The Dawn of Everything

 

Credit: David Shankbone 

”The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” is an almost 700 pages long tome by US anthropologist David Graeber (recently deceased) and British archeologist David Wengrow. It was published last year and received mostly favorable reviews in the press, although I frankly wonder how many reviewers managed to read the whole thing! I admit that I haven´t finished the book either, but at about 450 pages, I´m taking my chances posting a review! Stay tuned for further developments. Although the book deals with archeology and anthropology, its underlying purpose is unabashedly political. Graeber was an anarchist and activist in the Occupy movement, and “The Dawn of Everything” could be seen as an attempted leftist or left-liberal synthesis of human history and “pre”-history. Personally, I consider the leftist message of the work somewhat peculiar, but I haven´t read Graeber´s earlier books.

Usually, leftists postulate some kind of “fall” from a pristine and primordial Edenic state. In Marxism, the fall is connected to the rise of private property and class society. Anarchists blame our predicament on the rise of the state. The introduction of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution is seen by many as a precondition for these developments. In radical Green circles, it´s seen as the fall itself. To some feminists, the fall comes from the outside: matriarchal Old Europe was invaded and smashed by patriarchal Indo-European tribes from the steppes. Graeber and Wengrow, on the other hand, reject this notion and criticize it at length. But *why* do they do this? At least in the first 400+ pages, this isn´t entirely clear. The authors´ vision of prehistory (probably not their term) is pluralist. As far back as the archeological record goes, humans have always experimented with a wide variety of cultural forms, some good, some bad, some perhaps really ugly. There is no discernable point at which a fall (literal or even metaphorical) from a utopian state takes place. This also means that there are no “laws” of historical development, perhaps not even broader trends, and hence no teleology in human history. This goes against not only Marxism, but also the Western idea of progress in general, where we rise from a dystopian state towards a destiny in the stars (or at least in the British Empire or American Century).

I assume the authors regard the rejection of teleology as intensely liberating. It means that things don´t have to be this way, that another world really is possible. The failure of, say, Marxist teleology can thus be countered by arguing that actually no teleology exists at all, but precisely for that reason, class society isn´t a necessary stage (albeit a shitty and gritty one) society has to pass through before the dawn of classless communism. History could have taken a different turn, indeed *did* take many different turns before class society or capitalism became dominant, and presumably could do so again.

More curious is Graeber´s and Wengrow´s insistence that “the origins of social inequality” is the wrong question to ask, certainly today, when opposition to increased social inequality is one of the hallmarks of (real) leftism (as opposed to liberal leftoid-ism). Instead, the authors seem to emphasize “freedom”, all the while admitting that even in free societies, there could be a lot of social hierarchies. Perhaps their point is that freedom is a precondition for everything else, including attempts to create a socially equal society? Much of the anthropological material deal with societies in which there is no central power, or in which such power is heavily circumscribed, and private property can´t be easily transformed into social power over others. Graeber and Wengrow claim that there are really two forms of equality to begin with: one form in which everyone really is exactly the same, and another form in which the differences between individuals is regarded as so great that no meaningful hierarchical sorting can be made. I think it´s obvious that they prefer option two. Of course, other leftists could claim that maybe the writers are too moderate…

So much for the politics of this tome. Otherwise, I admit that much of the archeological and anthropological material presented in “The Dawn of Everything” is fascinating, and even clears up a question mark or two I had about our distant past. For instance, why does Göbekli Tepe suddenly emerge in the Mesolithic (or was it the Neolithic or the Epipaleolithic) as Minerva from the head of Jupiter, fully formed, with no apparent precursors, a gigantic necropolis of stone in an age supposedly consisting of small bands of hunters and gatherers only? Graham Hancock and his fans had a field day with that one, claiming it as virtual smoking gun evidence for Atlantis. However, it now turns out that Göbekli Tepe, while clearly a major accomplishment in its own right, *did* have precursors, both in the Middle East and across Eurasia. Already during the Upper Paleolithic, when the climate stabilized in the wake of the “last Ice Age”, hunters and gatherers were building large settlements and temples, usually of wood and often temporary ones, and also carried out sumptuous burials. It seems human creativity flourished the moment our ancestors could think of other things than mere physical survival. The authors argue that these building projects were perfectly possible to carry out without a state power or even a strong chiefdom, citing known examples in the anthropological record of “tribal” peoples where authority structures are temporarily erected to deal with some common task requiring a mobilization of manpower, but melt away when the task is finished.

Another important insight from the book is that the “transition” (to use teleological language) between hunting-gathering and agriculture took thousands of years and many “false starts” (to use such language again). The first exclusive farmers in Europe were actually massacred by more powerful hunters and gatherers! Many peoples around the world are quite happy alternating between hunting-gathering, horticulture and agriculture, seemingly oblivious to the stages of societal evolution imposed on them by Western scholars. Besides, “horticulture” can be highly advanced, as in periodical burning of large tracts of wood to make certain desirable plants grow more abundantly, rather than “primitive gardens” in some unmanaged jungle.

The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) is often depicted as a gigantic anomaly, due to its peculiar combination of uniformity and seeming lack of authority, not to mention its peaceful character. I don´t think the authors ever address that peace dividend, but they do comment on the first two anomalies. It turns out that there are many early city-states around the world that share precisely these traits: uniformity of one kind or another, and a seeming lack of authority at the center. In ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerian towns look more egalitarian than the tribal peoples in the hinterland, while classical theory should perhaps expect us to find the opposite arrangement. The authors believe that the Sumerian towns were democratic and run on a daily basis by benign administrators, while the tribals were warriors and brigands who rejected both democracy and bureaucracy in favor of rule by authoritarian charismatic kings. In Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan was another democracy, with archeologists scratching their heads about the whereabouts of the local rulers. The authors also present evidence that at least some of the Native peoples who supported Cortes against the Aztecs had a democratic form of government.

If Graeber and Wengrow have any theory of social change, it is the previously mentioned pluralist perspective, which the authors sometimes dub “schizmogenesis”. Human groups define themselves by consciously inventing and cultivating differences with neighboring groups. If your neighbors have slavery and large feasts, your tribe will tend to reject slavery and live in frugality. If your neighbors have a democracy and are relatively peaceful, your society will become “heroic” and war-prone. In this scenario, the superstructure seems relatively independent of the economic base, with very different cultural patterns arising from the same material conditions. Religion is treated by the authors as an independent variable, and they speculate that the centralization of the Egyptian and Inca cultures was caused by religious factors. Perhaps this *does* explain some otherwise completely baffling tenets of the Egyptian civilization, for instance the building of the pyramids as tombs for the pharaohs, an activity that doesn´t seem to have any obvious “material” explanation (note also that it eventually ceased).

The authors believe that “the state has no origins” and didn´t need to happen. They theorize that there are three sources of social power in human society: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma. In a modern society, control of violence is connected to the idea of sovereignty over a specific territory, while control of information is exercised by a gigantic bureaucracy, and our “democracy” is really a winner-takes-it-all contest between quasi-aristocratic factions endowed with charisma. This, then, is the modern state. But the confluence of these three strands of domination need not have happened, and indeed didn´t happen for a very long time. There are cultures in which some people are initiated into arcane religious knowledge by something resembling a petty bureaucracy (control of information), but the two other factors aren´t present. In other cultures, the kings and their armed retinues only exercised sovereignty if they could personally show up and insert themselves into the plot. And charismatic leaders can of course exercise control even without recognized sovereignty or a bureaucracy. Graeber and Wengrow point out that today, the three types of domination are coming apart again. There are global institutions (such as the WTO or the IMF) without any corresponding concept of global sovereignty. Crypto-currencies and private security companies have acquired a new significance, undermining the state´s monopoly on currency and violence. (Perhaps there are also informal economic networks in the wake of the lockdowns and cost of living crisis?) The “teleology” seems to be working in reverse…

If there is any drawback to “The Dawn of Everything”, it might ironically be the book´s huge popularity among the chattering classes. Such things are ephemeral. Who today remembers “Empire” by Hardt and Negri, the book that supposedly should have changed everything back in 2000? And what happened to Naomi Klein, Shoshana Zuboff, the Great Turning, the Fourth Turning, and what not? It wouldn´t surprise me if “The Dawn of Everything” goes the same way, being quietly forgotten already circa 2024. It would perhaps be a loss, since the work – despite its left-liberal leanings – does say a lot of interesting things that could perhaps be developed further.