#ahal

I'm currently reading Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! (sic) as its been on my to-read list for a decade at this point. I'm giving it an honest read and its pretty much what I expected.

The book is incredibly superstitious and justifies it with a weak anti-western framework that's part contrarian ethnographer, part rainbow warrior hippie. The book is constantly detracting from itself when it does things like refer to when humans lived primarily as nomadic hunter-gatheres as a golden age. The irony of using such an anthropocentric measure of human achievement to describe what they see as humans living uncivilized seems to be totally lost on them. I haven't read any rousseau but from what I've heard this is his influence (he was mentioned at the start of the book.) There's something so frustrating about these environmentalist types that can clearly see the root of the problem but are so enamored with myths and stupid narratives to the point inefficacy. The book is starving for a real anti-humanist, anti-western framework and instead uses the noble savage as a blunt instrument to bash away at some pretty serious foundations of civilization. The right target, the wrong tool.

All that said, the way they speak of empire -of leviathan- is very cool and is very much the draw of the book. The colorful language is at its best when describing leviathan, these dead, mechanical war machines meant to represent and describe hierarchical societies/empire/domination. I like how the book stresses that this wasn't always the case, that the reign of leviathan is something relatively new in the history of humans. Whether or not humans lived in a primitive golden age, it can't be denied that humans once lived in a stateless world, than some stuff happened, and now virtually all humans live within state societies. It had to start somewhere and the process was bloody.