THIS IS THE FACE OF IVY LEAGUE RACISM
Why this despicable twit is guilty of scholarly malpractice.
HEY NEVERMORONS,
I’ve got a treat for y’all today, or at least a treat for those of you who like it when I go into attack mode. I’ve got the perfect victim today.
Who’s the lucky sucker, you ask?
This prick:
Who’s that ugly dipshit, you ask? Good question!
His name is David A. Bell and he’s a professor at Princeton University, which belongs to the exclusive Ivy League, the club of elite institution which also includes Yale, Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard.
Here’s how Dr. Bell describes himself:
I am a historian of the early modern Atlantic world, with a particular interest in the political culture of Enlightenment and revolutionary France. I attended graduate school at Princeton, where I worked with Robert Darnton, and received my Ph.D. in 1991. From 1990 to 1996 I taught at Yale, and from 1996 to 2010 at Johns Hopkins, where I held the Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Humanities and served as Dean of Faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences. I joined the Princeton faculty in 2010. I have held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. My books have been recognized with prizes from the Society for French Historical Studies, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the American Historical Association, and have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Turkish. I am a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. I am currently writing a history of the Enlightenment.
“Okay,” you’re probably thinking. “And why should I care about this guy?”
Well, basically, he’s the perfect poster boy for Ivy League Racism. He represents everything that’s wrong with academia in one foul package.
It’ll take me a minute to explain why, though, so feel free to make yourself a cup of tea or roll yourself a joint.
This will be worth your time. I promise.
WHO IS DAVID A. BELL AND WHY SHOULD I CARE?
As y’all are aware, I’m a huge fan of the late David Graeber, who I believe was murdered back in 2020.
After his mysterious death by rapid-onset necrotic pancreatitis, his estate published a book called The Dawn of Everything, which has elicited widely-varying responses.
It’s a dazzling and maddening book, because it’s full both of brilliant insights and cringe-inducing stupidity. Many people have expressed their bemusement, and the book’s critical reception has been mixed.
The Wikipedia entry for The Dawn of Everything is so instructive here that I will quote from it at length.
Feel free to skim what follows. I won’t be quizzing you on this, but I think it’s interesting.
THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING - CRITICAL RECEPTION
The book entered The New York Times best-seller list at No. 2 for the week of November 28, 2021,[7] while its German translation entered Der Spiegel Bestseller list at No.1.[8] It was named a Sunday Times, Observer and BBC History Book of the Year.[9] The book was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Historian David Edgerton, who chaired the judges panel, praised the book, saying it "genuinely is a new history of humanity" and a "celebration of human freedom and possibility, based on a reexamination of prehistory, opening up the past to make new futures possible.” [10] Writing for The Hindu, G. Sampath noted that two strands run through the book: "the consolidation of a corpus of archaeological evidence, and a history of ideas." Inspired by "the rediscovery of an unknown past," he asks, "can humanity imagine a future that's more worthy of itself?"[11]
Gideon Lewis-Kraus said in The New Yorker that the book "aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past".[12] In The Atlantic, William Deresiewicz described the book as "brilliant" and "inspiring", stating that it "upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change."[13] The anthropologist Giulio Ongaro, stated in Jacobin and Tribune that "Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what [Galileo and Darwin] did to astronomy and biology respectively".[14][15] In Bookforum, Michael Robbins called the book both "maddening" and "wonderful."[16] Historian of science Emily Kern, writing in the Boston Review, called the book "erudite" and "funny", suggesting that "once you start thinking like Graeber and Wengrow, it's difficult to stop."[17] Kirkus Reviews described the book as "An ingenious new look at 'the broad sweep of human history' and many of its 'foundational” stories.'" and "A fascinating, intellectually challenging big book about big ideas."[18] Andrew Anthony in The Observer said the authors persuasively replace "the idea of humanity being forced along through evolutionary stages with a picture of prehistoric communities making their own conscious decisions of how to live".[19]
Historian David Priestland argued in The Guardian that Peter Kropotkin had more powerfully addressed the sorts of questions that a persuasive case for modern-day anarchism should address, but lauded the authors' historical "myth-busting" and called it "an exhilarating read".[20] Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argued in The New York Review of Books that there is a "discordance between what the book says and what its sources say," while also stating that the book, which is "chockablock with archaeological and ethnographic minutiae, is an oddly gripping read".[21] NYRB subsequently published an extended exchange between Wengrow and Appiah under the title "The Roots of Inequality" in which Wengrow expanded on the book's use of archaeological sources, while Appiah concluded that "Graeber and Wengrow's argument against historical determinism—against the alluring notion that what happened had to have happened—is itself immensely valuable."[22] Another philosopher, Helen De Cruz, wrote that the book offers "a valuable exercise in philosophical genealogy by digging up the origins of our political and social dysfunction," but also criticised the book for neglecting a range of other possible methodologies.[23]
Writing in the Chicago Review, historian Brad Bolman and archaeologist Hannah Moots suggest that what makes the book so important is "its attempt to make accessible a vast array of recent anthropological and archaeological evidence; to read it against the grain; and to synthesize those findings into a novel story about what exactly happened in our long past," drawing comparisons with the work of V. Gordon Childe.[24] Reviewing for American Antiquity archaeologist Jennifer Birch called the book 'a resounding success',[25] while archaeologist and anthropologist Rosemary Joyce, reviewing for American Anthropologist, wrote that the book succeeds in providing "provocative thinking about major questions of human history" and a "convincing demonstration of new frameworks of anthropological comparison".[26]
Archaeologist Mike Pitts, reviewing for British Archaeology described the book as "glorious" and suggested that its joint authorship by an anthropologist and an archaeologist "gives the book a depth and rigour rarely seen in the genre".[27] Reviewing for Scientific American, John Horgan described the book as "both a dense, 692-page scholarly inquiry into the origins of civilization and an exhilarating vision of human possibility"[28]
In Anthropology Today, Arjun Appadurai accused the book of "swerving to avoid a host of counter-examples and counter-arguments" while also describing the book's "fable" as "compelling".[29] David Wengrow responded in the same issue.[30] Anthropology Today later published a letter to the editor, in which political ecologist Jens Friis Lund writes "Appadurai never discloses where and how exactly Graeber and Wengrow go wrong," calling the book a "monumental empirical effort" and "exemplar of interdisciplinary engagement."[31] In a subsequent issue, Anthropology Today published a full review of the book by social anthropologist Luiz Costa, who suggested it contains "a range of examples of societies drawing on their own past experiences, or those of neighbouring peoples, to shape future ways of life - not in a voluntaristic sense, but within specific social patterns, considering historical events." Costa compared The Dawn of Everything to classic works by Claude Lévi-Strauss in terms of its scope and importance.[32] Another anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen called the book an "intellectual feast"[33]
The historian David A. Bell, responding solely to Graeber and Wengrow's arguments about the Indigenous origins of Enlightenment thought and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, accused the authors of coming "perilously close to scholarly malpractice."[34] Historian and philosopher Justin E. H. Smith suggested "Graeber and Wengrow are to be credited for helping to re-legitimise this necessary component of historical anthropology, which for better or worse is born out of the history of the missions and early modern global commerce."[35]
Anthropologist Durba Chattaraj claimed that the book includes "elisions, slippages, and too-exaggerated leaps" when referring to archaeology from India, but stated that its authors are "extremely rigorous and meticulous scholars", and that reading the book from India "expands our worlds and allows us to step outside of a particular postcolonial predicament."[36] Anthropologist Matthew Porges, writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books suggested the book is "provocative, if not necessarily comprehensive", and that its "great value is that it provides a much better point of departure for future explorations of what was actually happening in the past".[37] Anthropologist Richard Handler claimed that the book's endnotes "often reveal that a particularly startling interpretation of archaeological evidence depends on one or two sources taken from vast bodies of literature" while also claiming that the stories told "are stories we need and want to hear."[38]
Writing for the New York Journal of Books, another anthropologist, James H. McDonald, suggested that The Dawn of Everything "may well prove to be the most important book of the decade, for it explodes deeply held myths about the inevitability of our social lives dominated by the state".[39] Anthropologist James Suzman in the Literary Review claimed that the book doesn't "engage with the vast historical and academic literature on recent African ... small scale hunter-gatherers", but also maintained that the book is "consistently thought-provoking" in "forcing us to re-examine some of the cosy assumptions about our deep past".[40] Writing for Black Perspectives Kevin Suemnicht noted that the book develops ideas proposed by Orlando Patterson to account for the loss of human freedoms, and argued that the book confirms the "Fanonian positions within the Black Radical Tradition that this world-system is inherently anti-Black".[41] In Antiquity, archaeologist Rachael Kiddey suggested that the book arose from "playful conversations between two eminently qualified friends" and also that it contributes to "feminist revisions of the development of knowledge."[42]
In Cliodynamics various authors praised the book while also making criticisms. Gary M. Feinman accused Graeber and Wengrow of using "cherry-picked and selectively presented examples".[43] Another archaeologist Michael E. Smith criticized the book for "problems of evidence and argumentation".[44] Ian Morris claimed some of the book's arguments "run more on rhetoric than on method," but praised it as "a work of careful research and tremendous originality."[45] Historian Walter Scheidel criticized the book for its lack of "materialist perspectives", but also called it "timely and stimulating".[46]
The book's reception among the political left was polarizing. Several reviewers suggested that the book was written from an anarchist perspective.[47][48][49] Sébastien Doubinsky called the book "an important work, both as a summary of recent discoveries in the fields of archaeology and anthropology and as an eye-opener on the structures of dominant narratives".[50] In Cosmonaut Magazine, Nicolas Villarreal described the book as "a series of brilliant interventions" while criticising the authors for not appreciating that ideology and politics are "the source of our profound unfreedom."[51] CJ Sheu said the book is "simply put a masterpiece"[52] while Peter Isackson in Fair Observer described the book as "nothing less than a compelling invitation to reframe and radically rethink our shared understanding of humanity's history and prehistory."[53] Eliza Delay, writing for Resilience called the book "a revelation" and a "sweeping revision of how we see ourselves."[54] Socialist activist and anthropologist Chris Knight stated that the "core message" of the book was rejecting Engels' primitive communism, and called The Dawn of Everything "incoherent and wrong" for beginning "far too late" and "systematically side-stepping the cultural flowering that began in Africa tens of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe".[55] In a longer review, Knight did, however, emphasize that the book's "one important point" was "its advocacy of [political] oscillation".[56]
Reviewers in the Ecologist expressed the view that the authors "fail to engage with the enormous body of new scholarship on human evolution" while, at the same time, calling the book a "howling wind of fresh air".[57] Reviewing for The Rumpus Beau Lee Gambold calls the book "at once dense, funny, thorough, joyful, unabashedly intelligent, and infinitely readable."[58] Historian Ryne Clos claimed that the book partly relies on "a specious, exaggerated interpretation of the historical evidence" but that it is also "incredibly informative".[59] Historian Dominic Alexander, writing for socialist organization Counterfire questioned the evidence used in the book and characterized its rejection of "the teleological habit of thought" as a "profoundly debilitating approach" to political change.[60] Market anarchist Charles Johnson noted the book's "idiosyncratic readings of sources".[61] In The Nation, historian Daniel Immerwahr characterised the book as "less a biography of the species than a scrapbook, filled with accounts of different societies doing different things," while praising its refusal "to dismiss long-ago peoples as corks floating on the waves of prehistory. Instead, it treats them as reflective political thinkers from whom we might learn something".[48]
Writing for Artforum, Simon Wu called the book a "bracing rewrite of human history".[62] Bryan Appleyard in his review for The Sunday Times called it "pacey and potentially revolutionary."[63] Reviewing for Science, Erle Ellis described The Dawn of Everything as "a great book that will stimulate discussions, change minds, and drive new lines of research".[64]
When I read this, my interest was piqued by the mention of “scholarly malpractice”. I am completely mystified about how Graeber and Wengrow can get away with making all the absurd claims that they make in The Dawn of Everything, such 1) egalitarian societies don’t exist, 2) that private property is derived from immaterial sacred imaginary objects, and that 3) a handful of Ice Age “princely burials” prove that proto-states probably existed in Europe during the Paleolithic.
The book has a whole chapter entitled WHY THE STATE HAS NO ORIGIN, which argues that the concept of “the state” is meaningless. This is beyond ridiculous. It’s absurd! The state is one of the best-defined concepts in political theory, and no one to my knowledge has seriously challenged Max Weber’s definition of “the state” since 1920.
(By the way, did you know that Max Weber died suddenly before completing his magnum opus? Look it up!)
Remember, anarchism is the antithesis of statism. Anarchist theory depends entirely upon opposition to the state. By muddying the waters by confusing people about what the state is, they have done a disservice to radical theory.
Why would David Graeber do such a thing? Why would the world’s most famous anarchist scholar spend ten years working on an an anti-anarchist polemic? It makes no sense.
How can professional academics make such claims? They are contributing to the mental retardation of the human race. How is this allowed? Aren’t there professional standards in academia?
I’ve been at a loss to explain it, and I’ve been blown away that others aren’t similarly disturbed. Occam’s razor states that the simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one. Well, in this case, the simplest explanation is that David Graeber was poisoned by his wife and that The Dawn of Everything was a heavily-censored, limited-hangout version of the book that he and Wengrow spent years working on.
If anyone has a simpler explanation for all the mysteries clustered around this one book, I’m all ears.
When I saw that a historian named David A. Bell had said that The Dawn of Everything “comes perilously close to scholarly malpractice”, I was delighted.
“Thank God! Not everyone is asleep at the wheel,” I thought. “I knew that someone more qualified than me must have called shenanigans on this bullshit already!”
Then I read his review. And wow, was I ever in for a rude awakening! I didn’t actually know that this level of dismissive, racist arrogance was actually still possible for a professional historian. I thought that the culture war would have resulted in such people either losing their jobs or learning to keep their ignorant, arrogant, racist views to themselves.
You guys ready for this? It’s a doozy.
Although Graeber and Wengrow concern themselves primarily with humanity’s early history, they begin by examining how Western thinkers have previously treated the subject, and in doing so they first turn to the French Enlightenment. This happens to be my own area of expertise, and I was curious to see what they would make of it. Quite frankly, I was appalled. Unfortunately, despite its promise, the work suffers from a slipshod and error-filled approach to this key moment in modern intellectual history.
The irony. I can’t fucking handle these levels of irony. The historian is actually attacking the most revelatory, game-changing contribution that David Graeber and David Wengrow make towards their laudable goal of “Decolonizing the Enlightenment”.
First up, he completely misrepresents Graeber and Wengrow’s views on equality, which are very interesting, but which are too complex to summarize here. He then claims that the concept of equality is partly thanks to Judaism! You can’t make this shit up!
The history of equality, as a concept, is a long and complex one. In the Western world it has many roots: notably in ancient Greek philosophy, in the Roman tradition of civic republicanism, and of course in Judaism and Christianity.
Judaism promotes equality? Really? Since when? And you’re saying that the Romans had a concept of political equality? What drugs are you on? Adrenochrome and paint thinner?
I’m not an expert on this subject, but doesn’t Jewish Law treat the categories of “Jew” and “Gentile” differentially? I thought the reason that most interpretations of Jewish law have to come to allow usury despite it being forbidden in Deuteronomy is because Jews consider Gentiles to have a separate and distinct legal status. I have never once in my life heard anyone claim that Judaism has any concept of political equality, period. Maybe equality of Jewish men. Maybe. What kind of definition of equality is that, though? How can anyone make such a claim?
Is Dr. A Bell really claiming that notions of political equality can be traced back to the world’s most famous non-universalist religion? Does he care to explain how a religion in which some people are “God’s chosen people” has anything to do with equality?
Go ahead and accuse me of anti-semitism, by the way. I love the moment when it dawns on people that “You’re not allowed to say that!” arguments don’t work anymore.
Anyway, Dr. A. Bell continues:
It is not always easy to excavate what indigenous people actually said from the European texts that reported on them. Still, their voices were not by any means entirely erased or obscured. Missionary reports—especially the ones known as Jesuit Relations—were written in part to instruct future missionaries on what they could expect in their missions. They therefore generally made every effort to report accurately on indigenous customs, and on the arguments that indigenous people might make in response to attempts to convert them to Christianity.
Graeber and Wengrow devote many pages to this literature. Their survey, however, does little but repeat points that many scholars—Anthony Pagden, Tzvetan Todorov, Sankar Muthu, Michèle Duchet, David Allen Harvey and Antoine Lilti, to name just a few—have made before them. And while they are correct to say that this literature played a role in the genesis of Enlightenment thought, so did many other things: the scientific revolution, the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, the radical religious ideas of Benedict Spinoza, the rise of the periodical press, critiques of absolute monarchy. Enlightenment thinking, on human equality as on many other matters, had multiple, complex roots. To make a case that the “indigenous critique” mattered more than everything else requires looking at the Enlightenment in its full complexity and weighing its different elements against each other. This, Graeber and Wengrow fail to do.
The truly egregious part of their analysis, however, goes beyond simply the repetition of commonplaces and an exaggerated emphasis on one part of the story. Graeber and Wengrow don’t just attribute Enlightenment thought on equality to the “indigenous critique” in general, but to one “indigenous intellectual” in particular.
Note that Dr. A Bell uses the term “indigenous intellectual” in quotations. Is he suggesting that the person didn’t qualify as an intellectual?
Isn’t that, like, super-fucking-racist?
I know that we’re all sick of woke zealots losing their shit over micro-aggressions, but let’s be real - America is a racist country founded on white supremacy, slavery and indigenous genocide. I know that that probably makes me sound like the type of person that a lot of you might hate, but fuck it. It’s true.
You know what buck-breaking was on slave plantations? Look it up. Then tell me that the history of racism has been exaggerated by woke snowflakes.
When Immortal Technique rapped that “slave labour was the capital for capitalism”, he hit the nail on the head. The wealth that allowed Americans to become one of the richest nations in history was the “surplus value” extracted from the labour of slaves. Slavery is what made America so prosperous.
I think that it would hard to overestimate the racial dimension of this oppression in America, where the white working class was strategically granted privileges over blacks in order to forestall the possibility of class solidarity across racial lines.
In any case, my point is that racism remains important, unfortunately. That means that, unfortunately, we’re going to have to continue talking about the historic importance of racism. Nor should we gloss over this history.
But I digress. Where was I?
Oh guy, I’m in the process of explaining why this twit is such a despicable embodiment of all that is ungodly.
If you’re not convinced yet, you will be. Wait for it. This professor is a paragon of pompous intellectual superiority. I know this is a long set-up, but it’s worth it.
The figure in question was named Kandiaronk, a leading figure in the Native American nation known variously as the Huron, Wendat and Wyandot. After the destruction of their homeland by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in the seventeenth century, many of them ended up in French Canada. Kandiaronk impressed many French observers with his eloquence and brilliance, frequently met with the royal governor, Count Louis de Buade de Frontenac, and may himself have traveled to France.
In the 1680s, he also almost certainly met a young French soldier with the elaborately aristocratic name of Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron Lahontan, who traveled extensively in North America and learned Native American languages. Lahontan returned to Europe in the early 1690s, and ten years later published a series of works about North America, including one known under the title Dialogues with a Savage. It purported to be an accurate recreation of debates between himself and a Huron he called “Adario,” in which the Huron brilliantly refutes Lahontan’s arguments about the truth and superiority of Christianity, and more generally criticizes European customs. This character was probably based at least in part on Kandiaronk.
So, in other words, this Princeton history professor acknowledges that Kandiaronk was a historical figure. Yet he seems genuinely pissed off that Graeber and Wengrow have forced him to learn something.
Lahontan’s Dialogues fit into a long European tradition of what Anthony Pagden calls the “savage critic.” It extends back at least as far as an anticlerical Spanish work of 1519 that featured a Native American chieftain who exposed the delusions of European Christian society. Although often informed by encounters with indigenous people, and with works like the Jesuit Relations, these works were still fundamentally fictional. Critics have almost always assumed the same thing about Lahontan’s Dialogues.
Oh, that’s interesting. “Critics have almost always assumed the same thing about Lahontan’s Dialogues,” have they? Are you including yourself there? Are you admitting that you used to believe that Adario was a purely fictional character?
Guess what? If you thought that, you were wrong. Graeber and Wengrow have rescued an important figure from obscurity, and if you’re trying to sweep the truth under the rug, Dr. Dumbell, you’re too late.
For Christ’s sake, do you know what Wikipedia is?
Kondiaronk (c. 1649–1701) (Gaspar Soiaga, Souojas, Sastaretsi), known as Le Rat (The Rat), was Chief of the Native American Wendat people at Michilimackinac in New France. As a result of an Iroquois attack and dispersal of the Hurons in 1649, the latter settled in Michilimackinac.[1] The Michilimackinac area is the strait between Lakes Huron and Michigan (or, the area between Michigan's Upper and Lower Peninsulas) in the present-day United States.[2]
Noted as a brilliant orator and a formidable strategist, Kondiaronk led the pro-French Petun and Huron of Michilimackinac against their traditional Iroquois enemies. Kondiaronk realized the only way to establish security was to maintain a war between their enemies, the Iroquois, and the French in an attempt to keep the Iroquois occupied and the Hurons safe from annihilation. Kondiaronk succeeded in killing the peace; however, once he had secured the preservation of his people he favored a vast peace settlement.[3] This effort concluded in what is known as The Great Peace of Montreal (1701) between France, the Iroquois, and the other Indian tribes of the Upper Great Lakes. This ended the Beaver Wars and helped open up the interior of North America to deeper French exploration and commerce. Kondiaronk made them see the advantages such a peace would bring them.
The Jesuit historian Father Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix wrote that "it was the general opinion that no Indian had ever possessed greater merit, a finer mind, more valor, prudence or discernment in understanding those with whom he had to deal".[3] Louis-Hector de Callière, the Onontio (governor) that replaced Frontenac, was "exclusively indebted to him for ... this assemblage, till then unexampled of so many nations for a general peace".[3] Kondiaronk contracted a fever and died in Montreal during the negotiations for the Great Peace on August 2, 1701.[1] His body was buried at Montreal's Notre-Dame Church after a majestic funeral. Today, no trace of the grave remains. The Kondiaronk Belvedere in Montreal's Mount Royal Park is named in his honor. In 2001, he was named a Person of National Historic Significance by the Canadian government.
If I were you, Dr. Dumbbell, I’d be fucking embarrassed. Are you really claiming that Kandiaronk didn’t exist? Or are you just mad that Graeber and Wengrow forced you to learn something? What gives? Do you hate learning or something?
Look, here’s Kandironk’s signature, which he signed to the Great Peace of Montreal, which is a major historical document:
Is this not historical for you, Dr. Dumbbell? Why? Was the Great Peace of Montreal some kind of crazy conspiracy theory?
He continues:
The work owes an obvious stylistic debt to the ancient Greek satirist Lucian. Adario’s exposition of Huron religion sounds suspiciously like contemporary European deism.
Deep breath. Oh man. Okay, we’ll get to Lucian in a minute, but this “contemporary European Deism” really grinds my gears. European Deism was obviously influenced by the spiritual traditions of Turtle Island, though it was also influenced by anabaptism, Sufism, Romanticism, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit.
Voltaire was a Deist, and we know that he was influenced by Lahontan. For Christ’s sake, he wrote a short story about a half-Huron, half-French philosopher called L’Ingenu (sometimes rendered as Ingenuous in English), and in that work, the indigenous protagonist learns to read and gives his takes on various European philosophers.
Remember, Kandiaronk was fluent in French and was noted for his brilliance. Is it not possible that he could have read Lucian? Alternatively, perhaps his friend Lahontan might have. It’s also possible that Lahontan took some liberties in writing his book. But none of this means that Kandiaronk wasn’t real, or that he didn’t have a significant influence on the Enlightenment.
Also, there are similarities between many different spiritual philosophies, because all spiritual philosophies are all expression of the same human search for some kind of higher truth.
There are similarities between Mayan and Norse cosmologies, for instance. This isn’t necessarily an example of diffusionism - it is entirely possible that two entire separate intellectual traditions from two totally different cultures could come to similar conclusions. If there is a such a thing as spiritual truth, it is equally accessible to all people. The Vedic concept of maya and the Toltec concept of mitote are so close that we can reasonably deduce that they are two cultural expressions of the same thing. And similar shamanic motifs surface in different cultures not known to have any contact with one another.
People like Dr. A. Bell seem either to believe that such no such thing as spiritual truth could possibly exist, or that non-Europeans lacked the intellectual sophistication to be able to divine it. Perhaps the latter theory explains why he feels the need to use the term “indigenous intellectual” in quotations.
God, what a fucking prick. I’m all about peace and love, but I kinda actually hate this guy. Remember, Ivy League schools teach ruling class kids the prejudices of the ruling class. And make no mistake - Dr. Dumbbell is defending white supremacy, pure and simple.
He then goes on to deny that the gender relations in indigenous societies influenced early feminists, instead giving a French man credit for feminist critiques of patriarchy.
His critique of European marriage customs echoes many European works of the period, including those of the proto-feminist philosopher François Poulain de la Barre. In short, the Dialogues are a classic early Enlightenment work that blend observations of non-European societies with arguments drawn from European intellectual traditions to produce new and radical thought about society, politics and religion, all given extra spice by the figure of the wise “savage” who deliciously exposes one European custom after another as harmful and absurd.
Next, he downplays the importance of Dialogues with a Savage, saying:
It was also just one of many works that used similar devices, including Montesquieu’s vastly more popular Persian Letters of 1721, and Françoise de Graffigny’s Letters of a Peruvian Woman of 1747. Lahontan certainly influenced Rousseau, but so did many others.
Graeber and Wengrow, however, insist that Lahontan’s Dialogues had greater influence than any of these other books.
Graeber and Wengrow do most certainly argue what Dr. A. Bell claims - that Dialogues with a Savage was more influential and important than other works he mentions. The reason they claim this is because they credit Lahontan’s book with inventing the literary genre to which Persian Letters and Letters of a Peruvian Woman belonged.
Dialogues with a Savage was first published in 1703, along with two other books by Baron Lahontan, making Graeber and Wengrow’s chronology plausible. The Dawn of Everything goes into exquisite detail into how popular and influential Lahontan’s book was.
[I]f one examines many of the original sources, Enlightenment thinkers were often quite explicit that the sources of their ideas lay outside what we now call “the Western tradition” entirely. To take one example, which will be developed in another book, in the 1690s, just around the time the pirates were establishing themselves in Madagascar, there was something of a proto-Enlightenment salon being held in Montreal in the home of the Comte de Frontenac, then governor of Canada, in which he and his assistant, Lahontan, debated questions of social importance—Christianity, economics, sexual mores, etc.—with a Huron statesman named Kandiaronk, who took the position of an egalitarian and skeptical rationalist and held that the punitive apparatus of European law and religion was made necessary only by an economic system arranged in such a way that it would inevitably produce precisely the behaviors that apparatus was designed to repress. Lahontan was later to release his own redaction of his notes from some of these debates as a book, in 1704, and that book rapidly became a bestseller across Europe. Almost every major Enlightenment figure ended up writing an imitation of it.
It is shockingly brazen of Dr. A. Bell to accuse Graeber and Wengrow of scholarly malpractice whilst blatantly misrepresenting their work. Is this typical of academia in 2024? It’s scandalous!
Part of what make Dr. A. Bell’s review so infuriating is that many of the issues that he raises are addressed by authors of The Dawn of Everything in the relevant chapter.
It is common knowledge, I think, that book reviewers don’t always read the books they review cover to cover. But in this case, Dr. A. Bell could not have possibly missed the relevant passages. It’s all in the book’s second chapter, entitled Wicked Liberty.
Here’s a relevant passage:
All these would be rather trivial concerns had Lahontan’s books not been so successful; but they were to have an enormous impact on European sensibilities. Kandiaronk’s opinions were translated into German, English, Dutch and Italian, and continued in print, in multiple editions, for over a century. Any self-respecting intellectual of the eighteenth century would have been almost certain to have read them. They also inspired a flood of imitations.
By 1721, Parisian theatregoers were flocking to Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’. The play was revived almost yearly for the next two decades.
Even more strikingly, just about every major French Enlightenment figure tried their hand at a Lahontan-style critique of their own society, from the perspective of some imagined outsider. Montesquieu chose a Persian; the Marquis d’Argens a Chinese; Diderot a Tahitian; Chateaubriand a Natchez; Voltaire’s L’Ingénu was half Wendat and half French. All took up and developed themes and arguments borrowed directly from Kandiaronk, supplemented by lines from other ‘savage critics’ in travellers’ accounts.
Perhaps the single most popular work of this genre, published in 1747, was Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess.
Keep in mind that Dr. A. Bell wrote a review of The Dawn of Everything, so we should assume that he read it. Yet many of the questions that he raises are addressed in the text itself. The book includes lengthy passages about Montesquieu and Madame de Graffigny, for instance. Graeber and Wengrow seem to anticipated arguments that would be made by Ivy League pricks, and pre-empted them by presenting counter-arguments ahead of time. Dr. Dumbo solves this little problem by simply ignoring them.
For example, he says:
And more importantly, they also insist that the work was not fictional, but a recreation of actual dialogues between Lahontan and Kandiaronk. Far from being a fictional character devised by a European to criticize his own society, “Adario” was a real indigenous intellectual whose powerful words amazed Europeans with the force of truth, and forced a fundamental reevaluation of European notions of equality. It is a striking claim.
Let’s recap - Dr. A. Bell is accusing Graeber and Wengrow of scholarly malpractice for claiming that the fictional character Adario is based on a real historical figure, the Huron-Wendat chief Kandiaronk, who spoke fluent French and traveled to France, where he debated leading intellectuals of the day.
Graeber and Wengrow address the disbelief of academics in Wicked Liberty, writing:
In a way, this conclusion is unsurprising. Adario claims not only to have visited France, but expresses opinions on everything from monastic politics to legal affairs. In the debate on religion, he often sounds like an advocate of the deist position that spiritual truth should be sought in reason, not revelation, embracing just the sort of rational scepticism that was becoming popular in Europe’s more daring intellectual circles at the time.
It is also true that the style of Lahontan’s dialogues seems partly inspired by the ancient Greek writings of the satirist Lucian; and also that, given the prevalence of Church censorship in France at the time, the easiest way for a freethinker to get away with publishing an open attack on Christianity probably would have been to compose a dialogue pretending to defend the faith from the attacks of an imaginary foreign sceptic – and then make sure one loses all the arguments.
Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously. It’s all just supposed to be some kind of misunderstanding, fabrication, or at best a naive projection of pre-existing European ideas. American intellectuals, when they appear in European accounts, are assumed to be mere representatives of some Western archetype of the ‘noble savage’ or sock-puppets, used as plausible alibis to an author who might otherwise get into trouble for presenting subversive ideas (deism, for example, or rational materialism, or unconventional views on marriage).
Certainly, if one encounters an argument ascribed to a ‘savage’ in a European text that even remotely resembles anything to be found in Cicero or Erasmus, one is automatically supposed to assume that no ‘savage’ could possibly have really said it – or even that the conversation in question never really took place at all.
But here’s where Dr. Dumbo’s pompous pontificating gets really hideous:
The most important source Graeber and Wengrow draw on is a book entitled Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands, by Barbara Alice Mann, a scholar of Seneca descent. Graeber and Wengrow not only quote her at length, but paraphrase her arguments very closely. Mann argued that the “flat dismissal” of the Dialogues as an authentic transcript of a Native American voice reflected racism and a “western sneer.” She argues that in fact a “beguiled Lahontan” took elaborate notes as he conversed with Kandiaronk, and then later put them together into the Dialogues.
But what is Mann’s principal evidence? In her book, she triumphantly quotes Lahontan himself: “When I was in the village of this [Native] American, I took on the agreeable task of carefully noting all his arguments. No sooner had I returned from my trip to the Canadian lakes than I showed my manuscript to Count Frontenac, who was so pleased to read it that he made the effort to help me put these Dialogues into their present state.” The case seems irrefutable, except for one important point: These words come from the preface to the Dialogues themselves. And as anyone familiar with European fiction knows, there was no conceit more common for European authors of this period than presenting a fictional work as a first-hand account of real events.
Um, what? Anyone familiar with European fiction knows that “there was no conceit more common for European authors of this period than presenting a fictional work as a first-hand account of real events.” That’s news to me! Maybe I’m delusional in thinking that my love of literature means that I’m familiar with European fiction!
This is so blatantly absurd that I really think it should end Dr. Dumbo’s career. How can he claim that “there was no conceit more common for European authors of this period than presenting a fictional work as a first-hand account of real events.” That’s literally a description of lying! Does Dr. Dumbo know the difference between storytelling and lying?
It gets worse:
The author of these Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my ancient and intimate friend…” This is how Jonathan Swift began his most famous work of fiction, but few of his readers believed that a real Lemuel Gulliver had actually visited a land called Lilliput. Nor did they believe that the best-selling novels Pamela and Clarissa were real collections of letters. If serious scholars have failed to give Mann’s work much credit, it is not because of racism or a “western sneer,” but because her arguments on this score simply do not hold water.
Wow! You are fucking busted, buddy! That is not a real argument, at all! Anyone who has read Gulliver’s Travels, or who even knows an outline of the plot, knows that it could not have possibly be misinterpreted as a true story.
For Christ’s sake, at one point Gulliver falls asleep in the land of Liliput and wakes up tethered down by a throng of tiny people.
Is everyone asleep at the fucking wheel? Am I the only person who fucking thinks anymore?
For fuck’s sake, look at this book cover! Do you think, based on this book cover, that the author is about to tell a true story?
Good lord, this is infuriating.
As for the novels Pamela and Clarissa, I haven’t heard of them. They might be great books, but if they were an important part of the literary canon, I would have heard of them. I don’t like to admit that I wasted some of my parent’s money on university courses, but I did, and some of them were literature. I’m not going to brag about how well-read I am, but I definitely know a thing about European fiction, and I can assure that Dr. Dumbo is straight-up lying. Apparently, no one reads anymore, because I have no idea how he thought that he could get away with such an outrageous lie.
Dr. A. Bell appears to assume that his readers are ignorant of literature, granting himself license to pretend that with a couple of non-sensical literary references that he can slip an argument from authority past the reader. Apparently he thinks his expertise on history extends to literature.
Fuck, I hate this guy. He’s everything that I hate about experts in one vile package.
It gets worse, though. This is really the reason I’m talking the time to write this. This is some of the most epic scholarly disrespect I have ever seen in my life:
The error that Mann makes—and that Graeber and Wengrow uncritically repeat—is in some ways an understandable one. It can be very tempting to mistake Western critiques of the West, placed in “indigenous” mouths, for authentically indigenous ones.
The language is familiar, and the authors know exactly which chords will resonate with their audience. Genuinely indigenous critiques, coming out of traditions with which people raised in Western environments are unfamiliar, can seem much more strange and difficult.
The reductio ad absurdum of this mistake comes when people take as authentically Native American the words of Pocahontas, in the Disney film of the name: “You think you own whatever land you land on / The Earth is just a dead thing you can claim…”
Wow! The gall of this guy. A Princeton professor is lecturing an indigenous Seneca about how to recognize “authentically indigenous” critiques. Can you believe it?
Here’s that picture of Dr. Dumbo again, just in case you forgot what he looks like.
Yep. This Princeton professor argues against original, paradigm-shattering scholarship by an indigenous academic by telling her that a “genuinely indigenous critique” would be more “strange and difficult”, before quoting the Disney version of Pocahontas.
What a devastating argument! The wit! The erudition! He’s from Princeton!
And this is the guy accusing other people of scholarly malpractice. Apparently this is what passes for intellectual debate amongst professional Ivy League historians these days.
You know your civilization is past its best-before date when…
I honestly can’t get over it. Is this guy actually lecturing a Seneca scholar on mistaking “Western critiques of the West” for “authentically indigenous ones”. Is he saying that Barbara Alice Mann isn’t “authentically indigenous”? And why does he use the word “indigenous” in quotations? Is he suggesting that Barbara Alice Mann isn’t really indigenous? Why would he imply such a thing?
The irony is that Mann’s book is all about restoring indigenous voices to their rightful place in history by making primary sources more accessible to researchers.
“THE ERROR THAT MANN MAKES IS IN SOME WAYS AN UNDERSTANDABLE ONE”
This sentence in particular makes my blood boil:
“The error that Mann makes… is in some an understandable one.”
What error did she make? Apparently, in her book Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands, which is (you guessed it) about the true perspectives of indigenous Turtle Islanders, Barbara Alice Mann, who is an indigenous Seneca scholar from the Eastern Woodlands, misrepresents her own people’s history.
How does Dr. A. Bell know this? Has he read Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands? Who knows? He doesn’t say, and it doesn’t seem likely that he would waste his time reading the work of an indigenous scholar. After all, everyone knows that “indigenous intellectual” is a contradiction in terms.
No, the evidence that he cites in response to Barbara Alice Mann’s scholarship is… Pocahontas. And not the real Pocahontas, who was a real person, but the Disney “Indian Princess” version.
You can’t make this up. The same pompous prick of a historian who claims that Graeber and Wengrow are “infantilizing non-Westerners”.
Will someone please do me a favour and rearrange the facial features of this insufferable prick? I feel I’d enjoy looking at his ugly face more if his nose was in a different location.
Plus, he’s got too many teeth. Can someone please fix his face please?
The irony is that the Disney-fied message of Pocahontas does actually express one of the key differences between European feudalism and the widespread anarchism of the Eastern Woodlands of Turtle Island. There is nothing ridiculous about the words of Pocahontas. I am sure that I could go select quotes from Mann’s work that would express the sacred, beautiful understanding that indigenous Turtle Islanders had about their place within the “Circle Way of Being”, to borrow a Cree phrase.
It’s worth noting that there is a phenomenon of indigenous scholars being accused of ethnic fraud, including Ward Churchill, Andrea Smith, and Robert Lovelace. The CBC also loves to accuse artists of not being indigenous or of not being indigenous enough, as in the cases of Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joseph Boyden. I won’t attempt to defend all these people here, other to say that in each case, they had solid politics and appear to have been cancelled because of their political beliefs, not their ancestry. I’m not a fucking genealogist, and I see no reason why I should judge scholars or artists based on their blood quantum. I would rather judge them by the quality of their work.
Anyway, this is how Dr. A. Bell wraps up his pretentious ode to the righteous supremacy of received historical opinion.
The error is also—of course—deeply political. It fits what Graeber and Wengrow describe in their conclusion as a principal aim of the book: to “[expose] the mythical substructure of our ‘social science,’” and to reveal, contrary to what social scientists insist, that humans still have “the freedom to shape entirely new social realities.” Many Native Americans in the time of Kandiaronk still possessed this freedom, they claim. European societies, meanwhile, were incapable of real self-criticism. It took the wise Huron to open Western eyes to the possibility of a genuinely revolutionary politics. Graeber and Wengrow themselves now want to play a similar role.
Unfortunately, if their treatment of the Enlightenment is any indication, in pursuing this goal they are willing to engage in what comes perilously close to scholarly malpractice.
I don’t have the expertise to comment on Graeber and Wengrow’s arguments about matters other than the French Enlightenment, but the quality of their scholarship on this subject does not bode well for the remainder of the book, to say the least.
THE MYTH OF THE MYTH OF THE NOBLE SAVAGE
What Dr. A. Bell is doing is reviving the tawdry, shop-worn trope of “the Noble Savage Myth”.
This tactic has long been used to denigrate critics of Western Civilization.
It works like this: the type of scholars who consider themselves the standard-bearers for the Officially Correct Narrative of History, which all “real historians” have apparently taken some oath to defend, accuse anyone who dares compare indigenous societies to Western Civilization favourably of naivete, idealism, Romanticism, and “infantilizing non-Westerners”.
This oath apparently precludes updating the Officially Correct Narrative of History when convincing new information comes to light.
Personally, I have never understood why “serious scholars” see Romanticism as some kind of offence. Apparently curiosity and excitement about the subject one is studying are signs of stupidity. Who knew?
Graeber and Wengrow explain:
[R]ight-wing thought has always been wary not only of ideas of progress, but also of the entire tradition which sprung forth in response to the indigenous critique. We tend to assume that it is mainly left-wing politicians who talk about the 'Myth of the Noble Savage' and that any ancient European narrative that idealizes distant people, or even attributes convincing opinions to them, is in reality nothing more than a romantic projection of European fantasies onto people the authors could never truly understand. The racist denigration of the savage and the naïve celebration of savage innocence are two sides of the same imperialist coin. Originally, however, this was an explicitly right-wing position.
Ter Ellingson, the anthropologist who has done the most comprehensive review of the literature, concluded that there never was a 'Myth of the Noble Savage' - in the sense of a stereotype of simple societies living in an era of happy primordial innocence - at all. The accounts of real travelers tend to provide us with a much more ambivalent picture, describing foreign societies as a complex, sometimes incomprehensible mixture of virtues and vices.
Instead, what needs to be examined might better be called the Myth of the Noble Savage Myth. Why did some Europeans begin to accuse other Europeans of having such a naive and romantic view, to the point where anyone who suggests that an aspect of indigenous life has something to teach us is immediately accused of romanticism. The answer is not pretty. The phrase 'noble savage' was actually popularized as a term of ridicule and abuse used by a clique of die-hard racists who took control of the British Ethnological Society in 1859, and called for the total extermination of inferior peoples.
The original proponents of the idea blamed Rousseau for the Myth of the Noble Savage, but soon afterward, students of literary history were scouring the archives for traces of this noble savage everywhere. Almost all of the texts discussed during this chapter have come under scrutiny and been dismissed as dangerous, romantic fantasies. But at first, these rejections came almost entirely from the political right.
Ellingson gives the example of Gilbert Chinard, whose 1913 volume America and the Exotic Dream in French literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries was primarily responsible for establishing the Myth of the Noble Savage as a Western literary trope in American academia, with Chinard perhaps the least coy about his political agenda. He too recognized Lahontan as the key figure and explained in detail that Rousseau had borrowed specific arguments from him.
So there you have, folks - the Noble Savage Myth is a propaganda trope invented to make critics of Western colonialism seem naive, Romantic, and overly idealistic.
The implication is that it is somewhat silly to believe that human beings could live in harmony with nature, and that it is downright stupid to believe that the indigenous Turtle Islanders of the Eastern Woodlands were culturally superior to Europeans at the time of contact.
But here I’ve got to side with John Zerzan - the “Noble Savage Myth” describes a historical reality. Indigenous Turtle Islanders did have moral codes of their own, and if this is what the “Noble” part of the “Noble Savage” term that Dr. Dumbo finds objectionable, what he presumably objects to is that non-Westerners had their kind of moral philosophy which was more sophisticated than that which existed in Europe at that time, where the Inquisition was still in full swing.
Anarcho-primitivism has been accused of continuing the Noble Savage Myth, and I plead guily. Because there was a Noble Savage.
And it's very hip to scoff at that, to jeer at that... but that doesn't mean that we think there was some perfect Eden or something.
But compared to the nightmare now especially, and given what we learn from the standard literature... we know how workable it was. Noble or not noble… savage life was much superior. It simply was.
Amen to that. I have my critique of Zerzan, but when he’s right, he’s right.
Allow me to restate Zerzan’s insight in my own words:
TO THOSE WHO WOULD ACCUSE ME OF ENGAGING IN “NOBLE SAVAGE MYTHS”, I PLEAD GUILTY AS CHARGED.
I think the term “noble savage” is widely misunderstood. First off, it needn’t necessarily denote moral superiority. The term “noble” originally referred to social status and vocation. European nobles spent their time engaged in activities considered fit for nobles, such as hunting, war, feasting, politics, philosophy, debate, games, and contests of different sorts. When the French encountered the Huron, they found that most or all adults engaged in activities that back in France were reserved for the rich.
Hence, many French commoners envied the Huron, who also enjoyed a much greater degree of sexual freedom than they were used to.
So that’s the first thing to understand about the term “noble savage”. It shouldn’t be taken to mean that indigenous Turtle Islanders all possessed some kind of inborn moral superiority or something. I assure you that Mohawk and Cree and Wet’suwet’en people are just as human as the rest of us. If we were to ascribe to them some kind of unique superhuman spiritual qualities to them, I guess that would be somewhat racist, because people are people. But it’s the “Asians are good at math” type of racism. It’s not the type of racism that actually offends people.
I fail to see how naive Romantic utopian views of indigenous societies are actually harmful. If people have naive views and attempt to act on them, they’ll be treated to a reality check soon enough. Some people want you to think that Avatar is racist because it involves white people telling an anti-colonial story. The implication is that it’s racist for white people to identify with the oppressed, which ignores the fact that lower class Europeans have been oppressed for centuries. Ever heard of the Irish Potato Famine? How about the Battle of Blair Mountain?
Oh yeah, and here’s an unpopular opinion - the French were oppressed in Canada after the English defeated New France.
Don’t believe me? Look into the deportation of the Acadians.
I fail to see how “Noble Savage” tropes are seen as in any way equivalent to the genocidal racism of the colonial project.
I see the mainstream media’s promotion of Hobbesian narratives as much more problematic, but apparently it’s not racist to be racist against the human race.
Anyway, according to Graeber and Wengrow, a bigger problem than the Myth of the Noble Savage is the “Myth of the Stupid Savage”.
Maybe I’ll summarize this idea in more detail at some point, but for now I’ll refer to this video, in which they explain their logic.
For those of you who are curious about David Graeber and David Wengrow’s relationship, this video is instructive. With all due respect to David Wengrow, who I am a big fan of, he is clearly the junior partner in the partnership. I do believe that he is a genuinely great scholar, but I don’t think that he is nearly as bold or swashbuckling as Graeber was.
This video, which was posted in December of 2019, also shows David Graeber in what appears to be a state of poor mental health. Maybe he was just having a bad day, but he does seem deeply unhappy.
I never met David Graeber, but he strikes me as a very charismatic, enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky kind of guy. He married Nika Dubrovsky in 2019. Just saying.
Anyway, I could go on and on. I’m pretty sure that Dr. Dumbbell didn’t even read The Dawn of Everything, because he doesn’t mention the very interesting possibility that Montesquieu might have been personally met a delegation of Osage elders who visited Paris at a time where Montesquieu would was known to have been in Paris. It seems likely that he would have attended. Keep in mind that there were less people back then, meaning that top-tier Parisian intellectuals probably would have known when a delegation of philosophers from a distant were visiting.
Imagine that you were Montesquieu and you knew that such an event was scheduled. Would you miss it? I wouldn’t!
Graeber and Wengrow address this in Chapter 11 of The Dawn of Everything, which is entitled Full Circle. Nothing in Dr. Dumbo’s critique leads me to believe that he read this chapter.
[W]e are used to imagining that the very notion of a people self-consciously creating their own institutional arrangements is largely a product of the Enlightenment. Obviously, the idea that nations could be effectively created by great lawmakers such as Solon of Athens, Lycurgus in Sparta or Zoroaster in Persia, and that their national character was in some sense a product of that institutional structure, was a familiar one in antiquity. But we are generally taught to think of the French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu as the first to build an explicit and systematic body of theory based on the principle of institutional reform with his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
By doing so, it’s widely believed, he effectively created modern politics. The Founding Fathers of the United States, all avid readers of Montesquieu, were consciously trying to put his theories into practice when they attempted to create a constitution that “would preserve the spirit of individual liberty, and spoke of the results as a ‘government of laws and not of men’.
As it turns out, precisely this sort of thinking was commonplace in North America well before European settlers appeared on the scene. It might not be a coincidence, in fact, that in 1725 a French explorer named Bourgmont brought an Osage and Missouria delegation across the Atlantic to Paris, around the time Lahontan’s works were at the height of their popularity. It was traditional at the time to organize a series of public events around such ‘savage’ diplomats and arrange private meetings with prominent European intellectuals. We don’t know whom specifically they met with, but Montesquieu was indeed in Paris at the time, and already working on such subjects. As one historian of the Osage notes, it is hard to imagine Montesquieu would not have attended.
At any rate, the chapters in The Spirit of the Laws which speculate on the modes of savage government seem an almost exact reproduction of what Montesquieu would likely have heard from them, albeit framed by an artificial distinction between those who do or don’t cultivate the land.
The connections may well run deeper than we think.
Deadly. I love it!
Too bad both Dr. Dubo and Darren Allen seem to have missed this part of The Dawn of Everything. To be fair, it is towards the end of the book, and it is a very long book. I’m aware that that not all book reviewers actually read the books they’re reviewing from cover to cover. Many people should be a little more circumspect before throwing accusations around, though. Just saying.
So go ahead, Dr. Dumbo. Make a fool of yourself by making the historicity of Kandiaronk your hill to die on. But if you think that the indigenous critique began or ended with Kandiaronk, you’re an idiot. He was merely a particularly eloquent voice who we have decided to mythologize as a type of anarchist Socrates. We are fully aware that the indigenous critique reached European ears in a multiplicity of ways.
If you’re interested in nuance, I refer you to the following article, in which I specifically argue for mythologizing Kandiaronk as an embodiment of the indigenous critique. Personally, I believe that The Jesuit Relations was probably more just as influential on the Enlightenment as Dialogues with a Savage.
So it turns out that the conspiracy theorists who blame the Jesuits for the French Revolution are actually kind of right, although I definitely don’t think the Jesuits intentionally overthrew the French monarchy!
Listen, Kandiaronk was one man, and anarchists have never been big on the Great Man Theory of History. He was a hero, and helped inspired the French Revolution, but the real inspiration for the French Revolution was the everyday lived experience of oppression that French commoners had been subjected to centuries. But the new ideas brought by the indigenous critique definitely did play an important part, and I believe that it makes good political sense to lionize Kandiaronk. Due to the way that historians favour written sources, there aren’t enough indigenous intellectuals in the historical record. Graeber and Wengrow have given the world a new mythical hero. Why wouldn’t we graciously accept?
What cannot seriously be disputed now is that the indigenous critique led directly to the French and American Revolutions.
If you have a problem with that, I suggest you suck my fucking dick. Or debate me. Or fight me, if you’ve got the balls.
I spit on your Princeton CV. You’re a fucking disgrace as a historian. You deserve to go down in history as the poster boy for Ivy League racism.
I hate you. Please die.
for the Wild,
Crow Qu’appelle
P.S. If the above words seem harsh, I’ll note that I gave Dr. Dumbo advance notice that he was under investigation for scholarly malpractice. He didn’t respond. Apparently an anarchist conspiracy theorist such as yours truly isn’t important enough to be worth responding to.
P.P.S. I’m totally going to write John Steckley and tell him how you’re misrepresenting his work. In the words of Charles Bronson:
I wonder if Michael Hastings was killed by his wife...🤔
The best-sellers Pamela and Clarissa were by Samuel Richardson, from the 1740s.
I think there are some (modern) housing estates in Dalston named after them.
Also:
At least people have heard of some French explorers in N America..
The Spanish explorers were pretty much forgotten.