Obligatory pitch for The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
By: David Graeber, David Wengrow
which is a whole book about the challenging of the "Necessity of Cities" and "Agriculture Ends the Good Life" memes, as well as a few others that go mostly unchallenged in history books.
A trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state", political violence, and social inequality—revealing new possibilities for human emancipation
If you like this sort of stuff, I recommend The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a 2021 book by anthropologist and activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything
Somewhat related: I got a completely new angle at the formative years of civic society from David Graeber's new (and last, sadly) book [1] "The Dawn of Everything".
Surprisingly, there are also many enlightening bits and pieces in Hillary Mantel's collection of reviews for the LRB [2]. Plus her writing is among the most powerful I've ever read in English.
The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht. It taught me that there is indeed a direction for society to go beyond PostModernism, that is constructive and nuanced. Also explained why it is so rare for people to move into such a stage of development.
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Showed all of the archaeological evidence for vast time periods where alternate governance models were put into practice, and how the history of progress that we are given is not the whole story. Useful for seeing that we are in a local minim, and can evolve into something better.
Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. Goes through the diaries and historical evidence of the early interactions with Australia's Aboriginals. Shows how over time their agricultural practices, towns and living environments were destroyed and replaced with a narrative that they were backwards and not using the land. Good example of how sustainable practices can look like unused natural spaces, and thus dismissed as poor uses of space.
Began "The Dawn of Everything" about a week ago, still on chapter 3.
Chapter 2 was very, very good. Worth the whole book alone. It begins with by questioning "why did Rousseau wrote about inequality if 100 years before no one in western culture cared about it"? Then he goes to show how the themes of liberty and social equality came from Canadian First Nations criticism of western culture. It is very well argued, solid and mind-blowing.
Sometimes the book gets too much into petty fights. I didn't like its takes on Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" or Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel". But that's a matter of my personal taste.
"Burn: The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism" by Herman Pontzer
"Humankind" by Rutger Bregman
"The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow
"Work: A history of how we spend our time" by James Suzman
I sort of want to include "The Ministry of the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson because it feels almost as much like political treatise as it does a work of fiction.
Does anyone know about an expert, non-partisan (whatever the parties are in the field of pre-history) review of Dawn of Everything? Someone who can summarize the strengths and weaknesses, claims and critiques, etc.?
I recommend “Against the Grain” and also “Pre Industrial Societies.” They give a really good perspective on human life and the structures we create. One of my favourite quotes is: the hallmarks of a state: appropriation, inequality and hierarchy.
Grains are the only agricultural product that can grow an early state, because it can be easily taxed, it’s fungible so you can pay with it, and people can’t run off with their field and canals to somewhere else.
It’s kind of a wonderful point that without the taxman there would be no civilisation.
- The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, 1973 (Douglas North, Robert Thomas): Nobel Economic Historian North explains how institutions and property rights determine how human beings got along with each other through history; this is important, so they don't think we're mass murderers by design
- some school biology book on natural selection, evolution
- The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
- Goedel, Escher, Bach: introduction to the "weirdness" of the human brain
- the little prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry): human beings and their quirks
I felt his book was more arguing against racist notions of developmental inequality by painting a picture of how systemic and environmental factors influence societal evolution. We've learned more but the central thesis holds..
That said, do you know of a more current layman-accessible book on the topic?
"The Breakdown of Nations", by Leopold Kohr. Big organizations, centralization... are not good for humans, nor really efficient or sustainable. Some/many/most(?) of us feel it, this book clearly shows why.
The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops.
Read it, you're probably wrong, and it will change your views once again.
All his books are superb.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) analyzes our civilization from another angle - how we have apparently "got stuck" on a single trajectory of development, and how violence and domination became normalised within this dominant system. Not finished yet, but it's also a candidate for aggressive recommendations :)
which is a whole book about the challenging of the "Necessity of Cities" and "Agriculture Ends the Good Life" memes, as well as a few others that go mostly unchallenged in history books.
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