The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

With the grandiose subtitle of “A New History of Humanity”, I was certainly expecting a lot from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything; and in retrospect, I may have been expecting too much, and too much of something different altogether. I love reading stories of how people live in different places and different times — and those stories are here — but mostly, this reads like a one-sided argument that I don’t know anything about and that I didn’t know was taking place. The bottom line: Graeber and Wengrow argue that there’s nothing inevitable about the progression of human civilisation to the point where we find ourselves today; and that modern academia is an echochamber for that theory of progress, dismissing and suppressing evidence to the contrary. I didn’t realise until afterwards that Graeber, who has since passed, was a noted anarchist activist and one of the founders of the Occupy Movement, so while I understand why this book is antiestablishment, I was nevertheless disappointed that it didn’t offer up any ideas for how we could be doing things better. Overall, this was an often fascinating and paradigm-challenging read, but it didn’t amount to much, and some quirky writing (which only served to lengthen a long book) force me to round down to three stars. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would otherwise be invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say that things are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévis-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

Post-Enlightenment, we have been taught to think of early humans as living in one of two opposing states: that described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (a state of peaceful harmony with nature until the first person claimed a plot of land as their own; ushering in inequality, onerous bureaucracy, and state-sponsored violence) and that of Thomas Hobbes (who described life as “nasty, brutish, and short” until state control was introduced to stem interpersonal violence). Following in this vein, modern pop history writers — the likes of Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Yuval Noah Harari; all smugly dismissed by Graeber and Wengrow — take it for granted that the rise of human civilsation was an inevitable progression from unself-examined hunter-gatherer societies to early agriculture, the formation of cities, through to a culmination in modern democracy and capitalism. In particular, the authors chastise Harari (who once wrote that early humans were either as aggressive as chimpanzees or as peaceful as bonobos) as denying humanity to these early humans (literally comparing them to animals until they first started cultivating grain), and I must admit that that is a valid criticism: why can’t we think of early humans as actual people who made conscious choices about the kind of society in which they wanted to live? By telling the stories of many types of societies across time and space — including those that experimented with agriculture, monarchy, and city-states before abandoning them as untenable — the authors prove that there really isn’t anything inevitable about where we find ourselves today. I liked learning the stories of those who experimented with agriculture before giving it up (including the folks who built Stonehenge, who had reverted to acorn-harvesting at the time of their big project) and I appreciated that the authors took issue with historians who use terms like “intermediary period” or “proto-something” to describe times when early humans weren’t engaging in those activities we think of as markers of civilisation (as though people were living in stable societies for generations, just waiting for something important to happen). My thinking was challenged about these early societies — especially as it was mostly formed by the pop history writers that Graeber and Wengrow dismiss — and I like being challenged.

Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies — say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighbourhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction — will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like historical curiosities. What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternate possibilities: roads not taken?

Again, I appreciate the scholarship on display in The Dawn of Everything — and especially as it describes those people who simply walked away from the bureaucracies and overlords who made their lives unpleasant, leading to the ruins of former cities that now dot the globe — but while it is provocative to think of modern Western civilisation as an entirely replaceable construct (and I can’t deny that it doesn’t work for everyone), it feels naive for the authors to imply that it can all be torn down without offering an idea of what would come next. Honestly, as interesting as the history was, I kept waiting for the point; it’s not like today we could just walk away from our cities and countries and find empty space in which to mindfully start over; understanding history in this case does not feel, in itself, like a road map to a better future. I still enjoyed the read.