Всичкология - 2

В края на предишния век физиците решават, че вече са близо до някаква фундаментална теория, която би обяснявала известните природни взаимодействия. Те са четири на брой (гравитация, електромагнетизм, слабо, силно) и изглежда са достатъчни за да бъде обяснено всяко наблюдавано явление. Подобно виждане скептиците подигравателно наричат „теория на всичко“. Долавяйки или не иронията, популярните медии подхващат термина и така се стига до появата на книги със заглавия Еволюция на всичко (Ridley: 2015) или сега Зората на всичко (Graeber, Wengrow: 2021) - доколкото е съвсем нова, за нея съвсем накратко може да се каже, че тя съдържа малко теория, много факти и няколко запомнящи се фрази, които са цитирани тук.

We will be trying to write a different kind of history, which will also require a different understanding of ‘civilization’. /87

to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself./434

In developing the scientific means to know our own past, we have exposed the mythical substructure of our ‘social science’ – what once appeared unassailable axioms, the stable points around which our selfknowledge is organized, are scattering like mice./526

Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which human beings are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control./501

As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence./430

it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms./141

What until now has passed for civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre./436

How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing? /125