We need to look at alternative societies to understand the range of human potential

Review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Traditionally, scholars of “human nature” have focused on 2 opposing poles. Rousseau portrayed hunter-gatherers as existing in a state of childlike innocence, intellectually inferior but peaceful and without hierarchy. In his narrative, the agricultural revolution ruined this egalitarian paradise, introducing social class, inequality, and debilitating new forms of labor. In contrast, Hobbes’ authoritarian state stood as a bulwark against anarchic violence, whereby a collective repression of instinct (to domination, hierarchy, and naked self-interest) would allow men to live in security, however limited their freedom of action might be. Whichever you prefer to emphasize, development followed a rigid plan: agriculture meant civilization, hierarchy, and war. Graeber and Wengrow object to these simplifications, not only as blatantly inaccurate historically, but as limiting our imagination to a denuded range of possibility, pointing to capitalism as inevitable and the most efficient way to organize society.

To remedy this, the authors go back to the archaeological record. The result is a dazzling tour of prehistorical societies, revealing that many of them flatly contradict the frameworks of Rousseau and Hobbes. We can, they argue, reinvent ourselves and the proof of a far richer range of societal organization lies in the archaeological record.

Even though non-Western philosophers were dismissed as irrelevant to the debate, the authors observe, the trenchant critiques by indigenous peoples of the West shocked many Enlightenment thinkers. Take the Mi’kmaq of French America. They despised the French for their authority-driven society, materialism, lack of freedom and peace, and aggressive struggle for prestige and power – little better than slaves, the thought. The Mi’kmaq suffered none of these things, but arrived at coherent decisions by consensus, were perfectly capable of refusing to follow a chief’s orders, and could up and go to settle in a new place whenever they wished to live under different rules. Indeed, to some observers, the Mi’kmaq appeared rational, skeptical, and empirical. The contrast was so stark that it may have influenced Montesquieu, Jefferson, and others to formulate republican conceptions of self-government. The philosophes were awe-struck.

What we need to do, the authors argue, is to re-open our minds, first by looking at the evidence that is emerging in recent decades and then recognizing how our conceptions of human nature are flawed and tendentious, reflecting our parochial preoccupations. Interestingly, they noted, the absence of private property deprived Wendat chiefs of the ability to convert their wealth into power – economic resources were owned by the family or even the entire community, shared as egalitarians. Their women enjoyed both sexual liberty and the power to divorce. In the case of crimes, the individual was not held culpable: that fell on the entire clan or lineage, a clear incentive to keep their kin under control without the need for police or central authority.

There was, of course, a reaction to this perspective. Turgot, one of the Enlightenment founders of economics, portrayed freedom and equality among “the savages” as a sign of inferiority. Self-sufficiency, in this view, meant that everyone suffered equally. Moreover, he argued, as societies developed more “sophisticated” technologies, inequality became inevitable. Turgot represented an entire theory of social evolution, presenting a single ladder to capitalism and later, colonial domination in accordance with Victorian moralists. This influenced much of the academic work that followed.

With that, the authors review evidence that contradicts longstanding assumptions and narratives that started with Turgot, Rousseau and Hobbes. They include: 1) the Göbekli Tepe, a hunter-gatherer society at the end of the last Ice Age that developed institutions capable of supporting the erection of major public works, i.e. pre-agricultural. This was assumed impossible.

2) It took centuries for agricultural societies to develop because the social transformation required was viewed as too onerous and the dividends too uncertain and the investment too costly. Instead, hybrid hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies emerged, with seasonal festivals of working the land giving way to hunting and gathering in other periods. There was no single pattern for the transition to agriculture, which was viewed by many as a form of enslavement to the grain they cultivated. Some developed grain societies only to definitely reject them, as the Cahokia culture did. As they write: “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.” That is quite a profound perspective when you think about it.

3) Distinct cultures (and later nation-states) did not define themselves after the Ice Age, but evolved over many millennia in fluid and highly cosmopolitan forms. For example, Poverty Point, a Stone Age Settlement and meeting place on the Mississippi, brought huge gatherings from very far afield together for material trade, intellectual exchange, ritual celebration, and shared labor. The same is true of Hopewell in what is now Ohio, leaving visible traces in man-made hillocks and other configurations. These examples are legion and utterly fascinating.

4) For most of human history, private property was not viewed as a sacred or sacrosanct norm. Innumerable cultures did not develop it as an institution, but had it imposed on them during the colonial period. It was not necessarily, as Locke implied, the precursor to human rights and freedom or societies of law. This was also true of the enclosure movement in early modern England, when communal pastures were closed off in favor of aristocratic landowners.

5) Ideas did not necessarily spread because they were in some way optimal or effective. For example, California foragers held property sacred, eschewed indulgence like Puritans, and employed violence to protect their prerogatives and resources; they prided themselves on labor they accomplished themselves. In contrast, the Northwest Coast tribes took delight in excess (in potlatch festivals), hunted slaves to avoid labor, and developed mafia-like courts to control their society. Apparently, the mechanism for these differences was schismogenesis, according to which they observed what the others were doing and chose their own norms as a way to distinguish themselves. In other words, these groups did not act as automata whose behavior was determined by their environment: they chose how to build their societies.

6) Cities did not emerge in consistent patterns: some never developed palaces or temples (signs of “emerging complexity”), but existed in sometimes massive communities that remained egalitarian, even similar to welfare states, such as the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture, an urban agglomeration that pre-dated those in Mesopotamia and lasted for centuries. There was little evidence of war. Reciprocity and mutual aid were the norm. A warrior or priestly aristocracy never arose.

7) The authors have an interesting definition of the “state”, which they argue lacks academic consensus. They believe the social control of the state is based on a) control of violence; b) control of information; and c) a charismatic leader. They then go on to examine states that based their state design on some combination of each of these. Notably, some of them were quasi-democratic, e.g. Choctaw and Cherokee tribes; some depended on military mastery, some on cultural. Traditional narratives assume chiefs control police to enforce rules and that writing is in service of the bureaucratic state, but this is not always the case.

There are too many examples to cover in this review and I had to strip them of nuance as it is. It is, quite simply, a tour of human endeavor and societies all the way up to the Enlightenment. They claim that social science as a discipline emerged in reaction to the failure of Enlightenment ideas to improve the lot of man as promised, indeed interventions often made the situation worse. Hence, the simplifying, if elusive, search for a “human nature”.

The authors conclude that much of what we take for granted as human nature is not borne out by the history of our early civilizations. Thus, the shape of our societies are not as deterministic or standardized as we commonly assume. I find this a wonderfully liberating message. This seems to be a theme of many books I’ve read over the last 5 years, ranging from economics (and the form that modern capitalism has taken) to political science and even science fiction. As the philosophes argued, we can change our societies as much as they determine the kind of lives we lead. Reading this book over has inspired me to go further in pursuit of these directions. You can’t find a better recommendation than that.