"The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a landmark new book by British archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber, who was a London-based author, anarchist activist and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. Graeber was the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan, "We are the 99 percent."

The Dawn of Everything offers a dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution -- from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality -- and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. In its early chapters, the book proposes that the European Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries was actually, in great measure, a response to the Indigenous philosophies that Colonists and Imperialists had come into contact with in the New World of North America. Ideas of freedom, equality, and democracy did not exist in Medieval Europe. Ever since then, the Western mind has been moving closer, in these areas, to Native American views. As the authors point out, our ideas about human freedom, democracy, and sexual equality are much closer to that of an Indigenous person of the 16th Century than they are to the European Catholic view.

One of the main propositions that Graeber and Wengrow put forth in The Dawn of Everything is that the ancestors of our prehistory were not simple, ignorant savages, but rather self-conscious, idiosyncratic social organizers, evolving through a "carnival parade of political forms." Today we might use words like anarchist, communist, authoritarian, or egalitarian to describe their activity, but that language fails to represent the sheer quirkiness of the actual case studies: large cities without central authorities or farming (Göbekli Tepe), tribal nations spanning entire continents (Cahokia), and social housing projects (Teotihuacan).

 

Some populations would even alternate their social systems on a seasonal basis. For example, the Plains tribes of North America formed into an organized political community under one government during the seasonal bison hunt. There was a police force and squads of warriors with full coercive powers. If anyone endangered the success of the hunt, they could be punished, imprisoned, or even killed. The people who occupied those enforcement roles rotated from year to year. These coercive institutions did not last beyond the period of the hunting and ritual Sundance season. During the rest of the year, these Plains societies would split off into smaller groups which had entirely different social systems where people would have to resolve disputes through processes of deliberation and debate.

 

For 40,000 years, people have been moving between various forms of equal and unequal social structures, building up hierarchies and then dismantling them. The authors make the case that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies were considerably more so. How did we get stuck?

One of the key arguments of the book is its stance against a reductionist view of our current circumstances: its insistence that the first 300,000 years of human history offer a past that is more varied, hopeful and altogether more interesting than what we have interpreted it to be, and that the same might be true of our future. Our species has been creating new ways of living in all the diverse ecosystems on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. We have the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality, so why not exercise it. We have done all this before. We can do it again. The book's optimism, in the face of impending climate doom, political polarization, and social upheaval, is itself a provocation to act.