Everything is Possible
David Graeber’s The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World
By John Foster
Reading David Graeber can be an exhilarating experience, although it helps to be in the right frame of mind.
By the time of his death in 2020, the anthropologist had achieved remarkable academic success and well-deserved prominence on the activist left.
Graeber’s writings combine the two. His work yielded remarkable insights, although the question of how well it ultimately worked remains open.
The most recent addition to David Graeber’s work is the posthumous The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World.
The title is an allusion to Graeber’s anarchism, the nexus point of which, with his scholarly work, was the premise that things might be other than they are.
As an avowed anarchist, one of the main points of struggle against the existing order is its claim that things are the way they are because they have to be.
The naturalisation of domination is one of the most important discursive strategies of the existing order.
One can find myriad instances of it without looking too hard. Sometimes, it is overt, as in the assertion that “there is no alternative” to the existing order, often associated with Margaret Thatcher.
However, it also operates at more fundamental levels, such as the widespread tendency to regard human nature as an unchanged and ineluctable feature of existence.
In one of his more lucid moments, Nietzsche termed this “the family failing all philosophers”.
In Human, All Too Human, he wrote, “All that the philosopher asserts about humanity is basically nothing more than testimony about the human being of a very restricted stretch of time.”
Graeber took this critique to heart. Much of his scholarly output was devoted to showing how different things were at other times and how this could serve as a store of ideas for reconfiguring the present.
Nowhere was this put to better use than in Debt: The First 5000 Years, the work that first brought David Graeber to public prominence.
In tracing the long history of the interrelationship of debt, money, and social structures, Graeber created a powerful new optic to view one of the key features of modern life. Debt had functioned differently in the past, serving as a force integrating societies rather than as an engine for economic development or a means of social restraint.
The articles in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World all constitute contributions of one sort or another to this project. They’re of the more popular variety that characterised his later output.
The writings showcase Graeber’s incredibly wide-ranging and fertile intellect, from political narratives to historical excurses to meditations on art, culture, and inequality.
One particularly fascinating piece is the transcript of David Graeber’s discussion with the economist Thomas Piketty at the École Normale Supérieure.
Although brief, it illustrates Graeber’s ability to talk at a high level in a range of academic registers beyond his home discipline of anthropology.
Much of the scintillating quality of Graeber’s writing came from his anthropological roots. Especially where it intersects with history, anthropology is a discipline that specialises in wringing meaning out of evidence that is more meagre than other fields of work require.
This was one of David Graeber’s great strengths but had fewer sound aspects. He could be peremptory at times.
In the essay that opens The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, Graeber critiques the concept of “the West” by asserting that the term “civilisation” can be used in one of two ways: either to designate an urbanised culture or to refer to possessing certain cultural (in the sense of intellectual) attributes.
One may wonder why this is the case. The term civilisation has been used in many different ways, some more or less sound. Graeber seems intent on using it in a deflationary way, arguing that its use (particularly in the discourse of “the clash of civilisations”) is insufficiently specific.
While the anthropologist certainly has a point that Huntington’s use of the term is deficient, his deflationist account seems to exclude much more supple usages of the term.
Fernand Braudel and other historians of the longue durée have employed the term in ways that meld religious, political, and various other factors. They have also considered that civilisations often lack clearly defined boundaries.
More concerning is David Graeber’s frequent use of the subjunction. In his historically oriented writings, he asserts that such and such may have been the case but then proceeds to argue as if he had shown that it was.
This is not surprising. Much of what Graeber discusses in The Dawn of Everything concerns civilisations, about which we have very little direct evidence other than what physical anthropology and archaeology can provide.
Still, he relies rather heavily on these surmises as the basis for a political project: the mutability of human institutions and cultures.
Graeber concedes that this is the case but then argues that historians’ unwillingness to make similar leaps results from their disciplinary prudishness rather than a reasonable concern for evidentiary soundness.
In Graeber’s essay on the West, he criticises historians for adopting a “line of reasoning that assumes that, if there is no direct evidence for something, it can be treated as if it does not exist. This seems especially inappropriate when dealing with early antiquity, an enormous landscape on which archaeology and linguistics can at best throw open a few tiny windows”.
Admittedly, one sympathises with the problems confronting a fellow scholar.
However, the fact remains that if we are going to make guesses based on evidence, which is very often of the most paltry kind, we should resist the temptation to behave as if this has created a solid foundation for a political edifice.
I offer as a caveat that I spent a long time in academic training as a historian, so perhaps there is an element of wounded amour propre in how this strikes me. Still, one cannot help but feel some annoyance reading the following passage in an interview also contained in this collection:
“I find that historians obviously do the most detailed, empirically informed work, but they have this rigorous refusal to talk about anything for which they do not have specific, concrete evidence, to the extent that you have to treat these things that you can’t prove as if they didn’t happen, which is insane.”
None of this should be taken as seriously impugning the quality or value of David Graeber’s work. He is generally pretty open about his moments of speculation.
Moreover, his political points are well-taken. Humans have organised themselves in various ways and often used consensus rather than majoritarianism to make group decisions.
One can debate how this is scalable from a village (or Occupy encampment) level to organising a modern, mass polity, but you cannot deny that Graeber was on the side of the angels.
Offering well-considered critiques of orthodox ways of thinking is always valuable, as is searching for ways to engage in minimally coercive politics.
Graeber’s partner, Nika Dubrovsky, notes in the introduction to this collection that a wealth of material, both published and in manuscript form, will be added to his oeuvre. One can only welcome this.
David Graeber evinced a politically engaged scholarship sorely lacking in the modern academe. His work should serve as an encouragement to others.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.