I want to preface this post with the observation that I find romantics not just naive but irritating. By “romantics” I don’t mean what the term has come to mean. The reference is to the 19th century Romantic movement (as opposed to the Classical movement or the Realists).
In an op-ed in the New York Times David Graeber and David Wengrow tell us a story about Neolithic “megasites”, early large habitations. Some, apparently including the authors, have claimed that they prove that class systems are not inherent to civilized habit:
What held these early experiments in urbanization together, if not kings, soldiers, and bureaucrats? For answers, we might turn to some other surprising discoveries on the interior grasslands of eastern Europe, north of the Black Sea, where archaeologists have found cities, just as large and ancient as those of Mesopotamia. The earliest date back to around 4100 B.C. While Mesopotamian cities, in what are now the lands of Syria and Iraq, took form initially around temples, and later also royal palaces, the prehistoric cities of Ukraine and Moldova were startling experiments in decentralized urbanization. These sites were planned on the image of a great circle — or series of circles — of houses, with nobody first, nobody last, divided into districts with assembly buildings for public meetings.
What they don’t tell you is that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that these megasites weren’t cities at all, at least not as we understand them. They were either ritual sites or trading places where large groups of hunter-gatherers, possibly numbering in the thousands, gathered for one month out of the year.
So, yeah, sure. They were all equal. For one month out of the year.
The reality is that true agriculture, cities, and class systems go hand in hand not just in Mesopotamia but in Southern China, Central America, Europe—everywhere. What has brought a relative level of equality, at least temporarily, has been free market systems and the freedom from class systems that leaving the aristocrats behind in the Old Country brought. Carrying the beacon for this development was the young United States with its notions of individual rights.
I can’t penetrate the wall, but thought it odd that David Graeber is publishing a lot recently, albeit he died Sept. 2, 2020. Wikipedia informs me he is “an American anthropologist and anarchist activist.” He invented the term “bullshit jobs.” I assume his co-author on a recent book is repurposing their joint work.
I agree w/ Dave.
I do agree as well, but what I find interesting in archeology is that so many new discoveries push the timeline back, back much further than we thought possible not too long ago.
5,000 years ago may be much more recent than we thought.
The pushing back of the “dawn of civilization” is interesting. Though not many want to write endlessly about say the firepits of the Anasazi, boiled human bones and fecoliths on a hearth tell a different tale.
To the Romantics, I know Arthur will return from Avalon, Frederich will wake up from his nap, the Firebird will be blaze, etc too.
I didn’t realize Graeber had died. I’ve read some of his more political activist writings. Interesting, but not fully thought-out IMO.
The lack of economic classes does not mean equality, although many (Marxist) anthropologists assume it does. Blame Rousseau.
While early neolithic or late paleolithic may not have had economic classes, they certainly had hierarchies. Every primate species and every social species has hierarchies. The hierarchies do not show up as economic classes because the material culture, the number of things, is too small.
Some paleolithic tribes, like the Plains Indians, had multiple parallel hierarchies. (So do chimpanzees.) So there was a warrior hierarchy among the older boys and young men. A women’s hierarchy. And a hierarchy of elders. There were also slaves. Mostly women captured for breeding and labor. The Vikings did that, too.
You do realize that the libertarians and some conservatives use archaeology and historical writings to prove that successful societies have existed almost government free? I think people like to try to find stuff among the rocks to prove what they already believe.
Steve
They also imagine that our notion of the individual and rights descends from ancient Greece and Rome. It does sort of—as mediated by the Catholic Church. The most direct ancestor is the Italian Humanists.
That’s an idea the anti-papist Founding Fathers found hard to stomach so ancient Greece and Rome it is! We do not have a single work by Plato, Aristotle, or any other ancient Greek that wasn’t redacted by a monk.
All of that is irrelevant. I basically don’t give a damn about the myths that libertarians and conservatives believe. The subject of this post is the romantic myths being propagated by the authors. Two wrongs still don’t make a right.
The tu quoque fallacy is a form of ad hominem.