The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.

the prevalent ‘big picture’ of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts.

the question of inequality – and with it, the long-term history of inequality – have become major topics for debate. Something of a consensus has emerged among intellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes that levels of social inequality have got out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Pointing this out is in itself a challenge to global power structures; at the same time, though, it frames the issue in a way that people who benefit from those structures can still find ultimately reassuring, since it implies no meaningful solution to the problem would ever be possible.

The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.

The ultimate effect of all these stories about an original state of innocence and equality, like the use of the term ‘inequality’ itself, is to make wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense:

Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces; or, perhaps, to wangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way.

is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human?

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?

there is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian – or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even as laws of history.6

The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter.28

a few of the more powerful European kingdoms found themselves in control of vast stretches of the globe, and European intellectuals found

themselves exposed, not only to the civilizations of China and India but to a whole plethora of previously unimagined social, scientific and political ideas. The ultimate result of this flood of new ideas came to be known as the ‘Enlightenment’. Of course, this isn’t usually the way historians of ideas tell this story.

a lot of those conversations make reference to arguments that took place between Europeans and indigenous Americans about the nature of freedom, equality or for that matter rationality and revealed religion – indeed, most of the themes that would later become central to Enlightenment political thought.

There is no contesting that European traders, missionaries and settlers did actually engage in prolonged conversations with people they encountered in what they called the New World, and often lived among them for extended periods of time – even as they also colluded in their destruction. We also know that many of those living in Europe who came to embrace principles of freedom and equality (principles barely existing in their countries a few generations before) claimed that accounts of these encounters had a profound influence on their thinking. To deny any possibility that they were right is, effectively, to insist that indigenous people could not possibly have any real impact on history. It is, in fact, a way of infantilizing non-Westerners: a practice denounced by these very same authors.

not only that indigenous Americans – confronted with strange foreigners – gradually developed their own, surprisingly consistent critique of European institutions, but that these critiques came to be taken very seriously in Europe itself.

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

‘Social equality’ – and therefore, its opposite, inequality – simply did not exist as a concept. A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus.

natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World.

The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have ‘naturally’, even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws? The matter was hotly debated.

Earlier authors, confronted by a population of forest dwellers with no king and employing only stone tools, were unlikely to have seen them as in any way primordial. Sixteenth-century scholars, such as the Spanish missionary José de Acosta, were more likely to conclude they were looking at the fallen vestiges of some ancient civilization, or refugees who had, in the course of their wanderings, forgotten the arts of metallurgy and civil governance. Such a conclusion would have made obvious common sense for people who assumed that all truly important knowledge had been revealed by God at the beginning of time, that cities had existed before the Flood, and that saw their own intellectual life largely as attempts to recover the lost wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans.

We will argue that indigenous Americans did indeed develop a very strong critical view of their invaders’ institutions: a view which focused first on these institutions’ lack of freedom, and only later, as they became more familiar with European social arrangements, on equality.

We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples. Because it was true.

That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on was whether or not individual liberty was desirable.

To the Jesuits, of course, all this was outrageous. In fact, their attitude towards indigenous ideals of liberty is the exact opposite of the attitude most French people or Canadians tend to hold today: that, in principle, freedom is an altogether admirable ideal.

the Jesuits were opposed to freedom in principle:

scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will. This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage.

Jesuits had learned the Americans’ languages primarily so as to be able to argue with them, to persuade them of the superiority of the Christian faith. Yet they regularly found themselves startled and impressed by the quality of the counterarguments they had to contend with.

It was largely the speakers of Iroquoian languages such as the Wendat, or the five Haudenosaunee nations to their south, who appear to have placed such weight on reasoned debate – even finding it a form of pleasurable entertainment in its own right. This fact alone had major historical repercussions. Because it appears to have been exactly this form of debate – rational, sceptical, empirical, conversational in tone – which before long came to be identified with the European Enlightenment as well.

the argument was about liberty and mutual aid, or what might even be better called freedom and communism.

However, there’s another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There’s also a certain minimal, ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly extend.

It was only over time, as Americans learned more about Europe, and Europeans began to consider what it would mean to translate American ideals of individual liberty into their own societies, that the term ‘equality’ began to gain ground as a feature of the discourse between them.

In other words, we find here all the familiar criticisms of European society that the earliest missionaries had to contend with – the squabbling, the lack of mutual aid, the blind submission to authority – but with a new element added in: the organization of private property.

Whereas in their own societies there was no obvious way to convert wealth into power over others (with the consequence that differences of wealth had little effect on individual freedom), in France the situation could not have been more different. Power over possessions could be directly translated into power over other human beings.

I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?

(Kandiaronk had a point, as we’ve seen in the last chapter; settlers adopted into indigenous societies almost never wanted to go back.)

Here, finally, ‘equality’ is invoked as a self-conscious ideal – but only as the result of a prolonged confrontation between American and European institutions and values, and as a calculated provocation, turning European civilizing discourse backwards on itself.

theories of social evolution – now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins – first came to be articulated in Europe: as a direct response to the power of indigenous critique.

In fact, the indigenous critique of European institutions was seen as so powerful that anyone objecting to existing intellectual and social arrangements would tend to deploy it as a weapon of choice: a game, as we’ve seen, played by pretty much every one of the great Enlightenment philosophers.

France in the early 1750s; at least, in the saloniste circles with which Rousseau was familiar. Were freedom and equality universal values, or were they – at least in their pure form – inconsistent with a regime based on private property? Did the progress of arts and sciences lead to improved understanding of the world, and therefore to moral progress as well? Or was the indigenous critique correct, and the wealth and power of France simply a perverse side effect of unnatural, even pathological, social arrangements? These were the questions on every debater’s lips at the time.

To Americans like Kandiaronk, there was no contradiction between individual liberty and communism – that’s to say, communism in the sense we’ve been using it here, as a certain presumption of sharing, that people who aren’t actual enemies can be expected to respond to one another’s needs. In the American view, the freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of ‘baseline communism’, since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive.

The problem is that prehistory turns out to be an extremely long period of time: more than 3 million years, during which we know our ancestors were, at least sometimes, using stone tools. For most of this period, evidence is extremely limited. There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint.

Between war, slavery, imperialism and sheer day-to-day racist oppression, the last several centuries have seen so much human suffering justified by minor differences in human appearance that we can easily forget just how minor these differences really are. By any biologically meaningful standard, living humans are barely distinguishable.

Rewind a few hundred millennia and all this was most definitely not the case.

In other words, if we think humans are different from each other now, it’s largely illusory; and even such differences as do exist are utterly trivial and cosmetic, compared with what must have been happening in Africa during most of prehistory.

What were these ancestral societies like? At this point, at least, we should be honest and admit that, for the most part, we don’t have the slightest idea.

There’s simply nothing in the historical or ethnographic record that resembles a situation in which different subspecies of human interbred, interacted, co-operated, but sometimes also killed each other – and even if there were, the archaeological evidence is too thin and sporadic to test whether remote prehistory was really anything like that or not.

there is no ‘original’ form of human society.

such insights can only ever be partial because there was no Garden of Eden, and a single Eve never existed.

it is almost certainly misguided to think we could ever specify a single, more recent point in time when Homo sapiens ‘emerged’