January 13, 2022 61seemed incapable of making, the one
form of historic empathy she refused,
was with herself as a Jew.
Weil was going against the grain of
what she believed, at the deepest level,
humankind to be. She was also going
against the grain of her own experi-
ence, her feeling of eternal exile, of
being radically unloved and incapa-
ble of loving herself. In May 1942 she
wrote a long letter to the radical Do-
minican priest Father Perrin. It was her
“spiritual autobiography,” written from
the Aïn-Sebaa refugee camp in Casa-
blanca, where she was waiting for her
transit to New York. It was an outpour-
ing. Whenever anyone speaks to her
without brutality, she explained, she
thinks there must be some mistake. He
was the first person in her life who she
felt had not humiliated her. “You do
not have the same reasons as I have,”
she wrote, “to feel hatred and revulsion
towards me.” “I am the colour of a dead
leaf,” she wrote to him, “like certain
insects.” Weil’s inspiration is sourced
in revulsion, regardless of the love of
those who surrounded her, perhaps
above all that of her mother, whose loveSelma herself acknowledged had been
too much for her daughter to tolerate.
Such revealing moments are often
read as indicating a level of despair
or mental torment that disfigures her
judgment. I lost count of the epithets
that circulate freely in relation to Weil
in Zaretsky’s book, even though he is at
pains to temper and on occasion even
retract them: “morbidity,” “fetishiz-
ing,” “insufferable,” “inhuman,” “exas-
perating,” “the ravings of a lunatic,” or
“cursed by the inability to stop think-
ing”—that’s just a selection. (How
many of these would pass with refer-
ence to any male thinker?) Instead,
I would argue that it is her abjection,
and above all her willingness to know
and to accept it as her own, that propel
her to the heights of her ambition for
spiritual grace, mental freedom, and a
fairer world. I, for one, can only marvel
at the hill she had to climb.
A final clue as to how she managed it
is to be found in Weil’s way with words.
I always come away from her work
with a sense of her dexterity or even
playfulness, as if writing were the one
place where she could be most at easeand loving toward herself. By her own
account, she is a creature of analogy,
starting with perhaps the most vexed of
them all—between Hitler and ancient
Jerusalem, or Nazism and colonial-
ism. Analogies are deceptive (trom-
peuses), she wrote in 1939, but they
are her “sole guide.” Once you start
looking for them, they are everywhere
in her work—remember dogs walking
into fires, unconscious thoughts like
warriors concealed in wooden horses,
and God as a clinging female lover. To
which we could add a dog barking be-
side the prostrate body of his master
lying dead in the snow, to convey how
futile calling out dishonesty and in-
justice can feel. Or skin peeled from a
burning object it has stuck to, in order
to evoke the Frenchman forced to tear
his soul from his country after the 1940
fall of France. Or freedom of thought
with no real thinking, compared to “a
child without meat asking for salt.”
Nothing exists, Weil states, without its
analogy in numbers (her bond with her
brother was profound).
Visceral and unworldly, Weil’s
analogies push at the limits, giving voiceto something painful or something that
eludes understanding. God loves not
as I love, but as an emerald “is” green.
The fools in Shakespeare (notably the
one in King Lear), she writes to her
parents in one of her last letters, “are
the only characters to speak the truth”:
“Can’t you see the affinity, the essential
analogy between these fools and me?”
Analogy is a spiritual principle, since it
is only by means of “analogy and trans-
ference” that our attachment to partic-
ular human beings can be raised to the
level of universal love. Weil has often
been criticized for the unyielding tenac-
ity of her judgments, but this wrongly
tips the scales, ignoring the risks she
takes. At her best, Weil contains mul-
titudes; it is a miracle, she insists, that
thoughts are expressible given the myr-
iad combinations that they make. In
the end, spiritual, ethical, and political
generosity require you to reach, with-
out limits, beyond yourself. I can think
of no other writer in the Western canon
who pushes us so far off the edge of the
world while keeping us so firmly, and
resolutely, attached to the ground be-neath our feet. (^) Q
To the Editors:
In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber
and I present a new history of humanity,
based on the latest findings in our fields of
archaeology and anthropology. These find-
ings challenge long- held assumptions about
the origins of inequality, the nature of free-
dom and slavery, the roots of private prop-
erty, and the relationship between society
and the state. They present fresh opportu-
nities for a dialogue between archaeology,
anthropology, and philosophy, but Kwame
Anthony Appiah in his review of the book
prefers to challenge the empirical basis of
our work [NYR, December 16, 2021]. He
argues that we distort our sources in order
to present an artificially rosy picture of our
species’ past and its prospects for greater
freedom.
For example, Appiah is dissatisfied with
our account of the Ukrainian “mega- sites,”
huge prehistoric settlements that exhibit
no evidence for temples, palaces, central
administration, rich burials, or other signs
of social inequality. We note that popu-
lation levels are “estimated in the many
thousands per mega- site, and probably well
over 10,000 in some cases.” Appiah alleges
that these figures are inflated, based on a
“discredited maximalist model.” He cites
archaeologist John Chapman in support.
According to Appiah, Chapman argues that
the mega- sites were not cities at all, but sea-
sonally occupied festival grounds.
In fact, Chapman proposes three models
of habitation, ranging from seasonal to rel-
atively permanent habitation. He discounts
none of them and argues that—whichever
one adopts—the mega- sites can indeed be
considered “cities,” and strikingly egalitar-
ian ones at that. Far from adopting a “max-
imalist model,” the population figures we
give in The Dawn of Everything are more
conservative than those offered by some
other archaeologists, which range above
40,000. Appiah has misrepresented our
position, and Chapman’s, to create a false
impression.
Elsewhere, Appiah alleges that we mis-
characterize the work of Jonathan Mark
Kenoyer, an expert on the Bronze Age civ-
ilization of the Indus Valley. According to
Appiah, Kenoyer argues that the ancient
site of Mohenjo- daro was “likely governed
as a city- state,” something we dispute in
The Dawn of Everything. We are hardly
the first to do so. Another expert, Gregory
Possehl, argued that the Indus cities were
organized on more egalitarian lines, and the
most recent scholarship comes down firmly
on his side. We don’t cite Kenoyer for his
views on political organization, but for
his work on urban craft specialization. So
what is Appiah’s objection? Is he saying we
cannot cite Kenoyer’s insights on any one
aspect of Indus archaeology without sub-
scribing to all his other views as well? Does
Appiah’s own citation of Alvin Goldman
on causal theories of knowledge grant us
license to assume he agrees with Goldman
on social epistemology?
With regard to Mesopotamia, Appiah
accuses us of drifting, in the space of a
hundred pages, from a negative character-
ization of Uruk’s early phases—as lacking
evidence for monarchy—to their positive
characterization as examples of collective
self- rule. He forgets the ground we cover
in those pages, which review diligent work
on the topic by Assyriologists, ancient his-
torians, and archaeologists. What it shows
is that, even in later periods of monarchy
and empire, Mesopotamian cities exhibited
a remarkable degree of self- governance
through neighborhood assemblies, local
wards, and councils. Where does Appiah
think those forms of urban self- government
came from? Would he have us believe the
inhabitants of the earliest cities had no
knowledge of them?
With reference to Teotihuacan, in the
Valley of Mexico, Appiah suggests that
few archaeologists would countenance the
views of art historian Esther Pasztory about
the city’s political structure. But the oppo-
site is true. The latest archaeological studies
vindicate Pasztory’s view that Teotihuaca-
nos rejected dynastic personality cults and
built a society where wealth, resources, and
high- quality housing were distributed in a
more equal fashion. We could have listed
every dissenting opinion, but then—as we
say in the book—we are trying to strike a
balance:
Had we tried to outline or refute every
existing interpretation of the material
we covered, this book would have been
two or three times the size, and likely
would have left the reader with a sense
that the authors are engaged in a con-
stant battle with demons who were in
fact two inches tall.
Appiah presents as novel our “claim” that
the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, in Turkey,
lacks evidence of central authority. In fact,
this is the consensus among archaeologists.
Ian Hodder, longtime site director, charac-
terizes Çatalhöyük as a fiercely egalitarian
community that, despite its large size, held
inequality at bay for a thousand years. If
our agenda—as Appiah insists—were to
find some “primordial utopia” among our
Neolithic ancestors, surely we would have
embraced this conclusion. In fact, we ques-
tion it, pointing out the likelihood of sea-
sonal variations in the social organization
of the town. According to Appiah, we see
in Çatalhöyük a “gynocentric society.” Not
so. We draw attention to the importance
of women’s knowledge and roles in these
early Neolithic societies, but that’s hardly
the same thing.
Most of the archaeological ground cov-
ered in The Dawn of Everything lies be-
yond the scope of Appiah’s review, as does
nearly all of the anthropology. His crit-
icisms of our intellectual history rest on a
surprisingly naive and unfounded expecta-
tion that what academics write will neces-
sarily mirror their personal politics. “Learn
to respect, and love, and be intimate with,
a man of a far distant stage of life, and you
see then how very deep down is the wide
platform of elemental feeling and thought
which you have together in common,”
wrote the archaeologist Flinders Petrie in
- Petrie was also a fervent eugenicist.
Appiah claims we have a thesis, that Eu-
ropeans, before the Enlightenment, lacked
the concept of social (in)equality. In fact,
we give a whole series of examples to the
contrary. The question we ask is more spe-
cific: How did a consensus form among Eu-
ropean intellectuals that human beings—in-
nocent of civilization—lived in “societies of
equals,” such that it made sense to inquire
as to “the origins of inequality”? Appiah’s
evocations of Gregory the Great, Thomas
Müntzer, Montaigne, and the rest are be-
side the point, because—while all express
powerful sentiments of equality and in-
equality—none root those ideas in a search
for its origins.
The notion of a primordial society of
equals may have pre- Enlightenment roots
in Europe, notably in the constitutional
antiquarianism of the seventeenth century
(brilliantly discussed by J. G. A. Pocock in
The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal
Law). Jurists appealed to the customary
freedoms of a preliterate past as a legal foil
to royal absolutism. But Appiah makes no
mention of that, or whether he thinks such
juridical concepts were already extended
beyond specific “peoples” and “nations”
to humankind in general. Perhaps because
he knows the answer. They were not, or at
least, not yet.
Rousseau’s answer, in 1754, to the novel
question “What is the origin of inequality?”
was, we argue, a synthesis between ideals of
human freedom—shaped by Native Ameri-
can critiques of European society—and the
concept of history as stages of technological
progress, which was then gaining ground
through the writings of A. R. J. Turgot. The
just- so story told by Rousseau gave us our
modern concept of civilization, whereby
each step toward cultural advancement—
the invention of agriculture, metallurgy,
writing, cities, and the arts, even philoso-
phy itself—came with a loss of freedoms.
It’s a familiar and deeply ambivalent story.
As we show in The Dawn of Everything, it
is also at odds with the facts of modern ar-
chaeology and anthropology.
Appiah finds our reading of Rousseau’s
Discourse on Inequality “perplexing.”
How, he asks, could Rousseau promulgate
the indigenous critique of European soci-
ety—with its passionate advocacy of free-
dom—and smother it at the same time? But
surely this is precisely why myths endure.
As Claude Lévi- Strauss observed, myths
take root in the human imagination by evok-
ing profound oppositions (“Man is born free
and everywhere he is in chains”) and then
work to mediate those contradictions. “We
will not find our future in our past,” writes
Appiah. But myths are not just about our
past. They work in the present to circum-
scribe our understanding of human possibil-
ities. In The Dawn of Everything, we show
that conventional tellings of the broad sweep
of human history are one such myth, incul-
cating a profound sense of pessimism about
the prospects for change in our societies.
Archaeology, like all historical recon-
struction, is partly a work of imagination. ButThe Roots of Inequality: An Exchange
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