I’m not sure you’ve quite nailed the central claim of the book. Which is fair, they don’t make it clear, and I don’t think the reviews did a good job of making it clear either.
I think it’s more along the lines of:
Modern societies have lost the qualities of flexibility and political creativity that were once more common in human history. We have value lock in.
This seems plausible to me.
They also make the following claim:
Western civilisation is not conducive to human flourishing. This is made evident by the fact that Western civilisation did not spread of its own accord. Instead, European powers ‘have been obliged to spend the last 500 or so years aiming guns at people’s heads in order to force them to adopt it’.
This is more debatable. But I don’t think it’s very important (with regards to a discussion on the value of the book).
Why? Because they only state this claim due to the fact that this is why they care about the truth of the first claim. However, I expect most people on this forum already agree that value lock in is bad and, therefore, don’t need to buy this second claim to find value in the book.
Instead, to determine the value of the book (provided you already buy the first claim AND think lock in is bad), one ought to investigate claims such as the following (made in the conclusion):
Our society’s lack of flexibility and political creativity has its origins in a confusion between care and domination.
Societies such as ours, i.e. those that are large and complex, do not require domination to flourish.
I believe Scott Alexander has cited this book’s “ballistically false” claim, and I definitely remember ~believing it and finding it strongly compelling.
It is so, so much worse. I investigated the claim in depth, found it was indeed “ballistically false” (the claim being that the source they cite supports what the book says, not whether what they say in the book is actually true), and then decided to find out if Wengrow had perhaps apologized and issued a retraction . I ran across this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1460660171496173577?s=21 in which Wengrow defends his scholarship by variously claiming that people misread the source, that people misunderstood the claims in the source, that the source saying that “many” whites chose to stay with the Indians is evidence for his claim that they “almost invariably” did so, and that his source is unreliable and should not be trusted.
This guy is either very stupid, a very bad liar, or just lazy and thinks that everyone else is a gullible idiot.
Comments for Book non-review: The Dawn of Everything will go here.
I’m not sure you’ve quite nailed the central claim of the book. Which is fair, they don’t make it clear, and I don’t think the reviews did a good job of making it clear either.
I think it’s more along the lines of:
This seems plausible to me.
They also make the following claim:
This is more debatable. But I don’t think it’s very important (with regards to a discussion on the value of the book).
Why? Because they only state this claim due to the fact that this is why they care about the truth of the first claim. However, I expect most people on this forum already agree that value lock in is bad and, therefore, don’t need to buy this second claim to find value in the book.
Instead, to determine the value of the book (provided you already buy the first claim AND think lock in is bad), one ought to investigate claims such as the following (made in the conclusion):
Our society’s lack of flexibility and political creativity has its origins in a confusion between care and domination.
Societies such as ours, i.e. those that are large and complex, do not require domination to flourish.
I believe Scott Alexander has cited this book’s “ballistically false” claim, and I definitely remember ~believing it and finding it strongly compelling.
It is so, so much worse. I investigated the claim in depth, found it was indeed “ballistically false” (the claim being that the source they cite supports what the book says, not whether what they say in the book is actually true), and then decided to find out if Wengrow had perhaps apologized and issued a retraction . I ran across this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/davidwengrow/status/1460660171496173577?s=21 in which Wengrow defends his scholarship by variously claiming that people misread the source, that people misunderstood the claims in the source, that the source saying that “many” whites chose to stay with the Indians is evidence for his claim that they “almost invariably” did so, and that his source is unreliable and should not be trusted.
This guy is either very stupid, a very bad liar, or just lazy and thinks that everyone else is a gullible idiot.