Wishful thinking and prejudice that today is the worst we’ve ever been is what drives a lot of these people, and their scholarship reflects this face. I think that a hugely beneficial thing for the world would be to break up the ivory towers of academia, and ensure that the people who live in them have to come out and experience real life, before they start to render advice and teach others. Same with politicians–You shouldn’t be able to make a career at that until you’ve done something else successfully in life. The carpet-bagging career political operatives like Jay Inslee are a plague upon us all, and should never have been allowed to happen. No success doing other things? No political authority should ever be placed in your hands.

It’s like Marx: What the hell did that lunatic ever actually do in life? What was he, other than a political theorist and an overall parasite? Can someone point to a lasting legacy, a successful company that he ran, or anything else besides his lurid fantasies of class murder? Did he ever even run so much as a fan club, or a political party? What were his practical achievements in life? What performance-based evidence is there that anything he ever did was successful, outside of raising up revolutionaries?

I don’t recall exactly when the wind shifted, but probably not much before the 1990s at least in what was getting out to a general audience.

The pattern has also recurred with neolithic Europe and the Middle East. It occurred in the past wrt aboriginal cultures elsewhere in the Americas and in Australia.

I believe the professions are still holding out that the pre-Indian civilization of the Indus valley was still entirely peaceful with no evidence for armies or warfare among its members or with neighbours. But based on the track record when studying these other civilizations, I expect this thesis to crumble as well.

Depending on what tribe American Indians at war most of the time. Such is my impression.