I don’t quite get how this would be a fundamental right. You can’t generally just say “no” when you join the army and receive an order. And what if a judge orders you to look after your children, can you just say “no”?
Only because you likely don’t consider “go back where you come from” or “Blacks should know their place” to be viable threats to the same degree, when they very much are.
I do. As soon as he started talking about forced conversions, he should have been nicked.
A right I absolutely do not have. My freedom to speak is unquestionably limited. According to you, that means I couldn’t advocate as I do. Yet here we are. So I don’t see the point of delineating a right I don’t have, have never had, as somehow essential to my life when it clearly, demonstrably doesn’t impact me for its lack.
The idea is that you should very much be able to. That “armies” as we have them today would not likely exist when it is commanders’ personal charisma and social influence holding them together.
You would be able to refuse, yes.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re free from social consequences for your actions - in the societies referenced, all of that was very much still in play. What was not, was anyone with the real authority (read: application of violence) to force you to comply.
OK I see, thanks
No I don’t see those as direct or viable threats in the same degree. People should not be charged by the state for saying those things.
Without that guarantee of free speech then indeed, your ability to advocate on behalf on certain views is at the whim of your government. I’m not sure if you are saying that is a good or a bad thing.
You understand that you’re speaking from a position of privilege as to what is and isn’t threatening, and to what degree, right? That, say, a Windrush deportee, hearing such speech today, might feel different about it.
It’s actually at the whim of greater society, because if I make speech outside to the limits but no-one reports me, what the government thinks doesn’t enter into it.
In as much as it constrains the right of people to advocate for bad things, it’s a great thing.
In as much as it constrained my ability to advocate for good things in the past, it was a terrible thing.
I’ve not actively been constrained, even during Apartheid, so on balance, it’s been a good thing.
I spoke about a situation that was directly threatening to me and still held the same opinion.
As far as free speech goes I’m only talking about the degree to which government either restricts or compels my speech. Societal reaction to what has been said and the ramifications of that are a separate issue.
Gotcha, Free speech is good as long as it is speech that you want to have for yourself and that you agree with.
Which is not free speech at all.
I don’t call it free speech, so that’s just a strawman.
Speech I agree with is good, speech I disagree with is … fine too. Advocate for late-stage capitalism or open market medical care systems or the Duckworth-Lewis method all you want, no skin off my nose.
Hate speech is more than just “speech I disagree with”
“Rights” need to be balanced by “Responsibility”. Before we exercise something we consider a “Right”, we need to think about how it will affect the rights of others as individuals and with a view to social responsibility. It’s quite obvious that our unbridled right to “bear arms” is having a very negative effect on our society as a whole unless, of course, you consider the wholesale slaughter of America’s children to be “acceptable loses”.
If we do that, then we will in essence control ourselves and not need to be controlled by the police or our government. It’s quite obvious from the direction in which our society is heading that we are moving farther and farther away from that ideal rather than towards it.
Authority is freedom is responsibility. Different sides of the same coin. If you have the ability to do (or not do) something, you are responsible for the decision that you make, you’re free to implement that choice, you are the one with the authority, whether recognized by others or not.
Admittedly that’s not what most people mean by “responsibility”. The word typically gets used to mean “doing the mature appropriate thing when you have the freedom to choose what to do” and that in turn often boils down to “doing what I would have done if it were me” or “doing what I think you oughta do in that situation”. And anything else is “irresponsible”.
Overall I agree with you though. We’re lurching towards a coercive and totalitarian system and people are being sold on the idea that we need protection from each other. Or rather from that faction over there because they are socially dangerous folks. And we’re pulling away from compassionate concern for the effects of our actions on others, especially if the others in question are highly other and not like us in viewpoint and identity and behavior.
You need for that both a right to leave, and to have somewhere to go – as given in the OP and the book, to be accepted somewhere else; or at least to have a reasonable chance to be able to make an acceptable life somewhere else.
This, if there were a way to make it functional, would at least drastically reduce the impact of a lot of bad laws. Make the laws in a given municipality bad enough, and nobody will hang around – or the only people who hang around will be the ones who think they’re good laws; in which case, you’ll have people living a whole lot of different ways in different places, and mostly happy with it.
Is all property the same?
I can imagine a society that levies taxes on fungible income and/or wealth but is forbidden to take primary residences, or items that a person needs to live in reasonably good health. Writing the details of that could be tricky, admittedly.
Some societies own land communally.
Yeah. I think we’re rather odd, in an evolutionary sense and probably in the prehistory of our own species, in allowing people to lay claim to places they’ve never been, or have been only rarely, and could perfectly well survive comfortably without; often to the exclusion of property rights for people who are living there and taking their sustenance from the place.
– I don’t think any society has absolute freedom of speech. Sorting out what speech is disallowed is a lot harder. If truthful criticism isn’t allowed, that leads to obvious problems – but who’s to sort out what’s truthful? If criticism that isn’t truthful is allowed, that can lead to obvious problems – but what if it turns out to be truthful after all? And what about the cases where there isn’t, and may never be, a way to sort out what’s the accurate information?
Depends on the society. In some you’d need access to the talking stick; but it wouldn’t be your property. Whether it’s owning a lot of property that gets you enough respect to be listened to can also vary by society; and within groups within a wider society.
If you’re talking about something like our current society, that’s often, though not always, true in practice. But to the extent that it’s true: if most property rights are allowed to accumulate to a small number of people, only a small number of people will have a meaningful freedom of speech.
Society can set up ways for those without property to have access to community discussions.
Oh yeah. The details of that become a huge problem.
People don’t even agree on what “fair” means.
The book was also talking about pre-history, and about a very wide range of cultures. – as puzzlegal said.
You seemed to be saying specifically within written history. Maybe we misunderstood that.
What was actually going on during prehistory in various places is very difficult to determine. The book addresses some of that, including discussing some of what available evidence there is, and what evidence is becoming newly available as assorted techniques for discovering (or rediscovering} it improve. As @puzzlegal says, there’s quite a lot of book there.
No, I assume the book you are talking about runs from the first humans up to the first historical civilisations. I’m interested in the evidence being put forward to back up the claim that people had rights in that period that we mostly don’t have now i.e.
The evidence is that they did those things, and we can’t.
Graeber and Wengrow mostly use Native American societies as exemplars for the freedoms. Read the book for the specific examples they use.
I’m for freedom of speech because I don’t trust any entity that is given power to restrict it. There are negatives to freedom of speech, but IMO they are outweighed by the negatives of giving some entity (any entity made up of or administered by humans) the power to restrict speech by force.
That’s an assertion. The evidence would be more relevant to a debate.
Which, even if the evidence is solid, would be evidence for the behaviour of one type of society, not evidence of pre-historical behaviour world-wide.
Just as looking at the prevalence of freedoms in the modern world would need to take in more than just the modern USA or China or the middle east.
I’m not going to do people’s work for them. If you make the claim you should back it up. If it is in the book then quote the book.
Agreed, Popper warned of the paradox of tolerating the intolerance of others and people are always quick to quote him when they fancy cracking down on ideas they don’t like. What they are less likely to quote is the bit where he also says
I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Which is a fairly reasonable path to take.
They gave a lot of disparate examples.
There is a lot of evidence that Native Americans were organized into …I forget the word, but groups with the same totem animal, and if you walked across the country, you could join another group with the same totem animal and claim “family” and be accepted and supported, even if you didn’t speak the same language.
There were a bunch of civilizations where there was a supreme leader who could order anyone killed, or take anyone’s stuff, but only in immediate proximity. And lots of evidence that those leader’s people mostly stayed away.
There was a funny story of a ruler who, as an assertion of his power, had his people build a tower around him. Then he told them to let him out, and they decided they didn’t want to.
There have always been people killing each other and forcing things from each other, but a lot of it has been face-to-face and very local. They offer a huge number of anecdotes about ancient peoples simply refusing to obey the ruler, or packing up and leaving. They also point out that people who are in the habit of obeying the local authority are a lot easier to conquer than those who aren’t, as it doesn’t make that much difference who gets your taxes. And point out that some of the South American areas that tend to kill federal agents seem to have had that habit since well before the Europeans showed up.
I wish. 
It would have to be a really long quote; too long for either the thread or fair use. @puzzlegal gives a fairly good overall description.
The evidence is in the book. Read the book.
They cover several, actually, globally and over various time periods. They just use the Native Americans the most. They don’t use just one Native American society, either, they use several scattered, variant cultures as examples. But they also use the Nuer in Africa, etc.
Well, yeah, I would hope it would include at least one free society to counterbalance those 3 unfree ones.
That’s not how citations work. I’ve cited Graeber&Wengrow. The onus is on you to do the reading.
You think there’s one pithy quote where they say “This society, X, had these 3 fundamental freedoms” all in one sentence? It’s not that kind of book.
The book uses the term “clan” while acknowledging that what existed in North America is fundamentally different from kinship-based clans. They also use the term “moiety” when referring to the similar Australian system and some NA groups, but that only applies to a two-clan split.