What Is Transcendental Social Behavior?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Even though he is now very frail and perhaps even incapable of speaking, people still behave towards him with enormous respect. In other words, this is not transactional behaviour. Theyare no longer behaving on the evidence of his capacities - which by now show that he is not a powerful man at all. He is a very vulnerable man. And if you think about it, that's an absolutely cor component of all human social behavior. People who live and die in their weak, flesh and blood bodies step into these transcendental roles where the rules are readily already predecided. You know, as karl mark said, we can make choices, but not always under conditions of our own making.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike — either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

In this conversation, based on the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, Shermer speaks with professor of comparative archaeology, David Wengrow, about his pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology that fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society.