The Dawn of Everything

These are my notes taken from a wonderful book – The Dawn of Everything: a new history of humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Penguin 2021). I highly recommend reading this book – it tells important tales and gives a sense of the multitude of possibles.

To quote from three reviewers:

“A revolutionary look at where we came from… This is more than an argument about the past, it is about the human condition in the present.” [Brian Appleyard, ‘Sunday Times’]

“The radical revision of everything, liberating us from the familiar stories about humanity’s past. Instead, the authors tell us that what human beings are most of all is creative, from the beginning.” [Rebecca Solnit]

“It suggests that we have many more possibilities to choose from than we have been traditionally told we have.” [Margaret Atwood]

All that follows is taken directly from The Dawn of Everything.

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? 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 imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

…The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume…

Father Pierre Biard was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelise the Algonkian-speaking Mi’kmag in Nova Scotia [modern Canada] who had lived for some time next to a French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi’kmag, but reported that the feeling was mutual: “They consider themselves better than the French: ‘For,’ they say, ‘you are always fighting and quarrelling amongst 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 neighbours.’ They are saying these and like things continually.”

…It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence…the argument was about liberty and mutual aid, or what even be better called freedom and communism…

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 baseline communism should properly extend…

What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative than we are?

…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… we need to approach the evidence of the human past with fresh eyes.

…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…

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”). The same applies to cognition… Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans.

…In Eurasia, the most famous examples are the stone temples of the Germus Mountains, overlooking the Harran Plain in southeast Turkey. In the 1990s, German archaeologists, working on the plain’s northern frontier, began uncovering extremely ancient remains at a place known locally as Gobelki Tepe. 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 BCE, and then repeatedly modified over many centuries.

…What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic [upto about 10,000 BCE] suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities…

We are creatures of excess, and this is what makes us simultaneously the most creative, and most destructive, of all species. Ruling classes are simply those who have organised society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of the surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements…

The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequences – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.

…It made the argument that, at least when it comes to working hours, the Victorian narrative of continual improvement is simply backwards. Technological evolution has not liberated people from material necessity. People are not working less. All the evidence, Marshall Sahlins argued, suggests that over the course of human history the overall number of hours most people spend working has tended instead to increase. Even more provocatively, Sahlins insisted that people in earlier ages were not, necessarily, poorer than modern-day consumers. In fact, he contended, for much of our early history humans might just as easily be said to have lived lives of great material abundance…

Ever since Mesolithic times [upto about 4000 BCE], the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbours…

The intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, often a huge difference, and to some degree cultural difference really is just an arbitrary roll of the dice: there’s no ‘explanation’ for why Chinese is a tonal language and Finnish an agglutinative one; that’s just the way things happened to turn out…

…a number of discoveries among the miniature art of Catalhoyuk [Turkey; about 7500 BCE to 5600 BCE] appear to show that the female form was a special focus of ritual attention, skilled artisanship and symbolic reflection on life and death… Such findings suggest that the more ubiquitous female figurines, while clearly not all objects of worship, weren’t necessarily all dolls or toys either. Goddesses? Probably not. But quite possibly matriarchs of some sort, their forms revealing an interest in female elders. And no equivalent representations of male elders have been found.

…Theirs was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase the likelihood of securing a favourable outcome. Their ‘laboratory’ was the real world of plants and animals, whose innate tendencies they exploited through close observation and experimentation. This Neolithic mode of cultivation was highly successful…

…it’s abundantly clear that women’s work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What’s more, it was all carried out in ways that made radical inequality an extremely unlikely outcome.

…much of what we have come to learn in the last forty or fifty years has thrown conventional wisdom into disarray. In some regions, we now know, cities governed themselves for centuries without any sign of the temples and palaces that would only emerge later; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all. In many early cities, there is simply no evidence of either a class of administrators any other sort of ruling stratum. In others, centralised power seems to appear and then disappear…

…over eight centuries we find little evidence for warfare or the rise of social elites. The true complexity of the mega-sites lies in the strategies they adopted to prevent such things… It’s as of every household was an artists’ collective which invented its own unique aesthetic style… Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the apparent uniformity of the Ukrainian mega-sites arose from the bottom up, through processes of local decision-making.

…Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we recognise as a ‘state’ in the urban civilisation of the Indus valley… even 2,000 years ago it was not considered in any way unusual for members of ascetic orders to make decisions in much the same way as, for example, contemporary anti-authoritarian activists do in Europe or Latin America (by consensus process, with a fallback on majority vote); that these forms of governance were based on an ideal of equality; and that there were entire cities governed in what was seen to be exactly the same way…

The general consensus among those who know the site best is that Teotihuacan [Mexico; from 100 BCE to about 550 CE] was, in fact, a city organised along some sort of self-consciously egalitarian lines…

…this obsession with property rights as the basis of society, and as a foundation of social power, is a peculiarly Western phenomenon – indeed, if ‘the West’ has any real meaning, it would probably refer to that legal and intellectual tradition which conceives society in those terms… ‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence…

…democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers…

An old Shilluk [South Sudan] legend sums it up nicely: “There was once a cruel king who killed many of his subjects… One day, to demonstrate that his subjects were so afraid they would do anything he asked, he assembled the Shilluk chiefs and ordered them to wall him up inside a house… Then he ordered them to let him out again. They didn’t. So he died.”

…Over the course of this book we have had on 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’.

…there is simply no clear evidence of monarchy on Minoan Crete [3000 BCE to 1500 BCE] … Women are regularly depicted at a larger scale than men, a sign of political superiority in the visual traditions of all neighbouring lands. They hold symbols of command… Most male depictions, on the other hand, are either of scantily clad or naked athletes (no women are depicted naked in Minoan art); or show men bringing tributes and adopting poses of subservience before female dignitaries. All this is without parallel in the highly patriarchal societies of Syria, Lebanon, Anatolia and Egypt (all regions that Cretans of that time were familiar with, since they visited them as traders and diplomats).

…Cretan palaces were unfortified, and Minoan art makes almost no reference to war, dwelling instead on scenes of play and attention to creature comforts… Pretty much all the available evidence from Minoan Crete suggests a system of female political rule – effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses… There are no heroes in Minoan art – only players…

…what archaeologists refer to as the ‘Hopewell Interaction Sphere’, a network with its epicentre in the Scioto and Paint Creek river valleys of Ohio. Between roughly 100 BCE and 500 CE, communities participating in this network deposited treasures under burial mounds…many of these tombs were located in the vicinity of gigantic earthworks, some literally miles across… there is little evidence for warfare or organised violence of any sort…

…they were artistically brilliant. For all their modest living arrangements, Hopewellians produced one of the most sophisticated repertories of imagery in the pre-Columbian Americas… the Hopewell Interaction Sphere has no discernible centre, no single capital, offers little evidence for the existence of permanent elites, priestly or otherwise… the unity of Hopewell lay in the celebration of difference.

…Among the Cherokee [southeastern north America] we find evidence of priests claiming to be sent from the heavens with special knowledge to impart. Yet we also find stories, such as that of the Ani-Kutani, about the existence long ago of a theocratic society governed by a hereditary caste of male priests and how they so systematically abused their power, particularly in their abuse of women, that the people rose up and massacred the lot of them.

…One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that most felt like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities…

Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like. Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them. If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history…

…complex systems don’t have to be organised top-down, either in the natural or the social world. That we tend to assume otherwise probably tells us more about ourselves than the people or the phenomena that we’re studying.

…the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant. In fact, if you bracket the Eurasian Iron Age, they represent the vast majority of human social experience…

…Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backward from this as yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies – say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighbourhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction – will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like historical curiosities. 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?

After all, those things really did exist, even if our habitual ways of looking at the past seem designed to put them at the margins rather than at the centre of things… 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.