Book Review: The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber and David Wengrow spent ten years writing The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Everything. The book is based on a dialogue between them about human history. The breakthrough came when they moved away from European thinkers and focused on the perspectives of indigenous thinkers. The prevalent view of history has almost nothing to do with facts. The process was far messier, and far less unidirectional, than anyone has guessed.

The ultimate question of human history is our equal opportunity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. Our future depends on our capacity to create something new together. A society in which wealth cannot be freely transformed to power, where people’s lives have intrinsic value. We need to rediscover the freedoms that make us human.

Graeber and Wengrow treat our ancestors as people who are imaginative, intelligent, and innovative. They find that the realities of early human life were far more complex than many theorists have assumed. The results is an enriched human history.

Graeber and Wengrow argue that indigenous Americans developed a very strong critical view of their invaders’ lack of freedom. Everything in the Great Lakes region operated to ensure that no one’s will would be sugjugated to that of anyone else.

Native Americans who observed the French society from up close noticed how wealth was converted into power over others, how power over things was directly translated to power over other human beings. In today’s world, a very small percentage of the population control the fates of almost everyone else, and they do it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. To understand how this situation came about we need to approach the evidence of the human past with an open mind.

Human beings have self-consciously experimented with different social possibilities from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things. Human societies, who lived mainly from wild resources, were not confined to small bands before the advent of farming. Agriculture, in turn, didn’t mean the inception of private property. Many were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. A surprising number of the earliest cities had no need of authoritarian rulers, ambitious politicians, or bossy administrators.

Archaeological evidence that is piling up suggest that our remote ancestors moved back and forth between alternative social arrangements. They allowed the rise of authoritarian structures during certain seasons and then dismantled them. They built monuments and closed them down.

The social order was highly flexible. It made it possible to step outside any given structure and reflect. Our early ancestors might have been considerably more politically self-conscious than we are today. They self-consciously organized themselves in such a way that arbitrary power and domination could not emerge.

The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on farming took 3 000 years. People switched between modes of food production, much like they switched between their social structures. The first farmers were reluctant farmers. They understood the implications of agriculture and avoided any major commitment to it.

Settlements with tens of thousands of inhabitants make their first appearance 6 000 years ago. First they appeared in isolation and then they multiplied on almost every continent. The particular mode of production depended largely on where the cities happened to be. Almost everywhere we find built spaces in harmonious and beautiful patterns.

There were institutions which ensured that people had a significant hand in government. Early Buddhist communities where meticulous in their demands for all to gather together in order to reach unanimous decisions. Entire cities were governed in the same way. Democracy, as we have come to know it, is a game of winners and losers. The workings of a council, or an assembly, in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems, was very different.

Archaeological evidence shows that this was a surprisingly common pattern. A dramatic increase in the scale of organized human settlement didn’t result in a concentration of wealth or power in the hands of a ruling elite. Inhabitants enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved in any period of urban history, including our own. The claim that there is a connection between the origin of cities and the rise of stratified states looks increasingly hollow.

Graeber and Wengrow propose that control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma are three possible bases of social power. Access to violence, information, and charisma enables social domination. Usually, they all coexist to some degree. The threat of violence is the most dependable.

What is both striking and revealing is how in Roman legal theory the potential for arbitrary violence was inserted in domestic life and the most intimate social relations. Household and empire shared a common model of subordination. Children were to be submissive to their parents, wives to husbands, and subjects to rulers. The superior party could exercise violence with impunity when considered appropriate. Rome took the entanglement of violence and care to extremes. Violence was assumed to be bound up with love and affection. Its legacy is still with us and shapes our most basic values and concepts of social structure.

The book is an eyeopener. I like very much how David Graeber and David Wengrow challenges our habitual ways of looking at the past. They have done an extraordinary job in questioning what once appeared as unassailable axioms. The book is full of thought-provoking questions. What does it say about our time that we don’t have a terminology to adequately describe the cities which lacked the expected administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule? We have been asked to believe that we suddenly cannot organize ourselves once our numbers expand above a certain threshold. The truth is that we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is about. Mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, patriarchy, family violence, wage labor never had to happen. It doesn’t have to be this way!