The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening.

We are all familiar with the Christian answer: people once lived in a state of innocence, yet were tainted by original sin. We desired to be godlike and have been punished for it; now we live in a fallen state while hoping for future redemption.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754. Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end,

One thing that will quickly become clear is that 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 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.

The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.

V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself. Apart from the sexist language, this is the spirit we wish to invoke. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way?

When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death

we’ll see, there is reason to believe that during the Palaeolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all.

The idea that our current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are somehow products of the ‘Western tradition’ would in fact have come as an enormous surprise to someone like Voltaire.

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.

Intellectual historians sometimes write as if Rousseau had personally kicked off the debate about social inequality with his 1754 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind. In fact, he wrote it to submit to an essay contest on the subject.

In the Middle Ages, most people in other parts of the world who actually knew anything about northern Europe at all considered it an obscure and uninviting backwater full of religious fanatics who, aside from occasional attacks on their neighbours (‘the Crusades’), were largely irrelevant to global trade and world politics.

Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources

In fact, the terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory.

adventurers like Cortés and Pizarro carried out their conquests largely without authorization from higher authorities; afterwards, there were intense debates back home over whether such unvarnished aggression against people who, after all, posed no threat to Europeans could really be justified.

Jesuit Relations of New France

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.

Neither in the case of land and agricultural products, nor that of wampum and similar valuables, was there any way to transform access to material resources into power – at least, not the kind of power that might allow one to make others work for you, or compel them to do anything they did not wish to do.

if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.

In many societies – and American societies of that time appear to have been among them – it would have been quite inconceivable to refuse a request for food. For seventeenth-century Frenchmen in North America, this was clearly not the case: their range of baseline communism appears to have been quite restricted, and did not extend to food and shelter – something which scandalized Americans.

Kandiaronk.

Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled (1703),

‘They think it unaccountable that one man should have more than another, and that the rich should have more respect than the poor.

What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?…

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.

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.

A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason.

‘schismogenesis’

To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man’s ‘living in the way of money’.

Letters of a Peruvian Woman

this way, 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.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

In this view, freedom was always defined – at least potentially – as something exercised to the cost of others. What’s more, there was a strong emphasis in ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one’s direct control).

But a special vitriol is always reserved for traitors.

‘equality’ is a default term, referring to that kind of protoplasmic mass of humanity one imagines as being left over when all the trappings of civilization are stripped away. ‘Egalitarian’ people are those without princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests, and usually without cities or writing, or preferably even farming. They are societies of equals only in the sense that all the most obvious tokens of inequality are missing.

Evidence accumulating from archaeology, anthropology and related fields suggests that – just like seventeenth-century Amerindians and Frenchmen – the people of prehistoric times had very specific ideas about what was important in their societies; that these varied considerably; and that describing such societies as uniformly ‘egalitarian’ tells us almost nothing about them.

Ancient Athenian democracy, to take just one example, was based on political equality among its citizens – even if these were only somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of the overall population – in the sense that each had the same rights to participate in public decision-making.

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.

Rather than everyone starting out the same, then dispersing from East Africa in some Tower-of-Babel moment to become the diverse nations and peoples of the earth, early human populations in Africa appear to have been far more physically diverse than anything we are familiar with today.

By any biologically meaningful standard, living humans are barely distinguishable.

Not only do we look the same, in many ways we act the same as well (for instance, everywhere from the Australian outback to Amazonia, rolling one’s eyes is a way of saying ‘what an idiot!’).

there’s no human language, for instance, that doesn’t have nouns, verbs and adjectives; and while humans may enjoy very different forms of music and dance, there’s no known human population that does not enjoy music and dancing at all.

direct experience of today, or in the more recent past. Those elements that make up modern humans – the relatively uniform ‘us’ referred to above – seem only to have come together quite late in the process.

Consider the first direct evidence of what we’d now call complex symbolic human behaviour, or simply ‘culture’. Currently, it dates back no more than 100,000 years.

The reason archaeological evidence from Europe is so rich is that European governments tend to be rich; and that European professional institutions, learned societies and university departments have been pursuing prehistory far longer on their own doorstep than in other parts of the world.

Perhaps the real question here is what it means to be a ‘self-conscious political actor’.

Human thought is inherently dialogic.

Primitive Man as Philosopher,

There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them.32