Last of two parts
The first part is at thevoice.us/the-dawn-of-everything-new-answers-to-human-story
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and published by Farrar. Straus. and Giroux in 2021, joins other popular history books which garnered global attention with sweeping versions of the whole human story. This review was in YES Magazine Winter 2022.
“The Western Enlightenment view of social progress is not only chauvinistic, but, as these two social scientists contend, is increasingly untenable in the face of mounting scholarly evidence. By ditching the myth of progress, Graeber and Wengrow are free to examine prehistorical and precolonial societies with fresh eyes. From the earliest bands of hunter-gatherers, to the rise of cities, up to major moments of first contact, the book brings together previously siloed academic evidence and little-publicized interpretations. Marijuana, we learn, was widely cultivated in prehistoric Japan. Centuries before Montezuma, Mesoamerican city-dwellers developed a precursor to urban social housing. Each mini-revelation is fascinating in its own right; together, they pose a serious challenge to both the Hobbesian and Rousseau-ite interpretations of the human past.
“The conceptual shift away from linear models of social evolution bears profound implications for our present. The old framework offered too neat an origin story, distorting our understanding of the past. Too often, it merely served to make our current, rather dismal, societal outlook, marked by state surveillance, extractive capitalism, dominating hierarchies, and ecological destruction, seem all but inevitable. An epistemological break with that meta-narrative offers a startlingly new picture of our shared past: Messier and more complicated, flush with diversity, experimentation, and, above all, freedom.
“The book’s emphatic insistence on a broader, deeper understanding of freedom than is typical recalls past works by Graeber, many of which inspired activists, anarchists, and slackers the world over. The three primordial freedoms he and Wengrow arrive at—the freedom to move away, to disobey, and to transform social relationships, encompass and fortify the dissenting positions expounded in Graeber’s books Bullshit Jobs and Debt: The First 5,000 Years. As much as any one work can, The Dawn of Everything reads as a culmination of Graeber’s lifelong project, as well as a testament to the power of intellectual collaboration.
“Developing a renewed conception of fundamental social freedoms brings the Indigenous critique full circle, with the Eastern Woodlands confederacies of North America as their exemplars. Crucially for Graeber and Wengrow, there was among these groups no obvious way to convert wealth into the kind of power over others that coerces or forces labor. Leaders were elected, but office-holders couldn’t compel anyone to do anything they didn’t wish to do. We learn how, through generous social welfare provisions and consensus-seeking deliberations, groups such as the Iroquois and Wendat self-consciously cultivated communal practices and institutions that vouchsafed human dignity without undue sacrifice of agency. Native American societies are once more cast as noble, but not as the pure, Edenic savages of Enlightenment imaginary.
“The rabble-rousing authors clearly side with those Mi’kmaq critics who jibed that they were richer than their French counterparts—not in material possessions or extractive technologies, but in other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.
“The point, as with the whole book, is not only to reevaluate our sense of the past. Readers are invited to weigh starkly unfamiliar societal arrangements against our own, and to feel the sting. ‘Something has been lost,’ Graeber and Wengrow stubbornly insist. The Dawn of Everything begins a new origin story of human societies, one with a horizon beyond our present disillusionment.”