There is a special kind of book

I’ve been reading Kirkpatrick Sale’s After Eden.

It’s one of a number of books of a particular kind . . .

Since Darwin there has been interest in the question: How did homo sapiens evolve from the line of great apes? Since the advent of anthropology there has been interest in the question: How did modernity (having the characteristics of statism, class division, private property, institutionalized religion, complex division of labor) evolve from aboriginal culture?

At first the latter inquiry flowed from a perspective of “progressive development.” The most famous book of that kind was Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. It extolled the “Great Leap” from primitivism into developmentalism.

A revisionist type of perspective in our time has resulted in a new kind of inquiry. It considers the transition to the New Ways problematic. It says we very much need to analyze what went wrong when there was a dramatic turn just prior to or just after the Neolithic Revolution.

Books of that genre include Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan, Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, Elman Service’s Origins of the State and Civilization. They embody a very new and very important perspective: What happened? Why have things become so fucked up? How can we un-do the damage and understand its genesis so that we never go in this aberrant direction again?