The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

David was far more than an anthropologist. He was an activist and public intellectual of international repute who tried to live his ideas about social justice and liberation, giving hope to the oppressed and inspiring countless others to follow suit.

As we will soon be discovering, 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.

By far the most common reasons, however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. ‘Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.

As well as casting doubt on the historicity of scripture, Kandiaronk continually emphasizes the fact that Christians are divided into endless sects, each convinced they are entirely right and that all the others are hell-bound.

All this raises an obvious question: if the adoption of farming actually set humanity, or some small part of it, on a course away from violent domination, what went wrong?

But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications – that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty – are somehow less complex than those who have not?

As we noted in Chapter Nine, the political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty.

Over the course of this book we have had occasion to refer to the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.

We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, much as physically running away from a difficult situation is the most basic element of the first.

Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself.

Similarly, as we’ve seen, the concept of ‘civilization’ is still largely reserved for societies whose defining characteristics include high-handed autocrats, imperial conquests and the use of slave labour.

As a result, the social sciences were conceived and organized around two core questions: (1) what had gone wrong with the project of Enlightenment, with the unity of scientific and moral progress, and with schemes for the improvement of human society? And: (2) why is it that well-meaning attempts to fix society’s problems so often end up making things even worse?

Why did the passion for liberty, equality and fraternity end up producing the Terror? There must surely be some underlying reasons.

Still, it often seems difficult for contemporary writers to resist the idea that some sort of similarly dramatic break with the past must have occurred. In fact, as we’ve seen, what actually took place was nothing like that. Instead of some male genius realizing his solitary vision, innovation in Neolithic societies was based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, in an endless series of apparently humble but in fact enormously significant discoveries. Many of those Neolithic discoveries had the cumulative effect of reshaping everyday life every bit as profoundly as the automatic loom or lightbulb.

Most people who write history on a grand scale seem to have decided that, as a species, we are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves. Harari, once again echoing Rousseau, seems to have captured the prevailing mood.

On reflection, the same combination of features can be found in most later kingdoms or empires, such as the Han, Aztec or Roman. In each case there was a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might. But why exactly should this be the case?

The research that culminated in this book began almost a decade ago, essentially as a form of play. We pursued it at first, it would be fair to say, in a spirit of mild defiance towards our more ‘serious’ academic responsibilities. Mainly we were just curious about how the new archaeological evidence that had been building up for the last thirty years might change our notions of early human history, especially the parts bound up with debates on the origins of social inequality. Before long, though, we realized that what we were doing was potentially important, because hardly anyone else in our fields seemed to be doing this work of synthesis. Often, we found ourselves searching in vain for books that we assumed must exist but, it turns out, simply didn’t – for instance, compendia of early cities that lacked top-down governance, or accounts of how democratic decision-making was conducted in Africa or the Americas, or comparisons of what we’ve called ‘heroic societies’. The literature is riddled with absences.

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 alternative possibilities: roads not taken?

It means we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labour never had to happen. But on the other hand it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.

No doubt, for a while at least, very little will change. Whole fields of knowledge – not to mention university chairs and departments, scientific journals, prestigious research grants, libraries, databases, school curricula and the like – have been designed to fit the old structures and the old questions. Max Planck once remarked that new scientific truths don’t replace old ones by convincing established scientists that they were wrong; they do so because proponents of the older theory eventually die, and generations that follow find the new truths and theories to be familiar, obvious even. We are optimists. We like to think it will not take that long.