New Moon Reading Report: The Dawn of Everything
This month’s read is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
As I hope you’re seeing in this newsletter, I really love to pick at our cultural assumptions like they’re scabs and I’m 8 years old. Particularly the assumptions that are so prevalent, they’re pretty much invisible to us. They’re like the air we breathe—we just don’t think about them, but they affect everything we do. One such concept is “civilization,” the idea that human history is a progression, from cave dwelling hunter gatherers to agriculture to city-dwelling civilized folks. That this progression correlates with increasing power centralization and bureaucratization. There’s a sense that the way we are now–mostly city-dwelling cultures with very strong, centralized governments–is inevitable and irreversible.
The Dawn of Everything tackles that assumption in 704 surprisingly engaging pages. (I seriously could not put it down. Too bad I got it as an ebook—I might have built up some muscle toting it around.) It’s a kind of rambling, ambitious project. With a title like The Dawn of Everything, it’s hard to imagine it would be anything else. Despite the title, the authors don't present a new, comprehensive framework of human history. Their (only slightly less ambitious) goal is to free us from those assumptions about the course of history–its starting point and its trajectory.
The authors bring some academic chops to the conversation. Graeber (who passed away shortly after writing this book) was a professor of anthropology. Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology. They also have an agenda. Graeber was a self-described anarchist, and a major catalyst in the Occupy Wall Street movement. I think their points still stand even if you aren’t an anarchist, but it’s important to know that they (particularly Graeber) have an agenda.
The idea for this book was born when the authors noticed that our dominant cultural story about the progression of human history did not match what they saw in archaeological and anthropological evidence. It’s not necessarily a one-way progression or change. Cultures of the past progressed differently from what we often assume. Some went from city-dwelling or agrarian to hunter gatherer. Sometimes it was a big shift over time. Other times, cultures made the shift as part of annual cycles. Rather than history being a relentless progression of a culture becoming more urban and increasingly hierarchical, it appears to have been a series of choices and modifications based on effectiveness in a particular situation.
Now, assuming we have a flawed view of history's course, what's the source? You get one guess where the authors pinpoint the problem… Did you guess colonialism? Ding ding! You get a prize—another year living our crumbling capitalist system. (*Sad trombone*) The authors actually spend a huge amount of the book describing the clash of worldviews that happened when Europeans came to the Americas—how Indigenous Americans critiqued European culture, and how that critique gave rise to some innovations inspired by the individual freedoms Indigenous Americans experienced. Like, oh… democracy, for example.
The authors explore how Indigenous critiques shaped Enlightenment thought within European societies, drawing upon European historical records (because that’s what’s available). The implication is that one of the biggest cultural and political shifts in Western history didn’t originate in the West, but was borrowed from the folks that European colonizers mostly considered backwards and savage. In this context, our ideas of the progression of civilization make little sense.
Side note: This is where my biggest criticism of this book arises. The authors don’t consider modern Indigenous people’s descriptions of their own cultures and history. They rely entirely on historical records. Yes, this is a book about history. But it’s also a book about how present day folks understand history. Graeber and Wengrow bring their modern perspectives to the book. Why not bring in perspectives from modern Indigenous people? It’s a huge oversight. I feel like they’re repeating some mistakes of the colonialists they’re critiquing.
That said, it’s important to unpack dominant Western cultural assumptions from the inside. It’s good that Graeber and Wengrow attempted it. They don’t really offer any grand theories about human nature or the trajectory of history to replace the ones they’re dismantling. I’m not sure they should—the point is that maybe there isn’t a trajectory at all. Maybe there’s no grand story. Maybe there are just people making choices, some of which are more egalitarian than others. Our ancestors were not on a one-way path of human evolution and enlightenment. Their path wasn’t inevitable. Their decisions remain reversible. If we see history differently, the implication is that we, too, have a choice.