The Dawn of Everything
A New History of Humanity David Graeber & David Wengrow
Allen Lane 2021 Hb, 692pp, £30, ISBN 9780241402429
There are broadly two views of our prehistory, say David Wengrow and the late David Graeber. The first is Rousseau’s: hunter-gatherers lived an Edenic life of peace, contentment, and enlightened egalitarianism which was wrecked by the Fall of the Agricultural Revolution. The second is Hobbes’s: in the Upper Palæolithic, humans were as they have always been and always will be, living in a state of war of all against all. Progress from this grim state of nature has been possible only by governments, laws, police and the other oppressive apparatus of the State.
The Dawn of Everything asserts, and exhaustively demonstrates, that things aren’t that simple. Our story is more complex.
I wonder, though, if anyone who’s interested enough to follow the fine-grained and beautifully written argument through the 692 pages of this enormous, elegant book, needs to be told that the old dichotomy is false. It’s old news that many hunter-gatherers have seasonally shifting political and social structures, often being egalitarian while they’re hunting and foraging, but hierarchical and authoritarian when they meet in big groups for the annual meat and sex-fest.
It’s old news that hunter-gatherers can produce spectacular monuments like those at Gobekli Tepe, and that even Stonehenge was erected when foraged hazelnuts rather than harvested cereals were the main item on the menu.
It’s old news that communities shifted in and out of agriculture over many millennia, and that (at least arable) agriculture seems often to have been a last resort.
We all know that we should roll our eyes if anyone talks about the “Neolithic Revolution”. Humans are messy, and so is their story. Some will say that this book is mainly a set of colossal and brilliant footnotes to James C Scott’s short and brilliant Against the Grain. But that would be unfair. There are some new and crucial lessons here.
Graeber and Wengrow establish beyond doubt that humans can be urban without being hierarchical, authoritarian, enslaved, brutal or bureaucratic. Look, for instance, at the great Neolithic cities of Ukraine. The largest, Taljanky, was inhabited from c 4100 to 3300 BC. It had more than a thousand houses over an area of 300 hectares. Its people were small-scale gardeners who kept livestock, cultivated wheat, barley and pulses, hunted deer and wild boar, foraged for acorns and many fruits and nuts, imported salt, mined flint on an industrial scale and had a pottery industry. But there is no evidence of any ruling class, any centralised administration or government, or warfare.
There’s hope here. We’re used to hearing, per the Rousseauians, that surplus is necessarily toxic; that the fatal knowledge acquired by Adam in the Garden was the law of supply and demand. Yet Taljanky certainly produced surplus. It knew the law of supply and demand, but remained uncorrupted by it. We see a similar pattern in many other places – for instance in the Indus Valley and even, though more equivocally, in the earliest Mesopotamian cities. Rousseau was wrong, but Hobbes was even more wrong.
Being human, Graeber and Wengrow conclude, isn’t about being authoritarian, or being a hippie, or about being intrinsically reactionary or progressive, innocent or corrupt. It’s about being able to “negotiate between alternatives”.
If you’re a Rousseauian, we’re “stuck” with the nightmare of neo-liberal post-modernity because, once and for all, we’re fallen. If you’re a Hobbesian we’re stuck with it because we’re constitutionally, incurably depraved.
But since Rousseau and Hobbes both got it wrong, say Graeber and Wengrow, we’re not stuck at all.
I desperately want to believe that Graeber and Wengrow are right, but this final move seems to me to be a non-sequitur which no amount of meticulous sifting of Ukrainian soil can correct.
Yes, it’s good to look back and see where we’ve come from. It can be useful. It can help to exorcise heresies about the nature of human beings and the demands of human being. But we need also to look around.
If we do that, isn’t it plain enough – though we have only a couple of hundred years of evidence rather than Graeber and Wengrow’s 45,000 years of evidence – that we’re stuck and getting stucker? That there has been a constitutional change. That we’d sneer and yawn at Taljanky, and carry on looking at our phones while the forest blazed.
★★★