These are dark times, and I take solace where I can get it. Lately I’ve gotten it from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by anthropologist David Graeber, who died shortly after finishing the book, and archaeologist David Wengrow. Dawn is both a dense, 692-page scholarly inquiry into the origins of civilization and an exhilarating vision of human possibility. [Wengrow is speaking at Stevens April 20. Details below.]
Graeber and Wengrow, whom I’ll henceforth call the Davids, mount a rousing assault on determinism, the idea that biological and environmental factors make certain features of our existence inevitable. They show that humans have lived in wildly diverse ways, which cannot be captured by any simple scientific theories. The Davids argue, based on their analysis of the past, that we need not accept the crushing inequities of the present. We can do better.
The Davids challenge several widely accepted models of humanity. One dates back to 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who held that life for uncivilized people was a “war of all against all.” We need strong leaders, Hobbes asserted, backed up by armed forces, to save us from our savage tendencies. Hobbes, for obvious reasons, is popular with those who like the status quo. The Davids demolish the Hobbesian narrative by pointing to complex, agricultural societies—in Asia, the Middle East and the Americas–that governed themselves in non-hierarchical ways.
The Davids do not side, as Hobbes-haters often do, with 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who imagined that early humans lived in blissful innocence and equality. Hobbes and Rousseau were both wrong, the Davids contend, in an important way. Both assumed that our ancestors—and “primitive” people living in the Americas and elsewhere–were “stupid,” incapable of reflecting on their forms of social organization. Far from being simpletons, the Davids maintain, prehistoric people were often socially self-aware, creative, experimental.
As you read Dawn, you realize that its thesis is crushingly obvious. The Davids are merely saying that prehistoric people were as intelligent, complicated, playful and perverse as we are today. We humans share the urge to conform, to go along with the herd, but we can also be rebellious. If we see neighbors doing things in a certain way, we might reject that behavior and do things differently out of sheer contrariness.
The Davids want to shake up our conversation about who we are and what we can be, to open it up to new perspectives, and they have succeeded. The Dawn of Everything has provoked strong reactions, adulatory and critical. Although I love the book, I think it leaves an extremely important question unanswered: How did we get “stuck” with our hierarchical, and largely patriarchal, social structures?
I proposed an answer in my book The End of War. War is an especially insidious, self-propagating meme, which spreads even to societies that want no part of it. If a peaceful society is threatened by a belligerent neighbor, its choices are limited. It can flee, surrender or fight back. Once war becomes entrenched, as the Davids show, it often leads to patriarchy, slavery and other forms of oppression.
Finally, Dawn raises the question, So what? What should we do to make the world better? The Davids, although clearly hostile to big governments and big corporations, and to hierarchy in general, don’t offer specific prescriptions–wisely, perhaps. But I have a suggestion, which you can probably guess.
Just as war is the key to understanding how we got stuck, so it is the key to a better future. If we abolish war and militarism, the culture of war, many of our other social ills will become much more tractable. That’s my guess, and hope. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: We must start talking about how to end war once and for all.
David Wengrow, co-author of The Dawn of Civilization, will give a talk to Stevens via Zoom on April 20 at 1:30. You can find the link and passcode here.
John Horgan directs the Stevens Center for Science Writings. This column is adapted from one he wrote for ScientificAmerican.com.
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