The Dawn of Everything

This is an ambitious book, as its title proclaims: THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING.

If each generation needs to re-write history according to its own standards, this is a certainly a regeneration of history. The two Davids certainly ask different questions than the ones which, up to now, have shaped (and are still shaping) our understanding. The authors begin by quoting C G Jung’s saying that this is the right time for a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols that shape our culture.

David Graeber died in 2019, unfortunately for us, since he was one of those rare thinkers that lived out his principles. He is well known for challenging the foundations of academic thought and taking an active part in movements such as ‘Occupy’ which tried to widen the public discourse about what our society should be aiming for and how we should think of improving it. David Wengrove published a precursor to this book in 2010: What makes Civilisation?

In 704 pages, they challenge the foundations of thought of all the sages who shape our approach to History. Obsessed with the ‘Western’ view of things, with justifications for male dominance as it has developed the world over, and with power politics and the accompanying violence; we have for a long time been fed with a kind of neo colonialism which certainly needs reconsidering.

So, the first thing the book succeeds in doing is to ask new questions linked to modern concerns: inequality, suppression of women and the feminine values of caring, freedom and violence and the importance of love and peace.

The second thing which is a vital expansion of our notions of history is to stretch the horizon which normally limits modern thought beyond the ancient Greeks. It includes the last 12,000 years since the melting of the ice known as the Lower Dryas. Over the two thousand years from 10,600 to 8,600 BCE there was a truly dramatic warming of the Earth’s climate which resulted in the small human population of those days experiencing a wonderful explosion of diverse plant and animal life which, at least until Malthusian limits of population took effect, gave them ideal conditions for a good life. Ample rainfall and warm weather meant that all kinds of game and edible and medicinal plants were available for the picking. I have not been alone, I am sure, in conceiving the beginning of history as ancient Greece, or at least Homer’s Troy, beyond which prehistory was a complete unknown. But the ingenuity of Archaeologists and Anthropologists has opened up a fascinating realm of knowledge which should be taught and told, because ancient Greece and Rome were but a staging post, and the significance of the trials and errors of even older generations can show us alternative paths of development of which we are unaware.

So this book stretches time. It also brings in a sweeping panorama of the ways in which humanity developed in North, Central and South America. It is a revelation, as far as I am concerned, to read of the influence that conversations with native Americans at the beginning of the seventeenth century had on European enlightenment thinkers such as Robespierre and Montesquieu, Turgot and Adam Smith. At that time there were many contacts made between the French armies in America and diplomats from the Wendat and Osage tribes, whose dialectical skills were highly practised and polished as the result of daily tribal assemblies.

Two distinctions made by the authors stand out for me: first, on the subject of freedom. Foraging societies such as existed in North America from time to time are probably the free-est ones that we can imagine. Our notion of freedom of speech is all very fine, but if no-one is listening due to the general level of noise, it does not do a lot of good. Likewise, freedom to travel and explore the world is only available to those who can afford it and are not labelled as refugees. The three freedoms which they posit as basic to the life of a forager are:

1. Freedom to go where you want – freedom of movement. Best exemplified where there is a wide area in which the custom of hospitality to strangers is prevalent,

2. Freedom to disobey. In other words, an absence of coercion. This is always present to some extent – think of the freedom to not wear a Covid mask, which some people prize so highly.

3. Freedom to form new social relationships and make new associations. One of the defining aspects of slavery is that the slave is treated as a thing and may be arbitrarily prevented in any way his or her master sees fit.

Second, they have much to say about what it is to be a state. We are accustomed to think that every area, every person, is the subject of one or other nation states. This is very much the exception in history, and even now is being prised apart by globalisation, international finance, and legal arbitrage.

The authors introduce three aspects which may define a state.

1. Sovereignty - by which they mean the exclusive appropriation to the state of the right to violence or coercion.

2. Bureaucracy – something which has its useful aspect but also which, with the addition of quantified measurement, can become a frightening tyranny (think Franz Kafka)

3. Charismatic individuals in political positions. States may operate by one, two or all three of these but usually only one or two. Also, it seems that each of these aspects can take beneficial or baleful forms.

Questions about the origins of farming, democracy, cities, slavery and civilisation are the main concerns of this book. They begin by restating the common perception of the prehistoric condition of mankind as two alternatives set down in the 17th and 18th centuries – Rousseau’s idea of ‘the noble savage’, largely based on the story of the garden of Eden and the fall, and Hobbes’s notion that without an overarching power, men’s lives were condemned to be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" in a war of all against all.

They contend that both ideas are false. They also criticise the evolutionary ideas of Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) and Stephen Pinker (The better Angels of our Nature - 2011) where the authors’ preconceptions are seen as predetermining their conclusions.

A binding thread through the book is the fact that many societies had a seasonal rhythm in their activities, in the practise of transhumance – moving the whole community to follow its flocks and herds, to reap a harvests of nuts, or to prey on migrating herds – and also with seasonal festivals when different forms of social relationships are tried out. For example, today we might think of the season of Christmas as one where commercial relationships are replaced by gift giving, at least in the family. The authors argue that culture-shaping paradigms are the driving force behind human behaviour, more than developments of materials and technology, as some would claim. The influence of ideas of what it means to be an ideal man or woman often shape our actions whether that ideal is godly or demonic.

There is a refreshing discussion of the practices of neolithic matriarchy or the ‘great goddesses,’ and how it is that societies without hierarchy or male domination lasted for centuries, millennia even, with little evidence of warfare or revolution. In a section headed ‘Woman, the Scientist,’ (chapter 6) they point out that most significant inventions – weaving, cooking, horticulture, pottery, basketwork, matting – were in woman’s work. It is only more recently that men have taken to themselves the credit for technological breakthroughs.

On the question of how the [scale] of communities calls forth several types of organisation, they are again critical of the contemporary discourse, which sees hierarchy and inequality as an inevitable consequence of complexity. In this they cite the example of the megasites of Ukraine, assemblies of up to 40,000 people which were some of the very first cities in the world, but where there is no evidence of hierarchy of any sort. Similarly in the early towns and cities of Mesopotamia a democratic society existed long before kingships. They also write about the Indus Valley civilisation, Egypt and in the New World, Teotihuacan. Finally, among their examples they come to the Bronze age civilisation of Crete which was centred on feminine status and values until it was overrun by the Mycenaeans.

The inspirational conclusion is that as human beings we do have the ability to change and shape our attitudes to the World, in its largest sense. Radically different societies which have existed and lasted for long periods of time are being discovered. What is the purpose of all this new knowledge if not to restructure and give meaning to how we live now? We can shape our myths. So long as we are in the grip of an idea that history is determined by the past, the result of mechanical forces, society as we know it will be unlikely to survive even though humans in some form no doubt will.