# The Dawn of Everything **Covers**:: **Source**:: [[The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber]] **Creator**:: [[David Graeber]] # Highlights ### Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood #### Or, why this is not a book about the origins of inequality ##### ^258309231 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=109 ###### ^258309231q This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the καιρóς (Kairos) – the right time – for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.’ C. G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1958) ^258309231 ##### ^258309232 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=118 ###### ^258309232q most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history ^258309232 ##### ^258309233 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=122 ###### ^258309233q are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. ^258309233 ##### ^258309234 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=128 ###### ^258309234q the Christian answer: people once lived in a state of innocence, yet were tainted by original sin. ^258309234 ##### ^258309235 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=129 ###### ^258309235q Today, the popular version of this story is typically some updated variation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754. ^258309235 ##### ^258309236 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=131 ###### ^258309236q we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ – which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms. ^258309236 ##### ^258309237 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=141 ###### ^258309237q Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, is in many ways the founding text of modern political theory. It held that, humans being the selfish creatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; it must instead have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else. ^258309237 ##### ^258309238 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=150 ###### ^258309238q The modern-day Hobbesian, then, would argue that, yes, we did live most of our evolutionary history in tiny bands, who could get along mainly because they shared a common interest in the survival of their offspring (‘parental investment’, as evolutionary biologists call it). But even these were in no sense founded on equality. There was always, in this version, some ‘alpha-male’ leader. Hierarchy and domination, and cynical self-interest, have always been the basis of human society. ^258309238 ##### ^261572330 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=154 ###### ^261572330q collectively, we have learned it’s to our advantage to prioritize our long-term interests over our short-term instincts; or, better, to create laws that force us to confine our worst impulses to socially useful areas like the economy, while forbidding them everywhere else. ^261572330 ##### ^258309239 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=166 ###### ^258309239q human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. ^258309239 ##### ^258309240 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=170 ###### ^258309240q many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. ^258309240 ##### ^258309241 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=179 ###### ^258309241q the prevalent ‘big picture’ of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts. ^258309241 ##### ^261572331 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=182 What are the ways that this notion manifest in today's society? What are the negative effects of this notion? ###### ^261572331q our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). ^261572331 ##### ^261572332 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=187 ###### ^261572332q Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk, ^261572332 #### WHY BOTH THE HOBBESIAN AND ROUSSEAUIAN VERSIONS OF HUMAN HISTORY HAVE DIRE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS ##### ^261572334 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=200 ###### ^261572334q It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egoistic calculation rather than altruism or co-operation; in which case, the best we can hope for are more sophisticated internal and external controls on our supposedly innate drive towards accumulation and self-aggrandizement. ^261572334 ##### ^261572335 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=203 ###### ^261572335q Rousseau’s story about how humankind descended into inequality from an original state of egalitarian innocence seems more optimistic (at least there was somewhere better to fall from), but nowadays it’s mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering. ^261572335 ##### ^261572336 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=214 ###### ^261572336q It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) ^261572336 ##### ^261572337 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=217 ###### ^261572337q The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table. ^261572337 ##### ^261572338 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=244 ###### ^261572338q it’s bizarre to imagine that, say, during the roughly 10,000 (some would say more like 20,000) years in which people painted on the walls of Altamira, no one – not only in Altamira, but anywhere on earth – experimented with alternative forms of social organization. ^261572338 ##### ^261572339 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=247 ###### ^261572339q The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. ^261572339 ##### ^261572340 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=250 ###### ^261572340q If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place. ^261572340 #### SOME BRIEF EXAMPLES OF WHY RECEIVED UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE BROAD SWEEP OF HUMAN HISTORY ARE MOSTLY WRONG (OR, THE ETERNAL RETURN OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU) ##### ^261572342 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=261 The framing and scope of questions matter in research. [[knowledge work]] ###### ^261572342q When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality. It didn’t take long before we realized this simply wasn’t a very good approach. Framing human history in this way – which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong – made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were genuinely interesting. It felt like almost everyone else seemed to be caught in the same trap. Specialists were refusing to generalize. ^261572342 ##### ^261572343 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=271 bad assumption ###### ^261572343q hunter-gatherer societies (according to Fukuyama) have no concept of private property, ^261572343 ##### ^261572345 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=289 ###### ^261572345q hierarchy – according to Diamond and Fukuyama – is inevitable once humans adopt large, complex forms of organization. ^261572345 ##### ^261572346 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=300 In fact, pronouncements that change is impossible is antithetical to science itself ###### ^261572346q [Pronouncements that change is impossible] are not actually based on any kind of scientific evidence. ^261572346 #### ON THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS ##### ^261572348 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=316 ###### ^261572348q what Rousseau presented was more of a parable, by way of an attempt to explore a fundamental paradox of human politics: how is it that our innate drive for freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneous march to inequality’? ^261572348 ##### ^261572349 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=323 Oppressors say that inequality is intrinsic to humanity to justify their oppression ###### ^261572349q the State of Nature had already been used in European philosophy for a century. ^261572349 ##### ^261593419 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=352 ###### ^261593419q like Hobbes, Pinker is concerned with the origins of the state, his key point of transition is not the rise of farming but the emergence of cities. ^261593419 ##### ^261593420 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=353 ###### ^261593420q ‘Archaeologists’, he writes, ‘tell us that humans lived in a state of anarchy until the emergence of civilization some five thousand years ago, when sedentary farmers first coalesced into cities and states and developed the first governments.’ ^261593420 ##### ^261593421 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=365 ###### ^261593421q Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial. ^261593421 ##### ^261593422 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=378 ###### ^261593422q there is reason to believe that during the Palaeolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all. ^261593422 ##### ^261593423 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=386 example ###### ^261593423q The Yanomami are an indigenous population who live largely by growing plantains and cassava in the Amazon rainforest, their traditional homeland, on the border of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. Since the 1970s, the Yanomami have acquired a reputation as the quintessential violent savages: ‘fierce people’, as their most famous ethnographer, Napoleon Chagnon, called them. This seems decidedly unfair to the Yanomami since, in fact, statistics show they’re not particularly violent – compared with other Amerindian groups, Yanomami homicide rates turn out average-to-low. ^261593423 ##### ^261593424 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=400 ###### ^261593424q Chagnon’s central argument was that adult Yanomami men achieve both cultural and reproductive advantages by killing other adult men; and that this feedback between violence and biological fitness – if generally representative of the early human condition – might have had evolutionary consequences for our species as a whole. ^261593424 ##### ^261593425 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=412 ###### ^261593425q as a ‘non-state’ people, the Yanomami are supposed to exemplify what Pinker calls the ‘Hobbesian trap’, whereby individuals in tribal societies find themselves caught in repetitive cycles of raiding and warfare, ^261593425 ##### ^261593426 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=428 ###### ^261593426q Hobbes’s position tends to be favoured by those on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau’s by those leaning left. ^261593426 ##### ^261593454 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=429 whiteness is a hard rule that creates cognitive bias ###### ^261593454q Pinker positions himself as a rational centrist, condemning what he considers to be the extremists on either side. But why then insist 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’ (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, ‘Western civilization’)? ... It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things that can be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality, deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, ^261593454 ##### ^261593429 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=448 question ###### ^261593429q Has ‘Western civilization’ really made life better for everyone? ^261593429 ##### ^261593430 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=467 ###### ^261593430q The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter. ^261593430 ##### ^261593431 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=493 ###### ^261593431q Still others noted the ease with which outsiders, taken in by ‘Indian’ families, might achieve acceptance and prominent positions in their adoptive communities, becoming members of chiefly households, or even chiefs themselves.32 Western propagandists speak endlessly about equality of opportunity; these seem to have been societies where it actually existed. ^261593431 #### HOW THE CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE OF HUMAN HISTORY IS NOT ONLY WRONG, BUT QUITE NEEDLESSLY DULL ##### ^261593433 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=509 ###### ^261593433q ‘Noble’ savages are, ultimately, just as boring as savage ones; more to the point, neither actually exist. ^261593433 ##### ^261593434 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=509 ###### ^261593434q Helena Valero was herself adamant on this point. The Yanomami were not devils, she insisted, neither were they angels. They were human, like the rest of us. ^261593434 ##### ^261593435 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=511 ###### ^261593435q social theory always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification. ^261593435 ##### ^261593436 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=523 ###### ^261593436q Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects – very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed? The logic is perfectly circular. If precious objects were moving long distances, this is evidence of ‘trade’ and, if trade occurred, it must have taken some sort of commercial form; therefore, the fact that, say, 3,000 years ago Baltic amber found its way to the Mediterranean, or shells from the Gulf of Mexico were transported to Ohio, is proof that we are in the presence of some embryonic form of market economy. Markets are universal. Therefore, there must have been a market. Therefore, markets are universal. And so on. ^261593436 ##### ^261593455 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=544 ###### ^261593455q Is this ‘trade’? Perhaps, but it would bend to breaking point our ordinary understandings of what that word means. There is, in fact, a substantial ethnographic literature on how such long-distance exchange operates in societies without markets. Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialities ... we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time;33 and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’. ^261593455 ##### ^261593439 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=552 ###### ^261593439q long-distance interaction spheres ^261593439 ##### ^261593440 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=553 ###### ^261593440q Dreams or vision quests: among Iroquoian-speaking peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was considered extremely important literally to realize one’s dreams. Many European observers marvelled at how Indians would be willing to travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal or even an animal like a dog that they had dreamed of acquiring. Anyone who dreamed about a neighbour or relative’s possession (a kettle, ornament, mask and so on) could normally demand it; as a result, such objects would often gradually travel some way from town to town. ^261593440 ##### ^261593441 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=559 ###### ^261593441q Travelling healers and entertainers: in 1528, when a shipwrecked Spaniard named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca made his way from Florida across what is now Texas to Mexico, he found he could pass easily between villages (even villages at war with one another) by offering his services as a magician and curer. Curers in much of North America were also entertainers, and would often develop significant entourages; those who felt their lives had been saved by the performance would, typically, offer up all their material possessions to be divided among the troupe. ^261593441 ##### ^261593442 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=565 ###### ^261593442q Women’s gambling: women in many indigenous North American societies were inveterate gamblers; the women of adjacent villages would often meet to play dice or a game played with a bowl and plum stone, and would typically bet their shell beads or other objects of personal adornment as the stakes. ^261593442 #### ON WHAT’S TO FOLLOW ##### ^261593444 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=575 ###### ^261593444q In this book we will not only be presenting a new history of humankind, but inviting the reader into a new science of history, one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity. Rather ^261593444 ##### ^261593445 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=584 ###### ^261593445q At the same time, this book is also something else: a quest to discover the right questions. If ‘what is the origin of inequality?’ is not the biggest question we should be asking about history, what then should it be? ^261593445 ### Wicked Liberty #### The indigenous critique and the myth of progress ##### ^262026842 highlight_tags:: [[favorite]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=606 ###### ^262026842q Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual – whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather than seeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions in debates that were already going on ... but which otherwise might never have been written down. ^262026842 #### IN WHICH WE SHOW HOW CRITIQUES OF EUROCENTRISM CAN BACKFIRE, AND END UP TURNING ABORIGINAL THINKERS INTO ‘SOCK-PUPPETS’ ##### ^262026843 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=619 ###### ^262026843q ‘what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?’ ... The way the question is put, after all, assumes that social inequality did have an origin; that is, it takes for granted that there was a time when human beings were equals ... Rousseau was one such man: ^262026843 ##### ^262026812 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=625 Oppressors justifyijng oppression ###### ^262026812q This was a culture in which almost every aspect of human interaction – whether eating, drinking, working or socializing – was marked by elaborate pecking orders and rituals of social deference. The authors who submitted their essays to this competition were men who spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants. ^262026812 ##### ^262026814 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=633 ###### ^262026814q Fascination with the question of social inequality was relatively new in the 1700s, and it had everything to do with the shock and confusion that followed Europe’s sudden integration into a global economy, where it had long been a very minor player. ^262026814 ##### ^262026815 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=639 Possible origin ###### ^262026815q European intellectuals of that time were just rediscovering Aristotle and the ancient world, and had very little idea what people were thinking and arguing about anywhere else. ^262026815 ##### ^262026816 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=641 ###### ^262026816q when Portuguese fleets began rounding Africa and bursting into the Indian Ocean – and especially with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Suddenly, a few of the more powerful European kingdoms found themselves in control of vast stretches of the globe, and European intellectuals found themselves exposed, not only to the civilizations of China and India but to a whole plethora of previously unimagined social, scientific and political ideas. The ultimate result of this flood of new ideas came to be known as the ‘Enlightenment’. ^262026816 ##### ^262026817 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=661 Many enlightenment thinkers attributed their thought to foreign sources despite the possible consequences ###### ^262026817q What is really unusual about this case is that Leibniz was so honest about his intellectual influences. When he lived, Church authorities still wielded a great deal of power in most of Europe: anyone making an argument that non-Christian ways were in any way superior might find themselves facing charges of atheism, which was potentially a capital offence. ^262026817 ##### ^262026818 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=672 ###### ^262026818q Indigenous people are assumed to have lived in a completely different universe, inhabited a different reality, even; anything Europeans said about them was simply a shadow-play projection, fantasies of the ‘noble savage’ culled from the European tradition itself. ^262026818 ##### ^262026819 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=680 ###### ^262026819q We also know that many of those living in Europe who came to embrace principles of freedom and equality (principles barely existing in their countries a few generations before) claimed that accounts of these encounters had a profound influence on their thinking. ^262026819 ##### ^262026820 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=688 Claim ###### ^262026820q In fact, what we’ll see is not only that indigenous Americans – confronted with strange foreigners – gradually developed their own, surprisingly consistent critique of European institutions, but that these critiques came to be taken very seriously in Europe itself. ^262026820 ##### ^262026844 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=690 ###### ^262026844q For European audiences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, once disclosed, could hardly be ignored. Indeed, the ideas expressed in that critique came to be perceived as such a menace to the fabric of European society that an entire body of theory was called into being, specifically to refute them. ... our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose… ^262026844 ##### ^262026845 highlight_tags:: [[hierarchy]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=696 ###### ^262026845q ‘the origin of social inequality’ is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to… ... ‘Social equality’ – and therefore, its opposite, inequality – simply did not… ^262026845 ##### ^262026826 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=699 ###### ^262026826q A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to… ^262026826 ##### ^262026827 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=705 ###### ^262026827q natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’… ^262026827 ##### ^262026828 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=706 ###### ^262026828q Spanish adventurers like Cortés and Pizarro carried out their conquests largely without authorization from higher authorities; afterwards, there were intense debates back home over whether such unvarnished aggression against people who,… ^262026828 ##### ^262026829 highlight_tags:: [[christianity]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=709 ###### ^262026829q The key problem was that – unlike non-Christians of the Old World, who could be assumed to have had the opportunity to learn the teachings of Jesus, and therefore to have actively rejected them – it was fairly obvious that the inhabitants of the New World simply never had any… ^262026829 ##### ^262026846 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=714 ###### ^262026846q attempts to write off the inhabitants of the Americas as so utterly alien that they fell outside the bounds of humanity entirely, and could be treated literally… ... The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have ‘naturally’, even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of… ^262026846 ##### ^262026832 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=722 ###### ^262026832q what is important, in this context, is that they opened a conceptual door. Writers like Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius or John Locke could skip past the biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have… ^262026832 ##### ^262026833 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=731 ###### ^262026833q Earlier authors, confronted by a population of forest dwellers with no king and employing only stone tools, were unlikely to have seen them as in any way primordial. Sixteenth-century scholars, such as the Spanish missionary José de Acosta, were more likely to conclude they were looking at the fallen vestiges of some ancient civilization, or refugees who had, in the course of their wanderings, forgotten the arts of metallurgy and civil governance. Such a conclusion would have made obvious common sense for people who assumed that all truly important knowledge had been revealed by God at the beginning of time, that cities had existed before the Flood, and that saw their own intellectual life largely as attempts to recover the lost wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans. ^262026833 ##### ^262026834 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=738 ###### ^262026834q Introducing the concept of a State of Nature didn’t exactly flip all this around, at least not immediately, but it did allow political philosophers after the seventeenth century to imagine people without the trappings of civilization as something other than degenerate savages; ^262026834 ##### ^262026835 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=745 ###### ^262026835q ask a question like ‘what is the origin of inequality among men?’ This seems particularly odd considering how, prior to that time, most did not even consider social equality possible. ^262026835 ##### ^262026836 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=752 ###### ^262026836q Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. ^262026836 ##### ^262026837 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=767 ###### ^262026837q What we’re going to suggest is that American intellectuals – we are using the term ‘American’ as it was used at the time, to refer to indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and ‘intellectual’ to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas – actually played a role in this conceptual revolution. It is very strange that this should be considered a particularly radical idea, but among mainstream intellectual historians today it is almost a heresy. ^262026837 ##### ^262026838 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=774 ###### ^262026838q anyone who has ever learned a truly alien language deny that doing so takes a great deal of imaginative work, trying to grasp unfamiliar concepts. ^262026838 ##### ^262026839 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=775 ###### ^262026839q missionaries typically conducted long philosophical debates as part of their professional duties; many others, on both sides, argued with one another either out of simple curiosity, or because they had immediate practical reasons to understand the other’s point of view. ^262026839 ##### ^264301406 highlight_tags:: [[marginalized]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=792 ###### ^264301406q this habit of thought is very convenient for students of Western literature, themselves trained in Cicero and Erasmus, who might otherwise be forced to actually try to learn something about what indigenous people thought about the world, and above all what they made of Europeans. ^264301406 ##### ^264301407 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=797 ###### ^264301407q We will argue that indigenous Americans did indeed develop a very strong critical view of their invaders’ institutions: a view which focused first on these institutions’ lack of freedom, and only later, as they became more familiar with European social arrangements, on equality. ^264301407 ##### ^264301408 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=802 ###### ^264301408q We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples. Because it was true. ^264301408 #### IN WHICH WE CONSIDER WHAT THE INHABITANTS OF NEW FRANCE MADE OF THEIR EUROPEAN INVADERS, ESPECIALLY IN MATTERS OF GENEROSITY, SOCIABILITY, MATERIAL WEALTH, CRIME, PUNISHMENT AND LIBERTY ##### ^264337837 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=807 ###### ^264337837q The ‘Age of Reason’ was an age of debate. The Enlightenment was rooted in conversation; ^264337837 ##### ^264337838 highlight_tags:: [[dialogue]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=808 ###### ^264337838q Many classic Enlightenment texts took the form of dialogues; ^264337838 ##### ^265135476 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=814 origin of the [[noble savage]] ###### ^265135476q At that time, the region that came to be known as New France was inhabited largely by speakers of Montagnais-Naskapi, Algonkian and Iroquoian languages. Those closer to the coast were fishers, foresters and hunters, though most also practised horticulture; the Wendat (Huron),13 concentrated in major river valleys further inland, growing maize, squash and beans around fortified towns. Interestingly, early French observers attached little importance to such economic distinctions, especially since foraging or farming was, in either case, largely women’s work. The men, they noted, were primarily occupied in hunting and, occasionally, war, which meant they could in a sense be considered natural aristocrats. The idea of the ‘noble savage’ can be traced back to such estimations. ^265135476 ##### ^265135477 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=829 ###### ^265135477q What seemed to irritate Biard the most was that the Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French had more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time. ^265135477 ##### ^265135478 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=833 perception of other cultures ###### ^265135478q Sagard was at first highly critical of Wendat life, which he described as inherently sinful (he was obsessed with the idea that Wendat women were all intent on seducing him), but by the end of his sojourn he had come to the conclusion their social arrangements were in many ways superior to those at home in France. ^265135478 ##### ^265135479 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=839 indigenous socialism ###### ^265135479q Much like Biard’s Mi’kmaq, the Wendat were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another: ‘They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.’ ^265135479 ##### ^265135480 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=865 ###### ^265135480q That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on was whether or not individual liberty was desirable. ^265135480 ##### ^265135481 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=871 ###### ^265135481q When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology18 – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones. ^265135481 ##### ^265135495 highlight_tags:: [[anarchism]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=875 ###### ^265135495q Nowadays, it’s almost impossible for anyone living in a liberal democracy to say they are against freedom ... This is one of the lasting legacies of the Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions. Personal freedom, we tend to believe, is inherently good (even if some of us also feel that a society based on total individual liberty – one which took it so far as to eliminate police, prisons or any sort of apparatus of coercion – would instantly collapse into violent chaos). ^265135495 ##### ^265135484 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=879 ###### ^265135484q Jesuits most certainly did not share this assumption. They tended to view individual liberty as animalistic. ^265135484 ##### ^265135496 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=894 what did punishment look like in indigenous america? ###### ^265135496q There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger ... as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. ... Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’. ^265135496 ##### ^265135488 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=906 Lallemant's view on why the community would provide such gifts ###### ^265135488q the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ ^265135488 ##### ^265135497 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=911 ###### ^265135497q Wendat society was not ‘economically egalitarian’ ... However, there was a difference between what we’d consider economic resources – like land, which was owned by families, worked by women, and whose products were largely disposed of by women’s collectives – and the kind of ‘wealth’ being referred to here, such as wampum (a word applied to strings and belts of beads, manufactured from the shells of Long Island’s quahog clam) or other treasures, which largely existed for political purposes. ^265135497 ##### ^265135491 highlight_tags:: [[performance]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=916 ###### ^265135491q Wendat men hoarded such precious things largely to be able to give them away on dramatic occasions ^265135491 ##### ^265135492 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=933 ###### ^265135492q American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will. ^265135492 ##### ^265135493 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=936 ###### ^265135493q The ‘wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’. ^265135493 #### IN WHICH WE SHOW HOW EUROPEANS LEARNED FROM (NATIVE) AMERICANS ABOUT THE CONNECTION BETWEEN REASONED DEBATE, PERSONAL FREEDOMS AND THE REFUSAL OF ARBITRARY POWER ##### ^299918332 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1586 ###### ^299918332q In some ways, accounts of ‘human origins’ play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians, or the Dreamtime for indigenous Australians. ^299918332 ##### ^299918333 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1596 ###### ^299918333q Up until the early years of the nineteenth century, ‘men of letters’ – scientists included – still largely assumed that the universe did not even exist prior to late October, 4004 BC, and that all humans spoke the same language (Hebrew) until the dispersal of humanity, after the fall of the Tower of Babel sixteen centuries later.1 At that time there was as yet no ‘prehistory’. There was only history, even if some of that history was wildly wrong. ^299918333 ##### ^299918334 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1600 ###### ^299918334q The term ‘prehistory’ only came into common use after the discoveries at Brixham Cave in Devon in 1858, when stone axes, which could only have been fashioned by humans, were found alongside remains of cave bear, woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species, all together under a sealed casing of rock. ^299918334 ##### ^299918345 highlight_tags:: [[blue]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1614 ###### ^299918345q no one imagined we’d ever find Eve herself, the discovery of a variety of other fossil skulls rescued from the East African Rift Valley (a natural ‘preservation trap’ for Palaeolithic remains, long since swept to oblivion in more exposed settings) seemed to provide a suggestion as to what Eve might have looked like and where she might have lived. ... fact, biological anthropologists and geneticists are now converging on an entirely different picture. Rather than everyone starting out the same, then dispersing from East Africa in some Tower-of-Babel moment to become the diverse nations and peoples of the earth, early human populations in Africa appear to have been far more physically diverse than anything we are familiar with today. ^299918345 ##### ^299918337 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1626 ###### ^299918337q By any biologically meaningful standard, living humans are barely distinguishable. ^299918337 ##### ^299918338 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1634 ###### ^299918338q we did indeed live in Africa – but not just the eastern savannahs, as previously thought: our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape.3 Some of those populations remained isolated from each another for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed. ^299918338 ##### ^299918339 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1643 ###### ^299918339q Ancestral humans were not only quite different from each other; they also coexisted with smaller-brained, more ape-like species such as Homo naledi. ^299918339 ##### ^299918340 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1647 ###### ^299918340q What we do know is that we are composite products of this original mosaic of human populations, which interacted with one another, interbred, drifted apart and came together mostly in ways we can still only guess at. ^299918340 ##### ^299918341 highlight_tags:: [[blue]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=1666 ###### ^299918341q there is no ‘original’ form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making, ^299918341 ### Why the State Has No Origin #### The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics ### Full Circle #### On the historical foundations of the indigenous critique ### Conclusion #### The dawn of everything ### Notes #### 1. FAREWELL TO HUMANITY’S CHILDHOOD ##### ^261593448 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10202 ###### ^261593448q For Hobbes, all things large and small in history were to be understood as the unfolding of forces set in motion by God, which are ultimately beyond the capacity of humans to control ^261593448 ##### ^261593449 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10204 interesting connection to [[kharma]] ###### ^261593449q Even a tailor making a garment is entering, from his first stitch, into a flow of historical entanglements that he is powerless to resist and of which he is largely unaware; his precise actions are tiny links in a great chain of causality that is the very fabric of human history, and – in this rather extreme metaphysics of entanglement – to suggest that he might have been doing these things some alternative way is to deny the whole, irreversible course of world history. ^261593449 ##### ^261593450 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10207 ###### ^261593450q For Rousseau, by contrast, what humans make, they could always unmake, or at least do differently. We could free ourselves from the chains that bind us; it just wasn’t going to be easy ^261593450 ##### ^261593451 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10213 why would you want to imitate your child playing kitchen when you have your own? ###### ^261593451q so many contemporary authors seem to enjoy imagining themselves as modern-day counterparts to the great social philosophers of the Enlightenment, men like Hobbes and Rousseau, playing out the same grand dialogue but with a more accurate cast of characters. ^261593451 ##### ^261593452 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10250 ###### ^261593452q Academics are very prone to a phenomenon called ‘schismogenesis’ ^261593452 ##### ^261593453 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10255 ###### ^261593453q actual direct democratic decision-making had been practised regularly in various parts of Africa or Amazonia, or for that matter in Russian or French peasant assemblies, for thousands of years; ^261593453 #### 2. WICKED LIBERTY ##### ^262026840 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10316 #TO/EXPLORE/READ ###### ^262026840q In his (2009) Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727, Nabil Matar considers the relative lack of interest in Frankish Europe among medieval Muslim writers, and possible reasons for it (especially, pp. 6–18). ^262026840 ##### ^262026841 Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10340 ###### ^262026841q Marquis d’Argenson, who also failed to win a prize, made precisely this argument: monarchy allowed the truest equality, he argued, and absolutist monarchy most of all, since everyone is equal before the absolute power of the king. ^262026841 ##### ^264301410 highlight_tags:: [[gender]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10346 ###### ^264301410q bourgeois women may have especially appreciated the Jesuit Relations because it allowed them to read about discussions of women’s sexual freedom in a form that was entirely acceptable to the Church. ^264301410 #### 3. UNFREEZING THE ICE AGE ##### ^299918342 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10545 ###### ^299918342q The Sahara seems to have acted as a kind of turnstile for human evolution, periodically turning green and then dry again with the cyclical advance/retreat of monsoon rains, opening and shutting the gates of interaction between northern and southern parts of the African continent (see Scerri 2017). ^299918342 ##### ^299918343 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10551 ###### ^299918343q Fossil evidence tells us that the first expansions of modern humans out of Africa began as far back as 210,000 years ago (Harvati et al. 2019), but these were often tentative and quite short-lived, at least until the more decisive radiations of our species began around 60,000 BC. ^299918343 ##### ^299918344 highlight_tags:: [[orange]] Goto: https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08R2KL3VY&location=10555 ###### ^299918344q Recent and historical hunter-gatherers, as we shall see, present an enormous range of possibilities, from assertively egalitarian groups like the Ju/ ’hoansi of the Kalahari, the Mbendjele BaYaka of Congo or the Agta in the Philippines to assertively hierarchical ones like the populations of the Canadian Northwest Coast, the Calusa of Florida Keys or the forest-dwelling Guaicurú of Paraguay (these latter groups, far from being egalitarian, are known to have traditionally kept slaves and lived in ranked societies). Holding up any particular subset of recent foragers as representatives of ‘early human society’ is essentially a matter of picking cherries. ^299918344 #### 4. FREE PEOPLE, THE ORIGIN OF CULTURES, AND THE ADVENT OF PRIVATE PROPERTY #### 5. MANY SEASONS AGO #### 6. GARDENS OF ADONIS #### 7. THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM #### 8. IMAGINARY CITIES #### 9. HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT #### 10. WHY THE STATE HAS NO ORIGIN #### 11. FULL CIRCLE #### 12. CONCLUSION