The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021)
David Graeber (1961-2020)
David Wengrow (1972)
692 pages
[How has humankind come] to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? (9)
Our dominant present-day governing regimes, whether dictatorships, monarchies, or liberal democracies, appear incapable of solving potentially existential threats such as growing inequality and worsening climate change – at best they tinker around the edges. Given this evident reality, triumphalist claims that Western liberal democracies in particular constitute the end of history in terms of ideological development can seem more a cause for concern than celebration. Unfortunately, the very inevitability implied in the end of history argument makes promoting or even considering fundamentally new and different governing institutions appear outrageous, generally eliciting reactions of incredulity, if not out-right derision.
In
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, however, anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow argue against such fatalistic rejection of the possibility of “reinventing” civilization. They claim that our pessimism on this point has arisen as a consequence of the propagation of an over-simplified view of human history, one implying that our social evolution has followed a teleologically inevitable path to our current political structures, and that no other path was, or is now, possible.
Through a deeply researched review of human pre-history, in which the pair explore recent findings as well as older sources they argue have been ignored, misrepresented, or misunderstood, an alternative, more expansive view appears, one of our distant ancestors as having actively engaged in the creation of their community institutions. Rather than having blindly followed a relatively narrow, ineluctable path to our current top-down governing regimes, they consciously experimented with a wide variety of social and political structures. This more accurate understanding of the past, Graeber and Wengrow conclude, offers the promise that fundamental changes to our present-day political systems remain possible.
The authors trace what they consider to be our current misunderstanding of human social evolution back to the focus of Enlightenment Philosophers on equality, a concept that had been little considered up to that point:
“one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.” (32)
(Pankaj Mishra makes a similar observation regarding the sudden appearance of the idea of equality during the Enlightenment in his essay
Age of Anger, while also noting that the philosophers of the period considered it as applying only to
men of means, not to everyone. When the masses nonetheless came to embrace the idea and make it into a rallying cry, frustration and anger set in, according to Mishra, as it became clear that broad equality for all was unattainable, leading to centuries of recurring revolutions and revolts. My review of Mishra’s book linked to at right.)
Graeber and Wengrow argue that Enlightenment views on equality were heavily influenced by reports that came back from Jesuits and others in the early post-Columbian Americas based on their observations of Indigenous American societies as well as their conversations and debates with members of these communities. The pair demonstrate that Indigenous American cultures had a long history of creating a variety of complex political structures, leading eventually to the development of institutions that accorded a significant level of personal liberty. While these broad freedoms scandalized the Jesuits, they appealed to Enlightenment philosophers and, according to the authors, informed their work. That the possibility of such influence has generally been ignored or dismissed by later researchers they attribute to a widespread assumption of a lack of political sophistication among pre-historic and non-Western peoples, an “insist[ance] that indigenous people could not possible have any real impact on history … a way of infantilizing non-Westerners.” (31)
Interest in the evolution of social equality, they argue, led Enlightenment philosophers to look back into human pre-history to understand if such equality had once existed, and if so, how it had been lost. In so doing, quite opposing views arose, though leading to a common conclusion. Thomas Hobbes, on one side, viewed “humans [as] being selfish creatures” and felt that “human society … is founded on the collective repression of our baser instincts” and so “hierarchy and domination, and cynical self-interest, have always been the basis of human society.” On the other extreme, Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that the earliest humans were “hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence … [and] were egalitarian,” but he came to a similar social result of hierarchy and domination, arguing that “the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ and then still more the rise of cities, … usher[ed] in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’.” Either way, Graeber and Wengrow note, we end up with “literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.” (2-3)
Out of these Enlightenment attempts to understand the origins of inequality came a view of human social evolution, the authors conclude, as having passed through
discrete stages of political organization – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – and … that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilization. (109-110).
In such an understanding, the top-down, centralized power of our current political institutions – again, whether autocratic or republican – arose as an inevitable outcome of the complexity engendered by the agricultural revolution. And, out of this, the crippling assumption developed that society could not have been and cannot now be significantly differently constituted, that such a possibility violates a kind of physical law of nature of the evolution of complex social systems.
Beyond informing what is possible for the future, however, Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate how academics and others continue to misinterpret the past through the lens of this complexity argument, discounting or ignoring findings that don’t fit. The tendency has been to consider members of hunter-gatherer societies globally as closer to apes than to modern humans, as bands and tribes that spent little time contemplating how to organize themselves, and that active, deep consideration of social and political organization only appeared with the rise of the Western tradition.
By looking back into the historical record without that assumption, Graeber and Wengrow ask: why wouldn’t humans in pre-historical and non-European indigenous cultures have “self-consciously” considered a variety of possibilities for organizing their societies, debated these options, and intentionally chosen particular social, political and economic frameworks?
Through an analysis of the political structures that developed in groups globally and their evolution over time in relation to their environment and the impact of their neighbors, Graeber and Wengrow make a convincing case that already among hunter-gatherers, humans developed complex societies that continually adapted to changes in conditions. They demonstrate that the political structures could differ radically from one place to another, and would continue to evolve even as communities became more complex, including those with sizes on the order of the city-states that famously developed with the advent of agriculture in Mesopotamia.
The pair describe, for example, a number of pre-agricultural societies that had seasonal structures, with a tribe coming together to a common location during one part of the year and dispersing as smaller bands otherwise. The details varied from one group to another – coming together in winter and dispersing in summer, or vice versa; coming together to hunt and dispersing otherwise, or vice versa – but, critically, the organizational structure could vary dramatically between seasons. In some societies, a tribe could in one season have characteristics of a present-day nation-state with a strong, centralized leadership authority, while in the other living in a communal political structure.
Perhaps more striking are examples – again globally – of pre-agricultural societies in which people came together to build large, labor-intensive monuments and other structures, without the apparent presence of the coercive central authority or leadership typically assumed to be necessary for such work. (The pair discuss how, given the general lack of written records, such a lack of elites can be inferred from the anthropological and archeological work at such sites.)
For Graeber and Wengrow, this broad variety of findings invalidates the oversimplified view that people in pre-historic societies had little political sophistication and debunks the assumption that inextricably links the complexity of political structures to the complexity of economic development. And they argue that this new understanding makes invalid our assumption of the inevitability and unchangeability of the top-down administrative structures of our present-day world, making a convincing case that we really do still have a viable opportunity to change them.
Despite the persuasive preponderance of evidence the authors present for the sophistication of early peoples, the pair’s arguments for “self-conscious” decision-making among early, pre-historic societies – that these groups actively debated over and settled on how to structure their societies – can seem a bit overplayed.
For example, they note that experimentation has demonstrated that “crop domestication could be achieved in as little as twenty to thirty years, or at most 200 years, using simple harvesting techniques,” (232) and yet “the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until … as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began.” (233) Presenting this as evidence that the story is not as simple as and then crops were domesticated, the pair note indications that many peoples globally seemed ambivalent about the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and proceeded through that transformation in fits and starts that were consciously considered.
But the argument for it having been “self-conscious” deliberation seems weak. One can acknowledge Graeber and Wengrow’s evidence that early peoples were not the naïve children of nature they are often portrayed to have been, that they were political actors in much the same way present-day peoples are, while at the same time not assuming that they were any more self-consciously engaged than we are today. Could it not be that these early peoples evolved their social structures over long periods of time, in incremental steps that were only loosely planned? Even today, any particular generation can have a few engaged political actors, while the majority simply accept whatever the existing system they are born into.
The authors in some ways themselves provide indications of this more prosaic, less intentional path to social evolution in the number of times they describe early societies that appear to have gone through radical political transformations as a result of violent overthrows of the existing order. This fundamental element of revolution bringing about change aligns with one of economist Thomas Piketty’s main arguments in
A Brief History of Equality, that
“If a historical movement toward more social, economic, and political equality has been possible over the last two centuries, that is above all thanks to a series of revolts, revolutions, and political movements of great scope. The same will be true in the future.” (226, Piketty) Perhaps, too, it was also true back into our pre-history. (My review of Piketty’s book linked to at right.)
That said, Graeber and Wengrow’s main point stands: their more careful and nuanced review of historical findings in anthropology and archaeology “suggest[s] that … the possibilities for human intervention [to change the social, economic and political structures of our civilization] are far greater than we’re inclined to think.” (524) It may be that their implication that it can be through self-conscious engagement in debate leading to reform, and may not necessarily require a revolution, is wishful thinking – that Piketty is right. But the critical point made in both of these thought-provoking works is that we should not feel “trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves.”
The way forward from the challenges of today may not be obvious; but do not give in to the arguments of those who benefit from the status quo – and the many, many who carry their water – that no alternative structures can be developed and transitioned to for governing ourselves.
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