indigenous people

Before the Fall (2): Notes on The Dawn of Everything

Hi, this is Part Two of my run-down on The Dawn of Everything, a book that asks how unequal, hierarchical and class-ridden societies first arose. Here is Part One.

In this chapter Graeber and Wengrow ask:

  • What did indigenous Americans in the 17th Century think about Europeans?
  • To what extent did the Enlightenment draw on sources outside Europe?
  • What does ‘egalitarian’ even mean?

And they emphasize the urgency of these questions: ‘A very small percentage of [the world’s] population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion.’ (p 76) If we want a free society that is not careering toward ecological and social catastrophe, we need to figure out how it came to be that a small minority ended up in control.

Before starting their story of humanity from the beginning, the authors detain us for one chapter to argue that a lot of our ideas about that epic story are wrong to begin with, and to give an account of why. This involves rewriting the history of the Enlightenment. So that’s the fairly ambitious idea of the part we’re looking at today:

Chapter 2: The Indigenous Critique

Along the way, the book delivers a lot of what I expected and wanted. For example, we get a sketch of several indigenous American societies before their destruction by European settlers.

The Wendat (Huron) grew crops around inland fortified towns. They had formal political officers and a caste of war-captives with limited rights, whom the European observers assumed were slaves. Other tribes such as the Mi’qmak and Montagnais-Naskapi, meanwhile, were bands of hunter-gatherers.

The Europeans saw these people as eloquent and very good at reasoned debate, skills honed in near-daily discussions of communal affairs. The Europeans also noticed that they possessed individual liberty, and wholeheartedly disapproved. Laws were not enforced, fathers did not control children, captains had to rely on their own persuasive power to get people to fight.

Jesuit missionaries were shocked to observe the ‘equality of the sexes’ – women had sexual freedom and the right to divorce. But there was a gendered division of labour, with women owning and working the fields while men hunted and fought. This reminds me of Engels’ explanation of how gender inequality came about. His vision of the prior state of equality does not preclude a gendered division of labour.

Looking at the Wendat, I feel like I’m re-playing the greatest hits from Celtic Communism? In an exact parallel with Gaelic Ireland, the Wendat practised communal compensation rather than punishment. There were wealthy people among the Wendat – but, and we saw elements of this in Gaelic Ireland too, the main incentive in hoarding material things was to give them away and thus boost one’s own prestige.

Graeber and Wengrow say lots of clever and interesting things – such as, in relation to the Wendat, ‘insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom’ (p 48) – but they miss one obvious point. The 17th-Century Wendat (I specify 17th Century because, as far as I know, they are still around) had richer and poorer individuals, and individuals who held political office (on the sufferance of those who did not). What they did not appear to have had was distinct classes in conflict with one another. Again, here we see some parallels with Ireland. The Wendat were equal and egalitarian and communist in the sense that they all belonged to a single class. Like with my previous Celtic ruminations, here we are troubled out of complacent identification with the people of the past by the spectre of the un-free, the layer or caste who existed within the community but with curtailed rights. But the authors here don’t seem at all interested in class, and are visibly aggrieved when the Enlightenment salons turn from discussions of political institutions to discussions of economics.

Indigenous people roasting Europeans

What’s equally fascinating is the low opinion these Indigenous people had of Europeans when the latter arrived in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For some reason I tend to forget that European colonisers and indigenous people lived in proximity for centuries, had developed opinions and analyses about each other, and left records of same. What is more, these records were a very popular type of book in early modern Europe.

The Mi’kmaq, around 1608, saw their (overwhelmingly male) French neighbours as envious, slandering, lying, quarrelling, covetous and ungenerous. ‘They are saying these and the like things continually,’ writes the Jesuit missionary who recorded these opinions. To the missionary it was obvious that while the French had more material goods, the Mi’kmaq had more ease, comfort and time.

Twenty years later a missionary among the Wendat recorded that they had no lawsuits and were not covetous. There were no beggars ‘in their towns and villages’ (I admit, embarrassed, that I didn’t know they even had towns and villages before I read this). As for beggars the Wendat heard of existing in France, they ‘blamed us [the French] for it severely.’ While the Wendat had daily community gatherings and discussions, the French interrupted one another, quarrelled, competed to hog the limelight, and often resorted to weak arguments.

This chapter does great service to history by promoting knowledge of a Wendat political leader named Kondiaronk who actually visited France as a diplomat and, in lengthy salon discussions with Frenchmen back on his home turf, voiced a powerful critique of European society.

‘The whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly,’ declared Kondiaronk – that ‘contrary apparatus’ consisted of money, property rights and profit. If you want to learn more about Kondiaronk, I really recommend you read this book.

Stages

This brings us to the main focus of the chapter. The authors basically give an alternative history of the Enlightenment, arguing that this indigenous critique was of key importance. The idea of societies developing through stages is attributed to the economist Turgot, who developed the idea as a defence mechanism against the indigenous critique: in short, the indigenous people say that Europeans are un-free and miserable, but it doesn’t matter what they say, because they are on a lower level. Their freedom is ‘lower’ than our slavery.

Rousseau’s famous essay on the origin of social inequality appears here as a strange synthesis of the indigenous critique and of the ideas developed to counter it.

I have mixed feelings on this. Texts such as the main one cited here, Curious dialogues with a savage of good sense who has travelled (1703), are fascinating and valuable and it’s a shame they were dismissed so lightly as fabrications. And this narrative of the Enlightenment as a period when Europeans encountered and opened up to ideas from other parts of the world was fresh and interesting. It’s an ambitious argument, though, and the fact that it’s so much at odds with other accounts of the Enlightenment that I’ve read would give me at least pause for thought. Doesn’t the receptiveness of European minds to the indigenous critique say something about how developments within Europe were also driving the Enlightenment?

Whatever Turgot’s agenda was, the idea of societies ascending through stages of economic development is, in itself, a good one. Married to arbitrary criteria, or none at all, (sorry, Age of Empires), this idea leads to bad places. But you can attach it to valuable criteria (such as the productivity of labour) and thereby give some meaning to the concept of progress underlying it. I predict the authors are setting things up for an attack on Marxism in future chapters. They are emphasizing the conservative pedigree of the idea of stages of economic development as part of lining up those dominoes. We’ll see how that goes in the coming chapters.

I enjoyed this chapter in spite of reservations. I hope Kondiaronk and his opinions on early modern European society become a staple of school history courses.

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Before the Fall (1): Notes on The Dawn of Everything

Have human societies always been divided into classes? Do we naturally tend toward hierarchies? If not, when and how did we stumble into this vale of tears, and which way is the exit?

This blog meditated on these questions before in my series Celtic Communism? in which I asked whether James Connolly and others were right to assert that Gaelic Ireland was socialist.

At the moment I’m reading the very successful 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Wengrow and the late David Graeber. So far, it’s fascinating – which is not to say that I agree with all of it. Reading it, I sometimes tut and shake my head, sometimes suppress an urge to cheer out loud.  

To continue my ruminations on history, hierarchy and communism, I’m going to be blogging my reactions to The Dawn of Everything chapter by chapter, as I read it.

This post looks at…

Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood

From The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, 2021 (Penguin, 2022)

The authors set up two philosophers, Rousseau and Hobbes, as reference points. I haven’t read either myself, but here is a brief summary of what I learned from this chapter:

  • Hobbes argued that in early human societies life was ‘nasty, brutish and short,’ ‘a war of all against all,’ and that inequality, hierarchy and harsh penal systems rescued us from this chaotic state.
  • Rousseau argued that humans once lived in a state of wholesome communist innocence, but ‘ran headlong into their chains’ because inequality was a necessary overhead of prosperity and progress.
  • Graeber and Wengrow, on the other hand, argue that humans are neither innately good (as implied by Rousseau) nor evil (as implied by Hobbes), but creative and brilliant, and that actual early societies do not conform to either the Hobbes or the Rousseau model.
Rousseau, discoursing on inequality while a servant lights the fire

These two models, they argue, have three basic faults in common:

  1. They ‘simply aren’t true.’
  2. They have ‘dire political implications.’
  3. They make the past ‘needlessly dull.’

The chapter is engaging and witty, and plenty of the evidence presented here is really interesting. But my nagging feeling throughout was that ‘a plague on both your houses’ doesn’t really cut it.

For example on page 4 we read that many of the ‘first farming communities’ and the ‘earliest cities’ (my emphasis) remained democratic and egalitarian. This statement is meant as a refutation of Rousseau’s claim that once we invented agriculture we all started bowing down to priests and kings. But the authors are saying, in essence, ‘it took a while and didn’t happen everywhere all at once’ – not ‘it didn’t happen.’ It’s zooming in closer to the transition from primitive communism to class society and pointing at the messy interface. I am fascinated by that messy interface and I want to zoom in. But this chapter has failed to convince me that Rousseau’s version of events is broadly untrue. 

Moving on to the ‘Dire political implications.’ Regarding Hobbes, the dire implications are obvious to me: his model is an argument against freedom and for authoritarianism, against equality and for hierarchy. No thanks.

Thomas Hobbes, in a painting by John Michael Wright

But what are the dire implications of Rousseau? The authors say that talk of ‘inequality’ tends to reinforce inequality, to make it seem permanent, and that fifty or a hundred years ago there was a more powerful critique of ‘concentration of capital’ rather than inequality. But those who critiqued ‘concentration of capital’ 50-100 years ago, the communists, socialists and anarchists, would have had a much firmer theoretical grounding in Rousseau, via Engels, than the critics of inequality today. I feel Graeber & Wengrow do not shoulder the burden they have taken on themselves to prove that Rousseau has ‘dire political implications.’ 

The Marxist development of the ideas of Rousseau added a vital component: that modern industrial society has created such an abundance of goods that it is possible to return to a classless and stateless society while preserving material prosperity. This view is not pessimistic, does not accept inequality as inevitable. I assume it is dealt with later, but it is an omission here.

There is a powerful and memorable assertion on page 8: ‘The ultimate question of human history […] is not our equal access to material resources […] but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.’ Now, I don’t actually agree with that. I think the part about contributing to decisions (politics) is actually subordinate to the part about material resources. First, because most of the decisions will tend to be about how to allocate resources; second, because if there are some people who control most of the wealth, they will in the final analysis call the shots even in the most democratic system. But I appreciate the authors laying their cards on the table. The word that springs to mind for me is ‘voluntarism’ – an approach that downgrades considerations of how material conditions might limit the possibilities of human agency.

A museum reconstruction of Ötzi

This first chapter contains a satisfying rebuke to some modern-day iterations of the Hobbes model – the writings of Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond and Stephen Pinker. The latter presents Ötzi, a 5,000-year-old body found in the Alps with an arrow wound, as a ‘poster child for humanity in its original condition’ – the whole nasty, brutish and short thing. Graeber and Wengrow introduce Ötzi to Romito 2 – the 10,000-year-old remains of a man who suffered from a severe disability. Romito 2, in life, was taken care of by his community, given an equal share of meat, and when he died he was buried with care and respect.

The book also promises to be a stinging rebuke to eurocentrist and basically racist assumptions about history. ‘Western civilisation’ is just today’s ‘accepted synonym’ for what used to be called ‘the white race.’ As for the supposedly ‘western’ tradition of freedom, democracy and equality, ‘it is almost impossible to find a single author in the Western tradition, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Erasmus, who did not make it clear that they would have been opposed to such ideas […] it’s almost impossible to find a single European author before the nineteenth century who suggested [democracy] would be anything other than a terrible form of government.’ (Page 16) I agree wholeheartedly and I look forward to the further development of these ideas.

A Massim man in the Trobriand Islands, 1900s.

The last part of the chapter argues that the Hobbes and Rousseau models make history ‘needlessly dull.’ For example, material artefacts travelled great distances through such diverse means as vision quests, travelling healers and entertainers, women’s gambling, and the death-defying adventures of the Massim Islanders. To assume that objects can only travel through ‘trade,’ or to sum up such fascinating cultural activities as mere ‘trade,’ is to sell history and archaeology short. I’m not sure how much Rousseau or Hobbes can be blamed for the poverty of imagination which is under fire in these passages, but I’m looking forward to learning more about such cool and interesting stuff in the pages that follow.

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