The Dawn of Everything

I've just wrapped up a particularly fascinating, meaty, and provocative book: The Dawn of Everything, by David Wengrow and the late David Graeber, is a very ambitious book about the history of, well, us: the society of human beings. My friend Dan recommended it, and it dovetails in some ways with Nexus, a similarly fascinating historical/anthropological/psychological exploration. This book covers a lot of ground and it's hard to do justice to it, but I'll give it a shot!

 

As background: human beings as a species have existed for about 200,000 years, and for basically that entire time we've lived in communities: so-called "bands" or "tribes" that extend beyond the immediate family unit. However, we only have written history for about 5,000 years. So the question is, what were we doing for the 195,000 years before we started writing about what we were doing? And that in turn dovetails with a question that philosophers and sociologists have been asking for the last three or four centuries: what is Mankind like in a "state of nature"? That is, what is our default, "pure" form like, before we invented agriculture, cities, kings and all the other trappings of what we now call civilization?

They identify two main answers to that question. The first, which they attribute to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is that originally humans were egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Being nomadic, we didn't have any need to "own" land, and didn't have any possessions beyond what we carried. This was an idyllic time, cooperating with one another to hunt woolly mammoths or to pick acorns to eat. When we invented agriculture, we "ran towards our chains", giving up our freedom and shackling ourselves to specific pieces of land, at which point we needed ownership and defense and laws. These permanent settlements gave rise to compounds and cities, at which point we could start accumulating more property, which needed "protection", and we ended up with the hierarchical system we have today. This school of thought has tended to be associated with leftist thinkers.

The alternative explanation is associated with Hobbes, with the infamous idea that in a state of nature the life of Man is "nasty, brutish and short." Mankind practice pure dominance, might-makes-right, with the strong taking whatever they can from the weak: their food, their tools, their women and children. In this view, we willingly subordinate ourselves to authority (chieftains, police, etc.) in order to protect ourselves from our brutal fellow men. In this telling we exchange our freedom for safety, instead of for property, and civilization is a clearly superior progression, while the Rousseauian view is more ambivalent about the change. This Hobbesian school of thought is associated more with conservative, right-leaning thinkers.

But neither Roueasseu nor Hobbes were arguing from any sort of evidence: they said at the time that these were thought experiments, illustrative tales of how things might have happened. Now we have a lot more knowledge. The authors are an archeologist and an anthropologist, taking a very broad look at the actual discoveries we have made that shed real light on what we actually used to be like and how we changed. Unlike most practitioners who are extremely granular in their research and don't connect the dots, these two recognize larger trends (or contradictions) in the evidence and present a higher-level view, backed up by evidence, that is very very different from how we thought things were. The book does sometimes have a bit of a speculative flavor, but they are careful to call out what evidence they have; and, they remind us, the conventional wisdom is itself rarely evidence-based, so at a minimum we should think about why we believe certain things to be true.

So, were Hobbes or Rousseau correct? Neither one, and the actual picture is far more complicated and multi-faceted. To grossly summarize, there is no one "state of nature", and throughout history and around the world, there have been all sorts of different societies and civilizations observed. There's no linear progression from foraging to farming to civilization, and no progression from anarchy to dominance. One of the most remarkable findings is that even within a given year bands would move back and forth between different modes. One tribe might spend their summers in a village, leisurely trading and crafting, and then spend their winters in tighter hunting bands under the authority of a leader. Another tribe might do the opposite: part-time village life with police and chieftains, then during the hunting season cooperating in more egalitarian bands. That turns into one of the biggest questions of this book: how did we lose this flexibility that we used to have to move between different modes of political and cultural organization? We seem to have "gotten stuck" in history, where we are now permanently locked into systems of dominance and exploitation: capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism.

We do still feel some echoes of those ancient rhythms in our modern lives. For 11 months out of the year we are all told to work hard and to consume; but around Christmas time, suddenly all of the brands are advertising that it's better to give than to receive, that it's important to spend time with family and loved ones for the holiday. And in Europe it's common to take a month in the summer to leave the city and spend that time in the countryside. Both of these feel like faint remnants of the sort of flexibility we once had. Travel itself is an ancient practice for us: around the time of the last Ice Age people would roam around entire continents; it's been far more recent for us to stay stationary in our river valleys and coastal settlements.

Archeological records indicate that many pre-historical groups were able to supply all of their food needs with about two days' worth of work a week, which left all of the remaining time for other activities like dancing, conversation, artwork, long travel for fun, and so on. This is opposite the view that was actively promulgated during the Victoria era, which said that in ancient times people had to toil long hours merely to subsist. As we have "advanced" as a species, we have tended to work more hours, not less, which is the opposite of what we are promised. This has only very recently begun to shift back towards leisure (specifically in Europe in the last 80 years or so), and is still far beyond what our ancient ancestors apparently enjoyed.

Agriculture and farming is usually depicted as an ineluctable force: once we discovered farming, its advantages were so great that it out-competed all other modes of subsistence. But again, the actual record says otherwise. Tons of societies around the world were aware of farming and had neighbors who practiced it, and could have successfully raised crops in their own land, but they chose not to do it, instead pursuing foraging or hunting or fishing or other modes. They weighed the pros and cons and decided, "Nah."

This is one thing I really like about this book: it emphasizes human choice and agency, much more in line with Thomas Piketty than with Karl Marx. Technologies and ecologies can open possibilities, but we as humans decide what to do, we aren't driven by physical forces to always do one thing. As the authors repeatedly point out, politics and culture are huge. As a sidebar, think of all the dumb self-destructive things we do in the US: eat food that we know will make us sick, use a confusing measurement system instead of a simple one, drive cars that are expensive to fuel and hard to park. In most cases, we do those things to differentiate ourselves from another group: at least we aren't the French or the Canadians or the Californians or whatever. The Dawn of Everything includes copious examples, such as native Californians versus Northwest Coast tribes, where "schismogenesis" occurs, and two groups of people increasingly emphasize their differences by adopting radically different ways of life, even when it seems to be to their material disadvantage (such as the puzzling reluctance of the Californians to exploit their bountiful fisheries, instead focusing on collecting acorns). Especially after the last Ice Age, as populations grew more distinct, there grew a stronger sense that "We are the sort of people who eat with chopsticks, not who eat with forks" or "We are the sort of people who eat with spoons, not with chopsticks."

Going back to agriculture: the authors find that, when agriculture does appear, it doesn't automatically dominate. It often ends up being another side-project, an option, not a replacement. They use the term "play farming" and compare it with gardening. These early gardener/farmers seem to have been motivated by the joy at making things grow, and maybe enjoying some new flavors (or stimulants or colors or whatever else a given plant had to offer). They would fit farming/gardening into their lifestyle, not re-orient their lifestyle around farming. For example, members of a tribe might casually scatter seeds into a floodplain as the river receded, migrate on to hunt, then swing by later to collect the growths, then re-plant in a totally different place. The Davids also note that there is strong evidence that this work was primarily performed by women, and the overall male-centeredness of the field of archeology has tended to over-emphasize male-dominated activities and dismissed female-oriented ones.

The book is mostly organized thematically, but generally follows a forward progression through time, and near the end continues into the era of recorded history. This includes Mesopotamian sites like I learned about in high school "world history", but also contemporary cities in other areas like China, India and the Americas. Here too, they show that old assumptions are simply not supported in the archeological record. For centuries our idea has been that centralized authority arose in nomadic societies and early farming, and that authority was necessary to establish cities: "of course" we need someone to organize collective efforts and make sure that work is done through systems of bureaucracy and administration. But that doesn't seem to be true - at least not universally.

You can't prove a negative, and we can't say for certain that a given city didn't have a king, but it's always very obvious when a city does have a king, and those signs are simply missing from some cities, or from early eras in other cities. So what were cities like? It depends! In some cities, like Ukrainian mega-sites, it seems like everyone is on a level, with similar dwellings throughout the area. Other times it does seem to have differentiations, like temples or a higher elevation where a certain caste dwelt; but even in these cities we have evidence that decisions were arrived by communal consensus through the entire community rather than top-down commands. They point at more contemporary examples like Basque cities that were organized around a "wheel" design, where responsibilities rotated between households. This example disproves the long-held assumption that you can't organically get societies of larger than 150 people. Which is significant, because that's been an axiom that many people take as a given when trying to interpret historical evidence.

This is a bit of a tangent, but at one point the authors state that recent science has determined that most of the time we as human beings aren't really thinking: we spend the vast majority of our daily life on autopilot. When we do need to think, we tend to do it in short bursts to solve a specific problem or deal with an unexpected situation. On average this lasts for just seven seconds (!!), and then we switch back to autopilot. I hadn't heard that particular statistic before, but it sounds very much in line with Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow". The Davids say that the one time we can consistently keep our thinking brains engaged for longer than 7 seconds is when engaged in conversation with someone else. This is why, when we're trying to solve a challenging problem, we often "talk to ourselves" inside our mind; it's a hack for keeping our thinking engaged.

When Europeans first encountered natives in North America, their journals report them being very impressed by their skills at debate. It does seem like these natives were more "advanced" in their rhetoric and thinking, even as Europeans were more "advanced" in their physical technology. Contemporary Enlightenment thinkers often explicitly attributed their ideas on individual liberty, democracy and freedom to those expressed by native Americans. Since that time we tend to dismiss those attributions, saying that those writers were romanticizing or exoticizing those cultures, or putting impermissible thoughts into the mouth of an "other" beyond the reach of their European kings. But it's pretty condescending to believe that we haven't learned from those cultures, and it's weird to insist so when the Enlightenment writers themselves said those cultures were sources. While it's appropriate to be skeptical of writing, we should at least consider the possibility that people were telling the truth: that native cultures were socially very advanced, and that many of their ideas influenced the Enlightenment and ultimately the founding documents of the United States of America.

Near the end of the book they return to the question of how we got "stuck" in our current way of being. They identify three essential freedoms that humans have had throughout almost all of our history: the freedom to move around, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to create new forms of social relations. Opposite that, they identify three forms of authority that collectively create what we might call "the state": control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic politics. Early societies would dabble with those forms of authority, and then seemingly draw back. As there is no writing we don't know exactly what happened, but they can at least chronologically track how in places like, say, Cahokia Illinois or woodland Austria we see increasingly dense settlements, signs of mass executions and violence... and then a dispersal back to seemingly freer, less hierarchical societies. Many of the native North American legends could be interpreted as a kind of counter-programming to avoid modes of domination in the future. Several indigenous cultures (in the Americas and elsewhere) had essentially "play chiefs", who could give orders but couldn't compel people to obey them. Much like with farming, people could play around with certain roles, often as part of a mystical or ritual ceremony, and then lay them aside. Once the sun rises, you don't need the chief any more.

While they never give a definitive answer to how we got "stuck", they do suspect that the logic of patriarchy and the logic of society domination are closely linked. Both share a language of "caring violence": "I'm doing this for your own good," "I'm hurting these people to protect you," "I know what's best for you." The most intimate relations become corrupted by violence. Women, and then commoners, lose their autonomy, their freedom to defy orders, and become locked into these rigid systems. After enough generations, we've lost the capacity to imagine different ways of being: even our language makes it difficult to imagine living any other way.

But, the hope of this book is that we will be able to regain that long-lost flexibility. The first step is just recognizing that it's possible: freedom and equality isn't some ambitious dream for the future, it's how we existed for most of our time as a species. The various advances we've made should open new doors, not close old ones. It's a very ambitious and starry-eyed project, but one that sounds very thrilling.