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Comment by fckgnad | Hacker News Reader

I just started reading this. I'm hopeful but the forward and the first chapter don't look good.

First off at least one of the authors is into social justice. Social Justice tenants run completely counter to many of the findings of anthropology. It's a source of bias.

Second the first chapter comes from the perspective of introducing a better anthropological narrative given a lack of non-depressing stories of human civilization. I'm here for the truth, I'm not looking for narratives that are good or bad. Literally the book goes into "political implications" of alternative "narratives". I quote:

"HOBBESIAN AND ROUSSEAUIAN VERSIONS OF HUMAN HISTORY HAVE DIRE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS."

all caps literally first chapter. Why even bring up politics at all? Let's talk about truth. The consequence of the truth is irrelevant to the truth.

It could be the authors built this book with a pre-existing agenda.

Whatever, if it has this many accolades I'll read it.

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I finished the book earlier this week, and can say it does distance itself from the initial chapters pretty quickly. They are important frames of reference, and I can definitely understand the authors reasons to include those ideas so prominently. Anthropology was developed as a western oriented study, and carries along with it many of the biases and assumptions that only Europeans could have endowed.

The political climates that existed during the colonization of the Americas played an important role in the evolution of modern cultures. The book is filled with examples of different societies and how they formed, and politics has played a role in ever single instance. Regardless of if you agree with the authors’ ideologies or not, they do a pretty good job of remaining neutral when examining historical evidence. I found it a nice change of pace from the typical “westernized” explanations of how civilizations (especially Native Americans) were structured.

Overall I think it’s an excellent read, well worth the investment.

You have to understand the rationale behind the narrative. If you’re describing a period of 50 years of history, which had 49 years of peace, and 1 year of war, but you’re only focusing on the war. You’re not lying, but are you telling the truth?

And there might be a good justification, in the sense that maybe a lot of sudden changes happened during this period, but you’re still leaving a lot aside.

This view of history although it might present itself as the truth because it’s the status quo, it’s a narrative as it the ones who might succeed it. And you might not like it, but also had, has and will have political implications.

I feel that the main thing I got from the book is that it made me settle and accept that there is no truth to be had. That the main narratives are much less truthy than I expected. There really is much more diversity in how humans were structured than we can phantom, or reliably reconstruct from the evidence. That is why having a wider spectrum of narratives is more important if you want to learn from the past.

While I knew many of the points and facts in the book, somehow that realization had never stuck before.

History was written be the victors, pre-history even more so. The first chapters have a good point, which gets clearer later on in the book. Much of the historic narrative has been coloured by the way Eurasia thinks in the last 500 years.

And it is stuff I kind of knew or suspected, now I really internalised the idea because of the book. The main idea is obvious in retrospect.

> There really is much more diversity in how humans were structured.

There was diversity, but given behavioral modernity and a sufficient resource surplus, complex social organization seems to have been something close to a human universal. Graham Hancock has pointed out that prehistoric people were capable of large-scale infrastructure projects the remains of which have survived in some form to the present day - and that implies some combination of effective hierarchical organization (required to coordinate the effort of significant numbers of people, well beyond the scale of a single band or troop) and long-term time orientation.

Cherry picking and misrepresenting evidence to support his fringe political beliefs was David Graeber's whole shtick.

Full disclaimer: I didn't read Dawn of Everything and I don't intend to. My opinion is based on Debt and some of his other writings.

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