“The Dawn of Everything— A New History of Humanity,” by David Graeber and David Wengrow

THIS WEEK’S GUEST BOOK REVIEWER: TOM ALDERSON

I apologize for the clickbaity title, but I’m trying to write headlines that will bring in the rubes. The Dawn Of Everything— A New History Of Humanity— in Twain’s memorable phrase, “If that don’t fetch ‘em, I don’t know Arkansaw!”

This book review is a guest post by my friend Tom Alderson. As a loyal friend, he cleared his calendar to rush this book review through before sundown, and I breathed a sigh of relief, on that late afternoon in early 2022, as I only had enough essays on hand to last for another 1000 days.

Here it is, and I’ll say a few words of introduction while the back room hubbub dies down.

The main thing that occurs to me, reading this review again after lo these many years, is that the life of the hunter-gatherer sounds pretty good to me. It sounds even better when you compare it to the America that features the wonderful world of social media, and an incoming chief executive who uses a Sharpie pen to rewrite weather. In the blink of an eye, this meteorological revisionist will be moments away, at any given time, from dropping The Big One. When I say The Big One, I refer, of course, to the announcement that Scott Baio has been appointed acting head of the Ministry Of Truth.

I know, I know, some dyspeptic readers are cynically suggesting that I wouldn’t last two minutes with even the laziest band of hunter-gatherers. I think it would all depend on the extent that specialization was embraced; I don’t know from hunting, but I’ve never had any trouble gathering. It’s always come naturally to me, even when I was a child. Tell me what needs gathering, and I’m on it. You’ll be very happy with the quality of my gathering.

And now, please give a very warm and toasty Hot Plate welcome to Tom Alderson.

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A recent issue of the London Review of Books arrived with the headline “Exorcising War,” and my reflexive snark generator (like William Castle’s “Tingler”) started vibrating, as it does most days.

Some ideas lie dormant until a particular era is welcoming enough to grant them new exposure. That’s happening right now with The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. I highly recommend it, though it contains the sort of public exercise in projective wishful thinking that recurs every fifty years or so.

In 1970, someone named Charles Reich released a book called The Greening of America, which foretold a hippie dream vista of an increasingly enlightened nation living lightly on the earth. For the curmudgeon closing that book, some form of Donald Trump seemed inevitable. Reich’s book was serialized in The New Yorker, and was a huge, widely-discussed bestseller, but it seems like camp silliness today. Sic transit.

There is no element of camp silliness in The Dawn of Everything. It’s an assault on what the authors regard as our entrenched way of thinking about our ancestors, and an attack on people like me who are reflexively Hobbesian, and who believe it is an element of human nature that any agglomeration of homo sapiens will form hierarchies and begin to oppress one another. This is a very old dispute, roughly summarized as Hobbes vs Rousseau: the idea that the heavy hand of the state is required to keep order, vs. the idea that humans are born free but are everywhere in chains, not because of inevitable circumstances but because of bad choices. Things don’t have to be as they are; Friedmanite predatory capitalism is not necessarily the highest and best use of human reason; we can do better, if we just free our minds.

The authors of Dawn reject the accepted story of social evolution, arguing that we weren’t forced by the arrival of agriculture to institute a hierarchical state, that we did not have to trade freedom for food, and that our current regime of repressive governments, left and right, is not the inexorable legacy of our Neolithic past.

The great value of the book is its look at our prehistory, with the benefit of new archeological discoveries, that reveals a much broader range of governing organization, and what the authors insist was in some cases no government at all. The big leap here is taking that argument (long understood as a possibility with small bands of hunter-gatherers), and extending it to the advanced civilizations that built cities. This is where the current receptive audience part comes in. You hear the term “anarchist”—as in “Me? I’m an anarchist”—constantly now, if you spend enough time around young people in the blue states. This group of readers is the perfect audience for evidence that some prehistoric civilizations operated without hierarchies.

But does this book count as actual evidence? This grumpy Hobbesian is unconvinced. Dawn surveys a mess of ancient cultures, and the survey is fascinating; you’re gonna learn something. It’s just that at the point of making their point about the above-mentioned non-hierarchical structure of some of these prehistorical societies—the authors indulge in conjecture.

All conjecture is conditioned by the predispositions of the conjecturor.

What happens if you are looking at evidence from prehistory, which can tell us only so much about the people under examination, and you fill the big gaps with what you want to see? What happens is what happens with everything we analyze, regardless of our perspective, left, right or other; absence of evidence is taken as evidence of absence. Uruk had no king, so it enjoyed “at least seven centuries of collective self-rule.”

Say what?

This amounts to transformation of conjecture into an assertion of established fact, and it happens over and over in Dawn of Everything, usually right when we’re expecting the money shot. My assumptions are projection, too, but I’m at least upfront about it. Contemporary arguments for anarchy receive a lot less support from the evidence in this book than the authors imagine.

Do read the book for its expanded picture of Neolithic civilizations, all around the world (Mexico is especially juicy), but keep an eye out for the sly slides into propaganda.

So, it’s a book for the times. We’re sick of government, and the idea we might be able to dump it altogether is enticing. My years of research driving a car with two children in the back seat make me wonder how anyone can believe a peace-and-love alternative to hierarchy will ever work, but I suppose hope and delusion are eternal.

TOM ALDERSON