I’m busily working on a book review of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything and trying to follow the debate so far about the book. I won’t be able to speak to that wide-ranging discussion much in a short review, but some of the criticisms of the book have nettled me a bit. (Though I have my own critical thoughts about aspects of the book’s structure, tone and arguments.) It’s making me think generally about how we ought to be going about having debates about scholarly work.
For example, I came across the historian David Bell’s critique of the book, which uses very strong language in a way that bothered me. What irritated me particularly was Bell’s remark that Graeber and Wengrow stray “perilously close to scholarly malpractice” as a concluding dismissal in a short essay that: a) is focused narrowly on their comments about Rousseau; b) acknowledges that their argument in the book is in fact derived from the work of another scholar who is treated respectfully (how you can be guilty of scholarly malpractice while the originating scholar that you’re reprising is not, I can’t tell); and c) ultimately returns to a genuinely big and complex discussion about the representation of non-Western societies in Enlightenment-era writing in Europe.
In his short critique, Bell makes a lot of the way they mischaracterize Rousseau as a social climber with little direct personal experience of inequality. He’s got a point, but not at the level of “perilously close to scholarly mispractice”. Rousseau’s family background was solidly “middle-class” in 18th Century terms, and his experiences of poverty and difficulty in young adulthood were complicated and various—in many ways, engendering a resentment that we are now very familiar with towards the “idle rich” from the perspective of middle-class aspiration. At the time Rousseau became a well-known writer and intellectual, it’s perfectly fair to say that he was a social climber with an acutely competitive sense of his relationship to other thinkers of the French Enlightenment. He was certainly willing to go against his various patrons, so Bell’s also right that he had some degree of moral independence from his various underwriters. (The “trying to sleep his way into court” remark I think is a clumsy characterization of Rousseau’s infatuation with Sophie d’Houdetot, but I think Bell must know that’s what they are referencing.)
More importantly, when you read the whole section that Bell is focused on, it’s pretty clear that they are talking about the entire social world of the pre-Revolutionary French Enlightenment, which really did entangle a diverse set of writers, artists, intellectuals, merchants and aristocrats and which did feature a lot of jockeying for influence, financial support and political protection—and some very high-stakes debates and works that put their authors, including Rousseau, at considerable risk. Making the evaluation even of this chapter alone hang on whether it gets the biography of Rousseau completely right (a difficult thing to do, considering that our main source for that knowledge is still Rousseau himself, who could fairly be called an unreliable narrator) seems uncharitable to begin with.
Bell seems to know that, because he moves on to the much bigger point, which is whether Western representations of non-Western societies in the 18th Century were in any sense based on real witnessing of those societies or whether they were inventions arising out of European thought and experience. Now that’s a real discussion and it’s a genuinely important part of what Graeber and Wengrow are thinking about in that part of their book. But it’s not a conversation that can be quickly adjudicated by reference to well-established facts—it’s a huge problem of interpretation and theory that has been in play across multiple disciplines for the last forty years. On one side, there are readings inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism—a great example would be Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt—which trend strongly towards seeing European representations of non-European societies as instrumentally servicing colonialism and imperial expansion and based primarily on European ideas and paradigms. On the other is a wide array of historical and theoretical works that accept that texts authored by European observers and commentators nevertheless have some degree of real witnessing and possibly even polyvocality to them (e.g., that what non-Westerners said about themselves was heard and reproduced within European writing). (Carolyn Hamilton’s Terrific Majesty, about the intellectual and cultural history of representations of the Zulu emperor Shaka, is a good and subtle example of this approach.) Graeber and Wengrow are in the latter camp, and they push it a bit further, which is to say that some non-Western societies (they’re focused in this section on Native American societies in North America) should be read as a non-written “text”, an inhabited and practiced statement about social ethics and political structure—and that these texts were being rewritten in the 17th and 18th Centuries as a commentary upon the ethical and political practices of European settlers.
That’s a complex point, and it can’t be debated in the usual way that historians who are focused almost entirely on conventional intellectual history or archives might prefer—which might be precisely the point where Bell could generously concede that such a conversation is a big, sprawling and complicated one that takes multiple bodies of expertise and historiographical know-how to work through. But he’s still hung up in his short essay on seeing this point simply as an “error” and makes a really cheap shot about how “people” think that what Pocahontas says in the Disney film is really Native American sentiment, which is a million miles away from what Graeber and Wengrow and other scholars like Barbara Alice Mann are arguing. (A good example of how complicated this general point actually can be would be reading Shepard Krech’s The Ecological Indian and the numerous careful responses to Krech’s critique by scholars since its 1999 publication.)
As I wrote here recently, I continue to wrestle in complicated ways with the question of civility, a concept that seems both very valuable and often misused. But I do know what my preference is when it comes to scholarly debate, which is that we should treasure valuable conversations within our fields and between our fields. The problem is figuring out when the disagreement or the conversation available to us is a good one that we can mutually cultivate with tender care into a showpiece of good scholarly debate.
That’s sometimes a tough judgment call. I don’t feel any obligation at all to be gentle to work that I think is maliciously intended or that is reproducing deeply damaging ideas. Nor do I feel like investing much in a conversation with the work of a scholar who is methodologically careless in a persistent way and contemptuous of all possible disagreement (say, Steven Pinker’s work on the history of violence). Bell may feel that the tone of Graeber and Wengrow’s work is sufficiently provocative to his own base of knowledge that the book doesn’t qualify for constructive treatment. Obviously, I disagree.
I wonder in this sense if sometimes we write in ways that pick bigger fights than we mean to—if constructive readings slip away because of a general culture of combative argument embedded in certain phrasings and tropes. For example, Bell’s “perilously close to scholarly malpractice” is really strong, or so it reads to me—it’s not matched at all to the proportionality of his critique. If I’m going to throw down that hard, I feel like I need really good reason. (I am aware that this point can apply to David Graeber’s own writings—he was almost always a profoundly combative and combustible writer and participant in social media.)
Even phrasings that sound—and perhaps mean—to be gentle sometimes read to me as accusations with an abrasive edge. For example, the common construction of saying a scholar “forgets to address” or “neglects to mention” an important fact or work of scholarship. The emotional valence of those phrases in reference to scholarly work isn’t minor or neutral. I’d often rather have someone say “I think Burke is just wrong on this point” (and hope it is one of those interesting kinds of being “wrong” that opens up debate) than for someone to suggest I simply missed something important.
I feel that if we’re not going to cultivate further conversation but instead use language that scolds, accuses or delegitimates, we need to say why we start there as a kind of prologue, rather than just run our rhetoric on a kind of combative automatic pilot. If we’re going to piss on a plant rather than nurture it into bloom, we should do it with conscious purpose, because we should normally wish to live in a garden of dizzying color and luxuriant perfumes.