of evidence suggests suggests black white inequality is a product of heritable behavioral differences. Blacks in the west enjoy a standard of living which could not be dreamt of by most people in Africa, but there's absolutely ZERO reason to believe that they are *necessarily* capable of having the same standard of living as western whites and Asians unless you're a creationist.
Yeah, this is always the part of this blog where I peace out. You can't convince these goobers that they're wrong (or even that, if their premises were correct, they'd be wrong in different ways). And Scott in his infinite wisdom doesn't see fit to get rid of this sort of useless railroading. So they just reliably show up every time a thread gets long enough.
You are incorrect about Putin being afraid of cancel culture, and certainly wrong about it seeming that he is more afraid of it than nuclear weapons. The article in question referred to him talking about Russian artists being pressured by western institutions to condemn the invasion in order to perform. He's not "afraid" of this, he's talking about it as a propaganda coup.
This is different than what cancel culture really is, which is deranged social media pile ons trying to get the target fired or hounded into suicide. Cancel culture can't really happen across borders.
I would say that there's a zero percent chance that Putin commits suicide but a non-zero percent chance that his death is officially recorded as a suicide.
There's a significant chance that if Vladimir Putin decides to commit suicide, he'll decide to try and take a billion or so other people with him. And since he does have a couple thousand thermonuclear missiles at his disposal, which I am rather less than 100% certain that his staff would be able to take away from him if he became suicidal, there is one important question for you to ask: how close would you estimate your home is from ground zero?
I remember Gaddafi, yes. Unfortunately so does Kim Jong-Un. And that's a big part of the reason why Kim Jong-Un is closing in on a hundred nuclear and thermonuclear missiles, which he will never, ever, *ever* get rid of except by losing a nuclear war. The price for having Gaddafi anally raped to death with a bayonet, so you could say "three cheers for the principle of the thing!", is a real and significant increase in the probability that millions of Koreans (and maybe a few hundred thousand Americans) will die in a nuclear war in this decade. And Kim is just the first of many.
Add Vladimir Putin to the club, and it won't be mere millions. But hey, it's the principle of the thing. Let justice be done though the heavens may fall.
Move to ground zero, you and your family, *then* tell us how urgent it is that we kill all the bad evil nuclear-armed tyrants no matter the cost.
I don't think that "being nice" to Putin will cause him to reciprocate, and I've said nothing like that. I do think, and I have said, that trying to *kill* Putin, *will* cause him to reciprocate. And, yes, pushing him into a corner where he doesn't see any way out but suicide, counts as trying to kill him if he can see us pushing.
> victim of a totally inexplicable and blazingly fast case of necrotizing pancreatitis.
Let me start by acknowledging that this writer writes better than I can, and I am envious of that.
But I hate this kind of writing. "Necrotizing" is not clever, it's pretentious. Words have semantic values. You undermine their usage when you get creative with them.
"necrotizing" sounds like a joke but there's no joke. Tone matters.
This was a very well-considered review, and deserves a well-considered response. Instead you get a bunch of barely-coherent thoughts jumbled together:
1) On the thesis of ancient pre-civilization being a seasonal thing: sign me up for it. "Nomadism, but with regional burning man once a year" sounds like an ideal way for humanity to spend the next ten thousand years. It helps that pre-agricultural man was also kind of post-scarcity in a weird way - food security was generally much better for hunter-gatherer than for farmer, and all of the stuff of life could be made by you and yours.
2) On highschool as the crab bucket - I think that Americans seem obliged to have universally awful high school experiences, but mine was actually quite pleasant. I went from an small primary school environment dominated by awful, entitled, gossipy kids to a public high school which was large enough for me to blend in and find my preferred group. My school was very english-model, with all that that implies. I don't know what this adds or subtracts to the "Neolithic as gossip girls" hypothesis, but there's a data point at least.
3) On Twitter as the new/old destroyer: I think it's always been mean girls at the top - Twitter just pulls the curtain a bit and reminds us that the people running things are just average human beings, only with portfolios and armies instead of {whatever signified popularity when you were in high school}. The geeks and nerds never, ever, ended up on top They just got put in a cubicle somewhere were then told that the popular kids really do have their best interests at heart.
I think (3) is a little overdone. People do exist with genuine leadership skills, and they are definitely not the same as nerds and geeks. They have a different skillset entirely, they really are "people" people, who enjoy getting to know people, enjoy getting the best out of them, inspiring them, et cetera. They do make decisions, sometimes difficult decisions, but more because somebody has to and not because they enjoy putting other people down. People love to follow them, to work for them, to enlist under their banner. They're very important people, because good ideas are not enough by themselves -- you always need teamwork and ordinary people who don't follow the details of the idea but are willing to throw themselves into making it happen. This is what genuine leadership can do.
Of course, unfortunately such people are rare, and so you get a lot of second-raters who aspire to the job and sometimes fill in, who don't actually have the necessary skills and substitute being Mr./Ms. Bossy Pants to limp along. But that should not blind one to the fact that genuine leaders do exist, and are a critical component of success.
Fair enough - I think that leaning on the mean girls analogy makes it seem like I consider the folk at the top to be lacking in leadership or something. Instead I should clarify that what looks to the classic high IQ/low EQ person like a bunch of shallow, mean people playing incomprehensible status games just is politics as it is actually carried out, by people who are temperamentally suited and trained for it. True leaders can, as you point out, exist and thrive in that space - the review even mentioned how the example of Iroquois leadership seems to require a combination of intelligence, erudition, people skills and charisma that would code for good leadership in any society.
If I were to push the egalitarian aspect of the book's argument (at least as presented), I would say that the main difference between the pre and post-civilizational mode is that, as in the Iroquois example, there's at least a chance for anyone with leadership skills to rise all the way to the top (simply because the societies are smaller and the hierarchies are generally flatter and less well-entrenched). So rather than Twitter being the re-invention of some atavistic, universal tyranny, it's just everything as it always have been, only now the peasants get to see behind the curtain a bit to the parts of the power structure that they'd hitherto been completely excluded from and lied to about.
Greg Cochran's 'oeuvre' (book, blog, and poasts) touches on a lot of topics relevant to this review. Why 'anatomically modern humans' didn't displace neanderthals sooner is a topic he has blogged about. Cochran would also take issue with: "there’s no well-accepted evidence that human cognitive abilities emerged at 10,000 BC, and... Homo sapiens was pretty much genetically-intact, at least in the ways we think should matter, somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago."
If the author is unfamiliar with Cochran then The 10,000 year Explosion is required reading.
Anyway, I quite enjoyed this review - well written and creative!
"This often leads to blanket statements, like how Western civilization is currently great “except if you’re Black,” or even outright misrepresentations of their opponents, like assigning to Steven Pinker the claim that “all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth-century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’” (Pinker definitely doesn’t claim this), or rejecting kinship-based scientific theories of altruism with reasoning like “many humans just don’t like their families very much” (these are all real quotes)."
This rather reminds be of Gell-Man amnesia: If I can see someone is lying about a Canadian academic who is still alive, why should I trust him about things I can't judge? Such as his claims about a native Canadian called Kandiaronk who died a third of a millennium ago.
Are there good estimates of population numbers before and in 10,000 BC? Because a slowly growing population up to reaching a critical mass in which the Great Trap can be escaped sounds like a trivially plausible explanation to me.
debates about bottlenecks might give the best insight. But I´ve only had a cursory look on the literature and can´t judge how robust the current numbers are. Population genetics seems the best way to dig into it, though.
New front-runner for me. I especially like that this review advances the discussion and puts forward its own ideas, but in a way that still feels like it's engaging with the book. There's lots of interesting data presented along the lines of "what did the reviewer learn from the book" and at the end we get the reviewer's own interpretation. The review also does a good job of situating The Dawn of Everything intellectually and politically without letting that color the analysis too much.
On the minus side, I suspect some of the treatment here is a bit reductionist; e.g. it's weird to see Hobbes presented as an arch-conservative and I'm sure intellectual historians would paint a more complicated picture. But I see the rhetorical benefit, for the purposes of this review, of presenting him as a foil for Rosseau. Similarly I'm not totally satisfied by the "Gossip Trap" theory; what was it that broke humans out of the Gossip Trap, and why is Twitter such a threat given that our relationships still far exceed Dunbar's number? But it feels like a productive concept and I really appreciate the ending note of intellectual humility about these things.
I have lots to say but I was struck that he mentioned the 3 bigs: Harari, Pinker and Diamond but left out my current favorite Joseph Henrich of The Secret of Our Success who I discovered from [Scott's great review ](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/) of course.
I've been slowly but surely getting through it on audiobook.
Anyway, in the very first chapter Henrich spends a lot of time describing the importance of "Prestige" as an alternative and complementary form of power as opposed to "Dominance". He states that culture and tradition is copied and transferred via prestigious individuals and not via dominant individuals.
This seems to fit extremely well with the review's conclusion about a prehistoric popularity conquest.
To quote Henrich:
"The growing body of adaptive information available in the minds of other people also drove genetic evolution to create a second form of human status, called prestige, which now operates alongside the dominance status we inherited from our ape ancestors. Once we understand prestige, it will become clear why people unconsciously mimic more successful individuals in conversations; why star basketball players like LeBron James can sell car insurance; how someone can be famous for being famous (the Paris Hilton Effect); and, why the most prestigious participants should donate first at charity events but speak last in decision-making bodies, like the Supreme Court. The evolution of prestige came with new emotions, motivations, and bodily displays that are distinct from those associated with dominance.".
This strikes me as an elegant and compelling explanation of prehistory.
Your "gossip trap" reminds me of one side of Acemoglu's and Robinson's "Narrow Corridor". Their argument is that societies flourish best in a "corridor" where Hobbes' Leviathan is "shackled" by civil society. Exit the corridor on the side of too much government power and you get despotism. Exit the corridor on the side of too much power in the hands of civil society and no one can amass enough legitimate authority to organize large groups. This latter case isn't anarchy, but it prevents the kind stability needed for sustained growth and freedom. Gossip is a powerful tool for keeping societies stuck in that state.
So anthropologists not only take it for granted that meritocracy is a bad thing, but that it's such a bad thing that putting a cap on it is one of the great benefits of human intelligence. Am I reading that right? Seems completely nutbar.
>So 50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.
High schools are so bad because there is no objective criteria of success or usefulness. 50,000 BC would certainly have had social hierarchies, but there would also have been more objective measures of success - being a good warrior or chieftain, having access to food-productive areas, having skills in the various metis-filled arts needed to run a society of that era. This would ameliorate the purely social competition.
First impression: The "Gossip Trap" hypothesis is interesting and deserves real investigation. One of my problems with the rather fawning admiration by the "Davids" of the "non-hierarchical" organization schemes of early societies is that such groups are destined to be completely flattened by organized and acquisition minded -- and thus larger, better resourced and more powerful -- groups. It happened to the native Americans, except for those more militaristic minded (and thus organized and lead) like the Cherokee and Apache, the Myceneans, and on and on. If Western civilization is devolving as this describes, it will be overtaken by those who find a way to suppress or co-opt social media to retain and control a hierarchical civilization. It seems this is being attempted by China, and also by members of the Western elite among themselves. Hardly the first critique of social media, but one which has an interesting slant on the problem and its mechanism of action.
I really like the first half of this review! It's interesting, well-written, and does a good job engaging with the book's content.
I'm somewhat less convinced by the "Gossip trap" explanation: it isn't like small-scale, relationships-based societies disappeared 10,000 years ago, or like none of our archaeological evidence comes from this kind of society. Lots of "Western" societies tended to become large and centralized, but plenty of (maybe even most?) central African societies were organized around much-smaller, social-based up until the colonial era (see e.g. Jan Vansina's "Paths in the Rainforests"), and seem to have been pretty functional / produced plenty of the sort of archeological evidence this Gossip trap would predict would be lacking. There's a lot that's very interesting to explore in how this kind of society functions, but the "gossip trap" explanation feels too reductive and it doesn't fit the specific facts very well.
Still a very good review overall! I just much prefer the first half to the second.
> Some might try to dismiss the Sapient Paradox by pointing to evidence of ongoing human evolution. And while there is some evidence of recent human evolutionary changes, it often seems clustered around things like dietary changes—at least, there’s no well-accepted evidence that human cognitive abilities emerged at 10,000 BC, and almost everyone who tackles these issues, from the Davids to Yuval to Pinker to Diamond, agrees that Homo sapiens was pretty much genetically-intact, at least in the ways we think should matter, somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Indeed, early Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago had brains as large as our own!
This is untrue.
All humans outside of Africa are intermixed with archaic hominids, most notably Neanderthals, but also Denisovians.
We know from genetic studies that some Neanderthal brain-related genes are upselected while male fertility related Neanderthal genes are downselected.
This suggests that humans did, in fact, change when they left Africa, because the modern human is not homo sapiens, but a very slight admixture of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals - and in some cases, other archaic hominids as well, such as Denisovians.
This could easily resolve the paradox. You needed the right mixture of brain genes to get this stuff; once you got that, those people outcompeted all other groups and basically took over the world.
There's a paradox of intelligence: intelligence is extremely useful for creating better tools and more advanced technology, but once someone makes it, the rest of the group can copy it much more easily. How, then, is higher intelligence selected for, when it may not give individuals enormous advantages reproductively?
This is a difficult question to answer... but there's a plausible answer.
What if it wasn't selected for on an individual level?
Imagine the following scenario:
For tens of thousands of years, you have people sort of sloshing around. You need enough "good brain genes" to get the creative juices really flowing, so you have the occasional genius who does improve things, and then people copy it. This leads to random, slow progress, as these geniuses pop up and then disappear because there just isn't selective pressure to make their genes proliferate, but the techniques they come up with are imitated and spread. Sure, it would be better for the *group* if the geniuses became omnipresent, but evolution doesn't know that.
This looks an awful lot like this "trap", but in reality, what is actually going on is that there's these "geniuses" who advance technology and then the multitudinous copycats.
Then, something happens. A group gets taken over by a genius, who has tons of kids, or a genius family goes off and forms their own group and due to the founder effect, this group ends up with a really disproportionate number of these genius genes. These "smart genes" begin to approach fixation in this population, or possibly DO reach fixation.
At this point, you can start to see group selection occur, as while on the level of the individual, the genius is not particularly reproductively successful or selected for, on a *group* level, groups that have hit fixation on these genes will be more successful than those which aren't.
These groups then commit serial genocide, going out and either killing or subjugating the other tribes and producing a grossly disproportionate number of "genius" offpsring, allowing the groups to get these genes fixed.
This doesn't always happen; sometimes (if not most of the time), the "genius" conquerors are absorbed into the underlying population and the genius genes are lost.
But this doesn't matter, because there's always another "genius" genocide waiting, just around the corner, from one of the lucky groups which does get those genes fixed in it.
The result, then, is that these groups start to spread while mixing with local populations. But as long as the "genius" population still generated SOME tribes that were geniuses, and could then slaughter or conquer their neighbors, it continues to proliferate. This would cause all "genius" groups to be some mixture of the local tribes that could get that "genius" stuff up to a high enough level.
In this model, rather than "Europeans" or "Eurasians" being the successful, civilized group, instead you have some seed group which starts basically planting itself across populations, very possibly an elite group that does so.
So rather than everyone popping up and suddenly becoming "advanced" at the same time, instead there was some "seed" event where this started, and this group sort of cavalcaded around. Other groups could imitate the technology, but struggled to advance it themselves, and ended up getting wiped out/subjugated.
This would explain weird things, like "Why did Northern and Western Europe become the center of the world when they weren't very smart previously" - rather than having to come up with some weird explanation where smart people failed to invent advanced civilization and then slingshotted up to a hyper-advanced level, we instead say that they actually just weren't super smart to begin with, and became much smarter because they got taken over by "genius" populations from elsewhere.
This rather nicely fits with the spread of "civilization" in ancient times - you have this group, possibly somewhere in the Near East, that ends up spreading out into Egypt and India and across Mesopotamia, and then over to China and the Far East. The various ancient peoples spread around the Mediterranean and North Africa, then the Romans conquer to the north and spread it further, the Chinese spread it across the Far East, with some of them getting to Japan, and that group then contaminates the rest of the island, etc.
This would explain why things look the way they do today in the Old World.
The problem is, this hypothesis does nothing to explain Mesoamerican civilization or the Inca.
Of course, one explanation is that this maybe happened more than once - maybe there wasn't a single seed event, but this sort of "lucky break" actually happened a few times in history, and instead, East Asian civilization, the Near Eastern civilization, and the American civilization were actually three separate lucky events.
Another is that the actual origination group was actually a group of North Eurasians who ended up spreading to Mesopotamia, Europe, and the Americas - there is evidence of relatively recent shared ancestry between Europeans and North Americans. In this scenario, it was actually this group which was to blame, and seeded these "genius" populations across the Northern Hemisphere. Of course, this raises the question of why it took so long for us to notice this happening, but maybe we just haven't found the evidence because the last Ice Age wiped it out, or maybe we will go puttering around Russia or Siberia we'll find some ancient impressive thing somewhere - we only recently found Göbekli Tepe, so maybe we just haven't gone and dug in the right hill in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe the Ice Age kept the groups too small to really do much of value that was highly visible, but once the Ice Age ended, these folks went out and took over the world.
Or maybe there was a boating group that ended up spreading from East Asia to the Americas, along the coast, and accidentally "planted" a couple civilizations.
Or maybe it's just completely wrong, and the reason why this happened is something completely different.
Of course, there's another thought that comes to mind:
What if *heredity hierarchy* was the thing that allowed this to happen? That is to say, rather than there being some "tribe" that did this, it instead was inbred ruling families that effectively created the smaller populations that enabled these genes to reach fixation in them.
It was very common for ancient kings and nobles to be highly inbred and related to each other, but this also happened amongst other classes of people, with various specialist groups often being related to themselves and passing the craft on within the family.
What if this was not a flaw, but a feature?
This creates a small population amongst which these "genius genes" might flourish. In this scenario, these groups - the nobles, but also possibly hereditary artisans and priests - could potentially get these genes fixed amongst them. This gave them an advantage in manipulating and controlling other people, and gave their civilizations an advantage over competing civilizations. Indeed, they might be outright selecting for these genes, because in these groups, showing high ability gets you social credit and respect and gets you put in the position to pass on your genes the most profitably and stay in charge.
Of course, the fact that it is Good To Be King causes your genes to spread out in the population as you have a bunch of illegitimate children as well, which could result in your genes no longer being so special, which could eventually result in less inequality between the noble/artisan/whatever class and the general population, eventually resulting in the fall of the nobility as they stopped being special (or at least, special relative to a larger proportion of the population, like the middle class). This would be especially pronounced in lower population areas - a small smart founder population, or an elite rolling into a small place and spreading their genes all over the place, could result in a population like that. Like, say, Britain, or Iceland, or Japan.
Meanwhile, if you get overthrown by outsiders without these genes, it may be hard for them to maintain things the way you did, though they might have more success if they marry into your family and get those genes. This would explain why many civilizations fell apart after some other people rolled in and replaced the elite, while others benefitted when a foreign elite replaced their decrepit and stupid elite with one that was actually competent.
The gossip trap lacks explanatory power of how any such transition occurred.
Why did groups get bigger and break the population barrier? Why wouldn't this have happened previously? Why did it only occur amongst some civilizations and not others? Like, the Mississippian people seem like they should have broken this, but they apparently didn't, as they produced very little tech. Meanwhile, the Easter Islanders were on a tiny little island and somehow ended up making some fancy things.
It also has the significant flaw that one of the best ways to "beat gossip" is to produce things of value. Being an asshole to the guy who makes the best weapons in your village is a great way not to get those. People gossip a great deal about the rich and powerful, but they remain rich and powerful, because they own companies or are good actors or whatever.
Moreover, *smart people tend to win out in these sorts of social games.*
The most popular people are also often quite smart; indeed, the notion of smart people being socially unsuccessful a very recent trope, and honestly probably has more to do with modern technology than anything else, as it allowed smart people with poor social skills to do something of value, which created the nerd stereotype, when in fact the brilliant general, the clever businessman, etc. was the rule of the day previously. The Founding Fathers were all quite smart, and had risen to the top of the social hierarchy via their mastery of social skills and business acumen and leadership ability.
I'm a corrosion professional, and I want to interrogate whether there's a "civilisation trap" at all. The vast majority of human made structures simply don't last that long. The theoretical corrosion rate for modern steel in normal atmospheric conditions would be roughly 0.05mm/yr, and it'll probably be higher if you had iron instead and you were smelting it out of a rudimentary furnace with no controls for composition. But if you had an artefact that was 150mm thick, it would have holes within 3,000 years and probably more or less gone by 4,500 years, unless you lucked out and it ended up in some kind of anoxic environment. Wood would be gone within 100 years or less.
At time scales greater than 10,000 or 20,000 years, would human made material even be detectable to us? Are we just going to the beach and pointing at the pristine sand as proof that no one has ever built a sandcastle there?
If, hypothetically, some people lived in a humid tropical region, then later died out or migrated away, I don't think we'd find their traces after 50,000 years. We wouldn't know if they'd carved their words on trees, because that tree would have been dead and decomposed for at least 48,000 years before we even get the chance to turn it into IKEA dining tables. If they had trade routes and they left, their descendants wouldn't know those anymore and the roads themselves would have grown over. If they made art we might not recognise it as such and it's probably made of leaves or they might have crushed beetles to make paint which would be gone after a few thousand years, maybe 10,000 tops. If they buried their dead then some animals might have dug up the bones later and scattered the parts far and wide. We'd only know if they built something like the Stonehenge, but even then - would Stonehenge have survived on a faultline? Would the pyramids survive massive coastline or river path changes? What about bushfires? Massive floods, tornadoes, or cyclones?
If we all collectively decided to abandon a town after a particular bad cyclone, flood or fire, I would posit that it'll only take maybe 20,000 years before the town basically vanishes into nature, and that's with modern building materials. You'd be able to find us only by doing mass spec on the dirt and finding traces of petrochemicals and exotic minerals that were in our tech and you'd go "well these people must have traded with [places that had these resources]", which is way underselling the town that used to exist there. Maybe the cockroaches in the area test a bit higher for mercury or microplastics. You wouldn't know about how Sally liked avocado toast and coffee, or Tom the yoga instructor, or Mrs Tran's Vietnamese bakery. Even a tiled floor has a useful lifespan of maybe 100-200 years without maintenance, and I'm assuming that's indoors, in an intact building.
That being said, I'm not an archeologist, and someone's probably debunked my take already, but I'm interested in hearing the rebuttal.
It's a striking idea, but not very plausible. We have stone structures from over 10,000 years ago (Gobekli Tepe), various kinds of carvings and cave paintings from 40,000 years ago or so, stone tools and human remains from 100,000s or even millions of years ago. Even assuming all the products of civilization proper would have corroded, you would still expect to see evidence somewhere of its effects. Ice cores can measure atmospheric composition (which shows mining / industry effects even from well before the modern period) out to 100,000s of years ago. Fossil fuel and mineral deposits are orders of magnitude older than that and show no signs of being picked over. There's probably some way a prior civilization _could_ be compatible with the evidence by making assumptions that explain these discrepancies. But as a prior it has little to recommend it.
Wikipedia: "A replication of Dunbar's analysis with a larger data set and updated comparative statistical methods has challenged Dunbar's number by revealing that the 95% confidence interval around the estimate of maximum human group size is much too large (4–520 and 2–336, respectively) to specify any cognitive limit."
It's sad to say it of two such brilliant authors, but they could have saved themselves time and perplexity if they'd read Joseph Henrich's 2016 "The Secret to Our Success". The forward-and-backward-and-forward-again nature of cultural evolution is more parsimonious and reasonable an explanation of all the same facts than what the Davids present.
My first comment to SSACX, and nothing particularly original or erudite to say - how embarrassing...
*Entertainment Value. Unlike some other finalist reviews, and in sharp contrast to the non-brevity, I didn't constantly find myself struggling to keep reading. This wasn't one of the "grind through an actually-unpleasant post for progress on [Codex Completionist] Steam achieve" type things. Some other commenters compare it to last year's Progress and Poverty review, which seems apt - that was also quite long, but consistent positive utilon generation made it seem less so. One is reminded of Einstein's possibly-apocryphal layman explanation of relativity.
*Actually A Book Review. I'm not sure how to word that less-implicitly-critically. One of the concerns raised about the review of __Fusion Cuisine: Appropriating Electrons for Fun and Profit__ (sorry, can't remember actual title, that's headcanon) was that it was a very nice essay "about" the topic of the book, but didn't really...reference or review the book. Pretty sure there weren't any quotes, even. I left with a distinct feeling of having no opinion whatsoever about the associated book, other than it not being obviously wrong and possibly legible to the geriatric reader demographic, and those are low bars. Assessed on those merits, it was indeed fine, but...not a book review, which I thought was the point of this book review contest. This review avoids said pitfalls. I wish I could say the same of all previous finalists too, but that wasn't always the case. On purely technocratic pretextual grounds, this single factor is automatically (dis)qualifying for me, vote-wise. (I do think this might be an issue with Scott's fairly open-ended submission guidelines. While they do guarantee a much more diverse applicant pool, babble without prune leads to...well...a really diverse applicant pool, in both form and function. These same concerns seem to come up every year, or at least with the ACX book reviews so far.)
*Style. This has been the most "Scott-like" review so far, at least according to however my brain organizes such subjective schema. SSCAX for me has always been about the tendentiously long, peppered-with-relevant-what-the-refrances, "no really I swear this is Actually Interesting if you finish reading!" type content; this is the kind of stuff that finally convinced me to buy a subscription. It even finishes off with a possibly-plausible pet theory of Zeitgeist relevance that has an implied "Epistemic status: kinda shrug but Big If True". Contrasts nicely with the, uh, let's charitably call it a lack of epistemic humility on the part of the authors. Puncturing that certitude by satirizing the CHAPTER TITLES, IN WHICH THE GREATER WORK IS SUBDIVIDED ACCORDING TO NARRATIVE FLOW; & WITH CONSIDERATIONS FOR LEVITY was a nice tonal move as well.
*Substance. On the one hand, my priors were appropriately skeptical - I mean, c'mon, it's a book in the Pop <social science> genre. Some level of [Citation Needed] and "I do not think that citation means what you think it means" is to be expected. On the other hand, the comments section didn't disappoint in serving its divinely mandated role of collectively issuing a multitude of isolated demands for rigor - and at some point I think that definitely crosses over into rigor multis, wow. It's honestly sort of impressive that a fun doorstopper of a book, with an equally fun doorstopper of a review (Many Such Examples, actually, appreciate all the links to other reviews!), is *apparently* based on an anthropological house of cards. Which I guess would be made of flint and mammoth bone, or whatever. Social power was obviously determined by playing Status Poker. I'm not an arachnologist, and lack any relevant credentialism to assess or critique the empirical bits...but I think it's fair to say that the entertainment/enlightenment ratio of <s>Department of Egalitarianism</s> __Dawn of Everything__ is a bit lopsided. Gerrymandered, even.
*Regarding Martin Luther's Pet Thesis, One Of 99 Nailed To Jack Dorsey And Elon Musk's Respective Doors. Seems plausible enough...but as others note, this isn't exactly a hot take anymore. The great thing about Social Media Bad as food for thought is that it can be microwaved an unlimited number of times and still be sort of tasty, if empty mental calories. I say that as someone who does, in fact, think Social Media Bad and has given it up it like it's forever Lent. (She says, while writing a baroque comment on a blog, which is definitely not social media, unlike Reddit. Worst argument in the world!) It's certainly sort of novel to link this to Dunbar's Number of the Beast and ancient anthropology...but I'd really like to see the idea fleshed out a bit more. As presented, it's a bit of an all-you-have-is-a-banhammer thing, a sort of Fully General Counterargument for society's nails. Maybe it's true - but since the book which inspired(?) said thesis is itself lacking in structural integrity, shouldn't I revise my priors downwards? Perhaps if this review wins, the author could pull a Lars Doucet and go on to write three more equally-long guest posts exploring this idea in more detail. I'd certainly enjoy those!
Anyway, barring an even better review later, I'll likely vote for this one. Even a speculatively wrong thing based on another speculatively wrong thing can be thought-provoking, and I bet there's at least a little wheat in that chaff pile. (Oh, wait, agriculture wasn't invented yet. Or was it? Hmm, idiomatic uncertainty abounds! [See what I mean?])
Congratulations! This is a lively text I enjoyed reading, ever more so when it drifted away from mere book review to bold speculation. The high school social web is a convincing model for what might have ruled the social interaction of our early ancestors. However I doubt that it can explain the Sapient Paradox. There are other candidates: slow genetic development followed by a spurt, sexual selection.
> They argue that Native American intellectuals were the true originators of many of the criticisms of the Western World that would go on to define the political Left
While the review correctly points out that this claim is far too broad to be supported... wouldn't it be great to convince the far left that the entire social justice enterprise was culturally appropriated and watch it vanish in a puff of (il)logic?
The "Gossip Trap" is quite possibly the most interesting theory of human prehistory that I have ever read. I love it. Just to be clear though, since this is a book review -- that's your thesis, not the thesis of the book, right?
This is an excellent piece and one of my favorite things I have read all year. It also aligns with my attitudes about this book, which were that it had a lot of interesting facts, but they seemed clearly tortured to align with the authors’ political project.
I have been fascinated by this Book and its progressive attempt to identify what the authors’ believe is why we have been, and continue to be, ‘stuck’ in a particularly violent and dominate form of social structure. I completely disagree with their premises that heeding signs, taking warning, making the right assumptions and acting intelligently will allow for the human construction of a social structure that will be somehow ‘better’ as if utopia remains their goal. Nevertheless, they do introduce new concepts allowing for their theory to yield new evidence as well as new interpretations of the prevailing evidence. This is important for the process of social change, which is never progress, but only change.
The authors’ explanation of how their theory’s three elementary forms of domination (i.e., control of violence, control of esoteric knowledge, and charismatic theatrics) crystallize into institutional forms (i.e., sovereignty, administration, and heroic politics) introduces a new concepts for communicating about the state, but as they say, the ‘State’ is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is. So we are left discussing the mask, but with new concepts - which is something necessary for change.
I am always somewhat amused by how people so readily accept evolution is not based on intelligence or intent, but reject that notion when it comes to social institutions, which they say are the intended creations of intelligent actors. Of course, I take what I understand to be the evolutionist point of view.
Re-reading to decide which is my fav-review. (And it's this one, all right.) - Now I see a fun parallel - "seasonal kings of ritual" to: Carnival. In Germany, the 'societies' vote each season -11/11 to Ash Wednesday - their new princes and (male) queens, who are upper-middle-class at least, 'cuz that honor will cost them dearly. And then those "rule" the sessions and processions - though none ever does more than announce the next event/clown et al + wave and throw candies at "their" people.
This was bravely detailed, but it did get at the heart of the problem with the book: the Davids look at the last 10,000 years and claim it speaks to what humans fundamentally are. They ignore hundreds of thousands of years of humanity.
D&D isn’t anti story, it’s just another story. And the chronology in reality can’t be reduced since it has no intention, it’s not conscious. People aren’t making clear choices, they’re behaving: hormones, emotions, senses, memories, scarcity, weather. This notion that political social systems are developed in reason alone is obviously fiction. Plus the sapient paradox is obvious, how are we still on Renfrew? Sapiens gain temporal causality 75kya. Then correlational analysis 12kya. Put this mf bullshit to rest, the review and the book are pure narrative bunk. Humans are animals in chaos + language and records: don’t be fooled by the existence of either externality. Chaos rules, humans pretend consciousness until the ecology takes backcontrol as is occurring right now.
Great review. It strikes me though more as a defence of the Hobbsian view of pre-history than a real fourth alternative to it. This might be because I´m uncertain of how much of a difference between social and physical uses of power there was at that time. Even today formal rules in favour of free expression are the oddity and sanctions against it (because it´s considered a precursor to violence) the norm. Disputes remain in the realm of social power only when restricted by formal rules or technology. The examples discussed in the review support this interpretation.
High-schools rely purely social power, not just because humans have a innate tendency towards it, but also because physical power is formally sanctioned. Twitter also has technological restrictions on use of physical power which pushes users towars using social power. And even if people have access to twitter mobs, they still form traditional street mobs, even if the costs are way higher in the latter.
Great review! I love how this article takes the ideas put forward in the book and uses them as a launch pad for a far more interesting notion than anything the authors come up with. I haven't read the Dawn of Everything, but I did read Bullshit Jobs by Graeber and found it... entirely unconvincing.
The Gossip Trap idea seems quite plausible to me. I had not heard of the Sapient Paradox before I read this, and I can't wait to go down that rabbit hole.
Great review! I listened to "Dawn of Everything" and agreed with basically all your critiques. A few thoughts:
A) what made 10,000 BC such a significant date? One hypothesis is that this is when the last great extinction event took place. Wiping out certain competing megafauna might have paved the way for greater social organization to be possible, as dealing with the local saber-toothed tiger seems like a more important task than building Stonehenge, and small hunting tribes do the job just as well as big ones, kind of like landscaping companies. Also, fun thought, domestication of the dog might have been the necessary precursor to the great megafauna extinctions of 13,000-8,000 BC.
B) "The Gossip Trap" is a very fun hypothesis to explain the "Sapient Paradox." I have a few reasons why I don't buy this though (even though I want to buy it):
i) the most successful people I know all gossip a ton. They are obsessed with status, exude tons of negative energy, and work their butts off. I find these people to be rather unpleasant, but I also think that I (a person not particularly gossipy or invested in his own status) am much closer to 20,000 BC paleolithic man than they are. I just want everyone to chill. They want to be awesome and to shame all the people who are not awesome. So often gossip isn't a normative, demotivating force reminiscent of an Ayn Randian dystopia or Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. Sometimes gossip is very motivating and pushes people in innovative ways as they try desperately to become "cool."
ii) All political structures I know of are just dripping with gossip. Democratic elections are basically popularity contests. Authoritarian governments have all kinds of gossip determining who will be seen as loyal to the party and who will be sent to the gulag. These aren't 150 person monkeyspheres, these are centralized states ruling over millions. If gossip is a stagnating force that traps us in prehistory, why is gossip basically universal to human organizations? And if gossip is so stagnating, how did technology like the printing press- technology that was used to spread TONS of gossip- seemingly lead to economic/scientific progress, and not the reverse?
iii) I feel like this actually doesn't directly answer the "Sapient Paradox" at all. So people used to gossip so much they didn't build Stonehenge because they were afraid of being called a nerd. Sure. But why did things suddenly change? Their communities got so big that they needed other, more established forms of societal organization than raw social power? Why did their communities suddenly get so much bigger then? And why didn't those communities get bigger at 20,000 BC or 30,000 BC instead of 10,000 BC? I feel like we're back where we started.
All this being said, I think you're onto something when you talk like we are returning to our primitive state via Twitter/ social media/ the internet in general. I don't know whether we're getting similar to our 15,000 BC ancestors, but I do know we're getting very weird. Communication technology has the power to transform human civilizations. I'm hoping the net effect of the internet ends up being positive in the long run, but there do seem to be some bizarre negative effects that are causing all kinds of problems for people, especially in terms of mental health.
Anyways, thanks for your well written review of "The Dawn of History" and your thoughts on the Sapient Paradox/ "gossip traps." Enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoy reading Scott Alexander's stuff, which is high praise in my world. Best-
The description of hunter-gatherers as existing in a state of incredible political diversity and creativity reminds me strongly of Scott's own Archipelago utopia (which, as he pointed out, is much the same as a lot of both right- and left-anarchist utopias and even Moldbug's neoreactionary Patchwork utopia.) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/
I'm not sure whether this is a suspicious sign of rose-tinted glasses, a positive sign that this is actually positive, a worrying sign that the status quo has already out-competed it, etc.
It could be gossip games all the way back — and we'll never be rid of them.
The one thing that got rid of gossip traps was industrialism and thoroughgoing capitalism. Everyone was driven from farms to cities where any settled neighbourhood won't be for long. Modernity has offered most people one or two choices: a gossip trap or alienated individualism. Arguably there was a brief, slight period of culture and literacy enjoyed by a broad but still exclusive middle class that wasn't a bunch of jerks, but what they has was built on the backs of slaves and colonized countries.
I'm reminded of a funny passage in Eric Voegelin's History of Political Ideas where he explains John Calvin and the rise of protestantism in terms of terroristic hick towns full of surveillance moralism. It's not really wrong to think of the Reformation as an intense sectarian gossip conflict that rose up in opposition to the gossip monopoly of an existing political establishment. Eventually, sectarian gossip wars evolved into the forms of the modern state we associate with democratic politics while, as you say, some part of the press and academe play the role of neutral, benevolent, or specially enlightened monastics. In theory, as an ideal maybe. Definitely when things are bad, nobody is really free from factions and gossip games. But wherever you find people in groups, especially if they're supposed to be above gossip, there will be gossip. It may be just the rhetoric and aesthetics of social class — what goes on among elites is "politics" but for everyone else doing it, it's "gossip," which lacks legitimacy.
Then again, there are very developed traditions of trying to mitigate the evil eye/heart/tongue in Judaism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lashon_hara) — and of course resistance to consolidated power even when it's your own. The people who invented the minority judgment might know a thing or two about long-term group survival and the struggle not to be reduced to the level of petty gossips.
Do you honestly think slagging "the progressive left" and complaining about the author's refusal to condemn the left as "bloodily autophagic" really adds much to this discussion? We're here to talk about a book of anthropological history; obviously it's gonna involve some politics, but maybe don't start by trying to declare all leftists auto-cannibalistic lackies of Robespierre. It's just a bit uncivilized.
This is some amusingly poignant spam, given the context. Playing the gossip trap element (with references to her "neighbor", who was doing better than her), against a human desire to escape that trap (with references to being her own boss by relying on broad faceless markets for self-sufficiency)
I thought it was an intentional snarky juxtaposition of the two different attitudes towards the same Rousseau and the same Revolution.
Forgive me for commenting before reading, though I very much look forward to digesting this review - at the request of some subscribers I started blogging my way through this book but quit in disgust after a few chapters. (I did finish reading it however.) I'm someone with a fairly high tolerance for, let's say, ambitious nonfiction, but in terms of citation and responsible reference to evidence this is one of the most irresponsible books I've ever read. Just hundreds and hundreds of pages of inadequately sourced claims and a few instances of misreadings of the provided citations so egregious that it crosses the line into dishonesty.
Just a heads-up on the great user name!
Are you still planning to review the book as a whole on Substack?
ugh no probably not, I kind of moved on from it intellectually
Did you happen to write down your top ten disputations (and would you be willing to put a few of them here)?
I had a copy of this book, and I don't know how one manages to misplace something with a bright orange dust jacket and over a square foot of surface area, but I did. I was about 1/3 of the way in. So I'm cornered into sitting with the material I remember until I want to pay another 30 clams.
I was a few tens of pages past the introduction of Kandiaronk. I think G&W were getting underway with saying "you didn't prove that" at most/all of the critical junctures in the assumed timeline of the development of political theory. Footnoting that is going to be a b********** anyway... Did they end up postulating their own path, or does it continue with the "we really don't know, but there's lots of doubt to be cast"?
I read the first part of this review. An outline of a book like this is (to me) probably not the way to approach a review. One has to read it and digest it and then write about it, not alongside it. But especially if the reviewer were in a hurry - with a book like this, that might mean having started last year - writing alongside it might seem like the pragmatic choice.
I liked the bit about all the ruins of huge complexes that lacked farming. Farming is like the office, hunter-gathering is the gig economy, and the latter leaves a lot more time to do other stuff. Even thinking that they might have made that work is emotionally liberating.
You should finish the review - the last bit gets beyond the book.
Ok, I will. I admire someone who reads the whole book and reviews it. The discussion of “progressivism” at the beginning was a “skip this” clue. But I’ll go back. It’s 100 degrees here, looking like a long weekend with iffy A/C, what better to do than dive into this. I think the book is incredibly valuable for raising the questions it raises.
Yes that little offhand about Rousseau made me roll my eyes almost as much as many passages in Graeber’s work do. But the review gets better.
I bought the kindle version and stayed up until 245 tracing the quotes in the review and then wrote an essay which I haven’t yet read in daylight…and then posted it to the comments. I wasn’t mean though.
You’re in philosophy, right - you probably recall the 90s when (where I was) half the acreage of campus said “the encounter with the Other” to each other on a daily basis? Which writers were structuring and driving this? I just read Freddie’s blog entries about DoE from late 2021, one of his criticisms was “how is The Indigenous Critique of the West even a thing?” and all I can do is mutter “but it was such a popular idea it was in comparative literature course descriptions.”
Appiah's review is the most thorough debunking I've seen yet, although there are many other authors chipping away at other small bits. (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/)
Note that Appiah shares their politics, so while he demolishes most of the book's arguments, there is some faint praise scattered around.
I don't think Appiah shares their politics. He's a liberal cosmopolitan, while Graeber is a hardcore anarchist with a general leftist bent (though he's not really a leftist exactly either).
I tend to think that whenever you have very esoteric political beliefs you are best classified by where you fall when it comes to the real policy debates around you. I find myself vaguely reactionary but I will agree with a neoliberal on economic policy issues most of the time. Id be surprised if Appiah and Graeber have very distinct opinions on the things we actually get a chance to vote on, although I could be wrong.
As far as voting is concerned, sure. But writing a book review isn't voting, and Appiah seems to me to be doing the right service as a book review writer.
We can agree he is a very good and thorough reviewer!
Thank you for this link!
Wengrow replied https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-inequality-an-exchange/
Funny, but it was Appiah's review that interested me in the book. When I read it, I took it as an overall positive review but with some nits to pick with the authors about their interpretation of Enlightenment history and the interpretation of the archaeological evidence. And he ended his review on high note:
"Social prophets, including those in the anarchist tradition—from Peter Kropotkin and Emma Goldman to Paul Goodman and David Graeber—make the vital contribution of stretching our social and political imagination. Facing forward, we can conduct our own experiments in living. We can devise the stages we’d like to see."
What really interested me was Wengrow's response — which to me (with my undergrad background in Archaeology) seemed quite nuanced and reasonable.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-inequality-an-exchange/
In his response to their response, Appiah finally agrees that they did a good job of synthesizing vast amounts of data, but they ignored the counterarguments to their claims. I find that to be a fair comment, but OTOH, when creating such a vast tome, where hundreds of archaeological and historical examples were presented, would it have been productive to spend time arguing with each counterargument for each example. At the risk of falling into the trap of whaddaboutism, Ian Morris in his well-footnoted book _Why the West Rules_ doesn't spend a lot of time discussing the counterarguments to his narrative's examples.
Yes, I acknowledged Appiah's seems to share the overall ideological / political conclusion, but I remember the empirical disagreements as much, much more damning. I mean, Wengrow bothered to write a reply.
Thanks for sharing Wengrow’s response.
I agree it wouldn’t have been productive for G&W to argue every counterexample. I really like that they found interpretations of archaeological evidence which support rotating governmental structures, decentralized systems. I also like their People’s-history style take on what the actual relationships were like between people and the rulers, where rulers existed (I think it was the Natchez society, with the Great Sun king and most of the villages well out of his reach.)
I think as long as each (or most) of G&W’s citations retains a percent possibility that it happened that way, they have created enough of a loophole in the progression-of-civilizations theory to call it into serious question and then deserve more scholarship to line up the pieces in their arguments.
Rousseau & Hobbes is tricky, the whole enlightenment is tricky, to treat quickly - I think they also didn’t mention Foucault - mentioning the big names brings out all the pros with their vested interests in received wisdom.
I’ve read enough Vine Deloria (and Momaday and others) to believe that indigenous societies existed, and can in some places continue to exist, in forms outside the European imagination of the colonial era.
If turning the dial of society back just enough until it hits right-sized agrarian utopia- if that’s not possible, if that mostly did not exist, if the polities were often less agrarian, more materially egalitarian with varying types of social structure - I’m ok with that. Looking at other possibilities of materially egalitarian social structure is important, I agree, whether we find them in history or in theories - if in history, at least somebody made it work at some point, which adds promise.
Saying “the anarchists didn’t support their arguments” is also common and an easy way to dismiss them. There’s some intersection between that being right, and the historical situation. I’d like to do a Scott and inch through DoE putting probabilities on all their assertions. It would take a very long time though.
I think the idea of utopia is a perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good issue. I’d like to see it go. Wendat society was a real place, so it would have had its unfairnesses, but people apparently weren’t dying of poverty. If leaving that balance behind was not inevitable, I see that as good. If it didn’t take bureaucracy- if administration worsened it - that’s very interesting and has a lot of implications.
Sorry, ranting.
I think the big question is "Is it possible to organize highly complex societies on more or less anarchistic principles" rather than the uniformity or uniform stupidity of ancient groups of human beings.
The Davids have succesfully proven that ancient humans were not all equally organized and were not all equally stupid. I think that's neat and basically trivial. Pop-X authors very much enjoy taking an 80 year old view, presenting it as the consensus (it is never the consensus) and then demolishing it. It sucks.
But then we go back to the real big question, where the Davids play with all sorts of tricks and then still fail to be convincing because the scholarship is basically sloppy and ideological. It all reminds me of what some economists like to say of MMT “is a mix of old and new, the old is correct and well understood, while the new is substantially wrong".
Why do they fail? I think Turchin explains it quite well:
https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/an-anarchist-view-of-human-social-evolution/
Even leaving aside discussions about orders of magnitude and the true nature of a coercive state, they still fail because of the objective arrangement of the human planet circa 2022, which is that the State, hierarchy, administration and all the bad things ever won literally everywhere in a manner that suggests limited human agency in the face of more and less primitive ways of running things.
Thanks for the reference, this is really interesting.
As “the consensus” that’s set up and knocked down - do you mean the idea of back to the land/neo-indigenous non-technological utopia?
Part of the reason I think activists were most of the intended audience for G&W is that there are still people who very much believe in that better-society, or consider it “directionally correct” (great phrase from Appiah’s review).
I think contemporary US tribal communities don’t have much use for them but in “pro-Indian” organizing in the society at large it’s harder to fend them off. I was at a gathering recently where some activists were flyering the exit driveway by going up to cars and giving them flyers about Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women. The tiny print at the bottom of the xeroxed-looking paper showed it the upcoming protest was sponsored by something-something Workers. I care about the MMIW issue, I think it’s important.
I also think “indigeneity” can be used as a badge of credibility or reliability. “Here we go getting closer to Rousseau!” say the non-tribal activists going to the MMIW protest organized by whichever left organization. Or the feeling of that.
I think Utopianism is behind some of the land acknowledgements, ie, “if we say this enough times we ourselves will return to the Better World before colonialism.” Descendants of that community have a path to take in terms of negotiating their heritage, tribal government, larger society, and that makes sense to feel and consider things about a hypothetical better world there. People saying that who are not descendants of that community are often either really caring & helpful, or they’re hoping to ride the transformation into their own utopia. I think land acknowledgements are valuable for different reasons but “This was Ohlone land, soon it will be again, here come the farm girls with flowers if you say this often enough” can be an element. So for G&W to knock it down - big name activist - is relevant. There’s a lot to unpack there in terms of real needs of indigenous communities, what it means in the modern day, what a helpful response is from an outsider to that community, etc. I recall Deloria writing about the anthropologists going to Indian communities and intrusively/destructively studying them in service of the prior iterations of debate about utopia. It can still go on.
I’ll read more of Turchin now. His book looks good.
I think at least one point that G&W make is worth noting:
Despite the old adage
"The Greeks invented all known forms of government"
(and, it is sometimes added, couldn't make any of them work...)
the _seasonal_ societies G&W document don't fall under any of the usual forms. Perhaps there are some customs we could adopt from them.
But G&W never bring up the question of whether it's possible to organize a society on anarchistic principles. Just because Graeber was a self-styled anarchist, does that make everything he wrote an anarchist polemic?
As for an "80 year old view" that was "never consensus", V. Gordon Childe was still on my reading list when I was an archeology undergrad. And the theory they taught me was all about the evolution of states from tribes from bands and how do identify these transitions in the archeological record. Of course, a lot of my profs were Marxists, so they bought into that cultural evolution crap. My undergrad experience was 40 years ago, but the fact that people like Ian Morris are still recycling this dogma makes me think it's still consensus—at least in some circles.
Yes, I'd like to know what Freddie's disputations are. But he's too lazy to read the book, so we'll probably never know.
I’m not sure the reviewer finished it. I paid for a kindle copy and am locating each of his quotes. So far the furthest in is p. 246. In an hour or so I’ll post.
Freddie said that he finished reading the book. He just stopped blogging about it.
Not Freddie - I mean this current review. I’ve made a list of all 45 quotes from the book and the furthest in is from p. 257. This doesn’t absolutely mean they didn’t read the whole thing but a few of the reviewer’s questions are answered in chapter 12,
I’ll write it up here in a bit.
I replied to beowulf888, who specifically referenced "Freddie" not having read the book. He was replying to your reply to FdB.
sorry - substack feeds me these "name replied to your comment" emails. The threads line up oddly.
My bad. I guess I missed Freddie's parenthetical comment "(I did finish reading it however)". Apologies to Freddie for mischaracterizing his statement—but no apologies for saying Freddie is overtly mischaracterizing G&W's work by dropping that "inadequately sourced" turd in his opinion. Give me some frigging specifics with links to back up your arguments, Freddie. And don't say you've documented it on your Substack site, because I'm not going bother to subscribe to someone who's is too lazy to post his arguments in a forum where this subject is being openly discussed.
LMAO, nothing sums up Freddie Deboer like "too lazy to read." Sure, buddy. (He did write some interesting comments on the first few chapters, if you'd like to know what some of the issues were.)
My updated opinion: Yes, Freddie claims to have read the book. My bad.
But I'm not going bother to subscribe to someone who's is too lazy to post his arguments in a forum where this subject is being openly discussed. Let him post his arguments here on this forum.
Freddie's substack is much better than this one tho, and the discussions there are consistently of a higher quality.
Freddie does not even have a comment section at the moment
But...why? What rule says he has to do this? Why do you feel entitled to it? And why not ask politely?
Well, this is a forum for soi-disant rationalists and people interested in rationalism. Maybe I'm be I'm being overly idealistic that we can engage in rational discourse about rationalism and adjacent topics, but a large percentage of the discourse on these threads seems to be non-rational, ill-informed, or informed by personal prejudices, or by ideological obsessions and ego.
Freddie called The Dawn of Everything "one of the most irresponsible books I've ever read." By doing that he dropped a rhetorical cherry bomb into the middle what up until then had been a fairly sensible discussion (albeit with a few ideological digressions). On top of that he smeared the book as being "indequately sourced" — which, if one actually has read this book, is clearly just bullshit.
I'm not expecting an answer from him because I don't think he's really capable of mounting a rational defense for his positions. I must admit I find people who behave like Freddie in public forums to be tiresome. I probably shouldn't have responded to him in the first place (i.e. fed the troll), but even if you don't like Graeber's politics, or G&W's thesis, there's still an immense amount useful information in The Dawn of Everything—and if you're a seriously interested in the questions of why civilizations arose, you'll be following up on the cited works for years to come.
It’s likely many of the same things that most other reviewers have found frustrating. Basically the constant accusations of incomplete and slipshod scholarship for everyone else combined with incomplete and slipshod scholarship. Graeber tends to be at his best when putting forward an intriguing hypothesis that may actually be consistent with the information we have and that challenges orthodoxy in some interesting way that supports an anarchist political agenda, and at his worst when claiming that therefore this alternative hypothesis is definitely true and that the orthodoxy is the result of a political agenda.
This is super concerning to me, since I really liked Debt and thought DoE was very interesting. I'm not an academic, I read it via Audiobook and I didn't check the citations.
I know I'm asking a lot for a forum reply, but how bad are we talking about here? Is this a "author's point is totally shut down by their own citations" situation? Or more a case that they are stretching thin evidence too far.
The bigger problem is simply not citing statements of fact that seem very much in need of citation, but I found three or four cases of the authors misrepresenting what a given citation does say, and that was only in two chapters worth of really looking for that kind of thing.
This is the issue with Graeber, I automatically discount anything he writes after encountering the serious flaws in Debt.
Brad DeLong has a good thread covering some of the issues: https://twitter.com/delong/status/1455173184127324161
As much as I enjoy reading DeLong, he came off as a guy with an ax to grind. Academic cat fights are never pleasant to witness.
Very common for Graeber.
Everything that David Graeber has ever written is equally "problematic" in these sorts of ways.
Debt: The First 5000 Years is probably the book I have the most ambivalent reaction to of any I have ever tried to read - it both poses a bunch of fascinating ideas that I keep thinking about, and also disgusted me so much with how fast and loose it plays with the facts that I couldn't finish it. If he just said, "economists make up a lot of just-so stories, so let me make up another one and you can decide whether it's got some value and interest", it would have been an amazing book. But the fact that it keeps being "economists are the worst people in the world because they just make up just-so stories and claim they are incontrovertible fact, while here I've discovered the one true fact about the history of money" just disgusted me.
I just read his book on Bullshit Jobs, because it ties in to a paper I'm writing on the concept of bullshit generally, and it kept being frustrating how much weight he wants to put on a single survey to say, "look, the majority of work is bullshit, because 37% of workers admit it, and 37% of the rest are only working to support their bullshit!", and then how credulously he took everything his Twitter followers said to him about what their jobs were like.
I was also extremely interested in Bullshit Jobs before reading that little Economist piece on how their numbers don't make sense and finding out about how dishonest DoE is.
If you have access to academic journals, this article gave the most charitable possible complete debunking of every single empirical claim Graeber makes in the book: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067
I very much appreciate it.
I appreciated that Gananath Obeyesekere admitted to Marshall Sahlins' charge of engaging in “historical fiction, makeshift ethnography”:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/05/12/the-apotheosis-of-captain-cook-vs-how-natives-think/
Though I still prefer when people try to act against their biases and get things right:
https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/science-is-political?s=r
Would you mind sharing the ideas from Debt that you find deeply interesting?
The big thing is the idea that debt can arise before money, and can make the need for a unit of measurement natural even if no one has currency. The idea that debt can be prior to money and that money can be prior to barter reverses a lot of naive ideas I had.
The first chapter about the history of credit in the early fertile crescent civilizations and how it worked without coinage is amazing. Yes, when Graeber first says "Debt" he means "Credit". But then he starts using "Debt" in other contribed ways that sound confusing. The whole section on eastern religious views on "Debt" is like that and kind of ruins the great start of the book IMHO.
Alex Danco has a decent summary: https://alexdanco.com/2020/05/15/debt-the-first-5000-years/
Danco also explains better than Kenny Easwaran below - no offense to Kenny, his was a short response - Graeber's argument about growth of bullion as a currency stemming from conquest. In Debt's logic, bullion is an extractive tool, because you can demand bullion from conquered peoples, but you cannot demand credit in the same way, it is much more bound into networks of reciprocity.
I also saw elsewhere that the "Bullshit Jobs" argument wasn't substantiated empirically by other researchers (I think Dur & Lent, 2019, is the main paper, but you may know of others). I doubt Graeber would have been surprised to find that out, given that the idea of having a bullshit job feels not only subjective, but also possible to manipulate experimentally relatively easily. To my mind, interpretations of words like 'socially useful' or 'bullshit' are so context laden as to make surveying people about this very challenging. You are right to say that Graeber is overexcited by a single survey and his qualitative data, but I think he is channelling a more Marxist theory of work and identity that isn't necessarily shared by the random people being surveyed.
For instance, if you read other authors from a similar space as Graeber on work, like Peter Fleming, part of the logic inherent in their conception of neoliberalism is that it ties jobs into identities. Fleming calls this the 'I, Job' function, but it's pretty evident that the link between jobs and identities doesn't exist in the same way for them (they're maybe getting this from the little Marx writes about the future after Communism has been 'achieved', wherein people can be painters in the morning and poets in the afternoon etc.).
If someone's job is a large part of their identity, as it will invariably be in a world where 40hrs+ a week are spent at work, then that will change their perception on whether their work is socially useful. IIRC, Graeber says most jobs in PR are bullshit, and it seems unlikely that most people in PR would agree with him. I think it's very hard to extricate identity from these sorts empirical data collection processes.
I was surprised that the numbers in Dur & Lent were so high if anything: "We find that approximately 8 percent of workers perceive their job as socially useless, while another 17 percent are doubtful about the usefulness of their job."
Perhaps you've read more in this space that could persuade me otherwise, but I'm not fully convinced by the empiricism applied to Bullshit Jobs. I'd love to read your paper about bullshit when you're finished with it, that sounds fascinating!
I’ll have to check out the Dur and Lent piece! The one I link in the other branch of this thread (Soffia, Wood and Burchell, 2021) is good, and sympathetic to Graeber, but reject all his empirical claims.
I have a draft I’m showing people now. If you email me (last name at gmail) I can send it.
Samuel Bowles came up with a category he calls "guard labor" which he regards as socially wasteful:
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/06/lowtrust_societ_1.html
It is very bad: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/
Wengrow replied https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/01/13/the-roots-of-inequality-an-exchange/
I’m sure he did, just like Graeber replied to DeLong and just about everyone who thought his work was shoddy.
that is debating, the book debates Rousseau, Dunbar, Harari plus a bunch of anthropoogists and archeologists, I would not expect general acceptance, it visit a couple of dozen of archeological and historical sites with novel questions, and has 150 pages of notes BTW, do not discount this book because DeLong and Appiah, check the end of Appiah's reply to Wengrow "I hope I made plain, there’s much more to the book than that. Graeber and Wengrow’s argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable. Readers who imagine foragers on the Sahlinesque model of the San will encounter foraging societies with aristocrats and slavery, while the book’s account of the Poverty Point earthworks is a riveting study of collective action. We get an intriguing proposal about the nature of the state. And this is just to begin a long list of fascinations. That “kaleidoscope of social possibilities” emerges vibrantly from these pages."
150 pages of notes is not particularly impressive for a 700 page book. I dont think notes are an end in of itself, but I dont feel particularly reassured when a book has an about average number of them.
Re the debate, people have noted in this same thread Graeber’s tendency to be a pretty bad defender of his own work; having parsed the Graeber-DeLong saga, this seems true. Appiah’s review is not the only generally negative one, there is extreme carelessness displayed elsewhere and this is the exact same carelessness that characterized Graeber’s past work.
Re the actual Wengrow response: I am not really qualified to form a meaningful opinion on how competent it is. I wont ever be, but Bayesian thinking suggests it’s fine to assume Wengrow is wrong.
Also, the deterministic model still seems correct on a level for the simple reason that hierarchical, settled, agricultural civilizations clearly outcompeted everyone else.
To me, the biggest problem with their scholarship is that DoE is always looking at quantitative questions using nothing but qualitative data. For instance, they wanted to "prove" that the hunter-gatherer / band / tribe / chiefdom is "false". But of course there were many groups that fit comfortably into that mold. So the only meaningful kind of claim would be a quantitative one, like "/Most/ early cultures didn't fit that progressive scheme." But they never make such claims, and never give us quantities. In the case of the civilization-pipeline hypothesis, they list exceptions, but don't tell us what fraction of the groups they looked at were exceptions. 10%? 60%?
Brad DeLong very publicly noticed that everything in Debt that he was something of an expert on (modern economic history) was either slapdash or wrong. This lead to quite the internet war of words.
Given how common that is for people to say about his work on their own areas of expertise, there's a decent chance in my mind that's how he was with everything.
I completely agree about distorted use of sources, and I checked cases over many chapters. It's too bad the book didn't go through an academic press review (I'm sure it had some sort of peer review, but either it was inadequate, or FSG was wildly irresponsible in publishing anyway). Some reviewers have praised the depth of its sources, but many discussions make broad claims without sourcing, and then source tangential details. If Graeber and Wengrow had been pulled up short by reviewers invested in accuracy, they might have been forced to rework their argument in more responsible form. It's not as if their central hypotheses aren't interesting.
Graeber never really liked to be forced to rework arguments into more responsible form. A decade ago, the people at Crooked Timber set up a "seminar" on his book Debt: The First 5000 Years (a format they've often done where 5-10 academics read some book, write up a post about it, let the author write up a post responding to all of them, and then have a discussion in the comments) and by the end he got so prickly about being politely asked for more support for some claims that they almost wished they had blocked him from future comment threads. I still found that seminar interesting enough that I decided to get the book and read it, but by about 2/3 of the way through I couldn't bring myself to finish it (even though it was also really fascinating and interesting!)
https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/
I much appreciate the lead, Kenny. I went in turn to look at the Beggs review of "Debt," which quotes Graeber saying he intended to write, "the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate, but at the same time, without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor." Reading the review, it's the final phrase which was the problem, just as I think it is in the case of "Dawn."
It's hard enough to retain scholarly rigor in small scale work. I think it's wise to realize that avoiding any sacrifices in rigor isn't possible in works of this aspirational scale, and to at least try to compensate for it with an approach long on humility.
Yes. Graeber would be so much more tolerable if he had some humility.
Graeber's "Debt" was also notorious among academics for its sloppiness.
LoL. Inadequately sourced claims?! 145 out of 643 pages (22% of this book) are footnotes and references. Give me a break! So, now let's talk about dishonesty...
Yeah, and if you pick a few citations at random and actually look them up, apparently you will be very disappointed by what you find.
A lot of reviewers mentioned how extensive the note apparatus seems to be, beowulf. But midway through, my margin notes began to say things like, "*This* is where we need to see evidence." Nobody's claiming Graeber and Wengrow didn't look at a lot of books and articles.
Graeber and Wengrow use the notes for discussion, rather than embedding tangential strands in the text, which is fine, but when you do that in an academic text, to have 80+ pages of notes for a 500+ page text isn't unusual at all.
MOD DECISION: Minor warning (25% of a ban)
Cracking review; one sufficiently interesting and in-depth to make me think again about a book which forced me to rethink what I thought I knew in the first place. The delights of recursiveness...!
I thought-so too.
Very good professional level writing. IMO though, 9,600 words is too long for a book review. The main reason I read reviews is to see if the book is worth my time. At about 5,000 words we are talking about 20 page of double spaced text. By that point I start to wonder if I should just read the book itself.
Yeah, in grad school they used to force us to write 500-word reviews, but some of the detail was useful - I just skipped some whole paragraphs that didn't appear to be useful.
9,600 words is merely 'above average' for book reviews on ACX/SSC; there have been many longer ones. I enjoy them because of, not despite, the length, when they're written well, and I think I'm pretty typical of the readership here. If you read reviews mainly to figure out if the book is worth your time you're definitely better served elsewhere; that's not how most book reviews here are written (thank goodness).
Oh yes we love long reviews, and on Wednesdays we wear pink 👩🎤
The impatient guys wear chartreuse on Wednesdays. :)
Agreed. Maybe if the author began with a TL:DR of 500 words then that might help organize the rest of the post.
Yeah, from the comments I may have given up on it before the best part, wondering where is this going. I’ll go back and finish.
Copy that
Someone should start a substack where they review the contests reviews
lol
Normally I’d agree with you on this - and I downvoted most of the longer reviews - some were just baggy, tedious and repetitive. But this one’s pretty damn good and ends with some sound speculation on why humans took so long to get round to building civilisations & stuff. Spoiler alert ~200,000 years of high school level gossip & social shaming that’s now back with a vengeance via social media 🥳
I'm also on the record thinking many of the reviews submitted to the contest were too long, but this one felt just right to me as well.
IMO it's right on the edge in terms of length. Scott really needs to impose a upper limit on the length, because a 60-page review is a qualitatively different type of artistic creation than a 4-page review. That's why I think it scandalous that last year's winner was 60 (?) pages long, because why would I read it unless I'm really into Georgism, in which case I'd tend to give the review a high rating?
If it’s not your particular niche interest, at some point you start thinking, “Hmm, ‘Heart of Darkness’ was only 38,000 words. I didn’t start to feel impatient halfway through that….” So much to read, so little time.
Maybe you're wanting a more inverted pyramid writing style, where you can quit at any point and not miss the main point. But that's in tension with the natural essay writing style, in which the entire essay builds to the main point. I've seen book reviews (even within the same publication department) of both types, some are focused on "What's this book about and was it well said?" and some are more focused on "This book sparked some interesting idea, and let me tell you what it was, and how the book sparked it." Each has its advantages, but each will disappoint someone looking for the other thing.
I bailed on this too early. The best stuff was at the end. Excellent essay. I think we might be doing it a disservice labeling it just a ‘book review’.
I loved it all the way through, and I will not read the book anymore. I feel this was enough.
>Rousseau’s submission, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, became an intellectual sensation. In its long life as one of the foundational documents of the Western world it has been, at times, blamed for the bloody slaughter of The Terror, and, at other times, lauded as the inventor of the progressive Left.
Interesting that these "two" interpretations of Rousseau are posed as alternatives, when it was precisely the progressive Left (i.e., the Jacobins) who carried out the Terror. The purported two are in fact one.
Correct.
s/ But one has positive sounding words and the other has negative sounding words - how could they be the same?!?! /s
Is it fair to portray the progressive Left as a monolith in which everyone who agreed with the basic thrust of Rousseau would also inevitably execute and support the Terror?
I would not say “everyone” or “inevitably.” I would say “a majority” and “with high frequency.”
There is evidence that standards of living actually went down with the beginning of agriculture. People became shorter, for example. The gifts of “civilization” initially only benefited the elite. Only with industrial societies has the lot of the many been substantially bettered. I think of agrarian societies as a social trap in and of themselves- where the poor are the majority controlled by a mafia-like elite - an elite who only foster literacy and innovation etc when it helps them . So how did humanity get in that trap initially? Good question.
A person could "benefit" by never expending resources on offspring if you're measuring by how much they get to eat. But evolution has not primed us to see that as an actual benefit. Agriculture greatly expanded the population, and thus was a Darwinian "benefit".
"A person could "benefit" by never expending resources on offspring"
As a childfree person myself, Yup! ( Though, for me, the benefit is time, not food. )
Way to totally miss the point if his comment
Perhaps my response was too subtle. A substantial fraction of us are perfectly aware of Darwinian selection effects, and don't give a damn about what happens to to the frequency of our alleles in the gene pool.
If you need further clarification, consider Watts's Trunclade's poem in Watts's "Blindsight"
“My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight."
Is that sufficiently clear?
My offspring help hunt and forage, raise my reputation in the tribe and protect our village from gangs of Hobbesian savages who don’t read ACX reviews
I know you're joking, but having kids is a net cost which is merely selected by evolution:
http://www.econlib.org/was-having-kids-ever-a-paying-venture/
Which is why you need to carefully select a godparent of your children who would be willing to take them in if they were orphaned rather than assuming there'd be an abundant supply of people competing for access to them.
Surely that's only true when you live in a settled society that can forceably transfer the earnings of the young to the benefit of the old -- or at least in a tribe that through some kind of group sympathy is willing to do that voluntarily.
I mean, otherwise in the primeval setting without children you're fucked when you reach age 60 or so and can't successfully forage for yourself.
And at that, I would guess if one were deliberately childless in a primitive tribe, you better have *something* else to contribute -- being a shaman or brilliant about the local animal habits -- or it seems likely they will accidentally leave you behind the next time the tribe moves for the winter.
A settled society, yes - but it suffices for there to be a way to save earnings for one's old age. Social security is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but it is not the only possibility. A trustworthy banking system need not do anything forcible.
Actually, according to the article TGGP linked it isn't that "in the primeval setting without children you're fucked when you reach age 60 or so and can't successfully forage for yourself." -
even _with_ children:
"Grandparents continued to work hard to support their grandchildren and produced more than they ate. At almost no time in their adult lives, did adults produce less than they consumed. When people became too old and frail to work, death followed quickly. Suicide and euthanasia of the enfeebled were frequently reported."
That's a good point, but I wonder if it isn't quite as sharp a distinction as people steeped in modern Western notions might at first think. You still need the state to compel the young population to redeem the IOUs written to you by older people (i.e. your retirement savings), perhaps people now long dead. It's part of our modern heritage that transforming debts into dollars sterilizes them in some sense -- we no longer consider who contracted the debt or why.
But if the debt were framed some other way, we might not. Suppose you gave a goat to a neighbor farmer and he agreed to pay it back any time you asked. Decades go by, the neighbor farmer dies, and his property (and debts) are inherited by his great-nephew. You turn up one day, when you are old, and ask the young great-nephew for the goat. We might actually debate to what extent the great-nephew owes you the goat, notwithstanding his uncle's promise, since he (the great-nephew) wasn't party to the old man's promise.
But if you gave the goat to the neighbor and he gave you $200 on the spot, and then many years later you go to the great-nephew owner and offer him $200 for a goat (assuming the price of goats has not changed), we would consider it weird for him to refuse on the grounds that he didn't agree to give you the $200 in the first place.
When individuals are concerned, we can find strong reasons to distinguish between a direct IOU and a dollar, but we are talking throughout here really about collective debts and IOUs, so it's harder. To what extent does the younger generation owe you labor for your redeemed dollars, which represent obligations an older generation contracted in return for your labor when you were young? (I agree with you that they actually do, but I'm steeped in the same tradition. I'm trying to think like someone who isn't, someone for whom almost all social transactions are direct, not mediated by money.)
We might say, well, the younger generation inherits some responsibility for the debts incurred by the older. But then from *that* point of view public pensions start to also make similar sense. After all, that, too, is argued to be a payment of some kind of intergenerational debt (to which the young did not consent at the time, being too young or not yet born). "You took care of us as children, or at least built/maintained the world we inherited, with many good things, so we owe you support when you are old."
Did you read the link? It's not about a society that "forceably transfers the earnings of the young to benefit the old". Instead it says that in the past old people just consumed less as they get less productive.
I'm skeptical that things were that clear-cut, because if agricultural society was just strictly worse for everyone but the elites, why would it have ever taken off in the first place? Most people, even very poor peasants, were not literal slaves: They weren't kept bound to the land by force, and could theoretically leave whenever they wanted. Occasionally some of them did leave, either to live in the wilderness on their own or to join one of the many nomadic hunter-gatherer bands that still existed at the time. But most of them chose to stay, and presumably wanted to stay. In fact, exile from civilization was often threatened and used as a punishment! Why would that be the case if it was such a bad deal for them? Maybe after a certain point you could just social and cultural inertia, but that would take centuries. How would an obviously terrible system endure that long to begin with?
I think the answer here is that agriculture, stationary settlements, formalized laws, and everything else we associate with civilization provided a level of *stability* that hadn't been possible before. So yes, the average peasant had considerably less to eat than to average hunter-gatherer. He was probably less healthy overall. But he wasn't literally starving to death, and was actually far less likely to starve to death than the hunter-gatherer, because agriculture and the construction of storehouses allowed a large surplus of food to be saved for emergencies. The hunter-gatherer faced the threat of starvation whenever there was a natural disaster, but the peasant only faced the threat of starvation if things went wrong for several harvest cycles in a row, which was considerably less likely (though likely much worse on the occasions when it did occur, given that the peasant had far less flexibility in finding alternative food sources). People can live well into their 60s and 70s even with a fairly poor diet, so while the hunter-gatherer may have benefitted from a higher median nutritional intake, the peasant benefitted from a far lower rate of variability.
And that's not even getting into all the other forms of danger that the hunter-gatherer faces on a semi-regular basis: exposure to the elements, predatory beasts, fatal or incapacitating accidents, and worst of all, encounters with enemy humans. The peasant wasn't entirely protected from these dangers either, but they were noticably less likely in the relative safety of an established settlement. (One counterpoint is that the threat of disease was far worse in civilized areas due to the much higher population density, but that's outweighed by all the other ways that people in agricultural societies were safer.) Living in subpar health with a low chance of death was preferable to living in better health with a much higher chance of death, both on the individual level (again, most people *chose* to stay in agricultural societies) and on the group level (longer average lifespans = more time to have extra children = exponentially larger populations).
And speaking of children, only around half of the infants born in hunter-gatherer societies lived to adulthood. In some tribes, the child mortality rate was as high as 2 in 3! In contrast, the child mortality rate in ancient civilizations was "only" 1 in 3. This is abysmal by modern standards (the worst child mortality rate in the world today is Afghanistan's, at 1 in 10, and that's an extreme outlier - it's many times lower even in other extremely poor nations), but compared to the hunter-gatherers, it was nothing short of miraculous! So there were some very real advantages to agricultural living, and not just for the small minority of royals and nobles in charge.
A factor you seem to have discounted is the importance of geography. Precise knowledge of ancient life is dependent on location in a way that isn’t as true of more recent history. But the availability of food sources is very uneven across the landscape. And the various native cultures of pre-Colombian western N America show this. (I reference them b/c it’s the only area I have any real knowledge of, but it seems likely true elsewhere.) The Puebloan agriculturalists - builders of Chaco, Mesa Verde, etc. - managed to sustain their basic way of life in a difficult environment for many centuries, but generally avoided even more marginal land nearby. There are no known ‘Anasazi’ sites of any significance in most of the Great Basin, which is basically next door. Yet the Paiute were living there, in a very materially ‘modest’ way and continued to do so right up to the reservation era, c. 1900, when the conquest by white society was complete.
I think the argument from people who believe in the agricultural trap is that it only happens in the first place when it must, when the alternative (via geography, inclimate weather, and overpopulation) is starvation for many people. As long as people *can* fade over the horizon in small groups when they dislike the local social structure, they will, and it never takes off.
This is predicated on the observation that as long as the geography and climate (and low population density) support it, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not, as you aver early on, and as is the common assumption, dangerously unstable -- that in fact it is quite stable, and almost never involves feast-and-famine cycles. I think this is based around some modern hunter-gatherer tribes, who don't suffer from the problems one might assume they do. When food in one place is more scarce, they just move where it isn't. As long as you're not dealing with some very large scale and very fast-moving environmental fluctuation (which by definition are exceedingly rare) their mobility allows them to surf over any local weirdness (which actually *would* present a problem for a stationary agricultural society that couldn't just up stakes and move when the rainfall in this valley was 50% lower than last year).
I’m pretty sure the Paiute of the Great Basin are a close fit for demonstrating that. The nutritional yield of the land was relatively low but fairly reliable. B/c it was a harsh environment and not abundant they had no serious competition over a very wide area, and they had developed such an intimate understanding of the landscape that they could forage with reliable success. Seems like a textbook ‘hunter-gatherer society’. But I’m not as familiar w/them as I am w/some other tribes/groups.
I think (definitely not an expert) this is basically the story for much of pre-European Australia
One of the things economists know (or at least used to know) is that alternatives matter--a lot. Full time agriculturalism occurs when a wide area has been "hunted out" and "gathered out". If a peasant can easily "go back" to being a hunter-gatherer, he may well. In fact, James Scott's Against the Grain is largely about that. But at some point, there just isn't enough easily available food for the peasant who wants to flee. And at that point, he may well have lost enough of the practical knowledge of a foraging lifestyle to make it possible anyway.
Why would an area get "hunted out" and "gathered out"? My guess would be human population increase. More people are born and fewer die when times are good. Then, when times are bad, you hunt and gather more than the ecosystem can recover from. You're eating your "natural capital".
"And Christ, the most important intellectual figure for medieval Europe, was himself a political radical and revolutionary, overturning the tables of the moneylenders and frequently espousing things like in Matthew 20:25-28...."
To be fair, I understand that the question "was Christ poor?" was rather controversial in medieval Europe, with the princes of the Church seeking, in spite of the voluminous evidence to the contrary, to argue otherwise.
Contrast with the Piers Plowman tradition, which took a much more "progressive" (to modern ears) view of the roles of wealth and power and poverty.
On the other hand, they had to argue against some mendicants who took the poverty and egalitarianism with varying level of seriousness. They had some audience, too. Consider St Francis of Assisi, or the other sects who more extreme and got burned as heretics.
Obviously novels, not nonfiction, but both Eco’s Name of the Rose and Luther Blisset’s Q deal extensively with the question fo Christ’s poverty and mendicants role in the medieval church.
The debate about Christ being "poor" was not about whether he lived like a poor man or a rich man. "Poor" in that context didn't mean that.
The advocates of the "poverty" of Jesus argued that he didn't own anything at all, and that anything he held in his hands was not his own. A doctrine linked to the Franciscan order. Those who argued against Christ being "poor" were in fact arguing against that.
I didn't say otherwise.
Hilarious to me how they invented a definition of poor that has nothing to do with whether you're able to get your various needs and desires met in a stable and reliable fashion, like it means for the rest of us.
The story i've been telling myself about the sapient paradox is that it was something like a phase change in matter. Your 'gossip' theory maybe ends up telling the same story.
imagine a gas being injected into a weirdly shaped chamber. The chamber represents habitable niches for human beings; the gas is humans. As the gas goes in, first it fills the change (i.e. the out of africa exodus and population of all possible niches) and then the pressure starts to rise.
Pressure could rise for a loooong time, even if individual molecules aren't changing their structure. And-then, at some point, the pressure rises high enough for a phase transition from gas to liquid. What would this look like from the perspective of individual molecules?
From my perspective, a phase change would look like, you'd see some new kind of 'social arrangement' between other molecules, relating to each other in some new way that made the 'normal kind of relationship' (i.e., what happened before) harder to maintain.
So maybe what happened was, population pressure gradually went up, and once it got to a certain point, being better at fighting wars started to matter more than anything else. Gossip networks, because they tear down outstanding individuals, ended up losing out to formalized hierarchies.
There was an offhand remark somewhere in the review about pre-formalized societies sometimes exceeding Dunbar's number. I wonder if there was a really awful phase of history where human communities were usually a bit bigger than Dunbar's number, but not enough so that their organization changed. There's probably many such periods in history, where the structural facts had changed in a way that made an old organization no longer work, but not so much so that a new organization was developed that worked better.
That sounds like what’s happening now. Our most important social structures predate computers.
Yes. Whatever happened with the liberal revolutions a century or two after print media, and with the generations after the baby boomers with television, desperately needs to happen for social media. (Computers themselves, and Web 1.0, interestingly didn't seem to have such big consequences. As far as I could tell. But I grew up in that era, so maybe I'm the generation with the biggest blind spot on that.)
have you read this 1999 book's predictions of how the internet will change everything? Some of the stuff in the intro is kind of eerie.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82256.The_Sovereign_Individual
I suspect, though, that where we are headed is going to be terrifying for a while. I think the best analogy to what will happen is what happened after the printing press. This time around, i think the role of the catholic church will be played by 'the system of democratic nation states, ngo's, and global trade'.
Dunbar is only mentioned 3 times in text, but G&W say this of Dunbar: "It's simply assumed, in this kind of theory, that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dubar puts it, 'chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to'... G&W point out that the archaeological evidences shows there were large complex communities with potentially thousands of inhabitants where there was no evidence of social hierarchy. Indeed, even the early cities of the Fertile Crescent lacked any evidence of a distinct social hierarchy until well into the advent of the Bronze Age.
Yes, I think this is the major strength of "Dawn," pointing to lack of physical evidence of hierarchy in large settlements. It's much more persuasive to me than the material on Kandiaronk or some of the quickly summarized ethnographic materials.
But there are two major issues that come to mind in considering the argument from silence that these archaeological sites' lack of obvious wealth differentials or power centers suggest. One is that institutionalized status/power differentials don't always correlate with observable wealth, and the other is that religious constraints can be as powerful as physically coercive constraints. Think, for example, of early American Puritan communities or contemporary Mennonite or Haredi ones. These communities (as I understand them) exhibit highly constraining social norms enforced by religious hierarchies of elders--in some cases influenced by hereditary authority--without the major markers of wealth differentials or coercive violence.
I raised in an earlier post what I see as a major gap in the "Dawn" analysis: the persistent interpretation of geographical mobility of individuals as a marker of non-coercive social forms, of freedom to dissociate. I think it is just as likely to be a marker of coerced dissociation (exile), with "casting out" being a common control mechanism in social formations bound by religious constraints.
The point isn't that Graeber and Wengrow are wrong in their reading of the evidence; it's that they rely on an argument from silence without asking whether the data may not be speaking a language different from what their listening for. And it's worth asking, in terms of "Dawn's" underlying advocacy for anarchist values, what is gained in an egalitarian society if its structures depend on maintaining strict social conformity. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with social conformity--we all practice it in excruciating detail whenever we use language--but there is an issue with maintaining it through enforced constraints with life-altering consequences. There's no intrinsic reason to see it as preferable to some forms of hierarchical inequality that may satisfy life needs with less actual coercion.
Excellent point: this is something I always think about when I read archeological stories that state that stone-architectural (or grave goods) inequality must mean actual inequality, and without them, it is egalitarian.
If this theory were true, I'd expect the first civilizations to arise in the part of the world that filled up first: the parts of Africa that are far away from other continents. Instead civilization arose first in Asia, and in the corner of Africa with the best access to Eurasia.
Population density was historically rather low in Africa. This is related to the fact that so much of it was predominately hunter-gatherer until relatively recently, as well as to how much life there was already adapted to humans (to our detriment).
By Africa being full I mean at or near its carrying capacity, regardless of how high or low that carrying capacity happens to be.
But maybe a high enough carrying capacity is required. It's still suspicious though, that it this threshold just happened to be reached in many distant parts of the world relatively simultaneously.
If the carrying capacity supports less than Dunbar's number in an area, then it won't hit the level necessary.
'Time-binding' was a popular phrase some decades ago. CS Lewis remarked that every craft and art is lost in one generation if no one teaches it, and hunter-gatherers get killed by lots of things. I'd expect techniques that take hunting to ranching, and gathering to agriculture, to be lost as the technicians die without teaching survivors.
Well, that's why we've written stuff down for the past 4000 years or so. It's definitely harder to learn blacksmithing from a book than from a blacksmith, but it can be done.
And why the question of how it worked before we could write things down is so interesting.
This is exactly what I was wondering - did 12000 BC coincide with the end of “screw this, I’m leaving” conflict resolution in groups as there wasn’t empty space for the dissatisfied to migrate towards.
Interesting, but I liked the book review part better than the long tangent into the author's own pet theory.
ha ha, good point!
I thought the pet theory saved it - I was on the verge of shouting “it’s informal social power” at the screen until he got round to that and saved it.
That bit I had no problem with, the pet theory I thought detracted from the piece was the concept of the "Great Trap" and then his gossip based explanation for it.
Hah, that's the part of the review that I thought saved it from being a too-positive and too-credulous review of a deeply empirically problematic book.
Exactly. I have read much better synopses of this book, but the reviewer's own theory made reading this post worthwhile.
The long tangent into the author’s own pet theory is usually what you get from the book reviews Scott writes himself.
I think Scott's own pet theories are more interesting. Even his argument for Twitter being a potential x-risk is more interesting.
Maybe, but this is not really the place to complain about the author writing his pet theories in what is supposed to be a book review.
When a third of your "review" has nothing to do with the book and is instead entirely about your own pet theory that's barely tangential, I'd say that's worthy of critique. It's not insightful regarding the work, to start with.
You're just missing the point that an Astral Codex Ten 'book review' is intended to be exactly this. This is what Scott's audience wants to see.
I liked that long tangent more than the book review.
I’m afraid I’m on the pet theory table with my fellow plastics jumpingjack, Mo and Kenny (OMG…)
See, that’s the part where I really started to say “this is going to be one of the best reviews in the contest.”
I don’t agree with it necessarily, I’m still digesting, but a proper SSC/ACT book review is:
1) a fair summary and criticism of the book that
2) goes on at an absurd length then
3) diverges into original thought inspired by the thoughts of the book.
Anything else to me misses the point.
Yes, seconded on each point.
Very nice discussion. I do take issue somewhat with the framing of a great swath of human history being in a “great trap”: first, because it’s already natural to expect that archaeological records become sparser as one looks further back in time; second, because the conditions for long-term preservation of evidence of human culture are somewhat independent of what might be valued by the ancient people themselves: for instance if for many generations the people of a certain region favoured sky burial over tombs, we might erroneously take this to mean that they were not engaged in much cultural activity, simply because the evidence would not be preserved (much like how the fossil record grows sparse where and when soft-tissued organisms were dominant).
Admittedly these two objections have a ring of “just-so”. My bigger objection is that a society that lacked mass gatherings may not necessarily have been in a “trap” at all. It might not be that they were “held down” from complex social experimentation; rather, perhaps, conditions were such that they simply drew no benefit from doing so. This, though different in affect, is logically no different from a trap; but I do think it’s worth questioning the affect.
I’ll close with a few speculations about what the change in conditions may have been for this apparent blooming in the archaeological record.
1. Suppose in the distant past that languages diverged much more rapidly than they do today: a lack of standardized syntactic patterns, such as those we see in e.g. the Proto-Indo-European language group, could have caused diverging groups to rapidly become unintelligible to each other, and also hindered the development of Pidgin languages or lingua francas. (Call this the Tower of Babel Hypothesis). If this is true, it might further have had the effect of limiting the size of large gatherings to a smaller factor of the Dunbar number. This hypothesis posits that language evolved more or less like a technology, becoming more effective over a very long period of time.
2. Suppose, on the question of violence and rivalry, that despite humans’ demonstrated capacity for making peace, ancient bands always found it preferable to settle new territory instead. Therefore, for many tens or even hundreds of millennia, humans radiated away from each other in response to conflict and made only minimal attempts to coexist across tribes. Only when and where human migration settled into an equilibrium, in such cases as the risk of conflict in settling new land was roughly equal to the risk of conflict in remaining, did humans begin to develop rituals of broader social assembly.
3. I’m not sure how much this book covers this, but it’s well-known that foraging tribes have an active relationship with the land they live on: through techniques like brush-burning and the planting of favourable seeds, they, just like agrarians, have well-established traditions of working the land to make it more fertile. Yet these traditions may have taken a long time to develop. While the carrying capacity of the environment is low, human population density is also low, which limits the viability of assembling large groups of people for rituals or celebration. Perhaps, magnified by human activity, the carrying capacity of the environment gradually increased over many thousands of years until it crossed some critical threshold.
That’s not to say that the “Gossip Trap” idea isn’t compelling in itself. I fear that it—as well as any of the hypotheses I threw in—are all vulnerable to the same question of “yes, but why *then*? Why did humanity pick that particular threshold moment to stop gossiping and get around to building culture?”
Very likely, no matter what consensus we eventually land on, we’ll have to allow for an unrecoverable element of chaotic spontaneity, just like we (implicitly) do in charting the course of biological evolution.
I was also thinking that the things the review postulates as problematizing the "great trap" further might dissolve it. If things like hafted tools and rock art were emerging sporadically around the world for tens of thousands of years before the systematic changes we see around 12,000 years ago, then that breaks up the big 200,000 year period into a 150,000 year one and a 50,000 year one. If each of those then has further divisions within it, and so on, then eventually we get an explanation where it's just a whole bunch of little steps, and it's constant progress the whole time, rather than an apparent long stagnation.
Still, I did think the postulated explanation of the trap is interesting too.
On this note I think it's relevant that the bow and arrow, though probably first invented about 70,000 years ago, did not become common in most of the world until about 15,000 years ago--and in some places much later (California likely did not have bows until around 500 CE, see http://anthropology.ua.edu/reprints/22.pdf).
I have to imagine that other technologies and elements of culture also diffused very slowly through the sparse human population of the paleolithic.
If we leave aside the values question of which form of social organization is "best", then I think the conundrum is why does the species seem to exist stably for a very long time with one form of social organization, and then apparently accelerate rapidly in a different direction? It's difficult to square a long period of slow or absent change with a subsequent period of rapid change, if the same driving force for optimizing social structure underlies both periods. You'd have to adduce some very strong environmental shift that constrains the change (which is I think what you are doing with your alternate hypotheses) -- and then one asks: what is the evidence for that sharp and large environmental shift?
My read on the "gossip trap" argument is that it's saying that something like a phase change occurs instead. When you gradually increase the density of a fluid, nothing much happens until you reach a certain critical density, and then all of a sudden the stable optimum for the material shifts, and the material rapidly reforms itself around a new optimum (e.g. freezes or melts).
So the argument goes that for a long period of gradually increasing human population density the stable optimum for social organization is the smallish group with a fluid heirarchy established by "gossip." But at some point you cross the critical density, and the stable optimum consists of much larger groups with a more rigid heirarchy established by more formal and laborious means -- tradition, formal education, formal social structures like written law and government, whatever -- and humanity rapidly evolves towards the new optimum.
The advantage of this point of view is that you don't require any environmental shift. It just happens abruptly when human population density reaches the critical point[1], the way water just suddenly freezes at 0° when the temperature smoothly and steadily declines.
The major disadvantage I can see is that it begs the question of *why* human beings should have two different optimal self-organizing principles. It requires us to believe that in the process of optimizing our ability to organize at the small group level, evolution accidentally gave us the ability to organize at the large group level also (since we seem to have done pretty well at that level also).
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[1] Arguably technology enters to shift the critical point around a bit.
Speaking as a linguist, on No. 1, I'm not sure I understand what you mean, especially the emphasis on standardized syntax, which really is a concept pertaining to written languages in large-scale societies. (Certainly there does not seem to be any language reported not to have quite regular syntax--but "regular" is not the same as "standardized.") My knee-jerk impression is that your idea glides over the vast time depth involved in considering the languages at all, and overstates the stability of syntax that you seem to be getting at. Don't be misled by the fact that we're able to reconstruct decent amounts of PIE: That mostly reflects the fact that many of the descendant languages were written down quite early, and by the nature of reconstruction, the parts that can be reconstructed are those not lost in the daughter languages. (Clackson's Indo-European Linguistics in the Cambridge red series goes into the question of the actual historical status and overall accuracy of reconstructions of PIE quite well.) Instead consider only the modern languages: How much of PIE could you reconstruct from English, Hindi, French, Modern Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Persian, and Russian using only their contemporary forms in phonetic transcription? Quite little. (Indeed, the Russian would be peculiarly helpful in this context for the noun cases and the basics of the person marking of present-tense verbs, for example, though a total waste of time for the tense and aspect system and much else of verbs--and even what remains in Russian would still leave much that we know of PIE lost in the mists of time: variability in conjugations and noun endings, for example, that have been ironed out by changes within Slavic. Lithuanian, or at least the more conservative dialects that get the press, would help out somewhat more.)
More than that, what supposedly standardized syntax has survived from PIE into those languages? Not a lot: Wholesale destruction of noun and verb endings encoding massive amounts of grammar due to loss of unstressed syllables and other types of change means that the daughter languages HAVE to develop drastically different systems of syntax (much more fixed word order, jury-rigged auxiliary verbs, and on and on.) Indeed, syntax is in some ways slipperier than the lower levels of language (phonetics, phonology, morphology) because it is more closely tied to the conceptual level, and is varied semi-consciously to express shades of meaning in new ways that can stick around; it varies more readily and in a much greater variety of likely ways than sounds do, for example. Thus, the development of auxiliary do ("I went, I didn't go, Did you go?, Didn't you go?") that allowed the simple tenses to be used in closer parallel with the other tenses that use auxiliaries, developed over the space of two centuries, c.1500-1700, and that had major impacts on English syntax rendering it that much more different from earlier stages. The development of a full range of tenses for passive verbs (e.g., "my carriage is being repaired" versus the original form, "my carriage is repairing") took place over about 50 years, 1700-1750, again introducing a greater level of regularity different from the regularities in syntax in earlier stages of the language. If you look at all the records of IE languages over time, they all show similar histories of syntactic changes compounding to end up in very different syntactic systems than in the recorded ancient languages like Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit.
As an aside, probably not what you're getting at: Yes, the Chomskyans argue that language is innate, but in Principles and Parameters, the current formulation (or mark-current-formulation-minus-one, though regarding learnability Minimalism is more a development of P&P than a revolutionary overturning of it), that only means that certain general principles of language are encoded with binary switches for things like head-dependent word order, and the details of any given language are set by children as they learn the language under the influence of the language spoken around them: "Oh, the adjective precedes the noun. [Switch goes click, or in the native terminology of the tribe, parameter gets set for that principle.]" Deep structure isn't some sort of DNA braking change; it's just a model of general innate principles enhancing the learnability of language that simply lay down very broad channels within which language change can go hog wild--syntax can change just as readily under that view as in a view based on general cognitive principles.
Put another way, when was PIE spoken? (Though it is misguided to assume that all the features of PIE that we reconstruct were in fact spoken all at the same time. PIE's better viewed as a sort of projection onto one time slice of all the different aspects of it that we can reconstruct.) No way to say for sure, but we can thumbnail-estimate it at 6000-9000 YBP. How long has it been since out of Africa? How many times would PIE have developed into Hindi versus English versus Albanian in that time? Ten? Twenty? And the same is true for every other language family. The main thing special about IE is the time depth of our surviving records of older forms of the languages (and the Afro-Asiatic family--the Semitic languages and their relatives, especially Ancient Egyptian in this regard--exceeds IE in that respect); knowing what has survived into the modern languages, or just the fact that they are taught in standardized forms in the schools, might lead you to focus on their similarities while ignoring those of other contemporary languages.
However, there is a way in which I think you're getting at something I'd agree with, though the first part might seem like I disagree strongly: If you look at what we actually know of human language as spoken rather than when written down and taught in school and pay attention to what sociolinguistics teaches us, language is likely to change rather more slowly within small-scale societies (say, Dunbar limit or smaller for most interactions of daily life in most times of the year), in great part because there are much stronger cross-generational ties (grandparents taking a greater part in childcare, for example) that slow language change. That does not mean that individual variation is magically reduced; it means that changes are likely to spread much less readily. In modern mass societies, the major source of language change is changes beginning among and adopted by speakers (that latter part is the crucial factor in language change) aged, say, 15-25, and their changes spread rapidly among themselves and then more slowly through smaller numbers of intergenerational ties to other social networks because of strong generational divides due to mass education, division of labor, and social fragmentation--in short, the changes spread through social networks (Lesley Milroy's "web of ties") under the pressure of factors of social prestige (as per William Labov; though "prestige" is a rather catch-all concept). In small-scale societies, there are fewer social networks, the ties within the group are more general, intergenerational ties slow down the adoption of changes, and so on.
HOWEVER, that is change WITHIN a small-scale speech community. If you don't have a mass society, which we might take as a society viewing itself as and acting economically as a single group that is significantly larger than the Dunbar number, then speech within it will tend to remain more uniform than in a mass society, more than you'd expect from just the ratio of sizes. By the same token, however, it will have relatively much smaller connections with other speech communities even if they interact regularly economically and culturally; there will be much less of a brake on changes between groups. As to how those two factors would compare strength-wise in an area of small-scale societies versus the same area with a large-scale society, that would probably depend on the details of the societies (nature of interpersonal and intergroup ties and relations, social views on language "purity," and so on). In any case, you'll probably have a more patchwork picture than in the details of dialects in Europe before the solidification of the state, which in turn is a more patchwork situation than in the modern industrial state with strong political centralization and explicit policies of one state-one uniform language embedded in the educational system (France or Japan would be a good example there).
And above all, that's if we focus only on spoken language. The use of writing drastically changes the way language change acts in the long view, not so much by retarding language changes in the standardized language (it faces the countervailing pressure of easier spread of changes in mass society) but by killing off non-standard dialects and minority languages.
So in short, I don't think standardized syntax is particularly useful here, but you do get at a big passel of sociolinguistic factors.
I should add that upon a third or fourth reread of your post, I think I overestimated the importance of your comment about standardized syntax and didn't pay enough attention to this part: "Suppose in the distant past that languages diverged much more rapidly than they do today...This hypothesis posits that language evolved more or less like a technology, becoming more effective over a very long period of time." My comments don't really address that, focusing more on mechanism; in any case, it seems a hypothesis you couldn't test since it would refer to long stretches of unwritten language that would leave no obvious evidence.
I realize this thread is dead, but I only became aware of it recently and decided to read it.
I really liked your post, and very much agree with the lines of inquiry you raised.
>so”. My bigger objection is that a society that lacked mass gatherings may not necessarily have been in a “trap” at all. It might not be that they were “held down” from complex social experimentation; rather, perhaps, conditions were such that they simply drew no benefit from doing so.
And/or couldn’t?
One has to assume that for all those people to have gathered together in one place there was something very fundamental that they held in common, otherwise they just would’ve wandered off and started their own little community somewhere. From where did this come and by what means was it transmitted? It is here that I believe your speculation about language is crucial. Nothing could be written down. I think that is huge in this discussion, and I think it is under appreciated.
One person acting alone in a moment of kismet might make a small discovery. Another member of the community might watch and imitate. Then they both drop dead.
At some point things could be described in language, spoken language. But that requires someone to remember it and to be trusted with the word. I really think this is the fundamental process. For some reason when we look at what happened with Jesus and we think about people hundred thousand years ago we don’t see the connection. What if everything Jesus said could never have been written down?
Isn't the Sapiens paradox more easily explained by the difficulty to pass on knowledge from generation to generation in small groups? They didn't have writing, and a small group of people doesn't have as good memory as a larger group. Once the group reached a certain size, it was more likely that there was at least another member in the group that knew the skills or ideas that was discovered in the group, which meant that it had a greater chance of being sustained to the next generation, i.e. knowledge became cumulative for the first time. I think a more acurate analogy would be a bathtub without a plug. What does it take to keep the water level rising? Cumulation. No cumulation, no progress. Before cumulation, ideas had to be reinvented again and again. Fortunatly, one major idea was very easy to teach to everyone even in small groups: fire. Smash two flintstones together.
Wrangham is the same guy who co-wrote "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence". I recommend both.
100%. That changed my worldview once I read it. He also just wrote "The Goodness Paradox: How Evolution Made Us Both More and Less Violent", which is well worth reading
The orthogonal direction as neither Rousseau nor Hobbes is consistent, in some part, with Otto Rank's study of primitive culture. He found that ideology dominated psychology more than biology (which caused Freud to have his "golden boy" thrown out of the club). Rank always saw humans as most concerned with their individual soul, and the development of religion and ideology as the collective soul-belief. This avoids historical projection of modern values onto ancient ways which (in the 70's) was known as ethnohistory, and that seems familiar in this review.
I don't buy the comparison of prehistoric small civilizations that operate entirely by informal social power with Twitter, because in Twitter you're encountering way, way more than 150 people. And that's a big part of why Twitter is so terrible: people can tell blatant falsehoods and get away with it a lot more easily on Twitter because the people they're lying to don't have the past experience with them to realize they're lying, and if they mistreat people, they aren't risking the major negative consequences they'd be risking if they mistreated a literal neighbor who was either friends with or related to 20% of their social circle.
High school is also not a good analogue because it's a highly artificial environment with no shared goal.
By contrast, in a persistent community that relies on group cooperation, people are going to care a lot about how much other people are contributing to the community, whether they are willing to help out their neighbors, whether you can trust them to keep their word, whether they're moochers, whether they're always stirring up drama, etc. And...I'm fine with people getting more or less social power based on such factors.
Sure, popularity isn't going to be *entirely* based on those legitimate factors, not by a long shot--humans being humans will also end up gaining or losing social power for stupid reasons and occasionally for positively evil reasons. But the bullshit reasons will be a significantly smaller percentage of what matters to people if they're a functional community where they all need trustworthy fellow-helpers in order to survive and flourish. (Successful) prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes were such communities. Twitter and high school are not, and so are not good models for imagining what that would have been like.
I've read that the court of Louis XIV had a social life like high school, because the king didn't allow the nobility to do any useful work. They awarded status purely on the basis of stupid arbitrary things because they had nothing else to base it on.
I've also read (in the same source, maybe?) that Japanese high schools are different. They take their classwork very seriously and therefore award social status based on grades.
"I've read that the court of Louis XIV had a social life like high school, because the king didn't allow the nobility to do any useful work. They awarded status purely on the basis of stupid arbitrary things because they had nothing else to base it on."
This was a deliberate creation of Louis, to centralise power in his hands and symbolically around his person. In his minority, he had experienced the Fronde rebellion(s), a period I find hard to disentangle because the French state was coming out of and going into new wars, the old king died, the Queen assumes the regency and sets out to govern with the help of her chief minister Cardinal Mazarin.
Anne (the queen mother) wanted to give her son a unified kingdom where he would be the absolute ruler and brought him up in this belief. Then when Louis was ten the Fronde rebellions started, first one where the parlements (courts of appeal) rebelled against the crown taking on their powers, then one of the princes where it was power-grabbing by the powerful nobles to try and seize power, which eventually collapsed when Louis was fifteen.
He would remain under the tutelage of his mother and Mazarin for another few years until, upon Mazarin's death, Louis at the age of twenty-three finally took the rule into his own hands and embarked on what has been called "iron-handed absolutism". Fro now on, *he* would be the sole authority. His ministers served at his discretion and offered advice only when requested. And the symbol of all this was Versailles - a former hunting lodge and then small chateau outside of Paris, in a wetland, which Louis XIV had expanded into a magnificent new palace and which eventually became the seat of the court and of government, though it took decades to complete:
"All these events were witnessed by Louis and largely explained his later distrust of Paris and the higher aristocracy. "In one sense, Louis' childhood came to an end with the outbreak of the Fronde. It was not only that life became insecure and unpleasant – a fate meted out to many children in all ages – but that Louis had to be taken into the confidence of his mother and Mazarin on political and military matters of which he could have no deep understanding". "The family home became at times a near-prison when Paris had to be abandoned, not in carefree outings to other chateaux but in humiliating flights". The royal family was driven out of Paris twice in this manner, and at one point Louis XIV and Anne were held under virtual arrest in the royal palace in Paris. The Fronde years planted in Louis a hatred of Paris and a consequent determination to move out of the ancient capital as soon as possible, never to return."
Power now came from access to the king, and access to the king was obtained at Versailles. Being sent away from court was to be cut off from all hopes of promotion. Being summoned to Versailles cut the nobles off from their power bases in their home regions (so they couldn't get up to mischief and Louis could keep control over them). Isolated in this supreme example of royal magnificence, the way to gain status was those social power games, where maintaining the perfect facade was all-important and to show weakness was to lose.
Louis purposely set the trends in fashion, etc. to maintain his own aura of utmost royal grandeur and to have his nobles following him, and going to great expense to do the same. When they are all jockeying for status via intellectual salon games, they can't be plotting rebellion in the far reaches of the countryside on their estates:
"The Palace of Versailles was key to Louis XIV's politics, as an expression and concentration of French art and culture, and for the centralization of royal power. Louis XIV first used Versailles to promote himself with a series of nighttime festivals in its gardens in 1664, 1668, and 1674,[28] the events of which were disseminated throughout Europe by print and engravings. As early as 1669, but especially from 1678, Louis XIV sought to make Versailles his seat of government, and he expanded the palace so as to fit the court within it. The moving of the court to Versailles did not come until 1682, however, and not officially, as opinion on Versailles was mixed among the nobility of France.
"By 1687, however, it was evident to all that Versailles was the de facto capital of France,and Louis XIV succeeded in attracting the nobility to Versailles to pursue prestige and royal patronage within a strict court etiquette, thus eroding their traditional provincial power bases. It was at the Palace of Versailles that Louis XIV received the Doge of Genoa in 1685, an embassy from the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1686, and an embassy from Safavid Iran in 1715."
Re: the middle ages not having a concept of inequality, I think you may be misreading things somewhat. Obviously they were aware of the concept, and your reference to scripture is on point. But maybe it's just me, whenever I read the Bible, I can't help but notice for all it criticizes corrupt officials and bad kings, it ASSUMES there must be a king and a hierarchy of officials. Jesus doesn't criticize officials for having power, he criticizes them for being overbearing and not using their power to serve the people. But... and I'm just speculating here... the Son of God seems generally OK with authority?
Rather, I think that the David's point is how in the middle ages the default position was that inequality was natural, inevitable, divinely ordained, and ultimately just in a cosmic sense. There can of course be bad/unjust hierarchies, but the solution involves getting the hierarchy "right", not flattening it. If you think it undercuts the point to note how medieval peasants revel in a carnivalesque return to "primitive equality", you also have to acknowledge that they seem to collectively agree "this is not a sustainable social arrangement".
The indigenous critique was thus significant not in providing the IDEA of an egalitarian society, but rather an EXAMPLE of one, and one that seemed to be functioning.
Personally, my critique of the book is that Graeber has rose-tinted glasses when it comes indigenous anarchism. It may be true that egalitarian societies create complex and deeply fulfilling social arrangements, so calling them "primitive" simply inappropriate. Still, such groups apparently weren't very good at producing vast arsenals of quality weaponry and legions of well drilled soldiers. That turned out to be a pretty serious problem, and one that needs to be taken more seriously by anarchists.
I think it’s risky to try and guess too much about what medieval/biblical societies thought about politics - literacy was for elites, and anything that survived until now had to be worth laboriously re-copying by hand. It’s a bit like trying to learn what Americans think about their society, but only using New York Times editorials.
A point on the other side from this is that inequality would have seemed much more natural in the past, as back then elites would often be about a foot taller than everyone else (partly due to the same factors that make them taller now, but mostly due to nutrition). “We’re all equal” loses credibility when it’s being chanted at you by munchkins. They may also have benefited more from whatever intellectual advantages you get from childhood/adult nutrition as well.
It's irrelevant because the "indigenous critique" argument falls apart if you look elsewhere, too:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity?s=r
>whenever I read the Bible, I can't help but notice for all it criticizes corrupt officials and bad kings, it ASSUMES there must be a king and a hierarchy of officials.
Not really. I don't know how much it affected medieval political philosophy, but according to biblical history, Israel had a more decentralized, clan-based form of government during the period of Judges. And the key text about the establishment of the monarchy, 1 Samuel 8 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%208&version=NIV), pretty much explicitly states that wanting a king was a bad idea, not least because of the hierarchy of officials. You can find some more pro-monarchical viewpoints elsewhere in the Bible, but this doesn't seem to me like the existence of a king was taken for granted.
Authority in the New Testament is a more complicated question; there's certainly lots of grist there for arguing for both radically egalitarian AND radically hierarchical conceptions of ecclesiastical authority (and perhaps by analogy political authority, but since the early Christians weren't in charge of anything, mostly the advice is just to respect existing rulers, so long as they don't make you disobey God). But it's safe to say that when the event that best expresses the concept of "king" is a guy nailed to a piece of wood, that there's some pretty significant subversion of tropes going on, with an implied critique of earthly notions of authority.
I think I may have explained my point badly. You are right of course (especially in the OT) that there are examples of "good" societies without a king. But again: judges. Authority. It's everywhere.
I am specifically contrasting the society described in the bible with that of the indigenous social arrangements Graeber discusses, which is very much dependent on consent of the governed (a concept which simply doesn't appear in the bible).
The Book of Judges does not describe a society with a system of authority. Much of the time, there was no judge. Judges only arose when Israel was conquered by one of its neighbors and needed to cooperate militarily to fight them off. The judge was "chosen" based on who could get the most people to follow him or her (her being Deborah, Judges 4-5). This was a society which depended on consent of the governed. When the son of Gideon tried to declare himself king, most of Israel rebelled against him and he was killed by a woman throwing a rock at him (Judges 9).
I would also encourage you to read 1 Samuel 8. It definitely does not assume that there will be a king and hierarchy of officials.
Medieval Europe itself had several anarchies. From 930-1262, Iceland only had a government seasonally, and had an extremely strange legal system, described in David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. Peasant rebellions were successful in throwing off their lords in Frisia (northern Netherlands) from 1101-1523 and Dithmarschen (southern Denmark) from ~1200-1559. In 1440, the town of Cospaia found that the most recent treaty between Florence and Rome left them under the control of neither, so they got into smuggling and growing illegal drugs (tobacco), and they remained without a government until 1826. There definitely were people who believed that society could exist sustainably without the inequality of the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_freedom ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dithmarschen ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Cospaia
Medieval anarchy is super interesting and I look forward to learning more!
But it's a pretty radical position to take Samuel 8 as proof of the ancient Israelites rejecting authority, then ignore Samuel 7 (which declared Samuel their ruler) and Samuel 10 (where he annoints his successor as king). Ditto Deborah: I am no biblical scholar, but pretty sure she was prophet speaking with God's authority, not a proclaimed representative of the people?
I agree that it's pretty reasonable to assume one doesn't get to BE a prophet of ancient Israel without first being proclaimed by the people. But the medieval readership probably didn't really know that.
This is a massive tangent, but the text we have combines pro and anti-monarchic sources, which is why we quite often find successive chapters expressing opposite views as to the nature of kingship.
You are of course right that nobody involved was a humanist democrat. The debate (as it appears in the Bible) is between monarchy and theocracy, i.e. should the Israelites have a king "like other peoples" who would in effect govern them on God's behalf (while remaining answerable to God) or should the Israelites, as God's chosen people, be governed directly by God?
I think this should mostly be understood as a debate in post-Exilic Judea (or Yehud) between those who looked for the restoration of the Davidic monarchy and those who wanted to vest power in the Temple hierarchy.
I suspect the actual Deborah was in fact a charismatic figure who took her authority from the consent of those who followed her, but this doesn't appear from the text we have received (written much later, by writers who reflected the assumptions of their own times, although the Song of Deborah itself may be authentic).
That's basically my point: there is debate in the bible about the legitimate basis of power, but "consent of the governed" isn't really an option, not is radical equality (even allowing equal submission before God, the Lord has mortal agents who are prophets, kings, or both).
Thus it's not super surprising that the indigenous critique might have been more significant than we think.
There is also literally the “levelers” during the English Civil War. And just generally Graeber does a great job of committing the same academic sins regarding Western civ he and much of the left has been identifying the west did against “savages “ in the 1930s. Except we aren’t in the 1930s.
Reading his points I mostly bounced back and forth between “everyone following these topics knows this”, and “that is wrong”. With the latter most often happening when he thought he was being most clever. The whole thing is a political project. Not a work of scholarship.
Great review and thought at the end. I think one miss was Julian Jaynes and his book ‘the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind’ controversial but still the best explanation for how we got out of the world of Dunbar’s number.
Isn’t Jaynes’ theory that that happens a lot later, around 1200BC?
Yes but that part didn’t make sense to me. If felt he just put time at when the Iliad was set. So the fog of the great ‘before’ I read him as saying that is what caused larger group formation. But it was an indirect inference.
On answering your question I’m not sure you aren’t right that I got causality reversed. Let me reflect.
Yes and that is dumb.
The Davids seem to have fallen into the too-common academic doublethink of deriding the noble savage myth while at the same time buying it hook, line, and sinker.
Alot of people really seem convinced that their lives would have more meaning if all they did, all they could do, is look for food.
Just as a heads up, the Northwest Coast Indians are always being cited as “the hunter-gatherers with hierarchy,” and that boils down under the boring/normal theory to the fact that they’ve got colossal fisheries that let them live a settled existence.
This was my question as well. Northwest Indigenous tribes are regularly cited for their technological innovation, building advanced seagoing kayaks that allowed them access to the aforementioned rich fisheries (hat tip, George Dyson). It also created a positive feedback loop since they adopted materials from their aquaculture into their tools.
I’m not as familiar with the California tribes contrasted against but it set off a red flag that the PNW societies were presented as a reasonable comparison set.
Naively, a technologically advanced, more sedentary society having greater hierarchy than hunter gatherers would seem to support the Pinker case!
I read "Dawn of Everything" about six months ago, so my recollection of it isn't fresh, but I found the book's problems to outweigh its strengths, and not by a little. Among the major problems were the fact that it targets straw men (popular writing by Pinker, Diamond, et al., which doesn't represent, and is far more simplistic than the actual states of the fields of archaeology and anthropology). It sets up simple heuristics to measure social criteria of interest and applies them rigidly where flexibility is called for (e.g., assuming that evidence individuals moving from one settlement to another shows "freedom" to dissociate, when it could as easily be reflecting patterns of exile . . . think of our anonymous reviewer's school lunch tables: what does a change in seating mean?). It reduces the concept of power in a way that seriously discounts the role of religion and views ritual as playacting, rather than as social reality. And multiple times statements from cited sources don't match what the sources actually say, strongly enough that in areas I was familiar with that really jumped out as I read. In my own former field (ancient China), I found the representation of data inaccurate more often than not (which is actually pretty common when non-specialists try to jump into an unfamiliar area, as people in the China field routinely discover). Of course, I'm not capable of assessing the evidence "Dawn" cites about South America, Australia, etc., but I found obvious and surprising errors in sections on Egypt, where citations were from materials I was familiar with from comparative study.
Certainly, Graeber and Wengrow are right that the big popular narrative books about social evolution are simplistic, but they are non-specialist arguments that draw on superseded models that practitioners rarely use. I can't judge their use of French accounts of Native American practices and views of Europe, but a review by David Bell (https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity?s=r), who does have requisite skills, suggests it's deeply problematic, and regarding the issue of the pre-prehistoric period of actual "dawn" (about which I know nothing), I'm persuaded by a long review written by two specialists in that field, Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale (https://mronline.org/2021/12/20/the-dawn-of-everything-gets-human-history-wrong/), that Graeber and Wengrow were simply not in a position to present their perspective with anything like the rhetorical authority they do.
In the end, I think "Dawn" winds up in the same basket as Pinker and Diamond's books, although it's tougher to read because it is so rhetorically self-indulgent (which produces a variety of internal contradictions, because the authors themselves seem to have gotten lost, as the reviewer here notes). But because it has a contemporary anarchist political ax to grind it's likely to have a different kind of influence, one that tends to strengthen with unearned authority a political point of view that is already over-reliant on abstraction, and which will claim the model offered by "Dawn" as "factual" support.
I think Pinker and Diamond tend to be correct and much more honest than Graeber.
I didn't mean to dump on Pinker and Diamond, Franco. I've read little of their stuff; just browsing. In saying they are straw men for Graeber and Wengrow I meant that "Dawn" treats the ideas in their popular works as though they were academic paradigms in the disciplines of anthropology / archaeology / history.
This is great. I was at first suspicious because of the claims that the book has been getting glowing reviews (most of the reviews I've seen have found the book interesting, but ended up harping a lot on the empirical difficulties that plague most of Graeber's books, including this one), and also because of the simplistic association of Hobbes with the right and Rousseau with the left (while the headline views of these people might sound congenial to one or another side of the post-revolutionary political debate, the actual details of their ideas are both problematic and useful to both sides). But by the end it's doing the good thing of using the book to explore interesting ideas. I suppose I'm biased because I think the idea it comes to at the end is one I also had, when listening to James Suzman's appearance on the Ezra Klein podcast (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-james-suzman.html) - that the constant negging and social control of egalitarianism in hunter-gatherer society sounds a lot like cancel culture.
Now, I'm not as uniformly negative on that as the author of this review is, but I'm also not as uniformly positive on that as the anthropologists seem to be. But it's a really interesting thought - that we've somehow managed to re-create Dunbar-number-style social mechanisms with a population vastly beyond that number.
Yes, this was by far my favorite when I read all the finalists about a month back.
I’d argue Hobbes is a founding father of the liberal tradition which ultimately belongs to the left
Yeah, I think there's a stronger case that Hobbes "really" belongs to the left than that Rousseau "really" belongs to the right, but none of the four cases are all that strong.
Agreed that Hobbes is complex and harder to place than many realize. But it's hard for me to come up with an argument that Rousseau could belong to the right. Can you sketch out what that case would look like? I think you'd have to warp the words "left" and "right" beyond *any* recognition to make that one work.
I’ll have to admit I’m not really very familiar with Rousseau at all. But I think the way the case would work is that Rousseau is a critic of individualist enlightenment liberalism, and while not a supporter of monarchy or organized religion, is still an inspiration for the kind of German romanticism that feeds much modern conservative thought.
I've heard people claim that Rousseau's philosophy was one of the main driving factors behind French colonialism in Africa, the Middle East, and Indochina. So in that regard, he could be considered the forerunner of some very right-wing policies and movements.
Maybe people should stop thinking like today's definitions of "left" and "right" are some kind of fixed axis that has existed throughout human history.
Of course, but the liberal tradition is the basis of virtually all political movements in the developed world today. Even far-right reactionary and far-left Marxist movements, which are inherently anti-liberal by their very nature, need to pay some lip service to liberal ideas in order to have any chance of successfully appealing to the masses.
Hobbes is certainly a man of the left relative to, say, the Yongle Emperor, but I'm not sure that's a very useful framing nowadays.
You are correct.
Graeber reminds me of the magnesium guy here: https://faculty.cnr.ncsu.edu/fikretisik/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/06/Types-of-College-Teachers.pdf. But I agree with you about the author’s pet theory at the end about social media and Dunbar’s number. That was really interesting and thought-provoking.
I find the parallels some people are finding between contemporary society and hunter gatherer ones fascinating. I've seen a number of people casually draw attention to other similarities and I'm intrigued by them. Someone should write a long thing on it.
Yes, I really liked the gossip trap idea. I was listening to Jonathan Haidt talk with Lex Fridman and he was describing how social media was practically bad for young teens, and girls more so.
Reading this review I found myself asking a lot: how can the Davids possibly know that? They say very detailed things about the cultural practices of pre literate cultures a very long time ago. Why do they believe these things? Is it just inference from the archaeological record (in which case Macaulay's _Motel of the Mysteries_ seems a pretty good Swiftian critique of the confidence of that inference)? Or is something else going on?
Maybe the answer is just that they are relying inappropriately on dicta from their sources, as other commenters seem to suggest. But in any case the review would have been stronger if it gave some summary of the epistemological model the book uses to draw its conclusions.
Yes, this. I kept wondering how they could infer so much detail about political systems from the remaining (presumably scant) archaeological evidence. I don't know whether they explain their reasoning in the actual book or not. Motel of the Mysteries is an apt comparison.
Wishful thinking.
Did Taleb really praise this book? Yikes, his long decline continues. I can understand the New York Times and the New Yorker taking the line they took, but this book was so awful even the New York Review of Books has a negative review up (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/).
Also, the little speculation bit at the end is excellent and extremely plausible sounding to me.
"Hobbes, founder of the political Right"
Robert Filmer would disagree with that.
Peter Turchin had a telling critique of Graeber & Wengrow here:
https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/an-anarchist-view-of-human-social-evolution/
Bryan Caplan discusses a similar "trap", though one that post-dates agricultural civilization (it was first inspired by observations of rural Latin America):
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/11/the_envy_of_the.html
In terms of politics, I would add that before even the middle ages and Christ the Greeks had a tradition of democracy. The Romans refused to admit their emperors were kings, because they had already prided themselves on getting rid of monarchs.
I'm unconvinced that "envy" and tall poppy syndrome are bad things -- if they are keeping you from.becoming someone's serf, that's to your benefit. They presumably evolved for a reason anyway.
Caplan/Cowan tell a story about a Mexican village where wealthy individuals are required to spend a period of time both running things, and funding them out of their own pocket.
(Hanson doesn't like this sort of thing either. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-grabbing.html)
The objection is a mixture of "it's wrong per se" and "it stifles growth".
But it's far from inevitable that if wealth accumulation is allowed,the wealth is spent on investments in legitimate business. If nothing prevents you also have the option of hiring thugs and using them to force people to work for you, extort money from them , and so on. In, fact that sort of thing is rather common in Latin America.
(Indeed, the young Castro converted to communism after observing such abuses on his travels. If you get rid of informal forced wealth redistribution, you may be replacing it with formal wealth redistribution via left wing governemnt.)
WEIRD countries have institutions in place that are fairly successful in preventing petty tyranny...other places do not. The Oapan system does two good things: it prevents wealth turning into tyranny, and funds socially useful things. (The economists are rather uninterested in what happens to the "grabbed" wealth). It might do a bad thing as well, preventing growth, but you can't rely on everyone to automatically behave as a pro-capitalism economist would want them to. You have to consider what realistically would fill the vaccum if you somehow get rid of "envy". You need a formal mechanism to prevent kleptocracy if you get rid of the informal one.
Recently, someone here was expressing shocked disbelief at the classical world's custom of exiling successful generals. Why would you want to get rid of someone who is good at their job? The custom existed because successful generals often seized power. It isn't a law of nature that US generals don't set themselves up as dictators, it's the result of a particular set of laws and customs. Likewise, theres no expectation that Gates or Bezos will found private armies
Once someone has started down the road to becoming a local tyrant, they are hard to stop. Early intervention is vital, so constant vigilance is vital. And people do keep a close eye on what the rich and powerful are up to. There's a set of social instincts relating to tall poppies, because tall poppies are dangerous. Maybe what the economists call "envy" is greedy and vicious...but maybe it's all part of an evolved immune response to tyranny.
It may not be "inevitable" that accumulated wealth is spent on investments in legitimate businesses, but it's possible. Preventing the accumulation of wealth means preventing investments. WEIRD countries have primogeniture & monogamy in their past, which encouraged the concentration of wealth in fewer hands, thus permitting civil society to exist independent of the state. That is the thesis of Timur Kuran's "The Long Divergence". https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/the-scylla-of-clannishness-and-the-charybdis-of-despotism/
That's not really a disagreement. If you can firewall tyranny without preventing wealth accumulation , go for it.. But mere.disapproval of envy doesn't get you that. It takes complex social technology to promote the right kind of ambition while suppressing the wrong kind.
Would "the wrong kind of ambition" or "tyranny" result in going backwards, like the people who landed on Tasmania and forgot various technologies?
Well, the USSR had Lysenkoism, which is plausibly an effect of their tyranny, and which did damage their ability to use genetics and technologies derived from it. Would that count?
The USSR was much more technologically adept than the primitive societies discussed in the book. They were certainly inferior to the US, and we can imagine a hypothetical USSR which didn't make the mistakes they made, but they didn't go technologically backward as a whole.
Is that the only issue?
"The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like [economic growth] are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else."
Excellent review. I enjoyed the book but share the reviewer's criticisms. I'd add only that Graeber & Wengrow repeatedly use phrases like: "it cannot be doubted"; "it is obvious that"; "the evidence is clear" etc., on many occasions throughout the book when there are great doubts and the evidence is vague and even ambiguous.
As far as the Sapient Paradox is concerned, the only out-of-Africa Sapiens DNA we have in readable form is some 15,000 years old. We don't know when human vocal cords and the human palate developed and both were required to fully articulate the complex sounds of language. We also don't know when the FOXP2 gene became fully expressed in Sapiens populations.
Without complex language, none of the pre-history societies that Graeber & Wengrow examine could have existed, and it may have been the case that the gene expressions for both the mechanical and the intellectual elements of language did not exist across large populations of otherwise modern humans until after C. 20,000 years ago.
The Davids have compiled a good overview of recently-overturned hypotheses in archeology, and a qualitative introduction to the new hypotheses. Their usual method is this:
1. Explain a belief archeologists had 40 years ago.
2. List recent discoveries contradicting that belief. Make it sound like /all/ evidence contradicts that belief, without actually giving any numbers. Make it sound like they discovered this themselves, just now.
3. Pose as bravely speaking truth to power, even though they're just presenting something that's now doctrinaire.
4. Explain the vile motives of the archaeologists who conspired for so long to conceal the truth. They were stupid and either racist or sexist.
5. Don't present any quantitative data to support their claim; just imply by omission that the exceptions they've listed (exceptions to the old belief) comprise the great majority of a random sample.
Disclaimer: I read only the first half of the book.
The percolation of concrete facts is very poor. Things are usually not well-known and it's important to just say them. The consequences of facts propagate even worse: the consensus has momentum far beyond the point that people have stopped citing the old beliefs that lead to it. This is true in all fields, and worse synthesizing fields, but anthropology is particularly bad because it has become more hostile to drawing conclusions and especially generalizations over the past 40 years.
This was a really first-class essay, well-written and interesting. I even liked the "Gossip Trap" personal speculation part, it's a point of view I haven't seen before, and it's well presented. The only part I didn't really like was the semi-apologetic semi-false-humility final "In Which The Truth Is Revealed" section. Honestly, you could have just cut the essay with the ending of the penultimate section and it would be 20% better, and say just as much. You were bold in that section, don't navel-gaze and equivocate after, end on the strong note!
So, congratulations to the author, it's a great essay.
On the subject matter: the first caveat I would want to see addressed is the whether there is anything to explain in the first place (about the Sapient Paradox). Complex strongly interacting systems routinely have highly nonlinear emergent behavior, where for a long time nothing much at all seems to happen, and then shazam something drastic seems to come out of nowhere, and the triggering even can be something completely trivial, the way (by analogy) an avalanche is driven by snow that builds up all season, slowly, but it finally happens at a given moment in time because of some very small random jolt. So my question about the "Sapient Paradox" is: what evidence is there that anything happened that needs explaining? It could just've been an avalanche.
Good comment, just thought I would nitpick your analogy. Most avalanches do not happen like that. The highest avalanche danger tends to be right after a big storm, when there is new loading and the snow hasn't had a chance to settle and bond to the snowpack, or when wind moves new snow into an area, to form a slab of cohesive snow. There tends to be more avalanche danger early in the season with new snowpack, though you can get wet loose avalanches when the snow is melting in the spring. But it's all rather complicated, as there are 9 different avalanche types and there are some types that do get more dangerous as the snowpack builds. For example, you can have a deep persistent weak layer that gets more dangerous as more snow builds on top, but they are hard to trigger and tend to be triggered in areas where the snow is more shallow and weak. Professional forecasters spend a life time trying to understand it all. It's a fascinating but difficult area of study, because the feedback mechanism for your predictions is rare and dangerous.
Very interesting additional information, thank you. I triggered a small avalanche myself while skiing only once, and fortunately it fell away below me, and all I had to do was -- very, very carefully! -- back up. Gave me an enormous respect for the phenomenon, though; it was exceedingly weird to see the entire ground for a few hundred feet just shift and melt away below me, like it suddenly became liquid. Brrr.
I agree it was very well-written, especially the introductory paragraphs, which showed the author did more than just read the book. Re. "In which the truth is revealed", I would hate for a rewrite to end without the sentences, "I think it’s likely we did accidentally, via social media, summon back the Elder God that is our innate form of government. And I think we should be worried about civilization itself." I'm not convinced the claim is accurate, but it's worth looking into.
I'd like to bring attention to an older, shorter, and I think better archeological study of the development of social systems: Scott Ortman, Lily Blair, & Peter Peregrine, "The Contours of Cultural Evolution". In /The Emergence of Premodern States/, published in 2018 by the Santa Fe Institute, pp 187-217. See https://www.sfipress.org/premodern-states/the-contours-of-cultural-evolution.
It's much less-ambitious than DoE; but it /quantitatively/ shows that cultural evolution follows many long-term general quantitative trends, suggesting that there is an arrow of civilizational development, though one more more abstract than "band / tribe / chiefdom". This makes DoE's key idea, which I take is that social structures used many thousands of years ago might be transferred into the modern age, look untenable.
CoCE has lots of graphs showing things like
fig 1: the population size a society can support scales exponentially in the number of cultural attributes from the Atlas of Cultural Evolution (ACE) which that society possesses; also see figure 7 showing log(population) ~ # of different social functions
fig 2: the population of the largest settlement of each time interval increases exponentially, back at least to almost 12,000 BP (but note that, though the max population keeps rising exponentially, the existing cultures are spread log-evenly throughout the range from tiny to max)
fig 9: log(length a culture survived) ~ log(population of largest settlement)
Most-intriguing is figure 11, which claims to show that the size of cultures has sweet spots at 25, 500, 2500, and 10,000 people. That is, a culture gets "stuck" at these sizes for some time, and on bursting through one limit, begins developing more rapidly until it hits the next one. The histogram data is even neater than reported; the sweet spots appear by my reading to correspond to populations of 23.7, 237, 2371, and 23714, in a regular geometric progression. But the histogram is noisy, because N = 157. I'd like to see a formal statistical test done on the odds of getting such a clean result by chance.
There are a lot fewer claims in CoCE than in DoE, and they're less-specific; but they've got the proper quantitative science that DoE doesn't.
Sabloff, Jeremy A.. The Emergence of Premodern States: New Perspectives on the Development of Complex Societies. Santa Fe Institute Press. The Kindle edition is $3, which can be in Amazon digital credits (https://amzn.to/3MFQ2zd).
This looks like a worthwhile volume. Reading the precis and linked descriptions at your first URL, it seems the articles make use of complexity and network theory to analyze archaeological data. When I was briefly doing work related to these issues and had a little exposure to the use of that type of modeling to identify emergent structures in early cultures and their stepwise appearance, I felt this was a terrifically promising approach. It is wholly absent in "Dawn." Thanks for the reference. I plan to read it.
Excellent review.
Very well written and interesting, thank you for your contribution anonymous author.
I think the sapient trap question is very interesting and one I have never thought about before. I sadly must say that I find your answer to speculative and vague sorry. My main complaint is that you don't have an account about how the gossip trap was escaped.
http://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/09/escaping_the_en.html
I mean, the implication is pretty obvious no? The gossip trap was escaped via the formalization of social hierarchy by making permanent those temporary forms of government “the Davids” spend time chronicling.
I read the book... having read David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" I know that he questions mental paradigms or shibboleths or assumptions that deserve to be questioned--and substantiates his positions. Having seen the 2008 financial crisis, I was ready for the fresh air of "Debt," and after working in a hierarchical corporation I was ready to hear in "Dawn" about the possibility of social/economic structures that don't entail so much anomie and powerlessness. Graeber's voice was important. It's sad that he's gone.
I love this review. In your conclusion you nailed several thoughts that have been percolating through my mind for years. I’d love to write a book with you.
The book, though, sounds like it contains a lot of bunk. I’m kind of an archaeology nerd and armchair historian, and some of these quotes sound a bit wild to me. I want to check the citations to find out exactly what evidence is letting them make such precise statements about the political and religious culture of the Upper Paleolithic, or the Pacific Northwest in 1850 BC.
I love prehistory, but the desire to tell a compelling story (particularly an idealized one) is difficult to resist. It’s honestly sort of an obligation as you try to make sense of evidence, and try to make others care. But it bugged me when my tour guide at the Neolithic village recreation said “This burial was of a woman who traveled long distances trading flints. So clearly this society was egalitarian and the woman high-status because flint was important.” We have no idea what conditions led that woman to walk thousands of miles carrying flint, whether or not she had a choice, and how others felt about her.
There is so much we can never know from the archaeological record. It invites pie-in-the-sky idealizations of prehistoric life, and baseless theories about the beliefs and motivations of ancient people. Anybody who tells you a good story is suspect. I personally think your conclusion is the more convincing one. But then I read this blog, so I would, wouldn’t I?
I dunno. I'm all for linking interesting ideas back to our modern lives. But at the moment it doesn't seem like I get the chance to hear any conclusions other than "isn't Twitter terrible?" I've literally started to discount any piece of writing that includes this idea because it just seems vapid and contentless. Which is a shame, because I was quite enjoying the review up till then.
Ditto: the navel-gazing about social media is starting to reach such a concentration that even if I WERE to believe it's an apocalyptic threat to the entire human species on the level of the atomic bomb or climate change, I'd be getting desensitized to it through sheer overexposure.
I think climate change is actually the apt comparison, on a moment's reflection: even though it is in fact real and dangerous, the alarmists are so monomaniacal about it and talk about Twitter Bad is so inescapable that I'm tempted to be come a contrarian about it out of sheer exhaustion of the topic.
Huh, that final speculation about Twitter and the return to the Gossip Trap reminds me of previous speculation about the Thrive/Survive theory of the modern political spectrum (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/) & Farmer vs. Forager morality (https://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/05/forager-vs-farmer-morality.html).
Basically, if the modern world is increasingly returning to hunter-gatherer levels of mobility and individual prosperity, might we see a return to hunter-gatherer social structures as well? In both good and bad ways, like people being equal... but only because they're stuck in a high-school like morass where none of your accomplishments actually matter, you can't get away from anyone, and the only thing that differentiates you from the rest is how well you play the social game. A world where the formal hierarchies are weaker (e.g. the student council president doesn't really have any power over you), but informal hierarchies simply sprout up to take their place (e.g. every so often a student commits suicide because of relentless bullying, the star football players or band members get away with the occasional sexual assault or even rape because the community is willing to look the other way for its celebrities, punishment for showing up the 'Queen Bee' at the prom by contrast is swift and decisive, etc. etc.).
It's interesting that observing cancel culture in action you'd never suspect that its a symptom of thriving. All the narratives are about intolerable suffering that wrongthink inflicts on large swathes of the population, and that nothing short of the glorious revolution could possibly fix the irredeemably broken systems.
Yes, it is interesting and counterintuitive, though I must admit it's not actually novel. Generally speaking, the observation that a better life can lead to more suffering has been expressed before by Professor David Lester in his observation that suicide can be triggered by a higher quality of life, because you have 'no one left to blame': https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1475771-while-one-might-expect-that-suicide-is-highest-among-people. The clearest example he gave is that blind people whose sight is restored often become suicidal: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1266694-david-lester-a-psychology-professor-at-richard-stockton-college-in. More generally, the observation that a better life doesn't necessarily decrease suffering is something that more properly originates with the Buddhists and Stoics, which is why they emphasize things like meditation and self-reflection.
And honestly, the specific observation that cancel culture seems to be a disease of affluence, or at least the affluent, is not original to me either. Peter Turchin for example deserves at least partial credit for his theory of Elite Overproduction, which predicts that a prosperous society that can provide education and training to many of its people will find itself destabilized when those people realize that the supply of jobs like "President" and "spiritual leader" hasn't increased in turn, and that most of them will have to settle for jobs like "Presidential intern" and "Megaphone guy on the street who shouts about his spiritual leader" - unless they take what is rightfully theirs through fair means and foul, of course. (E.g. the vast number of journalism grads on Twitter who graduated into an industry that is outright downsizing, that doesn't need them because they can be replaced by a website/online printing press linking to the words of a better journalist. They spend a lot of time trying to get those other journalists fired so they can replace them, because how else are they supposed to find a job that uses their education? They can't form new media outlets, those run into the same problem of being replaceable by websites linking to better media outlets.)
And even more specifically, the criticism that cancel culture only exists because of the safety and security provided by the system that it is trying to overturn is almost as old as cancel culture itself. The most caustic version focuses on the individual, describing how they grew up in a culture that valorizes fighting against an evil empire (Star Wars, Reagan, War of Independence, WW2, you name it and Americans love to be on the side of the plucky underdog), only to grow up and realize that all the evil empires are far away and have names like "the CCP" and "the Taliban". And rather than joining those difficult but worthy fights, the theory goes, or simply accepting that they aren't brave heroes, the coward imagines an evil empire at home and beats it up for heroism points. (I don't really agree with this, but if true it explains conspiracy theorists very well: their conspiracy theories always seem to be about them being brave heroes against an evil empire, i.e. being self-indulgent).
The more charitable version is systematic and argues that it's basically an overactive immune system. Like the common criticism of the Military-Industrial Complex and 'the warrior caste', when reformers look around and see that everything is fine because they've done their job, instead of disbanding they just keep looking for *something* that justifies their continued existence - even if they have to squint and distort things a little. (Or a lot). Part of it is self-interest, but most of it is simply a lack of imagination - they simply can't *imagine* everything being fine, admittedly because they fired all the people who did so for doubting the cause. But it's a bureaucratic issue at heart, the same faced by any government service or company that should realize it's obsolete and disband, but is helmed by people who were selected for their determination/stubbornness and their heart, rather than their imagination and emotional detachment (you'd have to be pretty heartless to agree that everyone you know should be fired, even if it's objectively true). It's just a matter of bureaucratic groupthink and Yes Men, from this point of view.
Anyways, thanks for the praise but I must demur, my originality is simply the ability to stand on the shoulders of many different giants, to paraphrase Newton. (Assuming he wasn't just making a snide remark at Robert Hooke.)
The reviewer seems to have somewhat missed the ultimate point of Graeber and Wengrow's arguments. Although the reviewer admit that G&W objective was to disprove many of the social evolutionary assumptions that have haunted Western Civilization since the Enlightenment, they seems to take this book as a direct attack on modern capitalist society (though capitalism is only mentioned three times in the 500 page text). But the reviewer overlooks the fact, that even though both G&W have Leftie academic credentials, their analysis also guts Marxist arguments about social evolution and social inequality (and it earned them scalding review from the Troties over at WSWS). The reviewer writes "maybe the ultimate truth or falsity of prehistorical narratives is unknowable," but the reviewer overlooks the fact that certain narratives are obviously disprovable — which is what G&W do by marshaling massive quantities of diverse historical and archaeological evidence against current social evolutionary dogmas. G&W do not propose some new grand theory for the origin of civilization, and that seems cause the reviewer a certain amount of discomfort, because of their need to jump in at the end and argue for a Grand Theory of Culture revolving around the Gossip Trap.
I spent a month delving into this wonderfully enlightening tome and I followed up on many of the citations (and I am still waiting for some of the books they referenced to be delivered through ILL) — and, full disclosure, I submitted a much shorter review of this book. So, one might be able to accuse me of sour grapes, I am gobsmacked at how differently this reviewer interpreted G&W's arguments from how I interpreted them. It's almost like we read two different books that had the same outline.
And Kenny Easwaran in the comments here read a very different review that was "a too-positive and too-credulous review of a deeply empirically problematic book" up until the end :)
The reviewer mostly attributes progressivism aka "cultural Marxism" to the authors, which is the dominant mainstream ideology, instead of actual full-strength Marxism which is irrelevant fringe nowadays.
>the reviewer overlooks the fact that certain narratives are obviously disprovable
The reviewer readily admits that despite its faults the book demolishes currently widespread simplistic narratives.
Graeber is famously an anarchist rather than a Marxist, "full-strength" or otherwise.
Can't find the WSWS review you're referring to; searching "Graeber" on there doesn't seem to yield anything relevant. Do you have a link?
I went looking for it, but I can't find it now. WSWS has a pretty shitty search engine. I can't even find their memorable editorial against the NYTime's 1619 Project — where, in the comments, some CRT folks got into heated arguments with the Troties. It was truly a memorable confrontation between the followers of classical Marxism and a group that utilizes Marxist dialectics but substitutes race for class.
I agree with you.
I enjoyed your review of this book as well - your take on it was interesting in a different way. In fact, I ranked your review higher than half of the finalists!
Very good post. It is missing something: the author never explains how or why humans came to escape the gossip trap.
I'm also not convinced that gossip is the enemy of progress: people are often driven to accomplish great feats because of the popularity and status they'll gain from it. In high school, the sports star, the ace student, the most talented actor in drama or musician in band will see gains in the popularity from their accomplishments. I was massively productive as a writer in high school in no small part because I wanted to impress the other kids who enjoyed writing with how good/prolific I was.
I'm likewise unconvinced that "envy" and tall poppy syndrome are bad things -- if they are keeping you from.becoming someone's serf, that's to your benefit. They presumably evolved, anyway.
People who think informal social hierarchies are the incarnation of evil and produce nothing good tend to be people who are extraordinarily inept at socializing. I realize that might seem to a lot of people like the pot calling the kettle black to people who've read my posting history, but I don't bother using most of my social filters when posting here.
What you've said is a good argument for why humanity would *stay* in that "trap" as long as it did (if this is what happened). Id est, you're pointing out there are powerful local (in time and space) advantages: competing for social status within a fluid social environment brings out the best in people, and allows for a rapid re-alignment in leadership if someone has a better idea, proves better at this particular challenge in front of the tribe, et cetera. These all suggest that a fluid social heirarchy is optimal for small groups -- and indeed that is characteristic of families, groups of friends, social circles, and even small start-up firms.
The argument goes that however powerful this approach is in *small* groups, it fails in *large* groups, because the large group exceeds the Dunbar Number and human instincts are inadequate to appropriate judgment. What's left is populism, basically a mob mentality that hares off after the latest fashionable thing, whether it be adoration of a psychopathic mob leader or a Two Minutes' Hate directed at the latest Judas goat held responsible for broad diffuse social ills. ("Why is the price of gas $6/gallon? There must be some Judas to blame!")
How *do* we construct a more rigid social heirarchy that relies less on instinctual human social talent, and more on some constructed method for evaluation and reward (or demotion)? This is kind of the $50,000 question of theories of government and social organization for the past 5000 years, at least. We try aristocracy, inherited and selected monarchy, straight democracy, representative democracy. To certify new ideas, we try having a professional academy (e.g. universities, titles, patent offices, Nobel Prizes), we try fiscal democracy ("Which idea makes a ton of money in the marketplace? Must be the best tone!")
Almost all of these disappoint each of us, at one time or another, and we say "But it's freaking obvious that this/that/the other would've been better!" using our instincts for judgment (and some post-facto understanding) that would've worked great if it was all happening at a local small tribal level.
I can't say I find this argument convincing, because "great feats lead to popularity lead to power lead to great feats" holds true no matter how far you get from a Dunbar's Number-worthy tribe. The only difference between small groups of hunter gatherers and huge empires of sedentary farmers is that citizens of the latter have access to the other means of gaining social power: inheritance. A man works a farm his entire life, enriching it for his son, who buys more land and hires workers to enrich it for *his* son, and so on. With enough land and wealth you can call yourself "king" or "lord" and wear fancy clothes so everyone knows it's true.
If it's true that pre-agricultural humans were in fact far more materialistic and status focused than how Rosseau and Hobbes framed them, then things become doubly confusing! There was fundamentally no difference between pre-Neolithic and Neolithic human groups. It makes the author's argument even less convincing to me.
Sure, but your statement begs the question. The difficult part isn't "Should we reward great feats? If so, how?" the difficult part is "What exactly constitutes a "great" feat?" In a small tribe, human beings have many ways to evaluate "great" and they are generally pretty darn good at it. They have very high levels of knowledge about every aspect of the feat, and the feat doer. Contrariwise in a very large society it is totally possible to be fooled, because many human intuitions for judgment are thwarted by time, distance, unfamiliarity with circumstances.
Let's say I claim George S. Patton, Jr. was a fabulous leader of men and canny war-fighter. If both you and I served with Patton, and indeed half the people we know did, we both have many direct ways to assess that statement, and there's a pretty good chance that we would end up agreeing on the assessment, since we both have copious direct experience, and we share it. Unless one of us is distinctly weird, we're likely to converge on similar assessments.
But if Patton is just a figure out of history to both of us, separated by decades and maybe thousand of miles, and maybe a completely different culture, now what? It gets much, much harder not only to come to a conclusion as individuals, but for us to argue out a consensus on a conclusion.
With a huge society, where most forms of information exchange are not personal, it becomes possible to be fooled, and to fool. Huxterism becomes much more possible, the Pied Piper can exist, and at the least it becomes much harder to arrive at a social consensus about what is great and what is not. Hence recent elections, right? We find ourselves disagreeing violently on who is great. Hence the rise of scams and hoaxes, when widespread anonymous communication becomes possible. "I'm a Nigerian prince who wants to share his good fortune with you." Not knowing Nigeria, or any princes, and how likely it is that might be true, we have a problem those in a small tribe would not have.
We can certainly resolve that, up to a point, by holding votes and such -- indeed that is arguably one of the mechanisms by which we adapt to large-group social structures from small group. But it is necessarily less fluid, less flexible, then the older approach. We can't have elections every day, all day, on every little thing our would-be leaders say or do. We end up with a more rigid heiarchy: "OK, you have to do what this guy says, because he has the title President/Generalissimo/CEO, and you're not allowed to debate whether it's a good idea or not. We'll have an election by and by, and then we'll decide whether on balance he was a good President/Generalissimo/CEO, and you can have your say and argue the point -- but until then, the heirarchy is fixed and you are obliged to obey."
Good review!
I bet you could insert "ALIENS" into the Sapient Paradox, and get a History Channel special out of it. Just for fun.
First I want to say I appreciate this review. It has charm.
Something I like about Astral Codex is that people who care about rationalism, Bayesian stuff, "reasoning with insufficient information" as a poster put it a few days ago - these people are often rigorously honest about what they know and how they know it, and what they don't know. It's refreshing. So. If my suspicions are correct and the reviewer did not finish the book, I just want to encourage the writer that here, of all places, unlike undergrad school, it is ok, even preferable, to admit frankly that you stopped before you got to the end of the book. You can even write about why. Leaving the trail of accurate observations is more important than you getting to the end of the book.
The Dunbar number and the Gossip Trap are fun, you "spun a yarn" as you say and I think you would have gotten an A in the class I imagine you having written it for. The prof might have said "please use footnotes" and I would agree. Except if you use footnotes it becomes clear that the last one stops at p. 257 and the darn book keeps going. The final chapter begins on p. 493 according to this kindle version. G&W are just as quotable for the last 200+ pages as they were for the first 200+. Maybe fewer block quotes would help - I am in a social sciences grad program and have to do some writing here and there and sometimes it's just a lot of heavy lifting and one doesn't get there. No one is grading you. You can say exactly where you threw in the towel and why.
Like I said in another post I lost my hard copy before I was done with it. But I decided to get a kindle copy tonight and looked up the quotes. I'm skimming it, truly this makes me want to go over it with a fine-tooth comb. Anyway here's my list of receipts and at the end I will see if I can use G&W to answer at least one of the reviewer's questions. The method I used was to take a distinctive-sounding phrase from the first line or two of the block quote and look it up.
#1 the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed - p 4
#2 our world as it existed just before the dawn - p. 5
#3 struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense - p. 181
#4 Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious - p. 182
#5 in any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might - p. 199
#6 The behavior of the Northwest Coast aristocrats - p. 183
#7 this is emphatically not what we are taught to expect - p. 183
#8 Once cultivation became widespread in Neolithic societies - p. 232
#9 the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent - p. 233
#10 the key genetic mutation leading to crop domestication - p. 232
#11 were not farmers, or at least, not in the usual sense - p. 105
#12 the centre of settlement stood in a long-lived - p. 243
#13 there are heads that are (should be "were") removed - p. 246
#14 most clearly distinguished by the building - p. 245
#15 saw the creation of patterns of life and ritual - p. 245
#16 to Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously - p. 95
#17 when they appear in European accounts, are assumed - p. 36
#18 at the (that) time engaged in a complex geopolitical - pp. 48-49
#19 won a wide audience, and before long Lahontan had become - p. 50
#20 just about every major French Enlightenment - p. 58
#21 there is every reason to believe that Kandiaronk - p. 51
#22 one cannot (even) say that medival thinkers -p. 32
#23 A certain folk egalitarianism already - p. 34
#24 Activities around the stone temples correspond - p. 104
#25 Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty - p. 107
#26 it was winter - not summer - that was the time - p. 108
#27 these would have been kings whose courts - p. 106
#28 among societies like the Iniut or Kwakiutl - p. 115
#29 dismantle all means of exercising coercive authority - p. 110
#30 Most corpses were treated in completely different - p. 103
#31 a (quite) remarkable number of these skeletons - p. 102
#32 Rock shelters around the coastlands - p. 83
#33 a cave site on the coast of Kenya - p. 84
#34 research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi - p. 84
#35 Given that humans have been around for upwards - p. 257
#36 beginning around 12,000 BC, in which - p. 123
#37 picture our ancestors moving between - p. 85
#38 all the authority of their chief - p. 41
# 39 his name through generous feasting - p. 198
#40 urge their subjects to provide - p. 42
#41 Wealthy Wendat men hoarded - p. 43
#42 the Yurok were famous for the central role - p. 177
#43 Among (the) Plains Societies of North America, for instance - p. 160
#44 an office holder could give all - p. 43
#45 talented hunters are systematically mocked - p. 129
#46 Carefully working through ethnographic accounts - p. 86
Questions to follow.
I'll start with a quote from the review:
"It’s almost tautological that early societies had to be organized by raw social power—there are no formal powers to enforce anything else, nor combat social pressure when it’s applied (and humans will always apply it). It also explains why early formal governments are theatrical or seasonal, since they are merely a mask of raw social power—which families are important, which are liked, who’s friends, who’s frenemies, who’s enemies—i.e., what the Davids assume is a set of constantly shifting Neolithic “political experiments” is really just a bunch of constantly shifting mores that, like the Gestapo, hide the real power. Which was who was popular and who was not."
Conceptualizing society, government, and "the state" for societies one is unfamiliar with is a tricky proposition. It inevitably involves an effort of the imagination, an attempt to put oneself into the shoes of others. I believe it is not tautological at all that early societies were organized by raw social power.
Intellectual history - the history of ideas - is also twisty because the records are never complete. Writing about ideas inevitably draws from and sometimes relies upon the unstated and possibly unrecognized assumptions of the writer's sociocultural milieu. What those were in the past is often not what they are in the present. My first exposure to intellectual history was a course I took to fulfill a graduation requirement over 30 years ago. We read parts of Chernyshevsky's "What is to be done?" My vague recollection was that it problematized a certain situation; turns out the situation was that of the peasants in rural Russia (thanks, Amazon). This was my first exposure to problematizing. To problematize means to frame a situation as something that began in some way and has gone wrong, can be productively thought about and requires collective action to address. Before feminism, "the condition of women" in the US was not problematized per se; yes, men saw and treated women as lesser beings, yes, women could not vote, those differentials were noted, discussed - and considered normal. When feminism problematized it, it became possible to think about the situation as something that was negative and ought to be altered. Treating one's reality as a problem to be solved is not an obvious step. Partly it's not obvious because the map is usually incomplete, the solutions impractical, and historically, damage has resulted from attempts to fix things. Partly it's not obvious because it seems so normal. For another example, my high school had a smoking section behind the cafeteria where students were allowed by the school to go and smoke cigarettes. This seemed utterly normal. Youth smoking had not been problematized completely yet. In the early Curious George books, George and the Man in the Yellow Hat smoke a pipe together. That's how normal it was, it was in children's books as an example of cuteness. Subsequent movements problematized it, worked to end it, and now we are generally appalled by the idea of school-supported teen smoking.
G&W are not asserting that medieval European peasants were unaware of power differentials. They are trying to argue that those differentials had not yet been problematized in the way they subsequently were in the Enlightenment. They are arguing that critique of their society from the outside played a significant role in this. As an example of this critique, p. 39, G&W quoting Sagard regarding the Wendat, "They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages." Later, p. 40, G&W, "the Wendat - who might not seem egalitarian in anthropological terms, since they had formal political offices and a stratum of war captives whom the Jesuits, at least, referred to as 'slaves'." Here is an example of a society with social inequality but without material desperation. How did they do that? What were they thinking? This historical encounter with the "Other" served to problematize the idea of inequality in European society. Was it the only impetus? I haven't read all the footnotes. I'm comfortable asserting it was part of the situation.
G&W are trying to measure the question of "what is social inequality" against the question of "what is material inequality." The subtext is that social inequality is assumed to occur at the same time as material inequality in contemporary America. It is specifically stated that material and social inequality traveled together in medieval and colonial-era European societies. But it had not been problematized until the Enlightenment. I'm surprised nobody brought up the Magna Carta. There were at least currents of "we want our society to be different" long before the Enlightenment. How prominent? How did they change with the development of social classes devoted primarily to thinking? How did the problematization change in the Enlightenment?
One way G&W discuss is that writers began referencing non-European social norms rather than the Bible as possible sources of social patterns. That sounds legit to me. Hobbes and Rousseau are mentioned; it seems to me that when you assert that raw social power ran early societies, you may have chosen Hobbes' side there, the "nasty, brutish, short" theory. But that is not what early accounts of the Wendat describe.
American Indian societies had a variety of justice systems and social patterns; appeals to authority existed alongside capacity for individual decision-making to be respected. Why was it not connected entirely to material inequality? That's one of the questions I thought G&W were trying to answer in this book. If social power does not have to travel in lock-step with material accumulation, how are rules enforced? In the US we are so used to social norms being held in place by fear of destitution, it may seem initially plausible that social norms are held in place entirely through interpersonal domination, kindof a caveman archetype. But G&W are writing that that was not happening most of the time either. There are pages and pages of intricate social structures that carried on year upon year, literal mechanisms of culture and tradition enforcing the continuance, not interpersonal humiliation. I think you may have hit a wall trying to imagine that.
John Lennon ("Imagine") and many social theorists go off the cliff saying that the only alternative is a non-society; no possessions, no country, et cetera. G&W are writing that not only did societies exist that had possessions, that was decoupled from the social patterns such that both could exist. A hypothetical state of nature - perfect abundance and cooperation - was not necessary, neither was this destitution-dominance hierarchy. In other words, utopian socialism is not a requirement but neither must the current arrangement stay permanently.
It's an unfamiliar concept.
I have to read the rest of the book and might write more about it tomorrow. This went longer than I meant. But I hope this provides more context for the arguments and descriptions G&W put forth.
Looking forward to more
Since what you have written then there was in fact in the review, you haven’t actually proven the reviewer hasn’t finished the book.
You’re right. It was unfair of me to say that. I think the book bogs down in the middle and it’s hard to get past that and bring the questions forward.
The book is so speculative that it’s hard to read and the review is clever. I think I wish they wrote a different book.
So I read Appiah’s review and Freddie de Boer’s substack entries and then skipped to chapter 10 of DoE.
G&W’s intended audience is not academics, as I had assumed. I think it’s activists, because DoE is firmly in dialogue with the “ideas about society that were floating around in the 1990s.” The intended audience is activists and other readers wishing to reclaim and update an intellectual basis for these things. know that’s an awful formulation, but there are a few currents I can elaborate: a) left revolutions in Central and South America, relationship of indigenous cultures and left/anarchist theory with same; b) scholarship by indigenous (tribal) authors worldwide and in the Americas, articulating their own contemporary relationship to cultural practice and left/anarchist organizing; and US activism and theory attempting to articulate viable and transformational social and political movement strategies.
Right!
A decent fraction, maybe most of, a& b is in Spanish and not widely known in the US. As for c, we had/have Occupy, the DSA, DAPL, BLM, Antifa, Chaz, etc etc with a common response being This Is Going Down The Same Bad Road The Other Left Projects Travel. So G&W say “don’t forget about the anarchists!”
But to my knowledge there has been no academic, footnoted, theoretical, historical, sociological Book that could constitute a contemporary synthesis of multi-cultural European, multi-cultural “indigenous” and Left revolution history that a primarily-English-speaking political activist could read. I think that’s what this book is.
So when readers start at the beginning, yes, the dinghy runs aground midway through and we howl “this is a swamp!” That’s not wrong. But it’s a better-footnoted swamp than a lot of activistic quasi- theory. If the book plumbed every detail, it would be ten times longer. Is it full of “maybe” presented as “yes”? Yes.
Here’s an illustrative quote as to what else it is:
“ As early as 1546, a coalition of Maya rebels rose up against Spanish settlers and, despite brutal reprisals, resistance never really died down. Prophetic movements brought a second major wave of insurrections in the eighteenth century; and in 1848, a mass rising almost drove the settlers’ descendants out of Yucatán entirely, until the siege of their capital, at Mérida, was interrupted by the planting season. The resulting ‘Caste War’, as it was called, continued for generations. There were still rebels holding out in parts of Quintana Roo at the time of the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century; indeed, you could argue that the same rebellion continues, in another form, with the Zapatista movement that controls large parts of Chiapas today.”
Build a city in El Salvador? This history matters. Attempt to address the “benefactor of the poor” role of cartel in Mexico? This history matters. Global, regional and local indigenous sovereignty movements? The history matters (this touches everything from natural resource management to education funding and beyond). Trying to be coherent about US politics? Yep. Still matters.
I’ve been unpacking boxes recently and dug up some things from circa 2000. Why do I have a copy of anything by Subcomandante Marcos? Well, things weren’t all on the Internet yet and if you wanted something you had to get a paper copy, and I didn’t spend a lot of time at anarchist book fairs but I did spend a little. The history of the relationship of US radicalism with Central & South American revolutionary socialism in recent times - El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cuba on down to Venezuela and more, and the role of the US left in contemporary American Indian sovereignty - is relevant. Activists make appeals to imagined indigenous utopia all the time. Somebody needed to stick their neck out and filet utopia off of indigeneity in a popular way.
They tried. Is it perfect? Far from it. But even Appiah says there’s a larger worthwhile project in there and I agree.
So the reviewer had better things to do in 2000 than hang around armchair radicals. Good for them. But they ran their dinghy onto the Enlightenment sandbar like so many others and missed the rest of the book, chapter 10 at least and I suspect more of it as well. Maybe they did read it and howled “More swamp!” and didn’t footnote it.
Rescuing an academic left from itself, indigenous history from the academic left, and society from, um, the academic left? Is a weird project. I think the book makes a contribution. Maybe I’ll try blogging about it.
"Somebody needed to stick their neck out and filet utopia off of indigeneity in a popular way."
From this review, I am highly unconvinced that this book does any such thing.
I don´t get the sapiens paradox. Stone tool diversity seems on an exponential trajectory from the onset. Australopithecans used Oldowan industry for over a million years. Acheuleén hand axes were in use for a slightly shorter time. Middle paleolothic industries lasted for tens of thousands of years and younger paleolothic ones for thousands only. The neolithic sees numerous local tool arsenals with only hundreds of years to wait for the next innovation.
Is it supposed to be paradoxical that a modern looking skull is not surrounded by a modern looking arsenal? I would expect artifact diversity to increase with population density primarily, not brain size.
Innovation happens entirely within one brain, and the accumulated brain mass doesn't matter at all for having a new idea. That's why no matter how many chimps or dogs you get together, you won't get special relativity or a tokamak fusion reactor out of them -- but just one man can have that idea.
What more brains working on the problem gets you is a higher chance that any one brain will actually have a new idea. You're rolling the dice more often. Hence the question of technological progress in an evolving species depends critically on two parameters: the first, as you say, is the population density, but the second is how smart each individual is. I don't think you can discount either.
True. Those brains need to grasp a few steps at once and at least be able to imitate each other. Only then population density starts to affect technological progress.
Brains living at the same time yield completely different results than the same brains living after each other. Synchronous brains copy each others artifacts and thereby fortify them against forgetfulness. The more copies, the better the conservation of technology.
Brains in sequence with the same rate of innovation would be forced to constantly reinvent the wheel.
Therefore I think low population density has held hominids back much harder than mental capacity.
The Neanderthalers had a larger brain than us and their artifacts did improve, but much slower than the younger paleolothic sapiens industry. I wonder: If someone had dropped enough medicine to enable them to reach a certain threshold, would they have grown into an even faster progressing mankind? Would the Leonardo of Neanderthalers conduct flight experiments in front of an ice age crowd, instead of repairing spears for his clan?
And on the other side: how low you could go with human intelligence and still make progress, if you intensified communication? The Flores hominids retained a homo erectus inventory even after shrinking to australopithecine brain volumes. Watching parents do something is easier than reinventing. Would the have had a chance to progess, if they had had a way to cut tasks with x steps into small enough pieces so that many can do the work of one smart hominid?
Progress (at least in science) doesn't seem to me to be that one person has 1/4 of the great idea, then the next guy picks up the baton and takes it to 1/2, and so forth, like a relay team. It's more that the first person has a whole new idea, but runs into some problems working out some of the details, and the second schmo (who knows some special applicable skill) works out some of the details, and then a third person polishes up more detail, and so on -- much more like a photo coming into focus.
So even when it ends up being a team effort, the requirements for each member are quite different. The first is the one that needs the big imagination, and probably the most intelligence. The detail team that comes afterward needs other skills, but not as much raw intelligence.
So I don't think it's correct that population density matters much more. Even a high population density can nevertheless have slow technological progress if there is something holding back the idea-generators, the first person on the team[1], such as insufficient intelligence. But I do agree that population density is important as a second-order effect, because you do need the detail team to turn bright ideas into technology. There's a reason Hero of Alexandria didn't invent the steam engine and the Romans didn't invent the tank, and it's not for lack of intelligence.
There's also an aspect of population density that I think you're overlooking a bit, too, which is that high population means a greater chance of an unusually smart individual: you're rolling the genetic dice more often, so you are more likely to come up with a natural 7. So population growth doesn't *just* (or even necessarily primarily) mean better communication, it means more smart people, and it means the smartest person alive is likely to be smarter.
Yes, if you aren't in communication smart minds have to re-invent the wheel. It probably does have an effect -- particularly with the detail team -- but for the top-line invention I think this is much less important. Smart people already often "reinvent the wheel" as part of their learning. Reading Feynman's (semi) autobiography is illuminating here, the part where he talks about having to work out on his own, in his own way, everything he was taught. He talks about inventing new symbols for sines and cosines as part of his effort to "put it in his own words." My experience is that most smart people are like this: they very often reframe what they're taught in their own internal terms, and they often do construct for themselves things that other people already know[2], so there's already a lot of "reinventing of the wheel" going on.
---------------------
[1] China is kind of the modern poster-child for this, they have a historical rate of innovation that lags spectacularly behind the rest of the world, if you scale everything by population density. It's clearly not because they don't have smart people, but perhaps because Confucian culture apparently reveres respect for traditions *so* much that smart people are strongly dissuaded from expressing new ideas -- I've taught classes with majority Chinese immigrants and it is incredibly difficult to get them to ask questions, to challenge, to think outside the box I'm drawing, because I'm the professor and the culture says you do NOT challenge the professor. From an American point of view, it's frustrating:
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1985/01/27
[2] Fermi was supposedly an extreme this way. Apparently he never read the literature, and so when people came to talk to him, he would seem weirdly stupid, because he wouldn't immediately understand what they were talking about, would need terms defined, would ask naive questions that had already been answered, et cetera. Only...Fermi was *so* smart that he would basically deduce on the fly the entirety of what other people had worked out over months and years, and so by and by he would catch up to you, the mere mortal discussing some issue with him, and then zoom beyond, asking difficult questions and making new insights.
"Progress (at least in science) doesn't seem to me to be that one person has 1/4 of the great idea, then the next guy picks up the baton and takes it to 1/2, and so forth, like a relay team. "
Over the short term, I generally agree.
Over the long term, sometimes intellectual tools are invented (cartesian coordinates, calculus, etc.) that make whole classes of problems easier for the people who learn them - effectively handing the students that "1/4 of the great idea" as part of a standard tool set.
I don't think the author of this review is correct about the Gossip Trap, but absolutely I believe them.
I can't read this review because I read Justin E. H. Smith's review of it, which is a great read. After hearing that the facts are in dispute, which I sort of expected but I didn't realize to what extent, I can't bring myself to read another review of it. So this reviewer faces a challenge because some percentage of us reads E. H. Smith, and I even linked to that review on DSL about six months ago.
It's a fascinating subject, but It's probably so fascinating because it's so speculative. David Friedman says that James Scott makes a somewhat similar claim. I tried to get a discussion of it on DSL and there is some:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,5631.msg227728.html#msg227728
It's a different issue, but I no longer talk with the DSLers because their culture to me is as foreign as a culture from Mars. There's an uncanny valley feeling, in which I think I am almost one of them, but then I realize I am an alien to that tribe. (which isn't a right-left tribe, more of a video gamer tribe.)
I don't think you're being honest here. You no longer talk to DSLers because you are banned from the forum. You got to that position through having six separate strikes, the last of which was for writing -
"Go ahead and ban me again you cunts, cocksuckers and religious freaks"
I suppose it's possible that had something to do with it.
:)
Apparently, I've been called to serve. https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php?topic=6796.msg262731#msg262731
You can’t read more than one review, if facts are in dispute?
That seems to be the case.
Absolutely brilliant
I would live in eternal high school personally
I wish more of my favorite bloggers used a little suspense. Putting some paragraphs between the mystery and answer made it so enjoyable to read
Maybe interesting: Peter Turchin offers a critique of some of the points the Davids make: https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/an-anarchist-view-of-human-social-evolution/
I really appreciated the conclusion of the review, but as you say we see ourselves in the distorted mirror, so it's probably because I already felt the same way. (OT but related and maybe interesting: this essay starts from the ideas of mcLuhan to hint in the same direction as the conclusion of the article, albeit from a different direction: https://palladiummag.com/2021/04/17/americas-new-post-literate-epistemology/ )
What i fail to understand is the conclusion the Davids had hoped one would get from the book. If anything, this feels more apologetic of an archipelago (or well, in its more rightist incarnation, a patchwork) kind of scenario. And I love archipelago, but by construction it's not a leftist super egalitarian future with no hierarchies, it's a system of political experimentation which can accomodate even very unleftist political arrangements next to communes in a choose-your-own-ideology way.
And I am not sure this is what they wanted to hint at, expecially when many people would not choose the commune over Singapore
EDIT: pardon a bit of sarcasm:
> So 50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.
Turns out Hobbes was right all along.
The problem with history is that there's so much of it , even if a lot of it is not documented. In general you can find support in the historical record (or in speculations about the gaps) for any reasonable position. So just as science fiction often tells us more about the present in which it is written than the future it purports to describe, so our vision of the past changes as the things we seek in it, and recognise in it, change over the generations. If you've ever written a historical study you will know that it's impossible not to select and emphasise facts according to some presupposition or other, since otherwise you would be simply overwhelmed by the material. In our age, the default mindset for approaching history is secular progressive liberal internationalism; hence the nervousness with which a lot of historians and archeologists treat aspects of even the fairly recent past, as well as important historical figures.
I haven't read this book (and I won't, now) but Debt seemed to me very much open to this kind of criticism: a thesis looking for, and finding, evidence and arguments in support, but not a complete explanation. I think there are two particular problems with writing of this kind, given our current ideological norms and the generic problem of finding what you hope and expect to find.
One is the blindness of an overwhelmingly secular age to the importance of religion. I don't mean people in churches, I mean the sense of the world as inhabited and dominated by forces which humans could not understand, let alone control, and which needed to be propitiated or negotiated with through ceremonies. And this led to reification of such forces in the form of gods and spirits, and more sophisticated ideas of divine order and the interpenetration of the human and the divine. Now given that it's almost impossible to recapture the largely religious world-view behind, for example, the plays of Shakespeare, we should be extremely circumspect about assuming we can do the same thing by inference from civilisations thousands of years ago.
But (second point) in a liberal, teleological society, where we are happy to sit in judgement on the past, we get the problem of what I have called in a recent article "chronicism", which is the evaluation of the past in terms of the present, and attempts to force what are fundamentally anachronistic modern models onto it. So to talk, of "equality" in medieval times is, I would suggest, not very helpful, and what I think we have here, judging from the excellent review, is an attempt at something similar.
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/chronicism-a-new-problem?s=w
Hmm, the "Chornicism" criticism sounds like a re-encapsulation of the idea of the "Whig Theory of History": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_history. A liberal, teleological society, happy to judge the past in support of the politicians of the present...
"Whig history" tends to be used to define more specifically all the "Moral Arc Trending Towards Justice" stuff. It is not popular among current historians because they have a tendency to side with the leftists, and they often lose.
Yes, though I think it's surprisingly analogous. It's Whig history if it had been created by different people than the Whigs.
The high school theory is interesting, but I think it's missing something, which is that high school social antics may be peculiar to situations when you put together people of that specific age group and basically let them form a society of same-age peers. This is probably an unnatural situation in the ancient world; people wouldn't necessarily be segregated by age in the same way, so the status hierarchies would likely not pan out like high school.
Age always creates natural hierarchies; although the youth may rebel against their elders, it would be natural to defer to people who have more experience, time to accumulate physical and social resources, etc. This is true within high schools as well; your year in high school is a major determinant of your social status. And on average one would expect older people (especially those with families) to have a vested interest in keeping the youth well-behaved so as not to disturb the peace.
There's also a theory that social jockeying is particularly prevalent in *US* high schools, perhaps because of a lack of formal social ranks in US society.
It's a good cautionary point, but there's a broad "middle age" period in human life when there isn't a super strong sorting by age. If a company chose a CEO that was either 22 or 82 that would raise eyebrows. But anything from early 40s to late 60s and we don't notice the age much at all. If you said "So-and-so (age 45/55/65) is a wise and experienced leader" it doesn't much matter which age you put in the parentheses.
We do mellow in middle age, but for most of the period in question people died before 40 (if they were lucky enough to survive childhood). So the prehistoric equivalent of “middle age” was maybe 18-30? High school may be overstating it, but there’s only so much wisdom and maturity you can accumulate in a dispersed, preliterate society before 30.
I don't think that's the case. Life expectancy is not the typical age of death, the two are quite different. Earlier ages suffered from high rates of child mortality, death in childbirth, et cetera, which brought down life expectancy quite a bit[1], but they still had plenty of people who made it to their 60s and probably older. There were plenty of American Indians in the 1800s who were old and wrinkled, it's not the case that they all snuffed it by age 40.
------------------------
[1] Obvious example: in a society where half the people die immediately at birth and half die at age 80, the life expectancy at birth is 40.
That is true, but I don't think that looking at the age of modern CEOs tells you much about what age differences meant in stateless (and business-less) societies. Before states, the people you lived with were overwhelmingly your relatives. And when you consider how, say, even small age differences between siblings set their relationships for life, it's not hard to see why age differences are important in societies like that.
With that said, perhaps we can harmonize that with the high-school model by seeing the social jockeying as existing between families more than between individuals. It seems like every society outside the modern West has some concept of "family honor" which means that what you do reflects on the respect that the neighbors have for your whole family, and can act as quite a constraint on behavior.
Holy cow, this was really epic. Now I feel the urge to get the opinion of an anthropologist on this.
The whole part of the theatrical nature of hirachies made me think "This is what happens when you let constructivists sit in their own stew for to long."
The answer from Occams razor for why those societies did not have aristocracies year round, was because they couldn't. Their economic mode forced them to disperse every few months. In those dispersed groups everybody had to pull their weight.
Stable year round hireachies need easy to store staple foods, like grains. Before that when you tried to play the courtly games, of the fat season, in other seasons you simply starved.
This is an excellent point.
I've not read the book, though I'm familiar with Graeber (I was there at Crooked Timber when he got nasty but didn't participate in any of the discussions), and this seems like an excellent review.
On the topic of why civilization eventually coalesced around hierarchical societies, Mark Moffett has some observations about that in his excellent, The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall (Basic Books 2019). Moffett studied evolution and ants under E.O. Wilson at Harvard and went on to develop a reputation as a photographer of ants and ant life, publishing photos in National Geographic and many other places. He's also curious and reads a lot and so has written about the nature of societies, from insects to humans.
Among other things he talks about fission-fusion societies in animals and humans. These are societies where bands will spend part of their time on their own, but will also conjoin with other bands in the society for joint activities. That's one of the things discussed in this review and it relates to the problem of why full-time hierarchical societies eventually emerged out of the fluid jumble we see in preliterate social groups. Here's a crucial passage from p. 138:
"Taking to cultivation at all but the smallest scale of simple gardening had another drawback that no early farmer could have predicted: it could ensnare a society in a plant trap. A trap, because the option of going back to hunting and gathering full time faded away once an expanding society committed to agriculture. [...] Yet once a society grew to a huge population, or was packed in tight with other agricultural societies, the numbers of people would be too great to be supported by native foods and starvation would be guaranteed."
So, once a society became so successful at farming that it decides to stick together all year, it will in time become committed to farming and loose the option to fission into small hunting-gathering bands. As this happens, size forces hierarchy on the society. I'm sure the Dunbar number is part of the story but there's more going on.
I did a series of blog posts about Moffett's book. Here's the one where I quote him on the plant trap, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/10/reading-human-swarm-1-hunter-gatherers.html
Here's a post where I discuss the size of social groups more generally, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2019/10/reading-human-swarm-2-importance-of.html
I've gathered all my Moffett posts into a PDF which you can download here: https://www.academia.edu/41576252/Reading_Mark_Moffett_s_The_Human_Swarm
Gossip per se doesn't stifle growth. Gossip in the service of tall poppy cutting has the potential to stifle growth, but only certain kinds. The west ,. particularly the US, is tolerant of huge inequalities in wealth and fame, and it's gossip is mostly focused on policing their relationship to power and sex.
I feel quite a few of the critiques against this book are isolated demand for rigor, of the sort other thinkers rarely face in this neck of the wood. While it is (together with Debt) a book of "science", it should be compared in the same weight category: against "Sapiens", etc.
The Davids (i'm keeping the term!) are writing two books in one: one is an attack against the current framework of anthropology and prehistory (quite thorough and very well documented); another is their personal replacement framework (less well defended). To say the least, both the old framework and the new are politically charged. Only one of them, though, is dictating all of the public though since anthropology became a science. As such, this book should be read as something which will probably make a bunch of us bristle reflexively (the well known political tags attached to the author does not help in this regard). This goes double with establishment figures from academia: all "I have found this and that" questionable has to go through a filter of "is the person saying that benefitting from the status quo", and mainly: "is the person doing a purely negative review on a few focused points or a true general review with positives and negatives", a test that rarely fails to signal a hit job.
When it comes to misuse of the cited material, I have to step in and defend the authors here: the disciplines being discussed are always *interpretations* of archeological artifacts. The fact that a discovery was published and conclusions drawn will always reflect both the act of discovery (new ruins, etc) and the underlying interpretation framework. If you attack a framework, you will end up citing a bunch of litterature where the conclusions and abstract are seemingly misrepresented: but you have just used the discovery and discarded the loaded / dated / incorrect interpretation. If someone (like I think many of the citation warriors here have done) only skims randomly selected citations using only the intro / abstract/ conclusions and not the actual experimental section, the conclusions will be incorrect a lot of the time... Feel free to correct me here.
All that to say that I enjoyed this book very much, and it was a nice, heavy chunck of thought food to ruminate for a while.
> If someone (like I think many of the citation warriors here have done) only skims randomly selected citations using only the intro / abstract/ conclusions and not the actual experimental section, the conclusions will be incorrect a lot of the time...
Do you know of an example from archeology which shows how a 'citation warrior' could make this mistake? Not necessarily research cited by the Davids, although obviously that would be more relevant.
Hi, good Muster! First, I want to clarify: "citation warriors", on re-reading, sounds condescending. Yet, I intended it to be a kid of compliment: citation verification is hard, a slog and time consuming, and people who do it are literally warriors in my mind. It's true that internet adds a snerk to anything typed and I should have been aware of that, sorry if it offended anyone.
My comment comes not from any expertise in archeology, but from a set of general considerations on "reading research backwards", as Scott might put. It can apply to many (if not all) areas of research, but high interpretability ones are more susceptible. As an example: as a modern psychiatrist well versed in cognitive behavioural therapy, you are dropped in a parallel society (damn these random wormholes) that attaches a lot of importance to correct citations in books, but somehow never got past Freud. To justify your superior theory, you need to add citationsn to your work which all come from a framework of thought where they are self evidently correct and draw the corresponding conclusions... The difficulties come fast!
Hope that is what you were asking? I can try and find the original document where I found the explanation, but it's been a while and I just have the gist: "attacking the previous paradigm tautolaugically means you will cite work contradicting you in their interpretation, and you should rely on the experimental section only"
Thanks. I understand now.
'Citation warrior' doesn't sound quite as negative as 'data thug', but 'citation checker' or 'citation scrutineer' both have less of potential connotation of any sort. (I had to verify that 'scrutineer' is a word; I meant to invent it if not.)
Why do I think that DALL-E 2, given the term scrutineer, would output some sort of piratical dream figure?
Excellent food for thought! That'll be my favorite review so far.
My encounter with Graeber's "Debt" was similar - fascinating stuff, though the facts fit his thesis a little too well.
pretty much my impression as well, except they caught more self-contradictions.
For another hypothetical solution to the Sapient paradox, that does not politicise the past but ends up wacky nonetheless, I offer the ideas of journalist Graham Hancock (of did-the-Atlanteans-build-the-sphinx fame). His idea is that at some point humans started consuming magic mushrooms, got high on them and saw visions, this inspired them to do cave art and then civilisation somehow followed from these new mental experiences. It's definitely the most fun of the hypotheses, in my opinion.
I’m reminded a little of the Anti-Politics machine review, and a little of the Gary Taubes argument that only dumb scientists study nutrition.
Anthropologists are losers, by which I mean they were nerds in high school, and not particularly smart or creative or they would have done other things with their time, meaning they can’t possibly acknowledge that popularity was the governing principle of pre-civilization (that means they suck historically) and frankly they’re probably not bright/creative enough to ever figure the truth out anyway (because who even goes into anthropology?).
I love the part about summoning an Elder God. It fits so perfectly with the idea that social media gave a megaphone to all the dumbest people in society. They are advantaged because they don’t care about nuance (perhaps aren’t even capable of it). No cognitive dissonance slowing them down.
Social media has tilted the power dynamic to the people running the most primitive human OS, gossiping about people to bring them down. Lmao
Less of this, please. You are giving the impression you are running "the most primitive human OS" yourself right now.
Does the book anywhere describe the methods used to deduce political arrangements from 7000 year old arrangements of rocks and bones and shells?
I have personally been very unimpressed by everything I've read about the scholarly interpretation of Gobekli Tepe. You will read a discussion on how the Gobekli Tepe site proves a religious and cultural fixation with the phallus -- that Gobekli Tepe is a temple to a "phallic cult." And then the evidence for this is ultimately ... they used pillars. Which, like almost all pillars across the ancient world, widen near the top in order to support more of the overlying burden while minimizing the weight of the pillar itself, thus looking phallic.
(It gets worse: they also refer to a specific type of t-shaped pilled used in Gobekli Tepe as being shaped like a man covering his genitals with his hands. I implore you to look up pictures of t-shaped Gobekli Tepe pillars and tell me if this description doesn't seem like utter bullshit.)
Also, do the authors discuss the idea that substantial amounts of coastal land, where there should be archaeological sites on the order of 50,000-200,000 years old, is now under water?
I reckon you're onto something, the substantial variation in coastlines over the period being examined has been completely overlooked in the review and seemingly the book. Even today, human settlements express a clear preference for coastal locations. Virtually all of those from 15 to 100,000 years ago, and thus most potential Gobekli Tepes, are now under dozens of metres of sea water. Much of the apparent 'Sapient Paradox' may largely be just gaps in the record.
Another wretched work of heredity denying propaganda. Sorry if that sounds a bit strong, but at this point, it's utterly indefensible to try and explain inequalities without reference to heritable behavioral differences within and between populations. A failure to do so is a sign of profound ignorance and/or ideological bias.
On the topic of bias, "Western society is great unless you're black" and other such nonsense should be sufficient to dismiss this book out of hand. Black people in the west enjoy a standard of living higher than the overwhelming majority of people to ever live, and the plurality of evidence suggests suggests black white inequality is a product of heritable behavioral differences. Blacks in the west enjoy a standard of living which could not be dreamt of by most people in Africa, but there's absolutely ZERO reason to believe that they are *necessarily* capable of having the same standard of living as western whites and Asians unless you're a creationist.
Yeah, this is always the part of this blog where I peace out. You can't convince these goobers that they're wrong (or even that, if their premises were correct, they'd be wrong in different ways). And Scott in his infinite wisdom doesn't see fit to get rid of this sort of useless railroading. So they just reliably show up every time a thread gets long enough.
Tell me you’re an insecure white boi without telling me you’re an insecure white boi
You are incorrect about Putin being afraid of cancel culture, and certainly wrong about it seeming that he is more afraid of it than nuclear weapons. The article in question referred to him talking about Russian artists being pressured by western institutions to condemn the invasion in order to perform. He's not "afraid" of this, he's talking about it as a propaganda coup.
This is different than what cancel culture really is, which is deranged social media pile ons trying to get the target fired or hounded into suicide. Cancel culture can't really happen across borders.
Pity. It would be a virtuous act to hound Putin into suicide.
I would say that there's a zero percent chance that Putin commits suicide but a non-zero percent chance that his death is officially recorded as a suicide.
That depends on whether his replacement is more or less belligerent. Either is possible.
There's a significant chance that if Vladimir Putin decides to commit suicide, he'll decide to try and take a billion or so other people with him. And since he does have a couple thousand thermonuclear missiles at his disposal, which I am rather less than 100% certain that his staff would be able to take away from him if he became suicidal, there is one important question for you to ask: how close would you estimate your home is from ground zero?
Not close enough. But it’s the principle of the thing. Remember Khaddafi?
I remember Gaddafi, yes. Unfortunately so does Kim Jong-Un. And that's a big part of the reason why Kim Jong-Un is closing in on a hundred nuclear and thermonuclear missiles, which he will never, ever, *ever* get rid of except by losing a nuclear war. The price for having Gaddafi anally raped to death with a bayonet, so you could say "three cheers for the principle of the thing!", is a real and significant increase in the probability that millions of Koreans (and maybe a few hundred thousand Americans) will die in a nuclear war in this decade. And Kim is just the first of many.
Add Vladimir Putin to the club, and it won't be mere millions. But hey, it's the principle of the thing. Let justice be done though the heavens may fall.
Move to ground zero, you and your family, *then* tell us how urgent it is that we kill all the bad evil nuclear-armed tyrants no matter the cost.
Oh, we used to live much closer to ground zero - and if you think being nice to Putin's ilk will cause them to reciprocate, you need to re-read this article: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gFMH3Cqw4XxwL69iy/eight-short-studies-on-excuses
I don't think that "being nice" to Putin will cause him to reciprocate, and I've said nothing like that. I do think, and I have said, that trying to *kill* Putin, *will* cause him to reciprocate. And, yes, pushing him into a corner where he doesn't see any way out but suicide, counts as trying to kill him if he can see us pushing.
Excellent review. Just one observation: Hobbes was founder of the political Right? I would argue Plato has a better claim to that title.
> victim of a totally inexplicable and blazingly fast case of necrotizing pancreatitis.
Let me start by acknowledging that this writer writes better than I can, and I am envious of that.
But I hate this kind of writing. "Necrotizing" is not clever, it's pretentious. Words have semantic values. You undermine their usage when you get creative with them.
"necrotizing" sounds like a joke but there's no joke. Tone matters.
https://www.cedars-sinai.org/health-library/diseases-and-conditions/n/necrotizing-pancreatitis.html
I just read the winner entry for this year. Wow
Kudos (and bragging rights) go directly to you.
This was a very well-considered review, and deserves a well-considered response. Instead you get a bunch of barely-coherent thoughts jumbled together:
1) On the thesis of ancient pre-civilization being a seasonal thing: sign me up for it. "Nomadism, but with regional burning man once a year" sounds like an ideal way for humanity to spend the next ten thousand years. It helps that pre-agricultural man was also kind of post-scarcity in a weird way - food security was generally much better for hunter-gatherer than for farmer, and all of the stuff of life could be made by you and yours.
2) On highschool as the crab bucket - I think that Americans seem obliged to have universally awful high school experiences, but mine was actually quite pleasant. I went from an small primary school environment dominated by awful, entitled, gossipy kids to a public high school which was large enough for me to blend in and find my preferred group. My school was very english-model, with all that that implies. I don't know what this adds or subtracts to the "Neolithic as gossip girls" hypothesis, but there's a data point at least.
3) On Twitter as the new/old destroyer: I think it's always been mean girls at the top - Twitter just pulls the curtain a bit and reminds us that the people running things are just average human beings, only with portfolios and armies instead of {whatever signified popularity when you were in high school}. The geeks and nerds never, ever, ended up on top They just got put in a cubicle somewhere were then told that the popular kids really do have their best interests at heart.
I think (3) is a little overdone. People do exist with genuine leadership skills, and they are definitely not the same as nerds and geeks. They have a different skillset entirely, they really are "people" people, who enjoy getting to know people, enjoy getting the best out of them, inspiring them, et cetera. They do make decisions, sometimes difficult decisions, but more because somebody has to and not because they enjoy putting other people down. People love to follow them, to work for them, to enlist under their banner. They're very important people, because good ideas are not enough by themselves -- you always need teamwork and ordinary people who don't follow the details of the idea but are willing to throw themselves into making it happen. This is what genuine leadership can do.
Of course, unfortunately such people are rare, and so you get a lot of second-raters who aspire to the job and sometimes fill in, who don't actually have the necessary skills and substitute being Mr./Ms. Bossy Pants to limp along. But that should not blind one to the fact that genuine leaders do exist, and are a critical component of success.
Fair enough - I think that leaning on the mean girls analogy makes it seem like I consider the folk at the top to be lacking in leadership or something. Instead I should clarify that what looks to the classic high IQ/low EQ person like a bunch of shallow, mean people playing incomprehensible status games just is politics as it is actually carried out, by people who are temperamentally suited and trained for it. True leaders can, as you point out, exist and thrive in that space - the review even mentioned how the example of Iroquois leadership seems to require a combination of intelligence, erudition, people skills and charisma that would code for good leadership in any society.
If I were to push the egalitarian aspect of the book's argument (at least as presented), I would say that the main difference between the pre and post-civilizational mode is that, as in the Iroquois example, there's at least a chance for anyone with leadership skills to rise all the way to the top (simply because the societies are smaller and the hierarchies are generally flatter and less well-entrenched). So rather than Twitter being the re-invention of some atavistic, universal tyranny, it's just everything as it always have been, only now the peasants get to see behind the curtain a bit to the parts of the power structure that they'd hitherto been completely excluded from and lied to about.
Greg Cochran's 'oeuvre' (book, blog, and poasts) touches on a lot of topics relevant to this review. Why 'anatomically modern humans' didn't displace neanderthals sooner is a topic he has blogged about. Cochran would also take issue with: "there’s no well-accepted evidence that human cognitive abilities emerged at 10,000 BC, and... Homo sapiens was pretty much genetically-intact, at least in the ways we think should matter, somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago."
If the author is unfamiliar with Cochran then The 10,000 year Explosion is required reading.
Anyway, I quite enjoyed this review - well written and creative!
"This often leads to blanket statements, like how Western civilization is currently great “except if you’re Black,” or even outright misrepresentations of their opponents, like assigning to Steven Pinker the claim that “all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth-century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’” (Pinker definitely doesn’t claim this), or rejecting kinship-based scientific theories of altruism with reasoning like “many humans just don’t like their families very much” (these are all real quotes)."
This rather reminds be of Gell-Man amnesia: If I can see someone is lying about a Canadian academic who is still alive, why should I trust him about things I can't judge? Such as his claims about a native Canadian called Kandiaronk who died a third of a millennium ago.
Are there good estimates of population numbers before and in 10,000 BC? Because a slowly growing population up to reaching a critical mass in which the Great Trap can be escaped sounds like a trivially plausible explanation to me.
"Are there good estimates of population numbers before and in 10,000 BC?" I'm morbidly curious about the size of the error bars...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_demography
debates about bottlenecks might give the best insight. But I´ve only had a cursory look on the literature and can´t judge how robust the current numbers are. Population genetics seems the best way to dig into it, though.
This review is genius. Cancel the contest and award the winner, this one won’t be bettered.
Review-of-the-review: 9/10
New front-runner for me. I especially like that this review advances the discussion and puts forward its own ideas, but in a way that still feels like it's engaging with the book. There's lots of interesting data presented along the lines of "what did the reviewer learn from the book" and at the end we get the reviewer's own interpretation. The review also does a good job of situating The Dawn of Everything intellectually and politically without letting that color the analysis too much.
On the minus side, I suspect some of the treatment here is a bit reductionist; e.g. it's weird to see Hobbes presented as an arch-conservative and I'm sure intellectual historians would paint a more complicated picture. But I see the rhetorical benefit, for the purposes of this review, of presenting him as a foil for Rosseau. Similarly I'm not totally satisfied by the "Gossip Trap" theory; what was it that broke humans out of the Gossip Trap, and why is Twitter such a threat given that our relationships still far exceed Dunbar's number? But it feels like a productive concept and I really appreciate the ending note of intellectual humility about these things.
As always, many thanks for contributing!
Loved it! Great review!
Fantastic review!
I have lots to say but I was struck that he mentioned the 3 bigs: Harari, Pinker and Diamond but left out my current favorite Joseph Henrich of The Secret of Our Success who I discovered from [Scott's great review ](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/) of course.
I've been slowly but surely getting through it on audiobook.
Anyway, in the very first chapter Henrich spends a lot of time describing the importance of "Prestige" as an alternative and complementary form of power as opposed to "Dominance". He states that culture and tradition is copied and transferred via prestigious individuals and not via dominant individuals.
This seems to fit extremely well with the review's conclusion about a prehistoric popularity conquest.
To quote Henrich:
"The growing body of adaptive information available in the minds of other people also drove genetic evolution to create a second form of human status, called prestige, which now operates alongside the dominance status we inherited from our ape ancestors. Once we understand prestige, it will become clear why people unconsciously mimic more successful individuals in conversations; why star basketball players like LeBron James can sell car insurance; how someone can be famous for being famous (the Paris Hilton Effect); and, why the most prestigious participants should donate first at charity events but speak last in decision-making bodies, like the Supreme Court. The evolution of prestige came with new emotions, motivations, and bodily displays that are distinct from those associated with dominance.".
This strikes me as an elegant and compelling explanation of prehistory.
Your "gossip trap" reminds me of one side of Acemoglu's and Robinson's "Narrow Corridor". Their argument is that societies flourish best in a "corridor" where Hobbes' Leviathan is "shackled" by civil society. Exit the corridor on the side of too much government power and you get despotism. Exit the corridor on the side of too much power in the hands of civil society and no one can amass enough legitimate authority to organize large groups. This latter case isn't anarchy, but it prevents the kind stability needed for sustained growth and freedom. Gossip is a powerful tool for keeping societies stuck in that state.
To the author: This is a brilliant review, and the best of the contestants thus far!
This review is excellent. That's all.
I really wanted to comment on the Paradox... but then...
I congrat you, Book Reviewer, for proposing the Gossip Trap as the solution to the Sapient Paradox. I'm afraid it makes a lot of sense.
So anthropologists not only take it for granted that meritocracy is a bad thing, but that it's such a bad thing that putting a cap on it is one of the great benefits of human intelligence. Am I reading that right? Seems completely nutbar.
>So 50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.
High schools are so bad because there is no objective criteria of success or usefulness. 50,000 BC would certainly have had social hierarchies, but there would also have been more objective measures of success - being a good warrior or chieftain, having access to food-productive areas, having skills in the various metis-filled arts needed to run a society of that era. This would ameliorate the purely social competition.
First impression: The "Gossip Trap" hypothesis is interesting and deserves real investigation. One of my problems with the rather fawning admiration by the "Davids" of the "non-hierarchical" organization schemes of early societies is that such groups are destined to be completely flattened by organized and acquisition minded -- and thus larger, better resourced and more powerful -- groups. It happened to the native Americans, except for those more militaristic minded (and thus organized and lead) like the Cherokee and Apache, the Myceneans, and on and on. If Western civilization is devolving as this describes, it will be overtaken by those who find a way to suppress or co-opt social media to retain and control a hierarchical civilization. It seems this is being attempted by China, and also by members of the Western elite among themselves. Hardly the first critique of social media, but one which has an interesting slant on the problem and its mechanism of action.
I really like the first half of this review! It's interesting, well-written, and does a good job engaging with the book's content.
I'm somewhat less convinced by the "Gossip trap" explanation: it isn't like small-scale, relationships-based societies disappeared 10,000 years ago, or like none of our archaeological evidence comes from this kind of society. Lots of "Western" societies tended to become large and centralized, but plenty of (maybe even most?) central African societies were organized around much-smaller, social-based up until the colonial era (see e.g. Jan Vansina's "Paths in the Rainforests"), and seem to have been pretty functional / produced plenty of the sort of archeological evidence this Gossip trap would predict would be lacking. There's a lot that's very interesting to explore in how this kind of society functions, but the "gossip trap" explanation feels too reductive and it doesn't fit the specific facts very well.
Still a very good review overall! I just much prefer the first half to the second.
> Some might try to dismiss the Sapient Paradox by pointing to evidence of ongoing human evolution. And while there is some evidence of recent human evolutionary changes, it often seems clustered around things like dietary changes—at least, there’s no well-accepted evidence that human cognitive abilities emerged at 10,000 BC, and almost everyone who tackles these issues, from the Davids to Yuval to Pinker to Diamond, agrees that Homo sapiens was pretty much genetically-intact, at least in the ways we think should matter, somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. Indeed, early Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago had brains as large as our own!
This is untrue.
All humans outside of Africa are intermixed with archaic hominids, most notably Neanderthals, but also Denisovians.
We know from genetic studies that some Neanderthal brain-related genes are upselected while male fertility related Neanderthal genes are downselected.
This suggests that humans did, in fact, change when they left Africa, because the modern human is not homo sapiens, but a very slight admixture of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals - and in some cases, other archaic hominids as well, such as Denisovians.
This could easily resolve the paradox. You needed the right mixture of brain genes to get this stuff; once you got that, those people outcompeted all other groups and basically took over the world.
There's a paradox of intelligence: intelligence is extremely useful for creating better tools and more advanced technology, but once someone makes it, the rest of the group can copy it much more easily. How, then, is higher intelligence selected for, when it may not give individuals enormous advantages reproductively?
This is a difficult question to answer... but there's a plausible answer.
What if it wasn't selected for on an individual level?
Imagine the following scenario:
For tens of thousands of years, you have people sort of sloshing around. You need enough "good brain genes" to get the creative juices really flowing, so you have the occasional genius who does improve things, and then people copy it. This leads to random, slow progress, as these geniuses pop up and then disappear because there just isn't selective pressure to make their genes proliferate, but the techniques they come up with are imitated and spread. Sure, it would be better for the *group* if the geniuses became omnipresent, but evolution doesn't know that.
This looks an awful lot like this "trap", but in reality, what is actually going on is that there's these "geniuses" who advance technology and then the multitudinous copycats.
Then, something happens. A group gets taken over by a genius, who has tons of kids, or a genius family goes off and forms their own group and due to the founder effect, this group ends up with a really disproportionate number of these genius genes. These "smart genes" begin to approach fixation in this population, or possibly DO reach fixation.
At this point, you can start to see group selection occur, as while on the level of the individual, the genius is not particularly reproductively successful or selected for, on a *group* level, groups that have hit fixation on these genes will be more successful than those which aren't.
These groups then commit serial genocide, going out and either killing or subjugating the other tribes and producing a grossly disproportionate number of "genius" offpsring, allowing the groups to get these genes fixed.
This doesn't always happen; sometimes (if not most of the time), the "genius" conquerors are absorbed into the underlying population and the genius genes are lost.
But this doesn't matter, because there's always another "genius" genocide waiting, just around the corner, from one of the lucky groups which does get those genes fixed in it.
The result, then, is that these groups start to spread while mixing with local populations. But as long as the "genius" population still generated SOME tribes that were geniuses, and could then slaughter or conquer their neighbors, it continues to proliferate. This would cause all "genius" groups to be some mixture of the local tribes that could get that "genius" stuff up to a high enough level.
In this model, rather than "Europeans" or "Eurasians" being the successful, civilized group, instead you have some seed group which starts basically planting itself across populations, very possibly an elite group that does so.
So rather than everyone popping up and suddenly becoming "advanced" at the same time, instead there was some "seed" event where this started, and this group sort of cavalcaded around. Other groups could imitate the technology, but struggled to advance it themselves, and ended up getting wiped out/subjugated.
This would explain weird things, like "Why did Northern and Western Europe become the center of the world when they weren't very smart previously" - rather than having to come up with some weird explanation where smart people failed to invent advanced civilization and then slingshotted up to a hyper-advanced level, we instead say that they actually just weren't super smart to begin with, and became much smarter because they got taken over by "genius" populations from elsewhere.
This rather nicely fits with the spread of "civilization" in ancient times - you have this group, possibly somewhere in the Near East, that ends up spreading out into Egypt and India and across Mesopotamia, and then over to China and the Far East. The various ancient peoples spread around the Mediterranean and North Africa, then the Romans conquer to the north and spread it further, the Chinese spread it across the Far East, with some of them getting to Japan, and that group then contaminates the rest of the island, etc.
This would explain why things look the way they do today in the Old World.
The problem is, this hypothesis does nothing to explain Mesoamerican civilization or the Inca.
Of course, one explanation is that this maybe happened more than once - maybe there wasn't a single seed event, but this sort of "lucky break" actually happened a few times in history, and instead, East Asian civilization, the Near Eastern civilization, and the American civilization were actually three separate lucky events.
Another is that the actual origination group was actually a group of North Eurasians who ended up spreading to Mesopotamia, Europe, and the Americas - there is evidence of relatively recent shared ancestry between Europeans and North Americans. In this scenario, it was actually this group which was to blame, and seeded these "genius" populations across the Northern Hemisphere. Of course, this raises the question of why it took so long for us to notice this happening, but maybe we just haven't found the evidence because the last Ice Age wiped it out, or maybe we will go puttering around Russia or Siberia we'll find some ancient impressive thing somewhere - we only recently found Göbekli Tepe, so maybe we just haven't gone and dug in the right hill in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe the Ice Age kept the groups too small to really do much of value that was highly visible, but once the Ice Age ended, these folks went out and took over the world.
Or maybe there was a boating group that ended up spreading from East Asia to the Americas, along the coast, and accidentally "planted" a couple civilizations.
Or maybe it's just completely wrong, and the reason why this happened is something completely different.
Of course, there's another thought that comes to mind:
What if *heredity hierarchy* was the thing that allowed this to happen? That is to say, rather than there being some "tribe" that did this, it instead was inbred ruling families that effectively created the smaller populations that enabled these genes to reach fixation in them.
It was very common for ancient kings and nobles to be highly inbred and related to each other, but this also happened amongst other classes of people, with various specialist groups often being related to themselves and passing the craft on within the family.
What if this was not a flaw, but a feature?
This creates a small population amongst which these "genius genes" might flourish. In this scenario, these groups - the nobles, but also possibly hereditary artisans and priests - could potentially get these genes fixed amongst them. This gave them an advantage in manipulating and controlling other people, and gave their civilizations an advantage over competing civilizations. Indeed, they might be outright selecting for these genes, because in these groups, showing high ability gets you social credit and respect and gets you put in the position to pass on your genes the most profitably and stay in charge.
Of course, the fact that it is Good To Be King causes your genes to spread out in the population as you have a bunch of illegitimate children as well, which could result in your genes no longer being so special, which could eventually result in less inequality between the noble/artisan/whatever class and the general population, eventually resulting in the fall of the nobility as they stopped being special (or at least, special relative to a larger proportion of the population, like the middle class). This would be especially pronounced in lower population areas - a small smart founder population, or an elite rolling into a small place and spreading their genes all over the place, could result in a population like that. Like, say, Britain, or Iceland, or Japan.
Meanwhile, if you get overthrown by outsiders without these genes, it may be hard for them to maintain things the way you did, though they might have more success if they marry into your family and get those genes. This would explain why many civilizations fell apart after some other people rolled in and replaced the elite, while others benefitted when a foreign elite replaced their decrepit and stupid elite with one that was actually competent.
The gossip trap lacks explanatory power of how any such transition occurred.
Why did groups get bigger and break the population barrier? Why wouldn't this have happened previously? Why did it only occur amongst some civilizations and not others? Like, the Mississippian people seem like they should have broken this, but they apparently didn't, as they produced very little tech. Meanwhile, the Easter Islanders were on a tiny little island and somehow ended up making some fancy things.
It also has the significant flaw that one of the best ways to "beat gossip" is to produce things of value. Being an asshole to the guy who makes the best weapons in your village is a great way not to get those. People gossip a great deal about the rich and powerful, but they remain rich and powerful, because they own companies or are good actors or whatever.
Moreover, *smart people tend to win out in these sorts of social games.*
The most popular people are also often quite smart; indeed, the notion of smart people being socially unsuccessful a very recent trope, and honestly probably has more to do with modern technology than anything else, as it allowed smart people with poor social skills to do something of value, which created the nerd stereotype, when in fact the brilliant general, the clever businessman, etc. was the rule of the day previously. The Founding Fathers were all quite smart, and had risen to the top of the social hierarchy via their mastery of social skills and business acumen and leadership ability.
I give this review a chance of about 15% of having been written by Curtis Yarvin.
Which admittedly is not a very high chance, but, as the saying goes, it's weird it isn't zero.
I read this review at the suggestion of someone who commented on this post applying anthropologist Mary Douglas's work to some of our current purity purges: https://vpostrel.substack.com/p/purity-sorcery-and-cancel-culture?s=w
I agree that it's an excellent complement.
Another piece of the "why 10K years ago" puzzle: https://vpostrel.com/articles/how-textiles-became-the-fabric-of-summer
I'm a corrosion professional, and I want to interrogate whether there's a "civilisation trap" at all. The vast majority of human made structures simply don't last that long. The theoretical corrosion rate for modern steel in normal atmospheric conditions would be roughly 0.05mm/yr, and it'll probably be higher if you had iron instead and you were smelting it out of a rudimentary furnace with no controls for composition. But if you had an artefact that was 150mm thick, it would have holes within 3,000 years and probably more or less gone by 4,500 years, unless you lucked out and it ended up in some kind of anoxic environment. Wood would be gone within 100 years or less.
At time scales greater than 10,000 or 20,000 years, would human made material even be detectable to us? Are we just going to the beach and pointing at the pristine sand as proof that no one has ever built a sandcastle there?
If, hypothetically, some people lived in a humid tropical region, then later died out or migrated away, I don't think we'd find their traces after 50,000 years. We wouldn't know if they'd carved their words on trees, because that tree would have been dead and decomposed for at least 48,000 years before we even get the chance to turn it into IKEA dining tables. If they had trade routes and they left, their descendants wouldn't know those anymore and the roads themselves would have grown over. If they made art we might not recognise it as such and it's probably made of leaves or they might have crushed beetles to make paint which would be gone after a few thousand years, maybe 10,000 tops. If they buried their dead then some animals might have dug up the bones later and scattered the parts far and wide. We'd only know if they built something like the Stonehenge, but even then - would Stonehenge have survived on a faultline? Would the pyramids survive massive coastline or river path changes? What about bushfires? Massive floods, tornadoes, or cyclones?
If we all collectively decided to abandon a town after a particular bad cyclone, flood or fire, I would posit that it'll only take maybe 20,000 years before the town basically vanishes into nature, and that's with modern building materials. You'd be able to find us only by doing mass spec on the dirt and finding traces of petrochemicals and exotic minerals that were in our tech and you'd go "well these people must have traded with [places that had these resources]", which is way underselling the town that used to exist there. Maybe the cockroaches in the area test a bit higher for mercury or microplastics. You wouldn't know about how Sally liked avocado toast and coffee, or Tom the yoga instructor, or Mrs Tran's Vietnamese bakery. Even a tiled floor has a useful lifespan of maybe 100-200 years without maintenance, and I'm assuming that's indoors, in an intact building.
That being said, I'm not an archeologist, and someone's probably debunked my take already, but I'm interested in hearing the rebuttal.
It's a striking idea, but not very plausible. We have stone structures from over 10,000 years ago (Gobekli Tepe), various kinds of carvings and cave paintings from 40,000 years ago or so, stone tools and human remains from 100,000s or even millions of years ago. Even assuming all the products of civilization proper would have corroded, you would still expect to see evidence somewhere of its effects. Ice cores can measure atmospheric composition (which shows mining / industry effects even from well before the modern period) out to 100,000s of years ago. Fossil fuel and mineral deposits are orders of magnitude older than that and show no signs of being picked over. There's probably some way a prior civilization _could_ be compatible with the evidence by making assumptions that explain these discrepancies. But as a prior it has little to recommend it.
Yes. As is often said but bears repeating: the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
It's worth noting that Dunbar's Number has come under some pretty devastating criticism recently, like here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8103230/
Wikipedia: "A replication of Dunbar's analysis with a larger data set and updated comparative statistical methods has challenged Dunbar's number by revealing that the 95% confidence interval around the estimate of maximum human group size is much too large (4–520 and 2–336, respectively) to specify any cognitive limit."
It's sad to say it of two such brilliant authors, but they could have saved themselves time and perplexity if they'd read Joseph Henrich's 2016 "The Secret to Our Success". The forward-and-backward-and-forward-again nature of cultural evolution is more parsimonious and reasonable an explanation of all the same facts than what the Davids present.
Agreed on Henrich being a much better explanation.
My first comment to SSACX, and nothing particularly original or erudite to say - how embarrassing...
*Entertainment Value. Unlike some other finalist reviews, and in sharp contrast to the non-brevity, I didn't constantly find myself struggling to keep reading. This wasn't one of the "grind through an actually-unpleasant post for progress on [Codex Completionist] Steam achieve" type things. Some other commenters compare it to last year's Progress and Poverty review, which seems apt - that was also quite long, but consistent positive utilon generation made it seem less so. One is reminded of Einstein's possibly-apocryphal layman explanation of relativity.
*Actually A Book Review. I'm not sure how to word that less-implicitly-critically. One of the concerns raised about the review of __Fusion Cuisine: Appropriating Electrons for Fun and Profit__ (sorry, can't remember actual title, that's headcanon) was that it was a very nice essay "about" the topic of the book, but didn't really...reference or review the book. Pretty sure there weren't any quotes, even. I left with a distinct feeling of having no opinion whatsoever about the associated book, other than it not being obviously wrong and possibly legible to the geriatric reader demographic, and those are low bars. Assessed on those merits, it was indeed fine, but...not a book review, which I thought was the point of this book review contest. This review avoids said pitfalls. I wish I could say the same of all previous finalists too, but that wasn't always the case. On purely technocratic pretextual grounds, this single factor is automatically (dis)qualifying for me, vote-wise. (I do think this might be an issue with Scott's fairly open-ended submission guidelines. While they do guarantee a much more diverse applicant pool, babble without prune leads to...well...a really diverse applicant pool, in both form and function. These same concerns seem to come up every year, or at least with the ACX book reviews so far.)
*Style. This has been the most "Scott-like" review so far, at least according to however my brain organizes such subjective schema. SSCAX for me has always been about the tendentiously long, peppered-with-relevant-what-the-refrances, "no really I swear this is Actually Interesting if you finish reading!" type content; this is the kind of stuff that finally convinced me to buy a subscription. It even finishes off with a possibly-plausible pet theory of Zeitgeist relevance that has an implied "Epistemic status: kinda shrug but Big If True". Contrasts nicely with the, uh, let's charitably call it a lack of epistemic humility on the part of the authors. Puncturing that certitude by satirizing the CHAPTER TITLES, IN WHICH THE GREATER WORK IS SUBDIVIDED ACCORDING TO NARRATIVE FLOW; & WITH CONSIDERATIONS FOR LEVITY was a nice tonal move as well.
*Substance. On the one hand, my priors were appropriately skeptical - I mean, c'mon, it's a book in the Pop <social science> genre. Some level of [Citation Needed] and "I do not think that citation means what you think it means" is to be expected. On the other hand, the comments section didn't disappoint in serving its divinely mandated role of collectively issuing a multitude of isolated demands for rigor - and at some point I think that definitely crosses over into rigor multis, wow. It's honestly sort of impressive that a fun doorstopper of a book, with an equally fun doorstopper of a review (Many Such Examples, actually, appreciate all the links to other reviews!), is *apparently* based on an anthropological house of cards. Which I guess would be made of flint and mammoth bone, or whatever. Social power was obviously determined by playing Status Poker. I'm not an arachnologist, and lack any relevant credentialism to assess or critique the empirical bits...but I think it's fair to say that the entertainment/enlightenment ratio of <s>Department of Egalitarianism</s> __Dawn of Everything__ is a bit lopsided. Gerrymandered, even.
*Regarding Martin Luther's Pet Thesis, One Of 99 Nailed To Jack Dorsey And Elon Musk's Respective Doors. Seems plausible enough...but as others note, this isn't exactly a hot take anymore. The great thing about Social Media Bad as food for thought is that it can be microwaved an unlimited number of times and still be sort of tasty, if empty mental calories. I say that as someone who does, in fact, think Social Media Bad and has given it up it like it's forever Lent. (She says, while writing a baroque comment on a blog, which is definitely not social media, unlike Reddit. Worst argument in the world!) It's certainly sort of novel to link this to Dunbar's Number of the Beast and ancient anthropology...but I'd really like to see the idea fleshed out a bit more. As presented, it's a bit of an all-you-have-is-a-banhammer thing, a sort of Fully General Counterargument for society's nails. Maybe it's true - but since the book which inspired(?) said thesis is itself lacking in structural integrity, shouldn't I revise my priors downwards? Perhaps if this review wins, the author could pull a Lars Doucet and go on to write three more equally-long guest posts exploring this idea in more detail. I'd certainly enjoy those!
Anyway, barring an even better review later, I'll likely vote for this one. Even a speculatively wrong thing based on another speculatively wrong thing can be thought-provoking, and I bet there's at least a little wheat in that chaff pile. (Oh, wait, agriculture wasn't invented yet. Or was it? Hmm, idiomatic uncertainty abounds! [See what I mean?])
Congratulations! This is a lively text I enjoyed reading, ever more so when it drifted away from mere book review to bold speculation. The high school social web is a convincing model for what might have ruled the social interaction of our early ancestors. However I doubt that it can explain the Sapient Paradox. There are other candidates: slow genetic development followed by a spurt, sexual selection.
> They argue that Native American intellectuals were the true originators of many of the criticisms of the Western World that would go on to define the political Left
While the review correctly points out that this claim is far too broad to be supported... wouldn't it be great to convince the far left that the entire social justice enterprise was culturally appropriated and watch it vanish in a puff of (il)logic?
Not sure I would have bothered voting in this competition but I think this review absolutely blows the others out of the water. And they weren't bad!
The "Gossip Trap" is quite possibly the most interesting theory of human prehistory that I have ever read. I love it. Just to be clear though, since this is a book review -- that's your thesis, not the thesis of the book, right?
This is an excellent piece and one of my favorite things I have read all year. It also aligns with my attitudes about this book, which were that it had a lot of interesting facts, but they seemed clearly tortured to align with the authors’ political project.
What exactly is dumb. One of us or Jaynes
No ag during the ice age because CO2 was too low to allow productivity.
I have been fascinated by this Book and its progressive attempt to identify what the authors’ believe is why we have been, and continue to be, ‘stuck’ in a particularly violent and dominate form of social structure. I completely disagree with their premises that heeding signs, taking warning, making the right assumptions and acting intelligently will allow for the human construction of a social structure that will be somehow ‘better’ as if utopia remains their goal. Nevertheless, they do introduce new concepts allowing for their theory to yield new evidence as well as new interpretations of the prevailing evidence. This is important for the process of social change, which is never progress, but only change.
The authors’ explanation of how their theory’s three elementary forms of domination (i.e., control of violence, control of esoteric knowledge, and charismatic theatrics) crystallize into institutional forms (i.e., sovereignty, administration, and heroic politics) introduces a new concepts for communicating about the state, but as they say, the ‘State’ is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is. So we are left discussing the mask, but with new concepts - which is something necessary for change.
I am always somewhat amused by how people so readily accept evolution is not based on intelligence or intent, but reject that notion when it comes to social institutions, which they say are the intended creations of intelligent actors. Of course, I take what I understand to be the evolutionist point of view.
Absolutely love this one. I am now a convinced believer in the Gossip Trap.
Re-reading to decide which is my fav-review. (And it's this one, all right.) - Now I see a fun parallel - "seasonal kings of ritual" to: Carnival. In Germany, the 'societies' vote each season -11/11 to Ash Wednesday - their new princes and (male) queens, who are upper-middle-class at least, 'cuz that honor will cost them dearly. And then those "rule" the sessions and processions - though none ever does more than announce the next event/clown et al + wave and throw candies at "their" people.
This was bravely detailed, but it did get at the heart of the problem with the book: the Davids look at the last 10,000 years and claim it speaks to what humans fundamentally are. They ignore hundreds of thousands of years of humanity.
Good catch -- thanks.
D&D isn’t anti story, it’s just another story. And the chronology in reality can’t be reduced since it has no intention, it’s not conscious. People aren’t making clear choices, they’re behaving: hormones, emotions, senses, memories, scarcity, weather. This notion that political social systems are developed in reason alone is obviously fiction. Plus the sapient paradox is obvious, how are we still on Renfrew? Sapiens gain temporal causality 75kya. Then correlational analysis 12kya. Put this mf bullshit to rest, the review and the book are pure narrative bunk. Humans are animals in chaos + language and records: don’t be fooled by the existence of either externality. Chaos rules, humans pretend consciousness until the ecology takes backcontrol as is occurring right now.
Great review. It strikes me though more as a defence of the Hobbsian view of pre-history than a real fourth alternative to it. This might be because I´m uncertain of how much of a difference between social and physical uses of power there was at that time. Even today formal rules in favour of free expression are the oddity and sanctions against it (because it´s considered a precursor to violence) the norm. Disputes remain in the realm of social power only when restricted by formal rules or technology. The examples discussed in the review support this interpretation.
High-schools rely purely social power, not just because humans have a innate tendency towards it, but also because physical power is formally sanctioned. Twitter also has technological restrictions on use of physical power which pushes users towars using social power. And even if people have access to twitter mobs, they still form traditional street mobs, even if the costs are way higher in the latter.
Great review! I love how this article takes the ideas put forward in the book and uses them as a launch pad for a far more interesting notion than anything the authors come up with. I haven't read the Dawn of Everything, but I did read Bullshit Jobs by Graeber and found it... entirely unconvincing.
The Gossip Trap idea seems quite plausible to me. I had not heard of the Sapient Paradox before I read this, and I can't wait to go down that rabbit hole.
Great review! I listened to "Dawn of Everything" and agreed with basically all your critiques. A few thoughts:
A) what made 10,000 BC such a significant date? One hypothesis is that this is when the last great extinction event took place. Wiping out certain competing megafauna might have paved the way for greater social organization to be possible, as dealing with the local saber-toothed tiger seems like a more important task than building Stonehenge, and small hunting tribes do the job just as well as big ones, kind of like landscaping companies. Also, fun thought, domestication of the dog might have been the necessary precursor to the great megafauna extinctions of 13,000-8,000 BC.
B) "The Gossip Trap" is a very fun hypothesis to explain the "Sapient Paradox." I have a few reasons why I don't buy this though (even though I want to buy it):
i) the most successful people I know all gossip a ton. They are obsessed with status, exude tons of negative energy, and work their butts off. I find these people to be rather unpleasant, but I also think that I (a person not particularly gossipy or invested in his own status) am much closer to 20,000 BC paleolithic man than they are. I just want everyone to chill. They want to be awesome and to shame all the people who are not awesome. So often gossip isn't a normative, demotivating force reminiscent of an Ayn Randian dystopia or Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. Sometimes gossip is very motivating and pushes people in innovative ways as they try desperately to become "cool."
ii) All political structures I know of are just dripping with gossip. Democratic elections are basically popularity contests. Authoritarian governments have all kinds of gossip determining who will be seen as loyal to the party and who will be sent to the gulag. These aren't 150 person monkeyspheres, these are centralized states ruling over millions. If gossip is a stagnating force that traps us in prehistory, why is gossip basically universal to human organizations? And if gossip is so stagnating, how did technology like the printing press- technology that was used to spread TONS of gossip- seemingly lead to economic/scientific progress, and not the reverse?
iii) I feel like this actually doesn't directly answer the "Sapient Paradox" at all. So people used to gossip so much they didn't build Stonehenge because they were afraid of being called a nerd. Sure. But why did things suddenly change? Their communities got so big that they needed other, more established forms of societal organization than raw social power? Why did their communities suddenly get so much bigger then? And why didn't those communities get bigger at 20,000 BC or 30,000 BC instead of 10,000 BC? I feel like we're back where we started.
All this being said, I think you're onto something when you talk like we are returning to our primitive state via Twitter/ social media/ the internet in general. I don't know whether we're getting similar to our 15,000 BC ancestors, but I do know we're getting very weird. Communication technology has the power to transform human civilizations. I'm hoping the net effect of the internet ends up being positive in the long run, but there do seem to be some bizarre negative effects that are causing all kinds of problems for people, especially in terms of mental health.
Anyways, thanks for your well written review of "The Dawn of History" and your thoughts on the Sapient Paradox/ "gossip traps." Enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoy reading Scott Alexander's stuff, which is high praise in my world. Best-
The description of hunter-gatherers as existing in a state of incredible political diversity and creativity reminds me strongly of Scott's own Archipelago utopia (which, as he pointed out, is much the same as a lot of both right- and left-anarchist utopias and even Moldbug's neoreactionary Patchwork utopia.) https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/
I'm not sure whether this is a suspicious sign of rose-tinted glasses, a positive sign that this is actually positive, a worrying sign that the status quo has already out-competed it, etc.
It could be gossip games all the way back — and we'll never be rid of them.
The one thing that got rid of gossip traps was industrialism and thoroughgoing capitalism. Everyone was driven from farms to cities where any settled neighbourhood won't be for long. Modernity has offered most people one or two choices: a gossip trap or alienated individualism. Arguably there was a brief, slight period of culture and literacy enjoyed by a broad but still exclusive middle class that wasn't a bunch of jerks, but what they has was built on the backs of slaves and colonized countries.
I'm reminded of a funny passage in Eric Voegelin's History of Political Ideas where he explains John Calvin and the rise of protestantism in terms of terroristic hick towns full of surveillance moralism. It's not really wrong to think of the Reformation as an intense sectarian gossip conflict that rose up in opposition to the gossip monopoly of an existing political establishment. Eventually, sectarian gossip wars evolved into the forms of the modern state we associate with democratic politics while, as you say, some part of the press and academe play the role of neutral, benevolent, or specially enlightened monastics. In theory, as an ideal maybe. Definitely when things are bad, nobody is really free from factions and gossip games. But wherever you find people in groups, especially if they're supposed to be above gossip, there will be gossip. It may be just the rhetoric and aesthetics of social class — what goes on among elites is "politics" but for everyone else doing it, it's "gossip," which lacks legitimacy.
Then again, there are very developed traditions of trying to mitigate the evil eye/heart/tongue in Judaism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lashon_hara) — and of course resistance to consolidated power even when it's your own. The people who invented the minority judgment might know a thing or two about long-term group survival and the struggle not to be reduced to the level of petty gossips.