Graves’ thesis was...that greatness was a pathology; “great men” were essentially destroyers and “great” poets not much better (his arch-enemies were Virgil, Milton and Pound), that all real poetry is and has always been a mythic celebration of an ancient Supreme Goddess, of whom Frazer had only confused glimmerings, and whose matriarchal followers were conquered and destroyed by Hitler’s beloved Aryan hoards when they emerged from the Ukrainian Steppes in the early Bronze Age...
#matriarchy
--David Graeber, "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology"
In one essay, written in the ‘50s, Graves invents the distinction between “reasonableness” and “rationality” later made famous by Stephen Toulmin in the ‘80s, but he does it in the course of an essay written to defend Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, from her reputation as an atrocious nag. (His argument: imagine you had been married to Socrates.)
Brown was an admirer of the famous anarchist Prince (he of course renounced his title), Peter Kropotkin, arctic explorer and naturalist, who had thrown social Darwinism into a tumult from which it still has never quite recovered by documenting how the most successful species tend to be those which cooperate the most effectively.
Graeber all about the #zingers
