12 May 2023 - Graham
previously: spring update 2023
If you’ve interacted with me recently, I’ve probably yammered at you about a book, “the Dawn of Everything” by the Davids Graeber and Wengrow.
It’s a challenging book, in a good way and a bad way.
In the good sense, it’s challenged some of my core ideas. For example, it’s convinced me that those of us on the political left should be focusing on freedom, not equality.
And it’s revealed a crazy assumption that I was making. And perhaps you were, too? Without thinking it through, I had basically assumed that for our first 450,000 years as a species human beings were all just hunting and gathering in small egalitarian bands. This isn’t true. Our ancestors experimented with a wide range of social, economic, and political forms. Which means that we too can experiment.
In the bad sense, it’s a disorganized and turgid book. It’s no worse than most academic texts, but that’s a low bar. A few of you joined me in trying to read the book almost 18 months ago, and we gave up after 2 chapters.
I finally managed to get through the book by taking notes. And, as an excuse to learn more about web design, I decided to turn those notes into a website, which you can check out here:
Some suggestions for how to approach that site:
Jump into a topic or two of interest.
Use the table of contents to prepare you for your own read.
Dig into the details and tell me about everything I got wrong.
In any case, I’d love to hear what you think! And of course, I’m still happy to yammer at you about these ideas, if you’d like.