Everything Dawns

May 2, 2022 By in Book Reviews, Humanity 6 Comments

“The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow is an important book. Most models of the development of human society have us moving up an escalator from hunter-gatherers through agriculture to the modern nation state as a result of inexorable human progress. Through a fascinating study, the authors point out that this is a profoundly flawed model. Rejecting both conclusions of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Graeber and Wengrow find other approaches to understand human society. Along the way, they find the indigenous critique of western European society by Native American Wendat statesman Kandiaronk and his encounters with early French settlers in Canada. From these accounts we can see that in encountering Europeans, many indigenous cultures rejected much of what the Europeans found valuable, and vice versa.

Graeber passed away not long after publication of this book. I often find that many interesting thinkers do pass away after a significant accomplishment. This book presents the notion that early human societies had multiple ways of being organized, and our old models need to be scrapped.

We have to consider that neighboring human societies can develop as opposites out of a rejection of what their neighbors do in a process of schismogenesis. We have to consider what role “chieftainship” must or need play and why we think it is so important. One example that came to my mind, do we really need a president or a presidency? What about the roles of women in ordering society? This varied greatly. What does the division of land among landowners really mean? Does it tie us to gold and laws? What it comes down to is that there is a lot of support for the idea that human societies developed as it suited their situation. Is that still true of the modern nation state? Must it be retained if it is not inexorable?

As for criticisms, this is not the dawn of everything because the historical record is necessarily limited, but it is a new history. It could have been half or twice as long, however, depending on what the authors were trying to accomplish. They had sufficient examples to prove their point.

In the end, it is a valuable contribution to understanding human society.

6 responses

  1. I disagree. “The Dawn of Everything” is a biased disingenuous account of human history (www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity ) that spreads fake hope (the authors of “The Dawn” claim human history has not “progressed” in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system… so there’s hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book’s dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavor geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.

    Fact is human history has “progressed” by and large in linear stages, especially since the dawn of agriculture (www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). The book’s alleged major “fundamental” insight is “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently” (the first part of that statement is hardly a great insight because a perceptive child can recognize that) YET fails to answer why we do NOT make it differently than it is now if we, supposedly can make it “EASILY” different, why we’ve been “stuck” in this destructive system for a very long time. THAT is really where “the ultimate, hidden truth” is buried and the answer is… it is because of the enduring hegemony of “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html ) which the fake hope-giving authors of “The Dawn” entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding the nature of humans)

    A good example that one of the authors, Graeber, has no real idea what world we’ve been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn’t know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they’ve been wanting that for thousands of years (and that’s not the only ignorant notion in the title). Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!

    “The Dawn” is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked “science,” served lucratively to the gullible ignorant underclasses who crave myths and fairy tales.

    “The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” … just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm.” — Unknown

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    • Prior to reading this book I did the one thing I normally never do, I read the criticisms first. It is not surprising that a heavily-marketed book purporting to be “academic” would garner much criticism and praise. What surprised me was the intensity of the attacks in both anger and vitriol from places like academia and The Wall Street Journal. Was the response triggered by the questioning of entrenched interests? I can not read the heart of others, but these responses made want to read it all the more.
Is the title overblown? Of course. Publishers take note. Does it “cherry pick” its examples? Certainly; that is obvious from the reading and what the book is trying to accomplish. Does it fail to address the question of organization of human societies as they become larger (scalability), such that one questions whether its ideas are applicable at groupings of ~10,000 or fewer? Yes. There is much to criticize, but that does not mean we “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” One of the interesting questions, to my mind, is that if the authors have presented something so flawed that it will collapse on its own, why such anger?

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  2. Sounds like a good book. Might have to read this one.

    Sometimes, a significant accomplishment costs the author so much in spiritual/mental/physical resources that they have nothing left with which to go on, and just die.

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