This is the first of hopefully many book reviews that I write. I’ve set a reading goal for myself this year and have been enjoying the benefits of the public library to get audiobooks to listen to on my commute. (Unfortunately, because I listened to the audiobook, I won’t quote the text directly, but I highly encourage everyone to read it). At least initially, I will review books that give me hope and encourage agency and action to improve some small corner of the world. Eventually, I will probably make a short list of books that clearly detail why things are bad, for the inevitable individuals who would rather pick apart the need to even take action, but for now I’m starting with the assumption that people reading this have seen that our economy mainly works for the wealthy, at the expense of the poor, and that politics and the economy cannot be separated.
Quick side note: I know I promised a part II of my last post, but I started going down rabbit holes and realized I needed to do a lot more research to make a clear and fact-based post, so for now I’m postponing that to hopefully come back to more prepared.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021) by David Graeber and David Wengrow could have been another in a never-ending line of anthropological books that claim to explain all of human history and society and how it was determined by a few key technological shifts. Many similar books have claimed to be able to explain the broad development of civilization up to the modern day (I’ll explain why this framing is bad later). Among the most well-known are Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (1997) by Jared Diamond and Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011) by Yuval Noah Harari, both of which are mentioned several times in the book in an effort to debunk some of the implicit assumptions of their arguments. One book I recently read, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy (2022), by William von Hippel falls under this same category. As you can tell by the subtitles, all of the authors make bold claims about the factual power of their books.
Graeber and Wengrow started their research asking “How did human societies become so unequal?” But as they dug further, they realized it was the wrong question to ask. Implicit in the question was the assumption that human societies used to be equal, or at least that there is some natural state of society and if we are able to just look back far enough, we’ll see the original nature of society and understand how that led to the state of the world today. Upon realizing these faulty assumptions, they decided to look at how different societies have been structured throughout human history using their expertise as an anthropologist and an archaeologist. The real power of this book comes from the simple idea that humans are complex social creatures, and that humans have agency to make choices about their lives and societies. The authors examine anthropology and archaeology through the framework that ancient people had similar reasoning capacities to humans today. That they had social interactions and through conflict, cooperation, and learning created political structures to live together in a society. As this excellent Guardian article debunking race science notes:
“Given that so many genes, operating in different parts of the brain, contribute in some way to intelligence, it is hardly surprising that there is scant evidence of cognitive advance, at least over the last 100,000 years. The American palaeoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading experts on Cro-Magnons, has said that long before humans left Africa for Asia and Europe, they had already reached the end of the evolutionary line in terms of brain power. “We don’t have the right conditions for any meaningful biological evolution of the species,” he told an interviewer in 2000.”
The departure from common convention is that Graeber and Wengrow apply these standards to humans in the past, rather than assuming, as Diamond and Harari do, that biological or environmental factors determined the course of ancient human societies, and intelligent debate and reasoning had little if anything to do with the success of different political structures. This idea is radical in that it reaffirms human agency, and in comparing the complexities and developments of past societies, the authors make a very strong case that the social systems we have now were never inevitable. In fact, some societies experimented with different political and economic arrangements that lasted for many thousands of years. This is longer than any modern nation-state, or any political or economic system in which we currently live have lasted. On such a time-scale, it is much easier to see that no political system is inevitable, and that all social, political, and economic arrangements are the result of human interactions and the choices we make daily.
Early on in the book, Graeber and Wengrow show that enlightenment thinkers were heavily influenced by the vastly different political structures of Native American societies, and that we can trace the ideals of individual liberty and personal autonomy that many of us relate to the enlightenment to Native American social structures and their politicians and negotiators like Kandiaronk (who is super interesting and if you don’t read the book, at least read his Wikipedia page). In fact, at the time that Europeans were first in contact with Native Americans, many prominent Jesuit writers argued against individual freedom, preferring the Hobbesian idea that a strong tyrant (or government) was necessary to control the inherent evil of human nature and promote a good society. The rational debate, individual autonomy, and democratic nature of Native American societies caused many Europeans to rethink what was possible. The Wendats, a native group of Canada, shamed the French for their failed aristocratic political system which left them less free and with so many people in poverty, all so a few could amass meaningless money and treasure. They talked circles around many European visitors due to having so much practice in public debate in a society that valued open-exchange and debate, participation, and consensus building. Many truths we hold self-evident today were unthinkable to early Europeans until they were exposed to these new values and organizational structures.
The authors also tackle unscientific aspects of anthropology, such as classifications of societies based on level of complexity, where complexity is assumed to mean how close they are to modern societies, and the further away they were, the more primitive they were. When we talk about civilization developing, the concept of civilization itself is a fraught, political conversation. These classifications ignore the often highly complex social structures of ancient humans, with bureaucracies (hierarchical and not), participatory democracies, kings, coalitions of tribes, and many other forms of organization. Often, societies tried one political structure and reverted to an old way after several generations when it didn’t work. For example, and to debunk the “agriculture is development” idea of the “evolution of civilization”, there were several groups of humans who developed the technology of agriculture, and then either rejected it to live as hunter-gatherers, because they spent much less time working and had happier and freer lives, or who became “horticulturalists” who dabbled in farming just enough to supplement their diet and maintain their lifestyle. This Atlantic article describes how humans cultivated the Amazon rainforest for thousands of years, making it more productive for human needs without clear-cutting for what we traditionally think of as farming.
Through detailed looks at the many ways human societies have been organized for thousands of years, Graeber and Wengrow break down an abundance of false premises that have led to a sense of inevitability and a lack of human agency in the world today. In some cases, it can be more palatable to believe that the current world-order is pre-determined by technological advances. It allows us to avoid personal responsibility for the state of the world. It allows us to ignore large, seemingly intractable problems because “that’s just the way things are”, or “this is the best solution we have”. However, it can also lead to a sense of hopelessness, or even despair. I believe that many people in the US realize that corporate monopolies, lobbyists, billionaires, and all their money (power) is corrupting our democracy (oligarchy), but we have been raised in a system in which greed is justified as “efficient” or “innovative”, and can find it hard to break out of that mode of thought. This book is empowering because it presents so many different possible societies that functioned for longer than our current capitalist system. It makes the case that humans are fundamentally complex, interacting in infinitely complex ways based on the technological and social constraints placed on them. Humans have free will and can choose how to interact with each other and are fundamentally political creatures, organizing themselves into groups and creating both social and technological solutions to problems. Maybe we’d do well to take another look at social solutions, since technological solutions continue to benefit the wealthiest at the expense of the poorest in our world.
P.S. What can I do?
1. Read the book! It’s really good and gives a more complex and nuanced view of humans than I can fit into this short post.
2. From my own experience, volunteering is one of the best ways to regain a feeling of agency in the world. There are so many problems we are facing, but also so many solutions. Working in community with people who share the same goal has helped me get out of the cycle of cynicism and hopelessness that comes from reading the news regularly.
3. Please comment below if you have any thoughts, kudos, or angry criticisms. I’m writing these posts as a way of stepping above the level of just information consumer, and I appreciate any feedback or ideas you want to share!