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Key insights from
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of
Humanity
By
David Wengrow, David Graeber
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What you’ll learn
For a decade, an anthropologist (Graeber) and an
archeologist (Wengrow) committed to collaborating on a modest “side
project:” to rewrite human history. They begin by examining the
conventional version of history that most are familiar with: Isolated clans
of hunter-gatherers eventually settle down, leading to the growth of
civilization and all its attendant blessings and curses. According to this
understanding, that’s when population booms, technology, rule of law, war,
and disease begin to play major roles in human history.
After scouring and gathering findings from across numerous isolated
disciplines for the first time, the pair give us a story that is utterly
different from the standard rendition. They ultimately conclude that the
way history is told is too linear, more influenced by a myth of progress
and evolutionary theory than historical evidence. What the evidence does
point to is large, complex, diverse societies that flourished without
kings, police, bureaucrats, or a formal state hierarchy.
Read on for key insights from The Dawn of Everything.
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1. Hobbes and
Rousseau were both wrong, but our political imagination is still stuck
between the poles they constructed.
One of the most popular understandings of human history is a
move from the state of innocence and simplicity to complexity and violence.
The Christian rendition begins the story in the Garden of Eden, a realm of
innocence and bliss from which the first people were cut off for trying to
become like God. According to the story, we have been cut off from that
original state of childlike innocence and live in a fallen world full of
violence and hate until a future day of redemption.
In 1754, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced a secular
version of the Christian origin story in his essay “Discourse on the Origin
and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind.” He argued that people
began as relatively peaceful, childlike hunter-gatherer nomads, but once
they settled during the Agricultural Revolution, cities and civilizations
and “the State” emerged, bringing wonders like literature and technology
and miseries like disease and war.
Thomas Hobbes offers the only real alternative to this view
of original innocence. In his work Leviathan, Hobbes paints a
dimmer, grimmer view of humanity’s State of Nature: “solitary, nasty, brutish,
and short.” Unlike Rosseau, he saw no innocence at all in our humanity—then
or now. We’ve been bludgeoning each other since there were humans to
bludgeon. Without a heavy-handed state to restrain us, we would continue to
bludgeon each other.
The main problems with the Christian origin story, its
secular version à la Rousseau, and its foil account from Hobbes, is simply
this: They are either not true, hold dangerous political ramifications,
make history unnecessarily linear and boring—or some combination of all
three.
“The State of Nature” was a rhetorical device that became
popular in European political philosophy leading up to the so-called Age of
Enlightenment. Hobbes and Rousseau both used it to forward their political
philosophies. The State of Nature was a hypothetical that allowed
philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau to surmise how people would behave if
society and its institutions were suddenly stripped away.
In their own time, Rousseau’s and Hobbes’ speculations about
our original State of Nature and how the State emerged were innovative.
Their ideas opened new political panoramas and ways of thinking about how
people organize themselves. Centuries later, their ideas are just worn-out
platitudes. To continue building around these insights is to restate what
feels obvious. The old debates are stagnating and now stunt our political
imagination. We struggle to think beyond questions of “Are people good or
bad?” We have inherited a way of seeing politics and people that is
depressingly limited.
Part of the reason our political imagination is stunted is
because our view of history is, too. Thanks to evidence emerging over the
past several decades in anthropology, archeology, and related disciplines,
a new story is emerging that is very different from the untrue, dangerous,
and boring narratives we’ve been stuck with. You can catch glimmers of this
different story in scientific publications and among scholarly circles, but
they’ve never been gathered and made accessible to the public.
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2. Indigneous
groups in North America sound more like Westerners today than Westerners
from a few centuries ago.
The so-called “noble savage” is often linked to Rousseau’s
romantic vision of innocent early humans, but the term’s true origin had
nothing to do with Rousseau. The phrase had less to do with indigenous
virtue than the habits of indigenous Americans. French explorers observing
native Americans saw that they hunted and fought—just like the aristocrats
back home in France.
Records of interactions between indigenous Americans and the
French in the 1600s show us something unexpected: The indigenous Americans
held views much more aligned with modern Western views than European values
at the time were. In other words, Westerners today more closely mirror that
era’s native Americans than that era’s Europeans.
For example, in early field reports from French
missionaries, the few mentions of “equality” didn’t come from the Europeans
but from indigenous Americans. The Wendat (indigenous Iroquois group near
the Great Lakes) mentioned it occasionally to describe the equality of the
sexes—something the French Jesuits found distasteful. Conversely, the
Wendat saw the French as greedy, competitive, and uninterested in freedom.
The French and Wendat agreed, however, that native American
societies were free and European societies were not. With that settled, the
debates centered around whether individual liberty was preferable.
Indigenous Americans argued for individual liberty, while the French argued
against it.
The Jesuit missionaries who authored many of these field
reports saw liberty as primal and unrefined. Look at what one priest wrote:
“They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of
wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they
like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains,
while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.”
Don’t miss how the priest disdained the indigneous Wendat
for their freedom of expression, and their willingness to ridicule their
captains and mock Europeans’ sense of hierarchy and practice of groveling
at their superiors’ feet in fear. It sounds like a kind of slavery.
Another Jesuit missionary to North America made similar
observations:
“I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer
than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any
power whatever—so much so that Fathers here have no control over their
children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any
of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them.”
No freer people on earth. Top-down coercion frowned upon.
Autonomy honored. Changing minds through persuasion and reason instead of
brute force. The Europeans derided this, but the indigenous championed it.
First-hand accounts like these upset our assumptions that
the French from a few centuries ago would bear a likeness to today’s
Westerners. Furthermore, we would expect the indigenous Americans, the
exotic inscrutable “Other,” to hold views staunchly opposed to Western
values or at least unrecognizable to Western ears. But stories like these
reveal indigenous Americans insisting on the centrality of individual
freedom, equality of the sexes, sexual freedom, and rule by the
people—notions that sound familiar to modern Westerners but sounded utterly
alien to Europeans from four centuries ago.
This all raises questions of whether some Western ideas
actually originated in Europe or among the so-called savages they
dismissed.
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3. Indigenous voices
catalyzed the European Enlightenment.
Meet Kandiaronk: an indigenous American warrior and orator
from the Iroquois nation who lived in the 1600s. Kandiaronk earned the
admiration of allies and adversaries alike through his physical strength
and skills of persuasion. French colonists reveled in their debates with
him, and priests and captains marveled at his wit and charisma. He was
among the most eloquent opponents of European values, and his critiques and
debates with French explorers would eventually become fodder for
revolutionary discussions in European salons and cafes.
Kandiaronk’s critiques hit the European mainstream thanks to
a French explorer named Louis-Arman d’Arce, Baron de la Hontan (or Lahontan
for short). The third volume of Lahontan’s memoirs, titled “Curious
Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense who Has Traveled,” drew extensively
from conversations he had with Kandiaronk—though he calls his Wendat
character by another name. Still, Kandiaronk becomes the rational skeptic
critiquing church and political authorities, Europe’s lack of freedom, and
its stringent sexual codes.
Before and during the Enlightenment, dialogues like these
became a popular literary convention. They allowed thinkers to pen
critiques of European society and religion without the risks that come with
denunciating Cross or Crown too explicitly. By using characters as a
mouthpiece, they could gripe more safely about European culture and
religion. Lahontan added a twist to the literary form by using Kandiaronk’s
indigenous voice to criticize Europe—a tradition that spread quickly during
the course of the 1700s.
The memoir was read widely across Europe and inspired a
trend: Countless European intellectuals imitated the style and themes of
Lahontan’s original 1703 dialogue with Kandiaronk, including Voltaire,
Montesquieu, and Diderot. Each created a dialogue with some imaginary
exotic outsider casting a judgmental eye on Europe. This tradition of
self-criticism grew out of an indigenous voice that the most influential
Europeans built upon.
Enlightenment thinkers became increasingly dismissive of
indigenous voices as unsophisticated, childlike, irrelevant, and
unprogressive. Many European intellectuals overlooked the fact that these
so-called savages modeled many Enlightenment ideals well before
Enlightenment thinkers did. This matters because cases like these throw the
cultural evolution narrative into confusion. Indigenous thinkers like
Kandiaronk call into question the ongoing progress narrative that views
modern Westerners as “ahead,” bringing the light while indigenous people
are “behind” and ignorant.
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4. Archeologists
are discovering the ruins of kingdoms without kings, more ancient than
cities long considered the oldest urban centers.
The conventional belief about cities is that they’re far too
complex to function without rulers and administrators of some kind. The
thought of a kingdom without a king or ruling class is inconceivable to us.
Part of the reason for this dissonance lies in the deeply ingrained idea
that small is manageable and bigger means more factors to control—thus
requiring administrators and a hierarchy of some kind to scale up.
Discoveries in China, Peru, Ukraine, and elsewhere, however, are telling us
a different story.
We’ve long believed that hunter-gatherer bands could afford
to be more egalitarian and democratic because they numbered just a few
dozen on average. For a long time, archeological evidence suggested a
ruling class and hierarchy in ancient civilizations like Mesopotamia,
Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. It seemed inevitable that written languages
and philosophy popped up along with social classes, that some would
dominate and the rest would become peasants, serfs, and slaves.
But in the past half century or so, additional evidence has
turned up that overturns this narrative: the discovery of even older
megasites. We have to take seriously the uncovering of ancient cities that
had no palaces or temples until much later, or never at all. In modern
societies teeming with city planners and form-fillers, we assume anything
big needs to be controlled. But in the ancient cities scientists are now
uncovering, signs point to urban centers where power was only briefly
centralized—if it was centralized at all. It usually wasn’t. This means
that for most of our history, the form of political organization we take
for granted to manage complexity was mostly absent.
Ancient megasites in the Ukraine are currently
revolutionizing our understanding of prehistory and where cities come from.
These prehistoric settlements date back to the middle of the 4th millennium
BCE, making them older than our earliest known settlements in Mesopotamia,
which has often been called "the heartland of cities.” Mesopotamia was
thought to be the oldest until recently, but these megasites in the Ukraine
are older and far bigger. It doesn’t appear they had an army, but the
inhabitants managed to thrive for 800 years. We have believed that kind of
longevity was unheard of in the ancient world, yet lately we keep hearing
more stories like it.
In China, there are remains of cities that disappeared by
2,500 BCE at the latest. Along Peru’s Rio Supe, archeologists have found
the remains of a civilization at least 4,000 years older than the Incan
Empire. These newly discovered sites often dwarf the better-known ancient
sites like Egypt and Mesopotamia, and yet they so far show no signs of
rulership, an educated class of administrators, or a hierarchy.
The discovery of ancient megasites upends so much of what we
thought we knew about the origins of cities and the regulations needed (or
not needed) to govern complexity.
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5. The
conventional histories we grew up with overlook too much critical evidence.
Thanks to the legacy of Hobbes and Rousseau, we have been
led to believe that we had a fall from grace and now live like thieves and
thugs or that thieving and thugging is our nature and always has
been. These views predispose us to see the State as a necessary
intervention and part of an evolution out of ignorance and violence. They
encourage us to see civilization—complete with rulers and police and laws
and written language–as the pinnacle of our march toward progress.
The discovery of new societies that survived and prospered
before the most ancient cities we were aware of forces us to rethink
things. So does giving a serious listen to indigenous voices.
A common storyline that emerges from the
march-toward-progress myth goes something like this: The last 500 years
evoked marvelous growth and unprecedented prosperity, and the better angels
of our nature have finally won out against the demons of incivility and
irrationality. This is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s view, and he
attributes global improvements to the European Enlightenment. He constructs
history along very Hobbesian lines. Recent history is a reprieve from the
nasty, brutish, short existence humanity has always known, and the
improvements would not have been possible without Enlightenment tools like
rationality and science.
Pinker’s version of history does raise the question of why,
if the progress is so grand, did it not naturally spread on its own? Why didn’t
indigenous groups from across the world embrace it with open arms? Why did
it take so much military and financial power to import so-called Western
ideals like freedom, equality, and human rights to the rest of the world?
Even more remarkably, why are there so many records of
Europeans leaving this progress and embracing indigenous
communities in North and South America? During the era of European
colonialism, settlers adopted or kidnapped by indigenous groups almost
always stayed with their new indigenous families. Some of those returned to
European society only to return to their adoptive families for reasons of
loneliness and hunger.
Benjamin Franklin noted this pattern in a letter to a friend, that those
English captured by “Indians” and restored to their families would become
“disgusted with our manner of life” and “take the first opportunity of
escaping again into the Woods.” He also observed the converse, that few
indigenous individuals offered “the white man’s education” stayed in
European society for long. They either left as soon as they could, or
returned after a lifetime of failing to integrate into European
society.
The point is not to overly romanticize one group or another,
but to point out how some of the common understandings of history exclude a
growing body of evidence that can no longer be ignored. Much remains to be
discovered and teased out, but mounting evidence is making our common views
of an evolutionary, linear history look more and more mythological.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The Dawn
of Everything here. And since we get a commission on
every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.
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