Upending Our Understanding Of Human History 03.19.24

In episode 1643, Jack and Miles are joined by author, archaeologist, and Professor of Comparative Archaeology, Professor David Wengrow, to discuss him and David Graeber's book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity and more!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello the Internet, and welcome to season three point thirty,
episode two of Daly's Guys dayitestion of iHeartRadio. This is
a podcast where we take a deep dive into america
shared consciousness. It's Tuesday, March nineteenth, twenty twenty four. It's
like our two thousandth episode three thou. I don't know

(00:20):
how many episodes we have, like a lot, thousands of episodes. Yeah,
and it's finally it's all worth it. Baby. We got
to have the author of what the co author of
one of my favorite books on this episode.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Miles Yep, Bill Larson from Calvin and Hobbes. Fain folks. No,
I mean, I'll say for David Dave we Grow sorry
pressor David Weggrow. Yeah, I mean we are at this point,
We're just gonna dive into the interview that we do them.
Really just a fantastic discussion. Oh thank you, Justin man,

(00:58):
I'm sorry. What six hundred and forty two episodes sixteen
forty two A great year?

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Look at it now. Columbus sailed me where he was dead?

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yeah he was dead?

Speaker 1 (01:09):
But yeah, yeah, I mean, so this is the author
of the Dawn of Everything, A New History of humanity
that I talked about a lot on this show. It's
basically an archaeological look at like prehistoric societies that finds
that they're more complicated. They have these complex civilizations and

(01:32):
interactions and social structures, and that we just have there's
we're sitting on a fucking gold mine of philosophy and
history and all all of science political science from all
of these civilizations that have just been ignored up till now.

(01:53):
And so a big part of this book that we
don't I think explicitly state in the interview is that
the reason this book is possible is because over the
past like thirty years, there has just been an outpouring
of discoveries of what these various quote unquote prehistoric civilizations

(02:16):
lived like. And we're finding these massive works of art
or like ceremonial grounds that are like you can only
truly appreciate them from an airplane. They're so vast and
beautiful and impressive. And we're better understanding these accounts of
Native American thinkers and philosophers who met you know, Jesuit

(02:40):
priests and Jesuit like settlers and basically you know, ran
circles around them, and so there's all of these amazing
thoughts that we could be benefiting from, and instead they're
kind of getting deleted from the record by public education. Yes,
but also like the most popular like that book Sapiens

(03:02):
Stephen Pinker is Better, Angels of Our Nature, Guns, Germs
and Steel, like these popular books about history that are
not written by archaeologists or people who are like actually
looking at the evidence. So that's what I find so
exciting about the book is just like what we have
a current system that we are stuck in and we

(03:24):
think it's the only possible option, and instead we have
this rich history that we are ignoring. The book is
full of examples of just various civilizations, massive cities that
were governed from the bottom up. So's it's a great
book to just go to for inspiration when we talk

(03:46):
about like our inability to imagine the end of capitalism,
or like what a different organization for society would look like.
This is a great place to feed your imagination.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Well, and also helps to understand what that sort of
like how why it's difficult to break the inertia of
being able to be like is there something different? Because
there's just so much momentum of this like linear version
of how civilizations came to evolve, and like you think,
like I just think about the literal game Civilization by
Sid Myers, and how linear it is, like, well, you

(04:19):
need pottery to get admirable husbandry to get mining, and
then sailing and then cartography and then money. And because
of that, it completely distorts our understanding of how anything
has evolved rather than this like inevitable arc of like
sort of sequence of events that leads us to a
place that there's actually so much more. There was so

(04:39):
much more freedom about how these prior civilizations existed and
played with different ideas, and yet we find ourselves stuck
in an era where like, well this can only be
it right, this is like peak thought, and.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Yeah, all is our only option, and it's that is
the result that mindset, the mindset where we can't pick
or anything else, is the result of a very consistent
series of myths and lies that we've been telling ourselves
through like histories that are written and kind of cohere
to myth Like they point out that like a lot

(05:15):
of these founding myths kind of co also cohere to
like biblical like creation myths, like they're all kinds so anyways,
it's it's a fascinating book. It was a really fascinating conversation.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
It's a paradigm shifter, tell you that.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, so that is this. This is our conversation with
Professor David wengro Well. We are thrilled to be joined
by an archaeologist and professor of comparative archaeology. He's the
author of books like What Makes a Civilization, The Origins
of Monsters and co wrote what I think is one
of the best books of the past decade, along with
the late great David Graeber. It's called The Dawn of Everything,

(05:54):
a New History of Humanity. It's an international bestseller. It's
really a must read. Talk about a lot on this show.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
Yep. I read it by it just for sheer repetition
of you talking.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
About it so much.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
So yes, and I'm glad I did.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Well. Please welcome Professor David Wingroadome.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
Welcome, guys, Thank you. I just want to make a
quick disclaim. You know, I wrote all the really bad bits.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
The bad stuff. Okay, we'll only ask you about the
bad parts. Yeah, but I guess our.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
First question, what's the worst part of the book.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
Oh, yeah, that's a really good questions. What is the
worst part now?

Speaker 1 (06:34):
So, I mean, I just want to jump right into
it because we only have you for a limited time,
and I feel like I could talk to you for
twenty four hours about this book. But so your book
basically upends how we understand the history of humanity, or
at least how I did, based on a public school
education understanding of history, and the version that I had

(06:55):
learned from public school, and then from a lot of
these popular nonfiction books like Guns, Germs and Steel, Better,
Angels of Our Nature, you know, sapiens. The version I
learned is that our current system is the result of
a sort of inevitable linear civilizational evolution, and this is

(07:18):
just what you're stuck with, and that's it. And those
books are written, by the way, by people who aren't
archaeologists and anthropologists like yourselves. But what does the actual
archaeological record tell us?

Speaker 3 (07:33):
The first thing I would say is that I think
all human societies do this to some degree. It's not
just those of us educated in let's say a broadly
European tradition. All human societies tell themselves stories about how
they came to be, called it myth mythology, if you like.

(07:57):
We're not unique in that it's a very human thing
to do, and sometimes we reflect more carefully than others
about what those stories really are and what we're putting
in the minds of our kids. You know, almost from
the age that they can even receive such information. And

(08:18):
it so happens that the story we by which I
do now mean those of us educated in broadly European traditions,
have been telling ourselves for a very long time, probably
more than two centuries now, hasn't actually changed very much.
It starts off with people living in these tiny bands

(08:39):
of hunter gatherers wandering around the landscape. There's no private property,
so everything is very equal and egalitarian, and then comes
sort of fall from grace.

Speaker 1 (08:50):
You know.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
It's almost a biblical story, or a story with biblical echoes,
where we start off in the garden of Eden, and
then there is that faithful moment when somebody somewhere invents agriculture, right,
and this is the great transition that changes everything about
how we relate to each other. Suddenly you have private

(09:12):
property that you can support larger populations, so cities emerge,
and once you have cities, you've got to have some
kind of central government to keep order otherwise everything is
going to fall into chaos. Then you get the origins
of the state, and by the time you get to
our present world, which is of course divided up from

(09:33):
one end to the other into nation states, there's this
sense that somehow it was all kind of inevitable. All
the key moves in the game were made so long ago,
we're talking about not even thousands, but ends of thousands
of years ago, that the most we can do these
days is kind of tinker around the edges of what

(09:56):
we have, but that essentially there is no other in town.
So we grew up in nation states, which, as we
argue in the book, are actually politically really quite weird
and unusual structures. They combine, if you like, three basic
forms of power into one institution that we refer to

(10:19):
as the state. You know, everyone, everyone claims to live
in a nation state. If you don't make that claim,
you're in a very vulnerable position. You're either a refugee
or you know, in some way in search of an
alternative identity. But if you ask people to actually define
what that is, you know, what is a state? Could

(10:42):
you give me a short definition?

Speaker 1 (10:44):
Yeah, I mean yeah, you would have to think about it.

Speaker 3 (10:48):
You would have to think about it, which is kind
of scary if you think that we you know, we
live and we grow up within these political frameworks, but
actually what are they? What are they comprise? And you know,
generally if you go to the textbooks, what you get
is a definition that looks something like this. A nation

(11:10):
state of the kind that we all grow up in
is sovereign. In other words, it commands its territory. It
has the legal right to defend its territory and to
use violence in order to do so. So nation states
are sovereign and they're inviolable, and if somebody invades your sovereignty,

(11:31):
you have the right to go to war. That's one thing.
States are complex. They're kind of complex social organism. So
you need some kind of administration or bureaucracy. Somebody has
to control knowledge at the center just to kind of
keep the wheels turning, otherwise it's all going to fall apart.

(11:52):
And then we have these things called elections, which are
supposed to be the same thing as democracy. Now, as
we know, this is not not necessarily going the way
that a lot of people imagined democracy would go.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
Why it would happen. We're not familiar with anything.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
You wouldn't know about this, but you know, we live
in America. In some remote, exotic parts of the world,
you get this weird phenomena where the only people who
can be elected are over one hundred years old and
really strange, and they kind of get up on stage
and they can barely make it up there, and then
they give their kind of ches and there dribbling and

(12:35):
it's awful.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
And they have to have a personality disorder just to
get in the door. You have to like have this
weird thing where you're like, I should be in charge
of all of this, all of it. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
And then it's kind of like a grand sporting occasion
and everyone votes for their favorite team and they basically
get to do whatever they like, and yeah, this is
this is what some people have come comes in as democracy.
And you know, if you put those three things together,
I guess you get a rough approximation the kind of

(13:08):
societies we grow up in and the kind of societies
that we're educated in. And of course, like all other societies,
because we grow up in those particular frameworks, we have
a natural tendency to think of human history the same
way as if it were somehow all leading up to this.
And what we're trying to do in our book, me

(13:29):
and my friend David Greeber in The Dawn of Everything
is actually show how different things really were from this
kind of familiar story. There's really been an incredible flood
of new information, i'd say, like mainly in the last
two or three decades that throws almost every aspect of

(13:52):
that story into dissarray. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
You're gonna have to give you some point as it.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, I mean, I guess I think one of the
most instructive places, and I think a lot of the
beginning of the book is taken up talking about some
of the like Native American civilizations that when European settlers
came to the Americas were like, there's just been this
vast rewriting of what that exchange, what that interaction looked like.

(14:23):
And in fact, a lot of these American Native American
civilizations were miles ahead of the European civilizations they encountered
there in terms of the values we consider important, like
gender rights, environmental justice, democracy, and it required this massive
historical effort to just rewrite that history so it turns

(14:47):
them primitive, when in fact they were like these thought
leaders that were massive contributors to a lot of these
European colonial you know, Enlightenment ideas. But just talking about
that and then this idea of like we kind of
have a natural experiment there right where European colonial settlers

(15:08):
are coming over and interacting with Native Americans who already
live on the east coast of North America, and we
got to see, like who liked whose version of organizing
things better? Right like this?

Speaker 3 (15:24):
Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess it's important to
point out when we say they were Europeans, they weren't
much like you and me. Right, the Europeans were talking
about were generally either Jesuit missionaries or aristocrats, traders, soldiers
of fortune and whatnot. And you know, suddenly the attitudes

(15:47):
of the Jesuits, to our eyes, probably have much less
in common with things that you or I might believe
about the way society should function. Sure, and what's actually
coming back at them from the local populations. For example,
they had terrible difficulty getting the hood in Oshawanee and

(16:11):
the Wendad and other First nations who lived in the
eastern part of North America to even consider a religion
that was based on these ten commandments, right, because those
are commandments, and that implies that someone's going to tell
you what to do, and you're just going to do

(16:31):
it because you've been commanded to do it. This was
actually a pretty alien concept in these societies. The idea
that you would simply obey unquestioningly the command of another,
whether it's a priest or a king, or an ancestor,
was quite early in to them. And actually one of

(16:51):
the things that Jesuits noticed early on was that there
was a connection of sorts between this refusal to obey
and the development of something else in these societies, which
was a really sophisticated style of debate and persuasion. They
wouldn't have called it democracy at the time, but what

(17:12):
they're describing actually looks a lot more like real democracy
than what we were just talking about before, with our
bizarre electoral systems. People sitting around in a plaza, taking
time to debate, to make their cases, listening to one another,
trying to come up with some kind of workable compromise
where you don't end up with one group of people

(17:34):
who feel like total losers or suckers and the others
are victorious, which is never going to lead to anything
good in the end. All of this comes out of
an assumption that nobody's the boss, you know, nobody. They
used to laugh at Europeans, and this comes through quite
a lot in the Jesuit missionary relations. They say they
kind of laugh at Europeans because we have real chiefs,

(17:56):
you know, who must be obeyed. They had chiefs as well,
called sachems, but they didn't have that kind of coercive power.
If a chief tried to bust people around in that way,
people would just laugh at him. They'd make fun of him.
They'd say, well, we make fun of our chiefs, and
you take yours seriously. So you know, it's like we

(18:19):
may tell ourselves we live in free societies, but you
go into work or almost any other situation that the
majority of people find themselves in their daily lives, and
you try and exercise those freedoms, and pretty quickly you
know you're going to find yourself out on the street,

(18:39):
out of the job, whatever it may be. So as
they might have put it, you know, we have play
freedoms and real chiefs, whereas those other people, they had
real freedoms and kind of play chiefs.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
And I was always taught that whenever indigenous populations encountered
people from Europe, whether they be missionaries or they immediately said, oh,
you know what, the way you live is actually superior,
thank you so much for enlightening us onto that. I'm
guessing that was that also the case.

Speaker 1 (19:09):
They confused the way people with gods, right, and we're like, oh,
they must be gods, and we'll listen to everything they
say and they're better, right.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
And I'd imagine the Jesuits are like, we can learn
nothing from here.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
Let's I think it certainly came as a shock, and
actually we're still kind of feeling the effects of that
enormous shock of actually encountering another world of values. You've
got to remember, European societies until the eighteenth century had
basically known nothing except hierarchy, right, pretty much as long

(19:42):
as you want to go back, it had been about
the authority of the church, the authority of dynastic lineages, kings, queens, princes, harts.
And to be confronted with societies where you had women's freedoms,
where people could get divorced, where property was actually shared

(20:03):
out in some more equitable way, created what one historian
referred to as the crisis of the European mind. It's
a crisis, you mean, we don't have to live like this, right,
we don't have to be in this world. And so
what you get, you know, like you described earlier on,

(20:24):
is basically two things going on at the same time.
On the one hand, there is an appropriation of some
of these values which today we think of as European values,
like freedom, democracy, women's rights, all these things we value
as progressive values. There is a kind of appropriation of that.
But at the same time, there is a backlash by

(20:46):
more conservative thinkers, particularly the ones who are arguing that
property and trade and material wealth are really how we're
going to liberate our souls from the power of the
church and the power of kings. So you end up
with what we call in the book the backlash, the

(21:12):
myth of progress, the backlash against this indigenous critique of
European civilization, which basically is the story that we started
out this conversation with, the one about tiny bands of
hunter gatherers, and yeah, they can have all these freedoms,
but it's not because they're ahead of us. It's not
because they've progressed farther than us. It's the opposite. It's

(21:35):
because primitive, and what they mean is primitive in material terms,
technologically primitive. Oh they live in these funny little hearts.
They don't really wear many clothes. So freedom and democracy
and equality become these things that once existed in a
kind of natural state. They didn't even have to be created,
they were just how people were once upon a time.

(21:59):
And then agriculture kind of ruined all of that, and
we're into the familiar story. And then, supposedly, and this
is kind of the last part of the myth, a
small and very select group of white people living in
the northwestern part of Europe kind of reclaimed a little bit.
They kind of clawed back a little bit of those

(22:19):
last freedoms through their understanding of the ancient Greeks and
Romans who kept slaves, which is obviously a little bit
of a paradox. And hence we end up with these
sort of very ambivalent, deeply compromised notions about what democracy
is and actually a very low barn what we think

(22:40):
democracy is.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
Right, let's take a quick break. We'll come back and
keep talking about this, we'll be right back, and we're back,
and yeah, I mean, so, you know, we were talking

(23:02):
about European settlers encountering Native American ideals, and you know,
by our definition, they were further along, but it seems
like they were also further along in terms of like
they had. They were constantly going back and forth between
more authoritarian less authoritarian forms of government. I mean, and

(23:26):
there was just this vast kind of galaxy of different
ways that societies were organized.

Speaker 3 (23:34):
So yeah, this is one of the kind This is
one of the things we discovered, I guess in the
book that surprised us and kind of intrigued us and
actually inspired us to really develop this project is that
the whole way we think about humans in societies of
the distant post is basically wrong. You know, we begin
with these categories like people were either this or they

(23:57):
were that. You know, they were either hunt to gather
or they were farmers. They were either living in bands
or in tribes or in chiefdoms. And actually what we
found in the evidence of our fields in archaeology and
anthropology is that this really isn't the case. Actually, most
human societies, most of the history of our species, have

(24:19):
been kind of playing with the clay. You know, there'll
be one of these things for part of the year,
then they'll switch it around. They might be very hierarchical
in their organization. For one part of the year. You
might have a police force with coercive powers and whip
people or imprison them. But then these powers melt away.
And this often has to do with the actual form

(24:41):
that human society takes, which is not stable. It fluctuates.
People move around with the changing seasons, they change the
size of their groups. There'll be times of year when
you have a great abundance of meat and other resources.
There'll be other times that are lean. And people have
generally adapted their societies to these oscillating conditions. It's like

(25:05):
putting a mask on and taking it off where you
can have You don't start off with these purely egalitarian societies.
There are always going to be individuals who love power,
and there are always going to be individuals who want
to be flunkies. And you know, that is actually very
hard to explain. You know, at another level is individual psychology.

(25:27):
But let's assume that there will always be a mixture
of people in any human group, even a family or
a household, some of whom tend towards that direction and
some of whom, let's say, are more into the caring
and sharing. The question is what do you do with
those people? What kind of institutions do you build. Do
you build institutions that are going to raise those ambitious

(25:50):
competitive types to the top, or do you create institutions
that are kind to kind of level things out.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
And what we.

Speaker 3 (25:57):
Discovered is that actually a huge number of societies on
all continents of the world have kind of done both simultaneously,
so they will not suppress hierarchy all of the time.
You might let it out in some spectacular ritual performance.
This is why we get these things in human history
that people often regard as mysteries or puzzles, the kind

(26:18):
of things that the makers of certain Netflix series like
to call all great mysteries of the ancient world.

Speaker 1 (26:25):
That's how mystery. Aliens did it right. Aliens built all
those things, I.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
Agree, all the stuff that Aliens right, like Stonehenge and Egypt,
where you know, first you start out by sort of
characterizing the society as terribly, terribly primitive, and then you say,
but look, here's this incredibly mathematically geographic geometrically sophisticated monument.
How could these idiots possibly create which the answer is

(26:52):
obviously they were not idiots. You know, these are people
who could at times create these incredibly impressive cultural creations,
but then at other times, you know, would actually morph
into different forms of society. This is what the anthropologist
Marcel Moss called the double morphology of society. You don't

(27:17):
just have one system of law or one system of
religion or one systems of politics. You switch things around. Now,
this was kind of a revelation to us because it
changes the whole question. You know, the big question of
human history since the days of the Enlightenments and Jean
Jacques Rousseau and people like that, was about the origins
of inequality? How did we lose that original equality and freedom?

(27:42):
Whereas actually, starting from the earliest evidence that we can find,
you have to ask a different question. You have to
ask not so much what was the origins of inequality?
But how did the genie of inequality get out of
the bottle? When did those cages come down? The restricted

(28:03):
hierarchy which would always have been there, yea, and that
was always yeah, like relations between adults and kids, in
relations of gender in relations of domestic servitude. You know,
the idea that we've ever lived in societies of equals
is a little bizarre. So the question becomes more about,

(28:23):
you know, when did those cages break down? When did
things like private property and sovereignty and patriarchy escape from
those cages and effectively come to dominate almost every waking
moment of our human lives.

Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yeah, they didn't like that. When we imagine them. There
is this kind of bias that you identify frequently in
the book, which is like this idea that, like you
just said, those people are idiots. They didn't. It was primitive,
so they didn't have these elaborate systems to keep all
of these impulses that today are causing problems for us

(29:05):
under control. They couldn't have like just you know, we
refuse to look back and you know, from them, because you.

Speaker 3 (29:12):
See that thing the other day. One of the authors
you mentioned who wrote the Sapiens.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Book, Yeah, you've all know harari I think, yeah.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah, there was. Someone sent me a clip of an
interview just recently, just the other week, which went viral,
and I can't remember who was interviewing mister Hararii, but
he said this thing that annoyed a lot of people.
It went roughly like this, I hope I'm not misquoting,
but he said, I think the interview asked him something like,

(29:45):
it's often said that, you know, we're living in a
time of great uncertainty right now. Do you believe that's true?
And he started off as saying, well, everyone always says
that about the period of history that they live in,
but today it's actually true. For the this time in history,
we have no idea what to tell out it. You know,

(30:05):
we don't know what technologies are going to be relevant
to their lives in twenty years time. Are you falling
for this?

Speaker 1 (30:12):
Yeah, exactly right, that's what this is.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
Where And then he starts talking about what things were
like back in the day, Back in the Neolithic period
or the Middle Ages. You know, there were certain things
you couldn't predict, like when the Utings or the Mongols
were going to come through and radio settlement, but you
knew that you would still be growing wheat and raising
sheep in twenty years time. There were these basic things

(30:39):
that you could tell people that you knew were going
to be relevant. But today all of that's gone. We
just have no clue what it's going to be. Right,
are you buying any of this?

Speaker 1 (30:49):
No, I probably would have before reading your book. But
your book does a really good job of dispelling this notion.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
That's really telling. I mean, regardless, you know, even if
you haven't read that book, the implication is actually kind
of fascinating because it implies that there's no connection between
what we teach our kids and what's actually going to
happen in the next twenty years. Right, right, Yeah, do
you know what I mean? It's like this idea that

(31:17):
you're kind of floating blindly into the future and you
can tell the kids any old thing, but all that
other stuff's going to happen anyway, Whereas in fact, you know,
this is obviously nonsense. I mean, if we teach our
kids people didn't always raise sheep, they didn't always grow crops,
you know, and actually, as we show in the book,
these were very conscious processes which sometimes people actually rejected,

(31:40):
you know, they decided they tried it on, they tried
it emphasized, and they decided to drop it again. So
it's partly this idea that actually goes back to people
like Rousseau, that we're always kind of floating blindly into
these traps which we're making for ourselves, but we can
never quite see them coming.

Speaker 1 (32:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:01):
Is really, I think, particularly right now in this historical moment,
apart from being just kind of wrong, is actually a
pretty dangerous way to look at the world, because you know,
you can kind of put your hands up and say, well,
tell our kids any old rubbish.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
Right right? Yeah, And just briefly so, Rousseau and Hobbes
are kind of the two versions we get of that
narrative we were talking about earlier. With Rousseau. It's like
we were living in these happy, egalitarian groups and then
we gave it it's the Harari like sapiens thing where
and then we decide to.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
I think that's roughly although you know, I got to
tell you Rousseau is way more interesting, Oh for sure. Yeah,
you know, Rousseau was not about fatalism. Rousseau is not
about telling us that there's always going to be this
boot stamping on your face and on your kids' face.
Is Rousseau is about revolution. Rousseau is about, you know,

(32:58):
trying to understand what, what's this liberty that we lost?
You can just add no clue what that might really
be like and.

Speaker 1 (33:05):
Then Hobbes is on the Pinker side. Hobbes is like before, like,
if you think this is bad, you should see what
it used to be like. Man, everybody would just like
kill each other and then we had to like get
these laws to keep people in.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
Yeah, and I think Professor Pinker is very forthright about this.
He actually refers to himself as a neo Hobbs.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
Here, right, and he's like, and if you just look
at the record of what it used to be like,
you'll see and then he just like quotes a bunch
of like widely debunked bullshit about how violent everything used
to be. And doesn't it.

Speaker 3 (33:41):
Well, this is what my friend David used to refer
to as the extreme center.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yes, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (33:48):
You know, you get it in politics, you get it
in academias, like these individuals who present themselves as very
rational centrists, and then you actually look really closely at
what they're saying and it is really out there.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
Yeah, I mean it's pretty white supremacist. Like he just
keeps talking about the like how we were saved by
these Enlightenment European thinkers and then like writing the you know,
erasing the native American influence from everything, and it's just
the story of how we like trained ourselves to have

(34:27):
better and better manners and that led to lower murder
rates if you're not counting World War Two. But yeah,
I don't want to get too bogged down by Pinker,
but it just I think there's there's just so many
examples in the book of these stories that upend this
idea that these civilizations were not complex, that they weren't

(34:51):
trying different things out, that they weren't like there's a
I think it's a huron system of beliefs around dreams
that you cover in the book. It was like really
similar to Freud's theory, but almost more interesting because it
doesn't go in all the weird.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
Like yeah, I mean the ructions we have of this
it's called un in Dunk and it goes by way
I mean centuries before Freud, where actually dreams are one
of the only contexts in which it does seem like
you could have almost the kind of power of command

(35:27):
if you dreamed something. It could be a particular object
or a relationship you wish to have. If it came
to you in a dream, people almost had to try
and make it come true. So we have these descriptions
of the I think it's the winter seasons from the

(35:48):
late seventeenth early eighteenth century of Huron societies, where people
would gather around and try and make somebody's dream come true.
There was a compulsion to do this, and they would
do this by in top pritting the symbolism of the
dream in much the way that you know, Freud was
credited with an enormous breakthrough, one of the great intellectual
breakthroughs of the twentieth century, Freudian psychoanalysis. They have it

(36:14):
in their own form. The major difference is that they
do it communally. You don't have this notion of the
individual therapist and the patient. Society gathers around the individual
and supports them in much the same way that you
know some of the same kinds of hallucinogenics or psychoactive

(36:34):
substances that we tend to if we ingest them. You know,
people do it as largely as individuals would actually have
been done in a very communal context, with people caressing you,
supporting you, holding your hand, kind of taking you through
it as a group. But I mean, I guess that

(36:55):
the example of these dreams and dreamings you know, teaching
teaches us is that we're very foolish to dismiss those
forms of knowledge as somehow alien or exotic. Is actually,
you know, we find them within our own culture.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
I feel like that's sort of one of the things
that were so limited because we've dismissed so much of
this wisdom or papered it over with sort of like
revisionist versions of what had occurred or what things were
said and what those ideas were. And I think that's
why it's really important too, because as we as people
tend to look at our own systems of oppression as
being fixed and it's like, well, I don't know what

(37:33):
you can do. It's just it's just all it was
always kind of trending this way. I think there's these
examples in your book that just show a if we
can overcome our sort of perspective of like, well, these
people think this is like old ways man, and like
they didn't know what they were doing. But there are
examples I think of, you know, Teo Ti Hua Khan,
where you talk about how that is a shift where
people saw what was going on with their civilization and

(37:56):
actually decided to change it to a completely different system.
Can you can you just sort of kind of talk
us through that process, because I think it's very interesting,
especially for us who look at what we're like sort
of these structures we live under now and think, well,
I don't know what to do. It is what it is.

Speaker 3 (38:13):
Yeah, I mean, there seems to be a whole strand
of I guess what we would call a republican tradition
or a sort of anti monarchy tradition in the deep
history of Mexican societies and especially urban societies ancient cities.
Terti Wakan is one of the earliest and most spectacular
manifestations of this. So we're in the Valley of Mexico

(38:36):
now around the time of Christ so the years sort
of the year zero one whatever, in the first few
centuries of the common era. You get this extraordinary city
forming in the Valley of Mexico with a lot of
refugees it seems from surrounding areas. There was a lot
of volcanic activity at the time. There's a lot of
destruction going on. People flood into this site and they

(38:59):
fall us city with hundreds of thousands of residents, and
they start doing all the things that netflix would probably
lead you to expect of an ancient city. They build
great pyramids. That's the Pyramid of the Sun, Pyramid of
the Moon, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. But then,
rather fascinatingly, after a couple of centuries of doing this,

(39:20):
they change course in the most dramatic way. They stop
building these great monuments, and all of that labor and
collective investment that went into creating them goes into something else.
And we know what that's. Something else was because archaeologists
mapped it. In one of the first really great urban

(39:40):
surveys done by archaeologists, they found this incredible system of
public housing and it goes in a grid. It's incredibly
carefully planned, and it goes in an orthogonal grid from
one end of the city to the other, and it houses,
as far as we can tell, most of the city's
vast multi ethnic population, multi ethnic, multilingual, in very comfortable circumstances.

(40:06):
When archaeologists first discovered these kind of communal villas, they
actually thought they were palaces, and then they realized that
basically everybody is living in a palace, and talking about
really beautiful plastered walls with mural sub floor drainage systems,
maybe four or five nuclear families living in one of
these compounds or apartment houses, and we can reconstruct a

(40:29):
diet using the kind of techniques that archaeologists use these days,
and show that this was an incredibly prosperous site that
actually knocked inequality on the head for hundreds of years
on an urban scale, which is pretty mind blowing.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
Yeah. Yeah, these are the civilizations that that we were
viewing as primitive, and they've already gone through the process
of having this authoritarian set up and then like overthrowing
it and building a civilization that like them up and
running a large city. That's the bottom up, that's right.

Speaker 3 (41:02):
I mean, they did actually have some kind of writing system,
it seems that turtu Wakan, but nobody has really been
able to decipher it, and even if we could, it
may not give us the kind of information we would
really love because just imagine the kind of discussions that
are going on. Imagine the kind of philosophical discoveries and
movements that would have accompanied with transition like this, which

(41:24):
we can only reconstruction the material relates. Yeah, imagine all
the intellectual stuff. And actually we do get some insight
into this from a later period when the conquistadors arrive,
they actually stumble upon cities that are organized in pretty
egalitarian ways, and they describe some of them, including ones

(41:45):
with full blown urban parliaments, at a time when you
don't really have very much of that going on in Europe.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
Yeah, actually, let's take one more quick break, will be
right back, and we're back, And yeah, I think it's
interesting one of the parts of the book you identify

(42:10):
these like key freedoms that people in most civilizations kind
of take for granted unless they're otherwise trained into obedience
like we are. So there's they're freedoms that I never
thought about growing up because they just aren't freedoms that
are emphasized in our world. But they are a cent

(42:32):
like very briefly summarized the freedom to move, the freedom
to disobey, and the freedom to rearrange social ties, which
you know comes up in that story that you were
just telling. But you talk about those freedoms and like
how they show up in other civilizations through time, and
like why they would be nice to have for us

(42:55):
if we just knew to ask for them.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
Yeah, I mean, since you've been to night about the
don of everything tiny well, it's not really a scoop.
But the reason I've been so busy recently is because
I've decided to try and write another book. Hey, I
mean David and I. David and I never intended The
Dawn of Everything to be a finished project. It was

(43:20):
always going to be kind of the introduction or a
sort of prolegoma into a whole series that we were
planning to do amazing. David already got it into his
head that it had to be like Tolkien. So the
Dawn of Everything harpit.

Speaker 1 (43:33):
Oh, it was just the it doesn't work.

Speaker 3 (43:38):
Stupidly noticed the horbit is actually a pretty short but yeah,
that's pretty Everything is more like The Two Towers. So
it was a very analogy. But the idea was that
we would write three sequels. I don't think that's going
to happen without David, but I do want to continue
the project in some way. So I'm working on a
book called The Third Freedom, and I want to take

(44:00):
forward this concept that we came up with of the
three basic forms of human freedom that you mentioned, the
freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey, and the
freedom to kind of play with the social order, flip
things around. Create a different kind of society. It's one
of the number of ideas that we sort of throw

(44:21):
out there in the book when we're trying to bring
together our observations and say, okay, what are the larger
conclusions we can draw about all of this. But like
all the concepts in the book, it needs more exemplification
and more exploration. So what I'm trying to do is
understand better the connections between these three freedoms and how
the breakdown of one kind of freedom leads to the

(44:42):
breakdown of another kind of freedom. And you can think
about this at many different levels, from domestic abuse, you know,
if you can't move away, you can't disobey, all the
way up to much larger scale political processes. But I
actually want to start off with, if you like, the
grandest example of our first freedom to move away, which

(45:06):
is simply the spread of people. Yeah, you know, well
we all start off as africas, we all start off
from the continent of Africa. Nobody seriously today would dispute this. Actually,
I was thinking about this the other day because there's
a book that came up recently that says we shouldn't
do this archaeology stuff. It never leads anywhere good. You know,

(45:29):
it's always dangerous. It always plays into some demagoguery or
some political mythology is bad. I was thinking, well, that's
obviously true sometimes, but if we didn't do this kind
of work at all, you know, it was very hard
to get people to accept that humans evolved in Africa.

(45:51):
There was a lot of resistance to that idea, especially
in Europe. People pushed back against it for reasons that
were entirely racist of African ancestry. These days, almost nobody
disputes it, and you know that is the result of
scientific work in my field. So the idea that you know,

(46:14):
this is all a foregone conclusion and whatever stories we've
come up with a lead to disaster. You know, it's
a matter of opinion. I don't think it's really the case.
But the point is that from Africa humans disperss. We
know these days that you have humans in Australia sixty
thousand years ago. You have humans in a tiny place

(46:38):
called New Ireland, which is in Melanesia forty years ago,
which is long before you have humans in Ireland as
in European Ireland. And this is really the most extraordinary
story of human freedoms, but interestingly, it's never told that way. Actually,

(47:03):
the standard term in the scientific literature for how humans
get around the world in the first place is colonization.
We colonize the globe, which is kind of interesting. I mean,
it's hardly the neutral term, especially for a field like archaeology,
which basically developed as an extension of empire. And it

(47:24):
also doesn't make a great deal of sense. I mean,
maybe if you're talking about humans moving into areas where
you've got Neanderthals or dinisicipants or other human like species, Okay,
maybe then you could talk about colonization. But very often
we're talking about people moving into land that isn't inhabited
by humans at all, and yet we refer to it

(47:44):
as colonization. So there's already this mindset that freedom has
something to do with conquering or power or you know,
extending your kind of range over somebody else. So I'm
actually starting right at the beginning with that question. You
know what if we try to think about that differently,
What if we introduce freedom right at the beginning of
the human story in a very concrete way. Has the

(48:07):
freedom to move away.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
That?

Speaker 2 (48:10):
Yeah, that third freedom, I think is, so I'm assuming
the third freedom being the one about to be able
to rethink what sort of social structures we want to
engage in. I think there's a quote in the book
that says, how did we get stuck? Or greed, exploitation
and systemic indifference to others suffering? If something did go
terribly wrong in human history, then perhaps it began to

(48:30):
go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to
imagine and enact other forms of social existence. And that
feels so much of like, what, yeah, we are so
many people are experiencing this sort of form of living
on the planet in this moment and wondering It's like,
is this this is the best we can do? Like

(48:52):
so many people are like, I know there are other
ways to do it, yet, or just there's just so
much historical societal momentum going against this idea, and I think, yeah,
it really is.

Speaker 3 (49:03):
Right, And you know, we all have different things we
can be doing to push back against that kind of
thing and actually try and secure some kind of viable
future for our kids and our kids' kids. And I guess,
you know, my friend David was active on many different fronts.
I guess I share with him the idea that actually

(49:27):
rethinking human history on the largest possible scale should be
part of any freedom movement. Actually, yeah, maybe even has to.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
Be some of the alternate ways, because we talk a
lot on this show about our inability to imagine other
systems like that. Kim Stanley Roberts has said that, like,
it's harder to imagine the end of capitalism than the
end of the world. Or I'm misquoting that, but basically,
like people, I.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
Always thought that was Asyla la Gwin, but maybe.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
It might be he might be quoting someone else, but
he like just that idea that when we're asked to
imagine anything else, we I think just like that. That's
where our zombie movies come from. It's like, yeah, no,
it's either this or absolute, absolute hell on the streets.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Zombie like zombie zombie thinking is a good way to
think about this, I think. And you know, history is
full of what you might call zombie statistics. Right, let's
just clomber you with numbers.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah, let's just keep going on.

Speaker 3 (50:36):
You often hear this idea that by the time of
the Roman Empire, three quarters of the world's population were
living in empires, Right, think about that they were either
under the boot of Rome, or they were under the
boot of the Han Chinese, or they were under the
boot of the Parthians or the Cushions. But whichever way

(50:58):
you look at it, like most humans on Earth were
already kind of domesticated within these incredibly hierarchical structures. That's
a zombie statistic. I actually looked at what it's actually
based on, and it's like, it's way for thin I'm

(51:19):
not gonna I think I'm going to write about this,
so I don't want to spoil the surprise. But let's
just say this is basically not you know, it's it's
got a foundation really in any solid evidence. It's just
one of these kind of factoids that gets repeated and
repeated so that you know, you end up saying something

(51:40):
a bit like this. You say, well, oh, that's great.
There were these other people who were experimenting with all
these different forms of society, but you know, they were
basically on the losing end of history. There were a
few of them. You don't live in the world that
they created. We live in the world that Marcus are created,

(52:01):
or or you like, so come on, get real this
will realism relations that has to be about either free
trade or war.

Speaker 1 (52:13):
Those are the only ingredients that changes the world. Yeah,
I mean there's also parties, carnivals, festival That's one of
my favorite moments from the book is just talking about
that as like ritual, you know, festivals as like these
these places that people could you write in the book

(52:34):
what's really important about such festivals is that they kept
the old spark of political self consciousness alive. They allowed
people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, which for
some reason like that connected with our modern condition, right,
It's like, actually, this could be fun. We could be
like throwing great parties where we get to I guess

(52:54):
like Burning Man at some point was an example of this,
and it seems to be even though now like billionaires
take their helicopters to Burning Man and shit like, it
still seems to be the thing that when I talk
to people who've been to Burning Man, they end up
coming away from those festivals talking about, oh, it's cool
you like exist in a system outside of money for
a week essentially, but just that idea that like there's

(53:17):
been these festivals where that like up end the order
and like children get to play at adult jobs or
the less powerful get to play the roles of the
powerful are is really compelling to me and also just
like kind of made me slightly hopeful that there could
be like a way that's enjoyable out of this.

Speaker 3 (53:37):
This is this is actually really fascinating, and I think
it has a lot to do with you know, where
we place the boundaries between what is serious and what
is play. Right, So all the things you're describing, I
guess have been classified in our culture as forms of play. Yeah,
in other words, they're not to be taken seriously. Okay,

(53:58):
So you experienced this other thing for a little while,
and now you come back to serious seriousness, like serious reality.
This is a shifting boundary. And you know, if you
think about the extent to which are supposedly serious politics
is actually gamified. You know, there's a lot of play

(54:19):
there as well, and where we put the boundaries between
seriousness and play. You know, if you're a historian or
an archaeologist and you write a lot about war and violence,
people take you really seriously.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
You're serious.

Speaker 3 (54:33):
You know how many people write about peace? Yeah, or
actually really try and analyze societies that have found ways
to be peaceful and to end wars or design ways
out of war so that you can actually envisage mending
these these social wounds and physical wounds done on each other.

(54:56):
It's amazing how little work there is on these things
because somehow that's not regarded as terribly serious. Yeah, you're
a bit flaky. You're a bit flaky playing around if
you'd study that.

Speaker 1 (55:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:08):
So I think this is really fascinating, and I think
it does it is somehow central in ways that we
don't understand very well. Is the role of play in
human culture generally.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
Yeah, I mean it seems like it's the one constant.
You guys say, like, humans aren't inherently good or evil,
they are inherently creative and playful. And that's what you
find in the archaeological record throughout your your kind of surveying,
the book which you.

Speaker 3 (55:36):
Know, we put things on and we take them off.
And the idea that everyone has to be just one thing. Yeah,
it may turn out to be actually a very radical
and very kind of modern idea and actually very untypical.
And you know, I think we see this around us
all the time, people pushing back against those those kinds

(55:56):
of categories.

Speaker 1 (55:57):
Yeah, well, Professor wan Gres, such a such a pleasure
having you. I know we're kind of out of time here,
but where should we send people to find out more
about you? Obviously I'm recommending and continued recomend everybody read
The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity. Where
else should people go?

Speaker 3 (56:17):
Don't send them to my universtics. I've got way too
many students.

Speaker 1 (56:21):
All right, yeah, I'll tell them, yeah, leave him, leave
him alone?

Speaker 3 (56:24):
Please, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I think they should
listen to your show. Quite frankly, that's right.

Speaker 2 (56:29):
Wow, wow, Okay, hi Grace, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
Well, thank you so much for joining us. And uh yeah,
I would love to have you back when the next
project is uh is out.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
Thanks a lot, guys, I'm working on it.

Speaker 1 (56:43):
All right, appreciate it. All right. That was our conversation
with Professor David Wingro, hopefully the first of many. What
a joy. Go go read The Dawn of Everything.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Go listen to this show. I mean you just heard
him say it's obvious.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
Yeah, that's the most important thing.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
This has got some genius level ship. I knew that,
and I knew that, and I knew that. But thank
you Thank you David for recognizing that.

Speaker 1 (57:05):
Myles, Where can people find you? Follow you all that
good stuff? And is there a work of media that
you've been enjoying?

Speaker 2 (57:12):
Oh man, Uh, you can find me at Miles of
Gray where they got the ad symbols. You like basketball,
you like what you're seeing in the league, or you don't, Well.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
Guess what.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
Join Jack and I on our basketball podcast Miles Jack
and also gets me on four to twenty Day Fiance.
We're talking about ninety day fiance. Let's see uh blah
blah blah blah blah. Let's the tweet I like is
a quote tweet tweet from at Kyle R. Siebel, who's
just said I think about this tweet every single day.

(57:44):
And the tweet is from at Wheaton three thousand. Michael
Wheaton tweeted at face value. Penguin Random House is an
absolutely insane name for a company that sells anything.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:55):
Hey, it's what happens when we start throwing companies. But yeah,
where'd you get that, oh, Penguin random House? Yeah, oh
your medication, Yeah yeah, it's cheaper there whim random House.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
Oh shit, it's having an episode tweet. I'm enjoying cat
Algarista tweeted, they fucking nailed it when they named it snorkeling,
which is true. Trash Jones tweeted today I'm perfecting the Irish. Hello, Prince,
he's showing up drunk. And then Mayor Strom tweeted saying

(58:28):
this guy again at every Jesus painting in the loop. Everyone,
you can find me on Twitter, Jack Underscore, Obrian you
can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at
the Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have Facebook fanpage and
website Daily zeitgeist dot com where you post our episodes
and our footnotes link off to the information that we

(58:49):
talked about in today's episode. In this one, we'll probably
just link off to the dawn of everything. They have
an extensive bibliography. Yeah, book like all great books. You know,
if I wrote a book, I would want to be
able to use it as a murder weapon, and this
is one of those. It is, yeah, a hefty work.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
It's a hefter. It's a hefter.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Yeah, you could probably kill someone with just a bibliography.
That's I'll think it's.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
Sixty three pages. I think just the bibliography. Yeah, we
don't don't step to their sources. Okay, don't step to
the sources, all right.

Speaker 1 (59:25):
That is going to do it back this afternoon to
tell you what is trending until then. Daily Zeke is
a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from My
Heart Radio, visit Yeah Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. That's gonna do it
hookcol Later Fight Third Kind of Freedom,