The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, is in many ways the founding text of modern political theory. It held that, humans being the selfish creatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; it must instead have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else.

initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century.

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.

Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws.

A dismal conclusion, not just for anarchists but for anybody who ever wondered if there might be a viable alternative to the current status quo. Still, the truly remarkable thing is that, despite the self-assured tone, such pronouncements are not actually based on any kind of scientific evidence. 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.6

Describing how the invention of farming first leads to private property, and property to the need for civil government to protect it, this is how Rousseau puts things: ‘All ran towards their chains, believing that they were securing their liberty; for although they had reason enough to discern the advantages of a civil order, they did not have experience enough to foresee the dangers.’9 His imaginary State of Nature was primarily invoked as a way of illustrating the point. True, he didn’t invent the concept: as a rhetorical device, the State of Nature had already been used in European philosophy for a century. Widely deployed by natural law theorists, it effectively allowed every thinker interested in the origins of government (Locke, Grotius and so on) to play God, each coming up with his own variant on humanity’s original condition, as a springboard for speculation.

many modern writers treat Leviathan in the same way others treat Rousseau’s Discourse – as if it were laying the groundwork for an evolutionary study of history; and although the two have completely different starting points, the result is rather similar.10

‘When it came to violence in pre-state peoples,’ writes the psychologist Steven Pinker, ‘Hobbes and Rousseau were talking through their hats: neither knew a thing about life before civilization.’ On this point, Pinker is absolutely right.

In the same breath, however, he also asks us to believe that Hobbes, writing in 1651 (apparently through his hat), somehow managed to guess right, and come up with an analysis of violence and its causes in human history that is ‘as good as any today’.11 This would be an astonishing – not to mention damning – verdict on centuries of empirical research, if it only happened to be true. As we’ll see, it is not even close.12

We can take Pinker as our quintessential modern Hobbesian. In his magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012), and subsequent books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) he argues that today we live in a world which is, overal...

Since, like Hobbes, Pinker is concerned with the origins of the state, his key point of transition is not the rise of farming but the emergence of cities.

Chagnon’s central argument was that adult Yanomami men achieve both cultural and reproductive advantages by killing other adult men; and that this feedback between violence and biological fitness – if generally representative of the early human condition – might have had evolutionary consequences for our species as a whole.20 This is not just a big ‘if’ – it’s enormous.

The important point here is that, as a ‘non-state’ people, the Yanomami are supposed to exemplify what Pinker calls the ‘Hobbesian trap’, whereby individuals in tribal societies find themselves caught in repetitive cycles of raiding and warfare, living fraught and precarious lives, always just a few steps away from violent death on the tip of a sharp weapon or at the end of a vengeful club. That, Pinker tells us, is the kind of dismal fate ordained for us by evolution. We have only escaped it by virtue of our willingness to place ourselves under the common protection of nation states, courts of law and police forces; and also by embracing virtues of reasoned debate and self-control that Pinker sees as the exclusive heritage of a European ‘civilizing process’, which produced the Age of Enlightenment (in other words, were it not for Voltaire, and the police, the knife-fight over Chagnon’s findings would have been physical, not just academic).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau left us a story about the origins of social inequality that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day. It is the story of humanity’s original innocence, and unwitting departure from a state of pristine simplicity on a voyage of technological discovery that would ultimately guarantee both our ‘complexity’ and our enslavement.

Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual – whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather than seeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions in debates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties or public gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but which otherwise might never have been written down.

Fascination with the question of social inequality was relatively new in the 1700s, and it had everything to do with the shock and confusion that followed Europe’s sudden integration into a global economy, where it had long been a very minor player.

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.1

late fifteenth century, when Portuguese fleets began rounding Africa and bursting into the Indian Ocean – and especially with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Suddenly, 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’.

Leibniz,

When he lived, Church authorities still wielded a great deal of power in most of Europe: anyone making an argument that non-Christian ways were in any way superior might find themselves facing charges of atheism, which was potentially a capital offence.3

If we ask, not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’ but ‘what are the origins of the question about the origins of social inequality?’ (in other words, how did it come about that, in 1754, the Académie de Dijon would think this an appropriate question to ask?), then we are immediately confronted with a long history of Europeans arguing with one another about the nature of faraway societies: in this case, particularly in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. What’s more, 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.

Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources – even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case.

the whole story we summarized in the last chapter – 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.

one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.6

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

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?

what is important, in this context, is that they opened a conceptual door. Writers like Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius or John Locke could skip past the biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have been like in a State of Nature, when all they had was their humanity?

they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse).

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.

Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously. It’s all just supposed to be some kind of misunderstanding, fabrication, or at best a naive projection of pre-existing European ideas. American intellectuals, when they appear in European accounts, are assumed to be mere representatives of some Western archetype of the ‘noble savage’ or sock-puppets, used as plausible alibis to an author who might otherwise get into trouble for presenting subversive ideas (deism, for example, or rational materialism, or unconventional views on marriage).11

One of the reasons that missionary and travel literature became so popular in Europe was precisely because it exposed its readers to this kind of criticism, along with providing a sense of social possibility: the knowledge that familiar ways were not the only ways, since – as these books showed – there were clearly societies in existence that did things very differently. 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.

Biard did not think much of the Mi’kmaq, but reported that the feeling was mutual: ‘They consider themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.” They are saying these and like things continually.’14 What seemed to irritate Biard the most was that the Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French had more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.

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.

questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology18 – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.

Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’

The Jesuit Relations are full of this sort of thing: 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.

The ‘wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’.23

In political terms, then, French and Americans were not arguing about equality but about freedom.

Wendat leaders to agree to a prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and published an edict to that effect – crucially, the governor notes, backed up by threat of punishment. Father Lallemant, again, records the story. For him, this was an epochal event: ‘From the beginning of the world to the coming of the French, the Savages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.’24 Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law’, which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation. Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit.

social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.

it is important to bear in mind that the Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic world. Trained in classical rhetoric and techniques of disputation, 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 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. And, just like the Jesuits, Enlightenment thinkers and democratic revolutionaries saw it as intrinsically connected with the rejection of arbitrary authority, particularly that which had long been assumed by the clergy.

unusually brilliant Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk.

Everyone who met him, friend or foe, admitted he was a truly remarkable individual: a courageous warrior, brilliant orator and unusually skilful politician. He was also, to the very end of his life, a staunch opponent of Christianity.30

unusually brilliant Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk.

Father Pierre de Charlevoix described Kandiaronk as so ‘naturally eloquent’ that ‘no one perhaps ever exceeded him in mental capacity.’

During the 1690s, in other words, the Montreal-based governor and his officers (presumably including his sometime deputy, Lahontan) hosted a proto-Enlightenment salon, where they invited Kandiaronk to debate exactly the sort of matters that appeared in the Dialogues, and in which it was Kandiaronk who took the position of rational sceptic.

Lahontan himself claimed to have based the Dialogues on notes jotted down during or after a variety of conversations he’d had with Kandiaronk at Michilimackinac, on the strait between Lakes Huron and Michigan;

Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. 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?

Over and over I have set forth the qualities that we Wendat believe ought to define humanity – wisdom, reason, equity, etc. – and demonstrated that the existence of separate material interests knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason.