Tl;Dr: Rosseau didn’t think up ‘private property is the source of inequality’ on his own. Native American Intellectuals came up with it.
So the Dawn of Everything is a really big book. Not really so huge in terms of number of pages, but definitely in terms of breadth of ideas and number of rabbit holes. It’s big enough that I don’t think I can really summarize it all at once, so chapter by chapter it is.
Before we start – the topic of inquiry is: how did humanity live before written history (and why isn’t it like we’ve all heard before). Pretty huge scope. And, it will be disproven, revised, or abandoned as more evidence comes to light.
Chapter 1 –
Humanity emerged into The Enlightenment in the late 1600 (‘Common Era’ or ‘Anno Domin’ more or less). A key concept attributed to Jean-Jacques Rosseau is that as solitary individuals began to group together they decided to have private property, which leads to inequality and ultimately oppression or servitude. This is the topic of his famous second essay: The Discourse on Inequality.
To put this in the conceptual vernacular: when we were hunter gatherers, things were cool – we were free. But when we settled down and started farming bad things started happening: private property requires defense, people were no longer free, no longer equal. And this is the root of our discontent.
What Native American Intellectuals were around France in the 1700s you might well ask. The answer is pretty surprising: Jesuit monks in the Americas had been writing back to Europe of their conversations (and attempted conversions) with Native Americans for quite some time. And
If the story sounds familiar it should – it’s deeply embedded in our culture. There was a garden called Eden. We learned something (ate the apple, agriculture, etc) , then we were kicked out and everything’s been going downhill sense then.
Rosseau is quite famous for these concepts. Clearly they’ve been around for a while (Bible, hello!). He’s not the only big name here – Hobbes stands as polar opposite (‘Nature red in tooth and claw’).
These are big ideas, foundational, seminal. And vast over simplifications which can trap us into ways of thinking about the world. One of the main traps is: Everything was better before.
Chapter 1 basically sets the stage: They (the writers, David Wengrow and David Graeber) assert: these big, foundational over-simplifications…
“1. Simply aren’t true
2. Have dire political implications
3. Make the past needlessly dull”
The last one seems a bit flippant, but the Davids are quite serious: if we stick to these foundational ideas (and ignore new evidence), we miss out on the quirky nautre of people and cultures. And we miss out on the opportunity to imagine our own culture is new and different ways. We miss out on becoming unstuck.
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