 Hi, I am actually delighted to welcome David Vengaro and David Graber as the keynote speakers of our BPA Plus. Yes, I did say that. Yes, as our keynote speaker, I don't think either of these speakers need much of an introduction, especially to this audience, but not to many audiences. I don't think so. I'm not going to take up any more time or space, really. The title of the lecture is The Myth of the Stupid Savage. And now, up to you. And I'll keep hold of this for later. So we'll do three quarters of an hour of talk and then the same again for questions or something like that. Right, floor is yours. Is that? Yeah, that's definitely working. Oh, no. Yeah, mine too. Who's starting? You'll do the first two sentences, then I'll take up. OK, we don't want to lecture at you. As you can see, we have prepared nothing, except everything. Well, so I'm an archaeologist, and I just want to thank the organizers of this for inviting an archaeologist to talk about these kinds of quite fundamental issues about politics. And I'm not going to bore you, as archaeologists often like to do, with pictures of 30,000-year-olds, royal-looking burials, or magnificent stone temples from before the Neolithic period. Much though they are cool. Yeah, but we'd rather try and attempt something like a dialogue, because in a way, that is what we propose to talk about is the importance of dialogue in human history. Yeah, well, OK. And we chose to call our paper about the myth of the stupid savage because, well, this came out of our work on Rousseau. We were originally going to write a book on the origins of social inequality. And the more we started researching the topic, the more we realized that this is kind of a weird question to even be asking. First of all, it assumes a sort of primordial state of innocence and that inequality sort of comes out of that. And the reason why we started is because you realize that, essentially for the last 200, 300 years, people have just been giving variations on the same narrative as Rousseau over and over and over again. And it never seems to go away. So we wanted to create an alternative narrative. But finally, why was he asking this question to begin with? The interesting thing about Rousseau was that he was actually writing the famous essay on the origin of social inequality for a contest for the best essay on the origins of social inequality was put out by the Academy Dijon in, I believe, 1751 or 2. It must be slightly earlier, because the discourse is 1754. The contest was the year before, yeah. Yeah, so it's something like that. So it's 1553, yeah. But basically the joke was he didn't win. And I actually managed to get a hold of all the other essays that were submitted. There's one book where you can find out. And it was hotly contested, many of the arguments that you see nowadays were already being bounced around in 1751. And the thing which fascinated me when I started reading this is, OK, on-channel regime France. Here we have a society where presumably no one had ever walked into a room where they didn't know exactly where everybody ranked in relation to each other. It's one of the most hierarchical and elaborately hierarchical societies that one could imagine. Why did they think that social inequality had an origin at all, that it doesn't go back to the Bible in the Middle Ages? Everybody assumed there's Adam and Eve, Adam, Adam, Adam and Eve. At the very beginning, there's hierarchy. And so, but on the other hand, here they are doing essay contests, which is assumed that everybody starts from the question of there was primordial equality and something changed. What was it? So we started a process of asking how that came about. And what we discovered was, I don't want to cut completely to the end, but what we discovered is that what was so really changed and introduced was not the idea of the noble savage, which is kind of a dubious concept at all. It was really introduced by very conservative, explicitly racist thinkers actually in the 19th century as a way of making fun of the sort of people who we now have attitudes, which were typical of cultural anthropologists who were somewhat relativistic, and or said that non-Western cultures really had any value at all. It wasn't the idea of the noble savage. There are people out there who have something to teach us. That was very much assumed in the discourse he came out of, but the idea that they had something to teach us because of what they didn't know, that they were somehow innocent creatures who were so even argued that people in a state of nature have no imagination, and no sense of history. They can't project themselves into the future. Their happiness is based on their complete simple-mindedness. And that was actually a new idea. That wasn't in the previous discourse, as we'll see. And that, in turn, made me reflect on the very idea of political self-consciousness. And I thought I would start by talking a little bit about that. We have a notion that somehow what makes humans humans is the fact that we are self-conscious, that we can fully conscious beings that can reflect on the nature of our reality in our situation, and that that has both a individual and a social manifestation. So if you go back to Cartesian dualism, thought for self-reflection is the definition of what makes us sentient beings different from animals. And that notion of self-consciousness is simultaneously reflected in the idea that society itself can and should, at least ultimately, become self-conscious. The ideal of social evolution was seen as getting us to a point of self-consciousness, whether in the philosophical sense in Hegel, where all history leads up to the point where you can have someone like Hegel reflecting on the nature of history, or the idea that self-consciousness is embodied in actual control over the conditions of your existence, and Marx and other socialist thinkers. So it's actually a very interesting notion, because you have people, for example, arguing that ancient Greeks and Homer weren't actually conscious at all, the bicameral mind-guiding argument. There are people, and so somehow our consciousness or self-consciousness advances over time, but even, which is actually quite odd, if you think the idea that human beings are self-conscious and that's the definition, or that we are more so. Neuroscientists actually say that self-consciousness tends to last about seven seconds in human beings, a sort of window of consciousness when you're consciously reflecting on you're aware that you exist. Basically, we're on autopilot almost all the time and might as well be asleep. That's why people can do these kinds of forms of elaborate sleepwalking, where they get into cars and drive off 200 miles and suddenly say, where am I? Because you might as well be asleep when you're doing most of that stuff anyway. But there's an exception to that. Yes, indeed. There is an exception to that, which is largely when you're talking to someone else. So in conversation and dialogue, you actually can maintain consciousness for very long periods of time, which is why you need to imagine you're talking to someone else to really be able to think out a problem. So actually consciousness is a social phenomenon, it's dialogic. So rather than self-consciousness being this incredible achievement that we eventually have, most ancient philosophers, for example, assume that. They start with dialogues, almost all ancient philosophers in China, India, or Europe takes the form of conversations. But they're conversations about thinking about how you can become a self-conscious individual, which is the kind of person Descartes sort of assumes that we start at us, even though we're not. However, so social consciousness in most of the world's histories assumed your starting point, an individual conscious of something you maybe will someday achieve. Instead, we flip that over. Nowadays, we seem to have this idea that the very idea that we can imagine and create a society is something new. That it's something that takes huge amounts of historical evolution to get to. And that's, in a way, I think one of the, I mean, we should probably say, we came at these kind of rather general issues through some very specific parts of evidence, because as David was pointing out, we initially set out about, what, six or seven years ago, to contribute to this burgeoning literature on the topic of inequality and the origins of inequality. And it was in the process of actually thinking about what kind of contribution we would make as an archaeologist and an anthropologist, that we just began to realize how peculiar the starting point of the question really is insofar as it assumes that there was something else in order for a social inequality to have an origin. So in looking back at the origins of the question, what we found were a number of interesting things that we wanna talk about today. But it might be helpful to follow, or maybe for me to follow, some of those sort of trains of thought initially, which really are about this issue of what you might call self-conscious political behavior. What would most of human history look like if we wrote it from the starting assumption that people have always had and exhibited that kind of self-conscious awareness of their own political arrangements? Now, there's a sort of paradox here, because if you read evolutionary biologists and evolutionary theorists like Christopher Byrne, his book, Hierarchy in the Forest, he's a primatologist, is quite explicit about this and says, well, this is precisely what makes human politics different from the politics of, say, chimpanzees or bonobos or orangutans, is what he calls our actuarial intelligence, which I believe what he means by this is the fact that we can in fact imagine what another kind of society might be like. So imagine a group of hunters and gatherers who can picture what might in fact transpire if they didn't make fun of the very skilled hunter who brought down the ideal catch that day or if they didn't share out the meat and other resources from the hunt in an equal sort of way without prejudice towards those who actually engaged in it. They can sort of imagine what kind of society they might be living in if they didn't make fun of exceptionally talented individuals and therefore they build their own society on the basis partly of imagination. But there is a paradox here and the paradox is that when he and other writers actually talk about what happened in human history, it's almost as if they don't want to explore the implications of their own hypothesis because what he writes quite explicitly is that for most of human history, at least in political terms, nothing really happened. People lived in these small egalitarian bands of foragers, hunters, foresters and gatherers for 100,000 plus years. Then there was the origins of agriculture and then came the six, seven or eight, however many great civilizations with their alpha male pharaohs and kings and leaders. As we all know, this is effectively the story in Outline that Rousseau was telling 250 or so years ago. Now to me as an archeologist, this is very interesting, would it not be very bizarre and fascinating if all the efforts of me and all my archeological colleagues to actually dig down into the traces of what humans have got up to just happened to conform perfectly to what some Swiss philosopher imagined might have been the case in 1754. Wouldn't that be an extraordinary coincidence? And in fact, that is roughly the sort of consensus. When you read sort of big history type books, it's very much the impression you get. It's also we're quite convinced wrong to say this in almost every respect. And a lot of what we've been doing for the last few years is quite sort of detailed and empirical work, actually looking at what the evidence tells us now and other ways to conceptualize it. Because it's very easy to say it's all wrong, you can do that in about 20 pages, but if you want to say what actually happened, it's an enormous amount of work because essentially, it's not just that people don't write for people outside their specialties, they don't write for people outside their subspecialties. That's right. An enormous work of synthesis that just nobody's been doing. And I mean, the reactions to that have been quite instructive because it's quite hard to find an archeologist, I think, or even harder to find a social anthropologist these days who openly says, yes, I am a social evolutionist. I believe that human societies evolve and go through these stages from simple to complex. Yeah, and if you study anthropology, you do an intro anthropology course, you get rid of the evolutionists in the first lecture, well, then first there was the guys who were really dumb. Nobody takes that seriously anymore. And then you critique the structural functionalists as sort of more worthy idiot opponents. But in fact. Yeah, and we take it at face value when people tell us they're not evolutionists, we assume that they're not. However, every time we seem to propose an interpretation of some body of archeological evidence or anthropological evidence that goes against the assumptions of a kind of linear notion of social evolution, we seem to get into all sorts of trouble. People freak out. Yeah, not with the evidence. I mean, the evidence in some ways, I mean, maybe it's worth giving a few small sort of examples or case studies of what we've been up to. We talked about the paleolithic variable. So for example, it's very striking. Thank you. Yes. If you go back to the earliest evidence, the earliest sort of concrete evidence we have for how human societies are organized, you can't really say very much about, let's say the first 200,000 years, because all we've got are these great experiences of time in which there might just be, you know, various small scatters of flint tools and the odd tooth or skull remnants or something. But if we go back to, let's say, roughly the time of the last ice age or the last glacial maximum, sort of 200, excuse me, 20,000, 30,000 years ago, particularly in Europe, simply because Europeans have been practicing archeology for a very long time with a lot of resources. There is actually enough evidence to say something in outline about what human societies were like. And what we find in those cases is really nothing like these rather boring sort of abstractions that you get from evolutionary theory, which tell us we ought to be expecting small scale, vaguely egalitarian societies. Actually, what you see concretely in the archeological evidence are things like these extraordinary burials, which in any other context one would interpret as princely or regal, I mean individuals, buried with huge amounts of personal wealth, ornamentation, regalia, and so on and so forth. We see architectural constructions that are clearly different from everyday dwellings implying some sort of public building. And it's very peculiar because what we don't find alongside these things are any of the usual trappings of a very hierarchical, organized, sort of stratified society. We don't find fortifications. We don't find storage. Yeah, lots of evidence for administration or centralized storage. It's almost as if you have these sort of almost sort of ritualistic pageants of what it might be like to have a king or a queen or something like that. And then it comes into the archeological record and then it sort of fades out again. So we started looking into the literature of what people actually make of this evidence, which is kind of intriguing. I think it's actually Burm who puts it very nicely when he says we seem to be trapped in this endless kind of to and fro between Hobbes on the one hand and Rousseau on the other. So on the one hand, there are the sort of neo-Rousseau type commentators who basically just ignore all this evidence. This evidence is basically inconsequential. We're just gonna write as if people were living in smaller, egalitarian societies for most of human history. That's one sort of view. Then there's the sort of Hobbesian view which goes quite the other way and says well there must have been ranked stratified aristocracies all the way back to the Ice Age. Actually someone just drew to my attention there's going to be a big meeting of specialists in Paleolithic archeology in France which is sort of the spiritual heartland of all this kind of research called something like aristocracies in the Stone Age just in a few months time in the Daldain. And we don't really find either of these accounts terribly plausible. Yes, I mean for one thing there is the fact that the vast majority of the skeletons that seem to get the regal treatment are giants or hunchbacks or dwarfs or otherwise physically deformed in some way which seems to make it rather unlikely that we're dealing with some of our estranged deformed aristocracy. Right, and also presumably if they were princes there's one famous example from Liguria which archeologists love to give names to things. So they call this particular burial il principi. Now if he really was prince in the Machiavellian sense then presumably he would have got people to do more on his behalf than just make very elaborate headdresses out of small shells. He would have had them for little armies or... And it reminds one very much of Huckart who had the argument that kings come from rituals that people were putting on these theatrical rituals sort of performing royalty before they actually even had it. And in fact that ritual is a sort of zone of experiment where they played around with different social possibilities and it sounded really wacky when he proposed in the 1920s. But the archeological evidence that we've got now that's a much more plausible interpretation than the conventional evolutionist view everybody seems to feel they have to buy. It might not be right, but it's a lot closer to the evidence. So what we found ourselves doing and I think this is one of the advantages of talking to each other from our different sort of training is thinking about seasonality because there's a great literature in anthropology about the way that hunter gatherer societies and many other societies actually flip and alternate between very different kinds of political arrangements depending partly on the time of year. So one will have periods of great economic abundance let's say when the bison or the deer or the woolly mammoth if we're in Pleistocene Europe are coming through the valleys and you'll have extremely elaborate social measures put in place to make sure that the hunting is successfully completed and during those periods you might have a very authoritarian kind of political organization. But once it's all over, society changes shape. Marcel most actually used the term social morphology I think to describe this. Society moves and transforms from these very large dense aggregations often into precisely the kind of little small scattered bands that people often imagine we lived in for most of human history. Now it doesn't really take a genius to see that Ice Age Europe is bound obviously to have produced these kind of seasonal variations. We're talking about a very different kind of Europe in terms of climate and environment, fauna and flora to anything we see around us today. I mean it was more like Serengeti Park with forests all along the Mediterranean coast and then this great zone of tundra leading up into the ice sheets and then these little sort of what geographers call refugia or refugia where humans and animals and plants can actually keep themselves going for long periods of time. So putting these two things together drawing on decades of careful research by pre-historians, we started developing the notion that actually what one is seeing with these very elaborate burials and expressions of hierarchy are exactly that kind of fluidity or flexibility. Now then we turned to the ethnographic literature which allows you to see what it actually might mean in something more like psychological and philosophical terms to actually flip your society round between two quite radically different social structures which brings us back to the core sort of issue about consciousness. Right, right because the irony is that rather than living in this sort of naive state of not having figured out complex social arrangements yet, people living in these societies with what most called a dual social morphology with extreme seasonal variations are actually way more self-conscious about social possibilities than probably anybody living today because they completely shifted social structures every year to the extent that in some societies people actually had different names at different times of year. You'd have one summer name and one winter name. A lot of the Northwest Coast societies were like that. You'd belong in different, you know, sort of ritual associations that have different settlement type households, kinship, everything changed. And it could change in any number of different ways. It wasn't just, you know, in one season you might have an authoritarian, you know, you all get together and create a little king or some authoritarian structure and then you disperse in your egalitarian bands. The famous example by Marcel Mose seasonal variations of the Eskimo came out in 1902. They pointed out that they actually had authoritarian bands. You know, they had a little patriarchal units during the summer and they got together in the summer and they like had common property and had giant wave swapping orgies and you know, had all sorts of fun. But you really can't predict other societies. They would have police, you know, with actual coercive powers to enforce rules arbitrarily for but only for two months a year. And the group who would get to do it at any particular year would always rotate. So it would never be the same people two years in a row. But then they'd go to become, you know, scatter in bands where they resolved everything by consensus. So by the evolutionary, you know, sort of classic band, tribe, chiefdom, state hierarchy that archaeologists and anthropologists still apply, you know, you'd have a group that's, you know, half the year on the very bottom of the scale and half the year at the very top. You know, they were a state for two months because they had like, you know, separated group with monopoly of the use of coercive force, you know, but then they went back to being like bands again. Yeah, now, I mean, again, you know, it's very hard to find anyone who will say, I believe that human societies evolve from bands to tribes, chiefdoms to states. Most anthropologists will just laugh in your face and say, oh, we did away with all that rubbish, you know, generations ago. Same, by and large, goes for most archaeologists. But, you know, when we started publishing on this topic and presenting it and saying, well, look, it's really interesting, these are groups that seem to actually flip between almost a band and a state on an annual basis. The kind of reactions we got were really, well, you know, you're getting this all wrong, you're blowing this out of proportion, it doesn't really affect the large story of human history. Those aren't really monumental architecture, they're just big huts, yeah. Maybe we could just call them complex hunter-gatherers so that one still retains the possibility of talking about a simple to complex trajectory until you start farming. And, you know, another example of the same sort of thing, we got very interested in the ethnography of the west coast of North America, where you have these very extensive distributions of non-farming populations, hunters, gatherers, fishers and so on, going all the way down from the northwest coast of what's now British Columbia. Alaska, yeah. Right, or Alaska, right the way down to California. Reading our way into this literature, one thing kept really striking us about this, which was the issue of slavery. Now, Rousseau, famously in the discourse, says slavery is an outcome of agriculture and farming. And presumably he's got things on his mind like slave plantations and, you know, the very close ones. Ancient Romans, what? Ancient Roman slavery and so on. And this is something that I think, you know, most people trained in our subjects are aware of is the phenomenon of slavery among non-farming populations. And actually the classic example is precisely that of the indigenous societies of the northwest coast, who are known to have kept slaves who were actually hereditary slaves in their households, which were organized on these highly stratified aristocratic sort of lines. What nobody seems to have been interested up to now is why this practice of keeping slaves seems to sort of fizzle out and stop as you head south into what is now, broadly speaking, the area of coastal California. In fact, we found this extraordinary paper from 1951, I think, by Goldschmidt, Walter Goldschmidt, which nobody's read. It's got a very strange title, something like a contribution to ethical and philosophical sociology or something, which tells you very little about its content. But it's about these Californian foragers who lived next door to the highly aristocratic slavekeeping fishermen of the northwest coast. And what Goldschmidt, who was a student of Alfred Kruber, I believe, the great sort of Diane of Californian anthropology, what he argues their point for point is that these Californian hunter-gatherers actually had a kind of work ethic, which is remarkably similar to what Max Weber classically described as the Protestant work ethic of central and northern Europe as a kind of spiritual ethical foundation for the rise of capitalism. But this is all going on in farger societies in California, right adjacent to these other guys who seem to have a moral, ethical, political system that is precisely the opposite. Yeah, the extreme aristocratic ethos of, you know, potlopsers and the vast displays of destructions of wealth, whereas the other guys are showing off how frugal and momentarily gonna work with sweatbasses and steaming off their fat. And basically, in list numbers of points there, that one society's clearly a discomplete inversion of the values of the other and rejection of the values of the other. And the really striking thing was that we couldn't find, and we really mined down into this literature, which, I mean, all the ethnographies are online now, and it's all out there in the public domain, we virtually couldn't find a single example of a historian or an ethnographer or an archeologist actually saying, so how did it end up this way? How do you end up with two almost diametrically opposed political and ethical systems among hunter-gatherers living along the same stretch of coastline? And the reason for this is basically that all of these groups, regardless of the really quite profound differences between them, tend to get shunted into a single category of complex hunter-gatherers. It doesn't matter what they get up to enslaving each other, rejecting slavery, having abolitionist movements. Somehow there's something going on that says as soon as you see a cob of corn or a woolly sheep, all of this counts for nothing, and we've reset the whole clock of social evolution back to zero, which again sounds very evolutionary, right? Very evolutionary. So, I mean, we got this thing published in American anthropologists, but it took some hard work. But, again, what seems remarkable is that people weren't asking this kind of question. Right, this is not interesting because they're on one stage, and what's important about them is the fact that they don't farm. So the fact that they are completely different and very self-conscious, again, what was interesting to us about this is it's clearly self-conscious, and it is, we even found a California myth about these people from the North who came and took a bunch of slaves, and how their society fell apart because they all got fat and lazy, and eventually the slaves ran off and they had nothing, they didn't know how to make food anymore. It was sort of a... It's a cautionary term. It was a cautionary term. What happens if you keep slaves? But it made... It's clear people were thinking about this. Right, yet somehow none of this registers. The idea that people are living the way they are because they actually think that's the way people ought to live and that there's different philosophies and values and politics going on in societies. These people are actually adults like us thinking about the nature of human society and what it shouldn't could be like. It's just considered unthinkable. Yeah, and what we realized in doing this is that we're coming up against decades of research, for example, in the field of behavioral ecology, which will try and explain these kinds of differences in other ways, like, for example, the Californians historically relied a lot on gathering acorns, whereas the guys to the north spent a lot of time fishing. And the assumption is that somehow within the ecology, we will find a causal explanation for their social structures, which is a long way from saying we're talking about people like you and me, people who can reflect on the kind of societies they live in, their neighbors live in and build their societies and their political systems in a conscious fashion. And here's where we see the link back to Rousseau. Oh, very nice segue. Okay, let me take that one. Yes. We can do more archaeology later. Okay, we will. Yeah, because when I started looking into the, basically the origins of the question of the origin of inequality and this narrative that we are all these kind of naive creatures until some idiot goes off and invents agriculture and you get private property and we all know what goes on from there. When I looked into the origin of that, why is it that the Academy of Degeneres is asking this question in 1752 or three or whatever it was. I found a really remarkable story which is not much told. First of all, the phrase equality inequality so we wasn't used in the Middle Ages at all. They've got enough stuff on database that they can do word searches now. So people have gone through and confirmed that this wasn't an issue. Nobody talked about it. The concept of equality and inequality really talk about it in math. Mathematical terms are likely involved. Italian PhD, I think, wasn't it? Two guys actually did a systematic search. They just went through, yeah, they did a word search of a whole media of literature. They said discover that basically until the 1500s nobody uses these words at all. And it really comes in with natural law theory with discussions of what do we make of societies in the new world which presented a problem legally. Actually a lot of this stuff came out of the legal problem of was it okay to conquer people who had never heard of Jesus and therefore couldn't be said to have rejected Christianity. That was the basic problem they had legally. It's easy if they're infantiles but if they've never heard of Christianity at all the conquistadors would do this thing where they would make a declaration. Okay, you have 12 minutes to convert and they put up something in Latin. But legal scholars back home were not impressed by this any more than we would be. They said, oh, come on, no. So is there a real justification to have done this? And it was hotly debated. So that led to the question of what we now call human rights. Do people have rights that just by did to the existing at all or being human at all that you could have violated by attacking them? The conclusion was they did. But the question is how do you establish what those are? So you need to look at the simplest societies. And this is why they became fascinating societies that they thought as egalitarian. These they were seen as this sort of almost plasmatic stuff of which sociality comes from. You find people who seem to have no religion and no state and no writing and so forth and so on. What do they have? What do people minimally think they owe each other in that primordial state? Then you can start getting at the sort of mom, basic ground rules of what theory of human rights could come from. So talk of a quality came out of that. But what really was interesting and what really drove the conversation much more than the kind of legal theories from which it started was they started actually talking to people in the new world and those conversations made a huge impact on Europe. And this is where there's almost a kind of a, the only way I can describe it is a kind of covert racism whereby you're always ascribing such racism to the European observers that you assume that they paid absolutely no attention to what anybody was saying to them and therefore you have to pay no, you don't have to pay attention to what anybody was saying to them. So any statement or opinion attributed to a non-Western person can be written off as some noble savage trope. They didn't really say that. So you don't have to think about what they might have actually been thinking or saying. I think that these people were basically suck puppets. So when Montesquieu or Laurenton or somebody writes a dialogue with a savage, what they're actually doing is supposedly having a dialogue with themselves but avoiding going to prison, et cetera, by putting it into the mouth of a savage so-called person they have invented. It's an incredibly patronizing sort of view. And it's fascinating that it's like just absolutely assumed by everyone with the exception of scholars who are themselves Native Americans who say, well, no, actually, a lot of these arguments are the kind of arguments people like that would have made. And it's very, you know, that whole debate is sort of suppressed. But if you look at what actually happened, and I took the French Enlightenment because that's the one that leads up to it. So it's absolutely clear what's going on. You could reconstruct the whole thing because starting in the 1600s, you have these Jesuits writing reports from what's now Quebec. Which are just incredibly popular. The Jesuit relations, there was like 112 or 100 volumes of this stuff. Like everybody bought them. I mean, middle-class households would typically have these travelers' reports in Jesuit ways and so forth on the shelves. They're extraordinarily popular and widely debated. And one of the things which was always in there and was attracted the most attention were the critiques of indigenous people, of French and European society, which almost always took the same form. And the interesting thing is that at first they weren't explicitly about egalitarianism at all, actually. They're mainly about freedom and mutual aid. The usual accusations were, first of all, you guys don't take care of each other. You're just mean and hyper-competitive. But the other one was that, you know, you're about to slip. You follow orders all the time. This is actually a typical quote. I think it gives you a sense of this. It's from 1642 about the Montenegro's Nascopi. They imagine that they ought, by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass-cults, rendering no homage to anyone, whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our captains while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue's end. For he is powerful and so far as he is eloquent even if he kills himself, talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the savages. So there's all of the, they use the word captain for pretty much anyone, an obsession of authority. But, you know, they're always going on about how these are the freest people on earth. And it's very interesting, which they didn't prove at all. One of the interesting things when you read this literature is this sort of reversal because we're taught to think of this as this is the Western gaze. The Europeans are kind of us and they're observing these exotic people who you can't completely understand. But in fact, when you read it, it's the indigenous people making pretty much all the arguments that we would be making if we met a bunch of Jesuits. It's the Europeans who are questioningly believing the divine right of kings and reveal faith. And it's actually, it's the indigenous folk who are sort of looking rationally at this. Exactly. And very often, you know, you have these indigenous people saying, well, you know, just biologically, this makes no sense. But, you know, we need some distance on this. So, for example, in the case of freedom, this is most dramatic because nowadays you can't be against freedom, right? So the usual line is that, you know, personal liberty and individual freedom is obviously a value unto itself. You can't build a society entirely on that basis. There's a limit because it wouldn't work in practice. The Jesuits, you know, were exactly the opposite. They were like, well, you know, they have, nobody ever takes orders from anybody else. They completely refuse it. They don't use punishment of criminals even. And it actually works really well. And there's less crime here than there is in France. But it's terrible in principle. I mean, how are they gonna learn the 10 commandments if they don't ever command each other, you know? Giving orders is necessary. It's a moral good. So it's exactly the opposite, you know, of the opinions that most people would have today. So, however, you know, people read these accounts and they're very impressed. The interesting thing is the debate at first was entirely about liberty. And you can trace over time as indigenous people, particularly the Wendah, they were called at the time, Iirakoyan speaking peoples, diplomats started visiting cities like Montreal, New York, actually being sent on delegations to France. A lot of them actually did go to France, so met Louis XIV and came back to report, essentially they started doing enough ethnography of European society that they understood what was going on. The discourse gradually shifted from freedom to a simultaneous emphasis, one on freedom never went away, on equality. And I think the reason why, first, they didn't really care about differences of properties in their own societies. There was really no way to turn differences of property into power over anybody else. So it never really occurred to people that that would be, you know, okay, I have some more corn, I have some more beads, you know? But why does that mean I can give anybody orders? It just didn't make any sense within the terms of their own society. As when they figured out that, you know, European society is differently organized, they gradually shifted to critiques of inequality and money in particular, more and more. And this really comes for the most in the writings of a guy named Baron L'Hontan, who was a French impoverished French aristocratic family. He joined the army at the age of 17 and learned Giron and Algonquian. And he's a great source because he was a free thinker who hated the Jesuits. So, you know, his line was like, okay, well, the Indians tell me what they really think about these guys. You know, they're two. What's up? His full name is Louis Armand de l'homme d'Arce de L'Hontan. He's better known as the Baron L'Hontan. And he has a very strong connection to Amsterdam. Which we'll get to in a moment, yeah. Yes, he became particular friends of a gentleman by the name of Kandirank, known by many names. He's usually known as Kandirank in the literature, but in, you know, all the... Why is it A or O? Because O just doesn't make any sense in any Iroquoian language. So, the old indigenous writers put up an A. Okay. Yeah. I just couldn't possibly mean anything. So, they said it must have been an A. Anyway, but Kandirank, who was basically the Uron ambassador who was in charge of dealing with the Europeans. And it turns out this guy was utterly brilliant. He had been to France to meet Louis XIV himself on a diplomatic mission. And, you know, he was constantly outsmarting the Europeans at the diplomacy. He was... But the thing is he was an amazing orator. People said to him, people would come from miles around just to see him give a speech because even people hated him would applaud after his speech. These are so good. They just liked those. Everybody enjoyed listening to him talk. So eventually there was a kind of a salon. This is in the 1680s, right? In the 90s. Frontenac, who was the governor, would have him over for dinner and they would debate about economics, politics, Christianity, sexual mores. And Lantan probably took notes on a lot of these things. Later, Lantan himself got in trouble. He had to flee, couldn't go back to France. He ended up here in Amsterdam. From what he was actually homeless and working as a kind of freelance spy. And not doing very well at all, but he saved his fortunes when he came out with a series of memoirs in 1703 and 1704, which culminated in a book of dialogues with a character he called Adaria, who was one of Kandiyarok's many names, in which he included all of these critiques of European society, and particularly of social inequality. And this became an instant bestseller. It was huge. It was translated into all European languages. Everybody read it. There was a play inspired by it that like ran in Paris for like 20 years. It was like cats, it never went away. It was the one. And so everybody. Maybe let me say a little bit. Yeah, exactly. So this was like enormous cultural phenomena. And every single major enlightenment thinker wrote an imitation of this book. Yeah. And the funny thing is, all writers assume that Adaria was a made up character. And even when you show these fresh sources saying, oh yeah, he was the smartest man who ever lived. It was amazing. And with document that he did in fact engage in these kind of debates of Europeans, somehow we're all supposed to believe that the guys who witnessed this debate and thought he was the smartest person who ever lived then wrote them up and didn't use any of his actual arguments but instead like just made up other ones. This doesn't make any sense. And this process of denial, I was reading the other day. It begins very early. I mean, some of the Jesuits who saw La Henton as the enemy were already saying, oh, he can't really speak the languages. How can he possibly have to debate it? And this continues right up to the present day where you find these very long sort of lit crypt type pieces about Enlightenment literature in literary journals about the invention of Adaria and Adaria as a construct of the European imagination. You see, I told you we're always getting into trouble. Yeah. Ignore that. It's behind the screen. All right. But we should actually work on time. Let me move quicker. Go ahead. All right, so everybody, every single Enlightenment thinker writes an imitation of this book. I mean, Montesquieu famously is a Persian, but mostly it's, I think, Diderot has a Polynesian. Voltaire has a half-uron. There's naches of every sort of indigenous person you can imagine. And of course, these ones are made up, but they're inspired by the Jesuit literature, by the actual accounts of what people actually did say that are available. And it all comes to a peak. And this is like the Smoking God. This is I'm really found. Please, I found this. By a woman named Madame Ivonshi. Gaffini. Gaffini. Now why do I want to give that to you? Sorry, Gaffini, Madame Gaffini, who is one of the Salonists. Because all the Enlightenment salons had sort of women facilitators who, of course, have been forgotten and marginalized in the history. But she was one of those. And she wrote a book which is up Peruvian letters, which was mostly the letters home by a captured Inca princess who's trapped in France. And they're commenting on French society. And this is later remembered. It comes out in the late 1740s. It's later remembered as the first book, which suggested the idea of the welfare state. But she says at one point, well, why don't they just do like the Inca's and take a little bit of everybody's and redistribute to them a lot more rational. Which is fascinating, because nowadays you constantly read people saying, well, this idea of the Inca is having some kind of welfare state as a projection of European categories onto them. Well, actually, it might be the other way around. And she's had the best-known female writer in Europe at the time, I believe. And she's actually considered, this book is considered something of a feminist milestone. Because it's the first book with a female protagonist where the female protagonist doesn't either marry or die at the end. Yeah. But be this as it may, she has a problem. She gets ripped off for the first edition. She has to change it around a little for a second edition. She's actually going to get some money on. The book's the best seller. It's usually popular. But so we have these letters she sent to all her friends saying, OK, I've got to change it around a little. What should I do? One of them goes to Turgot, the physiocrat. One of the great founders of modern economic theory. And this is like 1751, right before Rousseau is writing. And we have Turgot's response. He says, well, you know, all this liberty and quality stuff, it's kind of dangerous in a way. I mean, I understand we're all for liberty and equality. But I think you should have your character gradually realize over the course of the book that this is appropriate to a certain level of social development. Imagine, he says, there's foragers and then farmers. And then we have a complex commercial civilization, like we have. And these are stages. In each one, you have a more complex division of labor. And our wealth and prosperity is based on a greater division of labor, which means that we can't have as much freedom and equality as we would in a society where everyone is equally poor. So basically, he comes up with evolutionism. And he's the guy who then next year gives a speech on the concept of progress. He basically made it up. And he comes up with the four stages of development, which I hear later is taken up by Adam Smith. And then all this stuff is taken up. It's the whole basis of the Scottish Enlightenment. So this is it. This is like the smoking gun, where it comes from. The very idea of social evolution based on means of livelihood, which wasn't considered all that important before this, based on means of livelihood was essentially concocted as a direct response to the indigenous critique of the inequalities of European society. So it's neutralizing. It's neutralizing the idea that these people could, in any way, have anything valid or questioning to say about Europeans, because they are effectively trapped within a particular mode of subsistence. Now, it's not such a result. Let me do that. Oh, we need to get back to this. So do you want to? Yeah, and then I'll pass it back. Because if you look at Rousseau, he's writing two years later. This is what everybody's discussing in the sort of social circles he's in. So what does he do? He synthesizes. There's these two positions. There's the evolutionist position. And then there's the sort of indigenous critique position. And he does both. So he comes up with the first fusion. Well, yes, there was this primordial state where we were truly free and equal. And that's cool. But of course, then social evolution sets in, and we lose it. But someday we might get there again. So basically, by synthesizing these two opposed positions, he essentially invents leftist discourse. But he does so by relegating the indigenous critique to the main of like, he's naive, innocent, stupid people who have insight just because they don't know anything or they don't have the sort of social complexity which comes to ruin us. So which of course was the classic conservative position that he'd invented of years before that. In a weird way, Rousseau invented both the right and the left in two different essays for the same contest. The first one he won, the conservative one, the second one he lost. So this is what Rousseau did, essentially. He put the two together and we've been stuck with this crazy synthesis of these two contradictory positions ever since. Yeah. And the really insidious part about it is not the idea of the noble savage. Actually, there is no noble savage in Rousseau's discourse because his state of nature involves creatures which are like humans, but actually lack any sort of philosophy at all because what they can't do is project their own lives into the future and imagine themselves in other states. They're constantly inventing things and chasing their own tails or rushing headlong for their own chains as he puts it. They invent agriculture, but they can't see the consequences. They invent cities, but they can't see the consequences. So we're talking about. They have no imagination. Exactly, we're talking about this idea of political self-consciousness sort of receding as one goes further back in time. There was a book published in 1946 by the Dutch archaeologist Henry Frankfurt called Before Philosophy which was about the ancient Middle East, Mesopotamia and Egypt and all that sort of thing. But he wasn't actually arguing that these people didn't have the capacity for philosophy. He was simply pointing out that they didn't have an explicit written tradition of speculative thought like that of the ancient Greeks. So when they did speculate, they did it in other ways through images, through discourse on the non-human world, et cetera, et cetera. To find the idea that there have actually ever been individuals who didn't possess any capacity for philosophical reflection, one has to go to Rousseau. But of course Rousseau is very explicit in saying that this isn't supposed to be history. Oh yeah. I don't actually believe any of this really happened. I mean he says it very clearly in this book. It's right there, yeah. Do not take this as a basis for your reconstruction of what actually happened in the past. This is a thought experiment. And what seems so extraordinary to us is how this thought experiment has somehow mutated into what still appears to be the standard meta-structure for human history. So what we find ourselves doing is kind of sort of fighting on two fronts. On the one hand, trying to reinterpret the facts, the evidence of archeology and history to try and put together some of the pieces of a new sort of story, but also simultaneously having to go right back to the philosophical roots of the existing story. So that we're not constantly just sort of pushed back and buffeted back into what seems to be an incredibly powerful myth. And it is a myth, and one can show it's a myth in fairly concrete ways. I mean, do we have any more time or should we be winding up? Well, let me just, okay. Well, we wanted to have a little question answered, but how about this? Shall I talk about how we end up with Kandiyarok to begin with, or? Sure, let's go do that and end with that. Okay, all right. To show the power of this myth, if you look at the history of the background to Kandiyarok and other people engaging in this critique, which was taken so seriously and seems to have such an enormous impact on European and hence world thought, you see that people are still trapped in these sort of Turgo-style categories of that people, there's stages of evolution based on what you do for your material subsistence. And that even though maybe it's not strictly linear, people can go back and forth, there's assumption there's a ladder that people and you placing people along that ladder is what's really significant about them. The fascinating thing is because people apply that, there's this really obvious thing that's happening that nobody seems to notice. First of all, if you look at the history of the Eastern Woodlands of North America, it just looks nothing like what it's supposed to, according to these models. You start with, say, Hopewell civilization where you have people living in isolated homesteads, getting together in these kind of strange geometric micro cities that are only inhabited in a few months a year, engaging in these elaborate astronomical rituals, that then, so it seems something like, it's not even a band system, they're just like in individual households, but then they get together through these cities. And then suddenly it turns into a state, you got Cahokia, which is this big city located in what's now East St. Louis. And tens of thousands of people, seems to be some kind of caste hierarchy, extensive human sacrifice. It could be an empire or maybe a trade empire. There's arguments about what was going on, which is very centralized and hierarchical. Then something happens, the whole thing collapses. The area around it turns into, it's almost like the Forbidden Zone and Planet of the Apes or something. Nobody lives there or anywhere nearby for like hundreds of years after the collapse. So whatever happened there, people really didn't stay away afterwards. Okay, then there's a series of successor kingdoms, those collapse, and then you get these kind of polis-sized republics. So by the evolutionary thing, you have something not even bands going to a state, to chiefdoms, to tribes, you're going backwards basically. But these republics often are very self-consciously creating new constitutions and political and social structures for the, sometimes even record, you know, Sajegh, where the guys who seemed to be most directly related to whoever it was had lived in Cahokia. Now, if you look at their ethnography, we're lucky enough to have a guy who actually spoke the language well because he was himself half indigenous, did the ethnography. They talked about how these complicated 12 sky clans and seven earth clans and, you know, we have a moiety system, all that kind of Levy-Strauss diagrammatic village stuff. Who's wonder, like, you know, who made that up? I mean, how did they come up with that? Was there, to some point where people just sat with a stick and tried to figure it out? And yes, there was. See, then they actually have a record of when that happened. Now, people sort of got together and figured out their constitution. And interestingly enough, a bunch of Ossange's also visited Paris and met Montesquieu. And seem to have had an influence on his whole idea that constitution orders create the strength of society. So, again, the Enlightenment ideas kind of came out of these guys more than anything else. But, so these societies often put a great emphasis on a kind of skeptical rationalism, especially the Urquan ones actually. They also often had very explicit myths saying things like, well, there used to, the Cherokee has this. There used to be hereditary priesthood, but they pushed people around to terrible things. So, one day we killed them all and now we don't have a hereditary priest anymore. Again, this has just been wiped out of the narrative. So instead, settlers show up and they find these like highly egalitarian, you know, rationalist people against inherited authority. A lot of them are basically kind of hippies. And it never occurs to them there's a history here. They just think they must just be like that primordially. And to this day, people write about that. So it never seems to occur to them that the fact that these guys essentially overthrew a series of hierarchical societies might have something to do of their opinions on the subject of hierarchy, right? The history is wiped out, but clearly, you know, Khandeerang is, if anything, giving these people the ideology of the movements that overthrew Kehokian and successor states. And, you know, it doesn't seem to occur to anybody that this is self-conscious political thought which comes out of a long history of political struggle and that it was so powerful that it affected Europe as well. And this is roughly what we refer to as the myth of the stupid savage because on the one hand, you know, there is actually quite a big literature on how European societies in the age of reason adopted various facets of material culture and cuisine from the new world. The whole idea of smoking tobacco in pipes, sitting around in salons, drinking chocolate. But nobody ever quite seems to bother asking whether they highly caveat what we've been doing today in preparation for this lecture. But nobody ever seems to bother asking whether they also listened to what the people who were smoking the pipes were actually talking about which turns out largely to be about constitutional law and various other things that found their way into European thought. There is of course the whole debate about the influence of the Iroquois on the US constitution. This is all later. We're talking about core enlightenment thought within European salons and coffee houses itself. And I was assuming that when they started looking into this that you'd have to tease out hints because they wouldn't admit that this is where they were getting it from. They would pretend they were getting it from classical sources but I was amazed to discover, no, they were just totally explicit. That they, no, we got this from Native Americans and then just nobody believes them. Right. Yeah, that's roughly it. And that's roughly it. I mean, we could sort of finish our dialogue there and sort of have a wider dialogue, just for example. A bit. Yeah.