David Wengrow

This book ripped my mind apart and my understanding of what it is to be a human and put it back together in a way that makes me excited to be part of the species.

Many of us think that civilization works like this:
You start in wandering tribes, you hunt and gather at the whim of the environment, and then one day you invent agriculture. You start planting, taming nature, grow cities, empires, science, etc. We assume this is the one and only way civilization grows. Sure, the primitive show more hunting-gathering sounds good, but to have that, you'd have to give up science and art and progress in general. Sort of the same way you may envy the carefree life of a child, but you can't really go back to childhood. Civilization works the same way, right?

What if all the above was absolute total bullshit? What if, instead, during the colonial era, we came up with the above theory specifically so we can 'look down' on the natives that were being colonized? That way, even if it seemed like they had a better lifestyle, Europeans could reason that they were just in a more primitive stage of human social evolution.

It's hundreds of years later, but we still have some strong lingering pieces of the above argument in our collective psyche. If we find some skeleton of a human from 50000 years ago, we imagine they were basically animals howling at the moon and worshiping their own toes because they didn't know any better. If it turns out they also knew something about the motion of the stars, we write it off as a fun, weird quirk but it doesn't really change our overall view of howling savages.

The book opens more-or-less suggesting that the European enlightenment was actually a result of contact with Native American philosophers, learning their views on civilization and sending that back to Europe. At the end of the book, they circle back to this idea and show that the specific Native American civilizations that may have inspired the enlightenment probably did so because they lived through monarchies and inequalities, they had actually evolved philosophies and practices to guard against it [I'm digressing a bit but the whole thing is just that interesting!!]

What is a city, really? Why would people choose to not farm? How did egalitarian societies avoid having dynasties? All of these questions have been answered by our species many times before, but there are some very heavy biased blinders we have on that keep us from seeing those answers.

The point is this: Human civilization isn't a linear, inevitable march to hierarchy, wealth inequality, and toil. We could choose from zillions of social configurations that have been tried out in the past, tried out by humans that were every bit as thoughtful, deliberate, and civilized as we are today. With some of those colonial prejudices removed from our brains, we can actually learn from the past... and this book very meticulously burns through such prejudices until you truly are able to see humans from the past as amazing, clever, complex equals (not just in theory but from the bottom of your heart and mind, scooping out the prejudices you didn't even know were prejudices around the past).

The downside is it's about a billion pages long, and kind of feels like it meanders a lot, but it does take that large length to start internalizing the views the authors present.

Note:
I've read lots of critiques of this book and I think it's important to point out how I read it vs. how many critics seem to read it.

Many of the passages follow a formula like this (this is my own made-up example):

"Archeologists found a skeleton of a woman in XYZ-land with a little statue by her. They assume it was for fertility, but who's to say she wasn't the secretary of agriculture for the regional district? After all, tribe W in land ABC had women who decided ..."

Now, reading the above, you can interpret it in 1 of 2 ways.

1. The author is explicitly claiming this particular woman was potentially secretary of agriculture in XYZ-land
2. The author is giving an example of our biases and pointing out the general feasibility of a skeleton found actually being a 'modern' person and why that shouldn't be a far-fetched thought, even if he doesn't believe this *particular* skeleton has the particular role he implied

If you read this book as (1), then you'll encounter a lot of problems. Pretty much every critique I've read interprets this book as (1). They'll do a detailed 'take-down' of that specific burial site, why XYZ-land didn't have secretaries, etc. Sure, but (in my opinion) that wasn't the point the authors were making.

If you read it as (2), you'll get more profound realizations out of it. show less

What was going on in our early days? There’s a big, misty gap in our understanding of our own history. That period from its beginning (more or less 150,000 years ago) to what we call the beginning of civilization (something like 10,000 years ago). That’s a big gap.

We’ve filled the gap, but we’ve done it with little attention to the archaeological evidence, or any real evidence of any kind. Graeber and Wengrow are out to bust the mythology we’ve invented about the “state of show more nature” or the natural progression of civilization, and appeal instead to what the archaeological evidence supports — a very different picture from what we’ve been accepting.

They frame their discussion with two of the existing versions of what was happening — Rousseau’s On the Origin of Inequality and Hobbes’ Leviathan. Both engaged in a kind of mythical narrative of humanity’s natural condition, and of course both did so with political inspiration. What Hobbes and Rousseau had in common, despite their political differences, was the presumption that there must have been a “state of nature” at all, a social and political organization that primitive humanity naturally and without design adopted.

That is the first presumption that Graeber and Wengrow reject, based on the archaeological evidence available to them. Their mission is to write a political history of humanity’s pre-history. Okay, yes, that sounds paradoxical. And their account is necessarily speculative.

But where we owe them credence is in their basing their speculations on the available evidence, often evidence that contradicts suppositions of either natural egalitarianism, natural conflict, or a natural progression from primitive bands right up to modern states.

What they find evidence for is a dynamic, fluid mix of deliberative political and social designs throughout humanity’s history. There is no point at which we “left the state of nature” or at which we fell out of a natural state of equality. Humanity has always designed and redesigned its political and social organizations, sometimes even mixing different principles of organization within the same community at different times and seasons.

In fact, what Graeber and Wengrow find remarkable, and problematic, is how we have become “stuck” in our present day political and social thought. They transform the search for the origin of inequality into a search for the origin of our loss of the political creativity and fluidity exercised by our forebears.

By their account, we have become “stuck” (their term) in political organizations that feature inequality in political power, economic standing, education, and other sources of value. Our forebears, by contrast, seemed much more fluid in political and social organization, often changing radically with the seasons (hunting seasons favoring more hierarchical and authoritarian principles of organization) and exhibiting broad ranges of diversity.

They structure their thinking around an interplay of principles of freedom and domination:
Three primordial freedoms —
- freedom to move (e.g., the freedom to leave a community you don’t find to your liking)
- freedom to disobey orders
- freedom to create or transform social relationships (i.e., to modify or redesign the political organization of your community)
Three principles of domination —
- sovereignty (control of violence)
- administration (control of knowledge and order)
- charismatic competition (individual charisma, as played out, for example, in elections or other ways of choosing leaders)

They understand the political organizations of historical communities through our own time as an interplay of these freedoms and principles of domination.

If there is an historical order to be drawn out, it is best understood as movement from a focus on one principle of domination in earlier communities, e.g., organization under a charismatic leader, with corresponding limitations on freedom. It is later that we see communities organized under combined principles of domination, e.g., where charismatic leaders build extensive administrative rule (as in ancient Egypt), until we saw all three at work together in modern states.

I won’t try to reproduce anything like the numerous illustrations of political organization that the authors take us through. It is exhausting, and traverses multiple continents and multiple examples of early civilizations, including those in Ukraine, Mesopotamia, MesoAmerica, and China.

Over and over, we find the mythologies of early human history overturned. We find egalitarian and non-egalitarian organizations everywhere. Contrary to Rousseauean thinking, we find plenty of examples of communities that adopted agricultural lives without inegalitarian consequences. We find no evidence for a kind of Marxian determination of political ideology by “modes of production.”

Neither do they find any credibility for common ideas of a natural progression of communities from bands, to tribes, to chiefdoms, and on to states.

Those common ideas actually have a root in the thought of the 18th century French intellectual,
A. R. J. Turgot. Turgot’s progression has a hold on us, both our common sense thinking about our own history, and even in the academic and professional worlds of archaeology and anthropology. We tend to see the progression as inevitable.

It’s a story told from the end backwards to join back up with the idea of a primitive beginning. As the authors say, “You can’t simply jump from the beginning of the story to the end, and then just assume you know what happened in the middle. Well, you can, but then you are slipping back into the very fairy tales we’ve been dealing with throughout this book.”

If you want to sum up the authors’ over-riding point, it is that contrary to all of these common misconceptions about our own history, humanity has always deliberated over its social and political organization, and the principles behind it. There is no state of nature or natural progression. Those are “fairy tales” in the authors’ words.

If this is so, then we come back to the question why we are stuck in the present day with the political forms that have fallen to us historically.

Such is the hold the modern political world has on us that the authors say, “in fact, it seems very difficult for most of us even to imagine how self-conscious egalitarianism on a large scale would work. But this again simply serves to demonstrate how automatically we have come to accept an evolutionary narrative to which authoritarian rule is somehow the natural outcome whenever a large enough group of people are brought together (and, by implication, that something called ‘democracy’ emerges only much later, as a conceptual breakthrough — and most likely just once, in ancient Greece).”

I’m not sure that Graeber and Wengrow, in this book, have a clear answer to why we have become stuck. In looking for it, they go back to their structuring set of freedoms and principles of domination.

They find what they think is a confusion in our conceptions of what they call “care” and domination in political organization. They cite as an insightful inspiration a contrast between the political structures of indigenous North Americans and early European colonizers.

The Wendat chief, Kondiaronk, is a consistent player in Graeber and Wengrow’s thinking. The 18th century French aristocrat Lahontan debated political (and other) issues with Kondiaronk and found Kondiaronk’s observations about European civilization challenging. Lahontan published a reconstruction of those debates in his Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled.

In particular, Kondiaronk helps the authors see a curious contrast between how the Wendat treat captives of war and their own community members on one hand, and on the other how Europeans treat those same groups. Wendat captives may be adopted into the Wendat community, or, if not, they may be excruciatingly tortured and killed. But they never torture their own community members. European, and here that refers to Kondiaronk's observations in France, states made torture (flogging, stocks, etc.) and violent execution (hanging, guillotining) normal.

The Wendat sense of “care,” I think Graeber and Wengrow would say, would prohibit such acts, acts of the exercise of domination over the community members they cared for. They write, “It seems to us that this connection — or better perhaps, confusion — between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another.” And further, “If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), it is precisely this: how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?"

The authors don’t come to a firm, clear conclusion. What they have done most effectively, I think, is to destroy the common sense myths we burden our political and social thinking with about human nature, states of nature, and the inevitable evolution of inegalitarian and authoritarian states. That is at least the first step in addressing our “stuck” condition.

Just some last words on the book as a reader. This is a dense, long book, falling somewhere between academic and semi-popular -- written to academic standards with a nod to the general audience. It’s not light reading, and readers may find themselves lost in the details of Graeber and Wengrow’s journey through so many communities, early cities, and civilizations. I’ve written a long review, and I haven’t even touched on many, many themes and details. It’s not that it’s not worth it. Just know that’s where you’re going when you start reading. show less

The Dawn of Everything was added to my TBR by a well meaning (and possibly intoxicated) librarian friend during a recent house party after she sorted through my shelves, saw my (apparently unacceptable) level of anthropological literary representation (it is, admittedly, just Harari at the moment), and decided to intervene. Reader, she was correct to do so.

This book is a dense but genuinely fascinating rethinking of human history, challenging the neat, linear narratives we’re often taught show more about civilization, hierarchy, and progress. It’s ambitious, wide-ranging, and occasionally a bit of a slog—there are moments where it wanders or leans heavily into academic theory—but the core argument is compelling: things did not have to turn out this way, and they still don’t have to.

I didn’t agree with everything, and it can feel a bit sprawling at times, but I loved the scope of it and the way it opens up new ways of thinking about society, freedom, and possibility. Infuriating (in a good way), thought-provoking, and absolutely worth the read—my TBR saboteur wins this round. show less

Where to begin reviewing a book weighing in at nearly 700 pages from title page to end of index?

We open and close with a lot about freedom. Our first section is totally arresting, as we delve into how the Americans who preceded Europeans on this continent viewed European culture: with disbelief and disdain at our lack of freedom. While we Eurocentric people have always tended to view ourselves as being quite free, our "formal" freedoms were as nothing compared to the "substantive" freedoms show more found in America.

More on that in a moment, but notice my avoidance of terms like "indigenous people" or "Native Americans". They were Americans. They lived here. I love the radical respect that the authors give to those people who lived in this place before us. And those Americans who engaged in thoughtful substantive debate with their European interlocuters, they rightfully refer to as philosophers, even "philosopher-statesmen".

So about those freedoms: we theoretically have the right to travel, but if we haven't got moolah, we effectively must stay put. Many of the earlier American societies had kinship networks far and wide, and people really could travel whenever and almost wherever they wanted, knowing they would have kin that would have their backs. We formally have the freedom to do whatever we like, but we have authorities we must obey. North Americans the Europeans first contacted often did not. Their chiefs had no real authority to make anyone do anything. In a great turn of phrase, the authors say "the Wendat [Huron tribe of native Quebec] had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms."

And so the book continue with more of its radical upendings of our typical outlook on things. Pre-historical societies experimented with vast, vastly different ways of self-organizing. We weren't just "bands" (they always put that word in quotes) of ape-like hunter-gatherers, living in one particular default way, until bam, finally agriculture changed everything. We weren't always all the same and agriculture didn't all of a sudden change everything everywhere.

One item I couldn't help but bookmark: "There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don't like their families very much." I'm sorry, why isn't this called out more often? Most of us, given the slimmest of chances, will get as far away from our families as the train tracks will take us. Not that I have an axe to grind on this particular topic.

I'm sorry I can't do justice to more of the book, because there is much, much more. But these were my takeaways. show less