# Book review: The Dawn of Everything

Book review: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David
Graeber and David Wengrow.

This book is about narratives of human progress. I.e. the natural
progression from egalitarian bands of maybe 20 people, to tribes, to
chiefdoms, to states, with increasing inequality and domination by
centralized bureaucracy. That progress is usually presumed to be driven
by changes in occupations from foragers, to gardeners, to farmers, to
industry.

Western intellectuals focus on debates between two narratives:
Hobbesians, who see this mostly as advances from a nasty state of
nature, and those following in Rousseau\'s footsteps, who imagine early
human societies as somewhat closer to a Garden of Eden. Both narratives
suggest that farming societies were miserable places that were either
small advances or unavoidable tragedies, depending on what you think
they replaced.

Graeber and Wengrow dispute multiple aspects of these narratives. The
book isn\'t quite organized enough for me to boil their message down to
a single sentence. But I\'ll focus on what I consider to be the most
valuable thread: we should be uncertain about whether humanity made (is
making?) a big mistake by accepting oppression as an inevitable price of
material wealth.

The Dawn of Everything asks us to imagine that humans could build (and
may have been building) sophisticated civilizations without domination
by powerful states, and maybe without depending on farming.

The book doesn\'t mention Burning Man, possibly to appeal to a broader
audience than those who have accurate information about it. But I\'ll
assume my readers understand Burning Man culture, and use it as an
example of the quasi-anarchist culture that Graeber and Wengrow hope
for.

[Occupy Wall Street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street)
(in which Graeber was active) shared some of this culture, but mixed
with too much statist framing to be a clean example.

### Freedom and Equality

Graeber and Wengrow lament the loss of freedom that\'s associated with
modern society. They use a somewhat nonstandard notion of freedom,
focused on:

> \(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one\'s surroundings;\
> (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and\
> (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back
> and forth between different ones.\

Nothing here about being secure in one\'s property or livelihood. E.g.
at Burning Man, almost all order is maintained via peer pressure, with
approximately no police-like backup. If you want your bike to be treated
as your property, rely on locks, not the threat of force. Peer pressure
is enough to ensure that people don\'t steal food or shelter, because
the culture of sharing ensures people don\'t develop a temptation to
steal. (I\'m excluding the interface between Burning Man and the outside
world, which does depend a bit on police backup).

> For the [Haudenosaunee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois), the
> giving of orders is represented as being almost as serious an outrage
> as the eating of human flesh.

But there\'s one exception: dreams became divine orders which everyone
had to obey for brief periods of time.

> Needless to say, there were few more terrible crimes than to falsify a
> dream.

Their original idea behind the book was to focus on the origins of
inequality, but that framing had problems. It\'s unclear whether there
ever was a time with no inequality.

Which kind(s) of inequality should we care about? Wealth? Income? Power?
Opportunity? Access to the tribe\'s deepest secrets? There\'s plenty of
variation in which of those a society cares about. Also, inequality of
one of these doesn\'t necessarily mean inequality of another. Native
Americans apparently didn\'t have much ability to convert wealth to
power (why not? I\'m guessing some sort of cultural obstacles).

The book tries to portray the worldview of societies that are more
egalitarian than ours. A focus on the origins of inequality would frame
that analysis in a very Western way. Graeber and Wengrow aim to frame
the discussion in a way that would better reflect what the other
societies consider important.

### Western Culture

Most discussion of the origins of Western culture focuses on ancient
Greece, or Christianity, or other forces acting within Europe.

Dawn of Everything focuses instead on the ideas that Europe took from
cultures on other continents.

Europe allegedly imported the nation-state from China.

More importantly, Europe learned a lot from interacting with the new
world. Some of that learning involved incorporating features of
anarchism, such as approval of freedom and equality.

The book claims that Europeans mostly disapproved of freedom and
equality circa 1700. E.g. they paraphrase
[Turgot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Robert_Jacques_Turgot) as
saying \"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 self-sufficient, and, therefore, equally
poor.\".

European objections to freedom seem to have focused on whether the
\"savages\" obeyed commands from entities above them in the hierarchy
(mainly God\'s commands, but likely also kings, lords, etc.). It was
apparently hard to even translate the concept of obedience into some
native languages. The book exaggerates by implying a more general
European rejection of freedom.

American
[intellectuals](https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/02/15/the-insights-of-kandiaronk/)
criticized European culture, and there\'s some evidence that [a book
describing these
critiques](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Voyages_to_North_America#Dialogue_Between_Lahontan_and_Adario)
was read in Europe. (Note that American, in the context of this book,
sometimes means mainly the people from the [Wendat
Confederacy](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wendat-Confederacy), but
probably applies to most of the people in what is now the US and
Canada.)

Graeber and Wengrow want us to believe that
[Enlightenment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment)
ideas of progress and social evolution were developed in reaction to
those critiques. The narrative of a natural set of stages of development
(hunter, gardener, farmer, industrialist) enabled Europeans to treat
American critiques as coming from people who were too primitive to
deserve a place in intellectual debate.

Did American ideals cause Europeans to yearn for equality and freedoms
that they wouldn\'t have otherwise wanted? The timing is somewhat
suggestive.

The book typically pushes a narrative under which America was mostly as
nice as Burning Man before Europeans conquered it, but occasionally
mentions downsides such as famine and torture of war captives. I\'m
unclear whether Graeber and Wengrow think these are important issues -
maybe 18th century Europe did similar enough things that these issues
say little about which societies were better?

This quote from Kandiaronk expresses a similarly odd attitude toward how
pleasant America was:

> If you abandoned conceptions of mine and thine, yes, such distinctions
> between men would dissolve. A leveling equality would take place among
> you, as it now does among the Wendat. And yes, for the first thirty
> years after the banishing of self-interest no doubt you would indeed
> see a certain desolation as those who are only qualified to eat,
> drink, sleep, and take pleasure would languish and die, but their
> progeny would be fit for our way of living.

### The Dawn of Farming and Cities

The authors dispute the stereotype under which the invention of farming
generated cities, inequality, states, and dependence on a few crops, and
that farming spread like an epidemic.

The book provides many examples of societies that appeared to make
deliberate decisions to avoid farming, or that engaged in \"play
farming\" without becoming dependent on it.

Some cultures managed to build large monuments without clearly
qualifying as farming cultures. E.g. [Poverty
Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_Point), a stone age site,
about 1/3 the size of the Burning Man, in an area where there are no
stones. Or Stonehenge, whose builders had abandoned grain farming, and
were mostly foragers who raised a few animals.

A number of the earliest cities show no sign of having had a government,
or inequality.

In Mexico, 5000 years passed between the domestication of corn and
squash, and when they became staples.

What looks like decay to a historian who is focused on records / palaces
left by oppressive rulers, may have looked like liberation to the
average person of the time.

Writing of the
[\"decline\"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longshan_culture#Decline) of
China\'s Long-shan culture (in the middle of a 1400 year period between
the rise of cities and the first monarchy):

> First, the ostensible \'state of anarchy\' (elsewhere described as
> \'collapse and chaos\') lasted for a considerable period of time,
> between two and three centuries. Second, the overall size of Taosi
> during the latter period actually grew from 280 to 300 hectares. This
> sounds a lot less like collapse than an age of widespread prosperity,
> following the abolition of a rigid class system. It suggests that
> after the destruction of the palace, people did not fall into a
> Hobbesian \'war of all against all\' but simply got on with their
> lives - presumably under what they considered a more equitable system
> of local-self-governance.

Why wasn\'t agriculture developed earlier? I think the authors imagine
that people didn\'t want it earlier, but they ramble so much after
asking the question that I lost track of whether they think they
answered it.

### Parochial or Cosmopolitan?

Most of us imagine that early humans lived in isolated bands, and that
there\'s been a trend of increasing contact with more distant people.

Graeber and Wengrow claim the opposite: a trend of increasingly local
allegiances. Modern social worlds have generally become parochial, based
on boundaries of culture, class, and language.

The study of modern foragers has misled us. They\'re isolated because
they are confined to marginal land. Pre-Columbian America had
continent-wide societies. It was normal for people to travel long
distances and find fellow clan members who would provide them with food
and shelter. People identified clan members by features such as hair
style (e.g. Mohawks). People might be made fun of for having \"wrong\"
beliefs about gods or vaccines, but wouldn\'t be punished for them.

But what about Papua New Guinea? It seems to have small tribes on decent
land, who are isolated from other tribes by something other than modern
states forcing them onto marginal land. I suspect the trend that Graeber
and Wengrow see was confined to America.

### Seasonal Dualism

In the dry season [Nambikwara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nambikwara)
were foragers living in small bands, with chiefs gave orders as if they
were petty tyrants. In the wet season, the Nambikwara switched to
gardening in villages of several hundred people. The chiefs lost their
authority to give orders, and used persuasion instead.

This kind of alternation between two social orders seems somewhat
common.

> If there\'s a riddle here, it\'s this: why, after millennia of
> constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did *Homo sapiens*
> \... allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take
> root?

The authors complain that we no longer experience those changes, so
we\'re poor at imagining what alternatives are feasible.

Burning Man is evidence that we do still imagine alternative social
orders. But we mostly forget to imagine an alternative way of earning a
living. When\'s the last time you considered a lifestyle stranger than
becoming Amish as a substitute for having a job?

### Fact Check

How much of this should we believe? I can imagine that anywhere between
40% and 80% of their surprising claims are accurate. Most of the claims
look hard to check. I\'ll restrict my fact checking to one point that I
care about more than most.

Graeber and Wengrow claim that European settlers in 18th century America
were much more likely to choose to live as part of a native tribe than
were natives to live as part of a European society. This sounds like an
important type of evidence about which society is pleasanter to live in.

They quote [Benjamin
Franklin](https://quotepark.com/quotes/1910206-benjamin-franklin-when-an-indian-child-has-been-brought-up-among-us/)
reporting that children fit this pattern. However, they also cite [The
Assimilation of Captives on the American Frontier in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth
Centuries](https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/3157/)
as if it supports that claim. The more detailed evidence there points to
a rather weaker conclusion: adults mostly want to return to whatever
culture they grew up in, and the younger children were most likely to
assimilate into whatever culture they were reared in, with some
exceptions that seem to be due to Native Americans being treated as
inferior and/or being kept in boarding schools with other natives who
reinforced their original culture.

So this evidence mildly supports the claim that European culture was
worse for Native Americans than vice versa, but only seems to say that
European racism was causing problems, as opposed to a more general claim
about European statism and hierarchy that Graeber and Wengrow try to
imply.

Much of the book sounds like this - reckless exaggerations, most of
which are trying to counter widespread statist biases that cause
comparable(?) exaggerations in the opposite direction.

### Plausibility

The book shows that we should doubt that humans needed states in order
to produce many of the desirable features of modern society. But the
authors don\'t ask how many good features would be missing from their
anarchist quasi-utopia.

The Burning Man style culture of sharing provides some benefits in terms
of community and safety nets, at the likely cost of preventing the
accumulation of wealth.

Would we be able to have cell phones without the ability of a corporate
hierarchy to order workers to show up on time to run the factories? Or
would we be better off without phones?

Is there a way to defund the police without a disastrous increase in
crime? There are clearly police-free cultures that are in some sense
decent places to live. That doesn\'t mean we can get there by abolishing
the police - instead, it would require a big enough culture change that
police-specific rule changes would be an afterthought. It also doesn\'t
tell us whether people who grew up relying on police would be able to
adapt to a police-free society.

It\'s also hard to find evidence that police-free societies can defend
themselves against modern armies.

### Conclusion

I\'ll give a medium-level recommendation to read the first few chapters
and the last two chapters as a way to broaden your perspectives about
what cultures are possible. Be careful not to trust the book\'s claims,
or any potentially controversial claims I\'ve made in this review.

I\'m convinced that the world could have taken a much different path to
a wealthy quasi-paradise, one with more freedom and equality. The Dawn
of Everything adds a few pieces to the puzzle of how much better such a
world could be.