Big History Books - suggesting The Dawn of Everything

When this group started, we listed a few of the foundational books that fit under the Big Picture rubric. David Christian's Maps of Time was prominent, the works of William McNeill, and others.

I think David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity belongs there too. Below is my review:

What if we ask ourselves how we come to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? This is my paraphrasing of the authors’ simple yet provocative question, the one that motivates David Graeber and David Wengrow’s synthesis of decades of accumulating knowledge in anthropology and archeology. The sheer efficiency of that question pleases me, as I labored in deep concentration over a richly documented synthesis of a body of work. Surely no one person could possibly be expert in the fullness of this material. The back matter - endnotes, index and bibliography - of this encyclopedic work are fully 30% of that of the text. And as I read, rapt and consumed by topics that have driven me for much of my life, I wrestled with doubt that I could convey the essence of a book of such scale in short form like this.

If there is one essential thing to glean from the authors’ ten year effort, it is this: without knowing it, we have all been subject to a basic story about the last some 30,000 years of human history. Roughly this is a story about original small bands of human beings; the advent of sedentism and agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution; the rise of cities and empires; and the growth and complexification that bring about the political structures and social control requisite for large scale human societies. It is Graeber and Wengrow’s project to demonstrate that this conventional account - to use their schema - is wrong, is boring and comes with dire political implications. It is a myth that dates largely to the Enlightenment. In abandoning it we can begin to consider other narratives of human history. Not only are alternative social arrangements abundant historically, but the accumulating evidence offered by new scientific tools and the research of recent decades allow us to see an ossified false narrative. Actual human societies are far more varied and quirky, and far less limited than we need or should believe. Given that unchained history, future human societies may achieve far more freedom and variety than we tend to assume.

Any attempt to convey the evidence and even the full arguments presented would occupy a substantial fraction of the 526 pages the authors took. So I will offer a few ideas and examples from the book. I highly recommend exploring the entire synthesis.

The only possibility in this account is to oversimplify. The authors see the Enlightenment narrative stemming from the work of Jean-Jaques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, whose nearly opposite accounts of history have been elaborated and reified over four centuries. In brief, for Rousseau, we began in freedom and only in settling into organized societies did we arrive at the current state of restriction and inequality, as humans “ran headlong to meet their chains”. For Hobbes, the original “state of nature” was notoriously “nasty, brutish and short”, and only by voluntarily surrendering to a central authority did people establish a “social contract” that protected them from the predations and misery of human life in its “uncivilized” state. Graeber and Wengrow argue that both narratives are wrong, and contributed to the emergence of views of human social arrangements that limit us intellectually, politically and socially.

For a practical illustration, consider the tendency toward explanations of human arrangements that suit our preexisting beliefs. For example, for centuries there have been people arguing for the existence of some kind of proto-economy or “primitive trade” very early in human history, based on the discovery of materials, precious stones, shells, etc. found hundreds or even thousands of miles from their original sources. However there are many other explanations for this distant dispersal. To share only one example, it is now understood that in many indigenous North American societies, women would play gambling games. Often they bet shells or other objects of personal adornment. One well known ethnographer estimates that many of the shells and other exotic materials found far across the continent arrived by the nonintuitive means of repeated wagering over a long period of time. This example not only indicates something of the explanatory limitations of motivated or biased conjecture, but shows the failure to account for the sheer wackiness - the authors use the word “quirky” - of human behavior, and how hard it is to anticipate its myriad forms.

One of the strengths of The Dawn of Everything is its ability to present familiar accounts of history whose faulty logic, upon exposure, can readily be seen. For example (and others have delved deeply into this area), they suggest that the role of foragers in the construct of the “Agricultural Revolution” is to stand for everything that farming is not, in order to help explain what farming and the agricultural life is. “If farmers are sedentary, foragers must be mobile; if farmers actively produce food, foragers must merely collect it; if farmers have private property, foragers must renounce it; and if farming societies are unequal, this is by contrast with the ‘innate’ egalitarianism of foragers. Finally, if any particular group of foragers should happen to possess any features in common with farmers, the dominant narrative demands that these can only be ‘incipient’, ‘emergent’ or deviant in nature, so that the destiny of foragers is either to ‘evolve’ into farmers, or eventual to wither and die.” We see how the prevailing concepts have defined our viewpoint, regardless of their reality.

Graeber and Wengrow review the evidence refuting that agriculture was adopted once humans learned its methods. Rather, many groups were uninterested, seeing it as unnecessary, even while understanding both the techniques involved and the attendant labor costs. It was adopted and rejected many times in many places, and there was apparently nothing inevitable about groups choosing to farm. Many other societies found ways to cultivate with minimal human involvement. And there is Richard Lee’s famous account of his discussion with an anonymous Bushman, who when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”

Such is the flavor of the book. In miniature and abbreviation.

This is a provocative and important book. One of its brilliancies is that any particular claim or example can be questioned without altering the fundamental point. Some have objected to the characterization of Rousseau’s thinking. Others have challenged the notion of a Native American “Indigenous Critique” that influenced Enlightenment thinking. And so on. Such critiques, however regarded, alter little if at all the fundamental claim here. It is hard to imagine marshaling any evidence or material of this breadth and volume without eliciting objections among some. And even harder to reject the fundamental insight that, despite one’s doubts about certain particulars, humans have lived within an exceptional range of social choices and arrangements over a vast period of time. In this, the authors are incisive and persuasive. I find this point of view truthful and exhilarating!

So what if we ask ourselves how we come to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves? Graeber and Wengrow have rendered a liberating service: the invitation to regard ourselves and our history more clearly, with less bias. We see more clearly who we have been and who we are. Optimistically, with such awareness we envision future human life with greater freedom. And who couldn’t use an extra dollop of optimism right now?

I'm slowly making my way through this, but am not very impressed. It has to do with the framing - they claim there is evidence that the procession from families to bands to clans to chiefdoms to towns, etc, is untrue, but where is the evidence for that? Oh sure they come up with a lot of observations and information, but it is not the same as evidence.

The Indigenous Critique is one example - I was hoping for a first hand account from a person who learned write, but instead I just got the same old thing we've always had - European accounts of conversations allegedly had with Indigenous persons. Those are fraught with problems as we all know. Or a few graves from prehistoric times - yeah, so a few graves. So what? What do they tell us? Surely something, but what? There are so few and they are so different that there is no pattern.

Things like that are problematic for me and for the claim that there is new evidence our assumptions are wrong. I don't see it. I see a lot of interesting ideas that may have been inconvenient for the narrative we've been fed all these years, but only that. I wish there were more concrete facts rather than supposition.

Perhaps there is value in pointing out that the existing paradigm is also not supported by evidence?

Except that there is...we didn't (as humans) draw many of our conclusions based on thin air. Of course there are assumptions baked in that we can question, but there is no evidence either way in a lot of pre-historic time.

For example, it's always been understood that the earliest bands of hunter/gatherers were family units. This makes sense based on other primate methods of organization. Except that families can be corrosive and tense groups of people; just witness almost any holiday gathering. I was musing with my mom about our own family and how a gravely ill member pushed away so many of us that her dying will be isolated and alone except for her husband and children - it was a prime example of how families break apart and I personally have no wish to be with this toxic woman. If I was forced to be part of some tiny collective including her and a few other choice members of my family, I think we'd all have killed each other by now.

That's kind of what I mean that they are throwing ideas out there to consider, but there is no evidence either way that early groups of humans were or were not family based.

As per >3 jjwilson61: above, I thought the greatest value here was the recognition that many of our existing notions are unsupported or sit beside counter examples. To me, that was very liberating.

Mostly, they are discussing societies, on small and large scales. I didn’t find that any claims about families in particular were crucial to the logic of the book.

The Indigenous Critique is debated. I’m not sure they have anything original to say about it, other than they are on the side that is sympathetic to it. The project is to synthesize; particular disagreements on the details are more thoroughly covered elsewhere. To me that’s a strength of the work - any particular can be further investigated elsewhere. But the volume of work covered and the organization and synthesis was persuasive to me, at least that we have previously unchallenged assumptions about societies, their structures and their lack of inevitability.

I thought the greatest value here was the recognition that many of our existing notions are unsupported or sit beside counter examples. To me, that was very liberating.

Yes, it is interesting as I said. No debate there. Ideas or circumstances that run against the accepted narrative are always worth exploring. I have issue with how this book is framed - as if there is new evidence to support that the accepted wisdom is flawed. I don't see any so far (I'm up to the in-depth discussion of the Northern California and Pac NW tribes/populations) but, maybe there are some actual digs and or remains to be had further along in the book.

But in the end, how will this affect us today? It won't. Nothing will change except that readers may wish that it might have been different.

“But in the end, how will this affect us today? It won't. Nothing will change except that readers may wish that it might have been different.”

Uh oh. Any hope for the future?

Nope, not really. Humans are what they are. We know better than to do pretty much everything we do and we still do it. We lack discipline, emotional restraint and common sense much of the time. Atruism is harder and harder to come by. Overcoming these things is difficult to sustain and pretty much no none bothers anymore because it's ok not to. You can be the most self-aggrandizing narcissist with a penchant for cruelty and no filter and become President of the United States.

I’m a long term optimist, but I can’t argue with your final point. I would just note that most humans are better than the worst of them.