Season of the Juggalos

This summer I read “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It’s a fascinating book. For years I have been teaching much of what they dismantle in the book. If YOU read the book you might think they are constructing a strawman to mock and rabbit punch.

But I’m that strawman.

It’s OK, I’m an adult. I can “own” the fact that I have been wrong for thirty or forty years. OK, OK… since you and my inner judges insist, I’ll admit that I have been instructing impressionable young minds… with, as you may have guessed, over-the-top stentorian pomposity… in that wrongness for many years now.

Specifically, I have, more or less, been teaching seventh graders that before the Neolithic Revolution most humans spent their lives in egalitarian and largely communal bands of 30–50 closely related hunter-gatherers.

The book makes clear that the above over-simplification is astoundingly absurd, and, in truth, I’m embarrassed that I really said this to students, though, I have to point out, it’s also what most middle school “ancient history” textbooks say.

The book makes the case that, prior to developing or coming in contact with what we call “civilization”, the people of the world had a wide variety of social organizations and ways of governing themselves. Furthermore, being just as smart and desirous of…