wengrow

Before the Fall (4): Notes on the Dawn of Everything

This is part 4 of my on-the-spot reactions to The Dawn of Everything by David Graber and David Wengrow. Here are the first three parts:

1

2

3

Stoned in the Stone Age

If there’s one thing to take away from this book, it’s that the Stone Age was way richer and more interesting than most of us would have thought. Moving from the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) to the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age, from about 12,000 BCE), us humans have not started working metal and a lot of us aren’t farming yet. Nonetheless even those who have not settled down to agriculture are still very busy:

1930s aerial photograph of the Poverty Point site.
  • At Poverty Point, Louisiana, US, there are massive earthworks dating from 1200BCE and larger than the contemporary cities of Eurasia. Analysis of artefacts and of the apparent systems of measurement used by the builders links this site all the way up the Mississippi and to the Great Lakes, and down to the Gulf of Mexico and even Peru. The builders were hunters, fishers and foragers.
  • In Japan, we have a wealth of archaeological data showing a rich and complex social life passing through cycles of nucleated settlement and dispersal from 14,000-300 BCE. My notes get a bit scattershot here: OK, they had acorn-based economies, they stored a surplus, they smoked weed, and they left no evidence of aristocracy or a ruling elite.
  • In Finland around 2,000-3,000 BCE we have ‘Giant’s Churches,’ massive structures built by the collective labour of hunter-gatherers.
Drawing of a Finnish ‘Giants’ Church’

This makes intuitive sense to me. We have seen that hunter-gatherer life could involve seasonal or local superabundance. This allowed for specialisation (people to do the maths and the crafts, the planning, overseeing and mobilising) and collective projects, such as monument building. But since the superabundance was temporary, local or conditional, so was the specialisation, and so was the mobilisation of the people in collective goals. That’s why kings, hierarchies, inequalities tended not to arise. The way I’d see it, agriculture, on the other hand, creates the basis for a permanent surplus, and so a lot more societies start to turn hierarchical, and these hierarchies grow more permanent.

As with previous chapters, we then turn to anthropology, that is, to modern and early modern hunter-gatherers, and see a few examples of where they have had kings (returning to Louisiana and Florida). ‘The economic base of at least some foraging societies,’ the authors conclude, could sustain priests, royal courts and standing armies.

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

Swallows and summers

The authors make repeated claims that they are overturning conventional wisdom and rewriting history. In this chapter they are arguing that there is no causal link between the widespread adoption of agriculture and the widespread turn to hierarchy, inequality and subjugation, or if there is a link it’s too broad to have any meaning. The evidence they present in this chapter consists of the amazing social and physical structures that hunter-gatherers built – all without agriculture. But are ‘at least some foraging societies’ enough to prove such a big argument? I am very impressed, but not yet convinced. If the stale old ‘conventional wisdom’ still seems to hold for all but ‘at least some,’ then it holds. A dam designed to let through a trickle of water still holds back a massive volume in the reservoir.

Usually the tone is good-humoured, but sometimes it’s nearly a Hancocky tone of denouncing ‘traditional’ and ‘conventional’ scholars. The thing is, it’s not clear to me that this book contains a conceptual revolution, as opposed to merely synthesising, collating, bringing into relief, making informed and imaginative suggestions. So far, more the latter. The authors make bold claims and hedge them, or fail to carry through fully with the evidence. For example they scold us for assuming that pre-agricultural societies were all equal, and regularly caricature that position. Saying that pre-agricultural societies were generally more equal is apparently the same as saying they were childlike and innocent, all one identical blob, or animalistic – except when Graeber and Wengrow say it, as when they acknowledge ‘the flexibility and freedom that once characterised our social arrangements.’ (p140)

To be clear, the project of synthesising, bringing into relief, etc. is more than enough of a reason to read this book. I’m really enjoying it. And often its denunciations of ‘conventional wisdom’ are on point, for example when they describe the idea of writing off 7,000 years of American history as ‘the Archaic Period’ as ‘a chronological slap in the face.’ You don’t have to agree with everything these guys say to appreciate and enjoy the close-up tour of the messy interface between social systems in our deep past.

A reference to Marx surprised me. I assumed that the authors were squishing Marxism and its theory of primitive communism into their general critique of the Rousseau ideological tradition, and I criticised them for not mentioning it. But here they describe primitive communism as the collective ownership and control of the surplus, clearly distinguishing it from more romantic or pessimistic views where communism is only possible with no surplus at all.

‘Conventional Wisdom’

But I’m not done with ‘conventional wisdom’ yet. A lot of the things that are set up and scoffed at as ‘conventional wisdom’ are not really that. Here are a few of them as laid out on page 127:

  • ‘…Rousseau’s argument that it was only the invention of agriculture that introduced genuine inequality…’
  • ‘It’s also assumed that without productive assets […] and stockpiled surpluses […] made possible by farming, there was no real material basis for anyone to lord it over anyone else.’
  • ‘Once a surplus arises, craft specialists, priests and warriors will arise to lay claim to it.’

Reading the above, you’d expect the authors to set about disproving these claims. They do nothing of the kind, at least in this chapter. As we’ve seen, they demonstrate that there are ‘at least some’ examples to the contrary. The built environment from the pre-agricultural age is impressive in absolute terms. As the reader, I have no way of judging whether this is a trickle or a torrent. OK, it’s useful to note that Poverty Point (more pictures below) has a bigger footprint than Uruk – but do all the sites built by foragers in that period have a bigger footprint than all the sites built by farmers?

‘The idea of ranking human societies according to their means of subsistence’ is described as a bad and weird idea that some eighteenth-century freaks thought up and that we have all accepted without question until now. I don’t believe in ‘ranking’ different societies, unless in relation to some specific and measurable quality. But I think that the way people put food in their bellies is actually foundational to how they organise their society. Those hunter-gatherers who changed their political structures every year? They did that because there were changes in how they could get food. It’s true that we look at prehistoric societies more than others through the lens of how they filled their bellies. But that’s entirely justified – because we know next-to-nothing about their politics or culture.

What is more, I’ve never had the above ideas presented to me as ‘conventional wisdom.’ Throughout my own formal education I never got an earful about the primacy of economics. At university we looked at Marxism as one topic of a dozen in Critical Theory, and one topic of a dozen in Historiography, plus Bloch and the Annales school. That’s it.

To be fair, I didn’t study Archaeology as such, or Anthropology – maybe it’s different in those fields. But in the broad public understanding of these fields, none of these claims in my experience constitute ‘conventional wisdom.’ On the contrary, the primacy of politics and warfare is asserted throughout popular history. In school, in the media and in popular culture, we compare societies not by their economic base but by their cultural and political ornamentation, through the prism of personalities and events. Economics gets only an indirect look-in, via inventors. Popular discourse evaluates societies according to the most arbitrary criteria (where for example Sparta somehow represents ‘democracy’) or with the aid of idiotic aphorisms like ‘Strong men create good times [etc]’ or even through the mostly-meaningless and deeply problematic lens of race. That’s where we’re at. We’re really not suffering from an excess of economic determinism.

An armed band of Aranda in early-20th Century Australia

Work and leisure

There’s a lot more in the chapter. There’s the trope about how people in past ages had more free time than modern office or factory workers, which the authors take as read and don’t attempt to prove. As they note, it holds true for the !Kung people, but not for other foraging societies – the ones in what is now Canada appear to have been workaholics. One thing about the !Kung that I would definitely think is universal, though, is that they know about agriculture, could do it if they needed to, but have no pressing incentive to turn to it.

There’s some intriguing stuff about how the only thing close to private property or hierarchy in many forager societies was (is?) the concept of the sacred. The Aranda people in Australia treated their children with kindness but initiation into adulthood involved painful rituals; subjugation and violence was only present in a sacred context. Sites like Poverty Point were probably ‘sacred,’ the only place in the social life of the community where demands for absolute obedience were made.

Linked to this, the authors note about ‘kings’ of the Mesolithic: ‘It is possible for explicit hierarchies to arise, but to nonetheless remain largely theatrical, or to confine themselves to very limited aspects of social life.’ (P 131) This is food for thought for scholars of Gaelic Ireland who are struck by the pedantry of the seating and portioning arrangements which our sources prescribe for a feast. I have a feeling this is building toward a theory of where private property came from, a theory that relegates agriculture to background noise.

But this chapter has not, in my brain anyway, broken the causal link between agriculture and inequality. But the assumption that towns, specialisation, crafts and science are impossible without agriculture is completely wrong. Graeber & Wengrow have proved this hands-down. They have given us a fascinating picture of the real social and political lives of foraging societies and the monuments and social structures they can sustain.

Another powerful point here is that colonisers routinely claim that the land they are seizing is somehow fair game because the people who live there are not working it ‘properly,’ ie they are hunting and gathering rather than farming (And of course, even when they are farming, as in the case of Palestine, the colonisers still have the nerve to pretend they ‘made the desert bloom’). So the idea of foraging as not being a valid economic activity, of not being able to sustain ‘civilisation,’ however you define that, has a blood-soaked and disgusting legacy. This part is conventional (though it was never wisdom) and we can’t dispense with it quickly enough.

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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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