[really, _really_, off-topic] At 2025-02-16T19:53:41+0100, onf wrote: > The problem with Graeber in general is that he is guided more by > ideology than a honest search for truth.
Everyone who writes on matters "political" (as assessed by the entire population, since a single voice suffices to brand one with this mark) must negotiate an internal struggle between these aims. The salient point here is your use of the word "more"; how did you measure this? Is your measurement independently reproducible? If not, then I suggest you're better off simply saying that Graeber was too overtly polemical for your taste. Personally, I don't mind polemical writing (I dote on Christopher Hitchens's work even where I disagree with its substance); I prefer an overt admission of authorial biases to pretensions that one is, or can be, perfectly objective. (This preference is useful but not perfect; it's conceivable that an author could write a _deceptively_ polemical work, wherein they champion or derogate value systems that are the opposite of, or bear no clear relationship to, their own subscriptions. But this practice seems rare. Anyone with the time and skill for this sort of literary play-acting might be better occupied as a highbrow novelist. The potential pecuniary upside is higher, besides.) But I acknowledge that not everyone is as entertained by splenetic fulmination (if well-crafted) or Wildean/Churchillian insult as I am. > And I'm not saying that from a place of necessarily disagreeing with > his ideology. It's just that I believe that truth is important and > bending it to serve one's opinions tends to go wrong. I think you'll find that to be a commonly held value. Electing to read _any_ particular writer doesn't imply that one has abandoned it. > In particular, I read portions of his book The Dawn of Everything. He > sets it off by expressing a desire to transcend the limitations of > seeing the story of our origin as either Russeau or Hobbes (that is, > either romanticizing the past, or seeing it as utterly terrible, > respectively). That seems an entirely reasonable mission. He's probably not the first to attempt a Hegelian synthesis of Rousseau and Hobbes, though. > In one part he then ends up describing the Inuit custom of men > swapping wives as being sexually empowering for the women. (If I > recall correctly, that is. It's been a while since I read the book. > On the other hand, there were also other mistakes which I do not > recall the details of.) Sounds like a lot depends on how much agency the Inuit women had in their reassignment. > Believe it or not, this has already been debunked by none other than > Theodore Kaczynski himself before the book was even written, in an > essay titled "The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of > Anarchoprimitivism" [1]. Hey, I know that guy! I loved him in "The set of curvilinear convergence of a continuous function defined in the interior of a cube"! > This has seen some criticism in response, so I won't comment on the > opinions expressed therein. Yes, I'd agree that the non-mathematical writings of Ted Kaczynski have come under, uh, close scrutiny. Since his manifesto was something I really did read every word of, some 30 years ago (because I didn't trust _any_ intermediary to fairly summarize it under the radioactive circumstances of its publication), I recall finding it cogent enough but unpersuasive. The main fallacy I perceived, which may be more fairly characterized as a disagreement, is that we can't reverse technological development any more than we can reverse a century and a half of extravagant fossil fuel burning or the direction of entropy. The only path to a more just and equitable future starts from our present circumstances. So while Kaczynski purported to critique anarcho-primitivism, I assessed him as a disgruntled anarcho-primitivist nonetheless. I would like to think I could write a better critique of Kaczynski's manifesto now if I tackled it afresh, but doing that doesn't seem like a good use of my time; he's not a major thinker, even compared to Graeber. We didn't need him blowing up university professors; Noam Chomsky already satisfactorily assessed their failures in his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Putting them in the ground wasn't going to convince anyone of anything Chomsky couldn't with mere words. But it gave people something to talk about besides Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, particularly the scourge of "extremists on both sides", which seldom fails to license harsher repression of the (in the U.S., overwhelmingly pacifist) left than the (Charlottesville/January-6th) right. Also see the respective Terrors, "White" and "Red" in 1918 Finland, and the contrasting responses of Weimar Germany to the Spartacist and Ruhr uprisings on the one hand and the Kapp and Munich Putschen, on the other. > What's relevant is that he properly cites antropologic literature > written by people generally favorable towards the primitive peoples, > which proves the opposite of what Graeber claims, and this without > even intending to since Kaczynski wrote it years before The Dawn of > Everything came out. ...but that's who you'd _expect_ to adopt such a position. Anthropologists are not known for adopting condemnatory attitudes toward the communities they study. What would be more surprising would be if some firebrand pro-Columbus Day activist who was still carrying the Manifest Destiny torch wound up working in anthropology, studied the Inuit, and reached a conclusion such as, "there is much to dislike about the Inuit, but their pair-bonds are more stable than those of Italian-American families, and incidences of domestic battery a standard deviation lower--we have something to learn from them in this respect." In U.S. civil procedure, that sort of thing is known as an "admission against interest". If such a person ever wrote such a paper, I'd predict a spectacle to outblaze Patrick Tierney's notorious "takedown" of Napoleon Chagnon. But that seems unlikely as of 2025; why go into anthropology when there's a juicy sinecure waiting in the freshly reformed Bureau of Indian Affairs? > I quote the relevant part: > Among the Eskimos with whom Gontran de Poncins lived, husbands > clearly held overt authority over their wives [83] and sometimes > beat them. [84] Yet, through their talent for persuasion, wives > had great power over their husbands [...] However, Poncins may > have overstated the extent of Eskimo women’s power, since it was > not sufficient to enable them to avoid unwanted sex: Wife-lending > among these Eskimos was determined by the men, and the wives > had to accept being lent whether they liked it or not. [87] At > least in some cases, apparently, the women resented this rather > strongly. [88] > > [88] Poncins, pages 112–13. See also Coon. page 223 > (“often the wives lent say that they do not enjoy this”). > [The bibliography is listed at the end of his essay.] > > This, to me, discredits Graeber. "At least in some cases, apparently" is, I observe, frank about its imprecise quantification and lack of first-hand observation. I hope you appreciate how it doesn't lift much weight. This isn't to say that Kaczynski and his sources don't have the better side of the argument. If I had to bet a dollar, I'd bet on them over Graeber on this point--but better than either might be contributing that dollar to a fellowship for an anthropologist with neither Graeber's nor Kaczynski's baggage. > If I have to verify everything that an author writes, You do and you don't; by that I mean that it's a dangerous practice to elevate any authority, no matter how qualified or reliable, to infallibility. All beliefs must be contingent. With work, we can achieve multiple nines of confidence in them--but Cartesian, apodictic certainty is for the ideologues that you say put you off. > let alone about his own field, I might just as well entrust my > research in said field to AI with its habit of making facts up. The > result might end up being the same. I find this a defeatist binary. There are other alternatives. We do best when we're prepared to (1) learn; (2) change our minds; and (3) not venture out onto limbs we'd be deeply embarrassed to creep back from. > Unless you have already read it, I would suggest also adding The > Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord to your reading list. I'm familiar only with Debord's reputation. He's been cited by some writers I enjoy, one of whom offers the flavor of my own leanings... ...when I opt to natter on about Marxism I have favored the French Situationists. Those for whom this blog is their primary window into the world of critical theory might therefore assume that the Situationists are the leading philosophical lights of Marxism. By and large I believe this to be true, but that position actually puts me outside the mainstream of humanities academia, which much more favors the so-called Frankfurt School of Marxists. (I think they backed the wrong horse appallingly here, and that Frankfurt School Marxism is mostly good if you want to feel smugly superior while smoking a lot of weed, which, to be fair, is actually what most Marxists in the humanities are going for.) -- Elizabeth Sandifer > You can get it from your favorite shadow library, as usual. "The work is a series of 221 short theses in the form of aphorisms. Each thesis contains one paragraph." -- WP That sounds perfect for me! I find that most system builders promise much more than they deliver, while few aphorists insist on being accepted as a package deal. > Reminds of the amount of stuff Ayn Rand said that people happily > gloss over. ...speaking of writers who suggest that the entirety of their philosophy can be derived entirely deductively, employing Aristotelian logic from a handful of axioms (say, three), but, uh, never actually do so. At a similar enterprise, Wittgenstein acquitted himself better in failure, and had the candor to admit his failure. To close, I'll suggest that if you can forgive the Unabomber a few murders, you might consider cutting Graeber a little slack. (Especially in his earlier work, since it does seem to have been better received by critics whose horizons don't stop where their black turtlenecks do.) I don't insist, but we should read _every_ writer with a red pen--literal or metaphorical--at hand to annotate their errors, doubtful claims, or underdeveloped notions. Passive reading is adjacent to brain death. Or at least to slow-wave slumber. Regards, Branden
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