![ancient city](/sites/default/files/2022-05/early-civilised-city.jpg)
By Tim Hazledine*
Since its publication in October 2021 this big book has quickly become something of a sensation: New York Times bestseller; reviewed in all the right places; meeting in general with a critical response generally supportive of the huge claims made by its title and subtitle. The furore has perhaps been stoked by the sad death of David Graeber, felled by necrotising pancreatitis in September 2020, while on vacation in Venice celebrating the submission of the final text to the publisher, after ten years of joint research and drafting with David Wengrow.
The testimonial blurbs on the back cover of my edition – all from people whose names respond instantly to a Google search, even if you didn’t know them already – include: ‘groundbreaking’, ‘radical revision of everything’; ‘an iconoclastic intellectual feast’; ‘miraculously reveals the future as open-ended’; ‘the most profound and exciting book I’ve read in thirty years’.
I decided to test out this last one. Just what books had Robin D.G. Kelley, whom I didn’t know, been reading over the past three decades? If they were a Mills & Boon specialist, for example, then perhaps we shouldn’t be so impressed. But Kelley turns out to be a distinguished professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles, with many notable books of his own -- including a biography of the great musician Thelonius Monk -- that must surely have required extensive and serious reading on his part.
So, read on, which I did – not just the book itself, but also all the reviews I could find. I wouldn’t normally do this -- at least not if the book were in my own field, economics – but these authors are, respectively Anthropologist and Archaeologist (A&A), and I thought I could justify seeking some help. Interestingly, perhaps, all the reviews I have found are also by non-A&As. Perhaps the more relaxed time cycle of scholarly journals - usually no more frequent than quarterly – has hitherto not yet brought us the considered responses of the authors’ academic peers. We shall see.
Also interesting, to me anyway, is that now, having read all of the book at least once, I see as its huge failing the lack of any attempt at all by these two A&A authors to ground their claims that we (in the 21st century) are seriously ‘stuck’ – as they put it -- in an adequate economic and social analysis of what we actually are stuck in.
But let’s focus first on their big idea. They are visiting and revisiting new and old archaeological and ethnographic evidence to undermine what, they say, has become a standard story in history and pre-history, as synthesized in the 1930s by the Australian V. Gordon Childs:
After a Paleolithic era of hunting [birds, beasts, fishes] and gathering [mainly berries and nuts] in small bands, a Neolithic revolution saw the rise of agriculture (mainly harvesting cereals and herding ruminants), a soaring population, sedentism, and finally the “urban revolution”, distinguished by large, dense settlements [ie, cities], administrative complexity, public works, hierarchy, systems of writing, and [what we now call] states.
An important concurrent theme of this narrative is that the early bands were quite egalitarian in sharing the fruits of their hunting and gathering, but that inequality inexorably resulted from the property rights attached to agricultural land ownership, and from positions in the hierarchical systems of management and governance.
Well, it does seem to be correct that this model of linear, uniform, progressively more complex and unequal social development has become the standard theory. It appears, for example, in the story told by Oded Galor, in the book The Journey of Humanity that I reviewed for this publication in March, and the reviewers of the new book seem to accept it as being such.
So is it true? From hundreds of fascinating clues and fragments and tales from the diggings and the oral histories and, where it exists, the written record, Graeber and Wengrow assail the conventional wisdom with blasts of counter examples:
A mode of production… doesn’t come with a predetermined politics. Societies of hunter-gatherers could be miserably hierarchical; some indigenous American groups, fattened on foraging and fishing, had vainglorious aristocrats, patronage relationships, and slavery. Agricultural communities could be marvellously democratic. Societies could have big public works without farming. And cities… could function perfectly well without bosses and administrators.
The two passages I have (with editing) quoted above are in fact not from the book, but from the most substantial of the reviews, by the superstar New York University philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah, writing in the New York Review of Books, issue of December 16, 2021.
The NYR is the Big Beast of upper middlebrow Letters – at least, apart from interest.co.nz. I remember how pleased -- even, vicariously proud – I was when the lead article of the January 30, 1992 NYR was a highly favourable review by Robert M. Adams of the New Zealander Brian Boyd’s massive two volume literary biography of Vladimir Nabokov. I was then a few months away from leaving Vancouver and the University of British Columbia to take up a professorship at the University of Auckland, where I would be a colleague of the now-famous public intellectual Boyd. (I was a bit surprised to learn that he was only a senior lecturer at Auckland, but that’s another story.)
OK: having given what I think is a nice account of orthodoxy and of the book’s critique of it, Appiah then settles in to take pot-shots, cunningly using ‘armchair archaeology’ to generate ammunition. This involves digging not into the sands, but into the sources, as documented in the 85 pages of endnotes, and then checking for ‘discordance between what the book says and what its sources say’.
He finds plenty of such. The Trypillia Megasites of Ukraine (4100-3300 BC) yield what Graeber and Wengrow consider to be evidence of a settlement with a population of around 10,000:
“Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?” they ask. Because they see no evidence of centralised administration, they declare it to be “proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.”
Well, Appiah could counter that even the 10,000 inhabitants of the settlement of Te Puke, in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, would hesitate to dignify their lovely abode with the name of city. But instead, he reaches from his armchair for the source of Graeber and Wengrow’s numbers, which turns out to be the archaeologist John Chapman, who turns out to believe that all those houses they are counting on for their ‘city’ most likely were not occupied at the same time! Touché!
There is quite a lot of this sort of thing, and it is not at all surprising that David Wengrow was moved to respond to Appiah. This follows a New York Review tradition. Publishers love their books getting reviewed in the Review: even a bad notice is good for sales. Authors, however, sensitive souls, tend to find anything short of a peon of unqualified praise deeply upsetting. Why have the Editor’s entrusted their masterpiece to the untender attentions of someone obtuse / prejudiced / superficial / unscholarly / flippant / all-of-the-above?
So, the last page or page and a half of the NYR is given over to an exchange of letters: first the enraged author, but then the reviewer again with right of reply. There is only room for one, or sometimes two exchanges of this sort, but it is hardly surprising that The Dawn of Everything made the cut, and in the next issue, for January 13, 2022.
Reading this, I realised I was rather in the position of General / President Dwight Eisenhower, of whom it was said -- perhaps unfairly – that his view on any issue was always that of the last person who had spoken to him. I had thought Kwame Anthony Appiah had made excellent points. But then David Wengrew made excellent points in rejoinder. Then Appiah came back with another barrage, unabashed.
So then I thought it was time I stopped trawling the reviews -- which also included good pieces by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker (November 8, 2021), and William Deresiewicz in The Atlantic (October 19, 2021) – and staked out my own position. Even if some of Graeber and Wengrow’s examples are vulnerable to armchair archaeology assault, there are so many of them that the overall picture of diversity surely must survive. If there is a particular model of small-scale political or social organisation that you like (or dislike), then Graeber and Wengrow can show you it in pre-history or early history: surviving – often flourishing – for long periods of time, somewhere in the ancient world.
Really the title of this book, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ (vapid, when you think about it), would better be: ‘The Dawn of Anything’ – anything you now want. And indeed this is how it has been taken, by many reviewers and by Pankaj Mishra, a noted Indian essayist and novelist, with his back-cover testimonial that the book ‘reveals, miraculously, the future as open-ended’.
But this is where the book, as a cohesive narrative, simply disappears. Its frequent plaints, ‘How did we get stuck?‘ are never supported by even a sketchy outline of what we actually are stuck with. The extraordinary past two hundred and fifty years of economic and social progress – since Adam Smith discovered the enduring secret of prosperity – go virtually un-noted.
An anthropologist from Mars would be bemused. Why do these clever earthlings spend their time seeking from shards of bone and pottery insights into past civilisations – insights which we Martians with our modern time recovery app could reveal to them in an instant – and have nothing to say about the lives they live now? Does perhaps this ogre called ‘bureaucracy’, lurking in the background of their accounts, forbid any discussion of current issues and problems?
No it doesn’t, of course, and we know from David Graeber’s previous book – Bullshit Jobs: a Theory (Penguin, 2018) -- that this ‘anarchist activist’ did indeed have a horror of bureaucracy and the workplace idiocies that it generates. As it happens, I also have a horror of bureaucracy, which with its creeping managerialism has done serious damage to my own workplace, the university campus. But we need a lot more than this to justify calling a book a ‘new history of humanity’.
Graeber and Wengrow seem to reveal an inkling of the emptiness of their account of modern life when they write, rather wanly (p522; compressed):
What does one even call a ‘city lacking top-down [ie, bureaucratic] structures of governance’? Dare one call it a ‘democracy’? A ‘republic’? ‘egalitarian’?
Well, I say: Just call it ‘Auckland’. Ours is a small-large city of one and a half million people – that is, two orders of magnitude larger than any settlement of the ancient world. At the top of its hierarchy is an elected mayor who has no control even of his lightly-elected rabble of councillors. Neither mayor or council have any operational control over supposed ‘council-owned’ assets, these being all run as independent fiefdoms, sometimes with spectacularly poor results (the waterworks, the port). And citizens grumble about ‘faceless bureaucrats’ handling urban policy, but I’d say these would better be dubbed as Mad Scientists, running amok with their latest theory, which in the case of urban transport is currently a savage crusade against our most cherished and useful possession – the private motor vehicle – even though trends in electrification and information technology mean that the environmental and logistical difficulties of private vehicles are steadily attenuating.
Golly! What a shambles! How do we survive? But we do better than survive in our city: we thrive. We prosper and have fun. Auckland was a good city when I moved here thirty years ago. It is even better now. So too even better now are the other big cities I happen to know and love: London, New York, Vancouver, and Melbourne. They are more diverse, more sophisticated, more exciting, smarter, and even cleaner than they used to be. Clearly, they do not depend for success on bureaucracy, but to look for some other ideal type of governance, such as ‘democracy’, doesn’t cut it, either.
So how do modern cities work so well? A large city is, necessarily, a community of strangers, as is society at large. How can we escape from the Hobbesian hell of strangers assaulting each other in lives ‘nasty, brutish and short’?
It was the great Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith who figured it all out, in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). As is well-known, Smith correctly identified the division of labour into productive specialisms as essential for general prosperity. Of course, he didn’t invent the division of labour, for which there is plenty of evidence in the pre-history sites. He didn’t even invent his famous account of the eighteen steps in the production of pins -- lifting this unacknowledged from the Encyclopedie (1755) of the French philosopher Diderot.
But Smith was the first to look at the division of labour from the perspective, not of a production engineer, but as a social scientist, worried about the difficulties of getting all those specialists to pull together:
In civilised society [man] stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.
Basically, people had to learn how to trust, and be trustworthy of, strangers, and Smith just rolled up his sleeves and taught his fellow Scots and English how to do it, setting down the precepts of bourgeois behaviour: forbearance, dependability, willingness to accept loss, and so on. We are still bound by these rules; by what could be called the ‘invisible hand-shake’ binding our horizontal linkages to each other; these being a world away from the vertical ties imposed by bureaucracy.
In modern times it is indeed the large city which is the engine of prosperity, and our prophet here is the great urban economist Jane Jacobs, whose classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) still has much to teach us.
Things can go wrong as well as right in cities and society at large. Poverty, and the widening of the income distribution since the neoliberal take-overs of the 1980s are surely worth worrying about.
But it remains to be seen whether David Graeber and David Wengrow’s fascinating insights into the various and varying existences of people in very small scale societies a very long time ago can substitute for hard thinking about the options now for humanity in the twenty first century.
Tim Hazledine is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland.
59 Comments
Slavery was prevalent in ancient societies. Today we have freedom and choices, but if you don't work or fit into the norms, you might live worse than a slave.
And is lifelong debt, a reflection of today's many chains. So much so that fertility is -ve, in developed nations. And high fertility in poorer nations.
With the exception of parts of Africa, most of the worlds birth rates have dropped by around 2/3 over the last 50 years. Thats mostly due to urbanisation.
And there in lies the rub with modern cities. People naturally end up in smaller and smaller groups, and become more and more dependent on externalities for survival.
Higher quality of life and giving women education and life choices are the main determinants of birth rate . Slavery has been replaced by minimum wages sought by immigrants in many cases to better their lives in another country. Slave masters are now the political classes from both sides of the spectrum who seek control for their backers .
Freedom For Females fuels fertility falls .... women don't follow traditional norms of domesticity , if given the option of an education , a career , running their own business ...
... the new slave masters are the Australian big banks ... their slaves are ? ... we know who , don't we !
Without reading the book (I have a house to put together), and relying on TH's thoughtful precis, I still have a coupla pearls to cast.
- Any current 'stuckness' may well be partly explained by the built environment. This is well explored by James Howard Kunstler in 'The Geography of Nowhere'. This also brings in infrastructure- 3 waters, transport, security and the governance thereof. The gist of Churchill's take on this is that we build the house, then the house builds us.
- The caveat about scaling from dimly understood historic artefacts to current societal pluses and minuses is well put. Apart from the low life expectancies, the prevalence of violence and the rule of superstition, we know little else about the lived life of the mass of people even a few short centuries ago, especially in preliterate societies. And written history is laid down by, who else, the victorious survivors, who have their own myths to initiate or propagate.
"In modern times it is indeed the large city which is the engine of prosperity",
Said without adducing any evidence to support it. Of the food consumed, how much does Auckland produce? Virtually zero and it's actually worse than that as the inexorable spread is destroying the highly productive land on its borders. Does it generate its own power? No.That also comes from elsewhere. let's not dwell on the insanity of Auckland's house prices.
I quite like parts of Auckland and i have family living there, but economically, I see it more akin to a black hole than our engine of prosperity.
Why single out Auckland...what city in NZ "produces anything"?
But the official data says otherwise so who is right?
Auckland had the largest contribution to national GDP, at 37.9 percent. Wellington had the second-largest contribution at 12.5 percent, followed by Canterbury (12.4 percent). West Coast made the smallest contribution to national GDP, at 0.6 percent, slightly less than Gisborne’s 0.7
... must agree , I'm a little confused by that tirade against Orc Land ... just because they aren't self sustained in food production within the city limits does not mean they're not contributing to the nations GDP .. 37.9 % ... a big chunk ...
Quite a bizarre opinion ... but , plenty of " likes " ... so , what do I know !
GBH,
I will simply refer you to the comments from others. As Keith Woodford keeps on pointing out, our main exports come from our farming sector, with horticulture, forestry and viticulture. None of these take place within city limits. Of course the picture is not totally black and white with excellent companies like F&P H'care based in Auckland. Nonetheless, I think I have a valid case.
Agree totally. GDP is the dumbest measurement out. And Auckland is the proof of that. GDP values all work as equal. It is not. Auckland is heavily weighted in people who's only employment is providing services to each other at high wages. Under the GDP measure Auckland is valued far greater than the 100,000 population of Southlander's who generate very high export earning for the country.
You manage things to optimize what you measure. Dumb measurement => Dumb economy.
Tim Hazeldine was a couple of years ahead of me at school. A very impressive, intelligent person.
In most countries the big cities are the engines of prosperity with London, NY, Paris producing GDP per capita multiples of the GDP per capita of their countries. Auckland is unusual in being so ineffective at producing wealth. From memory it is 32% of NZ's population but produces only 34% of our GDP. Why? Auckland has all the benefits of agglomeration; it has the greatest diversity with the most immigrants; it's average age is younger than the average New Zealander; the central govt spends/squanders money in Auckland on infrastructure.
It is a great place to live although it could have been much better. I'm a happy Aucklander but Auckland is an economic failure. Why?
Lifted from Wikipedia: ""Only 600 urban centers, with a fifth of the world's population, generate 60 percent of global GDP"". If Auckland was among them our GDP per capita would not be 34% (Professor John Tookey) or 38% (Baywatch) of NZs but I'm estimating over 80%.
My guess is you are right. Despite Fonterra having headquarters with presumably well-paid staff in Auckland the sum of the wealth of our dairy farmers would greater. Most of our exports have origins in rural areas and we do not encourage processing of those raw materials: milk power not Danish Blue; logs not furniture.
Another reason might be the long-term high levels of low paid immigration. Auckland has many well-paid foreign-born doctors, computer analysts, business owners but they are massively out-numbered by checkout operators, uber drivers, cleaners. It would be fairly easy to match applicants for residency with IRD tax returns to discover if immigration is building wealth or pushing low skilled Kiwis into poverty. Governments have been coy to publish data. As an immigrant I hope I am wrong.
NZ accommodation allowance and benefit system encourages beneficiaries to stay in Auckland. In other countries allowance are the same wherever you live so the unemployable tend to move out to less expensive housing and access to a garden.
Our tax system has also not encouraged economic development and innovation. It has pushed most money into useless speculation on land instead of investment in productive business. Thus Auckland is underperforming because people throw their money into a making an easy buck rather than a difficult one.
Orc Land's GDP per person is the third highest in NZ , with only Taranaki first , and Wellington second ahead of them ...
... Orc Land's economic power is in manufacturing , professional services , finance & insurance , scientific & technical services ....
Too busy doing those , to get around to planting the spuds or milking cows !
Auckland GDP is assisted by higher congestion equals more petrol used equals more car repairs, crime excellent for GDP more ram raids more bollards more police more GDP more violence more ambulances etc before I start on poverty assistance, inefficient housing supply higher prices more agents more GDP , enough said .
I saw $25 per hour for tourism. There is a major difference between working visas and permanent visas. An immigrant is rather arbitrarily defined as a in NZ for over 12 months and the NZ holiday-working visa comes in two flavours: up to 12 months or 23 months so many useful fruit pickers may not be counted as immigrants because they don't stay for long enough to be counted. Immigrants arrive with working visas and then some transfer to become permanent residents. Immigration: the devil is in the details and so much is open to debate with pros and cons on all sides. There is only one certainty: INZ is the most bureaucratic, incompetent, unfeeling organisation in NZ.
"And citizens grumble about ‘faceless bureaucrats’ handling urban policy, but I’d say these would better be dubbed as Mad Scientists, running amok with their latest theory, which in the case of urban transport is currently a savage crusade against our most cherished and useful possession – the private motor vehicle – even though trends in electrification and information technology mean that the environmental and logistical difficulties of private vehicles are steadily attenuating."
Ahh more armchair urban and transport planning. For an economist you seem to have a very poor grasp of the wider externalities of our (by our I assume you mean "my") most cherished possession. Perhaps stick to the dismal science and leave urban and transport planning to the experts.
Universalist histories are a delusion of a universalist age.
Read 'Against the grain" by James Scott, an interesting contrarian argument that points out that most people did not want to be part of civilization, as it usually imposed slavery. Lots of archaeological discoveries, like Egyptian Walls being designed to contain the residents rather than to exclude outsiders. Or the way 'civilized peoples' like early european settlers in the Americas or even New Zealand, regularly went native and rejected living in a 'civilized' way. American indians used to make significant livings off returning indentured servants (white slaves) who fled the plantations.
The capacity for greater inequality is obviously limited by the size of the society you live in, but even in smaller polities there are natural hierarchies. Any soldiers who have participated in leaderless exercises (constant part of officer training) will tell you that they exist and form spontaneously.
What is new about our age is the way in which the serfs/peasants with wifi/wage slaves are used for work. Unlike our counter parts during the industrial revolution, we aren't delimbed by machinery or crammed in tenements in quite the same way yet. But we are endless propagandized, psychologically manipulated and given scientifically calculated rations of free time for consumption. We live with less mental, emotional or spiritual support than any people in any age in recorded history, where we are constantly removed from any contextualization of our lives through endless consumption of media. It is a slavery where the whip of debt is used far more intensely and with far wider impact than any physical whip. At least the peasant or plantation slave had their community, their bible and were free in their own minds and spirit.
A comment that made me think, thanks.
""We live with less mental, emotional or spiritual support than any people in any age in recorded history"". If by mental you mean thinking then modern social media is a positive; my grandchildren do benefit from accessing the entirety of human knowledge. The emotional and spiritual support is lacking. Is it because we now live in nuclear families?
It doesn't because the psychological traps of our minds are consumed by all the very clever psychological tricks which designers can build into their software. Think of all the times you find yourself mindlessly doom scrolling or pointlessly browsing social media. You can enlighten yourself more than any age in the past, but the contextualization is missing.
A thought experiment for you. If you have ever studied a subject using the internet, you will always find your contextual understanding is scattered to the wind by comparison with consuming a book. Try to build a general history of the State of Venice using all the websites available to you and give a coherent 5 minute timeline to someone you know.
Compare that to simply reading a summary general history like John Julius Norwich's The History of Venice, where an expert historian (with experience as a soldier, diplomat and British aristocrat) which means he understands what he is looking at and has dedicated the time to distil the history into a format for a general audience.
The internet provides endless capacity to read and research, but keyword search does not provide the context to appropriately understand the complex subject matter there. Simply read Wall Street Bets, the subreddit where they constantly use ridiculous complex trading positions (using futures and options) traditionally confined to bond and stock traders of the major commerical and investment banks, yet most of them have never read the first thing about valuing corporate finances to analyze a firm's book. It is largely detrimental to the people gambling on the hype there, where one learns some subset of a topic, but never gain the broad based education which institutions and written books once provided.
TL:DR don't read the internet, read books.
Maybe read the Internet and books?
The Internet is too awesome and convenient to give up. All the information there at your fingertips. What if you don't care about Venice but need to find the best way to paint trellis? (use a very small roller and roll and pummel the trellis with it).
I am a little surprised that there has been no serious pushback against computer generated art and narration. Computers replacing us in these areas seems perilous.
We retain a mindset and instincts that have been developed since well before the stone age whilst now dwelling in the modern technological age. This problem is mostly overcome through education but not entirely as our education is lacking an important development.
People need guidance in how to be high functioning individuals in a modern world and thus not have to rely on a community, a religion, an employer, a life partner or state for their identity and meaning. This is hardly taught at all.
Many young people are lost because they are mentally living in a social milieu that has rules and urges that resemble the law of the jungle. Failure in this world can have truly dire consequences for the psyche and the physical body as indeed it did when we lived in a real jungle. Rejection and ostracism meant death in the jungle. Today it often leads to suicide.
Now more than ever people need to understand something, you are no longer part of a community, a tribe or even a nation. You are an individual, the centre of your own Universe, the first and only world that you will ever live in. Technology and freedom has enabled this. You can make this world hell or paradise, it's up to you, everything else is an illusion. You need to be up for this challenge as the reward is great.
I choose paradise. Everything I see around me is amazing. It is a thoroughly interesting place to live. I rely only on myself for finding mental, emotional or spiritual support.
""People need guidance in how to be high functioning individuals in a modern world and thus not have to rely on a community, a religion, an employer, a life partner or state for their identity and meaning."" By definition we cannot all be high functioning; our world needs both professors and cleaners. Covid proved who are indispensable and many were low paid cleaners and delivery drivers.
There are people who have such a high opinion of their high capability that their identity and meaning is uninfluenced by religion, community, employment - they are rare and horrible - Trump fits that description.
Zachary: if you rely only on yourself why are you wasting time regularly writing comments for others?
Perhaps my fault for not being very clear but I wrote, "I rely only on myself for finding ..." Commenting here is part of my exploration of the world. I'm not relying on others for emotional, mental or spiritual things. I may find such support, actually I do quite often on YouTube but I'm actively seeking it out as a "high functioning individual" by which I really mean someone who is aware that their world is the first and only world there will ever be as seen form this particular individual's perspective. It's a phrase I borrowed from Wittgenstein:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
High functioning as an individual meaning not reliant on others for personal meaning but could be a complete loser in other areas.
The world as it is suits me just fine. I wouldn't want people 'in my face' with a Bible in their hands offering me emotional or any other support. So I reject that a slave could be in a better place than an individual in NZ society today.
Yeah but I'm not relying on them or dependent on them. I'm free to change my mind tomorrow.
All I am really saying is don't anchor yourself to anything for personal meaning. Being a slave with a Bible is the antithesis of what I think freedom is. The modern (Western) world is great in that we can largely be what we want to be.
Yup,
I agree with you in terms of the society we engage on the Internet. it is is the society of schizophrenia predicted by De Bord!in the 1960,s a result of the consumer society, a result of capitalism.But we should limit our exposure and talk to those to are close to ourselves, as well as protecting a sense of self worth.
there are 5 million individuals in NZ
I never said you couldn't be social. However if you find yourself alone on a deserted island for a period of time you should still be capable of a rich experience and not fall to pieces. At least we should train ourselves for that, for change, for loss. My suggestion is that the modern world provides the possibility of a rich internal life that doesn't require one to be a slave to anything, even society. This is a unique time in human history. I like it.
I think I agree with you; we do live in a uniquely decent period of history. Not just the mental freedom - read about human existence before modern medicine (mid 19th century) where a bad leg fracture gave you a 50% chance of survival and every childbirth was like playing Russian roulette.
A baby has no language and its thinking is remarkable (a new born baby's brain is the most complicated object in the known universe) but until language is learned it cannot even conceive of concepts such as freedom.
Everyday my wife goes to work and I have your ultimate freedom - better than your desert island since I have hot and cold running water and a fridge. So I sit and use that freedom writing replies to your comment. Sometime in the mid-afternoon I get edgy waiting for my wife to return home and nag me and correct all my weird thoughts.
They Dawn of Everything is extremely anti-universalist. It’s the most convincing argument I’ve read that agriculture isn’t a one-way deal, and that a seasonal hybrid model was preferred. It also refers to multiple instances of spontaneous order in social hierarchies, though these seem to be limited by context (e.g. certain Native American leaders straying from their jurisdiction would just get mocked), or seasonal.
The second part of your comment is a bit dramatic. Nobody is forcing you to keep your wifi turned on. Join a church or CrossFit if you want community. No aspect of the lives of slaves were preferable to ours.
Urban and transport planning has not been in the hands of urban and transport planners for many years. It has been subjugated to the political will of those whose most cherished possession is their car.
The problems with Auckland's motorways lays firmly with those who do not understand how cities work and think a transport model which works in rural New Zealand can be applied to cities. It's pretty simple physics, after a certain size, using a car as the exclusive means to move around is not feasible.
I use motorways, public transport and yes also cycleways. I assume that you approve as when I cycle that is one less car clogging up the motorway? I mean it's hard to complain about congestion when you are the congestion.
Interesting that the author of this article mentions Brian Boyd. Boyd may have only been a mere lecturer in 1992 but by the early 2000s he was a Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Auckland University. After I sold my business and was still working in it part time I took his stage 1 course which was called something like "From Comics to Sonnets". He had an amazing knowledge of his subject but he taught it from the perspective of evolution; he was internationally recognized as being at the forefront of the movement to incorporate the theories of evolution into literary studies.
He was, and undoubtedly still is, the leading world authority on Vladimir Nabokov. I did an essay on Nabokov's "Lolita" during the course but I certainly wouldn't have had the time to read even one volume of his biography of Nabokov.
At the end of the course of lectures we all stood up and gave him a hearty round of applause, which, I should imagine, would have been unprecedented for any lecturer in any academic field.
This takes Graeber too seriously. He’s a **** stirring anarchist, and a great one at that. As well as a great author and scholar. But you should only take him 80% seriously. He was great at tearing apart false narratives in the social sciences, but he’s not the guy to ask when you want a vision for the future.
I’m 50% through the book, and it’s somehow both fascinating and boring, to be honest.
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