Emile, I’m an old (73) environmentalist, biologist, and natural born Luddite-sympathizer… I always read yr stuff. It always seems right on. Always make me feel shitty. But I enjoy it anyway. Kemp’s book sounds quite good and I thank you for reviewing it. So much of this entire mess was foreseeable, and foreseen by many of my heroes… which is somehow a comfort. It’s really amazing we’ve gotten this far. I was sure it was all about to collapse when I read McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy in… 1975? I suppose it’s all kind of exciting…
Wonderful shout-out and critique, thank you. Goliath's Curse is a deep and astonishing read (astonishing because it skillfully demolishes canonical ideas of civilization and progress through the use of tons of historical data and carefully thought-out arguments).
One key feature of "Goliaths" that's also well worth mentioning imo is the emergence of lootable resources (stored surpluses of seeds, lifestock, metals, etc.) as a result of humanity transitioning to agriculture and then industrialization. Today's global economic system is almost entirely built around incidental and engineered scarcity of such resources to maintain harmful hierarchies based on status and power.
Reclaiming these resources with more direct forms of democracy (such as citizen councils and selection of individuals via sortition rather than elections, which gobble up a lot of resources and only fuel cult of personalities and partisan politics) is the way to go.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this book. One thing standing out to me is how his arguments against the Hobbesian stance puts him in the Rousseau camp, especially the ideas which seem to imply society corrupts the natural goodness of people. He even has elements of the noble savage: Ethnographies "are replete with reflections on how carefree and happy they [Nomadic tribes] are, with close-knit communities and a propensity to spontaneously burst into song and dance." Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with the Rousseau position (asides from the risk of overly romanticizing things) but there have been arguments made against it (authority must be located somewhere; as you mention in the article, people who act aggressive are shunned; this is a power that has always been abused, such as shunning people who step out of the norm to the point of exclusion, even if they weren't aggressive). I need to read his book and see how he defends such a position.
Regardless, I am in full agreement with increasing democratic involvement and decision making.
Thanks, Emile, for introducing me to this book (I just bought a copy!). I see it was published last September but hadn't heard of it.
Regarding the Dark Triad and your comment that, "I’d never thought about it this way, but it’s so true! States behave exactly like narcissistic, Machiavellian psychopaths," you should definitely check out The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis by Greg Elliott (published last month). He argues that the "symbolic" systems of modern civilization (corporations, courts, banks, bureaucracies, big tech, etc.) not only reward psychopathic and Machiavellian personalities but, at an institutional level, take on a psychopathic character that self-perpetuates regardless of who is in charge. He then shows how this makes collapse nearly inevitable. You can check out a summary of the argument here
Very reminiscent of Angela Saini’s writing on patriarchy a few years back.
Agree that patriarchy and “goliaths” are pretty zero sum. However, any description of these civilisations needs to account for their arrival and eventual dominance. I’ve wondered whether a certain density threshold for human population growth tips Goliaths and patriarchies into being more competitive than, and eventually incompatible with the coexistence of, egalitarian civilisations.
The reason being that high rates of disease (entailed by population growth, density and interconnectedness) force very high birth rates evolutionarily, higher than pre-agriculture rates, which removes women from the sphere of decision making while also shortening everyone’s lives and suppressing older human-species-specific modes of organisation.
Saini said that Neolithic birth rates were a top-down innovation of patriarchy, which desired large armies. I don’t think all the pronatalist will in the world can force extra fitness. Selection, via selection pressures, must take care of that. Not that I’m saying patriarchy is a multi-level selected state of societies. But that the conditions that favour it, and favour seclusion of women, misogynistic religions, rigid hierarchy etc etc, are a result of incipient hypernatalism, a state that arises in multiple regions in step with agriculture and population size, density, interconnectedness. The pace at which novel plague causing pathogens become pandemic accelerates with these factors (size, density, interconnectedness) particularly during what I’ve seen called “the exponential age”
Thanks for reading and writing about this work.
Another I’d highly recommend to you is The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire by Henry Gee, for a species-specific, deep-time palaeontology informed and philosophical overview. Unfortunately he veers out of his lane in the last chapter or so and flirts with longtermism (space colonisation lol) but all in a playful humorous spirit so can’t fault him too much
Émile said in his review, "Parents fear that their children will inherit a planet much less livable than the one they grew up in. If there were a popular vote, the US would have taken action to mitigate the problem years ago. But elites have lobbied the government not to act, while spreading climate propaganda to the masses."
That seems to be faulty reasoning. Despite elites' propaganda, that passage says a popular vote would have led to climate action. Since our governmental system lacks that test, instead the problem is that the populace has failed to clearly signal to politicians that it would ACCEPT *necessary,* *fairly-applied* constraints on consumption (especially of fossil fuels). There has been no action in the climate-action movement to build, collate and drive home with politicians (and the media) a strong signal for such ACCCEPTANCE of needed constraints. (And why constraints?—because developing clean energy is, alone, insufficient.)
Even given the power of the oligarchs (Goliaths), striving for a strong signal of the public's acceptance of constraints would focus discourse on a hopeful path forward.
Emile, I’m an old (73) environmentalist, biologist, and natural born Luddite-sympathizer… I always read yr stuff. It always seems right on. Always make me feel shitty. But I enjoy it anyway. Kemp’s book sounds quite good and I thank you for reviewing it. So much of this entire mess was foreseeable, and foreseen by many of my heroes… which is somehow a comfort. It’s really amazing we’ve gotten this far. I was sure it was all about to collapse when I read McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy in… 1975? I suppose it’s all kind of exciting…
Wonderful shout-out and critique, thank you. Goliath's Curse is a deep and astonishing read (astonishing because it skillfully demolishes canonical ideas of civilization and progress through the use of tons of historical data and carefully thought-out arguments).
One key feature of "Goliaths" that's also well worth mentioning imo is the emergence of lootable resources (stored surpluses of seeds, lifestock, metals, etc.) as a result of humanity transitioning to agriculture and then industrialization. Today's global economic system is almost entirely built around incidental and engineered scarcity of such resources to maintain harmful hierarchies based on status and power.
Reclaiming these resources with more direct forms of democracy (such as citizen councils and selection of individuals via sortition rather than elections, which gobble up a lot of resources and only fuel cult of personalities and partisan politics) is the way to go.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this book. One thing standing out to me is how his arguments against the Hobbesian stance puts him in the Rousseau camp, especially the ideas which seem to imply society corrupts the natural goodness of people. He even has elements of the noble savage: Ethnographies "are replete with reflections on how carefree and happy they [Nomadic tribes] are, with close-knit communities and a propensity to spontaneously burst into song and dance." Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with the Rousseau position (asides from the risk of overly romanticizing things) but there have been arguments made against it (authority must be located somewhere; as you mention in the article, people who act aggressive are shunned; this is a power that has always been abused, such as shunning people who step out of the norm to the point of exclusion, even if they weren't aggressive). I need to read his book and see how he defends such a position.
Regardless, I am in full agreement with increasing democratic involvement and decision making.
Thanks, Emile, for introducing me to this book (I just bought a copy!). I see it was published last September but hadn't heard of it.
Regarding the Dark Triad and your comment that, "I’d never thought about it this way, but it’s so true! States behave exactly like narcissistic, Machiavellian psychopaths," you should definitely check out The Psychopathic Selection Hypothesis by Greg Elliott (published last month). He argues that the "symbolic" systems of modern civilization (corporations, courts, banks, bureaucracies, big tech, etc.) not only reward psychopathic and Machiavellian personalities but, at an institutional level, take on a psychopathic character that self-perpetuates regardless of who is in charge. He then shows how this makes collapse nearly inevitable. You can check out a summary of the argument here
https://gregelliott2000.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-selection-hypothesis-1fc
Very reminiscent of Angela Saini’s writing on patriarchy a few years back.
Agree that patriarchy and “goliaths” are pretty zero sum. However, any description of these civilisations needs to account for their arrival and eventual dominance. I’ve wondered whether a certain density threshold for human population growth tips Goliaths and patriarchies into being more competitive than, and eventually incompatible with the coexistence of, egalitarian civilisations.
The reason being that high rates of disease (entailed by population growth, density and interconnectedness) force very high birth rates evolutionarily, higher than pre-agriculture rates, which removes women from the sphere of decision making while also shortening everyone’s lives and suppressing older human-species-specific modes of organisation.
Saini said that Neolithic birth rates were a top-down innovation of patriarchy, which desired large armies. I don’t think all the pronatalist will in the world can force extra fitness. Selection, via selection pressures, must take care of that. Not that I’m saying patriarchy is a multi-level selected state of societies. But that the conditions that favour it, and favour seclusion of women, misogynistic religions, rigid hierarchy etc etc, are a result of incipient hypernatalism, a state that arises in multiple regions in step with agriculture and population size, density, interconnectedness. The pace at which novel plague causing pathogens become pandemic accelerates with these factors (size, density, interconnectedness) particularly during what I’ve seen called “the exponential age”
Thanks for reading and writing about this work.
Another I’d highly recommend to you is The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire by Henry Gee, for a species-specific, deep-time palaeontology informed and philosophical overview. Unfortunately he veers out of his lane in the last chapter or so and flirts with longtermism (space colonisation lol) but all in a playful humorous spirit so can’t fault him too much
Émile said in his review, "Parents fear that their children will inherit a planet much less livable than the one they grew up in. If there were a popular vote, the US would have taken action to mitigate the problem years ago. But elites have lobbied the government not to act, while spreading climate propaganda to the masses."
That seems to be faulty reasoning. Despite elites' propaganda, that passage says a popular vote would have led to climate action. Since our governmental system lacks that test, instead the problem is that the populace has failed to clearly signal to politicians that it would ACCEPT *necessary,* *fairly-applied* constraints on consumption (especially of fossil fuels). There has been no action in the climate-action movement to build, collate and drive home with politicians (and the media) a strong signal for such ACCCEPTANCE of needed constraints. (And why constraints?—because developing clean energy is, alone, insufficient.)
Even given the power of the oligarchs (Goliaths), striving for a strong signal of the public's acceptance of constraints would focus discourse on a hopeful path forward.