The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

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.

Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis’ to describe people’s tendency to define themselves against one another.37

Bateson suggested such processes can become institutionalized on a cultural level as well. How, he asked, do boys and girls in Papua New Guinea come to behave so differently, despite the fact that no one ever explicitly instructs them about how boys and girls are supposed to behave? It’s not just by imitating their elders; it’s also because boys and girls each learn to find the behaviour of the opposite sex distasteful and try to be as little like them as possible. What start as minor learned differences become exaggerated until women come to think of themselves as, and then increasingly actually become, everything that men are not. And, of course, men do the same thing towards women. Bateson was interested in psychological processes within societies, but there’s every reason to believe something similar happens between societies as well. People come to define themselves against their neighbours. Urbanites thus become more urbane, as barbarians become more barbarous.

Kandiaronk’s opinions were translated into German, English, Dutch and Italian, and continued in print, in multiple editions, for over a century. Any self-respecting intellectual of the eighteenth century would have been almost certain to have read them. They also inspired a flood of imitations. By 1721, Parisian theatregoers were flocking to Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’.39 The play was revived almost yearly for the next two decades.40

Kandiaronk, focuses on the lack of individual freedom in French society and its violent inequalities.44 But Turgot found such thinking disturbing, even dangerous. Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’ – in principle. But we must consider a larger context. In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and, therefore, where everyone is equally poor. As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour. We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some – however lamentable it may be – is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole. There is no avoiding such inequality, concluded Turgot in his reply to Madame de Graffigny. The only alternative, according to him, would be massive, Inca-style state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions: an enforced equality which could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and, therefore, result in economic and social catastrophe. In light of all this, Turgot suggested Madame de Graffign...

Turgot would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement.

In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization.45 Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development. In 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. Within a few years, Turgot’s breakdown of all societies into four stages was appearing in the lectures of his friend and intellectual ally Adam Smith in Glasgow, and was worked into a general theory of human history by Smith’s colleagues: men like Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson and John Millar. The new paradigm soon began to have a profound effect on how indigenous people were imagined by European thinkers, and by the European public more generally.

economist, A. R. J. Turgot

In the years between 1703 and 1751, as we’ve seen, the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought. What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom.

Some, like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright. Others – settlers, intellectuals and members of the reading public back home – came to see it as a provocative and appealing social proposition. (Their conclusions on this matter, incidentally, bore no particular relation to their feelings about indigenous populations themselves, whom they were often happy to see exterminated – though, in fairness, there were public figures on both sides of the intellectual divide who strongly opposed aggression against foreign peoples.)

Lahontan and Kandiaronk – an argument about freedom also became, increasingly, an argument about equality.

these appeals to the wisdom of ‘savages’ were still ways of challenging the arrogance of received authority: that medieval certainty which maintained that the judgments of the Church and the establishment it upheld, having embraced the correct version of Christianity, were necessarily superior to those of anyone else on earth.

The exchange between Madame de Graffigny and Turgot gives us a sense of intellectual debate in 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.

Rousseau’s essay. The Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality has been taught, debated and picked apart in a thousand classrooms

Rousseau agrees, in essence, with Kandiaronk’s view that civilized Europeans were, by and large, atrocious creatures, for all the reasons that the Wendat had outlined; and he agrees that property is the root of the problem. The one – major – difference between them is that Rousseau, unlike Kandiaronk, cannot really envisage society being based on anything else.

It may seem ironic that Rousseau, who began his career by taking what we would now consider an arch-conservative position – that seeming progress leads only to moral decay – would end up becoming the supreme bête noire of so many conservatives.55 But a special vitriol is always reserved for traitors. Many conservative thinkers see Rousseau as having gone full circle from a promising start to creating what we now think of as the political left. Nor are they entirely wrong in this. Rousseau was indeed a crucial figure in the formation of left-wing thought.

The Jesuits, according to Chinard, have promoted ‘dangerous ideas’ in giving us the impression of the good qualities of ‘savages’, and ‘this impression seems to have been contrary to the interests of the monarchical state and religion.’ In fact, Chinard’s fundamental characterization of Rousseau is as ‘un continuateur des missionaires Jésuites’, and he holds the missionaries responsible for giving rise to ‘the revolutionary spirits [who] would transform our society and, inflamed by reading their relations, bring us back to the state of the American savages’.58

Rousseau has been accused of many crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the ‘noble savage’, which he didn’t really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the ‘myth of the stupid savage’ – even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity.

There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion.

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.

Ancestral humans were not only quite different from each other; they also coexisted with smaller-brained, more ape-like species such as Homo naledi. 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.

Not true. Ardi informs us of our arboreal life changing to the ability gather food and walk it to others.

The only thing we can reasonably infer about social organization among our earliest ancestors is that it’s likely to have been extraordinarily diverse. Early humans inhabited a wide range of natural environments, from coastlands and tropical forest to mountains and savannah. They were far, far more physically diverse than humans are today; and presumably their social differences were even greater than their physical ones. In other words, there is no ‘original’ form of human society.

what are usually taken as the earliest proofs of social inequality, in the form of grand burials.

why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms of behaviour; between when we became capable of creating culture and when we finally got round to doing it? What were we actually doing in the interim? Many researchers have puzzled over this and have even coined a phrase for it: ‘the sapient paradox’.12

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.

societies that resulted in what archaeologists call the Upper Palaeolithic period (roughly 50,000–15,000 BC) – with their ‘princely’ burials and grand communal buildings – seem to completely defy our image of a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands. The disconnect is so profound that some archaeologists have begun taking the opposite tack, describing Ice Age Europe as populated by ‘hierarchical’ or even ‘stratified’ societies. In this, they make common cause with evolutionary psychologists who insist that dominance behaviour is hardwired in our genes, so much so that the moment society goes beyond tiny bands, it must necessarily take the form of some ruling over others.

Almost everyone who isn’t a Pleistocene archaeologist – that is, who is not forced to confront the evidence – simply ignores it and carries on exactly as they had before, writing as if hunter-gatherers can be assumed to have lived in a state of primordial innocence. As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.

Boehm’s own work is revealing in this regard. An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, he argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination)19 – none of which have any parallel among other primates. For instance, while gorillas do not mock each other for beating their chests, humans do so regularly. Even more strikingly, while the bullying behaviour might well be instinctual, counter-bullying is not: it’s a well-thought-out strategy, and forager societies who engage in it display what Boehm calls ‘actuarial intelligence’. That’s to say, they understand what their society might look like if they d...

The solution to the battle between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’ turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty much exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. This is an unsettling conclusion, especially when we consider some of the actual archaeological evidence for the existence of ‘Palaeolithic politics’.

ancient remains at a place known locally as Göbekli Tepe.25 What they found has since come to be regarded as an evolutionary conundrum. The main source of puzzlement is a group of twenty megalithic enclosures, initially raised there around 9000 BC,

The enclosures at Göbekli Tepe are massive. They comprise great T-shaped pillars, some over sixteen feet high and weighing up to a ton, which were hewn from the site’s limestone bedrock or nearby quarries. The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.

While groups of humans not too far away had already begun cultivating crops at the time, to the best of our knowledge those who built Göbekli Tepe had not.

But what has mostly intrigued scholars of different disciplines so far is something else: the apparent proof they offer that ‘hunter-gatherer societies had evolved institutions to support major public works, projects, and monumental constructions, and thus had a complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming.’

In Europe, between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Kraków to Kiev.

In the last chapter, we suggested that the really insidious element of Rousseau’s legacy is not so much the idea of the ‘noble savage’ as that of the ‘stupid savage’.

To Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age – and most were deeply divided as to whether it would even be a good idea in their own time. All this would have come as a great surprise to Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman whose impact on European political thought we discussed in the previous chapter. Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation.

But by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many in Europe and America had reached the point of arguing that someone like Kandiaronk could never have really existed in the first place. ‘Primitive’ folk, they argued, were not only incapable of political self-consciousness, they were not even capable of fully conscious thought on the individual level – or at least conscious thought worthy of the name. That is, just as they pretended a ‘rational Western individual’ (say, a British train guard or French colonial official) could be assumed to be fully self-aware all the time (a clearly absurd assumption), they argued that anyone classified as a ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ operated with a ‘pre-logical mentality’, or lived in a mythological dreamworld. At best, they were mindless conformists, bound in the shackles of tradition; at worst, they were incapable of fully conscious, critical thought of any kind.

The ar- guments attributed to figures like Kandiaronk could be written off as simple projections of Western ‘noble savage’ fantasies, because real savages were assumed to live in an entirely different mental universe.

Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments. A few, such as the early-twentieth-century scholar Paul Radin in his 1927 book Primitive Man as Philosopher, ended up concluding that at least those he knew best – Winnebago and other Native North Americans – were actually, on average, rather more thoughtful.

The very practice of burying bodies intact, and clothed, appears to have been exceptional in the Upper Palaeolithic. Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewellery and artefacts. (In general, Palaeolithic people were clearly much more at home with human body parts than we are.)

The key text here is Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat’s (1903) ‘Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo’. The authors begin by observing that the circumpolar Inuit ‘and likewise many other societies … have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.44

even in sub-Arctic conditions, Mauss calculated, physical considerations – availability of game, building materials and the like – explained at best 40 per cent of the picture. (Other circumpolar peoples, he noted, including close neighbours of the Inuit facing near-identical physical conditions, organized themselves quite differently.) To a large extent, he concluded, Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live.

Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ types, since what have been identified as the diagnostic features of ‘complexity’ – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population.

If we are right, and if human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again, the implications are profound. For one thing, it suggests that Pierre Clastres was quite right when he proposed that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so.

In other words, there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question. If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition?

There is also a centuries-long, and frankly not very enlightening, debate over whether the most apparently subversive popular festivals were really as subversive as they seem; or if they are really conservative, allowing common folk a chance to blow off a little steam and give vent to their baser instincts before returning to everyday habits of obedience.55 It strikes us that all this rather misses the point. What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality.

If nothing else, surely the time has come to stop the swinging pendulum that has fixated generations of philosophers, historians and social scientists, leading their gaze from Hobbes to Rousseau, from Rousseau to Hobbes and back again. We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story.

If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture? Of settling down in permanent villages and, later, towns?

Prehistorians use the term ‘Mesolithic’ for these postglacial populations.

In the nineteenth century, Marx and many of his fellow radicals did imagine that it was possible to administer such a surplus collectively, in an equitable fashion (this is what he envisioned as being the norm under ‘primitive communism’, and what he thought could once again be possible in the revolutionary future), but contemporary thinkers tend to be more sceptical. In fact, the dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all.

The greatest modern authority on hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is, by general consent, the British anthropologist James Woodburn.