Comment by i_dont_know_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by i_dont_know_ | Hacker News Reader

"The Dawn of Everything" by the Davids, Graeber and Wengrow.

It's a little dense and a bit meandering at times, but the core idea behind it: we have a strong bias in believing that civilization comes in stages. We believe we go 'hunter/gatherer/primitive' -> agriculture -> 'real' civilization. Basically, this is totally false.

Not only is it totally false, but one of the reasons we might have this bias is because, while the native Americans were being eradicated, Western thinkers and theologians had to justify why Western civilization was 'better', despite native Americans basically giving Westerners the seeds for individual liberties and social blueprints for the Western Enlightenment...

It really uprooted my deepest beliefs about human history, civilization, and (most importantly for me) what I believe "the future" should look like. Mind-expanding for sure.

Seconded!

The thing that I think about from them is the 'Reverse Fermi Paradox'. We've been humans for ~200k years now. Just in the last 10k or so have we had 'civilization'. What were we doing for the other 19/20ths of our time here? Ice ages don't account for all that time and there were warm periods in them. What was going with us all that time?

I think about it a lot also in context of their reviews of different cultural models. It seems we spent a lot of time experimenting and trying out a bazillion different ways to organize and have families and be in a tribe. Since we've no record of it, I'm fascinated by how our deep ancestors lived as a culture and how different it was.

>we had 'civilization'

Can't resist this apocryphal Gandhi quote:

Reporter: What do you think of civilization?

Gandhi: I think it is a good idea.

The quote, apocryphal or not, was "What do you think of Western civilization?"

Didn't know, cool.

The Enlightenment came from native Americans?

The book makes a good and strong case for it... though it's almost a side-note in the bigger scheme of what the book is trying to show: that we had civilization (and not even in some relativistic 'you have to squint to see it' way) all throughout our history.

You do realize that the author is a noted left wing activist/anarchist and affiliated with the Occupy movement? The Economist reviewed his prior book rather critically. Too many books are published these days masquerading as scholarly when they are actually nothing more than agitprop. This is one of them.

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