Speaker 1: Hello the Internet, and welcome to season three point thirty,
Speaker 1: episode two of Daly's Guys dayitestion of iHeartRadio. This is
Speaker 1: a podcast where we take a deep dive into america
Speaker 1: shared consciousness. It's Tuesday, March nineteenth, twenty twenty four. It's
Speaker 1: like our two thousandth episode three thou. I don't know
Speaker 1: how many episodes we have, like a lot, thousands of episodes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's finally it's all worth it. Baby. We got
Speaker 1: to have the author of what the co author of
Speaker 1: one of my favorite books on this episode.
Speaker 2: Miles Yep, Bill Larson from Calvin and Hobbes. Fain folks. No,
Speaker 2: I mean, I'll say for David Dave we Grow sorry
Speaker 2: pressor David Weggrow. Yeah, I mean we are at this point,
Speaker 2: We're just gonna dive into the interview that we do them.
Speaker 2: Really just a fantastic discussion. Oh thank you, Justin man,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. What six hundred and forty two episodes sixteen
Speaker 2: forty two A great year?
Speaker 1: Look at it now. Columbus sailed me where he was dead?
Speaker 2: Yeah he was dead?
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, I mean, so this is the author
Speaker 1: of the Dawn of Everything, A New History of humanity
Speaker 1: that I talked about a lot on this show. It's
Speaker 1: basically an archaeological look at like prehistoric societies that finds
Speaker 1: that they're more complicated. They have these complex civilizations and
Speaker 1: interactions and social structures, and that we just have there's
Speaker 1: we're sitting on a fucking gold mine of philosophy and
Speaker 1: history and all all of science political science from all
Speaker 1: of these civilizations that have just been ignored up till now.
Speaker 1: And so a big part of this book that we
Speaker 1: don't I think explicitly state in the interview is that
Speaker 1: the reason this book is possible is because over the
Speaker 1: past like thirty years, there has just been an outpouring
Speaker 1: of discoveries of what these various quote unquote prehistoric civilizations
Speaker 1: lived like. And we're finding these massive works of art
Speaker 1: or like ceremonial grounds that are like you can only
Speaker 1: truly appreciate them from an airplane. They're so vast and
Speaker 1: beautiful and impressive. And we're better understanding these accounts of
Speaker 1: Native American thinkers and philosophers who met you know, Jesuit
Speaker 1: priests and Jesuit like settlers and basically you know, ran
Speaker 1: circles around them, and so there's all of these amazing
Speaker 1: thoughts that we could be benefiting from, and instead they're
Speaker 1: kind of getting deleted from the record by public education. Yes,
Speaker 1: but also like the most popular like that book Sapiens
Speaker 1: Stephen Pinker is Better, Angels of Our Nature, Guns, Germs
Speaker 1: and Steel, like these popular books about history that are
Speaker 1: not written by archaeologists or people who are like actually
Speaker 1: looking at the evidence. So that's what I find so
Speaker 1: exciting about the book is just like what we have
Speaker 1: a current system that we are stuck in and we
Speaker 1: think it's the only possible option, and instead we have
Speaker 1: this rich history that we are ignoring. The book is
Speaker 1: full of examples of just various civilizations, massive cities that
Speaker 1: were governed from the bottom up. So's it's a great
Speaker 1: book to just go to for inspiration when we talk
Speaker 1: about like our inability to imagine the end of capitalism,
Speaker 1: or like what a different organization for society would look like.
Speaker 1: This is a great place to feed your imagination.
Speaker 2: Well, and also helps to understand what that sort of
Speaker 2: like how why it's difficult to break the inertia of
Speaker 2: being able to be like is there something different? Because
Speaker 2: there's just so much momentum of this like linear version
Speaker 2: of how civilizations came to evolve, and like you think,
Speaker 2: like I just think about the literal game Civilization by
Speaker 2: Sid Myers, and how linear it is, like, well, you
Speaker 2: need pottery to get admirable husbandry to get mining, and
Speaker 2: then sailing and then cartography and then money. And because
Speaker 2: of that, it completely distorts our understanding of how anything
Speaker 2: has evolved rather than this like inevitable arc of like
Speaker 2: sort of sequence of events that leads us to a
Speaker 2: place that there's actually so much more. There was so
Speaker 2: much more freedom about how these prior civilizations existed and
Speaker 2: played with different ideas, and yet we find ourselves stuck
Speaker 2: in an era where like, well this can only be
Speaker 2: it right, this is like peak thought, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all is our only option, and it's that is
Speaker 1: the result that mindset, the mindset where we can't pick
Speaker 1: or anything else, is the result of a very consistent
Speaker 1: series of myths and lies that we've been telling ourselves
Speaker 1: through like histories that are written and kind of cohere
Speaker 1: to myth Like they point out that like a lot
Speaker 1: of these founding myths kind of co also cohere to
Speaker 1: like biblical like creation myths, like they're all kinds so anyways,
Speaker 1: it's it's a fascinating book. It was a really fascinating conversation.
Speaker 2: It's a paradigm shifter, tell you that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that is this. This is our conversation with
Speaker 1: Professor David wengro Well. We are thrilled to be joined
Speaker 1: by an archaeologist and professor of comparative archaeology. He's the
Speaker 1: author of books like What Makes a Civilization, The Origins
Speaker 1: of Monsters and co wrote what I think is one
Speaker 1: of the best books of the past decade, along with
Speaker 1: the late great David Graeber. It's called The Dawn of Everything,
Speaker 1: a New History of Humanity. It's an international bestseller. It's
Speaker 1: really a must read. Talk about a lot on this show.
Speaker 2: Yep. I read it by it just for sheer repetition
Speaker 2: of you talking.
Speaker 1: About it so much.
Speaker 2: So yes, and I'm glad I did.
Speaker 1: Well. Please welcome Professor David Wingroadome.
Speaker 3: Welcome, guys, Thank you. I just want to make a
Speaker 3: quick disclaim. You know, I wrote all the really bad bits.
Speaker 1: The bad stuff. Okay, we'll only ask you about the
Speaker 1: bad parts. Yeah, but I guess our.
Speaker 2: First question, what's the worst part of the book.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, that's a really good questions. What is the
Speaker 3: worst part now?
Speaker 1: So, I mean, I just want to jump right into
Speaker 1: it because we only have you for a limited time,
Speaker 1: and I feel like I could talk to you for
Speaker 1: twenty four hours about this book. But so your book
Speaker 1: basically upends how we understand the history of humanity, or
Speaker 1: at least how I did, based on a public school
Speaker 1: education understanding of history, and the version that I had
Speaker 1: learned from public school, and then from a lot of
Speaker 1: these popular nonfiction books like Guns, Germs and Steel, Better,
Speaker 1: Angels of Our Nature, you know, sapiens. The version I
Speaker 1: learned is that our current system is the result of
Speaker 1: a sort of inevitable linear civilizational evolution, and this is
Speaker 1: just what you're stuck with, and that's it. And those
Speaker 1: books are written, by the way, by people who aren't
Speaker 1: archaeologists and anthropologists like yourselves. But what does the actual
Speaker 1: archaeological record tell us?
Speaker 3: The first thing I would say is that I think
Speaker 3: all human societies do this to some degree. It's not
Speaker 3: just those of us educated in let's say a broadly
Speaker 3: European tradition. All human societies tell themselves stories about how
Speaker 3: they came to be, called it myth mythology, if you like.
Speaker 3: We're not unique in that it's a very human thing
Speaker 3: to do, and sometimes we reflect more carefully than others
Speaker 3: about what those stories really are and what we're putting
Speaker 3: in the minds of our kids. You know, almost from
Speaker 3: the age that they can even receive such information. And
Speaker 3: it so happens that the story we by which I
Speaker 3: do now mean those of us educated in broadly European traditions,
Speaker 3: have been telling ourselves for a very long time, probably
Speaker 3: more than two centuries now, hasn't actually changed very much.
Speaker 3: It starts off with people living in these tiny bands
Speaker 3: of hunter gatherers wandering around the landscape. There's no private property,
Speaker 3: so everything is very equal and egalitarian, and then comes
Speaker 3: sort of fall from grace.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: It's almost a biblical story, or a story with biblical echoes,
Speaker 3: where we start off in the garden of Eden, and
Speaker 3: then there is that faithful moment when somebody somewhere invents agriculture, right,
Speaker 3: and this is the great transition that changes everything about
Speaker 3: how we relate to each other. Suddenly you have private
Speaker 3: property that you can support larger populations, so cities emerge,
Speaker 3: and once you have cities, you've got to have some
Speaker 3: kind of central government to keep order otherwise everything is
Speaker 3: going to fall into chaos. Then you get the origins
Speaker 3: of the state, and by the time you get to
Speaker 3: our present world, which is of course divided up from
Speaker 3: one end to the other into nation states, there's this
Speaker 3: sense that somehow it was all kind of inevitable. All
Speaker 3: the key moves in the game were made so long ago,
Speaker 3: we're talking about not even thousands, but ends of thousands
Speaker 3: of years ago, that the most we can do these
Speaker 3: days is kind of tinker around the edges of what
Speaker 3: we have, but that essentially there is no other in town.
Speaker 3: So we grew up in nation states, which, as we
Speaker 3: argue in the book, are actually politically really quite weird
Speaker 3: and unusual structures. They combine, if you like, three basic
Speaker 3: forms of power into one institution that we refer to
Speaker 3: as the state. You know, everyone, everyone claims to live
Speaker 3: in a nation state. If you don't make that claim,
Speaker 3: you're in a very vulnerable position. You're either a refugee
Speaker 3: or you know, in some way in search of an
Speaker 3: alternative identity. But if you ask people to actually define
Speaker 3: what that is, you know, what is a state? Could
Speaker 3: you give me a short definition?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean yeah, you would have to think about it.
Speaker 3: You would have to think about it, which is kind
Speaker 3: of scary if you think that we you know, we
Speaker 3: live and we grow up within these political frameworks, but
Speaker 3: actually what are they? What are they comprise? And you know,
Speaker 3: generally if you go to the textbooks, what you get
Speaker 3: is a definition that looks something like this. A nation
Speaker 3: state of the kind that we all grow up in
Speaker 3: is sovereign. In other words, it commands its territory. It
Speaker 3: has the legal right to defend its territory and to
Speaker 3: use violence in order to do so. So nation states
Speaker 3: are sovereign and they're inviolable, and if somebody invades your sovereignty,
Speaker 3: you have the right to go to war. That's one thing.
Speaker 3: States are complex. They're kind of complex social organism. So
Speaker 3: you need some kind of administration or bureaucracy. Somebody has
Speaker 3: to control knowledge at the center just to kind of
Speaker 3: keep the wheels turning, otherwise it's all going to fall apart.
Speaker 3: And then we have these things called elections, which are
Speaker 3: supposed to be the same thing as democracy. Now, as
Speaker 3: we know, this is not not necessarily going the way
Speaker 3: that a lot of people imagined democracy would go.
Speaker 1: Why it would happen. We're not familiar with anything.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't know about this, but you know, we live
Speaker 3: in America. In some remote, exotic parts of the world,
Speaker 3: you get this weird phenomena where the only people who
Speaker 3: can be elected are over one hundred years old and
Speaker 3: really strange, and they kind of get up on stage
Speaker 3: and they can barely make it up there, and then
Speaker 3: they give their kind of ches and there dribbling and
Speaker 3: it's awful.
Speaker 1: And they have to have a personality disorder just to
Speaker 1: get in the door. You have to like have this
Speaker 1: weird thing where you're like, I should be in charge
Speaker 1: of all of this, all of it. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: And then it's kind of like a grand sporting occasion
Speaker 3: and everyone votes for their favorite team and they basically
Speaker 3: get to do whatever they like, and yeah, this is
Speaker 3: this is what some people have come comes in as democracy.
Speaker 3: And you know, if you put those three things together,
Speaker 3: I guess you get a rough approximation the kind of
Speaker 3: societies we grow up in and the kind of societies
Speaker 3: that we're educated in. And of course, like all other societies,
Speaker 3: because we grow up in those particular frameworks, we have
Speaker 3: a natural tendency to think of human history the same
Speaker 3: way as if it were somehow all leading up to this.
Speaker 3: And what we're trying to do in our book, me
Speaker 3: and my friend David Greeber in The Dawn of Everything
Speaker 3: is actually show how different things really were from this
Speaker 3: kind of familiar story. There's really been an incredible flood
Speaker 3: of new information, i'd say, like mainly in the last
Speaker 3: two or three decades that throws almost every aspect of
Speaker 3: that story into dissarray. I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Speaker 3: You're gonna have to give you some point as it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I guess I think one of the
Speaker 1: most instructive places, and I think a lot of the
Speaker 1: beginning of the book is taken up talking about some
Speaker 1: of the like Native American civilizations that when European settlers
Speaker 1: came to the Americas were like, there's just been this
Speaker 1: vast rewriting of what that exchange, what that interaction looked like.
Speaker 1: And in fact, a lot of these American Native American
Speaker 1: civilizations were miles ahead of the European civilizations they encountered
Speaker 1: there in terms of the values we consider important, like
Speaker 1: gender rights, environmental justice, democracy, and it required this massive
Speaker 1: historical effort to just rewrite that history so it turns
Speaker 1: them primitive, when in fact they were like these thought
Speaker 1: leaders that were massive contributors to a lot of these
Speaker 1: European colonial you know, Enlightenment ideas. But just talking about
Speaker 1: that and then this idea of like we kind of
Speaker 1: have a natural experiment there right where European colonial settlers
Speaker 1: are coming over and interacting with Native Americans who already
Speaker 1: live on the east coast of North America, and we
Speaker 1: got to see, like who liked whose version of organizing
Speaker 1: things better? Right like this?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess it's important to
Speaker 3: point out when we say they were Europeans, they weren't
Speaker 3: much like you and me. Right, the Europeans were talking
Speaker 3: about were generally either Jesuit missionaries or aristocrats, traders, soldiers
Speaker 3: of fortune and whatnot. And you know, suddenly the attitudes
Speaker 3: of the Jesuits, to our eyes, probably have much less
Speaker 3: in common with things that you or I might believe
Speaker 3: about the way society should function. Sure, and what's actually
Speaker 3: coming back at them from the local populations. For example,
Speaker 3: they had terrible difficulty getting the hood in Oshawanee and
Speaker 3: the Wendad and other First nations who lived in the
Speaker 3: eastern part of North America to even consider a religion
Speaker 3: that was based on these ten commandments, right, because those
Speaker 3: are commandments, and that implies that someone's going to tell
Speaker 3: you what to do, and you're just going to do
Speaker 3: it because you've been commanded to do it. This was
Speaker 3: actually a pretty alien concept in these societies. The idea
Speaker 3: that you would simply obey unquestioningly the command of another,
Speaker 3: whether it's a priest or a king, or an ancestor,
Speaker 3: was quite early in to them. And actually one of
Speaker 3: the things that Jesuits noticed early on was that there
Speaker 3: was a connection of sorts between this refusal to obey
Speaker 3: and the development of something else in these societies, which
Speaker 3: was a really sophisticated style of debate and persuasion. They
Speaker 3: wouldn't have called it democracy at the time, but what
Speaker 3: they're describing actually looks a lot more like real democracy
Speaker 3: than what we were just talking about before, with our
Speaker 3: bizarre electoral systems. People sitting around in a plaza, taking
Speaker 3: time to debate, to make their cases, listening to one another,
Speaker 3: trying to come up with some kind of workable compromise
Speaker 3: where you don't end up with one group of people
Speaker 3: who feel like total losers or suckers and the others
Speaker 3: are victorious, which is never going to lead to anything
Speaker 3: good in the end. All of this comes out of
Speaker 3: an assumption that nobody's the boss, you know, nobody. They
Speaker 3: used to laugh at Europeans, and this comes through quite
Speaker 3: a lot in the Jesuit missionary relations. They say they
Speaker 3: kind of laugh at Europeans because we have real chiefs,
Speaker 3: you know, who must be obeyed. They had chiefs as well,
Speaker 3: called sachems, but they didn't have that kind of coercive power.
Speaker 3: If a chief tried to bust people around in that way,
Speaker 3: people would just laugh at him. They'd make fun of him.
Speaker 3: They'd say, well, we make fun of our chiefs, and
Speaker 3: you take yours seriously. So you know, it's like we
Speaker 3: may tell ourselves we live in free societies, but you
Speaker 3: go into work or almost any other situation that the
Speaker 3: majority of people find themselves in their daily lives, and
Speaker 3: you try and exercise those freedoms, and pretty quickly you
Speaker 3: know you're going to find yourself out on the street,
Speaker 3: out of the job, whatever it may be. So as
Speaker 3: they might have put it, you know, we have play
Speaker 3: freedoms and real chiefs, whereas those other people, they had
Speaker 3: real freedoms and kind of play chiefs.
Speaker 2: And I was always taught that whenever indigenous populations encountered
Speaker 2: people from Europe, whether they be missionaries or they immediately said, oh,
Speaker 2: you know what, the way you live is actually superior,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for enlightening us onto that. I'm
Speaker 2: guessing that was that also the case.
Speaker 1: They confused the way people with gods, right, and we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: they must be gods, and we'll listen to everything they
Speaker 1: say and they're better, right.
Speaker 2: And I'd imagine the Jesuits are like, we can learn
Speaker 2: nothing from here.
Speaker 3: Let's I think it certainly came as a shock, and
Speaker 3: actually we're still kind of feeling the effects of that
Speaker 3: enormous shock of actually encountering another world of values. You've
Speaker 3: got to remember, European societies until the eighteenth century had
Speaker 3: basically known nothing except hierarchy, right, pretty much as long
Speaker 3: as you want to go back, it had been about
Speaker 3: the authority of the church, the authority of dynastic lineages, kings, queens, princes, harts.
Speaker 3: And to be confronted with societies where you had women's freedoms,
Speaker 3: where people could get divorced, where property was actually shared
Speaker 3: out in some more equitable way, created what one historian
Speaker 3: referred to as the crisis of the European mind. It's
Speaker 3: a crisis, you mean, we don't have to live like this, right,
Speaker 3: we don't have to be in this world. And so
Speaker 3: what you get, you know, like you described earlier on,
Speaker 3: is basically two things going on at the same time.
Speaker 3: On the one hand, there is an appropriation of some
Speaker 3: of these values which today we think of as European values,
Speaker 3: like freedom, democracy, women's rights, all these things we value
Speaker 3: as progressive values. There is a kind of appropriation of that.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, there is a backlash by
Speaker 3: more conservative thinkers, particularly the ones who are arguing that
Speaker 3: property and trade and material wealth are really how we're
Speaker 3: going to liberate our souls from the power of the
Speaker 3: church and the power of kings. So you end up
Speaker 3: with what we call in the book the backlash, the
Speaker 3: myth of progress, the backlash against this indigenous critique of
Speaker 3: European civilization, which basically is the story that we started
Speaker 3: out this conversation with, the one about tiny bands of
Speaker 3: hunter gatherers, and yeah, they can have all these freedoms,
Speaker 3: but it's not because they're ahead of us. It's not
Speaker 3: because they've progressed farther than us. It's the opposite. It's
Speaker 3: because primitive, and what they mean is primitive in material terms,
Speaker 3: technologically primitive. Oh they live in these funny little hearts.
Speaker 3: They don't really wear many clothes. So freedom and democracy
Speaker 3: and equality become these things that once existed in a
Speaker 3: kind of natural state. They didn't even have to be created,
Speaker 3: they were just how people were once upon a time.
Speaker 3: And then agriculture kind of ruined all of that, and
Speaker 3: we're into the familiar story. And then, supposedly, and this
Speaker 3: is kind of the last part of the myth, a
Speaker 3: small and very select group of white people living in
Speaker 3: the northwestern part of Europe kind of reclaimed a little bit.
Speaker 3: They kind of clawed back a little bit of those
Speaker 3: last freedoms through their understanding of the ancient Greeks and
Speaker 3: Romans who kept slaves, which is obviously a little bit
Speaker 3: of a paradox. And hence we end up with these
Speaker 3: sort of very ambivalent, deeply compromised notions about what democracy
Speaker 3: is and actually a very low barn what we think
Speaker 3: democracy is.
Speaker 1: Right, let's take a quick break. We'll come back and
Speaker 1: keep talking about this, we'll be right back, and we're back,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I mean, so, you know, we were talking
Speaker 1: about European settlers encountering Native American ideals, and you know,
Speaker 1: by our definition, they were further along, but it seems
Speaker 1: like they were also further along in terms of like
Speaker 1: they had. They were constantly going back and forth between
Speaker 1: more authoritarian less authoritarian forms of government. I mean, and
Speaker 1: there was just this vast kind of galaxy of different
Speaker 1: ways that societies were organized.
Speaker 3: So yeah, this is one of the kind This is
Speaker 3: one of the things we discovered, I guess in the
Speaker 3: book that surprised us and kind of intrigued us and
Speaker 3: actually inspired us to really develop this project is that
Speaker 3: the whole way we think about humans in societies of
Speaker 3: the distant post is basically wrong. You know, we begin
Speaker 3: with these categories like people were either this or they
Speaker 3: were that. You know, they were either hunt to gather
Speaker 3: or they were farmers. They were either living in bands
Speaker 3: or in tribes or in chiefdoms. And actually what we
Speaker 3: found in the evidence of our fields in archaeology and
Speaker 3: anthropology is that this really isn't the case. Actually, most
Speaker 3: human societies, most of the history of our species, have
Speaker 3: been kind of playing with the clay. You know, there'll
Speaker 3: be one of these things for part of the year,
Speaker 3: then they'll switch it around. They might be very hierarchical
Speaker 3: in their organization. For one part of the year. You
Speaker 3: might have a police force with coercive powers and whip
Speaker 3: people or imprison them. But then these powers melt away.
Speaker 3: And this often has to do with the actual form
Speaker 3: that human society takes, which is not stable. It fluctuates.
Speaker 3: People move around with the changing seasons, they change the
Speaker 3: size of their groups. There'll be times of year when
Speaker 3: you have a great abundance of meat and other resources.
Speaker 3: There'll be other times that are lean. And people have
Speaker 3: generally adapted their societies to these oscillating conditions. It's like
Speaker 3: putting a mask on and taking it off where you
Speaker 3: can have You don't start off with these purely egalitarian societies.
Speaker 3: There are always going to be individuals who love power,
Speaker 3: and there are always going to be individuals who want
Speaker 3: to be flunkies. And you know, that is actually very
Speaker 3: hard to explain. You know, at another level is individual psychology.
Speaker 3: But let's assume that there will always be a mixture
Speaker 3: of people in any human group, even a family or
Speaker 3: a household, some of whom tend towards that direction and
Speaker 3: some of whom, let's say, are more into the caring
Speaker 3: and sharing. The question is what do you do with
Speaker 3: those people? What kind of institutions do you build. Do
Speaker 3: you build institutions that are going to raise those ambitious
Speaker 3: competitive types to the top, or do you create institutions
Speaker 3: that are kind to kind of level things out.
Speaker 1: And what we.
Speaker 3: Discovered is that actually a huge number of societies on
Speaker 3: all continents of the world have kind of done both simultaneously,
Speaker 3: so they will not suppress hierarchy all of the time.
Speaker 3: You might let it out in some spectacular ritual performance.
Speaker 3: This is why we get these things in human history
Speaker 3: that people often regard as mysteries or puzzles, the kind
Speaker 3: of things that the makers of certain Netflix series like
Speaker 3: to call all great mysteries of the ancient world.
Speaker 1: That's how mystery. Aliens did it right. Aliens built all
Speaker 1: those things, I.
Speaker 3: Agree, all the stuff that Aliens right, like Stonehenge and Egypt,
Speaker 3: where you know, first you start out by sort of
Speaker 3: characterizing the society as terribly, terribly primitive, and then you say,
Speaker 3: but look, here's this incredibly mathematically geographic geometrically sophisticated monument.
Speaker 3: How could these idiots possibly create which the answer is
Speaker 3: obviously they were not idiots. You know, these are people
Speaker 3: who could at times create these incredibly impressive cultural creations,
Speaker 3: but then at other times, you know, would actually morph
Speaker 3: into different forms of society. This is what the anthropologist
Speaker 3: Marcel Moss called the double morphology of society. You don't
Speaker 3: just have one system of law or one system of
Speaker 3: religion or one systems of politics. You switch things around. Now,
Speaker 3: this was kind of a revelation to us because it
Speaker 3: changes the whole question. You know, the big question of
Speaker 3: human history since the days of the Enlightenments and Jean
Speaker 3: Jacques Rousseau and people like that, was about the origins
Speaker 3: of inequality? How did we lose that original equality and freedom?
Speaker 3: Whereas actually, starting from the earliest evidence that we can find,
Speaker 3: you have to ask a different question. You have to
Speaker 3: ask not so much what was the origins of inequality?
Speaker 3: But how did the genie of inequality get out of
Speaker 3: the bottle? When did those cages come down? The restricted
Speaker 3: hierarchy which would always have been there, yea, and that
Speaker 3: was always yeah, like relations between adults and kids, in
Speaker 3: relations of gender in relations of domestic servitude. You know,
Speaker 3: the idea that we've ever lived in societies of equals
Speaker 3: is a little bizarre. So the question becomes more about,
Speaker 3: you know, when did those cages break down? When did
Speaker 3: things like private property and sovereignty and patriarchy escape from
Speaker 3: those cages and effectively come to dominate almost every waking
Speaker 3: moment of our human lives.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they didn't like that. When we imagine them. There
Speaker 1: is this kind of bias that you identify frequently in
Speaker 1: the book, which is like this idea that, like you
Speaker 1: just said, those people are idiots. They didn't. It was primitive,
Speaker 1: so they didn't have these elaborate systems to keep all
Speaker 1: of these impulses that today are causing problems for us
Speaker 1: under control. They couldn't have like just you know, we
Speaker 1: refuse to look back and you know, from them, because you.
Speaker 3: See that thing the other day. One of the authors
Speaker 3: you mentioned who wrote the Sapiens.
Speaker 1: Book, Yeah, you've all know harari I think, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was. Someone sent me a clip of an
Speaker 3: interview just recently, just the other week, which went viral,
Speaker 3: and I can't remember who was interviewing mister Hararii, but
Speaker 3: he said this thing that annoyed a lot of people.
Speaker 3: It went roughly like this, I hope I'm not misquoting,
Speaker 3: but he said, I think the interview asked him something like,
Speaker 3: it's often said that, you know, we're living in a
Speaker 3: time of great uncertainty right now. Do you believe that's true?
Speaker 3: And he started off as saying, well, everyone always says
Speaker 3: that about the period of history that they live in,
Speaker 3: but today it's actually true. For the this time in history,
Speaker 3: we have no idea what to tell out it. You know,
Speaker 3: we don't know what technologies are going to be relevant
Speaker 3: to their lives in twenty years time. Are you falling
Speaker 3: for this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly right, that's what this is.
Speaker 3: Where And then he starts talking about what things were
Speaker 3: like back in the day, Back in the Neolithic period
Speaker 3: or the Middle Ages. You know, there were certain things
Speaker 3: you couldn't predict, like when the Utings or the Mongols
Speaker 3: were going to come through and radio settlement, but you
Speaker 3: knew that you would still be growing wheat and raising
Speaker 3: sheep in twenty years time. There were these basic things
Speaker 3: that you could tell people that you knew were going
Speaker 3: to be relevant. But today all of that's gone. We
Speaker 3: just have no clue what it's going to be. Right,
Speaker 3: are you buying any of this?
Speaker 1: No, I probably would have before reading your book. But
Speaker 1: your book does a really good job of dispelling this notion.
Speaker 3: That's really telling. I mean, regardless, you know, even if
Speaker 3: you haven't read that book, the implication is actually kind
Speaker 3: of fascinating because it implies that there's no connection between
Speaker 3: what we teach our kids and what's actually going to
Speaker 3: happen in the next twenty years. Right, right, Yeah, do
Speaker 3: you know what I mean? It's like this idea that
Speaker 3: you're kind of floating blindly into the future and you
Speaker 3: can tell the kids any old thing, but all that
Speaker 3: other stuff's going to happen anyway, Whereas in fact, you know,
Speaker 3: this is obviously nonsense. I mean, if we teach our
Speaker 3: kids people didn't always raise sheep, they didn't always grow crops,
Speaker 3: you know, and actually, as we show in the book,
Speaker 3: these were very conscious processes which sometimes people actually rejected,
Speaker 3: you know, they decided they tried it on, they tried
Speaker 3: it emphasized, and they decided to drop it again. So
Speaker 3: it's partly this idea that actually goes back to people
Speaker 3: like Rousseau, that we're always kind of floating blindly into
Speaker 3: these traps which we're making for ourselves, but we can
Speaker 3: never quite see them coming.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Is really, I think, particularly right now in this historical moment,
Speaker 3: apart from being just kind of wrong, is actually a
Speaker 3: pretty dangerous way to look at the world, because you know,
Speaker 3: you can kind of put your hands up and say, well,
Speaker 3: tell our kids any old rubbish.
Speaker 1: Right right? Yeah, And just briefly so, Rousseau and Hobbes
Speaker 1: are kind of the two versions we get of that
Speaker 1: narrative we were talking about earlier. With Rousseau. It's like
Speaker 1: we were living in these happy, egalitarian groups and then
Speaker 1: we gave it it's the Harari like sapiens thing where
Speaker 1: and then we decide to.
Speaker 3: I think that's roughly although you know, I got to
Speaker 3: tell you Rousseau is way more interesting, Oh for sure. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, Rousseau was not about fatalism. Rousseau is not
Speaker 3: about telling us that there's always going to be this
Speaker 3: boot stamping on your face and on your kids' face.
Speaker 3: Is Rousseau is about revolution. Rousseau is about, you know,
Speaker 3: trying to understand what, what's this liberty that we lost?
Speaker 3: You can just add no clue what that might really
Speaker 3: be like and.
Speaker 1: Then Hobbes is on the Pinker side. Hobbes is like before, like,
Speaker 1: if you think this is bad, you should see what
Speaker 1: it used to be like. Man, everybody would just like
Speaker 1: kill each other and then we had to like get
Speaker 1: these laws to keep people in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think Professor Pinker is very forthright about this.
Speaker 3: He actually refers to himself as a neo Hobbs.
Speaker 1: Here, right, and he's like, and if you just look
Speaker 1: at the record of what it used to be like,
Speaker 1: you'll see and then he just like quotes a bunch
Speaker 1: of like widely debunked bullshit about how violent everything used
Speaker 1: to be. And doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Well, this is what my friend David used to refer
Speaker 3: to as the extreme center.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: You know, you get it in politics, you get it
Speaker 3: in academias, like these individuals who present themselves as very
Speaker 3: rational centrists, and then you actually look really closely at
Speaker 3: what they're saying and it is really out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's pretty white supremacist. Like he just
Speaker 1: keeps talking about the like how we were saved by
Speaker 1: these Enlightenment European thinkers and then like writing the you know,
Speaker 1: erasing the native American influence from everything, and it's just
Speaker 1: the story of how we like trained ourselves to have
Speaker 1: better and better manners and that led to lower murder
Speaker 1: rates if you're not counting World War Two. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't want to get too bogged down by Pinker,
Speaker 1: but it just I think there's there's just so many
Speaker 1: examples in the book of these stories that upend this
Speaker 1: idea that these civilizations were not complex, that they weren't
Speaker 1: trying different things out, that they weren't like there's a
Speaker 1: I think it's a huron system of beliefs around dreams
Speaker 1: that you cover in the book. It was like really
Speaker 1: similar to Freud's theory, but almost more interesting because it
Speaker 1: doesn't go in all the weird.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, I mean the ructions we have of this
Speaker 3: it's called un in Dunk and it goes by way
Speaker 3: I mean centuries before Freud, where actually dreams are one
Speaker 3: of the only contexts in which it does seem like
Speaker 3: you could have almost the kind of power of command
Speaker 3: if you dreamed something. It could be a particular object
Speaker 3: or a relationship you wish to have. If it came
Speaker 3: to you in a dream, people almost had to try
Speaker 3: and make it come true. So we have these descriptions
Speaker 3: of the I think it's the winter seasons from the
Speaker 3: late seventeenth early eighteenth century of Huron societies, where people
Speaker 3: would gather around and try and make somebody's dream come true.
Speaker 3: There was a compulsion to do this, and they would
Speaker 3: do this by in top pritting the symbolism of the
Speaker 3: dream in much the way that you know, Freud was
Speaker 3: credited with an enormous breakthrough, one of the great intellectual
Speaker 3: breakthroughs of the twentieth century, Freudian psychoanalysis. They have it
Speaker 3: in their own form. The major difference is that they
Speaker 3: do it communally. You don't have this notion of the
Speaker 3: individual therapist and the patient. Society gathers around the individual
Speaker 3: and supports them in much the same way that you
Speaker 3: know some of the same kinds of hallucinogenics or psychoactive
Speaker 3: substances that we tend to if we ingest them. You know,
Speaker 3: people do it as largely as individuals would actually have
Speaker 3: been done in a very communal context, with people caressing you,
Speaker 3: supporting you, holding your hand, kind of taking you through
Speaker 3: it as a group. But I mean, I guess that
Speaker 3: the example of these dreams and dreamings you know, teaching
Speaker 3: teaches us is that we're very foolish to dismiss those
Speaker 3: forms of knowledge as somehow alien or exotic. Is actually,
Speaker 3: you know, we find them within our own culture.
Speaker 2: I feel like that's sort of one of the things
Speaker 2: that were so limited because we've dismissed so much of
Speaker 2: this wisdom or papered it over with sort of like
Speaker 2: revisionist versions of what had occurred or what things were
Speaker 2: said and what those ideas were. And I think that's
Speaker 2: why it's really important too, because as we as people
Speaker 2: tend to look at our own systems of oppression as
Speaker 2: being fixed and it's like, well, I don't know what
Speaker 2: you can do. It's just it's just all it was
Speaker 2: always kind of trending this way. I think there's these
Speaker 2: examples in your book that just show a if we
Speaker 2: can overcome our sort of perspective of like, well, these
Speaker 2: people think this is like old ways man, and like
Speaker 2: they didn't know what they were doing. But there are
Speaker 2: examples I think of, you know, Teo Ti Hua Khan,
Speaker 2: where you talk about how that is a shift where
Speaker 2: people saw what was going on with their civilization and
Speaker 2: actually decided to change it to a completely different system.
Speaker 2: Can you can you just sort of kind of talk
Speaker 2: us through that process, because I think it's very interesting,
Speaker 2: especially for us who look at what we're like sort
Speaker 2: of these structures we live under now and think, well,
Speaker 2: I don't know what to do. It is what it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, there seems to be a whole strand
Speaker 3: of I guess what we would call a republican tradition
Speaker 3: or a sort of anti monarchy tradition in the deep
Speaker 3: history of Mexican societies and especially urban societies ancient cities.
Speaker 3: Terti Wakan is one of the earliest and most spectacular
Speaker 3: manifestations of this. So we're in the Valley of Mexico
Speaker 3: now around the time of Christ so the years sort
Speaker 3: of the year zero one whatever, in the first few
Speaker 3: centuries of the common era. You get this extraordinary city
Speaker 3: forming in the Valley of Mexico with a lot of
Speaker 3: refugees it seems from surrounding areas. There was a lot
Speaker 3: of volcanic activity at the time. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: destruction going on. People flood into this site and they
Speaker 3: fall us city with hundreds of thousands of residents, and
Speaker 3: they start doing all the things that netflix would probably
Speaker 3: lead you to expect of an ancient city. They build
Speaker 3: great pyramids. That's the Pyramid of the Sun, Pyramid of
Speaker 3: the Moon, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. But then,
Speaker 3: rather fascinatingly, after a couple of centuries of doing this,
Speaker 3: they change course in the most dramatic way. They stop
Speaker 3: building these great monuments, and all of that labor and
Speaker 3: collective investment that went into creating them goes into something else.
Speaker 3: And we know what that's. Something else was because archaeologists
Speaker 3: mapped it. In one of the first really great urban
Speaker 3: surveys done by archaeologists, they found this incredible system of
Speaker 3: public housing and it goes in a grid. It's incredibly
Speaker 3: carefully planned, and it goes in an orthogonal grid from
Speaker 3: one end of the city to the other, and it houses,
Speaker 3: as far as we can tell, most of the city's
Speaker 3: vast multi ethnic population, multi ethnic, multilingual, in very comfortable circumstances.
Speaker 3: When archaeologists first discovered these kind of communal villas, they
Speaker 3: actually thought they were palaces, and then they realized that
Speaker 3: basically everybody is living in a palace, and talking about
Speaker 3: really beautiful plastered walls with mural sub floor drainage systems,
Speaker 3: maybe four or five nuclear families living in one of
Speaker 3: these compounds or apartment houses, and we can reconstruct a
Speaker 3: diet using the kind of techniques that archaeologists use these days,
Speaker 3: and show that this was an incredibly prosperous site that
Speaker 3: actually knocked inequality on the head for hundreds of years
Speaker 3: on an urban scale, which is pretty mind blowing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, these are the civilizations that that we were
Speaker 1: viewing as primitive, and they've already gone through the process
Speaker 1: of having this authoritarian set up and then like overthrowing
Speaker 1: it and building a civilization that like them up and
Speaker 1: running a large city. That's the bottom up, that's right.
Speaker 3: I mean, they did actually have some kind of writing system,
Speaker 3: it seems that turtu Wakan, but nobody has really been
Speaker 3: able to decipher it, and even if we could, it
Speaker 3: may not give us the kind of information we would
Speaker 3: really love because just imagine the kind of discussions that
Speaker 3: are going on. Imagine the kind of philosophical discoveries and
Speaker 3: movements that would have accompanied with transition like this, which
Speaker 3: we can only reconstruction the material relates. Yeah, imagine all
Speaker 3: the intellectual stuff. And actually we do get some insight
Speaker 3: into this from a later period when the conquistadors arrive,
Speaker 3: they actually stumble upon cities that are organized in pretty
Speaker 3: egalitarian ways, and they describe some of them, including ones
Speaker 3: with full blown urban parliaments, at a time when you
Speaker 3: don't really have very much of that going on in Europe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, actually, let's take one more quick break, will be
Speaker 1: right back, and we're back, And yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting one of the parts of the book you identify
Speaker 1: these like key freedoms that people in most civilizations kind
Speaker 1: of take for granted unless they're otherwise trained into obedience
Speaker 1: like we are. So there's they're freedoms that I never
Speaker 1: thought about growing up because they just aren't freedoms that
Speaker 1: are emphasized in our world. But they are a cent
Speaker 1: like very briefly summarized the freedom to move, the freedom
Speaker 1: to disobey, and the freedom to rearrange social ties, which
Speaker 1: you know comes up in that story that you were
Speaker 1: just telling. But you talk about those freedoms and like
Speaker 1: how they show up in other civilizations through time, and
Speaker 1: like why they would be nice to have for us
Speaker 1: if we just knew to ask for them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, since you've been to night about the
Speaker 3: don of everything tiny well, it's not really a scoop.
Speaker 3: But the reason I've been so busy recently is because
Speaker 3: I've decided to try and write another book. Hey, I
Speaker 3: mean David and I. David and I never intended The
Speaker 3: Dawn of Everything to be a finished project. It was
Speaker 3: always going to be kind of the introduction or a
Speaker 3: sort of prolegoma into a whole series that we were
Speaker 3: planning to do amazing. David already got it into his
Speaker 3: head that it had to be like Tolkien. So the
Speaker 3: Dawn of Everything harpit.
Speaker 1: Oh, it was just the it doesn't work.
Speaker 3: Stupidly noticed the horbit is actually a pretty short but yeah,
Speaker 3: that's pretty Everything is more like The Two Towers. So
Speaker 3: it was a very analogy. But the idea was that
Speaker 3: we would write three sequels. I don't think that's going
Speaker 3: to happen without David, but I do want to continue
Speaker 3: the project in some way. So I'm working on a
Speaker 3: book called The Third Freedom, and I want to take
Speaker 3: forward this concept that we came up with of the
Speaker 3: three basic forms of human freedom that you mentioned, the
Speaker 3: freedom to move away, the freedom to disobey, and the
Speaker 3: freedom to kind of play with the social order, flip
Speaker 3: things around. Create a different kind of society. It's one
Speaker 3: of the number of ideas that we sort of throw
Speaker 3: out there in the book when we're trying to bring
Speaker 3: together our observations and say, okay, what are the larger
Speaker 3: conclusions we can draw about all of this. But like
Speaker 3: all the concepts in the book, it needs more exemplification
Speaker 3: and more exploration. So what I'm trying to do is
Speaker 3: understand better the connections between these three freedoms and how
Speaker 3: the breakdown of one kind of freedom leads to the
Speaker 3: breakdown of another kind of freedom. And you can think
Speaker 3: about this at many different levels, from domestic abuse, you know,
Speaker 3: if you can't move away, you can't disobey, all the
Speaker 3: way up to much larger scale political processes. But I
Speaker 3: actually want to start off with, if you like, the
Speaker 3: grandest example of our first freedom to move away, which
Speaker 3: is simply the spread of people. Yeah, you know, well
Speaker 3: we all start off as africas, we all start off
Speaker 3: from the continent of Africa. Nobody seriously today would dispute this. Actually,
Speaker 3: I was thinking about this the other day because there's
Speaker 3: a book that came up recently that says we shouldn't
Speaker 3: do this archaeology stuff. It never leads anywhere good. You know,
Speaker 3: it's always dangerous. It always plays into some demagoguery or
Speaker 3: some political mythology is bad. I was thinking, well, that's
Speaker 3: obviously true sometimes, but if we didn't do this kind
Speaker 3: of work at all, you know, it was very hard
Speaker 3: to get people to accept that humans evolved in Africa.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of resistance to that idea, especially
Speaker 3: in Europe. People pushed back against it for reasons that
Speaker 3: were entirely racist of African ancestry. These days, almost nobody
Speaker 3: disputes it, and you know that is the result of
Speaker 3: scientific work in my field. So the idea that you know,
Speaker 3: this is all a foregone conclusion and whatever stories we've
Speaker 3: come up with a lead to disaster. You know, it's
Speaker 3: a matter of opinion. I don't think it's really the case.
Speaker 3: But the point is that from Africa humans disperss. We
Speaker 3: know these days that you have humans in Australia sixty
Speaker 3: thousand years ago. You have humans in a tiny place
Speaker 3: called New Ireland, which is in Melanesia forty years ago,
Speaker 3: which is long before you have humans in Ireland as
Speaker 3: in European Ireland. And this is really the most extraordinary
Speaker 3: story of human freedoms, but interestingly, it's never told that way. Actually,
Speaker 3: the standard term in the scientific literature for how humans
Speaker 3: get around the world in the first place is colonization.
Speaker 3: We colonize the globe, which is kind of interesting. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's hardly the neutral term, especially for a field like archaeology,
Speaker 3: which basically developed as an extension of empire. And it
Speaker 3: also doesn't make a great deal of sense. I mean,
Speaker 3: maybe if you're talking about humans moving into areas where
Speaker 3: you've got Neanderthals or dinisicipants or other human like species, Okay,
Speaker 3: maybe then you could talk about colonization. But very often
Speaker 3: we're talking about people moving into land that isn't inhabited
Speaker 3: by humans at all, and yet we refer to it
Speaker 3: as colonization. So there's already this mindset that freedom has
Speaker 3: something to do with conquering or power or you know,
Speaker 3: extending your kind of range over somebody else. So I'm
Speaker 3: actually starting right at the beginning with that question. You
Speaker 3: know what if we try to think about that differently,
Speaker 3: What if we introduce freedom right at the beginning of
Speaker 3: the human story in a very concrete way. Has the
Speaker 3: freedom to move away.
Speaker 1: That?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that third freedom, I think is, so I'm assuming
Speaker 2: the third freedom being the one about to be able
Speaker 2: to rethink what sort of social structures we want to
Speaker 2: engage in. I think there's a quote in the book
Speaker 2: that says, how did we get stuck? Or greed, exploitation
Speaker 2: and systemic indifference to others suffering? If something did go
Speaker 2: terribly wrong in human history, then perhaps it began to
Speaker 2: go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to
Speaker 2: imagine and enact other forms of social existence. And that
Speaker 2: feels so much of like, what, yeah, we are so
Speaker 2: many people are experiencing this sort of form of living
Speaker 2: on the planet in this moment and wondering It's like,
Speaker 2: is this this is the best we can do? Like
Speaker 2: so many people are like, I know there are other
Speaker 2: ways to do it, yet, or just there's just so
Speaker 2: much historical societal momentum going against this idea, and I think, yeah,
Speaker 2: it really is.
Speaker 3: Right, And you know, we all have different things we
Speaker 3: can be doing to push back against that kind of
Speaker 3: thing and actually try and secure some kind of viable
Speaker 3: future for our kids and our kids' kids. And I guess,
Speaker 3: you know, my friend David was active on many different fronts.
Speaker 3: I guess I share with him the idea that actually
Speaker 3: rethinking human history on the largest possible scale should be
Speaker 3: part of any freedom movement. Actually, yeah, maybe even has to.
Speaker 1: Be some of the alternate ways, because we talk a
Speaker 1: lot on this show about our inability to imagine other
Speaker 1: systems like that. Kim Stanley Roberts has said that, like,
Speaker 1: it's harder to imagine the end of capitalism than the
Speaker 1: end of the world. Or I'm misquoting that, but basically,
Speaker 1: like people, I.
Speaker 3: Always thought that was Asyla la Gwin, but maybe.
Speaker 1: It might be he might be quoting someone else, but
Speaker 1: he like just that idea that when we're asked to
Speaker 1: imagine anything else, we I think just like that. That's
Speaker 1: where our zombie movies come from. It's like, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's either this or absolute, absolute hell on the streets.
Speaker 3: Zombie like zombie zombie thinking is a good way to
Speaker 3: think about this, I think. And you know, history is
Speaker 3: full of what you might call zombie statistics. Right, let's
Speaker 3: just clomber you with numbers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's just keep going on.
Speaker 3: You often hear this idea that by the time of
Speaker 3: the Roman Empire, three quarters of the world's population were
Speaker 3: living in empires, Right, think about that they were either
Speaker 3: under the boot of Rome, or they were under the
Speaker 3: boot of the Han Chinese, or they were under the
Speaker 3: boot of the Parthians or the Cushions. But whichever way
Speaker 3: you look at it, like most humans on Earth were
Speaker 3: already kind of domesticated within these incredibly hierarchical structures. That's
Speaker 3: a zombie statistic. I actually looked at what it's actually
Speaker 3: based on, and it's like, it's way for thin I'm
Speaker 3: not gonna I think I'm going to write about this,
Speaker 3: so I don't want to spoil the surprise. But let's
Speaker 3: just say this is basically not you know, it's it's
Speaker 3: got a foundation really in any solid evidence. It's just
Speaker 3: one of these kind of factoids that gets repeated and
Speaker 3: repeated so that you know, you end up saying something
Speaker 3: a bit like this. You say, well, oh, that's great.
Speaker 3: There were these other people who were experimenting with all
Speaker 3: these different forms of society, but you know, they were
Speaker 3: basically on the losing end of history. There were a
Speaker 3: few of them. You don't live in the world that
Speaker 3: they created. We live in the world that Marcus are created,
Speaker 3: or or you like, so come on, get real this
Speaker 3: will realism relations that has to be about either free
Speaker 3: trade or war.
Speaker 1: Those are the only ingredients that changes the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's also parties, carnivals, festival That's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite moments from the book is just talking about
Speaker 1: that as like ritual, you know, festivals as like these
Speaker 1: these places that people could you write in the book
Speaker 1: what's really important about such festivals is that they kept
Speaker 1: the old spark of political self consciousness alive. They allowed
Speaker 1: people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, which for
Speaker 1: some reason like that connected with our modern condition, right,
Speaker 1: It's like, actually, this could be fun. We could be
Speaker 1: like throwing great parties where we get to I guess
Speaker 1: like Burning Man at some point was an example of this,
Speaker 1: and it seems to be even though now like billionaires
Speaker 1: take their helicopters to Burning Man and shit like, it
Speaker 1: still seems to be the thing that when I talk
Speaker 1: to people who've been to Burning Man, they end up
Speaker 1: coming away from those festivals talking about, oh, it's cool
Speaker 1: you like exist in a system outside of money for
Speaker 1: a week essentially, but just that idea that like there's
Speaker 1: been these festivals where that like up end the order
Speaker 1: and like children get to play at adult jobs or
Speaker 1: the less powerful get to play the roles of the
Speaker 1: powerful are is really compelling to me and also just
Speaker 1: like kind of made me slightly hopeful that there could
Speaker 1: be like a way that's enjoyable out of this.
Speaker 3: This is this is actually really fascinating, and I think
Speaker 3: it has a lot to do with you know, where
Speaker 3: we place the boundaries between what is serious and what
Speaker 3: is play. Right, So all the things you're describing, I
Speaker 3: guess have been classified in our culture as forms of play. Yeah,
Speaker 3: in other words, they're not to be taken seriously. Okay,
Speaker 3: So you experienced this other thing for a little while,
Speaker 3: and now you come back to serious seriousness, like serious reality.
Speaker 3: This is a shifting boundary. And you know, if you
Speaker 3: think about the extent to which are supposedly serious politics
Speaker 3: is actually gamified. You know, there's a lot of play
Speaker 3: there as well, and where we put the boundaries between
Speaker 3: seriousness and play. You know, if you're a historian or
Speaker 3: an archaeologist and you write a lot about war and violence,
Speaker 3: people take you really seriously.
Speaker 1: You're serious.
Speaker 3: You know how many people write about peace? Yeah, or
Speaker 3: actually really try and analyze societies that have found ways
Speaker 3: to be peaceful and to end wars or design ways
Speaker 3: out of war so that you can actually envisage mending
Speaker 3: these these social wounds and physical wounds done on each other.
Speaker 3: It's amazing how little work there is on these things
Speaker 3: because somehow that's not regarded as terribly serious. Yeah, you're
Speaker 3: a bit flaky. You're a bit flaky playing around if
Speaker 3: you'd study that.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I think this is really fascinating, and I think
Speaker 3: it does it is somehow central in ways that we
Speaker 3: don't understand very well. Is the role of play in
Speaker 3: human culture generally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it seems like it's the one constant.
Speaker 1: You guys say, like, humans aren't inherently good or evil,
Speaker 1: they are inherently creative and playful. And that's what you
Speaker 1: find in the archaeological record throughout your your kind of surveying,
Speaker 1: the book which you.
Speaker 3: Know, we put things on and we take them off.
Speaker 3: And the idea that everyone has to be just one thing. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it may turn out to be actually a very radical
Speaker 3: and very kind of modern idea and actually very untypical.
Speaker 3: And you know, I think we see this around us
Speaker 3: all the time, people pushing back against those those kinds
Speaker 3: of categories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, Professor wan Gres, such a such a pleasure
Speaker 1: having you. I know we're kind of out of time here,
Speaker 1: but where should we send people to find out more
Speaker 1: about you? Obviously I'm recommending and continued recomend everybody read
Speaker 1: The Dawn of Everything, a New History of Humanity. Where
Speaker 1: else should people go?
Speaker 3: Don't send them to my universtics. I've got way too
Speaker 3: many students.
Speaker 1: All right, yeah, I'll tell them, yeah, leave him, leave
Speaker 1: him alone?
Speaker 3: Please, yeah, yeah, I don't know. I think they should
Speaker 3: listen to your show. Quite frankly, that's right.
Speaker 2: Wow, wow, Okay, hi Grace, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for joining us. And uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I would love to have you back when the next
Speaker 1: project is uh is out.
Speaker 3: Thanks a lot, guys, I'm working on it.
Speaker 1: All right, appreciate it. All right. That was our conversation
Speaker 1: with Professor David Wingro, hopefully the first of many. What
Speaker 1: a joy. Go go read The Dawn of Everything.
Speaker 2: Go listen to this show. I mean you just heard
Speaker 2: him say it's obvious.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the most important thing.
Speaker 2: This has got some genius level ship. I knew that,
Speaker 2: and I knew that, and I knew that. But thank
Speaker 2: you Thank you David for recognizing that.
Speaker 1: Myles, Where can people find you? Follow you all that
Speaker 1: good stuff? And is there a work of media that
Speaker 1: you've been enjoying?
Speaker 2: Oh man, Uh, you can find me at Miles of
Speaker 2: Gray where they got the ad symbols. You like basketball,
Speaker 2: you like what you're seeing in the league, or you don't, Well.
Speaker 1: Guess what.
Speaker 2: Join Jack and I on our basketball podcast Miles Jack
Speaker 2: and also gets me on four to twenty Day Fiance.
Speaker 2: We're talking about ninety day fiance. Let's see uh blah
Speaker 2: blah blah blah blah. Let's the tweet I like is
Speaker 2: a quote tweet tweet from at Kyle R. Siebel, who's
Speaker 2: just said I think about this tweet every single day.
Speaker 2: And the tweet is from at Wheaton three thousand. Michael
Speaker 2: Wheaton tweeted at face value. Penguin Random House is an
Speaker 2: absolutely insane name for a company that sells anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Hey, it's what happens when we start throwing companies. But yeah,
Speaker 2: where'd you get that, oh, Penguin random House? Yeah, oh
Speaker 2: your medication, Yeah yeah, it's cheaper there whim random House.
Speaker 1: Oh shit, it's having an episode tweet. I'm enjoying cat
Speaker 1: Algarista tweeted, they fucking nailed it when they named it snorkeling,
Speaker 1: which is true. Trash Jones tweeted today I'm perfecting the Irish. Hello, Prince,
Speaker 1: he's showing up drunk. And then Mayor Strom tweeted saying
Speaker 1: this guy again at every Jesus painting in the loop. Everyone,
Speaker 1: you can find me on Twitter, Jack Underscore, Obrian you
Speaker 1: can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at
Speaker 1: the Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have Facebook fanpage and
Speaker 1: website Daily zeitgeist dot com where you post our episodes
Speaker 1: and our footnotes link off to the information that we
Speaker 1: talked about in today's episode. In this one, we'll probably
Speaker 1: just link off to the dawn of everything. They have
Speaker 1: an extensive bibliography. Yeah, book like all great books. You know,
Speaker 1: if I wrote a book, I would want to be
Speaker 1: able to use it as a murder weapon, and this
Speaker 1: is one of those. It is, yeah, a hefty work.
Speaker 2: It's a hefter. It's a hefter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could probably kill someone with just a bibliography.
Speaker 1: That's I'll think it's.
Speaker 2: Sixty three pages. I think just the bibliography. Yeah, we
Speaker 2: don't don't step to their sources. Okay, don't step to
Speaker 2: the sources, all right.
Speaker 1: That is going to do it back this afternoon to
Speaker 1: tell you what is trending until then. Daily Zeke is
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Speaker 1: Heart Radio, visit Yeah Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows. That's gonna do it
Speaker 1: hookcol Later Fight Third Kind of Freedom,