(2022-06-10) Hoel Your Book Review The Dawn Of Everything

Erik Hoel: Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything. ON ROUSSEAU, ESSAY CONTESTS, POLITICAL MOTIVATIONS FOR REVISITING THE ORIGIN OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION, AND THE BOOK IS INTRODUCED

In 1754 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, at the comfortable age of 42, was composing a monograph for an essay contest not dissimilar to this one. Hosted by a local university, the prompt for the contest was "What is the origin of inequality among people, and is it authorized by natural law?” Rousseau’s submission, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men, became an intellectual sensation.

His genius move was to politicize the past, offering up an alternative mirror to Thomas Hobbes’ view,

Hobbes, founder of the political Right, and Rousseau, founder of the political Left, both built their arguments on the bedrock of prehistory. But on different bedrocks. The lesson being: if you want to change human society, change the past first.

Enter The Dawn of Everything, which tries to change the past by taking a third way orthogonal to the Rousseau/Hobbes spectrum.

What is the version of prehistory the Davids offer in The Dawn of Everything? It is an anti-story. The Davids are offering up an alternative to (as well as a criticism of) thinkers like Steven Pinker or Jared Diamond or Yuval Noah Harari, all of whom give a standard model of human prehistory that goes small hunter-gatherer tribes → invention of agriculture → civilization (with its associated hierarchies and private property and wealth inequality).

a modern Hobbesian might prefer to use the war-like Yanomami as the analogy, whereas a follower of Rousseau might prefer the more peaceful and egalitarian Hadza, Pygmies, or !Kung.

The thesis of The Dawn of Everything is that neither of these is correct

in its place they offer a complexified account, wherein prehistorical humans lived in a panoply of different political arrangements

So for the Davids, the question is not, as it was for Rousseau, “How did inequality arise?” but rather, given the diversity of prehistorical ways of life, “How did we get stuck with the inequalities we have?”

there is a problem with the book. For their own version of prehistory is corrupted by politics, the same corruption they accuse Rousseau and Hobbes and other thinkers of falling prey to before them.

THE AGRICULTURE REVOLUTION WAS NO REVOLUTION, NOR DID IT INEXORABLY LEAD TO INEQUALITY; INEQUALITY, EVEN CHATTEL SLAVERY, ALREADY EXISTED

They zoom into the Native American foragers (not farmers) who lived on the California coastline

in any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might have constituted up to a quarter of the population

Indeed, there is evidence of Native American chattel slavery that goes back to 1850 BC in Northwest Coast societies (again, these are not agricultural societies).

Furthermore, the Davids make a good case that agriculture was not the sort of parasitic memetic invasion it is often portrayed as by writers like Yuval Noah Harari.

some prehistorical societies seem to develop agriculture and then consciously abandon it, preferring some other way of life. The Davids give several examples of this, including the builders of Stonehenge

Nor did the agricultural revolution, even as it was occurring, result in one way of living

And yet we know that the regions traded with one another

the fact that humans were able to invent, and then abandon, agriculture, and have inequality or equality to greater degrees throughout the invention of agriculture... suggests to the Davids that our ancestors, despite (as one might say) having the handicap of living in prehistory, were choosing to live a certain way, not simply driven like automata by environmental inputs or new inventions. They made conscious political choices, just like us.

CONSCIOUS POLITICAL CHOICE AMONG NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE “INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE” OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

The indigenous critique served as a shock to the European system, setting the path to Rousseau’s Discourses by creating an entire genre of literature

just about every major French Enlightenment figure tried their hand at a Lahontan-style critique of their own society, from the perspective of some imagined outsider. Montesquieu chose a Persian; the Marquis d’Argens a Chinese; Diderot a Tahitian; Chateaubriand a Natchez; Voltaire’s L'Ingénu was half Wendat and half French. (noble savage; alien intelligence)

the pieces fit much better because Lahontan was, perhaps with only some exaggeration, writing the real Kandiaronk.

Judging this, I have to say I think the Davids are correct; there is a good case that there were real and serious intellectual contributions from Native Americans in critiquing the inequalities of European civilization, particularly from the articulate and debate-based Iroquoian-speaking nations.

This is a great hand to be holding, but, in a pattern that repeats throughout the book, the Davids overplay it.

They claim the idea of inequality arose in Europe entirely through the indigenous critique, essentially proposing that some conversations being held by Jesuits and fur traders in New France were the mono-causal origin of the political Left.

not for the only time in the book, the Davids undercut themselves when they later point out that the conception of inequality was alive and well in European peasantry

ON SEASONALITY AND THE “THEATRICAL” GOVERNMENTS OF PREHISTORICAL SOCIETIES, AS WELL AS THEIR CAREFUL BURIAL OF ABNORMAL INDIVIDUALS

almost all the early signs of civilization look seasonal to some degree

This seasonality also shows up in anthropologist accounts of hunter-gatherer societies. The Davids quote from a 1903 book on seasonal variations among the Inuit

Which brings up why an early hierarchical government, like an aristocracy, capable of moving gigantic stones, or coordinating large hunts and storing food, would give up its authority in the off-season so easily

So should we really even think of such rulers as royalty? Or are they almost a form of play royalty? There’s a certain theatricality to all this, isn’t there? (theater)

various techniques kept formal authority from ever becoming too real.

These nascent governments and formal systems of law and order might not have been taken all that seriously at first, more theatrical and seasonal in nature, until, slowly, as John Updike said, “the mask eats the face.”

THE SAPIENT PARADOX AS AN ANCIENT ANALOG TO THE FERMI PARADOX, AND THE GREAT TRAP OF PREHISTORY IT IMPLIES

Almost everything we’ve talked about so far, with the exception of the mammoth houses and some remains of gathering places, takes place after 10,000 BC

It’s really only in the Upper Paleolithic (12,000-5,000 BC) that there is any good evidence for what we would call civilization.

The vast majority of the Davids’ evidence throughout The Dawn of Everything comes from post-10,000 BC societies. And this is a problem, since even the Davids admit in the book that humans have been around for between 100,000 to 200,000 years

why does it take 90,000 years to get Gobekli Tepe? This perplexing question is called the “Sapient Paradox.”

So, Homo sapiens (broadly: people who wouldn’t look out of place on the subway), go back 200,000 years, possibly having language all that time. And who knows, human-level cognitive abilities might even go back further than that

In asking “What took so long?” the Sapient Paradox is the prehistoric analog of the Fermi Paradox. Instead of: “Why are we alone in the universe?” the Sapient Paradox asks: “Why were we trapped in prehistory?”

Indeed, early Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago had brains as large as our own!

The answer they give (in fact, the Davids barely give it, they sort of vaguely imply) is that the advent of farming was due to the ending of the Ice Age and retreat of the glaciers. But this is in direct contradiction to a bunch of their previous points around farming, like how the post-Ice Age was actually a “Golden Age” for foragers

So the Davids leave the Sapient Paradox unexplained.

The work of Robin Dunbar seems important here, somehow, although no two thinkers on these topics use it in the exact same way.

It seems there’s likely something special about Dunbar’s number being violated—after all, a lot of the Upper Neolithic revolution is occurring when groups of humans (in the few hundreds) are getting together seasonally into much larger groups

Even the Davids admit that the violation of the Dunbar number is likely important

Is there any hypothesis that fits all these disparate facts?

All I, all anyone can do, is offer speculations, which should be taken with a grain of salt. But with that said, it does seem to me there is an alternative theory, which tells the story of The Dawn of Everything in a different way. It’s the book I wish the Davids had written.

IN WHICH AN ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESIS FOR THE INITIAL CONDITION OF PREHISTORY IS PROPOSED, AND AN EXPLANATION OF THE GREAT TRAP OF HUMAN HISTORY IS GIVEN

perhaps small groups of humans less than the Dunbar number were organized by none of these, since they didn’t need to be—instead, they could be organized via raw social power.

So 50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.

Because it sure looks like being popular was the primary concern for prehistorical societies, at least if we use the same evidence the Davids do.

It may even be that money, rather than being invented to keep track of trade relationships or debts for private property, was invented to keep track of social relationships instead

according to the Davids, wampum “largely existed for political purposes,” i.e., to keep track of social capital

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

What’s interesting is that anthropologists, from what I’ve read, seem to assume that raw social power is mostly a good thing

Mostly they focus on gossip, and if we look at the work of Robin Dunbar, and his 1996 book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, he speculates that the need to gossip was why language was invented in the first place. And gossip has (as far as I can tell), an almost universally positive valence throughout anthropology. In the literature it is portrayed as something that maintains social relationships and rids groups of free-riders and cheats

But it never seems to strike Dunbar or others that living under a dominion of raw social power, with few to little formal powers anywhere, would be hellish to a citizen of the 21st century.

A “Gossip Trap” is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people.

So perhaps we leveled ourselves into the ground for 90,000 years. Being in the Gossip Trap means reputational management imposes such a steep slope you can’t climb out of it, and essentially prevents the development of anything interesting, like art or culture or new ideas or new developments or anything at all. Everyone just lives like crabs in a bucket, pulling each other down.

And this explains why violating the Dunbar number forces you to invent civilization—at a certain size (possibly a lot larger than the actual Dunbar number) you simply can’t organize society using the non-ordinal natural social hierarchy of humans

So then what is civilization? It is a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the Gossip Trap.

ON THE TECHNOLOGICAL RESURRECTION OF THE GOSSIP TRAP AND THE DEVOLUTION OF CIVILIZATION YOU’VE BEEN NOTICING

if we lived in a Gossip Trap for the majority of our existence as humans, then what would it be, mentally, to atavistically return to the gossip trap? Well, it sure would look a lot like Twitter. (social media)

One obvious sign you’re living in a Gossip Trap is when the primary mode of dispute resolution becomes social pressure.

if the Gossip Trap was humanity’s first form of government, and via technology it’s been resurrected once more into the world, how long until it swallows up the entire globe?

IN WHICH THE TRUTH IS REVEALED

For it should be obvious by now: this text is corrupted. The same corruption that I accused the Davids of falling victim to...

Just like Rousseau, or Hobbes, or the Davids, I have spun a yarn.

I think it’s a true yarn, I really do.

Maybe the ultimate truth or falsity of prehistorical narratives is unknowable. Maybe speculations such as these are only stumbling through a maze, all of human history a hall of mirrors in which we wander.