What a book! Apart from anthropology and archaeology (the authors’ respective field expertise), it deals with, or at least touches upon, ecology, economics, ethnology, history, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology — in short, most of the social sciences and beyond. Or, as the authors modestly put it, “everything”. You don’t have to agree with everything they say to admire their work. The point is not agreeing but questioning the accepted, or any other, narrative.
Speaking of which: I really liked the way the (sub)chapters are named, for example,
How the conventional narrative of human history is not only wrong, but quite needlessly dull
In which we ask: would you rather fish, or gather acorns?
In which we go in search of the real origins of bureaucracy, and find them on what appears to be a surprisingly small scale
and so on. An inexhaustible source of quotes about — well, you’ve got it.
On academia and democracy:
Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else. Obviously, it’s partly just the desire to preserve the credit for having ‘invented’ democracy for something called ‘the West’. Part of the explanation might also lie in the fact that academia itself is organized in an extremely hierarchical fashion, and most scholars therefore have little or no experience of making democratic decisions themselves, and find it hard to imagine anyone else doing so as a result.
On self-awareness:
Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behaviour without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic.
On freedom:
The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence — all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a selfconscious aversion to being told what to do.
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