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On “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow
I’ve wanted to talk to you all about a book I’ve just finished since I started reading it back in March. I think I may have mentioned it briefly in a previous entry. I thought I would offer you a number of passages from the book to give you a taste of it.
It’s a big book, over five hundred pages with nearly a hundred additional pages of notes (which I admit I’ve only just started to peruse... and they look as interesting as the main text), so I cannot imagine that the full depth and development, evolution, of the author’s primary premise/s can be adequately represented through such a selection of passages. But a taste is just a taste. So, feel free to ask me more about it via email or in the comments section!
But first, I have a rather serious admission to make.
I dog-ear pages. To mark favorite or moving passages. As I read. I crease the upper page corners, folding the corner toward the page upon which the passage I like is located. I admit it. It is a cruel thing to do to a book, but honestly... I make the fold as tiny as humanly possible, and the ease in collecting these passages is largely the result of that nasty habit. As incomprehensibly rude as the practice might be, it has helped me find and be reminded of certain points in my reading that blossomed and stuck in my consciousness. Plus, I am a slob.
None-the-less, this book is remarkable, even with dog-eared pages. It has changed my perspective on our species’ lifespan on this celestial clod of amazingly fecund carbon and water. Perhaps I was seeking such a change... and for a long time. Something in the very basic way we, I, was taught... indoctrinated really... to view the span of human residence here was continually unsettling, incomplete, to me. I am coming to believe that there is a possibility that this out-of-kilter, big and unformed, unsettled, question, has been to a great degree the reason I have continued to read about such things. Aren’t there the ingredients of a mighty search in all love of reading? As well as writing..?
And it’s not as if this one fat book has answered all my questions. I have never been able to accomplish the mental gymnastics that are required to be a true believer in anything. But it asks the right questions. The book does. It confirms that my own questions, however less formulated or smart, and those questions it has helped me refine, are indeed the correct questions. It confirms that it is in the asking that some aspect, some piece of the pie, some portion of the great galactic elephant to my many blind men and women, can be grasped and fathomed.
So, I am grateful. Thanks Mr. Graeber and Mr. Wengrow.
David Graeber, by the way, died in the period between finishing this tome and when it was published. Inutterably sad, hard to fathom... but the stuff of the mythological gods and demi-gods... really. That kind of thing absolutely blows me away.
I love fat books. Fat books that call me back and back again. Fat books that I feel require me to put them down for a time in order to properly digest and file and come to the next point of engagement. This is such a book.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a book that is hard to put down, or even one that makes itself hard to follow if one takes too long a break from it. While I was working my way through The Dawn of Everything, I discussed this point with a friend, and we compared the demands books make on us and the instructions they give, advice really, about how best to proceed through them. Demands that, if we are fortunate enough, we are more than glad to oblige. We compared the digestion periods required by a book like The Dawn of Everything with Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, a book, it seemed to us, that disallows the reader from taking too long a break from it due to the possible risk of losing track of its music altogether and having... even gladly... to start all over again.
In some ways those periods away from reading The Dawn of Everything were a way for me to, well, just plain old settle down. It is that kind of book... compelling, and not at all difficult to read, but its ease of readability disguises a kind of trickster penchant to over excite my noggin and all its powers of connectivity. I needed time to calm my synapses!
For one thing, the chapter titles themselves are lovely. Simply gorgeous. Here are a few I’ve just now randomly turned to: “On Breaking Apart the Fertile Crescent”, “In Which We Lay Out a Theory Concerning the Three Elementary Forms of Domination, and Begin to Explore its Implications for Human History”, “In Which We Go in Search of the Real Origins of Bureaucracy, and Find Them on What Appears to be a Surprisingly Small Scale”, “On How the Collapse of the Mississippian World and Rejection of its Legacy Opened the Way to New Forms of Indigenous Politics Around the Time of the European Invasion”. Gorgeous. Really.
As difficult as a short and concise statement that explains the core tenants of this book might be, I’ll take a whack at it, and then leave you to the passages I have criminally dog-eared and replicated here.
The authors unpack our currently unfolding malaise through an examination of how we became stuck in our historical biases even while attempting to uncover and discover our historical origins and the mélange of societal stories we tell ourselves about how we came to this place in time. The Enlightenment is a key turning point for them as it is for many thinkers, scientists, and historians.
As much as Enlightenment thinkers (and J.J. Rousseau’s work in particular is a constant in the authors’ presentation) did indeed create and cause a great shift in thought about the nature and practice of human equality and freedom, their legacy and indeed the nature of their influences, were hobbled by the superiority complex European men of a certain class, in particular, were addicted to.
So, as much as the ideas of equality and freedom were the fountainhead of a kind of real revolution (and the authors go into quite a dense bit or research-based discussion of how the ideas of freedom and equality that Rousseau in particular proposed were influenced by European contact with the indigenous populations in the “New World”) they were simultaneously hobbled by a deluded vision of history that made them the possessors of a more superior, more evolved, nature. Despite the undeniable influences on Enlightenment thinking that the conscious and purposeful philosophical livelihood of the Native American societies had, the Europeans could not think past the idea that this “freedom” and “equality” as demonstrated by indigenous people was a result of some innate and unlearned childlike innocence and naivete’, as opposed to being a purposeful and conscious practice and choice, a philosophical tradition and hard-fought for wisdom.
Our biases, the authors state, even today minimize the nature of the greatest majority of human experience and time spent in various societal forms on the planet. They persuade us to define most of our human experience as primitive and the result of an inability to choose our way forward. We continue to believe in our species’ lack of consciously expressed will until the relatively short eras and societies somehow arose out of some supposed archeological ether that included great warriors, great wars, kings, slaves, subjugated women, alphabets, temples and palaces with codified and enforced class systems that required strongman kings and emperors, allegedly to prevent self-destruction. And we insist on this in spite of all the evidence that these top-down systems of social organizations were particularly vulnerable to collapse over the relatively short term... if, as the authors propose, collapse is even an accurate term for the greater spans of time between what our historical, anthropological biases have determined to be our most elevated social structures and societies.
Whew. Did I get it right?
One of the points brought to bear early in the authors’, the two Davids’, discussion is the fact that Enlightenment figures like Rousseau also immediately spawned schools of opposing thought typified by a fellow named Thomas Hobbes, who posited that great and greater top-down controls were required to keep growing populations and inherently primitive societies in check. We were, in their minds, a species of unwieldy populations of free, wild, men... savages with savage instincts... not, even against all unfolding evidence, an upright ape who could choose and vote, work toward consensus, and organize their own self-determined lives and societies. We continue to play out this divide.
So, what ends up happening? The argument becomes one between two factions of a predominant Eurocentric assumption of superiority, neither of which can manage to tune into the nature of how other societies, even ancient ones that had been ebbing and flowing in myriad and uncounted, uncountable, ways, were absolutely thoughtful and made conscious and purposeful choices about the forms and structures of their societies... chose to become one kind of community perhaps after seeing how another kind, even in their own remembered, storied, history, was cruel or failed to protect and serve and provide for its members in ways that were satisfactory, or ways that turned horrifically bloody and catastrophic.
The authors are exhaustive in their review of the examples of the innumerable ways these long-lived if less than adequately documented societies invented and conducted themselves. And the authors are careful to remind the reader that huge portions of human history are still only in evidence through the fossilized remains of a single partial skull, a tibia or a tooth.
I think what I most come away with is the idea that the violent divisions we are currently embroiled in, the factions and sides we are compelled to choose from, remain largely false and incomplete ones, leftovers from a faulty and incomplete vision of our history and our possibilities.
There is, ultimately, a potential for great optimism in understanding that much of everything one was taught regarding what came before and what must come after is held up by some pretty substantial falsehoods, but there is also the feeling of potential doom if those who profit most from such erroneous and factitiously incomplete visions continue to protect and enforce fealty to these visions. Just ask the indigenous populations of every continent what happens when the primary social arguments profit from their societal organizations but do not include them.
Anyway. I hope you enjoy these excerpts. The book is a treasure. I hope many will read it.
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The passages. And we’ll start at the very beginning ( a very good place to start, as they say):
Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have little to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between about 25,000 and 15,000 BC. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.
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When Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera in 1492, these lands [The western coastal and near-coastal areas of North America] were home to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of inhabitants. They were foragers... ...Living in an unusually bounteous environment, often occupying villages year-round, the indigenous peoples of California, for example, were notorious for their industry and, in many cases, near-obsession with the accumulation of wealth. Archeologists often characterize their techniques of land management as a kind of incipient agriculture; some even use Aboriginal California as a model for what the prehistoric inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent—who first began domesticating barley 10,000 year ago in the Middle East—might have been like.
To be fair to the archeologists, it’s an obvious comparison, since ecologically California—with its ‘Mediterranean’ climate, exceptionally fertile soils and tight juxtaposition of micro-environments (deserts, forests, valleys, coastlands and mountains)—is remarkably similar to the western flank of the Middle East (the area, say, from modern Gaza or Amman north to Beirut and Damascus). On the other hand, a comparison with the inventors of farming makes little sense from the perspective of indigenous Californians, who could hardly have failed to notice the nearby presence—particularly among their Southwest neighbors—of tropical crops, including maize corn, which first arrived there from Mesoamerica around 4,000 years ago. While the free peoples of North America’s eastern seaboard nearly all adopted at least some food crops, those of the West Coast uniformly rejected them. Indigenous peoples of California were not pre-agricultural. If anything, they were anti-agricultural.
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Politically the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and the city-state of Tlaxcala embodied opposite ideals (no less than, say, ancient Sparta and Athens). Still, little of this history is known, because the story we’ve become used to telling about the conquest of the Americas is an entirely different one...
...We like to tell ourselves that Europeans introduced the Americas not just to these agents of destruction but also to modern industrial democracy, ingredients for which were nowhere to be found there, not even in embryo. All this supposedly came as a single cultural package: advanced metallurgy, animal-powered vehicles, alphabetic writing systems and a certain penchant for freethinking that is seen as necessary for technological progress. ‘Natives’, in contrast, are assumed to have existed in some sort of alternative, quasi-mystical universe. They could not, by definition, be arguing about political constitutions or engaging in processes of sober deliberation over decisions that changed the course of world history; and if European observers report them doing so, they must either be mistaken, or were simply projecting on to ‘Indians’ their own ideas about democratic governance, even when those ideas were hardly practiced in Europe itself.
As we’ve also seen, this way of reading history would have been quite alien to Enlightenment philosophers, who were more inclined to think their ideas of freedom and equality owed much to the peoples of the New World and were by no means certain if those ideals were at all compatible with industrial advance. We are dealing, again, with powerful modern myths. Such myths don’t merely inform what people say: to an even greater extent, they ensure certain things go unnoticed. Some of the key early sources on Tlaxcala have never even appeared in translation, and new data emerging in recent years has not really been noticed outside specialist circles.
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History and archeology abound with terms like ‘post’ and ’proto’, ‘intermediate’ or even ‘terminal’. To some degree, these are products of early-twentieth-century cultural theory. Alfred Kroeber, a pre-eminent anthropologist of his day, spent decades on a research project aimed at determining if identifiable laws lie behind the rhythms and patterns of cultural growth and decay... ...In his Configuration of Cultural Growth (1944) Kroeber examined the relation of the arts, philosophy, science and population across human history and found no evidence for any consistent pattern; nor has any such pattern been successfully discerned in those few more recent studies which continue to plough through the same furrow.
Despite this, when we write about the past today we almost invariably organize our thinking as if such patterns really did exist. Civilizations are typically represented either as flower-like—growing, blooming and then shriveling up—or else as like some grand building, painstakingly constructed but prone to sudden ‘collapse’. The latter term tends to be used indiscriminately for situations like the Classic Maya collapse, which did indeed involve a rapid abandonment of some hundreds of settlements and the disappearance of millions of people; but equally it’s used for the ‘collapse’ of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, where the only thing that really seems to have declined precipitously is the power of Egypt’s elites ruling from the northern city of Memphis.
Even in the Maya case, to describe the entire period between AD 900 and 1520 as ‘Post-Classic’ is to suggest that the only really significant thing about it is the degree to which it can be seen as the waning of a Golden Age. In a similar way, terms like ‘Proto-palatial Crete’, ‘Predynastic Egypt’ or ‘Formative Peru’ convey a sense of impatience, as if Minoans, Egyptians or Andean peoples spent centuries doing little but laying the groundwork for such a Golden Age—and, it is implied, for strong stable government—to come about. We’ve already seen how this played out in Uruk, where at least seven centuries of collective self-rule (also termed “Pre-dynastic’ in earlier scholarship) comes to be written off as a mere prelude to the ‘real’ history of Mesopotamia—which is then presented as a history of conquerors, dynasts, lawgivers and kings.
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Choosing to describe history... ...as a series of abrupt technological revolutions, each followed by long periods when we were prisoners of our own creations, has consequences. Ultimately it is a way of representing our species as decidedly less thoughtful, less creative, less free than we actually turn out to have been. It means not describing history as a continual series of new ideas and innovations, technical or otherwise, during which different communities made collective decisions about which technologies they saw fit to apply to everyday purposes, and which to keep confined to the domain of experimentation or ritual play. What is true of technological creativity is, of course, even more true of social creativity. One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book—indeed, one of the patterns that 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.
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In developing the scientific means to know our own past, we have exposed the mythical substructure of our ‘social science’—what once appeared unassailable axioms, the stable points around which our self-knowledge is organized, are scattering like mice. What is the purpose of all this new knowledge, if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become? If not, in other words, to rediscover the meaning of our third basic freedom: the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality?
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I Read A Big Book
Thanks; this helps me get ready to read this tome.