Ch. 2 - Dawn of Everything Book Circle (Chapter 2 meeting #1 of 2)

Artifacts

Notes From This Meeting

Big Questions

  • Is there such a thing as an initial state of human society?
  • If so, how did inequality arise?
  • Material determinism - how much do material means of production and material structures of production encourage? Are they necessary conditions for the right of inequality? Are they sufficient conditions?
  • How is our thinking limited by the languages we use for our exchanges?
  • What would "America" look like if Europeans had never landed? (how would governance, technology, transportation, communication have evolved?)
  • How does religion and more importantly the spiritual or numinous act as a filter for the questions we can ask or choose to answer and then act on?
  • Where do I stand on anarchy?
  • To what extent is the need for variety - diversity useful - versus when it becomes the seed of conflict?
  • What are the subtle differences, if any, between mistakes and errors and similar outcomes that trigger us to be prepared to think and act differently
  • What kind of reactions did people have to Kandiaronk’s take on money?
  • And, to tie Sand Talk in here, Tyson makes the distinction between high context societies - which are orate - and low context societies which are literate. The latter has dire consequences as it allows people to act without the need to understand context and we get the current state of the world as an example of how well it works. What would a culture that blended both high and low context look like?
  • What is the nature of discourse that is successfully continuous, the Infinite Game from James Carse, to keep everyone in play?
  • What does this question of equal or unequal mean? Does it mean equal opportunity, equal on the zoom equal access to whatever equal, equally free from the threat of whatever?

Why are Europeans so competitive?

Why do they not share food?

Why do they submit themselves to other people’s orders?

Europeans just don’t seem to care about one another - they are neither generous nor kind.

What if the American Indians were free of gov’ts, bureaucracies, and ruling classes not because they were lacking in imagination but because they were more imaginative than the Europeans?

What exactly does egalitarian mean? What exactly does equality mean? Equality of opportunity? Equality of condition? Equality before the law? A belief? An ideology that everyone should be the same? Not in all ways, but in certain respects that people consider important. Or is it that people actually are the same? What would that look like in practice? That all members of society have equal access to land? Or that we treat each other with equal dignity? Or that we are all equally free to make our opinions known in public assemblies? Or is there a scale of measurement that can be imposed by the observer? Cash income, political power, calorie intake, house size, number and quality of personal possessions? Would equality mean the effacement of the individual or the celebration of the individual? 

What about gender relations? In many societies equality is only applied to men. Men and women perform different types of work and some may feel their work is more important than that of others giving rise to different kinds of status.

Reviews posted by Ken

‘The Dawn of Everything’ gets human history wrong | MR Online

  • initial state
  • how is this initial state recorded validly - process and materiality AND who by?
  • (I think) initial state was just a way for the Two Davids to and ask the question of / undermine the notion of linear history and saying, "You know, we don't need to solve that problem now".
  • chimpanzees, bonobos
    • chimpanzees can be very Machiavellian
  • indigenous cultures in particular continuous ones have the ability to view nature in a way that we've lost
  • BIG QUESTION: How much of inequality and power is nature versus nurture?
  • We probably have both hard-wired in our head. (Is there populational variation? There is reason to not believe it, but we want to know either way.)
    • we live in a culture that has pushed us to either / or -- it's either this or is that. In fact, almost everything is a blend which means it takes narrative and sensitivity to figure out what's actually going on
  • I love this chapter, by the way, the indigenous critique. I just thought this was such a great fricking chapter, right?
  • Rousseau, A. R. J. Turgot
  • it seems that this depository of ways to understand the world is best expressed in religions, because religions form the filters, so we understand the reality around us.
  • the Americans, who were intellectually the equals, culturally the equals, of Europeans, in some ways even superior - but they didn't translate that into tool making
  • from the book, p. 66: "The one major difference between them is that Rousseau, unlike Kandiaronk, cannot really envisage society being based on anything else."
  • Big question: Balance Anarchy (anti power-abuse) vs need for collective action (eg climate change).
    • it's really important that there's a margin, so that you can have a group deciding collectively, we're doing this and people who don't want it have elsewhere to go, so they don't have to sabotage if they disagree. They can just go elsewhere and do their own thing.
    • A lot of the need to constrain action (pollution, geoengineering, war) is about cases where power already got concentrated
  • conflict theory (everything is a conflict) vs. mistake theory (better systems, how can we fix mistakes)
  • Circumstance-appropriate governance structure (Polydorus, ancient Roman republic) (eg current affairs vs conflict; contrast with the Seasonality in DoE)
  • "what's the overall feeling for life, that this text represents"

Other Books

Documentary series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Wormhole

Culture in Crisis: The Visionary Theories of Pitirim Sorokin https://satyagraha.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/pitirim-sorkin-crisis-of-modernity/

Becoming Animal by David Abram

Retrospective

Plus

  • there were silences, so we could consider what direction we could take. a considered pace.
  • a variety of ideas came up (even if we didn't get to go deep on them, we can dig in)
  • talking through the book criticisms

Delta

  • less discussion of "overhead"
    • maybe the resources are intuitive enough
    • could have been prepared beforehand or scheduled separately
  • some of us missed the fact that we were going to talk about the book criticisms, so we weren't prepared for that discussion
  • we could have "composted" the previous retro before getting
  • we could have stayed a little closer to the text
    • how about alternating between close readings and expansive discussion?
  • we could check in with "this is what i'd like to discuss during this call"