wisdom of kandiaronk
david graeber (2019) – The Wisdom of Kandiaronk – The Indigenous Critique, the Myth of Progress and the Birth of the Left – via anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-wisdom-of-kandiaronk]
notes/quotes:
Anthropologist David Graeber has been working for seven years, with archaeologist David Wengrow, on a work devoted to a history of inequality. A first excerpt from this work was published online in 2018. This excerpt showed that the usual narrative, according to which human inequality was the price to pay for developed societies and their comfort, is a lie.
david wengrow – dawn of everything (book)
Indeed, in an analysis of very long-term history, over approximately 50,000 years, David Graeber and David Wengrow show that there existed both small societies of unequal hunter-gatherers and large, extremely egalitarian cities.
Even more astonishingly, there were societies that could be egalitarian in the summer and unequal in the winter, or vice versa. This extract had been widely commented on in intellectual circles and particularly in France by Emmanuel Todd
graeber/wengrow back & forth law
This second excerpt from the same work, still unpublished in French and English, deals with the influence of Native American societies on Enlightenment thinkers in the West. It appears that the founding texts of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and in particular Rousseau’s text on the origin of inequality among men, were strongly influenced by books which related the criticism of the American Indians vis-à-vis -towards Western society.
Among these American Indians, the figure of Kandiaronk stands out as that of a sort of Native American Socrates, a brilliant orator who fascinated the French elite and who perverted Western youth as his critiques of Western society and of the Christian religion spread within the aforementioned society.
The text shows that the Myth of Progress then appears as a conservative reaction against the diffusion of these ideas, in order to justify Western inequalities since according to this ideology, the inequality of men would be the price to pay for technical progress and the comfort it brings.
We will comment on this excerpt soon and we invite interested people to offer their analyzes in order to try to open a friendly debate worthy of the dizzying height of this text.
Christophe Petit
https://davidgraeber.org/memorials/2020-9-10-a-tribute-to-david-graeber-by-christophe-petit/
notes/quotes from his tribute to david:
John Jordan’s testimony is particularly moving for me because he talks about a weekend in Paris with David and his wife Nika at the height of the revolt of the yellow vests and because I was with them those days. David and his wife were sleeping at my place. Usually, when a person dies, we exaggerate by finding all the qualities of the world in him. The special thing about David is that it is (was, unfortunately) true. He really possessed all the qualities of the world to an exceptional degree: kindness, benevolence, humour, erudition, imagination, intelligence, energy, curiosity, etc. and quite frankly, I am not exaggerating when I say that. He is the sunniest being I have ever met and all the testimonies of those who have known him converge on this point. At the age of 59, he was still very young. It is perhaps the privilege of geniuses to never grow old and to remain joyful children playing on the beach and exploring the beach, this frontier between the land of the known and the ocean of the unknown. While most individuals fossilize with age and lose their flexibility of mind, I have absolute certainty that he was mowed down in the ascending phase of his genius. This is what makes his untimely death so tragic. People confuse talent with genius. Talent is common, genius is rare. Genius is not a greater quantity of talent. Genius and talent are qualitatively different. Talent is the enemy of genius. Talent is conservative, genius is revolutionary. While talent is a matter of memory and analytical intelligence, genius is a matter of life drive, of sublimation, i.e. imagination. The man of talent possesses exceptional memory and intelligence, while the man of genius possesses an extraordinary imagination. Talent, like the talent of the champion of chess is replaceable by the machine, genius is irreplaceable because it comes from the impulse of life that goes beyond calculation.
Talent does not bring anything new because it is analytical. Talent combines what already exists. The genius that is perhaps most found in individuals who are not academically competent is creative and synthetic imagination. It is usually revealed through a sense of humour. Genius creates novelty through the synthetic faculty of imagination, which is the essential faculty of the human being.
Genius is the essence of the human being possessed to an exceptional degree. It is for this reason that David moved people so much as the extraordinary life drive of his imagination exploded in each of his works
back to wisdom of kandriaronk:
Historians of ideas sometimes write as if Rousseau had personally launched the debate on social inequality with his essay. In fact, Rousseau wrote it for an essay competition on that subject.
It’s pretty much the same thing with the issue of inequality. If we ask not ‘what are the origins of social inequality’, but ‘what are the origins of the question of the origin of social inequality’ — how would we have come to think that in 1754 , the Dijon Academy found this question appropriate..
rather.. what is missing.. what do we need most.. essential basic needs of all of humanity..
ie: missing pieces
The first thing to point out is that this problem is not one that would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were supposed to exist from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as St. Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly surpassed Eve.
garden-enough ness et al
The authors observe that the terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to become commonplace in the early 17th century, under the influence of natural law theory.
The question then was what rights human beings have simply by virtue of being human, that is, what rights could be said to have ‘naturally’, even if they existed in a ‘natural’ state of nature’, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion and without codified laws? The issue was the subject of heated debate.
the dance needs no rights ness.. rather.. the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
Introducing the concept of a state of nature didn’t really change everything, at least immediately, but it did allow political philosophers to imagine people lacking the trappings of civilization not as degenerate savages, but as a kind of humanity in its raw state. This allowed them to ask a host of new and unprecedented questions about what it meant to be human. What social forms would still exist, even among people who had no recognizable form of law or government?
But why did they fixate on the idea of primordial freedom, or, above all, equality? This seems all the more strange since social equality had not been considered a possibility by medieval intellectuals.
First of all, a clarification is necessary. While medieval intellectuals had difficulty imagining equal social relations, medieval peasants seem to have had a much easier time doing so.
What we are suggesting then is that American intellectuals-and here and in what follows we use the term ‘American’ as it was then, to refer to the indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, and ‘intellectual’ as anyone accustomed to discussing abstract ideas-, actually played a role in this process. It is very strange that this is considered a particularly radical idea, but in the scientific literature it is a real heresy.
The ‘Age of Reason’ was an age of debate. The Enlightenment was rooted in conversation; it took place largely in cafes and salons. Many classic Enlightenment texts literally took the form of dialogues, most cultivated in a style that was easy, transparent, conversational, and clearly inspired by the salon. (It was the Germans, at the time, who tended to write in the obscure style for which French intellectuals have since become famous). The use of ‘reason’ was above all a style of argumentation. The ideals of the French Revolution, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, took the form they had taken over a long series of debates and conversations. All we are suggesting here is that these conversations extended further than we had assumed.
Huronia, Algonkia: communism in the service of freedom
Even more scandalous, according to Biard, the Mi’kmaq constantly claimed that they were therefore richer than the French.
By the end of his stay, however he had concluded that their social arrangements were in many respects superior to those of his country.
Here he clearly echoed the Wendat opinion:
They have no trial and take little trouble to acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment ourselves so much, and for our excessive and insatiable greed to acquire them, we are justly and with reason reproached by their quiet life and quiet dispositions.
Like the Mi’kmaq of Biard, the Wendat were particularly offended by the lack of generosity of the French towards each other:
They offer hospitality and help each other so that the needs of all are met without there being destitute beggars in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard that there were in France a great number of these needy beggars, and thought it was through want of charity in us, and blamed us severely for it.
The fact that Native Americans lived in a generally free society, while Europeans did not, was never really up for debate — both sides agreed that this was the case. They disagreed on whether individual freedom was desirable.
Freedom is intrinsically good. The Jesuits of the 17th century certainly did not share this hypothesis. They tended to view individual freedom as animalistic.
In the opinion of the Montagnais-Neskapi, on the other hand, the French were little better than slaves, living in constant fear of getting into trouble with their superiors. Such criticisms appear regularly in Jesuit accounts, not only from those who lived in nomadic bands, but also from urban dwellers like the Wendat. Moreover, the missionaries were willing to admit that it was not just rhetoric. Even Wendat statesmen could not force anyone to do what they did not want to do. As Father Lallemant noted in 1644:
I do not believe that there are people on earth freer than them, and less capable of allowing the subjection of their will to any power whatsoever, to the point that the Fathers here present have no control over their children, nor on their subjects, nor on the captains, nor on the laws of the land, except in so far as each is willing to submit to them. There is no punishment inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are not in danger….
This account is worth quoting at length, because it gives an idea of the political challenge that some of the material found in the Jesuit Relations must have represented for the European public at the time, and why so many people found him so fascinating. After explaining how outrageous it was that even murderers got away scot-free, the good father admitted that, viewed simply as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat justice system was not ineffective. In fact, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish the guilty, the Wendat insisted that the offender’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This is why it was everyone’s responsibility to keep their fellow human beings under control:
it is clear that some people were indeed considered wealthy. Wendat society was not ‘economically egalitarian’ in this sense. ..Wealthy Wendat people hoarded precious items so they could give them away on dramatic occasions like this. Neither in the case of land and agricultural products, nor in the case of wampum and other similar valuables, was there any way to transform access to material resources into power — or at least, the power to make others work for you or to force them to do things they didn’t want to do.
any form of people telling other people what to do
For the Jesuits, of course, all this was scandalous. In fact, their attitude toward indigenous ideals of freedom is the exact opposite of the attitude that most French people, or Canadians, tend to have today. As we have observed, almost anyone who grew up in a liberal democracy sees freedom as a perfectly admirable ideal in principle, even if they feel that a society based on total individual freedom — say, a society that has gone so far as to eliminate the police, prisons or any other coercive apparatus — would instantly descend into violent chaos.
Father Lallemant was prepared to admit that in practice such a system worked quite well; he created ‘much less disorder than there is in France’. But the Jesuits were opposed to freedom in principle. Lallemant continues:
It is, without a doubt, a disposition entirely contrary to the spirit of the Faith, which obliges us to submit not only our will, but also our mind, our judgments and all the feelings of man to a power unknown to our senses, to a Law which is not earthly, and which is entirely opposed to the laws and feelings of a corrupt nature. Add to this that the laws of the Country, which appear to them to be the most just, attack the purity of Christian life in a thousand ways… especially with regard to their marriages….
marriage\ing.. nika & silvia on divorce.. et al
The Jesuit Relations is full of this sort of thing: scandalized missionaries often reported, for example, that women had full control over their own bodies, and that unmarried women therefore had sexual freedom. Married women could divorce at will. It was a scandal. But for them, this sinful behavior was only the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they considered pernicious in themselves.
The ‘wicked liberty of savages’, it was insisted, was the greatest obstacle to their ‘submission to the yoke of the law of God’ . It was even extremely difficult to find terms to translate concepts such as ‘lord’, ‘commandment’, ‘obedience’, ‘obedience’, into indigenous languages; it was virtually impossible to explain the underlying theological concepts.
On the political level, therefore, the French and the Americans were not arguing about equality, but freedom.
The democratic governance of the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, which so impressed European readers, was an expression of the same principle: if no coercion was permitted, it was obvious that whatever social coherence existed must be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.
aka: coercion
As we have seen, at first neither side had much to say about ‘equality’. The argument was more about freedom and mutual aid, or, what might even better be called freedom and communism.
However, there is another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime, but in the original sense of a web of social relations defined by reciprocity, in which the non-transactional exchange of goods and services predominated. Think: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’.
To understand the evolution of the indigenous critique and its impact on European thought, one must first understand the roles of two men: an impoverished French aristocrat, Baron Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce de la Hontan, and a exceptionally brilliant Wendat statesman, Kandiaronk.
But let’s give the floor to Kandiaronk himself. The first of the Dialogues focuses on religious issues, in which Lahontan lets his protagonist calmly expose the logical contradictions and inconsistency of the Christian doctrines of original sin and redemption, paying particular attention to the concept of hell.
Kandiaronk continually highlights the fact that Christians are divided into endless sects, each convinced that they are entirely right and everyone else is hellbound, as well as the inherent unreliability of historical texts.
A chapter on the subject of law follows, where Kandiaronk takes the position that European-style punitive law, like the religious doctrine of eternal damnation, is not necessitated by the corruption inherent in human nature, but rather by a form of social organization that encourages selfish and acquisitive behavior.
Lahontan: This is why the wicked must be punished and the good must be rewarded. Otherwise, murder, theft and defamation would spread everywhere and, in a word, we would become the most unfortunate people on earth.
Kandiaronk: For my part, I find it difficult to see how you could be much more unhappy than you already are. What kind of human being, what kind of creature must Europeans be to be forced to do good and only refrain from evil for fear of punishment? …
You have noticed that we lack judges. Why? Because we never file complaints against each other! And why do we never sue? Because we have made the decision not to accept or use the money. And why are we refusing to use money in our communities? Because we are determined not to have laws, because, ever since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live happily without them.
Kandiaronk : I have spent six years thinking about the state of European society and I still cannot think of a single one of your ways that is not inhumane, and I sincerely believe that this can only be because you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’..t
thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman
Kandiaronk is even ready to assert that Europe would be better off if its entire social system were dismantled:
In the 1940s, anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis’: the tendency of people to define themselves against others..t Imagine an argument where two people start out with a minor political disagreement, but after an hour, have taken the positions of two completely opposite poles of a certain ideological divide — even positions so extreme they never never have originally supported — just to show how completely they disagree with each other. We all know this kind of thing can happen. Anyone reading this will probably have seen it happen, at least once or twice.
gregory bateson.. schismogenesis.. us & them ness.. marsh label law et al..
Bateson suggests that such processes can become culturally institutionalized..t How do boys and girls in Papua New Guinea come to behave so differently, when no one has ever explicitly told them how boys and girls are supposed to behave? They don’t just learn gender roles by imitating their elders; It also happens because boys and girls each learn to find the other’s behavior distasteful and to try to be as little like the opposite sex as possible. What begins as minor learned differences become exaggerated until girls come to think of themselves as everything boys are not, which they then increasingly become. And of course, boys do the same thing to girls.
Bateson was interested in psychological processes within societies, but there is every reason to believe that something similar also happens between societies. People come to define themselves against their neighbors. When urbanites encounter nomadic warriors, something curious happens. The city dwellers become more urban and the barbarians become more barbaric. If we can say that ‘national character’ really exists, it is only because of these schismogenetic processes: The English try to be as little as possible like the French as possible, the French define themselves in opposition to the the Germans, and so on. To serve this end, members of one society commonly exaggerate their differences between themselves and their neighbors.
Kandiaronk’s focus on money is exemplary here: to this day, indigenous societies, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions ‘ as opposed to white men ‘living off money’ (to borrow a phrase from Marshall Sahlins.
Turgot found this thought dangerous, writing:
Yes, we all like the idea of freedom and equality, that is, in principle. But the broader context must be considered. In reality, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority, but proof of their inferiority, since such equality is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient, and therefore where all are equally poor.
His argument went something like this: As societies evolve, technological advances, natural differences in talents and abilities between individuals (which have always existed) become increasingly important, and ultimately they form the basis of a division of labor ever more complex. The poverty and dispossession of some, however lamentable, was a necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole.
The only alternative, according to Turgot, was massive intervention by the State which aimed to create a uniformity of social conditions — an imposed equality which could only have the effect of crushing any initiative, therefore leading to economic ruin and social catastrophe.
Between 1703 and 1751, the indigenous critique of Western civilization had an enormous impact on European thought. What began as widespread expressions of outrage and disgust from Americans first exposed to European customs eventually evolved into a debate about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, human freedom.
When it became clear to French observers that most Native Americans considered individual autonomy and freedom of action to be consummate values, that they organized their lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of a human being being subordinate to the will of another..t, and that as a result they viewed French society as a society of slaves, they reacted in various ways.
sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do to get to the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. the dance
But, as he is careful to point out, the whole parable is only a means of trying to understand what allowed human beings to accept the notion of private property:
The first man who, having enclosed a plot of land, said to himself, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes could one have saved humanity, by lifting up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellow men: ‘Beware! Do not listen to this imposter; you are ruined if you one day forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to no one.’
He agrees that private property is the root of the problem; although he can’t really imagine society being based on anything else.
This is what was lost in the translation of the indigenous critique into terms that French philosophers could understand. It never occurred to Americans that there was a contradiction between individual freedom and communism — at least, communism in the sense in which we have used it here, as a certain presumption of sharing, that people who are not real enemies can be expected to help provide for another.
In fact, the freedom of the individual was supposed to rest on some basic level of communism, since, after all, people who starve or don’t have adequate clothing or shelter in a snowstorm aren’t really free to do much of anything except what’s necessary to stay alive.
The European conception of individual liberty, on the other hand, was closely linked to conceptions of private property. From a legal perspective, it dates back to the ancient absolute power of the Roman head of household to do whatever he wanted with his personal and personal property, including his children and slaves.
In other words, freedom had always come at least somewhat at the expense of others. Additionally, there was a strong feeling that households should be self-sufficient; therefore, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of will, but freedom from dependence on other human beings (except those under their direct power or control).
Rousseau, who himself always insisted that he wanted to live his life in a way that did not make him dependent on the help of others (even though he had all his needs met by mistresses and servants), echoes this logic.
Conservative critics, as mentioned, have blamed Rousseau for almost everything. Many held him personally responsible for the guillotine. The dream of restoring the ancient state of freedom and equality, they said, led to exactly the effects that Turgot had predicted: an Inca-style totalitarianism that could only be imposed by revolutionary terror. It is certainly true that radicals of the era of the American and French revolutions were influenced by Rousseau’s ideas.
Here, for example, is an excerpt purportedly taken from a manifesto written in 1776, which almost perfectly reproduces Rousseau’s fusion of evolutionism and his critique of private property as leading directly to the state:
As families multiplied, the means of subsistence began to run out;..t nomadic (or itinerant) life ceased, and PROPERTY began to exist; men chose homes; agriculture made them mix. Language became universal; living together, one man began to measure his strength with another, and the weaker were distinguished from the stronger. This undoubtedly created the idea of mutual defense, of an individual leading coalitions of different families, and therefore defending their persons and fields against the invasion of an enemy; but FREEDOM had fundamentally ruined, and EQUALITY has disappeared.
rather.. as intoxication increased.. graeber stop at enough law ran out
Obviously, Rousseau’s effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and the lost ages of freedom and equality were in no way responsible for the uprising by putting strange ideas in the heads of the sans-culottes (as we have noted, intellectuals in European society of the day seem to have was the only class of people who didn’t already understand such ideas). But it could be argued that by bringing together theindigenous critique and the doctrine of progress originally developed to counter it, he, in effect, wrote the founding document of the left, as an intellectual project.
intellectness as cancerous distraction et al
For the same reason, right-wing thought has always been wary not only of ideas of progress, but also of the entire tradition which sprung forth in response to the indigenous critique. We tend to assume that it is mainly left-wing politicians who talk about the ‘Myth of the Noble Savage’ and that any ancient European narrative that idealizes distant people, or even attributes convincing opinions to them, is in reality nothing more than a romantic projection of European fantasies onto people the authors could never truly understand. The racist denigration of the savage and the naïve celebration of savage innocence are two sides of the same imperialist coin. Originally, however, this was an explicitly right-wing position.
Ter Ellingson, the anthropologist who has done the most comprehensive review of the literature, concluded that there never was a ‘Myth of the Noble Savage’ — in the sense of a stereotype of simple societies living in an era of happy primordial innocence — at all. The accounts of real travelers tend to provide us with a much more ambivalent picture, describing foreign societies as a complex, sometimes incomprehensible mixture of virtues and vices.
Instead, what needs to be examined might better be called the Myth of the Noble Savage Myth. Why did some Europeans begin to accuse other Europeans of having such a naive and romantic view, to the point where anyone who suggests that an aspect of indigenous life has something to teach us is immediately accused of romanticism. The answer is not pretty. The phrase ‘noble savage’ was actually popularized as a term of ridicule and abuse used by a clique of die-hard racists who took control of the British Ethnological Society in 1859, and called for the total extermination of inferior peoples.
david & david on stupid savage
Men make their own history, but not in the conditions of their choice.
aka: in sea world.. so whalespeak
Karl Marx
But the only ‘laws’ are those we invent ourselves.
When we set out to write this book, we imagined ourselves writing a contribution to the burgeoning literature on the question of the origins of social inequality — but this time, one based on the real facts.
As we researched, we realized how strange this question was. Even apart from the implications of primordial innocence, this way of framing the problem suggests a certain diagnosis of what is wrong in society and what can and cannot be done, which, as we have seen, often has very little to do with what makes people living in societies we have come to call ‘egalitarian’ different from people who are not.
Rousseau avoids the question, reducing his savages to simple thought experiments. ..
In fact, he strips his ‘savages’ of any imaginative power of their own; their happiness comes entirely from their inability to imagine otherwise or to project themselves into the future in one way or another. They therefore also completely lack philosophy. This is probably why no one could foresee the disasters that would ensue when they began staking properties and forming governments to protect them; by the time human beings were even capable of thinking that far ahead, the damage had already been done.
In the 1960s, French anarchist and anthropologist Pierre Clastres suggested exactly the opposite. What if the kind of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent because they are free from rulers, governments, bureaucracies and ruling classes, were free not because they lack imagination, but because they are actually more imaginative than us?.. t
We struggle to imagine what a truly free society would look like;.. t perhaps they do not have as much difficulty imagining what arbitrary power and domination would be like. Maybe they can not only imagine it, but also consciously organize their society so that such things never happen.
black science of people/whales law
huge
hari rat park law et al
Rousseau was accused of numerous crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is truly a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the Myth of the Noble Savage, which he did not really do, but his promulgation of the Myth of the Stupid Savage. Of this he is guilty, even if he considers his subject happily stupid.
Nineteenth-century imperialists enthusiastically embraced the stereotype, simply adding a variety of seemingly scientific justifications — from Darwinian evolutionism to ‘scientific’ racism — to expand on this notion of innocent simplicity in order to push the remaining free peoples of the world (or increasingly, as European imperial expansion continued, the once-free peoples of the world) into a conceptual space where their judgment no longer seems threatening. This is the work we are trying to undo.
Equality is almost universally recognized as a value, despite the almost complete lack of consensus on what the term actually refers to. Equal opportunities ? Equality of condition? Formal equality before the law?
Similarly, societies such as the Mi’kmaq, Algonquin or Wendat of the 17th century are regularly referred to as ‘egalitarian societies’ — or, alternatively, ‘bands’ or ‘tribal’ societies, which are generally assumed to mean the same thing.
It’s never clear exactly what the term is supposed to refer to. Is it an ideology, the belief that everyone should be the same — obviously not in all ways, but in certain ways that are considered particularly important? Or should it be a situation where people are actually the same? And in the latter case, should this mean that an egalitarian ideal that characterizes this particular society is in fact largely realized, so that all members of society can be said to have equal access to land, or treat each other with equal dignity, or are equally free to make their opinions known in public assemblies?
ooof.. seat at the table ness et al
Or could it be a measure imposed by the observer: monetary income, political power, caloric intake, size of the house, number and quality of personal possessions? Would equality mean the erasure of the individual or the celebration of the individual? (After all, a society where everyone was exactly the same, and where they were all so different that there was no criterion for saying one was superior to the other, would seem both ‘egalitarian ‘ to an outside observer).
Can we talk about equality in a society where elders are treated like gods and make all important decisions, if all members of that society who survive after, say, fifty years become elders? What about gender relations? Many so-called ‘egalitarian’ societies are only truly egalitarian between adult men. Sometimes the relationships between men and women in these societies are anything but equal.
Other cases are more ambiguous. It may be that men and women in a given society not only do different jobs, but they have different theories about what is important, so that they both tend to think that the main concerns on the other (cooking, hunting, childcare, war, etc.) are insignificant or so profoundly different that it makes no sense to compare them at all.
Since there is no clear, generally accepted answer to any of these questions, the use of the term ‘egalitarian’ has led to endless arguments. In fact, it is still not clear what the term ‘egalitarian’ means.
Ultimately, the term is not used because it has positive substance, but rather for the same reason that 16th-century Natural Law theorists speculated about equality in the state of nature: The term ‘equality’ is a default term, referring to that kind of protoplasmic mass of humanity that we imagine to be a remnant when all the trappings of civilization are stripped away.
‘Egalitarian’ people are those who have no hereditary princes, judges, overseers or priests, and are generally without a city or scripture. They are societies of equals only in the sense that all the most obvious signs of inequality are absent.
the ineq that matters.. missing pieces.. no equity.. no dance.. until all have access to those two
It follows that any historical work that purports to be about the origins of social inequality is really an inquiry into the origins of civilization; a work which in turn implies a vision of history which, like that of Turgot, conceives civilization as a system of social complexity which guarantees greater overall prosperity, but at the same time, guarantees that certain compromises will necessarily have to be made in the area of freedoms and rights. We’re trying to tell a different story.
It is not that we consider insignificant or uninteresting the fact that princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests — or for that matter writing and cities — emerge only at a certain moment in human history. Quite the contrary: to understand our current predicament as a species, it is absolutely crucial to understand how these things came to be.
but perhaps we don’t have to understand our current predicament.. other than.. we’re all (and have been since forever) in sea world.. and we need to get out.. hari rat park law et al
However, we also insist that to do this we must reject the idea of treating our distant ancestors as some kind of primordial human soup. Accumulating evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and related fields suggests that, like the Native Americans or the 18th-century French , our distant ancestors had very specific ideas about what was important. in their societies, and that these varied considerably during the approximately thirty thousand years between the beginning of the ice age and the dawn of civilization and that to describe them in terms of uniform egalitarianism tells us almost nothing about them.
*but important to whales.. so cancerous distraction
There is no doubt that there was generally some degree of equality by default: a presumption that humans are all equally powerless against the gods; or a strong feeling that no one’s will should be permanently subordinated to that of another. It would undoubtedly have been necessary to ensure that hereditary princes, judges, supervisors or priests did not appear for such a long period.
But self-conscious ideologies of ‘equality’, that is, those which present equality as an explicit value, as opposed to an ideology of freedom, dignity or participation which applies equally to all, appear to have been relatively recent in history. Even when they appear, these ideologies rarely apply to everyone.
Ancient Athenian democracy, for example, was based on political equality among its citizens — even though they only made up between 10 and 20% of the total population — in the sense that all citizens had equal rights to participate in public decision-making.
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
again.. need to try the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. ie: a sabbatical ish transition
This is therefore not a book about the origins of inequality. But it aims to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong in the world. A very small percentage of its population controls the destiny of almost everyone, and it behaves in increasingly disastrous ways. *To understand how this situation came about, we must go back to what made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers, and judges. But we no longer have the luxury of being able to assume that we already know exactly what it was. Inspired by indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, **we must approach historical, archaeological and ethnographic documents with fresh eyes.
*ie: khan filling the gaps law .. the gaps from missing pieces
**rather.. need to let go of all the history ness (since all in sea world.. so have no idea what legit free people are like)
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be you. 